Posts By Gary Phillips
Friday, February 17, 2012 / 8:52 am
Local Radio Haters Suspended
John and Ken get wrist slapped.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: John and Ken | Whitney Houston | crack
John and Ken, our L.A.-based spewers and fomenters of racist notions about people of color were suspended Thursday by their station, KFI, for “…making insensitive and inappropriate comments about the late Whitney Houston,” according to a statement by the station. Among other tidbits, they riffed on Houston being a crack ho and cracked out for 20 years. These two genial bigots are routinely targeted by the likes of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
They’ve called the South Central neighborhood where USC resides as uncivilized, gave out the cell phone number of a immigrant rights advocate form the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles (CHIRLA) so he could receive numerous death threats, and said nothing can be done to eliminate the achievement gap between black and white students.
John Kobylt: “And let me… who is going to tell the truth? Who is going to redesign Mexican culture? Who's going to redesign inner city ghetto black culture? Who's that wizard. Who's that social engineer…?”
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012 / 8:55 am
Happy Valentine’s Day, Baby!
Love is for suckers.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Valentine's Day | Hammett | love
On this Valentine’s Day, a tip of my fedora to those lovelorn saps in crime and mystery stories, men and women, who got caught up in circumstances beyond their control, blinded as they were by lust and love.
As the Right Reverend Deuteronomy Springer observed in The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford, desirous as is of lucre and the one he calls Merita, “Money is the root of al goodness.”
“It scares me and I sweat down the back – God, I must be going screwy! It’s my father-in-law’s wife, it’s a woman, and me thinking things like that! The narrator in Cornell Woolrich’s short story, “Kiss of the Cobra,” reflects.
Then of course there’s the hardest Valentine of all from Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel the Maltese Falcon. Private eye Sam Spade lays out several reasons jail awaits his client Brigit O’Shaughnessy for killing his partner Miles Archer, who he disliked…while maybe he loves her. “The sixth would be that, since I’ve also got something on you, I couldn’t ber sure you wouldn’t decide to shot a hole in me some day.”
Yet there’s all kinds of love that can go wrong as insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter observed in Joseph Hansen’s Death Claims to the two proprietors of an antiquarian bookshop.
“If Peter killed his father for insurance, why hasn’t he tried to collect it? What’s he doing?
“Having the horrors someplace, Dave said. “Murder takes some people that way. Doing it is one thing. Living with it is another. Thanks for the drink.” He went out through the dusky shop.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012 / 1:16 pm
The Artful Writer
FourStory’s serial mysteries take inspiration from his chunk-a-week storytelling.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
Big ups to Charles Dickens on this his 200th birthday. Not only has he made this world richer with his iconographic characters like Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Fagin, Lady Dedlock, Luke Honeythunder, Mrs. Havisham, Mr. Murdstone, Mulberry Hawk, the Artful Dodger, Pip and a on and on, but he knew how to spin a yarn. Most of his books were written in serial form and sure, like any writer, he didn’t always hit his mark, but that is far out-shadowed by his storytelling abilities, and the techniques still in use today form the chapter cliffhanger to his sub-plots that wound their way back to his main story. A poor kid haunted by his childhood poverty who infused his works with the triumph of the underdog against impossible odds, how cool is it that h he also invented slang words like sawbones for a doctor, turns of phrases like “Bah, humbug,” and the social issues he dealt with as well.
Reading Great Expectations for the first time in my high school English class, I was struck at how real he made a scene be, how it came alive on the page. Yeah, I suppose he padded it out some, writing as he did for a few shillings a word, but he set the stage for some high brow stuff and the penny dreadfuls, the pulps, the sci-fi and romance and mystery genre writers to come along many years later. He was a writer of and for the working class.
Happy birthday, Mr. Dickens.
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Wednesday, February 1, 2012 / 9:21 am
The Day the Music Died
Soul Train’s Don Cornelius is a suicide at 75.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Soul Train | dance
Hell of a way to begin Black History Month with the news that Soul Train’s Don Cornelius apparently shot himself to death earlier this morning, February 1. He was said to have been in failing health and suffering from dementia. In its heyday, when I was in high school as a junior and senior, in 1971 and ’72, we couldn’t wait for the show to be on Channel 11 on Saturday afternoons. You could see the latest in fashion and dance moves as the kids did their thing down the Soul Train line. The latest R&B acts, hell even David Bowie doing “Young Americans”, would be on, lip syncing to their top 40 hits and doing brief interview with the baritone voiced Cornelius after a number.
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Thursday, January 26, 2012 / 6:00 am
This Job Is a Solid Killer
African Americans in wartime, as depicted on stage and screen and in the funny papers.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: race | Red Tails | movies | stage | comics
This past weekend I was watching the big budget Captain America: The First Avenger on our newish flat screen TV. Set in World War II, I’d seen it in its 3D glory at the cineplex last year, but enjoyed the movie so much I rented it on DVD. For years we’d had this Sony Trinatronic. That much used machine finally gave up the ghost a few months ago, and a trip to the Best Buy in Culver City yielded the bad boy we got now, a Samsung LCD 40-incher. Not only does it deliver a bigger, crisper picture, it’s less than half the weight of the Sony, reminding me just how far we’ve advanced technology-wise.
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Sunday, January 22, 2012 / 10:40 am
They Might Be Giants
R&B loses two in a row.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Johnny Otis | Etta James | rhythm and blues
So my 25-year-old, still at home son has a job, praise Jesus. It’s in Compton and as he doesn’t have a car, most mornings, he has to be up and out of our Mid-City house by 7 AM for his bus and train rides to get there by 9 AM. But on Saturdays he has to be there at 7 in the morning so my wife and I trade off driving him to work. Thus I was on one of the three freeways taking him in this past Saturday and listening to KPFK rebroadcasting two of the many Johnny Otis Show recordings in their archives. Johnny was also remembered on Bill Gardner’s Rhapsody in Black show the night before on KPFK. Gardner had worked on Johnny’s show, who was 90 at the time he died last Tuesday at home in Altadena.
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Monday, January 2, 2012 / 9:31 am
Year in Review
Coconut water and other 2011 phenomena.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: tv | coconut water
My Year in Review includes how the hell did coconut water, as distinguished from coconut milk, become the “in drink”? Vita Coco, with gorgeous singer Rihanna slinging their product, expects to do $100 mil in sales for 2011. Kim Kardashian, she of the 72-day marriage to whatshisname the b-baller, was reportedly paid 600 grand just to be at a specific nightclub in Vegas for New Year’s Eve. Six hundred Kay. Damn. Bringing the same knack for hogwash in his daily show to the printed page, Bill O’Reilly supposedly co-wrote a bestselling book, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever about Abraham Lincoln that was so rife with errors, the National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theater recommended they don’t carry the book. Huh, assassinating reading was more like it. Why the hell did the Rum Punch Diaries get made? No, really…why? ABC’s Wife Swap became Celebrity Wife Swap. Flavor Fav, Gary Busey and un-gay’d pastor Ted Haggard and their surely saintly spouses are involved. As TV and media critic Eric Deggans noted on NPR, this is “Train wreck television.” Lastly we had Herman “Big Daddy, Uz-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan, Black Walnut” Cain dropping out of the presidential race ‘cause he couldn’t remember all them dang wommins coming out of the woodwork.
And oh yeah, there was also the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement. Cool.
