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.

Happy 2022!

Hahaha I’m just kidding. We all know 2022 is going to suck at least as much as 2021 and 2020 did.

Nevertheless, my sincere hope is that you will be more fierce and courageous than ever in your anger and activism toward injustice. wherever you may encounter it, and also that you will find joy and laughter – somehow, somewhere – every single day. Otherwise, the terrorists win white supremacist capitalist patriarchy wins.

On a personal note, I still find myself on the long, slow journey to healing from cancer and its barbaric treatments. [Read more…]

FtB Mothers Day Anthology: Mothers and Mom.

Mothers Day has utterly confounded me as far back as I can remember. During my childhood years, spent unhappily suffocating in lily-white, middle-class, conservative suburbia, I was continually struck by the jarring disparities between mothers I met in public, at school, at friends’ homes and, especially, those that dominated TV screens and supermarket magazines in the 1970s and ’80s, and the woman I knew as “Mom.” For better and for worse, Mom shared next to nothing with mothers. The contrast was so striking in fact, it occurred to me on more than one occasion that I might be born from another species altogether.

[Read more…]

Valentines for NYC.

Whether you buy into Valentine$ Day or not, sometimes something happens to come along on this date that unexpectedly hits you right in the ♥feelz♥. It happened to me today, reading love letters to New York from New Yorkers in the New York Daily News. Some are from celebrities; some from everyday people. Below, you can read one in rhythm and rhyme from Darryl McDaniels, aka D.M.C. of Run-D.M.C., one from J.W. Cortés, an “actor, philanthropist, [and] MTA police officer” I never heard of, and one from me.

As many of you can likely attest, you don’t have to live here to love New York City.

[Read more…]

Happy Election Armageddon Day! + UPDATE, + MOAR UPDATEZ.

I hope you’re hunkered down and staying safe, today and in the days to come.

Here at Death to Squirrels Central™, it’s as if a massive blizzard or Cat 5 hurricane had been predicted: we were already sort of well-stocked with staples and essentials due to COVID, but we’re now very well-stocked. We’re also charging all devices, checking flashlights/putting out candles and just generally being extra-EXTRA-paranoid. We have no fucking idea what today may bring – and neither does anyone else.

I have heard a few sharp and contentious-sounding conversations outside my window on Hudson Street this morning, which would not be unusual generally, but is highly unusual on a morning weekday. Then again, the water in my building is shut off to fix a drain pipe or something, so it could just be a couple of my pissed-off neighbors yelling at the super and the plumber. That would be totally normal.

Fuck. I just heard more yelling. What was I saying about extra-EXTRA-paranoid? Yeah. I think it might be klonopin o’clock.

I will NOT be hoping or praying for you (because hope is not a plan and nothing fails like prayer). But for whatever it’s worth I will be thinking and worrying about you, good people of the lefty persuasion (godless or not).

Remember, Iris loves you! Unless of course she doesn’t!

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UPDATE 1:

This just in:

New York Daily News "Breaking News" header, including black and red "Daily News" logo and "NYDAILYNEWS.COM"NYC Election Day: Long lines, lots of voters, plenty of angst across the five boroughs

Lines outside some city polling locations already came with a long wait within three hours of the 6 a.m. start opening, with the sites open until 9 p.m.

Read the Latest

Where’s that klonopin?

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UPDATE 2:

I clicked the link to Read the Latest:

Voters wore masks and observed social distancing in the year of pandemic and a presidential race pitting President Trump against ex-Vice President Joe Biden.

Voters who wear masks and observe social distancing are almost certainly not Trump voters. So, you know, that’s good.

Also: klonopin achieved.

[Read more…]

Nobody loves me, I’m gonna eat some worms. 👿

I am auctioning off an interview at Death to Squirrels. Bidding starts at ONE DOLLAR, closes in less than three hours (6pm EDT), and nobody wants to talk to me! *sniff* Waaaaah!

You can bid either in the auction thread comments or via email if you prefer: send your bid to irisvpluym [at] gmail [dot] com, with “Iris Interview” in the subject line, and I will post a corresponding comment on the thread that reads “Anonymous bid for $____” along with the timestamp on your email. You know: in case there’s a last minute bidding war! 😂

C’mon, I promise you have nothing to fear from talking to me. Unless you’re a squirrel.

 

CARNIVAL of CURIOSITY: Interview with Iris!

Freethought Blogs - Carnival of Curiosity - INTERVIEW WITH IRIS! - September Fundraiser HELP US PAY OFF OUR LEGAL FEES
and
WIN AN INTERVIEW WITH MEEEEE!

That’s right: you can interview me, or I will interview YOU for #deathtosquirrels – winner’s choice.

NO SUBJECT OFF LIMITS!

Promote yourself or your business! Make me embarrass myself – forever! On the goddamn internet! Either way I will post our interview here, and you can post it wherever you desire.

But before we get to that, I want to tell you a quick story about what “free” speech really costs.

[Read more…]

Chadwick Boseman, Rest In Power. Also, I need you to lie for me.

Good afternoon, beloved readers. First, I want to tell you some things. Then I am going to ask you to lie for me, and to get every adult under age 50 you care about to lie their asses off for you, too.

My heart is heavy today. I awoke to news of the death of actor Chadwick Boseman, at age 43, from colon cancer.

FORTY THREE.

Chadwick BosemanChadwick Aaron Boseman
November 29, 1976 – August 28, 2020
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Whether or not you’re a fan of Black Panther and the Marvel Universe movies, or of Boseman’s portrayals of iconic Black historical figures like Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown, this man – by all accounts a kind person and talented beyond measure – has left our world too soon. And he is gone because of a preventable disease.

And as you might imagine, beyond my sadness at this tragic loss lies a fair amount of…well, RAGE. If you or people you love happen to live in the U.S. today, you are living in a country where this is true:

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Bad news day.

[CONTENT NOTE: racist police violence, f-bombs.]

I awoke today, as many did, to news of more widespread protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by white police, and the murder of Breonna Taylor, a black woman, by white police, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, by white racist thugs, and, and, and, and…

I want to say this here as unequivocally as I can (and have said before): I stand in solidarity with communities of color around the country and around the world, in opposition to state violence and murder, militarized policing, unprecedented mass imprisonment and surveillance, social and economic and environmental injustice, and imperial wars.

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
–Emma Lazarus

I also want to cosign Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, who said this:

[Read more…]