I Love Words

“I am comfortable with my friend. For reasons not always clear to me, she loves me. She has seen me blunder; she is aware of all my annoying self-indulgences, my private habits. All the things I once thought no one could know about me and still loves me, she knows. In her presence I have very little to guard against, because she distills me from my words. We have been together a long time, and now some grace within her can see me even when her eyes are open.” -Hugh Prather

Beck and Kanye

Why yes, Kanye – Beck is out of touch with the music industry.  Last night at the Grammy’s, did not stand in the dark (save for a single column of light) and wail through auto-tune over a backing track. He did however, disappointingly perform with the lights on him and his band, his band who played real live instruments, and used no auto-tune whatsoever.  And Instead of writing disposable, interchangeable club anthems with epic grandiose themes like having sex, getting booty, or hollerin’ at “’dat fine a** b****”; Beck wrote an introspective, thoughtful album that explored a varying range of emotion, and meditated on weighty themes like personal growth, heartbreak, and mortality.  So ultimately you may be right, Beck is out of touch with the music industry.
 

He has been married for 11 years, with two children.  He however, does not define his life as having “a wife, a kid, and a clothing line.”  His music career has provided his family with a more than comfortable lifestyle mostly in southern California, I’m sure; it however, has not constructed the gilded walls and opulence of the globetrotting lifestyle for he, his wife, his children, and a small army of nurses, of which your career, Kanye has afforded your family.  And in case you were wondering, Beck is not his wife’s third marriage before the age of 35 years old.  So yes, Beck is out of touch with the music industry.
 

Beck’s public image has not required him to be a boastful, arrogant, loud mouth.  In fact, he has very little of a public image at all.  While accepting the Best Album Grammy he felt obligated to invite other people on-stage to take credit for their work on the album that brought him this far, because he seems to understand that no man is an island.  He was also clearly humbled to be in the presence of Prince, who presented him the trophy.  I suspect Kanye West has not been humbled in the presence of anyone in a very long time, and I think that is sad. 

In the end, I believe you may be correct Kanye – for all of the reasons outlined above and for so many more, I’m sure Beck is out of touch with the music industry…but is that such a bad thing?


***Additional Note*** 
The band Steel Panther also took to the studio last week and decided to write a song based on the controversy.

 

A Brief and Fine Hello

Or shall I say hola, namaste, salve, bon jour, and nei ho!

This is my first post coming to you from my little corner of the world wide web. This site is small, its reach is limited, and readership even more so…but it’s mine. And it’s probably the only piece of real estate I’ll ever actually own. So please, come in, stay a while…I will be sporadically adding content here, thoughts essays, ramblings, mental picadillos that strike me on a whim, the value oh which I cannot presume to guarantee at this time; but I hope the end result is fun for all of us.

Now…take a deep breath, and I’ll see you on the other side of this thing.

Here Is What I Know...

Here Is What I know
(A conversation about Stewart Askew)

Before you make up your mind and write off this latest story as “Just another black guy shot by law enforcement” cases; indulge me a few hundred words on the issue first.

Here is what I know (which is, admittedly, very little).  Stewart Askew is not a bartender, a comedian, a stereotype, a news story, a hot-button issue, or a statistic…he is my friend.

While he is a stand-up comedian, he’s not one of the many close friends in the Louisville comedy scene that I’ve made since I began covering it for a local magazine a few years ago.  In fact, Stewart pre-dates that particular time in my life.  We met as regulars at a bar we both love.  Where conversations are prevalent, and educated discourse often ensues.  It was after many nights of conversations on politics, movies, music, literature, etc., that Stewart and I realized we were no longer simple bar acquaintances with whom we ramble the night away, but rather we had become friends.  We have since shared countless laughs, gone to concerts, weddings, funerals, and everything in between with one another.

And I was there when Stewart took the stage for the first time at the Wednesday night Louisville Comedy Underground open-mic show at Comedy Caravan.  Drinking with him at the bar, I was privy to the weeks leading up to his debut, of listening to Stewart get himself hyped, trying out jokes he had (it could hardly have been defined as professional “material” at that point) on me, and occasionally there would be a moment of vulnerability where he would actually admit how nervous he was for this new venture. 

Because, see, Stewart is not the man that the State Troopers office and the media are presenting.  They, through innuendo and half-truths are painting Stewart to be someone that he is not; the real crime to all of this, is that much of the anger that often fueled Stewart’s art, came from his desire to not be perceived as a black stereotype.  He waited tables for many years, and almost weekly people would “compliment” him on how well-spoken he was, he would smile and thank those tables – but that sort of inadvertent racism always chips away at him, as it would anyone.  The very idea that people assumed, when he approached their table for the first time, before he opened his mouth, they had lower expectations for what was going to come out because the color of his skin.  And it was that chipping that fueled him to make art and to love art – he is a talented musician who loves everything from Miles Davis to Radiohead to Wu-Tang Clan.  It was that anger that drove him to be funny.  And it was that anger that motivated him to not become a stereotype or statistic.

And because of the questionable acts of a few people, today my friend is a statistic.

I will not defend his actions that led up to the shooting.  Mostly because I do not know which version, if any version of what is being reported is true.  I do not intend to excuse my friend’s decisions, nor make him out to be a martyr.  He is by no means a perfect person, but none of us are.  I would not presume to imply that my friend should not stand in court and be held accountable before a judge and a jury of his peers for the actions that led up to this greater tragedy.  That should and presumably will happen; and I will support him through that process and what comes of it accordingly.  But as he should be held accountable for his actions, so should the two men that tried to take my friend’s life – or at the very least went out of their way to force him into a situation where they could (and tried to) take his life.

I understand that only one officer shot, but it was the indifference to protocol on the part of both officers that allowed things escalate the way that they did.

In all the years of doing what he and I did – countless drinks, travels, bowls, late nights, bars, and more – I have never even once known Stewart to be a violent person.  That’s not to say that he is not an angry person, but angry and violent are very different words; and he has simply never been violent in my presence, not even a single occasion comes to mind.  That is not to say he isn’t bullheaded, flakey, and irrational at times.  Absolutely he is, and I imagine he will continue to be those things, as well.  And while words like angry, flakey, bullheaded, and irrational aren’t necessarily favorable attributes, they are the flaws that make up the person that is my friend, and I accepted those when I made Stewart my friend all those years ago.  But more importantly not one of those words imply the deranged madman that some of the people involved in this story are trying to paint him out to be.

I am not glib nor naïve enough to say that he couldn’t have done these things; the Stewart I know would not have done these things.  But any of us could, anyone on the planet given the right circumstance on the wrong day, could be pushed so far that they would do unimaginable things which are not in our nature.  And once he has paid his debt and answered for his actions, the life of my friend should not be defined by one emotionally trying day.

What this is and should be is a conversation.  A conversation which will anger some, it will be uncomfortable for many, and will flat out piss a few more off.  But it’s a conversation we tip-toe around too often, and then something like this comes up, we have a moment of public discourse, and then one side or the other yells “constitution” or “I’m offended”, and then the rest of us cower.  I admit, as a white male American, I have sat silently as injustice permeated the lives of my fellow Americans, on account of my own pussyfooted liberal fear of offending anyone.  But I can no longer do that, and I’m sorry my friend Stewart had to take a bullet in the chest for me to speak up about these things.

Now is the time, not tomorrow, next week, or next election cycle.  Now is the time to have the conversation about guns and race relations, and the specific roles of those two issues in modern America.

He was shot for protecting his home with a legally purchased and legally owned hand gun…a lot of use that did him against a badge.  Guns serve no purpose but to immediately elevate an already tense situation to a deadly situation.  It was simply the fact that he was holding the gun, for exact scenario (an unknown assailant banging on your door at 11:00 PM at night) the gun he bought to protect himself that almost led to his own murder. 

And this brings us to the second conversation, how long are we going to sit here while police forces and courtrooms across the country systematically excuse and justify the killing of black men in America?  We have seemingly created a new one-sided cause for self-defense in our court system that says, “Your honor, I am white and he was black, so I was in fear for my life.”

<Insert gavel slam here> 

Not guilty.

They have branded this defense the Stand Your Ground Act, and it must be repealed.

Stand Your Ground might very well be the most one-sided and culturally destructive piece of legislation our country has ever seen.  What if Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and B. B. King died on a sidewalk because someone “thought” their instruments were guns?  Right there jazz, rock n’ roll, and blues – as we know them now, would not exist.  Or what if Langston Hughes died in the street because someone “thought” his pen was a knife?  We would be without some of the most eloquent poems that have ever been put to paper.  Where would science be if George Washington Carver died in an alley somewhere because someone “thought” he stole a bag of peanuts from a general store?  Imagine a world where we never heard Kind of Blue, “The Thrill is Gone”, or “Johnny B. Good”; or never got inspired to follow our own paths by reading a “Dream Deferred”.  Fathom a world where we never tasted peanut butter.

The list of contributions African American culture has added to the American lexicon is endless, and they certainly don’t need me ranting in defense of it, but I’m probably going to do it anyway.  Blood banks.  Potato Chips.  The artificial heart.  The spark plug.  The ironing board.  The disposable syringe.  Refrigerated trucks.  Open heart surgery.  And even the Super Soaker water gun.

All of it could be snuffed out in an instant, and without even the slightest of legal recourse.

And how exactly did George Zimmerman get to claim Stand Your Ground?  Because the black thug attacked him?  Why was no one claiming Stand Your Ground on behalf of the fifteen year old African American boy standing a block from his father’s house, who was being stalked by a strange older man he didn’t know, who then approached him with a gun?  Is it possible that Trayvon Martin, armed with that deadly pack of Skittles, did attack George Zimmerman, perhaps out of legitimate fear for his own life?  I somehow bet, had Martin survived, he wouldn't have avoided jail time under the guise of Stand Your Ground.

Stand Your Ground doesn’t seem to apply to black people, and I don’t understand why not?

I suppose at this point, I have drastically veered from my friend Stewart, although in ways I suppose I have not.  Regardless, after having logged literally hundreds of hours in debate and discourse with him on a myriad of hot button issues just like this, he knows how my meandering mind works by now.  So I’ll wrap it up by saying simply…here is what I know, I wish I didn’t have to write this.