1986 mixtape

I found an old cassette tape of mine. It has songs, in bits and in full, that I recorded from New York radio, probably in July 1986. It is like a time machine!

Because it is an old tape I am afraid it could mess up at any time. So while I can still hear it, I made a list of the songs that are on it. See below. Where I did not know the artist I put “Unknown”. Where I did not know the song title, I put some of the words of the song in italics between ellipses (…). Release dates, when known, are in parentheses.

Some songs have a picture above them. Those are the ones I could find on YouTube. Click on the picture and you can hear it on YouTube (or maybe even on this blog).

Side A:

Starpoint: Restless (1985)

Bob Marley: Waiting in Vain (1977)

Prince: ... much too hard to be cool … a hundred miles an hour babe …

The Firm: Radioactive (1985)

Creedence Clearwater Revival: I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1970)

Shirley Jones: Do You Get Enough Love?

Supremes: Baby Love (1964)

Patti Labelle & Michael McDonald: On My Own (March 1986)

Fat Boys: Sex Machine

Little Steven: Forever

The Doors: Don’t You Love Her Madly? (1971)

Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer (April 1986)

Five Star: Can’t Wait Another Minute (April 1986)

Sister Carol: .. galaxy … earth rotate around me …

Irene Cara: Flashdance … What a Feeling (1983)

Janet Jackson: What Have You Done For Me Lately? (January 1986)

Grandmaster Flash: … raggety worms out your big mouth … ’cause we got style … we’re giving you a blast of class …

Unknown: … dress to impress ’cause I got it like that … rock the mic …

Unknown: … I’m Shante .. I get a glimpse of that face, turn around she’s gone … I would swim the deepest ocean so she could be mine …

Side B:

Whitney Houston & Jermaine Jackson: If You Say My Eyes Are Beautiful (1986)

Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes: The Love I Lost (1973)

The Pretenders: Kid (1979)

Vikki Love with Nuance: Sing Dance Rap Romance (1985)

Schooly D: P.S.K. What Does It Mean? (1985)

Unknown: ... yes yes he is rockin’ it … crossfader …

Unknown: … take me in your arms … I love the way that she talks, it goes so good with the way that she walks … she is so pleasingly fine … caught up in the wonder of her love …

Unknown: … dancin’, if you want to feel good … keep your body shakin’ …

Sister Carol: … pure laughter … entertainer …

The Real Roxanne: Bang Zoom (1986)

Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA (1984)

Fresh Gordon: Gordy’s Groove (1985)

Boogie Boys: A Fly Girl (1985)

The Cure: In Between Days (1985)

Angela Bofill: People Make the World Go Round (1979)

Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (1981)

Three of these songs reached their height in July 1986: “Sledgehammer”, “Bang Zoom” and “On My Own”. So I think that is when I recorded the tape. So far as I know none of the songs are newer than that.

Before I knew it was Angela Bofill singing “People Make the World Go Round”, she sounded to me like some female singer from New York – which she is!

See also:

• hip hop music
• New York
• Starpoint: Restless

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The fall of Lehman Brothers

Lehman Brothers (1850-2008), one of the top banks in New York, went broke on Monday September 15th 2008. It was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. The next day Barclays bought up the banking and trading parts of the company. Lehman almost went under in 1998. It employed 25,000 people.

In 2007 Lehman made $4 billion in profits. But then the following spring it lost $3 billion and then another $4 billion in the summer. It was unable to cover its mounting losses.

This comes on the heels of Merrill Lynch, an even larger New York bank, being sold to Bank of America and six months after the fall of Bear Stearns, a smaller bank.

In different times the government might have saved it. It chose not to. If it saved Lehman the markets would believe that a bank could be “too big to fail”. With the government as a safety net, banks would show even poorer judgement than they have and taxpayers would wind up paying for it all. There would be no road back to health for the banks or the country.

The big banks on Wall Street made this mess, what is known as the subprime mortgage crisis or the credit crunch.

They had done so well over the past ten years that they began to believe they were the gods of the universe, that the rules of banking no longer applied to them.

In this frame of mind they started making what they knew were bad loans: they lent money to people with bad credit histories to buy houses. Because of their credit histories, they knew these people, for whatever reason, were bad at paying back debts. But the banks thought it would not matter if they put the bad loans together with good loans. Instead it had the opposite effect: once these loans went bad, it affected even the good loans. Like bad apples.

In August 2007 it all started to fall apart.

So in March 2008 Bear Stearns went under, and now in September it is Lehman. Merrill Lynch almost went under. The other New York banks that are still standing made the same mistakes as Lehman and are losing billions and billions of dollars. There is no reason to believe that Lehman will be the last to fall.

Lehman Brothers started out in 1850 as a dry goods store in the state of Alabama. It accepted cotton as payment, so it got into trading cotton. In time moved to New York, the place where cotton was bought and sold in large quantities. There it got into trading coffee and dealing in railroad bonds.

In 1887 it joined the New York Stock Exchange and started issuing stocks. It helped to bring Sears Roebuck, RCA and other companies into the stock market. From 1969 to 1994 it was a part of American Express.

Having made it through civil war, the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression it could not make it through the times we live in now.

See also:

• credit crunch

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Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy (1957- ) is the daughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. When her brother John died in a plane crash in 1999, she became their only living child, the last child of Camelot.  Senator Ted Kennedy is her uncle, Maria Shriver is her cousin.

In January 2008 she came out in support of Barack Obama, saying that he would be a president like her father. She became part of the committee to choose a vice president for Obama. She said that Joe Biden was by far the best choice. Obama has faith in her wisdom.

Up until then she led a largely private life, avoiding the public eye, bringing up her three children. But now with her mother and brother gone and her children almost grown – the youngest is 15 – some say she is entering a new stage in her life. She does have that Kennedy thing of wanting to make the world a better place and a deep respect for civic courage.

There was even talk that maybe Obama should choose her as a vice president. She certainly has the name but not the experience. She could certainly become a senator if she wanted to and so maybe even president in time.

In 2004 she did campaign for John Kerry but she did not come out in support for him till after the party convention.

She was a Hillary Clinton supporter, giving her money in 2006 and 2007, but by September 2007 she was giving money to Obama instead. It was her children who got her to take a serious look at Obama.

Neil Diamond came up with the song “Sweet Caroline” (1969) after seeing a picture of Caroline on her pony, Macaroni, which she brought to the White House.

Her father was shot dead five days before her sixth birthday. A year later her mother moved the family to New York where she grew up at 1040 Fifth Avenue, just a block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art – where she would one day work and meet her future husband. She studied at Harvard and got her law degree at Columbia.

In 1986 she married Edwin Schlossberg but kept her last name. Schlossberg is an artist and display designer. They have three children:

• 1988: Rose
• 1990: Tatiana
• 1993: John, named after her father

She wrote two books with Ellen Alderman, a schoolmate from Columbia:

• 1990: In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights
• 1995: The Right to Privacy

Both explain the law to the general public. She has also edited some books, something her mother used to do when she was growing up.

She is the head of the Kennedy Library in Boston and takes part in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

She helped to raise $350 million for public schools in New York.

She owns the Red Gate Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, something she got from her mother.

She has lived most of her life in New York and still does, on Park Avenue.

See also:

• Bobby Kennedy – uncle
  
• Maria Shriver – cousin
• New York
  • 1040 Fifth Avenue: Where Jackie O. lived – where she grew up
• Barack Obama
• Caroline Kennedy: A President Like My Father

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1040 Fifth Avenue: Where Jackie O. lived

I was getting a ton of hits for Caroline Kennedy because of the Democratic Convention, so I was going to do a post on her. Well, one thing led to another:

Jackie O. loved New York City. She wanted to bring up her children there. From 1964 to 1994 she lived on the 15th floor of 1040 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is on the north-east corner of Fifth Avenue and 85th Street, across the street from Central Park and a block up from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A year after her husband, President John F. Kennedy, was shot dead she moved to New York to 1040 with her two little children, John, 4, and Caroline, 7.

She moved there because it was close to her sister Lee Radziwill and because she wanted Caroline to go to school at Sacred Heart on 91st Street, one of the best girls’ schools in the city. She also knew that the Upper East Side would pretty much let her be. She went to mass at St Thomas More on 89th Street.

She bought the entire 15th floor in 1964 for $250,000 (200,000 crowns). In 1996, after she died, it was sold for $9.5 million (2 million crowns). In 2008 it sold for $19.5 million (1.5 million crowns). One of the later owners was the 33rd richest person in the world.

She filled the apartment with her books, her paintings and her art objects. She had a piano she could not play and a telescope which she used. She had no central air conditioning.

The place was friendly rather than grand. She wanted a private place for her family and friends to enjoy and feel at home in. It changed little over 30 years: “She was ageless and her style was ageless,” her designer said about the place.

Because so many of her things were sold off after her death, hundreds of people own things that were once there.

With only two floors above it, it has a wonderful view of Central Park: you can see the Reservoir, now named after her, and the 3,400-year-old Temple of Dendur, which she had helped to bring to the Met museum from Egypt. The 15th floor has a terrace where you can step outside and take in the view.

From 1996 to 2000 much of the 15th floor was rebuilt and the layout changed somewhat.

In 2006 the 15th floor had:

• Facing Central Park:
  • master bedroom
  • library (with fireplace)
  • living room (with fireplace)
  • dining room (with fireplace)
  • terrace
• four bedrooms in all
• three terraces in all
• two dressing rooms
• a staff room
• conservatory
• five and a half bathrooms
• a wine room
• a gallery
• a chef’s kitchen
• a laundry room
• a cloak room

The building went up in 1930, done in a neo-Classical style. It was designed by Rosario Candela, who did many luxury apartments in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. The roofline is pretty strange and sets it apart. The building has 17 floors and only 27 apartments.

The building has a doorman but no garage or health club.

See also:

• Jackie’s Apartment – has good pictures and the 2000 floor plan
• Caroline Kennedy – Jackie’s daughter, who grew up there
• Monticello
• New York
• Bobby Kennedy
• Maria Shriver

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Why I love New York

Why I love New York City:

1. You walk down the street and you feel so alive. Everything feels so right. Everywhere else seems like the land of the half-dead, especially the nearby suburbs and towns. This does not apply to all of New York – there are parts of it that will pound all the life and joy out of your eyes.
2. You will see more walking one mile of New York than you will see driving through a hundred miles of Ohio. New York has worlds within worlds. People come there from all corners of the earth and make their own neighbourhoods there. It has littles bits of the whole world all in one city. And even if you somehow managed to see it all, it would change by the time you got done and you could start all over again.
3. It has wonderful bookstores. With books on all kinds of things, things you never dreamed of. While Barnes & Noble is way better than it used to be, it is more like a Wal-Mart or Home Depot of books in comparison to the bookstores of New York City.
4. So much of life beyond the city is flattened into something common and acceptable: all the beauty and richness and sweetness is lost. Like the food at McDonald’s.
5. You age faster when you live and work outside of New York. Maybe not physically – I am no doctor – but certainly in your heart and in your soul. Living outside of the city is safer, cheaper and the schools are better, which is why people do it, but it deadens your soul, bit by bit, day by day.
6. The women are so beautiful. People come there from all over the world and even mix, so you see women of every shade, women of a beauty you never dreamed of. This is more true of Queens than Manhattan. And just because you see more women you are bound to see one who makes your heart stop.
7. I love hanging out with my friends there and talking the night away.
8. I love the Chrysler Building.

I fear the day when I am too old to walk up the subway steps. It would be a kind of death.

I assume there are other cities like this, like maybe London, San Francisco or Rio. If you know of any, please let me know.

I am a city mouse but I married a country mouse. My wife says New York is dirty and violent, a Sodom and Gomorrah – she only goes there to visit her friends. It is all those things, but it is so much more.

When I married her I moved out of the city, partly to make her happy but mainly because I thought it would be better for our children. But now I am not so sure. It is certainly easier to bring up children outside of the city, but I am not sure it is better for them in the long run.

See also:

• New York

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Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons (1957- ) is an American businessman, a hip hop mogul.

Simmons took the hip hop music he heard in the streets of New York and got it put on the airwaves and in the music shops. He was the business brains that made hip hop into one of the main forms of black music.

No wonder, then, that USA Today in 2007 called him one of the “Top 25 Most Influential People of the Past 25 Years”.

In 1984 he founded Def Jam Records with music producer Rick Rubin. In the late 1980s he helped to put out such old school hip hop acts as Run DMC (of which his brother was a member), Kurtis Blow (a friend), LL Cool J, Whodini and the Beastie Boys.

He also founded Phat Farm, through which he sells hip hop clothing. That in turn gave rise to Baby Phat and Run Athletics.

Simmons is also behind the television shows “Def Comedy Jam”, “Def Poetry Jam”, “Run’s House” and others.

He was born in Hollis, a black middle-class part of Queens in New York, the son of a teacher. He went to City College of New York in Harlem. It was in Harlem in the late 1970s where he first heard the street poets that were called rappers.

He saw that the music industry was overlooking something big. So he dropped out of City College and started pushing rap music. He took what little money he had or could get from his father and made records and put on rap shows in Queens and Harlem. It paid off. He was able to sell 50,000 records for his friend Kurtis Blow. Now he could take on other acts and set his sights higher.

In 1984 he joined forces with music producer Rick Rubin, a punk rocker and fellow lover of rap. Together they founded Def Jam Recordings to put out the kind of music they loved but which the big record companies would barely touch. Later Simmons got CBS Records to agree to distribute for Def Jam.

By 1987 three of his acts were on the top of the black music charts: the Beastie Boys, Run DMC and LL Cool J.

At the time Whitney Houston was a crossover hit: she increased sales among whites by making her music sound more white and less black. Simmons took the opposite approach: he wanted his acts to be as street and black as possible. He did not cut out any of the bad language (as he would later urge in 2007). He wanted something that would ring true with audiences.

At first he was only interested in making black music for black people, not kind-of-black music for white people. But, as he would later point out, hip hop is universal, it speaks to people of all races.

In 1999 he sold his part of Def Jam to Universal for $100 million (20 million crowns).

He was married to Kimora Lee Simmons from 1998 to 2006. They have two daughters. He is the uncle of Angela and Vanessa Simmons, Run’s daughters.

He blogs for the Huffington Post.

He practises yoga and does not eat meat

See also:

• hip hop music
• Angela Simmons
• Harlem

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Rosario Dawson

Rosario Dawson (1979- ) is an American actress. She mostly plays supporting characters in Hollywood and independent films. In 2004 she won the Rising Star Award at the American Black Film Festival.

Among other things she was:

• Abernathy in “Death Proof” (2007)
• Becky in “Clerks II” (2006)
• Gail in “Sin City” (2005)
• Mimi in “Rent” (2005)
• Roxanne, Alexander the Great’s wife in “Alexander” (2004)
• Dina Lake in “Pluto Nash” (2002)
• Laura Vasquez in “Men in Black II” (2002)
• one of the Pussycats in “Josie and the Pussycats” (2001)
• Denzel Washington’s son’s girlfriend in “He Got Game” (1998 )

In 2005 she also played Julia in “Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park in New York. I wish I had seen her!

Many of her films have failed at the box office, like “Pluto Nash” and “Alexander”. She has not yet starred in a film that made it big, so not everyone knows who she is.

She is from the Lower East Side in New York. For most of her childhood her family lived in an abandoned building there.

One day sitting on the steps in front of her building, Larry Clark and Harmony Korine walked by. Korine took one look at her and knew she was just the woman for a part in a film he was writing. That was her audition. That is how she became Ruby in “Kids” (1995).

It changed her life.

Growing up she did not dream of becoming an actress. Despite her beauty, she was something of a nerd: she wanted to be a marine biologist. She is one of those Star Trek fans who can speak broken Klingon!

She even loves comic books, something she got from her Uncle Gus, a comic book illustrator. She created a comic book with him, “Occult Crimes Taskforce”. The main character is based on her.

According to this blog she is one of the most beautiful women in the world. I love the way she looks, especially her eyes and lips. I am so glad she keeps her hair black – unlike, say, Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce.

People ask, “Is she black?”

Her mother is Puerto Rican, Black and Cuban, her father is Irish and Native American. So that makes her part black, part white, part Native American and part Hispanic! She is almost America in one woman.

When she was cast to be Roxane, Alexander the Great’s wife, some people got upset and said, “Why did they hire a black girl?” But an Afghan friend told her not to worry: she looks just like the women in his family, meaning that the woman Alexander married could have looked like her.

People say things like, “I don’t understand why she just doesn’t say she’s black – Puerto Ricans aren’t that brown!”

She says that race was not an issue for her, “until I got older and it became an issue for other people.”

She says her race sometimes affects what parts she is offered, sometimes not.

In 2006 she went with Jason Lewis of “Sex and the City”.

See also:

• New York
• The most beautiful women in the world

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Audre Lorde: Eye to Eye

Audre Lorde, in her essay “Eye to Eye” (1983), says that all the hate that has been poured into her by white people since she was a little black girl in Harlem in the 1930s is what makes her so angry. But that anger is not directed so much at white people, but at other black women. Because it will hit the mark. Because they remind her of herself, the self she cannot love and accept. Yet they are the only ones who could ever help to make her whole again.

The essay was shortened and printed in Essence magazine in October 1983, but you can read it in all its 30-page glory in her book “Sister Outsider”.

One winter when she was five she sat next to a rich white woman on the subway train. The woman pulled herself away from her and looked at her with such hate in her eyes. Lorde looked at her new snowsuit thinking there was something wrong with it. But it was not her snowsuit – it was her! Her Snowsuit Moment, as I call it.

One time she was at the library. The white lady there was reading “Little Black Sambo” and laughing. All the white children were laughing too. But she was not.

“SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, ANYWAY? DON’T BE SO SENSITIVE!”

In a thousand and one ways she was told she was worthless, that she did not matter.

She has seen “my wished-for death, seen in the eyes of so many white people from the time I could see”.

All this hate that she could not understand got laid up in her heart over the years and in time became anger, “a molten pond at the core of me”, an everyday part of her – “I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit.” Her daughter kept asking, “Are you angry about something, Mommy?”

But, “in order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest.”

Not just by little acts of meanness, but also by the constant judgement by other black women: if you are not perfect you are no good – “the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgement.”

The answer is for black women to mother and accept themselves and each other, “making a distinction between what is possible and what the outside world drives me to do in order to prove I am human”.

… I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin, and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human.

See also:

• Audre Lorde
• Race in America
• Stereotypes about black women
• black women
• Harlem
• black-on-black racism
• There is absolutely nothing wrong with being black

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Nella Larsen: Passing

Written: 1929
Read: 2008

“Passing” (1929) is a novel about passing for white. It was written by Nella Larsen in the days of the Harlem Renaissance. It tells the story of Clare Kendry, a light-skinned black woman who passes for white and marries a white man who hates blacks. It is the tale of a tragic mulatto, of someone who tries to escape her race and comes to a bad end.

Because Nella Larsen herself, the author, could pass for white and because she lived in the Harlem Renaissance, the book gives you an insider’s view of both. That alone makes it worth reading.

Black high society in Harlem in the 1920s seems surprisingly English: a thing of drawing rooms, tea parties and beautiful dresses. The book has that general cast to it, even the spelling! (Ntozake Shange calls her writing “exquisite”. I did not find it so, though it did have its moments.)

It is also a book about blackness and what it is, about the nature of race in America – which is probably why I have been writing so much about those things lately.

What makes you black? Is it in your blood – that one drop, as they say. Or is it a matter of your background and upbringing? Maybe it is a little of both – or something completely different.

Clare Kendry looks white, but she is dark like a Gypsy or a Jew. You would never think she was black unless you saw her with other black people – even if she does have “Negro eyes”.

Clare thinks that if she can live as a white woman she will be happier. She will have more money and life will be easier. People will not look down on her. She can go wherever she wants, eat at the nicest places and so on.

Her friend Irene Redfield could also pass for white, but she chose to marry a black doctor and live as a black woman in Harlem. There is something inside her that does not let her turn her back on her race.

She thinks Clare is playing a dangerous game: if she is ever found out she will lose everything: her husband, her daughter, her wealth, maybe even her life. Clare knows it is dangerous but she likes to live on the edge.

Whiteness does not buy happiness, as Clare finds out. Instead it makes her unhappy. She always feels out of place, she does not feel like she belongs, she does not feel free. She wants to be with black people, if only to hear them laugh again. And with blacks she can be free in a way she never can with whites.

So even though Clare acts white and talks white and even looks white and lives white, something deep inside her is still black. And that in the end is what counts.

– Abagond, 2008.

See also:

• Nella Larsen
• The tragic mulatto
• blackness
  
• Harlem
• The best writers live north of 110th Street
• One Drop Rule
• biracial

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Stuff I Might Like

As we found out in an earlier post, most American writers I like lived in Uptown Manhattan in New York at some point early in their lives. Just like me. But if I like those writers, then I might like others who have also lived there. And maybe singers, musicians and film directors too.

The following lists are hardly complete but they are a start:

Writers:

• Harlem: Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, Nella Larsen, Gloria Naylor, Audre Lorde.
• Barnard: Judith Miller, Anna Quindlen, Jami Bernard, Mona Charen, Zora Neale Hurston, Patricia Highsmith, June Jordan, Erica Jong, Ntozake Shange, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Fatima Bhutto, Galaxy Craze.
• Columbia: Mitch Albom, Isaac Asimov, Kiran Desai, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Heller, Paul Auster, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, Ursula K. Le Guin, Walker Percy, James Blish, Anthony Hecht, J.D. Salinger, Mark Van Doren, Eric Van Lustbader, Eudora Welty, Herman Wouk, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Joseph Lelyveld, R.W. Apple, Mortimer Adler, Jacques Barzun, Joseph Campbell, Howard Zinn, Jack Kerouac, Edward Said, Adam Mansbach, Maxine Leeds Craig.
• City College: Marv Goldberg, Bernard Malamud, Paul Levinson, Mario Puzo, Robert Rosen, Walter Mosley, Madeleine Cosman, Oscar Hijuelos, Irving Kristol, Lewis Mumford.

Film directors:

• Harlem:
• Barnard:
• Columbia: Kathryn Bigelow (“Strange Days”), Bill Condon (“Gods and Monsters”), Brian De Palma (“Scarface”), Joseph L Mankiewicz (“Julius Caesar”, “Cleopatra”, “The Barefoot Contessa”), Jim Jarmusch (“Permanent Vacation”).
• City College: Stanley Kubrick (“2001”, “Eyes Wide Shut”), Joshua Brand (“I’ll Fly Away”).

Singers and musicians:

• Harlem: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, W.C. Handy, Ben E King, Dinah Washington, Sonny Rollins, Tupac Shakur, Cam’ron, Doug E Fresh, Juelz Santana, Mase, Kelis, Kurtis Blow, Alicia Keys.
• Barnard: Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Veruca Salt.
• Columbia: Pat Boone, Vanessa Carlton, Simon & Garfunkel, Utada Hikaru, Charles Wuorinen, Lauryn Hill.
• City College: The Velvet Underground.

Many of these I already like, such as Billie Holiday, Alicia Keys, Malcolm X, Isaac Asimov, Langston Hughes, Howard Zinn, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lauryn Hill and Stanley Kubrick.

When I saw Joshua Brand’s name appear I knew I was on to something: he created the television show “I’ll Fly Away”. Even though it is about the American South in the early 1960s, it is a perfect example of the Uptown sense of the world. But not till I made this list did I know Brand is from City College!

Pat Boone seems like the complete opposite of Uptown Manhattan. But maybe that is like how Madonna is the opposite of Catholic.

These also seem Uptown to me, though as far as I know none are:

• People: Shakespeare, Michelle Obama, John Singleton, Marvin Gaye, Common, Chuck D, Sinclair Lewis, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Kolko, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Noam Chomksy, Jay Bookman, Frank Norris, Ed Zwick, Jamaica Kincaid, Ishmael Reed, Marvin Gaye.
• Films: Training Day, Boyz n the Hood, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Television shows: My So-Called Life.

See also:

• The best American writers live north of 110th Street
• Uptown
• Harlem
• New York

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Adam Mansbach

Adam Mansbach (c. 1977- ) is an American writer best known for “Angry Black White Boy” (2005) and “The End of the Jews” (2008). He seems to be one of the few white American writers these days who writes about race and whiteness. Tim Wise also comes to mind.

Mansbach is Jewish, but his family was not all that religious and did not practise the old Jewish ways. Instead he grew up on jazz and especially hip hop in a white, well-to-do town just outside of Boston. He loved hip hop when it was still largely a black thing. That put him into a strange position with both blacks and whites. He became an outsider in both worlds.

The day that changed his life was April 29th 1992. He was 15 and heard that the policemen who beat Rodney King were found not guilty. How could that be? He saw the video over and over again on television of the white policemen beating an unarmed black man senseless. Who could doubt their guilt?

He was shocked that the policemen walked free, but what shocked him even more was that no one in his white town cared. No one was angry or anything. While Los Angeles burned it was just another day where he lived.

He and a teacher at school led a walkout and went to city hall to show their anger and make people maybe think a bit.

All this made him think about race, white people and his own whiteness. So years later he wrote a book about it, “Angry Black White Boy”.

It is about Macon Detornay, a young New York taxi driver. He robs his rich, white customers because of their race. Everyone thinks he is black, but he turns out to be white! He becomes famous and calls for a National Day of Apology where whites tell blacks how sorry they are for all the injustice they have done. Things get out of control from there…

Mansbach wrote the book in what he calls a hip hop style – just like Kerouac wrote some of his stuff in a sort of jazz style of prose.

Mansbach says whiteness is hard to understand because it is everywhere. That makes it hard to see. It does not stick out like blackness does. But he does understand that the way society works – from the police to the courts to the banks and so on – that it is all set up to suit whites and winds up screwing blacks.

Some things he has said:

… the legacy of black folks in America is so profound that it functions as a metaphor for all humanity.

I think that for every community there are outskirts, margins… To me, those margins are where art comes from.

Like if you don’t know Diana Ross, you might think Puffy is a genius.

The genius of graffiti is that five million people see your art.

See also:

• Jack Kerouac
• Jews
• hip hop
• Race in America
• The best American writers live north of 110th Street – not to say that he is one of the best, but when I found out about him he seemed Uptown to me and, as it turns out, he did go to Columbia.
  

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Three songs from Uptown

Three songs follow this posting:

• Billie Holiday: My Man
• Suzanne Vega: Luka
• Kelis: Milkshake

They were done at three different times in three different styles of music. Two of the singers are black, one is white, But all three lived in Uptown Manhattan in New York, Manhattan north of 110th Street, and it shows.

They sing about the world as it is, as they see it with their own two eyes. Even when it is ugly and unfair – in fact, especially when it is ugly and unfair. And they sing about what they see even when it does not make any sense. They do not try to pretty it up by throwing out facts because they are unpleasant or make no sense.

In “My Man” Billie Holiday sings “He isn’t true; he beats me too” but then sings “My man, I love him so” and “when he takes me in his arms the world is bright, all right”. She has thought of leaving him but then says, “What’s the difference if I say I’ll go away when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday.”

It is like living in Uptown itself: living in a world with a big crack going right down the middle that makes no sense but you live with it somehow. The world is profoundly imperfect but you must carry on all the same.

You see the same thing in “Luka” some 40 years later. It is about a boy who is being beaten. He tries to lie about it to his neighbour but the song does not play along with him. He too is trying to live with a big crack in his life and somehow make sense of it. “You just don’t argue anymore”.

In “Milkshake”, instead of beating women and children, men are driven by lust. The women with the best bodies get their man. Again, it looks at the world as it is in all its unfairness. It has no patience for politically correct ideas of beauty that many want to believe in.

Why this love of the ugly truth? Why songs about the unfairness of life? Because in Uptown the truth is ugly and life is profoundly unfair. Yet you have to make sense of it somehow.

All this is very different from how mainstream America sees life and the world.

In mainstream America people think they can get through life clean, that if they have enough money, enough police protection, that if they build their gates high enough and strong enough, they will get through life with as little suffering as possible.

But that is the life of escape, that is the life of an overgrown child. And, in America, it is a life built on lies. It is not the life for anyone with a true heart.

Sooner or later you will suffer, then what? And when the bad times come where will you run? And when all your lies have been knocked flat, where will you hide?

See also:

• Billie Holiday: My Man
• Suzanne Vega: Luka
• Kelis: Milkshake
• Uptown
• The best American writers live north of 110th Street

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Billie Holiday: My Man

It cost me a lot
But there’s one thing
that I’ve got
It’s my man
It’s my man

Cold or wet
Tired, you bet
All of this I’ll soon forget
With my man

He’s not much on looks
He’s no hero out of books
But I love him
Yes, I love him

Two or three girls
Has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him

I don’t know why I should
He isn’t true
He beats me, too
What can I do?

Oh, my man, I love him so
He’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When he takes me in his arms
The world is bright
All right

What’s the
difference if I
say
I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back
On my knees someday

For whatever my man is
I’m his forevermore

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Kelis: Milkshake

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

I know you want it,
the thing that makes me,
what the guys go crazy for.
They lose their minds,
the way i wind,
i think its time

la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting

la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

i can see youre on it,
you want me to teach the
techniques that freaks these boys,
it can’t be bought,
just know, thieves get caught,
watch if your smart,

la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,

la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

Once you get involved,
everyone will look this way-so,
you must maintain your charm,
same time maintain your halo,
just get the perfect blend,
plus what you have within,
then next his eyes are squint,
then he’s picked up your scent,

lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,

lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge

See also:

• Three songs from Uptown

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Suzanne Vega: Luka

My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before

If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble. some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was

I think it’s because I’m clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it’s because I’m crazy
I try not to act too proud

They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore

Yes I think I’m okay
I walked into the door again
Well, if you ask that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
I guess I’d like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown

Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am

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