He stared at me, waiting for an answer. At home we didn’t get in other people’s faces like that. You talked towards a space and the other person had a choice of entering or not entering …
I was today years old a few months ago when I first heard … Read the rest
Phife Dawg aka Malik Taylor, the raspy half of the seminal hiphop band A Tribe Called Quest, has died at the age of 45. The brilliant, funny, wise, immensely talented and lovable rapper from Queens had suffered from diabetes and other ailments for years. Despite his renown as one … Read the rest
I’ve been trying for a while now to come to terms with the emergence of Ta-Nehisi Coates as the clearest voice of black defiance and determination during the police violence outrages of the past couple years. The appeal of Coates’s basic message of empowerment through self-awareness is obvious, but I … Read the rest
Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s long-unseen companion novel to To Kill A Mockingbird, is arriving with a shock.
Where Lee’s classic novel presents Atticus Finch as a lawyer who fights heroically for an African-American who is unjustly accused, the continuation of the story (written decades ago, but … Read the rest
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Baltimore native and widely respected young writer, has written a powerful article about the shocking riots that are taking place in that city this week, following the inexplicable death of an innocent African-American named Freddie Gray in police custody. The article is titled “Nonviolence as Compliance”, … Read the rest
What can a pacifist say about racism? A lot, it turns out. The pacifist perspective is badly needed when rage abounds, as it does right now following the decisions by grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City not to indict two policemen who killed two unarmed African-American men.… Read the rest
“Wizard of Oz is on again”, I noticed recently while flipping through my favorite classic movie channels. Then I spotted the year on the movie listing: 1925.
Here it was, the early version I’d always been curious to see! This silent-era Wizard came out fourteen years before the great … Read the rest
Amiri Baraka, a seminal Beat poet, angry playwright, revolutionary activist and scrappy indie publisher from Newark, New Jersey has died. The Allen Ginsberg Project blog has the scoop. Here’s a Litkicks article about Amiri Baraka by Jamelah Earle from 2003.
Please feel free to share your memories or personal encounters … Read the rest
Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street
