Dr. Lester K. Spence

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Originally uploaded by Unbowed.

I visited Artscape, a local arts festival in Baltimore, for the first time. Got a chance to see an African drum/dance troupe perform. The brother in this picture was one of the oldest brothers there, and required a seat from which to see the show. But folks kept crowding his view.

The sister to the left?

Every time someone blocked his view, she stepped up. “Excuse me, you need to move so this older brother can see.”

I clowned on her afterwards…that’s what I do among other things. But I appreciated her, and told her as much.

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One of the issues that I’m currently trying to work my way through deals with the politics of black cultural production. More specifically what happens to genres like rap, techno, house, as they move across space and time? To an extent this relates to issues of authenticity, though to be honest I don’t think that set of questions is really all that important. But what I find fascinating, among other things, is the unpredictability of consumption and circulation.

Check out the video below and see what I mean. Thanks to my man Tafari who also dropped on me the fact that on this date in 1831 black women in Boston founded the African American Female Intelligence Society.

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This video below is extra hot. Thanks to All Tayo for the link.

On an unrelated note, check out The Shawn Mason Spence show where the topic of the day is black women in the entertainment industry.

We know of the men, but where are the deal-making, business-moving women in the industry? Founder of the National Association of Black Female Executives in Music and Entertainment, Johnnie Walker (JW), will share her journey, her success secrets, along with Kristian Buchanan, Publicist and Sheila Jenkins, Event Promotions. Whether you’re interested in music and entertainment or not, you’ll be happy to know that “sistahs are doing it for themselves.”

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It isn’t that hard to think about how the prison industrial complex influences people who are caught up in it. Mothers and fathers have to pay massive loot to talk to their kids in jail, to even get to the prisons in some cases. Jails themselves are focused much more on punishment than on rehabilitation so the prisoners come out with a limited set of skills and often end up going right back to where they were.

But what about the rest of us?

Earl linked to New York Times editorial condemning the use of prisoners in counting local populations. (ed: the previous version linked to an earlier story. thanks Peter for the heads up.)

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Tonight my wife will be hosting a show on education:

Education is being talked about across the nation, but who’s doing anything about failing school, bureaucratic mismanagement, and outdated curricula and materials? Our guests, Tonya Allen of the Skillman Foundation and Carolyn Blair of Clayton, MO Public Schools will share with us what’s working and what’s not. We want to hear from parents, students, administrators from across the country.

Please tune in.

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(as an aside, why has my traffic relatively blown up off of the Jamal Bryant Empowerment Temple stuff? all i did was point folks to the site….interesting.)

This global vs. local thing I’ve been working through has led to a few spinoffs that I think people might find interesting.

The folks at Democracy and Hiphop take issue with Grace Boggs local approach as well as her ideas about the working class.

Malik has decided to refocus his blog to focus more on local solutions in diasporal communities….and in doing so he juxtposes a local approach to EC Hopkins‘ more power elite driven approach.

Whether you agree or disagree, I think these conversations get at the crux of the matter, and should take you in interesting (and worthwhile) directions.

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This week’s barbershop segment came out today. On the docket? We talked about immigration policy, about Michael Vick’s legal troubles, and we talked about John Edwards’ campaign and his anti-poverty platform. Makes for interesting listening–check out the way that even the pros have drunk the koolaid on Edwards. There are significant risks in tying one’s ability to speak to a subject to personal style/appearance/background. We wouldn’t want a serial killer running our police departments…we wouldn’t want a firestarter running our fire department. Why should we expect someone running for President to actually be poor?

Holler at me and let me know your thoughts.

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Earlier, I had some strong criticisms of Obama. I didn’t really care about the “he ain’t black” stuff–that’s for the birds.

Today I was taping for The Barbershop, and one of the bits was about Johns Edwards’ poverty tour. I originally planned to compare Edwards’ platform on poverty to the non-existent platforms of Obama and Clinton, and wanted to double check just to be sure.

Obama has definitely stepped his game up. Here is his poverty platform. He’s cribbed some ideas from Edwards–his battle against mortgage loan sharks was presaged by Edwards for example. But he’s got some interesting ones of his own. The idea of giving environmental jobs to people in cities who needs work is a great one and one likely taken from the folks at worldchanging. This is the type of idea exchange/sampling/biting that I can roll with.

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The Rat-Proof Fence.More rats. (slightly tongue in cheek this time.)

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Troy Davis gets a reprieve.

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