Story Archives 2011

You jive time turkey

Talking all that jive

Pay out your royalties

Put the needle on the record

Like a broken record

Pay out your royalties, Pay out your royalties, Pay out your royalties

Talking all that jive

Jive Records

Pay out your old IOUs

Tried to take down the Temple Dynasty

Krip-Hop Nation is in the Temple family

Revealing this story

From country to country

Jive Records talking all that jive

Discriminating against a musician with a disability

Conway & Temple made top ten hits

Didn’t receive a cent

Blackmailed name taken off the list

Talking all that jive

But talk is cheap

We’ll attack like pit bulls on raw meat

Jive Records

Judge will review your records

Play it backwards & forwards

Jury getting down

To Temple’s music

Then came back with a verdict

Talking all that jive

“Silence in the court room!”

The heart of Jive Records going boom boom boom boom

After all these years

Judgment day will soon be here

Get you where it hurts, your pocket

Ching chang

Sounds of registers

Is music to our ears

So what do you

Want to do

Do we have to walk down this avenue

Or can we settle this

Behind close doors

Where u can keep talking all that jive

We don’t care cause it’ll be on your dime

Spinning Jive Records

By DJ Rob Da’ Noize Temple

Jive Records

Talking all that jive

“Rob, mix it!”

Jjjj jive jive jjj jive

Rec rec rec Records

Talk talk talk talking all that that that  jjj jive jive

Don’t make  us get physical

Going up against your temple

With Krip-Hop Nation with Rob Da’ Noize Temple

We will get justice believe me

Talking all that Jive

What goes around comes around

Temple Dynasty

Singing the melody

Leroy break it down with poetry

We don’t need a label

Cause we have already been labeled

The table has been flipped

Record labels playing dirty tricks under the table

No wonder they are going out of business

Listen to the music

Krip-Hop Nation, Sugar Hill Gang, Temple Dynasty

Serving justice through lyrics

We own our own & u can’t stop it

So go on talk that jive

You jive time turkey

Jive Recorders roast you for our dinner

By Leroy Moore Jr. for the Temple Dynasty

***please put this exciting event on your calendar!***

tickets are now on sale at:

http://missionculturalcenter.org/MCCLA_New/events.html#sins_invalid  

or call 415-643-2785 or visit the box office to pay the low income/disabled rate.  

PLEASE TELL YOUR DEAF FRIENDS - THERE IS ASL INTERPRETATION ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 29.  READ ON FOR MORE INFO!

Sins Invalid’s new Artists in Residence (AIR) Program, in conjunction with the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, presents:

Resident Alien

A collaborative theater piece by emerging artists with

disabilities, using music, spoken word, film, photography and wearable

sculpture to explore imagination, hospitalization, our bodies,

and the land we live on.

2010 AIR Artists: Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, Colleen Nagle, Fayza Bundalli, Lateef McLeod, Matthew Blanchard, Redwolf Painter, Tee,

and Nomy Lamm (Program Director of AIR)

WHAT:  Resident Alien:  The Sins Invalid Artists In Residence Show

WHEN: January 28, 29, 2011 ***ASL interpretation on the 29^th***

TIME: 8:00 PM

WHERE: Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts  (2868 Mission Street, SF, 94110)

TICKETS: $15/$10* (*low-income/disabled)

PUBLIC INFORMATION: (415) 643-2785, or info@sinsinvalid.org

BUY TICKETS NOW: http://missionculturalcenter.org/MCCLA_New/events.html#sins_invalid

*For low income/disabled rate, call the box office at 415-643-2785, or buy tickets in person during box office hours.

Sins Invalid is a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists who have been historically marginalized within society.  Our performance work shows that all bodies are beautiful, exploring themes of embodiment and sexuality that challenge normative understandings of disabilities, so as to instead offer a vision of inclusivity and liberation for all communities.  Co-founded by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore in 2006, Sins Invalid offers work unlike any other in the United States.  Our work challenges, destabilizes, and reorients common definitions of the body, beauty, and sexuality, drawing the audience into new conversations through the visceral experience of the performance. 

In order to expand upon our poignant, seductive, visually stimulating and politically informed performance work, Sins Invalid has launched our new Artists In Residence (AIR) Program, with the intent of fostering the skills of emerging artists with disabilities.  Program Director Nomy Lamm, a well-known Bay Area performer, writer and vocal coach, has worked with the AIR participants for the past nine months to develop and produce this performance.  Participation in skill building and visioning workshops, artistic collaboration, and one-on-one mentoring has allowed these artists’ visions to coalesce and translate into a stage-ready performance.  The participants embody a variety of disabilities and artistic disciplines, and they are all LGBTQ and/or people of color, providing a breadth of experience that is evident within the wide assortment of performance.

Colleen Nagle has scored original music for the show, and performs as Pathces the Girl Pirate, a “crazy” girl plotting her magical escape from a mental institution.  Fayza Bundalli and Redwolf Painter have created an interwoven piece exploring familial history and the ways in which experiences of colonization are embodied and passed down through generations.  Through the perspective of their travels through health, illness and pain, they explore the nuanced paths through which healing arrives.  Lateef McLeod has adapted his poem “Not of This World” into a collaborative piece that reclaims disabled bodies from the stereotypes of being monstrous, alien, freaks, to being beautiful, whole, loved and loving human beings.  Matthew Blanchard makes his cinematic debut with “Construct,” an experimental documentary directed by Daniel Cardone as part of the HIV Story Project’s compilation of short films honoring the individual lives of People With AIDS (PWAs), entitled “Still Around.”

On Friday, January 28^th and Saturday, January 29^th, Sins Invalid and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, California will host the debut performance of “Resident Alien.”  The show will begin at 8 PM, with tickets being sold at $15/$10* (*low-income/disabled) and ASL interpretation on the 29^th. 

About the Featured Artists:

Chun-shan (Sandie) Yi makes body adornments for the disabled bodies with metals, fabrics and found objects. Her work examines the potential of art to address the relationship between the body and social standards pertaining to beauty and disability. She has a BFA and MA in art therapy from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She had worked as an art therapist for four years in Chicago and Taiwan before she began pursuing a MFA degree at UC Berkeley in 2009. She has exhibited in Chicago, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Berkeley, Prague and Hong Kong. She was featured in PISTIL magazine, Fall 2005 and was the recipient of 2006 Disability Arts and Culture Honor. She recently published an article in an edited book in art therapy.

Colleen Nagle lives in San Francisco where she writes and creates music about the intersection of hope, hardship, and mental health. Colleen's creativity also extends onto the web, where she has been building web sites for nonprofits, small businesses, and community driven projects for a living for the past 13 years. During her artist in residency with Sins Invalid, she has worked collaboratively to create music and words to incorporate into the performance.

Fayza Bundalli is a poet, femme, a healer in a long line of medicine womyn.  Vancouver-grown and San Francisco-based, her poetry connects her South Asian roots to her queer identity.  Fayza has been published in numerous undergraduate student journals, from philosophy to gender studies, and is currently completing her Masters of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, where she co-chaired the Diversity Task Force.  She interns at the AIDS Health Project in San Francisco.

Lateef McLeod is a phenomenal black poet with cerebral palsy who just published his first poetry book entitled A Declaration Of A Body Of Love this year. He is also in process of writing a novel tentatively called The Third Eye Is Crying. He was also a cast member of the 2007 Sins Invalid performance. He works at United Cerebral Palsy of the Golden Gate as a grant writer and blogger and for the World Institute of Disability as an intern. He has earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and a MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. You can gain more information about Lateef from his blog at teefdabiggafigga.blogspot.com.

Matthew D. Blanchard was born and bred a white trash, Euro-mutt, slut, queer American kid, and escaped the double-locked, triple-chained closets of conservative Southeastern Virginia, only to be embraced by the welcoming arms of GAY MECCA’s chaotically corrupt, Crystal-lined, “Tina-torn, AIDS-quilted” community of wanton, woebegone whores & hustlers.  The life Matthew has led since arriving in the Bay Area in 2003 contrasts with his former life as a thespian erudite.  However, with drug dependency, disease, disfigurement and depression has come the recovery, rehabilitation, reconstruction and resilience of his “last-stitch, last-chance life.”  Today, above all else, Matthew is grateful for God’s boundless love of and faith in his own purely imperfect and human desire “for elaborate beautification and solemn self-betterment.”Matthew has studied performance arts in Paris, France, Florence, Italy, and at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

Redwolf Painter is a two-spirit, mixed blood, heyoka, ex-punk storyteller from Alaska.

Tee is a visual artist living and working in San Francisco. As a person of color, Tee is a fierce social justice activist and likes to facilitate workshops breaking down the systems of oppression. Different topics such as disability, sexuality, gender, and social class are frequently explored in both the arts and during workshops.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, performer, and voice teacher living in San Francisco.  Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything.  She performs with Sins Invalid, writes an advice column for Make/Shift Magazine, and is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing at SF State.

“In My Country” is a country that knows no borders; it’s a country of the heart”.  Tony Robles, revolutionary poet, nephew and son of many diasporas spoke about his inspiration for the beautiful short story, “In My Country” published in Mythium magazine (www.mythiumlitmag.com) and nominated by Mythium editor Crystal Wilkinson (www.crystalwilkinson.com) for the esteemed literary honor known as the Pushcart Prize--a well deserved honor for Tony, a deeply rooted community story-teller and poet of the people, who follows in the footsteps of his uncle, the late Manilatown poet and historian Al Robles.  The Pushcart Prize winners are to be announced in May 2011. 

From being a tenant organizer for elders in poverty in the Tenderloin, Mission and Manilatown districts of San Francisco to being the co-editor and contributor of one of the most revolutionary media organizations in the nation, POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE, Tony has never compromised his values, his community or the voices of his multi-racial family of Filipino and African descendent resistance fighters based in the increasingly gentrified San Francisco Bay Area.

This dedication to community, ethics and resistance began as a young child with the teaching he received from his family of brilliant, conscious artists  and organic revolutionaries who, like Tony, supported their families with work in the janitorial or service industry. Through-out his life of work and in the last two years, Tony has worked as a security guard. Through his own lens this “revolutionary worker scholar” as is the title of his POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork column, he has penned a series of brilliant narrative essays and short stories about workers, workplace injustices and peoples struggling with poverty, houselessness and racism in the US.

“In my country was inspired by poverty and migrant scholar Jose Sermeno of the Apollo hotel located in San Francisco’s Mission’s District,,” Tony said as he described his connection to the protagonist from In My Country, Tony went on to point out that Jose was a tenant representative and worked with other migrants in poverty like himself who were working as day laborers.

In addition to working as a tenant advocate and community journalist, Tony authored two bilingual (English and Tagalog) children’s books, published on Children’s Book Press: Lakas and the Manilatown Fish and Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel. As well, Tony is a teacher and playwright who authored a play, Hotel Voices, which he co-produced with, Lisa “tiny” Gray-Garcia, co-founder and co-editor of POOR Magazine. Hotel Voices is an innovative theatre production which took place in the Single Room Occupancy Hotels of San Francisco and included a 20 week script-writing and performance workshop and was performed to sold out audiences across the Bay Area in 2009.

The phrase “In my country”, according to Tony, means in my heart, and with his heart, the protagonist of the story, like Tony himself, brings his country, his heart and his humanity into the struggle for place, home, memory and justice into the increasingly cold and bereft land where all of us poor workers, migrants, elders and families struggle to dwell.

Rivers of icy wind swirled at my feet. The wet night snuck in through unseen crevasses of our old car and circled up my body, each gust, a laugh of hate against me and my mama who’d been living in and out of our car since I was 11. Those memories flooded  through my mind as the soft voice of Myron Standing Bear, a member of the Oglala Sioux Nation explained how he, a hard-working advocate in the community for 17 years, suffering with congestive heart failure was living in his car with his two teenage sons.

Through a story told by Myron, riddled with racial discrimination and un-justice by the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) that lasted several hours into that night, our revolutionary crew of legal and poverty scholar journalists began the lengthy process of documenting his case to transform into our special blend of change–making media and in your face advocacy.

“We don’t work with Indians,” Myron had begun his story with the first in a series of discriminatory and unlawful sentences said to him by SFHA when they rescinded his place on the Section 8 wait list. The injustice began in August of 2009, when the family was informed of their approved Section 8 Voucher, a list they had been on for 11 years. Upon finding a home, however, they were told by their SFHA worker that they were immediately being taken off of the Section 8 housing list where they had reached rank #1 and being put on the Public Housing list where they were placed at number 564. Following this horrible beginning there was an onslaught of discriminatory statements said to the Standing Bear family while they tried to get housing justice.

After our first meeting with Myron at POOR Magazine’s indigenous news-making circle in September, we wrote an article detailing Myron’s plight which was published in POOR/PNN and the Bay View Newspaper. POOR Magazine’s Revolutionary Legal Advocacy Project (RLAP) began a correspondence with officials at Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who were embarrassed by the light shed on this situation which eventually resulted in HUD re-opening an investigation about the wrong-ness with SFHA in October of 2010.

“Myron and his family are outside, in the winter, in a car, with a fatal heart condition,” Lisa Gray-Garcia and Marlon Crump from POOR said to HUD agents many times via phone and email correspondence following a meeting with HUD to re-launch the investigation. Several documents were demanded by HUD and produced, most of which were already in possession by a case started by Myron and his family several months prior.

Weeks turned into months. Myron’s condition worsened, he and his boys were still in their car and we realized we had no choice but to give HUD an ultimatum, “If Myron doesn’t get his Section 8 voucher by December 1^st, we will have no choice but to seek legal action.

On November 23rd we got the email, Myron would get his rightful section 8 voucher. Myron, Mark Anquoe, a friend of Myron’s and tireless advocate from American Indian Movement West (AIM-WEST) and Marlon from RLAP at POOR all went to HUD on a beautiful day in the first week of December. The bright sun shone on their backs as they entered the lifeless building. Hope was alive for the Standing Bear family.

Which brings me to back to mama. There were so many uncanny similarities between Myron’s family and my own. My mama, an indigenous Taino Boricua elder, had congestive heart failure.  She was a tireless advocate for the community.  We spent most of my teenage years living in our broke-down hooptie.  When we finally got on the SFHA wait list for a section 8 voucher for years and almost gave up hope, my ghetto scholar mama fought the stagnant injustices of HUD and won, resulting in us finally getting a Section 8 certificate.

Which is also why I am scared for Myron and his family.  We couldn’t get a landlord to rent us an apartment to save our lives. Landlords often don’t want to touch section 8 certificates with a ten foot pole, between the racist and classist stereotypes about “those kinds of tenants” said more than once to me about section 8, to the paperwork required of landlords, it was impossible for us to get a place in the 90 day window they gave us to find a place.

We looked every day, petitioned for a 90 day extension for the voucher, but still nothing.   After our years together through endless poverty and houselessness this was just another little murder of the soul, as my mama used to call it and we gave up, remaining in increasingly unstable market rate housing, in and out of eviction until the day my mama passed on her spirit journey in March of 2006.

Sadly, Myron’s family is not the exception, but rather, the far too common norm for countless poor families caught up in the struggle to get affordable housing from a broken and dismantled system built on an Amerikkkka scarcity model that is not meant to house everyone and barely meant to house some. Families like me and my mama and Vivian and jewnbug and Laure and Ingrid at POOR Magazine and so many other poor families in the US is the reason POOR is launching the revolutionary Homefulness project – a sweat equity co-housing model for landless poor families in the US and beyond.

In the mean-time Myron and his family must be housed, which is where readers and conscious landlords come in. You can make a difference. If you have a 3 bedroom apartment or house available in San Francisco preferably or the greater Bay Area please email POOR Magazine  @ deeandtiny@poormagazine.org or call us and leave a message at (415) 863-6306.

Those wet, cold winter winds currently remain Myron's family reality as it was for my po mama and me. Let's act as a community to change this piece of devastating herstory before it kills another landless poor family

Like cracks within the dry, humid, red dirt, scratches cover your hands... callouses are like the rough, dry patches of red dirt... yet when I touch your earthly hands it is like the softest cloud and the silver lining is in our soulful eyes... that brings us overflowing joy as the constant gushing river that is the bloodstream of Mother Earth. It is not everyday I meet a person and feel that I’ve known their soul forever. A person whose spirit and heart is the opposite of what people assume that they are. A person who had everything I did not. A person who has suffered horrendous grief, hurt, and pain but, like Tupac’s rose that grew from the concrete this person is the Ute rose sprung rezcrete. Meet the rose named Louis C. I met Louis in a Ute beardance ceremony, and he was one of the beardance singers. Right when I saw him, I looked at him as if I knew him. When I danced with him it was as if I knew his soul without saying a word. We did not have any conversations, and yet had a deep spiritual connection. While I was stunned with what had just happened, he left. A week later, I met Louis again at a different Ute beardance, and I picked him again to dance. After the beardance, I decided to find out more about Louis. We talked about two-spirited people, energy and how it heals people, and sang traditional songs. We found out we were even both semi deaf in the same ear. That night, I found out about some of the breakdowns in his life. I couldn’t believe that he had those breakdowns in his life and I saw him in his greatness of who he truly is. I have never lost that vision of Louis living out his greatest potential. While growing up, Louis ended up going to different boarding schools, and decided to drop out of high school and went back to his reservation in Utah. There he went through many ups and downs in his life, but one thing always secretly sustained him, his art. As a survivor of rape, abuse, and torture, I knew how important literary art was to me. I would keep a journal that no one else knew existed and write out my hearts desire. There I let out my pain on paper instead of cutting myself again and again. One day, I showed a teacher at the reform school I attended a poem that I wrote. They told me how good it was and so for the first time I let someone keep my poem. The teacher ended putting it in the yearbook. For the first time ever I felt validation as an artist. Just like how I was in high school, I came to find out he is an artist who kept his art to himself. Many people draw what they see but these drawings came from inside his heart and third eye. He would always say this about his artwork, “I just look at the paper and it shows me what to draw and the colors just pop out.” His artwork reminds me of pop art mixed with traditional arts. I am wowed by every time I see his art, it is as if I am looking at his art for the first time and I learn something new about myself. I started to see a transformation in Louis based on experiences and trainings he was going through. I saw a young man who was heartbroken, hurt, and feeling alone turn into a courageous, loving, intimate man who was as vulnerable as a ballerina. He told me his vision was to go heal and help all the people he had hurt in his lifetime. That is the most courageous act a person can do is face themselves and the hurt they have caused and transform into being the source of healing for the same people. Louis’s spirituality speaks through the energy he creates and sends out to nature. I remember one time him sitting outside on a cloudy day and he told me “I just kept thinking for the sun to shine through the that cloud.” Then a hole appeared in the clouds and the sunshine through. That day became sunny and brought happiness to all the creatures in nature. One night I was with Louis and my stomach started to cramp. I was in a great deal of pain and tearing from my eyes. Louis saw me in pain and all of the sudden he put his hands on my stomach and just within a few seconds the pain was gone. Louis’s art was affected and popped off the paper, canvas, or walls even more while he was going through his transformation. He came down to the reservation I live on and supported a youth mural project. This mural project was part of my vision for about 1 year. It is the only youth graffiti tobacco abuse-free mural in this county. He painted the Uintah and Ouray Mountains and animal tracks from his reservation after the kids would leave for the day. It was his first time ever on a public mural project and stated, “I am just so lucky to even have this opportunity to work for the youth to have some of my art on this wall.” Louis taught me the value of silence and being in it. Just to be silent with nature and to listen to what it is saying. He told me, “Too many people are so busy talking and forget to listen to the silence. Why can’t they listen to the silence?” He would take me on road trips where for hours we would sit in silence and he would every now and then point to an eagle, hawk, deer, elk, or another animal. He taught me to be comfortable with the silence that surrounds my life and to let it heal me. While I am writing this article I am evoking Louis’s silent spirit by being surrounded by silence and for the first time in a long time finding pleasure in the silence and not having fear associated with it. So many times we honor people after they died and they never know the impact they make on our lives. We thank them in their death for what they have done for us. I choose to honor a young man named Louis for all the things he taught me about his journey, art, and spirituality. I honor him for the greatest potential he is and his commitment to standing as the source of positive energy. Life is too precious for me not to honor an indigenous scholar such as Louis, and to honor his mother from whom he came from. As my friend Tiny says, “Without her (Mom) there would be no me”, this is true of Louis and his Mama. She raised a loving, spiritual, lucky young man. Thank you Debbie, for raising Louis to teach me lessons as he gives his gift of art to the world.

(The above pics are Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigates men sexually assulting disabled women)

Hate hate hate
It seems like every day
State to state

I was profiled in New York
Fredrick hung in Mississippi
Disabled women assaulted in LA

Hung, Shot & Assaulted
Protect & Serve
Black & Blue shot shot shot

Wheelchair user with a knife
He was a threat to public safety
As a Black man I never feel safe

Getting hot in December
Nothing new in a new year
Brothers & sisters

Hung, Shot & Assaulted
Life halted
Break out your cell phones

Get everything on video
Sell it to ABC, NBC, and CBS
Doesn’t spell justice for the victims

Budget cuts
Lead to hate
So we all bleed

Dig deep to the seed
Pull out the roots
Changing our attitudes

Things don’t change
Until it happens to you
But that is way too late

Politician was shot today
Rich & poor are getting hot
Time for radical change

Hung, Shot & Assaulted
Can’t see the bigger picture
When the media’s frame is crocked

Don’t need a band-aide
Beyond reform
We are all in this storm

Will we reach out for that hand?
After all of this still can’t understand
Why disabled people are still
Hung, Shot & Assaulted

By Leroy Moore Jr.
1/9/11

Note: according to US statistics a person with a disability is 4 to 10 times more likely to be a victim of a crime than a person without a disability. 60% of women with hearing impairments, 59% of women with visual impairments, 57% of women with learning disabilities, and 47% of women with mobility impairments will be physically abused in their lifetimes. 81% of people with psychiatric disabilities have been physically or sexually assaulted. Research consistently finds that people with substantial disabilities suffer from violent and other major crime at rates four to ten times higher than that of the general population. Estimates are that around 5 million disabled people are victims of serious crime annually in the United States. There is no figures of national rate of police brutality against people with disabilities but October 22nd Stolen Lives Project put out a book including people with disabilities.

1. Madness, Metaphors, and Mud In Yer Eyes, Oh My!

In 2010 we were "treated" to the stunningly obvious and madly maddening, information that there is a failure-to-graduate-from-high-school rate of 40%+ for Black youth in Amerikkka.  We also heard, just as the college/university basketball championship tournament known as March Madness was getting underway, that many prominent colleges and universities have an equally (or worse) record when it comes to graduating Black basketball athletes; some schools of higher larnin' have problems graduating many athletes period.

Black hole.  Padded room.  Pick your metaphoric image.  The news went "thud!" and the response was a muffled silence, or the cheering of crowds that wanted to see their fave team just win, baby!  2011 is upon us and March Madness looms large again in the minds of sports fans.

2.  A Little (Personal) History, part 1

I guess everyone thinks they live in a place where sports seems like the true religion practiced.  I like to joke that Texas, where I grew up, is definitely one of those places.  I didn't become a fanatic, but I did get socialized into enjoying (watching, mostly) sports.  I loved the 1970's Dallas Cowboys, and several other teams.  My baseball addiction developed the same way--I (usually) follow the teams of the cities I've lived in, though that has been tough to do in places like San Francisco and Seattle--places where it has often seemed that good players get trained to go somewhere else (like the New York Yankees...) to get paid ever more outrageous sums of money.

September 11th, 2001, did more than change some of the ways we live in Amerikkka now.  When the interrupted professional baseball season got back in gear, and the playoffs began, it was clear that the national (news) media had decided The New York Yankees were "America's Team", they "deserved" to win because of what happened to New York City. 

The televised playoffs included many tv camera close-ups of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, which was incredibly annoying since many people seemed to want to forget his Po'Lice-friendly policies and his very public hatred of any art that wasn't safely innocuous and easy to love.  The camera close-ups ended, I think, because the network covering the play-offs got complaints.  They certainly got mine.

Results?  I'm a mild-mannered Boston Redsocks fan.  Never thought I'd say that.  I sort of pay attention to the NFL, the end of the Michael Jordan Era led to a deflation in most of my interest in NBA basketball.  It's hard to ignore local (and other) college sports when something big happens--but there's so many more college/university teams I've never been able to wrap my tiny little mind around following THAT mess.  I loved pro tennis and golf for years, but, even though he has been the Mr. Big of golf, the only way I can get excited about golf again is if Mr. Woods returns to being Dr. Doom on the links.

3. A Little History, part 2

"Back in the day" (aka "back in MY day", not entirely true in my case since i'm not a Greatest Generation elder...) professional athletes had to work other jobs in their off seasons.  Their sports paychecks weren't big.  The pipeline for new guys coming up to replace the older stars was both the college/university-track athletes, semi-pro leagues, baseball's minor league network of teams, etc. 

How things have changed.  For Amerikkkan football you've got the Pop Warner young kids football leagues that train the kids that have potential to play well in high school and beyond.  That system has become a major cog in the machine of sports in this country, spitting out kids and spitting out kids that can go all the way to the NFL if they can ignore all the usual distractions, plus the ones that children in poor neighborhoods deal with daily. 

Basketball has the Nike Camps.  I met a teenager going to a Nike Camp when I was a laundromat attendant in Seattle.  My clue was the sheer massiveness of the amount of sports clothing, and socks.  My ghod, the socks.  The Nike Camps, sponsored by your friendly seller of gazillion dollar designer basketball shoes, are where potential NBA stars go to become better basketball players. 

If you're a kid from a middle class or higher family, the pipeline includes your own family's connections.  For poor young athletes, having potential and being good is about the only thing they've got, despite all the ranting and raving going on all around them about the importance of a good education.  Lip service on steroids. 

As has been said by someone, education ain't a Race To The Top, it's more like the steady tortoise beating the flashy wabbit, but what do "they" know?

4.  Why are Haiti and the Dominican Republic In This Article?

Haiti is in this article because The Dominican Republic is right next door on the island.  There wasn't much news from the DR after the earthquake, mostly stuff about how this or that person or organization that wanted to help could only get into Haiti via the DR.  Why relative silence from the DR?

Silence usually means the government is doing a good job of keeping the disgruntled, the dissenters, from being heard.  The Dominican Republic might as well be called The Baseball Republic.  It is where MLB (Major League Baseball) players from the DR, as well as some homegrown Amerikkkan players go to play "Winter Ball" between the end of one MLB season and the start of Spring Training and the next season.

Another pipeline for MLB is the DR, and other Caribbean nations, where children play street ball, get enrolled in the belly of the beast of the national/international obsession for the game (not to forget the intense desire not to be po' no mo'.  Those big paychecks the stars make are...magnetic); some of those children get exposed to fame early, traveling to Amerikkka for the Little League World Series. 

The drive to get out of poverty leads to doing whatever it takes, By Whatever Means Necessary.  Disputes over the age of young players are common.  Scandals over the age of older players happen too.  One of the relief pitchers for a team that got into the 2010 MLB Play-offs was unable to go pro for several years because his visa was suspended in a scandal over a real or imagined plot to get players married to Amerikkkan women, get green carded-up, etc.

5.  Whazzup, Doc? part 1

If there's more "there" there for young poor athletes, how did we get to this 40%+ national non-graduation rate state of affairs for Black Amerikkkan youth?  How do we fix (I have some ideas on that, which require another article.) what's broke? 

When I was a teenager in the 70's I hated hearing talking heads talk about education being about "training young people to be good workers".  I guess the old chestnut about "well-rounded educations" "well-rounded individuals" (or citizens) has been tossed on the bonfire of the buzzwords.  Capitalism needs workers, so all I hear is a-good-education-is-necessary-so-we'll-have-good-workers!  Yay. 

Several of my facebook friends post oldie and new songs on their pages.  I listened to one particular hip-hop/rap song I liked, posted it to my page, then deleted it--I liked the beat, but the lyrics drove me nuts.  Still, one of the other major paths to some sort of success that has been walked by many young Black men and women in Amerikkka is still spitting out new artists and songs, much to the on-again, off-again chagrin of Conservative White Amerikkka.

More of this might slowly, or quickly, fix some of the broke stuff.  At least one POOR Magazine person wants to produce a music CD, and the recent Mercado de Cambio saw the welfareQueens struttin' their stuff and rappin' hard and very conscious.  Vivian Hain is, as always, an amazing, intense performer, but all of the Queens spat some good stuff and I very much hope the welfareQeens make some beautiful music soon. 

Hey, POOR has POOR Press.  Why not a POOR Records label?  The Mercado was also host to various friends, allies, and extended POOR Magazine family rapping, blowing my mind, having fun.  "Charles Pitts and the welfareQueens" (or any reasonable alternate name you want...) anybody?

6. Whazzup Doc? Big money Capitalist sports must shrink!

I once had dreams of being a professional bowler, but quit competing when the competition got more interested in getting part-time jobs so they could afford to date girls.  The competition kept me focused on something I enjoyed.  Somehow, I managed not to think about joining an adult league for, well, competition to keep me rolling.  My bad.

There are many people in this country who play in amateur sports leagues.  Minor league baseball is popular because it's affordable entertainment.  You don't have to get a bank loan to take the family to a game! 

Making sports more community oriented, more indigenous to neighborhoods, smaller rather than larger, makes sense.  Especially when you have Tea Baggers and others ranting and raving about red ink, among other things. 

I'd much rather see more people playing baseball in the Summer--at the field (in San Francisco) on Turk Street between Gough and Laguna, near where I live--see more money spent on that sort of activity than what gets spent on the Bay-To-Breakers foot-race marathon and other "Bigger Is Better" entertainment events.

Maybe that should be part of the debate over what money should or shouldn't be spent in the coming "here we go again" Budget Brawl In City Hall.

Will George Gascone, the new District Attorney of San Francisco, increase the number of arrests for 647E (the Illegal Lodging statute)?  This law goes back to Gold-Rush times, originally intended to stop people from claim-jumping someone elses gold mine.   

The law, as written, can hurt people--especially poor or completely destitute people.  They can be charged and serve up to three months in jail for a first offense, for the crime of sleeping in public.  A sleeping bag (with cardboard beneath for insulation from the cold) is being considered "lodging".   

Taxpayers get to give $600 a day, per person, to house anyone found guilty of 647E--or any other infraction that gets them "three hots and a cot" in the city/county jail.  When cities and states talk bankruptcy, they must be more creative options for housing.  Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms are $60 a night--doing the math, that's $600 in one month instead of $18,000 a month per person!

This also cycles the money back into the community that is coughing it up. 

Dear District Attorney Gascone:  This poverty scholar doesn't like wasting money any more than you do.  It's about time you got out of the fascist mentality that has been bankrupting San Francisco.  This idea isn't new, Dianne Feinstein did it when she was Mayor (1980)--giving vouchers to people to get into SRO's.  I hope you like this idea instead of believing 647E will magically solve all your problems. 

This is the Loyal Opposition, a.k.a. Bad News Bruce Allison.  You could have more allies than you would believe if you did this.  Hospitals and psychiatric units are being overwhelmed, realtors are leaving 30,000 units vacant.  Where do you expect people to sleep?   

If you want to respond, this poverty scholar is willing to talk--at the poormagazine office.