Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Style Wars Restoration Benefit Event

For the NYC fam (Brooklyn represent!) here’s an amazing event. One night only. On the big screen. It’s being put together by Henry Chalfant to raise money to restore the classic hip-hop film he made with the late great Tony Silver, “Style Wars”. Changed my life. Help Henry and the fam get it back out to change many more!

posted by @ 3:19 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, August 30th, 2010

E.L. Doctorow On The State Of The Arts & Artists

E.L. Doctorow has a brilliant essay in this week’s issue of The Nation on where American artists and arts are now at this point in history. An excerpt:

Artists in America don’t usually band together. They are independent entrepreneurs of their imaginations. They create universes of which they are the sole occupants. They may influence one another, they may be bundled by critics as members of an aesthetic movement, but they work alone and think alone, and if they gather on social occasions, like the members of any trade, it is for warmth, for they all know how few of them there are and how unseen by most of the population.

But there are critical moments in our national life when artists do come together as a constituency…

(snip of a beautiful passage on artists in the 1930s)

So here now today, in a new century, is this assemblage of artists, poets, musicians and playwrights, and we must ask what is the crisis today that impels them, in all their brilliant individuality, to present themselves as a group show?

The fact is that some terrible deep damage to the nation was done in the aftermath of 9/11. The government that swung into action misdirected its response and, with devious arguments to the American people, took us to war. In short time it had adopted the policies of an authoritarian state. Americans found themselves the sponsors of torture, and of the endless imprisonment without trial or counsel of presumed terrorists; they learned well after the fact that they themselves were subject to secret illegal surveillance by their government, and they saw their Constitution disdained with the unilateral abrogation of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention, though such treaties are constitutionally “the supreme Law of the Land.” All these measures were claimed as wartime expedients and promoted with a propaganda of fear. At the same time, the scientific evidence of global warming was ignored, religious literalism was put in the way of medical advance, regulatory agencies were given over to the very industries they were to regulate and, rife with wartime corruption, this government left to wallow an American population severely alienated by gross economic inequalities, the forces of wealth thriving at the expense of the middle class and the shrill demagogues of right-wing radio and television shouting down all principled disagreement with what was happening. The resulting trauma to the American people’s sense of themselves and their country is still being felt. We have not wanted to believe that a sitting president and his advisers could have so given themselves to an agenda of social, economic and environmental deconstruction, and with such relentless violations of constitutional law as to render themselves, definably, as subversives.

(snip, you just gotta go read it)

…All of this together would seem to define a national identity crisis, a terribly weakened sense of ourselves as a proud citizenry in charge of our lives—a calamity of heart as bad as what America suffered in the Great Depression.

Under these circumstances, our art, literature and music, all of which comes up from the bottom, uncensored, unfiltered, unrequested—the artists of whatever medium always coming out of nowhere—does tell us that something is firm and enduring after all in a country given to free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate.

Read it in full here.

posted by @ 3:27 pm | 0 Comments

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

The End Of Darkness?

Not here to give idiots any more earned media–except to say “Hmmmm, ‘End of Darkness’, MLK evocation…and all this Beck/Tea Party/idiot BS is not about race?” OK.

But more to the point, I’m back. Saying HEY after another summer of our national discontent to give you a quick update on what’s up in my world.

I’ve been working furiously on Who We Be: The Colorization of America and so the good news is you can expect to see some of the fruits of that in the coming months, as well as more writings.

Since I will be doing a lot of heavy lifting for the book–and a couple of other huge projects I’ll be telling you about soon–you won’t see much of me publicly over the next several months. If you’re interested in that, check the Dates page.

But I will be back around here a bit more. I’ll be working on updating The Reader with more articles I’ve done over the years.

For everything else, you can always follow me too at my Twitter feed at Zentronix.

Back to school, back to work, back to fighting the idiots. See you soon.

posted by @ 6:45 am | 0 Comments

Friday, June 4th, 2010

MIA v. Hirschberg

And MIA wins.

Here are the details on MIA’s takedown of Hirschberg. The offending interview snippets are actually posted now on her website. Which BTW all but confirms that everything we suspected about the piece being pre-written was true.

Hirschberg’s response that MIA’s posting of their interview was “fairly unethical and infuriating” is hilarious–this from a celebrity writer. Anyone who has been in the business knows that publicists often record interviews themselves as a kind of insurance against these kinds of situations. It’s a standard practice, and if Hirschberg is upset that Maya–who showed up apparently without a publicist this time–didn’t disclose the recording to her she may have a point, but hardly a cause. It’s all fair play.

Bonus: In true 21st century TMZ fashion, the thing turns on an order of truffled french fries.

Even better is Nitsuh Abebe’s must-read “Why We Fight” piece in Pitchfork on MIA and the yokes of “authenticity” and “political art” that she needs to actually advance her work. It’s entitled “The Trouble With Maya.” I’ve followed Abebe for a long while, and I have tended not to agree with him more than I have, but there’s no doubt that he’s at the top of the game. May he be as influential as he already is important.

A snippet:

Maya Arulpragasam is not a politically sophisticated thinker. Or if she is, she doesn’t always talk like it.

In Arulpragasam’s defense, this may or may not be a bad thing. After all, people don’t need to be “sophisticated” to be right. People don’t need to be nuanced or thoughtful to say something important. (Sometimes sophistication is a way of keeping people powerless– ignoring anyone who doesn’t speak your diplomatic language.) And people definitely don’t need to be any of those things to release good music. Hirschberg isn’t much interested in the music; in that sense, the piece is like reading breaking news that Public Enemy’s politics may have been– get this– somewhat messy or incoherent. And politics is important, but so are love, sex, religion, and how we treat one another as human beings– all topics we’re often fine with pop musicians acting out in ways that are contradictory, unsubtle, or problematic. We don’t need musicians to be “right” so much as we need them to be resonant– and at least not objectionably wrong.

And in art, there are different versions of that. Being bad with politics– holding an indefensible position– can make you “wrong.” Being bad with symbols and gestures– in other words, being bad at pop– might just make you uncool or embarrassing. It’s funny: Half the praise M.I.A. gets comes from the space between those two things, which makes it kind of perfect that negative reactions to this article do, too. It’s this weird blur between whether she’s politically wrong or just embarrassing and sophomoric. Moral wrongness versus pop wrongness. So is she politically irresponsible, or fraudulent, or annoying, or none of the above?

If one measure of good artistry can be the amount of good writing it provokes, MIA is certainly the most important artist in a long while.

posted by @ 7:29 am | 0 Comments

Friday, May 28th, 2010

On Tar Beach

Just hours after Obama’s news conference, Talib Kweli + Hi-Tek + The Roots were right on time on last night’s Fallon. Check them performing “Ballad Of The Black Oil”. Alternative title, “How To Wreck More Than Just Some Nice Beaches”.

+ Download a preview of The Roots’ new album: “Dear God 2.0”.

+ If you don’t have the Reflection Eternal album yet, you’re buggin.

+ Speaking of wrecking nice beaches, check Dave Tompkins + Monk One’s Bonus Beach Mix. You need Dave’s book. Summer reading. Just find a nice beach. Don’t wreck, relax.

+ From The Not Relaxing Department: MIA is on the cover of Sunday’s Times Magazine. More of the “radical chic v. entertain us please” angle which really isn’t a dichotomy or a tension at all, just two different ways of expressing the same underthought, cheap, and narratively deadening point-of-view. Plus…a pull quote:

“Maya has a unique tomboy-meets-ghetto-fabulous-meets-exotic-princess look that, like her music, manages to combine sexy elements (lingerie peeks out from under her see-through tops) with individual flourishes (she designs elaborate patterns for her nails) and ethnic accents (the bright, rich prints of Africa are her wardrobe staple).”

Why Lynn Hirschberg? No more comment.

+ The real question of the day: Joe Conason asks why not simply nationalize the oil industry?

In these times, give thanks for the music and the art.

posted by @ 8:50 am | 0 Comments

Friday, May 21st, 2010

More Proof Of Life

With thanks to Danyel for the title!

posted by @ 6:56 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Fighting Chauvinism, Really? :: Ethnic Studies, Republican Politics and Arizona’s Future

Tom Horne, Arizona superintendent of education, was reportedly offended that Dolores Huerta allegedly told Tucson High students that Republicans hated Latinos. So he made it his mission to erase history.

Horne got his way two days ago when Governor Jan “George Wallace” Brewer signed HB 2281, a bill that intends to ban ethnic studies. Never mind that the bill is so stupidly written that it is legally suspect.

The bill will prohibit any course of instruction that does the following:

1. PROMOTE THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
2. PROMOTE RESENTMENT TOWARD A RACE OR CLASS OF PEOPLE.
3. ARE DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR PUPILS OF A PARTICULAR ETHNIC GROUP.
4. ADVOCATE ETHNIC SOLIDARITY INSTEAD OF THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS AS INDIVIDUALS.

By these standards, most American History courses that Horne would prefer could be thrown out on the grounds they are designed for white conservatives, ignore the accomplishments of individual non-whites (like, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.?), advocate the solidarity of some whites, and make the rest of the kids–whatever their color–resentful of rich racist whites.

Horne says he decided to pursue this ban because of Huerta’s speech, which was supported by Tucson Unified’s Raza Studies program. But even this story is to be doubted–because he apparently doesn’t take to facts to well. He once referred to Dolores Huerta as Cesar Chavez’s ex-girlfriend. Good work on knowing anything about the history you’d like to ban.

In fact, a day after the bill was signed, he was set to meet with school officials in Tucson about the ethnic studies programs there that he has already demonized for three years. Great time to try to find out exactly what is being taught.

The officials cancelled. Instead, the meeting was cancelled and students walked out of school to protest the bill’s passage.

All of this says a lot about Arizona Republicans these days, doesn’t it? Never do the policy research when the poll research will do.

You see, Horne is running for the Republican nomination as attorney general. The ethnic studies ban is, in all likelihood the last policy “work” he will have done. The other, of course, is his outright ban on English teachers who speak with “bad” accents; read: Latino and Asian, not Australian or Russian.

Horne is stepping down from his Superintendent post soon to run full-time. Brewer, too, is a short-timer. She was appointed to fill Janet Napolitano’s seat and is up against a crowded primary election in August. Yup, elections have brought on fear and loathing season in Arizona.

So what do Arizonans get? Racial profiling and de facto apartheid. Education for the 19th Century. Official accent discrimination.

With HB 2281, Horne and Brewer have not even pretended to do anything that is pedagogically useful. In the name of fighting “chauvinism”, they have not even pretended to welcome reasoned debate–as the right does, say, on climate change or evolution. They instead have voted to suppress histories. That’s not fighting chauvinism, that’s promoting ignorance.

The parallel here is the American Indian experience in the 1800s. In addition to being forced from their native lands, Indians were pushed into “Americanization” programs. Mexican Americans in the Southwest–not to mention and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Hawai’i and the West–have similar histories to tell.

Ethnic studies programs, at their best, have kept these stories alive, have serve as a wellspring for new narratives of America. They are the reason the history the U.S. tells about itself is much more plural than it was in decades past.

Cultural conflicts are about erasing bodies and memory. One side would like to pretend that change never happened. The other is the change struggling to be made.

Politics is where it all goes down.

If there is any kind of upside to this story, it is that the progressives may be re-energized to react. After record voter turnouts for youth, communities of color and progressives in 2008, the last two years have mostly seen a reversion to the disenchantment that had characterized the previous 16 years. The results have been big electoral losses for progressives.

Of course, Arizona is still a predominantly white and a predominantly Red state. Latinos are only about 12% of the electorate, although they make up 20% of potential voters. But they can become an important bloc in the elections this year. Add in pro-immigrant and pro-diversity voters and it’s clear: time and demography are just not on Brewer and Horne’s side.

In addition to honoring progressive boycotts of Arizona, supporters of immigrants and diversity should bring the kind of energy, resources, and capital to Arizona’s statewide elections this summer and fall that they brought to the presidential election in 2008.

posted by @ 9:57 am | 0 Comments

Monday, April 12th, 2010

How To Wreck A Nice Beach :: The Bay Tour


The mothership is landing…

–> Flyer for Bay events

–> How To Wreck A Nice Website

If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting for this book since you first heard rap music when you were a shorty. It is true that I once called him the best hip-hop writer ever born–all respect due to Greg Tate and the rest of my writing gods and goddesses in the starry pantheon, this wild-eyed child Dave was born to write hip-hop–and this is why. Not to mention that Stop Smiling has done up the text in a sumptuously illustrated fashion.

Come hear the man-machine himself speak this week in the Bay at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, rock out at not just one but two special club nights of computer love dedicated to Mr. Tompkins and his wacky affection-object, and check his website for his ongoing appearances across the country.

posted by @ 9:57 am | 1 Comment

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Fast Car

Click this...

Big ups Keith Knight…His first collection of The Knight Life goes on sale soon.

posted by @ 6:52 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

On Joshua Clover’s 1989

From the latest issue of The Progressive, here’s a teaser for my review of Joshua Clover’s new book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About:

What can popular music really do? Can it topple walls, stop tanks, unleash hope and change? Or are those powers really just a mass delusion, simply another part of the sale? For centuries the question of culture’s influence has occupied poets, philosophers, even those disposed to the sordid arts of politics. At the start of a new decade, poet-philosopher-activist Joshua Clover finds them worth reexamining in his dense, provocative, wonderfully written little book, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About.

In 1989, the scope of global events suggested political change on a scale unseen since 1968. The new expansiveness in pop music seemed to sound out a perceptual change as well. Something new was happening in what Clover calls “the unconfined, unreckoned year,” but exactly what?

Forests of hagiographies have long since taken the riddle and blood out of 1968. 1989 presents a different kind of capstone, one that leaves the left in a quandary. For the 1980s were the decade that the North American left never wanted. They remain critically under-examined, as if they were better forgotten.

But in neocon narratives, those years are carried as if on a wind of inevitability. Borrowing Raymond Williams’s startling turn of phrase, Clover is interested in describing “structures of feeling.” And the feel of 1989 was captured by Francis Fukuyama’s wacky “end of history” thesis, in which he posited from cascading global events that history had finally collapsed into the eternal truth of “the Western Idea”—World Liberal Capitalism (itself the flattening of two different subjects, “liberal democracy” and “global capitalism”).

Intellectuals love “end of” narratives: “the end of liberalism,” “the end of Black politics,” “the end of irony.” But these stories, even when nostalgic and ridden with regret and loss, are almost always rigid and triumphal. Clover takes this as a given. To him, the fact that history did carry on after the Fall of the Berlin Wall is barely worthy of comment (although this means he also misses an opportunity to cite the lyrics of Soul II Soul’s fine ’89 hit, “Keep On Movin’ ”).

But the popularity of certain “end of” narratives fascinates him, because they capture a mass consciousness, “a way of knowing.” Clover links the functions of pop music and what might be called pop history. So OK, it may be true that we live in an age of iPod isolation where smart pop criticism has retreated into microgenre formalism and an age of tabloid capitalism where the cult of celebrity eclipses even the most fashionable forms of materialist analysis. (These phenomena may be better known by their names “The iTunesification of Everything” and “The Cornel West Dilemma.”) But Clover doesn’t allow the reader to sweep all of that into a dustbin called “false consciousness” and walk away from the masses. Instead, he wants to clarify the real stakes of culture.

Clover is an acclaimed poet who may be best known for his music and film criticism. He is also an 89er who was shaped indelibly by the left movements of the era—from anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity to the AIDS crisis and anti-racism to the anti-corporate globalization movements. (Most recently, he has been a key faculty leader in the broad movement against the University of California’s budget cuts and fee increases.) But Clover holds serious doubts about pop music’s ability to “herald a new political awareness,” the notion—to borrow (and tweak slightly) Jacques Attali’s famous dictum—that music can be prophecy…

+ Buy the magazine or subscribe here.

+ Buy the book here.

posted by @ 5:46 am | 1 Comment



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