DEF POERY JAM REVIEW

byLATASH N NEVADA DIGGS
so yeah…this girl said “he fucked me like brooklyn” at a recent taping for
Def Poetry Jam’s fourth session.

so what’s in it for me?

(I) am the voyeur who needs to be viewed w/ parameters. a (hy)brid
mix master of hermit & camera hog. harlem/chicago
cage dancer & green thumb
good days. sour months. wick wick wack poems. analog prose.

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PUT YOUR CAP ON

by FARI CHIDEYA
Nov. 11th, 2004.

Has anyone else here been letting themselves go? I admit, I’ve been in a totally crappy mood for a week solid. I’ve been eating lots of sugar, breaking out like a teenager, and furtively pulling up to drive-throughs. (Yes, I read “Fast Food Nation.” I know what’s in that stuff, and I ate it ANYWAY.)

I guess that was my own culinary version of the primal scream. But hey, the joyride’s over. Time to go back to the gym, cook, find conversation topics other than politics… and stop wincing when I read the newspaper.

Now’s the time to take care of yourself.

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WHAT A DIFERENCE A DAY MAKES

by Suheir Hammad
Soundtrack: John Coltrane “Interstellar Space”
& Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising”

Do not be depressed. Do not be depressed. Do not be depressed. I woke up this morning; sure the States would get attacked. “Thank God I’m not in New York,” was my first thought this morning. “My God, almost everyone I love is in New York,” was the next. I am in Huntington, West Virginia, what the pundits are calling “Bush Country”. Word.

Yesterday, everywhere I went people looked beat down and broke. The downtown is full of construction workers and planners walking in and out of huge developments. The people are friendly but do no extend themselves. There was a toxic leak a few days ago, and some of the evacuated are staying in this same hotel. One medium sized window is not bringing enough light into this dreary room.

I waited and waited for my absentee voter’s form. I filled out the paper work in late August, with the DNC. I assumed it would be in my accumulating mail. Nothing. (more…)

TAMPA VOTE: DSIPATCHES FROM THE GROUND

by BERNESTINE SINGLEY

Thirty years ago, I fled the state after graduating from the University of Florida law school. I vowed never to return to this treacherous terrain. After ten years total practicing law in Boston and Dallas, I quit law altogether. Then came another vow, this time about lawyering: Never again.
Yet, here I am at the end of Election Day, fist cocked, ready to clock a Florida cracker who, despite being stooped by age, just body-slammed me. In Florida. Where I am as a legal volunteer.
“What’re you doing in line if you’re not here to vote?” he demands, still pressed against me.
I shove him away.
“You know who I am and why I’m here,” I say calmly and quietly. “You’ve been looking at me all day. But more importantly than that, right now, you need to step the f__k away from me. And whatever else you do, don’t ever touch me again.”

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ID RATHER GO BLIND
A RANT BY ANGELICA LINDSEY

Ok, so Macy Gray wants to be a social activist. At least that’s what she wanted the people who showed up at her naked concert to believe.

Yep, you read right, Macy Gray performed in a London concert as bare as the day she was born. Clad in nothing more than a necklace and seated in a gilded chair emblazoned with the words “I’d Rather Go Naked”, Macy Gray did something for the people. Or did she?

The July 5 London concert was staged to raise awareness and funds for AIDS. The infamous Ms. Gray was photographed during the concert in Jimmy Choo stilettos. The photos will be used as part of a media campaign featuring other nude celebrities who are involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic. Now, I know what some of you might be thinking. “Macy Gray? Nude? I gotta see this!” And that’s precisely my point. While Gray’s intentions may have been genuine, her naked approach to AIDS awareness looks to me to be just another media ploy to use sex as a way of garnering attention.

Was this a progressive, liberating, and creative marketing tool designed to bring awareness to the AIDS epidemic? Or was it little more than a stab at self-promotion by an artist whose visibility in the public eye has been insignificant at best? At a moment when Bill Cosby is lambasted for presenting cogent arguments about Black youth in America, why are we applauding Macy Gray for doing something that has no artistic merit or intellectual value? I mean, after all, couldn’t she just have announced that the proceeds of her concert would benefit AIDS research?

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