So, furthermuckers: I haven’t blogged in over six months. What exactly does this mean?

This could run 15, 20 paragraphs easy: Purple Rain came out 25 years ago next month! Around late May 1984, most of us got our first taste of the Linn LM-1 “Linn drum” Drum Computer beats on “When Doves Cry” from worldwide radio stations. “When Doves Cry” hit stores June 9; Purple Rain followed on June 25; and the famous film dropped July 27. But this ain’t about Wikipedia stats. Purple Rain, for me, always resurrects the summer of 1984. Things like:

1. Co-op City hotties Gretchen and Shanese doing “The Seduction” (a recreation of Prince’s “Baby I’m a Star” self-caressing stage stutter from Purple Rain, involving G. & S. circling willing Bronx boy-toy victims and feelin us up).
2. That super-effeminate pink Ebony magazine cover with Prince holding a rose in front of his unbuttoned ruffled shirt, the one that made me refuse to see the movie till it came out on VHS in 1985. (The joke was on me.)
3. My personal discovery of Purple Rain, playing the cassette while fighting through some 9th grade homework. (Back-to-back with Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, incidentally.)
4. The rumors of an X-rated Purple Rain floatin around, where sexy Prince and Apollonia outtakes revealed what our horny teenage imaginations just knew went down on set.
   
5. The college-age homeboy in my building who lent me those 12” extended remixes one day for the B-sides: “Another Lonely Christmas,” “God,” “17 Days.”

“Electric Intercourse” is a ballad cast in the mold of “The Beautiful Ones,” recorded in that 1983-84 period where Prince could do no wrong: piano, Linn drum, screams. “Feel some kind of love for you, don’t know your name,” he starts with a synth burst. “It’s the kinda love that takes two/Want you and I’m not ashamed.” He slithers towards the chorus as if tumbling out of that steamy bathtub from the “When Doves Cry” clip: “Baby, you shock my body with a sexual electricity extraordinaire…” Etc, etc. It’s a lost gem. (Lost, that is, unless you have LimeWire.)

“Moonbeam Levels” is another rarity, though it dates a little further back to the 1999 era. I lost my cassette of the mix long ago, an oldie from my college bootleg hookup Dave, but it’s a monster. Sometimes called “A Better Place to Die,” Prince sings about a post-nuclear world and searching for evidence of his lost love’s survival. Getting back to Purple Rain, there’s also the “God (Instrumental)” that Americans got cheated out of, the eight-minute Purple Rain love theme only available on the B-side of the U.K. “Purple Rain” singles. Sublime.

Though I always loved “Controversy,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious” growin up, Purple Rain is where I really joined the revolution, and I didn’t really defect till Come 10 years later. (Wow, was Come only 10 years after Purple Rain? Prince is so prolific that it don’t hardly seem like it.) In an alternate universe, Greg Tate is writing 15,000 words on this milestone anniversary for a The New Yorker feature. Till we get that space-time continuum machine running, there’s just us.

This is the true story of how me and my petite famille went down to Luxembourg Gardens this weekend for the classic Three Little Pigs puppet show and were all WTF two-thirds in when a Sambo puppet popped up to box the Big Bad Wolf.

The Jardin du Luxembourg is one of the more beautiful parks of Paris, with tennis courts, sandboxes, fountains, box-cut trees, kids guiding wooden sailboats in the pond, etc. Well worth the parking-space headache. Christine and I brought our boys (3 and a half, 1 and a half) to Luxembourg for the swings and such early this morning, and made a last-minute decision to check out the 11:00 puppet show: Les Trois Petits Cochons.

So I’m following the French as best I can (I kinda know the story), our kids are paying attention, everything’s all good. Then Bim Bam Boom comes on the scene. The brown-skinned, buck-eyed puppet with its cherry-red lips comes around to administer some knockout punches to the Big Bad Wolf early in act three, which is fine. But what’s up with the blackface? I didn’t pay 16 euros to take my black-and-proud boys to a minstrel show. Nobody in the audience batted an eyelash, except maybe from the flash of the Nikon when Christine snapped the picture.

I wasn’t indignant enough to storm out or complain to management. In their pretty harmless ignorance, the French, I’m sure, meant nothing by it. As the only black family at the show, my wife and I might’ve been the only ones to even think twice. Homeboy’s role was positive, Bim Bam Boom, he just had those popeyes and the Al Jolson firetruck-red lips.

For a deeper exegesis on blackface and the minstrel tradition, check out my old review from The Washington Post on Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface and Imitation in American Popular Culture. After the show, I told my oldest that I didn’t like it. I didn’t explain why, but I’ll probably end up pointing at the picture on this post in a day or two to tell him I was no fan of Bim Bam Boom. I never really had any rose-tinted glasses re: French impressions of black people when it comes to Paris, so don’t think I’m shocked. I just, y’know, wanted to put the Marionnettes du Luxembourg kids theater on blast for that insult to my young ones. And to its director, Francis-Claude Desarthis: get a new puppet, dude. For anyone who cares to make a bigger stink, email them: marionnettesduluxembourg@wanadoo.fr.

(And check the smirk on little Lucas Morrison Lewis. Gotta love it.)

I miss WBLS DJ Frankie Crocker (rest in peace); allow me to explain. My parents only have two decades on me. Pops was 20 when I was born, and moms a month away from turning 20, and married. So I’ve got graphic memories of them in their 20s (my single-digit years) and 30s (my teens), etc. This was pretty much the norm in the 1970s. Whenever there were late-late night get-togethers in Parkchester and the South Bronx (peace to Inwood Avenue), I’d be there with my Micronauts and Mego superhero dolls, playing with their friends’ kids my age and falling asleep whenever my Coca-Cola high started to subside. We’d get back to Co-op City in the north Bronx between midnight and three a lot of weekends, nights that usually started with the ending MGM credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as we walked out the door: Sonny Curtis’s “Love Is All Around,” the cat’s meow and so forth.

Driving up the Hutchinson River Parkway to Co-op, the “chief rocker” Frankie Crocker would spin the soundtrack of my kiddie years on the stereo of our Mercury Comet. Crocker was known for mixing up the playlist of WBLS with white hits that blacks (and everybody circa the 70s) were groovin to: “Call Me” and “The Tide Is High” by Blondie, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Hollywood Crocker led BLS to become the highest-rated station in NYC at the time, period. But every night, his set closed with the one that still chokes me up if I’m in Ellington’s proverbial sentimental mood: “I’m in the Mood for Love,” by King Pleasure. (Nope, it’s not called “Moody’s Mood for Love”; that was the name of the album.)

This special, kinda underground version of the tune by saxophonist James Moody (the one that is called “Moody’s Mood for Love”) was based on singer Eddie Jefferson’s vocalese version of Moody’s “I’m in the Mood for Love,” the one that Alfalfa always used to sing Darla in the Little Rascals. But it sounds nothing like that. Opening with descending strings from heaven, Tennessee-born jazz vocalist King Pleasure comes in with the “there I go, there I go, there I go, theeere I go/pretty baby, you are the soul that snaps my control…” And it’s all over. The clinks of wine glasses during the live performance are audible.

You really had to be there. Because though the song is lovely, and since covered by everybody from Amy Winehouse on Frank to Queen Latifah on The Dana Owens Album, it won’t ever mean the same to anyone who wasn’t coming in from (or starting!) late-night adventures in New York City in the 1970s, with DJ Frankie Crocker on copilot. When I began my own creepin in my own 20s, I knew I arrived one night when, out of the blue at some velvet-rope Roseland party, in walked a 70-year-old Frankie Crocker with a sexy white chick on his arm. Did I dare tell him we share the same birthday? No. I kept my Sagittarius cool as laid-back as “Moody’s Mood” and kept it moving to the open bar.

Everything is closeups and tracking shots and dissolves, voiceovers and fast cuts and fade-outs. Film, in other words. Since 2009 started, I put fiction on hold (for the first time in my life, really) and started reading nothing but screenplays and filmmaker interviews. This means Spielberg, Spike, Woody, Lucas, Scorsese and Tarantino; Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, The Aviator, Eyes Wide Shut, Velvet Goldmine and Storytelling. I’ve got 25 pages of a screenplay done, the trick being to chase THE END down to 100 pages before revising the whole thing from the beginning for a second draft.

Tomorrow is payday, and I’m eyeing some DVD collections from the UK, just so I can get the English subtitles. (I could not finish Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot weeks ago, almost three hours in black and white, Japanese with French subtitles.) So, this week will either be Viva Pedro – The Almodóvar Collection or The Luis Buñuel Collection. My accountant (a/k/a my darlin wife) informs me that the Canon DCR-HC38 MiniDV camcorder of my dreams will have to wait till May. Until then, I’ll be down at the Cinéma- thèque Française. If you’re around, here’s the best (IMHO) they have to offer:

The Velvet Underground and Nico – April 3
Alphaville – April 17
Rear Window – April 19
The Conversation – April 22
The Terminal – May 4
Carnal Knowledge – May 17
Sleeper – May 24

Sometimes there’s nothing sweeter than a love rekindled. Watching a red-boned burlesque fire dancer perform over an all-female Black Rock Coalition band’s live rendition of Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You,” I looked over the rapt Parisian audience at the Maison des Arts auditorium and thought: They’re falling in love again. It’s good to be black and American in France.

The Valentine’s Day tribute to Nina Simone came just a week after the “Barack Obama in Paris” gallery exhibition closed in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement. In December I was invited to a park dedication ceremony for the renaming of the Parc Clichy-Batignolles-Martin Luther King. I blew it off, but a resurgence of jazz-age-level appreciation for African-Americans seemed afoot in my adopted city.

Dorothy Polley, an expatriate originally from Connecticut, organized her gallery’s exhibit with help from the Democrats Abroad group and Parisian Obama supporters last fall. Thirty French and American painters, inspired by what Obama represents to them personally, created original artwork around this single theme of What Obama Stands For. Dorothy’s Gallery was forced to extend the extremely well-attended exposition from its original November 25 closing date all the way to February 8, renaming it “Barack Obama President: A United World” after his election win.

Even prior to Obama’s inauguration, folks worldwide speculated about how the image of a black president might affect the country’s standing internationally. One of the side-effects, at least in Paris, seems to be a renewed appreciation for us black folk. I pass the Collège Rosa Parks junior high school (est. January 2007) in my neighborhood nearly every day, but I was still surprised to get an invite from Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë in the mail three months ago about a new Martin Luther King parc. Clarence Jones, King’s former lawyer and co-writer of the “I Have a Dream” speech, was present to inaugurate the seventeenth arrondissement park.

In the early 1990s, Paris erected a plaque over the door of Richard Wright’s longtime former residence at 14 rue Monsieur Prince, and in 2001 the city dedicated the Place Joséphine Baker, a square in the Montparnasse area. Still, I couldn’t help but note the synchronicity of the Parc Clichy-Batignolles-Martin Luther King coming about weeks after America appointed its first black prez.

And then the pièce de résistance: the annual Sons d’Hiver festival in nearby Créteil placed a Nina Simone tribute on its program, to be performed by an all-woman, nearly all black-American incarnation of the Black Rock Coalition. The BRC, founded in 1985, has mounted similar tributes to Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder in the past, but that night was unique. With a coterie of singers including Joi Gilliam (the hiphop gen’s baadasssss answer to Betty Davis), Afro-punk geechee goddess Tamar-Kali, and violin prodigy Mazz Swift-Camlet, the BRC came to bring a taste of bodacious blackness to the City of Light.

An opening set by Yohimbe Brothers—a band of BRC co-founder Vernon Reid (late of Living Colour)—intrigued the French crowd, apparently accustomed to a little avant-garde flavor at the Maison des Arts. Starting with the spirited “Work Song,” the 12-piece band segued into possibly the most famous pop song of Simone’s career two songs in as singer-pianist Angela Johnson careened gracefully into “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”

Both Baltimore and Fodder on My Wings were recorded by Simone in Paris during her years living here in the late 70s/early 80s, but musical director Tamar-Kali chose none of those songs. Instead, scintillating arrangements of “Backlash Blues,” “Go to Hell” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” were served up until little past midnight in a 17-song set that could’ve lasted even longer. (No “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” for instance.) Kali herself spellbound the audience during “I Put a Spell on You,” singing Simone’s bluesy incantation with the sexy accompaniment of performer Maine Anders literally dancing with fire center-stage.

Imani Uzuri ripped through “Sinnerman” with evangelical fervor; Mazz Swift-Camlet took a melancholy turn at the mic on “Lilac Wine”; Joi was characteristically sassy on “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” By the rave-up finale of “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter,” Parisians were more than willing to chance missing the last métro back to Paris for a potential encore from the BRC women.

All this African-American love may very well continue throughout these nascent days of the Obama administration. The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain is currently planning a major exhibition dedicated to graffiti art for summertime 2009, with an acknowledgment to hiphop’s pioneering Bronx bombers sure to occur. These days, Paris agrees with Nina Simone that “to be young, gifted and black is where it’s at.”

What do I know about David LaChapelle? As hiphop editor at three or four mags in the 1990s, I saw this cat’s stuff all over the place: iconic, borderline pornographic images of Lil’ Kim, Naomi Campbell, Tupac Shakur. Like Jonathan Mannion, Barron Claiborne and Marc Baptiste, LaChapelle put a sheen on celebrities like you wouldn’t believe. Unlike Mannion, Claiborne or Baptiste, Chapelle’s work is being celebrated in its own right at a La Monnaie de Paris museum retrospective this month: February 6-May 31. I’m on my way soon as possible, but this weekend there’s the Black Rock Coalition tribute to Nina Simone which I wouldn’t miss for anything: Joi, Tamar Kali, Imani Uzuri and others. Calling all Parisians – brave the cold and represent.

Cannot get a proper blog post goin for the life of me. It’s been since last April that I was forced into some random notes, but “have at thee then” (as m’man Thor would say). Learned this month that a Ghost Rider 2 sequel (booo!) just got signed off on, but that Marvel Studios is nickel n’ diming Sam Jackson and Mickey Rourke for possible roles in Iron Man 2 (c’mon y’all); loved Revolutionary Road for that rarely seen, all-American “hollow emptiness, quiet desperation” p.o.v.; as the wheels keep turning for my book deal, the next project to be picked up is The Masters, no bullshit; that said, keep your eyes peeled this summer for BronxBiannual.com; speaking to former Prince/James Brown/D’Angelo road manager Alan Leeds on Monday (happy belated, Alan), plus former Madhouse drummer Dale Alexander; peace to Wax Poetics while we at it; cannot find a good book to dig into, so a re-read of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster will have to do; glad Chloé Mortaud is a black Miss France 2009, but she ain’t the first, or even the second (peace to Miss France 2000, Sonia Rolland); and rest in peace to the late French hiphop journalist Antoine Garnier. I haven’t seen the brother since a powwow at the World Bar up on the fifth floor of Printemps de l’Homme a few years ago. He will be missed…

Wish I was there…