The web can be a time-sink but it can also
be a remarkable research tool. I wrote
about my younger daughter and I, in the main, sharing songs over the
weekend. The big sister and mom joined
too. But the little one and I had kept going late. I’m
not sure what the initial though that set me off on this path was, but I
thought move beyond the artistry of hip hop to the simple power of the spoken
word; the power of African American
interpretations of speech. When my turn
came to play a “song” I put on a clip of Malcolm X speaking in 1962.
Fair to the games
rules I had to choose something that wasn’t more than a few minutes in length. There was a speech he gave speaking out against police
brutality in Los Angeles that I threw on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_uYWDyYNUg She took it in. But it was already late and after one more BTS
song she called it a night. I watched
Malcom clips for the next ninety minutes until sleep took me. Attracted, stirred and provoked, as one generally is, I thought
about his call for land, and revolution and nationalism, is Afro-Asian message, and all that's transpired since then, through the night.
Writing yesterday
I wanted to post an entry about the Last Poets.
I spent a few minutes that turned into a few hours learning all that I had
never really known, first about the three voices, which I’d written about and whom I have listened to for many years, and
then the story behind the “Original Last Poets” who co-mingled and co-created
and, apparently fought battles about just who was in and who was out of the group.
There is an outstanding
artifact on line of three members, cast as “original” Last Poets (though I
think only two were truly there at the inception) called “Right On!” Filmed on some rooftop not far from
where I used to live myself in the Lower East Side, Gylan Kain, Felipe Luciano,
and David Nelson leap out from grainy footage with brawny, confrontational
intellectualism that feels so damn close and at the same time, gone
forever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkEatBhpSLs Kain continued on as a performer, Luciano
became an activist, a reporter and a politician and Nelson a minister, in North
Carolina. But back in 1968, with the Tet
Offensive underway and Newark on fire, this is the New York revolutionary
counterpoint to the Cultural Revolution here in Beijing.
A Washington Post
article from twenty-six years back affords the best account I’d found with all
my searching of how the group began and how it metastasized, and atomized.
This sort of
independent film, this sort of information, would have taken months if not
years of concerted sleuthing to be able to view, or read somehow. Now it is just here, on line. The album, a live concert of the three men
performing the same poems profiled in the movie, is also available on
Spotify. Easy. I listened to it immediately when I wanted to
hear it. I could listen to it again this
morning, biking home from the gym. Near ubiquitous
film, near ubiquitous music, and text.
And as I’ve wondered before it seems this expanding library, (you must listen to Luciano's song about the New York Public Library!) ever easier
to search and share information from, will move closer and closer to becoming one
with our minds, everything accessible at the whim of conscious thought to
retrieve.
For now I’ve got
to find a clip for the film that’s appropriate to share, the next time we have the familial musical round-robin, oddly aligned with my wife's culling of Jiang Qing's revolutionary opera songs.
Monday, 01/14/19
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