Here are the results from last night's boys' basketball regionals. The score I had for Frederick Douglass last night was wrong -- they have not been eliminated. MaxPrep rankings in parentheses:
SIXTH REGION QUARTER-FINALS (home teams listed first):
Lou. Pleasure Ridge Park 61 - 47 N. Bullitt
Lou. Butler 71 - 66 Lou. Fern Creek
Lou. Moore 86 - 52 Lou. Western
Lou. Jeffersontown 79 - 74 Lou. Fairdale
SEVENTH REGION QUARTER-FINALS (home teams listed first):
(10) Lou. Manual 65 - 61 Lou. Male
Lou. Trinity 74 - 48 Christian Academy-Louisville
Lou. Ballard 83 - 62 Lou. Atherton
(1) Lou. St. Xavier 95 - 46 Lou. Central
ELEVENTH REGION QUARTER-FINALS (home teams listed first):
Matthew knows I'm a Roberta Flack fan, and, so, he was nice enough to invite me to write this "Defining Generation X" entry when news broke last Monday that she had died at age 88. Thank you, Matthew.
I flipped for Roberta Flack several years ago when I was living in North Carolina. I always liked her hits, and then I ran across her first record in a thrift store ...
I quickly came to learn that Roberta Flack was (like Nina Simone) a western North Carolina native who was steeped as a girl (like Nina Simone) in classical piano and (like Nina Simone) African Methodist Episcopal church music. From those common origins, however, Roberta Flack's art and career developed quite differently than Nina Simone's.
Nina Simone--I love her, too, by the way--appeared to me to have felt called to go deep and wide with her work as a commercial artist. She dredged a waterway through the often rooty and rocky subject matter which she claimed and which claimed her. She conceived and performed complex, brilliant songs about all manner of things heavy, and the listener was overpowered and sometimes even exhausted by Simone's profound talents (plural). Even Simone herself seemed exhausted--she spent about the last decade of her life in France and seemed in interviews to have been tossed this-a-way and that-a-way by the hard work and waters to which God had sent her.
Not Roberta Flack. She certainly could've gone deep and heavy with her work, too. (Sometimes she did.) She was obviously smart enough, talented enough and sensitive enough to drive whatever agenda she had chosen, and she never did stop caring or contributing. But specific to the product of her work as a commercial artist, Flack appeared to me to have discovered herself bobbing down a river of all sorts of fierce cultural currents--What does it mean to be Black or white in America? What does it mean to be woman, man, gay, straight, trans or otherwise? What does it mean to be or to have been made an American? Heck, what does it mean to be human? Or just plain alive?--and discerned her calling to ride atop that river. To swim and float and swim. And all sorts of beautiful and interesting driftwood washed ashore from her journey downstream.
There are beautiful pieces of driftwood art that are bent and shaved into an artist's vision. There are beautiful pieces of driftwood art that are merely discovered and placed somewhere for me to look at and think about. And there are beautiful pieces of driftwood art that fall somewhere along that infinite and growing spectrum.
Driftwood makes for such valuable and evocative art because it demands that we stand in loving wonder with the original Artist. A piece of driftwood catches my eye, and, when I'm wise enough and faithful enough to go with the notion that it caught my eye because God meant for me to pay attention to it, I start thinking about elements and forces, and 30 minutes later I find myself still staring at it and feeling more loved and safer in the beautiful order of God's world.
Roberta Flack turned out driftwood art, and the element ... or force ... no, element and force at its core was her God-given voice. You hear it in fantastic, heavily crafted lyrics like "Killing Me Softly with His Love," of course. But I'll be darned if I don't think I love it even more in some of the simplest, less-adorned artifacts from her catalog. I'll give you one example.
For my money, you really can't beat the love-song chorus of this Thom Bell/Linda Creed composition made famous by this Stylistics:
You are everything
And everything is you
Says it all, doesn't it? My word, it's a fortunate blessing to have ever been completely enveloped in that feeling of romantic love. Thank you, God, for giving us romantic love.
Now I love the Stylistics' hit version of "You Are Everything," but get a load of this ...
We here at the HP don’t often go NC-17 with our posts, but, boys, when Roberta Flack sings the chorus on "You Are Everything," that is an adult woman making love. And it is a beautiful thing, thank God. Roberta Flack's "You Are Everything" should be a whole chapter in a textbook for pre-marriage counseling.
Indeed, Roberta Flack was just perfect for the most intimate of love songs. Her naked voice was straight out of the Garden of Eden, and time and time and time again she sang beautifully of her delight in God's gift of sex.
Beautifully and--here's the other key thing--withoutembarrassment and in the pop mainstream, no less. Roberta Flack wasn't some obscure jazz singer; she was on the radio in the car with our parents. There was nothing tawdry or dark about the best of Roberta Flack's performances of intimate love songs. Certainly, she didn't seem embarrassed about any of it, and why should she be? I had a creative-writing teacher at Western in the 1980s who challenged us to write a short story based in a world in which sex wasn't and never had been a taboo. Of course, I failed miserably. Almost all of us did. It was almost unimaginable.
But Roberta Flack imagined, kept clear-headed on her artistic intent and let it flow honestly. And that artistic confidence and satisfaction seemed to render her a totally disarming and unaffected character. Look how clearly Dick Cavett enjoyed talking with her ...
And look how clearly Johnny Carson enjoyed talking with her ...
And David Letterman enjoyed talking with her ...
And Oprah Winfrey enjoyed talking with her ...
And Rosie O'Donnell ...
Not much of this so far has been exactly about Generation X, but, to me, Roberta Flack's influence is obvious across our people and our time.
Even beyond Delilah and the FM "Quiet Storm" genre for which Roberta Flack is rightly hailed as a pioneer, I see far-flung and deeply embedded influence across so many of my favorite aspects of Generation X. There is the clear influence on art and artists important to me. (I’m pretty sure we don't get, for example, the absolute triumph of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill without Roberta Flack, and I’m somewhat sure we don't get Lisa Bonet's challenging portrayal of Marie DeSalle in High Fidelity without Roberta Flack.)
But there's something more about the confidence, openness and faith of Roberta Flack--evidenced inside and outside her art--that seems informative to my favorite things of Generation X. As much as I am a cherry-picking nostalgist, I am not desirous of the America or world before Roberta Flack rode down the river into our consciousness. I don't want to go back, and, in spite of current events, I (still) don't think most of us do or that we ultimately will.
Here's one last thing I want to say about Roberta Flack: Do you know where she lived most of her adult life? I didn't until reading the obituaries and tributes of the last week.
I'm not going to watch the Oscars, and I didn't watch any of the movies this year. But they are on tonight, and if I read about anything worth commenting on, I'll put it here.
Here are the quarterfinals for the First Region Boys' Basketball Tournament, which will take place at Murray State University. MaxPrep rankings shown for teams in the top 20. That's a tough draw for St. Mary, although at least they don't have to play on Ash Wednesday:
Wednesday, March 5:
Paducah Tilghman (16-11) v. Fulton Co. (9-13)
Graves Co. (19-9) v. (4) Marshall Co. (27-2)
Thursday, March 6:
Carlisle Co. (14-16) v. Mayfield (20-9)
(6) Calloway Co. (28-3) v. Paducah St. Mary (23-8)
Meanwhile, here are the quarterfinals for the Second Region Tournament, taking place at Madisonville-N. Hopkins H.S.:
Wednesday, March 5:
Madisonville-N. Hopkins (15-12) v. Livingston Cent. (9-20)
Christian Co. (8-22) v. Union Co. (15-10)
Thursday, March 6:
Henderson Co. (22-6) v. Hopkinsville (15-15)
Lyon Co. (24-7) v. Dawson Springs (17-15)
MaxPreps has Henderson Co. ranked number 26, which is the highest ranking for any team in the Second Region. (Lyon Co. is ranked number 61.)
