Ben Khadim DeMott

American X-mas Party

by

Shane and I used to finger each other. Don’t worry mom, this isn’t me coming out. Fingering is a bit dramatic. It was just pre-pubescent exploring. I remember one time when we had our pants off, figuring out each other’s, in Shane’s room—my mom and Shane’s mom knocked on the door. We hadn’t heard them make their way from the living room. Shane and I rushed to button up. My mom didn’t notice the way my pants hung loosely from my hips.

I went to see Shane for the first time in ten years. His mom, an ex-police detective who had moved out to California, was hosting a Christmas party on her return to New York. I could discern which retro-fitted Harlem apartment building was Shane’s.

Read more

Murder Tucker!

by

Pierre—a rando from comedy show Kill Tony’s lot of amateur comedians—opens his set with “I’ve been working out lately, and I realized I could rape everybody here… if I wanted too.'” An outlier/success in ep. 669’s series of audience call ups, Pierre spins racial stereotypes/myths about black people, taking cues from the show’s host Tony Hinchcliffe—who’ll run with jokes about his homosexual life (clever ones, not hateful slurs). Before Pierre’s entrance, it’s hard to watch as Tony pressures one guest, after a lame set—enough humiliation already!—to detail his violent criminal conviction. Ali Siddiq‘s feature and follow-up in another episode—head in hands as Tony does in a newbie whose stand-up is impaired by a speech impediment—embodies every (sane) KT viewer’s dilemma: should I really be watching, participating in this? Comedian Bill Burr amps up such doubts by explicitly refusing the show’s premise in one ep., calling out Tony for abusing newer/younger comedians. Yet KT’s formula, the cringe (and/or occasional burst of talent), is almost addicting—the show gets millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners.

Read more

American Prism (Campus Diary)

by

The morning after the night raid, I woke up and checked my phone to see University security service’s automated message sent at 7:02 A.M.: “Quad cleanup.” I cringed. I texted a friend who had been involved from the start with the Encampment and checked the school’s paper The Maroon. Their live updated coverage had been one way of keeping up with goings on at the Quad. Like most students, I went in, and out, of the Encampment: meeting friends; nodding to acquaintances; hearing about campers’ fears and strategy; attending a Palestine-activist professor’s teach-in (“genocide isn’t complicated”); taking in kids’ play and an inter-faith call to prayer. Only snippets, perhaps, compared to those who stayed for the week and kept up chanting all night against the university police raid, but it was enough to give me a sense of the moment, and place.

Read more

Afropean Fraternity

by

https://youtu.be/pXx7bT282dk?si=xdzhI2A0ZEAPKtHF

Headie One and Koba LaD are brothers under the Channel. Their rap song, “Link In the Ends,” establishes a connection between French Banlieue and English council estate.

Read more

Sturdy New Acquisitions

by

Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

Read more

High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)

by

Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.

Read more

Forget Barbenheimer — Go Back to School (and Life) with Tariq Saleh’s “Boy from Heaven”

by

“Oh! Al-Azhar! Inshallah” exclaims our taxi driver. This cabbie has realized he has no ordinary passenger, but a student of Egypt’s and Sunni Islam’s premier university. “Sheikh Adam” enunciates the driver, bestowing an honorific upon the rider and bringing home Al-Azhar University’s prestige to viewers of Tarik Saleh’s film Boy from Heaven. Our boy hero, Adam, has a common first day experience—crammed move-in, first brush with the library (where he floats through aisles, grazing precious covers softly), first bunk bed night. We catch an inkling of a smile as Adam lays himself down, tired body soon to rest. Beneath the minarets and shady arches, though, Al-Azhar is in flux. The institution’s presiding Grand Imam, a quasi-Pope figure in the Sunni world, dies—setting off a succession crisis between extremist Islamists and a more moderate, pro-secular government contingent.

Read more

This Met is Mine

by

Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady.  The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…

I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.

Read more

Soul Show in the Underworld

by

You would think Hell eviscerates individuality. Sinners lose their mobility. They do not eat. They do not rest. Their human complications are boiled down to one wrong. They are forced to repeat an action or exist in the same state for eternity: the indecisive souls’ chase has no finish line, and fire and ice never let up for those in lake and lava. Hell’s project is to stratify and simplify, in short, to dehumanize humans. But, the underworld is full of souls with immutable characters and distinct ways of responding. Dante doesn’t chat with muttering masses. Instead, he charms, listens, recoils from the passionate and demure alike. Ulysses upholds curiosity, Master Adam is combative, Francesca refuses to renege on her love, and Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s differing physicalities embody confidence and diffidence, respectively. Their  individuation/human expression is a form of resistance to Hell’s order.

Read more

Bridges to Misogynists

by

A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:

Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.

Read more

iLied

by

I spent my middle school years without a phone. I had an iPod. There’s not much  difference but back then a phone and iPod seemed a world apart. (An iPod cannot use cellular data, so you can’t use it without wifi. iPods also can’t make phone calls.) I remember the biggest (most shaming) difference was that on the back of the iPod, iPod was engraved in large letters. Whenever I used my iPod around people I used my fingers to cover that humiliating logo.

Read more