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Showing posts from October, 2023

Brown-Eyed Son

  Early Morning Walk Fall is diminishing on this new day, Tell me what you saw, Jung lives in graffiti and a bag of potatoes on the sidewalk, A man wearing a fez gestures emotionally, Children stare from a glassed-in playroom, But we can only wave and smile before Being ushered away silently. Motorcycles or motor-psychos have their own Brew now. A vegan patio, a robed tattoo artist, a bookstore that knits. None of this is surreal, just unreal, There is a difference, you know.

Old Sheet Music for Sale (Rare)

 About 35 years ago, while roaming through an uptown antique store in the Carrollton district of New Orleans, I saw something that stopped me cold. It was a piece of sheet music from the early 1900s.  I have a small collection of old sheet music, not for playing the tunes, but because of the imagery.  I have used pop culture items in my classroom to illustrate racial attitudes and the proliferation of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and distorted imagery.  In front of me was just such an image, but of such unique quality, I was dumbstruck.       There has long been a tradition of racist imagery in the development of music in America.  The genre popularly known as the "Coon Song," was in its prime around the early part of the 20th century.  Derived from the minstrel show tradition, the song lyrics of this period unabashedly use the terms nigger and coon as if they were accepted in everyday usage.  They were.   Sh,  here ...

Holy Landmine

 As if we didn’t need another major news trauma to occupy our fearful minds, here comes that old nemesis  the latest version of the Arab-Israeli conflict to bring new heights of despair to the airwaves. Of course, what we are dealing with these days is the unprovoked attack by Hamas on the state of Israel. Yes, I know using the word unprovoked here is debatable, but for now it will have to remain. This conflict is as convoluted and complicated as it is frustrating. It is not a simple matter of just making sure the Palestinians have a homeland. If that were the case, surely a compromise satisfactory to both sides could be hammered out. I turned an International Relations class of high school seniors loose on this conflict 25 years ago and after looking at the arguments on both sides, and spending time with maps of the region, they came up with a solution that allowed Israelis and Palestinians to live and prosper side by side in the land they have both occupied for centuries. Wo...