Watch Night and Freedom's Eve

It's New Year's Eve. Around the world people will celebrate the end of the current year and welcome the next. In the United States there will be parties and fireworks. People will be in clubs and bars dancing to DJ's and live music and getting drunk on champagne and other libations. Not all of us will be partying. Some will stay at home and spend a quiet evening with loved ones. Some will be spending their time honoring a holiday that most people are completely unaware of. These people will be quietly spending their time in church in honor of Watch Night and Freedom's Eve.

Just about all Americans celebrate the 4th of July as a day of independence and freedom. When one knows the facts about American history one knows that it is a holiday that rings hollow for black people. On July 5th, 1776, black people in the newly declared, free United States of America, were still in bondage as slaves, as chattel, without rights or representation. At the advent of the American Revolution black slaves wanted to fight for the cause of freedom. They assumed that the new paradigm of freedom and independence would apply to them also.

As we know well today, that was not the case. George Washington, the leader of the revolutionary forces, forbade slaves in Virginia from participating in the war as did every other state in the South except Maryland. It is not surprising given the large number of slaves he inherited by marriage was the primary source of his high standing. He and other revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson built their wealth and reputation on the ownership of slaves. It wasn't something that just happened naturally, it was a conscious decision. It was debated among the revolutionary leadership and it was decided that slave labor would be vital to a fledgling nation trying to compete with established empires like England, Spain, and France, on the international agricultural markets. Even so, free black men from the Northern states enlisted in the army to fight for the cause of the revolution. Initially there was resistance from Congress but that resistance softened when there was a need to replenish the number of troops once the war began.

It was actually England that offered black slaves the opportunity to be free during the American Revolution. Freedom was offered to any slave who would escape their bondage and fight for the British against the American revolutionaries. It was not a sincere offer. After the British army was defeated at the deciding battle in Yorktown in 1781 the British forces brought all of their tens of thousands of escaped black slaves to the island of Manhattan to be reclaimed by their owners. The war so severely depleted the number of slaves in the Southern states that importation of slaves from Africa, that had been banned before the war, was began again in earnest.

It would be 86 years before black people gained their freedom. As they did in the American Revolutionary War, black people were eager to join the fight in the Civil War. President Lincoln, as Washington was before him, was reluctant to allow black men to fight in the war. After all, the war was not about slavery, it was about preserving the Union. It was the North that declared war on the South when the Southern states formed an independent government and elected Jefferson Davis as their president. As it was in the American Revolutionary War, black men were allowed to fight when the Northern forces became depleted and were at risk of losing the war. On September 22, 1862 Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, effectively freeing all slaves in the southern states except the state of Texas. Though signed in September 1862, the executive order would not become law until January 1, 1863. On the December 31, 1862, black southerners congregated in churches and other black meeting places to await the midnight hour when they would become free people in the democratic republic of the United States. This night would come to be known as Freedom's Eve.

It was not new for black people to gather on the eve of December 31st. This night was already known as Watch Night. During this period of the United States, January 1st was the day when all debts from the previous year had to be settled. The selling off of slaves was often used as a way to pay off debt. The selling of slaves often involved the breaking up of slave families so the slaves gathered together to celebrate and watch over each other, because for many it would be the last night spent with family and loved ones. Watch Night was originally a ritual of the Methodists which held a Watch Night each month when there was a full moon. The significance of Watch Night was a vigil to God, to be prepared to "meet your maker". As stated in 13th chapter of Mark, Watch ye therefore, for ye know not when the master of the house cometh. Black slaves adopted this, as they did with many Christian rituals, to their particular ways of worship.

When you get right down to the hard, cold facts, for African Americans it is not July 4th, 1776, we should celebrate for freedom. It is January 1, 1863, that it is the true day of our freedom. I know it is for me. My father is from New Orleans, Louisiana and my mother is from Birmingham, Alabama. I am a direct descendant of people who were slaves and practiced Watch Night and waited with the great anxiety on the night of December 31, 1862. From here on, every year on this night, I will celebrate the coming of the New Year, Watch Night, and Freedom's Eve.

The Other Side

If life is an illusion, then so is death-the greatest of all illusions. If life must not be taken too seriously-then neither must death.

Samuel Butler

Death has to be the very first ever human obsession. In the beginning, humans did not obsess over life. Before we were rulers of the world and held dominion over Mother Earth, life was just a simple matter of survival. Well, it wasn't simple in terms of the how but it was in terms of the what. Eat, drink, sleep, defecate, procreate, and nurture the young. We humans lived like most other mammals did. We took what nature offered us in terms of food and shelter. It was only in death that we began to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animals on the planet.

There was no great mystery in birth. Creating life through copulation was an instinct, just as eating, drinking, and sleeping were. We didn't question it we just did it. Death offered us the first boggle that induced us to use our oversized cranial matter. It offered us a reason to use or imagination and to think in the abstract. We had to invent a place that did not exist and that place was not in the physical world or available to us through our 5 senses like everything else we knew. The concept of nothingness, even to this day, is highly unacceptable to humans. So began the creation of the first virtual worlds, the Afterworlds, which were the very first significant creations of the human mind. The oldest human artifacts found mostly relate to burial ceremonies. Yes, there are also many artifacts that deal with birth and fertility but they are mimics of what we actually witness and experience in life. There was no way of knowing what was on the other side when it came to death. It was a one way ticket to the void.

We have split the atom and traveled through space but we still have not pierced the veil of death, though certainly not due to lack of trying. The greatest monuments on the planet are the Egyptian Pyramids and they are but three massive, timeless, odes to death. The Egyptians are acknowledged as being perhaps the first advanced people on the planet in terms of infrastructure, order, and the math and sciences, and from all accounts they were obsessed with death. Embalming may be the oldest science in the world. There is no culture in the history of mankind that does not have burial rituals.

In our highly advanced, technological culture, our approach to death is still a matter of the arcane and the rituals remain as they have since the beginning of time. Lifeless bodies are cleaned and treated to the greatest care, adorned with decorative artifacts, and either buried in the soil, housed in a mausoleum, or burned to ashes. All this attended by community and family members in mourning with elegant eulogies given to the recently departed. For many, respect is reaped in bounties that were never seen in waking life, such is our subordinance to the dead. Death is truly the master of us all.

But I’m not writing this blog entry to get into the details and intricacies of how we deal with death and our death rituals. This is more about how one family deals with it. Recently my eldest aunt, Johnnie Mae, died at the age of 83. My mother comes from a rather large family of 12, consisting of 8 girls and 4 boys, who are all now in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Johnnie Mae is the second sister to pass away in the last two years. I feel for my mother as it is hard to avoid the thought that given the age of her siblings funerals might become too commonplace for the remainder of her life. I was visiting my Mom on Thanksgiving when the she received the dreaded phone call. She had already attended two funerals that month.

I flew down from San Francisco to Los Angeles with a bit of excitement because, fortunately, for my mom’s family, funerals are not sad and gloomy gatherings. They are more like mini, impromptu, family reunions. 12 aunts and uncles equals dozens of first, second, and third cousins, and since we are spread out over the country from the home base of Alabama to California to the mid eastern states of Ohio and Pennsylvania any occasion for the family to get together is a blessing, even a funeral. I’m part of the West Coast Contingent and I don’t see my cousins for years at a time. Now we are all grown and have our own families, well, most of us do, and it is always a pleasure to see the next generation advancing in life and they are doing quite well from what I can see. Watching my little cousins run around playing games with each other takes me back to the 70’s when we did the same thing. There were a lot more of us and we were way more rambunctious.

We have a tradition of doing family reunions, usually in different parts of the country, and usually taking over a floor of a Hilton Hotel for a 3 to 4 days. I always wondered how other guests felt when they checked into a hotel and saw the hotel lobby and swimming pool full of African Americans and little black kids zipping up and down the hallways. My first trip on a plane and first time out of California was for the family reunion held in Pittsburgh back in 1975. For a California kid Pittsburgh was like visiting a foreign country. Just like our east coast cousins totally freaking out the first time they saw the Pacific Ocean, me and my brothers were fascinated by things that were foreign to us like fireflies, rivers running through the city, steel mills, bridges, basements, and real urban living where the houses were narrow, three stories high, and only separated by a few feet. I’ll never forget my Aunt Velma’s house with the white as snow carpet with runners, furniture covered in plastic, and the memorabilia shrine dedicated to the Pirates and Steelers.

The funeral was to be held in South Central Los Angeles at a small baptist church just off Vernon just a few blocks from the Harbor Freeway. I arrived in my rental car, a white convertible Mustang (free upgrade from Enterprise), and was greeted by my mother, her husband, and my oldest brother Keith and his three kids, Skye(16 yrs old), Kris (12 yrs old), and Tori (9 yrs old). We were the first family to arrive which was nice because it allowed me to spend some time with my mom and brothers who I only get to see once or twice a year. Over the next half hour, our aunts, uncles, and cousins showed up, kissing, hugging, and consoling each other, with extra love given to cousins Sandra, Tracy, and Stacie, the daughters left behind. Time changes everything. When we were little kids cousin Stewart was the oldest of male cousins of my generation and was the alpha male. Now just about all of us tower over Stewart and its been payback time ever since, but always in good fun, nothing malicious.

All of my mother’s sisters and brothers showed up for the funeral. We took our places in the church and the services began. Like my Aunt Carolyn’s funeral two years earlier the ceremony was lead by a charismatic preacher who’s powerful oratory skills filled the tiny church with much energy. The church going family did their part punctuating the end of each of the preacher’s proclamations with robust “Amens!” and “Allelujahs”! Halfway through the proceedings my cousin Miriam, a professional singer, came up to the podium to sing a gospel song in honor of Aunt Johnnie. Miriam has some serious pipes. She began in the classic, emotional style of soulful gospel singing and finished in a crescendo that took her from long sustained soprano highs to low and mighty guttural baritones that brought the crowd to its feet. Tears flowed and hands spontaneously went up in the air shaking invisible tamborines, praising the Lord with Amens and one particularly large woman was so moved she began speaking in tongues that lasted well after Miriam finished her song. Her performance sent chills up my spine. Cousin Afrika, the youngest cousin of my generation, followed by giving a moving eulogy to Aunt Johnnie and making a comittment to uphold family unity, imploring us all to do the same. I remember Afrika when she was just a little baby and I have always seen her like that but now for the first time I saw her as the powerful woman she has become.

In a perfect change of pace she was followed by her brother, Cousin Glen, or Glenny as we used to call him when we were kids. Afrika and Glen were two of the four children of my Aunt Emma and their family was very close to Aunt Johnnies family having spent their entire lives in South Central Los Angeles. Aunt Johnnie was the one who began the West Coast Contingent. She moved out west from Birmingham Alabama in the 40’s and was followed by many of her sisters, my mom included. My parents moved us out of LA proper to the Pasadena area in the mid 60’s while the rest of the West Coast Contingent stayed in South Central LA, so growing up we were the family that lived away from the nucleus and didn’t interact as much. At times, because of circumstances, Aunt Emma’s kids lived with Aunt Johnnie, so she was like a second mother to them. At the podium Glen began to relate to us his memories of Aunt Johnnie, speaking humorously about her well kept home with the plastic covered French colonial furniture. Glen told of how us kids could never enter Aunt Johnnie’s house through the front door, we always had to go around back and enter through the back door so we wouldn’t tromp all over her pristine living room. To enter through the front door would expose oneself to the Wrath of Aunt Johnnie. For a youngster she could be somewhat intimidating. She had a raspy voice from years of smoking and she still carried a lot of that Alabama southern drawl, and could swear like a sailor. Probably the most memorable memory Glen brought up was the “scent test”. Upon entering Aunt Johnnie’s house you had to present yourself to her for inspection. You had to raise your arms and let her get a whiff of your armpits. If you failed the test you were sent out to the backyard to hang out with the dog or you went to the bathroom and washed up. Aunt Johnnie wasn’t about to let any of us stinky boys defile her home.

Me and my brothers were lucky, we were spared the scent test because we didn’t spend as much time at Aunt Johnnie's house as Glen and the other LA cousins did. It must have run in the family because my mother would do it to me and my brothers at times. On Saturday mornings my mom would set herself up in the kitchen and talk on the phone for hours to her friends and relatives. In order to get out the front door you had to pass by her. Often times she would stop us on the way out and give us the once over, twice. If we smelled too manly, or our skin was too ashy, or hair too nappy, we were sent back to the bathroom to make ourselves more presentable and of course she would have to share that information with whomever she was speaking with on the phone in that tone of voice only a mother disgusted with her offspring could muster. The way she did it would always make you feel embarrassed and about two inches tall. Now that I am a grown man I can’t argue with her methods. She had four rambunctious boys and playing football, basketball, and running the streets all day was top priority. Showering and bathing were not. I can remember my mother actually rubbing dirt off my neck once with her finger. In the end she was really doing us a favor and keeping us somewhat civilized.

The pastor closed out the ceremonies with more lessons from the Bible. He must have known that he had the capacity to carry on all day so he told us if we wanted to slow his roll we needed to be emphatic with our “Amens!”. We didn’t heed his words with diligence until we realized he wasn’t joking as he powered on with one parable after another until finally the force of our “Amens” surpassed his colorful storytelling. We exited the church aisle by aisle and gathered on the sidewalk for an extensive session of photo opps. When our family gets together, photo opps are like being at the red carpet for the Academy Awards. For every group there were about a dozen cameras and video cams clicking away. There were so many cameras if you were in a group being photographed you really didn’t know where to look. We gathered in groups by individual families, we gathered by generation, we gathered by family sub divisions, and the holiest of the holies was the gathering of my mother and all of her brothers and sisters. If you were to drive by and see us crowding the sidewalk with beaming, smiling faces you would never think it was a funeral. Throughout the day and the ceremony the mood was not somber, it was celebratory. That’s just how it is when our extended family gets together. The funerals end up becoming mini family reunions.

Now that the funeral was over it was literally party time. We all caravanned over to the city of Carson to the spacious home of Cousin Erika. My nephew Kris and niece Tori sheepishly approached me and asked if they could ride with me in the convertible and of course I obliged. Riding in a convertible with me used to be the exclusive domain of my niece Skye but like I said before, time changes everything. I put the top down and off we went. We arrived at Erika’s house and the party began in earnest. The champagne, beer, and wine flowed freely and we lined up to attack the buffet of fried chicken, prime rib, greens, and potato salad. Cousin John-John, who is now enrolled in culinary school, held court in the kitchen adding strawberries to the chardonnay and frying up fancy shrimp. Cousin Chris, who has more than a bit of street in him and who’s stout build could be a result of too many trips to Popeye’s chicken, could be considered the family court jester. Baggin, crumbin, signifying, he’s the master and his jokes and stories had us laughing all night. The little ones took to the streets playing kickball and basketball just as we did when we were their age. The teens did what teens do, huddling in a small group manipulating their smart phones and exchanging the secrets of their clandestine world. The aunts and uncles sat in a circle and talked the night away, just happy to be together again. The ladies dominated the kitchen mixing juicy highballs and exchanging family gossip. The men found the tv room and planted themselves and their beers in front of the tube to watch the UCONN vs. Kentucky basketball game on ESPN, debating everything under the sports sun, from who was winning their fantasy football league to who is the best in the NBA, Kobe or Lebron. One thing they all agreed on was Kentucky guard John Wall may be the next Big Thing in basketball. Any stranger walking in to Erika’s house would never know all of had just attended a funeral.

Before the night ended, Big Brother Keith and Cousin Miriam gathered all the cousins for an impromptu family meeting to discuss the next family reunion. Our last two family gatherings had been the result of funerals and we didn’t want the next one to follow suit. After some discussion it was decided the next reunion would be in Las Vegas in 2011. Everybody seemed satisfied with the decision. The night had gone so well my brother Keith invited everyone to his home in Monrovia the following night for another family party which made everyone very happy, especially the East Coast contingent, who still had three days to kill (pardon the expression). I was not able to attend the party as I had to return to San Francisco but I heard it was off the chain. I knew it would be and I was really bummed that I was not able to attend.

Well, at least I was able to go back home to San Francisco buoyed and energized by spending time with the family which for me in my current state of extended unemployment was just what I needed. The search for hope and inspiration takes us all over the globe but often it can be found right under our nose, at a family funeral. God Bless!

The Princess and the President

It’s 2009 and we have a half black President sitting in the White House and Disney has released it’s first African American themed animated feature. In the minds of many these two events represent significant watermarks for the progress of black people in America. I beg to differ. I haven’t sat down with other black people to discuss this nor have I gone into any black community to gauge their collective feelings and opinions about these matters. This is strictly my own viewpoint, my own opinion, as one black person in America.

I vividly remember election night, November 4, 2008. I happily purchased two bottles of champagne to celebrate the soon-to-be President Obama’s victory. Unlike many people I knew he was going to be victorious. I wasn’t worried or nervous. I was 100 percent certain that Obama would win. When John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, in my eyes it sealed the presidential victory for Barack Obama. Up to then I was concerned the GOP would pull off another masterful cheating scheme to win the presidency as they had done in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Diebold voting machines). When the GOP allowed McCain to select Palin it was a true sign of their desperation. It’s not like they had a lot of great choices. Their new up and comers like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee couldn’t beat out retread McCain. Giuliani couldn’t hog enough of the 9/11 spotlight from George Bush to cash in on the patriotic/fear vote. Ron Paul was an outsider who really never had a chance. Fred Thompson, I don’t know what he was thinking. He wasn’t a leading man on fictional tv shows so why would anyone buy him as a leading man in the real world?

I had barely gotten home from work and uncorked the bubbly when the networks were already declaring Obama the winner. I remember turning to my girlfriend Denise and saying, “Do you know what this means? Now when we tell little black kids they can grow up to be President it will actually mean something.” In the next 10 minutes every network’s token African American analyst said the same thing, except for the FOX Network which had no prominent or token African American analyst. All they had was that deer-in-the-headlights look on their face as they mumbled in disbelief over the election results. Two bottles of champagne, $35. The look on the Fox Network newscasters after the election, priceless.

All over the world people were celebrating Obama’s victory. They were saying, “Look what America did”. The French news was querying why had they not produced an Obama ( I guess the French see themselves as the THE nation of western progress). In the eyes of the world America had redeemed itself, at least somewhat, for eight years of the Bush administration and what it wrought on the planet. Around the world Obama’s victory was not seen as a victory or validation for black people, it was a validation for the country as a whole. It was not an indicator of black progress, it was an indicator of American progress. That’s kind of how I saw it too. We didn’t put him into office. Yes, we voted for him but there aren’t enough black votes to put him into office. If you look at the voting record of black people over the last two elections we voted in almost the same numbers for Obama as we did for Gore and Kerry. The next day, sobered up from the champagne, I knew that the world would still be the same for everyday African Americans. I knew that the problems that plague our communities would still be there. I knew that just because we had a black President it wouldn’t mean that black issues would get top shelf treatment. A government for and by the people had changed over decades by war and globalization, into a government for and by the wealthy and powerful, who’s main instrument of control was the corporate structure, debt, and taxation. I didn’t see Obama as one who’s Presidency would be about radically altering that shift or changing that system. Presidents change but the corporate lobbyists remain. It’s a revolving door for elected and appointed officials to go from public service to private lobbying or to sitting on boards of large corporations, using their influence to dictate legislation that helps the rich get richer and stay richer. When the economy collapsed where did the all the bail out money go? Who was given all those hundreds of billions of dollars? It wasn’t the average, everyday, working American.

If anything the election of Barack Obama has ratcheted up the intensity of the hateful race rhetoric that has always been part of post Civil War America. The mindset of many Americans is since we now have a black President there is no excuse for black people not to be doing as well as other groups. It was like the election was supposed to make all of our problems and the history and legacy of racism, segregation, and institutional violence, disappear overnight. Don’t get me wrong. I was very happy that Obama was elected because I have a history of voting for people who don’t win (Nader, Camejo) and to be honest I never thought I would see a black President in my lifetime. I think Obama’s election was a greater nod to the country as a whole than to the black people of America. It proved to me that there are many many tens of millions of Americans who have moved beyond the politics of race and are willing to elect anyone to the office they feel can do the job.

Did Obama’s election have any influence on Disney’s decision to make its very first ever black themed animated movie? Maybe, maybe not. Was it due to years of pressure from organized groups of African Americans? Maybe, maybe not. If there has been a pressure put on Disney by black groups it hasn’t been on my radar. In my opinion, being recognized by Disney is extremely low on the priority list. We don’t need to be validated by the Disney corporation. Disney, like any other corporation, has one primary function and that is to be profitable and reward its stockholders. The only color that concerns them is green. I am completely ok with that. This is America where capitalism trumps all, including democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. I do have a problem with that last part but I do understand and accept that making money is the most important thing happening under the banner of Americanism. Disney’s choice to make a black themed animated film is simply a matter of diversifying its assets and tapping into and widening new markets. Although almost completely absent from the American media, there is a black middle class that exists and its consumer habits are no different than any other middle class. I'm sure Disney is counting on this movie to have audience appeal beyond the black middle class. They are counting on it to appeal to the majority of the middle class, because ultimately, that's where the big bucks are.

Like any other kid I grew up watching and enjoying Disney movies but I never drank the Disney kool aid. I never was one to pine for Disney trinkets and memorabilia. Growing up in LA I loved going to Disneyland. One of my earliest traumatic memories was going into the mouth of the whale on the Storybook Land canal ride. I can still vividly remember the frightening whale eyes, the humungous whale teeth, and the big thing that hangs at the back of the throat that I do not know the name of. I literally thought I was about to become whale food and it scared the bejeezus out of me. It was scary but it also was thrilling and I liked thrills. On my 8th grade graduation field trip we went to Disneyland and it was one of the most exciting days of my entire life. Space Mountain had just opened and there were no crowds on a beautiful May day in Southern California. Me and my classmate must have rode Space Mountain about 10 times. We would get off the ride all hyped up and get right back on to ride it again as there were literally no lines. Up to then it was probably the most thrilling thing I had ever experienced. I was also a huge fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean. Pirates was less about thrills and more about atmosphere. It was the kind of environment that transported me to another world and another time. It was a fantasy come to life. That’s what Disney meant to me. It was all about the “E” ticket rides of thrills and adventure.

The movies on the other hand, especially their animated features, I didn’t think much of. Even as a kid I knew they were tame and sanitized. Because I do animation for a living I do respect Disney for what they have done. They practically invented the genre and works like Fantasia and Snow White are true masterpieces from a technical standpoint, but I was never drawn to them by the stories being told. When I think back to my childhood and what animated features really stuck with me, none of them are from Disney. Watership Down, Fantastic Planet, Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, and The Yellow Submarine were the animated films that captured my imagination. There is only one Disney movie that ranks among my all time favorites and that is Dragonslayer which came out in 1981 and is a movie that breaks the Disney mold as it has much violence and a princess that actually meets a dire fate and literally becomes a meal for some not so cute baby dragons.

Watching these movies as a kid I was not at all concerned with skin color. I didn’t expect to see black people in Disney movies, it was just something that was understood about movies and television in general. To me movies and television seemed segregated. Whenever I saw black people on screen it was usually in what are now called, “blaxploitation” movies. On tv it was shows about living in the ghetto, shows like Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. I watched them anyway because black people were in them. Something was better than nothing. As I became older and more knowledgeable about media I began to notice that when black people were in mainstream productions they were always playing the role of a low class person, like a drug dealer, pimp, or criminal. When a black person appeared in a film and they weren’t playing a stereotype it was very noticeable. In the movie Bullitt, George Stanford Brown played the role of the lead doctor. In Planet of the Apes, Jeff Burton played the role of one of two astronauts accompanying Charlton Heston. In the Omega Man, Rosalind Cash plays the role of Charlton Heston’s love interest and featured the first interracial romance I ever saw in a movie. The Outer Limits, a very progressive early 60’s sci fi tv show, featured a few black actors in the role of scientist or astronaut, and of course there was the original Star Trek series featuring Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura. These characters stood out to me more than the gangsters, pimps, and drug dealers. I would actually wonder to myself how the actors obtained the roles. There is always the exception to the rule and of course that was Sidney Poitier. He was the only black actor who consistently played a wide range of characters that weren’t supporting the stereoptypes. It was almost shocking to see him paired up with Bill Cosby in the urban ghetto comedies, Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again, that were produced in the mid 70‘s. I love both of those films, first and foremost because they were hysterically funny and secondly because of the presence of Poitier and Cosby which allowed the films to rise above the stereotypes.

So now we have The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first black themed animated movie starring a black princess. There’s been a lot of hype over the film because of this. Really, what is the big deal? Is a black princess supposed to be meaningful to black people? If I remember correctly this country was created as a result of rebelling against a monarchy. In the Thomas Paine version of the Declaration of Independence(which Jefferson used as the foundation for the actual DI) one of the main reason for declaring independence was because of the African slave trade business that had been imposed by the monarch of England, King George. Many of the first Europeans that came from England to the Americas were indentured servants. You would think that Americans would have no interest in royalty, yet we do. How do you explain the American fascination with Princess Di? As a nation we are fascinated and thrilled by royalty and royal blood. Having a black princess does nothing for black people in America. If a black princess is supposed to be a boost to black self esteem then we are in serious trouble. You can’t grow up to be a princess in this country. You can grow up to be the President, an astronaut, or a doctor, but you can’t be a princess no matter what you are told. A black princess in a Disney movie serves Disney more than anything else. They get to take a crack at expanding the market for their movies into the black community and I think it is working. I’ve seen many parents with little boys and girls saying, “finally”, but really you think the kids are going to care? Is one black princess in a Disney movie going to have a profound, life changing effect? I think it’s the parents who are being affected more than the kids. They have probably struggled with trying to find positive black images in mainstream culture to bestow on their children and will seize upon anything halfway suitable in our highly visible, heavily saturated, 24-hours-a-day, digital, pop culture (even babies have i-phone apps now).

That’s what I am at issue with. We shouldn’t need to turn to the media for positive role models. Black people have been succeeding in America since the earliest days of its formation. We have a great legacy in this country of black achievers and it would be great to shine the spotlight on that. They aren’t going to see these people on movie screens and they won’t learn about them in school. We have been succeeding in this country long before Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. I love the reality of Sojourner Truth, an ex slave that went to live among the Dutch and learned their language and became a powerful spokesperson for women and black people. Even more intriguing is the story of John Horse, a man who escaped slavery and went to live among the Seminole tribe and became one of their most important leaders. He organized ex slaves and Seminoles to fight against the U.S. Army using guerilla warfare tactics. He is the only enemy combatant to fight on U.S soil and earn a peace treaty with the U.S. government. They could not beat him. How about Marcus Garvey? He began the pan African movement in the United States and was one of the very first black entrepreneurs. He was born in Jamaica but came to the United States to organize black people all over the world under one movement to advance African people. He started several successful businesses in pre World War II America. The first successful open heart surgery was performed by Dr. Dan Hale Williams, a black doctor, in 1893. In 1909, African American Matthew Henson along with Robert Peary discovered the North Pole. Today we have famous rappers and entertainers like P. Diddy and Kanye West but long after they are gone and forgotten people will still be influenced by the works of Langston Hughes. Barack Obama was only the fifth ever black Senator and only the second in the last 20 years. The first three black U.S. senators made it to that level in the Nineteenth century. Usain Bolt is the fastest man possibly ever but before him there was Jesse Owens smashing the myth of Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals in the 1936 in Germany, humbling Hitler and severely undermining his philosophy of white supremacy.

Africans have proven they can succeed in America long before Barack Obama and we don’t need validation from the Disney corporation. I’m not saying that the Princess and the Frog is a bad movie, on the contrary, I have heard it is a very entertaining film, but it isn’t a significant indicator of anything happening with black people in America. If anything it’s time we took control of telling our own stories. It is time to start teaching our kids the legacy of black success. Much of what I have learned about black heritage I have learned through my own research. There is more to our history than Martin Luther King and slavery and we shouldn’t have to wait until Black History Month to learn about black history. In this new age of information everyday is an opportunity.

Accidental Careerist Part 4

...continued from Part 3

I’ll have to give you the condensed version of the Diablo/Blizzard experience. It would take a book to give the story its proper due. So here we go. Two years into the development of Diablo Blizzard decided to buy Condor. We became Blizzard North and Max, Dave, and Erich became millionaires overnight. Diablo was released in the first week of January 1997 and stayed at the top of the software charts for 7 months and ushered in the era of online gaming. PC gaming ruled the industry. At the time Blizzard acquired us they were being acquired by software publisher Davidson. Warcraft 2 had been released in 1996 and was Game of the Year and Diablo followed suit in 1997. The success was continued with the release of Starcraft in 1998 giving Blizzard Game of the Year three years in a row. Blizzard North stayed small, we had only grown to 15 people for the making of Diablo. By 1999 we had grown to 45 people for the making of Diablo 2.

By then things had started to change. In a large part due to Blizzard’s success the gaming industry went through a rapid expansion. Annual revenue started to rival that of Hollywood. Corporations started buying their way into the industry and snapping up the small independent studios and publishers. Soon after the release of Diablo Davidson was bought by CUC, a corporation that made their money on memberships for discounted services and products. CUC soon merged with HFS, a real estate and hotel based corporation and formed the conglomerate known as Cendant. Wall St. was on a roll. Yahoo and Amazon, two new internet companies, were the hot stocks. Google at the time was just one of many search engines trying to find their niche. In April 1998 Cendant became the first corporation to get busted for fraud during the mid to late 90’s meteoric rise of Wall St. To us lowly workers they made stock options seem like gold. Our bonus money for the success of Diablo came in the form of stock options which became worthless once the fraud went public and the SEC started their investigation. I remember the day, it was April 15, 1998. The Cendant execs sold their stocks two weeks before the bust because they knew better. For me and my friends at Blizzard North our stocks became worthless. Cendant’s assets were frozen for a week and by the time they were unfrozen the stock had dropped to well below our option price. I was two years vested and my portfolio was worth $240,000 and almost overnight it became worthless. It was my wake up call to the nature of the corporate beast. The Cendant fraud was soon followed by the Worldcom debacle, which was followed by the Enron travesty.

There were many other high profile stock based frauds. Cooking the books was the business of the day. This was all paralleled by the dot.com boom and bust which I had a front row seat from living and working in the Bay area. Unlike Condor which was started on a small loan and money from parents I witnessed the birth of one dot.com outfit after another hitting the ground running fueled by venture capitalist money. These companies had made no revenue but they had the best offices with the best technology and handed out high paying jobs like cheap beer at a frat party. These companies had lavish perks and threw massive parties. Young people flocked to the Bay area for the high paying jobs, which in turn forced the rent and cost of living up in San Francisco disenfranchising the City I had known. It was like a technological gold rush. Many of my friends in San Francisco who were mostly artists and working class were priced out of the City.

Diablo 2 was released in June of 2000 and it was a monster hit setting a Guiness Book of World Records for game sales. Gaming had gone international and Blizzard was well known around the globe. We were especially huge in Korea due to Starcraft. Right before the release of Diablo 2 Cendant sold its gaming division to Vivendi, a French water utilities company, for $885 million. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the beginning of the end for Blizzard North. We had grown to 65 strong. Most of the people were new and had not worked on Diablo or Diablo 2. Many of the people who came on at the end of Diablo and the beginning of production for Diablo 2 left the company after the Cendant fraud. We were now fully corporatized. We had rules, we had overseerers, and we had several levels of management. We were no longer the small maverick studio that did whatever it took to get the job done. We started working on Diablo 3 with a crew that was not cohesive and leadership that had become more concerned with maintaining their wealthy lifestyles than leading the studio. For two and a half years we were like a rudderless ship. By the summer of 2003 we should have been putting the final touches on Diablo 3 but instead we had nothing to show. We had started on five different versions of game, spending 3-6 months at a time developing ideas that we eventually trashed. Max, Dave, and Erich came in to work one day and announced they were leaving Blizzard North to form a new studio. The scuttlebut was that they approached Vivendi for more money and not only were they turned down they were asked to resign. Blizzard South had been working on World of Warcraft since 2000 and had already sunk tens of millions into the game. Vivendi was trying to sell off Blizzard and was asking $1.5 billion but found no takers. To cut their losses they decided to consolidate Blizzard which meant liquidating Blizzard North. The guys (Max, Dave, and Erich) left to form Flagship Studios and they only took a select few with them. I wasn’t one of them. They had a plan to have a small group of designers and leads to create a game and outsource all the development for the assets. Soon after they left Blizzard, Blizzard North was downsized by a mass layoff. After being told in a private one on one meeting with the management that I was one of the so called important people I was shown the door. I had been with Condor/Blizzard North for 9 years and this is how it would end. I helped build the studio from nothing and helped the guys become millionaires

I had been working for 22 years straight without a break and for the first time in my life I was laid off. The day of the layoff was the same day escrow closed on the home (a one bedroom apartment) I had just purchased in San Francisco. I hooked up with a bunch of ex Blizzard guys who formed a studio called Castaways, the name a direct reference to how we exited Blizzard North. We secured a contract with Electronic Arts to make a Diablo like game based on Greek and Persian mythology. After a year and a half our contract was cancelled. Electronic Arts had a CEO change and went in a new direction and cancelled all of their third party contracts. After about six months of unsuccessfully trying to find a new publisher Castaways was forced to lay off all of its staff in December of 2005.

I didn’t start looking for work right away. I decided to do take some time off from working and do some traveling. I went to Costa Rica and had a fabulous time. A few months after that I went to Peru to hike the Inca Trail to Maccha Pichu and I went to Tulum in Mexico to see the Mayan pyramids. I took a summer job to be the director of the ID Gaming Academy, a three work residential program run out of UC Berkeley where high school kids were given a crash course in game art and game development. It was the perfect job for me since it combined my two careers. It was a challenging job. I worked from 7am to 1am, seven days a week. When that ended I landed an animation job working for Backbone Entertainment in Emeryville.

I had only been at Backbone for two months when I was contacted by my old friend from Blizzard North Michio Okamura. He and another old time Blizzard Northy, Eric Sexton, were forming a new studio. They had secured a deal with a Chinese publisher. I was hired to be the Lead Animator. It was just like the Condor days, we were starting a studio from the ground up except this time the stakes were much higher. Where in the Condor days it maybe cost a few hundred thousand to operate the studio now the annual cost was in the millions. The new studio was called UI Pacific Games and we were making an MMO (massive multiplayer game) based on the Chinese legendary story, the Three Kingdoms. All the core management people were ex-Blizzard North. We hired about 25 people and started production on the game. We also had a studio in Seoul. In March of 2007 we visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul to meet our new publishers in person. All was going according to plan when the Chinese pulled out of the deal abruptly after nine months.

Brad Mason, our CEO, managed to find another publisher for us in less than a month. This time it was with Gravity of Korea. Gravity built its success around the game Ragnarok and wanted to establish itself in the US market. Our new studio was named L5. Gravity had an office in Los Angeles and owned a few licenses based on Hollywood films. This was actually very exciting because at first we thought we were going to be making the companion game for the movie Avatar. For some reason the deal could not be worked out. Gravity had a license for Ice Age so that became our new project. It was a bit of a letdown because that is not what we signed on for plus we would only have an 18 month development window to make and ship the game. We weren’t even sure what kind of game we wanted to make so we spent the first few months negotiating with Gravity what type of game it was going to be and who would be the target market. Once that was settled we started working on the game. I was promoted to Art Lead responsible for all of the art assets. We were on a tight schedule but we were making good progress. We had most of the main characters modeled and animated and we were actually starting to get some momentum. Even the Blue Sky people who made the movie were digging our game. I have been in some whacked out situations in the gaming industry but I wasn’t at all prepared for what was about to happen.

In August 2008 I came into work and was told by Brad that the management team was going to resign from L5 to go work for T3 and Hanbisoft, another Korean company. I was told I could join them or stay at L5. The same offer was made to the entire staff which numbered about 30 people. Apparently there was some concern with Gravity’s commitment to L5. Of course I took the offer, what else was I going to do? So here I was heading into the third company in three years with basically the same people. The irony behind this move is that we were going to be working on a game that had shipped a year earlier that was made by Flagship which was run by our former bosses at Blizzard North.

Flagship had shipped Hellgate London in late 2007 under much controversy. They made a deal with Hanbisoft late in the game to get much needed funding. They took a sizeable loan from Hanbisoft and put their game up as collateral. The game was released before it was ready and it didn’t meet expectations. They had to liquidate Flagship in summer of 2008 because the loan was called in. Hanbisoft took over the game and the rights to distribute it in Asia. We were brought in to polish the game for its Asian release. Like Gravity, Hanbisoft was making its play to get into the US market. They were riding the success of a game called Audition. Our new studio was named Redbana US. Right after we began with Hanbisoft the global economy tanked. Audition was launched in 2009 in the US and it failed to garner any attention with the Guitar Hero/Rock Band dominated US market. In the spring of 2009 T3, the parent company began to downsize Redbana. Eric Sexton, who started the original studio, myself, and some other management staff were laid off in April 2009. Once again I found myself out of work, getting my ass scorched by corporate politics and decision making.

Seven months later I am still trying to reboot my career but this might be the end. With the economy in the shitter jobs of any kind are almost non existent. Fifteen years I have worked in the gaming industry, starting at the very bottom and reaching the top of the mountain only to find myself on the bottom again, on the outside looking in. My savings are rapidly dwindling and soon I will not have health insurance if I don’t find a job by January. If I go a few more months unemployed I’ll have to sell my apartment and probably move out of San Francisco, the city that has been my home for the last 18 years.

Has my luck run out? If there is a new career out there for me I haven’t had the chance to meet it yet. I have some ideas about some new directions I want to go in but the clock is ticking and these are hardly the best of times. I can’t say I have any regrets. It was a great ride that ended in a wreck but I had some great times and I met a lot of good people. Who knows? Maybe the gaming industry has one last silver bullet left for me. It would be nice to go out on my own working on a game that ships that I can be proud of. I’m down but I am not out. Perhaps if you follow my blog you will get to witness my resurrection.

The future is not yet written.

Accidental Careerist Part 3

…continued from Part 2.

It can sometimes be strange and mystifying the random occurrences that dictate our fate. What leads us down this pathway vs. that? What leads us down the road less taken? For me it has been because I have never had a burning desire too travel down any specific path, I trust the universe to reveal itself to me. Pathways and doorways are always opening up it’s just a question of how aware I am and how much am I willing to risk the unknown. How willing am I to let go where I am to get to someplace new and different? For most of my life not only have I been willing I have relished the moments when the strange and unknown have taken the reigns of my life.

In the fall of 1993 circumstances not directly related to me had a profound change on my life. One of my best friends, Megan Feeney had moved to New York and she met a guy named Ken Williams. They were living together in some hole in the wall apartment with a brick and chimney view in Manhattan. That summer Ken’s parents died in a car crash in Los Angeles where he was originally from. This unfortunate and devastating event called Ken back home to LA so he could settle the estate and put his parents to rest. Megan called me and told me she was heading up to San Francisco while Ken took care of his duties in LA. Ken’s best friends from his childhood in Brentwood, CA., Max and Erich Schaefer, lived in San Francisco and Ken planned on coming up to San Francisco later to be with his buddies while he was in mourning.

Megan arrived in San Francisco in October. She called me and asked me if I wanted to hang out with her and Kenny’s best friend Max who she didn’t know to well just yet. I agreed and suggested we meet at the Up and Down Club. At the time the so-called acid jazz scene was really happening in San Francisco. It was the last true live music scene the City has seen. I was deep into it, going out to the clubs two or three times a week. Alphabet Soup, one of my favorite local bands had a regular gig on Monday nights at the Up and Down Club and that’s why I chose it. I was very happy to see Megan and I was always up for meeting new people. My first impression of Max turned out to be way off the mark. He was 26 years old and a graduate of the University of Colorado. It was the way he dressed that threw me off. This was light years before the dot.com boom and bust. Most young San Franciscans dressed down by choice. Doc Martens, tatoos, piercings, Grateful Dead t-shirts, and American Spirit cigarettes was the standard uniform. Max showed up in a blue blazer, wrinkled and tucked in plaid button down shirt, and Dockers. He had the kind of look that suggested he didn’t go out much and was probably very conservative, possibly even a Republican. Boy was I ever wrong about Max.

Listening to the funky beats of Alphabet Soup Max told me about a new company he and his brother and a friend had just started called Condor. They had a contract to do a fighting game for the Sega 16 bit console based on the DC comics superheroes. They were just starting out. They had no employees and no office space yet they were working on the game. They were looking for an artist to draw superheroes like Superman and Batman for the game. It never crossed my mind to tell Max that I used to draw superheroes but Megan knew and she volunteered the information to Max. Max handed me a napkin and a pen and asked me to draw something. In about two minutes I drew a sketch of Superman. Max liked it a lot and asked me if I would be interested in doing some art work for their game. He was only able to offer me 20 hours a week with no benefits and no guarantee the company would even survive the first year. Although I was flattered by the offer it wasn’t enough for me to leave my job at the YMCA where I had built a career.

Even though I didn’t take the job I did become friends with Max. He lived with his brother Erich in an apartment at the top of Twin Peaks. Max was far from being a conservative. He was a classic ultra liberal San Franciscan who hated dressing up. He didn’t own a tie or suit. He was a sharp minded fellow who loved to talk politics, play video games, and smoke tons of weed. When I would go to hang out with him and Erich I felt right at home. Erich was an interesting guy in his own right. He was an easy going guy with that live and let live philosophy about life. He was the older brother but he didn’t have that older brother attitude. He had a wry sense of humor and we could relate to each other because he was into stuff I was into, like underground comics and weird magazines. He also was a lover of film, not the mainstream stuff, he was into the arcane and off the wall stuff like Eraserhead and the movies coming out of Hong Kong, especially Jackie Chan and John Woo films. They also loved playing video games, specifically Sega NHL hockey. They were experts. I had played video games growing up but lost my taste for it after getting beaten badly by my younger brothers Kenny and Kirk who were video game savants. They could beat anybody at Intellivision. When you can’t beat your younger brothers at something you just give it up because it’s just not cool to lose to your younger brothers at anything. It puts a dent in the older brother aura. I had fun hanging out with Max and Erich. We played video games, watched cool movies, ate burritos, and smoked bong hit after bong hit. They were self proclaimed “slackers” which was a term that was still new at the time. Their main inspiration for starting the video game company is that they didn’t want to work for the Man or work in some tight assed corporate environment. They were anarchist. They weren’t into rules or traditions. That was what defined the young people of San Francisco. Everybody was trying to find their own way to work and live, not for money and upward mobility, but for freedom and peace of mind. It was a City full of young people living on the cheap and by their own rules. Nobody had a nice car, nice clothes, or their own apartment. We all had 3 or 4 roommates. Everybody I knew was doing something creative and that’s the way we preferred it. The dot.com would change all of that and not for the better.

In the March of 1994 I was up for a visit at Max and Erich’s and I saw a stack of drawings of Batman on the kitchen table. They had finally found an artist and he was pretty good. He was a Japanese guy named Michio Okamura. Michio had been in the states since he was 9 but you could still still see the Japanese influence in his drawings because they had an anime look to them. The guys were excited beyond belief because they could finally get the project rolling and get more money from the publisher which meant they could hire more people. A few months later I left the Buchanan YMCA to work at the Hilltop YMCA in Richmond. I was hired to run a community center in the Iron Triangle, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Bay area. I looked forward to the challenge. I had been working with teens in gangs when I left Buchanan and thought I had the chops to do it in Richmond. Unfortunately I ran into the same problems that I left the San Francisco Y for. The Hilltop YMCA was a new branch and was literally on top of a hill. Like most hilltop neighborhoods it was fairly affluent and seemed a million miles from the weed encrusted, broken glass strewn streets of the lowland where the community center was located. I was spending way more time on the top of the hill attending meetings when I should have been at the community center getting to know the staff and the people in the neighborhood.

I had only been on the new job for two weeks when Max called me and again offered me a job. This time he was offering full time hours and 50% benefits. The pay was a few thousand less per year than my job at the Y but Max said I could earn an extra 5-10 thousand a year through royalties. I didn’t think twice. I accepted the offer right away. Something inside me told me this was the thing to do. I gave the YMCA one week notice. They were stunned. I had just started and already I was leaving. I knew I was done with the YMCA. I departed without looking back. I took nothing with me. I left my library of books and manuals on the shelves and left my plaques and certificates on the wall of my office. I walked away from 11 years with the YMCA almost as if it had never been. My outlook was completely forward. I had no idea what this new job would bring but I was ready for it. I had no fear, I had no hesitation, and I had no doubts heading into a new job without really having any idea what exactly it was I would be doing.

My new official title was game artist. My job was to paint DC superhero characters with pixels. Before I started I had an interview with Dave Brevik who was the third partner. Max and Erich were the art and story guys and Dave was the programmer. I rode my bike from San Francisco to Redwood City for the interview. I had a flat about ¾ of the way there. I called Max and he came and picked me up in his old war torn VW Vanagon. The interview with Dave was short. He didn’t even want to see my artwork, he just wanted to meet me in person and give me the stamp of approval. I wasn’t nervous at all. I had been in so many meetings with people in power suits much older than me it was quite refreshing to be interviewing with my future boss who was 26 years old and wore shorts and a t-shirt. I was 31 at the time. We had a few laughs and talked about comic books and I was officially hired.

I was the 7th employee and the oldest guy working for the company. Dave and Max were 26 and Erich was 27. Michio Okamura, 30, did the paper drawings using a pen and a light box. He didn’t even have a computer. Richard Seis, 24, was the first hire and was the other programmer. Tom Byrne, 26, was a pixel artist. Matt Uelmen at 22 was the baby of the group and fresh out of college. He was our sound and music guy. We basically had a three room office. Matt inhabited one room where like a mad scientist he concocted sound effects for the game. Max, Dave, and Erich shared a small, closet like room adjacent to the large room that contained the rest of us. We had used, large, oaken desks and worked on 486 computers running the DOS operating system which was all command lines. I had never worked on a PC before. At the YMCA I had used Mac Classics and at home I had a Mac Performa. On my first day on the job Max had to show me the basics of running DOS. Michio made full page drawings, each representing a frame of animation. The drawings were scanned and Tom and I would paint them with pixels. We used a program called D-Paint. We had a 16 color palette and basically we just clicked all day painting in muscles and details one pixel at a time. Pick a color, click, zoom in, click, zoom out, click, pick another color, rinse-wash-repeat. At times it could be maddening work. Completing three frames in a day was considered a good day. We worked hard and we played hard. Our philosophy about making games is that you have to love games to make games. We didn’t make games from the viewpoint of artists and programmers we made games from the viewpoint of a gamer. Our goal was simple. Get the game on the shelf. We didn’t worry about how many copies the game sold or critical praise we just wanted to get the game into the hands of the gamers and give them a great gaming experience.

We finished the game and it was released the following November in the fall of 1994. It did ok, it wasn’t a blockbuster but like I said we were just happy to get the game released. We were a miniscule, obscure, no-name studio with seven employees. We were building a studio from the ground up, creating an egalitarian work environment that lacked formality and rules. We reveled in our anything goes attitudes. We had no CEO, no Directors, and no Leads. We were all just programmers or artists, even the owners. We all did the same work at the same level. To survive we needed the maximum effort of each individual. After finishing Justice League Task Force we started shopping around a role playing game designed by Dave called Diablo. We secured a small publishing contract with Blizzard Entertainment, then and up and coming studio that had just released Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans. Blizzard was actually sort of a rival for us. They had worked on the SNES version of Justice League Task Force and we used to get builds of their game and compare it to ours. Of course we always thought our version was better. Diablo drew interest from other larger established publishers like Acclaim but we felt comfortable with Blizzard because they had a similar studio environment to ours. At the time neither Blizzard nor Condor had any idea we were just a few years away from skyrocketing to the top of the gaming industry.

Ok, there is still a substantial amount of this story to be told but out of respect for the one or two people that read this blog I’m going to stop here. The next entry will definitely wrap up the saga of my two careers. If you are still on for the ride thanks for your patience. The finish will be worth it if you like tragedies.

To be continued…

Thanksgiving

I’m riding on BART on the way to the airport. I am very excited because I’m going to Phoenix to celebrate Thanksgiving with my Mom and two of my three brothers. It’s been over a year since I attended a family event . Thanksgiving has always been a special day to me because usually it means spending time with family. My mother is a great cook. If she owned a restaurant I would eat there every day. She always prepares a fantastic Thanksgiving meal. As kids my brothers and I would look forward to Thanksgiving dinner and days of leftovers and cold turkey sandwiches. When I was young I could easily put away three plates of turkey, stuffing, yams, greens, mac cheese, potato salad, and of course pumpkin and sweet potato pie. As a young adult I remember taking home care packages of leftovers prepared by my mother which I would share with roommates and friends who once they tasted my Mom’s cooking were hooked for life. I’ll watch football games and have one healthy plate of food as that is all I can handle (and all I need) these days.

Too often the day goes by without really thinking about the real meaning of Thanksgiving. 400 years ago the immigrants, pilgrims, invaders, take whatever name suits you, landed on the shores of what we now call America. They were part of the many people who spread about the world to help secure the vast British empire. They were British subjects loyal to King James as Americans hadn’t been invented yet. The newcomers struggled to make a go of it. The world was alien. They didn’t know how to farm the land. They didn’t know how to hunt the game. Most of the people were dieing of starvation and disease. The Wampanoag, the indigenous people native to the land, had been watching the newcomers. They were invisible, blending in with the natural flora and fauna. They were not sure what to do. Do they help the struggling visitors or do they run them off of the land that they called home?

They decided the newcomers were not a threat. They brought women and children. Whatever they were here for it was not to wage war, or so it seemed. The Wampanoag took pity on the rapidly perishing newcomers. They came in peace and friendship and brought offerings of bountiful food to the newcomers. The Wampanoag knew they were taking a chance. From the cloak of the forest they silently watched the newcomers arrive on their large ships. What were their intentions? Would more come? Are they peaceful?

These were questions that could not yet be answered. Some of the natives wanted to wipe them out and easily they could have. But their chief Massasoit decided otherwise. He decided to come in peace and bring them food so they would survive. And so it was. They brought them food and the newcomers were saved. The newcomers were grateful and insisted they had come in peace under the protection of King James who was now the ruler of these lands, the King of all the people. The newcomers declared the day to be a holiday, a Thanksgiving. They thanked the natives but mostly they thanked their Christian god for in their eyes He was the one who saved them.

400 years later the newcomers still celebrate Thanksgiving, but not as a people struggling to survive but as the people who, in their minds, are the most powerful nation to ever exist on the planet. And what of the natives? They again have become invisible people but not by choice. For America to be what it is today somebody had to pay a price and they were the ones. They were a people who inhabited every part of the North American continent at one time and now are barely seen, almost extinct. Think about this. What is the closest indigenous population to where you live? What native people once inhabited the land where you now live? For myself I know that the Miwok tribe were the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. I have no idea what is the nearest native community to the City of San Francisco. I should find out. It is something I should know. I know the history of California when it comes to the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Americans, but I don’t know about the natives. I know there is some native blood in my family line of my father’s side. His grandfather was one quarter Choctaw. I know about the Trail of Tears. I know about Wounded Knee. I know about the Mandans and the Lewis and Clark expedition. I know about the half breed rebel Metis. I know about the Aztecs, I know about the Incas. I know about John Horse and the Black Seminoles. I know about Geronimo and Sitting Bull. That is not a lot. I should know more. We should all know more.

This is a day when we should give thanks but it is also a day we should acknowledge the people who made America possible. We should all take some time to learn something we don’t yet know about the native people of our land. We should find out about the lesser known tribes, the ones that inhabited the areas where we now live. Their blood and bones are in the soil. Anywhere you dig deep in the soil you will find what they left behind. Find the latest native community nearest to where you live. If you can, visit them and give thanks. We read and here about their casinos whenever election time comes around. We assume they are doing ok when in fact they are the most impoverished group in the nation. My friend Craig Catimon has lived in the midst of native people for years. He has a son with a Mohawk woman of the Akwesasne tribe. He lives in Massena in upstate NY near the Canadian border not too far from the Akwesasne reservation. From what he tells me there are no jobs, there is no industry, and everybody is poor. He himself works in a cigarette factory. He struggles to make a living just as the native people do. They have problems with alcohol and depression.

In the age of the internet many Americans have traced their family lines to claim any heritage they have as indigenous people. We have taken just about everything from them now we even want to own their identity for this heritage movement has nothing at all to do with restoring the indigenous people and honoring the many treaties we have broken with them. It has everything to do with people searching for some meaningful culture in a land of materialism and consumption. We will feast today and go shopping tomorrow on Black Friday and for the next month it will all be about shopping up to the day we celebrate the birth of a Hebrew man born in the Middle East who had a philosophy of peace, love and sharing, a man who appears on to us in churches across the country nailed to a cross, a man who was Jewish and Middle Eastern but made to look like a white Anglo Saxon everywhere his image exists. It is not the truth but like so many falsehoods we accept it as true because it fit’s the image they would have us believe is the truth. We don’t question it and will even go as far to violently defend the falsehood. Try to make Him African or Asian and see what happens.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Accidental Careerist Part 2

...continued

When last we met I was unfolding most of my early childhood and adolescence trying to lay the groundwork on how I came to choose a career in my adulthood. Let’s get right to it shall we.

In my quest to show the world I had a brain I decided I wanted to go to college, not on a sports scholarship but on the strength of my academic record. I was recruited to play basketball by all the local junior colleges and a few small colleges. Interesting enough one of the schools that showed the most interest was Occidental College in Los Angeles. Had I gone there I would have just missed our current President Oback Barama by one semester. Had I gone to the school when he was there we would have surely become friends since there were very few blacks at Oxy and he was a basketball fanatic. According to the book From Promise to Power by David Mendell, when Oback was at Oxy he was in search of his black identity and made an extra effort to become friends with the entire black student body (not that there where a whole lot of them). Well that will be left to a life in an alternate universe. I almost ended up going to Lewis and Clark University in Portland. The small school approach was not one of selling me an NBA dream, it was about connections. I could attend one of these small, prestigious schools and meet lots of people who could be beneficial to my future in terms of business and career.

The truth of the matter is I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself after high school. Career counseling at St. Francis was a joke. It wasn’t all that important because most of the students career counseling came from their parents and it was all about following in the footsteps. When it came to college my parents really couldn’t help me. Having both grown up in the segregated south they never attended college. My father wanted me to play basketball at a local JC and get a scholarship to a major Division 1 school. I had an older brother who was in college but it he wasn’t in a position to help. College for him was an escape and that’s what he did. He started out local but eventually landed at LSU where he joined the Omega Phi Psi fraternity. He’s Omega branded and still bleeds purple and gold to this day. Despite going to a college prep school I was completely clueless about college. I applied to Arizona State, Marquette, USC, and UCLA. How I chose the schools is a mystery to me even to this day. I really only wanted to go to UCLA. A lot of my friends were applying there and the UC system had a good reputation and it seemed affordable compared to the private schools. USC was out of the question. The cost was something I could not relate to since I knew I would be paying my own way to go to college. I ended up being accepted at all the schools and of course I chose UCLA.

My freshman and only year at UCLA was a success in many ways but a disaster academically. I declared Art as my major having no idea what the Art Dept at UCLA was like. The campus and classes were massive. I had classes in auditoriums that had more people in them than the entire student body at St. Francis. I lived in an off campus apartment, this being my first time living away from home. One of my rooommates played the electric guitar as a hobby. He had a Fender Stratocaster and he taught me about Les Paul, guitars, and the great and soon to be great guitar players like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Michael Schenker, Yngwie Malmsteen, Angus Young, and Joe Satriani. Up to then I only knew Jimi Hendrix because everybody knows Jimi, Andy Summers because the Police was my favorite band and Eddie Van Halen because he was from Pasadena. I worked a part time job as an intramural referee and came to really dislike fraternities but I ended up becoming good friends with some frat guys from a fraternity called Acacia. They were outsiders in the fraternity system lacking greek letters and a frathouse. The fraternity was christian based and the guys were what was considered “geeks” and that’s what I liked about them. I never joined the frat but they treated my like one of their own.

Half way through my freshman year I started getting recruiting calls from Redlands University. Because of my sub par academic performance I knew I wasn’t going back to UCLA. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself so I agreed to attend the University of Redlands and reboot my basketball career. My father still wanted me to attend a JC and get a scholarship. One week before I was to begin classes at Redlands I gave in to my father’s wishes and enrolled at Pasadena City College to play basketball. I played basketball for PCC. We made it to the state finals and lost to Merced in triple overtime. We had a great year but my heart wasn’t in it so that summer in 1983 I quit the team and basically wandered the streets for the whole summer. It was the lowest point of my life. I lost touch with my friends and was struggling with thoughts of suicide. I just didn’t feel like my life had any meaning. Music saved my life. It was the heyday of KROQ and I would spend hours alone listening to music by U2, Talking Heads, English Beat, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, Style Council, OMD, New Order, The Specials, and many other mostly British bands. In America I couldn’t relate but I could to these bands from Thatcher’s England. What I was feeling was in their music. I knew I wasn’t alone out there. There were a lot of people across the pond feeling just like me.

My younger brother Kenny was working for the YMCA as a day camp counselor and he invited me to attend their end of the summer staff party. At first I was hesitant. My impression of the YMCA was the people who worked there were a bunch of square Christians who didn’t party. Kenny didn’t party much but he did seem to enjoy his job quite a bit. I wasn’t hanging out with my friends because I was depressing to be around so I decided to go out of sheer boredom. I was totally wrong about this YMCA staff. When I arrived at the party the music was blasting and people were having a great time dancing and playing drinking games. In the backroom there was a group of people smoking joints and taking bong hits. This is where I met my brother’s boss, a red haired woman with freckles named CJ. We hit it off right away. I ended up having a real good time at the party and ran into a guy name Craig Catimon who had played Pop Warner football with my older brother Keith. Craig and I later would become best friends and partners in crime. For the first time in a while I felt good hanging out with people. I liked this group of people. It wasn’t college and it wasn’t sports, it was just regular people. The next week I received a call from CJ. She asked me I was interested in being a group leader for the After School Program at the YMCA. She thought I had the right kind of personality to work with kids. I decided to take the job. I was enrolled in classes at Pasadena City College and thought it would be the perfect part time job to have while I was going to school.

My only experience working with kids had been babysitting which I had done extensively since the age of 12. I was a natural working with the kids at the YMCA. I absolutely loved it. It was challenging and fun and I threw everything I had into the job. I looked forward to coming to work everyday. It was just a part time job so I was just enjoying it for what it was. I wasn’t making plans on doing it for more than one school year but summer came around and I applied for a job as a day camp counselor. That was even more fun because we had the kids all day and we went on adventures to the local parks, to the beaches, and hiking in the local mountains. The following school year CJ asked me if I wanted to be a Site Director in charge of one of the school sites. There were others who had been there much longer than I had but she felt I would be good at running things and providing leadership for the staff. I was a successful Site Director which was almost a full time job. I ended up having all kinds of jobs within the YMCA which was one of the things I liked about it as an organization. I held a ridiculous number of jobs in my 11 years at the Y:

After School Counselor

After School Van Driver

After School Site Director

After School Program Director

Day Camp Counselor

Day Camp Site Director

Day Camp Director

Youth Sports Referee

Youth Soccer Coach

Youth Basketball Coach

Resident Camp Maintenance Engineer (janitor/trash burner)

Resident Camp Cabin Leader

Resident Camp Ropes Course Instructor

Resident Camp Assistant Director

Resident Camp Branch Director

Summer Youth Employment Coordinator

Youth Director

Program Director

Senior Program Director

By the time I reached Senior Program Director I had seen it all when it comes to the YMCA. I could probably write a book about my experience. The YMCA is really big on training. They have a national training program that covers everything from life guarding at pools to raising millions of dollars for capital campaigns. Because the trainings were national I got to meet people from all over, from Boise to St. Paul to Orlando to Denver to New York. The best part about the whole thing was meeting all the kids. I met and got to know thousands of kids from preschoolers to high schoolers. I saw kids grow from fresh faced five year olds to take-themselves-way-to-serious teenagers. I was fortunate as I had the privilege to teach these kids about life as an authority figure and a trusted friend, it is a unique position to have in the life of a child. I did so many outrageously fun things with kids sometimes it was hard to even call it a job.

Working with kids put me in direct contact with the people who are the real heart and soul of this country and that is working parents. When you work with parents a partnership is born. You get a certain amount of respect from people who know you value their child’s welfare just as much as they do. You get to see parents at their worst (right after a really bad day at work) and at their best (showing up with big smiles and the their child for Pot Lucks, Talent Shows, and Haunted Houses). It was a good balance for my own personal life which leaned more toward the hedonistic and bohemian.

For about the first 6 years I didn’t consider the YMCA a career but by the time I made Program Director I decided it was what I wanted to do. I went to management trainings and certification trainings to mold myself from clock-punching-jack-of-all-trades to salaried, pensioned, credentialed professional. I went from small suburban branch to large metropolitan association. By the time I reached Senior Director I was just one step away from Executive Branch Director, it was the next and perhaps final stop on this particular trajectory. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an Executive Director. It was far removed from working directly with program staff and parents. It was a suit and tie job that required attending lots of Rotary Club type lunches and securing large donations and grants from local businesses and corporations. I was a guy who rode a bicycle and a sported a mohawk. I just wasn’t there yet. More than that I had plenty of years to watch all the politics involved at the management level. The Y is a large non-profit but its bureaucracy is just like any other. As an organization the YMCA became more and more focused on the health club business. All the new branches were primarily health clubs with state of the art equipment and facilities. The primary business was no longer serving the community, the business became selling memberships and selling memberships was driven by marketing. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to build facilities and start programs that would serve the community, primarily youth and their working parents. If that was your agenda you didn’t have much say and you were on the lower end of the pay scale. Executive Directors at branches with large health and fitness memberships made a pretty good salary and had tons of perks like housing and vehicle allowances while small community based Executives struggled to balance budgets and get funding for their programs putting in more hours for less pay.

I started to become disillusioned with my foreseeable future with the YMCA. It would have been a secure future. I had a good reputation and knew lots of directors around the country. I could work anywhere in the country, even abroad as the YMCA is an international organization. But I wasn’t feeling it. I was just 30 years old and still had young man’s view of the world. In my mind there was still some romantic adventure out there for me. I wasn’t ready for the life of a non profit administrator. I still had a touch of the wild in me. I felt I was still firmly planted in the field of anti-establishment. Becoming an Executive Director would have been like killing off a vital part of myself.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I could go from the YMCA. I had ideas about opening a school/camp using progressive methods like experiential learning. I was starting to warm up to that idea when my life took another unsuspected 90 degree turn. Out of the blue, or rather out of the low lights and hip hop beat of a San Francisco jazz club, I found a new career, or it found me, I’m still not sure how to call it. I’ll save that thought for the next blog, part three. Once again thanks for tuning in. Same bat time, same bat channel.

To be continued…