A Website of the Radical Imagination
You can hear L.C. Cooke get into a familial groove on recordings his brother Sam produced for him back in the 60s. Those recordings were archived after Sam died, but they were finally released this summer. Decades down the line, L.C.’s collaboration with his brother still sounds like Friday night. My favorite cut is “Put … Read more
Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, has moved your editor to re-up on First‘s 2007 tribute to JB. Get On Up‘s love-is-strange treatment of JB circles around the irreducible nuttiness of “the hardest working man in show business” even as it limns the maddening social continuum in which he pursued soul power. The Brits … Read more
To get the preliminaries out of the way, at Bob Dylan’s third of three concerts at the Oakland Paramount, first, the band – Bob (piano and harmonica), Tony Garnier (bass), Donnie Herron (banjo, viola, violin, mandolin, pedal and lap steel), Stu Kimball (rhythm guitar), and especially, given the way the sound mix reached these ears, … Read more
‘I am me.’ Pessoa. Once upon a time–How now can I begin like that? It’s June 30, 2000, it’s morning still cool although the murderous heat is waiting impatiently in the high branches of the eucalyptus. You shake your head no. Heat is an abstraction. Those are four black crows, you insist, the same ones … Read more
Nearly forty years ago today, the United Auto Workers (UAW) successfully organized a foreign auto transplant in the United States. The dismal denouement of that sequence in labor history is critical to understanding the defeat of the UAW’s organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in February 2014. Back in 1978, the UAW … Read more
Kate Millett is unpatriotic. The author of one of the defining books of feminism, Sexual Politics, for years has enjoyed a large Bowery loft and pays the un-Manhattan rent of $500 a month. So what else can a red-blooded landlord do other than throw her out? Nobody should pay that kind of rent for so … Read more
‘Harlem is the last great frontier of Manhattan real estate,’ gushes Barbara Corcoran, manager of an elite New York real estate brokerage. ‘There are many wonderful things happening in this historic and beautiful area.’ Others are calling it the new Harlem Renaissance. Wonderful things do happen in Harlem but gentrification isn’t one of them. Since … Read more