fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
[Update (3/27/17): This is playing again at SF Marsh through April 8. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, run, don’t walk, to check it out.] It’s the early morning hours of January 28, 1986. Hospice Nurse Elaine Magree just pulled an all-nighter, answering calls and visiting dying patients. She’s already tended to…
Before becoming the nation’s 44th president, Barack Obama served in the Illinois State Senate from 1997 to 2004. From 2005 to 2008, he was the Junior Senator from the state of Illinois in the US Senate. These facts are not in dispute. One can easily verify them online or by scouring old newspapers or other…
Until this year, I’ve never been to the Monterey Jazz Festival. One of the premiere events on the jazz calendar, one would think I’d have been all up inside it by now. Sadly, such is not the case. This year, opportunity dropped the festival in my lap when a friend passed along comp tickets to…
By early 2006, I flew to LA on a fairly regular basis to see about Dad, take him to appointments. He had spent the previous Thanksgiving in hospital. Now he was frail. Appointments. Follow ups. Medications. Monitoring. Watching. Waiting. He slowed down as the rest of us seemed to speed up. For me, that meant…
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Everyone gasped when Donald Trump uttered those words at his presidential campaign launch event in June, 2015. Out the gate, he hit the racism button, shamelessly scapegoating Mexicans and Mexican Americans for the country’s ills. Complaining that political correctness has kept America from having the “frank” discussions…
I don’t remember Larry Wilmore from The Daily Show. I didn’t watch it often enough to catch him doing his shtick, the “Senior Black Correspondent.” So when he started hosting The Nightly Show w/Larry Wilmore, I didn’t know what to expect. I saw this brother with a huge head, and I thought of Mr. Potato…
Way back when during my waning days at UCLA, not long after I came out, the Daily Bruin did something unconscionable. Buried in the paper appeared a story about the campus police arresting some guys cruising each other in a men’s room. And the paper printed their names. I was mortified. And livid. With youthful, righteous…
Duke Ellington’s Famous Orchestra had many great soloists. Indeed, it was a band of great soloists. But one stood a notch above them all, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Jazz writer Scott Yanow states that Hodges possessed “the most beautiful tone ever heard in jazz.” He formed his style early in his career and never varied…
Lots of screaming occurred during the Republican National Convention this past week. The Never Trump folks had a series of hissy fits as they tried in vain to derail the inevitable. Hampered by shenanigans during the Rules Committee, overruled on the floor of the convention by the chair, a group of folks saw no other option…
I started writing a very different post the other night about the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. I wrote a draft about the need for police departments nationwide to better police themselves, to root out bad officers, and to hire better officers to begin with so that problems do not occur. And then…
