My piece in this issue is called "The Aloha President." It's not on the site, but here is a teaser:

Consider the wry, half-inward-facing, half-defiant smile that ghosts the President’s lips whenever he refers to himself as a “mutt.” Or recall the passage, early in his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, where Obama notes the amusement his maternal grandfather took in toying with young Barry’s racial ambiguities. “Sometimes when Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with appropriate reverence, that I was great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. ‘I’m sure your picture’s in a thousand scrapbooks, Bar,’ he liked to tell me with a grin, ‘from Idaho to Maine.’”

Stanley Dunham died in 1992, five years before the boy he and his wife Madelyn helped raise won his first seat in the Illinois state senate. But his words were prophetic. Not counting the issue of Bidoun now in your hands, it has been estimated that since November 4, 2008, close to 300 million scrapbook-ready magazines and newspapers have been sold with Barack Obama on the cover, enough pages to stretch from Idaho to Maine many times over. Even Dunham’s reference to Kamehameha seems slightly uncanny. Hawaii’s great unifier brought the archipelago under one-man rule in large part by outspending his enemies, the islands’ other rulers playing overmatched Clintons and McCains to his Obama. Kamehameha’s last opponent, Kaumuali’I, gave up without a fight after watching him amass the biggest armada the islands had ever seen, right down to newfangled foreign-built schooners and cannon. The triumphant warrior king showed a great interest in the problems of war and the treatment of non-combatants, promulgating the doctrine of Mamalahoe, or the “Law of the Splintered Oar,” which asserted the right of “every elderly person, woman and child” to “lie by the roadside in safety” during battle. Looking forward, Kamehameha’s grandson, Kamehameha III would propose an early Declaration of Rights of Man, his assertion that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the earth in unity and blessedness” preceding Obama’s career-making and echoing assertion at the 2004 Democratic National convention that “there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America” by 165 years.

Indeed if there is a racial fantasy worthy of object, it is not the oft-bruited notion that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or an Indonesian, but Stanley Dunham’s sly assertion that his grandson was the scion of Hawaiian royalty. White recoil from Obama has often latched onto the supposed injustice of his rejection of his mother’s whiteness in favor of an identification with his absent African father, but it is far easier to project the face of Queen Liliuokalani, last reigning Hawaiian monarch, onto the President’s features than his own mother’s. The regal posture, the multi-layered, sun-kissed skin tone with its ghostly archipelago of freckles suggest a genetic transit that skips the American heartland altogether, jumping from Kenya to the middle of the Pacific in one hop. His grandfather, who had been primed for such insights after being instructively mis-identified as “some kind of wop” by his wife’s family, could not only see this connection but made it possible by picking his family up and planting it on Hawaii’s fertile volcanic soil during the 1950s. Obama’s autobiography describes at great length how his grandparents were unsuited for life in the moist, conflicted American south and drifted steadily west like pollen caught on steady wind. They needed a different greenhouse for growing the future.

Go buy a copy, or, better yet, a subscription!

Also: Bidoun is a finalist in this year's National Magazine Awards, in the General Excellence under 100K circ category! Congrats to the whole crew over there, but special xoxo to my droog and editor there Michael Vazquez, as well as Senior Editor Negar Azimi, Creative Director Babak Radboy and Bidoun's Founderix/Editorix in Chief Lisa Farjam. Fingers crossed!

new bidoun

Me, in the new Bidoun on Je Veux Voir, the second feature-length film from Franco-Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. You can read here, but you should buy the magazine.

...er, a few weeks ago, in The Root:

There is no sign of the so-called hope at an excellent show now on view in Atlanta's High Museum of Art, After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy. All the same, the artists in After 1968 offer a number of different takes on the central question of Obama's candidacy: "Okay; now what?"

After 1968 is on display at the High along with a new survey of civil rights photography called Road to Freedom: Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968. (Both shows, packaged together as "History Remixed" are on view until October 2008.) Road to Freedom displays hundreds of iconic civil rights photographs from the High's permanent collection. Using supplementary materials like maps, posters, magazines and official documents like Rosa Parks' fingerprint paper work, it sheds new light on photography's value as both documentation and a tactical tool for shaping public sentiment.

Road to Freedom is worthy in its own right, but, if you're old enough, you've likely already worshipped, found strength and grieved in this church before. The six artists in After 1968—Leslie Hewitt, the Otabenga Jones & Associates collective, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson and Hank Willis Thomas—were invited by High Museum curator Jeffery Grove to remix the images in Road to Freedom. The results have all that glorious diversity and nagging ambiguity that crops up whenever we think about our recent history. [full old me]

A look at the American Black Film Festival, held this past weekend.

Making films is hard and making good ones even harder, so the American Black Film Festival, held last weekend in Los Angeles, adheres to the old adage that 90 percent of life is just showing up. To paraphrase a panelist during one of the festival's events, "I've seen Citizen Kane and that shit was boring. What about Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" [full story]

A review of Tropic Thunder in The Root:

First things first: Ben Stiller's new movie Tropic Thunder, is neither as offensive as some feared nor as wry as I had personally (perversely?) hoped. In an age where repetitive, moronic attacks on the dignity of various groups are often met by tactical shows of manufactured outrage, Thunder, with its kitchen-sink jumble of provocations—blackface, Jewface, Southeast Asian stereotypes and the plentiful use of the word "retard"—could have been a memorable identity-related meltdown or a challenging satire on the order of Putney Swope (directed in 1969 by the father of Thunder co-star Robert Downey Jr.).

Instead of providing us with epic success or failure, though, Thunder is just boring and loud. The film is a prime example of the very Hollywood stupidity it pretends to satirize. Although I support the God-given right of any demo, group, segment or coffee-klatch to use their First Amendment privilege to protest against images they find offensive, picketing this expensive pile of "feh" is actually doing it a favor, as "political incorrectness" is Thunder's only selling point.
[full review]

A quick remembrance of Bernie Mac in the Root.

Over the next 2 months I'll be doing some consulting work for NPR's Day to Day. My gig involves helping the Day to Day team think through a new blog called Daydreaming, which, as the show describes it, will look at the state of the California Dream:

Daydreaming is Day to Day's official blog. Over the summer we'll be showcasing the people, stories and issues featured in our new series, "California Dreamin'." The Golden State has brought the world new trends, new ideas, and new ways of life, but what happens to the California Dream when the economy's sluggish?

My own goals are pretty straight-forward: build a blog for the show (check); develop policies and procedures for said blog; develop a content and community strategy; work within the framework of NPR's existing tools and digital policies, as well within the more abstract framework of "NPR-ness." Come visit every now and then, and leave me a comment. Or, better yet, subscribe to the feed.

Apparently a piece I worked on while consulting at NPR's News & Notes last year won an LA Press Club award for Best Multimedia Package. Who knew?

The package is here. Congrats to my co-winners: Tony Cox, who hosted the radio segment, and Anthea Raymond who produced it.

Me, in The Root on race, space aliens, In Search Of and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull:

How offensive was it compared to the other films? ... Skull has the middling honor of being neither the worst offender in the series (that's No. 2, South Asian horror misfire Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) nor the least. (No. 3, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, takes the dual prize of being the best Indy movie and the least racist.) Thank heavens for small favors, right? [full me]

dave mckenzie's while supplies last

Me writing about the Dave McKenzie show now up at LA's REDCAT gallery.

May 23, 2008--In Brooklyn-based artist Dave McKenzie's tantalizing first solo show "Screen Doors on Submarines," our conversation about race spins and spins like a broken record, our thinking trapped in cycles and rituals like a buggy program stuck in a loop. The work on display at downtown Los Angeles' REDCAT gallery through June 15 doesn't necessarily show us a way out of those loops, but McKenzie is young man (31), and his show is a strong solo debut that marks him as an artist to watch. With time his work might just give us some clues as how to get unstuck – provided, of course he doesn't fall into one of those pesky grooves he so effectively depicts.

Like Kehinde Wiley, McKenzie works with popular culture as a raw material. But unlike Wiley, with his wry, courtly depictions of black men heroically embodying a kind of imperial hip-hop ideal, McKenzie turns his back on luxe, collectible surfaces in order to brood a bit on the contradictions inherent to media, entertainment and our own folk mythology. In McKenzie's current show, things don't so much fall apart as they spin off on their own stubborn trajectories. [full me]

The show is on view at REDCAT until June 15th, so if you're in LalaLand, pay a visit.

buy this book

So I have a story/essay/memoir in the recently released anthology The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of The Prom.

A piece on viral video, Mumbo Jumbo and Barack Obama in TheRoot.com:

Whether it's the Vote Different ad that kicked off the primary season's viral warfare, or a completely loopy set of videos called Barack in 74 that imagine our next president as a resolutely nerdy stoner at Occidental College, this has been the best campaign ever for ads and videos. It's also been a completely one-sided campaign. Whoever first said "there is joy in the struggle" likely wasn't thinking of viral video, but if the muses of humor, visual intelligence and mashed-up insight could vote, they would clearly be voting Obama. (A tip of the hat to Media Assassin Harry Allen for bringing "Barack in 74" to my attention.) [full story]

The Root doesn't embed video, so here are some of the clips I mention:

May 8, 2008--At about the same time my little sister was getting married three weeks ago – it was a lovely beach ceremony in the Florida Keys; she was beautiful, and I was teary, having the bittersweet privilege of subbing for our dead father on the walk up the aisle – food riots were breaking out across the picture-perfect waters at her back, on the island nation of Haiti. Putting the two together – a wedding and a riot – is more than an article-opening flourish: My sister and I were both born in Queens, N.Y., but our family is Haitian, and some of the relatives in attendance barely made it off the island in time for the nuptials.

Our cousin Leslie, a priest in a small, rural town north of Port-au-Prince, was not so lucky. He got all the way to the airport before being called home. His rectory had been broken into and looted by parishioners looking for stores of rice used by a church-administered meals program. ("A church!" some of the older ladies tut-tutted at the rehearsal dinner, as if the building's powers of sanctuary should have included the ability to bar hunger and desperation at the door.)

more over at The Root.

I've got new pieces in Bidoun and New Angeles Monthly this week. Go check 'em out.

Websites I've built and managed, articles I've written and a few other things I've done. Under construction, as they used to say.

CLIPS