Today’s Media Links (and Non-Links)
Saul Williams and Henry Rollins Together Again
So, dig, I spent several weeks a few months ago in an email exchange with Saul Williams. To use words that are “easy” to understand, I was saying “crazy stuff” to him. According to the vibe I got out of the email exchange, people like me need to refrain from digging into esoteric free styling with “professionals.” It’s reminds me of hanging with an actor that used to do skits for free on the street corner when they were in the ’hood but now that “the man” tells them they are a pro they got to get paid before they volunteer anything.
My idea for contacting Saul Williams was actually not so crazy according to the probably-not-Black-people at thetripwire.com. Their exclusive, “Saul Williams Vs. Henry Rollins,” is based on the very idea I had for Saul Williams here in the kinté space—so when he kept writing me stuff like “huh?” and “what?” I can only guess that he “totally forgot” this interview where he gets to ask most (perhaps all) of the questions which allows Henry Rollins to produce the answers. I assume that this very Roman situation was sufficiently satisfying to Saul Williams and anything different I can contribute is insignificant. It is the Black Dada irony of “keeping it real” instead of keeping it free at the correct jam-session moment. (Remember jam sessions when Black men got together and just played out of respect for the form itself? I’m sure Mos Def and Saul Williams have those moments… more power to them…)
My despicable daring assumes that he, Saul Williams, would not even imagine that this Henry Rollins interview has any relationship whatsoever with what is going on here in the kinté space. Gee, I guess I must be “bitter” for being so “irrelevant.” It’s funny how people know so much about how my thoughts work and where they come from… Americans have very little intelligence on the ground and it shows in intimate ways. Even Saul Williams went so far as to write back to me saying that he knew who was writing him. I can only assume that this knowledge comes from the wisdom that guides him through his sacred life. It is then a matter of observing the fruits of this wisdom to see how his eye is positioned next to the throne.
Eye? Throne? “Huh?”… “What?”…
The bottom line is that this Blog post records that Bryan Wilhite actually tried to contact Saul Williams. Let the record show that Bryan Wilhite is not so caught up in his poem-writing ego such that he is not able to do Jim Brown thangs like this… Case closed. The last person who cares about this issue no longer cares…
Missing a Contemporary African Poet Actually from Africa
This photograph was archived in the \bitmaps folder here in the kinté space. It was poised to be loaded for some kind of project that I sincerely cannot remember. In fact, I would have to go through my email archives from over three years ago to find out who this guy is!
What was important to me was that he was a contemporary African poet who was published on paper overseas and it’s about time that African’s from places other than South Africa appeared on the Internet. Not only is this poet talented but the message to those sensitive enough to feel this that we here in the kinté space are not about forming some kind of myopic American clique trying to call it “African.”
Having spent years studying the continental African presence on the Internet—made much, much easier with the rise of the Blog, the challenges facing me trying to publish with people actually from Africa are highlighted with these bullets:
- Continental Africans who have access to the Internet are for the most part relatively affluent. This affluence comes with a political conservatism that, in the worst cases, makes them mentally indistinguishable from a European pro-colonial conservative from the 1950s. These people discovering the kinté space and pursuing a relationship with it is an aesthetic impossibility.
- The kinté space is trapped in the English language. We have very few French works like “David Mandessi Diop: Les Vautours.” It follows that we are missing out on the massive audience of francophone Africans all over the world.
- Too many Africans are literally dodging bullets—from the inner cities of Los Angeles to the sands of Darfur. No time for poetry publishing.Fortunately, the rise of the Blog publishing world provides me with powerful poets like Rethabile Masilo of Poéfrika.
fela.kintespace.com Abandoned or on Hold?
Deen Ipaye was the first African actually from Africa to publish in the kinté space. But he did it from Denver, Colorado. His work is our classic from 1998, “Deen Ipaye: Fela at the African Shrine.” His first-hand knowledge of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti captivated me and he invited me to visit with him in person when he was Northern, California. Unfortunately, we both started playing a game of tag where each of us in turn became overwhelmed with our demanding IT careers.
My turns were certainly the worst. In the vast depths of the hole I dug looking for Microsoft gold while making my transition from COM to .NET I would vanish for six months at a time. Then Deen would be overtaken by something from Oracle Corporation. Now we have not contacted each other for about a year. Our original plan was to develop fela.kintespace.com. There is a live site but it was meant to be much more. In fact, he was going to share his knowledge of the Yoruba language with me—but these damn machine languages get in the way… Maybe I should email him now…
Meeting Halle Berry
I’ll never forget what I told Halle Berry at a California African American Museum function years ago (when she was hooked up with that abusive baseball player). She asked me was I a producer. Keep in mind that she spoke to me first—a gesture that I will forever appreciate—but at that time, being so young, I had no idea how few times in my life a Black woman was going to speak to me directly without prompting so I took this gesture for granted. I was childish, playful and relatively ignorant of those laden with defenses for a world of war and its insinuating predators. I had no clear and horrible concept of how others can see me as a stranger so disfigured. I responded to Halle stepping to me in a manner similar to my email correspondence with Saul Williams and it instantly turned her off with random precision—I quoted Jim Morrison:
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars Out here we is stone Immaculate
She had nothing to respond. Had I known then that her mother was psychiatric nurse, I’m sure I would never have spoken to her like that. Had her mother been a hippie poet, I’m sure we would be friends to this day… I would rather have the true poet vibe so I’m sure things (and thangs) worked out for the best.