Want to say “nigger” without taking the chance of getting beat the fuck up? Are you a white liberal tired of white guilt? Feeling a little transracial? Does everything about you seem black, but your skin? Do you sketch self-portraits using a brown crayon, instead of peach? Find yourself tweeting #blacklivesmatter, but still getting bussed to the #alllivesmatter side of town? What about that blackface frat party you always wanted to throw? Want to get shot for no reason? Can’t …
Category: Writing
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of 2Pac’s debut album 2Pacalypse Now, I wrote something for L.A. Weekly about how that record influenced me as a kid. Pac’s career only lasted for a five-year blink-of-an-eye span. He was twenty-five when he passed. This year he was nominated for the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. He wasn’t a saint or an infallible icon. He was a man that made a lot of mistakes like most people, except his faults were publicized and broadcasted for the whole …
I just wrote an article for LA Weekly. It’s about L.A. mobile DJ crew, Uncle Jamm’s Army (UJA), founded by Rodger Clayton aka Ace of Dreams aka Mr. Prinze. From the late 70’s to the mid 80’s, The Army was king. Nobody was doing it like them, nobody. After working on this piece, I started to speculate that West Coast DJ’s were way ahead of East Coast DJ’s, from how they set up their turntables, scratching, blending, to how they approached the use …
“Murder House,” the first season of American Horror Story took all the familiar horror tropes and made them their own, turning scary clichés into compelling beats in the story. By midseason, creator and producer Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk turned the show into a funny game of “name that horror reference.” Murphy and Falchuk had ghosts having sex and killing the living. It was amusingly ridiculous. Jessica Lange as Constance, the masterful conniving next-door neighbor, dominated every frame she stepped in. …
For the month of July until the end of the month (7/30/2014), PBS is streaming online the documentary American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation). This documentary premiered recently at San Francisco’s CAAM Film Festival 2014 and is about the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit, who along with her husband James Boggs (who was a well known black activist) devoted their lives to fighting for …
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