Saturday, March 31, 2012

Even fascists can be nice...

Take a minute to marry Science
   By Malik Sekou OSEI
 
great poems are like
         center fire hollow points
          braking up Negro illusions
                                       of
                                      comfort and
                                      white acceptance,
                                      its like wearing a
                                                blackface target
                                                                    as
                                               a bullet proof vest,
                                               singing God Bless America
                                                                          in Arabic.
                                               It is like thinking that capitalism
                                               that makes its cash through death
                                               of the world for the world's resources
                                               can change its mind through
                                               the majestic benefits of world multi-culturalism.
                  But Monopoly capitalism only dances with irrelevant kings of mysticism like the.....
                  Dalai Lama who serves the simple axioms of niceties of being "nice."
                       For
                          even
                              fascist
                                     can
                                       be
                                     nice,
   If we only give them a chance to become
                                                        one
                                                            with
                                                                 the
                                                                      fucking
                                                                               universe.
For the people who work all their lives and have their pensions stolen and now must beg social services for medical supports
                                                 at the autumns
                                                                    of
                                                                       their lives.
                            Can, of course,  help
                                          the Dalai Lama
                                                   to become one
                                         with the universe
                                                    As they walk him to the
                                                    last wall of his and this 
                                                                                   reality.
                           For they will witness the bravery of this Lama
                                                    as
                                                       he
                                                          refuses
                                                                 the
                                                                     bindfold
                                      As the only sound will be JUST
                                         "Click" ....
                                                Ready... Aim...
                                      As the world purges this walking waste in colorful robes.
 
                                      For now the masses of the world
                                                                                   are
                                                                                      wedded to
                                                                                               science
                                      science
                                            mother fucker
                                                              science...
                                                                           FIRE...
   Malik Sekou Osei

Friday, March 30, 2012

A note to apolitical intellectuals...

(c) 2012 Baba Rumraisin

Apolitical Intellectuals

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.
They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.
No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with "the idea
of the nothing"
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.
They won't be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward's death.
They'll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.
On that day
the simple men will come.
Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they'll ask:
"What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?"
Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.
A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.
Your own misery
will pick at your soul.
And you will be mute in your shame.
-
-30-

Saturday, March 24, 2012

The 11th Commandment broken in Baltimore...


Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM, has been dropped by the public radio station after more than nine years on the job there.

His departure from WYPR was confirmed in an email by a newsroom staffer sent to colleagues at the station and elsewhere Monday. His last day was Friday.

Khalid and WYPR management both declined comment Wednesday.

Khalid, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, had been on probation in February for comments he posted on the Facebook page of a friend questioning the influence of Israel on American politics.

"I, for one, have had enough of this pandering before the Israeli regime," he wrote. "The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel's brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights."

What else can we say?



Friday, March 23, 2012

One man's RED SQUAD is another man's GESTAPO...


NEW YORK (AP)Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities...

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Pavane for THE REAL BRONX BOMBER


05/19/1945-03/02/2012
The living air has been knocked out of us all. Comrade Louis Reyes Rivera made his transition yesterday at 9:01 PM, Friday March 2nd, 2012. A real revolutionary died. Fuck the euphemisims!


We have lost a Revolutionary Radical Poet, a Scholar of world literature and a Committed Artist of the People. He brought not only insight, but a skilled practice of the Black Arts Movement and a radical artistic standard to our journalistic and artistic expression, in other words he was responsible for bringing our aesthetics to a higher level of standard and insight.

Comrade Louis Reyes Rivera was never seduced by celebrity culture or  having  people live vicariously through his art.  He wanted us to seek the conditions of the people, and then to encourage their resistance to barbarism. Louis' artist workshop was geared  to achieving a deeper understanding of the role of art, and how to create an art of resistance, thus laying the foundation for self-determination.

Comrade Louis Reyes Rivera was more than an intellectual, he was a w/c visionary. Through family ties, he became the son-in-law of John Oliver Killens. Comrade Louis Reyes Rivera grasped a connection between culture and revolt --during and after the World War II period --through Comrade John Oliver Killens who produced "Then We Heard The Thunder," and other works that portray Black/Latino working class characters as human, and the US ascendant class actors.
Comrade Rivera posited the notion that art is the soul and sensibilities of a people, and that it has to be taken seriously, if they are to be free. This is consistent with the heart of WEB DuBois, Lukasch, Walter Benjamin, MAO, Fanon....That is to say, you cannot fight the enemy while waving his/her  flag.
What should we do?
That is the quandary that challenges us now.
Comrade Rivera demanded an answer.
This is the prime directive of activistic investigation at this historical juncture. It is the question that must gnaw at any genuine COMMUNIST INTELLECTUAL-- (CLASS FOR ITSELF) cultural worker in the 21st century.
    
Comrade Rivera continued this tradition in his poetry, epitomize by the anti-racist poetic tract: "Why?"
Description of WHY? by Comrade Rivera:

The poem begin with the scream of a bullet as it careens towards the person of Malcolm X. Here Louis shows how an inanimate object also existed in a moral order of right and wrong and this would be Brother Louis' moral ground of all his art.

Comrade Louis was more than fearless intellectually, as an artist, teacher/professor he was scholastically prepared to defend the right of a people to socially define themselves. His art has expressed the humanity within "us" and the joys of our urban swagger. While Resistance and Self-definition (i.e., corporate-sponsored, multicultural, social identity politics , a.k.a. Afro-Coonery) were to be the centerpieces  of  the so-called Black Aesthetic, Comrade Louis continued teaching and organizing. He stook to his revolutionary guns.

Rivera's poetry of resistance of crowded subways, the moral dilemma of bullets killing Black revolutionaries in a rented ball room, where Detroit Red dies as "X." The great and beautiful mother and grand mother of the Bronx near Bath Gate Ave., a scroll from Boston Road speaking Spanish about getting his small butt home on time. Who, he himself became "a tough" in the neighborhood to use his fearlessness to explain the world to us all.


Who would share "Jazz in Jail" pass the great hills of Puerto Rico, eating Mary Janes hard candies in the Bronx before coming to Brooklyn with a hard fist of self-determining poems of the people and the people alone.
    "Then We heard the Thunder..."
                            and it whispered   
                                           Louis Reyes Rivera.....
                                               As the air
                                                  comes back in
                                                             our
                                                                  chests
                                     of memories and resistance.

[Comrade Louis Reyes Rivera was known by other poets as the  "Janitor of History," not a name that I used he was a  poet and essayist  has been studying his craft since 1960, and teaching it since 1969. The recipient of over 20 awards or more,  as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award back in 1995, and earlier a Special Congressional Recognition Award in 1988, and before that the CCNY 125th Anniversary Medal back in 1973. I know that Louis helped publish well over 200 books, including John Oliver Killens' GREAT BLACK RUSSIAN     

Considered by many as a necessary bridge between the African and Latino American communities, he is a professor of Pan-African, African-American, Caribbean and Puerto Rican literature and history whose essays and poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Areyto, Boletin, The City Sun, African Voices, and in five award-winning collections: In Defense of Mumia; ALOUD: Live from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Of Sons And Lovers, Bum Rush The Page, and his own Scattered      

From 1996 until his passing, Comrade Rivera hosted a bi-monthly Jazzoetry & Open Mic @ Sistas' Place (where he also conducts his writing workshop) in Brooklyn, and has appeared in Jazz clubs and festivals with The Sun Ra All-Stars Project, Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora, and his own band Scripture.

I remembered seeing him on Russell Simmons' DEF POETRY on HBO. And we used to be able to hear  the comrade every Thursday, at 2pm, on radio station WBAI (99.5 FM), hosting his own weekly show PERSPECTIVE (From 1996 to 2009 I think) before the powers that be at WBAI (Pacifica's liberal crackahs of all colors) bumped him off without explaination.   -- Comrade Sekou OSEI ] 



pavane, pavan [pəˈvɑːn -ˈvæn ˈpævən] n
1. (Performing Arts / Dancing) a slow and stately dance of the 16th and 17th centuries
2. (Music / Classical Music) a piece of music composed for or in the rhythm of this dance, usually characterized by a slow stately triple time
[C16 pavan, via French from Spanish pavana, from Old Italian padovana Paduan (dance), from Padova Padua]


--30--