Cobb

Living in Black Neighborhoods

"Your daddy's rich, and your ma is good looking. So hush little baby, don't you cry."

Q: What is it like living in a majority black neighborhood?

A: It’s kind of obvious to say they are all different, but I think it is useful to take note of the matter of class. You see since there are about 42 million in the US, that would make African-Americans the 35th largest nation on the planet. It’s also easy to remember that black median household income is about $42,000 per year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to compare that with median household incomes of other nations.

At any rate, I have used class:

Class in America
When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto. I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness.
And so I have lived like this in the following majority black neighborhoods.

Hood One - 90016
I grew up in what is now called Jefferson Park / West Adams in Los Angeles. It is in Southwest LA most notably known by its major thoroughfare, Crenshaw Blvd. I grew up in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house with my three brothers and my sister. My parents were civil servants. I would say that we were above the median income for the neighborhood. We moved in about 3 years before the white families started to move out. It was a very nice neighborhood with a good public school and lots of friendly neighbors from 1964 through about 1980. There were some street gangs on the periphery, but none in the neighborhood. Our neighbors all went to different churches and were quite diverse. So you could immediately tell that a lot of people lived there because it was a black neighborhood - meaning this was one where blackfolks could get mortgages, whereas others were off limits. The consequence was that it was not truly organic like an ordinary urban or suburban place. A lot of us had very little in common. After 1980 when I moved out, the drug wars began and the entire area started to run downhill. But that place was, to me, a very normal and often pleasant place to grow up. The place now looks a touch nicer than it did in the mid 60s. Values in the property have gone way up.

Hood Two - 90047
I then lived near the Circle Park in Inglewood with my father after my parents split up. This was a nicer neighborhood, but I was personally very broke. The middle class families were a lot more plentiful and similar to us. But the main boulevard, Manchester, was not as economically viable as Crenshaw was at the time. Shopping was not as nice. I didn't even think about crime, so much as I did worrying about how I could get my old car working again. I was there for two years then went off to college. The place looks pretty run down these days.

Hood Three - 90016
I didn't live in a black neighborhood again until five years later when I came back home to West Adams. Knuckleheads now populated the neighborhood. Ball scratching idiots nobody respected when we were kids. They didn't play sports. They had no mechanical or handy skills. They just smoked dope, acted tough, shoplifted, did B&Es and chased nasty girls. They evolved into gangsters. When young men like my friends and I left, everything went to shit. The little brothers and punks began to rule. ('hood trending towards ghetto, but still good houses). Looked ratty those days.

Hood Four - 90043
I got out as soon as I could, went to live with my ex-girlfriend on the edge of Inglewood in a duplex on a busy street. That didn't work out long. It was on the border of one of the worst blocks in the area called Hyde Park. Ick. Lots of Section 8 housing and crackheads roaming the streets, panhandling bums at the gas stations, steetwalkers and pimps at the McDonalds. But it was a very busy neighborhood at the intersection of Florence and Crenshaw. Lots of bus commuters, kids. Not quite a solid working class neighborhood but one on the verge of that. There was a big lumber yard nearby, a regional park, a little Jamaican grocer, a busy car wash. The McDonalds there, like two others on Crenshaw was owned by a black man who was pretty well known. (definitely ghetto adjacent)

Hood Five - 90016
I then moved in with my brother into another West Adams neighborhood. We lived in a very modest back house - which was basically a studio apartment. We got on each other's nerves sometimes, but I now had a good job, a new girlfriend and a serviceable sporty vehicle. We didn't interact much at all in the neighborhood. Our landlady was a quiet older Christian woman. The place felt quiet, definitely downscale, but not dirty. It was on the edge of what I call a burglar-bar neighborhood - where B&Es (breaking and entering) were so common that people put iron bars (ornamental as they might be) on their doors and windows. Unfortunately we didn't have those on the back house and the landlady's gardener(!) of all people had his 10 year old kid(!) crawl through our window. My brother busted them in the act and we we had to testify in court against him. ('hood accomodated to ghetto behavior)

All of this time, living in Los Angeles, most of my friends and associates were what we used to call 'buppies' - black urban professionals. Many of them came from the affluent neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills. So while most of us were not affluent, we enjoyed the same middle class culture, fashion, music and everything else. None of us were wannabe gangsters and music by Rick James was considered quite risque, but yeah we danced to it. I wrote about this social scene in People of the Dons.

I moved to the beach and in 1991 just before the Riots, I moved to Brooklyn. I wanted to live in the newly hype neighborhood of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee and other wealthy blacks were gaining a foothold, but I wound up in (still very nice) Prospect Heights. As I moved from Brooklyn to Boston and back to NYC., got married and moved to Atlanta, I didn't live in a majority black neighborhood until 1997 when I came back to California and lived in Altadena.

Burb One - 91001
Altadena is a super uniquely oddball neighborhood. The feel is like shabby gentility. 80 year old houses with old electric sockets, peeling paint, unkempt lawns and basketball hoops with no nets. The neighborhood grocer had old cash registers. It felt like a small town store somewhere in the middle of Texas. There were horses in the neighborhood and we'd see riders every week. The big public park had dirty foul mouth kids I liked to keep my kids away from, but a big hearted woman who ran the afterschool program. I befriended a young Nation of Islam man who would drop by occasionally. Jehovah's Witnesses were always trolling. But the police helicopter was trolling as well - around every Saturday night. Occasionally we heard gunshots. We had a swimming pool in the backyard - one day we found somebody's rooster had flown into the yard. The house next door was shrouded in tall bushes and was on a double lot behind an iron gate. It definitely looked like a haunted mansion. Fortunately the old man there would through the kid's balls back, eventually. This was the kind of neighborhood where the McDonalds runs out of french fries. Just crazy odball dysfunctions. When it was time we went to talk to the (young black) principal of the local elementary school, Edison. He told us that 40% of his students were foster children. We couldn't get over it. The private school was expensive and required parents to forbid their children from watching television (and probably eating meat). The parochial school had a total of about 25 students. We had to move.

Burb Two - 90745
From 2001 until last year, we have lived in upscale neighborhoods where rich people were not uncommon and black families were. Last year we moved to a majority black suburban community. I realized when we got here that I had not lived in a house with central air conditioning in 22 years. This place is a joy in pretty much every way. Even though we haven't gotten to know our neighbors very well everyone we do meet is cool. I never thought I would enjoy living in a gated community, although there was one at the top of the hill in Altadena I could not afford. Although this place isn't as upscale as View Park and Ladera Heights, it's easily nicer than Baldwin Hills. But that's Carson. It has always had a solidly black middle class suburban vibe. That means people drive a Lexus to the fish market. I didn't happen to watch 'Blacki-sh' on TV but that would describe this place, though there are almost equal numbers of Asians here. A lot of late model SUVs to be found here and retirees as well.

---

LA Riots: Myths & Stereotypes

l.a. riots myths and stereotypes
(from deep in the boohabian archives - spring 1997)
boohab - organic hiphop metaphysician

boohab - 07:42am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#6 of 185)
jesus christ. never have i seen such blatant revisionism. horowitz, you are seriously tripping! but you
know what? i forgive you because you are white and you didn't grow up in south central, so the only
access you have to the whole truth is through black folks like me who, on the whole don't care what you
think. you are so wrong it doesn't matter any longer if you ever get it right.

so despite all which has been said and truthful, people close to the facts understand that perhaps the
context will never stick. certainly after the fact of john woo's political descent, and riordan's ascent, the
political truth doesn't matter any more, so it is appropriate that your piece starts and ends with myths,
stereotypes and perceptions.

but just to give you the slightest clue, perhaps you should research back to those fateful days and ask
why people outside of los angeles rioted too.

further, as a matter of fact and record, kjlh 102.3 fm headquartered on crenshaw boulevard, right next
door to the angeles funeral home (an institution as distinctive as its name), played NO MUSIC. it was all
talk and call in for days. rap music indeed.

the only journalist closest to mainstream credibility i can give any credit for having any amount of context
on the subjects would be warren olney in his radio show 'which way la' in the aftermath.

boohab - 07:49am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#7 of 185)

the more i read that article the more i am amazed at how absolutely clueless the author is. i find it hard to
conceive what prompts him to flap around in the shallows of hearsay... i can't even find words which
describe how retarded his 'analysis' is. thank god he's on the web.

cause and effect. let us assume that this principle is universal, that it holds sway over all human beings
and begin from there...

---
boohab - 09:28pm May 1, 1997 PST (#41 of 185)

nobody is giving money to inner city schools. public high school education is being defunded, by what i
suspect are reactionary reasons. in california, the longstanding compromise has been to leave high schools
separate and unequal and attempt to take up the slack at the jr. college and state university level, where at
least there are state and federal funds available. that means, of course, affirmative action. now that
commitment is being dumped at the level it really matters because of all the rediculous hype over
berkeley. anyway...

horowitz, at least on charlie rose, doesn't appear to be a raving lunatic. at least now i understand what
stick he's shaking. and considering his enormous disenchantment with the black panthers, it is
understandable why his revulsion to the logic of violent insurgency infuses his rhetoric with such alarm.
still, i find his analysis flawed, and wonder who exactly he is talking to as regards the orientation of
african americans to the events of 5 years ago.

for example, as i talk about in the 'racial extermination' thread, there's no mention of the black church in
southern california, nor that of maldef, and left asian and black organizations in their response to the hype
about the uprising. what was clearly an outburst of rage has now been transformed into some grand
conspiracy in horowitz' description. i don't buy it.

i'm not entirely sure what anyone is supposed to learn about the events of 5 years ago. southern california
and the nation has failed to implement any serious policy related to the basic problem which was and
remains police abuse. there is no national watchdog and despite some efforts to implement community
policing, the public is not well prepared to act intelligently when such situations repeat, witness st.
petersberg.

if indeed the country is disintegrating into anti-government hysteria, there is no greater threat to civility
than distrust of police. anyone who recalls (or recalls reading about) events involving clashes of federal,
state and local authority regarding local police actions, should know what kind of mess this can lead to.
yet it is clear, in the wake of willie williams' dismissal that public confidence in the los angeles police
department is far from restored.

so what now?
---
boohab - 08:33pm May 3, 1997 PST (#44 of 185)

I was staring at that book just the other night in charlotte. well, that one and a dozen others. what i was
looking for specifically was something by john mcphee, but what section? over in the hype section was
cochran's book, radical son, the race card, fuhrman's book, and gates' book '13 ways to look at a black
man'. i read gates' dust cover and put it back. completely disgusted with everything surrounding oj, i can't
imagine what's left to say worth hearing besides chris rock's joke about if it were jerry seinfeld and the
only person who found the bloody glove just happened to be in the nation of islam... i ended up buying a
copy of the new yorker (with gates on black london - since i'll be over there this month) and gorbachev's
memoirs. i had picked up reginald lewis' 'why should white guys have all the fun' because it was
autographed by his widow and jett is in the news, but i decided to put it back.

at any rate, it would be interesting to hear angela davis dissected. as well it would be interesting to see
david horowitz deconstructed. now that i'm reviewing some history of actual marxism, it would be
interesting to see where these fellow travellers get off. as far as i've seen, all they do in black
communities is show up for king day parades and say "we're all the same". hmmm. let's try a thread shall
we?

---

boohab - 09:06am May 5, 1997 PST (#53 of 185)

whoa, slow down there pardner. my rage is my rage. i own it and i am responsible for it, it is not some
negotiable social anger to be farmed and framed.

what gives bell hooks, of all people, a special credibility is her unique ability to make clear the
distinctions. as soon as you got up to 'the killing rage of black women and men', bell steps in and lays
bare the differences in her critiques of 'she's gotta have it', for example. in that movie, men didn't see the
rape.

i'm going to crosspost some of my observations on black rage specifically, and i think that will illuminate
a bit more about the l.a. thing and the type of analysis bell hooks performs. overall, it is my belief that
'black rage' has become a commodity which too often substitutes for political action. that has a great deal
to do with the way non-blacks dismiss it (in the case of dh) and co-opt it (in the case of sa).

boohab - 09:51am May 5, 1997 PST (#54 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 27 Jul 1996 13:49:31

black rage is not a theory.

i'm not sure that it makes so much sense to explain it in any other terms than malcolm x's. 'whatever you
will do to me, just know that i will do the same to you'. considering what happens to black americans
ever day *not it theory* but in reality, it's a mutha to face. most white folks who have looked closely at
the situations many blacks find themselves often recoiled in shock. to a person, in my experience, it
comes out like 'man if they did shit like that to me...'. in the end, there is a profound respect for the many
black strategies used to displace or redirect that rage.

coming from that perspective, i respect that many folks are likely to respect the words and deeds of mlk.
but that is rarely the case. there is often a sense of resignation americans feel in confronting the facts that
justice is so often an impossibility - that oj will be virtually barbecued forever, yet the korean shopkeeper
videotaped shooting a black teenaged girl in cold blood received a suspended sentence and is forgotten by
the nation. white folks and blacks alike come to agree that black rage, given american society, is
inevitable. that is why white people live in white neighborhoods, stay away from downtown at night,
understand the fear of bernard goetz, get the message of willie horton and respond in all sorts of ways in
every aspect of american society in a predictable fashion to the images of danger associated with black
rage.

black rage becomes not only a self-fullfiling prophesy but a necessary component of american politics.
white folks accept their guilt and fear, as they realize their collective historical incompetence as the
political majority in addressing the injustices faced by blacks. they bow out. they accept the destruction
of cities and the perpetuation of tragedy. black folks do the same thing in their relationships to each other.
we abandon our brothers at the first sign of trouble despite what we know, better than anyone, about the
content of their individual characters, and we use our own successes and absence of (external) rage, as a
justification of our own evasions of responsibility. thus the enraged black man or woman has become a
staple symbol in everyone's rhetoric. but few of us are serious or busy addressing the fundamental
injustice.

---

boohab - 09:52am May 5, 1997 PST (#55 of 185)

rage is not hate.

rage is visceral reaction to a severe victimization when all else seems hopeless. rage is the explosive last
lashing out of a man facing death with his back to the wall. it is not sustained or calculated like hate. one
speaks of acts of rage, not strategies of rage or ideologies of rage. you rage to get shit out of your system
and scare folks into not pushing you any more. it's a natural thang.

what's unnatural is that there is black rage. that a society is so predisposed to pushing black folks to the
limit that their rage is almost predictable.

although i never do, well - i haven't in memory - i know very well what this rage looks like and how to
use it. the expression of black rage as a dramatic device is (over)used by black and white artists alike. it's
part of the american lexicon. but that is very distinct from the real thing, as different as individual rap
artists are in rhyme character in a recording studio are from real killers behind bars. the expression is
romanticized in typical american fashion (i can think of no better example than the western movie, and in
particular the role of the writer in clint eastwood's 'unforgiven').

also, black folks front. that's not rage, that's frontin'. and i know one of you stupid punk ass white boys is
going to want me to please explain frontin'. don't even try it. you know what i'm sayin? just be glad i
didn't straight wax your sorry ass from the jump. cause you wouldn't be standing there with that stupid
look on your face gettin all huffy. you'd be pickin your ass up off the floor. oh oh oh now you know
what i'm saying. damn skippy. if your shit was correct i wouldn't have to go there. lame ass mu'fukas.

(i need to invent a new smiley to cap off that last paragraph. it is the following expression: i am tilting my
head to the side, rolling my eyes up and smacking my teeth and straight walking away - kind of like what
dennis johnson did to chris collingsworth last night)

boohab - 09:56am May 5, 1997 PST (#56 of 185)

articulation of rage is a valuable skill.

so often black folks feel it, but don't know exactly where it is coming from or what to do about it. they
equate that existential anger, confusion and the resulting frustration as an essential characteristic of being
black. but it is not. while it is certainly part of the black experience, the permanancy of which white
supremacy replicates generation after generation, it is not the defining core of who we are.

every generation (and ethnicity) of african americans finds different ways to articulate and diffuse or
redirect this rage.

boohab - 10:02am May 5, 1997 PST (#57 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 03 Aug 1996

the articulation of black rage or any other black sentiment or thought serves as a critical discourse on
american society.

however, as many exemplify in their admittedly undernourished comprehension of articulate black voices,
most of america does not pay attention. there are certainly *reasons* behind white fear, defensiveness
and reactions to perceived threats posed by blacks. but they are not good reasons, and they must be
challenged. 'consistent patterns of thought' within black communities are either well articulated or they
are not. those which are well articulated have names as do those who represent them. if there are issues
to be discussed and contention about the validity of claims, then there are real ways to deal with them
which are not grounded in fear, defensiveness and reactionary rhetoric. to direct such discussions are the
reasons black thinkers of all types write histories, teach classes, create novels, compose music, sculpt,
rhyme, dance, preach, witness and otherwise work to expose their thoughts.

yet despite this fact, americans continue to beleive in or be unduly influenced by the racist hype, often
beleiving themselves to be as well-informed as anyone. because of this there is practically an industry
dedicated to knocking ignorant people upside the head. i take up the cudgel of the race man from time to
time, but this time i'll defer to farai: http://www.popandpolitics.com

certainly ms. chideya is not the first, nor will she be the last to bring clarity to issues of racial prejudice,
oppression and injustice. there are today and have been so many who have directly transformed rage into
productive lessons without pandering themselves as victims. they don't expect nor ask for pity; these are
teachers. and their lessons stand in defiance of fear. too often we extract soundbites out of these lessons
believing there are golden platitudes that stand for all time in any varitey of circumstances. but how many
times have americans consoled themselves with the pathetic plea of a brain damaged man beaten into
submission by brutal police officers? (if there was ever any question of whether or not rodney g. king
was willing to surrender, consider those words). there is no excuse for americans to pretend to
understand the lessons of the past without any consistent discipline and evaluation. racism invariably
leads to injustice.

like disease, racism needs to be fought with thoroughness and vigor every generation. yet unlike disease,
if you harbor racist ideas wittingly or not, it *is* your fault and your responsibility whether or not we live
in a democracy, everyone's attitude should bear scrutiny on the issues.

---

boohab - 10:07am May 5, 1997 PST (#58 of 185)

black rage is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

there is a vested interest in american politics to use black rage. white political majorities are particularly
attuned to black rage, whether that is constructive or raw rage. in short, black rage is a legitimated form
of political protest. a lot of blacks recognize this and make use of it. if i sit here in this forum and
complain that black folks get harrassed unnecesarily by the same police that should be protecting them,
that does not carry the same weight in american society as the artist ice cube writing the rap 'fuck the
police' and having 17 year olds pump the beat in the car next to you with an evil stare on their face.

when black representation on the city council of los angeles is resisted for decades, and there is no forum
given for the tyrrany of the darryl gates administration, that doesn't get the same attention as video of
blacks burning police cars. often enough, there are no acceptable political compromises offered by a
polity which ignores the facts of black life. consider how it is that 'law and order' has become a 'white
man's burden' in our society.

such political intransigence is often enough reasonable provocation for black folks to take rage to the
streets. the spirit of compromise - cant we all just get along - is not proactive. it comes after the violent
fact. clinton has demonstrated this in his dismissal of sista souljah, for example.

boohab - 10:09am May 5, 1997 PST (#59 of 185)

(end of blasts from the past)
---

boohab - 05:54am May 6, 1997 PST (#70 of 185)

my rage is what i say it is. but that doesn't stop the patronizing bullshit. but i don't need to go there. like i
said before, you can be so wrong for so long as to be irrelevent.

america can survive the burning of its cities and not change its mind. that is the one lesson i have learned
above all. myths and stereotypes are what count.

the inevitable destination of dh and iv's condescention can be found here, as they demonstrate the snide,
callous, intransigent politics which creates police brutality in the first place and defends the misapplication
of justice as applied to black folks in particular. it is clear, that after an exhaustive and patient explanation
of the human element of rage in the context of los angeles 1992, both were content to reduce complexity
to the snappy reiterations of the most ignorant and prejudiced comments about the tragedy.

no doubt, they will recount to me 'the facts'.

"The tones of lies are vulgar facts but they are not noble sounds. But there is another truth and that
truth passes through time in the very same way that an irresistible force passes through an immovable
object. That's what I said: this truth is so irresistible that it passes through immovable objects. It is the
truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the
possibilities of the human spirit."

-- Stanley Crouch

---

boohab - 10:27am May 6, 1997 PST (#75 of 185)

you are being silly ilya. maxine waters *is* a duly elected leader of south central los angeles. is this her
call, or does it matter to you what she thinks?

take a look at these photos, (the essay is a bit obscure but it's what i was thinking at the time). who was
out for revenge?
---

boohab - 10:52am May 6, 1997 PST (#76 of 185)

I don't think it's beneficial to think about the accuracy of the aim of the looting, torching, shooting ragers.
those who riot best, riot. those who lobby best, lobby.

what is important is to recognize the disposition of political forces in the aftermath. to consign this matter
to the police as merely a crime wave is to foreclose the possibility of a transformative politics of the
ragers. yet this was the status quo of the racist stereotypes against south central and east los angeles, and
this is precisely what horowitz has done. such is the justification for the lapd being one of the most
advanced paramilitary police forces in the world. is there any reason to believe horowitz' dismissive
majoritarian position might be moderated by intelligent or (heaven forbid) compassionate consideration?
well, not if you are preoccupied with maoist history and the love affairs of opera singers.

so instead of engaging (which would probably have been very easy, considering salon's recent article on
maxine) on a level of political negotiation, we witness crude and egregious examples as par for the course.

this does not bode well for the future expansion of democratic politics in the united states. there are
generations and geographies for which adequate political representation has never been achieved. where
the practice of voting and speaking out is the experience of defeat after defeat. where human rights issues
become 'special interest' issues. where people don't expect suspects to be brought to trial - merely shot in
the street. where people are suspects for just being alive.

my experience tells me that the fire next time will be put out by next wednesday. american society and
politics absolutely crushes such political dissent even before it gets the opportunity to become political.
and as long as americans can distance themselves, with haughty indifference from the truths of these
matters, hiding behind the thin blue line of police force rather than engaging in constructive political
engagement, then as malcolm x said "as long as those ingredients, explosive ingredients exist, you are
going to have the potential for explosion on your hands".
---
boohab - 08:35pm May 6, 1997 PST (#84 of 185)

speaking of salvadorans, i forgot to mention that there was an improper degree of cooperation between
the lapd and the ins in the aftermath. having arrested a large number of latinos and holding them under
emergency rules, ins records were searched and individual suspects turned over to that agency for
deportation.

korean liquor stores were a particular target primarily because of the murder of latasha harlins. her killer,
the owner was caught on tape shooting harlins point blank for allegedly stealing a quart of orange juice.
she was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. as i recall, no homes burned except one
apartment building adjacent to a strip mall. lots of pawn shops were burned.

I wrote "How will theory transform the monsters created in our nightmares by our abusive white
fathers?". i was thinking of several things, primarily the dualism gerald early calls the 'lure and loathing' of
american society. white cops protect white folks in white neighborhoods like beverly hills and like
hawthorne, meaning they keep you out, by any means necessary, but you are supposed to respect the
law - you hate the powerful society that you wish to be a part of because it is so eager to use violence
against you. so when you are successful, do you replicate that abuse? does the son kill the father and set
himself up to be killed, or does the son live forever in his father's shadow?
---

boohab - 07:23am May 9, 1997 PST (#125 of 185)

120 posts until slavery and the founding fathers. actually i thought nazis would be first. before we start
talking about the caucasian wars, the long march and the battle of hastings why don't we look a bit closer
at our own politics today?

the mike davis analysis is a very good piece. it clarifies for me some things that i knew but never looked
at very closely. (i studiously avoided all of the books coming out on the subject back then - the level of
ignorance was so astounding that i couldn't stomach it.) davis' ability to talk with gangbangers and his
understanding about their longstanding war with the lapd is unrivaled. although i didn't read leon bing's
bio on kody scott, i did read his own book, which i take to be more accurate.

I have some 30 or so photographs of the destruction which i'll scan in and add as a special addendum to
boohab's factotum.

Donna Dear - 07:47am May 9, 1997 PST (#126 of 185)
"A modest woman; with much to be modest about"

Boo....ya got a link to the Davis stuff?

boohab - 08:03am May 9, 1997 PST (#127 of 185)

http://www.exuberance.com/rut/miked/burning.html

david horowitz - 08:44am May 9, 1997 PST (#128 of 185)
Author, Radical Son

Sherman: Yes, the movie.

boohab: How come lefties like Davis always line up on the side of the criminals?

boohab - 09:19am May 9, 1997 PST (#129 of 185)

that depends on your definition of 'senseless death'.

if one is capable of compassion for the murdered, then one can measure ones tolerance for all murders
on the same scale. so justice denied to crips and bloods hurts just as much as justice denied anyone else.
davis lays bare the symbiotic relationships between local politicians, fear of crime, lapd funding and gang
warefare. what emerges is a picture of gang violence which is allowed to fester because it serves police
interests in obtaining paramilitary equipment, political interests in demonizing 'south central' as one big
sinkhole (which actually is one of america's largest and most ethnically diverse urban areas), and gang
interests in bloody revenge. despite the large number of gangs and gang members in los angeles, only a
small minority are involved in drug dealing and the murderous crime associated with that - but that
understanding is impossible to come by through conventional means. so there is essentially an ongoing
war between the lapd and gangs and it's the gangbangers who get shot on the street, not the cops.

the net result is that criminal suspects are systematically denied due process because of the agressive
tactics of the lapd. the courts try to compensate for the cops zealousness, then the cops try to
compensate for the courts.

on the other hand, davis illustrates clearly how operation hammer and gang sweeps affected everyone in
that geographic area. you recruit cops from all around the country, send them to the academy and then to
work an internship at the county lockup, then out into south central with orders to sweep, and you spend
millions of tax dollars with overtime for mass arrests with 2% criminal booking rates. nevertheless you
add thousands of names to a computerized arrest record system, available online to every patrol car -
which effects police thinking. they don't know, or care to know, the difference between criminals and
ordinary teenagers. to them, all youth of color in south central los angeles are potential gangbangers, thus
potential enemies.

also remember that the great myth of los angeles policing is that the area covered by the lapd is far too
great for community policing. the reason los angeles has helicopter patrols is an outgrowth of that old
idea. los angeles does not have community precincts - they have these large bunker buildings which spit
out squad cars. all the busses in the rtd have numbers painted on their tops, as do squad cars, and certain
public buildings so that la can be monitored from the air. cops don't get out of their cars unless they
*must*. they don't fight crime on the ground, they cruise around 'hostile territory'.

when pcp was (for a short time) the new hot drug on the streets, the lapd testified about its ability to give
superhuman strength to suspects. that's when they started with their more agressive baton techniques and
chokeholds. it was assumed that anyone resisting arrest was a potential pcp addict, and a great deal of
force was used. that whole technique we saw used on rodney king came from that period. the chokehold
got the lapd in more trouble than they could handle. so they got stun guns, then they got 9mm pistols,
shotguns and they even got tanks. well, they always had shotguns.

anyway, the lapd has been very successful in publicizing certain gang activity, bringing up the racial
spectre and in cooperation with local polticians, securing for themselves more and more paramilitary role.
the lapd's anti-terrorist and intelligence divisions are probably the most advanced in the world, and that's
no exaggeration.

the great irony is that citizens in los angeles, especially in south central, do not feel protected or served by
the police. everyone (these days) buys weapons for self-protection.
---
boohab - 03:13pm May 9, 1997 PST (#140 of 185)

So defending police officers somehow means that you are protecting
"the owning class"? Whatever that means. So many people seem to wish
to excuse criminal behavior due to the us vs. the cops mentality.
Does it suprise you that the cops will start to have the same
attitude? Americans today view our police as corrupt and violent
when the truth is that the vast majority are neither. You want to
see violent cops go to Germany. See what the Polizei constitute as
police brutality.

the vast majority of police departments in america don't have a credibility problem, and the vast majority
of police chiefs in california said darryl gates should have stepped down a long time before he did.

the vast majority of police officers in the foothill division which was that of koon, powell, wind and
brisneo also failed to cooperate with the fbi investigation of systemwide corruption. nor was there any
legal recourse for non-cooperation.

the vast majority of african-americans are unconcerned with police abuse and bruality in germany
because they know what it is like firsthand.

you seem to forget that african-americans specifically haved lived through an era when police exclusively
protected white people. so as much mouthing off as people do about 'defending criminal behaviour', this
country still writes off huge sections of its population as criminals, and not long ago that included any
black folks who asserted themselves in any dispute with whites. someday there will come a point in
american society when blacks, clearly and still america's most despised (except perhaps for gay blacks),
will be able to assert themselves in any situation without having to explain and carry their constitutional
and civil rights on their sleeves. but while we still do and are smarting from abuses, you'll hear a lot
whose rights are being stepped on, and that includes criminal suspects - because that's who we are.

---

johnny cochran is wealthy. why? because he has been successful in winning civil judgements against the
los angeles police department. the taxpayers as a political class, changed the law in order to limit the
liability of the lapd on several occasions.

the first example was after the successful prosecution of wrongful death and criminal negligence in the
case of (whatshisname) who was hung in the signal hill jail by police -(they claimed it was a suicide, and
were busted by a coroner's inquest). it limited the liability of police officers and jailers in civil and criminal
matters as regards the safety of suspects in custody. the second came on the heels of the successful jury
award of about 6 million dollars to activist michael zinzun, who lost an eye during his arrest and lockup. it
put a cieling on the amount juries could award.

it is perhaps not widely known that the legal defense fund for officer stacey koon amounted to about 13
million dollars. i beleive rodney king's award was about 4 million. these figures may be wrong, i am surer
about koon's defense fund, and i am certain he got more than rodney king.

so these are concrete examples of defenses of the police, specifically when they are at their worst. why?
because people like johnny cochran would bankrupt the city..

--

boohab - 09:17am May 10, 1997 PST (#146 of 185)

and even the abolition of slavery did not reject the presumed inferiority of africans... anyway.

neither the aclu or any other 'liberal' watchdog group has the political knowhow to work gang
intervention. the fact of the matter is that the few people IN the system which are successful at
reconstructing gang members get no respect or funds from either liberals or conservatives.

I think it is reasonable that juveniles of high school age convicted in the 'big four' violent crimes should be
tried as adults, but i don't think it is reasonable that special abridgements of due process are called for in
any case. just keep the police in their place.

but the fact is that before we can deal with violent crime, we have to undo the huge mistakes made in the
war on drugs and mandatory sentencing. i challenge anyone to convince me that prisons are not tough
enough, but they are wasted on the wrong people. the burden of prison overpopulation lies almost
exclusively with conservative neo puritanical prohibitions. violent criminals get out because crackheads go
in.

and yes it is a shame that the united states jails more people per capita than any other nation. the aclu is
right to fight against that. then again, the political majority seems to desire a police state.
--

 

The Dutzburger Tribute

This is my family. Dutz is my sister.

TC Remembered

TC was, in my childhood, one of the best friends I ever had. I found him again this morning, 45 years later. 

He was the first kid and only kid in my neighborhood where I could sleep over. He lived one house from the corner whereas we lived in the middle of the block. I can remember that sleepover when we decided, like boys will do, to count all of our scars and scabs and tell the stories of how we got them. Both of us had over 100. TC was a smart kid, polite and trustworthy. In the old neighborhood, the combination was rare. Darrell was trustworthy, but his family was dodgy so he'd cover for them when they didn't deserve it. Vincent was polite but his mother never let him come outside. The Myers boys were athletic and smart, but full of tricks. Basically they put us smaller boys up to gladiator fights for their own amusement. Lonzo was polite and trustworthy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. 

There were other kids who made decent enough friends, Teedee aka August Lewis whose dad had a real boxing ring in his backyard and whose fine sisters were also named after months of the year. But he lived a mile away on Blackwelder. Ebon Grant was the Huckleberry Finn to my Tom Sawyer, but was about as two-faced as anyone I ever met. Winky aka Kevin Brooks was a fun kid with big curls in his hair, but we fell out after a big fight. His family fell on hard times. TC and I were closest in age, temperament and spirit. So one day we decided, momentously to form a club.

It was probably TC's idea to form the Travermike. The three of us, he the leader, Verdis the muscle and me the brains, planned to rule the neighborhood with a benevolent triumvirate dictatorship. It formed enough of a bond, short-lived as it was, to keep our neighborhood gang free in the days when Pirus and Crips roamed the blocks and alleys challenging everyone they encountered. The Travermike was dedicated to fair play. In a neighborhood with 50 kids, it was a big deal. Over at Virginia Road School, the local elementary, TC and I stood a chance of becoming kings of the school in the sixth grade. I was already the reticent brainiac, but way too shy amongst kids who cursed up storms and picked fights. I had courage, but not nerve. TC had nerve. 

Then he collapsed. Something went wrong in TC's family and I couldn't understand it. It had something to do with him hating his father or his step-father. Step fathers and half-brothers were nothing I could understand at the age of 9, smart as I supposedly was. I didn't understand how kids could have different last names than their parents. I didn't understand how mothers and fathers didn't live together in the same house. It was a complete mystery. I remember him stifling tears in the front yard of the school as he told me this story, mad at me for not understanding. Before I knew it, he was moving out of the neighborhood far south over near Sportsman's Park. In the days when you had permission to ride bikes with your friends 15 minutes in any direction, Sportsman's Park was a world away. 

I never met his father but his mother was a slim, pretty and disciplined woman. Think Diahanne Carroll or Nichelle Nichols. At some point I got a chance to visit my old friend and have another sleepover. This one wasn't as fun as the other. I remember his mother chastising me for not brushing my teeth before I went to bed, and then telling me I was sleeping improperly, mumbling something about how my parents must be so ignorant. My parents were the strictest of any I knew, but not for TC's mom. I felt sorry for TC, coming up all alone with that woman and no dad, living way down near Sportsman's Park under the buzzing high tension lines. After that night, I never saw him again. 

The effect on me was deep. Not only did the Travermike end, though the idea of fair play survived, but I felt that I would never have a best friend again. It fell to the two-faced Ebon who taught me how to play poker with daily rule changes, who dissed me publicly at school but traded Sizzlers with me after school. He wasn't just a friend, he was a boss, and also Third King of Virginia Road behind Mark Vincent and Mark Bavis, both certainly prisoners or dead now. I heard Ebon's DD-214 wasn't very commendable. I have had occasion to thank the steeliness of the dastardly knuckleheads of my youth for toughening me up, but I have also long regretted not socking at least one of them in the nose as I knew they deserved. Very deep, psychologically deep in me is the knowledge that I will never trust anyone to be my best friend again because TC left the neighborhood. 

I had skipped two grades but had to stay in sixth grade two years because it would have been considered child abuse to send a kid my age and size to the local junior high.  A year later I took the bus across town to attend Holy Name of Jesus school and by then my alienation was complete. I kept my head and took advantage of my second chance to make first impressions. Did well academically but wasn't a real Catholic, survived and went even further afield to summer school in posh Pacific Palisades, and finally on to Loyola High where I met Richard Peete who was polite, smart and trustworthy. Except Richard was nowhere near as scrappy and feral as I could be when pressed. So I doubt that was ever as true a friend as I might have been to him, the man who introduced me to the literature behind Star Trek. I suppose if I were George Orwell or Christopher Hitchens I might go on in this vein of old schoolboy memories for several in-depth chapters, but that is not the point of this material which must suffice until I reorganize it in my retirement (provided the clouds of Typepad remain intact).

When I think about what is required to know what makes me tick, complex monster that I have become, it always seems necessary in my inventory of qualifications, that one must have known what it was like to grow up in my neighborhood. It is something I have felt was never done right, and if there is any hope of it, then that job falls to either myself, Paul Beatty, Wanda Coleman or Jervey Tervalon. I have possessed and cultivated a surplus of disgust for other auteurs who might have done it right but went the Hollywood route which also illuminates the specifics. I lament the failures of that portrayal to materialize although it can certainly be cobbled together by knowing the works of us four, but I more greatly lament those of us who fell silently. Men and women on my Facebook friends list who remain steady reminders of who we were and what we went through, Gerald Brown chiefly among them, but also the late lamented Patrick Reese and the lost but unforgettable Steve Butler. What it is worth to have known such men and such women as the Brown sisters and the Raymond sisters and the Andrews sisters goes beyond any one man's ability to tell, and yet we are all the poorer for not knowing such lives as they were lived in the cauldron my my generations coming of age in America.  I am an alien familiar with my old world, watching its denizens die, all of us too busy living to be bothered to spare a Friday evening drink together. We were a black community once. I'll never quite know if I am a defector or a survivor. Perhaps I don't even care enough to know. It's hard to say. Ernest is dead. Scoobie is dead. We use death as an excuse to make for unbridgeable gulfs between us. Between myself, my actual neighborhood, and the myths of South Central there are thousands of stories that can never be told. Who has time to stop living in order to recreate the past? Who can even answer such questions?

--

Work interrupts memories, as does life. I have to arrange which lunch date to take. The Spousal Unit is putting together some perfect planning for my birthday celebration happy hour thing for this weekend. I had a good cry about all this. And now it's time to close. I'm out of the zone.

There are a few other historical and autobiographical slices here about The Old Hood at Cobb that I hadn't noticed before, or forgot that I wrote. One is called Wayback Machine, and TC found it. Surprising details; glad I remembered when I did. There was the legendary mess over Tookie, founder of the Crips. I should make sure all of these get into the Crenshaw and/or Local Deeds categories to make them easier to find in the future. I have nothing witty left to say. I am actually emotionally exhausted. 

TC is back. Just wow. That's how I remembered him. I wonder who the man is. 

Overpoliced: Remembering the LA Riots

These days I am thinking back through several evolutions of my writing and going back some 20 odd years. As I present materials here, I am doing so in collaboration with an oral history project sponsored by Polytechnic School in Pasadena. I have presented them the following essay as well as some background materials from my old websites. There are three contexts of interest in looking back.

• Firstly is my own evolution as a writer in expressing more directly what I think and feel and my commitment to clarity rather than cleverness. It was my desire to be artistic and clever that obscured the few things I had worth saying back in the day.
• Second is expansion upon the idea that Americans are drawn to the political aspects of social control in much of their politics. I used to speak often of the 'political majority' with the direct implication that they wished to use law and order issues to clumsily exert control through police on political minorities, including and especially me. I still find politics overburdened with social traffic and it is still my number one issue when it comes to politics, but I appreciate more the dissonance inherent and the lack of continuity in governance.
• Third is my satisfaction with my own appreciation for and explanation of black rage in American politics. I wonder if it will remain as front of mind and captivating in these coming post-Obama years. I suspect that as soon as the King is out of office, these will become the 'good old days' of racial amity. But it's certainly not as called for these days as it was when America lived in fear of NWA, Public Enemy, Khalid Muhammad and Spike Lee.

To the essay:

In the days after the beating of Rodney King, I thought a lot about whether or not it was reasonable to distrust police. I myself had never feared police, but I did get a lot of police attention. Having lived all over Los Angeles County, I had a variety of experiences with cops. One day, long from LA I counted the number and it was 17. 16 traffic stops and detentions and one arrest, for a traffic warrant on a car I no longer drove. 2 citations, maybe 3. I was part of a captive population, a population driven to fear gangs and rap. I was caught up in the crosswinds.

There have been many times since that I have tried to make something out of all that because it's something many people want to hear. But the truth of it all is very simple. None of that truly hurt me.

Nevertheless while I still lived in Los Angeles, I couldn't do nothing. And so I did what I thought I should, which was to take my weekends up driving around and searching for police brutality. I had never been struck by an officer, but surely somebody had. I had never been cursed by an officer, but surely somebody had. I have seen officers behaving rudely and in one case my girlfriend and I had our parking space stolen by an off duty cop. She told me that he threatened her after the fact, and although I never saw it myself, I supported her testimony in court. I hear he was severely reprimanded. And yet I have never been a victim. I have never been frightened. I have been unsure. I have been angry. I have even been disgusted. I have never been hurt. But I wanted to find somebody who had, and so I searched. I thought it would be an easy search because I was convinced we were over-policed.

I searched up and down Crenshaw Boulevard. I searched Inglewood. I searched Leimert Park. I followed the sirens in my BMW. I followed them with my videocamera, because surely I had seen the black youth cuffed on the curb. That happened all the time, right? But when I looked I didn't find what I was searching for. I arrived at car accidents minutes after the fact. I arrived at fires. After having given up far too many weekend afternoons looking for trouble and finding none, I found myself in Mar Vista one day. I followed yet another squad car and stumbled onto a bonanza. At least 6 cars were just behind Venice High School. It was a charity basketball game. The cops weren't giving bruises, they were giving prizes. And so I stopped searching.

But everyone was still angry. Everyone could recite the names by heart. Latasha Harlins got no justice. Rodney King got no justice. Michael Zinzun lost an eye. We all still yelled about Ron Settles. We all knew about Don Jackson and the plate glass window. We lived in a time of loud talk and misunderstanding. Ahh when do we not? And we all had plenty to say. But I was a writer, probably not a very good one, as I look back in retrospect, but not a bad one either. I was a guerrilla poet. A YouTuber before the days of YouTube trying to get my footage on community TV. My words from those days still evoke the world of those days. They expressed the searching for meaning in the anger and frustration. They expressed the desire for truth in a sea of uncertainty. They sought the head bobs of recognition and the head shakes of sadness. But what was the end?

My last chance for romance was a date to the Umbrellas installation by Christo. It never happened. I decided not to care. For these and other personal and economic reasons, I decided to leave Los Angeles. When I left it, just after my 30th birthday, LA seemed destined in every way to end up as corrupt and dysfunctional as the film 'Strange Days'. My girlfriend at the time met Angela Bassett on the set and they discussed and debated the ending of the film, a film that was about a desperate, corrupt city heading for self-destruction amidst the doomsaying rap prophets of rage at the end of the millennium. So I got sick and tired of Los Angeles and was glad to be rid of the place. I found in New York, a very different kind of view of what happened in my hometown. It was both refreshing and tiresome to hear a completely new kind of misinformation and distance from the seething on the ground in LA. Still, I hated Los Angeles. I couldn't take it any longer.

I continued my writing, determined to keep my real experiences alive. I was part of that mob of disappointment, but I was articulate in a different dimension. I would be heard wherever. New York, now. I would continue with my poetry and my raps and my novel in the East.

The night of the riots found me in my Brooklyn apartment waking up to the news. It was late Thursday evening when I heard about the verdicts. I'm glad I wasn't in Los Angeles, but I felt as though I had a strange kind of brotherhood with the place. I expected that brotherhood to show up in the streets of Brooklyn where they had their own explosions about Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum, whom I didn't care about. So when I went outdoors to exerpeince that street, the street was silent. I walked alone at midnight in Brooklyn, communing with no one. The silence was absurd. Brooklyn cared about Brooklyn, not Los Angeles.

Yet the following day, all of us professionals in Midtown Manhattan were excused to go home early. People who wanted to riot were getting up their nerve, and so the message went out for us to head for the hills. So I did, and I then immediately returned in my street gear and found myself in Times Square. Here was my chance to make myself known - LA is my hometown I said. I was having a whirlwind of associative thoughts in my own head, and I wanted to say what I wanted to say, but the emotion of the day was to be rage. I was no prophet of rage, but I did what I could to rock the boulevard. To my right, on stage at Times Square was the legendary lawyer William Kunstler. Mine was the last speech, and so we departed southbound to Thompkins Square Park. Whose Streets? Our Streets!

I mocked the people who didn't care and I found it ironically delicious that they were now caught up in our crosswinds. They now had to fear our self-righteous condescension instead of the other way around for once. But it wasn't truly rewarding. I ended up corralled by New York's finest who had determined that we wouldn't reach the symbolic ground zero of Thompkins Square, whose radical history I couldn't get a straight answer about weeks afterwards.

But I got no satisfaction. My dense evocative prose collapsed under its own overburdened symbolism. It was atrocious writing that could only make sense to people who shared all of my insights. But I never had an audience to unpack all that weight, to go through it piece by piece and put the right emphasis on the right parts. I learned at long last to put all that in perspective, and I am grateful for the pain and passion I put into that part of my life. In the final measure I have had meaning and richness not only from family and career, but from the life of a writer making sense of himself and his times.

The LA Riots gave us all an opportunity to find out what goes wrong when people fail to trust their democratic institutions. We fall back to our tribes, tribes who cannot support us in the end, like political writing that tries to tie everything of significance to one or two events in history. Analogies always fail. Nothing can ever be summarized. There is not enough text in the world to contain a single soul, so no words here or anywhere can truthfully say what it fully means to the survivors of the dead. They will just be names, and do we know them? No, we don't.

My father spent hours taking photos of the ruins. I got sick of looking at them and pulled them out of my photo album. All the links on my Los Angeles Riot Research Page have gone dead, and only a few scanned pictures remain. Everything has been hacked and repacked, and all that remain are ghosts and echoes.

I have become the man who understands what I didn't as the young man blowing at his own sails thinking I was powering my own ship forward. I can read the crosswinds now and I am relaxed on a friendly shore. I understand our responsibilities better. I recognize the time it takes to capture an idea for what it is alone without pulling in an entire symbolic universe. So I am happy to stand and talk about what I believed and why, what I learned and how, and what I now know and what that means. We are changed.

Today, I think the most important lesson to be learned is similar to what I thought it was then. We are over-policed. We over police ourselves and we don't let go of old ideas and old bad behaviors. We think that everything and everyone can be corrected and thus must be corrected. We pretend to want every kind of justice at all times, but in fact none of us can stand the scrutiny. And sometimes what we need most of all, when we think we can join a brotherhood of righteous anger and contempt just around the corner, is a perfectly silent night. 

 

Illogical Hateration for the Other King

This weekend I went cruising through the old 'hood looking for people who have forgotten me and I have forgotten. This time, for the first time in a while, I felt that my hooptie was a bit too shabby to show off. But I was feeling very good anyway. My old street looks small, but maybe that's because more people have cars parked on it. I suppose that's a good thing. 

I spent the most time at Rancho Cienega Park. Sometimes we called it Rancho, but most of the time we called it Dorsey Pool. l spent a lot of time reminiscing about the good times we had there and most significantly about the great moment I had remembering something in particular about the pool. I have several fond memories of the place, but I just want to go into one which was about the lifeguard. I will never remember his name, but he was one of the first young adults I met in the neighborhood that had visions beyond. I remember one time that he walked a bunch of us over to Thrifty and bought us all triple cones, and it was no problem for him. He was nice, he was cool, he was smart. But most of all, he understood jazz. So he would play stuff like (I presume) Roy Ayers at the pool instead of the normal stuff. But there was one particular song that he played that I loved. I remembered the intro for many years afterward but never knew the song. Like the beginning of Flashlight or Strawberry Letter 23 there was that palpable excitement. It couldn't less than 25 years later when I discovered that the song was by Herbie Hancock, a version of Watermelon Man, now as then one of my all time favorite Jazz Fusion songs. But I'll always remember The Lifeguard at Dorsey Pool.

But I don't have any similar memories, nor am I inclined to consider many about the person of Celes King III who died at the age of 73 in 2006 - give or take. I did know that he occupied this building on Santa Barbara and then King Boulevard right next to a police station, and like many other mysterious men and women of color was said to be one of the great leaders of Black America by such publications as Ebony Magazine. He was a bailbondsman and from that came his fortune.

Celes King III was many other good things, but from my point of view no great thing. If I knew the name of The Lifeguard I would name Dorsey Pool after him, but as it stands it has been named after Celes King. Somewhere in the annals of the meetings of the bureacrats of the 10th District there is the glorified set of whereas clauses that show why above all other men in history that pool should be named after Celes King. Such words will never be emotionally compelling to me. I just won't be able to get over the fact that he made money as part of the "Prison Industrial Complex". 

I know he was CORE. I know he helped a lot of people. In fact, I think he was a Republican too. I have that vague feeling that I wrote about him somewhere back in the mists of time. But Google doesn't remember and there is no Wikipedia about the man, so I speak my ill and that's what we get. 

The Rancho Cienega Pool was by far, the most beautiful building in my neighborhood. It cost a quarter to swim there when I was a kid and 50 cents if you were over 18. Now kids under 18 swim free and adults cost 2.50. There used to be three panels in the roof that could retract and let the sun directly in, but that mechanism has been broken for decades. And oh by the way right next door are the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts at which Venus and Serena spent a lot of community time doing clinics, or so I'm told. So King is in good company. One day, they may restore the pool to its former glory. I hope so, and maybe King's good name might aid in that restoration. But I tell you what. I hope I get to be that big a millionaire first, then they could rename it after me. 

On the Necessity of Knuckleheads

(from the archives July 2004 )

You know, I gotta admit when I am wrong, and I think I've been caught in something of a dilemma. That being the case, I tend to think the subject is exhausted. I keep torquing the nut until it doesn't move, then I back up off it a half-turn. And so I have to talk about it.

Spence, whom I salute again, mentions the following:

It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.

There's talk, now and again, about how many black middle class parents feel the necessity of sending their kids to live with their grandparents down South for the summer, or to stay with their ghetto cousins for a spell. Assuming these parents aren't complete idiots there is a reason I could agree with although I'd probably try to accomplish it a different way. That reason is to toughen up their otherwise dainty suburban offspring.

I know my kids ain't black. And when it comes to their adulthood, they won't need to be. They're brown - like the zillions in Africa, India and South and Central America. That's a good enough sample, and it's only skin color. They can't be black like me because my blackness was born of the times, not an essential, inescapable box, but a response to a condition. But so much of who I am is locked into that alternatively golden and grim experience. I wish I could teach them things I learned the way I learned them. I cannot send my kids back to the neighborhood I grew up in, but I understand why somebody might want to.

In the three-bedroom house I was raised in, we had Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Rubella, Impetigo and Roaches. Every one of us five kids who bunked there survived them all and most of us, excepting my sister and I, grew taller than six foot two. In my neighborhood school, "Meet me after class" was most likely followed by "so I can kick your ass". I've played bicycle chicken with the Ice Cream Truck and been chased by more stray dogs and gangbangers than I care to think about. My sister swore to me last week that we used to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I don't know about that but we did make zip lines from the transformer level of power poles and hogtie each other for fun. I've talked about all kinds of ghetto games from suicide to slapboxing to stomp - but I never really wrote about 'Hide & Go Get It'. Use your imagination.

One of the reasons I don't back down about talking about my Black Nationalist roots is because, like my neighborhood, all that shit made me tough. And yes it was shit. You can't get that just by reading Ulysses. You get it from surviving the risk and the danger. Perhaps the Baby Boom was the lone exception in the struggles of life, and perhaps that cannot be compensated. Perhaps some folks feel the need to run with bulls in Pamplona, but I don't. Don't get me wrong, I got out of my hood before the Crack Wars. I would have needed a different kind of level of toughness, one perhaps completely incompatible with the life I live now, were I stuck back with Frankie, Mountain, Boo, Tissino, White Jerry, Nudie, Twin (and Twin), Shabazz, Ralphie, Rabo and KK. But I learned, and I overcame.

What do we owe our adversaries? What do we owe those thugs, knuckleheads, triflin' niggas (yeah that's what we called 'em), skanks and skeezers? We owe them not to punk out. They couldn't take us out of the game, so we shouldn't quit the game. I'll get mystical for a moment and talk about Lord not taking away my stumbling block. I don't thank God for creating temptation, but I understand purpose in the overcoming. But back from the abstract to the people. What do we owe them? I think we do owe them a little bit of respect for forcing us to deal with their reality.

After all, we know that achievement is real because we look at those who fell off. We faced the same choices they did and our choices landed us standing. And we've learned that the good are punished and the bad escape because of those knuckleheads. But we also know what works in the long term.

The Crenshaw Anthology

This is going to be the landing pad for my cultural biography of my old neighborhood. There's a lot to say and a lot to remember some of which I've already documented and some of which remains to be said. I'm going to leave comments open because I want folks I have found from over the years to come and speak. This may be the only record that remains. 

As we transition to the period After Facebook, we may have that double-edged possibility of finding people who remember what we did and who we were many years ago. Whether or not our eyes were watching God, somebody's eyes were watching us. And so I'd like to use that power and bring back to mind something of the place that made us, (or not) who we are today.

I start this with the phone call I got from my brother that woke me out of bed this morning. Dorsey High just had his 25th class reunion. And so there were people to talk about The Cork, Maverick's Flat, VIP Records, Leo's BBQ and Baron's Market, all landmarks in our old stomping grounds. I've done such reminiscing from time to time. But now I need to compile it so it becomes a bit more permanent.

So the category is Crenshaw. And some of my most popular stories are about The People of the Dons and Tookie Williams. So it begins.

VIP Records Crenshaw 1977

Famous Kids from the GDZs

There were several remarkable benefits about being hooked up to the social scene of my black LA. The first and most obvious was that there were some awesomely good looking young ladies and gents. As I peek into my Wayback Machine, I remember so many different trends of fashion that it's almost embarassing. The second was our association with celebrity - we were always arm's distance from the truly famous, if not rich, blackfolks in LA. The third was that, well, you were hooked up. Every party you went to, you were likely to see and be seen by somebody you know, or knew you by reputation.

Although I brag on it mostly now, throughout my association with the People of the Dons, I was more or less ambivalent. Rather I should say that I was conflicted. On the one hand, I knew that I wasn't one of the true core members of actual rich kids. I lived on Wellington, not Northridge, and it wasn't even the best part of Wellington. When lots of young adults had a huge room to live in at an attractive address and allowed to save money for their own condos after college, I was paying rent. And I also knew that we had more of our share of cokeheads and dealers, and all of the other dysfunctions of life in the fast lane. Still, I didn't miss an invite if I could help it.

Fame, as I said, is the great plum prize of the scene. And while I myself was somewhat comfortable in the second tier of the broad black LA pecking order, I wasn't often far from the hubs. The problem with fame is that it's all relative. Being the homecoming queen at Dorsey or Crenshaw High meant nothing to the white kids in the Valley, but it meant everything here in the 'hood. I can only communicate what seemed to be those excellent pinnacles at the time. Well, actually, I might as well get some of my own piece out of the way if I'm going to be the John Cheever of View Park. First off, I would say that having some reasonable good looks myself I was part of Makasi Sharo which was widely acknowledged as having put Alpha Phi Alpha back on the map. What's this you say? Makasi Sharo was the name of my pledge line at Cal State Northridge back in 1982. It was the first line at that school's new chapter, Pi Kappa, and established from Gamma Xi at UCLA. We started off with a Jewel Line, meaning seven pledges, just like the number of the original founders.  The line was an unusual combination of talents including the star and captain of the track team, the president of the Black Student Union, the president of the Black Business Association, the top pianist at the school, and the three who eventually crossed, myself, D and B. D is The Spy and B is Baby Boy from my profiles of them in The Regulars. We were roomates, line borthers and ace boons in the early 80s.

As it happened, Makasi Sharo, was pledged up and down the state of California. We got the party started wherever we were paraded, but the fact of the matter was that it was 80% Spy. Spy was cursed with killer good looks - not just rock star good looks, movie star good looks. And he had the extraordinarily double-edged quality of saying exactly the truth of every situation. Cracks me up just thinking about it. Anyway, you couldn't be Spy and not be famous - so we partied everywhere. As I often found myself as his negative wingman, keeping the floo-dogs at bay, Spy grew tired of the club scene that still occasionally fascinated me. Of course he was the one that had to remind me to obey the dress code, something I was often unprepared or unwilling to do. I couldn't quite do it right - I actually liked dancing with chicks better than talking to chicks in clubs. Me, I wanted to talk politics anyway.

Of all the party people we encountered over the years, the most notorious was Jim Brown himself. I didn't find myself at a Jim Brown party until I was in my early 20s, but some people I knew had been there as teens. The last one I went to was at the beginning of my association with the Babeless Crew, brothers I hadn't seen since summer at Paul Revere. Some readers at Cobb may know that I happened to skateboard with some of the innovators of that sport back in the summer of '73 on the asphalt berms of Paul Revere Jr. High in Pacific Palisades. I was next in line to get some kid named Peralta to shape me a new wooden board in wood shop - or at least I think that was his name. But I didn't end up at Pali High. Still, that summer I met Tony and John and the man I called Slim along with my old best freind Ebon Grant, who has disappeared somewhere along the way. That summer we were fanatics, as 12-13 year olds tend to be, about Bruce Lee, soccer whistles and those brand new sneakers called Nikes. We ran things at Revere and parted ways - I didn't see them again for 14 years. I was the insult king of Revere that summer, and I still felt it necessary to apologize for that behavior more than a decade later.

That night at the Golden Tale as I apologized to Slim, who would later introduce me to my wife, we reminisced Paul Revere and recalled our P.E. teacher Mr. Merryman who died of a heart attack, not long after he was fired for licentious behavior. I wasn't the only boy to have his ass pinched by the notorious 'Merryfag'. While on the subject of sex, nobody could tell if Baum's real mother was Linda Lovelace as he claimed. But they did recall him having the Z Channel and porno at his place. I never got out to Baum's house, and I never could make the party at the beach that he threw complete with overnight camping. He was going to hook me up with Flip Wilson's daughter. It was one of those sad moments when I realized that I was always so close and yet so far from being top dog in a social scene. There was, of course, no way that my parents would let me go to a sleepover in Pacific Palisades 30 miles from home.

Later, when Bret Easton Ellis wrote 'Less Than Zero', I recalled my close encounter with white rich kids in Palisades, and how we bussed blacks were some of the first outsiders encountering the complete freedom, even anarchy that they enjoyed. How they wore beat up clothes like surfers to disguise their wealth and how they chose insouciance as the form of their privilege. I never forgot how jr high school teachers deferred to them, coming as I had from Holy Name where we could be swatted for showing up out of uniform. Half a world away, we pledged allegiance to the Delco of the United States of Delco and to the Delco for which it stands, one nation under Delco with Delco and Delco for all. Why? Because it was funny as hell and Mr. Schutze in electric shop couldn't do shit about it. We actually played cards in class. The game? Bullshit.

By the time the Cosby 80s were in full swing, Moleman and I had established GDZ Productions. We threw beach parties and I was the marketing manager. My access to all the coolest electronic publication technology at Xerox where I worked allowed me to make some uber-cool flyers. At least I thought so. The significance of the stars we were at arms length from now grew. I mean it seemed like everybody knew Todd Bridges' family back in the day. But now, we knew the Partners In Crime, aka Robert Townsend's homies including David Alan Grier and all them. One dude close to the ambit of the Babeless Crew, Rusty Cundieff was the writer of one of the funniest and smartest black comedies of all time 'Fear of a Black Hat'. Around that time, I was chasing after a young lady who was basically not having me. I tend to be ridiculously intense and when I'm really deep into a babe, I give off stalker vibes. Only my casual flirtations bear fruit. Don't ask me why. Anyway, she was working for HBO and allowed me to hang around some so it was at that time that I got backstage passes to rehearsals to Townsend's upcoming HBO special over at the Wadsworth Theatre. Had you known me at the time, I would have told you that Bobby Brown has this new look and new song called My Prerogative and it's going to blow the roof off. Yes that Bobby Brown.

That was the golden age. For that brief moment in the late 80s, men like Townsend and Cundieff and Spike had attention in the right places. Bands like Tony, Toni, Tone were hot, Janet Jackson was doing "Diamonds", Prince was playing jazz with Madhouse, Miles Davis was playing hiphop, Quincy Jones put Back on the Block in rotation, and GDZ was morphing into The Black Chill, renting cabins up at Big Bear and Jet Skiing. Black people? Jet Skiing? It seemed like an era where we People of the Dons were finally going to get recognized not playing downscale roles, but more like we were in the society we created for ourselves. We had made it through the Crack Wars...

But alas it was not to be. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy E and NWA saw to that. Los Angeles, in the end, became their town, not ours.

90016 Reunion

Deet has had this plan in mind for some time now. This time it's going to happen. We're going to have an informal reunion and picnic at Virginia Road School on Saturday June 24th starting at Noon. If you grew up around Crenshaw and Jefferson in the 70s, you'll want to join us there. Even if you didn't. Come around. We're going to bang on doors in the old neighborhood and see who's still around.

Starbucks to the Rescue

I've always known that Leimert Park is the perfect place for a Borders Books & Music. One of these days Ruth Galanter or Mark Ridley-Thomas is going to pretend that they were the first person to think so and cut the ribbon. In the meantime all my homies who live up on the hill will drive to The Bridge which is basically where the money went. I have some sad thoughts occasionally about the direction my old neighborhood has gone with regard to the failure of aggregation, but there is some very good commercial news. That is that Starbucks has restored the Sakiba Lounge at the old Holiday Bowl. I haven't been there in a couple weeks, but it should be done about now.

It's interesting now that I think about it how things have worked out. I mean right there on Crenshaw, a dozen good sized businesses have opened up new shops. I'm prepared to say that Crenshaw is in about the best shape it has been since the car dealers left. In the meantime Bad Ito has put up some cool pictures & commentary.

If You Serve Them, They Will Eat

On my way to becoming KFSC, I put on my red plaid and headed downtown Saturday. I can tell you right now that there are few things that compare to the feeling of giving somebody what they want. Forget all that teaching a man to fish for a moment. Sometimes just serving a big fat fish is as good as it gets. Although it wasn't fish that we were serving up but hotdogs, hamburgers, fries, potato salad, beans and gallons of red punch, it was great.

The event was fairly disorganized strictly from the perspective of a crabby left brainer such as myself, but all in all it went off without a hitch. My job, as I took it upon myself, was to take care of the men and those who had a hard time walking.

I'm having a hard time not breaking my arm patting myself on the back having done this. I mean it really wasn't a whole lot of hard work. It was Santa Claus work. We had the goodies and I made myself subservient to the needs of the many and distributed them from the pockets of the few. For a few short hours, I was the man in the mirror. I only wished that I could have gotten some more folks to be down with the program.

Well, it turns out that I will have all kinds of opportunities because the Adams Harbor is open every Saturday at noon. I was wondering how they got 1000 people to show up just like that, but it turns out that this is a regular thing. Next time we'll keep the digital cameras to a minimum. I still have a difficult time getting in people's faces with my camera, I really do think it's rather rude.

Nevertheless, I hung out for a short time with Rerun and Beverly and several other of the characters. One of the men who said he was a Vietnam Vet exposed to Agent Orange had pockets full of everything. He made me fetch him some Saran Wrap for his third burger, and when I couldn't find salt, he was coming out of his pockets with packets. He pulled me up short and said that when you're living on the street, you have to be prepared for everything.

I understand the attraction that reporters get when they get up close and personal. I don't know how to describe the internal feeling - the transformation you have to go through when you decide ahead of time that you are going to pay deep attention to the people you generally ignore. Since they're humans, they're always bound to surprise you, especially if you have no expectations whatsoever. But then if you know what to expect, when you get familiar, then you're just another person in the game. So the entanglement comes as no surprise. When you're a sheepdog like I am, all sheep are precious. Still, I was there to do a job. That job was waiter, and prefect. It's all about service.

I'm going to have some difficulty dealing with exactly where to put this sentiment. Part of it is humility to a task that ought to be done, maybe. Part of it is not having a real army to feed. The impulse to serve. Where does it come from and why is it pleasurable? How is it a force that is complicit in my (relative) oppression? How is it self-serving bourgie brownnosing? It would be easy for me to say it's just the Spirit of Christmas and leave it at that, but I can't. you know me, always over thinking. But I'll do more cogitating on that score as time goes by and I go back, hopefully with friends.

Meantime, the one thing that sticks out in my mind is that it's so easy to get people's attention. If you give it away for free, they will come. There's a Boyle's Law of humanity at work here. Free food gets eaten, free goods get taken. And the last thing I would ever do is deny any of those folks what they deserve - they deserve exactly what we were giving away - them that came, got. But that's part of the curious thing. Once you decide to do it, charity is too easy. It's way too easy. And that's why I'm feeling that it's not particularly virtuous. That's why the whole thing feels a little self-indulgent to me. I know there's a Conservative in the back of my head prodding me along this path, but having actually experienced this experience, I know that I'm learning something about human beings - about the back patting one gets when in service for the least of your brothers.

Until I get some resolution on this matter, I'm going to continue. This was just the first time. Let's see what happens next.

Adams Harbor

Today I will be at St. John's Episcopal Church giving away food and toys to approximately 750 folks that show up. Local fire and cops will be towing Santa in and a great time will be had by all. If you have a minute, please come down and join the Christmas celebration in the spirit of being one for others. Ask for me or Larry Young, we can use some extra hands. I realize this was late, but I was in Arizona all day yesterday and couldn't get word out.

St. John's is located at 514 West Adams, 1/2 block east of Figueroa. and 1/2 block west of the 110 Freeway. Just take the Adams exit and you're right there. Everything starts at noon, but volunteers should get there at least a half an hour early. We'll be there all day pretty much.

I'll update everyone on what's going on. It's going to be a good thing.

Check out the pictures.

A Day in the Sun

A long time ago when I used to use Nix Check Cashing and drive a 1971 Ford Galaxy Custom (aka the FBIMobile), I recall drving north on Crenshaw Blvd. As I pulled up to the stoplight at Slauson at the foot of the hill they are now calling View Heights 90043, I peered over to the left. In the left turn lane, heading up that hill was a young woman in a brand spanking new Volvo. It had to be a Sunday because her hair was flawless, and she had two young children in the back seat who were immaculately dressed. It was one of those moments that shook my single life mentality to the core. I stared for what seemed like an eternity. I want that. I want that. I want that.

I got that, sorta.

This weekend, the wife went to get her do did off in Pasadena, so I had the kids all Saturday. We knocked around the house all morning, playing some videogames, watching some TV, then it was off to my buddy in PV. We hung out in the park just behind his house with his two tiny young daughters and enormous old dogs. They're like a cross between Weimeraner and Great Dane, the dogs, not the daughters. The kids had a ball with some pirated bottle of silly string and absolutely destroyed dog chew balls and we talked about nothing for a fun change. I don't know where I put the digital camera but somewhere on the chip are pictures of the most precious and precocious 17 month old I've ever met. Soon it was time for the SC game.

We caught the first half on the HiDef and swilled Snapples while USC snapped the heads of the Bruins. At halftime it was time to jet. We piled into The Transporter and flew down the coast to Rosa in Hermosa for shrimp tacos. As we munched, UCLA continued to get crunched. The dudes catty corner from our table were wearing the new broad style of sunglasses that mask the side of the face, and were polite enough to chill on the profanity. But there was no denying that UCLA was getting the shit beat out of them.

Next we headed out to Santa Monica. My son sitting in the front seat twiddled the GPS and my daughters snacked on Nerds in the back. Somewhere heading West on the 10 and rolling off at the Lincoln exit, I suddenly thought that people were watching me in the same way I was watching that woman. It happens to me more often when I roll up to school and drop off the kiddies. When it first lauched, I got the full tilt Turbo Beetle. People used to ask me how it handled and did it have a lot of room, when I would fill up for gas. At the gates of Arroyo Vista Elementary School, little kids would punch each other in the shoulders when I drove up. It's an LA thing. You know the effect you have socially on other people when you're driving the slammin ride. Soon I found myself in a neighborhood where I haven't had an opportunity to drive a sweet hooptie since... ever.

Sometimes it's difficult for me to make sense of progress. There are about 3 new luxury hotels at the Santa Monica Pier that simply didn't exist back in the day. The big building used to be the West Coast HQ for Narconon or Alanon or some such drug rehab palace. Now they've got doormen and valets scrambling around the joint. I pulled past into a lot which rather complex parking instructions and no attendant. Instead there was this computer thing. I ignored it, parked the hooptie and the kids sped off to the jungle gyms in the sand. When I finally caught up to them they were climbing ropes. I don't seem to call the ropes or the nice spongy mats for tumbling when I was a kid. Harumph. Back in my teenaged youth, I used to come right down to that little spot of grass in front of the main lifeguard station and do tumbling runs for the locals and tourists. Today I completely forgot how to lock my feet on the rope and only got up about six feet.

We headed over to the pier where there is a rather impressive construction project afoot. With a checkerboard stack of shipping containers, a museum is being architected. Meanwhile, although the tide is low, the pier was in full glory.We went out to the edge as the sun had just left its orange glow in a strip along the horizon and Venus shimmered. The kids screwed up enough courage to ride The Dragon and screamed through the whole pendulous zero gravity experience. After a few raucous games of air hockey, we were ready to hit the road again.

This time we headed to my old neighborhood. Progress again. It looks as if it has turned the corner and people are investing in the houses. The guy that lives in my old house is an actor on The Sheild and he's adding a second storey. Old Mrs Stanley can't get over how fat I've become. The kids couldn't stop giggling. But now it was time to eat. After a trip to Denny's (kids eat free on Satuday, but you still pay for the drinks) and some classical music, they were knocked out and in a deeper sleep than the UCLA Bruins. The weather had turned cold and windy but we were warm and cozy in The Transporter. I sped down the coast highway watching the bonfires at Dockweiler slowly roll by. It had been a full day, and I felt like a great dad.

It's days like Saturday that I hope continue to live in memory. I am thankful for the ease with which it was accomplished and the opportunity for simple pleasures. I thank God for the blessing of children and the complex ugly beauty that is LA County. Our town.

City of Quartz, Donald Bakeer & The Crips Mystique

Back in the day, around 1986, I was a freshly minted entry level programmer in El Segundo, the aerospace capital of the Western US. From my office on the 14th floor of the Xerox Centre (home of the Golden Tale), I could see Hughes ESDG, TRW, Aerospace, Northrop and a host of other high-tech firms. Although I hung with a host of other NSBE grads, black engineers & scientists all, I had issues with uppity blackness. And so I did what comes naturally to me, I went to extremes. In my search around LA for black culture of a decidedly highbrow nature, I found myself beset by myths about Los Angeles in general.

In the Reagan era, during the War on Drugs & the Culture Wars most blackfolks, myself especially, were very concerned about our portrayals in media. We made a big fuss about the success of the Cosby Show and of Arsenio Hall. We were wrestling with monolithic portrayals of 'the' black community on television. With blacks now infiltrating MTV with the popular Yo! and Spike Lee turning movie audiences on their ear, it was a boistrous time. My favorite of course was 'Mo Better Blues'. But where was black culture on the ground in LA? Before the release of Boyz N the Hood, Colors was just about it. Though you'd have to count Shabba-Doo in Breakin' on Venice Beach too. Sheesh. Given my history with The People of the Dons and the buppie party scene I was into in the late 80s, you could imagine my consternation. Part of my rebellion was GDZ, but that's another long buppie story that ends around 1990.

With 1990 came a kind of alternate rebellion for me. I was sick and bored with being a Nordstrom's fashion plate and started in with grit of the city. My guidebook was Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Somewhere in the middle of that Davis makes a strong connection between gangs and political life - a fixation that has never quite been broken in the minds of millions, especially after Rodney King and the fall of CRASH. The oppositional pose of oppositing anything establishment was good leaven for my BAP upbringing. So I listened.

During that time I started writing my Great American Novel that was going to pit the aspirations of the white collar and blue collar paradigms of black Los Angeles. In this novel, as in life, I confronted the problems arising from gangbanging and its connection to hiphop. In particular, I addressed the fate of Wild Style Grafitti, the one aspect of hiphop that has completely been submerged and abandoned by commercialization. As a novelist, I was actively engaged in trying to recoup some authenticity of black Los Angeles that was being lost and ignored by the popularization of various trendy aspects of emergent black and hiphop culture. There were two things that utterly destroyed the prospects of my book. The first was the huge success of Boyz N The Hood (and to a lesser degree 'White Men Can't Jump'). The second was the LA Riots. But while I was doing research for the book one of the people I had to talk to was Donald Bakeer.

Bakeer, loosely speaking, is a griot. He's a man of the neighborhood, who while working in the decidely gang-plagued areas of LA, has seen hundreds of gangbangers come and go. Very little of what he knows has translated well into print, and that includes his own book 'Crips', later translated into the movie 'South Centra" The man who has done a much better job describing the black neighborhoods and kids of LA in conflict with gangs has been Jervey Tervalon, although I can only speak from the experience of one book (that made all the difference) 'Understand This'. So the controversy at the time, while I was working on my stuff, was that of the 'white interloper' Leon Bing who wrote 'Do or Die' about Monster Kody Scott. A lot has been written *since* the LA Riots and the CRASH scandal, but there was little attention in print at the time. I wanted to frame the discussion in terms of the political aspirations of black families in LA. As far as I know, it has yet to be done, and if so, it certainly hasn't changed the popular consciousness. I did Bakeer a personal favor at his request and bought and read his book instead of 'Do or Die'.

I met Bakeer at the Aquarian Bookstore where I attended seminars on the regular for a period of time. Our family was tight with the Ligons who owned and ran the bookstore from way back in the mid 60s. Alfred Ligon may be forgotten by many, but not by me. And the surviving members of the Watts Poets, (like Quincy Troupe whose contempt for Stanley Crouch was palpable) took it upon themselves to instruct me informally about the finer points of becoming a published author. In this atmosphere of black bookstore politics (and you think barbershops get crazy?) there was much talk about gangbanging. The consensus was that the political aspects of the bangers had been lost in contemporary Cripdom, but that in the days of The Avenues it was more foreward. But it wasn't only because Crips and Bloods themselves had passed to a generation of young ignorant thugs, but because the LAPD had declared a 'low level war' against black gangs. Comparisons to the Palestinian Intifada were frequent and impassioned. It was this broadly and fiercely held sentiment that bolstered the political pretensions of LA Gangsta rap. So while everybody to a person wanted very little to do with Crips and gangs in general, the whole media blackout of the real black Los Angeles (what you talkin bout Willis?) left a desparately need for expression. Any kind of expression.

Unlike other cities, notably New York, blacks lived all over LA, and all the black neighborhoods were not alike. While Spike Lee's Brooklyn was getting media sunshine, all we had, before Singleton's bomb, was Arsenio Hall and he was from Cleveland. So if NWA hadn't come straight outta Compton, we would have invented it. Anything to get the message out. One particular message that needed getting out was how stupid policies of Police Chief Darryl Gates had turned the black middle class against him. During the 80s, he deployed the infamous 'batterram' against crack houses, and he deployed gang sweeps against black kids who wore gang colors. Anyone who reads Streetgangs thoroughly recognizes that with over 100 different Crip sets alone in LA County, there is not a major league sports team whose colors haven't been appropriated. The result was the arrest and detention of hundreds of ordinary kids with a incredibly paltry criminal booking rate of 2%. The reaction was explosive and the resentment was thorough and long-lasting. While few people know about the 2% booking rate on gang-sweeps, everybody knows 'Fuck the Police'. Thus began the reduction of a cogent political process to the jackleg ministrations of the Coalition of the Damned today 15 years later.

I have my doubts that better writers are still belaboring the point, there being so much more in the world, even in the black images world, to write about. Yet in those days the connection between black expression, the readiness to get any word out over the volume of glamour-puss writers like Bing, and black street life was at a high pitch. There were so many stereotypes to overcome, and during the culture wars before the triumph of multiculturalism the stakes were much higher.

I have unburdened myself of a need and a desire to write grandiose novels as large as black Los Angeles, though I still think I might do Jordan Crossing when I retire from this computer career. Maybe I should rename it Crenshaw. But I wonder if a substantial number of writers who would write about blackfolks in Los Angeles have unburdened themselves. What I see consistently here in the blogosphere about Tookie is that some liberal white writer fell in love with Tookie and basically started the whole Tookie Movement. Was it Venise Wagner at Mother Jones who inflenced Mario Fehr? Who knows? Clearly some of the same distortions about who Crips are and what black LA is like persist through these years and have charged with myth what might otherwise be a relatively inconsequential execution.

Hollywood is in this, and their appetite for the violent dram of gangsta life reflects America's own. That may come at the expense of the truth, or at least a likeable story of black LA. Certainly 'Devil in a Blue Dress' isn't truth, but it's a story I'd rather see about black LA than Boyz. The Mouse in that story, portrayed by Don Cheadle, is nothing like Tookie's partner Mouse, but was a killer nonetheless. Someday we might look back on some comical portrayal of Tookie in a retro movie about 70s black Los Angeles, but today it's no fantasy. Today is no time to romanticize the 'politics' of gangbanging. Gangs have stood in too long for symbols of the real people who live in 'Southcentral' that myriad area made sociopolitically fascinating by the lefty work and imagination of Mike Davis. It's time to break through the myths and the mystique.

Once again, the victims of this mystique, or perhaps I should say the targets of this obsession, are black youth. Are we to believe that they are so preoccupied and fascinated by the media inflation of Tookie that his influence is real? Whose fault is it if Tookie's word on the futility of gang-life beats out the word of socially responsible people? I knew better than to take drugs as a kid, but the State of California insured that my classroom had a huge color poster of every kind of hallucinagenic, amphetamine, barbituate, narcotic and psychotropic agent known to mankind. If Tookie can have a positive influence, perhaps he should do it in full media post-mortem glory like Yul Brynner did. Saying 'I'm dead now, and gang life is what killed me'. But all of us who survive need to remind ourselves that our job is not to punt to the likes of Tookie, but to stand up for what we know to be right and true.

Fond Memories of Tookie

I'm being sarcastic. The first thing you have to understand about Tookie Williams is that this is what he looked like. Knowing that this man used to hang out at parks and beat down people for fun, that he used to force people to oil his body, gives you some idea what Tookie was all about. The Tookie I knew hung out at Centinela Park in Inglewood with another huge dude named 'Mouse' doing pullups and otherwise being as badass as humanly possible. Basically, he did whatever he wanted to, and in the end what he wanted to do was be the most intimidating and dangerous man anywhere. He got his wish of course. Who was going to stop him?

I got other Tookie and Mouse stories second-hand from a kid named Timmy Green who was a bodybuilding roughneck too. Back in highschool, Tim Green was about five feet tall and 2 feet thick. He was a devastating football player, a little walking muscle. We all suspected that Timmy was a Crip, but nobody said it straight out, after all ours was an exclusive Jesuit prep school. I heard that Tim is dead, shot by another Crip somewhere. We kinda knew that he had a deathwish. Tim owned a red Honda motorcycle, a CB400 with the swivelly pipes. I rode with him once, and I immediately experienced a kind of terror I've never known before. Tim was absolutely fearless riding on the wrong side of the double yellow line of Crenshaw Blvd at 70 miles per hour. But if you talked about Tookie, Tim showed fear. Admiration to be sure. Tookie went everywhere in LA to prove that he was the was the baddest, and nobody lived to win a challenge, but fear too. Tookie was the man that thugs feared. There could only be one reason for that. He was more than buff, he was deadly.

You could not grow up in the 'hood in Los Angeles during the 70s and not know about Tookie or the Crips. It's probably hard to understand if you didn't grow up in a roughneck neighborhood. But street smarts are just that. You are forced to rely on the human instinct for survival, you navigate the degrees of danger and you grow senses that middleclass live has no use for. Tookie today looks like somebody's grandfather but don't be fooled. Back in the day, there were all kinds of gangs, some no more troublesome than the Jets or the Sharks. Truth be told, Tookie got busted right around the time gangs were going off the chain, and his Crips were the reason. The short version of the story is this, Crips were dangerous and they "Don't die, they multiply". There came a time when they became so pervasive and dangerous that anyone not in a gang was vulnerable - and then beyond that to the point at which gangs that didn't bang hard had to get hard. The Crips in the late 70s were basically escalating street rivalries into open warfare. From fists to knives to guns. The Crips created the Bloods because the Brims and the Pirus had to bang together or hang separately. When I was a kid, there used to be a saying: 'Crips are cool, but Piru rule'. By 1980, nothing was cool.

Me personally, I've battled Crips hand to hand. I've dealt with all kinds of knuckleheads, roughnecks and thugs. But everybody knows their limits. I know I am not to be a warrior and I didn't have to go to jail to learn any of that. I didn't have to wait until somebody wrote a rap song about 'dead homies' to know what that was all about. I grew up in the black neighborhood when basically few people had a choice on where they could get real estate. I know what it's like to walk through the Jungle at night, and I know if the man cursing on the bus is actually going to swing at you. But I only know what it's like to live around people who were basically about 1/3 as dangerous as Tookie Williams.

The scariest part of my neighborhood was West Blvd over near Adams. I could go into it, but it was over there wher I learned the meaning of getting 'curbed'. Now if you're dainty, skip to the next paragraph and agree me because I'm about to describe it. Everybody knows about being 'jumped in' and 'jumped out' of a gang. Basically about 7 of them beat you down until you can't stand up. That's child's play. You basically get curbed if you rat to the cops. What does that mean I asked? Well, you lay down in the street perpendicular to the and facing curb. You open your mouth and bite the concrete corner of the curb and somebody comes up behind you and kicks you in the back of the head. People who did this were afraid of Tookie.

I cannot wait until the founder of the Crips dies at the hands of the California justice system. This convict has actually convinced people that if you write some children's books, that you can redeem yourself for a quadruple murder conviction. That doesn't say much for the state of conviction these days. So long as he fries, I can handle it.

It's not surprising that the Coalition of the Damned is up in arms about this clemency drama, and quite frankly I'm not surprised that Jamie Foxx and others have a screw loose in this matter. Clearly, they don't know what Crips are all about. I discussed this sorry SOB here and over at africanamerican.org a month or so ago, and it's amazing the amount of BS excuses go into trying to make the case for clemency. Take this one for example:

Never mind the fact that Blacks make up the majority of the prison population because White cops are 6 times more likely to arrest a Black or Latino than a White offender. And never mind the fact that the police purposely go looking for Black criminal offenders while ignoring White criminal offenders.

Never mind the fact that the police don't do stings on White gangs because they know if it got on the news, it would tarnish the false image that "White people don't do crime". Never mind all of that, that is not important.

What is important is that Blacks are criminal animals, and that's all there is to it.

Nevermind? How about nevermind the Crips. So let's inteject a little sanity. And I'm going to break a rule here and bring back a whole lot more from a site than I usually do because I want people to get a handle on what gang violence is like in LA County. As you read this try to remember that this is just about one particularly notorius set out of hundreds of streetgangs.

Rollin' 60s N-Hood Crip Seattle Mariners

Seattle Mariners Cap

Sub Sets: All 60s are NHCs, but there are the Avenues and the Overhills that are west of West Blvd. Allie(s): Their allies include Neighborhood Crip sets such as 67 NHC, 55 NHC, and 46 NHC.

Brief History:Their main rival would be the Eight Tray Gangster Crips to the east. This would be the most intense rivalry between any two gangs in all of Los Angeles County. This rivalry goes back to 1979 and was the beginning to Crip infighting. This rivalry is discussed in Monster Kody's book Autobiography of an LA Gang Member and Donald Bakeer's book, Crips. It would be great to see a truce between these 2 sets, because so many other rivalries would come up under it and many lives would possibly be saved. Thus far nearly 400 members of both sets have died in the last 20 years and that does not include the bystanders caught in the cross fire. Also keep in mind that many of the decedents expired as a result of non-gang related circumstances such as car accident, suicide, natural causes and conflicts outside gang membership.

Comments:The Rollin 60s made news headlines when Tiequan Andrew Cox (b. 1966), who had purchased fake cocaine, sought revenge against the dealer when he mistaken a neighbor's house as the drug dealers. He was convicted in 1986 for committing a quadruple murder that occurred in 1984. The victims were the wrong targets and were related to former NFL Rams wide receiver Kermit Alexander. Cox, while on death row stabbed Stanley "Tookie" Williams in 1988. This act is depicted in the 2004 film Redemption starring Jamie Foxx but many suggested that the incident didn't play out as it did on the silver screen.

In 2003 City Attorney filed a gang injunction against the Rollin 60s Crips and they had specified 31 men that were members of the 60s, but some have suggested that the 60s were being unfairly targeted and some mentioned that the injunction included individuals that had not had police contact in several years. Below are some published articles about the injunctions.

Their main Blood rival would be the Van Ness Gangsters (VNG) to the north. Since the 60s attend Crenshaw High School, north of Slauson, they often clash with the VNGs and becasue the VNGs are a smaller gang with less membership, the Rollin 60s have been able to dominate the school population even though the high school is outside their turf.

The Rollin 60s also started a conflict with the School Yard Crips during the 1980s. This is an unusual conflict because gangs often rival with neighboring or adjacent gangs. But the Rollin 60s would show their dominance by hanging out at the World-on-Wheels skating ring on Venice in the neighborhood of the School Yard Crips uncontested many times. Although there were several shootings committed by the School Yard Crips, the Rollin 60s, for the most part maintained their dominance for several years there.

Other rivals would include all Hoovers, especially the 83 Hoover and 74 Hoover and all Gangster Crips that are hooked up with the ETGs, such as the 53 Avalon Gangster Crips and 43 Gangster Crips. The 60s and all the "Owes" were allied during the 1980s but that is not the case today.

Tookie deserves to die. Plain and simple. If he's such a saint, let's hurry him on his way to his everlasting reward.

A Casual Review of the Digital Divide

I realize that I don't go buck wild quite as much as I used to in these pages. I've become so bloody serious. I need to write some more comics and get those other humours flowing through the veins. At any rate, since I'm bent beyond recognition and dedicated to living on the bleeding edge of my passions, its difficult for me to redact the mix of characters that pushed me to this vector. So I guess I may as well make all concerned aware of some crudely frank yet strikingly correct original positions by way of the following links.

The Death of the Digital Divide

Race, Cyberspace & The Digital Divide

Computer-Show.com

PeoplePC

And now to the serious summary which is what I used in Greensboro - the following string of axioms.

There is no Digital Divide. The Digital Divide is a proxy for cultural dissonance.

My favorite show on television is Dirty Jobs. Our civilization doesn't depend on white collar work, so the digital revolution wasn't supposed to be about blue collar folks. 

The internet is what people who use the internet say it is, and it is way, way too big for anybody to say. People talk about white males being 75% of the internet as if anybody could possibly make sense of 1% of the internet.

When Russians build rockets to leave Earth's gravity they call the thing they're in 'the Cosmos'. When Americans do it, they call it 'Space'. Therefore the Russians will always win the Cosmos Race and the Americans always win the Space Race. So that begs the question. Who wants to be in the 'Blogosphere'? I say everybody who wants to be there is there. If people are there for different reasons, who is to say that they're not happy? If people aren't there, who's to say they're missing out?

Last year, a black guy came out with a blog and said he was the first black blogger from Detroit. Only he wasn't. He was at least two years too late. 

So what we're essentially dealing with is the question of the value of information which has been abstracted onto the net. There is a false presumption that the form and content of information that has value for an arbitrary group of people defines: A) What the Internet is all about. B) The stuff of value that Others have to get. Those who push the concept of digital inequality basically have to take their fight to exotic locales, because every town that has a Wal-Mart has cheap computers for little budgets. All of this is easy for me to say because I recognize various classes of people, and I don't make it a habit to second-guess blackfolks in particular. So if there are 34 million blackfolks who don't spend any time online, it doesn't concern me. I've been online since there has been an online, and I'm sure there hasn't been 100,000 blackfolks who have seen my work. I'm cool with that. If I suddenly discover:

[African American] Internet usage: 61%. Percent who regularly go online for news: 25% (up from 16% in 2000)

I'm cool with that too. Now there was a time, in my progressive days, that I had a certain amount of serious concerns about getting IT to the 'hood. In those days I approached a young woman named Micheline Wilcoxen who was at the time Program Director for a joint called Breakaway Technologies. This was fairly early on. It turned out that her big problem wasn't money, but the kind of bureaucratic fights she had to enjoin just to get access to public school kids in the 'hood. I met Micheline at the African Marketplace many years ago and we talked a few times about computers in the 'hood. I was especially interested because Breakaway was located around the corner from where I grew up near Crenshaw & Jefferson in Los Angeles. Understand that Breakaway had its own building, all the computers they needed, funding and staff. But the public school teachers would not let them on campus - basically because they would be showed up. The existence of Breakaway made public schools look bad, so they refused to let the kids learn. Yeah. I was shaking my head too. I have no idea what it takes to become certified as an afterschool program, but I got the distinct flavor at the time that the whole situation was mostly politics and mostly impossible. So I didn't volunteer. Apart and separate from that, I spent a lot of time trying to talk to community groups of various sorts to put their information online via bulletin boards in the days before the net and on the web in the days after. Notably I spoke to Haile Gerima about making a QuickTime version of his film Sankofa and making it available on CD for community groups. This was in the days just after the Power Mac was born and people were nuts about this thing called 'New Media'. Gerima dismissed the notion out of hand. I asked him why, and he looked at me like I was crazy. It's all about the big screen, he said. And he went on to reminesce about the great experience he had when his film debuted in Germany. For Gerima, it wasn't about getting a message to people in the 'hood, it was about filmmaking. Macs aren't film. They're low budget devices. Of course I wasn't the only black person with such ideas about low cost distribution of black mental liberation. There were plenty of pioneers back in the day, but for all kinds of reasons, there was something we couldn't see. The thing I couldn't see in 1993 was demand. I thought that good ideas provided their own juice. It's something of a naive belief, but I had plenty of company in that regard. I still thought that "If you build it, they will come." It's not true. You don't know who 'they' are until they show up. And if you think 'they' are the target market, the black, the poor - those for whom so much rhetoric and moral suasion is invested these days, you will be sorely disappointed. It's only a question of how quickly you'll be disappointed. So when I was trying to figure out why the cats at Netnoir were so upscale and shiny, whilst my partner and I were focused on serious black history, what I didn't really want to accept was that everything needs a business plan, and that communications is big business - even on the web. Generally speaking, you can't reach millions without spending millions, and millions aren't just lying around waiting to be spent. There are too many reasons to be online and to remain offline for anyone to suggest they have a handle on them when it comes to African Americans. So the Digital Divide is a theory ever in search of a target, and as time moves forward it adjusts again and again. There may be a new Digital Divide theory that evades every criticism I've laid down here. Maybe the Digital Divide is in Somalia today. I can't say. I don't study it. The joy I get out of computing and computer mediated communications is practically boundless. I've been playing and working with computers since 1974. Everything here has always made perfect sense to me, but I don't have a hard time recognizing that lots of folks don't get it and don't need to. I think the barriers against those who want to experience the joy are negligible. Even water's not free, but I don't think any real divide is keeping Americans from quenching their digital thirst.

Holiday Bowl

I have discovered a history project about the Holiday Bowl. I've got to tell you that I'm going to have to make myself known to these people because Holiday Bowl was a very important part of who I am. Well, it seems like that today because I was going down memory lane and writing about the time in my life when it was.

Among other things, I was one of the teenagers that hung out at Holiday Bowl in 1978 and 1979. I was also a part of the Burger King street race crowd early on and just before it broke up. Holiday Bowl was a very cool place, it was a street home and I have a few stories about the joint that I think are worth telling.

It doesn't surprise me at all that there would be a commemoration of the Holiday Bowl. Crenshaw was a fabulous place in the 70s, even as it wound down. Holiday was the last great institution before the Riot - the place where blacks and Japanese had always gotten along, as any local fan of the band Hiroshima would tell you.

I was recently invited to give some tours of the area, but the big plan has not emerged yet. I know that between my father and I and a guy named Donald Bernard who had a studio up behind Maranatha, there's a goodly amount of photographs of the Crenshaw District of old.

I have a new project.

The Jungle

"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine until my children can walk the streets in freedom, in safety, inpeace of mind. So let it shine!"
-- Rev. Leonard Jackson, Dec 2004

The other day, police and clergy marched on MLK Blvd for peace. Sound familiar? It should. As Robin Harris said more than a decade ago, we're talking about the Ghetto, where the cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

This time it's Eighteenth Street vs the Bloods. It's getting dark in the Jungle so get indoors behind the steel plates, lest you catch a stray bullet. Nothing new. Same as 1986. Same streets, different gangs. The speeches and calls are so familiar. Too bad. There's only one solution, it's called escape. Escape requires mobility, mobility requires skill, skill needs desire and discipline. I wonder if they are praying for these things, and yet somehow I doubt it.

Several years ago, I had wanted to bomb (tag with spraypaint) the Crenshaw Wall with the URL for my website. And someday I may yet do it. VisionCircle is ready for primetime. One or two more authors and it could be awesome - it's already growing in strength and relevance. If I put the URL on the Wall in spraypaint, how many hits would I get from around the way? Hard to say. But answers are out here, if people would stop listening to the same tired voices.

Aahh but street knowledge is irreplacable. There's no substitute for it. It's the only thing that will save you in the streets. The question is whether or not you are destined to remain there.

I drove my family through the Jungle a few weeks ago. I forgot the context of why we were there. Maybe it was just after a big dinner at the New Panda Buffet on MLK that was originally built as a Sizzler. I drove up Stevely where my girlfriend used to live in 1979 just before the dawn of the Crack Wars. We drove around to Hillcrest School and Cocoa and I recalled the beginning of the bad old days as well as the good old days before them.

See when the Jungle was first called the Jungle, it was all good. I clearly remember when those apartments were brand new and their pools sparkled. I recall how much everybody wanted them, especially those folks who had previously lived in Liemert Park when that was the spot. The difference, of course, was that Liemert Park had homes as well as apartments and that provided stability. But by the mid 80s, Liemert started to slide downhill to the point where black college students at USC began to swear off it as the premier spot for off campus housing.

Perhaps today in these post-riot, post-Gates days, relations between cops and communities can get to the level of trust necessary to hand the smackdown to the criminal element. It wasn't long ago when gang sweeps meant that basically every black and latino kid got picked up. When investigations showed something like a measly 8% criminal booking rate for these mass arrests, already hostile relations got worse. That's a lot of BS to undo, but it will have to happen, and that's why this march, as futile as I think it is, symbolizes the positive relations which must occur if gangbanging is to be made less deadly.

There's a difference of course. 18th Street is a Latino gang. Blackfolks still remaining in the Jungle and Liemert are among those left behind. Black Flight is real too. View Park may not be far enough away in the future - remember how a very popular black restauranteur was gunned down in Ladera Heights this year. My old neighborhood is growing more and more Hispanic. There's a new dynamic afoot - let's see how it goes down.

In the meantime, there's the old standby of exodus. It's a strategy that's worked since the days of Moses.

The Return of GDZ

I hung out with C4 yesterday.

It has been about 7 years since I've seen him. I'm sure we crossed paths one way or two, who knows. Except one Thai dinner when he was feeling out of sorts, there hadn't been much communication between us in a very long time. But that didn't really count because JB wasn't there since '98 when we had just gotten back to LA from the East Coast or 96 when we had the Easter Party in Carson. But yesterday was a righteous reunion. I know this is true because he brought out the GDZ flag.

The last time I saw the flag had to be somewhere back in 89 or 90 when we had our notorious beach parties down in Hermosa. There's not much I can do after all these years to evoke the spirit, and in some ways it's not important that I do. I can just tell you that a very cool network of very cool people wove in and out of our sphere, and it was the place to be.

After the BBQ was consumed, we reflected back on those days amid huge screaming fits of laughter. It was a very easy afternoon and it did a lot to remind me of how uptight I used to be. Very. The best thing about having friends is that they can see through you, and you know it. I enjoy being translucent around these guys, and I haven't felt that way in a while.

I discovered more long lost links to my young adulthood and childhood hanging out there. I remember that JB's folks and my folks grew up together in New Haven, many of them going to Hillhouse or working for Winchester. It turns out that one of JB's best college buds and I knew each other since we were babies - our dads were frat brothers. Still I haven't seen him since highschool; he's in San Diego now. We marvelled at the people we knew in common, but then again it shouldn't be a surprise. We were the People of the Dons. In fact, that's where C4's new pad is: 90043, yet another Geographically Desireable Zipcode. C4, his wife and baby are definitely Money and Brains, although most of the joint is American Dreams in that neck of the zip.

I'm coming back into the circle and it feels like home. Even though we stop and look at our guts and our kids running around in momentary disbelief, it's still us and we're here. We survived and did OK for ourselves. So I'm doing some serious recovery on this as well. Maybe I'll put together a private portal, because what gets us perturbed is how we 'fall off the map'. Even with C4's prodigious memory for all kinds of stories about us, we lose touch. I know it's been too long for me.

Eatz in the Hood

The Crenshaw Strip has a history that has never been told, but it lives on in memory. Over on Orkut's Angry Black Man community (the most jumpin' off set in the whole joint) the subject turned to Chicken.

That's funny because the other night at the Comedy and Magic Club, where they were joking about naked pyramids, a black comic tossed out a line that I never heard before. 'More nervous than a black family's pet chicken'. Cracked me up, because we had a pet chicken. He didn't last. On the other hand, the girl across the street had one and treated it like a kid sister. But I digress.

Yeah man, I used to always go to Pioneer Chicken just off of Crenshaw next to Boy's Market. You used to be able to buy had a bucket of fried gizzards. Man that was the bomb! Gizzards and Orange Whip! Pioneer Pete and that whole western theme. Best batter in the western hemisphere, worst service on the planet. A bittersweet experience every time.

Now if you want to go back, you cannot overlook Chicken Delight on Adams between Normandie and Vermont (on the south side). Nor can you forget Jim Dandy Chicken. Jim Dandy used to right at Crenshaw and Jefferson. That's where you could get a half pint of fried clams. Wooo! And of course no story about Los Angeles and Chicken would be complete without Golden Bird, the proprietors who have always been.. well, significant figures in the seditty community.

That's just the chicken. I can still remember the first time I ever went to Fatburger. Yeah, the original one on Western just north of Jefferson. That nasty little shack had the best burger. It was after church at St. John's, and my would-be girl and her mom (who is now practically a bishop in the Episcopal Church) used to stop by there all the time. They had to take me home one time and so I had my first Fatburger when sometime in 1978. It changed my life because since then I've always looked for dumpy fastfood joints to deliver way beyond what they appear capable of delivering.

It was in that spirit that I did find Oki Dog. I'm talking about the Oki Dog on Santa Monica Blvd. That trashy, nasty joint with all the junior hoodlums and runaway kids and boozy bums with post-traumatic whatever that's called. The Oki Dog is actually two hot dogs smothered in chili and cheese topped with pastrami wrapped in a flour tortilla instead of a hot dog bun. It is by far the epitome of junk food and has yet to be topped in any universe.

Back to my 'hood. Now if you can remember this joint, you're showing your age. But who could forget the Nubian Queen. The NQ was by far the nicest restaurant ever to hit the black community (back when we were all just one black community). Right on Crenshaw half a block south of Adams, the Nubian Queen had all the ambience of that Michael Jackson video 'Do You Remember the Time'. It was that slick. The service was good, polite and the food was good. They went broke within a year, but for one shining moment...

Right next door, and probably still there is Leo's BBQ. I cannot remember a time when Leo's didn't exist. It was probably there when the Windmill was still on Adams and Crenshaw and the owner of the chinese laundry still wore a queue. That's some LA history for yo' ass! Of course Johnnies Pastrami Stand is still there. Johnnies was scene of so many interesting and dangerous nights in my imagination. Whenever pops went to get a sandwich or two, I was always afraid to leave the car. It was populated with 'the element'; the real pimps. You see, West Adams, for all its churches on the hill, and more that a few motels further west, and strangely beautiful women with no place to go. I always used to ask my father why anybody would want to have their vacation in this neighborhood. It was a long time before I understood why he used to crack up at that question.

El Rey was the coolest taco stand around. Over on Santa Barbara and Arlington (or was it Western?), you could get them to make you a suicide - orange soda mixed with root beer. I never was much into the tacos, but I always got thirsty driving by. I also used to drool at the waitress drawn on the side of a little bar called the House of Dimes on Jefferson just west of Western around the corner from Fatburger. How many black boys would stare at that miniskirt on the green wall? There must have been thousands with that same memory.

One of these days, I'll probably visit all of the old black bars and dives that I never bothered to in my 20s when I finally got over my fears. I wonder if their stories will ever be told. Here's to hope.

People of The Dons

The other night, I met the spousal unit's new partners. I don't want to reveal too much but we're involved in a venture that I think will be heralded from coast to coast. Basically, what happens when you put together a brother like me, barbecue and jazz? If you like that idea and can imagine it happening at a cool spot in Hollywood, then you have an idea about the venture. It turns out that these brothers go way back and are intimate with the lifestyle that was everything exciting about 'The Dons'.

If you are black and know Los Angeles, then inevitably at some point in your life, you had to be overcome by the massive weight of the social scenes generated by the money, brains and style of The Dons, Baldwin Hills, View Park and Ladera. The Dons are basically a neighborhood on the north facing hills of Baldwin Hills. The streets are named Don Felipe, Don Miguel, Don Milagro, etc. Built by the same developers as built Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills and the modern houses on Vie Del Rey in South Pasadena (Monterey Hills), these were where the sons and daughters of the bourgie lived and played. And man do I mean played.

One of the things I haven't done in a very long time, but do from time to time is to remember back in the day to the lives of myself with the Party People. When I think of upscale partying and the Party People, I think of the young adults of The Dons as the leaders of the pack. You see during the 80s, a revolution in paryting was going on. Prior to then, in the late 70s, it was all about house parties, and while house parties were still happening, the black club scene was exploding in neighborhoods that had never seen the like from El Segundo to Beverly Hills. So here is an intro to a book that needs to be written one of these days, which is a canonical rundown of the happening clubs of black LA in the Arsenio Hall / Cosby 80s.

Wal-Mart in the Hood

One of America's first shopping centers has become something I love again for new reasons. Wal-Mart is in the 'hood.

The Crenshaw Shopping Center was built in the art-deco style just before or after WW2. It was the first mall built in America. Although I don't have all the details now, I once did a highschool paper on Crenshaw Boulevard and I'm fairly certain of this. The original anchor tenants were the May Company and the Broadway stores. That one which was the Broadway is now a Wal-Mart. I count this as a great rebirth and notable in the history of this part of Los Angeles where I was raised. It's the most significant change since Magic Johnson opened his first movie theatres here in 1994.

Back in the days, there was a Woolworths and a Lindberg Nutrition at the Crenshaw Plaza. Lindberg's was a massive pink building just north of the May Co with a huge sign that reminded us to 'keep in the pink', and odd saying indeed for this African-American and Japanese-American neighborhood. Although much has changed, just across the street are the legendary wig shops which haven't in over 30 years.

I passed through this mall several days ago during my increasingly seldom visits to the city. Oddly enough, the first thing that struck me was the number of people cruising around the three floors of the joint in mobility devices. It may be a function of the odd locales that I frequent, but I am not accustomed to seeing 7 or 8 such folks in a day let alone in one store within the space of 20 minutes.

Unlike other developments, I get the distinct impression that the appearance of Wal-Mart at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza changes this neighborhood permanently. Anyplace where Sears goes out of business appears to be doomed, and unless and until Wal-Mart comes in, they are. Despite its wealthy enclaves and proximity and affinity to ViewPark and Ladera Heights, Crenshaw has not been the healthiest of commercial neighborhoods since the mid 70s when most of the automobile dealers moved south to Hawthorne Boulevard. The sharpest blow dealt to the district was the development of the Fox Hills Mall around 1977. It began a love-hate relationship with the CRA and Ruth Galanter that people still talk about whenever the question of inner-city development comes up.

This time around things appear to be all to Wal-Mart's and thus global capitalism's good. The LA Urban League's John Mack famously declared he'd rather have the low-wage and low-benefit jobs than no jobs at all. He's not alone in that sentiment, and I'm glad he put it that way.

Calvin Clone

Back in 1988 when people were still getting used to Arsenio Hall, my best friend and I were radical integrationists. Our cadre was known as GDZ. Like most 20-something yuppies, we threw parties with a high quotients of people with law degrees and 'Fortune 100 jobs'. (What were we thinking?) Well, we were black and we did play beach volleyball, so it wasn't too typical, at least not for 1988.

Like everyone else with a sense of humor and a daily newspaper subscription, I was a vapid addict of Calvin & Hobbes, the comic strip. I can't say that much I do in 'Cobb's Neighborhood' is influenced by that, but are any of us wired that tight with regards to attribution? (Hint: say no, Big Media is watching).

As marketing director of GDZ Productions, it was my job to pull the upscale black crowd in Los Angeles to our functions. Damn. That was a fun job. For our second annual beach party, aka Bash O Rama II, I introduced the theme of Bike Shorts Snapping. Just use your imagination and think of something sexy and spandexy. You get the picture. Knowing not everyone might have a pair, I appropriated Calvin.

The cool Calvin here became our mascot. Of course he spoke the lingo and was hip to all our trips. As time went by, I noticed Calvin other places off-strip. Now he's as popular as the Jesus fish on cars.

In these days of bootlegs and intellectual property battles, it's nice to know that people use icons to communicate something new. It would be boring to see only a pure Calvin, only doing what Watterson would have him do. The Calvin Clones have life, and although I'd like to think my volleyball playing Calvin was one of the coolest, it's good to know that you never completely know.