Race

  • 100 Wins

    Tonight my hometown team, the Boston Red Sox, reached 100 wins for the first time since 1946 – with 16 left to play.  It brought to mind one of my favorite books about Boston, which is Howard Bryant’s Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.  One of the most interesting things in…

  • Organize 2020 and Durham’s Tipping Point

    I’m posting today to ask folks to consider supporting an Indie Go Go campaign currently heading into its final week by Organize 2020, the social justice caucus of the North Carolina Association of Educators.  As an active member of this group, I have been impressed by the commitment, vision and integrity of people involved in this…

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.2: Indicting Invictus

    (Like the original Magnum Force, this post is a sequel to the first Dirty Harry.) Of all of Clint Eastwood’s “Sympathy for the Other” movies, Invictus was the most popular in the Land of the Liberals.  J. Edgar (gays), Million Dollar Baby (women), and Gran Torino (SE Asians) all did well but received more criticism than…

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.1: Magnum Tucked In Tweed

    One of the weirder phenomena of early 21st century cinema has been the emergence of Clint Eastwood as would-be spokesman for various groups marginalized by the white male power structure his famed ’70’s character Dirty Harry once defended with a famously long phallic symbol.  Million Dollar Baby (2004) concerned itself with issues of gender and…

  • Read Robin D.G. Kelley on Ferguson

    This is simply to refer folks to an excellent article about Ferguson by Robin D.G. Kelley I read on the Counterpunch website after it was posted by Imani Perry on Facebook. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/25/75039/ Please consider a subscription to Counterpunch as well as checking out Kelley’s excellent books. In musical circles, Kelley is most known for his biography…

  • The Residents and the Arctic

    I rarely hear an entire record played on the radio.  A few months ago, I heard the album Eskimo by the Residents played on WXDU’s stellar Sunday afternoon show, Polyphonic Perversity.  I soon purchased it and have really enjoyed hanging out with it since. I know very little about the Residents, so I won’t say…

  • Top 40 over 40.17: A Different Kind of Swans Song

    Most of the musicians I’ve written about in this series are ones that were important to me when I was younger because of work they did themselves when they were young.  I’ve written about records they did after turning 40 that either came close to or equaled the quality I heard in their earlier recordings.…

  • Sunday Paper with the BPF: Ahhh, Mindfulness

    Well, I don’t really read a Sunday newspaper anymore.  Either they’ve been driven out of business by the internet or intellectually eviscerated by corporate centralized ownership.  But I’ve been kicking back and checking out some posts on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) website after renewing my membership today.  Among them was a piece with a…

  • World on a Wire

    As I keep track of the unfolding struggle over the FCC’s proposed creation of a corporate “fast lane” on the internet that would regulate non-corporate media to second class status online, I’m reminded of the film World on a Wire by Rainer Fassbinder, which I watched on DVD a couple of months ago.  Despite being…

  • Top 40 Over 40.16: Holding It Down

    One possible answer to the question I posed in my post on Reckoning with REM – How come their early portraits of Southern life never said anything about the history of racist violence and forced labor in their native Georgia, even on their album Fables of the Reconstruction / Reconstruction of the Fables? – is that…