They say that it takes about 7 years 4 u 2 recycle all the cells in your body. This took place abt 2 Pierre’s ago.

Chakaras & I went to art school together. We had several small adventures during the time we knew each other… our last big one was a road trip to the Million Man March in October 1995.

I was inspired to get this photo essay/album scanned and uploaded by his untimely passing last week. It’s dedicated to him, his memory, and all of those whose lives he touched.

You always hear the cliche about the journey and the destination. We’re all destined to end up in the same place, but i am thankful that our journeys crossed paths at some point. I am better because of it. Thank you, Chakaras. rest in peace.

Our Last Big Adventure

Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal and Grammy winning producer 9th Wonder (pictured left) are using SunMoonChild – amazing song by imani uzuri, amazing video by Pierre Bennu – as part of the midterm exam for their course, ’sampling soul.’ The course is about black cultural production and the tradition of borrowing/remixing/sampling and how it all relates to today’s legal issues of intellectual property rights and copyright law. Since YouTube just removed SunMoonChild after three years this issue cuts particularly close for us.

He’s made the midterm public on his blog to encourage a wider dialogue and wider exposure to the ideas. Stop by and give it a read, comment if you can! )

–jb.

As a DJ, an artist, a sometime teacher, and the son of an academic, I will never get tired of marveling at the intersection of HipHop and academia. It’s an honor to have my work thought of as contributing to this discussion.

–pb

- Dear you, yeah you complaining about how movies suck, music sucks? make your own. Yeah make it! it used to be hard but if you’re reading this on the internet chances are you have the tools. and clearly you have a creative mind cause you complain with such eloquence. Clearly you have a flair for fiction when you romanticize the past as if Hollywood & the music industry just started making crap in the late 90’s. Trust me the crap that exists now stands on the shoulders of a great legacy left by the crap b4 it. technology has just made it quicker and easier to make so there is a lot more of it. so get up and add YOUR crap to the mix, I dare you.

- Dear lame un imaginative DJ I love MJ and I don’t pretend to know what he thought but I would imagine that he would have wanted us to play more than just his music at a tribute to him.

- Note to self don’t bite your nails before scratching sensitive parts of your anatomy

- Dear supermarket why am I checking myself out?! WTF I don’t work here. How do you call yourself a supermarket when I’m checking myself out bagging and weighing  my own vegetables? Didn’t some one used to work here? and instead of hiring a person you now make me do it myself for free? I miss the line at the supermarket. Where you get to read the stuff you would never buy and eat the grapes and candy only to ask if they could just ring up the wrapper. Then there were those once in a life time i’ll probably never talk to you again friendly over polite conversations that you got into with strangers. I miss those and some how automated food checkout thingy it’s all your fault. I’m heading to the farmers market , they might not have a ceiling but they sell real food and have cool people.

- Note to self A notarized letter of permission signed by a handicapped person pinned to the windshield of your car does not give you permission to park in the handicapped spaces. ever.

- Dear PETA you can’t tell me that killing a mosquito on the back of your leg in mid suck isn’t satisfying

- Dear CNN Did you know that the demographic with the highest increase in HIV consistently for the past several years has been young black women?  next time you want to do a “blacks in America” show change your mind and do something about this thing that is still an epidemic, it’s called AIDS. what happened to AIDS? I have heard more about the bird flu. They say in news if it bleeds it leads. Well people still die from this illness so make this your lead. or even use it as filler next time you feel the need to cover a mans death 24 hours for 5 days strait. You’re welcome.

A friend and I were riding to the post office with about 5 bags filled to the brim with packages to mail off as was the ritual at the end of every day we work at the warehouse. We were stopped by a light and at the corner in the open space between the gas station and the curb were 2 children with bikes. My eyes would have not caught them had it not been for how small one of the children was. They both had dirt bikes but the smaller child seemed dwarfed – somehow he was riding the bike but could barley reach the handle bars. His hand couldn’t even wrap around the handle. It would be the equivalent of an adult trying to put their hand around a half spun roll of toilet tissue.

Me and my friend in the passenger seat smirked at how silly it all seemed, this child’s dedication to being out and on this bike that clearly he was too small for just seemed funny.
Then coming across the street were 2 women. One was holding a child the other was just stomping mad, her anger clearly pointed at the smaller of the 2 children.  Somewhere in the back of our minds we thought that universal childhood theme:  “oooh hes gonna get it”

As she approached the child quickly dismounted the bike and let it fall. His friend kept a safe distance. Then the mother, while screaming inches away from his face, balled up her fist and with everything she could muster punched him in the face.

I’ll say that again. A grown woman with a closed fist reached back as far as she could while yelling at the top of her lungs and punched this barley 4 foot tall child in the face, several times.

The look of horror on the child’s face is something that will never leave me. I have never seen a child’s face do that. He wouldn’t
stop looking up at her and he didn’t really defend himself… he just held his quivering fists together  under his chin as looked up to her.
He managed to pick his bike up but was still being yelled at and hit with a barrage of closed and open hands across his head neck and back as they walked off and disappeared into the collection of short brick buildings

Here are the thoughts that went though my mind

We make each other
Do I roll down the window and say something ?
Do I get out of the car follow them to where they live and…what?
Will me getting out the car do anything?
Are you ready to take on the responsibility of that child’s welfare after today?
Who is this child doing to be when he grows up?
What made him come outside? He knew his mom?
Stupid question, if she was my mom I’d probably be outside
Who am I to tell a parent?
Wait…I am I parent.
Perhaps she was concerned for his safety?
Perhaps she was terrified he had run away or was lost?
How does that concern turn into this?
It takes a village is he not my responsibility?
Am I a coward?
Do I think too much ?
Why won’t this light change?
Will that child grow up to hate women?
Will he beat his girlfriend or his own child one day?
Was his mother beat by those who love her?
How will this child define love?
How does this mother define love?
Patriarchal society sucks.
Society is not punching that kid in the face, she is.
How can you hit another human being especially one easily half your size that hard in the face?
How was he still standing after that?
If she was comfortable displaying that level of brutality in broad day light at the corner of a large intersection what does he get when he gets home?
Does Barack Obama’s victory make that little boy believe he can do anything?
Does his mother believe that he can do anything?
Will he overcome this to be a story of hope?
Why is this light not changing?
Why did I have to see this ?
Why can’t I turn away?
Why can’t I move?
Why can’t I cry?
Inaction is action.
And then there was a honk behind us. The light had changed. We drove off and dropped the packages at the post office but we were both pretty silent for the rest of the trip.
I still think about it every day.
I still feel like less of a man for not having done anything.
I feel like that inaction will have ripple effect that I can only hope to counter balance with the way I raise my son.
And that’s it.
No moral, no bit of wisdom to walk with, just something that I felt somehow had something to do with being a father. Something that hurt me to hold onto… so I had to share.

Love is a verb that has several definitions. Sometimes that’s an unfortunate thing.

This being our first baby and our first sickness we work in our strengths. My wife does everything and l look worried and ask what can I do.

Since I don’t have the body full of milk and the hairier face I am the legs of the family. The “could you get me the…”  guy  I’m also the “oh and don’t forget the…” guy and more often the  “did you remember to…” dude.

Things they don’t tell you #4080: babies don’t know how to blow their nose and (for the most part) don’t breathe out of their mouths. Which means it drips, occasionally blows bubbles, or they swallow it and it accumulates in their stomach till  then like your 4th grade volcano science project they erupt.

In the parenting game, I’m more the ‘blood man’ than the ‘bodily fluids dude.’ Cuts, scrapes, bruises, other assorted everyday gore, I’m your man. But from a very young age I have been a germophobe. Borderline obsessive. I remember being mad if anyone tasted my ice cream or if I had to share a cup of juice. It’s probably what kept me from being as promiscuous as my fellow classmates in college… I remember how thoroughly horrified I was in jr high school of all the films where they show you syphilis or gonorrhea.

But I digress. My point is, I’m skittish about germs.

So you can imagine my horror this holiday season when I brought my child among friends and family for their first viewing and he was passed around like a party joint.
Yuk party joints
Think about a party blunt for a minute.  Someone you don’t know takes what usually looks like a dirty nails, splits open a cigar, fills it with greenery and proceeds to lick it closed. The grossness is probably a big reason why I never smoked. I’m saying: if that same person prepared an eggroll like that you probably wouldn’t eat it.

My point is, here is my beautiful pure healthy baby, kissed on, squeezed, sticking his hands in various people’s mouths, dripping drool of all lengths and thickness. All I could see were heat signatures and medical stats like the POV of the cyborg in the movie Terminator.

For the first time since he’s been here it dawned on me that this is only the beginning. He is going to walk in mud, touch dead birds, play outside in filth with his filthy friends with their filthy parents that all go to the same filthy indoor germ filled school. His life will be spent as a host of a germ brunch.

I remember one of my cousins telling me upon his birth, “Wait till you have to suck the snot out of his nose.”

I immediately imagined myself in jail for having let a child suffocate on his own snot.

My first day in the yard (that’s what they call the play ground in prison) and some guy with arms as big as my legs asks me what I’m in for. Slow pan upward. The sun is blocked out by his height. A murmuring, hostile crowd forms around me and they begin to chant. “Booger Bennu” they’d call me and after the years pass, I’d have tattoo-tear-boogers on my lip…

But I digress. My point is, the only reason I would ever actually do that nasty deed is because I imagine jail has even more germs than a baby’s snot…well that and rape and white bread. Yuck!

I usually like to have a snappy ending to these but there is none.

Most of my imagination is spent being a terrified first time father using my imagination to think of what could be and comparing horror stories
Like one of our friends had to hold their son down while they put in a catheter. I guess you don’t know what your made of till you have to deal with something like that. I personally don’t want know what I’m made of.

Our child’s pediatrician says its not an issue till there’s a fever so
I chant, “No fever” into his hair over and over in increasingly softer tones till its just my mouth moving then silence.
Then I trust the silence.

As long as there is no fever he’s the good kind of sick – no hospital, no oxygen mask, no catheter, just good old fashioned snot.

What helps is that even through his pain he seems to find an occasional smile.

Well that’s it. My guilt about doing anything but hovering over my wife and child will only allow me to write this much so don’t be mad if I stop writing in the middle of a sentence to go chec

He will be remembered.

He left so much good stuff to for us to marvel at.

I would’ve loved to have been able to tell him to his face how much what he had to say and how he said it meant to me.

He is one of the greats.