Heavy Mentalist

When I agreed to do score/soundtrack research for the Princeville doc, that’s all I thought it was gonna be. But it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated. The premiere was bananas. Me and the main co-producers, Ryan and Drew, and everyone else involved, were all thinking “Wow, I hope folks show up” and boy did they. It was packed. The response was fantastic and there are folks overseas even trying to help arrange international screenings.

Anyway the night of the premiere I’m sitting there looking at the credits…I’ve been involved in film projects before and there is always that “I want to see my name on the screen” feeling, then you go home. I expected to see “Music Research – Cherryl Aldave” or something like that but that damn Drew and Ryan…you guys are too much! I saw instead “Associate Producer – Cherryl Aldave”. I was like “Oh, word!?” I did put in some work for this film, more than just on the music tip research wise, and in some other ways too, so that made me tingle when I saw it. *Happy*.

Well one of them anyway, on one side of my family. In this post about the Princeville doc I mentioned that some of my enslaved ancestors were owned by Elias Carr, who, several years after the end of slavery became the governor of North Carolina. I found his family home, Bracebridge Hall, which is listed in the national registry of historic places.

I tried to find some photos of it on the net but I could only find this one photo of some slave quarters taken by Chad Carraway for an elementary school photo contest.

I look at it and see my folks living in that after slaving from sun up to down, and I get chills.

Next time I go home I’ll have to go out to this place and take some proper pics of the main house, grounds, etc. The home is privately owned, I presume by his descendants, and is occasionally used for events. I want to buy this place one day. Everything has a price, after all. If I had Oprah money it would be so mine right now. I would sit on the porch and drink mint juleps, served to me by my all White staff…LOL!

I just received info that the great sci-fi writer Octavia Butler has passed. What a loss. This is the AP news on her death from today’s E-Drum:

Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:53 p.m. ET

SEATTLE (AP) — Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58.

Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.

Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.  Continue reading...

Imagine if everywhere you go there’s Black folks. In the stores, at the gas station, the barbershop, the restaurants, up and down the street and all around you, all the townspeople and business folk are Black people.

Most folks can’t imagine this now, but there are several small towns in America that are either all Black or more than ninety-five percent so. On Tuesday, Feb. 28, a documentary, This Side of the River, will premiere at Durham’s Hayti Heritage Center about one such town.

Princeville, North Carolina was the first town in America to be chartered by Blacks and is still a Black town. Princeville was founded by freed slaves and built off what was once swamp land. The film tells the story of Princeville’s beginnings, and how the town has had to struggle against racism, economic hard times, and a devastating flood in 1999 (caused by Hurricane Floyd) followed by an attempted FEMA buyout which would have erased Princeville from the map.  Continue reading...

In response to the R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop call for action to achieve balance in Hip-Hop, I propose this action plan for establishing a nationwide volunteer Hip-Hop Awareness Street Team.

This plan is not set in stone, and is merely one citizen’s open-ended suggestion of a possible way to disseminate critical Hip-Hop action alerts on a ground level to those who may not have internet access or are unaware of where to find critical Hip-Hop information on the net. Additionally, the Hip-Hop Awareness Street Team may serve as a vital link to breach the perceived gap between ”Hip Hop elites” and “the streets” and may have other possible positive applications.

The skeleton of the plan is as follows:

1. Establish lead figures for overseeing the Street Teams. These Lead Figures form a council which oversees representatives of each region in the US who serve as “regional coordinators”.

2. These regional coordinators oversee (hate to use that word…) all the states in their respective regions. They actively recruit one-two Street Team Leader(s) per state from a pool of hard-working persons already known for their activism work in each state.  Continue reading...