I recently released Kiss the Sky, a novel about a black rock musician. Then I did an event with an actual black rock musician who read my book and said that the part about Michael Jackson was so eerie. I had forgotten all about it. But I found it…written years ago… and yes, eerie.

Tell me what you think about MJ and your memories… I am getting creeped out watching all the old footage, especially the ones of Diana calling Michael “sexy” while they are are both wearing those dark spangly shirts…

I wish he’d been happy. I find it hard to believe he was.

Peace,
F

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Excerpt, Kiss the Sky, Atria Books, 2009
(Written from the P.O.V. of the main character.)

Drifted into a drowse and thought about the way music was my whole life.

My great grandfather sold Billie Holiday reefers, back when she was a bad little girl and he was a dirty old man. A withered up little yellow man. Always looking at the girls of school-age. A sailor, in and out of port. In town just long enough every time to get great-grandma pregnant. And wasn’t it just like me to love Billie, all of her, even her vices.

Then there was my first musical love, Michael Jackson. I was six, and to my child’s eyes he seemed just enough older to know a lot of things I wanted to learn. He was pure music, shimmering, shimmying, shaking, grooving, moving, liquid hipbones and fluid bell-bottomed pantlegs, denim, slouchy caps, a sexy choirboy backed up by his older brothers; plus television, dancing lions and tin-men, a too-old Diana as Dorothy. But wait, that last part was later.

Still, the Michael and “The Wiz” were always linked in my mind. When I was six, my Daddy and I went to see “The Wiz,” way before the movie with Michael and Diana, before the nose jobs and the skin lighteners and the hair straighteners and out-of-court settlements. Strange third-person memory: I see myself and my father walk towards the exit, along a half-lit aisle, with the play unfolding (bright reds and golds) behind us.

But: Michael. His was the music of longing, in a man-child’s voice that a little girl could understand before she truly knew desire. I liked Michael the same time Daddy liked to play the Isley Brothers. I didn’t understand the Isley’s lyrics (thank God), but their guitar licks and keyboards made it hard for me not to dance; their whispers tickled my ears.

Older still: When my girl scout troop had a party I brought Stevie Wonder and my friend Ronnice brought Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” which was everything you needed to know about the difference between uncool and cool. Stevie was uplifting and parent-approved; the teenaged Michael was your best friend’s older brother, a boy who you had a crush on so bad you thought you might melt every time you saw him. Ronnice was in fifth grade and I was in third, which might have been part of my problem, but not all of it. She was what my mother called “fast”–loose with the boys, hard and unforgiving with the girls.

I loved Michael, don’t get me wrong. How could I not? He was my first. But I mounted a defense of Stevie, which all the girls took as a weak-assed move.

When I was in eighth grade, Ronnice had an abortion. Like most of my fast girlfriends, she loved house music, the kind you heard in the clubs she’d sneak into. She was underaged but built like a brick shithouse and nobody checked her I.D. When she got into LL Cool J, I was loving Prince.

Later I worked my way through alternative rock, romantic R&B, gay disco, Public Enemy, Madonna and Grace Jones. Music ecstatic and anthemic, smoke drifting through laser lights, tranny boys in platform heels and lip liner, parties on the subway platform, lots of drugs but not down my throat or up my nose, the music simply lifting me, carrying me like the wind under the cape of a superhero or a pigeon caught in an updraft from a subway grate.

The music, just the music, used to be enough for me. Everything else came later.

I wanted to get back to those days again.

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This is an excerpt from Kiss the Sky (Atria Books 2009) by Farai Chideya. Chideya is a multimedia journalist, author, and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Novelist Chuck Palahniuk seems to have a predilection for pithy titles that invoke death. Two of his works—Choke, the film adaptation of his 2001 book by the same name, and Snuff, his latest novel, offer glimpses into characters who appear soulless, heartless, and thus, lifeless, but are merely hiding behind a chilly demeanor.

Both Choke and Snuff present a series of sordid sex scenes, graphic details and improbable scenarios. They are also cynically hilarious Pynchon- and Easton-Ellis-esque satires about romantic and platonic love, family and sacrifice, reunion and redemption.

Palahniuk stuffs his work with wit and irony, literary leitmotifs, stunningly researched facts, neuroses and truly touching hijinks—which are elegantly directed and performed by Choke director Clark Gregg and Sam Rockwell respectively.

Choke, which opened September 26th, centers around Victor Mancini (Rockwell), a thirty-something sex-addict med school drop-out. Like Fight Club’s unnamed protagonist (played by Ed Norton), Victor frequently sits in on support group meetings to fulfill a need not conforming to that group’s intended goal. In his case, Victor trolls sex-related 12 Step programs for tail. When he’s not venturing into the self-help world, he earns most of his money playing an Irish indentured servant in a recreated 18th century American setting and gets the rest of his living as a con-man.

Victor spends much of his life choking. That is, and without giving much away, he has a fear of facing intimacy, his shortcomings and potential and anything else that will actually make him experience an emotion other than wry disdain.

But that commitment-spawned paralysis isn’t the only choking Victor indulges in. He regularly visits restaurants and forces himself to choke mid-meal. He does so in order to get a (preferably wealthy) fellow patron to use the Heimlich on him, forcing that individual into the unique position of forming one half of a bond between a savior and the saved. The way Victor sees it, it is not the person who is choking who should be grateful to the Heimlich-performer, but the other way around. That one act forces the innocent diner into a heroic role he or she would never have otherwise filled, thus priming him/her up for an endless pattern of future extortion. Struggling to pay his demented mother’s medical bills, Victor turns to his scheme often. When strapped for cash, he successfully enlists the aid of one of his many benefactors, relying on the generosity he will evince in his rescuer.

Because of her deteriorating mental state, his mother, Anjelica Huston, never knows who he is. She tends to confuse him with everyone but himself, confiding in those she thinks he is (her old lawyer Fred, for example) that she’s appalled by her son’s negligence.

Her portrayal of Ida J. Mancini is reminiscent of the quirky roles she played in The Addams Family, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. After all, she is the queen of what I call “Bombay Sapphire Cinema” (dry, fun and nicely packaged).

Both Ida and her doctor turn out to be very important figures in Victor’s life and path to emotional recovery. It’s the complicated relationship he has with his batty mother that plunges Victor into his unfeeling state in the first place, but it’s also that relationship—as well as a specific one that develops with that doctor—that allows him to take that fourth step of the 12 to self-repossession.

Similarly, Snuff takes a troubled child-mother and common law husband-wife relationship and upends it until its altered state is best for all concerned.

The book revolves around the making of a “high priestess of porn’s” presumed best and last work: a serial fornication involving 600 lay (smirk) men who, with their possible embolism-causing thrusts, could be unintentionally involved in the production of a snuff film.

Narrated by four people, Mr. 600, Mr. 137, Mr. 72 and Sheila, the talent wrangler orchestrating the whole thing, the reader never really hears porn star Cassie Wright’s side of things but through their memories, lurid descriptions and the constantly streaming videos from her portfolio (e.g. World Whore One: Deep in the Trenches).

The numbers Palahniuk gives the men are, in most cases, arbitrary, but their presence in that green room is not. Through them, and through Sheila, we find out who Cassie Wright really is, what she means to those waiting and they to her, what this movie could really be doing for her and those closest to her and how it could be seen as an absolution for all such parties.

Two scenes stand out as particularly poignant. The first involves Mr. 600, Branch Bacardi’s, famous pornstar-“woodsman,” loss of innocence, the second with Cassie Wright’s meeting with Sheila as the latter pitches the serial fornication film to Ms. Wright in the first place. The scenes, when read retroactively, convey heartbreak and vendetta but also set the stage for that aforementioned reunion and redemption.

Behind the absurdist, life-lampooning bravado and gasp-worthy shocking punchlines, these stories are as much about humanity as something as treacly as Love, Actually: they concern sons and mothers, fathers and sons, and mothers and sons and daughters, as well as mistaken identity. Palahniuk’s people, stripped of all their costumes and crutches, reveal a pathos all too familiar to us all.

(image copyright 2008, Andre Leroy Davis, all rights reserved)

With the taping of VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors being at the Hammerstein Ballroom last Thursday (the show aired this week), New York City was overflowing with parties and events that brought back a million memories of back in the day adventures. Indeed, it seems like just yesterday that Dante Ross was playing me some of De La Soul’s debut album, I was eating Philly cheese steaks with Cypress Hill for a Source feature (shot by the talented Daniel Hastings), hopping on the Jersey transit to meet Naughty By Nature and hanging out in Too Short’s ritzy hotel room during a photo shoot.

Though I have never interviewed Slick Rick, believe me, it was not for lack of trying. In 1988, his classic track “Children’s Story” was one of my favorite songs.

Two days before the VH1 taping, I was invited to a book party for the upcoming DEFintion: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop edited by Cey Adams and Bill Adler. Old friends since the old Rush/Def Jam days when crack heads used to be lurking and smoking across the street (Cey was the graphic designer, Bill was the publicist), these gentleman put a lot of effort into this beautiful book. While there have been some rumblings about the overt sexism of the cover (sexism…hip-hop…I’m shocked), I encourage folks to look beyond Mike Thompson’s aptly titled Lust and open the book.

Overflowing with beautiful images by painters (Kehinde Wiley, Keith Haring) sneaker designers (I wrote the essay for this section), filmmakers (Charles Stone III, Spike Lee), graffiti artists (Cope2, Sye) and graphic designers (Brent Rollins, D.L. Warfield) this book is a must-have for cool coffee tables and offices.

The party itself had to be the throwback event of the season, with cats like Positive K, media assassin Harry Allen, DJ Chuck Chill Out, Roc, a few Beastie Boys, Andre Leroy Davis (the cool Cancer who drew “The Last Word” cartoons in The Source years back), producer Dante Ross and my adopted brothers-the Ego Trip boys were all in attendance.

Coke La Rock, left, and D.J. Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick in the early seventies. (Photo: Coutesy of Cindy Campbell)

While my “Old School Hip-Hop Week” began with the thrill of seeing my first New York magazine in print (a four page joint on Kool Herc) it ended on Saturday night with Common and N.E.R.D. blowing-up the stage at Roseland. During Common’s set, my man Cee-Lo Green (you know he’s a mean machine) joined the windy city rapper on stage.

As my former Billboard columnist/present p.r. maverick Havelock Nelson kept yelling Friday night, last week was “the best week ever.”

NEW YORK MAGAZINE OLD SCHOOL STORY:

http://nymag.com/anniversary/40th/50665

DEFinition: The Art & Design of Hip-Hop

http://www.amazon.com/DEFinition-Design-Hip-Hop-Cey-Adams/dp/0061438855/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223325501&sr=1-1

This originally appeared on Michael Gonzales’ blog Riffs&Revolutions.