Posts in: Pop culture
- On blacks and gays and gals in New Orleans
- Big Freedia and Galactic at the Fillmore from Big Freedia on Vimeo. As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity [...] [24 Jul 2010]
- On the danger of seeing a story as more than a story
- We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. Writer Elif Shafak in her TED talk The Politics of Fiction (embedded below). Shafak was prosecuted for her novel about a family’s women set against [...] [19 Jul 2010]
- “41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers”
- Elaine Brown, a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. I attended a screening of 41st & Central last night, as part of the National Black Arts Festival. It’s a quite moving documentary about the rise of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, especially [...] [17 Jul 2010]
- On models and attractiveness
- Obviously we went through a period where models reflected the Twiggy phenomenon, but that didn’t have much to do with what actually was attractive to the opposite sex. Hugh Hefner just gave me the giggles with this quote from an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times. In it, Solomon asserts that the [...] [11 Jul 2010]
- On rocking the mic
- And so, in the revised entry for rock included in the O.E.D.’s June 2010 update, Melle Mel trumps Big Bank Hank as the earliest known M.C. to “rock the mic.” Though fresh evidence could always push the usage back even further, there’s a certain justice to setting the record straight, more than three decades after [...] [11 Jul 2010]
- On “protest art”
- Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is [...] [6 Jul 2010]
- On happiness
- Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. That’s from the epilogue of Eric Weiner‘s tremendously fun book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the [...] [18 May 2010]
- Gender and the Arab world
- One of the most rewarding aspect of researching and writing the book was my growing realization of the central role of gender in social and political life, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Reality television animated the discussion of gender by featuring unmarried young men and women dancing, singing, eating, and (in some shows) living [...] [12 May 2010]
- Who’s French and Whose French
- Photo by notfrancois. Found on Flickr. French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French. More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures [...] [25 Apr 2010]
- On art movements and outsiders
- The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority … But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within [...] [18 Apr 2010]