Back in March I wrote Robadamus Speaks: The October Skyfall. I was looking at war, commodity prices, consumer debt, commercial real estate, AI stocks, yada yada yada. Then some of the smartest people building artificial intelligence tools started warning that their own creation might eventually kill all of humanity, which seems like something we should probably put somewhere on the damn list of worrisome shit. I sniff a rat in here. Too many economic and geopolitical white swans trying to land on the pond everywhere and all at once. I was particularly worried about energy. In that essay, I predicted that heating and electricity could get outrageously expensive the following winter, and suggested that if energy prices exploded, governments would eventually have to relieve some pressure on consumers, including suspending taxes on gasoline and other forms of energy. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is now proposing a temporary suspension of the state’s gasoline and diesel tax, so this is Robadamus speaking, and I would like my cookie for getting that prediction correct.

It isn’t so hard to figure out how we ended up in this situation. The Trump administration and its decisions in the Middle East were bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. If it walks like a duck, it is most likely a fucking duck. But still, the Dear Leader didn’t create New England’s dependence on heating oil, he just didn’t actually give two shits about us when he shook hands with Larry Ellison and Miriam Adelson and made that deal. At this point, I’m less interested in assigning blame. What interests me now is a more practical question:

What the hell do we do about it?

I put my Robadamus hat back on again in May, and I wrote I Hate Slow Motion Disasters, freaking out about what high oil prices could mean for my New England neighbors and my family. I am a second-generation landlord: one thing we can partially control is the energy costs in our properties. I remember when Big Dad switched the three-decker where we all lived on Deckard St. from oil to gas hydronic boilers. Each apartment had its own complete system with individual bills, even for my Mom.

“I am damn sure not paying for your Mother to open the windows while paying to heat the place. She thinks this is the damn Projects.” - Big Dad 1978

When Mom had to pay for her own heat, she only heated the kitchen during the day and most of the night too. My room wasn’t heated except from 7 pm to 10 pm- my mom was a communist: “…to each according to their needs.” Children don’t need heat. She heated her throne area in the kitchen by boiling giant pots of water on the gas stove, bringing the place to a temperature and humidity level sort of like the Amazon rainforest.

Today we operate a small Airbnb and hospitality business with properties in Orange, Massachusetts, and Winchester, New Hampshire, which means I own old vacation shacks and my guests expect that when they rent the place in January, they shouldn’t be shivering when inside. However, my guests also seem to expect what we call back home: Project Heat. In the projects, the thermostat has two settings: Off and my mom’s Amazon-style sweat kitchen. In the projects, we adjusted temperature by opening windows, not turning the thermostat down, or, God forbid, wearing a damn sweater. In the May essay, I put a number on the oil-price danger point for the New England economy at seven dollars a gallon. If home heating oil reaches $7, I think we are in trouble.

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The Robadamus Strategic Reserve

Food prices have my attention too, particularly protein. Chicken is the primary protein in my family’s diet; we eat a shitload of chicken. Yes, I fit the stereotype perfectly. Don’t lie, I bet a lot of you eat a lot of chicken too. I just don’t do beef much anymore unless we splurge and go to a restaurant, at that point fuck it, I order the steak. I got permission from Patti to raise birds again, and Brandon became lead farmer, and we raised 60 chickens and four turkeys. We named the turkeys Christmas, Easter, Rob’s Birthday, and Thanksgiving because they weren’t pet turkeys; their names were essentially their job descriptions. Two birds didn’t make it, so we just have Thanksgiving and Christmas, as of this writing anyway, crossing my fingers.

I also put up about 20 gallons of hard apple cider, which I intend to freeze-distill into roughly 11 gallons of a mild apple brandy. Ben Franklin would be proud of me. An 800-gallon winter at $7 means $5,600 for heat before you’ve paid the mortgage, taxes, electricity, groceries, gasoline, or repaired the car. That’s at least two extra mortgage payments. Heat isn’t optional here in New England. Patti pre-bought 2000 gallons of heating oil in July from my oil dealer, Bob’s Fuel, which I like partly because, in some circles, I answer to the name Bob, and I like feeling like I've “got a guy”, instead of buying energy from some giant corporation. More personal, like. I need heat, so I call Bob. Patti bought the oil at $3.99 a gallon, and because apparently that wasn’t enough to satisfy the part of my brain responsible for getting through February, I bought two giant piles of firewood from my neighbor, Mr. Hildreth. I am not saying I am some doomsday prepper that may or may not have 40 thousand rounds of 7.62x39mm in my basement or anything, but I am a grown-ass man with grown-ass problems, who was raised by depression era black people and communist parents. We have no control over a lot of what happens in this world, but there are things we can all do if we don’t put our heads in the sand to make it through.

At my hospitality properties, Project Heat continues blissfully unaware of monetary policy and rising commodity prices; at $3.99 a gallon it annoys me, but at $7 it changes the business, which is why I have decided to close the hospitality operation for January and February. An Expensive decision, but when the economy gives you lemons, make lemonade. This policy has consequences: the people’s last names on the layoff spreadsheet match mine. My brother Josh works in the operation, my daughter picks up cleaning shifts, and I also have a part-time handyman and another full-time cleaner. To keep the whole team from going broke, I decided to use it as an opportunity to spend more money. We are going to do a “Five-Year Maintenance” and upgrade mission. Drain hot water heaters, re-coat surfaces, repair curtains, etc. That way, my handyman will have work, Josh will still have some hours too, but Al and my cleaner will have significantly fewer hours for the period. Multiply my decision by thousands of other small mom-and-pop businesses doing the same thing, and somebody on the news calls it a recession, or my favorite, a slowdown. When you run a family business and look at the spreadsheets, it hits different. It hurts. It makes you angry.

For real though, this is all truly a bunch of first-world problems. I have been through Kibera, Kenya, flat-footed. To some, this whole thing may sound like a rich guy talking about how smart he is. When I got worried about oil prices, I could write Bob’s Fuel a $7,980 check, buy two giant piles of firewood, raise my own chickens, and walk away from $24,000 in winter hospitality revenue, and even spend more money on a massive maintenance run. That’s privilege, full stop, and I recognize it. I am not ashamed of it, it just is. I was never once actually poor. Big Dad grew up in a dirt-floor sharecropper’s cabin, but I can still remember the difference between asking whether $3.99 is a good price for 2,000 gallons and asking whether I had enough money for the minimum delivery, split between two different credit cards. Having money gives you time and options, while poor folks have no time, no options because they bounce between unexpected emergencies, a life of constant uncertainty and anxiety.

I wasn’t really poor because I had family. A Big Extended family.

My extended family practiced an internal social/economic safety net. We had different generations with different resources, and instead of expecting each person to reproduce the entire American household on their own, we shared what we had. Somebody had a house, Big Dad had an apartment, somebody had twenty dollars, somebody could cook, and some people had enough food for twenty people on Tuesday. The old people had accumulated assets and knowledge, the younger people had labor and time, and the people in the middle were supposed to keep the whole damned machine moving.

Americans have spent generations treating privacy as the sign of success: everyone strives to live alone or in small nuclear families with two-car garages and white picket fences. The richer you are, the point comes where all you can buy is more privacy. Private clubs, chefs, and beaches. You know, bottle service at the club.

I fully get that intergenerational living isn’t gonna work for every family—some families probably shouldn’t share a ZIP code, much less a bathroom—but when it can work, generations living together or clustered close to one another can share housing, food, most everything, and, most importantly, risk. I could never have taken my first big risk as a young man by making the movie Squeeze without the confidence of knowing I had a large family behind me, even though I didn’t have a pot to piss in.

The Revolving Twenty

I didn’t always have money, but I always had people, and the older I get, the more I understand what an enormous difference that can make. My mother, Lynda, kept a $20 bill in her wallet. She called it the Revolving Twenty. Back in the eighties, twenty dollars was nearly half a day’s pay. If somebody needed it, Mom gave it to them. Eventually, it came back, or another twenty replaced it, and then somebody else needed it. There was no application, credit check, or pawnshop paperwork with a side of humiliation put on top, because its entire purpose was to move toward whoever needed it.

GG used a different system- instinct. She seemed to just know when Patti and I were broke, and would show up unannounced with a gallon of milk, a pound of butter, and a dozen eggs without asking. She knew, we knew she knew, she knew we knew she knew, and everybody avoided talking about it. It gave us a little dignity. GG also loved to cook, and her house was a reliable source of Nova Scotian Black people’s food, lots of pork, salt fish, boiled cabbage, boiled chicken, potatoes- simple things that can feed a bunch of people without costing a fortune. It was never super tasty, but we didn’t die either; “Aunt Belva” meat is actually really good, though. I’ll tell you all the recipe for that one someday.

Great-Grandmother was the first-generation American daughter of D.B. Janey, an immigrant from Nova Scotia, so that Nova Scotian traditional food was very much alive in my life. Then, within a generation, the rest of the Black world showed up in our kitchens. Big Dad and Aunt Daisy were from South Carolina, Aunt B came from Guyana, and even my Dad was from Baltimore. This family of Boston-raised Black Nova Scotians began absorbing Southern Black and Caribbean food traditions. Thank god. Thank you, Jesus, for the Southerners and the island people. They brought fried chicken, greens, macaroni and cheese, grits, rice and beans, goat, and the amazing idea that food could be seasoned with more than salt and black pepper. I make fun of the old Nova Scotian food, but I still love it from time to time because it tastes like my childhood and when Patti and I were broke. GG was the main benefactor of our poverty. She saw us more. We were reliable company, because we were hungry and old people like company. When you don’t have money, GG’s house is a pretty good entertainment option because parking is free, she had cable TV, the food is mostly filling, if not almost good, and all you have to do is listen to some stories, wash some dishes, and take the garbage on your way out. She fed us, and we kept her loneliness at bay for a few hours.

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I didn't understand another side to GG’s deal with food and money until we were both older. Around 1998, when she was still going to Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury on her own, she must’ve mentioned that food had gotten expensive, so somebody heard an elderly Black woman complaining about grocery prices and did what decent church people do: they put GG on the food pantry list. There was one problem. GG wasn’t poor. She collected two pensions and had more than a hundred thousand dollars in her checking account while somebody from church brought her free groceries. Checking account, I’m not counting her equity funds or savings, her checking account! Then, I shit you not, she somehow got herself enrolled in Meals on Wheels, so a hot lunch arrived every weekday. GG thought the meal was terrible and wouldn’t eat it, but our dog Waggy certainly would, and after a while Waggy concluded that Meals on Wheels was a reliable government-sponsored dog-food delivery service created specifically for her benefit. When GG eventually moved in with me in 2004, I finally called the church and put a stop to the whole free-food operation she was running. The more I think back, the more I question whether she was truly getting groceries from the church pantry and then dropping them off for Patti and me when we were young and broke, if the shoe fits.

GG was a teenager in the 1930s. She grew up during the Great Depression, and scarcity was just life and the way it was. As a Mom in 1940, she had to learn how to use a WW2 ration book and keep it moving, with everyone full. I try to imagine some Gen Z influencer trying to feed a family with a ration book. Those people can’t use a paper map or read cursive. But I have to laugh at GG, a member of the greatest generation, sitting on a hundred grand while accepting food-pantry groceries, but then I have to step outside and look at 2,000 gallons of prepaid heating oil, two giant piles of Mr. Hildreth’s firewood, 60 chickens, two surviving turkeys, and twenty gallons of hard cider and admit that perhaps the apple did not fall all that damn far from that tree after all. I have a lot of GG in me, but I draw the line at getting food from the food pantry. That shit ain't right, GG. I said it, and shame the devil.

Tuesday Dinner

Then there was Uncle Bill, who during some pretty hard times fed up to two dozen people every Tuesday night, not Thanksgiving or Christmas but nearly every Tuesday. Uncle Bill was a retired Colonel in the National Guard, so he knew how to take care of a whole brigade. He would buy food at a discount at the Army base, giving him a logistical and financial advantage over the average uncle trying to feed a heap of people every week. Apparently, retirement from military command meant the brigade became a platoon and later was reduced to a squad. He loved it, ordered us all around, told us where to sit while Wifey made sure everyone was fed. Patti and I could go to Uncle Bill’s on Tuesday, eat dinner and take food home, which matters when you’re broke because Tuesday’s dinner is handled and maybe Wednesday’s lunch is too. Uncle Bill provided the logistics, and the family provided the appetite. Nobody called this social infrastructure. We called it Tuesday dinner.

Bill’s wife, Aunt Horty, baked an astonishing amount of bread, enough that refrigerators all around Roxbury were stocked with Aunt Horty Bread. I think the recipe is gone now. Danny, Paul, and Skip would have been among the people most likely to know it, but they have all joined the ancestors. When people die, they take knowledge with them, and knowing how to make bread by feel, feed twenty people cheaply, or stretch something until Friday is really useful knowledge. Maybe somebody still has Aunt Horty’s recipe tucked away somewhere. I hope so. And while we’re preserving the family culinary archives, God save Kim Janey’s mac and cheese recipe. Some things are simply too important to be entrusted to oral history.

Big Dad added another piece to our extended family economy because he owned a small portfolio of apartment buildings, and some of his nephews were also his tenants. Big Dad wasn’t running no damn 1970s commune. Family members who lived in his buildings also traded labor for discounted rent. Big Dad had only one leg, Tojo took the left one in 1943, so it helped a lot when his nephews shoveled snow, cut the bushes, and raked up the leaves. In fact, to this day, most affordable housing in America is still operated by Mom-and-Pop landlords, even though our politicians act as though a giant private-equity company controls all housing, and that is the line they keep force-feeding us. In the world I grew up in, a little apartment building wasn’t merely an investment; it could be housing, retirement savings, income, and part of the family’s economic safety net all at once.

Patti and I took Big Dad’s real-estate model and scaled it. At one point we had built a portfolio that included seventeen retail stores, more than eighty apartments and a storage hustle, which is a lot of tenants and lots of opportunities for somebody to call you on Sunday morning at 1 am because something is leaking. Over the last few years we’ve been selling it down, and recently—just in time, as it turns out—we sold the last of that larger portfolio and are now down to just our hospitality assets. I would love to tell you this was all brilliant Robadamus economic forecasting, but some of it was simply getting older and deciding that Patti and I didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives managing all of everybody’s problems. We wanted to make art again.

I Have the Revolving Twenty

After my mother, Lynda, died, I was settling her things and found what I think is the last of the Revolving Twenties. I put it in my wallet, where I still carry it, except I’ve made one adjustment due to modern monetary policy. The twenty stays. But the new inflation-adjusted Benjamin now revolves. I was born in 1969- I’ve lived through ten recessions now, including the COVID one, which was so strange that for some people it felt more like a paid vacation than a traditional recession. Recessions don’t begin for ordinary people when economists on our YouTube feeds announce them: they begin around kitchen tables months before: we’re not going out tonight, turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater. Put that bill on the credit card, don’t fill the whole tank, until eventually economists give it a name on TV.

I don’t know whether heating oil will reach $7 this winter; maybe oil prices will collapse, and my 2,000 gallons at $3.99 turns out to be a stupid purchase, which would delight me because I don’t need Robadamus to be right. But I doubt it, despite what the president says, about that and his $5000 payola checks he is lying to us about now. What worries me is what happens if Robadamus is right: what happens to the family that can’t afford oil, when the boiler stops, and pipes freeze. What about the little landlord when the repair bill arrives, or when enough people begin to feel like nobody gives a shit? They vote for Democratic Socialists.

I can’t control oil prices, wars, recessions—— or whatever fresh catastrophe artificial intelligence may eventually have planned for humanity, but I can take care of the little piece of the world entrusted to me. I can take care of Patti, the buildings, the animals and the people around me, keep the pipes from freezing and put chicken in the freezer. I will still remember that somebody else might be having the kind of week when the Revolving Benjamin can make all the difference.

Rally round the family. Robadamus has spoken.

Financial disclaimer: Robadamus is not a financial adviser, economist, energy analyst or prophet. But he thinks he is all four.

Sometimes one of them would take me out for the day. One of my earliest memories, probably because it was captured in a picture, is Cheryl (now known as Lady Calhoun) and me out for a day of mayhem at a carnival. She and her sister Chrissie always snatched me up and showered me with love. I would wait at whatever family event we were attending for Chrissy and Cheryl, asking everyone else when they were arriving, until someone would yell, “Enough about Chrissy and Cherry!”

(note: Cheryl (Lady Calhoun) is now so bougie, they write about her house in bougie magazines, as an example of what bougie should strive to be.)

Driving with Paul, the career soldier, in his Chevy Monza, speeding through the Jamaica Way and Franklin Park, was the exact moment my love of sports cars with a five-speed standard transmission first developed. I learned to process black-and-white film with him in a ramshackle darkroom he built in one of my grandfather’s basements, Vietnam style, he called it. One time he snatched me up from school early, took me to his job, and told his boss that his Baby’s momma had dropped his son off (me) unexpectedly, so he had to skip work that day. I used that trick years later when I snatched up my little cousin Tarik and brought him to a meeting I had with a professor about my less-than-admirable study habits at the time. That trick works well.

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Danny sometimes took a Saturday to bake bread all day and filled the triple-decker we lived in with the smell of yeasty goodness, leaving me desperately hungry. His sense of humor, shared by all those boomers, was, shall we say, mean. I think they call that bullying today. I’ve been told Irish Americans have a similar kind of mean family humor, too. I’ve grown to like the Irish Americans since my early negative experiences with them back in the seventies. When I would reach for a dinner roll, Danny would whack my hand with whatever was at hand and say, “Bread isn’t good for children.” When I reached for a piece of chicken, the same thing: whack, “Meat isn’t good for children.” Everyone else would laugh as I got frustrated and hot. My same-age cousin Erika would come up to the table and get her bread and chicken no problem; me, whack- “Cake ain’t good for children.” A pissed-off child was funny to them; and me too now that I’m a fully grown-ass man. Finally, my Grandmother, like a mother hen, would say, “Let the boy have some food, fore’ I give out a beatings to all of you.” She'd ball up her fists and mean-mug them all, chasing them if she felt spry that day. Which was also funny; my grandmother was maybe 5’ nothing, making these giant men, giant to me anyway, scurry and pretend to cower from her furious wrath was funny too. My life with my first cousins was funny. For the rest of this story, these people, my Boomers, will be referred to by their correct Black culture titles: Aunties and Uncles.

Brother’s Dinner

My grandmother’s five brothers started a tradition in the 1970s of having a monthly dinner together. The mayhem they must have caused. These were big roebuck dudes, all of them six feet plus, except for Uncle Kenny; he was normal. In the pic, you can see he is actually standing on the curb. When I imagine these men together, all of them born between 1915 and 1932, remembering their personalities, it must have been hilarious: the playful banter of the dozens, the storytelling, the laughter that makes tears stream out of your eyes. These men all grew up before television; during the radio age, they knew how to tell stories, and they were experts at chauvinistic humor, too. My great-great-grandfather, D.B. Janey, when teasing my grandmother, would say shit like: “I had five boys, and one mistake.” Uncle Bill’s nickname for his wife was Wifey. That’s what he called her, and she answered to it too. They were obnoxiously flirtatious with their sisters-in-law. The very definition of grown-ass men. A little like Black Archie Bunker types, experts at saying outlandish sexist and semi racist shit, with a smile and a twinkle in their eye, and a great punch line. A tradition that I attempt to uphold as well.

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Uncle Bill and Aunt Hortense hosted a Tuesday night dinner that was open to any and all, but brothers’ dinner was for the men. Not boys, but grown-ass men. At first, it was just the original brothers, but then their sons were invited to join the tradition in the 1980’s, and it continued through the 2010s when I got the call. When my dad was invited to join back in the 1990’s, he had to decline because of my mother’s rule: women weren’t invited, so he couldn’t participate in a toxic male-only experience. At some point, Mom even put a sticker on the color television in the kitchen that read: This Insults Women.

My mother also banned football games from the house until they were sex-integrated. As a teenager, fortunately, I discovered Dad’s secret: the “broken” nine-inch black-and-white television on the shelf in the back hall, partially hidden behind old coffee cans filled with mystery hardware and such, with its coat-hanger wire antenna, wasn’t actually fully broken. That broke-ass-looking little mutha’fn’ TV got in Channel 4 pretty good, and as long as Dad and I were quiet, and the coat-hanger wire touched the heating pipe, our feminist overlord would never know we watched most of the Patriots game while raking up the leaves and trimming the bushes every Sunday. Sometimes we had important work to do out back on Monday nights in the fall, too. If my Dad was ever caught, there would've been hell to pay, and shit rolls downhill.

After Mom and Dad died in 2010-2011, I was numb. The world felt different as an adult orphan, in a profoundly lonely way. Sure, I was around people, but the world still felt dull. I felt like I had lost everyone who loved me and whom I loved unconditionally. I’m not sure if anyone fully gets over the loss of their parents, but my healing began when I got the call. I was invited to Brother’s Dinner, in my own right as a Janey man. I was forty years old, and I could finally take my place at the men’s table. A seat on the high council, officially a grown-ass man.

I rode down to the 99 Restaurant in Canton with Danny. We talked local politics the whole time. He was a Ward Boss and one of Roxbury’s Delegates to the state Democratic convention. I first met Ayanna Presley at his house, when he worked on her first campaign. This was back when Ayanna’s was pre-squad, during her wig/weave era, and when I still stood with the Democratic Party. We had several tables pushed together: Uncle Andy (my mom's brother, my actual Uncle); cousins/uncles David, Skip, Mike, and Uncle Rick (actual great-uncle), the last of the original five brothers, were all there; welcoming smiles and warmth flooded me.

Also in attendance were their wives- I was suddenly shook. What in the name of Big Dad’s ghost was this? No one told me that women go to brothers’ dinner!

“Uncle Andy, what is-” He interrupted me before I even finished my sentence, shaking his fork at me.

“Wait a second, fella, don’t you ever call me Uncle in public. I can’t have some gray-haired old man calling me Uncle. That don’t look right. Looking at you, people’ll think I am a thousand years old! Call me Andy. Just Andy.” Everyone laughed. I knew the assignment: I could feel the eyes of my ancestors on me.

I turned to Mike and David’s wives, Denise and Debra (formidable women), and said:

“What are you two doing here? I thought this was called ‘brothers’ dinner’? You two here to cut steaks and butter rolls for the men, right? Listen up, I like my steak sliced thinly, and just a light pat of butter on my roll.” I looked over at Skip. “Are women allowed to speak when there are men talking at this thing?” In my mind’s eye, I could see my ancestors salute me like in that actor meme.

Skip, Danny, David, Mike, and I burst into laughter. That good-for-the-soul-black-man laughter. Auntie Claudia raised Rick’s cane, eyes little angry slits- “Keep on, and I will beat the stuffing out of all of you with this cane.” Aunt Ilona held up her steak knife: “Robbie, test me again, I’ll cut you. Real thin slices, just the way you like it! Test me, little man, test me.” Laughter filled the restaurant; I could see folks at other tables laughing too, sharing in our joy. I was with my people, feeling unconditional love again. Once a month or so, for the next four years, I would make the trek down to the 99 with Skip or Danny and enjoy the mean-spirited, obnoxious, but somehow comforting humor I grew up with.

The Grim Reaper collected his debts over the subsequent years: first Rick Jr., then Rick. The hardest part for me, witnessing all these men join the ancestors, was telling my Grandmother each time. Escorting her to all the subsequent funerals. I remember standing in front of her bedroom door, trying to find the strength to go in and tell her. When I told her my mom had died in 2010, that was bad, but when I told her that her son Andy had died in 2015, the little grief noise she made has stuck with me forever. Nothing prepared me for this strange ritual of telling my grandmother that her brother died or her children were dead, or that another one of her friends had slipped over.

“GG, I have news, and it’s not good.” I would sit on the bed with her and grab her 90+ year old hand, look her in the eye, “___________ has died.” I would crawl into the bed beside her, hold her, feeling the waves of grief shudder through her frail frame. I escorted her to what feels like dozens of funerals. It was almost a relief when she passed in 2018 that I didn’t have to keep repeating this grief routine every few months with her. Today, nearly all the men of my Mom’s generation are gone. Rick Jr., Cliff, Ron, Chuck, Paul, Skip, Danny, Andy, Ken Jr with only Mike, Gerry, and David left. Mike and Denise moved to Florida; Jerry is fully engaged with the home care of his wife, Jane, as she suffers from dementia. A generation nearly all gone.

Me and Patti and David and Debra

Ever since Uncle Paul died in 2023, I have been lonely. Not that teenage girl type of lonely, the old black man kind. Keeping that shit to yourself and not talking about it type of lonely. Slowing down, doing less and less, retreating into a shell where it feels safe, listening to the same song on repeat all day. Actually, maybe that is exactly what teenage girls do too. After months of this, my mother’s wisdom finally spoke to me: “You bring your own happiness into this life,” and then I got lucky with two events. First, I started helping out on the Glenn Show, and Glenn lets me call him Pop, which feels nice. Glenn is the exact age my mother would be if she still lived. Second, one of my younger cousins caught some felony charges out of Greenfield, MA, which is only twenty minutes from my house, and lo and behold, the only relatives who gave a shit about them besides me are Uncle David and Auntie Debra!

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As Yoko Ono told me, to get people together you need a project, and boy oh boy, we had a project with this one. A cousin in jail on felony charges with no one other than an overworked public defender to advocate for them. I put Rage Against the Machine on repeat and began head-banging: “Rally round the family. With a pocket full of shells.” My daughter is a lawyer in Massachusetts, and that little muthafucka owes me several hundred thousand dollars in hard money for raising her, not to mention all the late fees she has accrued since she was eighteen, so she was compelled to be in on the caper from jump (Her loan with me is currently in forbearance). We started weekly conference calls and update emails; although the project was grim, it was fun hanging out and collaborating with my boomers on a high-stakes project. In the end, after some visible courtroom support from David and Deb and great lawyering from Al and the Public Defender, charges were dropped, and they were freed from jail after eight months in the pokey.

Alejandra had invited David and Debra to her engagement party (more on that later), and they stayed with Patti and me for almost five days, and boy did we have fun. The obvious highlight for me was enjoying a full dose of that Janey-style humor and banter. We went to dinner at Peter Haven’s in Brattleboro. To set the scene, imagine Jonathan Lithgow was enjoying his meal at the table next to us. I asked Uncle David to pass the water pitcher over, and he said:

“Don’t you call me Uncle in public! Can’t have some grey-haired old man calling me Uncle. These people will think I am a thousand years old! Call me David. Just David”

Therefore, since Uncle and Auntie are now in their seventies, and there is no longer a formal brothers’ dinner, it is my duty, nay, my responsibility to the ancestors, to tell it like it is, contemporary Janey-style. The following is excerpted directly from the pages of Massachusetts Boomer Monthly magazine:

And….One More Thing: You can’t make this shit up.

At dinner at Peter Havens with David, Deb, and Jonathan Lithgow, I had always wondered how they actually met. So I asked.

Me: How did you guys meet?

David: I put a men-seeking-women classified ad in the Boston Phoenix.

Now that is Boomer shit right there. The classified ads.

For your enjoyment here is the actual ad, pulled from the Boston Phoenix’s archive:

Guess that’s what happens if you live long enough. The grown-ass men who seemed like giants when you were a kid slowly join the ancestors, and one day you look around the table and realize you’re one of the old muthafuckas now. I miss Brother’s Dinner. I miss Danny and Skip and Paul and Andy and all those men laughing too loud, telling the same stories over again, talking shit, and getting on each other’s nerves. But David and Deb are still here, Patti and me too, and there are dinners to eat and younger people who occasionally need to be sprung from the pokey. The old man assignment is pretty simple: rally round the family, keep laughing, and keep this shit moving for as long as we can. Just don’t call me Uncle in public. I can’t have some gray-haired old man calling me Uncle. People will think I’m a thousand fucking years old.

For the twenty years I taught college filmmaking, I always told my students what I really thought about their work, and what I thought they could do to improve it. Call me weird, but that is what I thought teaching was. Sometimes students didn’t like hearing the truth. In fact, sometimes their little feelings got hurt. Didn't make me sad. My Dad, back in his day, hurt quite a few now-famous feelings as a teacher: Rosie O’Donnell still hasn’t recognized the truth he told her when she was his student, even though she built a career on his advice. Told Jason Alexander the same thing, Jason took it much better than Rosie. Non-tenured college professors face a major problem: the risk of hurting students’ feelings and the negative consequences that follow. Parents send you nastygram emails because their kids got a B+ instead of an A, or worse, you would be investigated for racism or sexism when students thought you were being unfair to them; the teacher hates me because I am a woman, gay, Hispanic, Black, whatever.

Apparently, some of these young people (most) have never been told the truth. They have been raised by parents who treated them like fragile little glass ornaments. Professors without tenure have to consider this because administrators only read the student reviews to evaluate a teacher’s performance- if you give out an F and three D’s, the student evaluation scoring system would alert your Department Chair, in seconds, that you sucked, and she would tell you that you will be unemployed if you get low scores again. Shockingly, students who fail a course don’t rate their teachers highly. The truth is, for them, they failed because they had a shitty teacher. Not because they got double high all weekend during a couple of all-night Magic: The Gathering sessions, or some other equally stupid shit, and didn’t complete their assignments. This could possibly be the root cause of the decline of Western civilization, and the most obvious explanation for grade inflation in the academy.

“When you want to help someone, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, tell them what they want to hear.” Thomas Sowell

That quote has rung like a bell in my mind for almost two decades now; it affects almost all of my human-to-human connections. If you need an example, listen to the President say anything. He is simply telling people what he thinks they want to hear. That’s the whole trick to politics; there you all have a political science degree now. A decent film school education will include a screening of Kurosawa's Rashomon. Made in 1950 and set in medieval Japan, it explores the many different perspectives on a rape and murder in the woods. Truth and who is telling it, and who isn’t, is the basis of storytelling.

The Glenn Show

I asked Glenn Loury to see if he would host a debate with Sabby, giving her an opportunity to defend her work. After all, she uses the “Film By” credit; she has taken authorship, you hanging out in my world now. And in my world, there are people who get their paychecks by criticizing the films you make. It’s also normal in the academic world to make a statement, write a paper, and then defend it against one’s peers. That promotes rigorous attention to improving the work. We call it peer review.

Her “people” responded to Pop:

Her people just said “Bye, Felicia” to Glenn “Whoop Ass” Loury himself. And then they added a little sauce at the end, pointed at me, real personal like. Is she saying that if we show clips from her film, she or “they” will copyright-strike it? Is she planning to copyright strike a muthafucka? How do you go about that when you put a Fair Use Disclaimer in the description of your own work as published on YouTube? Fair use is great for me, but not for you? Is that what you mean? Hilarious. Guess I’m about to find out what she means by that.

Here is the thing: the difference between a documentary and propaganda is the selection or manipulation of evidence to produce a predetermined conclusion while suppressing all the inconvenient facts and details. Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece “Olympia” features Aryan supermen athletes doing their athlete thing, but it never gives you the whole story- Jesse Owens running his ashy feet up and down the track, dusting the Aryan supermen. Propaganda is telling people what they want to hear, not the truth. Propaganda creates feelings; it doesn’t deal with facts. Here is the thing about the truth: it is a moving target. Especially over generational time spans. What was true in 1975 may no longer be true today. Does that mean we keep repeating the 1975 truth, despite the obvious 2026 truth? How would my grandfather, Big Dad, react to today’s world? I think he would be stunned by the sheer size and scale of Black America’s societal victory, and disgusted by the media, music, and consumerism we practice with vengeance. I never saw him shed a tear, but I bet if he saw the Roxbury we redeveloped, that big bear of a man would at least get a little misty in the eye.

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Revolutions eat their children.

Big Dad used to say that people “act like crabs in a bucket”. Just when a crab has climbed its way to the top of the bucket, another crab, trying to escape as well, reaches up and pulls the first crab back down. He would also say “crabs in a bucket” to describe folks who made it out of poverty but didn’t reach back to lend a hand to the folks still in the bucket. After the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960’s and policies like Affirmative Action, which also encouraged private and government contracts for black entrepreneurs, I can think of many black Bostonians who made the most of this moment in history. The Inkwell crowd. The Guscotts, Redds, Taylor the chicken man, and most visibly, the Cruz family. No family took greater advantage of the newly available opportunities than the Cruz family and its descendants.

“Let some people get rich first” is a famous policy and philosophy introduced by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and 1980s to jump-start China’s stagnant socialist economy. Kinda the same thing Nixon told the black community around the same time; he probably used the n-word, though. We should check the tapes.

Through public contracts and savvy business acumen, John Cruz, who had inherited his father's company, and his son, Danny, built a powerful construction and real estate operation. They built over 3000 housing units and manage 1,300 apartment units. A powerful Black-owned capitalist enterprise. The Trump Family of Roxbury. This also supports my thesis that it takes three generations to actually create generational wealth. I talk about that in my book, Let’s Try Capitalism.

When I started developing property in the 1990s, I made friends with other landlords and small developers who were also trying to rebuild properties in Roxbury's Highland Park neighborhood. Carl Hyman was busy, and so was Darrel Settles, and we all lived within walking distance of each other. That’s also how I got to know Gloria and Scott Webster. I was redeveloping a mixed-use property at 227 Roxbury St, with six apartments and three commercial units, and Scott was working on the corner building, 291 Roxbury St., across the street from the community college, which he developed into a community cafe with an apartment upstairs for his family and his office in the basement under the restaurant. Together, we would pick up trash and litter along the street. We would weed-whack the lot that would eventually become Jeep Jones Park. We were the neighborhood watch. He introduced me to the perfection that is the first-generation Toyota Tacoma truck.

Scott and I marveled at the multistory building that Cruz Construction built and managed, which towered over our neighborhood, silently mocking us into doing better. Dr. Claude Anderson, the godfather of black capitalism, once said something to the effect of “You won’t find more than a handful of black investors who own a building over four stories.” That was like a challenge to Scott and me, and in Boston, that was very true. In our sub-neighborhood, Eliot Square, there is one such man. John Cruz. If he could do it, we thought we could too.

I was going to build my condo project at Lambert Ave, and the Websters were going to tear down their building and replace it with a seven-story, 40-plus-unit apartment building. It never occurred to us that our community would block us. We grew up with them, mowed their lawns, helped shovel out their parking spaces for Christ's sake. Scott and Gloria, unlike Patti and me, stuck to their guns: they commissioned architectural drawings, developed a plan, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. They secured the blessings of the Mayor’s office and the Redevelopment Authority. They survived through the neighborhood using the “save black history” movement when he was before the Historic District Commission. Keep in mind, full disclosure, that Scott and Gloria are like Patti and me’s older siblings. We are close and have been for twenty years. Scott is in his late sixties, and Gloria is in her early seventies; this project is everything to them. Their past, present, and future.

I have already discussed what happened to me. I was run out of town and lost a whole heap of dollars.

In 2022, the Websters’ project came before community review. In front of many of the same people featured in Removed. John Cruz (not featured in Removed) lambasted the project, stating he would never support a project like this: “Scott is trying to put ten pounds of crap into a one-pound bag.” He was, shall we say, vociferous in his opposition to support his gatekeeping. A crab pushing the next crab back down into the bucket. I was kind of shook; why would he do that? I was at that same community Zoom meeting when, at one point, he just yelled out, “I will sue!” I really hope that was dementia or some medical shit talking. Why is he, the great capitalist of Neighborhood, allied with the socialists on this? It sucks when you find out your hero and role model thinks your project is a bag of crap. Really does. And why the fuck is Angela Cook actively trying to stop a black family from building a building after she herself developed nearly an entire city block of properties for her school? WTF, Angie. Somehow down the line we traded our heroes for a ghost.

And then I saw Sabby Sab’s Removed, and lo and behold, at minute 24:36, she brings up my friends' project on Roxbury St.

Here are the Websters in their own words, with a little context in the form of text commentary from me with a Fair Use disclaimer implied:

These are smart people, and in the video Scott seems to be on to some shit that the big think tank muckety-mucks need to listen to:

He doesn’t say it directly, but it seems to me that the Democratic Socialist movement is really the political arm of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, in the same way the Republicans are the political arm of the think tanks funded by the Oligarchs. For nonprofits to be good, then for-profit must be bad. Some Americans are positive towards socialism because they live in a world where non-profit grocery stores and housing corporations do what the free market would handle in a normally functioning community. That shit is deep.

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What happens when revolutions succeed?

Here is something I have been thinking about: what happens when a revolution or a movement actually works? We spend a shitload of time talking about failed revolutions and pretending it is still 1965, 1975, 1985, etc. Apparently, successful revolutions are more complicated. The Civil Rights Movement worked; laws and minds were changed. There, I said it. Don’t send me an email.

Of course, racism still exists. There are still poor Black people, and Lord knows there are poor white people and Hispanics too. Poverty is, after all, the human condition. Always has been. There are still shitty schools and shitty neighborhoods and all the other things people can point at and say, “See, nothing has changed.” But come on, let’s be real, at least with ourselves a little bit. A lot has changed. Big Dad was born into an America in 1919 where Black people were legally prevented from doing all kinds of things that I have spent much of my life doing without giving it much thought. He lived long enough to watch some of those walls come down. We, his children and grandchildren, gingerly stepped over the rubble and now live in an unimaginable world- this would be Big Dad’s Dreamland.

And isn’t that the whole fucking point after all?

Something weird happens when a revolution or movement succeeds, and the Republic changes its laws. The revolution becomes an institution. The people marching outside the building eventually get offices inside the building. A nonprofit is started. The lucky and connected get a government contract and become rich. Somebody gets elected. Somebody gets tenure. There are conferences. There are grants and, of course, community meetings. Eventually, there is a Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator earning $137,000 a year with excellent health and dental insurance who makes everyone attend training sessions both in person and online.

What happens to all those people if the problem gets solved? Can the institution pivot to survive? Nobody starts an organization with the mission statement: “Our goal is to make sure nobody needs us ten years from now.” That would be a terrible business model even for a non-profit. Institutions survive by continuing to do whatever it is institutions do. Colleges need people to teach. A homeless organization needs homelessness to justify its existence. An anti-racism organization needs racism. Churches need sinners. A neighborhood organization needs a neighborhood to protect. That doesn’t mean anybody actually gets up in the morning thinking, How can I keep this problem going so I can make my mortgage payment? That’s foolish talk. I’m talking about institutions, not evil people twirling their mustaches. Institutions want to survive. Human beings are human beings. Rent is due on the first. That is what I think Scott was getting at when he talked about the Non-Profit mindset.

The first guy fights his way through the door. The second dude follows him inside. Eventually there are enough people inside that somebody gets put in charge of keeping the fucking door closed. Which is our current immigration policy as well. I always understood Big Dad’s crabs-in-a-bucket thing as poor people pulling down another poor person who was trying to escape. That’s how I pictured it in my head since I was a kid: a bunch of crabs at the bottom of a galvanized bucket climbing over each other. It never occurred to me that one of the crabs might already be sitting on top of the bucket, pushing everyone else back down, not lending a hand to those left in the bucket.

John Cruz represents exactly the kind of success Big Dad’s generation wanted to create. A Black man who builds a construction company, gets government contracts, owns buildings, employs people, creates wealth, and passes something substantial down to his children. The Generational Wealth blueprint. Scott and Gloria want to build a building in the neighborhood where they were born. Scott is pushing seventy. Gloria is already there. This isn’t some private-equity company from New York or even Brookline trying to squeeze another six percent return out of Roxbury. This is their retirement. Their kids’ inheritance. Their little piece of the American capitalist dream. And now the Black capitalist who already made it through the door is standing with the socialists, telling them the building is too big: make it smaller and less profitable. Somehow, Sabby Sabs uses them, the Websters, of all people, in her propaganda without giving them a voice. Hits different when you see the Websters- those mean, old, profit-seeking developers, doesn’t it? She published their street address in her film- she knew how to find them, knock on the fucking door.

Seriously. What in the name of Booker T. Washington’s ghost is going on here!?!?

You just can’t make this shit up. The revolution doesn’t end. It can’t. It becomes part of the place like the stinky wallpaper on the walls. The organizations created to fight the old world remain after the world changes. The language stays the same. The villains stay the same. The stories stay the same. The truth from the past doesn't become a lie, but insisting that yesterday's truth still describes today's world can become one. In fact, pretending nothing changed seems insulting to Big Dad and his generation. Those people went through some shit. They fought. They voted. They marched. They bought houses when they could. Started businesses and continued businesses. They sent their kids to college. They forced the Republic to change its laws.

If Big Dad were here with me, he would look at me and I him, he would shake his head and say it in his deep baritone, 1920’s Carolina-accented voice:

“Son, dats jus crabs inna bucket.”

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Part one:

Part 2:

My parents were theater people, and I was raised in the small and sometimes large theaters of the greater Boston area. As a teenager, I was technical directing a show at Symphony Hall. I was headset-connected to a small posse of old-school union stagehands and lamp operators, and at the end of the last show, they pulled a Boston-style hazing on me, thick 1980s Boston-accented Irish union men through the headsets. “Jimmy, did you hear that little squeaky rat telling you to filter your spot?” “That’s what that is? Someone taught a f-n rodent how to speak English, and somehow it got a job at Symphony f-n Hall!?” It was grand. I felt like Doogie Howser coaching an NFL team and getting the Gatorade cooler dumped over my head after winning the championship.

To understand me, you need to know that I have been in “show business” and the academy for a long time, my entire life. But I don’t actually want to be in “show business” or deep in the academy ever again; I just want to make and produce “shows.” I want to divorce myself from the actual economics of it, but I am also a capitalist, and I find making money fun in itself and, unfortunately, validating. I don’t want to make art for commercial purposes, but I do like it when the art is commercially successful. My wife calls me sick and conflicted, and she thinks I do stupid things, not that I am actually stupid, but I do stupid things. And she is right.

I decided to do what any creative GenX black dude, with some means, would do. I started a record label.

Fat Squirrel Records

I have been following this young thinker, Joel Gouvieia, thank you, Substack algorithm for serving him up:

“The Artist Economy is where I work through what’s happening — the economics, the structural failures, and the frameworks that work in a system designed to extract value from artists.”

His articles made me think: what if I were to build an entertainment company that allowed me to scratch my own multiple creative itches while creating value for instead of from the artists I respect and love? That would be something. After all, what does a Gen X man actually do with their time and money when he’s pushing sixty? I’m too scared to ride a skateboard these days; my buddy, who is younger than me, just dislocated his hip while riding his electric bicycle. This getting-old shit is real. I am at that age that I seem to injure myself getting out of bed. Everyone says, “Why don’t you travel?” I am usually miserable traveling; my close cousins David and Deb love to travel, they go all over the place, but I did too much of that as a commercial media maker to find that shit fun in me old age. Feels like work to me. But I do feel a strong primal urge to create songs and tell stories, while relearning and growing as an artist and storyteller. I just want to make things with what I have around me, a bit like being in an improv theater company, I think.

Many years ago, I interviewed Yoko Ono, and while we were discussing how to get the Kinks back together, she told me: ‘You need a project, a project is good.’ To get this project off the ground, Patti and I wanted to create an old-school singing group. Something for all our artists to bring to life together. We signed three singers, people we have known for decades, whose art has inspired us and made our lives better. My son Charles Brandon Burrell (see his latest video for his song Seven Reasons, at the bottom of that previous article). Jae Simms of the band Rubikon and his heavy-metal persona, Unkl Sham. I have always loved heavy music, and his talent is infectious. We also signed our super close friend, who has been Patti's and my big sister, the incomparable Ingrid Chavez. Together, we are the Landlords, bringing to life the music Patti and I have been writing in the living room for the past thirty years. These folks are our friends and family; we want to give back to them and nurture their personal creativity as well, so we decided to shoot videos and create other media content for their projects and to begin exploring publicity plans as we figure out how to help artists become financially sustainable without losing too much money in the process.

What does a record label do today anyway? Joel’s article “The Death of the Record Deal” got me thinking. In his article, he argues that everything a record company did in the past can now be done more cheaply and independently, and I think he is right. Seems to me that traditional record companies hire people like my former students and me to create content that they give to publicity people to push to playlists, other gatekeepers, and consumers. Doesn’t sound like rocket science exactly, and making lots of content sounds like a lot of fun to people like Patti and me.

Patti and I set a $2,700-per-day budget for 14 shooting days to test how much content we could produce and at what quality level. I know $2,700 per day seems like a lot of money, and it is, but in the world of media production, that is the catering budget on a shitty Netflix show. Our goal is to create a large number of media assets in a short period of time, keeping the per-asset cost low enough to be recouped. Setting financial limits is important; when Coppola did something similar in his old age, making Megalopolis, he put something like $120 million of his own money into the damn thing, and I ain’t got those kinda means anyway. I needed to structure this production around old people shooting days, I think our longest day was ten hours at most. I wanted to work at a pace that felt comfortable and not end up in the hospital or something. I also wanted to get the kinks out of the studio, test all my new equipment and capabilities, experiment with establishing a signature “look”, and take as much personal control over it as possible.

Having said all that, I recognize that I work in a collaborative art form and couldn’t have done it without my killer team. Probably the best squad Patti and I have ever had: Missy Allard, Max Beebe, Peter Flynn, Lenny Frazier, Josh Spruill, Mary Winzer, Ben Kilanski, Ralph Griswold, Kristina Ellery, Nerrissa Scott, Cody Whitney (aka Cody 2), Cody Hall (aka Cody 5), and my new project, Cameron Paul (aka Pogo).

A little glimpse at the fun:

No production plan survives in its entirety, but I think we got eight music videos, wrote and recorded a song from a hook and chorus Ingrid brought, and dozens of vertical and short-form videos and still images. In an attempt to explain to Patti why this was actually a prudent investment, I came up with this perfect yet still wackadoodle financial justification. “You see, Patti, if we spent $40k on ATT stock, it would only return $1700 per year, and I bet those eight videos combined can make us $1700 a year as well. Certainly a lot more fun, right? So, Patti, this is actually the greatest GenX retirement plan ever!”

She blinked a few times and returned her attention to her knitting project. This is what happens when old people are left unsupervised. We make things because we can, and we’re not dead yet.

Post Script

Here are some ungraded screenshots from the shoot for Unkl Sham, which Ingrid Chavez directed with masterful precision. It is always fun to work with a character that scares the shit out of you, just looking at him in costume and makeup made my spine shiver. And I finally got a cameo, unless it gets cut out again.

And here is a gallery of a few of the screen grabs from Ingrid’s shoot. That woman is super creative, connecting at a higher level.

The Afritocracy

On a recent episode of the Glenn Show, Glenn Loury had a conversation with Delano Squires. Delano is a something or other at the Heritage Foundation- yes, the people behind Project 2025. And of course, Glenn is an Ivy League double muckety-muck something-or-other, currently at the Hoover Institution. Delano came up with the term Afritocracy to describe the elite of the Black American community, the five P’s of the community, actually any community or country, for that matter. Notice how writers are not on this list at all (just saying):

• Politicians

• Pundits

• Professors

• Performers

• Preachers

It’s accurate for all Americans, and a clever reframing for a Black Audience, not that groundbreaking, but funny. Afritocracy does have a good ring to it. My pal Nadine calls these same people the “Glitterati”, which I think is still a better descriptor, indicating a certain level of vapidity. I grew up glitterati adjacent, and I hate when the professors, the smart types, do an epic job of explaining a problem, but their solutions make me say to myself, “Huh?” One of Delano’s solutions involves the church; I don’t know exactly what it is, but the church? This isn’t 1965; we have something called the internet now. Even the Hawk Tua girl has more moral influence than pastor TD Jakes, just saying, let alone the current masters of the universe, like the Ellison family.

The High Priests of the Twenty-First Century

On the first day of film directing class, the first question I asked my undergrad students was a simple one: “How many of you have been to a religious service in the past 30 days?” The answer is almost always zero or one time because there was a funeral. I then ask, “How many movies have you seen in the last 30 days?” Now granted, it is film school, but young people are young people, and they always answer around six to twelve movies. If I allow for Netflix, Hulu, TikTok, YouTube, etc., then the number balloons to over 40 hours over a seven-day week, like it is practically these little muthafucka’s full-time jobs. I then explain to them that they are the future High Priests of humanity, now and forever. Our society and culture depend on them. They are not at film school; they are at 21st-century wizard school: we have power over time and space. 150 years ago, we filmmakers would have been preachers, painters, composers, etc; 3000 years ago, we media makers would have been leading the prayers for the dead under the Sphinx. 10,000 years ago, we media makers would have been the dudes making cave paintings about the greatest hunt ever! So what influence does the church have over our culture today? Answer: not much. We media makers are the moral teachers and the primary “influencer” of the 21st century; in this battle, churches are bringing a knife to a gunfight. Think “the sword fight” in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The problem for media makers in a capitalist society is that we know that visceral things, things that affect our reptilian brain, make the most money. Things that keep them scrolling, clicking, and surrendering their disbelief. When I was in Hollywood editing the movie Body Count, my William Morris agents had thought it would be a good idea for me to be friends with their other clients. Hollywood is a “Who you know business”; that is their job: to get all their clients working together so that they get a 10% cut of all the money. I mean of ALL the money, also known as the packaging fee. The agent/middleman always makes the most in any economic system.

So there I was, the 26-year-old Masshole (not yet fully jaded though), with instructions from my agents to befriend Brett Ratner. Brett was cutting Money Talks, and his office was right across the street from mine; it made sense from a business perspective. Get in with the high priests- Russell and Brett, and have my career take off.

“Doesn’t Test Well.” ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

So picture the scene: It is 1996, I am in a nondescript office, Sunset Boulevard humming below us, and I’m watching the rough assemblies of Money Talks with Brett; and the shit is legit funny. I'm impressed with his footage, but it feels like a live-action cartoon, Chris Tucker making jigaboo faces for the laughs. I tried to laugh at the right spots. That's when Russell Simmons and his people bust into the room with sandwiches, snacks, Snapples, and shit. They started chatting and talked about things I have nothing to contribute to. Dinner reservations, which women they were inviting, and which hip-hop artist was coming, to make them look good with aforementioned women. I am a bookish, black kid that thought going to the library and reading with a girl was the best date ever. Finding meaning within a Mamet monologue was something I could talk about. I could talk about James Baldwin's writing, and I had been engaged to Patti for a year or two by then; I didn’t have anything to say about locker-room stuff. I was not on the same wavelength as these Masters of the Universe. Thinking my “Hollywood” career is on the line; I am in the room with the President of Def Jam Records and his protege, my contemporary, Brett Ratner, eating fancy LA sandwiches, and I have nothing to add to the conversation. This is your shot, kid. Gotta take the shot. There I am, food stuck in my mouth, can barely swallow, nothing to say, just watching these two “thought leaders” talk about what my Grandfather would describe as “nothing”.

After a few deep calming internal whoosahs, I finally jumped in with a question to try to get myself into the conversation: “Hey Russ, how come we don’t hear more Digable Planets and Tribe Called Quest? I love that jazzy, moody hip hop.” I asked. Without looking up from his frufru LA sandwich, he said: “Doesn’t test well.” The most deflating three-word answer I could have ever imagined, because what tests well is violence, mayhem and terror. Sex sells too, and so does Democratic Socialism, but I digress.

Some months earlier, Patti and I had gone through “testing” of our film Squeeze. We watched as a Bronx Co-op City audience laughed at the film in all the wrong places. The testing sheets that came back said I had made the corniest, worst film of all time. After that, Harvey Weinstein was dismissive: never took my call again. Refused to honor the multi-picture deal I had signed with Miramax six months earlier, holding up payment of the money he had already agreed to pay. I remember hearing from an agent or a lawyer that he was embarrassed he ever signed me. Hearing Russell Simmons saying the same thing as Harvey: “It didn’t test well” meant I was never going to have the Hollywood career and those dreams were indeed chimeras. Better to fail quickly, then die a slow death. I was still a filmmaker, but an independent one. For an accurate look at that world, people and those times, check out the movie Overnight. I always screened with my Seniors, before they ventured of Los Angeles.

Patti and I had rented a house in the hills of Los Feliz, we had a full mattress on the floor, some books, and two dogs (can’t have a gun in California). As we lay on the mattresses, cuddled by the Rottweilers, all of us staring up at the ceiling, I told her what had happened. I told her I wouldn’t be able to make friends with these people. I told her that the stories I wanted to tell would never find an audience. I told her in the Money Talks footage I could hear Brett, off-screen, directing Chris Tucker, saying “Bigger Eyes- wider!” I can’t do that. Even the premise of Money Talks was distasteful to me. I just didn’t have what it takes in me to do what I would need to do to make it work. This Hollywood thing wasn’t gonna work out for us. My Dad was right; I can’t make stuff with Black men in a dress. It felt a little like I was telling my future wife I lost all the money at the dog track, as her Dad told her Mom over and over again during her childhood back in Spanish Harlem. I was trying to tell her this is her chance to move on and find a better man. My ride-or-die said, “I think we should go home.” Alejandra was born 18 months later.

Rebranding the (Black) American Father

Back to Scene: media-making in 2026, I want to use what’s left of my storytelling power differently. I want to make media that subverts the mainstream, “the professional,” and the “successful.” This year I have a sense of fulfillment, making things that express my feelings about Gaza, and then there was the song we just did about the rural America we live in. Being a creator of any kind is what it means to be human. When I work with music and visual images, I feel calm and relaxed. Confusion is my happy place. As expected, our Gaza video has a mere 250 views; my rural black-and-white libertarian economics video has 800 views. My compulsion to make things is no longer connected to making money; the validation is nice, though.

One thing that is universal at the think tanks that I am distantly exposed to- Hoover, Heritage, and Cato- is that they spend a long time thinking about the American Family and creating prescriptions that won’t work from jump. Most of them believe that Christianity is somehow part of that mix. Our republic is secular, but the think tanks that develop its policies are not. I want to rebrand fatherhood and the patriarchy (Trusteeship) in this process a little bit, at least express what it is like for me to be an American Dad. Patti wrote a song with Brandon, a man who has seven kids with four different women.

Patti: “Being married to a black man, it always pisses me off how they are portrayed even to each other. Black men should be celebrated. Children are a blessing, and if a black man has seven children, he is blessed. Let’s hear their stories and give them a voice. Their stories will get us all closer to the truth. The story isn’t deadbeat dads and criminals; it is what they go through, and it isn't what you see in the media.”

Well, here we go again, making media we know will never “test well”. Media that no one really asked for either. I have probably made some “corny shit”, but I might have been subtle enough to sneak my message through. In this new age, I hope people make media that expresses some humanity, is at least real to themselves, and, hopefully, inspires others to contribute their own real stories. Looking forward to your reaction; remember, this is only for my subscribers here on the stack. Please don’t download and share it without asking me first.

Seven Reasons to Live, by Charles B. Burrell

The crew was me, Patti, and my friend and collaborator of thirty years, the great and lovable Ralph Griswold. We used cheap DJI Osmo 3 cameras set to auto-everything, shot it in my favorite house, and kept it moving as old people do. Edited by Matt Willson.

Written and produced by me, Patti, and Brandon, my adopted son. Copyright: Fat Squirrel Records 2026

Epilogue

"In the end, the universe tends to unfold as it should." Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Holy Shit! Thank God I didn’t spend my working life with those fucking people!

I come from a long line of extremely judgmental and petty people. That’s what we do. It is documented in all our family bibles, and as Big Dad used to say: “What goes around comes around.” And boy did that shit come back around. I have giggled with impish delight for years, following Harvey Weinstein going from court to court and jail to jail. I have shaken my head, my lips pursed like my grandmother's, every time I read that Russell Simmons is being sued by another victim while he hides out on the other side of the world. Can there be anything more hilarious than the exiled Brett Ratner making the Melania Trump movie so he could come back to America from his hiding place in Israel? Not to me. The ancestors and I have alerts on our phones just so we can get a good laugh every couple of weeks when the next news alert dings. Did I mention how much I truly enjoy the image of Harvey Weinstein in a wheelchair with handcuffs on? I really enjoy that picture. Alejandra said I was being “extra” when I started to make it my computer’s screen saver, so I didn’t, but I wanted to. I have shared it here with you:

My German-American brothers have a word for this: Schadenfreude. It perfectly describes how I feel: “The feeling of joy, pleasure, or satisfaction derived from seeing or learning about another person's misfortune, failure, or humiliation.”

Someday, remind me to tell you the Harvey Weinstein pimple-popping story.

Post Script

When I think back on the late 1990’s and I ask myself how did I make it through those ups and downs, and still find my way? Pretty simple actually, I had a mentor. My Dad. The man that adopted me when I seven years old. The man that put up with my shit. The man that listened to my crazy ideas. The College professor that made art without compromise. During the summer and the weekends that is, he had to get the check to buy us health insurance. I just became more like my Dad thats all. They key to a better future is to make it cool to adopt people, no matter what their age is or you share DNA or not. Thats why I call Glenn Loury Pop. Even old guys like me need really old guys to adopt them too.

Therefore, I have changed the terminology of my role in the family from Patriarch to Trustee; take the gender out of it so my women people can hear the words actually coming out of my mouth. My family is disproportionately female, I have had to adjust with the times and the growth of the language so I can reasonably get along with the rest of them. Adapt to the new world. Adapt to the new world. Said over and over to myself like a Hail Mary for a catholic. Incidentally, I have also changed my real estate identity from “Landlord” to “Housing Provider," and now “Host”, which makes me seem a little warmer.

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In my experience, being a trustee has been a little like being a cat herder. Relatively straightforward, but not easy at all. Manage the present and prepare for the future, seven generations into the future. Obsess about the basics- food, shelter, education, well-being, protection, and healthcare. Plan and provide for that shit well and in that order, and you are a good Trustee. Coincidentally, these are the same things some of us want the government to do for us. SMH, that seems insane to me; those government people are terrible at everything, except for blowing up shit around the world. They are very good at that.

In March, I woke up in a cold sweat, like I was Rob on The Dick Van Dyke Show, hyperventilating and shit. Yahya Sinwar and Gavrilo Princip have played the same role in history, and the resource/oil wars had already begun! That muthafucka even got “war” in his name. I am a terrible Trustee because I have done nothing to prepare the family for life during a time of war, and this war hits different. This one will affect us all. We won’t be able to pretend it doesn’t exist for very long, as we do with conflicts around the world that don’t impact us.

I feel empathy and sympathy in my daily life; it’s what makes a human-zee a human-zee (proper term IMO, derived from Jared Diamond). I have felt great sympathy for the hundreds of trustees who couldn’t protect their families on October 7th, and intense sympathy for the thousands of trustees in Gaza who can’t feed, house, educate, or provide healthcare for their families. I can’t imagine how devastating it must be for a trustee working under those conditions. Before I asked Patti to marry me, I asked her if she would live in a tent with me, if we ever had to. She said yes. Thirty-something years later, Patti and I wrote a song which we call Under a Tent:

Like I said though, I got most of this Trustee shit on smash and set for a generation or two:

• Housing: Done, mortgages paid. Yes, you read that right it is plural.

• Transportation: Hybrid Vehicles paid for.

• Energy: Solar power systems engineered and on my construction list. Firewood stashed up.

• Education: Kids student loans paid off.

• Healthcare: Got fucked by the big beautiful bill, but we manage. Don’t get me started on that.

• Food: I don’t have any control over that at all in a shortage. Wait what? Scratch the record.

I can’t live with out poultry

When I think of a time of war I think about shortages, and one thing I can’t live with out is chicken. This is not exclusive to just us black people, I know y’all eat a bunch of chicken too, so stop fronting. Some of you even eat Chic Fil A chicken, whatever the fuck that shit is. I am serious about poultry. I eat all types of eggs, I eat turkeys, ducks, chickens, if it is a bird I will cook that muthafucka up. I eat fish too, and sea bugs(shellfish). Pigs, cows, goats and sheep, but my primary protein is poultry. So it is written, so it shall be done.

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Me and Patti have been homesteading on and off for twenty years now, both in a Urban setting as well as the Appalachian hill country we live in today. I have heard my wife humming the theme to Green Acres under her breath while weeding our gardens, initially as a coping mechanism I think, she’s from Manhattan. But for the past few years we have had money and we were busy creating more money, so we hadn’t sown a kitchen garden or raised small livestock. When I woke up from that nightmare that had to change. Check out my first article on this: Winter is coming, and money is worthless during a chicken shortage.

My ace boon coon, my ride or die jumped into action. Patti loves garden centers, farm stores, she even buys clothing accessories at Tractor Supply.

As it has been done since the dawn of agriculture there is a division of labor, this is what Patti do

:

• Buys plants. She loves to buy plants.

• Buys the birds, this season we are doing 80 chickens and 2 turkeys. It was originally 4 turkeys, but that didn’t work out so much, and there were no ducks or geese available. The chickens come 20 every six weeks.

• Plants the garden.

• Weeds the garden.

• Feeds the birds.

• Harvest the produce.

• Make the salads

This is what me and Brandon do:

• Build the garden beds and the soil.

• Build and move the livestock cages across the garden.

• Set up irrigation systems.

• Get the birds processed and preserved.

• Cook the birds, any style or recipe, with a 24 hour notice.

• Take out the trash.

I would like to recognize the elephant in the room here, that is, raising animals to eat them. These animals are not pets. The first year we raised our own protein, my daughter Alejandra and my Grandmother refused to eat the birds we had raised. Whiny voice: “They knew those birds.” No matter how much a tried to use logic to convince them raising birds ourselves in humane conditions, birds living on grass, was a better way to live for us then eating government controlled, over processed, factory farmed food. When Patti and I told them it tasted better, they still wouldn’t touch their plates. They weren’t having it, and that is when I started naming them. Not friendly names, accurate and truthful names. My turkey’s are named Christmas, Passover, Thanksgiving and Sandwich. My ducks had names like L’orange and Peking. I got tons of names for my chickens: Wine Sauce, Fried, Adobo, Rotisserie, Kung Pow etc.

This is how we live:

In a thousand years the latin name for my families particular subspecies will be: Homoamericanus Negroensis-Hispanicus-Batavi et Bougieasfuck. That’s right, no lie and no cap, we are bougie, probably even double bougie if there is a scale for bougie. We eat like billionaires do, Jeff and Elon got nothing on us. Don’t look at all further if rich ass, arty, crafty, whimsical, hippie like bougie people offend you. Haters, you have been warned.

For my birthday in 2023, Trustee Day as I make everyone call it, I was planning on building an outdoor kitchen when it hit me. I didn’t want an outdoor kitchen, I wanted a food truck, after all I first learned about pricing, market dynamics and slicing onions as a teenager outside of Gate B at Fenway. After Patti bought me the food truck and we got it into place, I decided I needed an entire Food Pavilion, so I added a barbecue pit with wood fired bread and pizza ovens. I also added in a bar. As Kanye says, “I’m dope, and I do dope shit.”

Epilogue

Reminder: I am a kid of the the 1970’ and 80s, and my Food Truck must include a Ron Popeil- RonCo- Rotisserie Chicken machine.

I can remember waking up, a broke ass, half drunk film student, finding the television on and drool all over my chin. I had been listening to a two hour informercial for the Ron-Co Chicken maker. Dreams do come true.

We have fryolaters too:

Until this past holiday, I had never been to a July 4th cookout hosted by white people. Never happened. Why would I? I am from a large black family, and I always have solid cookout choices. I could go to Mike Janey’s house; he and Denise had a swimming pool, or roll over to Dudley Street for a Jerk Caribbean adventure. No matter where I went, I knew the food was gonna be great. I was raised to consider white people similar to us but different. I have nothing against white folk; I have to come to understand that people are people, that their cultural heritage is secondary to their humanity, and I have tried to follow the American ideals of the Declaration of Independence in my daily life—All Men are Created Equal, especially on July 4th, when we celebrate the document with a national holiday. I judge people based on the content of their character, not their skin color. I wanted to confirm and potentially debunk some of the stereotypes, play a little game of “racial mythbusters,” so to speak, while using the opportunity to be like my mother and grandmother, judgmental.

The Fourth of July- 2026

The day before the event, I had participated in a discussion on the Glenn Show about July 4th, and during that show, Glenn asked Mark Sussman and me the same question: “What does the 4th of July mean to you?” To me, it was always a celebration of independence, an attack on Tyranny and power. Something I have always celebrated. When I was a child, my Dad required my brother and me to declaim Douglass’s “What is the 4th of July to a Slave?” which always pointed out the document's blatant hypocrisy. Dad would play Ossie Davis’s version of the speech on vinyl, with hisses and pops, making it feel like the ancient testament it is.

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Regardless of the hypocrisy behind the holiday, the Patton, Spruill, and Janey Clans that I descend from take that particular holiday seriously, kind of like an outdoor, summertime Thanksgiving celebration. The solemn duty of the menfolk is to make the meat fall from the bones and be properly spiced - delicious, juicy meats, with house-made sauces to bring the flavors to the peak of mouthfeel perfection. Even the starting of the fires is taken seriously and judged by all the other men standing around. Other family members (women and children) brought desserts and sides, such as potato salad, sweet potato pie, and sometimes even apple pie. I can remember vividly my Cousin/Uncle Danny making the ice cream to go with the pies, grinding that churn, and checking his salt levels.

These events are full of judgments made by judgmental people. It was the best of times. “The ribs are so tender.” Aunt Muriel would say. “Did you try Kim’s Potato Salad?” Aunt Horty would ask. “Sweet Lord Jesus, these chicken wings are amazing!” Aunt Rita would declaim. Any invoking of the Lord's name was considered the highest praise possible for a plate of food.

After the food and other activities were over and we kids sent to bed, my great-uncles and Aunt Daisy would retreat to the screen house and play poker late into the night, or at least until Aunt Daisy had cleaned them all out and went to bed with a sack of their quarters, dimes, and nickels under her pillow.

My Mother’s Role in all of this.

Forty years ago, when I was a late teenager, Mother had a few things to say about my future life partner, often pondering aloud at her kitchen table, usually with four or five witnesses in attendance. My mother, Lynda Patton, the Black Panther Super Soldier, had said, “If you bring home a white woman, I am going to jump off the back porch!” She lived on the top floor of Big Dad’s triple-decker; she was literally saying she would have to commit seppuku if I did what she had done and procreated with a white person.

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My Mother had me read a lot of Charles Chestnutt's stories as a young teenager to help me understand who I was in America. One of my earliest short films was an adaptation of Charles Chestnutt’s short story “The Doll,” set in a mafia context. Like a character in Chestnutt’s “The House Behind the Cedars”, my mom spent a lot of time worrying about my future marriage, her thinking profoundly impacted by the color line, the racial laws of the day, and the recent past. In the back of her mind, she was terrified that I would abandon being black and pass for white. Passing for white meant abandoning her and everyone else she loved. Alienation was a real possibility.

Back to scene: “Mom! You can’t say that, and I know you don’t really mean it! You have best friends that are white; you're most definitely full of it, Old Lady. My very existence proves that.” I defended. At the time, I was consorting with a lovely Irish American girl whom I had nicknamed “Muffy” for obvious young-adult reasons.

“Robert Alexander,” she always used my first two names when she was at least semi-serious. “I am not saying this for cultural reasons (she was), but for aesthetic reasons. I want honey brown grandchildren; at least try to find someone darker-toned than you.” Clearly, my mother intended to use her grandchildren as fashion accessories. I accepted her wisdom about six years later when I met and married Patti, and it then became settled family policy to try to marry someone darker than yourself for “aesthetic reasons”. This is the policy I pursued and that I thought I had passed down to Alejandra. Yes, we are a light-skinned family: light, bright, and almost white, and we could probably use some more melanin in the future gene pool, but we are Black Americans no matter what we look like. Alejandra, just find someone darker than you, please, like I did.

My first impression, as we pulled into the newly blacktopped driveway, was that they lived exactly as I thought. New black driveway, mowed lawns, no peeling paint or blue tarps visible on the roof. This place looked exactly how the “TV” white people lived. Apple pie nice. American nice. I went into Al and Nick’s apartment and found very little to complain about. There were a few dishes in the sink, nothing outrageous, but the sink should have been emptied by the time the guests arrived; that’s a rule, and I was a guest. A couple of books and some wall art were “stolen” from my collections, but none of my good stuff. Al’s shoe collection seemed to be neatly put away, and they had two black cats. Kitty litter was clean, and there was nothing I could point out that was obviously wrong. And black cats are cool. I was bereft of things to fault…..

The Food

The backyard was as nice and groomed as the front, with a swimming pool full of frolicking little Mexican children, and then I saw Robin on the grill. I’ll circle back to the Mexican children, but a woman cooking outside, let alone on a day like the Fourth of July? What in the name of Frederick Douglass’s ghost is going on here? I felt Patti’s hand on my shoulder, steadying me as the shock passed through my body. Women can and do have the right to do anything that they want in this world. But in all my years, I have never seen a woman willingly grill or cook outside. I thought this was pretty standard for all Americans, even the white ones. Even with my Catholic in-laws, the men do the outdoor cooking. When I was in Kenya, the men cooked outside. Whenever I was in the Caribbean, the men did the outdoor cooking. Down South and out West, the men cook outside. It is just the way it is supposed to be.

Robin must have sensed my surprise and seen the transparent, judgmental look on my face because before I had even gotten to my chair, she was shaking her tongs at me: “Any lip out of you and you're gonna get wet,” pointing to the pool. Spunky, I thought to myself, I like spunky. So I sat my ass down next to the old man of the house, my contemporary, Jeuroon, to try and stay out of trouble for a few minutes. I have had trouble saying this man’s name since I first met him. He is a foreigner, after all; he’s from the Netherlands, and whenever I hear someone say his name, it sounds like they’re saying “Urine” to me. Patti had taught me to pronounce his name on the ride down by saying, “Pretend he’s from India and say his name - Yah Rune.”

To break the ice, I used Glenn Loury’s opener from yesterday’s show, “Yah Rune, what does the fourth of July mean to you?” He pondered it for a moment and said, “Just another Saturday.” A dozen thoughts crushed my mind simultaneously. The fourth of July is when we celebrate our common values, the core statement of our citizenship, for fucks sake. “These truths are self-evident. All men are created equal.” I then thought this was an opportunity for me to think before I actually spoke. I was about to launch into a lecture in my Professor Emeritus voice about American ideals, but I thought better of it and was simple and direct.

“Don’t say that to an ICE agent.”

Knowing he consulted on and worked with computers or some shit, I thought I should pivot and talk about the local area data network I need to set up for the new “FilmShack” I am building. I would love some advice on drives and Wi-Fi networks.

“But you use Apple computers? No good, I would never touch an Apple computer; they never work.” - slight 80’s movie bad guy accent. Like the villain from Beverly Hills Cop.

I sat there, looked at him up and down, thought about it for a second before I asked, “You don’t have a creative bone in your body, do you?”

He smiled, and I shit you not said. “No. I do not.”

I was again momentarily stunned. Even my redneck neighbors in Winchester, New Hampshire are at least a bit creative. Those guys fabricate hot rod cars, build and fire cannons; they do something. But no creativity at all? While pondering such a profound statement, Alejandra presented me with my plate, steak hot off the grill. I observed the cut, sliced it. Nicely cooked, except I couldn’t see any seasoning or crust on the outside at all. Nothing. Not a single black pepper flake. It was my understanding that white people had already adopted spices in their food, certainly by 2026, but here I was faced with an actual cut of meat with no spice on it.

“Robin? Is there any spice at all on this steak?” I asked. “Nope. There is a Cajun rub on the ribs though.” She said. I am Cackalacky-descended, and we rub and brine our pork ribs, then finish them thangs with a molasses-based sauce, back on the grill to burn and caramelize, repeat until perfect. The old dunk and burn. Not gonna lie, I was a little shook by the no-spice thing on the steak and by a Cajun dry rub being used in Massachusetts.

Seeing her father pale and shook, Alejandra immediately pulled out her emergency packet of A1 sauce and her specialty hot sauce from her purse and started doling it out onto my plate. It was at that moment I suddenly felt calm and relaxed. My daughter was going to be okay. She knew who she was, like all her mothers, grandmothers, and aunties, those gone and still present; my daughter had sauces in her purse, direct evidence of her innate blackness. Both A1 sauce and a very good specialty hot sauce. Which meant I was going to be ok too. I wasn’t on a path towards alienation. I thoroughly enjoyed my steak, knowing my daughter was still indeed a grown-ass Black Woman.

I was then joined at the table by a small squad of Mexican children; Nick’s sister had apparently made a family with some Mexican dude. I looked around the table and realized it was up to me to give these children a little lesson in Civics while being brown in America, in case no one told them before.

“If you encounter the police or some government agent, you kids say this: ‘I have a right to remain silent, and you need to call my Aunt Alejandra.’ ”

I had all the children repeat that statement a couple of times, and that’s when Yah Rune stood up and blotted out the sun. I forgot this muthafucka was six foot seven, and when a giant blonde white guy like him stands up, I get scared and I clutched my steak knife and bent my elbow, just in case. I had a brief flash of minor sympathy for the many white women who fearfully crossed the street when my friends and I would be walking by. This guy was scary looking to me; I grew up watching movies and television, where you kill German-looking people on sight (The Rat Patrol, Combat, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc).

To face my fears, I put down my steak knife, stood up, and asked that we take a picture together: Patti, Yah Rune, Robin, and me. As I lined us up for the picture, Robin had the line of the day. “Oh look, he is lining us up in order of oppression.” My smile is genuine.

Epilogue

I slept on what had happened with my future in-laws and found that I still had unanswered questions. I showed my adopted son, Brandon, also a Janey man, the steak I had taken home. He concurred with me on that.

To be fair and balanced in my thinking, I decided to call my friend Jackie O and get her insights on my experience. Jackie is a formidable woman. Irish Catholic, raised on Staten Island, attorney, public defender, and whisky expert.

Jackie O.

“Jack, in your experience, do women cook outside when there are men present? You know, on the grill and such?”

“As I think about it, that was one of the reasons I got a divorce. My first husband didn’t grill outside, and my Dad came over and found me at the grill. He said, ‘What’s wrong with this f’n guy? He don’t cook outside?’ It actually gave me a little of the ick.”

“What about spices? I have seen posts of your husband Ken’s grill work. It all looks well seasoned. Did you always season your food?”

“We, as a family, have spiced our grilled meats at least since the 1990s. Maybe your in-laws are still first-generation in America.”

Confirmed. Most white Americans now do actually spice their food, but since my future in-laws are still Northern European immigrants, that part of our American culture hasn’t sunk in yet.

David J.

I then sought counsel from my older cousin David. He has the most experience with white in-laws, having married a couple of white women over the years and observing his son Devin’s experience marrying a white woman.

“David, how does one get along with white in-laws?” I asked.

“Well, I have found the key is to simply lower your expectations.”

“About what?”

“Everything. If you go over for dinner, eat before you go. If you look at their books or vinyl music, expect to see some ABBA or Fleetwood Mac and maybe a Tom Clancy novel. Conversations about sports, good. Anything else, not so much. Just lower your expectations, and you will be fine. Over time, they will adapt; they just don’t know what good is. You have to teach them joy. Invite them to your house for holiday meals, show them what flavor is. They will learn over time.”

I found this in the fridge on July 6th. Patti wanted to make me feel a little bit better.

Me and Henry

On September 11, 2002, Patti and I closed on the purchase of 88 Lambert Ave in Highland Park, Roxbury. We set the record purchase price at $400k for a derelict property in the neighborhood. I had been watching the property ever since I was a little kid. It had been the early home and workspace of the Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Henry Hampton and his roommate, local Judge Leslie Harris. When I learned it was for sale, I offered more than the asking price. Years earlier, Henry had politely but firmly told me that I didn’t have the experience to be a director at his company, Blackside Productions, which at the time was producing a PBS series on the blues. Me, not enough experience to direct documentary television on the blues? Me, Robert Patton-Spruill, blood relative of Charlie Patton, Wild Jimmy Spruill, and Robert Johnson? Jeez, Henry, I am the blues, and I was born to work on this project with you! I know I am young, but I can do this! He gave me a signed copy of his book and said a polite version of, "Bye, Felecia.” Great early lesson for me, it still stung, but I needed it.

When we took possession of the 11,000-square-foot property, it was filled floor to ceiling with his life and work. His NAACP, Emmy, and Lifetime Achievement awards, and every file box and pile of media he had collected during his lifetime. We spent the next several months working with his estate, donating his papers to libraries, and selling his car collection. I was allowed to keep a few trophies that were important to me: a few of the original printing plates for the Black Chronicle newspaper, a full set of the Black History comic book series, and, most importantly, his talisman of power, his conference table. The place where his entire creative life centered was his conference table, the same table I sat across from him when he quashed my early filmmaking dreams. Just putting your hand on it, you can feel a creative pulse, a spark from the other side, the life of the trees that it is made from, trees born before the Europeans conquered the continent we live on. I also found his plans to develop a six-story mixed-use building where the garages stood, and I thought they were important for my family’s future.

Living the Dream: Rebuilding Roxbury

Over the next fifteen years, Patti and I invested a million dollars to bring the giant property back to life, expecting to benefit from that investment later. We converted the garages into our company's offices and made a home for our families and dozens of others over the years. We always knew that when we were ready, we would tear down the garages and replace them with apartment or condominium units, the sale of which would allow our descendants to live there for generations to come.

For a decade plus, I thought this was the place I would raise my family, and my grandmother could live out her final years in love and safety. Where my daughter would raise her children. The place where my ashes would be scattered, among the graves of my beloved pets, in the hillside I had planted with fruit trees. The place my great-grandchildren would call home as well.

Together there, Patti and I became gardeners. We turned barren land into gardens and opened said Gardens to tour groups for Discover Roxbury and the kids from the neighboring Timilty school. Our friends got married and celebrated their milestones in our gardens; it was a sanctuary in the middle of the hood.

That was the plan, anyway. Ten years ago today, we began seeking building permits for the project. When completed, we would own the big house, barn, and massive front yard debt-free and make a few million in profit, which we would invest in passive-income-producing stocks, allowing us the freedom to live our best creative lives in economic security. More than doubling our Black family's net worth, generational wealth achieved in three generations, just like my grandfather had planned out in the 1960’s.

It didn’t happen, and my life outlook was permanently changed on everything from politics, capitalism, to racism in America. My neighbors, some of them I had known my entire life, banded together to do everything they could to prevent me from developing the project, using the building permit and zoning process to stop me from building. I couldn’t believe it, I had thought we only prevented White People from developing our neighborhood. It didn’t occur to me that my neighbors, friends, and family would be against me. I remember being stunned at a Historic District commission when the list of signers of the petition against me included my own cousins, whom I had sold the very house they lived in (They later apologized; they thought it was some white folks)! I was shocked, my image with my camera was even on the mural leading into the neighborhood.

The Removal Process

What does this have to do with Sabby Sabb’s documentary “Removed,” which you are asking yourself about now? Well, everything, actually. I was “Removed,” forced to leave the community I was raised in and start over in a strange land they call New Hampshire. In my opinion, one of the people most responsible for my removal, and there were many others, is widely quoted in Sabby’s work, Rodney Singleton. A man, in my opinion, who is personally responsible for the destruction of tens of millions of dollars of black wealth. He is the one who organized the community to appeal to the City’s Historic District Commission to designate my property a historic landmark, thereby preventing its development for profit. He first came up with the scheme to argue that because my house was built for Peter Wainwright (founder of Wainwright Bank) by the architect Bond, it was worthy of historic protection. At the first meeting of the Historic Commission, he showed a slide of a painting of the neighborhood from the eighteen hundreds and claimed that the house depicted in the painting was my house. I shattered that argument before the board, pointing out that the house in the painting could have been one of a dozen houses that looked just like it. You see, Sabby, I did my research, effectively destroyed the argument, and was on my way to getting a variance to build my 12 apartments. A woman in the gallery even loudly hissed “Capitalist!” at me, as I walked back to my seat in smug victory formation.

But then racism happened. The Race Card was pulled on me. Rodney and “them” resubmitted their proposal for Landmark status, this time on the basis that Henry Hampton had lived there, the producer of “Eyes on the Prize.” They ignored the fact that when he worked on those films he was famous for, he did so from brownstones on Shawmut Ave, and actually lived in a downtown high-rise condo, and that for most of his ownership of the property, it was used for his car collection, media and file storage, and as a place for his many girlfriends to stay when they visited him (my man). If a building should be Landmarked for Henry, it is the now fancy condo brownstones on Shawmut Ave, not the building he neglected, which cost me a million to restore. Hell, at least Landmark the building after Patti and me. We actually made movies and media there. We were the ones who saved it from his neglect, but they Landmarked my house for Henry, the house that I had no intentions of demolishing in the first place, but in the end, the garages could be developed in the future, a victory for the next owner, not me or my descendants.

The Battle of Fort Hill:

The great journalist Chris Farone wrote an amazing article at the time, and some of the pictures in this article are taken from it. Check it out if you want more of the nitty-gritty. It’s called sources and research, Sabby.

This is why real estate costs so much to build in many places, not just Boston. To fight the community, comply with zoning, and design, my legal costs would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure the zoning relief I needed to build my 12 new homes. My grandmother, who lived with me, was dying of Alzheimer's, and her medical care had ballooned to $30k a month. I listened to the doctors and caregivers and knew I had lost. At that rate, I could only afford six more months of her care, and I would have exhausted her net worth and most of my retirement plan, too, in less than a year. The decades of wealth building my grandfather had put in place would be exhausted paying for her health care. It was a crushing realization. I knew I couldn’t pay for her care and the six-figure worth of lawyers, architects, and consultants that it would take to win the real estate development fight simultaneously

I surrendered. They won, and I lost, triple bypass surgery a year later, and completely ran out of Boston, removed, so to speak, Ms. Sabby. My grandmother died in a hospital room, not in the bedroom I built for her. I will never have my ashes scattered with my dogs and cats bones on that hillside I planted with fruit trees.

What about the money?

I sold the property to a younger developer who found out the hard way that he was not getting a variance to build one- or two-bedroom apartments cheaply, either. So he did what any developer would do; he got a permit to build “as of right” four units instead of the twelve that would have made sense for affordability and community reasons. It is what I should have done in the first place when I still had the resources to pull it off. I wanted to offer 12 apartments for sale between $400k and $700k, to give people an opportunity to get on the property ladder and meet the needs of the larger community (It sounds ridiculous, but that is actually cheap for Boston). But that isn’t what the “community” actually got, after obstructing me and removing me from Roxbury. The new developer has instead put up four 4,000+ square-foot luxury homes, priced between $1.8 million and $2.2 million, the code allows him to do “as of right”, low-density housing like the community wanted. But who is the buyer for that sort of property? Certainly not the person from the neighborhood trying to get a start and a leg up coming up behind me. The buyer is someone in the top 1-2% of earners! Folks that don’t come from there by a long shot.

Oh, I forgot to mention the developer I sold to is white, not that it matters; specifically, he is Jewish, but this article is about Black wealth after all, not that that matters either. He will make the $8 million and secure generational wealth for his growing family, not me, Daniel Benjamin “Pa” Janey’s great-grandson. Four families with a minimum net worth of $5 million each will buy the homes he builds. Those people will likely be white. Not that it matters, but do keep this in mind: the average wealth of a black family in Boston is $7. Yes, you read that right: a cup of fancy Starbucks coffee with pumpkin spice and some whipped-up diabetes in it.

In the 1970s and 80s, I was my grandfather’s little helper. He was a small-portfolio landlord who owned three three-family buildings in Roxbury, all of which I had lived in as a child for different periods. On weekends and after school, when I didn’t have sports practice or I wasn’t needed in my parents' theater, I would hop into his green Chevy pickup truck with bench seats, and we would do property maintenance. I still have his red steel Sears tool box; it reminds me of who I am and where I come from. My Grandfather passed away in 1988, during my Freshman year at Boston University, and to help my Grandmother manage the portfolio, I took over until she eventually sold it. She had begged me to take over the business, but I refused. Hollywood was calling me, so we put the portfolio up for sale. I studied for and got my real estate salesperson’s license and learned all about residential real estate sales, and by the time the 1990s rolled around, that proved to be extremely valuable knowledge, which helped create millions of dollars of generational black wealth, not only for myself, but for many of my cousins and friends. In 1995, Patti and I bought and renovated our first property together on Cedar St in Roxbury, and in 1998, we did our first investment property on Dudley St.

I have a lot to say about this “film” of Sabby’s, but I am only going to dive into the red lining narrative in this article and the crazy reparations lady. I will circle back to tearing apart her other premises in some later posts. If she wants to debate me on camera, I am game to do it on the Glenn Show at any time. I am sure Pop will get a kick out of it.

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The Redlining Premise

The first premise, often repeated but still wrong, is that Redlining was used to prevent black people, specifically, from receiving financing for the purchase, repair, or rehab of property in black neighborhoods. So I did some research, I had never actually seen the map, and I bet Sabby hasn’t either. I got a copy of the map that hung in bankers' and insurance companies' offices to help guide them in their risk assessments of prospective buyers. It isn’t just Black communities that were redlined, as the narrative would suggest. A simple glance at the map above shows that the catholics (the Italians and the Irish), the Jews, the Asians, and what we used to describe as poor white trash were also in Red-Lined areas. East and South Boston, the North End, Chinatown, and Whiskey Point in Brookline are redlined on the map. Maps like the above were created for every city across the nation until 1994, when they were discontinued, and the finance industry switched to using individual credit scores to better assess risk. It took decades for Catholics, Jews, and Asians to become white, so that is how I presume the narrative was created that redlined communities were all non-white, cause those people didn’t become fully white until the 1980’s. Sabby, you may consider reading this book (it is under five bucks, spend some money on your mind); it might help inform you.

First of all, people could definitely get financing to buy homes in the Black, Catholic, and Jewish communities. How do I know? When I was a kid, my Grandfather used many banks, including the Roxbury Highlands National Bank. I opened my first savings account there as a child. I remember my Grandfather, with his elementary school education, filling out the application at the bank and, shortly thereafter, receiving a loan to fix up one of his properties. This memory is imprinted in my mind because when he told my Grandmother he had gotten another loan for an apartment building in Roxbury while they were doing dishes, she splashed a cup of soapy water in his face in her rage over his risk-taking behavior. I remember him silently towel off his face while she continued yelling at him for digging them back into debt, relying on rent from no good n-words that never paid on time if they did at all.

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None of that is to say that real estate in redlined areas was valued the same as in the Anglo-Saxon neighborhoods; it wasn’t. It was cheaper, and, as it turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, it created affordable neighborhoods and communities. Here are my Grandfather’s “quick books” from this period, Sabby. I got the receipts:

So, the claim that redlined communities could not get financing is clearly a distorted myth, not factually based, and has become the prevailing narrative despite the fact that it simply isn’t true. My grandfather had multiple loans from multiple banks, collateralized by real estate in the redlined neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester.

Crazy Woman Speaks

Then there is this crazy acting woman she includes in the “film” for reasons I don’t quite understand:

Ms. Edwards here has been drinking the reparation Kool-Aid. She is even on the “Reparations Taskforce”. Now I agree, the best and most just thing that could have happened to/for the recently freed slaves in 1865, should have been to follow through with General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, but it didn’t happen, the 40 Acres and a government mule never materialized. Glenn Loury has repeatedly stated for the past 40 years that no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves, period. You can get an Amen or two talking about reparations, but you are wasting all of our time. Republics make reparations through laws and court cases, and as far as our Republic is considered, this was settled in 1968 with the Civil Rights Act. That’s it. We already won that movement. Encouraging people to continue to waste the most valuable thing we have, time, on reparations, is fighting the last war, and it is doing nothing to solve the problems our communities face in the here and now. Now it is time to live like the victorious people we are. The most successful and economically prosperous people of African descent on the planet. Just an annoying waste of time for everyone. Reparations Lady, let me tell you what reparations in the real world feel like: it is cashing the checks of your white tenants. I even had a tenant named Lily White. I loved getting her checks, felt like cosmic justice.

Sabby, where did the Black People Go after they sold their Homes in Roxbury?

Next, she discusses the displacement and gentrification of the mid-1990s, when the Credit Bureaus were first established, and the redline maps were shelved. White residents moved in, snapping up all the cheap houses and leaving Black communities dispossessed—an issue described in the 1960s as “Negro Removal," which gained new momentum in the 1990s. I apologize, Sabby, but I have to call bullshit on much of this. I was active in real estate in Roxbury between 1992 and 2005. I saw it firsthand. Every time I told my Black clients I had received an offer above their asking price, they first thanked Jesus and then me for this blessing. I asked where they planned to go, and the answer was always the same: “I’m going to Georgia! Atlanta area! You can get a nice house in Georgia.” Hundreds of millions of dollars in Northern Black wealth fled to Georgia, and over the next generation, these people built the place we call Atlanta—and, unfortunately, its outgrowth, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, and, of course, that troubled man, Tyler Perry, and the trash media he makes that poisons black women’s minds. There was Black displacement, of course. The former tenants of the new pilgrims to Atlanta were forced to migrate to places like Brockton, Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, and Worcester, which have now seen their own revitalization (gentrification) in recent years.

I am pretty sure the same thing happened all across the North East, from Philadelphia to Washington and Baltimore. Part two and three of this story are on their way.

I can’t recall how I was introduced to the schoolhouse economy, but I do remember participating in it from first through twelfth grades. Schoolyard economics develop because some resources at school are scarce — At least they were when I was a grade-schooler. A piece of candy had value, even at my fancy private school, since it wasn’t as readily available as little cartons of milk. Milk was free, but candy could be traded for other scarce commodities and sometimes even for actual currency. On Sundays, it was my job to go to the corner store to get the family the newspapers, and I would generally receive a decent pile of tip money. Danny was always super cheap, but Dad and Big Dad were a bit more generous, and I usually had some leftover lemonade-stand money. At the store, I would buy easily tradeable items that were scarce at school, like penny candy and beef jerky. Sometimes they’d have cool tchotchkes like pen knives and switchblade combs, which the boys in my class always wanted.

The kids I went to school with were mostly upper-class and never went to the corner store, but they did have allowance money, and I could provide them with highly sought-after and scarce resources. As we got older, I had access to a scarce product in the rich private-school market: Mexican Dirt Weed. I sold it in brown manila envelopes called “nickel bags,” which I told the rich kids were “dime bags.” The key to successful schoolyard economics is the theory of equal exchange. People will stop trading with you if they feel like the exchange isn’t equal, so a sense of fairness is important. Schoolyard economies were partially controlled by two forces: the bully kids, who used violence to enforce debt collections and settle fairness disputes, and the higher authorities, the teachers, who had the most authority in the schoolyard. However, appeals to teachers were used only as a last resort, since the consequences of squealing could be worse than simply swallowing one’s pride and moving on.

Sam Zell, the man whose grandchildren will one day completely control the mobile home park rental market, had a similar introduction to arbitrage. He discovered he could buy Playboy magazines in the city and then resell them for a profit in the suburbs where he lived. He had a killer product — pictures of naked women where they were in very short supply. He made a killing, as did I. I could have made a fortune selling dirty pictures at my school as well, but I’d done a teenage feasibility study and realized that, although I had access to Boston’s Combat Zone, the penalty for possession of such material would have been the death penalty from my feminist activist mother. The risk/reward equation didn’t add up. What did I do with the money I hustled? I bought musical instruments, bicycles, and a rifle. I still have the gun, but the guitars and bikes have been lost to the four winds.

College Economics is like graduate-level schoolyard arbitrage. As a local kid, I had access to things that were in high demand and short supply at a huge university. I had local hook-ups for weed, cocaine, and, especially, alcohol. Not only did I have a job at a liquor store, but every fall for half a decade, my grandfather, brother and I made North Carolina-style high-proof moonshine in the basement, which I could sell for cash. My friends Craig and Emil, along with Jon and Johnny, the kids from across the hall, and I rented the third floor at the corner of Harvard and Commonwealth Avenues in Alston, where we held epic rent parties, purchasing kegs from the liquor store I worked at, using my employee discount. One keg party easily covered our rent for a month. Sadly, the Boston Police ended my career as a house-party promoter during my junior year of college.

This is how my daughter, Alejandra, learned arbitrage as a child. In the winter of 2010, Patti bought three pairs of Dr. Martens, one for each of us. Mine are hardly worn to this day, hers have long since been run into the ground, and my child’s pair was sold off on the open market. Fast forward a few years and a few soles to Newbury Street, Boston’s major shopping artery, where we’re doing last-minute shopping before my kid heads for the dorms. Suddenly, I notice Al’s face suction-cupped to the glass door of the Dr. Martens store in front of a “Now Hiring” sign. Before she could bolt in, my wife put a loving hand on her shoulder and said, “Shower first, and we’ll bring them your resume in the afternoon.” A week later, she started, and a middling Dr. Martens hobby became a full-blown obsession. Alejandra spent the next three years smuggling shoes through the back door, some purchased, some gifted, and some traded for favors, weed, or other shoes. Within a year, the boots needed their own infrastructure, and the shoe shelf expanded from property to property as the family moved up the property ladder. I shot her a glare with each new box, and with each twisted ankle, I protested, “Those stupid shoes!” Finally, what felt like 100 pairs later, I discovered Alejandra wasn’t so foolish after all. A classic pair of 1460 Dr. Martens, which ran you two pounds sterling in 1960 (the year they were introduced), could bleed you 239 pounds today. That’s 120 times what they cost 62 years ago. (Alejandra would like me to add that she and my wife have bespoke pairs from the last remaining factory in England.)

We made a quick demo and sent it off to our artist, Charles Brandon Burrell, or simply Brandon, here at the nest. Brandon lives, breaths, and dreams R&B. It is more than his thing, it is his calling- he has seven children, enough said on that. Brandon loved the song, and when I recently asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he pointed to the stage out front and said, “I want a music video of me singing Am I Wrong, all by myself up on that stage.”

“That is something I can do for my son,” I said.

The wheels started to turn. I have wanted to make something on that stage in my front yard since it arrived years ago. I had some ideas, and I certainly don’t need an excuse to make a music video. I sat down in front of that dumb-ass but effective ChatGPT to prompt me up some storyboards when it hit me. Why make storyboards at all? The stage is right there, and Brandon is staying here in my guest house while he records vocals on Patti’s songs. Why not just take a few hours and shoot a demo of the music video first? Ben, Patti, and I could probably smash out a demo in a couple of hours, and now we have something way better than storyboards and a shot list to use to communicate the vision. The ultimate in Pre-Visualization work.

We shot it with the Osmo Pocket 3 camera, some filters, and a DJI drone. We had solid success with the camera test on the dock. Let's see what it can do in the dark. She did really well. This technology is opening up completely new doors in pre-visualization and affordable filmmaking.

A few things that came out of shooting and editing the video, before I shoot and edit the video:

1. Fireworks will be really cool during the crescendo of the song.

2. That shadow was killing it.

3. Shooting with long lenses will make the close-ups spectacular.

4. Gotta fix the microphone stand.

5. Gotta get my string lights working again, then it will be over, as we used to say back in Dudley.

In November of 2025, I watched news coverage of the plight of people living in Gaza. Shots of folks holding out bowls and pans as rice and grain were doled out to desperate children. My screens were filled with images of buildings coming down, acre after acre of demolished neighborhoods and streets, but it was the row after row of lined tents that got me. I have been camping, slept in a tent, and cooked over an open fire, and it is fun, fun for about three days, or until it rains. Living in a tent for a year, two, or three years….forever? I set my phone to share the daily weather conditions from Gaza with me, and whenever I saw rain in the forecast, I would burst into tears. I am a little better now. When it rains in Gaza now, I release a single tear, like that Native American anti littering commercial from the 1970’s, where the old dude was played by an old Italian guy, he looks at the litter and trash with a single tear down his cheek. Gen-X, I know you remember that one.

How did we get here? It was the American founder Gouverneur Morris’s vision of an American empire that set us on this path of meddling and involvement around the world to become the hegemonic Empire we are today. To be fair, Morris never intended us to be a military empire, but an economic one; he favored giant economic projects and engineering achievements, and interest coupon payments on war loans FROM European powers. Later, an American president’s arrogance in 1947 set this particular catastrophe in motion. It burns me that bombs that read “Made in the USA” leveled the homes of millions. I have pledged my allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, and my country is a secular state, not a religious one. Morris would have challenged the current president to a duel, “Why are you spending the American fortune on more religious wars and Napoleon, King George, and Habsburg bullshit?” I then imagine him slapping the president across the face with his glove. Reality is we are living with the consequences of the world President Truman brought to life (source, Truman Library - not an isolated clip, but his prepared statement).

But I digress, point blank, there are two million people living under tents in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, and around the world. Where are the protest songs? The music industry is obviously suppressing dissenting opinions; it is up to independent media artists like Patti and me to say something. I wrote a song, which Patti later fixed, of course, and we call it Under a Tent for reasons that should now be obvious. But I faced a problem in creating the companion video material. I was raised by Black Panther members, radical Black militant communists, and when I listen to the music, I just want to break down and weep. Luckily, visual media lends itself to collaboration, so I knew what I needed to do.

This piece was too important for me to fuck around with. Therefore, I called “The Best Man I got.”, my redheaded stepchild, the person in my family of collaborators whom I think of by an African name of “Ntwadumela” (He who greets with fire). Yes, the best men I have are actually women. Go figure. In conversation and in the public her Swahili name turned out to be unwieldy, so it ended up being just Mallard for two reasons, the obvious one being the way the letters in her name work together in her government name, Missy Allard, the other because early in her professional career she wanted to ring the neck of one of our clients and when I was talking her down off that particular ledge I said that “You need to let this shit wash off you, like water off a duck’s back. You are a Mallard duck, a powerful Duck, rain don’t bother a Mallard Duck.” I got a guy, and her name is Mallard, duck down fool.

So I asked her to direct and edit the video; she said yes, and away we went. Ten days later, we shot the damn thing. Luckily, it turns out my right-hand man in Winchester, Ben Kilanski, is an amazing natural Art Director. The job just clicked for him, he really has an art department career on the big show if he ever wants to run off and join the movie making circus. His first mission was to create a wall of screens that would actually be a permanent installation in my studio, FilmShack 3, and build good old duveteen black theater flats. More on that later. He also worked out a low-cost video signal delivery system and killed playback on the day of the shoot. We wrangled up young Max Beebe on camera, and it happened. As a producer, I only screwed up the lunch- I forgot the plastic utensils for the Chinese food, if I had been on a Daniel Lupi show, I would have been shot. The crew somehow all managed to get the food into their mouths in the end, so no big deal.

Storyboards:

I got this letter the other day, and then I got this email right behind it.

Emeritus: Meaning: From the Latin emeritus (meaning "earned by service"), it signifies that someone has completed their time in a position honorably and with merit.

Therefore, I am now known as Robert Patton-Spruill Professor Emeritus - Emerson College. This is a big deal for me personally. First and most importantly, in the world of the Emerson College Mafia, I have been promoted from Capo to Boss. That is a REALLY big deal for me. I obsessively watch the careers and creative work of Emerson Mafia members. I have cheered for Peabody, Emmy, and Oscar wins, and I have seen the Emerson Mafia do what it does. They work together, help each other, and make the best motion media in the world. It is pretty much the best part of being on Facebook and Instagram for me. Although throughout my time at Emerson, I have always been known as Boss, the college's trustees have now confirmed that I am a Boss for life.

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I had always wanted to teach at Boston University, like my Dad, but my applications were always tossed in the bin, and I never even got an interview there. Frankly, BU film school is a bit of a joke compared to Emerson. I quickly realized I was an Emerson guy. Teaching at Emerson has truly been a highlight of my life so far. To be at the best film school in the country for over a decade and to interact with some of the brightest young filmmakers in the world for over a decade is something that warms my heart on a constant basis.

I don’t want to say I was competitive with my Dad, because every time I compared myself to him, I felt I came up short. He ranked higher than me on the academic ladder, he was taller, better looking, always beat me at chess, tennis, frankly, everything. He was never voted Emeritus, though, so I finally got him. Too bad he has been gone for sixteen years now; I would have forced him to address me with my new honorific title, Professor Emeritus. Oh man, that would have been sweet.

This emeritus title is up there, though. Not quite a British Knighthood, but I think it is better than being a Kentucky Colonel and definitely better than an honorary doctorate. Because of that, I intend to be completely unbearable at least through the summer. I am thinking about getting an obnoxious pinky ring so I can hold my hand out for people to kiss it. I have told Patti that the people who are Emeritus don’t do anything around the house. And I mean anything. I have already quit doing dishes and laundry, so now I am not washing any cars or changing any smoke detector batteries either. No bathrooms will be cleaned or rugs vacuumed with these newly minted emeritus hands. That is the new landscape I live in now, one of distinction and honorable service. Service to myself, that is.

Although I am still answering to my nicknames “Boss” and “Maestro”, I will no longer answer to my government name unless it is accompanied by the words “Professor Emeritus”. When my grandmother turned ninety, she announced that she would no longer be saying words like “please" and "thank you”. And in her honor, I intend to do the same, at least until the end of the summer. This by itself isn’t a major transition for me, as I'm traditionally insufferable in the month of August anyway, so really it is only June and July that I will be allowing my ego to affect others directly.

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Did I mention I was competitive? Especially with the people closest to me? Last but not least, my relationships with my daughter Alejandra and my nephew Logan have thankfully returned to their rightful place. The world is no longer upside down for me. You see, Logan received his PhD a couple of years ago, becoming the highest-ranked Spruill, and worse, my daughter became a JD, both leapfrogging over me in academic ranking and success. Both of them doctors of letters. I didn’t like that one bit. Sure, I was proud and all, but I haven’t won an argument or a game of Scrabble against either of them in years. They have, on occasion, reminded me that, in comparison to them, I was a mere Master, while they were both Doctors. But now, thanks to the wisdom of the trustees at Emerson College, I breathe Emeritus air, something neither of them will enjoy for at least the next forty years. Readers, to illustrate, Emeritus air is wonderful; it contains a strong sense of petrichor with light accents of good skunky weed and the smell of barbecue in the distance. It’s nice.

When I was about eight years old, my Mom decided to put the family, me and Dad, on a vegetarian diet. The thinking at the time around nutrition had been corrupted by political lobbying groups, and the government published a new food pyramid that promoted a high-carbohydrate diet. I soon became the fat kid, wearing “husky” sized Sears corduroy pants, low self-esteem, and burdened with a sense of envy. At school, I always had the same thing, a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and I would watch and smell as everyone else had the cheeseburgers. I would go to family cookouts, and everyone would be smacking their lips over North Carolina-style barbecue, but I could only have the mac and cheese. This diet probably killed my mother in the long run, too; she went from being mildly overweight to morbidly obese during this period, a slow-motion disaster. I think my Dad was spared because he cheated and ate whatever he wanted when he was at work. I never cheated. I was scared of getting a beating and being punished, so I ate carbs, candy, and some fruit. The sugars coursing through my veins made me fidgety, nervous, unstable, and angry. A slow-motion disaster.

My grandfather, whose three-decker we lived in, was an African American Paulie from Goodfellas. “Big Dad may have moved slowly, but only because Big Dad didn’t have to move for anybody.” Except for his daughter, that is. He thought my mother was “Crazy as a bing bong,” but he feared her, in a way I now understand as a father of a daughter myself. My biggest fear was/is becoming alienated from my child. Scorsese’s “The Irishman” dramatically illustrates this special hell a man can face. Big Dad bought a weight bench for himself, said to my mom, picked me up from Wrestling practice, and transformed me so much that by age fourteen, I feared no one, certainly not my father’s punishment or my mother’s anger. My self-loathing was replaced with confidence, a chip on my shoulder, and a sense of ungovernability. When my mother told me I had to quit the wrestling team to devote more time to my studies, I stood up and never sat back down again. I became ungovernable.

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With my Robadamus hat on, I think I know what is going to happen this fall. It seems more likely than not that our world will be disrupted and unstable this fall, or sooner. Last month’s inflation report showed a 4% rate, double the preferred 2% target. I hate having too much time on my hands before the event actually happens, which my gut is telling me is inevitable, makes me feel sick to my stomach all the time. That’s why the 2020 Pandemic event was the best one ever. I had only three weeks to plan and prepare, compared with the 2008 crisis, for which I had two years. Two years of fear, anticipation, and useless tension. Looking back on those past events, I actually did the same thing with my tension and my feelings of helplessness:

I bought chickens and planted a garden.

As a family trustee, you can only do so much; you can rebalance a portfolio, sell stuff that isn’t nailed down, but other than that, you are still left with a restless, nervous energy waiting for the inevitable to occur. One of the things that I have done to prepare is to switch the Trust’s vehicles to Hybrids, thanking myself every time I refuel. I still have to invest in creating energy independence, and hopefully, in seven years, I will have completed that part with solar arrays everywhere I can put one. The more you can separate your family from commercial supply chains, the better off your family will be.

It was great in 2020 to have a nearly unlimited supply of eggs. Al even sold our excess out of a cooler at the end of our driveway, which more than paid for the chicken feed. It felt great to read news stories about high egg prices while I savored my breakfast. The idea that poultry products could become expensive scares me to death. I am an African American male carnivore. Chicken is the cornerstone of my diet, and I break out in a cold sweat at the thought of $20 whole-chicken prices. Let alone the outrageous prices for the pasture-raised birds I prefer. I know this is more likely than not with 4% inflation baked into the economy, thanks to Uncle Sam. I remember what happened to chicken wing prices after 2008. Chicken wings pre-2008 were a discount protein; now they are priced like beef.

To continue absorbing my nervous energy, I installed the largest garden I have ever had. The idea behind this garden is to be cheap and easy to blend back into the field when the crisis eventually passes. It is built out of scrap wood and straw bales. I have some upgrades to install to be more efficient on a per-square-foot basis, but it feels right. Growing food is a great way to protect your family against uncertainty. I believe that in times like these, it is best to focus on high-yielding, calorie-dense crops with a long shelf life.

This year’s financial apocalypse garden:

The staple crops:

Potato: Super easy to grow in small spaces, and seed potatoes can be found cheaply at nearly every grocery store. Simply look for bags of potatoes with lots of eyes, and sprout them indoors. Potatoes will last for a really long time, deep into the winter, when heating our homes will be super expensive. Mound the plant as it grows for greater yields. If you have limited space, you can grow them easily in a trash can.

Tomato: Although I can't stand a raw tomato, I can’t live without marinara sauce and ketchup, both of which are easy to store and preserve.

Onion and Garlic: Easy to store, and I can’t cook anything tasty without them. Garlic is tricky, so I had to buy one-year garlic starters.

Beans, beans, and more beans: Bush beans, string beans, all sorts of beans.

Carrots: Can’t live without these roots. Salads and soups, let’s go!

Cucumber: My favorite salad. Cumber, Feta cheese, olives, and onions. I can eat that every day.

Peppers, hot and green

Fast-Growing Crops:

Lettuce, I plant rotating beds of lettuce every week. This gives off fresh “baby” greens on demand and makes chicken sandwiches delicious. This is an important rotation.

Herbs:

Luckily, my wife Patti has developed an epic perennial herb garden: Sage, Parsley, Lavender, oh my.

Sugary stuff:

We have four dwarf, espaliered apple trees that are showing abundant bunches of apples. I love apple desserts.

The Great Melon Patch: Patti always leaves a watermelon or two in the garden after harvest, and sure enough, they are sprouting on their own, no effort on our part. And I am indeed African American, I can make short work of a watermelon. She has a big brain and loves me.

Winter Heating:

The North East's economy will collapse if petrochemical prices rise by a third or more. Two-bedroom apartments in Boston had $700 gas bills last winter. Currently, home heating fuel is running at $4.89 per gallon (this is summer!). At $7 per gallon, as Richard Pryor said, “We can kiss the baby.” Now that I am old, and my blood pressure is normal, I freeze in the house when it is under 65 degrees. Oh hell no. I am planning to return to the old ways and start collecting firewood. The good news, thank you, El Niño, is that Robadamus is predicting a mild winter.

Between the Garden, My flock, firewood collecting, and some overly ambitious art projects, I think I will be mentally fine as I anticipate this fall and winter. I hope you can do the same. If you are scared and nervous, do something, whatever you can. We are the smartest biological creatures in the known universe; act like it.

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When I decided to return to amateur filmmaking, I knew I had to set some rules for myself; I could go completely off the rails if left unsupervised and to my own devices. My daughter had to sit me down to have a “talk”. She pointed out that Francis Ford Coppola had to sell his winery, watches, and art collection to fund his retirement film project, Metropolis, and, since my wallet is her wallet (in her mind), she had some concerns she needed me to address before I did something she would regret. I listened, and I promised her I would budget my projects just like back in film school: use what we had around the house, easy locations, and friends and family for crew and on-camera talent. Al wasn’t fully satisfied with my “student film” budget plan. Alejandra went to Emerson, where some of the kids spend tens of thousands on their projects, so she wasn’t feeling that explanation. I pivoted and said I was leaning into my years as a MassArt professor, and I promised to be cool with the spending. My MassArt (public college) students were legendary for their ability to spend next to nothing on a film project; they somehow managed to survive on Vegan Ramen cups. Fast and Cheap!! She felt better about my new/old art practice.

One of the things about being a film professor, for me anyway, is that when really bright students are studying with you, I feed off their energy, their joy in discovering new ways to express themselves. Over the twenty years of teaching film, there are a handful of them that I want, or even need to collaborate with in my current art practice. It feels natural to me to be in the safe space of re-learning with some of my most favorite people in the world, whose instincts and skills I have been able to watch grow, in some cases, over multiple decades.

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, and I have a need to collaborate with my creative “children.” I am asking my former students, now formidable professionals, to help the old man out. I was able to sweet-talk Jessica Wilde, my former student, into convincing her husband, Brad Allen Wilde, also my former student, to edit this video. Always ask the wife first; the man may actually follow. Brad edited my film “Do it Again” back in 2009, when he was fresh out of college, and has since become a steadily working film professional.

As expected, undertaking the editorial process in the current age meant another ride on that damn, cursed learning curve. Even though I have accepted that my happiness has always depended on my need to learn new things, sometimes it makes me have a fit of “I don’t wanna learn new things!” like an angry toddler. It already began on this project with having to learn how to share media using the Google Drive app. I am so sick of apps, I don’t want another mothafunking app in my life. Brad, to his credit, is the GenX technical whisperer (notice how polite he is when giving me the solution to my technical problem):

I now know how to use this miracle device, the Google Drive Desktop App, and again, I can’t believe I am this old, and that stuff like this exists and actually works. These kids really do have easy buttons for everything. Needless to say, he did a great job with the material he was given, and I am very happy with the final edit. When I put on my film professor hat, I give the work an A-. The only reason it is not an A is that I probably should have had Patti play guitar. We debated it pre-shoot and decided to shoot if it was unusually warm, but it wasn’t. It was regular cold ass February and I am quite sure that my Caribbean princess muse would have slapped me across the face if I had asked her to take her hands out of her pockets and actually play the instrument.

Brad made three cuts solid cuts and here is the final. This is the first time we ever did something so creatively complete. We have made music videos before, lots of them, but we never wrote and recorded the song and made the accompanying video. Feels satisfying. Like and share it as they say and I hope it speaks to you as much as it does for us.

Since the late 1990s, whenever I have had to make an important decision about my life, I have always consulted my lawyer and now close friend, Kirk Rothemich (Cap). I first met him when he had a desk at the Law Office of Don E. Greene in Dudley. I had a trash argument with my neighbor, Cruz Management, yes, those muthafucka’s, and I needed some legal help. Ever since then, I have always sought his counsel. He is the person who taught me about how trusts can serve families; he is the one who got my insurance company to actually pay my claims. He has negotiated contracts worth millions of dollars on my behalf. He has served as my guard and attack dog. He advised me on a lot of things, so it was only natural for me to go to him for advice on which subscription service to get for my family's media consumption, cause there can be only one, and this was a very important decision.

“You have millions in net worth, and you don’t have any subscription services?” He asked. “Cap, I didn’t get cable until 2011.” “You may, in fact, be my cheapest and stingiest client. How again do you keep a woman?”

“I think it's my proportionally large package.” Awkward pause.

“Ok, YouTube, that’s the one for you. It is the best deal out there. You get movies, television, music, original and specialized content, all commercial-free. You haven’t really lived until you get commercials out of your life. It’s a game-changer. You are way too busy to be watching commercials.”

He was right, as usual, and from 2020 to 2025, I lived an almost commercial-free lifestyle. Life-changing to not be bombarded with marketing noise. For the first time in my life, really, I could go days without anyone trying to sell or “influence” my mind. I saved money by only having YouTube, and the content selection was pretty good with a little filtering and algorithm training. —They be serving up some dope as Napoleon content. How does the algorithm know that I am five feet three inches tall and I love that Napoleon shit? And space, keep that astronomy content flowing! Hail, my fellow short kings that look up at the stars.

Signal to Noise Ratio

One of the things the astro space scientists and podcasters talk about is how much noise there is in the universe, and in the search for intelligent life, most of the work is spent trying to find the signal hidden within the noise. That theory carries over into our lives, and especially our creative lives. We search for that moment of insight, that spark of light, a way to stay in a constant state of creative flux. To stay within the creative flux, I have to do everything at once. However, that goes directly against the principle that you can do anything you want, but not everything you want to do. That is a baked-in human limitation; money doesn’t fix that, and our lifespans are too short to achieve it either. In my role as an Emerson College Mafia Boss, I just have to do everything everywhere all at once; it comes with the job.

What they call Artificial Intelligence today is not actually intelligent; it can only do math really well. The things we call Data Centers today are what we used to call “render farms” back when computer chips were much slower in the 1990s. It is a robot that has no function without actual intelligent input. As I have explored this, I have had to consult with my personal magical and all-knowing Oz, Bill Warner, the co-founder and inventor of Avid, among many other awesome things. So I called him, and he introduced me to the idea that today we are simply playing “Chat-Roulette,” giving the machine prompts and hoping we land on the right number and have a “winner.” That concept has fundamentally changed how I approach AI, both as a creative who uses it as a tool and as an educator trying to figure out how to integrate it into a film school curriculum. In my own work, it has been super awesome for pre-visualization. With enough credits and prompting, some very good work can be achieved. Check out these boards for an upcoming video project. What you can do is mind-blowing. It even looks reasonably close to Patti.

But here is the thing, I find I don’t actually like AI-produced media. It simply feels like a “demo tape” to me. Unfinished. Not actually ready for prime time, so to speak, and it is now filling my feeds with thousands of damn demo tapes. I simply realize it is a robot within seconds, and I tune it out; I can’t suspend my disbelief. Now I admit that what works for me is a cat video. Those driving cats get me every time, but for everything else, it has turned into a giant increase in Noise. Noise is the killer of my creative life; it's the last thing I need more of. It’s like the difference between visiting a house of prostitution and having a dark and grimy affair in a Park Avenue hotel. Maybe that is a little extreme, but that’s me, always taking things too far.

In my writing practice, I find that AI is mostly useless, except for research; it blows away the Lexis/Nexus system I would wait in line to use back in college in the 1990’s and even Google in the 2010s. But I do love the way the machine can help me get my grammar together so my thoughts are more accessible, but I find I can’t really get into or allow myself to read AI writing. Therefore, I propose a filtering system that simply allows me to filter for only Human Made content. Now that is tricky, I get that, but the machines need to filter the other machines so it can only feed my content, which, in its final form, is actually made by a human being.