A good friend from L.A. called me yesterday railing about TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAME with Vivevca Fox and Morris Chestnut. He said it was "atrocious". [His word]. He said it was "everything tragic and self congratulatory and base and cynical and VILE." [His words, again]. He then jokingly said, "Keith, what are we going to do about YOUR people.

Well! The brother had a lot of his mind.

Last night. At around 10:30. A very large SUV pulled up in front of the brownstone across the street. And out poured at least twelve people. All African-American [or Carribean-American]. Let's just say they were all of African descent. And as they poured out of the SUV, music blarred from their speakers. Not the blare that happens when you're traveling and you have music pumping to complement your mundane and/or pointed conversations, but this was a blare that would wake the dead who would rise up from their graves in a Queens cemetary and come to Brooklyn to beat your ass. IT WAS THAT LOUD. After ten minutes of this, a woman who I believed was the grandmother, came charging from her house screaming for them to turn it down. The three 20-something young women who danced near the stoop, blonde wigs swinging, continued dancing. The elderly woman, the grandmother, at least 75 years old, was ignored by all. She then opened the door of the SUV and DEMANDED for them to turn down the music ASAP. It went off. With reluctance.

But as soon as the grandmother walked away, one of the blonde young women screamed for a seven year old boy to turn it back up. And he did. And it blarred. And they danced as they swung glow sticks in the air.

I think the picture I'm painting is clear. The reason why I'm painting the picture may not be.

I'll explain.

I do not associate the behavior of others with my own behavior. I do not believe black people are monolithic in cultural, social or educational perspectives. The TWO CAN PLAY THAT GAMERS is not my experience. The young folks blasting music against their grandmother's wishes on a quiet block of tax payers is not my experience.

However, I did grow up on the outskirts of a mid-sized midwestern city. I did grow up near two horse farms, a mall, a lake, streams, creeks, General Electric and a cow pasture called Trillium Trails. I attended Mass every Sunday, and when we attended my father's church, I'd sit and listen to the minister preach his fire and brimstone sermon.

My mother encouraged intellectual and creative conversation, but she did not tolerate insubordination. [There was a period in my teen years where everything she said unnerved me and I was quick to let her know]. I played tennis, golf. I roller-skated, swam and ran on my high school track and field team. I loved flag-football; although basketball held an air of "black boy grooming" that sent red flags all up and down my soul.

I am a product of a few different migrations within the black community. My father's family came to Ohio in the 1940s; my mother's family were in Ohio and Kentucky as early as the 1700s. My maternal grandfather's family came to Ohio in the 1920s [not for work, but for the Veterans' Hospital that offered the best care for World War I vets, which included my granddad's uncles, Lennis and Arthur.

I'm simply saying: for people of color [people of African descent] to be lumped into the same general conversation about black people... To pretend to understand black poverty, or black wealth, or black single parenthood, or black folks who refuse to eat pork.... is unfair and ridiculous.

What ties black folks together in the New World is that we all had ancestors who were brought across the Middle Passage against their will. But our experiences since then are vast and wide and complex and distinct and individual and regional and cultural and religious and just plain human.

It's certainly a struggle and a challenge to live in this world as a person of African descent and demand your complex humanity, but it's a challenge I obviously signed up for when I stepped foot through my mother's birth canal and sat up in the world.

Black folks are just not black folks. Black folks are human beings with varied experiences and many different ways to interpret these experiences.

Until next time,

Keith

What an amazing two weeks!

On the first of the month I moved from my apartment in Fort Greene [thin walls, slamming doors, issues with the snorer] to another apartment in Fort Greene. It has certainly been a full year of transition and reshaping for me, but I feel like I found my NYC apartment for now. [Not the house I'm seeking, but a decent spot to lay my head, do my work and get away from it all].

A few days after I moved, two good friends invited me to Los Angeles for the Fourth festivities. I swam, I sunned, I hung out with some of favorite people in the world and I slept. For some odd reason, I couldn't snap out of this lethargy. I was yawning way past noon. Maybe it was the smog, or the record-breaking heat; maybe it was a need for much-needed rest creeping up on me, maybe somebody was dropping sedatives in the drinking water. Whatever it was I was one yawning brother. [For my L.A. friends I wasn't able to see... I'll be back soon.]

I also made a great connection with a film company and wishing for continued growth and work with them. I even had a chance to holiday in San Diego with a my long-time Hortense. And I must say she was full of light and love and focus... I was so proud and happy for her. She is one LIGHTED SOUL.

When I returned to NYC, I hooked up with another long-time friend Karla Brundage. She was in town on book tour for her poetry collection SWALLOWING WATERMELON. I've known Karla since my early neo-soul bohemian performance poetry days in San Francisco. Karla lived directly across the street from me in Oakland, and when I started teaching Fourth grade she gave me her car. It was a broke down mess of a car, but Karla gave it to me and I was grateful. It kept me mobile for many a day.

On Friday of last week, Karla was reading her poetry at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe [the legendary] and she asked yours truly to share the mic. I read, for the first time, a long excerpt from my short story JESUS AND THE WHITE CAMARO. I was excited and honored and inspired and the audience really seemed to love it. Thank you, Karla. Your poetry was pouring sensuality and honestly all up in the place!

A day later, I was in Memphis, Tennessee attending the annual ADKINS-PEEKS family reunion. My dad's people. It was such a great time. We had this amazing tour guide who navigated us through Memphis' rich black history and never held back the truth behind the truth of how daunting life was for many poorer blacks in that area prior to Dr. Martin Luther King.

I certainly slept for a good two days upon my return to NYC, but it was such a great time to travel and create and gain knowledge.

Oh, I almost forgot. Upon landing at Newark International Airport from Memphis, I quickly hurried for a 1pm rehearsal of a short play by Amy Evans at the Culture Project. Along with a few other amazing young actors and directed amazingly by Daniella Topol, we rocked the house in a play examining the silence of women in Darfur. You have to catch me on the street to get the 411 on the explosive symposium following the play.

An amazing two weeks!

My favorite quote from Memphis: I was swimming in the pool at the La Quinta Inn. Simple swimming. Underwater, floating on my back, several dives under the water. Well, this 11 year old boy paddles over to me and says to his cousins, "Look, y'all, he's swimming on top of the water. [then to me] "How did you learn to swim like that? You went to school for swimming, didn't you?"

Until next time,

Keith

Tyler Perry and his Art of Pain.

I must admit: I have never been a Perry advocate. I find his plays and movies trite and thin, archaic and blatantly buffonish. And I've been overly concerned about a certain sector of the black community who finds his "art" interesting, moral, funny and a reflection of the modern black experience.

A few years ago I saw a Perry play [on DVD] for the first time and I was impressed by his comic talent and timing. But I found his subject matter and structure to be a world foreign to my experience as a man of color raised in a working-class suburb of a Midwestern city with Catholic roots.

A friend of mine recently made an interesting comment about Perry. She said it was like being fed shit. Like the powers that be decided black folks will eat anything [watch anything]. She said it was reminiscent of the black community being fed the part of the pig that nobody wanted.

I agree.

I certainly don't think Perry should be removed from the world of entertainment. His right as a capitalist to make money off of the blind and misinformed consumer is his constitutional right as an American citizen. His mansion and 100-episode deal with TBS are prime examples of him taking advantage of that right.

However, like any other capitalist [disgusing themselves as moral or righteous or a cultural custodian] Perry is not immune to resistance or criticism, hell, even cultural assasination.

As an artist and entertainer, I am very interested in pushing the buttons of society and asking society to rethink its values and traditions and be willing to make change in order to make a healthier world. And the idealist and romantic in me continues to hope that society wants that for itself, and that it's willing to do whatever it takes to ensure a better place for all. And if that requies them to look at something like Tyler Perry Inc [or Disney, or the American theater] and challenge it and criticize it, so be it.

We should all be invested in creating a more profound and truthful world, by any means.

Until next time,

Keith

SEEDS PLANTED

My father was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia. A small town [now suburb] a few miles north of Atlanta.

He lived there until he was four, in a brown house in the middle of town, with a vegetable garden in the rear yard. He lived with his mother and an infant brother. I'm not certain, but I believe his mother's mother lived in that house as well, or very close by, and she boot-legged for a living. So says my father. Meaning she was one of those smart-thinking women who braved cut-throats and drunks and southern racist police who showed up at her front door [or back] for a bottle or two of top-rate liquor at a low-rate price.

My father's father, not yet a minister, was out in the world, sharecropping and job-searching, until he finally landed a decent-paying job hundreds of miles north at General Electric in Cincinnati. Soon after he sent for his wife and two small sons and they all lived together in Cincinnati in a very large two-family house he purchased himself. Several years later, their adult son, twelve years my father's senior, joined them.

My grandmother was a handsome woman. Bright brownish red skin with freckles [a characteristic often found in the remote corners of Georgia]. A very stylish woman, my grandmother also had particular impulses. She didn't eat red clay like her southern relatives, but preferred white clay. She said it was sweeter. She didn't like the dark and certainly didn't like ghosts. Her sister once told me about the time they were still living in Crawfordville, Georgia, and my grandmother was spending the night in the house of her sister's mother-in-law [a woman born during slavery and a mother of 19]. The house was once occupied by slave owners and some 50 years later it was allegedly occupied by their ghosts. One of whom had a thing for bouncing balls and opening bolt-locked doors. On this night, my grandmother, her sister, and I believe a cousin, was sleeping in the bed behind a locked door [a large dresser had been placed in front of the door, you know, in case the ghost got cocky and started opening doors during the night]. No sooner than the lights went out, the sound of balls bouncing could be heard til the wee hours of the morning, and by daylight, when all had awakened, the door was opened, but the dresser had not moved. My grandmother apparently screamed til lunch.

My grandmother was also a professional chef. Her specialty: southern cuisine. And I mean, if her food wasn't falling off the bone, or melting in your mouth, it had you dreaming about it, thousands of miles away. She put her heart and soul and art into her cooking, and when you tasted it you knew you were experiencing the work of a master.

I don't know much more about my grandmother before my recognition of her adult presence in my child's world. But I knew she had a playful sense of humor, she was welcoming, warm, and sometimes a sharp turn in her voice's tembor suggested at one time she didn't tolerate any foolishness, and that she had witnessed things in her life that could turn any soul cold.

My grandfather I knew very little. The fourth of thirteen children. He was a tall man who sat in a white reclining chair where whenever he saw me he playfully screamed, "Keith!" and scared me so much I clung to my mother's leg and started crying. He died of bone cancer when I was nine and I remember very disntinctly the sermon the Sunday following the funeral where a relative stood in the pulpit and talked about the dream my grandfather had a few weeks before his passing: His entire body had been engulfed by a white umbrella.

My father's cousin once said my grandfather was a gentle man. All-knowing, wise and the shoulder for many to cry away their tribulations. A "real" person who never judged others, and could find light in the darkest soul. She said she missed him deeply.

For so long I never saw the connection to my father's kin. Except for my darker complexion, and a few freckles on my hands, I believed for so long that the only thing connecting me with my father's people was my last name.

But here I am. Some thirty years into a recognizable journey and finally I see it. The love of cooking, my joy/fear thing with ghosts, my impulse toward a non-judgmental life... it all feels very interwoven, very deep below the molecular. Some kind of seed was planted and it continues to grow.

Until next time,

Keith