HAPPY BIRTHDAY PZ!

Happy birthday to my godless mentor, esteemed FTB comrade, and beloved friend, PZ Myers.

At my old blog, I would throw a virtual birthday party for him every year on this date, and celebrate with a collection of quotes, quips and bon mots that he’d written on his blog over the previous year. When his obsession was strictly cephalopods, it would look like this:

cameo photo of PZ Myers surrounded with purple balloons and floating presents, with a plate of fried calamari and black-colored cocktails in martini glasses.In 2016 I served fried calamari and Barchetta’s Spezia cocktails, made with vodka, caper brine and squid ink, with whole caperberry garnish. (I’ll have to come up with a spider-themed menu… hmmm.)

These days I’m not up for throwing a big bash, not even a virtual one. But I do want to celebrate PZ’s completion of another orbit around our sun. So today, I thought I’d share a quote from PZ that has long inspired me.

The general context of the quote is this. Back at ScienceBlogs in The Year of Our Lard 2009, PZ wrote a scathing, righteous screed about an apparently very terrible book by some Christian apologist named Terry Eagleton. PZ was stuck on a plane for 8 torturous hours with nothing to read but a SkyMall catalog (which, ♥♥♥! cultural anthropology FTW!), and a copy of this Eagleton book someone (evil?) had just given him in New York. He read the fucking thing twice.

As he was wrapping up, he wrote this:

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It’s Day 27 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

URGENT REMINDER: The fundraiser for reopening the National Black Doll Museum ends February 28. If you are able to donate a few dollars please do, and either way, please share the fundraiser link as widely as you can. Many thanks! ☮️ -Iris.

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Since before I started this Black History Month series, one of my ideas for a post has been the Harlem Renaissance. I’ve been collecting snippets, links, materials, even writing a few words here and there, but I’ve come to realize there is so much material to cover, and from so many potential perspectives (culturally, politically, artistically etc.) that I have come to realize a blog post would invariably give short shrift to a subject of majestic depth and brilliance. Further, so much work has already been documented that the world reeeeally doesn’t need a white blogger regurgitating the words of Black historians, or worse, the words of the people who actually lived it.

Instead, I will post some resources that I found especially informatve. Whether you want to take a deep dive or stick a toe in the water is up to you. Just know that the legacies of those who lived and worked in Harlem during the 1920s are still very much with us today, so broad and profound was their impact, even on a white supremacist society.

BlackPast on the Harlem Renaissance. BlackPast’s mission:

“is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world. We aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge to generate constructive change in our society.”

There is so much material here. It is an excellent resource and repository for Black history, not just USian but the African global diaspora as well. This is the kind of work I think of when I look for potentially powerful antidotes to erasure – provided white people and especially educators avail themselves of it.

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Louie Armstrong, circa 1938
(image: William P. Gottlieb Collection / Library of Congress)

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It’s Day 21 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

Today we all get to STFU and maybe look a little more than listen. This post is about a piece of Black history being reclaimed and revived, and it is also about that revival being beautifully documented by photographer Justin Hardiman.

Okay, quick: what’s the first image that comes to your mind in response to the word cowboy?

For me, it’s some hybrid of Clint Eastwood in one of his Western films, sitting high on a horse with a squint and a snarl, and some white dudes with unkempt facial hair, iconic cowboy hats, and conspicuous holstered guns doing “cowboy things” (I guess?) like sitting around a campfire passing whiskey, riding horses to round up cattle, or small groups of these men on horseback traversing the mountains and deserts of the Western U.S.

For Black photographer Justin Hardiman, a “cowboy” looks a lot more like him.

Photo of Justin Hardiman, wearing white dress shirt, jeans, and tan leather lace-up shoes, seated, against a dark backdrop with large red lettering: "TEDx"Justin Hardiman
Photographer & Cowboy
(image via justinhardimanvisuals.com)

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It’s Day 14 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

Today, we get to listen to recording artist Stevie Wonder from back in 1973.

Album cover of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, drawn/painted like a surrealist landscape, with a profile of the artist at a window, with a golden beam shooting skyward from his closed eyelids.

Stevie Wonder Innervisions
album cover art

As I’ve immersed myself in this Black History Month project, I’ve had some memories surface from long ago. I now view those experiences through a very different lens than I did at the time.

I was was a young child when Innervisions came out in 1973. As I got a little older and gained a musical awareness, singles from Innervisions were still in occasional rotation on the radio. They weren’t current top 40 hits by any stretch, but still, I knew these songs.

I remember one day finding Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions album in the stacks of my father’s records. I was not allowed to touch them – nor his turntable or tuner – but he was rarely ever around. All I had to do was wait until my mother was scarce, and I could pretty much have at it.

I played that record, both sides, straight through. And played it again. And again. I even dug out daddy’s 100% off-limits headphones so I could listen to it louder and with more clarity, alone inside my own head. Sure I was just a kid, but I got lost in that record. Musically and lyrically, Innervisions transported me to another world, one very different from my own. A Black world.

The music was positively bursting, full of struggle and pain, of power and pride, of musical exuberance and originality, of yearning and hope, of politics and poverty, and of characters and stories unlike anyone or anything I had known. And that was by design, by the way: I knew only a very insular, sheltered, and blindingly white world.

Innervisions gave me my first glimpse into Blackness. Now, looking back, I can see that was where my Black history lessons first began.

Of all the tracks on the album, Living for the City hit me the hardest, touched me the deepest. Here are two versions of it, plus a link to the album in its entirety. It changed me. I think it’s worth honoring and celebrating what is arguably Stevie Wonder’s finest work this Black History Month.

This is the radio edit (3:39):

Full-length version (7:22) from the album:

The whole album (nine tracks) can be played on YouTube here.

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Day 1 of Black History Month 2022 (Lori Teresa Yearwood) is here.
Day 2 (Mallence Bart-Williams) is here.
Day 3 (Emmett Till) is here.
Day 4 (A Tale of Two Citizens) is here.
Day 5 (Trayvon Martin) is here.
Day 6 (Franchesca Ramsey) is here.
Day 7 (National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and the Black Aids Institute) is here.
Day 8 (extreme racial disparities in marijuana arrests) is here.
Day 9 (Summer of Soul/1969 Harlem Cultural Festival) is here.
Day 10 (current and historic racist domestic terrorism, Steve Phillips/Democracy in Color) is here.
Day 11 (Gee’s Bend Quilters) is here.
Day 12 (egregious anti-Black (& anti LGBTQ+) behavior at a NY State high school is here.
Day 13 (Erin Jackson, 1st Black woman to win Olympic gold medal in speedskating) is here.

It’s Day 11 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

Today, we’ll listen to the extraordinary history and personal stories of the Black women quilters of Boykin a.k.a. “Gee’s Bend”, Alabama, population 208.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I know next to nothing about quilting. I can just barely sew a button. And I may or may not have used duct tape extensively to “fix” unraveling hems on many items of clothing. Nevertheless, these stories gripped and captivated me. Yes, this is about quilting. But it’s so much more than that. This is about art and artists. About unfathomably painful histories and extraordinary resilience. About women and community. But specifically about Black women, and Black community.

For a very brief (3:27) introduction, watch this segment from Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. Given the time limitation inherent in this type of media platform, Roberts does a good job here of showcasing the Gee’s Bend quilters’ history and culture, and how they come alive in these quilting traditions.


But to say this only scratches the surface is quite the understatement. These stories run deep. [Read more…]

It’s Day 9 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

Today we are going to STFU and listen to black voices speaking to us from 1969. Not just any black voices, either: these are some of the most groundbreaking, hit-making, genre-breaking, unfathomably influential musical artists of the time – and for some, perhaps, of all time

Last evening, a film popped up in our streaming suggestions: Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The blurb said the documentary was about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a multi-weekend concert series that took place in the summer of ’69 in what is now Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. Directed by Ahmir Khalib (“Questlove/?uestlove”) Thompson, perhaps best known as the drummer and co-frontman for the band The Roots, his debut film was put together from reels of raw footage that sat in a basement, virtually untouched, for fifty years.

Summer of Soul premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it took both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for a documentary.

Playing the trailer (which you can view below), I first heard then saw Nina Simone (*squeee4EVAH*) sing-saying to an enormous sea of black bodies and faces,

“Are you ready, black people? Are you really ready? Are you ready to listen to all the beautiful black voices, the beautiful black feelings, the beautiful black waves, moving in beautiful air? Are you ready black people? Are you ready?”

The Harlem crowd erupts in response to her callouts with spine-tingling, goose-bumping enthusiasm. Meanwhile, written words are interspersed, appearing in bright, colorful lettering against a black background:

In 1969
the same summer as Woodstock

Another festival took place

It was filmed but never seen

Until now

And with that, we were only 21 seconds into a 2-minute trailer.

The concert lineup promised nothing less than a pantheon of Black musical gods: Nina Simone, 19-year old Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Fifth Dimension and more.

Ms. Simone had me at “Are you ready?” We paid $5.99 for the rental.*

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Sunday funnies.

 

Top: photo of GOP activist Deanna Lorraine, with quote beneath "God Does Not Want Us Wearing Masks... If you have a mask on, it means you actually don't trust God. You don't have faith." Beneath, a cleseup photo of the face of Patrick Stewart/"Captain Picard" squinting with confusion, with overlaid large block letter text, "BUT YOU'RE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO NEED A RIFLE TO PICK UP GROCERIES"

Ya gotta laugh. Or, you know, cry. Either way, there is something very, very wrong and/or hilarious about the conservative mind.

 

Reddit post by u/henke: "Last week one of my art teachers suggested I 'dial down the feminism.' Today I showed him my newest piece: (image of a stainless steel panel labeled Dial Down the Feminism' with a single round tuning knob. To the left it reads 'COMPLICIT IN MY OWN DEHUMANIZATION' and to the right it reads "RAGING FEMINISM."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-Iris Vander Pluym, Art Critic.

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Tweet by @amy_istrying: "I'm disgusted every time someone does a gender reveal and it's a gender I already know about, what kind of reveal is that"

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

EXACTLY, Amy. I’m pretty sure that people who do gender reveals are conservative, at least with respect to sex role stereotypes. And those kinds of ideas never seem to travel alone. In other words: eew!

I think if I’d ever had a kid, I might have done a gender reveal just to fuck with the conservatives in my family. I’d make a multi-layer red velvet cake, with each layer consisting of a few different colors of batter roughly swirled together, just like I did for my sister’s birthday that one time. (If I can find a pic I’ll post it later.)

When I’d cut into it, every slice would have a rainbow of colors in it, at which point I’d announce “It’s a gender! Or maybe agender! Who the fuck cares and what the fuck is wrong with you people?”

[CUE: music, disco lighting and ecologically-friendly rainbow confetti.

The Joy of Painting With Bob Ross and Banksy.

LONDON (AP) — Banksy appears to have thrown his support behind a campaign to turn a former prison in the English town of Reading into an arts venue, a town spokesman said on Thursday, after the street artist confirmed that artwork that appeared on a red brick wall of the prison was of his making. The elusive artist confirmed the picture was his when he posted a video of him creating it on his Instagram account… More: https://apnews.com/article/banksy-reading-prison-artwork-bebac98ca76807d260985cd18e58adc8

I fuckin’ love this guy.