MF GALAXY

Christian A. Brown is an epic fantasy author and indie publisher who’s earned the praise of Kirkus Reviews, Clarion Reviews, The Huffington Post, and a former supervising producer of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The former fitness trainer is also an active blogger on numerous topics, including gender and sexuality, and on his mother’s experience of cancer.

Christian Brown spoke with me by Skype on December 30, 2015 via Skype. We discussed:

During the discussion, I alluded to the concept of hypomania and mentioned the theory of multiple intelligences, but forgot the name of its framer—Howard Gardner (https://howardgardner.com/multiple-intelligences). We began by discussing Brown’s preferences for how an editor should work with him.

www.christianadrianbrown.com

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By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Christian A. Brown discussing:

Ice-T is one of the best-known artists from what is now widely known as the golden era of hip hop—the 1986 to 1992 span that saw the widest assortment of lyrical content and the climax of political and Africentric work.

West coast artist Ice-T brought a mixture of allegedly autobiographical stories and fictional ballads named “crime rhymes,” while also engaging in incisive social commentary against racism, media, and government.

In 1992, Ice-T’s musical career nearly imploded under attacks from White police, Charlton Heston, Al Gore’s wife Tipper, US vice president Dan Quayle, and President George H.W. Bush. Ice-T’s heavy metal band Body Count released the revenge fantasy ballad “Cop Killer,” about brutal and murderous racist police.

Having survived the onslaught with the support of The National Black Police Association, Ice-T continued to grow his acting career, which had begun with the 1984 US film Breakin’, grew through 1991’s New Jack City, and later hit its height on television’s Law & Order: SVU.

In the year 2000, Ice-T performed in Edmonton at club then called Red’s. In this episode you’ll hear what he had to say, including:

A few of notes: I have no way of knowing what claims Ice-T made of his past are actually true; creating a fictional onstage persona is almost as much a key element of hip hop as it is of pro-wrestling. At one point Ice-T describes having been a pimp; I don’t know if his claims are true, but certainly now as a husband and father, I marvel at my failure sixteen years ago to have asked him about the inherent depravity of such a degrading and misogynistic profession. You are a grown-up, so decide for yourself if you want to listen.

That being said, for those of you who subscribe to the EXTENDED EDITION PODCAST, you’ll hear the commentaries on Ice-T’s remarks, also recorded in the year 2000, by E-Town community activists Darren Jordan and Kelly Fraser.

Also, when I recorded this interview in the year 2000, I’d never heard of Kid Rock. That’s important to know to understand the sarcasm of Ice-T’s comment and my confusion at his answer.

Finally, Ice-T let me interview him immediately after his show. There’s no question that any artist, or speaker, walking offstage after an intense performance is in a mind-state that isn’t suited to honest reflection, but to spectacle and artifice. But note while you’re listening how Ice-T slowly calms, becoming quieter and possibly more sincere. He was generous with his time, and for that I thank him.

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To hear the half-hour of patrons-only bonus material about my conversation with Ice-T, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes community activists Darren Jordan and Kelly Fraser from a Terrordome interview in the year 2000 discussing:

It’s one of the most innovative and best-written Western animated series ever made, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Brian Konietzko and Michael DiMartino created its three seasons, which ran from 2005 to 2008. While technically aimed at children and teens, the series had a vast adult following that continues to grow via DVD, and because of its sequel series The Legend of Korra.

Distilled to its essence, Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a Dalai Lama-style boy monk with super-powers. He’s a bender, a person who can shape the four elements to his will. In this world, each element has a nation: the Air Nomads, the Water Tribe, the Earth Kingdom, and the Fire Nation. Young Avatar Aang, born an Airbender, awakes in a world in which the Fire Nation has destroyed the balance among the nations by waging a war for global conquest.

Young Aang already knows air-bending, but if he’s to defeat the Fire Nation armies and its Fire Lord, he has less than a year to master the other elements, or face a planetary dictatorship that is now invincible. Avatar is a lushly animated and intelligently-written series with memorable and touching characters. It’s alternately deeply philosophical and hilariously slapstick.

Sifu Kisu is the martial arts consultant for the series. He’s the man who designed the distinct bending moves for each of the four nations and all the lead characters, and choreographed all the weapons fighting, based on his own decades of training in Chinese and other East Asian fighting systems. Avatar without his enormous impact wouldn’t be the same—try imagining Star Wars without the Force and light sabres. In the show’s final season, the creators transformed Sifu Kisu into a character named Sword Master Piandao, voiced by Robert Patrick, best known for playing the T1000 in Terminator 2.

Sifu Kisu has led a fascinating life. In addition to his decades of training in and teaching of martial arts, he’s been in the US armed forces, served as a body guard to foreign dignitaries, and worked in Hollywood; as an African-American super-achiever in martial arts, he’s befriended many of the most accomplished African-American practitioners of various fighting forms.

Sifu Kisu and I discussed:

• How Sifu Kisu came to be the fight choreographer and martial arts consultant and concept designer for Avatar: The Last Airbender, even though at the time he was on a self-imposed exile from Hollywood
• How Sifu Kisu worked with the producers, directors, and artists to translate his martial arts moves into animation, and how he invented the multi-martial system for the series’ elemental bending
• How Kisu used the martial arts of Jingis Khan to design the martial arts for the evil fire bender Azula
• How Sifu Kisu ended up as a character in the series named Sword Master Pian-Dao, and the impact of Avatar on the world of martial arts
• Sifu Kisu spoke with me by telephone from his home in Los Angeles on February 20, 2012, and as you’ll note by his references to The Legend of Korra, that series was still in production.

We began by discussing Sifu Kisu’s pitch to Hollywood for his own animated martial arts series, which embodies his ideals for how martial arts can improve humanity.

To hear the half-hour, patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Sifu Kisu, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes Sifu Kisu discussing:

• How he began learning East Asian fighting arts and the discipline required to perform literally thousands of kicks per day
• Why he believes his advanced martial arts training saved his life without him having to throw a single kick or punch
• What martial arts taught him about the difference between his ideal self and his real self
• Sifu Kisu’s experiences with Hollywood stars and major martial arts masters including Dr. Moses Powell and Ron Van Clief, and how he almost got the starring role in The Last Dragon
• Overcoming Hollywood racism
• The martial arts difference between fighting on screen and fighting on the street, and how his Northern Shao-Lin kung fu fighting system addresses grapplers and grappling, the core theory of Northern Shao-Lin, and real danger in the world of martial arts

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The word “psychopath” strikes terror. While most people imagine psychopaths to be extremely rare serial killers, in fact, most psychopaths are not murderers, but exploitative and terrorising managers, bosses, politicians, drug dealers, pharmaceutical CEOs, family members, clergy, atheists, police, teachers, and others we’ve met and under whom we’ve suffered.

The Canadian researcher Robert Hare is one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of psychopathy; he developed a screening test called the Psychopathic Check List (Revised) or PCL-R, and estimates that approximately one percent of people, or around 70 million humans, are psychopaths.

But Robert J. Sawyer thinks otherwise. Sawyer is one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists with endless awards and accolades. His carefully-researched science fiction novels have earned acclaim across the globe. And his latest novel, Quantum Night, theorises that psychopaths aren’t one percent of humanity, but two-sevenths—that is, about two billion people.

And wait: it gets worse. That another four billion people are not figuratively, but literally mindless—so-called “philosopher’s zombies” or P-Zeds who speak and act just like we do, but who have no interior life whatsoever: the talking dead.

Sawyer’s latest novel—which I regard as his best ever—is as intellectually provocative as it is chilling, and as he revealed to me before any other media source, it may be his final one. The book is about a Canadian psychologist, Jim Marchuk, who realises that psychopathy may be a quantum mechanical event that will end the world—unless he can end it first.

Rob Sawyer spoke with me by Skype from his home outside Toronto on February 23, 2016. We discussed:

• Why, if humanity is two-sevenths psychopathic, the world isn’t in even worse shape
• What rights the mentally-dead should have, if any, if they actually exist, and
• How the model for Jim Marchuk—contemporary philosopher Peter Singer—advocates against eating animals but for abortion and infanticide.

Along the way, I cite the DSM-V, or the fifth edition of the North American “bible” of psychological diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Full disclosure: Rob Sawyer and I have been friends for over a decade.

We began by discussing the novel’s fascinating and disturbing central idea: that psychopathy and intelligence itself arises from a quantum-mechanical setting in the microtubules of neurons.

sfwriter.com

Cross-Canada book tour

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Born in East Harlem in 1936 to Puerto Rican and Italian parents, Benedict Fernandez became one of the most celebrated photographers in the United States, in large measure through his documenting some of the most powerful images of the human rights struggle of 1960s and 70s United States, and especially from visually documenting the final year of the life of Martin Luther King.

Fernandez has earned numerous prestigious awards for his work, including a Fellowship of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in China, a US National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Various museums around the world house his work in their permanent collections, including the Smithsonian, the US National Portrait Gallery, the Schomburg Center, the University of Tokyo, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Fernandez has published several books of photographs, including IN OPPOSITION: Images of American Dissent in the Sixties, and I AM A MAN.

During African History Month in 2001, Fernandez came to give a lecture during an exhibition of his work at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. He spoke with me afterward to discuss:

Along the way, Fernandez cited two former King associates: Andrew Young, later mayor of Atlanta and American ambassador to the United Nations, and Julian Bond, later a Georgia State Assemblyman and Chair of the NAACP.

benedictjfernandez.com

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While it’s remarkable that a man who didn’t live past age 39 has achieved immortality, Malcolm X accomplished so much in his brief, dramatic life that the reasons are clear. He was one of the most significant figures of the 20th Century, an African-American whose life, experiences, influences, and effects crossed continents and oceans.

Born in 1925 to a family of activists for Marcus Garvey’s internationalist United Negro Improvement Association, young Malcolm faced numerous obstacles including the murder of his father, likely by Klansmen. Descending to crime and prison, he recreated himself with the aid of the Nation of Islam, one of the many groups that rose following the US government’s destruction of Garvey’s UNIA.

Malcolm employed his astounding intellect, oratorical skill, and organisational brilliance to build the NOI from a few scattered temples of a few hundred people into a nation-wide organisation, and became an electrifying international figure. His success provoked jealousy among other leaders of the NOI, and fear at the highest levels of US intelligence, amply demonstrated in the books Malcolm X: The FBI File by Claybourne Carson and The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X by Karl Evanzz.

Such jealousy, fear, and intrigue from shadowy heights of US power collided on Feb. 21, 1965, when five NOI assassins murdered the man described by the FBI as a potential “Black messiah.” Malcolm’s final testament, the Autobiography which he co-authored with Alex Haley, is a modern classic.

On this episode of MF GALAXY, we’ll hear from a man who was an apprentice of Malcolm X: A. Peter Bailey. Bailey is a journalist, activist, former editor of Ebony Magazine, a founding member of Malcolm’s secular, united-front Organisation of Afro-American Unity, and editor of its newsletter The Blacklash. With Rodnell P. Collins, a nephew of Malcolm X, Bailey is the author of Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. He’s also one of the key figures behind the classic book Malcolm X: The Man and His Times.

Bailey spoke with my by telephone from Washington DC on May 16, 2005, just before Malcolm’s 80th birthday. He discussed:

• Following Malcolm’s path directly by becoming the founding editor of the OAAU’s newsletter, just as years before Malcolm X had founded Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam
• His personal experience of Malcolm X from working with him in the OAAU
• Why the OAAU stated repeatedly that it was not a civil rights organisation but a human rights organisation
• How Malcolm X’s revolutionary internationalism preceded—if not shaped—that of Martin Luther King
•  
• The many deficiencies in the anti-Malcolm X biography Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America by Bruce Perry, which later formed much of Manning Marable’s book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, and
• Bailey’s attempts to keep the US-based Socialist Workers Party and its publishing arm Pathfinder Press from seizing control of Malcolm X’s legacy and historical image

Along the way, Bailey cites Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow; the Pan-Africanist scholar and activist Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the credited editor of Malcolm X: The Man and His Times; and novelist John Oliver Killens, author of And Then We Heard the Thunder.

We began by discussing the controversy around creating the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Centre out of the remnants of the Audubon Ballroom where assassins killed Malcolm X in 1965.

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Few people have done as much to promote the Africentric perspective as Molefi Kete Asante, the scholar, editor, and activist who wrote the seminal work Afrocentricity and furthered the intellectual movement for an African-centered scholarship and world-view that employs research for political liberation through the academic resuscitation of smothered history.

Asante has published over 400 articles, and has authored more than seventy books, among them Afrocentricity, African Pyramids of Knowledge, Ancient Egyptian Philosophers, and most recently, the memoir As I Run Toward Africa. The Utne Reader called him one of the “100 Leading Thinkers” in the United States, and he has appeared on Nightline, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, The Today Show, The Tony Brown Show, and 60 Minutes.

The African Union cited him as one of the top twelve scholars of African descent when it invited him to give one of the keynote addresses at the Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar in 2004. He’s currently Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

Asante spoke with me by telephone from his office at Temple University in Philadelphia on August 12, 2010 (You’ll note that during our discussion I refer to the African continent as having only 54 countries, rather 55 with the creation of South Sudan in 2011). We discussed:

• How Afrocentric analysis opens possibilities for pursuing knowledge and success in various walks of life
• How many of his detractors have distorted the meaning and goals of his philosophy of Afrocentricity, and
• Asante’s list of everyday English terms such as tribe, native, and dialect that reveal Eurocentric biases against Africa and obscure the massive diversity of African nationalities, languages, and histories

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To hear the patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Molefi Kete Asante, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. Here’s a preview.

• Ongoing resistance to recognising the Ancient Egyptians as Africans, whether from Europeans, or from Zahi Hawass, the Arab who is the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities
• His reactions to National Geographic’s ongoing misrepresentation of Ancient Egypt’s racial identity, and
• The analytical limitation of using the word “Black” instead of the word “African”

In wealthy countries, chocolate is part of daily life. We give it as the generic token of affection at Christmas. On Valentine’s Day we send it as a sign of romantic love. When we need a mood booster or something to staunch our hunger, we grab a chocolate bar.

In recent years, it’s become a staple of corporate journalism to report on the supposed health benefits of consuming chocolate, or chocolate’s alleged power as an aphrodisiac, or how it produces near-orgasmic effects on brain chemistry.

But what almost no one in the wealthy countries realises is that chocolate is not simply big flavour or even big business, but a big, gaping wound in the body of human rights. The world’s number one supplier of cocoa beans is Ivory Coast, a country whose cocoa farmers routinely employ child labourers who are paid nothing. That means they’re enslaved. These same children are often lured to be transported hundreds of kilometres from their homes. That’s human trafficking. The massive profits from cocoa exports are used by governments and militias to finance their arsenals against each other. That’s civil war.

As much a planetary killer as is Big Tobacco, its daily operation pales before the massive human rights abuse that is Big Chocolate, or what should be called Blood Chocolate.

As we’ll find out in this episode of MF GALAXY, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Some of it belongs with the farmers in Cote d’Ivoire who are enslaving children, or the militaries feasting on chocolate profits. But much if not most belongs with massive Western corporations reaping profits in the billions while operating out of cartels which manipulate global markets and commodity prices, which permanently shackle the economies of Original World nations.

To explain this story, we’ll hear from Carol Off, the acclaimed journalist and host of CBC’s As It Happens who’s author of Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet.

A finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing and for the National Book Award, Bitter Chocolate is a horrifying description of the tortured history of cocoa, from its use by megalomaniacal kings in Meso-America, to its role as an economic driver in European global conquest.

We’ll discover the fascinating story of a Canadian-French journalist assassinated for investigating Big Chocolate at its production source, cocoa money laundering in New York state, and the role of the IMF and the World Bank in crushing national sovereignty by economic manipulation.

We’ll also hear about the groups fighting against Big Chocolate, and why Carol Off declares that simply buying fair trade won’t amount to a hill of beans.

Carol Off spoke with me by telephone while on the road in Ontario on April 19, 2008. We began by discussing the bizarrely utopian origins of Big Chocolate before we engage its horrifying results.

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If you’re concerned about what you’re hearing, use the links below to discover how you can get involved. Make sure you call your school board trustee to say you’ll vote only for candidates who stop raising funds for their school children by enslaving school-age children in Ivory Coast.

CHECK OUT:

Child Labor and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry

Chocolate and Slavery: Child Labor in Cote d'Ivoire

Chocolate Works.com

Chocolate: Slave Trade or Fair Trade?

The Purefood Campaign Against Starbucks

Chocolate... by Slave Labour

Global Exchange on Harkin-Engel Protocol (2005)

The following links are courtesy of antislavery.org:

Statement on slavery and chocolate production

Slave trade or fair trade - how can you tell?

Child trafficking from Benin to Gabon

Child trafficking from Mali to Côte d'Ivoire

Mali and Côte d'Ivoire agreement against child trafficking

Rehabilitating trafficked children in Mali
UN submission on child trafficking in Benin and Gabon

UN submission on child trafficking in West and Central Africa

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“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is perhaps the best-known line of poetry of any post-war American poet. Gil Scott-Heron’s accomplishments and views allow for many labels, none of which encompass the man: jazz musician, singer-songwriter, poet, novelist, and historian. Born in 1949, Scott-Heron released more than twenty albums, two novels (the first published when he was 19), and the 2012 memoir The Last Holiday about Stevie Wonder’s campaign to enshrine Martin Luther King’s birthday as a US national holiday.) His work is political, personal, and always richly poetical.

In July, 1999, Wayne Malcolm of CJSW Community Radio Calgary and I met with Gil Scott-Heron at the Calgary Folk Festival. He discussed:

• The importance of his mother and his grandmother in his early life
• How he got pigeonholed as a political artist despite the broad range of his art and life
• The significance and illusions of gangster rap
• Art and education vs. the US prison-industrial complex
• Scott Heron’s thoughts on popular selective memory about Malcolm X
• His first novel, written when Scott-Heron when he was only 19, and the subject of his final novel
• How his lyrics address manhood and his own personal experience of being a husband and a father
• His collaboration with Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, and
• How corporate media distort our perceptions of famous entertainers or famous crusaders

He began by talking about his famous father who was known as the Black Arrow—and no, he wasn’t a superhero.

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Best known as Detective Bunk Moreland on HBO’s The Wire, stage and screen actor Wendell Pierce has appeared in over 30 films and more than 50 television shows. He’s also an outspoken commentator on racism in US life, politics, and entertainment, and a social and economic justice activist for the people of his home town, New Orleans. He was also a top fundraiser for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Way back in 2008, Wendell Pierce came to Edmonton to shoot “Something with Bite,” the werewolf episode of the horror anthology Fear Itself produced by Lion’s Gate, written by Max Landis, who later wrote Chronicle, and directed by Ernest Dickerson, best known for Juice and Never Die Alone.

Pierce and I had a wide-ranging conversation in which he discussed:

• How he deals with disappointment about his acting performance
• The craft difference between acting for the screen and acting for the stage
• What the “domino effect” is in acting and how to use it
• Representation of Africans in US entertainment, in 2008 comments that are completely relevant to the 2016 US Academy Award nominations
• His commitment to working on films by independent African artists
• The responsibility of African celebrities in the US
• Why the superb film Antwone Fisher failed at the box office
• His opinion of the brilliant writer Ishmael Reed, who is one of the most outspoken critics of The Wire, and why he frequently considered quitting the series, and
• His analysis of the so-called War on Drugs, privatisation of education, and the US Prison-Industrial Complex

I recorded today’s never-before-aired interview with Pierce on April 30, 2008. We sat in the lobby of the downtown Sutton Place Hotel while he waited for his ride to take him to set. I began by asking him about his approach to the craft of acting.

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