Nightengales: Angel Taylor's "Chai Tea Latte"

Here is a fantastic new artist I stumbled across about a year ago.  I love her voice and she is even more amazing in person.  Definitely check her out and buy her self titled album Angel Taylor: Love Travels

It is not enough to say you like an artist, you need to support them as well. 

The official recording for Chai Tea Latte is my favorite song, closely followed by "Best Father Around".

Words of Silence: Clayton Valli, "Dandelions"

"People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate." - James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?"

One of the new things I have picked up is a love for ASL.  I have only been studying for less than a year, but I have found the language to be nuanced and extremely beautiful.  Below is a video featuring Clayton Valli.  He was the first person to ever receive a PhD in ASL Poetry.  Watch and enjoy a giant of the field.







Clayton Valli (1951—2003) was a prominent deaf linguist and American Sign Language (ASL) poet whose work helped further to legitimize ASL and introduce people to the richness of American Sign Language literature.  As a poet, Valli created original works in ASL that he performed to appreciative audiences around the country. His poems make sophisticated use of handshape, movement, use of space, repetition, and facial expression. Influenced by canonical American poets like Robert Frost, as well as Deaf poets such as Bernard Bragg, Valli often chose nature imagery to convey subtle insights into Deaf experience. His brief "Hands" -- which makes use of the 5 handshape throughout—is a celebration of the power of sign language to describe anything in the universe. "Dandelion" uses simple nature imagery to convey the persistence of ASL despite oralists' best efforts to weed it out.  (source Wikipedia)

Echoes: Verse 11, Robert Westley

A warning...

What's Happening
by Robert Westley

It is not necessary to wait long
To see it happen -
Happening in the streets
Red with black blood
Happening in hallways
Littered with semen stains
Happening behind doors
Where babies loll on the floor
Scream with pain and tear each others hair.
It's happening right now.
A young girl surrenders her secrets
To the boy she loves, but
When they rise from her bed
Nothing remains between the sheets but
Vaginal secretions, some dark decaying spit
No love and not even a condom.
Everything she will know of him is inside her now
Her bones are light beams
Her arms are wings
And if the bedroom widow won't do for a fall
The butcher knife is in the kitchen drawer.
It's hapening.
Happening, by the way, in your neighborhood
You of the fresh-dew flowers
You of the scornful looks who hide
Behind your money it's pulled
Not just your petty crimes
Like murder or theft
A simple toke of some smoke or coke
Cheap sins that wash off on Sunday
Someone's abusing your mind
Fucking your son
Deceiving your daughter
Filling your house with shit
As if I care
You could take the dare
End the affair
Eat a pear
Turn to prayer
Stare into reality like a basin
Full of heavy water
And cleanse your skin
Of the evil that's within
But forget it.
You are not what's happening.

Westley, Robert.  "What's Happening."  The Road Before Us: 10 Gay Black Poets. Ed. Assoto Saint.  New York: Galiens Press, 1991. p. 136-137.

Bio from The Road Before Us

Robert Wesley was born November 10, 1962.  "I am a native of New Orleans where I spent my first seventeen years.  I graduates from Northwestern University in 1984 with a B.A. in philosophy.  I attended graduate school at Yale University for the following three years, and then started law school at the University of California, Berkeley, in  f1987.  I am currently working towards completion of my dissertation in philosophy and the final year of law school.  My career plans include teaching, law practice, and economic development in the black community."

The Places I Have Been

To tell all that has happened to me in the last months would take more ink than this post can hold so instead of a recap, a few simple facts:
 

1. Still working in the arts.
2. No longer single.
3. New house.  Fewer roommates (although I miss the old ones sometimes)
4. Still calling the District home.
5. Happy and learning how to deal with the unfamiliar sense of balance that comes with it.



I am coming out of a period of much needed self reflection.  I needed to get right with myself.  Now it is time to tend to those things and people that were neglected in my absence.  Back to business. I am giving myself the reported simple task of making two post a day.  I want to stay true to the intent behind this blog and keep it to writing and social commentary, so expect the see the world through my eyes in more ways than one.

For now.  Rest assured that the lights are back on underground.