Lauryn Hill is back. Sort of. One of my favorite songs ever. From Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill
“Nothing Even Matters”
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Before Lauryn Hill… Diana Ross & The Supremes “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” No subtext; I just like the song
There are 6,713 words after this. Words that may one day resemble a book.
The piano girl on 114th loved to play her black and ivory. Ivory keys on black bought by her father. Her father who’s never there. Everyday, she practiced. Repeated. She practiced, the piano girl Kendra from 114th. Long, thick black braids down her back, she lived in a brownstone with her mom, and her mom told her the piano would get her nowhere. Her father was absent. There, but never there. He came and went, brown hat and slacks, khakis, was all she saw of him because he came and went. Drank his coffee black, came and went. Every morning before school, Kendra played her piano. Started off with Beethoven’s Ninth—placed her hands over the keys, listened, and drifted off to a place. Kendra in the morning did this until her mom yelled stop. Time to go. She was the child of the house, the piano girl Kendra from 114th who’s 14.
Just keep trying and trying
It’s just a matter of timing
Though the grinding is tiring
Don’t let ‘em stop you from smiling
Just keep trying and trying
Sooner or later you’ll find it
It’s surprising how inspiring
It is to see you shining
Cause in the dark of the night you’re all i can see
and you sure look like a star to me
Tomorrow I’ll have coffee.
And I’ll sit on a bench in the morning, a green one, and wait for the pigeons to come.
Because they come every morning.
The coffee will be black with sugar, lots of sugar.
Sugar to keep me up, in the park, as the pigeons keep me waiting.
I won’t feed them but I’ll watch, as they feast and feed me.
Can’t wait.
At least from early adulthood if not before, Barack Obama was clearly driven to write; to trace that continuing compulsion, from the days when he penned fiction and then memoir to his present speechcraft, is to recognize that writing is anything but a small part of Obama’s life. It’s basic to who he is.
“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’ [GQ]
I said, “I want to write a novel. But I don’t know what to write.” Mom told me try to put myself in it and maybe that’d make it easier. I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. This isn’t Adaptation. “It’s not that easy,” I said. I screamed it, actually. I exclaimed it. It’s…not that easy. She says it is. I disagree. We disagree over and over before dropping the matter altogether.
We’re in the kitchen discussing the matter. The kitchen is in Philly. I’m trying to write a novel, but I have no idea. I have no ideas. Plural. No idea that’s original. My mom tells me stop. Think. Sit. Just stop. I tell her it’s not that easy. It’s…not that easy. We disagree over and over before dropping the matter altogether. We drop so many matters. Altogether.
We sit at the table and brainstorm.
Mom asks, “What do you want to write about?” I’m 19. She says, “Kayla, what do you want to write about?”
“I don’t know mom, that’s the problem!” She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand. “I want to write about me… But not with me in it.”
She sighs. She laughs. “You want to write about you.”
“Not about me, but someone like me. I mean, something someone like me would read.”
I pause. I stare, suck teeth. “You get it?”
“Write about you.”
It’s not that easy.
“In the middle of all this gossip and speculation that permeates peoples’ lives, I still think they know the difference between real news and bullshit. And they’re glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth.” -Russell Crowe’s character in State of Play
“I shed a lot of stuff, a lot of unnecessary weight in the last three or four years. I left a lot of old luggage behind, and when I did, the blessings just started pouring on me, and the light in my spirit started to lift again.” -Whitney, Ebony, October 2009
With a voice that gives you chills and makes her whole face sweat, Whitney Houston is one of the greatest balladeers in the history of music, missteps and all. She’ll be on Oprah’s season premiere on Sept. 14 & 15 in a two-part interview. The new songs are cool, but these are some jewels.
“Greatest Love Of All”
“Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)”
“Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”
When it rains, it feels like a million mini plastic army men marching on my face. The grass, prickly and soft. And when the clouds part, they’re gone. Though I wanted them there. Gone too soon.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -Maya Angelou
Read this the whole way through, or at least half, and you’ll be grateful. Also, probably angry and skeptical of the U.S. health care system if you’re not already
How American Health Care Killed My Father
by David Goldhill
After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
Perhaps the greatest problem posed by our health-insurance-driven regime is the sense it creates that someone else is actually paying for most of our health care—and that the costs of new benefits can also be borne by someone else. Unfortunately, there is no one else.
For fun, let’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.
Somebody else always seems to be paying for at least part of our health care. But that’s just an illusion. At $2.4 trillion and growing, our nation’s health-care bill is too big to be paid by anyone other than all of us. [The Atlantic]
