March 4th, 2008 — Architecture, Books, Environment
I met Jill Herbers at a WBAI fete which she attended with a friend, then proceeded to spend almost all the rest of that evening talking to her. Thoughtful, more than a little opinionated, and utterly serious about the art and science of fabricating living spaces, what was not to love? I’ve grabbed her books: 1996’s Tile, and 1990’s Great Adaptations to find out more on her ideas. But I would have picked up 2004’s Prefab Modern for the cover alone. O.K.: The cover, and pages 50-59 alone.
March 4th, 2008 — Gaming, Toys
You’re looking at a soon-to-be-released Locust Horde “bad guy” action figure from the multimillion-selling Xbox game, Gears of War.
The ne’er-do-well in this image replicates one of the game’s most devastating moments: the immediate aftermath of a sniper shot to the Horde head. If you look near the top of the image, you can see the creature’s still-intact face heading towards Saturn.
(Thanks to Tomopop and Destructoid for turning me onto ActionFinderInsider.com’s photo stash!)
March 4th, 2008 — Film, Music, Pop Culture, Sex, Technology
I’d never heard of Canadian-Chinese pop singer Edison Chen, 27, until a link on racialicious.com told me his sordid story. In short: Brother took a laptop in to have it fixed. Then, in late January 2008, a picture of him in a compromising position with an Asian starlet appeared on the web.
At first, Chen gave the usual excuses—It’s not me, I’m being framed, etc. But, then, soon, more of the explicit flicks appeared, not just one or two, five or six, but dozens.
March 3rd, 2008 — Hip-Hop, History, Media, Music Video, Politics, Pop Culture
“Yes We Can” is the Barack Obama-affirming musical short by Black Eyed Peas front man and producer “Will.i.am” Adams Jr. It’s peopled by minor celebrities, and Scarlett Johansson, sing-songing an insignificant melody to text and footage from Obama’s January 8, 2008 New Hampshire primary victory speech. As I post this, it’s been viewed 5,460,140 times at its main YouTube location.
Make that 5,460,140.5 times: I only got halfway through it before I just couldn’t take any more.
Pourquoi? I think it’s more than the film’s bloated, black & white solemnity and manufactured earnestness, both, perhaps, best signified by an otherwise throwaway gesture at the 0:06 mark: Will.I.Am “offhandedly” “fixing” a lapel pin that appears to be just fine. (These despicable qualities are also on display in the newer, “We Are The Ones” video, as is another starlet, Jessica Alba.) Indeed, to really put one’s hand on what the problem is, one has to briefly go back to the recorded origins of the Black Eyed Peas in the 1990s.
March 3rd, 2008 — Books, Medicine, Science
If I could have been anywhere other than with you, last week, it would have been in Monterey CA at the TED Conference. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and the event, held annually since 1984, thrives on bringing together disparate thinkers from diverse fields to ask less-than-obvious, critical questions about ideas. Big-picture stuff.
Of course, people from WIRED went, and one, Kim Zetter, brought back this report of a presentation by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist with the Indiana University School of Medicine in Bloomington. I’d not heard of Dr. Taylor before this piece, but now, man, I’ve got to get this woman on NONFICTION, my WBAI-NY radio show.
See, on December 10, 1996, Taylor woke up to realize that she was having a stroke—a rare type called an arterio-venous malformation or AVM. What makes the episode odd, yet captivating, as Taylor recounts it, says Zetter, is that her
knowledge of the brain made her the perfect witness to her body’s gradual shutdown. Over the course of four hours she watched her body deteriorate in stages, all the while processing its breakdown as if she were a curious explorer taking field notes.
Yet, at first, she didn’t realize what was happening to her. So after feeling searing discomfort in her head,
March 3rd, 2008 — Uncategorized
A house-sized Thank You to everyone whose been reading Media Assassin, whose passed around links to the posts, whose posted to the forums, and whose subscribed to our feed during our now-ending first week. There’s nothing like the excitement of writing these articles in the dark, sending them out into the ether, then watching the analytics come in. Please keep reading, forwarding, and posting. We’ll work to keep it interesting and varied.
Extra-special thanks to Carmen Van Kerckhove (Racialicious.com) and Chello (allpurpose.newsvine.com), for linking to what was, apparently, last week’s Media Assassin hit: “I’m Older Than Michelle Obama, and I’m Not Proud of America Yet.”
Chello’s aggregator site is newer to me, but also insightful, and the first place I saw the New York Times link reporting that U.S. adult incarceration had was now above 1%.
Carmen I’ve met, worked with, and I rely on Racialicious for seemingly scouring every corner of the net for thoughtful race critique, like this piece on Vivienne Westwood’s perhaps-well-meaning-yet-somehow-still-wrong ad campaign. You can always find her site listed—our first—on Media Assassin‘s blogroll. Rock on.
March 3rd, 2008 — Automotive, Crime, Money, Politics
In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Mark Maremont ran the numbers on Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, right, and his alleged $14.8 billion bum rush of the small, oil-drenched, former British protectorate’s treasury.
You’ve heard of Brunei, of course. It’s located in Southeast Asia, almost completely enwrapped within Malaysia, a little smaller than Delaware. It’s head, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, 61, is the world’s wealthiest monarch, with a fortune Forbes estimates at $22 billion. He lives in a $1.4 billion (in 1984 US dollars), 2 million-plus-square-foot palace with 1,788 rooms, including 257 bathrooms. His personal fleet of automobiles is believed to number between 3,000-5,000 cars, including 531 Mercedes-Benzes, 367 Ferraris, 362 Bentleys, 185 BMWs, 177 Jaguars, 160 Porsches, 130 Rolls-Royces, and 20 Lamborghinis. (Take that, ballers.)
Prince Jefri—uh, Prince Duli Yang Teramat Mulia Paduka Seri Pengiran Digadong Sahibul Mal Pengiran Muda Haji Jefri Bolkiah to you—is Hassanal’s youngest brother, the 53-year-old baby of the sultan’s three bros.
Apparently, for a number of years, Jefri served as finance minister and chairman of the Brunei Investment Agency (BIA), where his role was to sock away the nation’s money, not stuff it in his socks. As well, since the sultan is an absolute monarch—reportedly, he recently had himself declared infallible under Bruneian law—the nation’s money is his money. So, he’s more than a little pissed that
February 29th, 2008 — Film, Pop Culture
No lie: My eyes literally watered when I watched this: the second full, 2 1/2-minute trailer from the upcoming summer blockbuster-in-waiting, Iron Man. (When I say second, I’m not including the incredible Super Bowl commercial, by the way. This new piece is currently the featured trailer on MySpace’s Trailer Park section. Special thanks to the folks at FirstShowing.net for dropping the bomb.)
Based on the long-time Marvel superhero comic, Iron Man stars Robert Downey Jr. as billionaire weapons designer and manufacturer Tony Stark; features Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges; and is directed by John Favreau (Made, Elf, Zathura). This is literally Paramount’s game to lose, if mounting fanboy excitement—and my own, doggone it—is any indication. Out May 2, 2008.
February 28th, 2008 — Film, Hip-Hop, Politics, Race
That’s the title of a piece I recently wrote about hip-hop in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel for VIBE. It’s in their March 2008 “Hollywood” issue, the one with Robert DeNiro and 50 Cent on the cover, as seen at left.
The narrative focuses on the completion of Palestinian-American artist/director Jackie Salloum’s new doc, Slingshot Hip-Hop, and the experiences of her film’s subjects, especially the Palestinian crew DAM, within the setting of Israeli occupation of the aforementioned territories.
It was one of the hardest articles I’ve ever written, not only due to the fractal-like, almost never-ending complexity of the subject, but even more due to my initial lack of familiarity with virtually every major detail around it. One of the first questions I asked Salloum: Why is it called “the West Bank” when it’s in the eastern part of the Occupied Territories? A member of her team kindly answered: It’s on the west bank of the Jordan River.
February 28th, 2008 — Media, Race, TV
If you’re an adult Black person, you’ve probably had the following experience more than once:
You’re walking down the street, or a supermarket aisle, or an office hallway, when you recognize a white friend or colleague—someone with whom you’ve had fairly regular, or even recent, contact—coming toward you from the opposite direction. Your face warms expectantly as you get closer to them, only to have them go right past you, often after glancing directly at you in your face.
You then turn around and call out their name. They stop, look at you, then burst into smiles and recognition. “I didn’t notice it was you!”, they apologize.
Sound familiar?
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