This evening, MTV returned to it's roots and is playing Michael Jackson video's on heavy rotation. If you haven't already heard, Jackson died today at the are of 50.
One of my favorite MJ memories is proudly wearing little pink purse with MJ's face on it back in 1st or 2nd grade.
Looking forward to a MJ tribute dance party in NYC.
I've been away from the blog for about a month preparing for a redesign in addition to other related projects. The new look of the site will be up by the end of next week.
Today, I did want to briefly mention a rather upsetting, yet important article I read in yesterday's New York Times Sunday Magazine. The article details the racially segregated high school proms of Montgomery County High School in Mount Vernon, GA. Since 1971, the school's senior prom has been this way. 1971 is also the year the school was integrated. (The above photo was take by NYT photographer Gillian Laub). Writer Sara Corbertt spoke to several students of Montgomer County High School, some who seemed to be torn by their situations, while others appeared to just accept things as they are.
It's terribly disappointing that in the same year our country inaugurates Barack Obama as the first African-American President, episodes such as this continue. It also says a great deal about our country and the challenges we face.
16 years ago, when researching colleges during my junior year of high school, I learned that the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana had a separate African-American homecoming dance. I grew up in the well integrated suburban Chicago town Oak Park and at the time, I couldn't imagine something like this existing and I didn't want to be a part of a school or community that felt that his was "normal". Fast forward to 2009, and I'm even more blown away and saddened.
The documentary Prom Night in Mississippi details a similar story. Airing on HBO in June, the film profiles Charleston High School's first intergrated prom which took place in 2008 after actor Morgan Freeman offered the school, located in his hometown, a deal they, thankfully, couldn't refuse. He offered to pay for the high school's upcoming senior prom if they agreed to end its legacy of racial segregation. The film has collected numerous awards including Best Documentary Feataure at the 2009 AFI Dallas International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the 2009 Oxford Film Festival, and was screened at Sundance earlier this year (the above photo is from the films website).
One of the first things that came to my mind this Earth Day was the art of El Anatsui. I wrote about my visit to The Met to view the museum's acquisition of his piece Between Earth and Heaven and cannot get enough of his work. Born in Ghana and now living and teaching in Nigeria, he regularly uses found materials in his artwork but doesn't consider his method as recycling. In a statement I found on the website Ethnicarts.org, El Anatsui comments on his piece, Fading Cloth, which is made from the caps of liquer bottles:
"I
don’t see what I do as recycling; I transform the caps into something
else. If there is a direct link between the bottle tops and the fabric
cloths, it is probably the fact that they all have names linked to
events, people, historical or current issues. I
don’t see what I do as recycling; I transform the caps into something
else. If there is a direct link between the bottle tops and the fabric
cloths, it is probably the fact that they all have names linked to
events, people, historical or current issues. Take Ecomog gin: this
refers to the regional military intervention force which brought the
wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia to an end. The brandy called Ebeano
(meaning ‘where we are now’) references a popular electioneering slogan
from the last political polls in the state in which I live. Similarly
kente cloths are given names like takpekpe le Anloga (conference at
Anloga) or can be named after a personality. Fading cloth is more of a
formalistic name, with the full blooded reds at the top and bottom of
the cloth yielding to creams and other pale colours in the centre.
Flattening and stitching the caps is laborious and repetitive – a very
different process to my earlier work using power tools on wood. I have
several assistants working with me, and we start with strips and
eventually assemble them into the final composite results. The process
of stitching, especially the repetitive aspect, slows down action and I
believe makes thinking deeper. It’s like the effect of a good mantra on
the mind. "
Happy, happy Earth Day.
Want to perform a good deed? Let's help Boston's Museum of African-American History win a $100,000 preservation grant. The museum is housed in the city's historic Abiel Smith School and African Meeting house. Both sites played a significant part in the abolitionist movement and the grant would go toward the preservation of the Abiel Smith School, built in 1834. It was the first public school in America designated to the education of black children and is a National Historic Landmark.
I had a chance to visit the landmark earlier this year and am looking forward to my next visit.
You can vote once every day until May 17th, so let's get to it. Please visit the website for Partners in Perservation to vote.
Abiel Smith School 46 Joy St Boston, MA 02114
I have been absent from the blogosphere for about a month, but am now back and plan to post regularly.The first order of business to congratulate Annette Gordon Reed on the Pulitzer she won for her latest book The Hemingses of Monticello. The book chronicles the Hemings family from the 1700s in Virginia to 1826, when Thomas Jefferson died at his and the enslaved Hemings family home at Monticello.
I got the book when it first came out last September, not only because of my interest in the life of Sally Hemings, but because of the Hemings family's imprint on the American experience and the intriguing life of Jefferson's chef and former slave James Hemings, brother of Sally. I read Reed's earlier book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy years ago and visited Monticello in 2006 to learn as much as I could about the Hemingses. After hearing about the Pulitzer win on Monday, I plan on finally sitting down with her latest book starting tomorrow.
If you would like to see more of Gordon-Reed, she will be giving the University of Delaware's Department of History's William Watson Harrington Lecture on May 7th. The topic of her lecture will be "The Hemingses of Monticello: Writing the Life of an Enslaved Family" and the event is free and open to the public.
Below is a short list of profiles on Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello:
This afternoon, I came across Mrs.O, a website that follows the fashion of our first lady, Michelle Obama. This is not your average fashion site. The wonderfully simple logo made me want more, so I looked through the site and discovered that it not only tells what and who Mrs. Obama is wearing in particular photos, but also provides detailed coverage of the photographed news event. Bravo.
Image courtesy of The Washington Post.
I still have my copy of his book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans that I got as a teenager and cannot imagine ever parting with it.
His work truly helped shape my life.
He died yesterday of congestive heart failure in a hospital in Durham, N.C. He was 94. The Washington Post wonderful tribute to Franklin on their website.
For some reason last week I woke up with Nirvana's take on the American folk song "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" When I first heard the song back in 1993 during their performance on MTV's Unplugged after Kurt Cobain's death, I was taken by both the haunting lyrics and Cobain's delivery. I was also at the height of my angst-ridden teen years. Angst or not, it's an incredibly emotional cover.
It wasn't until much later that I that listened to blues musician Lead Belly's (Huddie Ledbetter) 1944 eerie take on the song on YouTube. Masterful, to say the least. Below are the lyrics:
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I'm going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
Her husband, was a hard working man
Just about a mile from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I'm going where the cold wind blows,
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I'm going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
After listening to this, curiosity got the best of me and I did some research. The song was written sometime in the 1870s and is thought to be from Southern Appalachia, passed on as an oral tradition. It was first published in 1917 by Cecil Sharp. The number covers seem to be too many to count and often include slightly different lyrics and song titles including "In the Pines" and "Black Girl". Performed in many musical styles, the long list of artists who have taken the song on are Pete Seeger, Mark Lanegan, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Odetta, Dolly Parton, Hole, Robert Plant, Joan Baez, Nicole Atkins and one of my favorite artists Susheela Raman. There is also a Hit By a Rock remix of Raman's "In the Pines".
A 1994 New York Times article by Eric Weisbard discusses the the songs structure:
The basic elements of the song remain similar from version to version, but the context can be altered with a few words. It may be a husband, a wife or even a parent whose head is "found in the driver's wheel" and whose "body has never been found." Men, women and sometimes confused adolescents flee into the sordid pines, which serve as a metaphor for everything from sex to loneliness and death. The "longest" train can kill or give one's love the means to run away or leave an itinerant worker stranded far from his home.
To learn more about Lead Belly and hear some of his music, visit the Lead Belly Foundation website.
At 12am this morning I received many wonderful birthday gifts from my boyfriend and one of them was the genealogy program Reunion 9. Yes!
I downloaded the demo about a month ago after doing some research into several other genealogy programs such as Ancestry.com's Family Tree Maker and Mac Family Tree. I was initially leaning toward Family Tree Maker until I learned that it is not Mac friendly and my Powerbook is too small to support Virtual PC. (Sadness.)
Once I started using Reunion, I fell in love with it. The software is simple to use and organizes all of your information extremely well. I no longer have to dig through endless documents looking for information. You can create several types of family history charts, attach photos and other files to your ancestor person sheets and create your own categories within each person sheet. What I love most right now is the ability to suppress or add what categories you would like to be visible when printing. This lets you tailor your files so you can see what you need, making it easier for you to sort your data. There is even a new iPhone application to let users take the information with them.
I'm still in the early stages of the program, so I will post additional information as I learn.
My boyfriend and I have seem to have mastered the art of the quick vacation. On Valentine's Day we flew to Boston from NYC for a daytrip, and it was a lot easier than we thought it would be. Though we missed the Shepard Fairey exhibit at Institute of Contemporary Art, one of our main reason's for taking the trip, we were able cover a lot of ground. Here's how you, too, can tour Boston in 12 hours.
Above: Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge
Below: Strata Center, MIT
54th Massachucetts Regiment Memorial.
Exhibit at the Museum of African American History in Beacon Hill.
The museum is housed at the Abiel Smith School which is the first
publicly-funded school for educating African-American children.
The African Meeting House was closed for renovations.
Above: George Washington statue at Boston Common
Below: Massachusetts State House
