No Homo and the Evolution of Tolerance

(ONLY A FEW WEEKS FROM NEGROPEDIA ON SALE DATE. MANY VAINGLORIOUS PLANS IN THE OFFING. WE GOT A PRE-ORDER WIDGET TO THE RIGHT HERE--->> AND NEW HOT FIRE CONTENT COMING. BUT FOR JUST A LITTLE WHILE MORE WE REPUBLISH SOME TAN CLASSIC POSTS (i.e. ONES WITH COMMENTS and CONVERSATION ON THEM!!) ... SO IN THE MEANTIME, IN-BETWEEN TIME, HOLLER AT YOUR BOY, STOCK UP ON CANNED GOODS AND PREPARE FOR THE REVOLUTION!!!)

Jonah Weiner, who serves as one of the hip hop/urban music ambassadors for Slate, has a solid point-of-entry piece on the "No Homo" craze in hip hop (and beyond, since the term has by-and-large crossed over into more of a pop cultural phenomenon). His point, essentially, is: yes, saying "no homo" is still homophobia; but it's a lot better than what used to be status quo in hip hop.

Both those things are true. But, just like when racial or religious or *any* sort of intolerance needs a firmer hand, or at least noting that we are only scratching the surface of a much more profoundly complex issue, I think that's called for here. Because honestly, we need to be further along, and I say that mostly from the spirit of being a fan and hip hop urban-culture enthusiast.

Coates at the Atlantic has run some harsher words over this before. And been much more pointed about the problem. It makes me briefly wonder if Jonah, and/or Slate as proxy, can only approach with a certain cavalier attitude because it's not *their* issue so much. Maybe The Root and Skip Gates need to be slamming the door on this a little harder. Because while i don't actually cry, I do think about shedding a tear or two -- i feel the emotional swelling (no homo) -- when considering the rampant homophobia and ultimately, hypocrisy of intolerance, when I think about all the rappers and artists and *Heroes* who have brazenly been hateful to a group of people. It's really no different than your daddy being a racist.

Jonah opens his piece with the both brilliant and obvious example of Kanye. Specifically mentioning his rant about homophobia, that came a little prior to his "george bush hates black people" comment. Which got a lot more pub. He notes the anti-homophobia rant for its unique anomalous nature; no one else has really come out of the closet in such a bold declarative way on the homophobia issues in hip hop (and hip hop serving in some sense as proxy to black culture here).

But the more direct attack and implication is to consider Kanye extending the George Bush comment in this way: "George Bush doesn't care about Black people, Black people don't care about homosexual people. (Homosexual people don't care about vaginas, but that part is neither here nor there.)" Such a line might have framed the tradition of (American?) intolerance in a more comprehensive light.

In any event, i wonder about proprietary issues when righting a wrong. Correcting an error. Obama challenging black folk is different than Bill Clinton. An old-wave feminist doing the same to women, is a similar formulation. Rappers and black people need to be more forceful and demanding in this zone. Because we are losing when we reject ourselves in this way.

Which segues to some of Jonah's extended premise in his piece. A sense of humor/jokes as indicator of progress, movement towards truth.

This makes sense in the realm of racial and sexual identity politics. Black people make black people do this and white people do that jokes. Men and women make men do this and women do that jokes. "No homo" is in fact often a funny addendum. If you can insulate yourself from the hateful part of it all, it's an amusing pithy little phrase. And certainly when used to access the even broader construct of masculinity, femininity etc., it can bring a smile. Of course, that shows the "no homo" isn't even actually about "homos" any more. But what we consider masculine and feminine. The Katy Perry "ur so gay, and you don't even like boys" sentiment. Kanye and many famous "tough rappers" are probably a little removed from knowing how to fix a car that broke down on the highway, chop down a tree and start a fire, fist-fighting, but know about the latest fashion-designers, getting pedicures, etc. No homo?

But as any dysfunctional comedian will tell you, the sense of humor, comic relief, is sourced by a sense of detachment. ironic distance. you/we couldn't make jokes about black people for a long time, because it was too raw and serious and immediate. The wounds were still open. Then they scar over, and it gets a little easier. And now, shoot, we almost can hardly tell it's there now with all the cosmetic surgery we've enlisted *cough*.

So that's progress. But again, point of entry. There's a narrative of tolerance here. Where are we progressing from? How did the story begin? Why was hip hop culture so invested in hating others in the first place? I sense this racial issue, like so many others, is a gateway to larger American or human issues. In this case my suspicion is that when we have been abused we want someone else to at some point experience the same pain/abuse. We want to be empowered by damaging someone the same way we felt damaged. If we stop and *pause* and think about it, such logic doesn't make sense; all of these abuses and wrongs are circumstantial. You can never inflict the same pain, only the particular pain for those particular people/circumstances. If you as a father abuse your son, he doesn't know the abuse you received from your father, his grandfather, any more intimately. He only knows the pain he's receiving from you. This is why the Golden Rule works practically, not only as a morally idealized notion of the universe. We can't transfer our rationalized selves, which is what the psychological scars from abuse are. There's the immediate pain (or joy), and then how we live with it and synthesize it into the new us that emerges from the experience.....

I've sprawled out into deeper waters, and want to stay swimming safely in this smaller pool.... so, no homo. i guess, much like with women, we just need a "homo" rapper who through the sheer force of his will makes all the jokes and lines premised on intolerance, obsolete.


The Changing Face of Hip Hop Homophobia [Slate]

AssimiLinks: Your Jealousy and Black Female Rabbis are Useless To Me, Like Newspapers and Indie Dream Girls

Changes afoot. TAN soldiers being recruited and suited up for war. There will be AssimiLink-dumps. Send assimilated links, news, brainfarts to theassimilatednegro at gmizzy.

~~

On Jealousy: "Jealousy may be losing its utility in contemporary life, more useful to our ancestors than to us" -- does this mean in 100 years jealousy might not exist? useless and/or phased out via our evolutionary tract like the dodo bird, the appendix, third nipples? what other emotions are no longer useful to us nowadays? Psychology Today with the fodder for thought.

Paper vs. Web, the unscientific experiment: Slate's having some people only read physical newspapers for a few days, while others only read the web. Unscientific but interesting, and a model TAN might use to to conduct some cultural experiments of his own.

Speaking of newspapers, how does the Times home page gets made: don't need much more explanation than that. via the Observer.

LeBron James going from classy to ashy: Josh Levin dissects the Lebron James video cover-up. "The man who wants to be known as "The Global Icon" should be smart enough to realize that a single dunk in a pickup game does a lot more to build the name of the unknown dunker than it does to harm the world-famous dunkee. LeBron lost face the only way he possibly could have: by failing to be magnanimous." Indeed. Although really the reason to peep is for inclusion of video of Michael Jordan losing a one-on-one game to CEO John Rogers. Nice insightful pull on that one, Josh.

Indie Dream girls: Doree Shafrir, who's hot to death right now, explores the genre of manic pixie dream girls in movies. we're gonna have some focused follow-up on this.

First African-American Female Rabbi: have the jews gone post-racial and post-gender? i'm surprised at the lack of negro memos i've received on this.

And finally, some unreleased Nas, a snippet from a song called "Colors", from DJ Khalil and OKP

DJ Khalil and Nas in the studio recording "Colors" from DJ KHALIL on Vimeo.

illustration: via

Negropedia Brown: The Case of the World White Web

Negropedia Brown was pedaling furiously on his bike. He needed to return to his bodega office in fast order. His last case resulted in picketing, "Hell no, the negro must go!" the surly crowd chanted.

It was only hours after Negropedia had declared Slate's Jody Rosen to be in need of hip hop autotuning. And the crowd disappeared as quickly as they had arrived once the case files fell off the front page of the blog where he stashed his evidence, but the dank smell of defeat lingered.

Perhaps humbled by the angry mob, Negropedia was still undaunted. He knew he was the best -- in fact, only! -- Ethnocultural Blog Detective in town. More important: He knew the stately town of Mediaville needed someone to solve these mysteries of ethnocultural dissonance.

See, Negropedia felt strongly that people's perspective and choices were inevitably informed by their ethnic/cultural background. And often in Mediaville, despite no obvious ill intent, there were weird mysteries of slights, misinterpretations, and lack of sympathy resulting from what Negropedia's father called "culture gaps".

Negropedia found it odd how the folks in Mediaville loved to talk about how technology was changing the town, but never about how the face of the population was changing as well. It seemed to him that as long as America was a melting pot, someone would need to watch over mixing the ingredients to make sure things didn't get salty....

(click image above or link below to continue the story ...)

Negropedia Brown: The Case of Vanity Fair and the World White Web [Gawker]

Celebrating National Fist Bump Day!

TAN celebrates National Fist Bump Day on Slate: Black The Root today. Here's a teasing snippet:

... This mainstream outreach may seem warm and fuzzy now, but at the time, some writers wondered if white folks had even noticed the gesture. And oh, they did. (To the point of not even paying attention to the perhaps more dubious booty-love tap that followed right after.) For a fascinating few weeks, the fist bump, a functional, hyper-hygienic descendant of the handshake and high five, was the topic du jour around America's water coolers. First came the blogs and tabloids, both here and across the pond. Then came the satirical cover of The New Yorker depicting the first couple as a Muslim Constitution-burner and an Angela Davis wannabe. This controversial image inspired parodies of the parody. And of course, the conservative response to Hurricane Obama made the whole thing feel like a game of “telephone” gone wrong: Fox News host E.D. Hill asked on-air, with fevered eyes: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?”

So why take us back there? If anything, the fist-jab furor represented a profound moment in interracial misunderstanding. For blacks, the salutation was nothing new. We wondered, were white folks really so ignorant, our worlds so segregated, that they couldn’t tell what a good old-fashioned dap looked like? ....

The Bump Heard 'Round The World [The Root]

The Assimilator: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, and the Hammer is Gawker

So Gawker is known for their gossip and *snarky* (sigh) take on current events. The writers -- certainly the ones I've known or met -- are all smart and generally sympathetic/aware of celebrities being human, or the deeper issues at play when a magazine is shuttered; but as per their job, usually need to cut to the witty, pithy chase at the expense of indulging, say, the modern window into the human condition The Hipster Grifter provides.

All to say, Gawker is not what anyone instinctively thinks of as a home for "panel discussions" on culturally resonant news/themes/stories. But we're trying to do just that on the weekend, via The Assimilator, and so far so good. We're still working on facilitating the "discussion" element, as it's tough to get professional opinion/taste-makers to stand where you want in line sans $ or significant lead-time. But we've got cool people, and opinions, and a space to share and exchange these things. So that, as the kids say, is something.

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, is the guiding spirit here. Specifically: The Revaluation of all Values. Seems most writers, artists of sound mind and clear conscience are motivated by this impulse to reassess the world around them; "The Assimilator" is another on-ramp to merge -- mind meld? -- with the rest of those in the struggle.

We've finally got enough in the can to start the archived list, so that's what this is, in no particular order:

On the Recession Possibly Being Over?: Melissa Lafsky (Discover), Jozen Cummings (Vibe), Abiola Abrams (Planet Abiola)

On Double X Launch and Feminism: Pt. 1 - Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon), Jill Filipovic (Feministe), Pt. 2 - Jess McCabe (The F-Word), Matt Ufford (Warming Glow)

On White-Rapper Asher Roth: Byron Crawford (XXL), Touré (Rolling Stone), Tom Breihan (Pitchfork)

On University Reform: Pt. 1 - Dan Kois (New York), Kate Perkins (N+1), Pt. 2 - Macy Halford (The New Yorker), Jeff Chang (The Nation)

On Dan Baum vs. The New Yorker: Emily Gordon (emdashes), Troy Patterson (Slate), Eric Easter (EbonyJet)

On the Hipster Grifter: Doree Shafrir (Observer), Gavin McInnes (Street Carnage), Big Time Book Editor (Big Time Book Publisher)

On a Prospective Hipster Reality Show: Becky Sharper (Pursuit of Harpyness), Rachel Shukert (The Nosemaker's Apprentice), Robert Lanham (Hipster Handbook)

On Eminem's "We Made You": me (School of Hard Knocks, etc.)

The Assimilator [Gawker]

cartoon: via

Any Chance that Elzhi is Deeper than John Updike?

The wikipedia, for all its flaws, has become an iconic testament to this Information Age. The depth of its reliability can be strained, but it works as a get-everyone-on-the-same-page knowledge depot/resource.

1. The wikipedia on John Updike says "Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output."

Updike is a wonderful example of one of these American literary lions that often does not translate for people not of his generation, or, possibly more importantly, his purebred American background. We shouldn't forget the missing modifiers in David Foster Wallace's essay on "the end for Magnificent [White, Male] Narcissists".

Updike is a legend for his prose. One of Slate's assimilateds, Troy Patterson, says,"Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence." Even in Wallace's previously mentioned takedown he concedes love for "the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose."

I was talking with a friend of mine who recently had a book club session on one of the "Rabbit" books. They told me how the group started talking about the book until everyone admitted they were bored/distracted/frustrated by the elaborate prose; stripped of the pretense, no one cared or related enough to make the effort to appreciate the flourishes and "getting every word and rhythm right". In the Patterson piece he mentions an example of Updike spending ten pages discussing the character's penis. It's an indulgence that ultimately makes Updike niche; if you're expensively educated like Patterson or Wallace, you've likely cultivated an appreciation for this strain of mental acuity. But as the fields level, it's easy to see other ways to flex your brain muscles.



2. The wiki on Detroit rapper Elzhi identifies Jason Powers as "a solo rapper" and also a member of the group Slum Village.

A few weeks ago a new single from Elzhi began making the rounds. It was called "Deep", and in an era of fractured opinions i was struck by the near universal love/appreciation for elzhi's skills. This given, of course, by those who gave the time to check it out. Deep isn't a pop song. It's the underground hip hop that your white girlfriend might appreciate, but you're pretty sure her parents won't. Not that they won't listen, they just won't get it. Or will be bored by it. White-black noise, if you will.

So as i bumped the Elzhi track on loop, i realized the same effort, the same niche-nerdiness that is demanded of someone who loves elzhi is also required of Updike apologists. Fans of El will mention his wordplay, meticulousness w/ rhyme schemes, his imagery. Here's Patterson on Updike again, "The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic."

Here's the start of Elzhi's first verse in "deep":

i'm the bell ringer
shell slinger
hiding bodies until the smell linger
until they pale as renee zellwegger...

Worth noting rhat last line works orally, not on the page.

3. There are obviously a lot of difference between Updike and Elzhi, but that seems to make the similarities all the more striking. Most critique of underground hip hop will use terms like narcissistic, ponderous, overly indulgent in minutiae that no one cares about.

I hear/read a lot of academic talk about hip hop lyric appreciation, processing it as literature, but that sensibility is not embedded in the pop cultural zeitgeist yet. The difference in mainstream perception between Elzhi and Updike is the gap yet to be bridged. Obama can't do it alone. Or in 100 days. Only time and a history of multitudes will condition us to think in different ways. Until then our wikipedias, our informational home base, will be slanted. One that places updike and that white male narcissist on a pedestal, while barely making a case/argument/entry for 'zhi. elzhi = updike?, maybe not totally equal, but we have to raise one or lower the other a little.

This is mostly a rough thought exercise. the analogy might not be perfect. a more apt comparison, for example, might be: a John Updike is to Dave Eggers as Jay-Z is to Elzhi. That one seems to work in a few ways, including J and J both being "bigger" artists. While eggers and elzhi are master craftsmen operating within the constructs of genre limitations. by choice.

Life Has Three Speeds: Twitter, Google, Facebook

Farhad Manjoo -- who's been on fire the last few months covering the tech beat for Slate; if there's a popular technology or device you don't know about, he's got your primer -- finally gives Twitter a once-over, and instead of transparently making a pitch for followers like Julia Angwin's at the WSJ he decides to examine the comparison to two other pop technology tools, Facebook and Google.

After giving all the need to know info and background on twitter and the other tools there's not much time/space left to ruminate, but his main *idea* goes deeper than the usual here's-why-this-is-cool rhetoric.

See, everyone's in a tizzy over the prospect of twitter developing into a search-engine of immediate real-time response and news -- usually citing twitterers who broke news and pictures of the Hudson plane crash before any real news people got to the scene. But Majoo wonders if this is filling a void that doesn't exist:

That gets to a more fundamental question: How often does anyone need "real time" information on the Web? Yes, in the first few minutes after a plane has landed in the Hudson, Twitter might be the best place to find news. But its advantage is short-lived....

Google had a coherent story within hours; Twitter had a messy story within minutes. News junkies love the messy, fast story, but lots of us aren't news junkies. Lots of us are OK waiting an hour for coherence.

And I wonder the same thing, and the philosophy major in me is a little sad that he has to shortshrift the question born of us stealing fire from the tech gods: that being, how much speed do we really need?

Now cruising on the road of life, or evolution, it appears human beings have three gears: Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

Twitter is the fastest we can do. Something happens you can let the world know in the time it takes to type 140 characters or less. For those who like a moment to reflect, Facebook is fairly immediate but not as streamlined for REAL-TIME REACTION. And finally you have the "lumbering" google as your vast archive of the timely and timeless. These three tools/technologies developed will give us coverage on basically everything within the space-time continuum aside from the thoughts in our head (hmmm).

So now all that's left is to decide your cruising speed?

The Chang Interview: Part 2. Et tu, Obama? Then Fall, Hip Hop!

Subject: Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop -- a book (currently $6 on amazon? cop it now, yo.), and a website -- long and short, he's one of the contemporary Professors of Hip Hop.

Backstory: In part two of this three-part interview, we get into Obama and hip hop, and really the question that prompted me to get Jeff's opinion.

Mission: The two meatiest Q&A's in the interview are below. Let's peep the science:

(Part 1 of interview is here)
(Part 3 of interview is here)

PART 2: WILL OBAMA KILL HIP HOP???

TAN: I think this is the pea under my mattress that prompted all of this: in a recent slate article you used the phrase, “postracial-is-the-new-black.” It made me think, maybe Obama is the new hip hop...

Your book Can't Stop Won't Stop seems all the more relevant today, not because of hip hop, but because it's the story of our post-racial generation. In the current phrasing we’re swapping out hip hop semantics for new slang that's more inclusive/accessible.

Obama has personified this transition; the same way "hip hop" once served as a cultural uniter, Obama is now serving that role in a a more tangible way.

Looking back now, it seems hip hop, perhaps, had a certain misplaced ambition. In the 80s and 90s all we had was Hip Hop, so we needed it to be in politics and fashion and music and make cookies and do dishes and be transcendent. Now we know different. We can’t deny hip hop’s influence, but that no longer makes a given thing "hip hop" in that KRS-istential sense. Obama may brush the dirt off his shoulder, and show his love, but he's clearly not hip hop, right? He's bigger, badder, better.

All this makes me wonder: is hip hop still as relevant as it seemed to be, or at least aspired to be, a few years ago? if so, how? if not, didn't obama play a big role in killing it off?

Jeff: i think you're right on the mark in identifying right now as a moment in which everything is shifting. success--even partial success--always creates new tensions, new anxieties, new questions. obama is certainly a symbol of hip-hop's success in literally desegregating the popular culture. but without hip-hop, obama is unimaginable.

it's as simple as yz calling for 'a black president solution' back in 1989. i'm certain that against the backdrop of ronald reagan, nelson mandela, 'do the right thing', tawana brawley, and howard beach, he was imagining someone like a fela anikulapo-kuti/louis farrakhan figure--'black power's in the realm and the government's disagreeing'. now that we're in 2008, the first real black presidential candidate is, well, half white.

in a way, that's the difference between culture and politics. hip-hop is the art of the impossible. it imagined we could rule the world when we were clearly so far from actually doing so. politics is the art of the possible. democracy in theory reduces everything to the mean+1.

i'm as ambivalent about the idea of the 'post-racial' as you are, and not just because it denies an identity of blackness or brownness or yellowness--or an identity that sits somewhere between all of that--but it also denies an identity of whiteness. whiteness is an identity born of and linked to power, after all, and one that we thus have to understand as well.

hip-hop was the new black, and in that way, it created all kinds of avenues for people like me who aren't black to understand and value culture differently than it has been valued by society in the past. that, in turn, created ways of understanding what political power looks like in this country, and furthered desires to understand and value people and communities differently. so in the end, i'm for a movement whether in culture or politics that redistributes power, shares power, flips off authority and flips the given script.

if hip-hop would go back to being disadvantaged voices yelling loudly, that might solve the problem. but here's the problem--that's impossible now. too much has changed. the only realistic way forward is to admit that in some important ways we aren't the underdog anymore, that we fucking won. and then we have to get over our fear of 'what happens next'? what happens next is we take this shit over and run it.

TAN: A lot of your piece talks about the new multi-racial majority. reports have whites becoming minority in 2050. How do you see things changing once ethnics are running this piece?

Jeff: dude. now the census bureau says 2042. and the brookings institution says 18-29's hit that g-spot in 2028. 2028!!! i might even live that long.

so yeah, this is the big question now, right? this is where whiteness as the identity of power is crucial--i think of all the anti-black racism of my folks. it's pretty viscerally about both being higher up the food chain AND being lighter skinned. that, i think, was part of the real fear behind the 'is he black enough?' talk--but it was the Fear That Could Not Be Named, except perhaps by a cadre of folks who lived through COINTELPRO with a gun under their pillow. and generationally, some of us have been so eager to crash the party that those folks just sound really old. that's the flipside of 'post-racial' if you will.

the truth is probably somewhere in between--and my sympathies probably lie closer to the cadres than the david broders of the world, who are ready to call it a day for racism before driving home to their gated community.

lots of folks i spoke to this year, especially bun b and david banner, really wanted to emphasize that obama would be the president of america, not of non-white america, and that we needed to deal with that. which for me raised the obama and faith question. do we place our faith in him that he's gonna make things right? in this sense, 'yes we can' was a neat little rhetorical device--it allowed obama to wipe that dirt off his shoulder. it's not me, it's you. barack is getting ready to let us down easy. but then again, i truly buy his sincerity. i'm feeling that earnestness. after so many years of 'kick me please', it's nice to hear someone say, 'have it your way' and like really really mean it.

i guess my best hope is that the difficult conversations around race continue, that obama's presence puts a ceiling on the biliousness and the viciousness, and that the general arc gets pointed again in the direction of justice. as for the rest of it, i take his challenge seriously--if obama's in the office, then let's get it.

Saving the best for last in PART III: Which came first: The Death of Hip Hop or The Death of Wall Street... and, did crack pave the way for Barack?

image:
barack bigot

Crayon Physics Deluxe

The kids have so much cooler playthings these days. I sorta can't believe this game/product has the word "Crayon" in it:



Crayon Physics Deluxe [Slate]

Religionism Trumps Racism?

Christopher Hitchens in Slate joins in the Obamontificating, suggesting that Barack's victory in Iowa (less the victory itself, more the accompanying hubbub) is not a triumph of race, but a failure of our presumed war against "uplift, and deceptive optimistic windbaggery" ....

I'm with him on the "God Is Not Great" tip, but he throws baby after bathwater when he eschews other aspects of Obama's import on racial politics to highlight our collective blind spot for black people with sketchy church affiliations. (can I get an amen!) Suggesting that going to this church makes Obama Al Sharpton with a proper haircut? Eh. Some good points are made, but they all suspiciously direct to his book.

Anyrace, I'm surely out of my depth, but do think I prefer "optimistic windbags" over "drunken-grump windbags." Hmm, actually that's not true. But I still want to stand up for positive people, cause they give us drunken-grumps something to complain about. Yay! I mean, hrrumph!

Identity Crisis [Slate]

Slate Biting TAN's Ass ... Post

If you look at my Six Asses That Changed America, and Slate's Illustrated History of Buttocks it wouldn't be crazy to think they were two separate, but similarly themed, feature ideas. I did a sillier, bloggy version. And Slate did a slightly more diligent examination.

Of course if you knew that I pitched "Asses that Changed America" to Slate, specifically as a slideshow pictorial ... then, I don't know. It starts looking a little sketchier.

But I'm getting used to others biting my style. As it goes with CBS Sportsline, and Radar, and the world ... so it goes with Slate. And, y'know, they did change my "let's take a quick trip through the history of our dear derriere" to "Oh, that Darling Derrière: A History of the buttocks, in pictures" (italics mine; don't steal them, Slate!).

Anybutt, I'm going to ignore the impulse to add this clip to my press room. I know this sort of thing comes with the territory. I'm just happy that, at least as far as the History of Ass goes, I seem to be in tune with the sensibility of an online magazine that I read and respect. And when you have that sort of personal affirmation, who needs a byline and $$?

Besides I don't write to pay the bills, that's what dating is for.

A history of the buttocks [Slate]
Six Asses that Changed America [TAN]

Black. White. Watched All Over??

Anyone see this show Black. White.?

Apparently it's a new reality show on FX where they have some amazing makeup person make a white family look black and vice versa, and then we get to watch the wacky hijinx ensue.

Of course this sounds like prime TAN fodder. So has anyone out there seen it? I'm seeing mixed reviews, which I'll post below. And I can't find any good still images to see the universally lauded makeup jobs. But I'm curious ...

Black White And Brilliant [Rolling Stone]
Color Commentary [Slate]
Black.White.Like.Me [CBS News]
On TV: Black. White. [Seattle Post intelligencer]