TheObamaNation.com

Fox is an easy target.  It’s fairly obvious the cable channel has a significant anti-Obama bias.  But I heard the entertainment division is giving Wanda Sykes a late night talk show, making her the “first black lesbian late night host,” even if it is on Saturday night only against SNL.  I’ll admit I was one of those who laughed when Bill Cosby dissed her at the 2003 Emmy Awards [another perspective from Michael Eric Dyson], but I’ve since come to like her for her activism and her television appearances.  Maybe it’s another tactic for the entertainment division using blacks to get an edge.  (Remember Martin, Living Single, and New York Undercover on Fox vs. Must See TV on NBC or all those other 90s shows, The Sinbad Show, South Central, Moesha, In Living Color, and Roc?  Honestly, I can never say any of those shows were ever must see for me.  But it was a remarkable era for black TV.)  And, in full disclosure, my cousin from the black side of the family does work for Fox and I’ve always felt her to be progressive, politically and culturally.

Though I missed the black era of Fox-TV some of my guilty pleasures have been those David E. Kelley on Fox shows like Ally McBeal, and Boston Public.

Now, I bashfully cop to a new show on Fox in a similar quirky mold, Glee.  (I’m a sucker for quirky comedy, kids overcoming the odds through music, plus huge vocal harmonies and a little camp.)  Mr. Kelley has nothing to do with this one, though.  If you’re a fan of any of his work, you’ve definitely seen a lot of quite progressive diversity represented.  This new show, though it shares some of the absurdist bent, seems to have a strange thing for mixed race people.  One of the characters is I’m guessing, Japanese and Caucasian – last name Tanaka.  But now two episodes in a row they’ve alluded to either the instability of parents of mixed race kids or the genetic viability of mixed race kids altogether.  I know it’s a comedy and it’s had some bad word of mouth for it’s mean-spiritedness, though it also had a very sweet coming out story of a gay teen.

So, maybe I’m just being sensitive again, but I’m just wondering is this a common sort of perspective in certain parts of the country?   Check out these two 30 second clips.  The piling on two episodes in a row is a bit much for me.   What do you think?  And, for fun, do you think it’s an anti-Obama directive from on high?  (For fun, OK?  I’m not a conspiracy theorist.  Really….)

How funny to be sitting in a coffee shop in the Valley on the day John Hughes died.  I don’t know if all those eighties films were set in the Valley, but it feels like it.  In my teens, the Valley was a slightly more exotic Irvine – which made it even more detestable.  I’d moved up to UCLA, just 17 a few weeks earlier, and there were a few new friends from over the hill with ostentatious style that made my post-preppy/mod self cringe.

“Sixteen Candles” came out when I was 18.  I liked “Breakfast Club” a lot better.  And I hated that the Hughes Machine corrupted my precious Psychedelic Furs by inducing them to re-record “Pretty in Pink.”

But as cool as I wanted to be, I was swept up in the misfit romance of those films.   Part of me wanted to be the dick that Andrew McCarthy or James Spader portrayed in those films.  Part of me felt like Jon Cryer or Molly Ringwald.  Really there was no one that really looked like me in those films, but it looked enough like the world I’d moved in just a few years earlier.

Then as the eighties and nineties moved ahead, I got to meet Jon Cryer one embarrassingly drunken night and Molly became a friend for a while after she’d seen my band play a few times.  (Interesting that I never met the dicks.)  My life really blended with the fantasy world of the Hughes entertainment.  I was a geek who made it, at least modestly, to live the dream of making music, a beautiful partner, and seeing my friends do well.  John Hughes films were kind of an ad for the geek dream.  Even when it seemed kind of racist with Long Duck Dong, he gave kids who didn’t fit in hope.  (Though I can’t really speak to authoritatively because I don’t remember a really stereotypical black character in his films.)

So somehow as the author of those dreams dies early (is ‘auteur’ appropriate?), it gives me an odd sadness.  I’m sitting in a Coffee Bean.  There are laptops everywhere.  And we’re all a little out of the mainstream as we sit in this chain café.  We all have modest dreams or even huge ones.  Some people are dressed a little ostentatiously.  I’ll never really understand Valley fashion.  I’ll never understand why anyone would choose this place to live. (I’m house sitting and homeless at the moment…typing on my new MacBook Pro…It’s a strange world.)

How long do we have to dream?  That’s the sadness.  But I like the quirkiness here in this coffee shop and in the people passing by.  John Hughes made it a little safer, or at least a little more imaginable for us modest misfits to dream.  Thanks.

Two walls.  Two acts of violence.  I can’t remember what precipitated the violence, but I do remember that race mattered.  I tore down the pinups of the J5 from my wall.  Dad punched holes through the Angels.

Less than a year after the original moon walk, I saw the Jackson Five play a concert at the Los Angeles Forum.  I wasn’t even five.  At least that’s how I remember it.  Maybe it was when I was 7 that I first saw them there, but it seems like it was twice.  And I remember seeing a change the second time.  Michael was bigger.  His moves were wild… adult, I thought.  He was about to be 14.  Maybe it was too sexual for me.

Sex and blackness.  I was ambivalent.  I was barely seven!  But I was already aware of my father’s libido and my inadequacies.  Somewhere in my Oedipal/Castration Anxiety stage of development, he made me aware.

I don’t know what caused it, but I remember one evening, slamming the door to my room and ripping down all the photos of the Jackson Five.

A few years later we’d moved to Irvine.  We’d bought a house and were living the suburban dream that the Encino Jackson’s epitomized.  I was all about the Angels, and really Farrah.  One day my dad, angry at something or another, started screaming at me and punched holes in the Charlie’s Angels poster above my bed.  It was a slanted roof, so I was stuck there, on my bed, beneath the torn paper and falling plaster.  He was shouting something like, “Do you love those white girls more than me?”

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett represented two parts of my life I never could embrace without some sort of interference.  If only Michael had stayed black, maybe I would never have had any issues!  Ha!  But he was a model of some subliminal influence that indicated with talent and a non threatening persona you could be loved.  There was even a boyish sexiness that you could use with the girls and especially the older women, to get ahead.

Farrah represented carefree beauty, seemingly free of any calculation, just the privilege of beauty.

I really stopped caring about either Michael or Farrah by the time the first Van Halen record came out.  Then, when I came under the influence of The Clash, around “London Calling,” they seemed to be hopeless artifacts.  I mean, I respected the production of Thriller.  I dug that Vincent Price and Eddie Van Halen were on the record (though I was suspicious of Eddie in my New Wave ethos).  I even got into the ambition and emotion of “We Are the World.” But the stuff never moved my soul the way the Smiths were, or the old school R&B of Marvin and Curtis, or Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

But I started to bawl when I heard “We Are the World” followed by “Man in the Mirror” driving home from a poetry gathering in Pasadena Thursday night.

There was heart and empowering ambition beneath the glitz of both Michael and Farrah.  The world responded to the glitz.  It seems like they both wanted to express more.  Yet the high of the glitz seems to be what destroyed them both.  The desire for adulation and the compulsion to run away from the falseness it imposes, to angrily reject it, is cancerous.  It can break your heart.  Both of these performers tried to break walls.  People wanted the pinups intact.  How does one make peace with that?  How does one walk in the world knowing who he or she is, while knowing that people are reacting to only a piece of you?  How do you accept the superficial praise and deflect the shortsighted damnations with grace?

I offer you this in celebration of the Mixed Roots Festival and the Lovings of Loving v. Virginia, the case that forever abolished anti-miscegenation laws in the US in 1967.

It’s something I did in the mid-nineties.  It’s kind of silly with it’s Rolling Stones references, but also a lot of fun.

Hope to see you tomorrow, June 13th, at the Festival.

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WE*

I am the future
I am the past
I am the baby that you never had

Product of love
Raised in confusion
Not so much mine
But your illusion

Apartheid
In my life
Love is the solution
What about the children?
Don’t be chicken

We are what we are.

What’s so right within the white?
What’s so right within the black?
We all have organs
We like to use them
Gene pool mix—some brown will be the fusion

Down by law
Down by culture
One day
There’ll be no other
Miscegenation
Long gestation

We are what we are.

We are African American European Asian sons
Politically incorrect, embracing every one
And loving and sexing
And sex and sex and sex and sex and
Look at me!

We are what we are.

(Repeat first verse)

Jason Luckett, © 1996 Lucky Masala Head

*Lucky Mingus was the name of the band. It lasted about 6 months with a revolving cast of Jim Doyle, Rob Ladd, and JMD on drums, Wil-Dog Abers (now of Ozomatli) and David Sutton on bass, and Jebin Bruni always on keys. This recording is Jim, David, Jebin and me with Danny Brown producing.

I was heavy into my Charles Mingus period and was trying to add a more collective and historical vibe to what I was doing. The best historical thing here is the bass line which is inspired by a 70′s glam band far on the other end of the spectrum from Mingus…also a little nod to the Rolling Stones… Very little Mingus…