Entries from June 2008 ↓

Santa Don’t Take No Mess.

Santa don’t play that.

I’ve been a big fan of David Walker’s BadAzz MoFo from its zine days, and was honored to be blogrolled by him recently.

But I don’t know if anything he’s ever done thrills me more than the poster for his blaxploitation short, Black Santa’s Revenge, starring naught other than Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead).

Check the tagline: “He Knows When You’ve Been Naughty.” Come on. As they say in the U.K., brilliant.

Hill Country

You go, girl!!
It takes one to know one: Hillary counts on her peeps

I never get tired of news footage that documents blatant racism. Also, when it’s coming from Al-Jazeera English, you know it’s got to be good. It’s going in some direction that the self-congratulatory, corporate U.S. media, still suckling the dry, cracked teat of American exceptionalism, is completely unwilling to go.

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Bo Diddley, 1928-2008

Bo knows.

We will not see the likes of him again.

Click the pic. Play it loud. See why he was so great.

Words You Never Expected to See in the Same Sentence: Rastafari Culture at the Smithsonian Institution

Blood clot exhibit!

When I saw that the Smithsonian is running an exhibit ’til Nov. 8 on Rastafarianism—“Discovering Rastafari!” is the horrible title—my first thought was this: I’d have given my eyeteeth to have heard the ensuing comedy of errors when white, Ivy League-bred curators negotiated with Rastas for artifacts.

Then, it occurred to me that everything in the show is probably already owned by white Brits.

Then there’s this question, which The New York Times, itself, raises: Why is this exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History?

the Rastafari exhibition does not really belong in the same museum as paleontological finds and collections of insects and gems. That placement is a relic of the 19th-century conception of the natural history museum as a temple devoted to exotic “natural” cultures and objects — evolutionary predecessors of the scientific West.

How unexpected.

Brother, Can You Spare Ten Mil?

Let this be our little secret, hmm?
“Be vewwy quiet. I’m hunting duckets”: Poor old rich guy

I find the nuances of wealth endlessly fascinating. But the aspect of it that I find most intriguing is the carefully maintained illusion of limitless capacity the rich apparently work to maintain.

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And That Cup is Packed with C-4: Rachael Ray’s Keffiyeh Controversy

“I’m taking the whole donut shop with me me!!”
“Is that a fashionable scarf, or are you just happy to terrorize me?”: Rachael Ray, meet Yasser Arafat, late head of the PLO

Late last week, Good Morning America took on the the tempest-in-a-thimble over Rachael Ray’s scarf, doing so, actually, sensibly.

Conservative bloggers had raised the the charge that Ray’s scarf, in the print ad, above, was a keffiyeh. This, “for the clueless,” as screechy Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin warmly explained on her web site,

is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not so ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities and left-wing icons.”

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