The Great Move West

So The Wife and I leave for Berkeley in ten days. We have a weekend to do some furious packing before we hand our earthly possessions to those paragons of reliability known as The Movers. The chosen movers incidentally built in a lot of padding in their quote, 3,000 pounds worth of padding it seems, hmmmm, and there is some toli to be shared about their approach but I won't tempt fate until we safely receive said possessions on the other side. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, the last throes can be a very "interesting" phase.

All this to say that our time in Cambridge is fast drawing to a close (at least for the next couple of years), and that the Great Move West beckons.

Some would say it's about time, that 15 years living 10 minutes from your freshman dorm (and 11 years living 15 minutes from your office) indicates a certain aversion to change (or lack of imagination depending on your point of view). I've long found my relative stability a source of comfort. In any case, all change now...

I'll continue to work with Lotus/IBM - out of the San Francisco office with occasional forays to the Almaden lab. If you read the tea leaves closely you would have surmised that there was a transition 9 months ago, and that the work front has been more IBM than Lotus ever since. That switch made this westward journey easier and it has been good to be in a group ostensibly focused on web technologies.

I have been agitating for a certain reinvention of Big Blue with mostly middling results but my dark matter has occasionally warped things in the right direction which is pleasing. "This web thing is going to be big. Really!" I resisted the dot com temptation during that bubble, and I've been lucky enough on the whole to work on interesting technology. By and large, we've tended to keep in mind the effects of said technology on those who use it. Thus there is considerable delight in the problems I grapple with, and the solutions found, delight that overshadows the school of hard knocks that life sometimes enrolls you in (or voicemail hell to pick on a small thing).

If time permits, I'll share some assessments of the various tributaries of this chapter: Havard, Cambridge, Boston and the evolution of Lotus into IBM; some amateur anthropology perhaps from my ground level view. I suspect however that I'll be too busy engaging with the new to worry about such navel-gazing. Typically also, such things are better done at a certain remove.

I've been going through a fairly prolific phase of late, but now real life demands a blogging hiatus - at the very least until we settle on the new coast. In the interim I'll point you to a couple of new links intended to ease navigation on the blog: The Book of Toli and The Toli Technology Series. I'm slowly working up to The Pitch and hopefully there'll be good news when it's fully baked.

If you're in Boston you might well catch us at the Bastille Day business where Amadou and Mariam are purportedly performing - funny that one's last act in Boston is to listen to Malian and Senegalese musicians on the anniversary of the French Revolution, let them eat cake and all that) or at The Middle East on July 15th when The Brand New Heavies (!!!) and Van Hunt will do their thing. Some soulful and funky music to round out this chapter.

[Update] After the movers leave, I'll be doing a radio appearance on Radio Open Source on WGBH tonight Wednesday July 12th at 7pm, dispensing some toli on sports as a leading indicator. You can stream it live or listen to the podcast later. A last bostonian hurrah with Christopher Lydon, Chelsea Merz and crew.

Next stop Berkeley.

File under: life, move, change, journey, transition, Cambridge, Boston, Berkeley, California, toli

Koranteng's Toli On The Radio

So Christopher Lydon called me up at 1pm yesterday wanting me to be on his radio show that evening to discuss the G8 summit, Live 8, Africa, debts, Ghana etc.

This came from out of the blue but I guess that's what having a blog and writing about all manner of things will do; one's jaundiced prose will occasionally hit fertile soil. I believe Ethan, who called in to the program also had something to do with making that connection, my first foray into punditry.

It was an hour long show and I was in the studio with Chris and Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The Girlfriend was along for moral support and watched from the control room so I later got a fuller version of the way the show was put together.

Lydon's program is called Open Source and the topic was ostensibly Is Aid Enough?.

You can download an mp3 of the show (it's a big file 24MB, but it should stream in your browser).

I'm surprised I came off okay... I suspect I'm better on the written page than in person. Mostly I was hungry. For some reason, the only thing I had eaten all day was a bar of candy I picked up just before we got to the studio... I don't think it was just nerves, my stomach really was growling.

At a certain point, it seemed that the discussion was turning into a dichotomy of NGOs or universities/technology which I found discomfiting since those are not the only alternatives facing Africa. As an unknown quantity on my first gig as a pundit, I didn't want to jump in and change the frame of the conversation. I'm a little diffident and there's also the respect for elders aspect, in retrospect I should have been a little bolder.

I would have liked to have a couple of women in the mix to bring wider viewpoints to the table. For example, Sokari Ekine of Black Looks, would have brought a far more nuanced dialog, although it turns out that she is in Spain and not Boston like I had long thought. When Chris called and asked for suggestions for what he billed as a dinner party conversation on Africa, I was a little at a loss to point out those others who I read and enjoy. I guess the onus would be on folks like me to have 5 names at the tip of the tongue so that those voices would be called on in the same way that I was picked up into punditry...

I think I made a couple of cogent points during the program which discussed Africa, luggage, aid, debt, cell phones, radio, universities and various other things.

On Luggage

Africans typically travel with huge amounts of luggage - we have lots of responsibilities to our extended families. When I was a teenager, I once had to carry a television as hand luggage for an aunt of mine, she didn't even blink when the airline agent was almost incredulous that she would make a youngster attempt to carry that beast. My aunt simply wasn't about to pay any excess luggage fees and it worked, the agent took pity on me and checked in that piece for free. Another aunt used to say as she packed what seemed like the world into her suitcase,

"You just have to make sure you don't show the strain when you carry the bag."

Thus I mentioned the following.

• The luggage allowance on British Airways flights from London to Ghana is 40 lbs for economy fares and 60 lbs if you travel business class.
• The normal trans-Atlantic allowance is 70 lbs for economy fares on all airlines (say London to Boston).
• On the other hand, on British Airways flights from London to Lagos, Nigeria, the allowance is now 120 pounds per piece.

"It’s a matter of pricing power. They [the Nigerians] have the numbers, they have the economic activity, and because of that, British Airways, which 5 years ago did not even allow you to get frequent flyer miles to travel to Africa, now not only do that, but now for Nigeria, they will let you have almost double the luggage allowance that trans-Atlantic flights would have. So the Nigerians are moving."

I truly believe this. Ghana might be a current darling of the international community but with a population of 20 million, we simply do not have the kind of internal market that will allow us to weather oil at $60 a barrel like the US is doing without much pain. We are "helped" now that many of our neighbours are basket cases, and consequently this focuses a lot of development activity on us, but ultimately we'll never have the kind of pricing power that 100 million Nigerians will have.

I didn't mention the other statistic that underlies my point about Nigeria moving: the installation of 1 million cell phone lines in Nigeria in the past year. And anyone who has had to deal with the acumen of Nigerians in whatever sphere knows that if that society decides to advance, it will change in very short order. It will still be difficult, unwieldy and disorderly, but it will move and possibly even faster than India or China will.

In my Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse piece, I asked

"Why can't we be like the Indians for whom it increasingly makes a lot of sense to stay put back home or to even head back from abroad?"

Chris picked up on that and pressed me to address that very same point; it's a question that I ponder daily but have no satisfactory answer for.

I alluded to my manifesto about what is taking place in many African countries and you'll notice nary a mention of aid, debt or the West, even though all those can play a part in the answer

The messy business of development is about countries where three centuries of history are simultaneously taking place. The challenge is to creatively find ways to move the laggards into this century and the next. Giving goat herders mobile phones is only a first step.

I managed to get in a couple of customary toli zingers during the program:

"It takes two to do the corruption tango"

when the discussion inevitably turned to charity, handouts and rogues. The corruption tango is something I addressed in passing earlier on. It deserves a fuller treatment at some point. Right after that comment, someone called in (an American businessman) talking about trying to do business in Nigeria and how everyone wanted handouts and paraphrasing here "how he had to pay if he wanted to get anything done" and the "mentality of the people on the street". The juxtaposition was inspired and all credit is due to David Miller who is a great producer. A great corrective was then supplied by Ethan who mentioned that in all his dealings, and there have been many, he has never paid any bribes.
And:

"I’ve never seen money return from Swiss banks."

Despite the amount of shaming that the Swiss and others have endured in recent years (at the expense of the Holocaust lobby and others), I can guarantee you that the bulk of Mobutu, Savimbi or Abacha's money (let alone what we know about General Pinochet's dealings with Riggs bank and the like) will never be seen in their native countries, it is destined to be played with by Swiss and American bankers. I hope to be proved wrong but if you believe that all the money will be repatriated perhaps you're still waiting for the discovery of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Anyway it was a great experience, I want to do more...

It's funny, I'm more interested in the process of putting the show together than on the show itself. So I was completely at ease in the studio or chatting with Chris. As I've mentioned before, I've seen my mum do this countless times: at 1pm call around and try to put together a show for the evening - figure out who's in town, try to gather names of "interesting" folks, sounding them out quickly to see if they can talk, if they are quotable, quick-witted or ponderous all the while thinking about what the framing device will be etc.

In many ways the conversation I had when Chris cold-called me was even more interesting than what was ultimately broadcast, and looser also because there wasn't a particular angle that he had in mind. As you might know I too have a roving mind... We have a shared love of journalism in general, and radio in particular, and it was a great thing to see him at work. I think I mentioned the impact that mobile phones and FM radio stations had on ensuring clean elections in Ghana in the 2000 elections. It takes a lot of nerve to steal ballot boxes if your car license plates and description are likely to be phoned in and broadcast on various FM stations. I have long been a fan of his interviewing style and it seems that he got a lot out of his time in Ghana. I hope to continue the conversations we begun.

I believe I had the last word in the program; the question was something about what one would say if one was able to have 30 seconds with President Bush at the G8 summit. I started to say something about wanting "a level playing field" in world affairs but midway through my sentence, reality struck me, a level playing field is a tall order in the light of manifest destiny or The Long Thief in the Night. Thus I cut my thought short and simply ended with

"Just listen."

That's really all that that one can hope for from them. Lots of people have opinions on Africa, and many are quick to pontificate and prescribe solutions. But it would be good to hear the breadth of ideas that come from the continent itself; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's is only one of many. That's what makes me add my voice to the cacophony of the blogosphere, not that I have any particular insight, but rather that I can add value to the ongoing conversation. Maybe somewhere, someone will indeed "just listen".

Soundtrack for this joint

• Ice T - Radio Suckers
  I love radio, it can be more vital even than almost any medium and Ice T here samples that great line from Public Enemy's Rebel Without A Pause

  Radio Suckers Never Play Me

  Now that there's a little toli on the radio I can't complain
• Video might have killed the radio star as Buggles proclaimed but blogging is reinventing her as Chris Lydon is showing with Open Source. It's a lot of fun.
• Musiq - Juslisen
  Are you listening Messers Bush, Blair, Chirac and Schroeder? Is this a conversation or is it just one party talking?

See also: Chris Lydon Radio Toli

File under: Chris Lydon, Calestous Juma, WGBH, Open Source, radio, Africa, Cambridge, Boston, G8, aid, Ghana, debt, corruption, globalization, global voices, web, blogging, politics, economics, toli

Manhole Explosions in Central Square

Some blog journalism on an action-packed afternoon in Cambridge...

• More Lights Out
• Manhole Explosions in Central Square (Photo Essay)

More Lights Out

"In any case, you welcome the US to the fun of the Third World"

I had just written those words when the lights went out in my apartment. The monitor went dark as the computer died and the music stopped. It was around a quarter to four in the afternoon.

Today was a hot day especially in my uncooled bachelor pad. These are strange days and it is air conditioning season as I pointed out just last week. Unfortunately the windows in my apartment are not congenial to air-conditioners; there are bars obstructing something or other and I can't see installing an air-conditioner in a kitchen which is the only possible location. Thus I rely on lots of liquids and take it easy when working from home in the hot summer. Indeed I had just turned up my fan to get a stronger breeze. A thought crossed my mind that perhaps I had caused the power failure.

In any case it was the usual routine. Switch outlets off and check the fuses (nothing had blown). I started hearing a beeping sound outside the apartment and lots of people loudly asking "What's going on?". "Are you okay?". "Lights are out". "No... Electricity". Having satisfied myself that this wasn't just my apartment affected, I picked up my laptop bag and decided to head to the office, there'd be air-conditioning and I could drop off a roll of film to be developed.

Lights Out is nothing new, indeed one of my most heartfelt pieces of writing is about a case of Lights Out a couple of months ago and how it precipitated a community to come together and gain perspective.

Outside my door, the building was on generator power and emergency lighting - the reason for said beeping noises. I met some concerned neighbours who were also stepping out and we commiserated about the lights. "Is it just our building?" "This happened just months ago." "This electrical company..." "Frauds". "Incompetent". "I've got a baby here, we need the air-conditioner" etc.

Once outside the building I met a friend who lives a couple of blocks or so away. He had stepped out to mail some letters and then decided to take a walk. He also didn't have any electricity at home. This news meant that this was a bigger deal than the last Lights Out. It was likely that most of Cambridge was affected. I decided to walk to Central Square, pick up a shwarma at that Syrian Falafel joint in Central Square before heading to the office.

Manhole Explosions in Central Square

There was no electricity in Central Square (8 blocks from home) thus the traffic lights were not working. The police seemed to have cordoned off 5 or so blocks. There were fire engines streaming towards the place and helicopters circling above the square.

Drawing closer I noticed plumes of smoke. This must have been an electrical fire. There were lots of people on the street all heading to the source - we're all ambulance watchers.

The smoke seemed to be rising from the McDonalds. I remembered that that restaurant had incredibly been the target of an arson attack 5 years ago. I vaguely wondered if that was the case this time.

Drawing closer still, it became clear that it was an explosion in a manhole that was the cause of the outage.

The News trucks arrived and began setting up for their broadcasts. One cameraman saw my vantage point and came to stand next to me. At that I left. "The professionals have it in hand", I thought. Besides I needed air-conditioning. It was rush hour.

The guy on the right tried directing traffic for a while but no one paid him any mind. It was chaos.

Since Mass Ave was closed, there were a few diversions but the buses kept running. The T kept running with the loud sound of the emergency generator at the Central Square subway station providing a mid-afternoon soundtrack. Bus drivers stopped checking fares but there were still too many people trying to get home.

The air conditioning in the new electricity-powered, eco-friendly buses (on the right) is much stronger than that in the old diesely ones (on the left) so some smart folks waited for the appropriate one to come along.

When it's hot some people just strip down and sit down to cool off. Teenage boys being teeming masses of hormones, a crowd quickly gathered around that exhibitionist young woman who was shedding layers outside Blockbuster Video. A cop yelled something before they dispersed and left the poor girl alone.

Almost every shop had closed down due to lack of electricity but the Indian grocery kept its doors open and took cold cash. I managed to pick up some much needed ice cold water to cool off.

Heat. Conversations. How to head home? Would the subway be running? Or would it be another bus journey to work? The bus stop is outside Jax Liquidation Outlets which normally dispenses street-smart bargain basement clothes that will last for one club outing before disintegrating. But at $5-10 dollar a pop, Central Square chic is hard to beat.

This woman was having a moment in the hot sun, she was seemingly writhing to some inaudible song and doing a quite lascivious dance oblivious to the alternatively bemused and lecherous glances that were coming her way.

It takes all sorts in Central Square.

Manholes Explode in Central Square: a photoset

See also:

• Media reports on today's events
• Lights Out
• Inman Square Still Life
• The Journalistic Impulse

The blurb on George Packer's seminal Central Square should be noted and pondered:

In the face of yuppies' plans and transients' dreams, the poor and affluent alike strive for change while Boston's Central Square finds its own purpose for them all... Any big city offers its inhabitants both magic and mayhem... a haphazard mixture of therapy and activism to thwart inner-city depersonalization... Central Square... this hauntingly rendered hibernal wasteland...

File under: Cambridge, Central Square, city, urban, life, news, electricity, explosion, street life, writing, travel, journalism, observation, photo, essay, fun, Boston, toli

The Roots + Floetry = Virtuosity

The Roots + Floetry = Virtuosity

The Roots and Floetry. Live at The Roxy, Boston. Wednesday May 18 2005

Intro * The Scene * The Vibe Y'All * Outro

Intro

I Shall... Proceed... And Continue... To Rock The Mic
Everybody Is A Star
"Go All Stars, Get Down For Y'all"
The 'Notic, The Hypnotic = Floetry, Floacism
All You Gotta Do Is Say Yes
Illadelph Halflife Meets Ill London Flow
Bring Some Money To Spend And Somebody To Lend And Some Worthwhile Money Not Some 20s And 10s
Adrenaline
Boom!
They're Coming To Break You Off
Duck Down
Don't Say Nuthin'
All Roads Lead To Apache
With Thought At Work, It's The Next Movement
I Don't Care As Long As The Bass Line's Thumping And The Drum Line's Banging Away
Kool Herc Ain't Never Seen A Royalty Check
Hip Hop You're The Love Of My Life
The Legendary Roots Crew Stay Cool In The Melting Pot
We Are The Ultimate (Rock-Rocking It)
That's What's Happening In The Parking Lot. That's What's Happening On Stage.
Din Da Da (Dun Do Do)
Do You Want More?
Somebody's Gotta Do It When The Guns Are Drawn
The Roots Come Alive
The Tipping Point Is Here And That's The Bottom Line
Give The Drummer Some
Keep the Beat Going
Bring The Beat Back. Bring The Beat Back.

The Scene (Combat Zone)

You might sense a little exuberance, a little elation, a little plain joy in these parts and you'd be right. Wednesday night with The Roots and Floetry was even more reason to sport that wide smile that I've been bearing of late. It was a cheer that started in the long lines that stretched out for 2 blocks outside The Roxy. In downtown Boston, the Theatre District is very close to what is lovingly called the Combat Zone. Indeed during my first visit to Chinatown in 1991, there were gunshots and people scrambling as we walked out of the Boylston T Stop (200 metres from The Roxy) to try to get some Dim Sum. Most Harvard students tend to stay in Cambridge which has pretty much everything they need thus each excursion to Boston and its environs is an event. With guns drawn, that outing certainly fitted the bill;it was a great Sunday brunch by the way, baptism by fire as it were.

Now of course the city has cleaned things up since then. There was a concerted effort in this liberal bastion to husband the commons in a kinder, gentler mode than Rudy MussoGiuliani in New York. In the black community at least, the churches got everyone together and knocked heads around. There was one incident that was the last straw the community could bear in 1992 when teenage gang members came guns drawn chasing people into Morning Star Baptist Church and stabbed a kid during a funeral service for a teenager who himself had been killed in a drive-by shooting days earlier. Pastors and Samaritans everywhere started hitting the streets and patiently mentoring youths and forming a Ten Point Coalition that hasn't let ever since. With the Big Dig Irish/Italian/Federal/Mafia money to spread around for the past 15 years, a little dotcom boom and bust, the current biotech splurging, and a set of savvy universities around Boston with their 300,000 students in mind, it appeared that lots of things could go well for the community and economy. The notion was that it would pay for government and even Big Government to actually to manage the cultural and economic zeitgeist so that social ties were woven together and one wouldn't end up like the anomic New Haven, to take an example of what social neglect can do.

So now there are fewer porno emporiums or theaters in the Combat Zone. Whoever had the inspired idea of placing the Registry of Motor Vehicles next to that sordid theatre knew very well the power of shame in human affairs. Thus there has been considerable gentrification throughout the city of Boston and Developers With Vision™ have tried to clean things up. There are lots of gleaming and spiffy new buildings around, including the fancy Loews Theater at Boston Common outside of which the Star Wars tribe had camped out to buy tickets at the stroke of midnight for this Friday's Sith-like Revenge on office productivity everywhere.

However the move up-market was done in typical liberal fashion, with much hand-wringing about gaining community consent and buy-in from those affected. This is why there is the occasional attraction for strong men and fascism, they make the trains run on time. Ghana, like Chile before us, could only be a poster child of the IMF and World Bank in the late 80s because it was ruled by vicious rogues who could run roughshod over the wishes of their populace. Things are not so easy when you have a case of the episodic ballot box. Thus Franklin D. Roosevelt's "He's our sonofabitch" theory of the Realpolitik of "vital interests" and the recurring marriages of convenience with noxious strongmen and Strange Bedfellows are played out in such a grisly fashion in Uzbekistan and other countries even today.

With no dictator in place to press the issue, there is still a significant minority of people around Boston and Cambridge who haven't heard the word about the clean up program. Thus as you head for the opera or some fancy show, dressed in your finest tuxedo or shimmering dresses (Swan Lake was playing at the Boston Ballet which I must see at some point), you'll pass the 7-Eleven at the corner of Tremont and Kneeland and see a few (shockingly young) hookers and their rough but effete pimps, most just a few years older, casting a wary eye and assessing the likelihood of your disbursing cash money for The Game all the while speaking a patois full of puns, coinages and ghetto witticisms. Some of us were harried after long days at work or the minutiae of dissertation completion and were dressed down hence we glossed over these gritty urban fixtures. Our thoughts were all about the Sound of Philly and perhaps Brixton or Deptford.

Others however had seen a late addition on the Ticketmaster web site about a purported dress code, "No Jeans, No SNEAKERS, or Athletic Wear", which I suspect caused much gnashing of teeth and wardrobe deliberation. The notion that a low rent joint like The Roxy was ever going to enforce a dress code on an $18 ticket to a hip-hop show was hilarious to me, but I suppose others took this seriously because I saw a fair number of people dressed up as if this were one of the summer concerts along the waterfront, or the adjacent Boston Ballet for that matter, instead of a hip-hop soul lovefest. People wearing uncomfortable shoes, plus a late start - 10:30pm on a Wednesday night, might cast a shadow on some of the enjoyment.

One thing to note is that this one-off concert was sponsored by a cigarette company and there was a certain dissonance in seeing Surgeon General's warnings on the video screens above the stage right after a stream of "Kool" images (tagline: Be True and A New Jazz Philosophy) floated past repeatedly. Just in the past year, Angie Stone was sipping on Remy Red and Jill Scott's tour was sponsored by Alizé. I suppose the floodgates opened when KRS-One did the Sprite tv commercial to the sound of The Revolution Will Not be Televised. Gil Scott Heron must not own his masters. Ironies abound when companies in the guilty pleasure industries pick up all the "progressive" artists; one wonders a little about artistic integrity but maybe it's a matter of holding your nose and paying the bills (dollar, dollar bill y'all). Who else is going to sponsor the next movement?

Left-of-center artists like The Roots have a very diverse audience, they are musicians' musicians, and hip-hop's favourite jam band thus the crowd was a kind of Rainbow Coalition of neo-soul and hip-hop aficionados, the kind of people portrayed in candy like Brown Sugar. The addition of Floetry brought out a few more older African-American women to the table, intellectual poetry with harmonies, wit and the kind of groove that gave Michael Jackson Butterflies. Everyone looked good and expectant and harassed college students could escape their fears about the courses they had neglected all semester before buckling down for finals. This was the place to be if you weren't a George Lucas addict.

The Vibe Y'all

If you walked in to a joint to the booming sounds of A Tribe Called Quest's Electric Relaxation, you would know that everything was going to be all right. Like Earth Wind and Fire singing Keep Your Head to the Sky and Devotion live, it felt like a revival meeting so "Clap your hands this evening. Say it's all right. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."

With 'that dude from Living Colour' guesting on guitar (I turns out that it was Vernon Reid and not "The Other Guy"), this was a performance that sometimes verged on the rock side of things. Well as rocked out as a hip-hop sensibility allows and with the good Captain Kirk Douglas also doing a mean Hendrix or more accurately a Kravitz impression, the rock and soul meshed well in the flow of things. The band always pay homage to the greats with snippets of the obscure breaks thrown in every now and then and this time it was Ray Charles' What I'd Say that did the trick.

Coincidentally this past weekend I had been in New York and passed by my favourite crate digging place Rock and Soul on 35th and 7th and, if I hadn't had a train to catch, would have spent a good couple of hundred bucks on essential breakbreats.

In any case the musical territory covered was hip-hop, rock, soul (with a very soulful new backing singer who's just joined them and not mere eye candy too, she can sign), lilting reggae to straighten things out. Black Thought is completely in control of things these days and now that he no longer hoards up his charisma or turns his back from the audience, the love is plainly reciprocated. The way he started with the pyrotecnics of Web, that one verse drum-and-bass, old school raw adrenaline was astounding and there was no let up. The humour and verbal dexterity (the breath control) is about about as good as it gets, I'm reminded of Big Daddy Kane or Kool Moe Dee going to work on things but with a millennial flow. Kamal at times introduced jazz and classical keyboard breaks, he's still hip-hop's Ahmad Jamal and towards the end gifted us with an amazing church keyboard solo that hit the spot. Hub's styles himself as a cross between Michael Henderson who made Miles Davis simply Live/Evil when he pushed him to slickaphonics and foot-foolery in the early 70s and Miko Weaver who, along with Eric Leeds, pushed His Royal Badness into the zone.

And the drummers you ask? Frankie Knuckles on percussion, in empathy with ?uestlove's mission, adding great effects especially when they tilted towards reggae, soul and funk.

Questlove on the drums is simply scary and deserves his own paragraph. The frenetic and phonetic Brother Questlove is a perfectionist on his instrument, I now put him ahead of Kariem Riggins who got the nod last year because of his regular jazz moonlighting. Having listened to the Grover Washington-influenced Philadelphia Experiment, and heard the swinging I Am Music from Common's Electric Circus of which he was the executive producer, I knew he could do jazz and now with the kind of live performance that leaves you awestruck, there was simply too much talent to consider.

There was a point when it felt like that moment in the Sign O' The Times concert during It's Gonna be a Beautiful Night, right after the band has worked out on the Detroit Crawl when Prince says "Night Train" and the band switches on the dime and Duke Ellington's chorus blares from the horn section fitting perfectly and dazzling the audience. Or when James Brown was In a Jungle Groove for those magical 4 years starting in 1969, or even the point in Curtis Live during (Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below We're All Gonna Go when Brother Curtis sings

Cat Calling, Love Balling
Fussing And Cussing
Top Billing Now Is Killing
For Peace No One Is Willing
Kind Of Make You Get That Feeling
Everybody Smoke
Use The Pill And The Dope
Educated Fools
From-Uneducated Schools
Pimping People Is The Rule
Polluted Water In The Pool
And Nixon Talking About Don't Worry
He Says Don't Worry
But They Don't Know There Can Be No Show
And If There's A Hell Below We're All Gonna Go

Need I go on? At such moments, the music, audience and performers are in complete consonance. This is what I call virtuosity. This is life in a rarefied zone.

In last year's Toli Music Awards, I wrote

They've certainly hit a groove. It's like Prince circa 1986-7 when the Miles Davis horns came into his arrangements on the Parade. They've done the kiss-off album (Phrenology as Around the World in a Day) to throw off fairweather fans. They are now going for the vituousic and this works perfectly. Could a Sign O' The Times be in the offing next?

That was before hearing them on Giles Peterson and certainly before seeing them take it to the stage in the tradition of Funkadelic. I got my answer I believe.

Suffice to say that the kind of music I heard live last night has blown the band way past The Tipping Point they proclaimed was their due. The Roots are so confident in what they are doing these days that they make it appear effortless. The elated audience felt it too. Floetry who are so versatile were similarly inspired in their performance. They weren't blown off stage as almost anyone else who had to follow The Roots would be, but did their own thing and got a lot of love and plain respect. Their vibe is one of great invention, harmonizing, operatic and sensual with some London Yardie and garage inklings. It's a White Teeth meets a Brick Lane Sense and Sensibility. The thing about such musical intelligence is that at times it can be too dense and overwhelming but both bands kept the Boom Bap factor in mind so they "Rock(Ed) It To The Bang Bang Boogie Say Up Jumped The Boogie To The Rhythm Of The Boogie, The Beat"

The Roots closed out with a their usual 45 minute Hip Hop 101 tribute medley to those who have gone before them. They always choose different heroes to focus on and this time even went into more commercial club-banging territory (snippets of Biggie even turned up) intermixed with the exhilarating instrumental rare groove of Booker T and the MG's Melting Point that I pointed out earlier as the Jazz Funk in a Blanket of Soul.

Outro

Since the DJ who warmed the club up was utter early nineties nostalgia, I'll close with this lyrical zinger from that same era, a golden era in retrospect, Chubb Rock's Yabadabadoo:

From The Rustler
Lyrical Hustler
The Fat Lady Sang
I Crushed Her.
Word Up The Chubbster

As we walked out at 2am to brave those denizens of the night who were still plying their trade in the combat zone, there was a little wistfulness about whether the car would still be there. It was hence highly appropriate that we were handed a couple of fliers for next weekend's Pimps and Hoes party.

Iceberg Slim's hoedown aesthetic is now a commonplace with Don "Magic" Juan, 50 Cent and Snoop literally pimping the cultural (and financial) zeitgeist. Thankfully people like the more reflective Ice-T have stepped off that program (and never would I have dreamt of writing a sentence containing the words reflective and Ice-T but that is a sign of the times). Perhaps one should see this as just a bit of fun, the ascendancy of a culture of irrepressible irreverence and reinvention, a kind of poking your thumb in the eye of those august New York Times types who now write editorials about how hip-hop lost its way. What these grey ladies don't understand is that that hip-hop is vibrant enough that Ludacris and De La Soul can coexist and even feed off each other without dissonance. Even if I were that way inclined, I'm off to London next weekend and anyway what would Malcolm and Martin think? The commercial road is certainly a heavily travelled path for instant gratification. The Roots and Floetry aesthetic simply shrugs of such concerns and tries to win you over with musical dexterity, one performance at a time, and it pays off I think. As the Black Sheep (who were also played during the warm up) put it, The Choice is Yours: "You can get with this or you can get with that". In my book, the tortoise does beat the hare in the end. I might take Richard Pryor over Bill Cosby but I still love both aspects of the culture. Mission: Music.

With a Philly groove still echoing in my ears, this was simply blasé blasé to me. I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

File under: music, virtuosity, elation, exuberance, soul, hip-hop, jazz, funk, poetry, rock, Philly, The Roots, Floetry, culture, vibe, lyricism, dexterity, musicians, Living Colour, Miles Davis, Prince, Curtis Mayfield, Chubb Rock, Vernon Reid, Boston, urban, life, development, black, history, sociology, Broken Windows, concert, review, roots, Ghana, Chile, Uzbekistan, toli

Inman Square Still Life

Inman Square is a little patch of urban anomie within walking distance of where I live in Cambridge. Unlike that other nearby paragon of urban blight, Central Square, it isn't much to talk about. No one has written eloquently words like the following:

In the face of yuppies' plans and transients' dreams, the poor and affluent alike strive for change while Boston's Central Square finds its own purpose for them all... Any big city offers its inhabitants both magic and mayhem... a haphazard mixture of therapy and activism to thwart inner-city depersonalization... Central Square... this hauntingly rendered hibernal wasteland...

Not quite. Inman Square is the stuff of blog entries; no poems or novels here, no Thoreau, no Wordsworth not even a Packer to chronicle the lives of its denizens in these environs.

Herewith some observations from last afternoon's tableau vivant.

First start with the name. Inman Square is a misnomer at best. There is no "Square" per sé, unless you count the little concrete patch where Cambridge Public Works have been storing their building materials for the incessant construction on Cambridge Street over the past 3 years.

It should more properly be called Inman Cross with 10 different streams of traffic crossing, nay colliding, in its unruly center. It is a nightmare of uncertainty for pedestrians; one of the worst in pedestrian-unfriendly Boston. The only thing preventing monthly carnage amidst the disorder being the poor quality of the roads. The drivers' muscle memory anticipating the obligatory encrusted potholes where Cambridge Street meets Beacon Street, meets Inman St, meets Hampshire St, meets Antrim St, meets Springfield St.

Inman Square is just a block off from where Cambridge encounters Somerville at Line Street but the Square proudly clings to the cantabrigian postal code. Well proud is perhaps too strong a sentiment...

The last apartment I viewed before I found my present nest was just above a storefront on the Square. It was a most dingy and seamy affair, perhaps the worst rathole I had seen in my 6 months of apartment hunting. Its Indonesian students knowingly eyed me; they had finally saved enough money to move to a better place. I must have appeared as the desperate immigrant fresh off the boat - desperate because I was inspecting their crumbs of the American Dream. The realtor actually didn't blink as we stepped over the holes in the stairs leading up to it, nor was there any comment on the 70's decor - corduroy on the wood paneling?!! - the leaking toilet, the musty smell of the mid-summer heat, nor even the exposed asbestos in the alarmingly-wide hole in the bedroom ceiling. I soaked all this in as I listened to her blathering on about what a nice neighbourhood this was. She capped it by naming the price: $900/month, heat not included !!! (in 1996?) I replied that I would take the last place she had shown me...

I suspect, in retrospect, that this was a wonderful sales tactic: show an apartment you've been having trouble pushing, listen to the equivocations and then show them their worst nightmare and say it costs more than than the previous one.

Across from Cambridge Savings Bank at the Quick Food Mart, the "Indian" storekeeper wields his weapons: a hose and a plastic brush, and tries to scrub the recent graffiti off the side wall. Actually I think he's Bengali (or are they rather called Bangladeshi?) but anyone of his complexion is "Indian" in American. Well why not? After all, in America if you have a drop of 'black' blood, you're black aren't you?

Next to it is the proletarian's friend, Punjabi Dhaba, "arguably Boston's most economical Indian restaurant", a chop bar par excellence, that has outpaced Akbar India, that other low rent joint just a block away. Cheap eats for hungry students served in utilitarian prison-ware. You could climb upstairs and enjoy the view overlooking the square: they used to have Christmas lights on last summer, it gave flavour to the whole thing but they cut down some of the trees this spring and the lights are gone. The Dhaba is busy: authentic cuisine always wins out, especially when it's dirt cheap.

There is another "Indian" grocery a few doors down (Pakistani-run this one - no name that I can gather); the competition between the two keeps the prices down, all the better for the student population. This one specializes in lottery tickets and a sign proclaims that they had a grand prize winner of mega-millions - hmm, is that truth in advertising? But more important, I think, are the dvds they sell - especially the 'special' ones you can get from behind the counter (read: some of the most varied porn you can find this side of a grimy sex shop). Mom-and-pop shops being good capitalists as it were.

The "Irish" drunks are early today, it's noon on the Thursday before Labor Day I suppose, and five or six of them are overflowing from the Druid Pub leaning against its washed out green walls. Football season has started and noontime Guinness washes things down swimmingly. It's a hot day, their swagger befits the weather...

Next door Austin Antiques sells the kind of things that wouldn't be out of place in the 'Jews for Jesus' outlet in North Cambridge - dark, vintage furniture, cabinets made with a long-lamented craft - we only have Chinese plywood these days. Same thing with the nameless vintage clothing shop where you can get some musty and frankly outré dresses from the fifties or even the early parts of the 20th century. The Indian shopkeepers are a bit more industrious and professional than these Cambridge natives for whom these shops are little more a hobby. There's a vision of growth and progress in them that has escaped the defeatist Inman Square born-and-bred types.

At the Zeitgeist Gallery there's "Yo! What Happened To Peace?" - a Traveling Exhibition of Peace & Anti-War Posters. I should check it out sometime; its a clear reminder that I live in the People's Republic of Cambridge, where good old Massachusetts liberals mix with peaceniks, anarchists libertarians and frank Marxists. The local Trotskyite office is just a few blocks away.

The funeral home is next to the law office. In actuality the buildings almost seem to merge into each other. It is right that they are a package deal. After the lawyers get their cut, you can get buried in style.

Like Sisyphus, the grocer scrubs... this never-ending exertion is repeated perhaps monthly, and sometimes daily, depending on how annoying the local teenagers decide to be. Interestingly, some of the other establishments have given up on cleaning up the graffiti. Take for example that surprisingly expensive Mexican restaurant on the other side. Haven't they heard of the Broken Window theory? And how can they justify their prices when their outside walls have teenaged angst scrawled over them. Regardless, he sprays, scrubs, sprays and scrubs, scrubs and sprays... Half an hour goes by and there still lingers a faint trace of the latest screeds.

There's a group of teenagers who observe him, smirking. Perhaps they were the nocturnal sprayers? One of them is wearing a pair of brown gloves (in this weather?) and sports a big zit - a blend of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Pinocchio. The rest have your garden-variety acne, black spots basically. They're bored. And the fun they've been having doing the earphone shuffle sharing tunes from their iPods is getting a little old. They all spontaneously break out the cell phones and begin text-messaging friends trying to find the next place to hang out.

If Indian restaurants are bargain basements that will do anything for your dollar, per contra, there are local restaurants like the S&S Deli that still don't take credit cards. Similarly, the clothes shops, the antiques looteries, and that curious toy shop, Stellabella, are all strictly cash affairs.

Legal Seafoods started out in Inman Square; similarly Jaes' first restaurant was in the square, but these have flown to better pastures and restaurant-chain fame; there's no reminder of this in The Square. The Square suffers from being a no-man's land midway between Harvard Square and Kendall Square, too far from the delights of the more urbane and richer masses of Harvard and MIT.

To the east of the Square lies the mainly Portuguese and Brazilian East Cambridge. The focus being the credit union, the insurance agency, the steak restaurants serving huge chunks of beef, the butchers with 'live killed chickens', the fishmongers whose smelly Boston Scrod is sometimes dumped onto the streets, and the pinnacle, Casal Bakery that sells the sweetest Portuguese bread in the world - all of these are family establishments. These are the poorest cantabrigians who haven't improved their lot even after 40 years of working on construction, restaurants and other odd-jobs. A fair number of the older folk still don't speak english. The newer generation though are beginning to take the American melting pot to heart but it's a struggle.

Similarly there are the nearby former projects (Prospect Towers where the internecine gang roadkill of the early nineties used to take place and youthful killers did their part as the crack epidemic ebbed) and even further, the low-income housing developments, now gentrified at the surface but resisting history at their core. Lots of teenage moms walk their strollers into the Square, trying to hold on to the sophomoric dads who are overwhelmed by it all, weeks away from abandoning their screaming offspring and current squeezes.

The City of Cambridge is set on raising property values and so everywhere there are policemen overseeing public works. There isn't enough money to lay bricks down the length of the Cambridge Street but some bright beancounter figured out that you can upgrade the town by simply having brick strips and trimmings on the sidewalk. The street has consequently been in upheaval for the past 2 months. Where they have finished however, the neighbourhood is much improved. There are now these newfangled bus stops, newly installed benches and street lights all lovingly painted black.

The Stars and Stripes flutters outside the fire station. A couple of firefighters linger outside. They are still ruing the kind of play and easy sex that they got in the months after 9/11, mourning the disappearance of the young hotties who would say to themselves: "I'm going to bed me a firefighter tonight". Normalcy has returned and even Tom Ridge's and John Ashcroft's periodic "elevated warning" hysteria hasn't been enough to loosen teenage panties of late.

These days the centerpiece of the square is Ryles Jazz Club. It may not get the upper class tier of performers but it has a solid booking schedule. The Jazz Brunch on Sundays is known all over the town and even attracts the occasional hardy tourist. Tonight is samba night and there is a certain spring in the step of the Cape Verdeans who pass by. The great innovation of the past decade were the swing classes and dances that now take place bi-weekly. Demand is strong for nostalgia and a good time; white middle-class America does love The 50s of Ronald Reagan and the B-Movies so the lines are long those nights. Ryles obliges.

Argana is the closest the square has come to gentrification. A lovely blend of Moroccan cuisine (great couscous) and decors (Arabian Nights meets The Spanish Inquisition) that would compete with the stylings of Newbury Street's Cafe Sonsie, and better food to boot. Not to mention that they have Belly Dancers every now and then that walk up to your table - even that woman who teaches dance at Central Square. Guys love the place overriding their girlfriend's jealous looks. Maybe it's a sign of things to come, a leading indicator of the future. I'm a little skeptical personally but it's good to know someone is trying. All it takes is a few more visionaries and a couple of "Developments" and before you know it, the yuppies will move in. In New York's Lower East side they talk of "Trendiness Among the Tenements" these days.

Inman Square isn't quite a slum, it lingers midway between a tenement and your vanilla urban backwater. It's akin to the brackish water, treated with alum to dissolve the brown sediment before drinking that is the lot of those poor villagers in my mum's constituency, Ho West. All they got was tins of evaporated milk in the last election. All Inman Square has is unspoken promises of cashing in someday on the dot-com and biotech boom that the rest of Cambridge is spearheading.

I leave the bank and take in the scene, the 2 clean-cut Mormons returning to the mother house after a day of proselytizing. I wonder what they think of me as I enter the Haitian grocery/Voodoo emporium to try to find some ripe plantains - the Haitians like their plantain green - I believe some wires got crossed when the slaves crossed the Atlantic...

Later I pass by Inman Pharmacy to pick up a newspaper. After 8 years as a regular customer, the Portuguese woman behind the counter has finally begun to greet me. She asks how I'm doing, smiles, I smile back and mutter the typical Yankee platitude. This doesn't come easily to my Ghanaian self and yet this personal touch makes me feel part of the community. I also get beaucoup points since I helped stop that old shoplifter a couple of weeks ago who was trying to smuggle a greeting card and a cuddly toy furtively under his clothes. My involvement in that affair was to stand arms-crossed in front of the door while he received his old-world dressing down.

Heading home, I pass the Psychiatric Emergency entrance of Cambridge Hospital where a concerned family have brought a young man - presumably a student. There's a worried look in their faces but the nurses are jaded at all of this. They've seen it all before.

All in a day I suppose.

File under: Boston, Cambridge, writing, travel, whimsy, wit, observation, portrait, fun, life, Inman Square, city, culture, Small Things, toli,