My new book is here! The forth release in the Rowman and Littlefield Living Existentialism series.

My new book is here! The forth release in the Rowman and Littlefield Living Existentialism series.
[Written for and performed at the Celebration of the Other Arts (COToA) Festival, Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, September 7, 2018, at the Castle Inn.]
There is water here.
Its flowing under your moldy feet.
Do you feel it?
The river.
People keep talking about it.
I know its here, I think.
The man who taught America to sing.
The blender man.
Frederick Malcolm Waring.
Glee club reject.
Banjo orchestra prefect.
You gotta be a football hero,
To get along with all the girls.
Fred was the fourth member of the Beastie Boys.
Breezing along with the breeze.
Wasn’t that the B side of Black Star?
Fred was so dope
White college kids put his picture
Next to Bob Marley
And smoked weed.
Most white guys
Can’t rock dreads.
Fred did.
It must have been the banjo.
Or the Miracle Mixer.
There’s no such thing as an ugly millionaire.
Wiggle your feet.
Splash.
Monsieur Antoine Dutot bubbles up.
The water is red with the blood of Haitians.
Don’t be afraid.
Or turn away.
Your moldy feet will only fester.
The Lenni-Lenape have been replaced by steakhouses.
Don’t be afraid of the ghosts.
Or the sweat stains on your white cotton socks.
Wiggle your toes.
Make sure they’re still numb.
Swim naked in the river with babies.
Just breeze along with the breeze,
Trailin’ the rails,
Roamin’ the seas,
Like the birdies that sing in the trees,
Pleasin’ to live,
Livin’ to please.
This is America.
You’re here.
I’m here.
He’s here.
Facts can’t be denied.
Your facts.
My facts.
His facts.
Ghosts.
There is water here.
Its flowing
Under your moldy feet.
Do you feel it?
T Storm Heter
Composed Nov 2018. Posted July 17, 2019
Dedicated to Lori Kaye, who was murdered on April 27, 2019 in the Poway Synagogue shooting, which took place six months to the day after the Tree of Life Shooting in Pittsburg. Lori rushed the shooter, placing herself in front of her rabbi, saving his life and others.
Dedicated also to the victims of the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris, which took place 77 years ago, to the day. Zikhrono livrakha, may their memory be a blessing.
Self-care day gets sidetracked by non-self-care
Another shooting
Bloody survivors crying
Talking about the guns
News always names the gun
Some details we don’t need
The conservatives hope it’s a “middle easterner”
But…it’s a white marine
A dude whose had “domestic issues”
The day is fucked
I’m exhausted from stress of
Reading about bad shit
Trump destroys our country
One executive order at a time
I see the stress on the faces of my students
They are just trying to get by another day in
AmeriKKKa
11 Jews die in synagogue
I’m not over it
I’m not going to get over it
Two weeks ago
And suddenly my Jewishness
Feels like a weight
Around my neck
My girls, I ask them
How do you feel
M. says
“I knew this would happen”
I. says “I’m okay”
These two girls grow up in a world
Where being Jewish
Is met with
Violence
Thinking of my Grandpa Bud
Fighting Nazis in Amsterdam
After the war he brought home a Luger
From a dead Nazi
Summer 2017
Unite the Right
“The Jew will not replace us”
Fall 2017
Al-right gun nut
Harasses me
Threatens me
Doxxes me
My school says “don’t talk about it”
Three weeks ago
At Penn State
I drive three hours
I am there three hours
I drive three hours
Back home
To talk about it
I talked about it
I am talking about it
Talking
Back at work
A three-hour diversity meeting
Banging my head against the wall
Against the wall
Ahmed, the wall
Just like she says
Anger
Mixed with rage
And confusion
And impotence
Political impotence
Can’t act
Can’t move
Get dressed and shave
Is that self-care?
The self-care routine breaks down
The air is molasses
I can’t move
Can’t breathe
The news makes me
…ill
…angry
…watch more news
Is this my escape?
Tamer Nafar
Chuck D
These are my fuckin heroes
Touched by fire, by god
Where is that fire in me?
Where is that god in me?
I try to say: write philosophy
As if that’s my rap, my poetry
There is a lot of shit inside of me
The feeling inside of being beaten down
Of being a survivor
The guilt fucks with your head
Why me?
Why did I survive?
At what cost
Did I wake up alive today?
Survivor is a noun
I need the verb
The violence is in my soul
It’s in my brain
Feeling his angry breath to this day
Deep sadness inside me
The death of a brother
The sadness of a Christian hell
The sadness of a father never satisfied
The sadness of a mom’s broken nose
The sadness of a mind cage
Don’t talk
Don’t talk about it
Don’t talk
Don’t tell
Not my besties
Nobody
At a breaking point
Feeling like a freak
Inside this skin
There’s no protection
Chuck D protected me
PE kept me alive
Kept me on the road
Kept me from driving into the sun
Chuck D, the father I needed
Seeing death on the TV
Dead TV
Death TV
Murder in a synagogue
An angry white kid
Snaps
This violence
Is a daily affair
Name the
White boy violence
That infects American veins
Talk, talk, talk
11 Jews die in synagogue
I’m not over it
I’m not going to get over it
Two weeks ago
And suddenly my Jewishness
Feels like a weight
Around my neck
Check out my article on “Jazz” in the newly released book Keywords in Remix Studies (2017). I explore the history of the turntable in jazz culture and compare it to the history of the turntable in DJ-culture. Long before DJs learned to create break beaks, jazz musicians would lift the needles of turntables while listening to records in order to slow down and repeat phrases they wanted to imitate. Jazz musicians of the 1920s used turntables as tools for copying sound. Today’s jazz musicians have a number of technologies like the Amazing Slow Downer that have replaced the turntable. An exciting new direction in jazz-remix culture is the work of Christian Scott Adunde whose album Stretch Music (2015) has redefined the concept of an “album.” Stretch Music and its accompanying app give the listener/user the ability to mute whichever instrument they want, speed up or slow down tracks without pitch alteration, and more. Scott Atunde’s work demonstrates the fruitful exchange between jazz and remix culture.
In a related piece of writing for the jazz magazine The Note I explore remix-jazz culture from a more personal point of view. I was raised in Kansas City by hippies who were passionate amateur musicians. Weekly Friday nights jams were a staple of my childhood. We didn’t have living room furniture; we had a Hammond B-3, multiple acoustic pianos, a drum kit or two, a rack of guitars, trombones and tubas, and a slew of other instruments. Everybody played. Cousins, uncles and aunts, and friends from all over. What brought everyone together was the listening party. My father would put on whatever new album he’d scored, and everyone would listen and try to play along. One cut would be on repeat for five or six or seven times, until the band could get the changes. By the end of the night, with any luck, a new tune had been added to our repertoire. These weekly listening parties had a profound effect on me as a musician, artist, and human.
Immigration Nation
By T Storm Heter
[Delivered at Stroudsburg rally, “Vigil for Immigrants”, Courthouse square, Sat, Feb 11, 2017]
Someone shouts “go back to where you came from”
I came from here
Someone compliments me “your English is so good”
Thank you, I smile, “your English is good too”
I am immigrant,
Aren’t you?
Chile, Nigeria, Kazakhstan
France, Turkey, Russia
India, Bangladesh, Canada
I’m an immigrant
Aren’t you?
Jew, Buddhist, Sikh
Jain, Akan, Hindu
Muslim, Baptist, Mystic
I’m an immigrant,
Aren’t you?
Namibia, Laos, Colombia
El Salvador, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia
Yemen, Romania, Poland
Portugal, Ireland, Italy,
Iran, Jordan, Venezuela,
Kenya, Bolivia, Georgia
I’m an immigrant
Aren’t you?
Do no mistreat the stranger,
We were strangers in Egypt
Do not mistreat the stranger,
Your mother was once a stranger
Do not mistreated the stranger
Your grandmother was one a stranger
Do not mistreat the stranger
You were once a stranger
I’m an immigrant
Aren’t you?
Someone shouts “go back to where you came from”
I came from here
Someone compliments me “your English is so good”
Thank you, I smile, “your English is good too”
I am immigrant,
Aren’t you?
As a white dude teaching black studies I’m often asked, “Why are you teaching Black studies?”
My friend the philosopher Michael Monahan writes about this question in the beginning of his book The Creolizing Subject.
Here are my top five reasons for teaching Black studies:
(1) Racism is the most fundamental social problem we face today. The problem of the 21st century is the global “color line.”
(2) Philosophy is critical thinking. We need critical thinking most in areas where it is hardest to think critically. We should be interrogating whiteness.
(3) Innovative, dynamic, and exciting philosophical work is being done today by philosophers of color. Traditionally, philosophy has been one of the whitest, most colonized disciplines in the academy. Whereas disciplines like History, Anthropology and English started the process of decolonization in the 1970s, Philosophy has only begun to face its whiteness in the last twenty years. It is a good time to be a philosopher; philosophy is becoming more open, more diverse, and more interesting than ever before.
(4) My theoretical perspective, Black Existentialism, is not the same as my body, which is a white, male body. Interestingly, if I say my theoretical perspective is “French Existentialism,” my white, male American body gets a free pass. It is assumed to be natural that a “white” American would study a “white” European author. The disruption caused by my being a white Black Existentialist is a productive disruption. The disruption can help us name the theoretical and demographic whiteness of philosophy.
(5) It is easier to be a white person writing about blackness than to be a black person writing about blackness. I feel compelled to study and talk about whiteness. As Richard Wright might say, “we don’t have a black problem, we have a white problem.” As a Black Existentialist, I urge my University to hire black staff and black faculty at a rate that reflects the demographics of the 21st century.
social distortion pedal, t storm heter 2016
For several years I’ve been researching the subject of jazz and race. I’m now in the process of writing up my thoughts in book form. I’m calling the book “Black Noise/White Ears.” The title is an allusion to the black existentialist philosopher Frantz Fanon, who wrote one of the most important texts of black existentialism in 1952, “Black Skin, White Masks.”
In Black Noise/White Ears , I’ll be using the ideas of Fanon, along with ideas drawn from a long cast of other wonderful (living) thinkers like Sara Ahmed, George Yancy, Lewis Gordon, Ingrid Monson, Martin Munro and Josh Kun, just to mention a few.
I’ve decided that as I write my book I will share my ideas here, in the form of short blog posts.
The motivation for the book is the question: “What does it mean to ‘hear’ race?”
In the United States, race is usually something we claim to see. But don’t we also categorize each other based on sound?
The writer Gary Younge wrote a striking book in 1997, No Place Like Home where he described the confusion many Americans expressed when they heard a “black looking” man speak in a British accent.
As a philosopher and musician, I am interested in what musical sounds get labeled as “white” or “black” or “Latin” or “Asian.” Where do these genre labels come from and how to they affect the way we think about each other. For instance, why is the genre Hip-Hop considered “black music”? Are there particular sounds in Hip-Hop music that are “black” or “white” sounds?
I am a jazz drummer. I’m white. Does that make the music I play “white jazz”?
Jazz music originated in black and creole communities, in the US South and West. But by the 1930s white jazz artists dominated the charts and jazz became the popular music of the United States. Today, most jazz musicians are trained in conservatories and universities. Demographically, jazz has become a white dominated music form. Why?
These aesthetic questions are important. Music is the one place we talk explicitly about “ear training.” Maybe we all need ear training.
Within the next 25 years the US will become a majority-minority nation. Our racial vocabularies need to be reinvented. We are not a “post-racial” nation. We’ve mostly suppressed the hard questions about race and mixture.
We hear a lot about “talking about” race. I’m more interested in the act of listening. How can we begin listening to race–and listening to the mixture of race that characterizes both our past and our future?
here is the program for this year’s Sartre Society:
and here is a map of the area
time for some sartre