AfroPunkFest 2014 & Spike Lee MJ Party

(above: Alice Smith mid set on Saturday Aug 23, 2014 at Afro Punk Festival, Commodore Barry Park, Bklyn)

AfroPunk 2014 music art food culture ere in Downtown/Fort Greene Brooklyn and i'm here.

5:15p Alice Smith at the Green Stage literally brought the sun out with her voice and energy.

Amazing set, Alice gave that no nonsense sweet sweet fierce fierce love to the crowd, her inspirations and even had a little left over for the soundman.

Lianne La Havas, brit born, Jamaican/Greek descended chartreuse/muse followed a Beverly Bond DJ set, and proceeded to cause a Brooklyn swoon the likes of which many are still happily unrecovered from. 

Throughout the crowd I heard as many people singing La Havas lyrics as there were remarking about how perfectly darling she is. Its true Lianne's songs have the quality of a young woman who's in the effort of finding love has had heart tarnished and uses the experience to burnish out songs which when delivered in her range from primal scream to often audible whisper, melt the heart.

It's a perfect bit of scheduling that Valerie June (whom I just caught before her set ended) Lianne La Havas & Alice Smith, played a processional lead toward Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, because each of the three musicans present a facet of young womanhood. Valerie's rockabilly strunging and "aw shucks-esque" sing cleverly ensconce a Valerie's  woman who will not be taking shit now or later. Lianne is romantic optimist, going mind and heart wide open into the romantic abyss, and Alice is lightning a potential lover hopes to catch and worries my fry them. 

If you'll allow me to wrap these three musicans into a loosely fitting metaphor, here goes, Alice Smith is Id, Lianne the Ego and Valerie's the Super Ego. Granted each has songs in which they play all and none of those roles, but on stage thats what the viberation I hear.

Alice Smith is a force of nature unapologetically contained in the body of an electrifying young woman. When Alice's label lacked the vision of her second album, the Grammy nominated artist went to her crowds and funded "SHE" her second album which has produced more of the high voltage, piognant and true songs of Alice's heart as mind, laid bare, that make her a musical pleasure to be transfixed by.

The stellar end to the 1st night of Afro Punk at the green stage was aptly presided over by the one and only Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. If you've ever been in a church service, if you've ever been to a racuous party, or had the pleasure of both in one, you'll have a slight idea of what heaven on Earth  Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings unfurled in Commodore Barry Park at Afro Punk 2014. Sharon was  minister preacher in full in one sequence sharing with the congregation her personal struggles and uncertainties after illness, "I didn't know if I would make it, I had no hair, no eyebrow hair no nostril hair, I didn't know if I would be anywhere.." in another moment renegotiating the playlists into a satisfying melody of their decade longer career songs. The movement of souls was visible, a funk more fortified than the sess tinged air, churning up the clouds as their musical chariot descended, like the revival jams of 100 Days, 100 Nights and eons of horny bass all rolled in to one, knocking the often unknowingly sanctifying crowd flat dead and bringing us back to life. Thats how Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings closed night one of Afro Punk 2014 on the green stage.

Today acts ranging from the nearly brad new life of "Unlocking the Truth" (who at aged 13 swiped the title of youngest festival group  from The Bots) to stalwarts of punk, ska & rock, Fishbone, who can always be counted on for a memoral show, will hit the Afro Punk stages, along with dynamic and diverse acts including Tamar-Kali, SZA, The Internet, Cro-Mags, the legenday Michell Ndegeocello, and culminating with a festival ending set by D'Angelo. So you've been told.

In a true challenge to musical loyalty and geographic possibilty at today is also the Spike Lee presented Michael Jackson party in Bedford-Stuyvesant at historical mixed media venue Restoration Plaza from 12noon to 6p Dj Spinna will be controlling the decks an spinning straight MJ and Jackson and or Jacksons inspired track just as Spinna does at hos annual MJ and MJ vs Prince parties around the country.

Cell service at these events tends to be spotty which I dont know whether to blame on infrastructure, or crowd control, but that is the case so I'll be uploading pics tomorrow as well as some choice video.

Fyi if youre a straight R&B type, the Mj Party ends at 6 as D'Angelo starts at Afro Punk at 8:30 so that C train (Kingston Av to Lafayette, followed  by a walk north on Ashland) might have your name on it

All Free. That's what's up Brooklyn, USA. 

Oops: Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant Spike Lee/Doing the Right Thing

(Updated Sat 6/28)

Apologies.

I got the date wrong. Hopefully I'm the only person who had to miss out on the block Party.

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"What is brooklyn?” is a question I find myself asking a lot lately. I’m willing to bet, New York being New York, that question is sincerely asked on average three times a week around the world. And that’s sincerely, add the ironic existential asks and I’m sure the question of what Brooklyn is, and my god isn’t runs like a metronome. 

For me to be wondering that, born here, having been, across the span of now five decades (I promise I’m still carded and I still think I’m supposed to be) it’s as bizarre as if I awoke this morning, swung my feet off the bed and looked down wondering, “who’s legs are these?”

But that’s where I’m at and I’m not alone. The amount of spontaneous conversations I hear and take part in on a daily basis asking the same questions, wondering as well whether we born Brooklynites are still attached to a living breathing factually member, this borough of whether we’re all suffering the pain of a phantom limb are countless. 

There are many Brooklyns. In each era for decades now, there have been many, untouched by the goings on of Manhattan, fairly oblivious to other corners of this same borough. Five decades lived and I’ve never walked the streets of Bay Ridge. I know of people who work a job, raise a family, live a life and never set foot out of Sheepshead bay, or Brownsville, or Greenpoint. It’s not unsurprising in a place like Brooklyn that has a population three times larger than San Francisco and if counted without the other four boroughs would be the 4th largest populated city in the United States.

I just watched an old episode of what I happily recall President Obama calling a “iiberal fantasy”, TV’s “The West Wing”. In this episode a congressman, and leader of the Black Caucaus tried to make the point that his constituents, young Black men in Bedford-Stuyvesant were being under-represented. The same episode referenced Colombia as proxy for a conversation about the drug war, and in a different region of the world (as well as the plot) “friendly fire” as short hand for the complexities of war. Bedford-Stuyvesant was referenced several times, each timing meaning impoverished, disenfranchised, and Black. That blanket reference doesn’t work today, barely ten years later. And that should be cause for celebration, but the problem for many people, many native New Yorkers, many born Brooklynites, is what definitions do apply to Bed-Stuy, today.

It’s good that as opposed to poverty and disenfranchisement, there are small businesses and home owners, forging new bonds and reaping dividends in Bed-Stuy. Fantastic would be if more of those people were the residents of that community that helped keep two nostrils above water when the floods of drugs, crime, and systematic neglect rained down upon that part of Brooklyn.

I recently was invited to the home of a new business partner, he a professional was telling me about the Bed-Stuy brownstown he’d recently purchased. I remarked about how great he, not of Brooklyn, must be finding it all, and I rattled of some culinary and social points of interest. He had no idea where any of these places and the streets they belonged to were. “He doesn’t need to…” I thought to myself as he told me, sheepishly the story of the people who were foreclosed on, which made his purchase possible. To say the least, I felt conflicted. Part of me wanted to look down and ask where my legs were and why weren’t they moving.

This Saturday Sunday June 29th from noon to 6p, on Stuyvesant Avenue and Quincy, Spike Lee will be hosting a block party in honor of his seminal film “Do The Right Thing”http://www.okayplayer.com/news/spike-lee-hosting-25th-anniversary-do-the-right-thing-block-party-bed-stuy.html. The block is the actual and entire block the Oscar nominated film was shot on. 

If you truly know Brooklyn’s Brownstown belt and the skirmishes contained in, or your simply old enough, you know how much of the city’s ills then and sadly now Spike packed into that film with poignance and power. You then probably know of the scene in the film where a man white of skin walks his ten speed bike, and celtics basketball jersey up the block and into that character’s new brownstone. A lot of people relate that scene from twenty-five years ago to today, especially after Spike voiced the displeasure thousands of us feel at having neighborhoods we’ve lived in redressed around and without us, earlier this year at a Pratt Institute event. I recall watching the film and not understanding how that could ever happen, I was unfamiliar and undeserving of Bed-Stuy back then, I was a teenager. Spike knew what I wish more people knew today, Brooklyn is a place where people intended to live, that had fallen on hard times (for countless reasons) and it only took (and takes) a release of the yoke holding the neighborhood down, offered to those with means, to create a market and a marketing, that would invite people with means to come back.

Sadly, and what troubles me most is how difficult it is for a lot of us to be happy about Brooklyn's fortunes. If you would have told people in 1989 that Brooklyn would be undergoing the current renaissance we'd be partying in the streets. Surely people would have to presume the problems of drug wars, underfunded schools, over policing, banking discrimination, crime, would have been resolved. But they really weren't, despite the light Brooklyn basks in today, the instrument of change in most cases is a bulldozer. Pushing away, old structures and old cultures, pushing people off the reservation, tables held for the new. Crime hasn't be solved in Brooklyn of most anywhere in New York City as much as it's been made complicated by raising rents on the poor, people who are victims crime and relative to their population, occasionally suspects in crime. The Brooklyn Bulldozer Baby & Bathwater Bloomberg Policy is what happened. And after eight years of a hostile Mayorial administration, and the near two decades of urban decay preceding that, it didn't seem so bad at first, until you saw the baby's rolling down the street and off into cold night.

Yesterday I was randomly net-surfing (see I am old) and I came across a listing on Franklin in Bed-Stuy for an apartment. Fifteen years ago members of my family used to go to substance abuse treatment a few doors down. Not a nickel to rub between them, not a pot to do anything with at a all. 

The asking price for the apartment I saw online yesterday? 1.025 Million dollars. Seriously where am I?

Well like I said, Spike is having a block party on Saturday sunday and I don’t quite know what that means or where my legs will be, but I believe they’ll be doing the right thing. If you don’t have the house you gotta have hope.

"Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At?"

Spike to the heart of Gentrification Agnst

Since everyone else is talking about fiery filmmaker and Brooklynite Spike Lee's expressive talk about gentrification during a Q&A at Pratt Institute (Alumni office I'm side-eyeing you for my lack of notice) I might as well post it too.

Besides simply saying gentrification is bad Spike addresses the issues of new people trampling the longstanding culture of existing residents, neighborhood renaming and my fave the "discovery" of places that already have people, culture and life.

A few highlights:

"Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers into South Bronx, Harlem…for the facilities to get better?"

"The motherfucking Christopher Columbus syndrome… you can't discover this we been here."

Spike also references the Michael Jackson Tribute party planned for Fort Greene park back in 2009, and how it was turned away, by new residents to the area, which I wrote about on this blog: http://umbrooklynborn.blogspot.com/2009/08/community-is-bigger-than-one-person.html

Here’s the full audio, including the man’s response and Lee’s rebuttal:

https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gentrification

All that's essentially the raison d'être of this blog, nearly verbatim. Wonder if Spike's a reader?

The whole breakdown from NYMag:

The filmmaker, wearing a Knicks beanie, orange socks, blue Nikes, and "Defend Brooklyn" hoodie, was at Pratt Institute for a lecture in honor of African American History Month, surrounded by locals, when he was nearly asked a question about “the other side” of the gentrification debate. “Let me just kill you right now,” Lee interrupted, “because there was some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the good of gentrification.’” (See: “Argument Over a Brownstone Neighborhood” andNew York’s “Is Gentrification All Bad?”)

“I don’t believe that,” said Lee. And for the next seven minutes he explained, with passion, humor, and a fair amount of f-words.

Here’s the thing: I grew up here in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It’s changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. P.S. 20 was not good. P.S. 11. Rothschild 294. The police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something.

[Audience member: And I don’t dispute that … ]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And even more. Let me kill you some more.

[Audience member: Can I talk about something?]

Not yet.

Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!

Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.

You can’t just — here’s another thing: When Michael Jackson died they wanted to have a party for him in motherfuckin’ Fort Greene Park and all of a sudden the white people in Fort Greene said, “Wait a minute! We can’t have black people having a party for Michael Jackson to celebrate his life. Who’s coming to the neighborhood? They’re gonna leave lots of garbage.” Garbage? Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning? It’s like the motherfuckin’ Westminster Dog Show. There’s 20,000 dogs running around. Whoa. So we had to move it to Prospect Park!

I mean, they just move in the neighborhood. You just can’t come in the neighborhood. I’m for democracy and letting everybody live but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here. Can’t do that!

And then! [to audience member] Whoa whoa whoa. And then! So you’re talking about the people’s property change? But what about the people who are renting? They can’t afford it anymore! You can’t afford it. People want live in Fort Greene. People wanna live in Clinton Hill. The Lower East Side, they move to Williamsburg, they can’t even afford fuckin’, motherfuckin’ Williamsburg now because of motherfuckin’ hipsters. What do they call Bushwick now? What’s the word? [Audience: East Williamsburg]

That’s another thing: Motherfuckin’… These real estate motherfuckers are changing names! Stuyvestant Heights? 110th to 125th, there’s another name for Harlem. What is it? What? What is it? No, no, not Morningside Heights. There’s a new one. [Audience: SpaHa] What the fuck is that? How you changin’ names?

And we had the crystal ball, motherfuckin’ Do the Right Thing with John Savage’s character, when he rolled his bike over Buggin’ Out’s sneaker. I wrote that script in 1988. He was the first one. How you walking around Brooklyn with a Larry Bird jersey on? You can’t do that. Not in Bed Stuy.

So, look, you might say, “Well, there’s more police protection. The public schools are better.” Why are the public schools better? First of all, everybody can’t afford — even if you have money it’s still hard to get your kids into private school. Everybody wants to go to Saint Ann’s — you can’t get into Saint Ann’s. You can’t get into Friends. What’s the other one? In Brooklyn Heights. Packer. If you can’t get your child into there … It’s crazy. There’s a business now where people — you pay — people don’t even have kids yet and they’re taking this course about how to get your kid into private school. I’m not lying! If you can’t get your kid into private school and you’re white here, what’s the next best thing? All right, now we’re gonna go to public schools.

So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why’s there more police protection in Bed Stuy and Harlem now? Why’s the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!

All right, go ahead. Let’s see you come back to that.