In Game Three of the Cleveland-Orlando NBA Eastern Conference Finals, with the Cavaliers trailing 77-70, announcer Doug Collins reached for an adequate descriptive term for Lebron James, and came up with: locomotive.
Culturewatch
To Criticize the Critic
“Thank you, Doctor.”
– Johnny Carson
Tom Hale’s measured praise of First of the Year [http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=257] ends up as a funeral oration for the paper.
Not so fast.
Unwritten Rules
Excerpted from First of the Year: 2008 Copyright Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
It’s been an elegiac time for our crew lately. In the past year, we lost (among others) Hans Koning, Ellen Willis, George Trow, Kurt Vonnegut and, a year before that, Benjamin DeMott. They were First readers as well as writers for our tab. You could count on them to give it to you straight and there were occasions when one of their opinions could outweigh all others due to its cogency. There are no substitutes for irreplaceable elders but we’ll try to sustain what they valued in First by finding new originals to help carry us into the future. Which, sorry to repeat myself, remains unwritten (despite the chorus of that slack Natasha Bedingfield song).
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Addressing the United States Congress in February 1990, newly-elected Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel said his “one great certainty” is that “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.” It is this idea that is debated and ultimately upheld in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Boom
George Trow sent us the following squib lampooning Tina Brown and her circle as he was composing “Is Dan Mad?” for First back in 1999. It shouldn’t be confused with his more serious “media studies,” but it’s not quite a throwaway either. Trow’s New York Times obituary gave Tina Brown the last word when it invoked his feud with her over the celeb-mongering turn at The New Yorker during her editorial tenure. This gives Trow a chance to talk back…
Refugees and Searchers Go to the Movies
“Are we still alive?” That’s the line incarnating the unexpectedly avant-garde challenge in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
Tales From Behind the Black Curtain
Now that hiphop culture has become the lingua franca of international media and business, it ironically keeps a class of Black Americans, especially youth, in isolation. That’s how hiphop preserves it source–the engine of its innovation and perpetuation and commerciality.
History Gets Lost in The Matrix
“Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation.”
– Cornel West making his Hollywood film debut in The Matrix Reloaded
Genius—Not
A knowledgeable hiphop lover’s list of the best rap artists would not include Eminem
In My Lonely Room
The following thought experiment was inspired, or provoked, by this year’s art scandale, the “Mirroring Evil” exhibit that opened at the Jewish Museum in March; and in particular by Roee Rosen’s installation, which invites us to imagine that we are Eva Braun having a last night of sex with Adolf Hitler:
A Strange and Bitter Spectacle
The James Allen exhibit “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” which opened in New York in 2000 and is now touring the country, deserves more than the pious attention it has received to date.
A Child at the Oscars
Sidney Poitier won his Lilies of the Field Academy Award just before my 11th birthday. That event was part of the world opening up to me and changing for everyone.
To Observe and Project
“When Marge first told me she was going to the police academy, I thought it was going to be fun and exciting. You know, like that movie Spaceballs. Instead, it’s been painful and disturbing. You know, like that movie Police Academy.”
-Homer Simpson
There has never been a popular American movie about why someone becomes a cop – that is, about the egotism and politics that influence such a decision. Yet even after the killings of Patrick Doresmonds, Amadou Diallo and the rape of Abner Louima, police-worship in movies and in the general media persists. It’s a special American cultural fetish.