Birdgirl: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future is inspiring for those looking to change the world, for those wanting an adventure story, and for those concerned about mental illness.
While dismissed by Hollywood as a handy trend, Blaxploitation has earned a shaky status in the history of film and Black cultural history at large. The propensity to elicit loaded for or against debates has led to equally overwrought praise and scorn for these films. A half-century after Blaxploitation’s bombastic introduction, quick rise, and equally quick fall, we would do well to revisit, and reconsider, those films that best exemplify the still prickly term.
Perhaps, given our recent claim to greater visibility and the fact that RISE is arguably the first volume of its kind—especially as a “pop history of Asian America”—overzealous readers like myself may hastily expect it to be the Asian American story.
We forget to ask what our own words are bringing into existence.
Alas, it is not the music that is the relic but Wenner himself.
All religions should make room for the grown-ups to move toward a more open, meditative, inclusive, deconstructed experience. Maybe we could even hold on to what is best about religion if each denomination stopped insisting it possessed the only truth.
The deeper problem is not the predatory trickery of planned obsolescence or the high cost of labor in the United States. and the low cost of manufacturing overseas. It is not the closure of that sweet, fusty shop or the stubbornly slow pace of the honey-do list. It is my own impatience, my terror of taking something apart and finding that this half-hour task will take me two weeks.
Tempted as I am to lavish consciousness on everything around me, I was fascinated to learn that tobacco and tomato plants click when they are stressed.
“Monk on the Run” is shaped the way Warren Rosen has lived his life: moment to moment, choosing freedom over convention, scorning practicality, following impulses. Lots of digressions, in other words, and prose that is not always linear or logical but stays vivid, a paintbox spattered with bright personalities.“
The need to flush is basic and practical, and we maybe should have taught one another better before we handed off such an intimate task. But tech addicts us, and free enterprise lives on.