Ghetto-opoly pt.2
If there's one thing I learned from the filmmaker Calvin Able, it's this: If you're losing at someone else's game, just create a new one in which you prevail. At the Paris show last November, he flashed the bouncer a DVD copy of his film and insisted that he should have a free ghetto pass into any black nationalist concert in San Francisco, because damnit, he's a black man, and he made a film. And it worked.
As Adrian points out, there are other black men who make films and still pay for shit. But in Kevin's case, permanent VIP status somehow seems right.
That's the attitude I had when I first approached Paul Smith. There's something really titillating about striking up a conversation with someone you're convinced hates you --a simple overture becomes a grand act of seduction. And I liked the chase.
On Sunday night I sent him a simple, cordial e mail, under the pretext that I wanted to dig up a letter to the editor he'd written a couple years ago, which criticized the Beast Bay Gazette's former music editor (obviously this is before he became a columnist for the paper) for heaping praises on the "avant-hip-hop" outfit, Anticon (which is predominantly, if not totally white), but largely ignoring the genre's African American standard-bearers. He wrote back the next day, saying he might have it somewhere, and why was I interested? So I replied:

What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I have this
suspicion that part of the reason I'd appeal to the
(mostly) white population of weekly editors is that
they're totally stoked when they find another white
person who can "bring" people of color to them.
Borrowing a friends words --it's like I've done the
work for them; my activity legitimates their
inactivity.

That among other self-effacing things, and in the end, I thought I'd offended him. So I was surprised when he replied:

i'm not offended. actually, i think you're on to
> something.
>
> unfortunately, there's probably not a whole lot you
> can do about it,
> especially if you dont want to be--pardon the
> expression--blacklisted.
> while i'm personally disgusted by the amount of
> freelance writers who
> never wrote about hip-hop until the streets and
> eminem came out, it's
> not like i "own" the music or the culture, so
> sometimes you just have to
> let that go, and hope that readers can separate the
> real from the fake.
>
> i do feel that hip-hop journalism has receded,
> quality-wise, since its
> mid-90s zenith, but to a certain extent that's true
> of the media in
> general. and it's hard to complain too much about
> alt.weeklies when
> major media is even wacker.

And from there we started a nefarious relationship: I impressed him by dissing other weekly journalists and showing how much downer I was --without quite downing myself out of a position. He impressed me by being infinitely, organically downer --by virtue of having a black dad.

Pretty soon we were exchanging 5 or 6 essay-length e mails a day, comparing our respective critiques of race, gender, and pop culture, swapping Top Ten lists of the year's hip-hop artists, and talking shit about local rappers. I was smitten; I completely degraded myself and licked his ass. In fact, I developed a crush on Paul Smith that was so earnest, and heartfelt, that its sheer visceral force gave me physical symptoms --when I thought about the e mails, my breath got caught in my throat. I was convinced that, at 23 years old, I suddenly had asthma. I even went to an Urgent Care Facility to have the problem checked out, only to learn that I suffered from minor anxiety attacks, and should probably start taking Yoga, or something.

And then he suggested -obliquely- that maybe the best way for a down white chick and a down black guy to subvert the white man's print media operation was to bump uglies, and maybe we should go out for a drink some time. It was on.