Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones RIP

Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, died today at the age of 79. Baraka was a poet, a playwright, and a political activist. Rather than write about my feelings towards Baraka or how and why they changed over the years, instead of doing the IMeMine routine, I decided to post one of his poems, saved a lifetime ago when I tore it from the pages of the Village Voice. Re-reading it I fell in love with his work all over again.

For Baraka’s bio, facts, photos, politics, and controversies, Democracy Now is doing a whole hour on him today, and numerous other sources of information abound.

When We’ll Worship Jesus
Amiri Baraka

We’ll worship Jesus

When jesus do

somethin

when jesus blow up

the white house

or blast nixon down

When jesus turn out congress

or bust general motors to

yard bird motors

Jesus we’ll worship jesus

when jesus get down

when jesus get out his yellow lincoln

w/ the built-in cross stain glass

window & box w/black peoples

enemies we’ll worship jesus when

he get bad enough to at least scare

somebody—cops not afraid

of jesus

pushers not afraid

of jesus, capitalists racists

imperialists not afraid

of jesus shit they makin money

off jesus.

We’ll worship jesus when mao

do, when toure does

when the cross replaces Nkrumah’s

star

jesus need to hurt some a our

enemies then we’ll check him

out, all that screaming and hollering

& Wallering and manking talkin bout

jesus, jesus in a red

check velvet vine & 8 in. heels

jesus pinky finger

got a goose egg ruby

which actual bleeds

jesus at the apollo

doin splits and helpin

nixon trick niggers

jesus w/his one-eyed self

tongue kissing johnny carson

up the behind

jesus need to be busted

jesus need to be thrown down and whipped

till something better happen

jesus aint did nothin for us

but kept us turned toward

the sky (him and his boy allah

too, need to be checked

out!)

we’ll worship jesus

when he get a boat load of AR-47’s

and some dynamite

and blow up abernathy robotin

for gulf

jesus need to be busted

we aint gonna worshp nobody

but niggers getting up off

the ground

not gon worship jesus

unless he just a tricked up

nigger somebody named

outside his race

need to worship you self fo

you worship jesus

need to bust jesus (& Check

out his spooky brother

allah while you heavy

on the case)

cause we aint gon worship jesus

we aint gon worship

jesus

we aint gon worship

jesus

not till he do something

not til he help us

not till the world get changed

and he aint, Jesus aint, he cant change the world

we can change the world

we can struggle against the forces of backwardness

we can change the world

we can struggle against our selves, our slowness,

our connection with the oppressor,

the very cultural aggression which binds us to our  enemies

as their slaves.

We can change the world

we aint gonna worship jesus cause jesus don’t exist

Xcept in song and story except in ritual and dance, except in

slum stained

tears or trillion dollar opulence stretching back in history, the history

of the oppression of the human mind

We worship the strength in us

We worship our selves

We worship the light in us

We worship the warmth in us

We worship the world

We worship the love in us

We worship our selves

We worship nature

We worship ourselves

We worshp the life in us, and science, and knowledge, and transformation

of the visible world

But we aint gonna worship no jesus

We aint gonna legitimize the witches and devils

the spooks and hobgoblins

the sensuous lies of the rulers to keep us

chained to fantasy and illusion

Sing about life, not jesus

Sing about revoltuion, not no jesus

Stop singing about jesus,

Sing about creation, our creation, the life of the world and fantastic

nature how we struggle to transform it, but don’t victmize our selves by distorting the world

Stop moanin about jesus, stop sweatin and cryin and stompin and dyin for jesus

Unless thats the name of the army we buildiing to force the land finally to change hands.

And lets not call that jesus, get a quick consensus on that.

Lets damn sure not call that black fire muscle no inivisible

psychic dungeon

no gentle vision strait jacket, lets call that peoples army, or wapenduzi or simba

wachanga, but we not gon call it jesus and not gon worship jesus

Throw jesus out yr mind. Build the new world out of reality, and new vision

We come to find out what there is of the world

to understand what there is here in the world!

To visualize change, and force it

We worship revolution.

Susan Miller RIP

Susan in a Wacky Wig

Susan (“Shoshana”) Miller
b. January 1941 — d. Jan. 19, 2013

“Susan evolves and helps other people evolve.”

Someone once asked me what my friend Susan “did” in the world. I thought a moment and then told him that she evolved and helped others do the same. It’s true, that’s what Susan did. She evolved.

The first time I met Susan we bonded over the songs of Bob Dylan. She was thrilled to meet a feminist who, like her, did not condemn his “sexist” lyrics the way many of our sisters did. She was even more thrilled that I knew most of his lyrics. Together we launched into a joyful songfest that lasted almost 40 years.

Susan was always excited about one thing or another. She’d share her cultural discoveries, saying with great fervor, “There’s a lot to check out!”

I met her in 1975, while she was in New York waiting for a space to open up in a Colorado asthma clinic. Her friend Stephanie, who she’d known since childhood, introduced us. I was in a theater group with Stephanie, and was also madly in love with her. So was Susan, but having been at it longer, she played the role of mentor to my first and only serious lesbian relationship. Being bisexual in the lesbian-feminist community was another place where she and I bonded.

Our most significant bond, though, came from the kind of people we were by virtue of our experiences with disability. Susan was one of perhaps three people who understood from the inside out my life as the mother of a person born with a chronic medical condition. Having been born with asthma and eczema, as a child she was tied to the bed to keep her from scratching herself. Painful “medicine” was applied to her inflamed arms and legs—like so many treatments of that era, it was pure torture. That Susan became such an enthusiastic, fun-seeking lover of life is testament to the human spirit.

Some 15 years after our New York meeting I moved to San Francisco. Susan was living here, and we reunited at a Mother Tongue theatrical event. She was still singing Dylan, still bisexual, still checking things out. She became my cheerleader, faithfully reading almost everything I wrote, leaving a trail of comments sprinkled across my blog. I’m glad I have those comments–I’ll always be able to open one and feel her enthusiasm leaping off the screen.

She was a wonderful woman and a great friend. RIP Shoshana. I’m certain you’re still evolving.

WSS Singalong Report

Bernardo, played by George Chakiris, and Anita, played by Rita Moreno: The Dance at the Gym

I can encapsulate my feelings about yesterday’s West Side Story Singalong in one concise sentence: It was not my favorite way of viewing West Side Story. Since I’m prone to much more verbiage than that, however, I will elaborate.

The singing itself was kinda fun—it was nice to be able to sing as loudly as I wanted without anyone shushing me. I probably should have expected the words to be captioned on screen, and really, what’s the big deal that they were? But I couldn’t help feeling this was cheating. I’d gotten grumpy even before the movie started, when the two women who organized the program got up on stage to give us our instructions. Seriously—they told us how to wave our hands, when to shake the little lights they handed out, and which characters to sympathize with out loud (Baby John and Anybodys). As if the PC audience wouldn’t have known! They demonstrated their impeccable principles by hissing, laughing and making noise at appropriate moments.

Silly me, I thought Singalong meant simply that we would sing along, and I even wondered if I’d be allowed to say some of the dialog as well. Hah! There was so much extracurricular participation it was annoying, especially the hissing. At every Puerto Rican slur—and if nothing else WSS is a portrayal of ethnic hatred—they hissed. Okay, I wanted to shout, we get it, you don’t approve, you’re a good person!  I may even have muttered something like this at some point, but if anyone heard they ignored me. Almost as annoying as the hissing was the laughter—they laughed at some of the outdated dancing and the corny love dialog.

These are the artists who worked on West Side Story: Music—Leonard Bernstein; Lyrics—Stephen Sondheim; Choreography—Jerome Robbins; Director—Robert Wise. Listen up, morons: You don’t laugh at these giants of the theater. You just don’t. Yes, some of the dancing is outdated—but in 1962 it was new and revolutionary. Yes, when the Jets glide down the street in the opening number they look kind of silly: after all, they’re supposed to be gangsters. But WSS began as a Broadway musical, and in this scene the Jets are claiming their turf. That’s the way it was done, and it’s the kind of thing that’s still done on Broadway.

Ironically, when I saw WSS at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, a bunch of African-American teenage boys laughed their asses off during that scene—but by the time we got to “The Jets Song” they were speechless, and remained so for the rest of the picture. Not so the sophisticated audience at the Castro: they kept laughing. (By the way, I was surprised that the Castro wasn’t filled with gay men, but hetero couples and groups of young women. I’d expectedgay men to come out in droves since they love musicals—or has this changed?. Also, most of West Side Story’s male dancers were probably gay.)

During one love scene, with everyone cracking up, I asked a young woman sitting next to me what was so funny, was it the corny dialog, and she said yes, that was it. But I suspect the laughter comes from the same place as the hissing—as proof of sophistication.

I’ve never been to any Singalong, other than a piano bar, before this. I can see how certain movies—like The Sound of Music, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show—lend themselves to the format. In the case of WSS, however, it seemed like a trivialization.  Maybe I’m being over sensitive because of how precious WSS is to me. Then again, it is a remake of Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Shouldn’t we show some respect?

Related articles

• ‘West Side Story’: Photos From the Set of a Hollywood Classic (life.time.com)
• West Side Story Singalong (marcys.wordpress.com)

Occupy West Side Story

Friend from New York sent me this, it’s making the rounds in and out of Occupation. They took “Officer Krupki,” the song the Jets sing to the cop in West Side Story, and turned it into “Officer Winski,” the NYC police chief. It’s a hoot.

See also:  West Side Story Day

SF Mime: A Perfect Day

A few small things in this world never disappoint me: M&Ms; West Side Story, no matter how many times I see it; the Alvin Ailey dancers; the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Today I got to see the latter at Yerba Buena Gardens. I’ve been to see the Troupe in North Beach’s Washington Square Park, Mosswood in Oakland, Live Oak in Berkeley, and Delores Park, and I must say, Yerba Buena wins my golden seal of approval: spacious, no street noise, shady trees, and they even supplied chairs — after I’d schlepped mine across the bay on BART.

The Death of the Worker, this year’s show, is typical Mime fare, so if you like what they do, you’ll like it. Oppressed workers are cruelly laid off,  but  they form a collective when the owners take off, and socialism rules. The seven or eight songs in this year’s play stood out for me as high quality, and I wondered if the group sells soundtracks (check out their site).

I’m a big fan of these guys, and I go to see them every year. They do high quality, meaningful theater all over the Bay Area, and charge nothing. They pass the bucket at the end — I’d guess that if everyone feels as good as I do by that time, they give generously. The Troupe survives primarily on grants.There’s not a better cultural deal in town, so check out the schedule for the rest of the summer and get thee to a city park!

This might be my last post for awhile. I just started a writing gig that’s going to suck up most of my writing energy. ( I seem to have only so many words to spend per day, so when I’m working on a big project, I’m unable to write anything else other than email, if that.)

Dozens of current topics, like the so-called mosque at so-called Ground Zero, are bursting to be addressed, but I’ll just have to squelch my need to write about them. There’s plenty of posts to read on this blog and my two others, though, so do a little exploring. The only stuff that’s really obsolete are the posts about baseball from seasons past. Speaking of which — I hope I can at least steal some blogging time when the Yankees hit the World Series! Go Yanks!