Is She Gonna be a Good Girl Now

Apologies to Rihanna

It had to be, mid-November, 2007, a few days before Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad concert in Berlin—that I settled in front of my television set to really finally pay a bit more attention to Rihanna.

I sat still, glued to the set, watching MTV, and listening to the moderator rush rapidly in a mix of two languages, in and out into German and then in English, as he translated the sentences of this aspiring talent, who was visiting the show to promote another German tour. This was, Rihanna: this sigh but astute persona, who at intervals, which seemed far too seldom, allowed her to answer the Frankfurt-based MTV moderator with quick pragmatic sentences that pronounced an accent that was rather Caribbean.

As I’ve already mentioned, she appeared genuinely sigh. And though she seemed very thrilled to be on the show, she remained quite well-posed for her years. Albeit, I’d not seen her perform yet, she was endearingly charming. She possessed this awe, an enigma of a perfectly polished sophistication and credibility that helped me sense she had to be a performer of prowess.

Those were my first impressions of Rihanna, a young singer who was taking the German media by storm. And this was just upon the ebb of seeing a good girl go bad, as she was about to continue to run on along that wild and wary path of fame and wealth in America with another music icon, named Chris Brown.

It still remains an inexplicable mystery to me as to why Chris Brown went into such a violent rage. One would have had to have been there to know what all had provoked his attack. But I believed every detail of Rihanna’s account. She was merely asking questions and Mr. Brown was not up to replying. It was his privilege, as he saw it, to not be questioned by her.

I had never followed his career closely; however, I had managed to spot a couple of his recurring appearances on Ellen Degeneres a few years back. I recall that she seemed to praise both his persona and his dance-moves. He was extremely courteous and misogyny had not seemed to be a part of Chris Brown’s demeanor. Not covertly so, anyway. I’d grown accustomed to seeing him in Rihanna’s company. They appeared to be suited for each other. At least the media had made it seem as if they were a perfect match.

In his essay, New Black Man, Mark Anthony Neal points out that, “Those who speak out about black male violence against black women are seen as traitors.” Neal continues, stating, “We must get to the point where black male violence against black women, children, gays, and lesbians is openly challenged for what it is—behavior that is deeply harmful to the entire black community—and not just in the cases where the culprit is some young black male of the hip-hop generation. It has been too easy to blame the indiscretions and crimes of hip-hop generation, when we should be owning up to the fact that their behavior might have been influenced by their perceptions of how black male privilege operates in our communities.”

I admired Rihanna back then in Berlin [As I became an instantly incessant fan and believer in her promise with her hit Don’t Stop the Music reaching the top of the charts, worldwide!], and I have come to admire her even more now in the aftermath of her visits [and exposure] on 20/20 and Larry King. In her defense of her having the world know of her incorrigible relationship with Mr. Brown, she proved herself to be an explicably classy and intelligent act. She placed a noteworthy degree of emotional intelligence in the forefront of her discourse with Diane Sawyer, and in that interview she sent a message to more than those who stood alongside her, in her struggle to return her sense of being to a plausible state of dignity once more. It was that time, indeed, that black male violence against [black] women had to be addressed. And, suddenly, this was far from the sigh, soft-spoken entity of womanhood I’d seen on German television, actually twice, back in the mid-2000s. Now, she was the composition of an icon that seemed worthy of encompassing that leadership role she was readily inheriting in consequence of enticing a generation of followers and admirers who didn’t want to see her music stop.

Violence and abuse pervade U.S. society and put millions of people at risk for direct or indirect attacks. When we consider the number of people who have been victims of violence with those whose loved ones have been victims and those who fear victimization, nearly everyone in this society is touched by violence. (Estelle Disch, Reconstructing Gender, p. 496.) This is too sad an irony in the fate of American society, when one thinks how we strive as a nation that supposedly attempts to be this Great Society of Peace and Goodwill. Nothing seems so far from the truth. We are a nation with its genes deep in its reign of violence. And, too, so sad it is, that such a dearly island girl, someone, courageously in search of fame and prosperity in this culture, has had to fall victim to what has readily become that which is now but one of our domestic norms; domestic violence as a case in point is something we have all become so simply immune to.

I, for one, hope that Rihanna’s next album has a profoundly autobiographical statement against black male violence emerging from the core of its social context.

FULLMOON
morning dew coiled on the back of my window shield.

A patch of frost on the ground below by the pavement:

The engine is on, warm, and running.

Two yearlings lift their heads into my headlights

Yet, they’re too hungry to be distracted.

No harm has been done. Hurray,

There’s a full moon above

Quieting my morning. Off of

US 70 now, out on the Interstate

Gas billboards illuminate and keep my math

Skills active before an early hour’s dawn approaches.

Truckers roar by: visible, lonely, paired off, like couplets.

Ah, how bitter sweet: this one of few subversive aspects

Of male dominance passively wanders on

And on across the frontiers of America,

Incessantly, between the intervals: 1—5am.

At least one cornerstone of our economy is healthy

And isn’t out of demand. Hurray.

There’s that full moon, again, I’m watching alone—

And I can only think of Grandma Semmie’s passing,

(Of her fertile African-Cherokee veins—102-years and 8-months-old),

Calmly escaping this world only a few days ago, and just an hour or so after

Thanksgiving. And I can only think of how all those lost tribes that danced

Their genderless, engendered rituals, possibly believed for centuries

That this moon, above, was where Heaven was

12-1-2007

In The World: Orleanna at Triad Stage

Mamet’s ORLEANNA at Triad Stage: A Provocative Evening of Theater
by Fred Canada

An Introduction via another Prologue
There’s this great deal of pounding coming off the walls of my family’s townhouse flat. The neighbors aren’t supposed to be home. They’ve even asked that my mother collect their news-papers for the weekend, but someone happens to be there, banging various sorts of aggression up against the walls.

I go next door. Ring the doorbell. J rushes awkwardly down the stairs and comes to the door. Her eyes are well-lit with tears. She wipes another collection of tears from her eyes, as her front door widens. She is seven years older than I am. I have viewed her as a friend and felt as close to her as I am to my mother’s three sisters. I ask, “What is wrong?” Ask if I can come in? “Sure,” J says.

Now J can no longer hold herself back from explaining what all is wrong with her. Before last weekend, I might have simply gone up to this 60-something year-old white woman and offered her a hug. But I’m not as spontaneous as I usually am. I can’t do anything but offer an index finger towards her; for only slightly less than seven days ago, I’ve seen Preston Lane’s di-rection of Orleanna at the Triad Stage, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Three Recurring Acts in Motion
I sit inside Triad Stage where an audience member seldom sits. I can also look at others looking at me look front, left and right. There isn’t anyone at center stage. Not yet, anyway. This is, however, the stage and, soon enough, the players, Lee Spencer and Ginny Myers Lee, will arrive.

The set makes one think that they have side-ring seats at a boxing match. Though no ropes are visible, the set is simple. No bookcases or a couch as Mamet has suggested are available. This seems quite suitable for a potential staging of Orleanna. For as audience members, this will keep the intensity on the characters before us, as our distractions will be minimized as John and Carol begin their bout: a moment’s praise to Randall J. McMullen and Preston Lane on this fleet.

What keeps my attention at this interval of silence (I cannot even plunder on the fact of whether or not there’s any music at all, albeit there seemingly isn’t ever any fore-playing tunes at Triad Stage) are the pair of fluorescent lights mounted up above the arena. And with this ceiling’s view, one sees the usual brilliance of a set design that has become hallmark inside this location in Greensboro’s downtown renaissance on Elm Street. John Wolf has also added a couple of interior lights to this cubic dynamics of fluorescent shields that grants an almost inexplicable gesture that heavy weights are among us.

The ambience is perfect, but ambiguous. A phone rings when it is supposed to ring. An actor speaks and listens as if someone else is indeed on the other end of the line. (By the way, it could be any of us: and not to take anything away from Ginny Myers Lee’s state of anxiety in the role of Carol, that’s just how convincing Lee Spencer also is.)

The props, a desk and a chair, were not made with oak, pine or maple trees. They are metallic. And resemble furniture that one usually sees in the dominance of authoritatively institutional settings. This could be the office inside a library. This could be a corner inside a mental asylum. This could be a dwelling inside the barracks of an officer’s lodge. This could be inside the periphery of a university’s corridors. The fact being this, that Mr. Lane has managed to make it exquisitely universal; and this is what secures everyone, no matter which side they end up on, that Mr. Mamet’s piece is indeed controversial and timeless.

The lights dim. The rollercoaster ride begins. Mistakes are made: compounded with attempts at corrections. A cycle of communication recycles, but to no avail. The actors are at a plausible height with their adrenaline from the play’s outset. The music blasts out welcomingly harsh at the end of the first act, when the lights fade; then again after the second act; that’s twice, intensifying more and more with each closing act.

Third act: lights up: Kelsey Hunt’s ingenious hindsight as the Costume Designer erupts! Perhaps you yourself feel that you’ve just spent the last two nights out on the street with John. Ms. Hunt’s perfect details of a dress shirt dangling out of John’s jeans allow this to seem so.

Now, at the end, the director has found a bold statement of violence that Mamet hadn’t dared envisioned. This now becomes a feminist issue, if it wasn’t one for Carol and us all before the third act began: (Carol’s face pounding on the desk top: John kicking her in the stomach: exactly how many times I’ve seemed to have forgotten. I’m thinking about poor Rhianna at this point!) Then at last, back to Mamet, John stands over Carol with a chair as the counts of our breath shorten. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Triad Stage’s impeccably brutal, but worldly ripe production of David Mamet’s Orleanna.

In The World

Hey, Were You Looking Under Rhianna’s Umbrella, Too?

While I was Busy Looking for Ela’s Whereabouts

…Justin Timberlake shows up! I’m reading day after day that word has it in Hollywood that Justin and Rhianna are together. Perhaps, for me, this brings a bit of closure to all the suspense that seemed built up around the fact that Chris Brown refused to say much about their intimacy, or privacy, in the aftermath of violence that he wage upon her a few months ago: in the post-ambiance of circumstances that led him to believe he needn’t have explained why he had beat her as he had. Was Chris truly to blame for his senselessness? Becoming that someone who was jealous because of the notion that Justin was moving into his territory following his video work with Rhianna? Or was she surely that good girl gone bad?: and, then, Chris simply freaked out totally about it all.

However, I can’t seem to feel dubious about her merger with Justin Timberlake. In public appearances, I’ve always found Rhianna a genuine personae and classy act. And I have hardly doubted that she wasn’t a stark talent, and she has an inner and outer beauty that must be capable of overwhelming anyone who lands their eyes upon her: be they male or female.

I say this using my words rather intentionally. For a while, e.g., I felt that she was very much her own person. Very much a loner and very independent and individualist: one who would not care to go the way of the traditionalist. Sixteen is a very early age for an island girl to go off in the world as she did.

For a long while I felt that she was even capable of enacting openly in bi-sexual relationships, esp. after the lyrics “under my umbrella: Ela Ela Ela” were tossed out onto the world some years back. I’m sure the lesbians undoubtedly loved the lyrics. (And that I only knew one Ela: my sister-in-law, the song got my fantasy going each and every time I heard it on the air. And it was on the air incessantly in Europe. So the lyrics got my hindsight buzzing from the get-go! Oh, and remember, during her single years there was that one girlfriend that was constantly at her side at galas and many other celebrity functions.) I couldn’t help but think that, maybe, it just might have been that Chris found out about such a liaisons with another woman and went off on her as he did. It’s still one of those “Homosocial” taboos too many of us in America just cannot savory; swallow; and then get on out into the open with.

But suddenly, Justin’s in the picture. Puzzling? I don’t think so: for as we all seem to know, Justin has been out to attain such an exotic, cultivated, post-Caribbean-prize for some years now.

Well, at least for now, I guess the paparazzi [nor I] wouldn’t be secretly scouting about underneath her umbrella in search for Ela.

Sex-Trafficking in the World

All These Missing Little Girls
No longer Does Media Blame Aliens From Outer Space

We are finally getting it. We’re finally accepting that Martians, among other aliens, and the man in the moon can no longer be held solely responsible anymore for all the missing little girls and young teenagers being kidnapped in the world. And now that the truth is revealed, it’s long overdue that we come to some healthy state of consciousness and civility, as to address and reproach this marginalization of women in our civilization. With the exposition of these women as sexually exploited objects, our culture has helped assist women remaining victims in one of the last venues of modern slavery: sex-trafficking in the marketplace of organized crime. Added to this is the fact that the abduction of younger girls in the private sectors also has shown of late that the pornography industry is, indeed, cultivating a new vehicle of harm that has jeopardized the exploitation of children in our society. The paradigms marginalizing and imprisoning women are at last all too visible for either the media or public to avoid.
Of these past few weeks, as I’ve randomly watched the news recurring on behalf of detectives searching for samples of bone debris in the back of Phillip Garrido’s backyard, I cannot help but go back to the incessant days when I spent hours in the basement of the British Studies Institute at the Free University Berlin, reading The Daily Mirror, The Times, The Sun and other British papers that had suddenly returned to the subject of Frederick West following his prison suicide in 1995. (In many ways, I couldn’t believe that such enormous “satanic murders” could surface again, and I kept asking myself, was this but merely a media scheme of sorts on CNN’s part, as to keep us all glued to their TV station for a few extra weeks: were they using Fred West as a PR motive. Or were we as men prone to such violence, dominance, and abuse over members of the opposite sex if our own sense of power (or lack of it) caused us to fuel some mundane illusion in our psyche as to propel us to feel superior? In an attempt to bring some closure over such analysis I did not feel empowered, but shame for the sake of knowing how helpless these men must have actually been. Looking back on Frederick West’s saga, I found it most intriguing how unaware England was during the interim of those twelve murders—I had been stationed in Alconbury RAF in the mid-70s and no one had ever had a clue that such a crime of this magnitude would even incur in England.)
Within the past decade, just around the time Tony Blair was campaigning for England to support American in Iraq, the BBC broadcasted that sex-trafficking and -slavery was about to become even more of a serious challenge in the globalization community. As I listened to the radio-documentary revealing and denouncing sex-trafficking that evening—I asked myself, Why was it so hard for the world to believe that there was no such thing as spaceships out there beaming little girls up into outer space? Why couldn’t society get that there were circumstances far too complex and marred for this dynamics of child exploitation to be recurring as often as it had been?
However, roughly five years ago, suddenly the media started unfolding one story of sexual abuse after another. It seemed the images were beginning to come in loud and clear: from Florida to Minnesota: from Utah to Portugal: and from Colorado to Cambodia: even from Aruba to Peru. Slowly, the media had begun to understand that many of these cases did not limit themselves to mere runaways.
On August 25, 2006 my own breakthrough of conscientiousness on the subject of child exploitation seemed plausibly ignited. On that day, I watched the news from my Berlin apartment and learned about a young teenager named Natascha Kampusch who, only a day or so before, had successfully escaped from over eight years of imprisonment in the cellar of a man named Wolfgang Priklopil in Austria. She had found her way to the safe havens of a police office. He had just placed himself in front of a train, knowing the police were out there hunting him down. The story shocked Europe. Natascha received mega exposure though her face had yet been unveiled. It was to be the first of several women I watched, at the expense of the media, who would find their way back to some state of normality in the world.
I was extremely happy for Jaycee Dugard’s escape. One can only praise her for her bravery.
Yet, even if the whereabouts of the bodies of Madeleine McCann and Natalee Holloway remain a mystery, finally with the success of females such as Elizabeth Smart, Natascha Kampush, Jaycee, and most recently Elizabeth Fritzl, we in western society are finally beginning to place potent analysis on the issues of male dominance and abuse in our culture, as we have at least finally come to accept that the kidnapping of children around the world has got very little to do with Martians, and above all else, at least not on behalf of aliens arriving from outer space.

AMERIKA: It just isn’t the best place to live in anymore!

America’s Harsh Realty!
by Fresca

Yesterday morning, as I sprinted down Interstate 85 at approximately seven a.m.—leaving Burlington, seconds before dawn in the westward traffic rush to get my 9-year old nephew to his school in Hillsborough, for his sake: not mine, I kept to the air-waves coming out of Durham, North Carolina’s G- 105.1. The theme that occupied the three broadcasters [always two guys and a woman on these sorts of shows!] that moment was that Norway had just been viewed as the world’s best place to live,[1] and was a country having one of the highest life expectancy among developed nations in the world. The United States was not as high on the list that the listeners wished to have it; I believe the claim was that United States ranked 13^th – other online sources I have looked into since have shown that the States remains to stay at anywhere from the mid-20s to mid-30s in various ratings in recent years.

It was about 6:50 a.m. when this one caller came on and expressed her concerns on behalf of the debate of the poor showing the United States had displayed. She insisted that countries like Norway and Iceland had to have a longer life expectancy rate if only because of the fact that they had lower people living in their countries. Yes, like the three broadcasters, I too was baffled by her logic. Or lack of it. They tried to explain to her that countries such as Australia and Canada with their highly dense populations were ranked in the top five: and, that even Japan was higher—at number 10—than America was. But she kept arguing that America and India and a few other countries had to have higher death rates at an earlier age in life, if but because they were countries with higher populations.[2] There were a few good wise-cracks tossed about. Again, those on the radio tried offer one last shot as to help the woman try to understand that Japan and Canada had high population densities and still experienced higher mortality rates than America did. She just was not about to accept their reasoning and went on and on too long in an attempt to clarify her argument. Then she simply said, “And we are just with too many different nationalities in America and this adds to deaths in our country being higher then what it is elsewhere in the world.” She was far off the mark of conceptionalizing why the calculations had even ever been made in the first place. For example, in Norway alone, 60% of deaths in 2006 were due to cancer and cardiovascular diseases. (Statistics: Norwegian Institute of Public Health) This left 40% for other factors. Like deaths due to automobile accidents, homicides, aging and perhaps other abrupt means. But she tried to argue that because Norway and Iceland were with lower populations it justified why these countries didn’t have poorer ratings. And I seemed to be waiting for her to ask, “And where’s Germany, by the way? Is it still that awful in the East?”

At some point I had to suppress my ambivalence, as to avoid yelling out something rather condescending that might cause me to rebuke her Hinterwelt convictions in a rather cursing fashion, right there in front of my nephew. But I kept on repeating to myself, darn it that she—nor any damn one of them for that matter—is able to simply see that America’s soldiers dying for the cause of our wars against terror; urban gang wars slugging it out against one another; media’s exposure on Chicago youths going head to head with one another because violence in Chicago sells at the moment (haven’t you all figured that one out yet!); lack of cell phone restrictions on the highways; and our basically innate, pro-gun-control convictions were those issues that kept America’s poor showing active in the life expectancy argument, which was also helping to keep America from being one of the best places in the world to live. And just three places below the States, at number 16, was another Scandinavian country: Denmark. But one of Denmark’s best kept secrets was how high its urban violence was. And add to this the percentage of lives lost behind the wheels of drunk drivers attempting to get on over to Malmo and Helsinki for the weekends!

It seemed a perspective worthy of consideration.

I wanted to call in and pitch this question to the hosts of the talk show early yesterday morning, but I’m one who never drives with a cell phone on in the car.

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[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290550.stm

[2]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1218276/Norway-crowned-best-place-world-live--UK-trails-21st-place.html