Gotham City Soul

Death has been on my mind lately; not in a depressing way, but it just keeps popping up. The latest was the story about Oscar the cat . Dubbed the "furry harbinger of death," Oscar has unfailingly appeared during the last couple of hours before death at the sides of 25 patients in a Providence, Rhode Island, nursing home. He jumps on the bed of a patient and sniffs the air. If the end is very near, he sits down and waits. If not, he jumps off and leaves. I think about something someone told me; no matter how many people surround you when you die, you still die alone. But do you? Is the line between being alive and being dead that inflexible? People who have had near-death experiences claim that they can see and hear everything that is going on in the room; some while hovering in the air, others because they have the ability to see their surroundings in 360-degree panorama. So many people have reported this “phenomena” that I’ve had to take note; why would they lie about it?...

So, I was having my tea the other morning when I hear "Is There a Happiness Gene?" floating out of my television. Another teaser went something like, "a condition that causes extreme joy, but it comes with a price," or something like that. The segment, which was on Good Morning America was about Williams Syndrome, according to GMA's reporters "a condition in which the areas of the brain that process hearing are more rich in connections than a normal brain, resulting in people who experience sound—like music and language—more intensely than the rest of the population. They also tend to be incredibly sociable." The segment featured a young man named Ben Monkaba, who was, indeed, joyful, from the looks of it; he glowed. And it wasn't phony. He made me put down my tea and listen to him. He went straight to my heart. What’s remarkable is that this condition is not brought on by what he does have, but what he doesn’t: He is missing 20 chromosomes on one...

“MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Scientists are using the pine-forested slopes of a Mexican volcano as a test bed to see if trees could grow on a heated-up Mars, part of a vision of making the chilly and barren red planet habitable for humans one day. "Planetary scientists at NASA and Mexican universities believe if they can warm Mars using heat-trapping gases, raise the air pressure and start photosynthesis, they could create an atmosphere that would support oxygen-breathing life forms.” So we screw up this planet, and instead of spending the time and energy (as well as the money) to deal with the mess we’ ve made, scientists are chasing a theory that might not bear fruit until 50 years from now, if at all. I’m all for science; it’s a wonderful, beautiful thing. I’m all for the brilliant people who were and are brave enough to persevere when others call them charlatans and kooks, or worse yet, heretics (shout-out to Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei and the t...

And so at the age of 94 Lady Bird Johnson has died and instead of thinking about her, all I can think about is a friend of hers, Virginia Durr, a fellow Southern belle, but that is where the comparison ends. Virginia Foster Durr and her husband Clifford were civil rights activists. Not extraordinary until you consider the time and the place: 1950s and 1960s Alabama. And their pedigree: Had they been anything other than WASPs, had they been able to offer any reason for their “misguided” behavior to their disapproving neighbors in Montgomery, Alabama, they might have been forgiven. But the Durrs were both from plantation families. Their ancestors had been wealthy aristocrats. It just didn’t seem possible that two people from such privilege would care about blacks or their civil rights. Simply put, they didn’t have to “go there”. But the Durrs, who had never kept their beliefs a secret, made their position very clear and very public in December of 1955 when they posted the $100 bond to ba...

The other day I watched the movie Lady in the Water . Yes, it came out last year—I don’t rush to see things just so I can say I saw it first—I’m too distracted by so many books to read, and stories to write, and art I need to make, and conversations I need to have—movie watching happens in between times. When it's raining or snowing and I want to stay in. When I have a cold, or need cheering up, things like that. Lady was panned by the critics; but that’s not surprising—in the film a character is a film critic, a beady-eyed, pompous little bore of a man who gets eaten by a monster. I’m not really all that interested in what critics have to say—aside from one or two, I really don’t care to know the opinion of most people who bloviate* for dollar bills. But then again, I liked Snakes on a Plane . I know schadenfreude is not a good thing, but I have to say it was kind of fun watching all those CGI snakes losing their reptilian minds, while Samuel L. Jackson almost singlehandedly sav...

“No slave who had had his ears nailed to a post and severed from his head would have wanted to speak exactly like his persecutors, no matter how many hours he had worked alongside them in the fields.” From Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English What I mean to say is that some things just belong to black people, and our language—the one we speak when we are by ourselves, or share during a performance, or wield like a weapon in battle—with few exceptions, belongs to us. We created it, for many reasons—because our African dialects died out for lack of use; because we were denied formal educations; because we all had to be able to speak to each other through the babel of the Atlantic slave trade. Because we didn’t want to sound like them. I didn’t like the way my language was being used the other night; it was all wrong. There was no music in it. The man thought that by using what is called in linguistics “the invariant be”* he had embodied Black English—his job was done. As stated in Spo...