A Website of the Radical Imagination
Benj DeMott Balla Sidibe—one of the original front men of the legendary afro-pop band Orchestra Baobab—has gone to see what’s coming for all of us. You can watch the late Sidibe sing lead (and dance) here as Baobab does a charming version of a song that dates back to the 70s, “On Verra Ca.” 2020 is the 50th anniversary year of the band’s founding.
This next song is another Baobab classic. It’s the track that got me on board their train to heaven.
Comic Conner O’Malley caught the MAGA moment on the wing a few years ago in a series of Vines (collected here). In these six-second shots: “O’Malley — playing a deranged car-and-wealth-obsessed man — would pull up to befuddled Manhattan businessmen in sports cars, scream guttural praise for their public display of opulence, and then bike away before they knew what hit them.”
A Salt Lake City cop was filmed throwing an elderly bystander to the pavement in the first 50 seconds of the video posted below. It’s just one of many brutal acts that have been committed by cops under pressure from protesters in cities all over America. (I’m not claiming that pressure has been all good. I doubt the woman who blew up a police van in New York with a molotov cocktail is George Floyd’s sister under the skin.) What distinguishes this scene of brutality, though, is the nada response of one reporter who witnessed it.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, January 2, City Center: “Ode,” “Fandango”, “Mass,” “Revelations”
How loud did “the shot heard round the world” sound when you were young?[1]
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.
My old friend Charlie Keil emailed me–“See why you like Kanan Makiya. Love those lions.”–after he read Makiya’s recent piece in the Kenyon Review, “The Dying Lion.”
In 2013 I published an essay (sparked by Obama’s public responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin) that took in Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove–the book behind last week’s pardons of the Groveland Four. What follows is a Devil-centric excerpt from that 2013 post.
