Michael Jackson: Speak A Good Word

Posted on June 26, 2009 by the angry black woman

michael-jackson-speak-a-good-word

Michael Jackson died yesterday. I wish I could say this came as a shock. Though I didn’t know anything about his health or recent condition, somehow I just found myself unsurprised. And profoundly sad.

In deciding to write this, I went through many thoughts on why I feel able to be sad about Michael’s death and to even say positive things about him when I would not extend the same charity to other flawed artists. For example, when Ike Turner died I was unwilling to allow his talent to overshadow my feelings about his history as an abuser. And if R. Kelly were to die today I would think it was a shame, but I would not mourn. In the former case I don’t have much opinion on the talent of the individual; in the latter, I do feel that the man has a lot of talent, but I can’t separate that from the disgust I feel at his sexual adventures with underage girls.

So why don’t I feel the same about Michael?

I can’t give you a good answer. Perhaps because I feel like, whatever Michael is alleged to have done, I can see how the damage done to him in life could have led to it. Doesn’t excuse it, certainly. But it allows me to personally look past it to the good things about him: his music.

The first music video I ever saw was Thriller and I was around 3 years old. My aunt was excited to have me watch it, my mother thought it was too scary for me. But in the end my aunt won and I tried to match those dance moves all night. Michael’s music has been in my ear since before I was born. And before I was five I could sing all the lyrics from every song on Thriller and a bunch from his Jackson 5 days, too.

I was too young at the time to understand the implications behind Michael being the first black artist on MTV. As an adult I still feel a sense of incredulity when I think about that. In the 80s there was still a need for someone’s talent to transcend their race. But Michael did and music (and television) is all the better for it.

The first record I bought with my own money was Bad. Dangerous and HIStory were the first CDs I ripped to MP3. I know that in my music-listening life there has rarely been a month that’s gone by without my listening to some of his music. It seemed like everything he set himself to do he did really well. The singing, the dancing, even the acting.

The videos! Oh goddess, the man pioneered music videos as cinema. Thriller did us all in, but as I sit here searching YouTube I’m reminded of so many more. Remember the Time, Black or White, Smooth Criminal (the long cut), Bad, Jam…

I saw him in concert once when he was touring after Bad came out. It was… amazing. He was a machine. Dancing, singing, never stopping for hours. He gave the crowd everything and then he went on to do it every night for everyone else. It increased my love for him ten-fold.

I think I mourned the MJ I adored many years ago. I had no expectation that he’d make a satisfactory comeback, though I would have been happy to be surprised. It all ended sometime after HIStory for me. Invincible didn’t impress, Blood on the Dance Floor didn’t even register. I felt bad for that. But Michael changed, and not in the way he was able to change before to keep up and transcend.

Still, today I am sad. Because the image of him I have in my head is that amazing entrance to the stage for the Dangerous tour. He exploded out of the stage in a spray of fireworks and then just stood there, silent and still, for a full five minutes, with the bearing of a god. He knew he was good. He knew that, in those moments, he was a rock god. And then the music would start, and he would move, and the concert began, and everything else melted away.

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson. You and James Brown can spend eternity trading moves. Maybe you’ll teach him to moonwalk.

And now a word from our sponsor…


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Posted in Syndicated feeds | 39 Comments

Savana Redding Interview

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Myca

Via Boingboing, this is a great clip of an interview with Savana Redding, the girl who, at 13 years old, was illegally strip-searched by her school.

The money quote for me is when she says:

When I was a kid and they asked me to do this, I didn’t know that … y’know, that it was wrong. I didn’t know that I could say no.

She didn’t know that she could say no. Think about that.

Well, first off, she shouldn’t have had to say no. Women shouldn’t have to say ‘don’t rape me,’ either. No means no, but she didn’t even know it was an option, and she shouldn’t have had to. It’s not a child’s responsibility to remind an adult of what is ethical.

Second, the similarity of this language to the kind of language we hear from people who have experienced statutory rape or were molested underlines that this was a sexual violation, and (like statutory rape and child molestation) one premised on taking advantage of her age, inexperience, and deference to authority.

I’m sure that that’s not how the vice principal intended it, but it doesn’t matter what the intentions were. A crying 13 year old girl was humiliated by being forced to strip in front of adults.

It astounds me that anyone would even try to come up with a justification.


Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people (even people under 18).

Posted in Whatever | 8 Comments

More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

It feels odd to be promoting myself and my work now, with everything that’s going on Iran, and in the context of everything I’ve been posting, but there is a good interview with me up on the blog More Babel,which is the editor’s blog for the online journal Babel Fruit. I answered questions about translation, classical Iranian literature, my own poetry and more.

One thing I said that I happen to like:

I also discovered that the most popular contemporary translations of classical Iranian poetry into English–those of Rumi by Coleman Barks and of Hafez by Daniel Ladinksi–were more concerned with spiritualizing the texts and writers they were translating than in rendering any but the most tenuous connection between their translations and the original texts, not to mention the culture in which those original texts were written and where they are still very much a living literature. It’s not that I think all translation must hew to a particular line in relation to the original text; nor do I think that either my personal dislike for Barks’ and Ladinsky’s work (neither moves me) or my objections to their motives and methods (about which more below) means that their work is bad in some absolute moral sense–though it does seem to me that it is false advertising to call Ladinsky’s work translations and that it would be more appropriate to call them “writings after Hafez,” or “versions of/improvisations on Hafez,” or some such thing. Rather, it’s that, given both the history of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English and my personal connection to that literature through my wife, my son and the many Iranian friends I have, I feel very strongly the degree to which past translations, including those of Barks and Ladinsky, have been very explicitly invested in misrepresenting Iran, its culture, its literature and, ultimately, its history. More to the point, this misrepresentation was not the misrepresentation of which all translation is guilty by definition; it was an almost willful–and sometimes fully willful–misrepresentation that grew out of the political or spiritual, non-literary agenda of the translator.

More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

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Beauty, Media, and Babies

Posted on June 25, 2009 by karnythia

beauty-media-and-babies

So, a few months ago my husband took an illustration gig. That project is now published and it is a really good book for little black girls who need to remember that they are beautiful just the way they are. When he took the commission it was for a friend’s mother and at the time it seemed relatively unimportant since it was really being done as a favor. Fast forward to now when our nieces are hitting that age and we’re hearing them criticize their looks left and right and all of a sudden we’re looking for other books like this one and realizing that we can’t really find them. Oh, we’ve found a couple but for the most part despite all the talk about self-esteem in kids there’s not a lot addressing what it’s like for a child of color in a society that uses a beauty standard based in whiteness.

And although I admit I hope that a lot of you go buy this book, I’m also hoping that you’ll be inspired to create more books like this one. Because listening to little girls critique themselves on every level is awful. And they need to see images of WOC in the media that are positive and nurturing and beautiful. And it’s not enough to start that message when they are 7 or 8 (we thought it was) because society starts teaching them something else entirely right from birth. It’s not enough to have the token fairies of color (ala Disney) or the one black Princess (again Disney) we need to make the media reflect the world that we all live in.

And now a word from our sponsor…


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Posted in Syndicated feeds | 1 Comment

Cartoon: The Great Cycle of Wall Street

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Ampersand

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Economics and the like | 3 Comments

Supreme Court Rules That Strip-Search of Teen Was Unconstitutional

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Ampersand

From the NYT:

In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and students across the country, the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs violated her constitutional rights.

The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.

Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.

“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

The dissent was written by Thomas.

The court also ruled that the vice-principal could not personally be held liable for his actions in this case. Dissenting from that decision were Ginsburg and Stevens. However, lower courts can still decide to hold the school district liable.

(Curtsy to Sailorman in comments.)

Posted in In the news, Supreme Court Issues | 24 Comments

Torture in Iran: I Thought Three Times About Posting This

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

But I decided that, since the Iranian government has shut down just about every outlet by which people there could get there stories out, and since the Iranian government is trying so hard not only to take control of how events in Iran are shaped, but also to hide what is going on there–check out this article in particular–that it is more important to bear witness when we can and watching this video will be nothing if it is not bearing witness: not to sentimentalize the man being tortured in this video in the way that Neda has been sentimentalized, but because if we do not bear witness, then the people who perpetrated and the people who gave license to the perpetrators for this kind of thing will have won. (I will add that an Iranian friend of mine points out that the thugs in the video are speaking a language other than Persian.)

I will say it again: This video is very, very, very, very disturbing, and if you have triggers it will likely pull all of them.

ETA: This clip from The Daily Show is also worth watching:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Reza Aslan
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Whatever | 4 Comments

Spam spam spam spam

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Ampersand

For some reason, we’ve seen a huge increase in spam recently — I’m not sure how many spams I’ve deleted in the last couple of days, but it’s probably over a thousand.

The more spam we get, the more likely it is that genuine comments that are accidentally caught by our spam-trap will get deleted along with the spam. To make this less likely, please let us know right away if you think a comment of yours may be stuck in the spam trap.

I know that our current anti-spam software — Akismet — has been crappy for a while. At this point, it’s basically impossible to post a link in comments without being mistaken for spam. I’m hoping to have time to deal with the problem, and institute a better spam solution, in mid-July.

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 4 Comments

NYC Teachers Paid To Do Nothing

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Ampersand

The AP has a story about the New York City school system’s “rubber rooms” — the places where hundreds of teachers facing disciplinary hearings wait, doing no work but drawing full salaries. Sometimes this can go on for years.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said. […]

Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.

So the teachers blame the schools, the schools blame the teachers. Buried deep in the article, however, the real culprit is briefly mentioned:

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.

So why don’t they just hire a bunch of full-time arbitrators? Given the millions of dollars of potential savings, it seems silly not to hire the needed personnel.

There’s an compelling episode of “This American Life” focusing on life inside teacher purgatory.

(Via.)

Posted in In the news | 5 Comments

Terra Nullis

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Maia

I live in New Zealand, and like so many other countries it gives me a strange view of the USA. I’m familiar with so many things that are alien to my life. As a child I read of twinkies and home room. As a political blogger I read of primaries and supreme court appointments. But there’s much I don’t really understand. Sometimes that ignorance is a hinderence. There are things I’d genuinely like to know ((like why aren’t the left doing a nut about the law and order-ness of the latest supreme court judge. It seems to me that the right threw a tantram about that female judge who didn’t get nominated and they got someone they liked more. Whereas the left says “Yay she’s a centrist.” Amp has tried to explain this to me, but I don’t understand)) But sometimes this difference means I see things that people more immersed may miss.

On Womanist Musings Renee began a post: “The original sin of the United States is undoubtedly slavery.” ((Personally I’m not sure about the use of ‘original sin’ as a metaphor, not just for theological reasons (I don’t know enough about the theology of original sin), but that I think the personification of nations naturalises them in a way that is unhelpful.)) It’s not true, the original sin, the origin sin, of the United States is colonisation. I’m not making an argument of primacy, or importance. Just of chronology. Statements such as this render colonialism, and native Americans, invisible. It invokes the idea of the colonial idea of Terra Nullis, where there were no people before colonisation, and no sin before slavery.

I read a lot of American feminist blogs, and I’m always surprised by the silence around colonialism (and I know Renee is Canadian, which makes this even stranger to me). On an intellectual level I understand the factors that tend to mean that American progressives spend less time thinking and talking about colonialism than New Zealand progressives do. But I don’t grok it – I can’t imagine it – I’ve no idea how it changes your political worldview. ((I say this not to say I’m a great example on Maori sovereignty, but just that it’s a thread that I can’t imagine politics without.))

So I thought I’d ask left-wing commenters from America and Canada, what role colonialism plays in their political analysis and understanding of their country and it’s history and racism.

Edited to Add: Just in case there was any doubt, I fully agree with Renee’s point about reparations for slavery in the post that I linked to. The line I quoted is the only line that I take issue with.

Posted in Colonialism, Race, racism and related issues, Whatever | 29 Comments