World AIDS Day, dads and dancefloors
Today was World AIDS Day and in 2009 it's also a reminder that a decade ago this year my dad died of complications related to HIV. Bad needles, bad sex, bad something. I never got the whole story and to be honest that's one tale I'm cool with not knowing. Truth is...
Spells on the Wall: A Q&A with Curator Cicely Sweed
Article originally published on Oakland Local Virtually all artists flirt with the divine when they work, delving deep into themselves and their beliefs in the name of creation. But for artist and curator Cicely Sweed art is a chance to dialog with ancestors, a...
The problem with the CNN Don Lemon & Nas interview
(Props to The Hood Nerd for his original post.) CNN, we have a problem. By now most people have heard of Derrion Albert, the 16 year old Chicago honor student killed in the middle of a...
Afrofuturist down. RIP Charles Huntley Nelson
While a lot of the future soul crowd has been (rightfully) mourning the death of Slum Village MC Baatin, another afrofuturistic luminary passed over the weekend. Charles Huntley Nelson was a visual artist, experimental film director and proffessor at Morehouse in...
Death of Autotune or Death of Hip Hop?
Alright, I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks as I've been rewinding the hell out of Jay Z's latest and I want to get a couple things out of the way from the jump. 1) Autotune is hella overused and...
What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead.
Alright, this is depressing as fuck. I first heard the news as a rumor between two cats outside the corner store about 4 hours ago on my way downtown. "Yo, you heard Michael Jackson died?" "Naw, man I heard that was just a rumor." A small lump in my stomach started to...
Music+Tech+Crumbling Industry=We’re not sure yet, but it’s gonna be cool!
Right now the music biz is living somewhere between the Blade Runner future and the Kitty Hawk past. On one side we're at the dawn of a new tech age and battles to determine the shape of what's to come are being waged on all levels-from the indie foot soldiers pushing...
Young, Gifted, Black and Avant Garde
This is already snowballing into something bigger. I woke up this morning to the usual coffee, smokes and words and an article I'd been meaning to get to for a while. Back in March, over at Esther Ivereem's excellent Seeing Black site, black American experimental...
Literature 2.0? It’s about damned time
When Mark Amerika created Grammatron 16 (?) years ago, who knew it would take the rest of the world so long to catch up? Still, you have no idea how exited this article in the NYT makes me-enough to get me blogging again after umpteen months. It's always annoyed the...
Cultural Criticism 2.0?
So in my previous post I wondered about the death of Cult. Crit. as posed in this piece from the SA Times. It's an interesting article but the more I think about it, and with the help of some smart journo friends, I really have to wonder just which medium the author...
