May 2016 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Friday Funnies: The Black Comic Book, Pt. 4

The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew.

The last piece on The ~~Colored Negro~~ Black Comic Book by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.

Note: in the comic strip tradition all the words in the strip are in capitals, but for readability, I’ve deigned to write in standard English. Also the words that are in bold in the strip are in red in this text.

“B.S.”, a 4-page reply to “B.C.”

Page 1:
White caveman (sharpening spear): What are you doing?

Page 2, Panel 1:
Black caveman (holding arrow): I am inventing something called the wheel…
Page 2, Panel 2:
Black caveman: What are you doing?

Page 3:

Page 4:
Both cavemen dead, one from spear, one from arrow.
Cave boy: What did they do?
Father: They just invented brotherhood!

All they were saying was, “Give peace a chance.” There were a lot of songs about getting along at the time, notably “Friendship Train” by Gladys Knight and the Pips: “Unrest between races must come to an end.” That song was written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, who wrote a number of “message” songs for the Temptations.

“Brother Blackberry”, a 1 page parody of “Brother Juniper”, not in Toonopedia, but in my local newspapers when I was a kid.

Well, if God did make us in His/Her/Their image… There are lots of pictures of black Jesuses in black people’s homes I visited, even to this day.

“Likriss Sikniss”, a 1-page reflection of “Dennis the Menace”

Some things that one wants to avoid have no race.

“Believe It or Watts!”, a 2-page riff on “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”

Page 1:

Page 2 (left side)
Nude man sitting in steamy area:
Narrative: This black man has slept in a hot coal bed for fifteen years!! (Before that, he was an idiot albino from Kalamazoo!)

Page 2 (right side):
Tree carved with word “black”.
Markings found on a white birch in Caucasia, Pa. The tree is owned by Mrs. Fiona Black, whose son carved his name into it.

(In arrow): Look what can be done with Sidney Poitier’s name:
which involved the words Hi, Doris Day (from the D and O in his name), plus Rosh Hashona, apple, Ship, parsley, Altoona, Nipsey, CORE, and NAACP in crossword form

The first page was a pretty OK piece, but the second generated a Huh? from me.

And that’s it, except for these final thoughts:

The book publisher, Price/Stern/Sloan, also put out other books at the time, including You Were Born on a Rotten Day, The Power of Positive Pessimism and my favorite, the Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew, which was a title page, followed by a bunch of blank pages.

It was great to find something that the comic book fans, which I (marginally) still am, would appreciate.

First published on February 25, 2006.

The Lydster, Part 145: Hip hop

“It’s SO annoying, but it’s still fun.”

The youth of our church, ages 6 to 18, did a hip hop performance of original readings, one extant reading, plus three dance numbers, and one song, at the beginning of March.

The Daughter’s first contribution was like pulling teeth. She was supposed to write a poem about her good qualities, but she was so self-effacing, I sat with her to suggest what she was good at, such as dancing, and being a good friend.

In a collective piece called Church and Family Rule, she ended up saying: “Mom: tucks me into bed at night. Dad: watches the news with me at midnight.”

Now, what she had ORIGINALLY written was that I watch the news with her, then something entirely different about our cats Midnight and Stormy. So, NO, Albany, I don’t watch the news with my daughter at midnight, unless she’s having insomnia.

Her solo reading, though, was particularly popular with the crowd. I was glad I had heard it a few times before she delivered it. And I had NOTHING to do with its composition, except, apparently, as its inspiration.

My dad and I dance to The Beatles.
Well, I wouldn’t call what he was doing DANCING, but something like that.
I dance to I Saw Her Standing There, Help, Hey Jude, and Revolution.
My dad sings, “She was just seventeen if you know what I mean.”
And as soon as he starts to sing, I start to sing.
It’s SO annoying, but it’s still fun.
We do it a couple of times a year, usually around the Beatles’ birthdays.

SHE added the extra “if” to the song lyric.

It was well-received by the audience that was clearly not a traditional hip hop demographic.

A room with a view

“But you do see that bloc of rooms?” I asked.

Our program had its annual conference in lovely Lake George, NY, about an hour north of Albany, in mid-May.

The deadline to register with the office that was coordinating the conference was April 10. We were told we could spend an extra day or two at the conference hotel at the cheaper conference rate. However, while our folks coordinating the event had secured a bloc of rooms, they were not going to send up the list of names until April 24.

I wanted to take advantage of The Wife and me going up a day early, the Sunday of the conference being our wedding anniversary. But the person I first called, right around April 10 didn’t think it was possible, though she sent me to someone else, who gave me over to a third party who was to call me back but did not.

A week later, I called again, this time speaking to a young woman who had been working there only six days. She too noted that the bloc of rooms was secured but that my specific name wasn’t in the system yet.

“But you do see that bloc of rooms?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And are you likely to sell out for the night before the conference?”

“It certainly seems so.”

So she said she called me back, and, ten minutes later, she did. I had a room for the one night and a note in the system that I had three more nights in this mystery bloc.

Then she wanted to know if I wanted – and I forget the terms – but let’s say regular or premium. I asked what the difference was. The regular was in the two-story building adjacent, and the premium was the main four-story structure, which had a view of Lake George.

“What is the difference in price?”

“None.”

“I’ll take a room with a view!”

And on our trip, after The Wife dropped off The Daughter with The Uncle, The Aunt and The Twin Cousins, we got to the hotel. It was for four nights in the same room – so I didn’t have to move – and it was indeed a room with a view, a spectacular one that I enjoyed every morning.

Wear orange: end gun violence

“I will also Wear Orange on June 2nd for the other 30,000 lives lost to gun violence in our nation every year.”

It was only this year that I heard about the # Wear Orange movement. Thursday, June 2 is National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

“The color orange symbolizes the value of human life. Hunters wear orange in the woods to protect themselves and others. In 2013, teens on the South Side of Chicago asked classmates to honor their murdered friend by wearing orange.” And it has become a national movement.

I asked my friend Ruth Senchyna to write about it from her very personal perspective:

On Thursday, June 2nd, I will Wear Orange to commemorate the life of my beloved nephew Camilo Senchyna-Beltran, who was shot and killed in December 2014 in San Francisco, the city in which he lived. Camilo was 26 years old, had just successfully completed paramedic training, and was out on the town celebrating with friends. He was a bright, beautiful and loving young man, with his whole life ahead of him, but his light was extinguished by another young man with a gun. A young man who—we were to find out after his arrest—was himself a shooting victim just a year before.

Although Camilo grew up in San Francisco, he also loved Albany, where his grandmother lived. He spent many of his Christmas and summer vacations here, and especially loved whitewater rafting in the Adirondacks and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

I will also Wear Orange on June 2nd for the other 30,000 lives lost to gun violence in our nation every year. And for the countless others left behind to mourn the lives lost needlessly due to our inability as a nation to address this epidemic in any type of meaningful way.

Please join us on June 2nd in honoring Camilo’s life, as well as the thousand other lives cut short by gun violence in our city and our nation. I am grateful to Trinity Alliance of the Capital Region for providing the space and opportunity to do so. From 4 – 6 pm on June 2nd, we will gather at Trinity Alliance at 15 Trinity Place in Albany to observe National Gun Violence Awareness Day. We will also honor the life and work of Brother Yusuf Burgess on that day, who worked tirelessly to provide urban youth with positive alternatives to the cycle of violence that ensnares and destroys the futures of far too many young in our nation.

The mission of Trinity Alliance is to promote services to the community that will support and promote healthy families, adults and children. Their agency is dedicated to improving the neighborhood as a setting for family life, contributing to health and well-being, and promoting education and employment as a means of self-development. Albany Cure Violence and Leader Leading Troy’s Youth are anti-violence intervention and prevention programs run by Trinity Alliance.

Ruth Senchyna was born and raised in Albany, and currently resides in the South End. After stints in the Bay Area and southern Africa, she returned to Albany in 2009 and is currently employed by the NYSDOH/AIDS Institute. Since the loss of her nephew to gun violence in 2014, she has channeled her grief into activism, primarily through Everytown for Gun Safety. She is grateful to Trinity Alliance for providing the opportunity and space to develop a memory garden for those lost to gun violence on the Brother Yusuf Burgess Community Garden site.

T is for Traveling Wilburys

The two Traveling Wilburys albums were out of print for about a decade.

Everything about the creation of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, I love. From the website comes a story I already knew.

George Harrison was asked by the folks at Warner Brothers Records to put together a non-album B-side for a single from the ex-Beatles’ album Cloud Nine.

Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison had shared dinner, then went to Bob Dylan’s home studio in Malibu, California. George had left a guitar at Tom Petty’s house, and when he went to retrieve it, he invited Petty to join in the fun.

Harrison played the resulting track, Handle with Care, to the WB brass, who thought the song was too good to bury on the flip side of George’s single. Maybe it could become part of an album?

The five frontmen took on the persona of the Traveling Wilburys from this: “Referring to recording errors created by some faulty equipment, Harrison jokingly remarked to Lynne, ‘We’ll bury ’em in the mix’ Thereafter, they used the term for any small error in performance… Harrison suggested ‘The Trembling Wilburys’ as the group’s name; instead, Lynne suggested ‘Traveling’, with which the group agreed.”

The album was very well received and won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group in 1989. Unfortunately, “Roy Orbison died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988… Despite Orbison’s death, the remaining group members recorded a second and final studio album, which they intentionally misnumbered Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. It was released on October 30, 1990, and met with less success than the previous one.”

I had thought Volume 3 was a function of all the collaborations among them, but it was an acknowledgment of bootlegs of the original sessions featuring songs not on that first album.

The group talked about touring, but it never happened. I had heard rumors of Del Shannon replacing Orbison, but he died on February 8, 1990.

The two albums were out of print for about a decade, until they were re-released, with added tracks, in 2007, including Nobody’s Child, the title track for a benefit album. “The project was organized by Olivia Harrison, who created the Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation with the other wives of The Beatles (Barbara Bach, Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney) in April 1990.”

The singles

1988 “Handle with Care” (US 45, AUS 3, NZ 4, UK 21)
1989 “End of the Line” (US 63, AUS 12, NZ 11, UK 52)
1990 “Nobody’s Child” (NZ 9, UK 44)
1990 “She’s My Baby” (AUS 45, CAN 30, UK 79)
1991 “Wilbury Twist” (CAN 86)

You can find Nobody’s Child HERE. The remaining songs above, plus Inside Out, you can listen to HERE, and Margarita HERE.

For good measure, I Call Your Name – Ringo Starr, backed by Harrison, Lynne, Petty, and Traveling Wilburys drummer Jim Keltner on cowbell.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18