Welcome to Carsey's Intervention an supposed-to-be-blog page. Today I'll be giving you a quick running down on what I did for my intervention.

 

Originally what I had in mind was to a do an original piece admonishing the practice of chemically altering one's hair with particular emphasis on straightening. I did some checking around and found a report that said that hairdressers show a tendency toward having low birthweight babies. This was believed to be connected to the exposure to the chemicals like the dioxins in chemical perming products (of course I can't find the link now, but I'll try to add it later).

Armed with this info, I intended to do some test runs of the planned intervention. Using a some text I already new. In particular a verse from a song by Goodie Mob (media player sample here , real player sample here ).

Time, unfortunately, caught up with me and I found that I didn't quite have it in me to write something original. I also got a little bit chicken and wasn't really feeling the idea of doing the AuntJemimah Anti-Perm Extravaganza just yet (worry not, it will yet be born).

So I decided instead to just use the verse from the song as my intervention. Here's the orignal text:

Me and my family moved in our apartment complex
A gate with the serial code was put up next
The claim that this community is so drug free
But it don't look that way to me cause I can see
The young bloods hanging out at the sto 24/7
Junkies looking got a hit of the blo it's powerful
Oh you know what else they tryin to do
Make a curfew especially for me and you the traces of the new world order
Time is getting shorter if we don't get prepared
People it's gone be a slaughter
My mind won't allow me to not be curious
My folk don't understand so they don't take it serious
But every now and then, I wonder
If the gate was put up to keep crime out or to keep our ass in

Who's that peeking in my window
POW nobody now

Deep, right?

Well, I chose a couple of spots to do like test runs. The first place I tried was in Einstein's Arcade in Guadalupe. Not much response there. Everybody was too into their video games, and it was actually kind of loud. It was also dark, so the video we ("we" being me and film director extraordinaire, David Garcia) didn't really come out that well.

Next I tried at the arcade down the street from that. The lighting was better, but there weren't a lot of people - I was going to leave, but David suggested just performing for the the guy working the change booth, so I did. Got some interesting reactions which you can view here. Seems he pretty much thought I was crazy.

Next I decided to try it out at in a larger venue. I chose the food court at Dobie Mall. The video turned out much better, and you can see some reactions, which pretty much consisted of people trying their dangdest to ignore me. Here's the documentation.

Lastly, I decided that I wanted to actually show the class what I did, instead of just showing them the less that spectacular video I got. It occurred to me later that I could have just made this my intervention. I'm glad I did it in several environments, though. There was a big difference in the amount of attention that people gave. I also think there was a difference because I delivered it differently. Since I was fighting against loud background noise or feeling like I really had to get people's attention, there was more nuance to the performance, and I felt like people heard what was being said more. It's really what I intended the first couple of times.

The point of the intervention? Well, I'd say that in our current state of "increased security", the idea of the incursion of the powers that are intruding further into our lives is one that is ever more palpable. Hopefully somebody heard it and thought that it might prove useful for them to keep watch .

Also, I kind of like the idea of showing people that hip-hop is, in fact, poetry. If done again, I might add an element after the performance explaing to people that what they heard was a verse from a rap song. I read this in one of my acting classes, and people in the class who's heard the song before didn't recognize it. I think I might find myself getting in the habit of taking these words out of the musical context and giving people a chance to really hear them.

Another result of the in-class intervention was that I realized that I've had this really good monologue memorized for a while and not used it. On my way out of class Harriss (a classmate) made the comment that he enjoyed the monologue. I'd never considered it as such. Now I do.

 

Peace: C. Walker, Jr.