Heavy Mentalist

Recently Conan O’Brien got pegged to replace Jay Leno in five years as host of the Tonight Show . Made me wonder if any females have been successful at carrying the late talk format so I looked it up. I found this article about Ali Wentworth from Ali & Jack getting a gig to do her own late show but then it was canned. Here’s what the writer had to say:

Ali Wentworth, star of stage and screen, walks out from behind a curtain as America ’s first-ever female host of her own late-night talk show, this one on ABC following Nightline . What woman wouldn’t want to be Ali at this moment? Funny. Beautiful. Says what she wants. Shoots from the hip. Rebellious and girl-next-door. A sexy, intelligent chick who can counter-balance the Daves and the Jays and give women a kindred spirit to tune into and look up to as they wind down from their stress-filled days.

This is what we need, sighs ladies from coast to coast, finally, one of our own on top.  Continue reading...

I just watched Glen Johnson stand up for the little guy in a historic bout against Roy Jones Jr. on HBO. The crowd was all about Jones at the beginning, giving it up to him lovely as he soaked up the applause. Seeing that Johnson is a *nobody* folks hardly even noticed when his name was announced. Ha. Tonight that nobody KO’d Roy Jones Jr. in the 9th round after delivering a thunderous right cross. Tonight that *nobody* is the Light Heavyweight Champion of the World .

When heralded as *The Best* he humbly said “I’m not the best, I’m just the guy who’ll fight the best.” Right on, mutherfuckers. As for Roy Jones Jr., pundits are saying “Tonight was the death of a king.” They were saying on HBO that Roy Jones Jr. probably has a concussion due to the KO, and I do hope he gets better, but without a doubt the man of the hour is Glen Johnson. Bravo.

Ok so Talib Kweli’s new album is called The Beautiful Struggle. This is gonna be an insta-smash coming to a Che shirt near you.

In my experience with struggling, and I have a lot of it, none has been very pretty at all and I cannot wait until I can pull myself out of this hellacious hand to mouth existence.

I’ve heard others romanticize poverty…the agonizing, back breaking scratching and clawing for every grain of grit and self worth you own in this way in the context of generational struggle or I guess societal struggle, or movements in “the struggle” and all that…I guess that’s what he means. All that’s good but I’d rather that we did not have so much struggling to do, ya dig? To publicly convey that there is anything even remotely pretty about struggling indicates a lack of familiarity with the concept.

I want to hear about The Beautiful Chillin Like a Villain With A Mil In The Bank. Struggle has made my acquaintance far too many times already.

My heart is with Eugene Armstrong’s family today, the man recently beheaded in Iraq. Goddamn I can’t take too much more of this psychological torture. On both sides. Enough already. Bush, stop whatever it is you’re doing. Not that it justifies this either, but damn. Iraqis, whoever you are…

There is some rumor that US are involved in this too. That would be the ultimate betrayal, but for now that is all just conjecture. I feel sick every time I think about the beheading. Especially knowing that the man was beheaded with a knife, not a sword. At least AOL said it was a knife. That means several passes back and forth. At least I imagine it so.

Even butchers use a cleaver for one clean shot. How awful. The thought just makes me want to touch my throat, just to make sure it’s not serrated. I empathize too much. Sometimes I feel like I can feel what others feel physically, like everyone in the world is my twin. A burden at times, but this made me extremely sensitive to the needs of others.  Continue reading...

Tonight I witnessed Kim Fields performing spoken word with a group called Impromp2 on the Live In Hollywood show hosted by the curiously ageless Kiki Shepard. She was attired in a semi-ridiculous getup consisting of an orange baseball cap over blond (dred)locks, very tight acid washed jeans, pulled up almost cholo style to the cusp of her breasts.

The group was ok, but more an older “R&B Hits” style demographic. The song they performed was called “Mocha Soul.”

My problem is not with the ensemble she coordinated for herself tho…I just like being contrary, but whatever works for you is good with me. My thing is with the spoken word. What the fuck? I am at a loss for words to even describe how bad it was for me. It was like, “ok some dude’s playing some sort of jazz lite type muzak, with Tootie bopping around bare chest and orange fluff thingy talking about how down and real and blah blah she is with one of the guys in the band like “yah she’s fine, she’s the bomb, blah blah. ” Those are not the exact words but you get the point. I was thoroughly unimpressed, and woe is the day that I receive a press kit from her publicist.  Continue reading...

What’s gonna happen when whites can’t bite from black folks anymore?

Of course, nothing emerges from a vacuum. Everything in American society is a pastiche of influences, a merging of cultural textures, but most people in touch with reality know that usually, the artistic bounty within the black community rarely translates to material gains within the black community.

Where there are still black communities, that is. More and more, as our country grows towards some sort of uni-ethnicity (Prediction #1: In the Future, we will all be Latino!) there are fewer and fewer pockets of actual “black community”. What does that term mean in the mainstream, Po(Lit)ically correct society?

As more of “us” get “out there” and online, and move away from traditionally black communities, and stop attending historically black colleges, the fabric of the black community is slowly becoming threadbare. What kinds of things come from communities? A common aesthetic certainly, hence a common art. Like Jazz. Like Blues. Like Rock and Roll. Like Hip-Hop.  Continue reading...

Kids don’t bother me, and nudity certainly doesn’t, but the combination of the two– in public especially–can be disturbing. This morning the first thing I see on my TV is the naked, bloody, screaming, frightened out of their mind kids fleeing from the school in Chechnya. What the fuck? Hostage taking is one thing but I guess these motherfuckers wanted to get a leg up on the game and start taking kids. Horrendous. Now I am in a worrisome mood.

The media should pay more attention to that area. It was just a minute ago in Russia (two years in October) that Chechnyan “rebels” held hostages in a theater, and whoever was responsible for breaking up the situation and “securing the safety” of the hostages ended up gassing the place to make the hostage takers “give in” or whatever and those smart fuckers killed 117 of 700 hostages!

So intent on keeping exactly what the gas was a secret, the Russian government refused to tell doctors what the gas was, preventing doctors from making an antidote. While this event was widely reported on, the media seems to have downplayed the fact that Putin the Pres was actually at the head of this operation. He gassed his own peeps too.  Continue reading...