Chairman Ralph's Ministry Of Truth

Whether they just dropped by the neighborhood, or spent the whole weekend, the first Harbor Vision Festival offered something for everyone during its three-day run (August 12-14) at the Dwight P. Mitchell City Center on the corner of Main Street, and Pipestone Avenue.

Featured activities ranged from dance groups, to youth talent contests and performances by local artists like Charlene Jones-Clark, and Johnnie Edwards – and, on Sunday, a five-hour “Gospel Extravangaza” to close the proceedings.

For Harbor Vision Festival Chairman Kareemah El-Amin, everything fell together exactly as she and her organizing committee anticipated – having had only three months, a fraction of the lead time that such major events require.

"It's like a big block party downtown. There's so much love in the air,” El-Amin said Friday, during Jones-Clark's set. “It's about engaging people, and bringing people together under a common cause – which is to bring back this city. Look, it's nine o'clock at night, and kids are playing basketball – they can do that anywhere, but they want to do it here.” El-Amin estimated that about 500 to 600 people per day would have passed through the festival site by the event's conclusion. “I think we hit a home run, because so many people didn't think it would turn out as well as it did. We've already shut everybody down who thought that this wouldn't happen,” she said. (The committee closed up shop for 2011 with a final sum-up meeting on August 23.)

Livery co-owner Leslie Pickell is well aware of the challenges – having spent six years on the Coming Home Coming Together Concert Committee., and also as a key organizer of the venue's Artoberfest event. “This is my third time over here today, actually,” Pickell said. “I think it's got great potential – I honestly we wish could do this every weekend. It's hard work doing this, to get people really inspired around the vision of what you're doing, and I think Kareemah has done a great job. That's why it's happening.”

Friday's lineup proved a case in point, with Jones-Clark and Edwards taking turns to front a four-piece house band – with help from by DJ James Sims, on turntables, and Marcus Robinson, on guitar – through R&B hits like Michael Jackson's 1979 breakout smash, “Rock With Me.” The band also improvised reggae and funk moods behind an hour of local spoken word artists from the “Xpression Session” – which El-Amin hosts monthly at the Livery, in Benton Harbor, and is now in its third year.

FULL DISCLOSURE (CHAIRMAN'S LOG...) For me, the best part involved being able to float (vocally speaking) over the house band, whose crack musos included Marcus Robinson (guitar), and Johnnie Edwards (bass). I could simply leave the guitar playing to someone else, and just get down to the business of...

...(ahem)...representin', as they call it sometimes. I just had to project, and let the band take care of business, which they did...the minute I heard that slinky l'il reggae groove slithering out of those speakers, I felt like I Knew exactly what to do, and it wasn't too long before I flew from simple recitation, to freeform toasting and improv-ing off my own words.

I managed to do two numbers, including "I Was A Teenage Subversive," my self-described "political monster movie" ("I was a teenage subsversive when I saw the siren song of sex for profit being touted on billboards, serving up another blonde on the end of a fork...and I realized, this equation need not include me..."), and: ..."A Revolution Of The Mind," which basically states that we will never change our conditions, until we get past that "it's always been done that way" mentality ("Enough! Let us be done checking stocks & shares, divided among the propertied classes like so many dried-up old rotten apples...what & where the hell did it get us? Nothing!").

...AND NOW (BACK TO THE JOURNALISTIC BIT)
The festival's sounds and sentiments proved pleasing to St. Joseph residents Greg and Andrea Szczotka, who grew up in East Detroit during the height of '60s-era Motown, and recently marked their 44th wedding anniversary. As longtime Michael Jackson fans, the pair couldn't resist a quick dance during Edwards' version of “Rock With Me.” “We like to dance – we just like to go out and enjoy that (kind of thing). I saw them putting up the stage, and we said, 'Let's drive down tonight, and see what's going on,'” Greg Szczotka said. “We spend a lot of time in Benton Harbor.”

Heavy rains and thunderstorms halted all proceedings at about 3:30 p.m. Saturday, but the festival resumed by 7 p.m. with more competitive dance activity, and finished strongly with Sunday's gospel music show – spearheaded by Bonita Mitchell, who served on the festival's entertainment committee. El-Amin had originally budgeted $50,000 for this year's event, but the final number ended up closer to $13,000 or $14,000 – bolstered by a lot of in-kind contributions, she said.

Those contributions came from local residents and committee members like Tim Johnson, for example, who handled all the festival's electrical work, and helped bring its site layout to life, El-Amin said. “The in-kind (contributions) probably made it (the final amount) more, but what we actually had in dollars – a lot of it was, people actually did things for us. So we made a lot happen on a lot of determination. We had lots of different skill sets that came to the table,” she said.

Johnson worked from a Google map of the area to help create the site design, which changed two or three times, El-Amin said. “I got a bird's eye view of it, and then I just wrote on the map where everything was going to go – from what Kareemah said,” he said on Saturday, during the rain delay. “I said, 'Wait a minute, why don't we get a picture off the computer? Sure enough, it printed it out, and it printed out a good picture.” Such help makes or breaks events like Harbor Vision, which also made the final design so important, El-Amin said. “It was very intentional. That was the whole point – it (the layout) allowed them to come through vendors, allowed you to see the main stage, and get to the other things, as well.”

Concerning next year's event (scheduled for August 10-12, 2012), El-Amin wants to start organizing in January, with a $100,000 budget as the starting point. That will allow a longer lead time to land corporate sponsors, recruit more vendors and build momentum to help the festival grow, El-Amin said. “What we'd like to do, ultimately, is maybe give some scholarships out, and give really good prizes for talent – there's so many talented people. That's the opportunity that we can provide, but we have to be able to bring some of those dollars back into the festival. We can do that corporate sponsorship, and also, through people paying to be vendors, and things of that nature, so we can provide a platform to launch people's careers."