Out of the Box

"The voice of the intelligence...is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all, it is silenced by ignorance." --Dr. Karl Menninger Out of the Box Struggle and Triumph: The Story of Henry "Box" Brown "Birthing," by Stanley Squirewell, an original artwork inspired by the story of Henry "Box" Brown, will be on view at upcoming Festival events. The Brothers' Network is pleased to invite you to the premiere event of the Henry "Box" Brown Festival. Our festival will feature African-American men who are choreographers, filmmakers, actors, writers, and composers who will interpret artistically the story of Henry "Box" Brown.  Our launch event on Friday, June 21, at 7 p.m. is a symposium on the pedagogy of oppression featuring some of the region's leading African-American thinkers, intellectuals and scholars:  Robert Miller, Ph.D., playwright and adjunct professor of religion at Rowan University Lourin Plant, DMA, operatic baritone and professor of voice at Rowan University The Rev. Charles Rice, M.Div., chaplain and assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Ursinus College Paule Turner, MFA, choreographer and assistant professor of dance at Rowan University Our distinguished panel will lead an exploration from historical, cultural, literary and artistic perspectives on the struggle for freedom. This lively participatory conversation will enlighten and engage you. The conversation begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 21, 2013, at The Brothers' Network's office suite, just off the Avenue of the Arts at 1315 Walnut Street, Suite 320, Philadelphia, Pa. This conversation is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to henryboxbrownfest@gmail.com. The Henry "Box" Brown Festival is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Image above: Henry "Box" Brown For Henry "Box" Brown news on Twitter, search #henryboxbrownfestival! Follow us on Twitter @TheBroNet www.thebrothersnetwork.net Copyright © 2013 The Brothers' Network, All rights reserved.  You are receiving this email because you asked to be kept abreast of Brothers' Network activities.  Our mailing address is:  The Brothers' Network 1315 Walnut St Suite 320 Philadelphia, PA 19107

Fillmore Street Living Legends: Marvin X and Fillmore Slim at SF Juneteenth, 2013

photos by Aries Jordan

During the 1960s, Fillmore Slim and Marvin X worked on Fillmore Street doing their thang. In 1966, Marvin X co-founded Black Arts West Theatre, along with playwright Ed Bullins, et al.  At Marvin's San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair, 2004, Fillmore and friends Gangsta Brown, Mickey Moore, Rosebud Bitter Dose, Jimmy Star participated with their books. They told the audience if they had known writing books was a way to live, they would have passed up pimping. Dr. Julia Hare told them, "Don't feel guilty, after all, we have a lot of ecclesiastical pimps every Sunday!" As for his past, Fillmore said he did his time in prison and warns young brothers, don't do the crime cause you will do the time. And stop shaming the game, pimping with yo pants off your behind, on a bicycle, staying at yo mama's house. And don't beat yo ho's. Treat them gentle. If you don't beat them, they might come back. If you beat them they will be long gone! And keep yo day job cause pimpin ain't easy! I'm a guitar player and blues singer. I sing the blues all ova the world! I was singing the blues when dat white girl put dat money in my hand! And I'm still singing the blues.

Now Available: DVDs from the Marvin X Video Library

Marvin X and student at University of California, Merced

Now Available: The Marvin X Video Library

San Francisco State University lecture/reading in Davey D's class on Hip Hop and the Black Arts Movement

Howard University, lecture on the Mythology of Pussy and Dick, Dr. Greg Carr's class

Morehouse College, lecture on Partner  Violence
Berkeley City College, lecture on How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
,
In the Crazy House Called America, concert, Buriel Clay Theatre, San Francisco, accompanied
by percussionists Tacuma King, Kele Nitoto, harpist Destiny Muhammad, baritone sax, Khevan Najae

Marvin X at Black Repertory Group Theatre, Berkeley, accompanied by percussionists Tacuma King and Kele Nitoto, harpist Destiny Muhammad, violinist Tarika Lewis, dancer Raynetta Rayzetta, speaker Suzzette Celeste, Earl Davis on trumpet

Marvin X at San Francisco Theatre Festival, Wisdom of Plato Negro, reading, accompanied by Elliot Bey on keyboards, actors Paradise, Michelle LaChaux, Taliba, Rashidah Sabreen,

The Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness, San Francisco State University, includes Rev. Cecil Williams, Askia Toure, Amina and Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Dr. Cornel West, Phavia Kujichagulia, Tarika Lewis, Rudi Mwongozi, Elliot Bey, Rev. Andriette Earl, Kalaamu ya Salaam

Women's History Month at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland, Tureada Mikell, Oak Town Passions,
Marvin X

One Day in the Life, a docudrama of addiction and recovery, Bannam Place Theatre, San Francisco. Features Ayodele Nzinga, Marvin X, Rev. Otis Lloyd, Pinky, Geoffrey Grier,

In the Name of Love, a play by Marvin X, Laney College Theatre, 1981, Oakland, features Ayodele
Nzinga, Doris Knight (RIP), Zahieb Mwongozi

Drugs, Art and Revolution, a discussion of Marvin X's play One Day in the Life, Sista's Place, Brooklyn New York, 1996, panelist include Sonia Sanchez, Amina Baraka, Amiri Baraka, Sam Anderson, Elombe Brath, Marvin X

Marvin X at Yoshi's, opens for Amiri Baraka and Rosco Mitchell

Marvin X interviews Bobby Seale

Amiri Baraka's 75th birthday celebration, San Francisco Jazz Heritage Center

Dr. Nathan Hare's 80th Birthday celebration at Geofrey's Inner Circle, Oakland

Marvin X at Wall Street, reading poem Can A Nigguh Pimp, 2007

DVDs $19.95 (priority mail included)

Order from
Black Bird Press
1222 Dwight Way
Berkeley CA 94702

Bay Area Book News: Sugaree Rising and Virgin Soul

 

Pre-Announcement (Sugaree Rising)

A number of folks have been asking when we will be releasing my novel, Sugaree Rising, in ebook form. We've been working on it, and we'll have an announcement, soon, on a release date.

Request (Sugaree Rising)

If you've already purchased a copy of Sugaree Rising, and you've had the chance to read it and happen to like it, please take the time to post a review on our Amazon.com purchase page (http://www.amazon.com/Sugaree-Rising-J-Douglas-Allen-Taylor/dp/09151 17215/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354467664&sr=1-1&keywords=sugaree+rising). We're not favoring Amazon over any of the other sales outlets, either bookstores or online. However, Amazon is the only one where readers appear to rely heavily on reviews to make their choices, and so a kind word on their site would be very, very helpful.

Announcement (Virgin Soul)

A good family friend, Judy Juanita, has just published her first novel, Virgin Soul, based on her experiences during the 1960's in the African-American Freedom Movement in The Bay Area as well as a member of the Black Panther Party.

Information on Judy's novel (including where it can be purchased) is available on her website at http://www.judyjuanitasvirginsoul.com/, and the Los Angeles Times published a very favorable review at http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/19/entertainment/la-ca-jc-judy-juanita-20130421.

Judy's book is certainly worth a look.

Aries Jordan: Poem on the Shaman's Ordeal by Fire

The Shaman's Ordeal by Fire

                              
photo Gene Hazzard

You say "I love you" but can't stand you
We both laugh the feeling is mutual
Student  Teacher
Dear Teacher, have you learned something from me?
I have learned so much about my history about standing up for myself

One cannot be a punk ass bitch around you
Thick skin a must 

overbearing
like night and day
true  Gemini
12 personalities
1.Brown liquor Nigga
2. intellect
3. Historian
4.OG
5.Plato Negro
6. Dirty old man
7. The lazy Prophet
8. Poetic mad man
9. Advisor
10. Hustler Supreme
the last two personalities don't yet have a name
always a truth teller

Though you think i don't listen
I do sometimes
Though i think you don't listen to me
you don't
only sometimes

you create magic with your words
a journey with your pen

I can't do more than 3 to 4 hours around you

too intense

I gots to go

You say I am  square and you're out the box

say I am steeped in religiosity

i say I am me

You drift off sometimes to places unseen
You say all teachers take students through the ordeal by fire

I say "Is that right?!"

More like ordeal of Madness

I don't play that shit

Thank you for making me a better writer and better person

--Aries Jordan

 

The Shaman Speaks to Neophyte     photo Gene Hazzard you come into my world of fire disturbed you got burned what foolishness is this when the world is ablaze do they not make fires to put out fires? In my fire is love the only reason for being engulfing the flames burn away all illusions only the essential shall remain the loving self beyond youth and age beyond preference want desire only the spirit needs shall be met no ego desires need apply it is dross like a candle in the wind the flame cannot last the student and teacher dance only to transcend the normal naked world that bland self taught by mother/father on to the shaman world beyond the brink across the chasm that is our task if you come with me all the way to the end no half stepping no diversion into the normal this journey is to the meta reality you can go there with me or fly into fires beyond my torch of freedom with discipline beyond lover husband and wife to the spirit truth without name yet it is all there is in essential time we may not like each other but again the need is there we try escape to no avail humankind is not for us only the divine so try if you must to escape see how we come into each other's arms only to avoid the kiss some fear remains until we understand there no escape the matter was settled the moment we met. We are one in the sun in the wind in the fire of love. --Marvin X 6/14/13

Mandela receiving intensive care CCTV News - CNTV English

Mandela receiving intensive care CCTV News - CNTV English

Marvin X at San Francisco Juneteenth this weekend

photo Don J. Usner

photo Gene Hazzard

At San Francisco's Juneteenth, Marvin X will autograph books and exhibit his archives as well as the archives of Dr. Nathan Hare and Dr. Julia Hare. SF Juneteenth is on Fillmore Street, Saturday and Sunday.

History of Juneteenth

JUNETEENTH, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a holiday in the United States honoring African American heritage by commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. State of Texas in 1865. Celebrated on June 19, the term is aportmanteau of June and nineteenth, and is recognized as a state holiday or state holiday observance in 40 states of the United States.

OBSERVATION The state of Texas is widely considered the first U.S. state to begin Juneteenth celebrations with informal observances taking place for over a century; it has been an official state holiday since 1890. It is considered a "partial staffing holiday", meaning that state offices do not close, but some employees will be using a floating holiday to take the day off. Schools are not closed, but most public schools in Texas are already into summer vacation by June 19th. Its observance has spread to many other states, with a few celebrations even taking place in other countries.
As of June 2011, 40 states and the District of Columbia have recognized Juneteenth as either a state holiday or state holiday observance; these are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Notes from the Master Teacher of Black Studies to Marvin X: Dr. Nathan Hare

Dr. M,

Also folded in the book with the birthday greeting card to me from Max Stanford, aka Dr. Muhammad Ahmed (most feared black militant by FBI in the late 1960s) is a note from a boy named Cadence, saying “I love Dr. Julia Hare.”

Nathan

From: Nathan Hare [mailto:nhare@pacbell.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 6:01 AM
To: Marvin X Jackmon (jmarvinx@yahoo.com)
Subject: Endless Archives and Bottomless Pockets

Marvin,

I notice you left the birthday card from Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmed), I guess because it was tucked in one of a stack of books. One of them, “Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology” (Macmillan, 1972), has me and Tolson in it (pre-Great Debaters, Wiley College, where he practiced and James Farmer was a student before Tolson moved on to Langston and left debating for poetry and drama, aiming at Broadway and hitting Hollywood); indeed the editors   discuss Tolson and celebrate him as one of my teachers in the preface to my essay, “The Challenge of a Black Scholar,” I see they gave it a section all by itself, “Essay” under  “Part VI: The Present Generation: Since 1945,” though near the tail end of the book, just before Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and The Blues, in that order.

Talk about black studies, which they also mentioned, the article was also reprinted in a number of places, like such other articles as “Black Ecology,” in a number of different languages around the world. In fact I just got a call on Friday from a University of Pennsylvania black female professor  of ethics (as you know they worry about what’s right and wrong -- while I worry about what’s right, I know what’s wrong ), wanting to interview me on the article. I told her I’d have to take a look at it and get back to you, because I’ve forgotten what I said in it, especially since I was writing it while I was in jail in San Francisco (they didn’t let me keep anything but a paperback I had with me when arrested, Karl Mannheims “Idelogy and Utopia.” No pencil, so I used my thumbnail to mark off passages I wanted to quote or paraphrase.  But I didn’t just use Mannheim, lest black intellectuals say it’s not black enough, not even black studies in the first place. And anyway, how come you didn’t mention Moses.

I also don’t want you to take the book, “Medicine in the Ghetto” too lightly, not even my essay in it. Its editor, John Norman, was the director of the conference put on by the Harvard Medical School at Wentworth-by-the-Sea in New Hampshire in the late spring of 1969, but he was black, as were most of the participants. On my panel was the now late Charles Sanders, then the managing editor of Ebony magazine, when magazines were magazines and print media was print, The chairman of the panel, I believe, was the president of Meharry Medical College (I know he was the one who invited me). I forget the other person or two.

Some people think black studies is equivalent only to ancient history (“contributionism” a term I coined in the early 1960s at Howard – I note that white individuals have taken it up but could find no reference before the early 1960s, and certainly I coined it for myself and my students at Howard. Indeed circa 1970 the black sociologist, West Indian, at Harvard, wrote an essay in the” Crimson,” in which he referred to me and “Contributionsm” but added two categories. Jancie Hale Bensin in her book on black children, their cultural roots and learnin styles, summarizes Patterson’s  article but gives “contributionism” not to me as Patterson had, but to him. (Patterson may have mentioned me but kept the term for himself, a common ploy of black intellectuals (creatures who think black studies is equivalent only to an account of how  the first physician or something was black, Imhotep, and arguments over the proper spelling of his name, Immutef, or the first god was black (wouldn’t you know it?), the first devil, to the first person to make a spool or a piece of thread, etcetera. That’s one reason black studies and black intellectuality in general got bogged down and locked in antiquity from 1969 to 2009; and only came out to wail and bash the first black president for not picking them up and flinging them into the kingdom of snow white liberation.

As regards the stuff in my storage in the office building, I admit I wasn’t up to the challenge of taking those heavy file cabinets of files packed and crammed in there last Sunday morning. Don’t know whether that’s worth just going one day back again and wrenching the cabinets out and seeing what if anything we need to keep that’s not in current use. If so we would need Ali or some such heavyweight to help, I think, to boost the meager might of two old men and a pretty woman or two; although it was precisely two women of the physical stature to rival Ali who crammed them in there in the first place. The ringleader was a literary enthusiast and skimmed and got away with my big volume of the complete works of Shakespeare and God knows what. We weren’t thinking about archives -- at least I wasn’t. It’s like one continual try in a marathon game of finders keepers.

It’s good you’re making a movement out of the Archives Project, just don’t make me the sacrificial lamb. I’m trying to work my way out of this quagmire, this nightmare of deprivation, before I wrap my smothering blanket around me and lie down to pleasant dreams.

Hotep (is that black enough for you?),

Nathan

Review: Marvin X's In the Crazy House Called America, essays

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Review: In the Crazy House Called America

Marvin X Offers A Healing Peek Into His Psyche


By Junious Ricardo Stanton



Rarely is a brother secure and honest enough with himself to reveal his innermost thoughts, emotions or his most hellacious life experiences. For most men it would be a monumental feat just to share/bare his soul with his closest friends, but to do so to perfect strangers would be unthinkable, unless he had gone through the fires of life and emerged free of the dross that tarnishes his soul. Marvin X, poet, playwright, author and essayist does just that in a self-published book entitled In the Crazy House Called America.

This latest piece from Marvin X offers a peek into his soul and his psyche. He lets the reader know he is hip to the rabid oppression the West heaps upon people of color, especially North American Africans, while at the same time revealing the knowledge gleaned from his days as a student radical, black nationalist revolutionary forger of the Black Arts Movement, husband, father lover, a dogger of women that did not spare him the degradation and agony of descending into the abyss of crack addiction, abusive and toxic relationships and family tragedy.

Perhaps because of the knowledge gained as a member of the Nation of Islam, and his experiences as one of the prime movers of the cultural revolution of the '60s, the insights he shares In the Crazy House Called America are all the keener. Marvin writes candidly of his pain, bewilderment and depression of losing his son to suicide. He shares in a very powerful way, his own out of body helplessness as he wallowed in the dregs of an addiction that threatened to destroy his soul and the mess his addictions made of his life and relationships with those he loved.

But he is not preachy and this is not an autobiography. He has already been there and done that. In sharing his story and the wisdom he has gleaned from his life experiences and looking at the world through the eyes of an artist/healer, Marvin X serves as a modern day shaman/juju man who in order to heal himself and his people ventures into the spirit realm to confront the soul devouring demons and mind pulverizing dragons; he is temporarily possessed by them, heroically struggles to rebuke their power before they destroy him; which enables him to return to this realm, tell us what it is like, prove redemption is possible, thereby empowering himself/ us and helping to heal us. He touches on a myriad of topics as he raps and writes about himself and current events.

Reading this book you know he knows what it is like to come face to face with and do battle with the insanity and death this society has in store for all Africans. Marvin X talks about his sexual relations/dysfunction, drugs, media and free speech, sports, black political power or the lack thereof, the war on drugs and the current War on Terrorism, nothing is off limits. He includes reviews of music, theater as well as film, but not as some smarter/ holier than thou, elitist observer.

Marvin X writes as one actively engaged in life, including its pain and suffering. He lets us know he was a willing and active participant in his addiction, how it impacted his decision making, his role as a parent, his male-female "relationships", his ability to be creative within a movement to liberate African people and the world from the corruption of Caucasian hegemony.

Marvin X is in recovery and it has not been easy for him. As a writer/healer he still has the voice of a revolutionary poet/playwright, it is a voice we need to listen and pay attention to. He has survived his own purgatory and emerged stronger and more committed to life and saving his people. As North American Africans (his term to differentiate us from our continental and diasporic brethren) he sees the toll the insanity of this culture takes on us. His culturally induced self-destructive lifestyle choices and the death of his son is a testament to how life threatening and lethal this society can be.

But Marvin X also talks about spiritual redemption, the ability to transcend even the most horrific experiences with resiliency and determination so that one gets a glimpse of one's own divine potential. This book is an easy read which makes it all the more profound. In The Crazy House Called America is for brothers especially. It is a book all black men should grab hold of and digest, if for no other reason than to experience just how redemptively healing and liberating being honest can be.

Obama: Big "Brother" is Watching You!

There is no doubt: President Obama is Bush on steroids! Now those of us in the hood know all too often the black cop is worse than the white cop, the black jailer is worse than the white jailer, the black teacher is worse than the white teacher. Of course, as per presidents, since the end of colonialism, Africa has had a plethora of presidents-for-life, although much of their wretched behavior was learned from their colonial education, especially in political science, where they observed and were traumatized by the brutality of the colonial masters. This is not to say all was peaches and cream before the white masters arrived, but certainly after their arrival, the white masters far outdid the pre-colonial native rulers in brutality, wretchedness and thievery, e.g., the Congo comes to mind and of course Apartheid South Africa. We have the political history of the Caribbean to document the wretchedness of white men in black face or as they say in the Caribbean "black men with white hearts."

Let us then end our final escapade with black romanticism, i.e., a black face will save us, will liberate us, will free us from our myriad ills, too numerous to note. For sure, we must free ourselves, but black skin alone will not save us. We must, I believe Dr. John Henrik Clark said it best, maintain the best of our cultural traditions and high morals. For sure, we cannot expect to become truly free in a free market capitalist system that is rooted in slavery, now called wage slavery. We cannot become the Michael Jordan's who don't mind pimping Asians to make tennis shoes for fifty cents, then pimp the ghetto and white America as well, selling the shoes for a hundred or two hundred dollars per pair.

As per President Obama, I confess that I was one of the starry-eyed idealists who supported his initial run but by the end of his first term, in was clear to me he was in the tradition of those African politicians mentioned above who mastered the white man's political science to become brutalizers of their people.
Of course, President Obama (and global capitalism in general) does not discriminate. Clearly, the actions of the Obama administration is, indeed, the Bush administration on steroids, as per the constitutional rights of American citizens. I never imagined, except for the treatment of North American Africans, that citizens could be killed without charges, without trial, in the name of fighting terrorism. No one knows terrorism better than North American Africans who have been subjected to the worst treatment ever given to human beings on the face of the earth. And don't tell me about Jews. Hitler learned how to treat the Jews from American Christians!

North American Africans have been subjects of spies and snitches since slavery, many slave revolts were aborted by snitches who warned ole mass. The FBI originated with spying on Noble Drew Ali and Marcus Garvey, yet we never thought the day would come when every American would be subject to Big Brother Obama, listening to our every thought, every email, every blog, every cell phone call.

This is not the America we were taught about in Civics and political science. This is the American Gulag, the number one prison house of the world, home of the world's leading gun seller and terrorist who now labels every freedom fighter a terrorist if their agenda is not in sync with America's.

It is hard to believe Big Brother goes around with a list of people to murder, American citizens included. Was there any reason (except white supremacy in black face) for the drone murder of Anwar Awlaki and his son, without charges and trial?

Is it now necessary to spy on the press, the opposition and loyal citizens? Obama is now in the tradition of Richard Nixon!

Perhaps, we should not be so personal, after all, this is the capitalist system on its deathbed, way pass the emergency room.

When will the passive, pitiful, slothful, deaf, dumb and blind Americans wake up from their world of make believe? For sure, the present political/economic system cannot save you, you must rise up as people around the world are doing at this hour, for sure, if you do not initiate an American Spring, the winter of your discontent has arrived!
--Marvin X
6/7/13

Marvin X is a free thinker.