The Business of Fancydancing dir. Sherman Alexie May 31-June 6 Guild Theater I read somewhere that the reason the 20th-century African American novelist Richard Wright wrote the brutal novel Native Son was to shake up and shock the white readers who too easily enjoyed his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. Though it had […]
Charles Mudede
Posted inMusic
Bushi Hiphop
Ludacris’ Dirty Mouf
Ludacris Mon April 22 Memorial Coliseum I come from a bourgeoisie (or bushi) black family. In the ’70s, my father reached the peak of black stability–he was a pastor for three churches in rural Maryland. In the ’80s, he was an economist for the World Bank, while my mother was a university lecturer and successful […]
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Cult of Personality
Busta Roars Like a Dungeon Dragon
Busta Rhymes Tues Feb 19 Crystal Ballroom Towards the end of the 1982 hiphop movie Wild Style, the graffiti artist “Lee” Georges Quinones comes to this realization: The future stars of the hiphop enterprise will not be the breakers, or the DJs, and certainly not the graffiti artists, but the rappers. At the time, hiphop […]
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The Greatest
Will Smith’s Audacity and the Registers of Gods
Ali dir. Michael Mann Opens Christmas Day Various Many years ago, a good friend, who got me loaded on his special brownies, told me the story behind Carl Orff’s florid Carmina Burana. Apparently, a group of wine-drinking medieval monks wrote the music at registers that were forbidden in Christendom because they were considered to be […]
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Tropical Futura
Bebel Gilberto and the Passionate Planet
Bebel Gilberto Sat Nov 24 Aladdin When I watched Brazilian bossa nova goddess Bebel Gilberto perform songs from her debut CD Tanto Tempo two years ago, my mouth produced sugar. I must explain this phenomenon. The performance of Bebel Gilberto–who is the daughter of the world-famous samba musicians João and Miùcha Gilberto–was so erotic that […]
Posted inBooks
Empire
Book Review
Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Harvard University Press) A Mercury Reader User’s Guide Once in a blue moon, something happens to the social universe: a grand convergence of social and cultural forces beams down to earth a radical new book. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire is such a book. Published three months after […]
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Holes in the Wall
Wong Kar-Wai and the Architecture of Absence
At the end of Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels, we find two lovers on a motorbike, racing through an underground a tunnel. Suddenly everything hits slow motion and we sense that something is up ahead. What is it? Are they about to break out into the open country? No, the lovers break out into a financial […]
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Crouch And Deliver
Bamboozled Derails the Hardline Black Aesthetic
STANLEY CROUCH loves Bamboozled. If you think I’m making this up, then please read the November issue of Talk magazine. On page 144, Stanley Crouch writes: “[Bamboozled] contains some of the most inventive and telling social satire ever brought to the American screen.” Stanley Crouch praising Spike Lee? The same Stanley Crouch who once called […]
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Cool World
Disney Sells Black Codes to White America
THIS MOVIE IS BAD, so I’m not going to judge or compare it to other bad Disney animation films. What’s infinitely more interesting than the movie’s content or technical achievements is the semiotic matter of “cool codes,” and how they relate to the marketing of The Emperor’s New Groove. In America, blacks (or more specifically, […]
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Mars Needs Women
A Sexual/Spiritual Interpretation of Red Planet
INTRO “This is the best Mars movie because it celebrates man’s ingenuity and asks the big questions about who we are, and what’s going to happen to us.” –Val Kilmer Red Planet is first and foremost a philosophical declaration of mankind’s subconscious desire to seek out and destroy God. The tool, or theory, used to […]
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Simply Gorgeous
Pretty (Dangerous), Simple Film
THE MOST TERRIBLE TIME in My Life is a dangerous movie. Not because it’s beautiful, or because it transmits subversive messages and depicts graphic violence. It’s dangerous because it makes filmmaking (or great filmmaking) seem so easy, you wonder why you aren’t out making a great film instead of sitting in the dark watching one. […]
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Das Hiphop
Overcoming Racism with Freundeskreis
WE ALL HARBOR little racist notions. For example, I never saw a dentist until I was 27 because I was convinced that white people had weak teeth and Africans had super strong teeth. The costly consequence of this racism has been seven fillings and three horrifying root canals, one of which was on a complex […]