Eltro Bond Newman. The black cowboy. Better remembered as my grandfather.

He was about 6″ 3, survived living on South 18th Street in Newark, helped raise 7 kids, smoked the Marlboro reds, kicked back on a lazy boy after a hard days work. He lived out his later years a member of a church, never really too much of a church-going dude before he had to battle cancer from what I could tell.

He made right with his maker.

Used to drive a long yellow Caddy. Never missed a holiday or Christmas. Bought me a BDP and Public Enemy tape one Christmas. Gave me a ride to the a girls house when I became a man (a.k.a virgin no more).

A saint somewhere out there is still clutching his cowboy hat. Granpa, you’re still missed.

Keep resting.

Machine politics and nepotism is how they run politics in my town. Somehow, someway, they got an ex-street ball star (probably one of the most visible, pop culture “stars” to ever come out of the “L” City) to jump into the fray.

That’s right, none other than Main Event from high school All-American, to the Rucker to And 1, fame.

We’ll see how he does running for 4th Ward councilman. See if he can beat the machine. Or help create a new one.

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Love is for sure that feeling you get when you buy your kid five new stuffed animals for his or her birthday, and a week later they are all on the floor, dirty, with eye buttons ripped out.

Love is cleaning up your dog’s puke because you fed her apples when you should have stuck with Purina.

_That was mean_

Love is when your girl’s water breaks and you’re down to spend the next 72 hours by her side — and then some, because you know your life is about to change … and you know it’s for the bettter….and you know you’ll still realize your dreams, because baby you’re a winner.

That’s love, bro.

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Collecting candy on Halloween is so far removed from my person, that I only remember waking up with hang-over’s on All Saint’s Day and hardly recall mixing up my carmel candies with my milk duds the weekend of Halloween.  I can blame so many cavities on that silly “holiday” that we now measure by Wal-Mart candie sales. In a good economy the Hershey multipacks go like hotcakes, in a bad economy, it’s mostly candy corn.

For some reason the wonderful world of Youtube isn’t cooperating with me and I can’t find the full length “Trick or Treat” episode of Tales From the Darkside.

For the longest time I thought this was a Disney short. If you watch this old promo clip, you’ll see the (dare I say ‘classic’) episode at around :19. Enjoy…your cavities (diabetes) and Halloween. That’ll be my kid dressed like a Mexican pumpkin come this time next year. Watch-out-now!

So, like, what’s “good hair” exactly? I think Chris Rock made a movie about it that I still haven’t seen. This is actually the type of discussion that would lend itself to a multi-part post. But, like, I don’t have the time, dude. I’m really busy right now. Still some dues paying I have to do. Does it ever stop?

I’ll just tell you this: I was born with what could best be called “mixed hair”. Mixed? Like a dog?

Yes, like one of those dogs with short wiry hair.

No. It got like that way later.

When I was little it was fluffy and curly. But since I went to a school with a lot of Jersey kids who used mousse (<<— that’s what it was called), I got sucked into the culture. I made my rough, yet soft, jumble of odd ends hair really hard. Or, my mom put a ton of oil in it. Not Crisco, but baby oil or something heinous. I’d go to school with my hair glowing! And this was like the 6th grade.

Sad to look back on that.

Nowadays, I don’t have much hair. If I let it grow too much, I start to look like a middle aged accountant. Or worse, an inner city math teacher. I keep it short and to the point. And since I started using my own clippers, man is it cheap.

Hair, for many, is not cheap. When I lived in L.A., I learned first hand exactly what weave was.

Now there’s a lot of deep discussion to get into when you talk about women and weave. I thought I saw it all in L.A., until I was at a CVS in Linden, N.J. and I could see the glue shining off the cashier’s forehead right under the line of her weave cap…or wig cap. I don’t know what you call it. I’m fascinated by it though.  The weave was so perfect, so off-blonde, so….straight.

Of the two new stores that opened in Linden this month, one is a bakery and the other is a wig/weave shop. Now Linden has two wig/weave shops on Wood Avenue. What does this all mean? I’ll have to study on that one to decide.

Anyway, when my kid is born I’ll be curious to see the type of hair that comes out. Will it be “good hair”, which I assume means it’ll be long and luscious like Cindy Crawford circa 1990? Or, will it be “hair, hair” which means just regular old hair that the kid’s going to have to figure out how to manage once he or she gets of age to give a what? Whichever it is, I won’t be adding any baby oil to the equation.

Photo is from a Jet magazine I found via Google books.

I’ve been so plugged in I’ve been neglecting this space. Sorry about that my fair readers. I’m dropping this on your because 1) It’s funny. 2) It’s creative AND 3) Questlove posted it on Twitter…so it must be good, because, well…that dude is paid and hipsters love and he’s still got hair. He must be special.

By the way, I’m not condoning drug use. (Lucy…Sky…Diamonds)

Ish né Butterfly

When I saw Digable Planets back in like 90-something at Apollo Theater, I was a little surprised to see that the crew was relaxed and humble. All three members were chilling with their public when the show was over, smoking blunts and walking in the street with the rest of the fans. I mean, these were MTV stars at this point. They could’ve been on some greater-than-thou stuff.

Above, the former Seattle-to-BK transplant who went by Butterfly. He’s now back in Seattle catching some fame from the rap scene, but also keeping his efforts alive with his first full-length release that you can read about, here.

I’d been reading about “Shabazz Palaces” for a while, but didn’t know his first LP was coming out this summer. NPR has a nice little series, led by a former co-worker of mine, Ann Powers (who was nice enough to have coffee and a chat with me once in L.A.—she’s always been (kinda) supportive).

This week, Sub Pop, the label that released Nirvana‘s first record and which is also home to Fleet Foxes, will release Black Up, the debut album from its first major hip-hop act, the critically adored Shabazz Palaces, which has resurrected the career of Ishmael Butler, once of the hit ’90s group Digable Planets. Every week a new hot act was bubbling up on my radar. I noticed that some of my old rocker friends were now frequenting hip-hop nights at Nectar and the Lo-Fi Lounge.

Check the rest, here. And, here.  And kudos to http://www.subpop.com/ for signing this guy. Smart move, ya’ll.

***Don’t forget to “Like” us on our FACEBOOK page.

The Dream_Love_Future

N.J. hectic? No. Stimulation for greatness I’d like to believe.

I met plenty of ill cats while I was completing my master’s work. However, among the illest writers/personalities I met was this cat Samaha.

He’s blessed us at IKH with something of a short essay about the beginnings of June, and the stirrings of summer just before the melt of those powerful, sun-shiny days. Read it, and then read it again. Follow this guy’s work, because you’ll remember his name, and he’s only getting better. 

Read his author archive at the RiverFront Times in ST. LOUIS.: http://goo.gl/e23Rv

www.facebook.com/albert.samaha

@AlbertSamaha on Twitter

An Ode to Summer

Albert Samaha

The heat tends to make people go mad. Something about the sensation of a crisp white tee pasting against your flesh, a ball cap getting soggy against your forehead brings out that part of the brain reserved for Samurai warriors in battle and defensive tackles on fourth and short. Anybody who’s read Camus’ “The Stranger” or watched “Do the Right Thing” knows this, knows the crazed things man does when the sun bears down on him. Here in St. Louis we’ve already had a girl smack a crow bar across another girl’s face, caught on camera phone and posted on World Star Hip-Hop.

The people are already hot. According to a recent Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, nearly a third of Americans are angry and almost half are at least “upset.” We have a right to be, of course. College debts and gas price rise, home prices fall, jobs remain scarce and the Wall Street bankers whom the people bailed out are making more money than they ever had before. So the summer comes at a bad time.

We’re pissed off on all sides. The Right is angry that we have a Socialist Kenyan Non-Citizen President, that jobs are outsourced, that the government doesn’t care about the people. The Left is upset that The Right believes we have a Socialist Kenyan Non-Citizen President, that the rich get richer while services for the poor are cut, that Sarah Palin says things like, “Even Piper was able to grasp the significance of being in the presence of our first President– who had such diverse interests– when she told me later ‘how hard he must have worked to keep that farm going!’”

With the summer comes The Circus. Rich old men grinding their crotches on hotel chamber maids, dick pictures on politicians’ twitter feeds and an endless loop of adultery by famous leaders. America has been absurd for a while. Riots in the 1930s, witch hunts in the ‘50s, Chicago in 1968, Watergate in ’74, crack babies in the ‘80s, the Patriot Act in ’01. Only now we can’t shake the madness. The Circus doesn’t leave town. It pounds us from all angles– our smartphones and our news channels and our social networking sites. And the anger builds, fueled by the madness and the discourse that accompanies it.

Both the world and the rhetoric are getting hotter. The racists and homophobes and Islamophobes and chauvinists and greed-mongers, the crazies, seem to speak for the masses, when all we, the masses, want to do is stay out of the heat, find a cool shady place to exchange ideas and drink Sam Adams Summer Ale. All we want are jobs and schools and health.

In the middle of the hottest day ever recorded in St. Louis, a young man in a red polo, blue jeans and black snap-back hat pushes a long line of orange shopping carts across a Home Depot parking lot. He weaves them around moving cars. He is drenched in sweat. He pushes the carts past the automatic doors, into the air conditioned building and locks them into the row of carts already there. Then he walks back outside, into the heat, to corral more carts. He doesn’t seem to be going mad. Perhaps it is because he has a job. Or perhaps it is because there is hope even though the summer has just begun.

–30–

This is becoming a memorial blog of sorts. But I guess it’s that time that notables are moving on to paradise. Today we lost South Central Los Angeles boxing legend Genaro “El Chicanito” Hernández, a super star who only lost two fights in his career.

May his power inspire forever.

h/t Ajiiiplatinum