From THE LOST YEARS: 2005

I tried to cry Katrina into art that would do something

In a feeble John Prine-esque country-folk waltz

I packaged as a New Orleans Benefit CD (not the Red Cross, dammit).

I raised like $527, a lot for one who sucks at hustlin’.

I saw people cry when I played it on a casio

Lying on my belly on the floor of Adobe Books

(couldn’t get comfortable crosslegged after the accident)

Yet it was kinda sanctimonious

Lacking the spirit of New Orleans

I felt at the Mother-In-Law Lounge just before K-Doe died

And the Krewe du Vieux parade with Brett and Janine

Who were now trapped in an abandoned warehouse[1]

After the flood took their dog

Still, I self promoted my little song

More than I self-promoted my previous art

(much to the chagrin of my publishers)

because it didn’t seem like a mere self

I was promoting and perhaps it was

Sanctimonious enough for the old white folks on KPFA

Using Katrina as an excuse to dig out

Their old Randy Newman records

As they used Desert Storm as an excuse

To dust off their old Phil Ochs.

KPFA didn’t play it….

Was I hung up on trying to convince

The whites to feel some sympathy for black people

Or was I just trying to act like what whites called “my age?”

Like my Tom Waitsy cover of  The Coup’s “Ride The Fence”

Or strategically using Merle Haggard’s “Branded Man”

To convey the same message about the P.I.C

They couldn’t hear if Tupac rapped it

Even though at least as many racist whites

Listened to hip hop as that kind of northern country folk

So beloved in Nor-Cal during the height of the hyphy craze…

And soon The Legendary K-O’s “George Bush

Don’t Care About Black People”

Was getting play in commercial pop stations—

(I love the lineage of that song

sampling a Kanye song

that sampled Jamie Foxx singing

a Ray Charles song

that caused a controversy

for sampling “It Must Be Jesus”…)

KPFA didn’t play it, but KPOO did.

I went to KPOO to buy a shirt

And got talking to Terry Collins

About Katrina and told him about the CD

If they would be so kind to mention it.

I didn’t expect them to actually play the song

(I was as humble and/or embarrassed

as I was when one of K.Doe’s musicians

invited me to play trumpet on stage with them—

in retrospect I deeply regret it

so in awe of the black musicians

or perhaps feeling solidarity

with all the black musicians

who criticized James Brown

when he hired a white musician

or when the Panthers

hired a white lawyer to get Huey out of jail).

But my favorite Bay Area radio jock,

The legendary station manager J.J. On-The-Radio

Said, “we could interview you about the song now.”

There’s no recording of that. Thank God

And I went back in shame and think

Of what my friends Brett and Janine told me

About a debate brewing in Nawlins next February.

“Should we celebrate Mardi Gras

even amid all the destruction or cancel it?”

Cancelling it would be letting them win, of course,

And however noble in intent my song was,

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing

Or the transformative power of the second line[2]

Or even the funk of the legendary K.O

Sampling Jamie doing Ray—

You can’t be truly pro-New Orleans

In Eurocentric words only…

Maybe that’s when I got sick

Of trying to pass so when Yezal got shot

I made sure to go a nearby traffic triangle

With my trumpet and blast out

When The Saints Go Marchin In (screw my cliché)

As cars flip me the bird or even the bitch

(which almost makes up for my regret

for not jumping up on stage with K Doe)….

---

[1] I bet it’s now a luxury market rate condo

[2] I got to join in with one in front of The Make-Out Room, blocking off streets in the Mission to bring a little Mardi Gras back to the city that’s now less than 4% black.

Post Election Blues

Post Election Blues

The minor character said:

Oh, the only vote they really care about

Is how you vote with your pocket book.

Every month, AT&T for President,

Comcast for King of Kings, taxation without rep.

The Emperors have their Colonial governors

And gives them little fortress gated community land grants

In the heart of what used to be

Your proud working class city…

Their blue collar servants drive up in Vans

To procure more money

Under the guise of fixing the equipment

That breathes new life into the phrase “planned obsolescence”

And, you vote, sheepishly

And kinda feel forced—

You need it for your job

    Of trying to find a job

And this government

Has more power than the one

We try to convince ourselves is democratic—

Some know the story of Apple’s “heroic stand”

Against U.S. Government surveillance

But we could use a government

To take a heroic stand

Against Facebook’s surveillance.

“Oh, they like Trump—what can we sell them?

(up pops a confederate flag)

“oh, they like Bernie”

“don’t worry, that doesn’t mean

they plan to boycott big tech anytime soon.”

Oakland Nocturne 2016 (R.I.P Biff's Coffee Shop)

Another seemingly apolitical difference

Between then & now I hear the old folks,

Or, say, wise elders, wax nostalgic about

Is how they used to be able to walk around Oakland

More at 1AM and 2AM and felt less unsafe.

The way they talk about Oakland in 1968

Makes me almost forget about

 the cops killing Bobby Hutton, and Vietnam

but those things at least as bad today

(Sandra Bland….Tamir Rice….Iraq….)

so it sort of cancels out, but he’s talking All Night Diners

for instance….where did they go? Why did they go?

The death of those diners should be in history books,

And the way Judy talks about Oakland in 1966

Has a lot in common with my nostalgia for NYC 2000

Or the way my grandmother talks about Reading, PA. 1952

Reading: the poorest US city according to the 2010 census

Reading: the town that died giving birth to me

Reading: Taylor Swift’s hometown

(though she came out of the gates denying it).[1]

But Oakland is home now,

Even though the physiocrats give it more

Of what they call love than Reading does,

It’s got more in common with the poorest city

Than it does with New York 2000…

Indeed, the lack of night walking here

Was oppressive even before that car hit my bike.

Subways, such as they are, stopping by midnight

So you gotta drive to go out

So you drink less and more clubs shut down

And more drunk drivers zigzag on the highways

They tore down the blues clubs

(within walking distance from where he lived)

to build.

The anti-night people so normalized here—

(Wasps from the Midwest?)

stores closed then the streets became less safe

(for those cause-effect argument buffs).

Of course it’s logical.

Since the NYC business day starts 3 hours earlier,

The west coast has to open and close earlier.

It’s logical, if one accepts colonization,

Like starting school on the hottest day of the year

Coz the east coast school schedule

Doesn’t work for this climate

And the Spanish conquistadors 250 years earlier

Imposed curfew….

Perhaps you have to be an “outsider”—

A New Yorker—specifically---

Who speaks too fast (in NYC they liked that)

To find that lack of night-running subway

Is clearly part of a “kinder, gentler,” curfew

“police state” lockdown policy

As was later made brutally obvious when,

On the one exception night---New Year’s Eve—

That they allow it to run after midnight

to appease the restaurant industry lobbyists—

they murder Oscar Grant!

And I wonder if the gentrifiers

Are really happy? And even though so many

Things in this town are named after Henry Kaiser,

It’s clear the Bay Aryans are still mad that

He lured so many black people here back in the 40s

(not that he did it because he wasn’t racist)…

Meanwhile, Gov. Brown and his puppet mayor

Keep telling us, It’s gonna be more like NYC….

And each day it’s less like what was good about NYC

Less like what was even better about Oakland

In the days when Rodger Collins sang

About those foxy ladies strutting down East 14^th[2]

(now called International because the urban developers

couldn’t bring themselves to call it Cesar Chavez)

while the cops run prostitute rings

but thank god for Khafre Jay & Malik Diamond

and their “invisible” (No cell phone) parties

with no whites allowed. I don’t mind

coz I get to listen to their radio show

and bring them into my classroom

at the school that they’re trying to replace with MOOCs.

---

[1] It’s even got a recent Tony-Award winning play

called Sweat, though Gary Adelstein’s Reading 1974: Portrait Of A City is better

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_5grSonbU

Video Monitoring Service (3)

on those rare occasions

you slum it in TV

or perhaps use football as an excuse

to check out some advertisements,

you notice how the cell phone

appears in so many

(even more than the car

and of course they appear together)

and hardly ever as a merely functional device

but bathed in an aura of wonder

the cell gets more close ups

than hands ever did

(except maybe for ivory soap

or “you’re soaking in it”)

and much more like cigarettes

back in the day, prosthetic

the cell appears like fingers

the center, the prop, the star—

& I don’t just mean the obvious ones

like the one for I think Cisco

in which an oh so civilized man

s(eemingly with a British accent)

is pictured in front of a river scene

with a raft (perhaps in Africa)

brags about how its APPS

can bring water to poor people

(who may have had better water

precisely to the extent they’re

less developed)

but also the adds selling cars

or food or insurance or soda

(if not yet the US army)

or banks---

pushing paperless

with its grim futurism

or the guy who won’t even answer

the urgent beeps of his cell

coz he’d have to put down his McNuggets.

the romance of seeing “Marry Me”

on a electric football scoreboard in your cell.

ah, to see the cell as the sell,

the hard sell disguised as soft sell

the luxuries sold as necessities-

the kind of progress that caused

the Kogi to come down from the mountains

in the 1980s to try to teach the Euro-Culture

to stop destroying the planet…

The sadness I feel when I see

in the younger actors smile

the same overcompensated smiles over their cells

that I see in the older actors' smile

after seeing their doctors about Cialis, etc

both with the same cheesy music

I once got paid to make (for a bank commercial).

or, worse, Journey’s “Anyway You Want It”

and yes an ad for facebook

showing a silly woman

obsessed with faking a smile for a selfie

while Wells Fargo spends more

to spin its image like BP did

after the Gusher In The Gulf

the movie Deep Water Horizon

was designed to hide….

(by the way, the Raiders won

--in overtime---and broke

the NFL record for most penalties ever in a game)

10-30-16