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

Red Clay: High and Low from Shawn Peters on Vimeo.

“A new performance art project that we have been working on with RED CLAY called High and Low, the name is based on the Kurosawa film with the same title. We take High art to common places and see what reactions we get.” – Shawn Peters

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

- note to self: when you fall down in public again (and you will fall down in public again) DO NOT pop back up as fast as you can! Laughter directed at your pain and ripped clothing hurts your feelings instead… lie motionless for as long as possible hold your breath and when you can no longer do that roll your eyes to the top of your head and twitch violently till some one calls the ambulance. If you can muster up some drool that’s a plus. Then when you hear the paramedics, that’s when you pop up as fast as you can, dust yourself off and walk through the crowd surrounding you and off into the sunset. PS Remember to wipe the drool off.

- dear wife: 10 years! WOW that’s cool. but isn’t it kind of random how they only make a big deal on anniversaries that are divisible by 5?  I say after this, let’s celebrate on years that are prime numbers.

- dear guy with one eye working at that place: I would think (seeing as how someone poked out your eye and you have no depth perception and you wouldn’t make a good eye witness and no one is really gonna see what your saying) that you would be a nicer less rude person…oh well guess I was wrong. I got my eye on you.
- Dear conspiracy theory documentarians: Are there any big organizations that work and do good?

- dear everyone at every store I’ve ever been in,  No I don’t work here!

- dear son “NO”does not mean look at me smile and then proceed to do what ever wrong thing you were doing, faster.
- dear doubt F%$@ you and anyone that look like you!
- dear men who try to pick up women on the street with that weak game: STOP! Seriously please. She hears you! she just is not listening to you. I’m am convinced that there is a legend of a man who did this sometime in the late 1700’s and went on to have the most amazing love affair that ever existed. I’m also convinced that every man that tries  to hit on a woman in this manner is either young & ignorant, has more ‘hope’ than the obama campaign, or has heard this amazing myth. who has this ever worked on, and would you really want anything from a woman that responded to your barking upon first call?  I just don’t get it. it’s summer time in the new millennium fellas step your game UP.

- dear professional athletes why don’t losers thank god at the end of games? Here is a short list of things to be thankful for, getting paid millions to play a game, the humility of losing that builds character, those nice sneakers you have on… im sure you and your loser friends can think of more
- dear producers of random crap and bad packaging please  stop making unnecessarily hard to open non biodegradable packaging for simple things then tell me I’m polluting the planet. Do your part.

- Dear any one who finds themselves saying “I’m a grown ass man/woman,” ponder this: When you see a guy in knee high socks with cleats on and a baseball cap holding a bat and swinging it at a ball with outquestion that’s a …come on…say it…yes that’s a baseball player. That person never has to yell up to the stands that he is indeed a baseball player. Let me make it plain I think what’s confusing people are one of 3 things. where you are, what you’re wearing or how you’re acting. Next time you feel the need to say that phrase check one of those 3 things take a deep breath then ask yourself if you need to go home change your clothes, not be where you are and or put some bass in your speaking voice.
- dear children I’m sorry adults run everything and nothing works. I swear some of us are really trying hard…my advice is to  have the good sense to create your own mistakes and don’t repeat ours.

(drapetomania definition)

Isaac  Hayes  (1942 – 2008)

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

Several days later, by mail, I received a copy of the young man’s story in his college newspaper. He mentioned my talk, listed some of my books and the future problems they dealt with. Then he quoted his own question: “What’s the answer?” The article ended with the first three words of my reply, wrongly left standing alone: “There isn’t one.”

It’s sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie, by offering an accurate but incomplete quote. In this case, it was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.

Learn From the Past

Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.

When I was preparing to write Parable of the Talents, I needed to think about how a country might slide into fascism–something that America does in Talents. So I reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other books on Nazi Germany. I was less interested in the fighting of World War II than in the prewar story of how Germany changed as it suffered social and economic problems, as Hitler and others bludgeoned and seduced, as the Germans responded to the bludgeoning and the seduction and to their own history, and as Hitler used that history to manipulate them. I wanted to understand the lies that people have to tell themselves when they either quietly or joyfully watch their neighbors mined, spirited away, killed. Different versions of this horror have happened again and again in history. They’re still happening in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, wherever one group of people permits its leaders to convince them that for their own protection, for the safety of their families and the security of their country, they must get their enemies, those alien others who until now were their neighbors.

It’s easy enough to spot this horror when it happens elsewhere in the world or elsewhere in time. But if we are to spot it here at home, to spot it before it can grow and do its worst, we must pay more attention to history. This came home to me a few years ago, when I lived across the street from a 15-year-old girl whose grandfather asked me to help her with homework. The girl was doing a report on a man who had fled Europe during the 1930’s because of some people called–she hesitated and then pronounced a word that was clearly unfamiliar to her–”the Nayzees?” It took me a moment to realize that she meant the Nazis, and that she knew absolutely nothing about them. We forget history at our peril.

Respect the Law of Consequences

Just recently I complained to my doctor that the medicine he prescribed had a very annoying side effect.

“I can give you something to counteract that,” my doctor said.

“A medicine to counteract the effects of another medicine?” I asked.

He nodded. “It will be more comfortable for you.”

I began to backpedal. I hate to take medicine. “The problem isn’t that bad.” I said. “I can deal with it.”

“You don’t have to worry,” my doctor said. “This second medication works and there are no side effects.”

That stopped me. It made me absolutely certain that I didn’t want the second medicine. I realized that I didn’t believe there were any medications that had no side effects. In fact, I don’t believe we can do anything at all without side effects–also known as unintended consequences. Those consequences may be beneficial or harmful. They may be too slight to matter or they may be worth the risk because the potential benefits are great, but the consequences are always there. In Parable of the Sower, my character put it this way:

All that you touch/You Change
All that you Change/Changes you
The only lasting truth/Is Change
God/Is Change

Be Aware of Your Perspective

How many combinations of unintended consequences and human reactions to them does it take to detour us into a future that seems to defy any obvious trend? Not many. That’s why predicting the future accurately is so difficult. Some of the most mistaken predictions I’ve seen are of the straight-line variety–that’s the kind that ignores the inevitability of unintended consequences, ignores our often less-than-logical reactions to them, and says simply, “In the future, we will have more and more of whatever’s holding our attention right now.” If we’re in a period of prosperity, then in the future, prosperity it will be. If we’re in a period of recession, we’re doomed to even greater distress. Of course, predicting an impossible state of permanent prosperity may well be an act of fear and superstitious hope rather than an act of unimaginative, straight-line thinking. And predicting doom in difficult times may have more to do with the sorrow and depression of the moment than with any real insight into future possibilities. Superstition, depression and fear play major roles in our efforts at prediction.

It’s also true that where we stand determines what we’re able to see. Where I stood when I began to pay attention to space travel certainly influenced what I saw. I followed the space race of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s not because it was a race, but because it was taking us away from Earth, away from home, away to investigate the mysteries of the universe and, I thought, to find new homes for humanity out there. This appealed to me, at least in part, because I was in my teens and beginning to think of leaving my mother’s house and investigating the mysteries of my own adulthood.

Apollo 11 reached the moon in July 1969. I had already left home by then, and I believed I was watching humanity leave home. I assumed that we would go on to establish lunar colonies and eventually send people to Mars. We probably will do those things someday, but I never imagined that it would take as long as it has. Moral: Wishful thinking is no more help in predicting the future than fear, superstition or depression.

Count On the Surprises

I was speaking to a group of college students not long ago, and I mentioned the fear we’d once had of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The kids I was talking to were born around 1980, and one of them spoke up to say that she had never worried about nuclear war. She had never believed that such a thing could possibly happen–she thought the whole idea was nonsense.

She could not imagine that during the Cold War days of the sixties, seventies and eighties, no one would have dared to predict a peaceful resolution in the nineties. I remembered air-raid drills when I was in elementary school, how we knelt, heads down against corridor walls with our bare hands supposedly protecting our bare necks, hoping that if nuclear war ever happened, Los Angeles would be spared. But the threat of nuclear war is gone, at least for the present, because to our surprise our main rival, the Soviet Union, dissolved itself. No matter how hard we try to foresee the future, there are always these surprises. The only safe prediction is that there always will be.

So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.

Last January, when the White House asked Octavia Butler, 52, to write a memorandum to the President outlining her vision of the future, the author chose education as her subject. “I was poor, Black, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid,” Butler explains. “At best I was treated with gentle condescension when I said I wanted to be a writer. Now I write for a living. Without the excellent, free public education that I was able to take advantage of, I might have found other things to do with my deferred dreams and stunted ambitions.” Instead she went on to garner science fiction’s highest honors, the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Butler, a native of Pasadena, California, is the author of 11 critically acclaimed novels. Her loyalists return again and again to the worlds created in such titles as Patternmaster, Imago, Kindred and, most recently, Parable of the Sower, a haunting coming-of-age, feminist road novel, and its more hopeful sequel, Parable of the Talents. Winner of a 1995 MacArthur Fellowship for her fiction, Butler now lives and works in the Seattle area.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

We’d like to point out that we’re aware of the fact that some of the cartoons listed below did not originate in the ’80s. However, they were on during the ’80s, that’s when we watched them, so they’re ’80s cartoons to us. It’s like when we refer to bedwetting as “late ’90s behavior.” Without further ado…

CARTOON: The Smurfs
LESSON: Communism works!
For naysayers who point to the Former Soviet Union as proof that communism is inherently flawed, may we merely direct your attention to Smurf Village, where everyone shares everything, wears similar utilitarian clothing, battles Gargamel and his turn-Smurfs-to-gold get rich quick schemes and obeys the dictates of a bearded, red hat-wearing, benevolent authority figure. Quoth Comrade Papa: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Really, he actually said that.
How it affected us as adults: Secret communist agendas ceased being dangerous, or really any adjective of consequence, years ago. The worst thing communism does these days is make Ivy League students waste a couple of years wearing ugly clothes and attending boring meetings. However, the sexual politics of Smurf Village, with its one female for every 30 guys, did go a long way towards preparing us for freshman year of college.

CARTOON: Popeye
LESSON: Spinach is good for you.
Sure, it doesn’t taste as good as candy, ice cream or opium, but it’s full of essential vitamins and minerals that’ll make your muscles explode like battleship cannons. If you want to triumph over the bullying Blutos of the world and win the affections of your own lovely, leggy Olive Oyl, pound a can of spinach at least once a day. Or put it in your corncob pipe and smoke it, like everybody’s favorite ornery, mumbling sailorman. Toot toot!
How it affected us as adults: You only need to look at the steroid scandal rocking Major League Baseball to see that Popeye raised a generation that is willing to use performance enhancers. Also, it should be pointed out that Olive Oyl was the first anorexic sex symbol.

CARTOON: G.I. Joe
LESSON: Knowing is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is kicking Cobra’s terrorist ass. And with the coolest soldier codenames ever –Snake Eyes, Duke, Lady Jaye, Shipwreck– winning the war on terror should be no problem. Good will always win out over evil, because good guys work together (Team Work! Cooperation!), while bad guys are ruthless cowards who turn tail and run whenever G.I. Joe’s laser guns get to zappin’. As Sergeant Slaughter once said: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we.”
Now that’s some good strategery.
How it affected us as adults: Actually, we’re pretty certain that our strategy for the Iraq War was conceived after a two day long G.I. Joe marathon in the Pentagon. They just implicitly trusted that the good guys were going to win, that firing off our guns would make the bad guys run for the caves and that giving everyone cute nicknames was somehow endearing. When things didn’t turn out the way they’d planned, the administration placed the blame on faulty intelligence, or in other words: “Knowing is half the battle, and we unfortunately didn’t know shit.”

CARTOON: Scooby Doo
LESSON: Trust no one.
Those phantoms in the fog are actually malevolent hicks, dressed up as ghosts to scare you off their spooky farm. That monster hiding in the attic is actually old man McGee, trying to find the treasure buried in the floorboards. And that happy-go-lucky frat boy, Fred, is actually a bloodthirsty killer. Don’t turn your back on him. Or the girls. Or your dog
…Or maybe we’ve just been spending too much time in the Mystery Machine, and got a little contact high paranoia. Hey, it happens. You want a Scooby Snack? Yeah, it is dog food. So what? You’re really harshing my mellow man. What are you, a narc?
How it affected us as adults: We can’t be certain, but it would appear that our habit of, upon being dumped, grabbing hold of our ex-girlfriends’ chin and yanking upward, started with this show.

CARTOON: He-Man
LESSON: It’s OK to be gay.
Look at this guy: golden locks cut in a tasteful bob, buff biceps, tanned, toned, hairless torso, a magic sword and most importantly, fabulous powers. What’s more, He-Man invites his handsome friends, the Masters of the Universe, to come hang out in his castle anytime. Of course Skeletor and his fugly cohorts are never allowed access to the secrets of He-Man’s dark, dry palace.
Yes, we had He-Man toys, like Ram-Man, Trap-Jaw and even Castle Grayskull. We also had a favorite pair of tighty whiteys that had He-Man on one cheek and Skeletor on the other, battling over our asshole. But did merely owning and wearing that underwear make us gay?
How it affected us as adults: As regards the above question, it’s a very complex matter, but in a word: yes. (For more on depictions of homosexuality in ’80s cartoons, please see Care Bears.)

CARTOON: Jem
LESSON: Grrrls rock!
OK, this was more our sister’s show, but we certainly watched it on more than one occasion, and learned that chicks with guitars and magic earrings kick ass. Jem is a sexy feminist living every young girl’s dream: music executive by day and rock star by night. She has it all: a bubblegum pop band called The Holograms, a boyfriend in love with both her and her alter ego and, for some reason, a foster home for orphans. In addition to teaching us how much grrrls rock, Jem also taught us that love triangles between only two people are often messy, confusing and potentially hilarious.
What? You’ve never seen Jem? Oh. Neither have we.
How it affected us as adults: Let’s just say the matching restraining orders filed against us by Debbie Gibson and Joan Jett didn’t happen on their own.

CARTOON: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
LESSON: April O’Neil is really hot.
She’s got red hair, wears a sexy yellow jumpsuit and gets down with anthropomorphic pizza-fiends. Most girls want nothing to do with dudes that live in the sewers, but not April O’Neil. She doesn’t even mind hanging with that old man-rat wearing a pink kimono! This girl is a freak, for real. I’ve got one word for you dude: cowabunga. Cowabunga that chick in your underground lair all night long.
How it affected us as adults: Mistakenly thought our girlfriend would be cool with it if we called them dude, ate nothing but pizza and wore a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask during sex.

CARTOON: Transformers
LESSON: If we’re not careful, robots will kill us all.
This is a humbling lesson for any child to learn, but an easy one to accept, considering Transformers was one of the coolest cartoons of the ’80s. Would the Unabomber have renounced his violent ways if he were to witness the sheer stunning spectacle that is Grimlock? Hard to say, since he didn’t have a TV. But we will tell you one thing: when machines replace humans at the top of the food chain, we’ll be standing on the sidelines, waving our Autobot flag with fervent pride. Because, let’s face it, getting eaten by an alien car would suck.
How it affected us as adults: The reason we stay away from Priuses and make our TV wear a blindfold when we sleep at night.

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