Culturewatch
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.
Rip it Up (W.T. Lhamon Jr. on Little Richard)
What follows is an excerpt from W.T. Lhamon Jr.’s Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (1990). Thanks to the author for giving First permission to reprint his revelatory writing on the lore of Little Richard.