I cannot recall when I have ever dreaded viewing a film. I’ve attended numerous 24-hour horror film marathons during which I knew I would be subjected to films handpicked to twist the knife of political sensibilities, films so graphic and nihilistic I cannot give their titles in unguarded company. The guilt from even accidentally convincing…
I spent much of my time reading writer Lionel Shriver’s recent speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival first, with my mouth open, then trying to ascertain if she was genuinely obtuse or trying to win a flame war as the worst troll ever. Much of what she presents as evidence of the problem with “cultural…
I wrote a piece for 614now, in which I have sort-of reviewed Atlanta and Queen Sugar, and most definitely politically pondered Atlanta and Queen Sugar. You can get that hotness right here!
Netflix series The Get Down and Stranger Things have very little in common, but they’re built on nostalgic leanings that attempt to propel the events of their stories. The respective eras of these shows – 1980s for Stranger Things, 1970s for The Get Down – suffuse every frame of these shows, and yet in Stranger…
(Note: I’m informing you out the gate that this one is a bit inside, a little shop talk with the Poetry Slam community at large. Feel free to keep moving if you need to have any part of the previous sentence explained to you.) In an online discussion by a poet who was taking white…
Sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting to fly home today, I overheard a political conversation. Well, I did not so much overhear it as it was an experience I was subjected to: the participants are loudly extolling the virtues of their respective candidates from thirty feet away. It’s actually fairly terrifying in its rudeness. We’re all pretty aware that there’s a…
Things I Am Reasonably Sure Prince Has Never Done – Scott Woods Replaced toner in a copy machine Manned the grill Needed proof of ID Played for exposure Used a feather duster on a piece of furniture Worked part time in a five and dime Touched a black woman’s hair unsolicited Stayed on the phone…
On the heels of the shooting of Alton Sterling, the days-later shooting of Philando Castile has people asking – again – what would it take to stop police killings that amount to state-sanctioned murders? With little preamble, no cute title, no personal reflections from 1989, no qualifiers, here’s some day one recommendations. To change the culture of…
Contrary to public outcry, X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t the worst superhero film in just the last three months, let alone its own tedious franchise, but for every one thing it gets right it gets a dozen other things wrong. When you start running that math out for two-plus hours, you’re left with a film destined to…
Listening to NPR the other morning, I caught Scott Simon interviewing 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo and became incensed. Pardlo availed himself admirably. No surprise there: he has been professional and warmly erudite in every clip of him I have seen to date. The interview, short as it was, was plugging along just fine. And…
If you are, say, thirty-five years of age or older there is a 99% chance that you are no good right now. Not merely sad, but irreparably despondent. Verily, Shakespearean in your grief. Depending on how old or weird or gay or starstruck or black you were in 1984, Purple Rain was either an awakening, a…
The video of Jameel McGee hugging, smiling and working alongside Andrew Collins, the Benton Harbor, MI ex-cop who framed him and put him in jail for four years, kept popping up in my feeds over the last twenty-four hours. I avoided it initially because news stories about random black people forgiving not-so-random white acts of…
