Sarah Palin and The GOP's Charly Baltimore Plan

by Barry Michael Cooper

(Failed Alaskan governor, best selling author, hockey mom, gun enthusiast, provocateur of potential political violence; Sarah Palin is a multi-tasking polymorph whose limited worldview in no way shape or form upends her bottomless reserves of unnerving ambition. The lady with the telegenic smile and the eyes of a sociopath owes her overexposed-exposure to Sen. John McClain, and his desperate bid to shift attention away from the Barack Obama Express during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. This was an essay I wrote about the Palin phenomenon, that was published online at the Huffington Post on 22 October 2008.) 

When Politics Became The New Hip Hop, Vol. 2.

We found out two things the night of October 18th, 2008:

1. Republican V.P. nominee Sarah Palin is a good sport.
2. She is down with the GOP (the Gangsta Opportunist Party).

Last weekend, a record seventeen million viewers watched as Gov. Paliin played along with the SNL Weekend News. Amy Poehler spat a catchy gangsta rap -- a song that Palin "refused" to perform, wink-wink -- which included references to: John McCain, Barack Obama, a moose caught in the Northern Lights of an Alaskan drive-by, and the view from her front porch to Red Square. As the yuk-yuks rained down on her pretty head, Palin stayed true to the endgame, raising her hands in the air and waving them like she just didn't care.

Larry Scott: The Picasso of Charles Village

by Barry Michael Cooper

(This is a piece from 2003 issue of The Journal of Urban Youth Culture--a magazine founded by my good friend and famed Michigan State University educator Dr. Carl S. Taylor--on the late Baltimore, Md. fine artist, Larry Scott. Scott--who died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2007--was one of the most prolific artists this city had ever seen. In my opinion, he was the Picasso of Baltimore, Md.)

"He lived so many years with small intervals of recuperation, in visible glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that, troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously..."
Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"

"...Don't shed a tear/'cause Mama/I ain't happy here..."
Tupac Shakur, "I Ain't Mad At Cha"

I am sure that neither Franz Kafka, nor Tupac Shakur have ever met Baltimore painter Larry Scott. Yes, it is quite absurd; one died seven years ago in a shower of nine millimeter mystery and counterfeit love, the other nearly a century ago from savage tuberculosis and public ennui. Yet the viscous that bonds all three is the need to be experienced; that humid, gothic desire fueling the mythic virus known as glitteraticosis, p.k.a. mad fame. Not that Scott, the 46-year-old Newark, New Jersey native and husband, father, and grandfather is sweating the art world for acceptance. His amazing work just wants you to holla if your feel it. 

Over Our Headz: A Micro Film About Life Under A Bush...

by Barry Michael Cooper

17 February 2010

Six years ago, I used to walk around Baltimore and New York City with an inexpensive Fuji Fineshot SLR, and just film stuff. Not necessarily looking for a narrative, but just life in action: homeless Vietnam Veterans in Times Square, seagulls at congregating on the roof Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore, the clouds, dudes getting pulled over by five-o on St. Paul Street in East Baltimore and getting arrested, puffs of white steam oozing from street corner storm drains, a newscast of a young American soldier in Iraq going in on a stunned and appalled Donald Rumsfeld. Getting my Stan Brakhage/David Lynch on.

These seemingly unrelated items became a cohesive micro film a few days into the new year of 2005, when I was listening to a track by the UK musical collective known as Zero 7. The track is titled "Over Our Heads", which was fitting for me, because I still couldn't figure out why George W. Bush was the leader of the free world. The answer was in GOD's Hands, and way over my head.

"Snowmore, Blizzardland": The Great Baltimore Blizzard of 2010

by Barry Michael Cooper

My micro-film on the great blizzard that blanketed Baltimore, Md. (and most of the Midwest and East Coast of America) on Wednesday, 10 February 2010. Music courtesy of Blue Magic: "You Don't Have To Tell Me Goodbye".

Teddy Pendergrass: The Unbearable Heaviness of a Love TKO

By Barry Michael Cooper 


"Teddy was the spirit and voice of his times. No voice better expressed the aspirations of late '70's Harlem."
--Gary Harris.
Twitter, 14 Jan 2010

Twenty-ten has roared up the on ramp of our lives like a ghostly metallic hearse, looking for the last exit to oblivion. The first psychic toll booth flashed a horrifically blinking snapshot of the Apocalypse; where a 7.0 tectonic plate shift in Port au Prince, Haiti, may have cut down hundreds of thousands of lives.

The second detoured us with the news that legendary American crooner, Teddy Pendergrass--the original Philadelphia International--died from colon cancer. He was 59 years old.

Both world shattering events took place on Wednesday, 13 January 2010. GOD Help us.

New Jack City Eats Its Young-Original 1987 Village Voice Feature

KIDS KILLING KIDS:
NEW JACK CITY EATS IT’S YOUNG
By Barry Michael Cooper
Published in the Village Voice: December 1st, 1987
(A Blessed and Bountiful New Year to one and all. Next March 2011--GOD Willing--will be the 20th anniversary of the Warner Bros. film, "New Jack City". This is the Village Voice feature I wrote 23 years ago, that was the basis for the film.)

MOTOR CITY BREAKDOWN
I. BLOOD LIKE WATER
“Yo-yo, where the money at?”
Lenny Higgins, 17 at the time, didn’t usually go to the store with his foster brother James, also 17, but on the night of March 1, 1987, James asked and Lenny obliged. It was 10:30. At Williamson’s Party Store, on Perry Park Boulevard on Detroit’s West Side, they bought sodas and played some games. They left about 10:45. As Lenny tells the story, he and James were approaching their corner of Heckler Street when a hooded figure ran across the street and stopped them in their tracks. Clad in a black jacket and black hooded sweatshirt, Mark Hunter, 24, pulled a .357 Magnum from his pants waist and stuck it in James’s temple.
“Yo-yo, where the money at?”

When the Levees Broke: Spike Lee's Sonogram of an American Stillbirth

by Barry Michael Cooper

(originally published in the Huffington Post: 2 September 2008)  

01. September. 2008/Monday 

Both Truman Capote and Saint Teresa of Avila made copious notes on the tearful taxes that come with the cosmic payoff of answered prayers. I don't know if the Rt. Rev. James Dobson and his Pharisees-On-The-Family minion Stuart Shepard are aware of the havoc they might have caused by asking their flock to pray for rain in order to sabotage a certain political convention.

Their prayers were answered. Only thing, that "Abundant rain, torrential rain, urban and small stream flood advisory rain" in Shepard's venomous supplication during his "Spotlight" broadcast, pounded the Gulf Coast instead. Not Denver. The powerful eyewall of rain and wind that fell in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Plaquemines Parish, also set its' sights on St. Paul, Minnesota, resulting in Hurricane Gustav's collateral disruption of the Republican National Convention's opening ceremonies.

Fast Forward to Back In The Day: Chief Rocker Busy Bee

by Barry Michael Cooper

(originally published in the Village Voice:11 September 2007)

Bee Kind, Rewind
The exuberant wild style of Busy Bee still resonates three decades later

That grinding sound in your ears is the gears of nostalgia down-shifting into a golden backspin. Forty may be the new 30, but 2007 is not the new and improved 1977, our Twin Towers still intact. This Scared New World has us anxiously coveting the lost continent known as Before. Before the echo of a modern Pleistocene Epoch—the New Ice Age—sent peals of Bling! Bling! ricocheting around the world; before Jay-Z became not only Jigganational but hip-hop's Magna Carter; before 9-7-96 and 3-9-97 bodied the innocence of "Rapper's Delight"; before nine bullets and a hot mix tape parlayed itself into a blue-chip stock portfolio at Goldman Sachs.