“NO-LEGGED MOTHERFUCKER!!” I’d left the lunch room at Malcolm X Junior College, in Chicago. I decided to eat my food at one of the tables that were located in the hallway, just outside the lunch room. There was a card game at another table–four black folk. One of them had no legs–literally. It was his […]
Archives for 2019
Purging with Marie Kondo: The Lack of Joy in Middle-Class American Households
I am captivated by America’s fascination with Marie Kondo. Named Time’s most influential person, Kondo is a 34-year old Japanese millennial (or xennial is it?) and professional home organizer whose books have sold millions of copies. Over the past few years, her company has transformed into a global communications platform spreading the gospel of tidying up […]
What a Waste!
Today’s NY Times has a flattering profile of Shannon Kent, a 35-year old woman in the US Navy, who was killed last month in northern Syria: Apparently, much about her military career has been kept more or less secret—since she was working on various “Special Forces” operations. She seems to have been a woman of […]
The Camp For Underprivileged Children
When I was young, a group of us from my nearly all-Black neighborhood were enrolled in a summer camp for city children to expose us to the soothing wonders of the great outdoors. The camp was run by the Salvation Army and located in the white wilds of Western Maryland – I call it “the […]
Bitterly Divided
The best-kept secret in U.S. history is the resistance of southerners, and especially southern nonslaveholding whites, to the slaveholders during the Civil War. W.E.B. Du Bois, in the chapter “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in America, told the story of black resistance. Bitterly Divided: the South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams (New Press: […]
Escaping into Music and Fashion Part II: Alexander McQueen
From High School Drop Out to World-Renowned Fashionista As a closeted goth (which wasn’t exactly cool in Bronx public schools in the late 90s) who scribbled dark and depressing poetry on the margins of her notebooks, I found a kindred spirit in Lee Alexander McQueen. I saw “Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art […]