text:
TFAA LIVE
TFAA PODCASTS
Podcast Programs
Revive Podcast
Afrikan Perspectives Podcast
Black Reality Think Tank Podcasts
Conversation Reparations: Podcast
LetsBuyBlack365.com Connect Podcasts
Acres Of Diamonds Podcasts
Exclusive ProductsShop
As Black Activists Protested Police Killings, Homeland Security Worried They Might Join ISIS
Alice Speri
April 8 2019, 8:23 a.m.
As nationwide protests against police killings of black men began rolling across the country in 2014, federal and local law enforcement who were closely monitoring protesters' online activities repeatedly expressed a bizarre concern: that the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad.
That concern was unequivocally baseless, and no evidence ever emerged to substantiate it. Still, documents obtained by the government transparency group Property of the People, which were shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal that officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence exaggerated the significance of isolated social media activity, mostly by foreign accounts, advocating for a connection between the domestic movement against police brutality and foreign terrorism.
In intelligence reports and internal communications circulated around the time of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 Baltimore protests following the death in custody of Freddie Gray, DHS officials fretted that the Islamic State might attempt "to use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool" or call on "Baltimore rioters to join them." And in July 2016, during nationwide protests against the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a cabinet position, circulated a memo warning that a lone, foreign pro-Al Qaeda Facebook user sought to seize on the protests to urge "'Black' Americans to take up arms" and "start armed war against the US government.
A Fixation Born of Bias
These official warnings that U.S. activism against police violence might be exploited as a recruitment opportunity by violent foreign terrorist groups slightly preceded the FBI's designation of a "Black Identity Extremist" domestic terrorism category, which essentially cast large numbers of the same black activists as potential homegrown violent extremists. As The Intercept has reported, the FBI's "Black Identity Extremism" label, while first used in a 2017 threat assessment report, originated on the heels of the Ferguson protests, and the first individual the FBI designated as a "black identity extremist" was a young Ferguson protester the agency had entrapped. But just as there is no evidence that a "Black Identity Extremist" ideology actually exists, there is also no evidence that U.S. activists ever saw or in any way responded to sporadic social media calls to join foreign fundamentalist Islamic groups.
If anything, critics say, law enforcement's fixation on that nonexistent connection is testimony to both their anti-black and anti-Muslim bias.
"They try to make it more scary, it's like, 'If we link Islam to it, and we link Muslims to it, then people will see this as a real threat, because nothing is scarier than Muslims,'" Umar Lee, a well-known St. Louis activist, who is Muslim, told The Intercept, referring to the movement for black lives that started in Ferguson. "Nothing is scarier than, 'Hey, if the Muslims get together with these scary black dudes, then we got a real problem, so we need every resource available to stop this.'"
"They already have a massive amount of funding to do quote unquote counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism, and all these other things that they do," Lee noted, referring to well-funded domestic intelligence initiatives that have primarily targeted U.S. Muslims. "And they come up empty because the reality is that there are very few, hardly any people that are engaged in these activities."
Civil rights advocates maintain the documents' message is both baseless and dangerous.
"Blackness and Muslim identity have been cast as threatening since America's founding," said Omar Farah, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sued the FBI and DHS to obtain more information about its surveillance of black activists. "No surprise, then, that these documents reveal near obsessive fear of their intersection."
"It's inflammatory," echoed Nusrat Choudhury, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Program. "Just because members of foreign organizations are calling on domestic protesters to join their movements, that does not show those people in the United States are posing any threat of violence."
The ACLU, which together with the Center for Media Justice also sued the FBI to obtain more information about the secretive "Black Identity Extremism" label, warned that casting individuals who express legitimate grievances as "extremists" risks exposing them to police harassment and stifling a movement that is badly needed. "There are long-standing, deep, structural, racial injustices in America, and people are allowed to call on this country to do better," Choudhury said. "They're allowed to do it under our Constitution, and frankly we need them to do it, because that is what has always led to racial justice in America."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. DHS declined to comment on the record.
Fictional Connections to International Terrorism
The documents obtained via public records requests by Property of the People supplement similar documents previously made public by CCR and the racial justice group Color of Change. The earlier set of documents includes Islamophobic press coverage shared by DHS officials during the Baltimore protests, such as a Fox News story claiming that "Muslim groups seek to co-opt Ferguson protests" and an op-ed warning that the Islamic State, "which has stunned the world for its filmed beheadings and abuse of non-Muslims, is looking to capitalize on growing racial tension in the American city by claiming there is 'no difference between black and white' in their society." It also includes an FBI situation report, issued less than two weeks into the Ferguson protests, warning that "ISIS supporters are urging Ferguson protestors to embrace radical Islam and engage in further violence. They are also reportedly telling any ISIS supporters in the US to travel to Ferguson."
"Senior federal law enforcement assessing hysterical tabloids about ISIS co-opting the Ferguson protests is foolish," said CCR's Farah. "It would be comical if there weren't dangerous implications for people of color and Muslims who speak out for justice only to be met with militarized police responses."
The new set of documents, a selection of which The Intercept is publishing with this story, includes more internal assessments and emails exchanged by federal and law enforcement officials between 2014 and 2016.
In a partially redacted document marked for "DHS internal use only," circulated days after a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for Brown's killing, officials warned that "a purported fighter with the Islamic state, posted two images earlier today regarding Ferguson calling for the protesters to swear loyalty to the Islamic State." The document also noted that the images were "making their rounds on English-language support accounts for the Islamic State," though it made no mention of whether anyone affiliated with the Ferguson protests actually saw or responded to them.
DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Ferguson Protests November 20142 pages
In another redacted DHS intelligence document, released at the height of the 2015 Baltimore protests, officials warned that the account of a "presumed USPER," a term used by intelligence officials to refer to U.S. citizens and residents, had called upon "'indigenous peoples' of the Americas and 'Afro-Americans who are oppressed' to attack 'Anglo-American supremacists.'" The report continued: "There were multiple references to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri which was likely designed to resonate with an audience wider than [redacted name] has typically targeted. The messaging reflects
[redacted name's]
awareness of recent US media coverage of perceived racial and other issues in American society, which the group is trying to exploit." As in the earlier case, this assessment, too, offers no indication that anyone involved with the protests actually saw the posts.
DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Baltimore Protests May 20152 pages
In December 2015, in Minneapolis, following the police killing of Jamar Clark, DHS posted a report indicating that it was closely watching the social media accounts of a number of people, and noted that one user "expresses support for Islamic State" and another posted a photo revealing an "Islam Is Life" tattoo. DHS again reported that a "US person posted a call for Islamic State support" in July 2016, days after the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.
DHS Open Source Information Report December 20157 pages
DHS Open Source Information Report July 20162 pages
Shortly after that, as the deaths of Castile and Sterling were followed by deadly attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a warning based on the Facebook posts of a Bangladesh-based Al Qaeda supporter. The user called on black Americans to draw inspiration from Micah Johnson, who on July 7 had killed five police officers and injured several others at a protest against police brutality in Dallas. "Like the Dallas attacker in US, we appeal to the other negro Americans to jump into the agitation to realize their rights," the user wrote, according to the intelligence memo. "Pick up arms, like this attacker, against the terrorist US Armed Forces. Fight for your rights."
Office of the Director of National Intelligence July 20162 pages
The reports quickly trickled down to local law enforcement and fusion centers across the country. In a July 2016 assessment by the Greater Cincinnati Fusion Center, for instance, officials preparing for an upcoming NAACP convention in that city warned that "FTOs such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, have encouraged HVEs to conduct attacks within the Homeland," the memo noted, using acronyms for Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Homegrown Violent Extremists. "These groups use social media to inspire and urge violent extremists to attack targets in the Homeland, including mass gatherings such as the NAACP convention."
Greater Cincinnati Fusion Center Field Analysis Report July 20167 pages
That assessment listed a number of potential threats to the gathering and included references to a series of recent incidents of white supremacist violence specifically targeting African-Americans. But it also included much vaguer warnings that "ISIL" had recently "released an audio message urging its supporters to launch lone wolf attacks against military and civilian targets within the Homeland." Theodore Sampson, a member of the fusion center and captain with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the threat assessment, conducted in partnership with DHS, was "intended to support the security and public safety efforts of government agencies and private sector partners in identifying, deterring, preventing, and responding to potential threats during the convention" and that such "threat assessments are designed to look objectively at potential threats towards an event or venue without bias."
"In 2016, foreign terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula had repeatedly called for homegrown violent extremists to conduct attack within the United States. This messaging was published in al-Qa'ida's magazine Inspire and ISIL's Dabiq publication and recordings sent our through the internet and radio. Additionally, these terrorist organizations and sympathizers utilized social media to encourage attacks within the Homeland," Sampson wrote. "In this particular threat assessment, the reference to the audio message was to illustrate a recent example of the messaging encouraging lone wolf attacks towards mass gathering events and point out that homegrown violent extremist attacks were a persistent threat to mass gathering events."
The NAACP, which last month requested that Congress hold hearings on domestic terrorism and "the ways in which Black activists are being tracked and monitored by government agencies," could not immediately be reached for comment.
Absent from all these documents is any evidence that anyone associated with protests in the U.S. had responded to the exhortations of Islamic extremists — or that they had ever even seen those calls in the first place. Still, law enforcement's close scrutiny of these isolated instances, even when none of them seem to have amounted to anything more substantial than social media posts, and the fact that these calls were prominently included in intelligence assessment reports, risked conflating, in the eyes of law enforcement, legitimate domestic protest with foreign terrorism.
Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People's executive director, noted that government efforts to denigrate domestic critics by associating them with foreign enemies was an old and tested repressive tactic. "Since even before the FBI was named the FBI, U.S. intelligence agencies have preposterously targeted progressive dissent at home as tied to enemies abroad," he told The Intercept. "Today's obscene attempts to link Black Lives Matter to ISIS and Al Qaeda stand on the shoulders of a century of similar efforts to tar American dissent, especially in struggles for racial justice, as fronts for enemy agents."
Shapiro also noted that the documents showed a propensity by federal law enforcement to base their "open source" intelligence-gathering on the conspiracy theories of conservative news outlets, which officials uncritically circulated during the protests. In addition to Islamophobic coverage, DHS officials shared during the Ferguson and Baltimore protests, for instance, in July 2016 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence circulated news stories, by Fox News and the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail, about a photo posted on Facebook in the aftermath of the Dallas killings that showed "a man dressed in black slashing a uniformed officer's throat with a knife as blood spills out of the cop's neck." By contrast, earlier that summer, DHS officials monitoring protests in Minneapolis had also shared a story by the liberal publication AlterNet revealing that a local police union leader who had called Black Lives Matter a "terrorist organization" had a history of racist attitudes and was connected to a "white power-linked" bike gang. In that case, however, the officer circulating the story added a comment: "This article sounds like a drummed up hit piece to me," the officer wrote. "But it's nonetheless interesting to see all the race-related drama in Minneapolis at the moment."
Office of the Director of National Intelligence Press Clippings July 20167 pages
DHS Press Clippings June 20166 pages
"Homeland Security is basing terrorist intelligence assessments of Black Lives Matter on articles from Fox News and a British tabloid that literally warns of the great menace posed by Putin's purported army of hypnotic, shapeshifting super squid," said Shapiro, referring to DHS officials sharing a report about Islamic State members calling on black protesters to join them by the U.K.'s Daily Express, which also published a particularly outlandish story about the Russian president. "Meanwhile," Shapiro added, "DHS and other U.S. agencies are contorting themselves to ignore clear evidence of the dire threat from the far right."
Exposing Activists to Serious Risk
Federal officials weren't the only ones seeking to associate domestic dissent to foreign terrorism. Starting in Ferguson, a number of elected and law enforcement officials across the country referred to protesters not only by using racist terms such as "thugs," but also, increasingly, by calling them "terrorists," a reference that the FBI's "Black Identity Extremism" report only seemed to validate.
Indigenous and environmental rights activists involved in the Standing Rock protest movement were also repeatedly characterized as "terrorists." As The Intercept reported, private security contractors hired by the oil company behind the Dakota Access pipeline referred to the peaceful protest movement born to oppose the pipeline as a "jihadist insurgency" — and routinely shared intelligence assessments with law enforcement that portrayed activists as dangerous threats.
At Standing Rock, as in Ferguson, those watching the growing protests also paid particular attention to displays of solidarity with Palestine, with private security in North Dakota, for instance, noting that "the presence of additional Palestinians in the camp, and the movement's involvement with Islamic individuals is a dynamic that requires further examination."
"To them, a Palestinian flag might as well be an ISIS flag," said Lee, the Ferguson activist, referring to the baseless conflation of the Palestinian struggle with Islamic extremism.
"It wouldn't shock me at all to see misinterpretation of symbols, conflation of different groups, of different racial and ethnic and political and religious backgrounds, under this vector of challenging a Muslim boogeyman," echoed Choudhury. "It's absurd."
A protester waves a Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza during a demonstration after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 16, 2014.
Photo: Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Choudhury, who for years has worked to expose an FBI "racial and ethnic mapping program," noted that following the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU has obtained a number of intelligence documents that revealed the surveillance of Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian groups, premised on what she called a "totally unsubstantiated" recruitment threat from foreign Islamist groups. The ACLU, she added, also exposed intelligence training material filled with racial stereotypes about people of Arab descent and Muslims, showing the agency's profound ignorance about the very people it was surveilling.
But while there was never any evidence that foreign extremists' isolated appeals to U.S. activists had any effect, critics said the mere suggestion exposed those activists to serious risk.Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.I'm in
"That is the inevitable result of the creation of such a flawed intelligence product, that it inspires fear, and that it is going to lead to federal and state and local law enforcement's targeting of black activists based on nothing close to wrongdoing or violence," said Choudhury. "It's very dangerous, because it leads to this kind of targeting of human beings here in America, who are calling for equality and justice, just because there are other threats abroad."
Lee, the St. Louis activist, said that during the Ferguson protests, online trolls and conservative commentators especially targeted him and a couple of other Muslim activists with smear campaigns and racist and Islamophobic attacks, calling them terrorists and suggesting they were affiliated with Al Qaeda. One such smear, picked up widely by right-wing blogs, accused Lee of "threatening to behead critics."
"Some of those people were spreading rumors that I was in Ferguson recruiting for ISIS," Lee told The Intercept, noting that even some fellow protesters, when he once joined a protest right after leaving his mosque and while still wearing a thobe, commented "Here comes ISIS."
But Lee put the blame for smears and harassment campaigns squarely on government-sanctioned racism. He also pointed to the recent vilification of the black and Muslim Congressperson Ilhan Omar as another example of how ignorant and hate-filled campaigns are enabled by official discourse — whether by law enforcement and intelligence agencies or by lawmakers themselves. "It's institutionalized Islamophobia," Lee said. "It's institutionalized crusader mentality.
READ MORE AT: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/08/black-protesters-terrorism-threat-isis/
Black Activism black lives matter Black millenials cointelpro
Featured Music News
The Last Poets: the hip-hop forefathers who gave black America its voice
By Elliot Booker	—	2 years ago
Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
By Rebecca Bengal
You can trace the birth of hip-hop to the summer of 1973 when Kool Herc DJ'd the first extended breakbeat, much to the thrill of the dancers at a South Bronx block party. You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier – 19 May 1968, 50 years ago this weekend – when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park – now Marcus Garvey park – in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King. "Growing up, I was scheduled to be a nice little coloured guy. I was liked by everybody," says the Last Poets' Abiodun Oyewole. He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. "But when they killed Dr King, all bets were off."
That day led to the Last Poets' revelatory, self-titled 1970 debut of vitriolic black power poems spoken over the beat of a congo drum. Half a century later, the slaughter continues daily, in the form of assaults, school shootings and excessive police force. "America is a terrorist, killing the natives of the land / America is a terrorist, with a slave system in place," Oyewole declares on the Last Poets' new album, Understanding What Black Is, in which he and Umar Bin Hassan trade poems over reggae orchestration, horns, drums and flute. It's their first album in 20 years, reminding a new generation of hip-hop's roots in protest poetry.
The Last Poets – When the Revolution Comes.
"Ghostface Killah and RZA [from the Wu-Tang Clan] will bow down when they see us," Oyewole says. "People say we started rap and hip-hop, but what we really got going is poetry. We put poetry on blast." The Last Poets' poems have been sampled or quoted by NWA, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and many more; the rapper Common's Grammy-nominated 2005 song The Corner features the Last Poets (as well as Kanye West) representing the old-school guys in the neighbourhood who explain how black power rose up from the streets. "The corner was our Rock of Gibraltar," Bin Hassan says in the song. "Power to the people!"
The late Gil Scott-Heron, meanwhile, is often mistakenly believed to have been a member of the Last Poets. Rather, they were contemporaries, the connective tissue between the rap, hip-hop and spoken word genres they helped inspire, and their own direct influences: jazz and Langston Hughes and the words of their slain leaders. "'I been to the mountaintop!'" Oyewole says, quoting King's final speech when I visit him. "Ain't nothing but a poem."
On this Sunday, as with almost every Sunday for the last three decades, Oyewole is hosting the Open House poetry workshop in his Harlem apartment, a 20-minute walk from the spot where the Last Poets once spoke their first words. The door is cracked open for the stream of visitors who will fill the seats all afternoon and evening. Oyewole rarely reads his own work, but instead serves as teacher, leader and cook ("I do this to repair myself," he says). There are homemade salmon croquettes, shrimp grits and potatoes waiting in the kitchen. Fifty years of vintage posters and framed awards adorn the walls in the corridor – a literal hall of fame – while others are covered with masks from Oyewole's travels all over Africa and South America.
When he was growing up, Oyewole says, his father "raised me to hard work" – weeding the garden in Jamaica, Queens – "and I got love overtime from my mother". He calls two women mother, including the aunt who raised him and demanded he learn to clearly recite the Lord's Prayer so she could hear every word in the kitchen. Now 70, wiry, energetic, and having received his chosen name in a Yoruba religious service, Oyewole still uses his voice like an instrument, dramatically dialling it up and down in volume for emphasis in the free-ranging conversations that take place in his living room: basketball, the novels of Chinua Achebe, the backlash election of Donald Trump. "All Barack Obama got to do was clean up the mess made by the Bush administration. Pride was restored, money was restored. But that's all black folks has ever done, cleaning up. We've been the biggest servants this country has ever seen."
In the early 70s, when the Last Poets' first album began to attain popularity, Oyewole was in prison. He had been studying at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and robbed a local Ku Klux Klan meeting. "I have a strong distaste for guns now," he says. "But back then I treated my .38 Special like it was my wallet." During his three-and-a-half-year sentence, Oyewole's good behaviour permitted him study leave. On school days, as part of his study, he would visit a radio station and read out entire books on the air, which were then broadcast in the evenings. "I'd come back to my cell after class and guys would holler: 'I got you on my headphones, New York!'" he says. These days, when he teaches poetry workshops to teenage girls incarcerated at Rikers Island, he exhorts his students to educate themselves. "I tell them: you put a top hat on time and you learn how to get time to serve you!"
The Last Poets today … Abiodun Oyewole, Baba Donn Babatunde, and Umar Bin Hassan. Photograph: PR
Last Poets drummer Baba Donn Babatunde drops by and Oyewole introduces him as the heartbeat of the group. Impressively tall, he wears a gold pendant on his dress shirt in place of a tie and speaks in a serious, mellifluous baritone. When he was 11, his activist mother turned him on to the Last Poets; since 1991, when he joined the group that so inspired him, he tries to summon in his drumming "the spirit, the anger I felt when I first heard those poems. What I do is the dramatisation of those words, carrying them rather than fighting them."
By and by others drift in. "Can I play your drum?" a guy called Jason asks as he wanders in. In his early 20s, he smokes some dope and grows quickly impatient. "Check this out!" Jason pleads, pausing to cue up a phone recording of himself playing at home.
Oyewole isn't having it. "I don't want to hear your damn gadget!" he explodes. He refuses to use a mobile phone. "In 1972, in my poem Mean Machine, I wrote: 'Synthetic genetics controls your soul,'" he says. "Who would I be if I had one of those things now? Some of them here get up and read their poetry right off their gadgets. I tell them: that thing is a wall between us and you."
He is equally harsh on those who blame their circumstances for their troubles, a philosophy Bin Hassan shares. One of Bin Hassan's poems on the new record, NEWS (North East West South), is a moving response to the death of Prince, who was a fan of the group. "I grew up black in the midwest; I had a creative father who could be abusive," Bin Hassan says a few days after the workshop. "The kid in Purple Rain is named Jerome, and that's my real name. So when I saw the film, I felt like it was my life story, too. But you can't get hung up – you have to use that and move on." Bin Hassan moved to Baltimore several years ago and, in between writing poems, he looks after his grandchildren. "I cleaned up," Bin Hassan says, having fought a crack addiction, "and I'm thankful I'm still here."
Rain Maker, a 20-year veteran of the workshop, runs through poems for a gig in Albany the next night. Albe Daniel, an actor and poet who calls Oyewole a surrogate father and addresses him as "Pops", brings his daughter Katie, six. A poet called Miriam strides up to Oyewole's chair: "This is Ramesses!" she says proudly, and a tiny face peeps out from a carriage. "Well, well," says Oyewole, smiling. "I just got off the phone with my own son, Pharaoh." A guy who introduces himself simply as Born brings bags of wine and groceries; soon there's frying in the kitchen, Lauryn Hill on a mini-stereo by the stove, the happy chaos of a little party in the making.
At about 8pm, Oyewole shuts everyone up. "We're getting ready to do poetry!" he shouts and everyone dutifully lines up. Immediately, a chorus of 15 or so voices – young and old, all persons of colour – recites in bright, powerful unison: "I want to be who I want to be …" This is the "pledge", committed to memory by every workshop poet, written on the fly by Oyewole years ago when he was doing a school visit in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district and a sharp-eyed student noticed he hadn't recited the US pledge of allegiance. "I don't sing no Star-Spangled Banner – that's a war song!" he responded. "And I tell you what, I got a better pledge than that one."
"I want to feel good about me, and blame no one for my misery," the poets continue in collective, syncopated rhythm. "I want to say what I know, to make my brothers and sisters grow."
"Baby, that's a mouthful!" Oyewole says, his eyes lighting up. It's time for the workshop participants to step up.
A guy in his 20s rises, mumbles his name inaudibly. He recites his poem over familiar music, the instrumental of Childish Gambino's Redbone. "You got a flow," Oyewole acknowledges, "but I want to see you being totally original."
A discussion about artistic theft ensues. One of the best-known homages to the Last Poets arrived via Notorious BIG's debut single, Party and Bullshit. Recently, a judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Oyewole alleged that Biggie, Rita Ora and other artists, infringed on copyright and used the lyrics in a "non-conscious" way, corrupting the original message.
"When the revolution comes, some of us will probably catch it on TV, with chicken hanging from our mouths," the Last Poets chant on their debut. "When the revolution comes …!" The line in question is one they say in a rhythmic chorus: "But until then you know and I know niggers will party and bullshit, and party and bullshit …" The rhythm is echoed in Biggie's recitation of the line. "It's like prophecy, Pops!" Albe Daniels says. "Y'all called it. The revolution came and they were all partying and bullshitting."
Abiodun Oyewole performing in 2006. Photograph: Johnny Nunez/WireImage
Vanessa, a New York-raised teacher in her early 40s with family back in Haiti, waits through a few protracted rounds of talk before the room shushes again. "May the dust of your slain sisters stick to the soles of your feet when you walk," she reads midway through her poem and Oyewole stops her. "Do that line again!" he shouts appreciatively. "That was so fucking powerful."
At midnight, the open house is closed. "I tell them all to scatter like mice!" Oyewole says. At seven the next morning, like every morning till 12.30pm, he will return to his desk and write facing east, to Marcus Garvey park. "I look east because that's where the sun rises," Oyewole says. "That's where life begins."
READ MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/18/the-last-poets-the-hip-hop-forefathers-who-gave-black-america-its-voice
Hundreds of Protestors Close Ports Down To Protest Hiring Practices There
By Michael Hill
"Newark is here! We're ready to work! We work or nobody works," said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
Baraka made good on his promise and led a protest at the Port of Newark, first shutting down one lane of truck traffic and then all lanes on Corbin Street outside the Maher Terminal where he tried to deliver job applications from Newark residents. Port Authority Police watched. Some truckers became hopeless and turned around. Some port workers yelled, "Go back to Newark" and "Run the animals over!"
But, the mayor and hundreds of protesters who came by buses were undeterred as he held court in the middle of the road.
"Guy hit me up on Twitter said you should be worried about crime. I said I am that's why I'm worried about jobs," said Baraka said.
The mayor has asked the Justice and Labor departments to investigate and accuses the International Longshoremen's Association and the New York Shipping Association of denying full-time jobs to Newark residents and said these Newarkers got temporary jobs but were not called back while counterparts from another town were.
"And all that we ask as citizens of the great city we call Newark is the opportunityto be a part of the greatest job opportunity that the great city of Newark has to offer," Newark resident Alan Gates said.
In response to the mayor, the ILA's president wrote: "Historically, the percentage of longshore workers who live in Newark has fluctuated. Even though many Newark residents have been hired for these jobs over the years, many of them have decided to move themselves and their families to other areas of New Jersey and New York to experience a different lifestyle."
The city of Newark and the Waterfront Commission say the hiring numbers here are disappointing and staggering.
The commission was formed to combat corrupt hiring practices and it says as of March 1, this was the ethnic breakdown of the nearly 1,600 Port of Newark maintenance workers: 40 black, 252 Hispanic and 1,281 white — all men.
In a statement, the Waterfront Commission told us, "The Waterfront Commission has been tirelessly fighting to secure waterfront job opportunities for minorities and residents from Port communities. While our efforts have resulted in an overall increase in minority hiring, the practices of the New York Shipping Association, Inc. (NYSA) and the International Longshoremen's Association, AFL-CIO (ILA), and others continue to result in an incredible lack of diversity in waterfront employment."
The ILA said the mayor knows what it stands for and has accepted its $9,000 in contributions to his political war chest. Its president said, "The longshore industry is committed to a discrimination-free waterfront" and "Mayor Baraka presents multiple claims to create the appearance of nonexistent racial discrepancies"
And the Shipping Association, which does the hiring, says the most recent numbers paint a much different picture than the mayor's.
But, these Newark residents cheered on their mayor's employment quest.
"We have to say if we can't get employed there's going to be hell to pay down there at that port until they start opening up their doors to all Newark residents in this city," said Baraka.
They vowed this is not the last protest here, it's the first.
Summer Reading: Recommended New Books on the Black Experience
By: IBRAM X. KENDI June 11th 2018
https://www.aaihs.org/black-perspectives/
With summer quickly approaching, I have compiled a list of recommended new non-fiction books. All of these books, which were published as early as February or will be published this summer, offer valuable insights on the Black experience in the United States and across the globe. Collectively, these books deepen our understanding of race and racism, and provide the necessary tools for antiracism work. The list is organized alphabetically.
Tera Eva Agyepong,The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945(University of North Carolina Press, April 2018).
In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of "child" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. In this important study, Agyepong expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, she also complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century.
Mary Frances Berry,History Teachers Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times(Beacon Press, March 2018).
Despair and mourning after the election of an antagonistic or polarizing president, such as Donald Trump, is part of the push-pull of American politics. But in this incisive book, historian Mary Frances Berry shows that resistance to presidential administrations has led to positive change and the defeat of outrageous proposals, even in challenging times. Noting that all presidents, including ones considered progressive, sometimes require massive organization to affect policy decisions, Berry cites Indigenous peoples' protests against the Dakota pipeline during Barack Obama's administration as a modern example of successful resistance built on earlier actions. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Berry discusses that president's refusal to prevent race discrimination in the defense industry during World War II and the subsequent March on Washington movement. She analyzes Lyndon Johnson, the war in Vietnam, and the antiwar movement and then examines Ronald Reagan's two terms, which offer stories of opposition to reactionary policies, such as ignoring the AIDS crisis and retreating on racial progress, to show how resistance can succeed. The prochoice protests during the George H. W. Bush administration and the opposition to Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, as well as his budget cuts and welfare reform, are also discussed, as are protests against the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act during George W. Bush's presidency. Throughout these varied examples, Berry underscores that even when resistance doesn't achieve all the goals of a particular movement, it often plants a seed that comes to fruition later.
Keisha N. Blain,Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Penn Press, February 2018).
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
Howard Bryant, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Beacon Press, May 2018).
It used to be that politics and sports were as separate from one another as church and state. The ballfield was an escape from the world's worst problems, top athletes were treated like heroes, and cheering for the home team was as easy and innocent as hot dogs and beer. "No news on the sports page" was a governing principle in newsrooms. That was then. Today, sports arenas have been transformed into staging grounds for American patriotism and the hero worship of law enforcement. Teams wear camouflage jerseys to honor those who serve; police officers throw out first pitches; soldiers surprise their families with homecomings at halftime. Sports and politics are decidedly entwined. But as journalist Howard Bryant reveals, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. In fact, among all black employees in twentieth-century America, perhaps no other group had more outsized influence and power than ballplayers. The immense social responsibilities that came with the role is part of the black athletic heritage. It is a heritage built by the influence of the superstardom and radical politics of Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos through the 1960s; undermined by apolitical, corporate-friendly "transcenders of race," O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods in the following decades; and reclaimed today by the likes of LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and Carmelo Anthony. The Heritage is the story of the rise, fall, and fervent return of the athlete-activist. Through deep research and interviews with some of sports' best-known stars—including Kaepernick, David Ortiz, Charles Barkley, and Chris Webber—as well as members of law enforcement and the military, Bryant details the collision of post-9/11 sports in America and the politically engaged post-Ferguson black athlete.
Brittany Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower(St. Martin's Press, February 2018).
So what if it's true that Black women are mad as hell? They have the right to be. In the Black feminist tradition of Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper reminds us that anger is a powerful source of energy that can give us the strength to keep on fighting. Far too often, Black women's anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women's eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It's what makes Beyoncé's girl power anthems resonate so hard. It's what makes Michelle Obama an icon. Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don't have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother's eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper's world, , neither mean girls nor f***boys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one's own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.
Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality(PublicAffairs Books, June 2018).
The American frontier is one of our most cherished and enduring national images. We think of the early pioneers who settled the wilderness as courageous, independent–and white. This version of history is simply wrong. Starting in our nation's earliest years, thousands of free African Americans were building hundreds of settlements in the Northwest Territory, a territory that banned slavery and gave equal voting rights to all men. This groundbreaking work of research reveals the lost history of the nation's first Great Migration. Though forgotten today, these pioneers were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence leading to fierce political movements and battles that tore families and communities apart long before the Civil War erupted. The Bone and Sinew of the Land is a story with its roots in the ideals of the American Revolution, a story of courageous pioneers transformed by the belief that all men are created equal, seeking a brighter future on the American frontier.
Roxane Gay, ed., Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture(HarperCollins Publishers, May 2018).
In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are "routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied" for speaking out. Contributions include essays from established and up-and-coming writers, performers, and critics, including actors Ally Sheedy and Gabrielle Union and writers Amy Jo Burns, Lyz Lenz, Claire Schwartz, and Bob Shacochis. Covering a wide range of topics and experiences, from an exploration of the rape epidemic embedded in the refugee crisis to first-person accounts of child molestation, this collection is often deeply personal and is always unflinchingly honest. Like Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, Not That Bad will resonate with every reader, saying "something in totality that we cannot say alone." Searing and heartbreakingly candid, this provocative collection both reflects the world we live in and offers a call to arms insisting that "not that bad" must no longer be good enough.
Jean Hatzfeld, Blood Papa: Rwanda's New Generation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2018).
In Rwanda from April to June 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in the largest and swiftest genocide since World War II. In his previous books, Jean Hatzfeld has documented the lives of the killers and victims, but after twenty years he has found that the enormity of understanding doesn't stop with one generation. In Blood Papa, Hatzfeld returns to the hills and marshes of Nyamata to ask what has become of the children—those who never saw the machetes yet have grown up in the shadow of tragedy. Fabrice, Sandra, Jean-Pierre, and others share the genocide as a common inheritance. Some have known only their parents' silence and lies, enduring the harassment of classmates or the stigma of a father jailed for unspeakable crimes. Others have enjoyed a loving home and the sympathies offered to survivor children, but do so without parents or an extended family. The young Rwandans in Blood Papa see each other in the neighborhood—they dance and gossip, frequent the same cafés, and, like teenagers everywhere, love sports, music, and fashion; they surf the Web and dream of marriage. Yet Hutu and Tutsi children rarely speak of the ghosts that haunt their lives. Here their moving first-person accounts combined with Hatzfeld's arresting chronicles of everyday life form a testament to survival in a country devastated by the terrible crimes and trauma of the past
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"(HarperCollins Publishers, May 2018).
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, June 2018).
Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
Keisha Lindsay, In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools(University of Illinois Press, July 2018).
Many advocates of all-black male schools (ABMS) argue that these institutions counter black boys' racist emasculation in white, "overly" female classrooms. This argument challenges racism and perpetuates antifeminism. Keisha Lindsay explains the complex politics of ABMS by situating these schools within broader efforts at neoliberal education reform and within specific conversations about both "endangered" black males and a "boy crisis" in education. Lindsay also demonstrates that intersectionality, long considered feminist, is in fact a politically fluid framework. As such, it represents a potent tool for advancing many political agendas, including those of ABMS supporters who champion antiracist education for black boys while obscuring black girls' own race and gender-based oppression in school. Finally, Lindsay theorizes a particular means by which black men and other groups can form antiracist and feminist coalitions even when they make claims about their experiences that threaten bridge building. The way forward, Lindsay shows, allows disadvantaged groups to navigate the racial and gendered politics that divide them in pursuit of productive—and progressive—solutions. Far-thinking and boldly argued, In a Classroom of Their Own explores the dilemmas faced by professionals and parents in search of equitable schooling for all students—black boys and otherwise.
Darnell L. Moore, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America(Nation Books, May 2018).
When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling. Moore's transcendence over the myriad forces of repression that faced him is a testament to the grace and care of the people who loved him, and to his hometown, Camden, NJ, scarred and ignored but brimming with life. Moore reminds us that liberation is possible if we commit ourselves to fighting for it, and if we dream and create futures where those who survive on society's edges can thrive. No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope-and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.
Donna Murch, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Mass Incarceration, and the Movement for Black Lives(Haymarket Books, August 2018).
Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working- class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, it is these punishment campaigns, Murch says, that generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such difficult conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and incarceration has proved difficult. This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged since the killing of Trayvon Martin that challenges the bi-partisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party, in which the world's largest police state has emerged.
Nell Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over(Counterpoint Press, June 2018).
How are women, and artists, "seen" and judged by their age, race, and looks? And how does this seeing change, depending upon what is asked of the viewer? What does it mean when someone states (as one teacher does) that "you will never be an Artist"—who defines "an Artist," and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Old in Art School represents an ongoing exploration of such questions, one that ultimately honors curiosity, openness, and joy—the joy of embracing creativity, dreams, the importance of hard work, and the stubborn determination of your own value. Nell Painter's journey is filled with surprises, even as she brings to bear the incisiveness of her insights from two careers, which combine in new ways even as they take very different approaches—one searching for facts and cohesion, the other seeking the opposite. She travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, such as Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, or Maira Kalman, even as she comes to understand how they are undervalued; and struggles with the ever-changing balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.
Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem(University of North Carolina Press, February 2018).
The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life up through the present day. In this rich, poignant, and readable work, Imani Perry tells the story of the Black National Anthem as it traveled from South to North, from civil rights to black power, and from countless family reunions to Carnegie Hall and the Oval Office. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Perry uses "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a window on the powerful ways African Americans have used music and culture to organize, mourn, challenge, and celebrate for more than a century.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wresting with the Devil: A Prison Memoir (The New Press, March 2018).
Wrestling with the Devil, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's powerful prison memoir, begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya's Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population. In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ's account of the drama and the challenges of writing fiction under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.
READ MORE AT: https://www.aaihs.org/summerreading-recommended-new-books-on-the-black-experience/
Other Podcasts!!
Be sure to check out our other Podcasts!!!!
African Perspectives
Black Reality Think Tank
Saturday Sports Talk (SST)
Us Lifting Us (ULU)
Support Time for Awakening!
Donate to Time for an Awakening Media
Time for an Awakening Media, part of the Black Talk Radio Network snags #1 Black Audio Podcasting Ranking. Please make a donation to keep Time for an Awakening and it's programs on air & online & in the community.
Snags #1 Black Audio Podcasting Ranking
Top 25 Black Podcasts & Radio You Must Subscribe & Listen to in 2019 - blog.feedspot.com
Black Podcast newsletter is a comprehensive summary of the day's most important audio podcasts episodes from the best podcasters on the web and delivered to your email inbox each morning.
blog.feedspot.com
Click to give a custom amount
TFAA Adsense
©2019 Copyright Time For Awakening Media


You can use beacon for; ● Inform your customers: You can share various information with your customers such as event agendas, brochures or schedules as people enter the venue. ● Sell your products: By adding hyperlocal and customized context to your marketing messages that are delivered directly to customers' smartphones you will be able to attract more new customers and engage better with existing ones. ● Analyze: Beacons can provide detailed analytical insights on the movement behavior of your visitors. This data is extremely valuable for many businesses as it helps them to learn how visitors interact with their venue in space and time. ● Track: You have a warehouse with hundreds of containers that are constantly on the move for un/loading. It can be difficult to find a specific one at short notice. Mounting beacons can help you to establish a monitoring system for keeping track and locating every single one of them. ● Security: Beacons can be integrated with electronic locks to secure doors in your office, household or a venue. There is no need to carry around a bunch of keys anymore. Your smartphone is the only one you'll need!
Weltanschauung < ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ < 🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 < ... // #UltimateDataMachine with #MachineLearning , study the present... #MotivationMonday Pioneering Non Destructive Testing for Telematics. // // N-dimension Play, Codify, or Draw? Since '85 👀 🍻 (cheers) QM Omnichannel 🗞 Apple News - CrowdMole 🥶🦃 // +30 year warm start in #Engineering #Analytics , True luxury is not driving 100, it is being 100!!! 100th monkey rule. 101 IAM Geometry - Science of Solitude, Only pay for what you need. "Thou Shall Not Code, Query", Because binary is 2 dimensional space, For higher levels of work. 6 Paths Quantum is not taught in 🇺🇸, Binary "Follow The Leader" becomes, This is how I earned, Colin's Law - ECRA 2018 label on packaging. ⚖ #TrueStory "Thou Shall Not Query" // // Military Child Month 🏴TA4 3x ✍ "the thing" #DigitalTransformation #BehindTheScreens // // Cox #DataScience Predictive #SupplyChain 2 legs up!!! 99% Audience likes Science, Technology ✨ Augmented Common Sense, Q4 2017 ✨ Machine Common Sense, Q4 2018 +30yr warm start, equal work, opportunity lead to: For example: "The data must be transformed so it is coherent, relevant, and actionable by humans and machine-to-machine or system-to-system interfaces." - Official Sources 🎞 in quilt - pension earned. SPARK, exponential professional experience 200k. // Self-service - QR code, Next 🧩 // #SpatialIntelligence #QuantumFinance #QuantumMechanics #InterstellarFinance . #hoboken #manhattan #McLean #Alexandria #Paris #London #Zurich // Disclaimer: Demo - opinion only. They seem to be grounded in common sense as well as experience. Don't argue the topic, develop your own. // 😎 SOCIALGOODREWARDS® physics of others. // Eleanor Framework™. // ©1983, ©2019. All Rights Reserved. // Colin, IBM® §U.S.C., Treaties, etc. // Augmented Project Thinking. // Designed by Freepik.


text:
Roger Ebert's Critical Eye on Machinima: Will the use of video game technology to make movies result in art or kitsch?
On May 31, 2018 March 11, 2020 By DondeIn Community, Machinima, Quake 2 art
The Ghost in the Machinima, by Roger Ebert
Somewhere right now, in a basement or bedroom, a kid is making an animated movie that will play in a theater near you. It's been possible for years to create animation on home computers, but a new movement named Machinima plans to make those movies more sophisticated — of commercial quality. Machinimists don't use high-priced software programs but the "rendering engines" used by games like Quake and Unreal.
This was only a matter of time. Software gets cheaper and wants to be free. Home computers are more powerful than the mainframes of a few years ago. Sony's new PlayStation 2 is both a toy and a supercomputer. In March, the digital media practitioners' collective, Conduit, held the first U.S. gathering of Machinima filmmakers at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
The key elements in Machinima are low cost and artistic freedom. These movies do not require actors, set designers, cinematographers, caterers, best boys, or key grips. They can be made by one person sitting at a computer. This is revolutionary. But my guess is that the films themselves will not be as revolutionary as the techniques used to make them — that out of those basements and bedrooms will come not cinematic art but elaborations on the themes of video games.
One day in 1967 I was having lunch with Francis Ford Coppola, then about the age of a lot of today's Machinimists. We were talking about his film Finian's Rainbow, but then he opened a bulging briefcase. "Look at this," he said, spilling glossy brochures on the table. "These are video cameras that can actually be carried by one person. One day they'll be better, cheaper, and smaller. And a filmmaker will be able to carry a movie studio in his hands."
With the advent of digital video, that day has come. Nevertheless, films shot on digital require lots of collaborators. The director Bernard Rose, at Sundance this year, was exulting about his new film, made with eight actors who doubled as the production staff. But it had a sizable budget by Machinima standards, and if you want big stars you have to pay for them in one way or another.
Animation doesn't need stars. All it needs is imagination and technical skill. It's at this frontier that Coppola's vision comes true: An individual animator, working alone like a painter, a novelist, or a poet, makes a work of art.
Intrigued, I looked at some examples online, starting at Machinima.com. One film, Ozymandias, is a visualization of a Shelley poem about the ruined statue of a once great king. It involves simply rendered desert landscapes and a sketchy human figure that traverses them. Very basic, but curiously effective, and the music establishes the mood. Another film is The Kick, which is essentially a video game demo.
These films represent two choices. One has an idea, but the other just recycles the exhausted clichés of games. Neither one is realistic in appearance, but here's an important point: Animation does not need realism. Although Disney and other mainstream Hollywood shops seek the ideal of full-motion animation, some of the best animated films have been much simpler.
Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988) may provide the most powerful emotional experience ever created by animation. It isn't realistic at all. The characters follow the anime conventions of big saucer eyes and simplified figures. The backgrounds, beautifully drawn, aren't intended to depict real life. Animation suggests, and the imagination supplies; our eyes fill in the gaps. Grave of the Fireflies uses pauses, silence, moments of regard and meditation to tell its story.
I'm afraid those kids in basements will gravitate toward ideas based on games; their work will be visually impressive but empty. We'll get aliens, laser rays, space cadets, tomb raiders. The Machinima movement will produce the ability to make feature-length animated films at home. But it will not automatically realize Coppola's dream of putting the means of production into the hands of the artists. The means of production are here. It's the artist part that's tricky.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405112906/http://www.zdnet.com:80/yil/stories/features/0,9539,2572985,00.html
2000artistryAustinBernard rosecomunidade MachinimaConduitCoppoladigital mediafilmmakingFinian's RainbowFrancis Ford Coppolagrave of the firefliesisao takahataMachinimamachinima artmachinima moviemachinima videomovie reviewozymandiasQuakequake 2Quake IIQuake II Machinimaroger ebertshelley poemSouth by Southwest Film FestivalSundanceSundance film festivaltexasThe Kickunrealvideogame artistryzdnet
The History of the Hyperion Theatre, Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut
The Role of Art in Quake Movies: A Warrior's Life

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
jimbessman.com
Bessman News
Cancer Funnies
Tales of Bessman
The Fall of the House of Bessman
Concert Highlights
The Bessman Sideshow
YouTube Discoveries
Talking to Myself Out Loud
Bessman Archives
Jean Ritchie
Bill Gaither and the Bessman Homecoming
September 9, 2016 September 10, 2016 Jim
For the record, that's Bill Gaither on the right, photo by Kevin Williams
It was Christmas in September—Sept. 3, to be exact—when the mail brought the new DVD box set Bill Gaither's Homecoming Hymns, a 10-disc set of 150 performances including a disc of Christmas hymns, not to mention a 48-page hymn book. Special guests including George Jones, Alabama, the Oak Ridge Boys and Marty Stuart join such Gaither Homecoming stalwarts as Jeff and Sheri Easter, The Isaacs, the late Jake Hess and Vestal Goodman, and of course, the Gaither Vocal Band, whom I was lucky enough to see in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Tabernacle on Mother's Day, May 8.
The last time I was in Brooklyn—not counting a few doctors appointments—was to see Richard Smallwood & Vision, D.C.'s top gospel group, back in January at the Kumble Theatre at Long Island University. Valerie Simpson was concerned about the rough start to 2016 and brought them all up for a private show for friends in need of something positive and good. The last time I'd seen the Gaither Vocal Band was way back, at the post-9/11 Homecoming show Bill Gaither did at Carnegie Hall in 2002, which came out later that year in a two-part video set, Let Freedom Ring/God Bless America. Like all Gaither Homecomings, it was a huge show, starring besides GVB—if I remember correctly–Mark Lowry, Gloria Gaither, The Martins, Jessy Dixon, Sandi Patty, Larnelle Harris, The Isaacs, The Hoppers, members of the New York "Firefighters for Christ" organization, Jeff and Sheri Easter, George Beverly Shea, David Phelps, Ben Speer, James Blackwood, Howard and Vestal Goodman, Jake Hess, J.D. Sumner, Buddy Greene, Guy Penrod, Russ Taff, the Crabb Family and maybe Dottie Rambo, and, by the way, Paul Simon!
But you didn't see or hear Simon, who had brought Jessy and his Jessy Dixon Singers on tour with him for eight years (and used them on the Paul Simon in Concert: Live Rhymin' and Still Crazy After All These Years albums) and had been invited by Dixon to the show, on the Carnegie Hall Homecoming videos and CDs: He didn't sign off on his performances, which included a stunning version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
Otherwise, there are three songs from the concert that I regularly post from YouTube: Sandi and Larnelle's "More Than Wonderful," The Martins' "So High" and The Isaacs' "Star-Spangled Banner"—far and away the best version of the National Anthem I've ever heard. A year or so later I walked past Marty Stuart's booth at Country Music Fan Fair in Nashville and Marty yelled out that he'd seen me in the audience on the DVDs. Sure enough, they had me front row, center. Had I known in advance, I'd have dressed a whole lot better.
All of this was thanks to my dear friend Bill Carter, Secret Service agent for Kennedy and Johnson (no, there was no JFK conspiracy—Oswald acted alone) and later tour lawyer for the Rolling Stones (Bill first appears on the first line of Page 2 of Keith Richards' memoir, having sprung Keef from his Canada heroin bust) and manager of country artists including Reba McEntire and Rodney Crowell prior to handling all of the Gaither projects. Through Bill I'd done a lot of work with the Gaither organization, writing bios and liner notes for Jake, Jessy, James, GVB and others. Indeed, my association with the Gaithers is among my proudest and most enriching.
But it had been way too long since I'd had any live contact with Gaither stars other than Bill's Rector Concert 2010, a fundraiser for the Rector High School Helping Hands Foundation in Bill's tiny, impoverished hometown of Rector, Arkansas, which featured Mark Lowry, Jason Crabb, Gene McDonald, Charlotte Ritchie and GVB's bandleader/guitarist Kevin Williams; also the August, 2014 annual Johnny Cash Music Festival in Jonesboro, Arkansas, a benefit to fund the restoration of The Johnny Cash Boyhood Home in nearby Dyess, which Bill organized and Mark hosted. I'd also spoken with Mark and Kevin and Bill, Sandi and David and Jason for various examiner.com features over the years—which is why Kevin had contacted me ahead of the Brooklyn show: He wanted help getting the word out on his own Carter-inspired Kevin's Kids concert fundraiser for at-risk kids in his hometown of Russell Springs, Kentucky. Of course, I was happy to oblige, and almost as an afterthought he told me he'd be at the Brooklyn Tabernacle that Sunday with GVB.
I'm pretty sure I'd seen the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir somewhere in New York—at a Madison Square Garden gospel show, maybe, or one of the Billy Graham Crusades–but never at its immense temple in the heart of downtown Brooklyn. Yet as excited as I was on the train from 42nd Street, there was also a feeling of guilt, of not being worthy. Putting it mildly, I'm not a believer. If there is an afterlife, I most certainly am going to hell, which is fine by me: That's where most my friends already are or eventually will be.
And I don't believe in a higher power…well, I take that back: Years ago when I went to Fan Fair every year, when it was held at the Fairgrounds, I'd always go out for lunch with Bill Carter, top Nashville publicist Judy Turner and his daughters Joanna and Julia, it being Joanna's birthday lunch. They always had a hard time accepting my atheism, and at one point, Joanna turned to me and said, "I just can't believe you don't have a higher power!"
But I do have a higher power, I assured her, then turned to her dad and said, "Bill Carter!" He just proudly flashed that warm shit-eatin' grin of his.
But really, I don't believe in anything…well, I take that back, too. I believe in Ashford & Simpson. And I believe in doing good, which is the same thing. And I know I try to do good.
But what I love so much about Bill Carter and Bill Gaither and everybody associated with the Gaither organization is that they really are good people, "good and gentle people," to quote from a song I remember by Jean Ritchie, though I can't seem to find it anywhere. Wonderful people, actually. I am blessed to know them, let alone be part of them in my own small, unworthy way.
The Gaither Vocal Band did a set following one by the Tabernacle Choir, all following the first Sunday morning service. The 280-voice choir was stacked 10 levels high on a riser on stage, and their sound, obviously, was overpowering, under the direction of Carol Cymbala, wife of Pastor Jim Cymbala, who then introduced his friend Bill Gaither. Somehow GVB—now including, besides Bill, David Phelps, Wes Hampton, Todd Suttles and Jason's brother Adam Crabb–was equally overpowering, if not even more so.
I've seen GVB with David, Mark Lowry, Guy Penrod and Russ Taff—four of the 16 members the group has had in its 30 years, according to Kevin's tally.
"They're so young, talented and handsome. It makes you sick!" said Bill when he introduced the current lineup, which was backed by a band made up of drummer, keyboardist, guitar/fiddle/mandolin player and Kevin. Somehow he's now 80, though he hasn't aged at all in the 14 years since I last saw him, and he looked a whole lot younger even then.
The first four songs of the GVB Brooklyn Tabernacle set were "standard," Kevin told me after. "We just winged it after that." Most of the rest of the repertoire, then, were songs by Gloria, who sadly wasn't there. But they did do the late Mosie Lister classic "`Til the Storm Passes By" and James B. Coats' "Where Could I go but to the Lord?" The sound was simply stunning, as were the visuals: At one point the great bass vocalist Gene McDonald came out for a bass-off with Todd Suttles, who had to stand on a chair to stand up to his much taller opponent.
Gene came out again for the closer, Gloria's "I Then Shall Live." With its synth orchestration, it built and built and built like a classic Ashford & Simpson performance. Then again, Ashford & Simpson came out of gospel—Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson met at the White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem, and were first part of a gospel group called The Followers.
Besides being a great guitarist/bandleader, Kevin is very funny, and an experienced emcee who hosted Bill Carter's Rector benefit. He's taken over Mark Lowry's role as comic foil to ever-befuddled straight man Bill Gaither in GVB shows, though he sees himself as more of a "wise ass" than Mark's mischievous clown. He got a big laugh during the show when after Bill reminisced about Southern gospel Gaither Homecoming legends like Vestal and Howard, Jake and J.D., he pointedly said to Bill, "They're all gone—except for you!"
But you'd be hard-pressed to guess the 80-year-old in the picture of me and Bill taken outside GVB's tour bus after the show. On the bus we all talked about that Carnegie Hall Homecoming show, and how all those greats are indeed gone now—as is Nick. It was great seeing Bill, Kevin and Gene again, and regaling them all with Nick and Val stories.
For sure, I have known some good and gentle people. And I believe in the Gaithers.
Music, Tales of Bessman	Alabama, Ashford & Simpson, Ben Speer, Bill Gaither, Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, Buddy Greene, Carnegie Hall, Country Music Fan Fair, Crabb Family, David Phelps, Dottie Rambo, Gaither Homecoming, Gaither Vocal Band, Gene McDonald, George Beverly Shea, George Jones, Gloria Gaither, Guy Penrod, Howard Goodman, J.D. Sumner, Jake Hess, James Blackwood, Jason Crabb, Jean Ritchie, Jeff and Sheri Easter, Jessy Dixon, John F. Kennedy, Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, Kevin Williams, Larnelle Harris, Mark Lowry, Marty Stuart, Nick Ashford, Oak Ridge Boys, Paul Simon, Reba McEntire, Richard Smallwood, Rodney Crowell, Rolling Stones, Russ Taff, Sandi Patti, The Hoppers, The Isaacs, The Martins, Valerie Simpson, Vestal Goodman	Leave a comment
In memoriam, 2015
January 1, 2016 Jim
Once again I'm looking back at the little "appreciation" pieces I wrote in 2014 and recall those who moved me then and now–here, however, on a more personal basis.
And that there are so many means there will only be that many more next year, for the older you get, the more you lose—unless, that is, it's you who are lost.
It started early last year on Jan. 2 with Little Jimmy Dickens, whom I didn't really know, but met a few times and was in his presence backstage at the Grand Ole Opry many, many more. Andrae Crouch came next: I didn't know him either, but had seen him live at least once, on a Gaither Homecoming show.
Ervin Drake I did know quite well. And even though he died at 95, I was still surprised. I used to run into the Songwriters Hall of Famer ("It Was a Very Good Year," "I Believe") and his wife Edith a lot, at ASCAP and songwriters functions and at Christine Lavin shows–where he'd usually perform and always seem forever young.
As for the notorious Kim Fowley, I'm not sure if I ever met him, though I think I did, and I'm not sure I'd have been so kind to him had the piece by Jackie Fuchs—formerly The Runaways' Jackie Fox–about being raped by him at 16, with band mates Joan Jett, Cherie Currie and Sandy West allegedly looking on, come out before mine. But let me say also that I had problems with that piece and a more recent one where she talked about the impact of the first one, particularly the charges against Jett and Currie. I found both pieces then and now way too confusing—same with those who corroborated her. And admittedly and not unashamedly being a Joan fan, I didn't feel she deserved the contempt and willingness among so many to summarily erase her positive contributions based on one person's recollection of a horrible incident of which the only certainty I found was that it happened a long time ago when all but Fowley were teenagers, and if the other girls were there, likely not sober—though in no way does any of this absolve Fowley.
I did meet Dixie Hall, the great bluegrass songwriter–and wife of Tom T Hall, but never met Ernie Banks, though there was no one who did not love either—especially Mr. Cub, whom I followed as a Milwaukee Braves fan in the state next door. I was a huge fan of Ward Swingle's Swingle Singers, and used to run into legendary New York TV talk show host Joe Franklin a lot—and will always regret never taking him up on his invitation to come visit him.
Not sure if I met Don Herron, but I hung out a lot on the set of Hee Haw and might have. Most definitely enjoyed his Charlie Farquharson newscaster bits. And most definitely did meet the great Rod McKuen, at a Songwriters Hall of Fame awards dinner.
I'd seen Don Covay, but knew him first from covers of his songs like the Stones' "Mercy, Mercy" and Aretha's "Chain of Fools." Lesley Gore, on the other hand, was such a dear, dear friend and music hero that when I learned of her death on Feb. 16 while at Toy Fair, of all places, I really did burst into tears. I wrote an appreciation piece for at examiner.com and then two more personal pieces here. She was "one tough broad," as Lou Christie didn't say, exactly, but surely meant. I know I'll always be haunted by her loss.
Same with Bob Simon. Bob was my hero as a broadcast journalist for CBS, a poet of truth in the midst of blathering self-promotional idiocy. I actually wrote him a fanboy letter after he was captured and released during the Gulf War, and he responded.
I met him on the street once and he gave me his email. I tried for years to get him to feature Dengue Fever, and came close the second time I met him, at the secreening of a Bob Marley documentary the night of one of the Obama-Romney debates, which we watched together at a bar during the post-screening party. Bob had worked in Jamaica and Cambodia, not to mention Vietnam and the Middle East—where he earned much of his reputation. He was into Dengue Fever conceptually, and I was about to email him again about the band when he tragically—and ironically—died in a car crash on the West Side Highway, having survived decades of work in the world's most dangerous places. Another irreplaceable loss to the world.
I knew Nashville photographer Alan Mayor. Sam Andrew I knew as guitarist in Big Brother & the Holding Company and then with Janis Joplin's Kozmic Blues Band—the one and only Joplin being the first rocker I ever saw in concert.
I'd met the great jazz writer/producer Orrin Keepnews, and know his esteemed journalist son Peter quite well. I interviewed the pioneering "direct cinema" documentarian Albert Maysles several times over the years; he was the nicest guy.
I knew promoter/songwriter/record producer/artist manager/session drummer/record-label entrepreneur/bandleader/recording artist/music journalist Billy Block ever since he moved form L.A. to Nashville at least 25 years go and started writing for Music Row, where I had my notorious Gotham Gossip column. Billy went on to befriend just about everyone in the business and promote many of them by way of his weekly Billy Block Show/Western Beat Barn Dance.
I posted a fab video of The Chanteys performing their 1963 surf-rock classic "Pipeline" on The Lawrence Welk Show after their writer/guitarist Brian Carman died on March 1. I must have met beloved New York trumpeter Lew Soloff, but never really knew him. And I feel truly lucky to have met Michael Brown (March 19 at B.B. King's, wehn he showed up at a show by the then recently reformed Left Banke. The creative genius behind the band's landmark "Baroque Pop" 1960s recordings—among rock's most beautiful ever–Brown was obviously in poor physical shape and had to be assisted to the stage to play keyboards on "Pretty Ballerina." He left immediately, but I ran after him and caught him on the steps and told him who I was and how thrilled I was to see him and meet him and how much he meant to so many music fans everywhere. He thanked me and seemed genuinely touched.
The Bitter End's Kenny Gorka was the most wonderful guy to New York musicians—and me. He always welcomed me with open arms—and a bottle of beer—whenever I came down to the club. And I'm forever in debt to Samuel Charters, not just for his important blues and jazz books but for producing my favorite Siegel-Schwall Band and other great acts including Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite.
I knew and loved Tony Bennett's longtime pianist/bandleader Ralph Sharon, and we're all indebted to him for giving Tony "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." I'm indebted to May Pang for a lot of things, including introducing me to Cynthia Lennon. Percy Sledge needs no introduction.
Andre Smith was particularly sad in that he was only 57 and had been such a great host of Sugar Bar's legendary Thursday night Open Mic Show for 15 years. He had a wonderful gospel funeral send-off in Harlem.
Jack Ely, as the comparatively anonymous voice of The Kingsmen's classic rock 'n' roll hit "Louie Louie," is immortal. Ben E. King, too, had an immortal voice; I met him several times, with Allen Klein, and at parties in Lynnfield, Mass., thrown by Wes Reed, an old Dr. Bop & The Headliners fan who would bring the band in to play private parties, with his other hero Ben E. also on the bill.
I met B.B. King once, at a press gathering many years ago when his manager of over 40 years Sidney Seidenberg was still alive. I remember B.B. saying how they never had a cross word in all that time.
I must have known Ren Grevatt as long as I've been in New York, since 1982. I knew him as an indie publicist who worked with The Dead and handled PR for promoter John Scher. Such a nice guy, and even in his '90s, ageless. I knew the great record company executive Bruce Lundvall almost as long, and haven't forgotten how he let me stay in his office while he took a call and tried to convince a prospective artist to sign with him.
I met the great Anne Meara once, at a Broadway show opening party, back in the early or mid-1980s. She was clearly lit, but I'm sure she'd have been just as sweet and friendly any time. What struck me was that when I introduced myself she immediately apologized that husband Jerry Stiller wasn't there—as if I'd been their pal forever.
Like Sam Charters, Guy Carawan was an important music historian, in his case, of folk music. A major figure in the historic Greenwich Village-based folk music revival of the 1950s, he was also a folksinger and played a big part in bringing "We Shall Overcome" to the Civil Rights Movement.
Johnny Gimble was one of country music history's greatest fiddlers, while according to the American Folklife Center, no one was more important to the survival, appreciation, and revival of traditional Appalachian folk music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than ballad singer, songwriter, folksong collector, Fulbright scholar, and champion of the Appalachian dulcimer Jean Ritchie.
I'm so glad I got to interview Jim Ed Brown on the occasion of his last album In Style Again, and so glad he held cancer back long enough to complete it. I knew him from years of hanging out at the Opry, but always remember how he first put me off when I met him in the late '70s at a rural Wisconsin country music festival, when he thought I was a songwriter trying to pitch him a song after I told him I was a writer.
Ornette Coleman was so significant I had to write about him, whereas Patrick Macnee—one of my true TV heroes as The Avengers' John Steed–I was lucky to meet and interview and find that he was as nice as his character.
Ernie Maresca was one of those unsung heroes of rock 'n' roll, having had a hand in writing such landmark hits as Dion's "Runaround Sue" and "The Wanderer," not to mention recording his own classic "Shout! Shout! (Knock Yourself Out)." Dave Somerville was also an obscure name, but his voice is cherished by doo-wop fans for leading The Diamonds on the huge hit "Little Darlin'," and my personal fave, "She Say (Oom Dooby Doom)."
I'm pretty sure I met Louisiana musician Jillian Johnson, but I know I'll never forget her. She was one of two who were randomly shot to death (nine others were injured) by a hate-filled lunatic at Lafayette's Grand 16 movie theater on July 23. My Cajun music pal Wilson Savoy's words bear repeating: "She changed my life forever. She inspired me more than anyone else in my younger years, and I wish I had told her what an amazing person she was before it was too late. Before her show last Saturday, before she jumped on stage with The Figs, we stood together on the side of the stage at Blue Moon and chatted all about the past and the future, about her grand plans for projects, renovations, exciting new stuff. Never a dull moment with Jillian. I never said it in the past, but I'll say it now. Thank You Jillian. I love you."
I met the great country vocalist Lynn Anderson several times and especially loved her hit versions of songs by the late, great Joe South. I never met or got to see Cilla Black, but I sure wish I had—and was touched by the outpouring of love for her in England when she died.
I think I met Billy Sherrill, but I certainly knew his classic country music hit productions. Of course I knew indie publicist Jeff Walker, who was as much a part of the Nashville music community as Sherrill, closely for nearly 40 years.
I might have let Frankie Ford go out quietly had it not been for my pal Rockin' John McDonald demonstrating on his Madison, Wis., WORT-FM show I Like It Like That that Ford was much more than a "Sea Cruise" one-hit wonder. My friend Billy Joe Royal, on the other hand, didn't need Rockin' John's help, having shared with Lynn Anderson a goodly amount of Joe South's hit songwriting catalog.
I'd run into Allen Toussaint now and then, especially after he moved to New York following Hurricane Katrina. He never really remembered me until I invariably brought up how my favorite production of his was Take It, the regrettably obscure 1986 album by genius Minneapolis no-guitar/keyboard rock-polka band The Wallets, upon which Toussaint, ever the refined gentleman, waxed sentimental.
Legendary songwriter P.F. Sloan's death in November was a personal blow, even though I'd only met him once, when Donna Loren brought him to Bessman Bash 2015 in L.A. in August. Of course I was a huge fan of a songwriter so significant—and elusive—that none other than Jimmy Webb wrote a song about him. Turned out that not only could he not have been nicer, he seemed at least as humbled to be at the party as we all were having him there.
As for John Trudell, I only met the Native American activist/poet/recording artist twice and interviewed him once, but the effect was immense. One of the great artists/humanitarians I've been lucky enough to meet, and a real loss to the world. His album Wazi's Dream was my No. 1 pick for 2015.
I was hoping John's death would be the last, but it was only Dec. 8. Historic Aussie '60s rock band The Easybeats' frontman Stevie Wright followed, and then Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead. I don't think many in America knew of Wright, as The Easybeats' had only one hit in the U.S., though "Friday on My Mind" is immortal. Remarkably, the intense love and grief for Lemmy, while deserved, was quite astonishing in that he was a heavy metal/punk rocker, from England, with limited mainstream success.
Music, Observations, Sports	Alan Mayor, Albert Maysles, Allen Klein, Allen Toussaint, Andrae Crouch, Andre Smith, Anne Meara, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Ben E. King, Bessman Bash, Billy Block, Billy Joe Royal, Billy Sherrill, Bob Simon, Bruce Lundvall, Christine Lavin, Cilla Black, Cynthia Lennon, Dave Somerville, Dengue Fever, Dion, Dixie Hall, Don Covay, Don Herron, Donna Loren, Dr. Bop & The Headliners, Ernie Banks, Ernie Maresca, Ervin Drake, Frankie Ford, Gaither Homecoming, Gulf War, Guy Carawan, Hee Haw, Jack Ely, Jackie Fuchs, Janis Joplin, Jean Ritchie, Jeff Walker, Jillian Johnson, Jim Ed Brown, Jimmy Webb, Joan Jett, Joe Franklin, Joe South, John Trudell, Johnny Gimble, Kenny Gorka, Kim Fowley, Lawrence Welk, Left Banke, Lemmy Kilmister, Lesley Gore, Lew Soloff, Little Jimmy Dickens, Lou Christie, Lynn Anderson, May Pang, Michael Brown, Motorhead, Ornette Coleman, Orrin Keepnews, P.F. Sloan, Patrick Macnee, Percy Sledge, Ralph Sharon, Ren Grevatt, Rockin' John McDonald, Rod McKuen, Rolling Stones, Sam Andrew, Samuel Charters, Siegel-Schwall Band, Songwriters Hall of Fame, Stevie Wright, Swingle Singers, The Bitter End, The Chanteys, The Diamonds, The Easybeats, The Kingsmen, The Runaways, The Wallets, Tom T. Hall, Tony Bennett, Toy Fair, Ward Swingle, Wilson Savoy	Leave a comment
Tweets by @JimBessman
The last day of the year
To execute for treason
Three nights in L.A.
Davin Seay: An appreciation
Gary Stewart—A Record Store Day appreciation
Jim's World
Al Goldstein Ashford & Simpson Barack Obama Billboard blues Bob Dylan Bob Merlis Cajun music Cancer Cheap Trick City Winery Corky Siegel country music Donald Trump Dr. Bop & The Headliners Elvis Costello Folk music Grand Ole Opry Hillary Clinton Jim Bessman John Lennon Johnny Cash Kris Kristofferson Lesley Gore Liz Rosenberg Madcity Music Sheet Madonna Muhammad Ali Nick Ashford Phil Spector President Obama Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Rolling Stones Sandra Bernhard Siegel-Schwall Band Songwriters Hall of Fame Sugar Bar Tammy Faye Starlite Taylor Swift The Beatles The Ramones The Turtles Tony Bennett Valerie Simpson Vietnam War
Bis.Co.Latte
Film Biz Recycling
Five Points Academy


text:
How to exercise outside with spring allergies
Before taking a jog in the beautiful spring sunshine, make sure you take steps to protect yourself from seasonal allergies.
By US News and World Report
PUBLISHED: March 21, 2014 at 2:18 am | UPDATED: April 27, 2016 at 8:03 am
No doubt many of us are shooing off the last remnants of winter and rejoicing that (according to the calendar, at least) it's finally spring. Good riddance, bulky coats and stuffy gyms. Welcome, T-shirts and jogs outside, where it's lukewarm, flowery and full of people who are equally jazzed to be walking without shivering. Hallelujah.
But then – behold, a familiar enemy.
"Now the sun is higher in the sky, you're craving exercise, and all of a sudden, your spring allergies hit," says Lisa Lynn, a New York-based fitness trainer. "And it's gigantic. Now you have a new reason not to exercise, because the allergies make you feel exhausted, and some of the symptoms, like stuffy nose and irritated eyes, can be debilitating enough to make you not want to move."
[See: Pharmacists' Top Recommended Nasal Decongestants.]
Lynn, who specializes in performance nutrition and is perhaps best known for being Martha Stewart's personal trainer for 13 years, is no stranger to intrusive seasonal allergies. She won't accept sniffing and sneezing as excuses to miss out on outdoor exercise – not after you've been cooped up in a gym (or in front of Netflix) for the last few months. Below, Lynn shares advice for reaping the benefits of exercise and fresh air while avoiding the worst of spring allergies.
Know your enemy. For seasonal allergy sufferers, the enemy – the thing that makes you sniff and sneeze – is pollen, and time of day and weather can affect how much of it you'll encounter. The pollen count (the amount of pollen in the air) is typically highest in the mornings, so save your outdoor workouts for the afternoon or evening. (If you're running at night, remember to sport reflective gear for visibility.) Pollen is usually at its peak levels during warm, dry windy weather and at its lowest during cool, damp weather, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Weather channels and websites, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology's National Allergy Bureau website, will show pollen counts for your area so you know when to take your workout outside and when to stick to the gym.
Cover your hair. Lynn says it's key to wear a hat so pollen doesn't stick to your hair. This is especially important for people who don't wash their hair every day, she says. "You want to cover [your head] so you don't get all that stuff in your hair and let it continually irritate you." She points out that a billed hat, like a baseball cap, can play double duty by protecting your hair from irritants and providing sun protection.
[Read: A Survival Guide to Spring Allergy Season.]
Shield your eyes. Wear sport goggles, regular eyeglasses with an attachable band securing them to your head or sunglasses while exercising out doors. Lynn explains: "If the pollen never gets in your eyes, you never really have to worry about it."
Get clean. We hope for your sake (and for whomever is in smelling range) that you're bathing after exercising. This step is even more important for allergy sufferers, because the pollen can stick to their bodies and irritate them long after their venture outside. If you've decided to exercise at night, wash thoroughly before hitting the hay. Your allergy symptoms will get worse, Lynn says, "if you jump into bed with pollen and allergy irritants on your body."
Discuss your medicines. Lynn, who suffers from allergies herself, says some antihistamines can make you feel tired. Work with your pharmacist or doctor to discuss the side effects of your allergy medicines and when you should take them. This way, you can avoid taking a medicine that will drag you down minutes before you plan to exercise.
[See: Pharmacists' Top Recommended Cough, Cold and Allergy Medicines.]
Go back to the basics. While this advice is relevant any time of year, it's worth repeating. For one, drink "buckets of water," Lynn says, pointing out that "it's great to be in a predicament where we're going to sweat again." Feel your best while exercising by eating a balanced diet that's high in fruits and vegetables. There's some evidence suggesting the vitamin C in plant-based foods may help reduce allergy symptoms, and even if that's not the case, "they'll just make you feel good, because they're natural sources of energy," Lynn says.
And as you begin spring cleaning, now may be a good time to check in with the state of your gym shoes, Lynn says. Replace shoes as they become worn out, although experts have different ideas on when shoes officially become kaput. The point: Don't wait until your shoes are visibly tattered, or you may end up hurting yourself.
US News and World Report
Suspects with pellet guns allegedly shot more than 100 car windows in Commerce City, police say
Most of the vehicles were damaged in the area between East 66th Avenue, 60th Avenue, Glencoe Street and Quebec Parkway, police said in a statement.
Denver weather: Warm temperatures, sunshine with possible snow later this week
The Denver region will see sunshine and warmer temperatures early this week, but that will give way to possible snow and wind on Thursday as a storm system swipes across the state.
Ridin' for the brand: State inspectors keep the National Western, Colorado livestock industry moving
Lest you think cattle rustling, tracking down stray dogies and inspecting the brands on cattle are quaint remnants of Colorado's wild West past, you should talk to Terry Florian.