Sometimes, we just need beautiful music.



Thanks CC!! Props to you for this song.

What happens when you're facing the person who pulled the trigger, pushed the button, relished in the moment after bombing? What happens when you see the expression on their face, one of joyous memory.

"The thing I miss most about being in the (U.S.) Army is the sky after a bombing. The color..."

and I finished,

"Yes, the color red. The way everything's in focus and there's dust in the air. And the light is red?"

I was thinking of times when I'd experienced bombings - like during the first Gulf War, or when I was in Lebanon when the U.S. was bombing back in 1998. The way the sky lit up a bright red from the dust. I was recollecting the fear, and the taste of fear: it's bitter, like sweat gone rancid. The smell of a bombing, too, is singed, bitter, like burnt coffee. But worse, cause it's followed by the taste of blood in your throat.

I looked up at her; she was reminiscing. A big smile on her face. The way the sky looks after a bombing. After she, or someone in her unit, had pushed a button, pulled a trigger. And I was not smiling, thinking of all the innocent people who'd been killed as she was coming out of the bunker, thankful to see the sky.

And there we were, facing each other.

Unarmed people shot at, abused or killed by NYPD. Find the original at NYTimes.com

Eleanor Bumpers

Abner Louima

Antoine Reid

Amadou Diallo

Patrick Dorismond

Ousmane Zongo

Timothy Stansbury, Jr.

Sean Bell

And, thanks R.H. for adding writer Henry Dumas (age 33), shot and killed by NYC Transit Police in 1968, in a case of 'Mistaken Identity'.

This happens to me sometimes. My worlds collide. I remember when I lived in Boston YEARS ago, one Saturday morning, I got on the T - the red line - to ride into town and five people from five different parts of my life were in the same car. I just rode the T all the way to South Station, got on a train and went to New York for the rest of the weekend. I was young, couldn't handle the collision. Needed the anonymity of the Big A.P.P.L.

But yesterday was different. I flew to Louisville for a one day meeting at the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which is doing AMAZING work in Kentucky and supporting incredible people doing AMAZING work. When I got in the car, who was there in the front seat but Lauren Austin - who I met a year ago to the day at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where she's the Community Artist in Residence. I was excited to see her, as meeting her was a turning point during my stay at the residency and it was joyful to learn about her work. My host (who happens to be cousins with my friend here in Austin, K.G. aka Trevor - yeah!! so excited to meet your incredible family) dropped me off at the lovely Columbine B & B. When I stepped in the door of this beautiful place, Rich takes one look at me and says, "Didn't you live in Jamaica Plain?" All the while, I'm trying to locate him and then we REALIZE we know each other from 10 years ago - when his partner was my supervisor (Hey Bob :)!!!

I about fell out. But then I didn't. Because I'm older now and these kinds of things just don't surprise me anymore. But they do move me. And it was wonderful to see people who I have been moved by, or who are close to people I love or who I have kind feelings for. It's awesome.

And, I got to meet new beautiful people, too - like Sue Massek of the Reel World String Band - who shared with me the joy of Paula Nelson's music and the fact of her great grandfather's banjo.

Life holds deep surprises sometimes. Who would have thought I'd be a Dominican American girl living in Texas, running into folks in Louisville, Kentucky.

It's beautiful, really.

I can't believe almost a month has passed since I last posted. Time is flying this spring' the cardinals and herons are flying with it.

Aime Cesaire has passed. Last week, in fact. Here's a news clipping about it:

Aime Cesaire, voice of French Black pride, dies

Thu 17 Apr 2008, 13:18 GMT

By Astrid Wendlandt

PARIS (Reuters) - French Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, founding father of the "negritude" movement that celebrated black consciousness, died in his native Martinique, France's Ministry of Culture said on Thursday.
Cesaire, 94, who was mayor of the island's main city Fort-de-France for more than half a century, was admitted to hospital last week suffering from heart and other problems.

His writings offered insight into how France imposed its culture on its citizens of different origins in the early part of the 20th Century. The theme still resonates in French politics today, as the country continues to struggle to integrate many of its residents of African and North African origin.

In 2005, Cesaire refused to meet then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (now French president) over concerns that Sarkozy's conservative UMP party had pushed for a law which proposed to recognise the positive legacy of French colonial rule. The law was eventually repealed.

Cesaire and African intellectual Leopold Senghor -- later president of Senegal -- founded "The Black Student" in 1934, a journal that encouraged people to develop black identity.

ANTI-COLONIAL VOICE IN THE 1960s

The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land", written in the late 1930s, in which he says "my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of the soil."

His poems expressed the degradation of black people in the Caribbean and describe the rediscovery of an African sense of self. In his "Discourse on Colonialism" , first published in 1950, Cesaire compared the relationship between the coloniser and colonised with the Nazis and their victims.

He was a mentor to fellow Martinican author Frantz Fanon, and their anti-colonial writings were a major influence in the heady intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s in France. The negritude movement was a counterpart to the Black Pride movement in the United States, though it has been criticised for not being radical enough. Cesaire was also a friend of the French surrealist poet Andre Breton who had encouraged him to become a major voice of Surrealism. Cesaire's anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent him from having a long-lasting political career.

After becoming mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 at the age of 32, he was elected deputy of parliament a year later, a post he held until the early 1990s.

A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole Normale Superieure -- unusual for a black Martinican in the 1930s -- he remained a member of the French communist party until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956. Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse-Pointe in Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussi in 1937, a gifted writer in her own right, with whom he had six children.

Just FYI, Martinique is still a French colony (excuse me, "department"), along with Guadalupe, Reunion, and French Guiana (different from "les collectivites", which include: French Polynesia, New Caledonia, San Martin, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Pierre, Wallace and Fortuna, Miquelon and Mayotte).

I had the honor to meet Aime Cesaire in 1995, when I was working in the Dominican Republic. He was visiting, along with Raphael Confiant, and speaking as part of a conference on negritude and creolite in the Caribbean. At 19, I was too shy to have a real conversation with him, but I remember how he handled the audience with such deep, loving grace. Especially when the members in the audience began to spew out Dominican discourse on race ideology. He responded with the attitude that said, "Brother, you may question your own Blackness, but I know you're Black, and because I know you're Black, I will love you and because I love you, I will ask you to be more than this."

A la prochaine, Aime.

Last night, Angie Cruz, Nelly Rosario and I read as part of the Hemann Sweatt Symposium at UT-Austin. From Island to Mainland: Three Authors from the Dominican Diaspora in Texas. The Symposium is focused on relations between Black Americans and Latin@s in the U.S., particularly in Texas. For me, this was a very special event - it was a moment to sit in our politics, and our visions as artists in the world.

But, one of the questions that stuck with me actually came from a comment Angie made right before we started. She was talking about asking her students to identify major events from their lifetimes - aka the 1990s - and today, I spent the entire day recalling major world events from the 1990s. So here's my challenge to you: today, name 10 major world events from the 1990s that you recall. I'll give you my list, too:

1. The First Gulf War (1991)
2. The assassination of Rabin (1995)
3. The Rodney King beating & L.A. Uprising(1992)
4. Internet boom (1998 - 2000)
5. HIV Drug Cocktails (1996)
6. Contract on America (1996)
7. Ollie North ran for office
8. Rwanda (1994)
9. Mandela was freed (1994)
10. East Timor declared its independence (1999)

Go on - what do you remember?

Small victories loom large:


PHILADELPHIA - A federal appeals court on Thursday said former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot be executed for murdering a Philadelphia police officer without a new penalty hearing.

Article by KATHY MATHESON, Associated Press Writer