A Website of the Radical Imagination
Sidney Poitier won his Lilies of the Field Academy Award just before my 11th birthday. That event was part of the world opening up to me and changing for everyone. There had already been the March on Washington featuring Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a hometown civil rights march in The Motor … Read more
“When Marge first told me she was going to the police academy, I thought it was going to be fun and exciting. You know, like that movie Spaceballs. Instead, it’s been painful and disturbing. You know, like that movie Police Academy.” -Homer Simpson There has never been a popular American movie about why someone becomes … Read more
I To Have or Not to Have? So much attention has been paid to the Miami Heat—including myriad analyses of the nature of offenses revolving around a number of stars vs. one or two, what role players are all about, and how much experience/stature a contemporary coach hired (and presumably tutored) by Pat Riley must … Read more
Where were you on April 11, 2009? On that day, writers for and readers of the lit-journal n+1 participated in a symposium at NYC’s New School on “the contemporary hipster.” Papers were read, then a panel discussion was held to which audience members—there were 175 attendees—were invited to contribute. I missed it. But now there’s … Read more
I PROLOGUE Lebron James has been a groundbreaking force in many ways, but who expected him to be in the forefront of the humanization of superstardom? A team player in all senses – even extending the notion to the NBA family of players – after seven years of Cleveland, he felt he needed someone to … Read more
The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs]. I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. … Read more
Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos (for it is a cosmos, a perineum … Read more