Culturewatch

Human Comedy

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What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece on black stand-up comedy, “Unlikely Heirs: The Comedic Children of Cosby,” that places contemporary comics in relation to Bill Cosby, including ones who are not easily seen as being in his tradition. In the course of limning the Cosby aesthetic, McInnis highlights two little miracles performed by Ali Siddiq. 

I discovered Siddiq after he was already a sixteen-year vet of comedy on two episodes of Comedy Central’s This Is not Happening, “Mitchell” and “Prison Riot.”

In both episodes, Siddiq tells horrifying stories about prison life, but I was unable to stop listening or laughing. Y’all know that I don’t do blood or gore. I don’t like violence in reality or art. Thus, I don’t watch horror films or films with graphic killings. Yet, I was captivated by Siddiq and couldn’t figure out why.

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Getting Your Gun Off

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They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing.  Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage.  They are armed with the latest in assault weapons.  They carry knives.  Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.

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Do Good Things

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I’ve been thinking about writing and activism—which one is “better” for a person to do, a person with limited time and energy, a person in a pandemic, a person living in a country where basic voting rights are not at all secure. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it like this—as in one or the other. Except for the obvious fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, even a strange pandemic day, and everyone I know is exhausted and demoralized. What “should” people do? I’ve been thinking about that.

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“A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication”

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Among the distant ancestors of Onora O’Neill’s A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press) is a work by Plato, the Phaedrus, in which Socrates expresses misgivings about telecommunications technology.

The dialogue is not usually understood in just those terms, of course. But the technology that gets Socrates wound up is the written word, which allows a message to be stored and retrieved, minus the context in which it was created or the nonverbal signals that go with proximity to a speaker.

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Mobile Soul

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https://youtu.be/sztxZR3ag50

Jordan Poole is impossibly fast on the court where his athleticism goes with a sweet touch (he’s the best free throw shooter in the world), genius passes, and stop-start gambits as flashy as his eye-moves above.

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Blade

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Hunter Harris and the rest of us who laugh along with her may need help at the Pearly Gates. Until then, though, bless Ms. H. for failures to forbear such as the following…

Normalize Being Hot And Not A Poet

Kacey Musgraves’ boyfriend, Cole Schafer, is a poet (derogatory). The poetry is not what I would describe as “good.” He appears to be releasing more of it:

 

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A post shared by Cole Schafer (@cole_schafer)

Hoping this is a promise!

False Memory

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For members of my generation, tales of the Mustang they should have hung onto are almost as heartfelt as those of the Mickey Mantle cards their mothers tossed. So nothing about Maggie’s story surprised me, until her assertion that hers was a ‘63. “The first Mustang was a ‘64 ½,” I told her. A couple days later, she came back to the café and asked, “Did Pontiac have a Firebird?”

Indeed, Pontiac did – but it debuted in 1967.

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Butt Beautiful

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Back in the day, the New Yorker was set to run the following letter in praise of an article on women’s basketball, but it got squeezed out. Still seems on point so…

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What’s New (Always)

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My Brilliant Friend has returned. Beyond love this show. What women say to each other when only they bare speaking, what they feel about each other throughout their lives, the prints they leave on the skin of other women, there is no more interesting contemplation. A world that is the world behind a door, past a clearing, down a ravine. Lenu’s mother, pointing to her belly while her daughter stares off, smoking a cigarette, “You’re not better than us, you came from here. Where do you think your brains come from? I could have done what you did if I’d had your opportunities. I would have done better.” A few moments later to the daughter, “You can’t stand me.” Lenu, “Yes.” The mother, “Me, neither.”

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