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.”
Culturewatch
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.
Still Bill
Damn near everything you want to know about the late singer/songwriter Bill Withers’ music is in the following line from his bio: he was born July 4th, 1938 in Slabfork, West Virginia.
A Life in Struggle: Felicitas Magdaleno R.I.P.
It is with deep sadness and pain in our hearts that Movement for Justice in El Barrio mourns the passing of our beloved long-time member leader, Felicitas Magdaleno.
First Day Out (A Blue Sky Day Turns Grey)
Like a lot of New Yorkers, I’m missing the outside.
Alter Cocker
Even after this crisis is over, I will never stop feeling old. That’s what I’ve learned from the coronavirus. Old is not wise. Not just archaic. It is susceptible, assailable, penetrable—vulnerable.
The Pharisee and the Coronavirus
I’ve been thinking about the Old Testament prophets lately. I distrust end-is-nigh-ism; that “end” is often just the destruction of some solipsistic fantasy. Life goes on in whatever seemingly hobbled form. The fundamentalists I grew up with understood those OT doom-sayers quite literally. The surreal omens promised a real-world destruction always five minutes from a moment exactly like now. But that now never comes.
Virus-Apocalypse
More notes on now from the author’s Facebook page…