Beans and Cornbread
Seeing as how we were talking about cornbread . . .
and we’ve been talking about cornbread for over a year now . . .
Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five serve you up some “Beans and Cornbread.”
It makes no difference
What you think about me
But it makes a whole lotta difference
What I think about you
R.I.P. Don Cornelius (1936-2012)
Don Cornelius checked himself out, it would appear.
See him here — doin’ it to death — with Mary Wilson in the Soul Train line dance.
Cooking Up Change
They looked so young, the four college students who sat down and ordered coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960.
Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn’t sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.
Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn’t get their coffee.
But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.
It wasn’t the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement.
tweet of the day
“Today I think I’ll make some music for white people to do cunnilingus to.” —Miles Davis, 1959
— Scott Simpson (@scottsimpson) December 14, 2011
NPR’s Winter Songs: Bill T. Jones on Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’
As cold weather descends on most of the country, we’re asking for winter songs — songs that evoke the season, and the memories that come with them. So far in our [NPR] series, we’ve heard some lighthearted or slightly wistful tunes, but this next song goes to a far icier place. It’s the choice of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones.
His winter song comes from “Winterreise,” — or “Winter Journey” — by Franz Schubert. It’s a song cycle about a solitary traveler in a savage winter whose heart is frozen in grief. Jones chose the last song in that song cycle: “Der Leiermann,” or “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.”
“For me, it’s the musical arrangement underneath,” Jones tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block. “It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should’ve been paying attention, but I was dreaming.
trending on twitter
There are some good ones: #makeracistjokesnotracistanymore.
(thanks, Joel)
Quote out of context
Arugula is a type of lettuce that is offensive to some conservatives.
tweet of the day
from the archives: April 28, 2006
I always wondered why Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown decided to visit Israel and hang out with Ariel Sharon. Tonight, while eating Country Fried Kalebone™ at phATLanta’s Soul Vegetarian restaurant on N. Highland Avenue, I finally found the answer.
GM Futurliner Quarter Mile
Want to see the most amusing quarter-mile in automotive history?
General Motors built the Futurliner to promote a traveling show called the “GM Parade of Progress” in the 1940s and ’50s. The slippery-lined bus, which was penned by the legendary Harley Earl, is one of 12 that traveled the U.S. to show Americans the future of motoring and technology.
The Futurliner weighs 30 tons and is powered by a four cylinder diesel engine with a top speed of 40 mph. The Wikipedia article has a dozen pictures, and you can follow the history of its restoration at The GM Futurliner Restoration Project.
video out of context
The Aston Martin DB5
From a gallery of cars competing in this year’s Silverstone Classic:
The Aston Martin DB5, one of Britain’s finest motor cars ever. It was a luxury grand-tourer. It was a race car. It was the most recognizable (and arguably coolest) of James Bond’s cars.
Don’t Forget the Motor City Lawndale
I was looking at pictures of Detroit (from my Flickr friend Jan Normandale and from the archives of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University), and now I have to stop looking for a while.
I’ve visited Detroit a couple of times, and in truth there’s a lot I like about it, but I can’t think about it anymore. This afternoon I’m recollecting a blisteringly hot afternoon in Chicago, late July, when I thought to avoid the expressway and take a parallel route down Roosevelt Road to where I was going.
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The Great Dismal Swamp
A national park composed of vast acres of swampland, straddling the border of North Carolina and Virginia, was once home to runaway slaves, an anti-oasis of sorts in the South for people to disappear to.
The site was long known as a haven for escapees and members of Indian tribes avoiding European encroachment. Advertisements seeking the return of escaped slaves from the 1700s mention the swamp, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about it as a place of refuge in the novel “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.” The North Carolina legislature was even petitioned to do something about the settlements in the swamp, said Wanda Hunt-McLean, a local historian who studies the underground railroad.
“Many people were warned about traveling near the edge of the swamp because of stories about blacks living there,” she said.
But the only significant attempt to recapture slaves in the swamp came after the violent slave uprising led by Nat Turner in 1831, and that barely reached the fringes of the wilderness, Sayers said. The swamp was simply too dense and treacherous to make sustained efforts to capture slaves or their descendants worthwhile.
tweet of the day, II
human pedigree
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading through The Federalist Papers, which, as way leads to way, led him to this thought:
When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.
(Thanks, Noah.)
SENNA
A trailer for a documentary about Formula One World Champion Ayrton Senna. Regardless of whether you plan to watch the movie, there are some racing moments here that are electric magic.
Senna is considered by many to be the best driver in Formula One history.
(via @gary_hustwit)
Lee Otis Johnson, 1939-2002
“Why are those people hollering about beans?”
“Free Lee Otis! Free Lee Otis!”
I still think that’s funny even, or maybe especially, if you don’t know any Spanish, but there’s a Texas Monthly article about Lee Otis Johnson that’s not funny. You need to “register” to read it, but I think that’s all.
Lee Otis Johnson was a symbol of many things, and that can be a killing burden. All his life he had been reduced to shorthand labels: radical student agitator, black power advocate, casualty of Texas’ draconian drug laws, victim of racism, petty criminal. But labels are beside the point in death, and Lee Otis Johnson died alone, in Houston, on June 12 of complications from circulatory problems. He was 62 years old.
He was best known for the thirty-year prison sentence he got in 1968 for passing a marijuana cigarette to an undercover police officer in Houston. Those who thought the punishment didn’t fit the crime distilled their outrage into a chant–”Free Lee Otis!”–that was heard on campuses around the state, including Texas Southern University, where he had been a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the mid-sixties.
Frijoles
It was the photo of a friend’s pot of weekend frijoles that called this to mind, and now I want to tell a story.
It’s a Texas gubernatorial anecdote. Could well be spurious, but even if so, it’s true. In the early 1970s, a white man named Preston Smith was governor of Texas. And there was this Texas member of the Black Panthers named Lee Otis Johnson, who got 30 years for possession of one joint. And then there was this one day (probably one of many) when people were demonstrating outside the Governor’s Mansion or the Capitol. And Preston Smith is said to have asked, “Why are those people hollering for beans?”
They were chanting, “Free Lee Otis! Free Lee Otis!”
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
Black in Latin America
We’ve seen a few episodes from Henry Gates’ excellent series Black in Latin America. The episode on The Dominican Republic and Haiti was especially fascinating, as you have a microcosm of evolutionary pressures present in such a small space. All the episodes are available online.
HipHop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
Apologies if you already know about this documentary, but I was just exposed to it in my Cross-Cultural Counseling class.
If you hadn’t heard of this and liked it, try checking out The New Jim Crow.
2011 Kentucky Derby
I forgot to watch it yesterday, but it turned out to be a good race.
The Order of Myths
A film by Margaret Brown. Trailer:
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Oh. Dem Watermelons.
Grew up on this mess. No wonder I bent so twisted.
