Today is a rainy day here in sunny Los Angeles. As my pants and jacket dry off here in my cubicle let’s take some time to review the continual inconveniences of the current state of my local civilization. Surely it must be an act of subversion to dare to critique any civilization founded by “the greatest empire television has ever seen”—to quote Monty Python’s Flying Circus—but there are a few naughty bits that must be worth mentioning. Before I shoot the real bullets, let’s list the meta-bullets:

• My inconveniences are insignificant compared to the street existence of a small boy in Iraq and the village death of a little girl in Darfur. However, the assumption here is that my inconveniences are caused by the same “universal” mindset developed during the imperialist revolutions culminating in the Roman, Messiah-killing age we live in now.
• It may seem strange for many who have only seen Los Angeles on television to get complaints from a native Angelino.

And now for something completely different:

• The almost continuous inconvenience here in Los Angeles is the traffic. It is so bad it even gets into my poetry. When I was a young, white liberal I used to get upset about white people not “believing” Black history. Egocentrism causes more sadness than giddy delusions of grandeur. Such pathetic sadness went away when I realized that these are certainly the same white people sitting in a traffic jam thinking nothing of it—thinking nothing about the “black” history of how the diesel engine was used with fossil fuel instead of vegetable fuel and the deliberate sabotage and underdevelopment of public (communal) transportation. Nevertheless, my triumph over ego is limited: I still hate traffic jams—but I know what caused them so I do not have the road rage of the ignorant.
• Another prominent inconvenience is the difficulty in finding and procuring real food. Our local supermarket chain Trader Joes went heavy into GMO a few years ago drastically reducing the surface area. When we walk into any of the “normal” chains like Ralphs it is almost like walking into a desert: there is very little life-renewing food in the store—just call out to all the high glycemic index carbohydrates and ask them walk out the store—the store will be almost empty. So we are forced to shop at expensive-ass Whole Foods or stumble upon a farmer’s market. I am completely aware of how silly this sounds to most of the civilized folk of Los Angeles and I am aware that there is little sympathy for this inconvenience. So now let’s have a fake conversation about the obesity epidemic in North American children… One related tidbit: when many people see me they often think I was born and raised in the continent Africa (which, dude, is totally cool). One of the reasons I think they think this is because I am not obese—many, many “African Americans” my age are obese—a clear sign of assimilation. And I say this not out of arrogance because my mother and father—many in my family—suffer greatly from her past American food styles. Sufia Giza and I chatted about this back in 2003. Did I mention that we buy bottled water exclusively—effectively permitting the commercial sector to sell us our potable water?
• The dominant monthly inconvenience is paying rent. My father had me and mother and brother living in a house by the time he was 24. I am almost twice his age and renting an apartment! Here’s a cliché: housing costs are too high in Los Angeles. But, again, historical, metrical information is the savior from neurosis: the dollar is now currency—back in my father’s day, the dollar was money. Also there was a law passed when I was a child that encouraged the development of commercial property over residential property. Oh yeah: there’s my personal relationship to finance that I can quickly summarize by comparing my debt status to that of an African country financing with IMF auspices.
• Rainy days like this one reminds me of the inconvenience related to driving into work. As a computer programmer, it is outright insulting to have drive into work. But this one circles back to the traffic thing…
• One yearly disappointment, at tax time, is not really knowing what my taxes are doing apart from killing people in Darfur and Iraq. I’m pretty sure my funds are being used to provide money for oil barons who are saving up for their own rainy day… I don’t see my taxes educating American children or preventing young people from being punished by law enforcement (instead of being rehabilitated by community empowerment). Whatever “rabid and ironic racism” white people are wont to accuse me of, it does not provide excuses as to why education, featuring the development of thinking powers, does not happen en masse in my “community.”

I’m going to go with this one: Cities are ego centers for the white town fathers of all colors. In China and in India, billions are evacuating the underdeveloped villages and are packing into the giant slave ship slums. They are dreaming of a semblance the lifestyle I dislike today. Oh, I am so ungrateful!

Last week Jerry Quickly interviewed a group of “professional” poets on KPFK. I will assume that most of these people were souls of African descent. The poets were on the air to promote at least three bullets:

• Their show at the L.A. Theatre Center.
• The pathetic state of the “art” of spoken word.
• The “professional poet.”

In the promotion of the show at the L.A. Theatre Center, I recognized the name Jaha Zainabu. We are proud and pleased to host a small sample of her work here at kintespace.com. The second name that was known to me was Gina Loring—also here at kintespace.com. None of these names were represented during the Jerry Quickly interview so whatever ‘bad stuff’ to be said in this Blog post have very little to do with them…

The Approach toward the Pathetic State of Spoken Word

The speakers in the Jerry Quickly interview came at the pathetic state of spoken word from a fundamentally Babylonian shopkeeper point of view instead of a political point of view. I see this approach as incorrect only because I do not intend to “make a living” off of poetry. The solace and nipple comfort for the people who are trying to make a living being an “artist” these days is that I am not talented or skilled and, in fact, I am a part of the tyranny of mediocrity that dominates the poetry scene. This of course is an act of murder toward an innocent man and I choose to escape as a fugitive instead of trying to represent myself in an artificial court of law—for laws laid by corrupt flesh men.

My recommended political point of view looking on the pathetic state of spoken word is to see the possibility that the hordes of mediocre poets out there are developed deliberately by a dominator culture. An empire cannot contain a population that knows how to think and command language. My recommendation is not to condemn the victims but to take the opportunity to remind us of the systems in place that create such bland, dependent and egocentric people. Speech itself is under attack because Hitler knows what brought him to power…

Regarding the “Professional Poet”

The opinion here is that the poet is fundamentally fascinated with language and speech itself. This area of fascination is most rewarding for poets of African descent because they descend from the oldest cultures on Earth—peoples so old that they have a collective memory of the innovation of word making (logic) itself. My discipline based on this fascination immediately permits me to ignore “artists” who find no value whatsoever in this primitivism. This is not destructive on my part because any agile and swift Babylonian shopkeeper can spot a customer who is not going to buy it and they ignore me before I have “my chance” to ignore them. It’s a win-null situation—me with null…

The grounding here is that a poet who professes is not far from a prophet—and when you hear a prophet speak it will “move you”—to quote two words I heard during the interview. What I came away with from the Quickly interview is that the mediocre masses should be willing to pay money to listen to words that surely may question the need to make money. The mediocre masses are willing to pay money to not listen to the mediocre masses—they need a “professional” instead—a very New York state of mind… It’s like a little empire state building inside of an empire state building. No thing is free and materialists get what they pay for…

So let me guess here…

• A small cartel of spoken word artists will form a caste system that companies like Viacom can package and shop around as voices of diversity. It looks similar to the time in New Orleans when creoles approached the white town fathers with a deal…
• The business model of the “professional poet” will resemble that of the “rap artist”—from the much respect deserved for the work of Mos Def down to the television appearances of famous names we all know and we don’t want the search engines to hit here today…
• The “professional poet” will become a recognizable product for the entertainment industry and this will be seen as an innovative achievement instead of yet another Negro job program for talented, charismatic tokens used to pacify the mediocre masses…