I'm having a fit of nostalgia today thinking about people I've lost track of over the years. There are a couple occasions. One is that I'm backing up my contact list, and another is that I've been eyeballing some of the websites of the community organizations I used to hang with. Particularly outstanding in my mind is DJ Riley.
At the very beginning of the spoken word movement out here in LA, there was the primary joint called The Good Life. Right about the time I was just about ready to take my diary public I met with and hung out with the brothers at The Good Life. It was located in a strip mall on the corner of Exposition and Crenshaw and it was an all natural food kind of place. Yes there was a time when I used to chew on licorice roots. Got mine at The Good Life.
In fact, now that I think about it, I was probably one of the first posers who sat in coffee shops with a laptop computer saying "I'm a writer". It was a Zeos computer. This was back in 1990 or so. It had to be because Xerox never gave me a laptop, and I hadn't started reading Beloved much before then in my break with buppie brotherhood. So I think I should have the timing about right.
Right about this time, I was extraordinarily impressed with a progressive brother named Ron Daniels. I was I learned about him hanging with DJ and the brothers at The Good Life. The very first conversation I got into there was appropriately deep, and DJ, in his own inimitable way, was holding court. Somewhere in my Contacts are the names of the female urban planner and the UCLA undergrads I was talking to that day, as is the name of the political dude whose fund raiser I attended some weeks later as I began insinuating myself into local LA politics. What I most fondly remember was the apparent ease with which DJ inched into a wide variety of conversations, how he was level headed when others tended to shout.
DJ also has, or had, a radio show. Check out the article: It's hard to tell, looking at the site, if he's still around.
It turns out that DJ has a little bit of a blog, but he hasn't been very active on it. I can't remember the disease that put him in the chair, but I know it didn't mess with his brain. I think he might need some assistance to get his stuff online. At any rate, he's posing with notable blackfolks on his Flickr site, it's good to know he's still around. I'd like to hook up with him one day soon.
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