Thursday, December 20th, 2007

F the CC :: Part 3,765

Belatedly, John Nichols on the FCC’s latest Monopoly move. I was listening to the lobbyist for newspaper owners the other day and rolled on the floor for a few minutes laughing at the way dude invoked localism as a reason they needed to be able to buy up TV and radio stations. That was a new one.

In any case, Congress has the last word. That means you can still make a difference. Sign a letter here.

posted by @ 11:30 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Roboprof :: 20 Seconds To Comply

Follow up :: Roboprof explains himself in the The Washington Post!

posted by @ 11:08 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Tonight In The Bay!

posted by @ 10:00 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Hillary To Attack Obama On Mandatory Minimums?

Thanks to all yall who posted or emailed or txted me on yesterday’s Huffpo piece.

BTW it’s always interesting to me to see how the comments section on pieces like this always move quickly away from the topic to something else entirely. One person actually suggested college basketball teams be investigated for reverse racism. Riiiiiiiight.

Sigh. Well…it is what it is and that’s why we do what we do.

Getting back to the actual article I wrote–as opposed to the one some people thought they read–my man Ethan Brown called my attention to this Atlantic blogpost from Marc Ambinder that suggests a Clinton aide’s recent attack on Obama over his admitted cocaine use is hardly the end of the story.

Ethan comments here and will be tracking the story on his blog. One last thing…his incredible new book Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice has just been released.

posted by @ 8:38 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Huffington Post :: Obama, Clinton, and the Spectre of the Culture Wars – Politics on The Huffington Post

My first blog entry is up at HuffPost. Check this preview:

In Iowa last Tuesday, a man–a good friend and a brilliant professor named Kembrew McLeod, actually–dressed up as a robot–yes, a robot–to heckle Bill Clinton on, of all things, the infamous 1992 Sister Souljah incident.

You may remember that one: at a crucial moment in his presidential campaign, Clinton seized on a decontextualized quote by the rapper about the Los Angeles riots to reassure white voters that he was solidly on their team. (Then he went on Arsenio Hall to play a disastrous sax solo.)

So against the round booing of 400 FOBs–none of whom, it may be safely presumed, had ever been forcibly detained like Wen Ho Lee–my-friend-the-robot dropped a club promoter’s amount worth of flyers that detailed Clinton’s disservices to racial justice while, at the top of his lungs, demanding on behalf of all robots that the Great Triangulator apologize to Souljah.

It’s true that a lot has changed since then. A rap group even won an Academy Award. And I’m still not sure why my man needed to be in a robot suit. But he had a point.

The resentments that made it possible for Bill Clinton to summon race, class, and generation divides to scold youths of color into behaving properly towards nice middle-of-the-road voters haven’t disappeared. Think of how the Don Imus firing turned into a referendum on rap earlier this year. (And think of how much money Imus received to return to the airwaves.) Think of the 50 noose incidents in the two months since the march on Jena in September.

The culture wars have never really ended…

Click here to read the whole thang.

posted by @ 8:12 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

How For Do Business Like One Local

This one’s for all the kotonks, kachinks, haoles, and all my Pilipino cousins who wish they were from Hawai’i. Courtesy, Hawaii Business Magazine and Tanimitsu Mitsuyoshi Yoshimura and Associates.

posted by @ 4:55 pm | 1 Comment

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

BREAKING NEWS :: Robot In Iowa Heckles Bill Clinton Over Sister Souljah

During school hours, he’s a mild-mannered University of Iowa professor. But during the primary season, when he’s not grading papers he’s a Robot Seeking Truth and Racial Justice.

He’s Kembrew McLeod, and he’s in today’s Des Moines Register. (Here’s his manifesto.)

BTW: absolutely no truth to the rumors that the protest was organized by Cylons For Edwards.

posted by @ 11:44 am | 2 Comments

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

More Wire Geekdom

Perhaps the best fanblog ever about definitely the best TV show ever, Heaven and Here, is back and landing punches. Under discussion right now are the 3 exclusive short ‘prequels’ at the Amazon page for The
Wire :: The Complete Fourth Season DVDs that give background on some of the most interesting characters from the show: McNulty & Bunk (inc. Rawls), Prop Joe, and Omar.

Meanwhile I’m planted in front of the tube with my Season 4 DVDs until the Season 5 premiere on January 6. Great way to spend 12 hours. Or maybe 48 or 96…

posted by @ 7:56 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Rap Sales And Globalization :: Hip-Hop Verses The World?

When I was doing work on my piece for Foreign Policy–and for those of you in China still hoping to get at this, please hang on, I’m working on it–these past several months, I kept on trying to work one intriguing storyline that I could not quite pull together fully for the piece: the idea that U.S. rap is in decline because it hasn’t globalized as fast as other genres.

Now I realize that this is completely counterintuitive to the argument of the piece (nor does it explain country music’s continued rise, among other trends) and this is why I left that particular storyline hanging. But some of the buzz I was getting from industry sources was intriguing.

Here are two things that came up…:

+ One top-selling label finds its overseas sales now outstrips its domestic sales but hasn’t been able yet to capitalize on it fast enough because of its U.S. focus and its rap-dominated roster.

+ U.S. rappers are now more likely to guest-appear on overseas artists albums than they are to appear on those rappers’ albums. It’s not because of North American arrogance, but because those rap artists desperately need to build demand overseas.

Trust that there’s a lot more where that came from, and I might develop it into a future piece.

In any case, the excellent music industry reporter Jeff Leeds has a great story in today’s NY Times on Martin Kierszenbaum, an Interscope music exec who is charged with bringing U.S. music to the world (and to a lesser extent these days, to bring the world’s music–forget that antiquated term “world music”–to the U.S.).

It’s a good read and perhaps another reason that the music industry is fast becoming the Mike Gravel of the global media/entertainment complex.

OK, that’s not fair. Most of what Gravel says and does makes sense.

posted by @ 8:31 am | 3 Comments

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

David Henry Hwang Goes Post-Multiculti

Fascinating read about David Henry Hwang in yesterday’s New York Times. Hwang created the sensational “M. Butterfly”, a smash critical and audience hit, a pinnacle work of the multiculturalist movement and, for a long time, the subject of many an Asian Americanist’s love and/or hate. It was, of course, a response to the Orientalist standard “Madame Butterfly”.

Hwang was also, like many other prominent Asian American artists at the time, an activist on issues of representation, and protested the casting of a white guy as the lead hapa pimp for “Miss Saigon”.

His new Off-Broadway piece “Yellow Face” casts a character named DHH who is protesting the casting of a white guy in a role meant for a hapa. Sound familiar? The work deconstructs that period–not to declare racism and representational issues dead, but to examine the fallout and legacy of that charged era.

I won’t be in NYC this winter…too much stuff to do…but if anyone is and gets to catch it, holla.

posted by @ 10:50 am | 1 Comment



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