...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.

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.

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.

These pieces of mine appeared on The Root and in Bidoun Magazine recently.

This time, we discuss Tyler Perry, Rev. Wright and the (potential?) end of the chitlin circuit.

I also slip in a direct Alexyss K. Tylor name-check, as well as an encoded/oblique 2Girls1Cup reference. Not a bad day's work.

As explained by me, here.

Click over and give my numbers some love.