new york city

Riffs&Revolutions: Michael Gonzales Takes a Trip Down Old School Hip Hop Lane

Friday, October 10th, 2008
(image copyright 2008, Andre Leroy Davis, all rights reserved)

(image copyright 2008, Andre Leroy Davis, all rights reserved)

With the taping of VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors being at the Hammerstein Ballroom last Thursday (the show aired this week), New York City was overflowing with parties and events that brought back a million memories of back in the day adventures. Indeed, it seems like just yesterday that Dante Ross was playing me some of De La Soul’s debut album, I was eating Philly cheese steaks with Cypress Hill for a Source feature (shot by the talented Daniel Hastings), hopping on the Jersey transit to meet Naughty By Nature and hanging out in Too Short’s ritzy hotel room during a photo shoot.

Though I have never interviewed Slick Rick, believe me, it was not for lack of trying. In 1988, his classic track “Children’s Story” was one of my favorite songs.

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Coffee Klatch: Daily News Round Up

Monday, August 18th, 2008

The Great Debate: This weekend’s debate between Prez candidates Barack Obama and John McCain at Orange County’s Saddleback Church has been making the news—mostly because by all accounts, McCain kicked Obama’s ass. Of course, McCain, even as a “fake” Republican, had the advantage in a debate where the setting is a church, which tends to draw a more conservative crowd. But still, the Los Angeles Times’ description of the debate, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren, should send chills throughout the Obamamaniacs who believe the Chosen One should be moonwalking to the White House. Obama is dubbed, “analytical and nuanced,” says the Times, which is newspaperspeak for “he’s f9%cked in the debates!” Everyone knows, the average American is too dumb to sit through long, ponderous replies, which is why McCain will do better in the forthcoming debates. McCain, said the Times, “answers the same questions crisply to greater applause.”

The sequel to this story, comes today, as the blogosphere is alight with claims that McCain knew the questions beforehand, even though he was not to hear Obama’s portion. McCain’s teams has responded to this outburst with a wag the dog manuever, pointing fingers and whining that NBC News covers Obama more and it’s so not fair. Politics is fun isn’t it? It’s almost like watching five-year olds in a playground. Except the five-year olds are more mature.

Where’s My Veep At? The Democratic National Convention is a week away and the Republican National Convention is two weeks away, and still no VP announcement has been forthcoming. The Financial Times says that an announcement from Obama might come by Thursday, since announcing the pick over the weekend would be fruitless. Still, the same names are floating around: Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, Tim Kaine, and Kathleen Sebelius. Over the weekend, John Kerry was mentioned, which seems absolutely bizarre. For McCain, Tom Ridge and Joe Lieberman still seem to be in the running.

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Ann versus Hanna

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

A Top Five this week is two versions of a single four-year-old reality.

Before she went off about “perfecting the Jews” this week, Ann Crazy Coulter described heaven as something “like New York City during the 2004 Republican national convention… People were happy, they were christian, they were tolerant.”

Coulter said “New York City” but she wasn’t talking about the city at all. She was referring to the people who were smiling and clapping in the paradise of the convention hall while their security forces attempted to “perfect” the jews and other rabble in the wilds beyond the police tape.

Our intrepid contributor Hanna Ingber Win was one of those thousands of unperfecteds. As she recounted here in a recent column, she joined the weekly New York City Critical Mass bike ride that Friday, 27 August, only to be arrested with hundreds of other riders and illegally detained for more than 24 hours. She asked a policeman how to get around the clogged traffic. She was then cuffed and thrown with others into a bus and carted to Pier 57, aka “Guantanamo on the Hudson,” where she was mocked and officially charged with no crime. Instead she was told that she had been arrested for protesting and was laughed at when she asked to make a phone call.

That’s the kind of happy Christian tolerance we can expect in Ann Coulter’s America and in the harp-strewn police state she imagines as the afterlife. Coulter’s nonsense is more than shock punditry. She articulates a shared political fantasy that requires the same kind of off-stage oppression as did her beloved convention. Her tolerance doesn’t include the kind of true American diversity that demands acceptance of difference or, god forbid, change. In her world, as she makes clear in the YouTube above, black or brown christian megachurch attendees represent diversity. That’s racist bullshit. That’s her imagining that toleration means “accepting” the same kind of person (a christian republican) in merely a different kind of skin. All she’s tolerating is the fact that they’re not white.

Coulter’s happy and tolerant America is the same as Bush’s liberated and democratic Iraq: a lethal combination (for others) of wishful thinking and blind fantasy! Her New York is a convention center. His Iraq is the Green Zone.