Gotham City Soul

So my mom bought Nikki Giovanni's album "The Truth Is on the Way" when I was a kid. Eventually I got around to listening to it (I listened to all my parents album in an attempt to understand their musical tastes, which ran the gamut from R&B, blues, jazz, and funk, to classical, folk, and country). I memorized this poem and used it as protection and defense against junior high school boys. It stunned at least a few of then into silence. I've since met Nikki, had the great pleasure of having lunch with her. I told her that my mama was my introduction to her poetry. But I didn't tell her I used her as a secret weapon. Ego Tripping by Nikki Giovanni I was born in the Congo. I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built the sphinx. I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light. I am bad. I sat on the throne drinking nectar with Allah. I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool ...

I can never say enough about the Library of Congress and its terrific archive of images. Here is a lovely blog from the Denver Post featuring photos taken around the United States from 1939 to 1943, but instead of the usual black and white, they are in stunning living color. The photographers all worked for the Farm Security Administration and were given the task of chronicling the effects of the Depression. Please take a moment and look. Unlike the famous photo of the Depression era mother and child that we've seen many times, these are actually more about living life and overcoming.

Germany might have been my birthplace, and America my homeland, but Haiti, a place to which I've never been (but one day hope to go) has a deep place in my heart. I don't know why—only God knows why, but I am connected, through my friends Michael and Michelle, and spiritually in ways yet to be discovered. Timouns means children in Kreyol. Through an organization called Save the Children, I sponsor a child named Wilner Derval, who lives in a village in Maïssade Haiti in the Central Plateau about an 8 hours drive (over rugged terrain) from the capital of Port-au-Prince. I chose Save the Children because they have no religious affiliations. They also checked out well with the Better Business Bureau. The money I send goes to building a solid educational system in the countryside, paying for schools, teachers, and teacher training. It occurred to me that although I do correspond with Wilner, who is 14, I don't do it nearly enough. All I have is a photo, which they...

Chateau de Joux in the Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland. Part two of my grand adventure in the Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté region of France in 2004: How I learned about the fate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti. I am standing with several fellow journalists in the courtyard of a nearly 1,000-year-old fortress called Chateau de Joux and looking at two tiny windows in it. The chateau is more than 3,000 feet above sea level near the French town of Pontarlier in the Jura Mountains, a range that forms a 125-mile natural border between France and Switzerland. Built in the eleventh century as a Burgundian fortification, the original wooden structure was replaced with one of stone two centuries later.      A true castle fortress, with its massive medieval towers, dry moats (there wasn't enough water for a wet moat up on the mountain), and drawbridge, the chateau was reinforced and expanded several times. Sometime in the e...

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in the Roman Catholic Church (and other religions and cultures), the commemoration of the Christ revealing himself as man as well as the visit of the Magi (Wise Men) or more familiarly, the Three Kings (they weren't kings but astrologers, seers, holy men). There is much written about the Magi, better and more intelligently than I could without extensive research. What I did want to talk about is one of t he wise men who is described and represented in literature and art as an African. Although there is no evidence that one of the magi was African (often considered either Abyssinian, Ethiopian), black Baltasar , bearing either frankincense or myrrh (both of which are found on that continent) has made an appearance at Jesus's crib from around the 12 th century A.D. . Since the Magi themselves were said to have been Persian, it's a bit of mystery as to how Baltasar (whose name has roots in ancient Phoenecia and means "save the life o...

Last year’s Santa-Dote entry was so popular I thought I’d do another one to give people refuge from the stress that sometimes comes with the holidays. I’m a Christmas fool, being part German I am prone to what I call Weihnachtsdelerium, so I am not here to diss it but to add to your cheer by making you laugh. A couple of these things have nothing to do with Christmas such as the following throwbacks to my childhood (and some of yours too if you were born in the 1960s) I came across a Dragnet Christmas episode that was sweet and funny at the same time. Joe Friday and the gang have hearts just like the rest of us . The incongruity between their deadpan delivery and the holiday theme makes the show. For those last minute gifts and cards that look like they come from the Island of Lost Good Taste Regretsy Awesomely Bad Christmas Cards Awesomely Bad Christmas Gifts And for something different to ring in the new year, watch this performance by Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian drummer who ...

The truly perfect film Black Orpehus is 50 years old this year and it is still fascinating me. I've been to Brazil since the first time I saw the movie at least 20 years ago, and darned if the energy and music and beauty in Salvador da Bahia in 2005 wasn't like that in Rio in 1959. A synopsis from Gene Seymour in an article for the Fall 2005 issue of American Legacy "The ill-starred ancient Greek romance of Eurydice (played by the luminous Marpessa Dawn) and Orpheus (Breno Mello) takes place in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, with an all-black, mostly Brazilian cast, and evocative samba soundtrack by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. With the success of this film, its director Marcel Camus and screenwriter Vinicius de Moraes broadened the global perspective on black cultures and helped ignite the bossa nova movement that would seduce music lovers in both hemi spheres" The film won the Palm D'or at Cannes in 1959, and the Oscar and Golden Globe for best foreign ...