Culturewatch
Stanley Crouch Faces the Music
Stanley Crouch died today. We hadn’t been in touch much the past few years. I’d heard he was sick. I don’t know the ailment. I’m sad and shocked. Sad. I always liked him. We got along. I don’t know why. People like you, and you think okay, I like you too.
Stanley Crouch & The All-American Skin Game
Late in his life Amiri Baraka once mused that he knew he was old because he’d begun to feel sad when his enemies died. Their obits reminded him of passionate struggles in his past and made the present seem like a diminished thing. Baraka didn’t outlive Stanley Crouch but I bet he’d’ve felt bummed to know another one of his contras had split. In the case of Crouch, though, Baraka’s sadness might’ve been deepened since Crouch offered him more than an olive branch before both of them departed.
Not that cultural powers-that-be took that in…
The Democracy vs. The Undercommons
On the night of Joe Biden’s big speech, I prepped for the spectacle by Zooming with black alt leftists who addressed an “ensemble” very different from the Democratic Convention.
Goodbye-ing
One night in August, while I was watching Cavani’s The Skin, I learned that Jay had died.
The Old Ball Game
Maybe the game you play first is the one that memory coats with the richest patina.
For me it is baseball…
Tom Cotton Vs The New York Times; Queering the Debate
As the demand for “moral clarity” in journalism grows, at least among progressive journalists, I’m forced to reconsider my career as a censor, back when I was an editor at The Village Voice.
At Camp We Sang “Dixie”
Struck by the non-response of her Facebook friends to the following post, Laurie Stone kept her movement of mind going…
The Comedy of Modern Life: Conner O’Malley’s American Breakdowns
Comic Conner O’Malley caught the MAGA moment on the wing a few years ago in a series of Vines (collected here). In these six-second shots: “O’Malley — playing a deranged car-and-wealth-obsessed man — would pull up to befuddled Manhattan businessmen in sports cars, scream guttural praise for their public display of opulence, and then bike away before they knew what hit them.”
Notes on Being Down But Not Out with Hip-Hop
The author of this piece wrote it before the killing of George Floyd. (See his postscript on that score below.) Osborne notes “recent real-world events take precedence over bitching about good or bad rappers.” Your editor takes Osborne’s point but his act of imagination isn’t out of time. His refusal to buy into ugly images of black men is, in its sweet way, a contribution to the struggle against real killer cops.