Sekou Sundiata, 1948–2007

Vernon Reid remembers the seminal black artist and activist.

By Vernon Reid
First published in the Village Voice July 24, 2007

The untimely death last week of the visionary activist, poet, playwright, songwriter, educator, and vocalist Sekou Sundiata is a terrible shock to the many communities that his extraordinary life and art touched. Sekou was truly a great man, an artist whose incisive analysis of modern society was equaled by a deep compassion for, and understanding of, the human condition. The sound of Sekou's voice was iconic and electrifying, its deep melody the sound of a griot for the ages. It was the sound of unflinching honesty, warmheartedness, wry comedy, righteous anger, and elegiac longing. It was as distinctive as Coltrane's horn or Jimi's guitar. Sekou loved everyday people, their madness and occasional genius, their inexplicable and contradictory natures.
I was introduced to Sekou in the early 1980s by the great drummer J.T. Lewis, who was raving about an amazing poet he was playing with at City College. I went to the gig and was mesmerized by a tall, dashing figure who had the audience in the palms of his large, expressive hands. His band Sekou and the Crew was funky and edgy, like Gil Scott Heron's Midnight Band, but not at all derivative. After the show, J.T. introduced me. Sekou became a mentor and a close friend.

Sekou was a witness to and part of the tumult of the '60s and '70s. Despite the many setbacks that plagued and stymied the black-empowerment movements, he remained a steadfast opponent of racism and fascism in all their hydra-like forms, and was an indefatigable optimist with regard to the future of black people. Unlike many black-power ideologues, Sekou's love wasn't solely reserved for people of African descent, because he internalized Dr. King's message of love for people of all colors. Sekou was also a great romantic, a trenchant observer of the mysteries and misunderstandings that exist between men and women, themes explored in poems like "Forsaken Sea" and "Sweet Tooth"—poems I heard performed many times, but which always seemed new because the truth never grows old.

Sekou was the first person from whom I heard about a drug named crack, the first person who told what it was doing to his beloved Harlem. The nation would soon follow. I also first learned about the emerging AIDS crisis from him. He always had his ear to the street, listening to its shadowy music, shifting rhythms, flows and currents.

Sekou had a magnetic leadership quality that centered the energies of the artists he collaborated with. In Craig Harris, the master trombonist, composer, and didgeridoo-ist, Sekou found a musical soulmate. Their play collaboration, The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop, looked unsparingy at what happened to the children of Martin's dreams and Malcolm's grassroots. The lyric prose work "Space, a Monologue" lies at its center. It's a tour de force in the voice of a madman making mad sense, an incredible stream of black consciousness that brings together a butt-naked Marilyn Monroe in Bird's hotel room, Afrika Bambaataa, Nat Turner, and Martha and the Vandellas. Astounding.

Nothing slowed Sekou down—not a kidney transplant, nor the terrible car accident that happened right after. Sekou transformed these harrowing experiences into his solo masterwork Blessing of Boats, performed nationally to the acclaim his work always deserved. It's hard to imagine a world without Sekou Sundiata in it. At the end of "Space, a Monologue," he says: "Let this be my epitaph: 'His heart to the very end was in the left place.'" And there he is, in the hearts of those he loved, especially his beloved Maureen. In the hearts of those he taught, and the ones he touched with his beautiful works, all of us who heard him laugh or saw him dance at those great parties uptown or heard him speak truth to power without clichés. Sekou Sundiata lives inside of us now and will never die.

Musician-composer Vernon Reid is guitarist for the band Living Colour and co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition.

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Alex Webb "Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names" (2007)

“Images frequently find old Muslim temples paired with European cars and streets, and capture neighborhoods ranging from the winding streets of Cihangir and Ayvansaray to the nightclubs of Taksim.”

Perhaps the best way into Alex Webb's photographs in Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names is the accompanying essay by Orhan Pamuk, which examines the Turkish word Hüzün. The term means both caring too much for material possessions, and spiritual suffering as a result of not being able to do enough for Allah. "Istanbul is Hüzün," claims Pamuk, filling more than a page with descriptions of scenes that might well double as descriptions of Webb's photographs.

As the artist explains in his introduction, Istanbul straddles two continents, connecting Asia and Europe to create one of the most diverse cities in the world. Images frequently find old Muslim temples paired with European cars and streets, and capture neighborhoods ranging from the winding streets of Cihangir and Ayvansaray to the nightclubs of Taksim. "Faith" 2001 and "Eminõnü," (2001), for example, open the book and document a familiar relationship with the religious architecture that dominates the landscape. By contrast, the nighttime shots, with glowing reds and greens in bars and lit streets, feature prominently later in the book.

Such photographs build a robust portrait of the city, but even with Pamuk's breathless account and more than 75 photographs of the city, a feeling of incompleteness permeates the book's raw and unpolished documentation. Much like the static and transitory advertisements that appear in Webb's photographs or the shots of people either relaxing in their homes or working and traveling, no distinct emotional state can be attributed to those captured. The images do not depict strict melancholy, nor do they frame elation. Each photograph suggests a city merely on its way to experiencing something else.

In 1998 Alex Webb visited Istanbul and was immediately enthralled by the people, the layers of culture and history, the richness of street life. But what particularly drew him in was a sense of Istanbul as a border city, lying between Europe and Asia. As he writes, "For thirty-some years as a photographer I have been intrigued by borders, places where cultures come together, sometimes easily, sometimes roughly." He has returned to Istanbul whenever possible, and the resulting body of work—some of Webb's strongest to date—conveys the frisson of a culture in transition, yet firmly rooted in a complex history.

Straddling the Bosphorus, Istanbul is a place in which East literally meets West, the only major city in the world that actually exists on two continents. Founded by the Greeks some twenty-seven centuries ago, it has survived sieges, civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes. Connecting Europe and Asia, this much-fought-over trading center has had many names: Byzantium, Nova Roma, Constantinople, to name but a few. It has been the capital of two of history's most powerful empires—the Byzantine and the Ottoman—and now stands as the largest city of one of the few secular Muslim nations in the world, a state that hopes to enter the European Union, but is hampered by, among other things, the treatment of its Kurdish citizenry. Women in Istanbul have taken to the streets to protest traditional Islamic laws regarding their rights while others, often dressed in chadors, cling to the past.

In Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names, Webb's ability to distill gesture, color, and contrasting cultural tensions into a single, beguiling frame is used to full effect in presenting his vision of Istanbul: an urban cultural center rich with the incandescence of its past, a city of minarets and pigeons rising to the heavens during the dawn call to Muslim prayers, yet also a city of ATM machines and designer jeans.

Official Site

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Watanabe Katsumi "Gangs of Kabukicho" (2006)

Kabukicho in the East Shinjuku section of Tokyo began its life as a swamp. By the time Watanabe Katsumi arrived, the swamp had been filled in and the area, named after a Kabuki theater that was never built, was a well-established red-light district filled with hostess bars, ''love hotels'' and nightclubs. Denizens called it ''Sleepless Town.''

The black-and-white photos in ''Gangs of Kabukicho,'' taken between 1966 and 1980, feature various Kabukicho characters, from actual gangsters to drag-queen geishas, pimps, johns, rent boys, transsexuals and prostitutes posing together like sorority sisters.

With their focus on subjects culled from the urban demimonde and framed in the center of the image, the photographs recall Diane Arbus's work from roughly the same era. But where Arbus was frequently criticized for exploiting her subjects, Mr. Watanabe, who died earlier this year, catered to his milieu, selling his pictures back to his subjects in an attempt to eke out a meager living.

This lack of detachment might explain in part why Mr. Watanabe's images don't possess the same complicated and complex power as Arbus's. But the photos serve as interesting documents of Kabukicho during its seedy heyday. The parade of street fashion, with girls in go-go boots, tattoo enthusiasts and Japanese James Cagneys, foreshadows more recent interest by other photographers in another style-obsessed Tokyo hot spot, Harajuku. And it's hard not to be affected by Mr. Watanabe's subjects, whose expressions range from joyful to heartbreakingly abject.

Text by Iizawa Kotaro.

An edition of 3,000 copies. $55.

3000 copies, the entire edition. Designed by Alexander Gelman and Andrew Roth. Watanabe Katsumi was an itinerant portrait photographer working primarily in Shinjuku in Tokyo. Gangs of Kabukicho reproduces 155 photographs taken in the 60s and 70s in the blue light district of Shinjuku called Kabukicho. The title of the book reflects the title of his first book published in 1973 called simply The Gangs of Shinjuku.

The subjects in Watanabe's photographs are the prostitutes, street people, Drag Queens, entertainers and gangsters (Yakuza) that populated Kabukicho at night. Essentially, Watanabe made his living by selling the photographs to his subjects. He would offer three prints for 200 yen. A modest gentleman, Watanabe had a keen sensitivity to the natural posturing of his subjects which allowed them to uninhibitedly reveal their identities. He saw Kabukicho as a stage; his photographs documented the performers.

To accompany the photographs, Iizawa Kotaro, who wrote The Evolution of Postwar Photography in Anne Tucker's The History of Japanese Photography, has chronicled the history of Shinjuku and offers a biography on the life of Watanabe who died earlier this year. The text is printed in English and Japanese.

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The Books of Albion by Peter Doherty

Bohemian rhapsodists
Reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray
First Published in The Independent: 13 July 2007

No matter how much mileage there is in the time-honoured doomed-young-poet-in-romantic-squalor syndrome, a small but significant embryonic talent as singer, songwriter and performer provides an increasingly flimsy peg on which to hang an entire industry. Pete Doherty's status as soap-op on legs, tabloid media event and Public Bad Boy Number One has swallowed his career whole and excreted artefacts like The Books of Albion. We seem to be getting the ephemera, juvenilia and feetnote before all but a tiny proportion of the basic text has arrived.

Imagine a shopping-bag's worth of notebooks filled with cuttings, doodles, scribbles, Polaroids, artworks delineated in blood and literary/lyrical works in progress, all painstakingly scanned and reproduced on glossy paper with a faux-leather binding decorated with a self-portrait (rather a good one, as it happens). Those with the patience to decipher the author's handwriting will not go entirely unrewarded: the unfuddled Doherty can be witty and sensitive, as the best of his songwriting has demonstrated.

Since he has, at the time of writing, been dumped by the "true love" to whom the artefact is dedicated - if the tabloid press is to be believed, she has recently hired a minder to keep him away from her - it is to be hoped that he has received a sufficiently decent advance to pay for his own accommodation. All in all, The Books of Albion seems less like a tribute to Doherty's talents than an exploitation of his notoriety. With luck, Doherty will be the one receiving the benefits of the exploitation.

Charles Shaar Murray's 'Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and postwar pop' is published by Faber

The Books of Albion, Orion £20 (324pp) £18(free p&p) from 0870 079 8897.

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The Many Lives of Tom Waits by Patrick Humphries

Bohemian rhapsodists
Reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray
Published: 13 July 2007
Never has the word "goatee" seemed more appropriate than when describing the beard worn by the singer, composer and actor Tom Waits in the first few years of his career. There was something incontrovertibly goatish about Waits in his earliest 1970s manifestation: the lanky, hirsute body and elongated, lantern-jawed face made him seem like the Great God Pan, crash-landed to earth and incarnated as an amnesiac wino poet in thrift-shop threads, half-awakened from an alcoholic stupor in the gutter outside San Francisco's celebrated Beat bookshop City Lights sometime in the early 1950s. His personal hygiene may well have been immaculate, but he looked like he smelled really, really bad.

While never unduly troubling the pop charts, Waits has built a formidable body of work over the past three and a half decades, as a low-life laureate whose voice and sensibility are as unique and unmistakable as those of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed. His musical career has been paralleled by a notable sideline as a character actor in movies by directors as prestigious and varied as Francis Ford Coppola (Waits's Renfield to Gary Oldman's Dracula was to die for, dwarling), Terry Gilliam and Jim Jarmusch.

Born in 1949 in the same Southern Californian environs as Frank Zappa, Ry Cooder and Don "Captain Beefheart" Van Vliet, the young Waits couldn't have been further from the average Sixties-raised rock boy. His tastes inclined more towards Leadbelly, jazz and classic Tin Pan Alley songcraft. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the creation of his raffish-boho persona: dressing, singing and writing like a minor character from a Kerouac novel and utilising his impressive gift as a raconteur for self-mythologising shaggy-dog stories ("I was born in the back of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted 'Times Square and step on it!'") and the one-line zinger. Waits is widely credited for originating "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

He spent the 1970s in the unlikely setting of David Geffen's Asylum record company for the succession of Beat Noir albums which founded his cult - alongside the cocaine-cowboy Mellow Mafia of Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles (who recorded one of his early songs). He toured incessantly, while residing in an LA motel and subsisting on a diet of whiskey and cigarettes. The next phase of his musical career - considerably more complex and substantial - found him mutating into what Howlin' Wolf would have sounded like if the Wolf's favourite songwriters had been Brecht and Weill and his recording sessions orchestrated and produced by Harry Partch. Collaborating with his wife and songwriting/producing partner Kathleen Brennan on albums like Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years, Waits found his best and truest voice.

As has his biographer, Patrick Humphries. The author of several other books, including the definitive works on Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, Humphries has always been a perceptive, literate and conscientious writer. Nobody who has had the misfortune to read far too many rock and pop biographies could possibly construe that assessment as damning with faint praise.

However, this book says bye-bye to sobersides: under the influence of his subject's penchant for tall tales, low life and wisecracking wordplay, Humphries channels his inner Chandler for the snappiest prose of his career. "Like desolation row with a zip code... here's where bedlam gets into bed with squalor... where the hoods from West Side Story slunk off to open all-nite drugstores so that when times got really hard they could rob themselves". At its best, it's almost as much fun to read Humphries's book as to listen to Tom Waits.

The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Omnibus £19.95 (354pp) £17.95(free p &p) from 0870 079 8897.

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"Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter"

Blood ties: Yakuza daughter lifts lid on hidden hell of gangsters' families. Unexpected bestseller reveals Tokyo underworld of drugs, abuse and tattoos.

It is only when Shoko Tendo removes her tracksuit top that you appreciate why, even on a hot day, she prefers to remain covered up in public. Outwardly she is much like any thirty-something you would be likely to encounter on a Tokyo street. Her hair is of the dark-brown hue favoured by many Japanese women her age, her greeting is accompanied by a well-executed bow, and her voice seems to be pitched a little on the high side, a common affectation in the company of strangers.

But her protective layer comes off to reveal stick-thin arms covered, from the wrists up, with a tattoo that winds its way to her chest and across her back, culminating, on her left shoulder, in the face of a Muromachi-era courtesan with breast exposed and a knife clenched between her teeth.
It is an appropriately defiant image for Tendo and the most obvious sign that, as the daughter of a yakuza (mafia) boss, she hails from a section of Japanese society that most of her compatriots would rather did not exist.

Her story, Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter, which was published in the UK last month, became a surprise bestseller in Japan in 2004, shining a light into a dark and little understood corner of modern Japan. With the release of the English version, her story of a happy early childhood that quickly descended into delinquency, addiction and a string of abusive relationships is set to reach a much wider audience.

"I hated the way my father behaved," she told the Guardian at the Tokyo office of her publisher, Kodansha International. "But then I became just like him. I was a glue-addicted delinquent [her misdemeanours earned her an eight-month stay in a reformatory]. I behaved exactly like a junior yakuza, picking fights and not caring about how other people felt."

After years of relative calm, the yakuza have recently captured the public imagination in Japan. The swearing-in two summers ago of a new godfather of Japan's biggest underworld organisation, the Yamaguchi-gumi, was followed by a spate of shootings of high-level gangland bosses, and then, in April this year, the assassination, also by shooting, of the progressive mayor of Nagasaki, Itcho Ito.

But, though much has been written about the male members of the yakuza fraternity - the drink, the money, the women and the violence - much less is known about their wives, daughters and lovers. Tendo has been all three.

Her status as the daughter of a gangland boss was the cause of her troubled youth, a history involving being bullied at school to dealing with the expectation of drug-fuelled sex among men to whom her father was somehow indebted. As a teenager she was repeatedly raped by men who fed her addiction to drugs then left her bloody and bruised in seedy hotel rooms. Only her make-up hides the scars from the reconstructive surgery she required on her face after a particularly bad beating. Her marriage to someone with gangster ties ended quickly, although she still talks of him as a "serious, well-intentioned" man who treated her well.

Tendo's last speed fix came when she was 19, when her injuries from another beating in the room of a motel came close to killing her. "I kept thinking, 'I don't want to die in a place like this'. I was there for an hour and managed to drag myself home ... I knew it was time to stop," she said.

She quickly rose up the ranks of the Tokyo hostess scene, but it was her decision, in her early 20s, to tattoo the top half of her body, yakuza-style, that marked the end of her emotional and physical dependence on the men of violence, and the beginning of the new life she has since made as a writer and, now, as a mother.

The popular image of yakuza families as ostentatiously wealthy and loyal to the core bears little resemblance to Tendo's early experiences of poverty and betrayal. She has a hatred of gangsters that is partly due to the shabby way in which her father's associates treated him in his hour of need.

"They gave him 'sympathy' money to tide him over after his business failed and he became ill, but they basically left him to sink on his own," she said. "Only his really good friends ever visited him in hospital."

When we met she was furiously trying to meet the final deadline for her second book, which she said would be a more light-hearted look at life as a single mother. She was reluctant to talk about the father of her 18-month-old daughter, saying only that he was a photographer with whom she remained on friendly terms.

She does not believe she is alone among yakuza offspring in having had a turbulent childhood. "Japanese society looks very calm on the surface, but underneath it is in turmoil," she said. "Discrimination is rife."

Though she is not ashamed of her tattoo she knows even a tiny patch of tell-tale ink poking out from beneath the cuffs of her shirt is enough to invite looks of disgust. "Musicians and artists can get away with showing off their tattoos, but a delinquent like me does her best to hide them."

Despite the satisfaction she gets from writing, she says her struggle for acceptance in a deeply conservative society goes on. "There is a big difference between becoming a single mother after a divorce and because you choose to be one." But she is adamant that she would not change her past. "I had a hard time as the daughter of a gangster, but looking back I wouldn't have lived my life any other way. I am proud that my father was a yakuza. I know his is a world that has no proper place for women. But I have his DNA."

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Andrew Keen "The Cult of the Amateur - How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture"

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
By Andrew Keen
228 pages. Doubleday. $22.95.

Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 — distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing — ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” Web 2.0 has a dark side as well.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard, is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the “wisdom of the crowd.” Although Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book — to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography — he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.

For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.

Mr. Keen also points out that Google search results — which answer “search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but merely what is most popular” — can be manipulated by “Google bombing” (which “involves simply linking a large number of sites to a certain page” to “raise the ranking of any given site in Google’s search results”). And he cites a recent Wall Street Journal article reporting that hot lists on social networking Web sites are often shaped by a small number of users: that at Digg.com, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible at one point for submitting one-third of the postings on the home page; and at Netscape.com, a single user was behind 217 stories over a two-week period, or 13 percent of all stories that reached the most popular list in that period.

Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (which relies upon volunteer editors and contributors) gets way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica (which relies upon experts and scholars), even though the interactive format employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent. This year it was revealed that a contributor using the name Essjay, who had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people given the authority to arbitrate disputes between writers, was a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, not the tenured professor he claimed to be.

Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.

Although Mr. Keen’s objections to the publishing and distribution tools the Web provides to aspiring artists and writers sound churlish and elitist — he calls publish-on-demand services “just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication” — he is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media.

Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web’s penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.

“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”

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