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Author Archives: BUSINESS/ BOXING SIDE OF THE FAMILY THAT CALLED HIM "SONNY"
Never judge a book by its cover.
I guess when you get invited to an A-List Black Hollywood party. That is a sign that you’re starting to make some headway. So I’m standing there talking to Thomas Mikal Ford, of the legendary sitcom “Martin.” One of the most down to earth A-List actors, I have ever met. And he says to me, ” look over at the guy sitting on the couch.” I said to him?” you mean that shy unassuming loner, sitting all by himself in the corner?” Thomas says to me, “Yeah, that guy.” I say to Thomas, “Yeah, what about him?”. Thomas then whispers in my ear, “He’s gonna be famous.” I looked back at Thomas and said, “Nigga, please, that guy? You have to be kidding me.” I thought to myself, “What is his talent, hiding it?”
Weeks later, I’m flipping through the channels on the t.v., looking for something interesting to watch. And I turn too, “Live at the Appollo Theater.” And the announcer, on the show, begins to announce their special guest. So the special guest walks out, and there on live t.v., in front of a national audience. Is the guy, who if he had talent was hiding it. The guy that had been sitting on the couch by himself at the A-List Black Hollywood party.
I watch the announcer turn to the audience and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to America’s breakout artist, whose songs are now climbing the charts to the #1 spot. The one, the only, Keith Sweat!!”
The play that started it all, and shook up L.A. In the era of Crack Cocaine, The War on Drugs, Gangster Rap, and the L.A. Riots. “Timing is everything.”
We learned early on that L.A. was a town that followed the market trend. That is when we decided that if we were going to get our point across. We would have to buck the current trend. To create a new one. Traditionally, For-Profit theater companies that sell out their shows. Extend the run of their shows for weeks. To meet the Demand- Side of economics. These were theaters like the Mark Taper Forum and Broadway. These were For-profit theater companies. We would buck that trend by turning it on its head. When our shows sold out, we would close the show. Making our shows more of a “happening”.
In other words, if you missed one of our shows, you would not get a second chance to experience it. Therefore we created our market. Because no, For-Profit theater company would ever close a hit show. Even Broadway, would not be foolish enough to take such risks. So we took Demand- Side economics. And created the demand for our particular type of theater. A theater that benefitted the audience, by allowing them to have an experiential experience with us. A shared moment in time, that would only happen once. A theater we called, “Black Male Silence”.
Eventually, our shows would sell out before we even opened. Based on word of mouth. L.A. a town that whispers would do their best, to find out, when and where our next show would take place. Because we would not promote the show, until a couple of days before we opened it. This process allowed us to deliver our message. Because nobody wanted to leave one of our shows, for fear of missing something.
Because the L.A. trend became, who did and who did not see the last Hittite Performance. And if you did not see it, you better have said you did. The downside was, people started showing up to our performances because we were becoming trendy.
Where before, we had a base audience that started with us from the beginning. And came for the message only.
Eventually, people started to come to our shows, just to say that they were there. And their numbers grew greater than our original base. So you can say, that we are to blame for creating this monster. But we had no idea, that what we had set out to do, would work. When we sold out the Lincoln Center of New York, in one day. We realized, that what we had created, was now a Frankenstein monster. That we would no longer be able to control. It was the beginning of the end. The only way out of this situation was to kill Frankenstein. To save ourselves.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-11-06-ca-102-story.html
WE DIE IN THESE STREETS by Lynel Gardner
We Die In These Streets
We Die In These Streets
We die in these streets.
Bullets, whizzing by me. Babies bullets to the head. Collateral damage. Ripping through muscle and breaking bones.
We die in these streets.
Learning about our lives, not in the history books. But on the 11:00 Oclock News.
We die in these streets.
Another funeral, too many to count.
We die in these streets.
Avengers, Guardians of The Galaxy, don’t need an Endgame. The ghetto streets. Are Guarded by the police in battle gear, “Ending Game.”
We die in these streets.
Every day, helicopters buzzing above our heads, sleepless nights. A constant reminder of being watched. Like enemies of the state. It’s like an internment camp.
History repeating itself. I am reminded of Executive Order 9066.
We die in these streets.
Remembering having to sing the National Anthem in middle school. In order to start the day. “Can someone tell the class the meaning of the word creed,” the teacher asks.
We die in these streets.
White Lives, Blue Lives, Black lives, All Lives Matter?
We die in these streets!
The only difference between then and now.
Is that they no longer hang us, from a “Popular tree.”
We die in these streets.
By Lynel Gardner
Blog at, lynelgardner.com Click the link below, to read my Amazon book, “BEAST: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CHARLES SONNY LISTON” , and leave a review. Thank you https://rb.gy/khwhzn
#Godhelpusall
#Heynigger!
“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.” – Jung
“Hey Nigger!!…”
God, why? Why did you make me so ugly? What did I do to make the whole world hate me so much? Why did I have to be born black in this world?
As I stood there weeping from the core of my soul wondering, what in the hell was happening to me, I felt that I was being possessed by something beyond my control. But at the same time this pain felt somewhat familiar. And these words that were coming out of my mouth, weren’t the words of a grown man, but the words of a child. It was starting to come back to me now. I remembered the very first time that I realized that I wasn’t like every other kid in the sand box. “Does it rub off? Your hair feels funny, why are the backs of your hands black, but your palms are white?”, the other kids at recess would say. It was then, in between four square, jacks, and marbles that I was called Nigger for the very first time. The memory of it was slowly beginning to come back to me. I began to remember how it felt. How I had held the pain of that emotion in my chest. How the word Nigger seemed to have the power to paralyze my entire body. That word Nigger affected me like kryptonite had affected Superman whenever he got too close to it. It seemed to destroy my strength, like when Sampson got his ponytail cut off by Delilah. I held that pain in my chest as long as I could, until I could one day wish it away. Until it would just vanish inside of me, and I would never have to see it or feel it ever again. I could do this because I had done it before with other painful emotions and memories. Because like Pinocchio who wished that he was a real boy, I too believed that “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires, will come to you.”
“The black skin of the Negro was not only ugly, but was also the symbol of moral taint and turpitude. The Negro was the descendant of Ham, and thus accursed, and designed to be of service to his master, the white man.” – Ashley Montagu
Blog at, lynelgardner.com Click the link below, to read my Amazon book, “BEAST: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CHARLES SONNY LISTON” , and leave a review. Thank you https://rb.gy/khwhzn
A great parting gift for Trump, when we kick him out of the White House, should be, a recently removed Confederate statue.
https://images.app.goo.gl/oQTGDKqLtNKmaaAp7
“The black skin of the Negro was not only ugly, but was also the symbol of moral taint and turpitude. The Negro was the descendant of Ham, and thus accursed, and designed to be of service to his master, the white man.” – Ashley Montagu
Blog at, lynelgardner.com Click the link below, to read my Amazon book, “BEAST: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CHARLES SONNY LISTON” , and leave a review. Thank you https://rb.gy/khwhzn
I have a great idea for a theme park. Take all of the Confederate statues. And put them all in one place. And call that place Racist World.
“The racist propaganda the pro-slavery lobby employed to justify the capture and enslavement of Africans has meant that the ideology of African inferiority has persisted over hundreds of years. The dissemination of print materials in the 19th and 20th centuries that presented Africans in distorted, negative ways is still being perpetuated and challenged around the world today.”( http://www.recoveredhistories.org)
Blog at, lynelgardner.com Click the link below, to read my Amazon book, “BEAST: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CHARLES SONNY LISTON” , and leave a review. Thank you https://rb.gy/khwhzn
