Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

(Thanks to the everlasting gobstopper called BoingBoing for pulling this, above, from betwixt Living in Small Sizes‘s low-hanging fruit.)

I’m tellin’ ya, Barry: These techies do not like you moonwalking on the FISA bill. But you didn’t even need David Axelrod to tell you that!

I’m taking bets: How many of these banners do you think we’ll see in Denver at the Democratic National Convention next month?

Also, if they get within camera view during his speech, like Shimaa Abdelfadeel and Hebba Aref nearly did in Detroit, what will “volunteers” do?

Patton Oswalt is an actor / writer / voiceover artist / comedian perhaps best known, at least to me, for playing “Spence Olchin” on The King of Queens, and the lead rat, “Remy,” below, on Pixar’s animated 2007 hit, Ratatouille.

In short, he’s a funny guy that I notice from time to time, probably once every three months. That’s pretty much it.

At least, that was it. I just read Oswalt’s commencement address to the 2008 graduating class of Broad Run High School in Ashburn, VA, his alma mater, and…whoa…it’s one of the most profound graduation speeches I’ve ever come across.

Continue reading →

On September 11th, people repeatedly said that the destruction of the World Trade Center “looked like a movie.” But no one had ever seen a movie before during which an exploding building powerfully, suddenly, ejects thousands of reams of paper with a woeful, confetti-like bloom. That sight was completely unexpected, a detail few would have anticipated, the random visual white noise that reality adds to a disastrous purview.

I thought of 9/11 while scoping this incredible, horizontally-formatted poster for The Dark Knight (double-sided, 40″ x 30″, rolled, $75.00, MoviePoster.com). Of course, that’s director Christopher Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and the late Heath Ledger in his final movie role, opening this Friday, July 18th.

I’m conviced that, especially as we get more and more distance between us and that horrible fall day, imagery straight from the Towers’s deaths will infest our cinematic visions as the only universally credible depictions of apocalypse.

Continue reading →

Hey: If you’re in Chicago tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, July 17th, around 3 pm, come on by the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater. I’m going to be there with my pals Chuck D of Public Enemy, and Hank and Keith Shocklee of the Bomb Squad, hosted by the Future of Music Coalition, and talking about the creation of P.E.’s seminal album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, above.

Continue reading →

It is a headline seemingly so odd that, upon reading it, one’s first thought is that it must be incorrect: “In Japan, Buddhism May Be Dying Out.”

Continue reading →

Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle: Christopher Hitchens gets inarticulate

While perhaps not exactly an advocate for waterboarding, journalist / pro cynic Christopher Hitchens has certainly been seen as an apologist for the highly debated technique of “information extraction.”

But no one would accuse Hitchens of being uncurious. So, when Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter asked him if he’d like to be waterboarded, then live to tell about it, the doughy, two-pack-a-day smoker leaped at the chance.

Continue reading →

Come on: I get it that, right about now, Ebony is probably starving for any kind of contact with Obama, or for any reason to put him on the cover, but seriously….

Continue reading →

What can one possibly add to this otherworldly image of Golden Rays migrating off the coast of Mexico?

As amateur photographer Sandra Critelli said in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, via BoingBoing,

“It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.”

No, Sandra. You described it perfectly. Thanks for photographing it even better.

The Treacherous Three, Norman Thomas H.S., 1981 by Joe Conzo

Fascination with hip-hop’s history is growing, as a generation that never saw it comes of age. Because of this, photographers who had the pluck to take pictures of the then developing scene are experiencing a renewed interest in their work. (I’ve even been the beneficiary of this new regard, enjoying my own show, last summer, of pictures taken mostly on Long Island, during the White Castle days of what would become Public Enemy.)

Today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 11, at 2 pm ET, I’ll be speaking with Joe Conzo, whose pictures of formative hip-hop sextet the Cold Crush Brothers form the basis of seminal urban work in his book, Born in the Bronx; Janette Beckman, a British photog who, arriving here in NYC during the early ’80s, having exhausted punk, found fresh! inspiration shooting Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and others (The Breaks: Stylin’ and Profilin’ 1982-1990); and Jamel Shabazz (Seconds of My Life), whose touching portraits, mostly of Black New Yorkers, have drawn comparisons to James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks.

They’ll be briefly preceded by a conversation with Coloradoan jazz singer Rene Marie, whose controversial performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” ten days ago has drawn so much ire.

You can hear the ideas of these thoughtful innovators by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

Vocalist Rene Marie prepares to knock one outta the state

Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” speech is now officially retired as my favorite “Straight Jack-Move Racial Protest by a Musician in a Public Forum.” It’s now a distant second to Colorado jazz vocalist Rene Marie’s singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” July 1st, at Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City address, but, instead of using Francis Scott Key’s traditional words, switching them out for the lyrics to James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the so-called “Black National Anthem”!

Continue reading →