AllenLowe

can't we all just get along?

it was the Oceanhill Brownsville decentralization fight, that quickly turned into a racial and religious hot spot. As I said earlier, Hentoff did great work on exposing the Teachers Union's attempt to fan the flames, with even fake leaflets. Not that Leslie Campbell was innocent. I was a young kid who lived on Long Island during that whole thing, and I remember it well.

Joel - it was actually Leslie Campbell, a community activist, who read that poem. Lester wrote a book called "Look out Whitey Black Power's Gonna Get your Momma" IIRC.

Hettie is small, and definitely not fat - I have her book, with pics, and I met her, briefly, about 1990. She was very pretty.

well, ironically or not, I had one conversation with Baraka - years ago he did the liner notes to Bob Neloms LP Pretty Music. Baraka called me for some info on Bob. He was very cordial, but I was, I will admit, taken aback at how little history he knew relative to some of the things we were discussing (older pianists like Nat Cole, Errol Garner, etc).

that was a poem by a young African American kid that Leslie Campbell read on WBAI during the Oceanhill Brownsville dispute. And in fairness I should add, bad as that poem was, the American Federation of Teachers under Albert Shanker did its best to fan the flames; Nat Hentoff did some amazing journalism during that controversy and discovered that the teachers union did some falsification, as in counterfeit leaflets that they claimed were done by the Black opposition, and which were completely fake. and btw, any thread that has two of my favorite poets in it, Frank Ohara and Charles Olson, can't be all bad.

Zionism is a movement of National Liberation. But you can pick your own allies. And here's that little poem I mentioned earlier: Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead . . . Jew boy you took my religion and adopted it for you But you know that black people were the original hebrews When the UN made Israel a free, independent state Little four and five-year-old boys threw had grenades They hated the black Arabs with all their might And you, Jew boy, said it was alright And then you came to America the land of the free Took over the school system to perpetuate white supremacy Cause you know, Jew boy, there's only one reason you made it You had a clean white face colorless and faded.

I would say, given his 9/11 poem, that he never really abandoned his anti-semitism. And it is appropriate to raise the specter of the Nazis in any instance of anti-semitism; the poem that Joel Fass mentioned earlier was read by Leslie Campbell during the Oceanhill Brownsville fight, and basically expressed viciously anti-semitic sentiments. Anti-semitism is just too easy for anyone who thinks, it's ok, we can forgive a little if the big picture is more acceptable. This is crap. We don't accept small bits of racism, or Rush Limbaugh's hate speech toward women, In this context check out the interview that Ishmael Reed did with Ralph Ellison years ago, Reed keeps trying to get Ellison to say that there's some fundamental peculiarities with the Jews, and Ellison won't bite. He knows that ignorance is ignorance. These are the kind of things, btw, that have made it so difficult to debate about Israel; so much indigenous dislike of Jews regularly seeps in and contaminates the debate.

not sure what you are asking - are you saying that Baraka's brand of anti-semitism is a form of African American vernacular expression? If so, then he is part of the world's largest historical subculture. Time for an article in an Academic journal: "Jew Hating in the Diaspora: The Atlantic Origins of Pacific Psychotic Expression, and White Offshoots: from Dred Scott to Scott in Dredlocks"

1) Duberman also wrote a very powerful theater piece called In White America. Sort of, IIRC, a history of African American life. I saw it in, maybe, 1967. 2) I was doing "black" before anyone else was doing "black" - but at least when I did "black" you could understand the words. ***** 3) Jim, I think you are getting bogged down in relativist thinking. It's like saying, well, the Nazis and the Jews didn't get along either..... It avoids the real consequences of ant-semitism. ****from The Sunshine Boys

1) Larry, it wasn't Bill Byers who did that arrangement; it was Manny Albam. 2) Why are we talking about this in 2012? Why not? We still talk about 9/11, WWII, Vietnam, Mt. St. Helens, and other policy/political/natural disasters and examples of internecine warfare. 3) I happen to know that Bird was watching that later Dorsey show, on the big TV in the sky,

that poem is disgusting and repulsive. There are no other words. It is possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-semitic, of course. But that poem has nothing to do with any rational political belief.

well, Michael Jackson tried it, but he got the hair instead.

1) keep the recording, burn the poem. 2) I stopped drinking orange juice years ago. Rickets is a small price to pay for principle.

I dunno. My vote would be for "Hot Dog."

just to clarify, I look at the work foremost when making the evaluation - so if Baraka wrote something smart, I would acknowledge it thus. I mention the ideology because it has tainted so much of the actual work. Jarman can say that stuff, but unless he writes a snuff novel or makes a snuff film, it may have little effect on his work. And I still like Wagner. and Mel Gibson - Payback, uncut, is one of the best films ever made.

darn.

this from the man, BTW, who slept in the bed that King Oliver slept in (though not at the same time). I am in awe.

this would be interesting to hear, in light of Henderson's comments that he felt he never "got" bebop, and did not feel he had a real voice until Coltrane's thing started happening. I wonder where his playing is at this stage.

Wilt hit 36 field goals and 28 foul shots that night. Do not ask me how I remember this (it seems I have a near-photographic memory for numbers. I can remember stuff, yet can't do any math).

yeah, much as I respect some of his work, that poem makes it hard to really move on. He belongs at St. Elizabeth with Ezra Pound.

the sound on the BMG reissues of the 1929-30 Olivers, as well as the original RCA Jazz Tribunes, are fantastic. They were done from actual masters.

worse than I thought.

am I wrong, or didn't Baraka help spread the (vicious) silliness that the Jews were warned out of the World Trade Center before the attacks?

I like "high yaller" myself -