Happy 65th Birthday Cassius.
One customer's name today was James Crow. Yes, James, as in Jim, Crow. I don't know if he is a legislator. But during the same week as the commemoration of Martin Luther King Junior's and Muhammad Ali's birthday: James Crow tops the cake.
Speaking of cakes, I like the TV show Ace of Cakes. It is mainly a reality show in the vein of American Chopper, where you just see the goings on of a business that happens to make very creative artistic cakes. In the episode I'm currently watching Duff is delivering a cake of Wrigley Field to an eightieth birthday party in Chicago. Duff is from Baltimore. So he drives a cake 700 miles. What dedication: to pay someone a lot of money to make a cake and drive so far, just to eat cake.
posted by Daniel @ 9:51 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Cubs fans will pay for such things.
You got tickets for MO?
Yes.
Nice. I'm excited.
Question:
Are you being intentionally and ironically disrespectful of Muhammad Ali by calling him by his slave name? The customer's name makes me think that perhaps your title knowingly invokes the voice of opression in order to identify and belittle it.
Question:
Do you know if Ali's demanding of Ernie Terrell "What's my name, fool? What's my name?" is the source of the trash-talking dominating tactic we still hear today. "What's my name" or "say my name" often followed by "-bitch!"
Answer: Yes. Foundationally, if not consciously, the fact that I thought of Jim Crow when seeing the customer's name, and then paired it with two civil rights figures atests to that. My mind was working that way. Part of it is layering his Cassius and Muhammad names, and part is an affectation like using Samuel Clemens (I want to show what I know.), which is belittling religiously in this case.
Answer: I don't know, but there has been a show on ESPN 2 called Ali Rap that has a bunch of interviews discussing how Ali was the fountainhead of hip-hop culture, so that is a possibility, but I sounds like you have more knowledge on the details, so I'll defer.
fothr
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