ebogjonson.com

Since 1999, filmmakers Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster have been documenting the educational experiences of their son Idris and his buddy Seun, bringing their cameras

"into classrooms, to conferences, on school trips, on college tours, to prom and everywhere in between— to capture the year-to-year ups and downs as well as the perspectives of students, parents, teachers and administrators who are all striving for academic excellence. Through the years, we've documented our personal family struggles, and the boys' experience with privilege, stereotypes, culture clashes, learning differences and two eventual divergent paths in education." [more]"

12 years later (!) they need a bit more scratch to finish the film, though, and have taken to Kickstarter to raise the rest. I've ponied up, and I really urge all of you to do the same. (Full disclosure: they are pals, but I wouldn't recommend this project if I didn't believe in its merits independent of my knowing them.) (You can find their Kickstarter here.)

It goes without saying that Joe and Michele's film documents a 12-year journey that does not end well for most black boys. As their Kickstarter points out, "[b]lack boys are twice as likely as whites to be held back in elementary school, three times as likely to be suspended from school, and half as likely to graduate from college." It also documents the particular struggle faced by black middle class parents trying to navigate a peculiar nexus of individual privilege and group penury. Michele and Joe citizens in good standing of Brooklyn's storied Fort Greene, which Nelson George (toggle another disclosure, this time from working together at various publications) and Diane Paragas recently documented in a doc called Brooklyn Boheme:

The two films would make a great double feature. Although they'd don't quite line up properly chronologically (12 years ago, the end of things was coming if not completely nigh in Fort Greene) there is a sense in which the concerns of one spring from the other. I'm not sure if Joe and Michelle make a cameo in Boheme, but given who they are - politically minded black creatives - they easily could. If the films were screened back-to-back they would marry and multiply during intermission, and, when the curtain rose on American Promise, the story would continued on to the problem of raising sane, safe and strong black sons, our heroes attacking it the only way they know how - talking, filming, thinking.

I have to confess that sitting here way off in Los Angeles I felt a deep twinge of nostalgia watching both of these trailers, and that (typically) my reactions have little to do with the actual subject matter at hand - education, local history, fondly remembered community, what have you. But that's another story for another time.

Phantom Limbs

ebogjonson — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:31:48 -0500

I originally wrote this for BlackPublicMedia.org

“PORT-AU-PRINCE — On the western outskirts of the Haitian capital, a large white house shows signs of coming back to life. Groundskeepers have torn down the campaign posters that a presidential candidate had papered all over the forest-green front gate, trimmed the long lawn, swept the winding, fir tree-lined driveway, and even planted flowers. A light illuminated the two-story house like a lantern one evening last week. The groundskeepers are busy because they and other supporters anticipate the return of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has lived in exile in South Africa since he was ousted in 2004. Supporters say the former leader will inject a sense of hope in this nation, battered by a massive earthquake, a cholera epidemic and political unrest. [full story]”

There have been entire generations of Haitians for whom “diaspora” is synonymous with abrupt, forced exile. For these Haitians the old house back home is a recurring setting for their personal and political dramas, the exile, the refugee, the reluctant emigrant – even the ousted dictator or democratically elected president – prone to obsessively casting a glance over their shoulder at the things they have left behind. Sometimes the old house sits empty except for ghosts and memories, sometimes it waits diligently minded and maintained by family and friends, and sometimes it is not your house at all anymore, the place where you used to live occupied by strangers: unruly squatters, or worse, the victor in whatever lost contest sent you packing in the first place.

In the fantasies of the exile the country itself is often much like that waiting house, and the course of Haitian politics has long been particularly prone to sudden reversal due to the unexpected return of people who think themselves its rightful owners, its ablest caretakers. Just in the last tumultuous year we have seen Wyclef (no exile, but still), then Baby Doc, and now, potentially, Titid, overturn the Haitian market cart by merely stepping off a plane and declaring themselves home. Their ambitions treat Haitian politics like a packed theater (another kind of house) where the headliner has been running late: even when the warm-up act is there doing their thing, the stage remains empty and waiting.

My parents were exile Haitians, and by extension I am as well, so we know a thing or two about waiting. Back before he became an exile, my father had been an officer in the Haitian Coast Guard, and although I suspect he was, in the main, apolitical, he had strikes against him in the form of ties to the ousted Magloire regime. He waited out the violence of the early 60s before sending my mother ahead to stay with relatives in New York, then waited some more before li pran anbasad – sought asylum – at the Colombian embassy. After waiting a few weeks there in hopes of getting to NYC, some or another friend at the embassy counseled my father to have my mother meet him in Bogota instead. The weather was better in Colombia and life would be easier there for them, the Colombian explained, but my mother spoke no Spanish, and, anyway: why bother setting up shop in an entirely different country? By then the Duvalier regime was already long in the tooth compared to any number of its predecessors; surely they would be back home in just a bit? [...]

full story at BlackPublicMedia.org

Shades of Gentrification

ebogjonson — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 01:07:29 -0400

I originally wrote this for KCET Departures

Chief among the themes emerging from the recent suite of KCET Departures is that communities change. While national imaginings of Los Angeles still depict it as a flat non-place poor in history, the local voices Departures has amplified in Venice, Chinatown and Richland Farms offer alternate, first person testimonies to crowded, sometimes tumultuous cycles of birth, rebirth and transformation. Departures interviewees like Jatuan Valentine & Navalette Bailey from Oakwood lend much-needed human texture to often impersonal-seeming shifts in real estate and demographics, the tidal flows of commercial money in and out of our zip codes.

But a specter haunts many of these stories, a guilty creature called "gentrification" who - in the telling at least - leeches their richness and complexity before reducing them to simple undifferentiated parables of loss and greed. Indeed, the vast majority of conversations about gentrification in this country are a literal kind of ghost story, ritualized tales where stylized embodiments of demographic good and evil play out their appointed roles in predetermined scripts. These dramas always begin in the hardscrabble idyll of monolithic, once-upon-a-time 'hoods, lurch through zero-sum economic warfare where white gain goes hand-in-hand with colored/working-class loss and invariably end in bohemian elegy, pale-faced victors compelled by guilt to speak for the dead, the erased, the evicted. In such a vision, the unique texture of, say Oakwood, is lost. Before Oakwood could become the site of "gentrification" many say it is today, it transited through other stages not typically part of the standard white/non-white two-step, phases where black middle class and black working class people faced off in their own internecine and often inconclusive encounters.

Those other, interstitial stories are rarely told because our image of immigrants, people of color or the poor often admit only the most stereotypical or easily communicated details. Take the key player in every gentrification narrative, the hipster. He is rarely the figure evoked by African American novelist Colson Whitehead in a recollection of gentrification days across the country in Brooklyn:

I used to live in Fort Greene, and whenever I visit my old neighborhood, I am tormented by the same absurd thought: I should have bought that crack house when I had the chance. Never mind that I was broke--this line of thinking is a natural member of that gang of peculiar New York regrets. Regrets about places you loved but had to leave, places you coveted but could never pay the admission price, places that were surrounded by invisible barbed wire before you were born. Regrets about quaint little crack houses with southern-exposure gardens, owner duplex, needs TLC. [full story]

The hipsters of most gentrification fantasies - whether set against the backdrop of Whitehead's Brooklyn or our own Chinatown - are always white newcomers, real estate-minded vampires coming to feed on the flesh of authentic communities. We rarely imagine the possibility of a Whitehead: colored, middle-class hipsters carrying both universal dreams of cheap rents and their own peculiar set of ambivalences on slouched shoulders as they navigate neighborhoods on the cusp of change.

Visit KCET.org for the full story.

Lost in Peyton Place

ebogjonson — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:29:13 -0400

Procrastination-related random google find of the night: Samuel Peyton, fake founder of faketown Peyton Place was black in the book. From David M. Jones' “Blacks, Greeks, and Freaks: Othering as Social Critique in Peyton Place”:

After his arrival in town by train, Makris is surprised by how little the townspeople want to engage in conversation. Speaking with the owner of the town cafe, Corey Hyde, Markris receives evasive answers when he asks about the origin of the town’s name:

“Peyton Place…is the oddest name for a town I’ve every heard. Who is it named for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Corey, making unnecessary circular motions with a cloth on his immaculate counter. “There’s plenty of towns have funny names. Take that Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had a kid took French over to the high school. Told me Baton Rouge means Red Stick. Now, ain’t that a helluva name for a town? Red Stick, Louisiana. And what about that Des Moines, Iowa? What a crazy name that is.”

“True,” said Markis. “But for whom is Peyton Place named, or for what?”

“Some feller that built a castle up here, back before the Civil War. Feller by the name of Samuel Peyton,” said Corey, reluctantly.

“A castle!” exclaimed Makris.

“Yep. A real, true, honest-to-God castle, transported over here from England, every stick and stone of it.”

“Who was this Peyton? asked Makris. “An exiled duke?”

“Nah,” said Corey Hyde. “Just a feller with money to burn. Excuse me, Mr. Makris. I got things to do in the kitchen.”

The old man at the end of the counter chuckled. “Fact of the matter, Mr. Makris,” said Clayton Frazier in a loud voice, “is that this town was named for a friggin’ nigger. That’s what ails Corey. He’s delicate like, and just don’t want to spit it right out” (102).

The latter sections of the novel tell more about Samuel Peyton, when a reporter from out of town interviews Clayton Frazier. According to Frazier, Peyton escaped from slavery long before the Civil War, “at a time when most folks looked on niggers as work horses, or mules” (329). He escaped to France, married a French girl, and built a castle on the highest point in the then-unoccupied landscape around Peyton Place. Both Peyton and his wife eventually die of tuberculosis, and according to his will, the land and castle was given to the state, left in disrepair but towering over the town of Peyton Place that grew up around it.

Metalious’ development of the Peyton plot focuses on racial difference, setting up a conditional shift in power as the townspeople live their lives in the physical and symbolic shadow of Samuel Peyton. In the film and television versions, Samuel Peyton is no longer identified as an African American character – in the television version, he becomes a wealthy industrialist with a resemblance to J.R. Ewing of Dallas. [full]

"We see it, too. We see it every day, we never think about it. Do you Allison?"

Peace, Deductible!

ebogjonson — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:41:13 -0500

Below is the Google Voice transcript of my mother's NYE message. Exactly 3 words are right, can you guess which?

"Yeah, I just wanted to see and then it's vending so much in Bosnia one slight 19th it but that I know it's not getting this evite but not you were supposed to go out of this, he did. I don't know which day. Peace, deductible. Can you email and I've got everything is. Thank you."

Happy belated NYE, all. May all your peace be deductible!

rips Jack

ebogjonson — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:58:54 -0500

VAZQUEZ JOHN MANUEL "JACK" (March 7, 1932 - December 10, 2009.) Son of Manuel Vazquez and Helen Flannery Vazquez, was good times and fun to all he met. He attended Annunciation on Detroit's east side, graduating high school in 1950, while also taking art classes at Cass Tech. He studied architectural engineering at the University of Detroit, where he first met the woman who would later become his wife, Lois Cahill, and the priest who remained a lifelong friend, Arthur Lovely. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1955 and spent the next twelve years studying and teaching Latin in Milford, OH, West Baden, IN, Cleveland, OH, and Toronto. In 1968 he left the Jesuits to marry Lois, and in 1969 they had their only child, a son named Michael. He continued to teach, first Latin and then English, at Nolan Middle School near Seven Mile Road in Detroit, while advising various student groups and serving as librarian. He retired in the early 1990s. He was often to be found in a cafe—always wearing his dragonfly pin—writing in his journal, tutoring young people, and reading poetry aloud with friends. An ardent patron of the Grosse Pointe Public Library, he was a champion of librarians everywhere. He is survived by three sisters, Mary Gottlieb of Portland, Theodora Vazquez of San Francisco, and Carmen Forkin of Detroit, and by his son Michael, an editor and writer in New York. A funeral Mass will be held at St. Paul Catholic Church in Grosse Pointe Farms 12pm on Wed. December 16, 2009

adios, Mr. V. Good luck on the next leg of the trip, and many thanks for the emails over the years. You might not have realized it, but the stream of missives were a great comfort to me after my father died, in so much as they managed to be completely familiar and alien at the same time. No worries: promise keep an eye on Mike.

Happy Birthday, Dad

ebogjonson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:56:31 -0400

Well, at least you are saved the hassle of the DMV this year.

If I said so myself

ebogjonson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:11:39 -0400

From Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Bruno:

You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. [full review]

Sasha Baron Cohen obviously did not consult my blackface use guidelines, which counsel near the end that any use of blackface that reruns an image or scene or trope from the existing repertoire of racism should be sent back to the drawing board for retuning.

Tweeting...

ebogjonson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:20:11 -0400

...is way more fun than blogging, which is more fun than writing articles, which is way more fun than finishing short stories. It really is like one of those evolution cartoons that runs in reverse! Sad, actually.

20 Year Old Kisses and Punctums

ebogjonson — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:58:49 -0400

Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"

But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.

The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:

There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:

I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.