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The A-List: 06.06.03
Compiled by Africana Staff

This week on the A-List:

1. Eunice: Blame it On the U-RAIN!
The A-List has many penpals -- Kola Boof, Howell Raines, Mr. Marcus, several UN Under-Secretaries for African Grain Bio-Diversity -- but our favorite is Eunice, an 82-year-old, retired A&T history-and-civics professor now residing in Missouri. "I have difficulty finding much redeeming historical, educational or racial significance in many of the items presented in this column," Eunice writes in like clockwork every other week. "It seems as if the authors take their greatest pleasure in either making smug reference to obscurities of little interest to most American Negroes, or in shocking the very audience they claim to represent. Matters of great import are either ignored or treated flippantly and great heroes are disrespected, while gossip, bizarre coincidence, and negative reporting is enshrined as the collected opinion of Negroes everywhere. Also, the manner in which the column is written leaves much to be desired. Fiction seems intermingled willy-nilly with factual information, while items are invariably prefaced by lengthy, showy prologues with no discernable relation to the story purportedly being presented. Also sentences in the A-List tend to run-on, veering wildly from subject to subject on the slimmest verbal pretext. Du Bois, whose image is cynically made use of repeatedly by the Africana website, and who dreamt of meaningfully connecting the disparate threads of Negro life in his great encyclopedia, would be disgusted."

The A-List, of course, doesn't believe a word of the above. First off, what's an 82-year-old, retired A&T history-and-civics professor named "Eunice" doing surfing this great, charnel house that is the Web? Does anyone surf these days for anything except pornography, EBay auction updates, bottomed-out stock prices, weather, or to see if their name showed up in their best friend's blog? Getting a letter like that from a regular A-List reader is a bit like getting caught out at the strip club by your great grandmother. ("Well. This is certainly embarrassing, Nana. For you.") Still, on the off chance that Eunice is a real person, with perhaps nothing to live for except writing letters to the editor, the A-List always makes a point of finding an item just for her, something in particularly -- nay, outrageously -- poor taste that satisfies the full range of A-List-specific criterions (linkable, about, or involving black people) while also constituting a special, almost private, back-channel shout-out the woman we have come to think of as "our Eunice."

Speaking of poor taste, this week's "the Eunice bit," as we like to call it, comes from her very Missouri, where a white jail guard, Justin K. Hastings, has been accused of regularly urinating on his jail's black inmates from a grate in the roof of a covered recreation area. While some inmates seem to have instinctively understood that the warm, yellow liquid dripping down from the rafters was to be avoided, others did not. One recent, rainy afternoon, a group of thirsty inmates, fresh from playing a hard game of prison basketball, went so far as to enthusiastically thrust their faces into the downward flowing stream, only to discover that the leaking "rainwater" smelled and tasted remarkably like you-know-what. Equally remarkably, the incident went to trial, CO Hastings facing a 15-day prison term for abusing his charges. Things nearly unraveled when inmate Zewayne "Winkie" Durley called his jailhouse golden shower "racist," a charge apparently so incendiary in Missou that a mistrial was almost declared, but after a brief recess the proceedings turned to the not-so difficult question of positively identifying Hastings. While it's impossible to see anyone through the grate, and no one actually saw 21 year-old CO commit the dirty deed, DNA tests presented at the trial positively linked Hastings to urine samples taken from the grate.

What the A-List wants to know, of course, is how anyone knew to perform DNA tests on Hastings in the first place. It's not as if prosecutors went and collected samples from every guard or even two. Obviously something about that racist urine, some quality or aspect of it, reminded Durley and the other inmates of Hastings, but what could it be, what could it be?

Until next time, Eunice!

[Ebog note: As you likely guessed, there was no Eunice. At the time this particular column was written me and the Africana team were engaged in a bit of a turf war with another with another African American programming team stationed on the AOL mothership in Dulles. That team in Dulles often cited the A-List as why the Africana team was unfit to manage AOL's black business, what with how unruly, inappropriate and all un-around un-DST-like we were. They lost the battle but the forces of mediocrity eventually won the war.]

2. Say it Ain't So, Serena!
A far sadder sports story came from France this week, where Serena Williams was foiled in her shot at Grand Slam history-making, losing in the French Open semifinal to Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne. It's not that Serena lost &151 though that makes the A-List sad, of course -- but that she was brought down by, in addition to Henin-Hardenne's commendably gutsy comeback, a jeeringly hostile crowd and her own rattled nerves. (The A-List loves the French when they're jeering Imposter Presidents, but not when they jeer Serena!) We've always seen the strong, in-control Serena; yesterday's match revealed another side, one more in keeping with the fact that she is only 21 years old. After the match ended, a tearful Serena admitted the crowd got to her: "It was just a tough crowd out there today, really very tough. It's the story of my life. It's a little difficult. All my life I have had to fight."

Any time Venus or Serena Williams steps onto the court, she is the automatic odds-on favorite. Some crowd love winners and some cheer for the underdog (especially if she's local, or from a neighboring country, as was the Belgian Henin-Hardenne). That's just sports, but it doesn't make it pretty. It gets uglier in the case of the Williams sisters, who have endured racist taunts from crowds at home and abroad, no doubt making it at times difficult for the pair to tell the difference between run-of-the-mill stadium boorishness and malicious, mass abuse. Here's to hoping Serena gets to take a few weeks off and comes back and smokes the competition in Wimbledon!

3. Faster than a Speeding Bullet, Charles Taylor Thwarts Coup Plotters
Like the malevolent, African super-villain he sometimes resembles, Liberian president Charles Taylor this week flew back -- whoosh! -- from peace talks in Ghana to quell an uprising that might have sent him to prison -- or worse. Responding to reports that he'd been indicted on war crimes charges by a UN-sponsored court, Taylor invoked the supernatural ("To call the president of Liberia a war criminal? God himself will not permit it") and made sure his thuggish government not only put down the rebel advances, but also turned back the thousands of refugees rushing into Monrovia in hopes of escaping the violent countryside. The world's attention rarely rests for long on West Africa -- troubles there seem too hard to confront, too endlessly circular, too local, too complex. But the nature of Taylor's evil isn't hard to grasp at all. Too bad "regime change" is only the West's stated policy when there's oil at stake.

4. Finally, A Token White Male on Reality TV!
Hooked up to two croaking, used speakers, the television in the A-List's first college apartment doubled as a stereo that stayed tuned to music-vid stations most days and nights. We still clearly remember the surround-sound splash MTV's first Real World season made when it landed into our lives in 1992, the shouting about race, the partying and the primitive sexual innuendo (oh, how innocent the antics of Andre, Becky, Eric, Heather, Julie, #%^@^Kevin and Norman were! Looking at it today is almost like watching The Brady Bunch episode with the tri-racial Musketeers ï¿1⁄2 only with alcohol poisoning) spawning an ongoing obsession with reality TV. Of course, we were most obsessed with "the black guy." Besides the fact that we felt that we should have been on that first series instead of Kevin Powell, or perhaps precisely because we felt we should have been on, the A-list was annoyed and embarrassed by Powell on a nearly weekly basis and by every token reality black man that followed in his footsteps on MTV. Did the Real World only choose bordeline crazy black men, we wondered? Was it a requirement? There was the mellow, be-dredded Muhammad of the San Francisco show, but like all gentle, holistic, spoken-word Negroes, he was just too tofutti, too nice. It just seemed that reality television was doomed to never get the black man right.

Over the years, our convictions about the ignoble yet central role of "the black guy" on reality TV have only been confirmed by the hard evidence gleaned through literal couch years spent mainlining reality crud directly through the optic nerve -- Springer in the morning, videos hosted by reality contestants and game shows all day, reality TV at night. The genre has evolved -- Survivor, Road Rules, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The Osbournes -- but "the black guy" has not. Trapped between the Klieg lights of celebrity and the cave walls of racism, he casts a pantomime shadow across America's television screens that is interpreted by most as "black maleness," but that bears no resemblance to the genuine article as experience by the A-List and our friends and family. It would take nothing less than a philosopher-king to break through this play of forms and shadows, and since all royal black people are from Africa (or are assassinated Civil Rights leaders, making it hard for them to appear on new shows) our black princes have arrived in the form of -- you guessed it -- an African reality TV show! According to the BBC, the latest craze sweeping the Continent is a show called Big Brother: Africa. Core premise? Eleven young black people from all around Africa trapped in a house with one token white guy. Produced by a South African pay-TV company, the show has been warmly received in the 40-plus African television markets where it is aired, but it seems that the predominantly black cast has not caught on with White South Africans, still the big-get of the African TV ad market. It is as yet unavailable here in the States unless you have one of those crazy, old-skool satellite hook-ups. At which point, the A-List is going to come after you and your TV the way Kevin came after Becky -- only friendly-like!

5. That Lot Is Poison
Click the "Full Story" link below. Go ahead. We promise it's not nasty. You've probably already seen it (you know how these things circulate) and anyway, we would lose our job if we direct-liked to something nasty, or to something that met any legal or corporate definition of "obscene." A good deal of Africana readers log-in from work and we would never do anything to get them in trouble. (This is basic Internet etiquette: Thou Shalt Not Abuse the End-User By Unexpectedly Direct-Linking to Web Pages That May Offend.) So it's not nasty in the slightest. It's more funny, and not even funny really, because there's nothing funny about earning an honest living, nothing amusing at all about diversifying one's professional portfolio in the interests of keeping that income coming in. It's just curious to us, having his face just pop up like that, and the way his palm is holding and pointing at the text, and that suit. The tag-line is pretty great, too -- "A 'New Edition' to Re/Max." He was always the funny looking one, wasn't he? Skinny and aloof with that Zeta Reticulan, Grey alien head. He always seemed vestigial, like the other guys were letting him hang around for obscure reasons buried in the past -- or so you thought until some weird girl you were scheming on confessed in the middle of a basement dance party that he was her "favorite," which would always mess with your head. (Why pick him? What did it mean about us, the A-list, that he was her favorite?) Besides the odd, inverse diminution that afflicts young stars that have grown into men in obscurity, he looks none the worse for wear. Bobbie, of course, we all know what he's been up to and he looks it, while Michael Bivens has the healthy heft that befits the run he's had producing groups like Boyz II Men, but Ronald DeVoe? Have you spent a moment in the last ten years wondering what he's been up to? We haven't, which is why the link is funny to us, but, that could just be us.

"Full Story"

6. Say it Ain't So, Sammy!
News this week that Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa had been caught using a corked bat in a game sparked a conflicted, multilayered response. From Sosa himself: a quick admission of guilt, albeit accidental guilt -- he says the bat was one he routinely used in batting practice, in hopes of pleasing homer-hunger fans. From Chicago-area fans: fervent defense and protestations of endless devotion to "Sammy," a figure of one-name-status popularity there. From the yahoo-talk/sports radio-contingent: self-righteous censure, rantings about highly paid athletes dogging it, blah blah blah. Missing so far has been an overtly racial angle to the Sosa affair, though it's certainly a covert factor in the mix.

Ever since the 1998 home run race between Sosa and St. Louis's Mark McGwire, the exuberant Dominican has been cast in the role of lovable furriner, his broken English and blown kisses endearing as hell -- provided he didn't outshine the laconic redhead who won out in the end. For his part, Sosa has been a proud crowd-pleaser, a role the bat incident indicates he may have taken a bit too far. A Major League Baseball official review of Sosa's other 76 bats (the A-List is semi-astounded that even a major slugger like Sosa owns this many bats!) reveals no other corked specimens; after Thursday's interview with the MLB investigator, Sosa awaits a verdict. If it goes down anything like the handful of other "corking" incidents over the past two decades, Sosa can expect to be suspended for 5-10 games.

So is the incident going to hurt Sosa's legacy? Is it a "say it ain't so" moment to rival that of Shoeless Joe Jackson, forever kept out of the Hall of Fame for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series? It doesn't seem like it. A lot of the ink being spilled over Sosa's transgression seems appropriately focused on just how frequent this kind of thing is, from several recent bat-corking incidents to spit-ball throwing to various other rule-bending that's just part of the game. Unlike football, with its corporate/militaristic soul, or basketball, which is all about style and grace, baseball is at its heart a humbler, more forgiving sport, a game of flaws and quirks, a field of uneven dimensions. The A-List hopes and believes that this whole episode is almost certainly going to blow over fairly quickly, and if it doesn't, it'll only convince us yet again that what this country needs is more, not less, moral relativism, which is to say, the ability to distinguish between a small crime and a large one. Let Sammy do his time, but then let him get on with the game.

7. He's Gotta Have It --
-- the rights to his name, that is. Filmmaker and kid's book author Spike Lee filed a lawsuit against media giant Viacom over the company's recent decision to change the name of the TNN cable network to "Spike TV" in hopes of attracting more male viewers. Viacom plans to achieve this demographic feat by playing reruns of Bay Watch and introducing new cartoons like Stripperella . (Created by Stan Lee and voiced by Pamela Anderson, Stripperella follows the exploits of exotic dancer Erotica Jones, who fights crime in the near future as a secret agent.) Um, we guess that'll work. Since they can't call it the "T&A Channel" or "The Softer-than-Spice, Spice channel" -- sure, why the hell not "Spike"? It's manly, it's pointy, it's hard. That's why when the A-List first heard about the name change back in April, it never occurred to us to associate it with a Spike Lee joint. In fact, quite a few other Spikes came to mind. There was, for instance, that girl named Spike from Degrassi Junior High who got pregnant and couldn't hang out with the gang anymore cause of her kid. (Damn, we miss that show. Now that was some telly.) Then there's the blond, undead Brit, Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike from Cowboy Bebop, director Spike Jonze, Spike from underground cult film animation duo Spike and Mike, and only the good lord above knows how many cartoon bulldogs have been (and ever shall be) named Spike. You can see where we're going with this. Maybe if all the Spikes united and filed a class action suit could take this one more seriously. So while we still got love for Spike (Lee) -- after all, he is the reason we owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in film school debt and also maxed out all our credit cards to make the best black independent film you've never seen -- we think Spike, (Lee that is), is really reaching with this one. Sometimes a spike is just a spike, Spike.

8. Legal Team Not So Supreme
News came down from up high this week that alleged NY drug kingpin and famed, alleged, hip hop label financier Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff would be sentenced to 37 months in the Federal pen for violating probation. As the A-List understands it, McGriff was just at ye olde shooting range doing what reputed drug lords do at such establishments after serving lengthy sentences and coming out to a few million -- namely cocking, loading and letting off. You know, just trying to keep the skills behind the nine-mill up. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz saw things a mite different, telling McGriff (and we're quoting): "There's no reason for you to keep your skills up." (Now ain't that a grimly wry thing for a judge to say during a sentencing! "No reason for you to keep your skills up!") If the A-List were ever to find ourselves in McGriff's position -- and we won't, but let's pretend -- we would jump up, spit a verse, and tell Judge Motz that, to coin a phrase, "It's Murdaaaahhhhhhh!" True, perhaps shooting is not be the best recreational activity for a man recently released from a ten year bid for drug trafficking and violent crime, but rap and it's associated social arenas can be dangerous for alleged players. This year alone rapper Freaky Zeaky, a member from Camron's Diplomat crew was shot in an altercation, while Murder Inc. CEO Irv Gotti -- McGriff's "son" in the eyes of many -- saw his brother and a close associates shot in separate incidents. If he's under some kind of threat, McGriff is not the type who would seek out police protection (do police protect convicted drug dealers who aren't in witness protection?) making the safest place for him, oddly enough, either jail or the shooting range that landed him there.

9. Summer Jammies
In case you haven't received any of the A-List's up close and personal snaps from HOT 97 FM's Summer Jam at New Jersey's Giants Stadium, it's also safe to assume that you haven't seen Lil' Kim's fake breasts. "The girls", as she likes to call them, bumped and grinded their way through her bikini top last week to reveal their surgically-enhanced and surgically-scarred "brown eyes" (the A-List would rather not say the "N-word" in front of Eunice) to the whole world, or, at least, to the entire Summer Jam audience. While the crowd was more than happy to see the dirty diva doing her thing, the A-List couldn't help but think that these were not the perky, pastie-assisted fake breasts Kim had bared over and over (and over) the last few years. These were older, wiser, more withdrawn fake breasts. Sadder fake breasts. Which prompts us to ask: is something wrong, Kim? Something wrong with your fake breasts, we mean. Because if there is, you can tell us about it. Over the last year, the A-List has been privileged to offer counseling to a number of black female celebrities facing various types of crises -- - Beyonce, Frenchie, the Williams Sisters -- and we can help you too, if only you'll let us.

Will you let us?

The A-List would provide our gentle readers with a link to images of Kim, but we won't, because that wouldn't be in keeping with (TRY) our (ALL) high (HIPHOP) journalistic (DOTCOM) standards. We can provide you with links to this story, though: Nas fans will remember that last year the radio station stopped Nas from hanging Jay Z in effigy on stage, saying that Summer Jam was all about the music, and not about airing grudges. While the A-List is categorically against hanging, it seems that the warnings to play nice only extend to God's son, as this year HOT 97 let Eminem bash The Source by bashing his 2000 "Lyricist Of The Year" Source Award to bits on stage. The A-List will be the first to admit that it has been interesting to see Marshall take on someone other than bubble gum groups and Moby, but it's becoming clear that both sides of this beef are only interested in the financial benefits of maximum street cred. As for Em, most of this madface business started around the time a certain, got-shot-in-the-face, certified thug from Queens joined his ranks. Curiously, Em also started to weight train around that time. Hmmmmm. Although the A-List is a firm believer that you don't have to be a piano player to know a bad rendition of "Chopsticks" when you hear it, we do guess having a potentially violent hip hop feud comes in handy when you're managing a reformed hardcase.

10. That's all this week, folks!
Come back next Friday, same A-List time, same A-List channel!

About the Author: The low-pro column gets cut like an Afro.