#why Miles have to prove his Latino side

[silent-raven13]

Why we need to prove our Latino side? Miles Morales’ B in Spanish...

One thing I’m annoyed with the fans watching Spiderman Across the Spider Verse, it's the way they make fun of Miles’ Spanish (I thought he spoke decent enough to understand, considering where he’s growing up)  How a lot of these Latinos (mostly older Spanish Speaking Latinos, I been seeing their asses on TikTok) calling Miles, a “No Sabo kid” because he got a B in Spanish. 

Like ya’ll never taken a Spanish class in America before? It’s not Latin American Spanish (or all types of Spanish in Latin America), it’s Castellano (Spain’s Spanish)! I don’t speak enough Spanish and went into a Spanish Speaker 1 class for my high school credit (and to get into College), and it makes up two credits (which is Spanish 1 and Spanish 2) I ended up with a B+ even when I barely spoke it, read, and write it (I bust my ass off for that B+). Even some of my classmates that knows fluid Spanish (Mexican and Salvadoran type of Spanish) were shookth by taking that class. Some of them even got low grades, or had to argue with our teacher because the Spanish we were learning wasn’t what we grew up with and the words we use wasn’t considered “proper”. So for those that never taken that class and start saying shit about Miles getting a B in Spanish, ya’ll are bitches and giving low vibration?? Like why ya’ll so badly wanna see young Latinos to prove their worth so bad?? 😒😒😒

The worst part is ya’ll love Evil Miles’ because his Spanish is so damn fluid, that you forget he lost his OWN DAD and was only around his mom more often to speak Spanish so well like ya’ll need to go to therapy. Read some articles about Latinos in America aren’t speaking Spanish as much as their native countries. Read articles about How part of Mexico becoming California, or Latino scholars talking about growing up during a time their own parents have to force themselves to speak English? Or how our American School system fucks us over! Once you learn why, you're gonna realize is a deeper than not wanting to.

[forever-rogue]

HI LOVE, PLS FOR THE AUTUMN PROMPTS #12 WITH BUCKY I’M WHEEZING

AN | This is one of my favorite prompts! You know I love Spooky Szn more than anything!

Warnings | mentions of dying (as a joke); reference to ptsd (in passing); use of pet name (bunny)

Prompt Used | “I paid $50.00 for this haunted house. I better die.”

Masterlist | Bucky, Main

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

"I can't believe you managed to convince me to do this," Bucky's face was pulled into a dismissal expression as you beamed at him. You tugged on his arm with excitement as the line moved forward, throwing him a smile almost as sweet as the Halloween candy that had been everywhere for the last two months. He looked over at you, and opened his mouth to say something but stopped to lean down to give you a kiss first, "all I'm saying is that for all the hype this place gets it should be good."

"It will be," you insisted excitedly, "and ugh...it's basically a premium haunted house so...its a little bit more than the average haunted house."

"Premium haunted house?" he raised an eyebrow in surprise as you took his hand and laced your fingers together, "what do you mean?"

"Well, ugh, this is supposed to be really creepy and realistic and actually scare you," you explained sweetly, hoping he wouldn't flip out too much when you revealed how much this place was going to cost, "so you know the saying, you get what you pay for…"

"Oh no," he appeared worried for a moment before being unable to conceal the grin on his face, "alright, out with it. What are you hiding, little bunny?"

"Well, this is the hip, cool haunted house and-"

"How much is it?" you gave him a little smile as he just huffed in bemused exasperation.

"Fifty dollars…"

"Fifty dollars-"

"Each."

"Fifty dollars each?!" for a moment his expression grew worried as you just give him a nervous smile, "you know, back when I was young-"

"I know, I know," you pulled him forward with you, "you walked twenty miles to and from school in old shoes, and you worked for a dollar a week. Well times are different and these days we're paying for premium haunted houses. Besides, I asked you on this date, so it's technically my treat. Just relax and have fun!"

"Fine," he agreed, "you're an odd one, little bunny. But I still love you."

"And just how am I odd?"

"Who enjoys paying money to get scared?"

"A lot of people apparently since haunted houses are a huge commodity!" you huffed and lightly stomped your foot as if to prove your point, "I promise it'll be fun! And if for some reason you're still Mr. Grumpy Boots afterwards, we'll do whatever you want."

"Fine," Bucky was never one to turn down a challenge, "for someone that gets frightened by her own shadow, you sure do love Halloween a lot."

"Halloween is everything baby," your eyes practically lit up at the mention of your favorite holiday, "you know it's the best time of year for so many reasons! Foods, the aesthetic, fall - all of it. You can't out argue me on this one!"

"I'm not even going to try and bother," you were nearing the ticket booth and growing more and more excited by the second. Bucky could practically feel your excitement radiating onto him as you clutched his hand tightly, "I'm glad you're happy. That's all that matters."

"I am happy. You make me so happy," you promised and pressed a soft kiss to his lips, "I love you, James. Hey - are you okay with this? Like really, if you don't want to, we can figure something else out."

"I'm okay," he promised, offering you a small smile, "really. I love you too. Now, let's go and get scared."

"Yay! Oh Bucky, you're the best! I love you so much," you almost jumped into his arms when he so easily acquiesced to your request. When it came down to it, you knew he would do just anything for you, "if this totally sucks, you know I'll try and make it up to you."

"All I'm saying is that I'm going to pay Fifty-five dollars for this haunted house. I better die," he looked at you with such a straight face, for a moment you couldn't tell if he was joking or serious; but you both quickly burst into laughter, "come on!"

“Alright - but don’t get mad when your wish comes true and you die!”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

“That wasn’t too bad at all,” you shrugged as you walked out of the haunted house, into the now chilly autumn evening. You stopped for a moment to admire the stars before noticing that Bucky was slowly trailing behind you, no longer at your side. You snorted lightly before crossing your arms over your chest and raising an eyebrow at him, “what? James...did you…did that actually scare you?”

“What?! No,” he insisted with a dramatic scoff as a grin stretched across your features, “that was child’s play at best. The costumes weren’t even that convincing. But I hope you had fun, baby.”

“I did,” you held out your hands towards him, still not convinced that he was telling the truth, “why don’t we-”

“BOO!” the voice behind Bucky was enough to make him jump out of his skin as he yelped and practically sprinted over to you. You almost doubled over in laughter as Bucky shoved you in front of him as a human shield, “you jumped! Actually jumped!”

“Sam!” Bucky groaned at the sight of his best friend wiping tears of laughter from his eyes as he walked over to you, his girlfriend Leila at his side, and shaking her head at his childishness. You exchanged a look with her and rolled your eyes at your silly boyfriends, “you’re an asshole.”

“Had to capitalize on the moment,” Sam laughed as Bucky sighed, “man, I can’t believe you didn’t realize we were behind you. What happened to the White Panther - too busy being scared?”

“I was...I was not scared!”

“You were too!”

“Boys,” you quickly interrupted the two of them, “why don’t both of you shut up and we can all go out and get dinner? Then the two of you can be idiots and argue and I can actually spend time with someone with a brain.”

“Hey!” they echoed in unison as you linked arms with Leila and the two of you skipped away to your cars. They would catch up soon enough.

“Love you!”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

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[lookinghbo]

'Looking' Made Raúl Castillo A Sex Symbol. Sheer Force Made Him A Star.

In New York, in the middle of July, if the fickle subway system allows it, you’d be wise to arrive at a destination 10 minutes early. You’ll need that time to let the sweat evaporate, to stamp out the damp spots that have betrayed your outfit.

Raúl Castillo forfeited his chance to cool down before shaking my hand at a Manhattan hotel restaurant on a sweltering Thursday morning. I didn’t mind. It was an honest mistake.

The “Looking” star was running slightly late and looking slightly frazzled when he bounded toward our table. He’d confused this hotel for another within walking distance where, the previous night, Castillo had attended a screening of the new Alexander McQueen documentary with his girlfriend, the costume designer Alexis Forte, who has the late fashion maverick’s biography at their Brooklyn apartment.

It’s cute to see celebrities frayed, even ones who are still building their marquee value. Castillo is the type who hasn’t yet abandoned public transportation when navigating the city, even though it’s becoming harder to do so without attracting strangers’ gazes. While trekking home from the “McQueen” event, a Latina teenager tapped him to say she loved “Atypical,” the Netflix series in which Castillo played a charismatic bartender sleeping with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s married character. The teenager’s mother loved “Seven Seconds,” the Netflix series in which Castillo played a narcotics detective tending to a racially charged investigation.

Raúl Castillo: a guy you can bring home to Mom, punctual or otherwise.

It’s his voice that people recognize, the 40-year-old actor said, a modest notion considering his breakthrough role as the sensitive barber Richie on “Looking” made Castillo a veritable heartthrob, despite the HBO show’s modest ratings. But it’s true that his warm baritone gravel is a distinguishing trait. Earlier this year, when I saw “Unsane,” Steven Soderbergh’s scrappy iPhone thriller set inside a mental institution, I recognized Castillo’s intonation before his face appeared onscreen.

That’s a significant feat. Castillo mumbled so much as an adolescent that a teacher recommended he see a speech therapist. He refused, instead reminding himself to enunciate or else using the impediment as a defense mechanism. “I have all these things wrong with my voice,” Castillo said, though few today would agree.

Castillo’s cadence may be growing familiar, but fame hardly seems like his long game. This is, after all, a guy who studied playwriting ― hardly the creative pursuit that commands the brightest spotlight ― at Boston University, after which he paid about $300 a month to live in a garage in Austin and perform local Chicano theater. “We the Animals,” a Sundance indie opening this weekend, marks the first time Castillo is the one generating a project’s star power. He portrays the father of three tight-knit boys storming through a wooded town in upstate New York. The movie, adapted from Justin Torres’ autobiographical novel of the same name, combines elements of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Moonlight” to capture a domestic home life that’s equal parts tender and volatile, where abuse and affection are equally common.

Castillo’s enthusiasm about “We the Animals,” and about the possibly of again working with its director, Jeremiah Zagar (“Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart”), speaks to his ambivalence toward the celebrity ecosystem.

“He could be like Tom Cruise without the child slavery,” Zagar said, roasting the “Mission: Impossible” moneymaker’s Scientology association (and its alleged history of forced manual labor). “Raúl’s that kind of a dude. He’s a perfect-looking dude, and yet he’s incredibly real and honest and true. There’s never a false note. He’s also incredibly collaborative. As a director, that’s a wonderful thing. I didn’t know what I was doing, really, because I had never directed a narrative before, and Raúl had a way of making me feel comfortable and confident in my own beliefs and my own material. He’s so seasoned and so clear about what he needs to do to make a scene work and a character work and to elevate other people around him.”

It’s a small movie with grainy aesthetics and an impressionistic lyricism ― in no way the kind of thing that will make a killing at the box office. For someone who first fell in love with theater by discovering the plays of Puerto Rican and Mexican writers like Miguel Piñero and Luis Valdez in his high school library, playing the complicated patriarch of a mixed-race family feels like a destiny fulfilled. (Sheila Vand, star of the Iranian horror gem “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” plays Castillo’s wife.) At this point, opportunities to extend his commercial footprint ― guest spots as a cannibal on “Gotham” and a music teacher on “Riverdale,” for example ― will find Castillo one way or another.

“I’ve always felt that I was never cookie-cutter,” he said. “For as much as I tried to fit my square peg into round holes, constantly, my whole career, I could never do it. Whenever I read ‘We the Animals,’ I didn’t think I would be cast in that film. [...] I felt viewed more as a Richie. People think I tend to find those roles easier than I do a role like this, ’cause it’s harsh. I knew that I could do it. I’m so grateful for both Jeremiah and Justin, who did see that in me.”

Born in McAllen, Texas, a midsize agricultural town that sits on the Mexican border, Castillo’s triumphs were born out of people believing in him at the exact right moments. He belongs to a first-generation immigrant family, even if home was a mere 10 miles down the road. Castillo didn’t feel othered, but his dual identity instilled a sort of anti-establishment fluster.

“I just saw a lot of bullshit in the structures that were established for me,” he said. “I found a lot of hypocrisies. People valued money, and I think when I was very young, I valued money and I didn’t have it. I think I hated myself for it.”

Slowly shedding the Catholic mysticism that once awed him, he took up bass and played in punk bands. When his friend Tanya Saracho, who would go on to write for “Looking” and “How to Get Away with Murder,” likened his GPA to a lifeline out of McAllen, Castillo decided to care about school. But in Boston, he was suddenly the minority. His “bad attitude” kept him out of second-year acting courses, until mentorship from a professor of color let Castillo understand that he shouldn’t punish himself for being subjected to an overwhelmingly white institution. And when he moved to New York in 2002, his pal Mando Alvarado, now a writer for “Greenleaf” and “Vida” (on which Castillo will soon appear), posited presentation as a mark of self-worth; if he didn’t put care into his résumé and headshot, why should anyone put care into hiring him?

Of course, when success takes years to manifest, it’s easy to forget the lessons you’ve learned. Living with four or five roommates at once, Castillo worked his way into the Labyrinth Theater Company, an experimental off-Broadway troupe founded by Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz. He still wanted to be a writer ― in high school, Castillo only ever acted to impress girls anyway ― but in 2006 he found himself starring in a Labyrinth production of “School of the Americas,” a play by “Motorcycle Diaries” scribe José Rivera. The acting bug stuck. In 2009, his play “Knives and Other Sharp Objects,” a multigenerational drama about class in Texas, opened off-Broadway, earning a mixed review from The New York Times.

Still, nothing quite lasted. The business side of things was grueling, and his coffee-shop gigs were getting old, even if he did count Lili Taylor and RuPaul as customers. An agent sent him on auditions for “huge” Hollywood movies ― which ones, Castillo wouldn’t say ― but dropped him after none proved fruitful. He was ready to give up altogether when “Looking” came around. Castillo had starred in the short film that became a prototype for the series. Its director, Michael Lannan, called him to audition for Richie (the character he’d initially played) and Augustin (a more prominent Latino character who worked as an artist’s assistant). He didn’t land either role, even though he’d originated one of them.

But by the time “Looking” was a week away from shooting, a Richie still hadn’t been cast. The producers called Castillo to read for Andrew Haigh, the gifted English director who shepherded the half-hour dramedy. Haigh had seen Castillo in an indie mystery called “Cold Weather” that gave him “street cred.” Crashing on John Ortiz’s couch in Hell’s Kitchen, wondering what else he could do with his life, Castillo was at a bar one night when he received an email with a contract attached. He had no representation to negotiate his salary, but it didn’t matter: After living check to check, he was on HBO.

“I was like, ‘Yes. Take my soul. I don’t care. Pay me. I need money,’” Castillo recalled. “I needed not just a paycheck but the affirmation. I needed something artistically that I could sink my teeth into that had value to it. Something that was substantial. Something that had a real point of view. I needed a character that gave me a platform to do what I do in a really great scale in the best way possible. And it ended up being that. That show was such a great gift to me.”

All of Castillo’s ensuing fortune can be linked to “Looking.” It made him a sex symbol, a love interest, a fan favorite, a rising star whose claim to fame meant a great deal to anyone hungry for frank depictions of queer intimacy. Richie was the good-natured, self-righteous ideal ― a perfect counterpoint for Patrick (Jonathan Groff), the series’ unsettled protagonist. It became gay viewers’ great disappointment when they learned that Castillo, their anointed hunk, was in fact straight.

“His inability to be fake as a person translates directly into his acting,” Groff said. “There is nothing extraneous or false about Raúl, and he brought a grounded, honest integrity to the character that absolutely no one else could have. He’s also just innately magic on screen and has that ‘it’ factor.”

Perhaps it was Castillo’s dual identity as a Mexican-American that helped him shine as a gay, blue-collar Californian who was sure of himself despite being rejected by his family. It’s certainly what lets him shine as the cash-strapped paterfamilias, caught between unremitting love for his kin and an inescapable pattern of violence, in “We the Animals.” This dyad comes at time when Castillo sees his identity splashed across the evening news.

McAllen houses the U.S. Border Patrol’s busiest hub for detaining immigrants suspected of entering the country illegally. While Castillo was vacationing in Europe and playing make-believe on sets, children were being ripped from their parents’ arms in his hometown.

“I would always have to explain where McAllen was, and now it’s this name you’re seeing constantly in the news for all these reasons that represent, for me, everything that’s wrong with this country,” Castillo said. “It was paralyzing. I was sitting in a beach in Europe, wondering why I deserved to be there. My parents had access to this country in ways that people who are coming from longer distances don’t. We had the great gift of citizenship, which is an incredible privilege. But my parents were immigrants, and they navigated that dynamic our entire lives. I saw my mom and my dad deal with all the insecurities and all the precarious nature of what being an immigrant in this country is. [...] Having grown up going back and forth across the border throughout my whole life, it’s disheartening and upsetting to see what’s happening. And then to think about this particular movie that deals with children, who are especially in that age when their minds are being formed and their view of the world is taking shape, to think about [the ones] locked in cages is enraging.”

Castillo may be miles from that crisis now, but he’s done more to better the world for brown people than he can know. His goal hasn’t been to diversity Hollywood roles written for white ensembles; it’s been to find work that naturally accentuates the grooves of his Latino heritage. He saw almost no Chicano role models in popular culture growing up, and now he is writing and starring in artistic endeavors that paint all shades of the human experience ― gay, poor, brown, cannibalistic, whatever ― with a dynamic brush.

Which isn’t to say everything’s gotten easy. He was slated to play the lead in “Mix Tape” (a musical drama set in Los Angeles) and appear on “One Day at a Time” (the Norman Lear reboot), but has since exited both series and would rather not disclose why. I got the sense, during our two-hour breakfast, that Castillo is still protective of how he is perceived. Maybe he always will be. He’s comfortable reflecting on his upbringing and his relationship with race ― concepts he’s spent his whole life processing ― but being candid about recent setbacks, as routinely asked of celebrities in interviews, does not yet come easy.

It’s the “ego business bullshit” that still eats at him. It’s what eats at most of us. But when someone makes a name for himself, that burden slowly fades to the periphery, replaced by a newfound comfort, even power. The man who once served RuPaul coffee now shares an agent with the drag dignitary.

“For so long, it was all feast or famine,” Castillo said. “I just took work when I could take it. And at this point, I’m in a new place where I want to be more thoughtful about the roles that I take on from here on out. The projects, the roles, the people. I’ve learned so much in the journey that now I want to apply all that and also honor my experience, because at this point I want to work with people who challenge me in all the right ways and push me to become a better actor and a better artist.”

[the-merricatherine]

Why can’t y’all just decide to be what you already are – more like us – a white co-worker named Travis asked me in the early 1980s. He was a diehard Southern Baptist, Reagan was the newly elected president, and we were working at the Chicago Pullman plant, laying on our sides all day or night, whatever shift it was, routing ducts and cabling in the tiny equipment rooms beneath Amtrak cars, talking politics and history. I’d just brought up the war in Vietnam, in which the US killed 3 million Vietnamese alone, and the murderous wars in Central America which were happening as we spoke.

But you were born here, Travis insisted. Your parents and grandparents were born here, not over there. You’re an American, just like me. What are those people to you?

... I’d just brought up the war in Vietnam, in which the US killed 3 million Vietnamese alone, and the murderous wars in Central America which were happening as we spoke. I probably threw in some references to the ongoing wars for liberation in southern Africa as well where the US was backing, financing and arming the wrong side as usual.

There’s an internet current of US-born black people calling themselves ADOS, the American Descendants of Slaves who seem to be trying their level best to be the kind of Good Black Americans Travis talked about.

The ADOS people claim to be relentless advocates of reparations for the crimes of slavery, Jim Crow, the prison state and more, but with an important right wing twist which sharply differentiates them from the previous generation of reparistas.

ADOS followers throw away the internationalism of their forbears, embracing instead a sometimes polite, but always frank hostility toward immigrants of all nations on the grounds that they’re either economic competition for native-born blacks, that they’re stealing the contracts, the patronage, the affirmative action and similar spots which ought to go to native-born black Americans, or that they are somehow cashing in the accumulated moral and social capital which belongs to the US born descendants of slaves alone.

It’s a tribal thing, #LineageMatters, ADOSers tell anybody listening, and anyone not a US born descendant of US slaves on both sides of the family is in some other tribe. Until last summer’s wave of public revulsion at the deliberately cruel separation of refugee children from their parents at the border, the kindest sentiment you could find on ADOS Twitter feeds was the equivalent of Latinos don’t never stand up for us, why we gotta stand up for them?

Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, originators of the #ADOS name and hashtag would like us to believe ADOS is a movement. But that claim is made so often by so many canny self-promoters that it’s hard to take seriously without some kind of proof. Carnell has been doing podcasts, internet writing and commentary, and most reccently YouTube blogging the past several years, while former LA assistant DA Antonio Mooreis a more recent entry into the world of internet propaganda.

ADOSers may be misguided, but they don’t take money or direction and have no need to borrow bad ideas from the Russians We’ve got plenty bad ideas already. Their insular tribalism, and ADOS co-founder Yvette Carnell frequently refers to #ADOS, American Descendants of Slaves as in terms of “our tribe” is entirely home grown and very very tribal. If you look, you can find similar, and similarly backward looking ideas represented in every country on this planet. Like patriarchy and monarchy tribalism is one of those ancient backward looking but widespread human social contraptions which belong in a museum.

ADOSers take a different road. Being tribalists rather than internationalists, ADOSers rarely mention the existence of class differences among American blacks. They usually manage to ignore the very existence of the US empire in whose heartland they and their tribe were born and raised, let alone explain how that global capitalist empire generates the influx of refugees to its center, to which they object so vehemently.

But clearly the refusal to talk about class is a kind of class politics itself, while the inability or unwillingness to examine and acknowledge the role of global capitalist empire in creating transnational refugee flows is a de facto endorsement of the same. Opposing white supremacist and capitalist empire is what an actual left would do, and whatever ADOSers are, they ain’t leftists.

ADOSers are in a permanent rage against Democrats, and declare that like it or not this election cycle will be the one in which the issues of #reparations2020 and #tangibles2020 will be relentlessly pressed upon every party, every candidate. ADOSers see Democrats as going out of their way to appease and pander to every other voting constiuency EXCEPT the descendants of slaves who are owed reparations.

ADOSers forget how candidate Barack Obama won the whopping majority of the Latino vote in 2008 and 2012 by promising them a road to citizenship. But President Obama proved to be the deporter-in-chief, with an all time record 2 million deportations, so many that even a two-term Trump administration is unlikely to match his total. There may not be enough undocumented people and green card holders to hang the necessary misdemeanor under current law which allow the feds to manufacture deportation cases against. Like his successor, President Obama separated immigrant families at the border and built hundreds of miles of border wall, leaving only the last six or seven hundred miles for Trump successor to complete. Obama opposed gay marriage in 2008 , only coming around when election to a second term seemed certain. The pandering to other voting blocs that so enrages ADOSers is pretty much fakery, but as tribal folks will do, ADOSers seem to perceive only the slights, the lies, the insults which are directed at them.

ADOS leaders Carnell and Moore have probably never participated in, probably never seen a mass movement against unjust authority. As far as most of us know, they’ve never organized a new union or tried to take over a corrupt old one, never led a rent strike, never helped found or lead a cooperative, never gotten themselves arrested for defying unjust authority. There was a time when those sorts of credentials were required for aspiring black leaders.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ados-shrinks-reparations-politics-fit-narrow-horizon-tribalism

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

How Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal Got Their Movie 'Blindspotting' Made After 10 Years

Six years before Daveed Diggs made Thomas Jefferson cooler than any history teacher thought possible in the musical  Hamilton, he was huddled over a pirated version of the screenwriting software Final Draft with his best friend, Rafael Casal. A producer had offered Casal a movie after seeing his slam poetry on YouTube and HBO’s  Def Poetry. Casal brought Diggs star on board, and right away they knew what the subject had to be: their city, Oakland, California. In 2009, that topic was weighted with tragedy. “Oscar Grant was murdered at Fruitvale Station, blocks away from where I was living,” says Diggs, referring to the unarmed black man shot by a white police officer on January 1 of that year, an incident dramatized by Ryan Coogler in his 2013 film  Fruitvale Station. At that point, says Diggs, “you couldn’t write about Oakland without talking about that.” But unlike Coogler, Diggs and Casal intended to charge their politics with dark humor. “So many comedies ignore race except when it’s funny,” says Casal. “We wanted to write a buddy comedy without ignoring the world these guys live in.

In January,  Blindspotting debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, starring Diggs and Casal; six months after that, on July 27, it will open nationwide. And that’s exactly eight years after the duo expected the film to be made. Diggs laughs: “As I learned,” he says of their crash course in the film business, “you can have a movie fully green-lit, ready to go, and then it disappears.”

The producers, Jessica and Keith Calder, had originally offered the two a $300,000 budget to shoot on DSLR cameras; they even had a director, Jonathan Levine (50/50), signed on. But the Calders had just launched a production company, Snoot Entertainment, and they kept getting pulled into outside-funded projects. After three false starts, says Casal, the heartbroken writers told the producers, “We don’t even want to talk about this movie anymore. Let’s move on.” The persistent Calders, however, came back to the project in 2015. This time, Diggs was the roadblock. He had just signed on to do  Hamilton, which debuted off-Broadway. He remembers telling the producers, “I’m sure it will only last three months.” A year later, the musical was a record-breaking Broadway hit, earning Diggs a Tony and a Grammy for his two roles (Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette). In February 2017, as  Moonlight won best picture at the Academy Awards for its depiction of a black gay man’s coming-of-age, Casal drunk-texted the Calders something along the lines of: “We could have had a  Moonlight.” The Calders jumped back in. “This was the beginning of Trump’s America,” says Casal, “and we all got reinspired.”

At that point, like many in the original cast, Diggs had left Hamilton, but the rising star’s new management team had to sign off on the script. They did, pending a massive rewrite, due in two months. Diggs was busy with acting—guest roles on TV and the Julia Roberts film  Wonder —so it was left to Casal. The basic plot stayed the same: Collin, a convicted felon with a gentle demeanor (played by Diggs), is determined to get through the last three days of his yearlong probation without incident. Miles, his white, hot-headed best friend (Casal), is eager to stir up trouble. Early on, Collin witnesses a white police officer fatally shoot a black man. He tries to bury what he saw, but it eats away at him. What changed, says Casal, was how the aftermath of the shooting played out. “Over 10 years, that conversation has evolved so much,” he says. “When we started the script, there were protests in the street when something like that would happen. Now, nothing.”

“The momentum behind movements like [Black Lives Matter] has been tough to sustain,” says Diggs. “We thought a lot would change, but it didn’t.” A big protest scene was dropped. “Now, Collin is the only person affected by the shooting,” Diggs says, “with no response from the city. And once word gets out that the black victim was a felon, suddenly he’s not perfect enough to warrant protests.”

Production began in June 2017. Casal chose a friend, Carlos López Estrada, to direct. Casal sent him references for the Oakland he and Diggs wanted to see, “like Whoville: big cars, big hats, big sunglasses, bright shorts.” Casal’s highly stylized vision borders on surreal. “Oakland is a place like nowhere else,” he says, adding wistfully, “Well, that was more true when we were growing up.”

The Bay Area tech boom, which pushed real estate prices into the stratosphere, means the once–predominantly black and Latino city is gentrifying. Collin and Miles resent the young hipsters moving in, but Miles is particularly incensed—as well as desperate to prove that, despite his skin color, he’s not one of them. When he and Collin attend a housewarming party, it’s not the tech-bro host Miles punches in the face but a black Oakland native who accuses Miles of cultural appropriation. “When I’m back home,” says Casal, who lives in Los Angeles now, “I’m aware of the glaring hostility between presumed locals and presumed outsiders—and I say ‘presumed’ because no one is actually checking. We’re just using race as a placeholder for knowing who’s from there and who’s not.” Misinterpretation aside, the screenwriters tend to side with natives. The privileged white newcomers in Collin and Miles’s world serve, in part, as comic relief, but as Diggs notes, in real life, gentrification “is more complicated than painting bad guys.”

He knows because when he moved to New York City for his role in Hamilton, “I lived in Washington Heights and disappointed people every day because I didn’t speak Spanish. That was a moment for me to learn something and be—to the degree that I could—part of a community that had thrived for a long time before I got there and will continue for a long time after I’ve left.” As much as Diggs tried to be sensitive, “it’s hard to walk around thinking that way every day,” he says. Similarly, Blindspotting is attempting to show that “in any given situation there’s something you’re missing, through no fault of your own. We’re not intentionally trying to offend anybody,” adds Diggs, “but if you’re offended, maybe you should ask yourself why."

The first scene the two friends wrote, back in 2009, comes toward the end of the film. Collin challenges Miles to use a racial slur. Miles refuses. It leads to a confrontation that’s been percolating: Miles gets away with his antagonistic behavior because he’s white, while the more cautious Collin is stereotyped as a thug because of his skin color and dreadlocks. For Diggs, it was the hardest day of the shoot. “It’s the only time I thought, Damn, this would be a lot easier if I wasn’t acting with my best friend,” he says. “We’d meet up after each take to hug it out.”

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

America is a young punk country with a knack for reinvention — political traditions don’t stick to our ribs. In case you needed any proof, look to California. Not 30 years ago, it helped elect George H.W. Bush, part of a 20-year streak of voting for Republican presidential candidates, including two of its own native sons, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arianna Huffington was a prominent California Republican many, many naps ago, and Joan Didion was an unabashed Goldwater Girl who once wrote that if Barry Goldwater had “remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election.”

But times have changed. “California,” especially for those of us who come from “not California” — that gray, dreary expanse that extends for 2,500 miles east and north of the state — has become shorthand for “liberal.” A sanctuary state powered by Moonjuice and tech money, it has become a defiant Democratic anchor in the Trump era, ironic for a place that rests on inherently shaky ground. Hillary Clinton won it with 61.5 percent of the vote in 2016, turning even Republican enclaves like Orange County blue.

Throughout more than two decades of shifts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has remained a California constant. But as Feinstein campaigns this year for a sixth term, the state’s unabashed liberalism has given her a rough go of it. Progressives have deemed her to be insufficiently left-leaning — she was booed at a 2017 town hall for saying she wasn’t for single-payer health care — and now she’s facing a more serious primary challenger than she’s seen in many years: Kevin de León, a progressive state senator from Los Angeles. Thanks to the state’s “jungle primary” on Tuesday, in which the top two vote getters regardless of party move on to the general election, de León could well remain a thorn in Feinstein’s side all the way through November.

De León’s progressive politics and origin story as the son of a single immigrant mother are in line with the left-leaning tilt of present-day California. He’s for single-payer health care, has criticized Feinstein for taking too centrist a stance on immigration in a heavily Latino state, and has made environmental issues front and center in his campaign, winning the endorsement of billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. Feinstein, on the other hand, seems somewhat out of step with the state grass roots, though she’s been tacking left during the primary election; she didn’t secure the Democratic Party’s endorsement at a state convention in February, and she lost endorsements from the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association to de León. Given the advantage of her incumbency and fundraising, those moves were largely symbolic — but powerfully so. They cast Feinstein as a California politician of another era, one that favored moderates rather than excoriated them.

But it’s unlikely that this is the year something changes. Feinstein is heavily favored to win — recent polls put her as much as 24 points ahead of de León.

So why hasn’t California, blue as blue can be, moved past its moderate senator? The state’s population shifts have moved it steadily into the safely Democratic column, but that doesn’t mean that its electorate is progressive enough — or angry enough at the Democratic establishment status quo — to rock the boat.

The Consummate Moderate

When Dianne Feinstein won her first Senate race in 1992, 47 percent of the state electorate was Democratic, and 40 percent was Republican. Two years later, she faced a close re-election battle against Republican Michael Huffington and won by only 2 points.

Her ideological leanings at the time reflected the relatively competitive political environment. In her first Congress, Feinstein was considered a moderate Democrat based on her DW-Nominate score, which rates members on a scale from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). Feinstein had a -0.302 DW-Nominate score; for comparison, her fellow senator from California, Barbara Boxer, had a score of -0.439, which was on the liberal end of things for that Congress.

Present-day California looks much different than it did when Feinstein became a senator: 45 percent of the electorate are now registered as Democrats, and 25 percent as Republicans. Feinstein won her last election by 23 points.

Yet Feinstein’s current DW-Nominate score (-0.267) is more moderate than the one she started with. Her fellow California senator, Kamala Harris, has a -0.706 score, which is nearly as left as liberals go in the highly polarized 115th Congress. Feinstein has voted with President Trump 26.4 percent of the time, though based on Trump’s 2016 vote margin in California, she would have been expected to support him on just 19.5 percent of votes. By contrast, Harris would have been expected to vote with Trump 19.3 percent of the time, but her Trump score is only 15.1 percent.1 Feinstein was booed at a speaking engagement last summer for saying that she hoped Trump would become a good president.

Longtime Feinstein adviser Bill Carrick called the accusations from California progressives that she isn’t liberal enough for the state “ridiculous.”

“She voted against every single serious, substantive issue that has come on the floor against Trump — she has a long history of being out there on progressive issues like choice and the environment and economic fairness, civil rights,” he said. “Just because someone has a narrative doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Feinstein has always been viewed somewhat skeptically by the most left-wing factions of the Democratic Party, according to progressive columnist and longtime California political watcher Harold Meyerson, former editor at LA Weekly. The first time he remembered seeing Feinstein was at the 1990 Democratic state convention, when she was running for governor against Republican Pete Wilson and looking to prove her moderate bona fides. “She said something to deliberately get the delegates to boo her by asserting her support for the death penalty,” Meyerson said. “I remember sitting there with folks in the press section saying, ‘Damn, she said that and she’s going to get an ad out of that.’”2 The problem with Feinstein, Meyerson said, “is that she’s still living in that California which no longer exists.”

The booing, it would appear, is a career-long trend.

California changed

Feinstein’s tenure has overlapped with two major demographic changes in California: an ever more diverse racial makeup and ever-shifting patterns of economic migration.

In 1992, when Feinstein was first elected, California was home to nearly 30 million people, 57 percent of whom were non-Hispanic white, 26 percent Latino and 10 percent Asian. Now the white population has fallen to 38 percent, while Latinos have risen to 39 percent and Asians to 14 percent of the state’s population of nearly 39 million. The implications of that are easy enough to ascertain: The growth of these Democratic-leaning populations has only served to strengthen the party’s foothold in the state.

Just as important, though, has been the state’s economic migration since the end of the Cold War.

The recession of the early 1990s hit California hard. During the Cold War, the state was a magnet for aerospace and defense dollars, but as the decades-old international tensions wound down, so did spending in the military-industrial complex that had served as a tent pole of the state economy. The effects of federal defense spending cuts were percussive. According to a 1995 report from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, there were 337,000 California aerospace jobs in 1990 but only 191,000 by 1994. A 1998 report estimated that the state lost 720,000 total jobs during the downturn.

Residents began to leave California in droves. According to a 2000 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, the state saw a net loss of 2 million people from 1990 to 1999. Washington, Texas and Arizona were the top destinations for California expats, 71 percent of whom were white. Most who left were in families with children, and just under half of adults leaving the state had a high school education or less. About 700,000 were “poor or near poor.” The economic opportunity in the state had dried up for those used to the state’s Cold War paradigm — largely middle-class and lower-middle-class Californians.

While white, middle-class residents were leaving, wealthy, well-educated whites from states like Illinois and New York arrived as the state’s tech sector grew. Between 2007 and 2016, California had a net loss of residents but saw migration gains among those who made at least $110,000 after they moved to the state, according to an analysis by Brian Uhler and Justin Garosi of the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“There’s two big factors driving domestic migration in California,” Uhler said. “California is more likely to have net out-migration than in-migration just because it’s more expensive to live here. But there’s a counterweight, at least in certain parts of the economic cycle, of higher income and job growth in California than the rest of the country, especially in the Bay Area.”

Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said that many of California’s well-educated white migrants were operating in a new sector with new norms and practices, and that had the effect of changing political attitudes in the state. “It was socially liberal, and economically, it was reasonably conservative but not super conservative,” he said of the new Silicon Valley culture, a stark contrast from the old-economy jobs that had once dominated the state. “Just a different kind of person fills these kind of jobs.”

California’s economic transition helped make the state’s white population more primed to vote Democratic. In 2016, California’s white electorate favored Clinton over Trump by 5 points, bucking the national trend for the white vote. This might also be because of the high education level of white people in California compared with white people nationwide: 42 percent of non-Hispanic whites in California have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with the white national average of 31 percent, and Americans with higher educational attainment favored Clinton over Trump.

There were signs prior to 2016 that California’s white population was more likely to buck the demographic’s nationwide trend of voting Republican. Whites in California flip-flopped between Republicans and Democrats, voting for Bush, Obama and Romney. White women in California voted Democratic since the 2004 Kerry/Bush election.

“Everyone talks about the diversity part,” McGhee said, referring to California’s growing Latino and Asian cohort, “but if you look at the demographic complexion of Texas, it’s actually very similar [to California], and yet Texas is much more Republican. And it’s not because the Latino population in Texas votes Republican. It’s because the white population votes Republican. It’s a combination of these two things that has pushed California way heavily into the Democratic camp.”

Yet Feinstein is still the favorite

So if the state is getting bluer, why Feinstein and not de León?

First, it helps to be an incumbent. Feinstein’s campaign cash reserves top $10 million compared with less than $700,000 for de León, and she has received endorsements from the likes of former President Obama along with numerous state officials and newspapers. “If this were an open seat in a different political environment with a different president, de León would be a strong contender,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote. “But Feinstein’s experience and influence are too important to pass up.”

And there are cultural forces at play, too. California went from tilting blue to becoming the undeniable fortress of the Resistance in the span of a couple of decades. But just because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the state doesn’t mean that there are enough lefties to swing the balance toward a less “establishment” candidate like de León.

California’s white population, which tilts slightly more conservative than the rest of the state, holds outsized sway in its open primaries and the state’s general elections. According to a 2017 analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California, 61 percent of the state’s likely general election voters are white, though non-Hispanic whites only account for 43 percent of the adult population; Latinos are 18 percent of likely voters but 34 percent of the adult population. Homeowners are also more likely to cast ballots in California than its many renters facing sky-high housing costs: Sixty-four percent of likely voters were homeowners, while 66 percent of unregistered adults were renters.

The state’s primary electorate is similarly skewed. In a 2014 analysis of 11 election cycles, McGhee showed that the state’s primary electorate tends to be much less diverse, with fewer young voters. The 2012 fall general election, for example, had a 7-point higher share of Latino voters than the primary.

California voters are also more ideologically split than what the state’s reputation might project. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, whites in California identify about evenly as liberal (36 percent) and conservative (39 percent), with 25 percent saying they are “middle of the road” politically. Latinos identify more as liberal (38 percent), with 29 percent calling themselves “middle of the road” and 33 percent identifying as conservative. Black and Asian voters, smaller portions of the state electorate, identify much more solidly liberal.

The Senate primary, like so many other inter-Democratic battles since the 2016 election, has debated the virtues of vocal systemic change versus the power of establishment influence in uncertain times. California voters might not be as radical as their reputation makes them out to be. Many appear comfortable with the status quo or are prospering in the new California. Garosi pointed out that many of the state’s debates are over traditionally nonpartisan issues. “One of the interesting things about California is that a lot of our political conflicts aren’t so much left vs. right as pro-development vs. anti-development,” he said.

Now that California is so deeply Democratic, how its future politics will shake out is an open question. What is sure is that the electorate will look very different in the future. McGhee said California is going through what he calls an “eligibility revolution,” with Latino and Asian residents becoming eligible to vote faster than the same populations in other states. “All the growth in the Latino community is the children of Latino immigrants who are citizens,” he said.

“There’s a lot change going on, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that. You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring — that’s just inexorable change.”

[hellyeahheroes]

Secret Empire: Top Ten DUMBEST Moments

As far as events go, Secret Empire is probably one of the worst. And considering both Civil Wars, Ultimatum, Amazons’ Attack and Countdown are events, that bar has been set pretty low. So as it finally comes to an end, seven months too late, let us showcase some of the worst decisions made during the creation of this story. They made it into such colossal trainwreck.

Honorable Mention: Dress Like a Nazi To Work Day

Out of all moronic decisions in this event, this was the one that irks me the most because it slipped into real life. Marvel tried to get their retailers to not only dress in Hydra shirts the day the book premieres but also dress their entire store in Hydra symbols. At least one store owner told them they hire LGBTQ and Jewish people and will be dropping Marvel. Hard to blame that person. Who in their right mind tells people selling his product to dress like a Nazi?! And don’t tell me the old “Hydra isn't Nazis” crap. First of all, even if they’re not, they’re still a fascist death cult that had absolutely no moral qualms about working with the Nazis during World War II, copying from their style and being effectively taken over by remnants of Nazi Germany multiple times. At this point, it’s splitting hair. And two, Marvel, you had Steve Rogers say Hail Hydrand a whole year before. Since then you were constantly trying to tell people Hydra isn’t a Nazi organization and NOBODY BOUGHT IT! At this point, you should have looked at the “Hydra Takeover” idea and realize it might backfire. That this wasn’t recalled but went through only proves that Marvel’s head is so deep up its very ass they no longer see the reality.

Number Ten: Captain America Walking Out Of Himself and Standing Nearby

It is undeniable that Marvel did horrible damage to Captain America in this story, basically twisting the guy into everything he wasn’t. I was honestly afraid how, if ever, they manage to fix the character. But I was not expecting them to pull out the good, old-fashioned chickening out by having an identical copy of the character before he was ruined appear to take over. While seeing real Captain America beat the shit out of Captain Nazi is really cathartic, one cannot forget it came to be through rather...ridiculous means.

Number Nine: Tony Stark

Okay, this one is simple. Tony Stark is in this story. Despite being in a coma. Tony Stark holographic A.I. from Brian Bendis’ Invincible Iron Man is filling in for him. Only here he parades around in Tony’s old armor all the time without anyone commenting on it, recalibrated his personality to be constantly drunk and at one point Steve Rogers tries to decapitate him, a hologram, talking some technobabble about how Hydra made it possible for Tony to die this way.

He’s just Tony Stark. He is Tony Stark because Spencer had scenes requiring Tony Stark to be there and instead of killing his darlings like a good writer, he just wrote clearly human Tony Stark and threw some half-assed explanations and lampshades. It’s silly and makes every scene with him impossible to take seriously.

Number Eight: All the Fucking Quislings!

This one is bad. And I mean, just simply bad. Okay, it’s multiple problems, not a singular one. But it makes my very insides turn at the thought. Nick Spencer asked how can he threw some moral ambiguity IN AN EVENT ABOUT HEROES FIGHTING LITERALLY NAZIS and the best idea he had was to have some random heroes join Hydra. I’m not talking here about those who were brainwashed, like Wanda and Vision, although that is a conversation to also be had by their fans about how often this treatment occurs. Although I wonder - if they are too powerful to let them roam freely, why even HAVE them in this event? It’s not like every superhero was there, currently, heroic Victor Von Doom could probably break Hydra at day one and he was nowhere to be seen.

No, the real problem is with the fact they made some heroes join Hydra willingly. Sometimes they tried to throw flimsy reasons in. Punisher joined to get his family back...even though in previous stories he refused the same offer from less evil people. I feel it’s kinda funny they did this with Frank, considering the man who more or less defined him, Chuck Dixon, has thrown in with real-life Nazis like Milo Yiannopolus. Meanwhile, Deadpool and Thor just go along with letting Nazis rule the States because....Steve Rogers said so and Steve Rogers is always right. That’s just a plain stupidity and total lack of compassion on their side. I’m sure don’t feel like buying any book starring them ever now.

But the worst one is, by far, the Hulk. Who also comes back to life for this event, only to smash for Hydra and immediately die.But that is not the worst part. The worst part is how they build up to it. By having Hydra Steve give Bruce Banner long speech over how Avengers and everyone mistreated him over the years and with Hydra he will finally be accepted for who he is. And Banner calls him a Nazi and tells to go fuck himself. And it is a very powerful moment, Bruce Banner symbolizes everyone disfranchised by the society being offered hand by Nazis and heroically rejecting it... Nah, turns out Rogers was talking to Hulk who felt like changing his catchphrase to Sig Heil. I don’t think Spencer even realized what message he sent by this one moment. He basically said that everyone who has been screwed over by the system secretly agrees with the Nazis, but are “too PC” or “too weak” to say it out loud. It’s stupid AND extremely insulting, two for the price of one.

Number Seven: BARF!

How to properly seed a classic Chekov’s Gunman and yet STILL make him feel like a Deus Ex Machina? Make him ridiculously fucking stupid, that’s how!

Enter Barf, a random Inhuman with the power to vomit up things he needs. He shows up in the first issue, is absent through the entire story only to reappear in Captain America #25 and vomit out a fragment of Cosmic Cube. Because why let people work for their victory and earn their happy ending when you can just have all their efforts blow in their faces and just have means of victory handled to them on a silver platter in the most blatant way possible! If Nick Spencer knew he’s going to write himself into a corner, couldn’t he simply change the plot to avoid it instead of setting up something so stupid?

Number Six: Thou Shalt Not Kill, Miles

After Civil War II we were left with a vision of the future where Miles Morales kills Captain America. Once Secret Empire rolled around and we saw Rogers go full Alt-Right on the country, many were hoping this will actually happen. And Miles, with a handful of friends, does join Black Widow in her efforts to off Captain Nazi. And she spends most of the series training them to be more like her....then talking how she doesn’t actually want them to be more like her and how her generation screwed things up....then taking them on the assassination day anyway only to lock Miles up to kill Rogers herself and when that fails, give up her life trying to stop their fight. Which, in the classic refrigerator fashion, pushes Miles hard enough to actually do this. Only to be given one of the most hollow, lazy-written speeches about how killing is wrong. It hits all the old, tired notes. “Heroes should be better than villains”. “If you kill him, you will be just like him!” (a reminder that “you” in this situation is a Black-Latino and “him” is A FUCKING NAZI FOR CHRIST”S SAKE...). “Natasha wouldn’t want this for you.” (she showed it in the strangest way).... It’s especially bad when you have a character who has a backstory of being trained to kill but rejecting those ways, like Nadia Van Dyne, delivering this speech. Despite her background and personality none of this sounds like her words. It reads like she was going through a checklist of tired cliches.

This is why I came to hate this Aesop that superheroes shouldn’t kill. Because nine times out of ten this isn’t done to actually be a piece of a character driven narrative. It’s done to give a bunch of excuses to let villain live when he deserves to die.

Also, that entire plot point dragged since the previous event, in the end, amounted to BUG FUCKING NOTHING!

Number Five: Who Cares About the Civilians, Right?

So okay, the day is saved, villains are defeated, Captain Nazi got his ass kicked by Steve Rogers and Kobik, a sentient cosmic cube, undoes all this damage. EXCEPT FOR FUCKING VEGAS, WHICH HYDRA LEVELED AND LEFT NOT SURVIVORS! Seriously, I don’t care about the explanations given. Someone should have asked her to do it. And no, some “leave it as a reminder” excuse doesn’t work, Kobik is mentally three years old, she isn’t some wise all-powerful being like Odin or the Stranger from whom we could buy this shit. This is pretty much done only so that Nick Spencer can claim he kept his promise to not undo everything by the cosmic cube. He didn’t undo EVERYTHING, that counts, right? It makes all the heroes look like morons and assholes. Even Z Fighters in Dragon Ball have enough decency to ask the dragon to resurrect all dead civilians when they undo everything after every arc. Marvel heroes, for all the “lessons” this even taught them, couldn’t be assed to do even that.

Number Four: Ultron the Centrist

I’ll be honest with you, Pymltron wearing “Kiss the Overlord” apron, forcing Avengers and Hydra to sit and roasting all of them was one of the best parts of the event. But then it also comes off as paying lip service to the “both sides are as bad” mentality that we saw being used by people of today to desperately try to equate alt-right and those opposing them in real life. It’s pretty much justifying this approach in this story and it doesn’t matter one saying that is a fusion of mentally unstable man and a genocidal robot - he never gets challenged on this position because, for all his talk otherwise on twitter, Nick Spencer apparently cannot think of a compelling argument against it. I guess he secretly agrees with him...

And it doesn’t help that while Ultron ends up aiding the good guys, he does say it’s because Hydra became too strong and might pose a threat to him. Sending a message that any outside powers that show support to those opposing Nazis, in reality, wants America’s destruction...

Number Three: Nazi Pandering

Do I really need to explain this one? The entire event does nothing but bends over to kiss Hydra, and by the extension, Nazi ass at every possible opportunity. They beat up all superheroes because the plot says so, while the narrator goes on and on about how NAZI STRONK! We’re told they were supposed to win the World War II and that Allies “cheated” by rewriting reality...but for some reason let the Holocaust in?! Their rule is shown as being the strongest, which is water to the mill of real-life Nazis as their philosophy is based on “might makes right” and they beat up pretty much everyone, even Wakanda. Every victory heroes have against them must be immediately undermined by giving Nazis another win for consolidation. And while the heroes win at the end, this comes after several issues portraying them as absolutely pathetic losers who didn’t really earn their happy ending but it was handed to them by a random inhuman and Deus Ex Machina device. Which brings us to the next point...

Number Two: Cosmic Cubes

All the dumb shit going in this event can be tracked back to Cosmic Cube, be it as Kobik or the shards. She causes Crazy Steve to emerge, launching this story. And she fixes this mess at the end. Shards of Cosmic Cube serve as a distraction to put both good and bad guys on a wild goose chase because Spencer couldn’t think of any actually interesting plotline for this event. All dumb shit evil Steve pulls out can be explained by them. When it’s time for heroes to win, Barf vomits out a shard. And It undermines everything. A story that entirely revolves around this crap doesn’t have any time to actually show things it’s talking about. Maybe instead of running after Dragon Balls, more time should be developed to show how lack of trust and resentments between the good guys gets in the way? You know, something the narration keeps talking on and on and on but never is reflected in the book? Or show more of them acting like an actual resistance would? Worse, thanks to them heroes no longer win because they’re heroic but because they’ve been handed the I Win Button. Any easy win of the villains can be explained by them holding the Fuck You That’s Why Button. Making you wonder why even care if everybody wins only by writer’s fiat?

Number One: Bown Down To the Gary Stu

Most of the problems in this entire story can really boil down to just this. Steve Rogers is a gary stu. He wins because Nick Spencer wants to show how cool and badass he is. His plans always go without a hitch and he never has to adapt or improvise, under him, Hydra wrecks everyone's shit, even if he loses he still wins and in the end, the only man allowed to beat him is...another Steve Rogers. All other problems in the story can be traced back to Spencer’s desperate need to make him look strong. And believe me, he tried soo damn hard. Up to have him go full Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Four Madara Uchicha with Cosmic Cube Dojustsu on everyone’s ass at the finale. I don’t think we’d see a guy being shoved down our throats so hard if Roman Reigns joined Ultramarines! This is where the book truly falls. Nick Spencer could not let go of his fanboyism over the character and it twisted everything he supposedly wanted to say into a parody of itself, often sending the exact opposite message to accommodate the need to make evil Steve Rogers look good.

So, these are ten dumbest moments in the series. As far as events go, this was one of the worst. It looks like it might have ruined Nick Spencer’s career at Marvel and maybe in general, and will probably make it very hard to look at certain characters for years to come. The only good thing you could say is that it finally ended.

Fuck this book.

- Admin

[newyorktheater]

As the season heats up, Off-Broadway is showcasing plenty of screen stars — or maybe it’s the other way around. Click on the photographs to learn the show and the theater, then check out details in my guide to the Off-Broadway Spring 2019 Guide , 

Uzo Aduba in Toni Stone Lydia Diamond (Roundabout)

Alan Cumming in Daddy by Jeremy O. Harris (Vineyard and the New Group)

Daveed Diggs in White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks (Public Theater)

Chris Noth and Isabelle Huppert in The Mother by Florian Zeller (Atlantic)

Debra Jo Rupp in The Cake by Bekah Brunstetter (MTC)

Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal in Sea Wall/A Life by Simon Stephen and Nick Payne respectively (The Public)

  The Week in New York Theater Reviews

The Neurology of the Soul

If Edward Einhorn has given his play a title that might prove a tad off-putting to anybody but neurologists who read Scientific American, the playwright has fashioned an accessible plot that is more or less a love triangle, which allows him to weave in neurological observations about his trio of central concerns  –  love, art and marketing.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

There was one thrilling moment in Manhattan Concert Productions’ one night only concert version of Frank Wildhorn and Nan Knighton’s “Scarlet Pimpernel” at Lincoln Center last night. Norm Lewis as the evil French revolutionary Chauvelin draws his sword on Tony Yazbeck, who portrays a man with a double identity, the masked hero of the title, and the English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney. Yazbeck, looking for a weapon, grabs the first violinist’s bow. He apologizes, and seeks help next from the conductor of the New York City Chamber Orchestra, who just happens to have a sword handy. Lewis and Yazbeck fight gallantly, Laura Osnes as Sir Percy’s wife Marguerite St. Just gets in on the act — and then suddenly, Yazbeck starts dancing. Yazbeck is one of the best dancers on Broadway, and it’s Heavenly. Then Lewis joins him in a soft-shoe routine.

Otherwise, despite a starry cast with great voices, there is unlikely to be much of a reassessment of this musical that critics called “middlebrow,” “wooden,” “pulpy” and boring when it opened on Broadway in 1997, but whose fans kept it running for more than two years. One thing has changed: It’s easier to see the exaggerated foppishness of Sir Percy and his men (in order to escape suspicion that they are the heroic he-men that do battle against the French) as crossing the line into homophobia.

Books:

Looking for Lorraine

Lorraine Hansberry was just 28 years old when “A Raisin in the Sun” opened on Broadway — 60 years ago next month – and lived only six more years, dying of cancer at the age of 34.  Yet her short life was extraordinarily full and varied. She was the privileged daughter of an affluent, politically active Chicago family whose father’s anti-segregation lawsuit was resolved in his favor by the United States Supreme Court. She was a radical activist and anti-colonialist who gave speeches on Harlem street corners… She was an intellectual who studied with the legendary scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois and debated with novelist Richard Wright; a bohemian who lived in Greenwich Village in an interracial marriage; a closeted but active lesbian who wrote short stories about lesbian life under a pseudonym; a celebrity who formed close friendships with both writer James Baldwin and singer Nina Simone…

Fraver by Design: 5 Decades of Theatre Poster Art

Some of the theater posters Frank Verlizzo designed hang on the famous flop wall of Joe Allan’s restaurant. Some hold a prominent place in the homes of grateful Broadway stars. But many are images embedded in various parts of our brain via images in newspaper ads, on the side of buses, t-shirts, album covers, and up and down the Great White Way. Many of those posters appeared in an exhibition at the New York Library or the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and are now in his coffee table book…

“Just a Homosexual at a Broadway Show”

A passage from Less (Little, Brown), the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer about a middle-aged gay writer living in San Francisco who takes a trip around the world to avoid attending the wedding of his ex-lover. His first stop is New York: “New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner…It is completely reasonable to call none of them. You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.“

The Week in New York Theater News

Tony Calendar April 25: Official cut-off for 2018–2019 Tony Eligibility. … April 30: 2019 Tony Award nominations revealed. … May 1: Meet the Nominees Press Reception. … May 21: Tony Nominees’ Luncheon. … June 3: The Tony Honors Reception. … June 9: The 73rd Annual Tony Awards, taking place at Radio City Music

.@DontStoponBway, the Michael Jackson musical, has canceled its pre-Bway run in Chicago (due to complications involving the now-settled @ActorsEquity strike) and will now have its world premiere on Broadway in the summer of 2020. pic.twitter.com/DwcV1OhoAK

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) February 15, 2019

@arsnova kicks off its @GreenwichHouse residency w/ #MrsMurraysMenagerie, created by @the_madones (Miles for Mary) March 26-April 27 A focus group probes the parents of the target audience for a 1970s children’s TV show.

Cast replacements

Frozen: Ryann Redmond as Olaf, Joe Carroll as Hans, and Noah J. Ricketts as Kristoff j

Brian d’Arcy James and Holley Fain lead the new (American) cast of The Ferryman

Aladdin: Ainsley Melham becomes Aladdin and Mike Longo Kassim

Odd Calamities in The Theater

Panic at Hamilton in San Francisco

Manhole explosion on 50th Street Manholes exploding on 50th Street forced the evacuation of New World Stages, and canceled performances of “Jersey Boys” and “Avenue Q.”  ”Puffs”  “A Spirited History of Drinking,” and most appropriately, The Play That Goes Wrong.

Heard FIVE manhole explosions on W 50th St. The first one was right outside Avenue Q theatre. #HellsKitchen #NYC pic.twitter.com/oPa8O51v43

— Renee Xiaoyu Wang (@reneexiaoyuwang) February 17, 2019

How Extra Arts Education at School Boosts Students’ Writing Scores — And Their Compassion

How art creates community by Teresa Eyring

Comedy and Theater

Laughing Matters by Matthew McMahan in HowlRound One can look at almost any comedy, from the irreverence of The Book of Mormon, to the agitprop of the Latino collective Culture Clash, to the philosophic whimsy of playwright Sarah Ruhl, and find a whole host of information about the way a culture thinks and feels and acts….Laughter, then, tells us who we are even when we don’t want it to, and the American theatre would be remiss to ignore it.

Why Comedy Is Eating Theatre’s Lunch by Jason Zinoman in American Theatre A message to the theatre: Comedy is, if not your enemy, then at least a very formidable rival. TV was long seen as the enemy of theatre. A common criticism you would often hear of a play is that it was too much like a sitcom. But TV was always fundamentally different than theatre. Comedy, on the other hand, shares a lot. It is a live art form, and the same romantic defenses you often hear of theatre you can also hear from comics—the beauty of its ephemerality, the present-tense nature of the form in a time when everyone is on screens. People who once went into the theatre are now going into comedy.

“I’m Not A Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce” will begin an eight-week engagement at The Box (189 Chrystie Street) March 8th.

Yes, who ARE you? Answer: The art work is by Shantell Martin, part of the New York City Ballet art series.

Screen stars on Off Broadway Stages. Tony Calendar. Comedy and Theater: Why you laughing? Just A Homosexual at a Broadway Show. #Stageworthy News of the Week. As the season heats up, Off-Broadway is showcasing plenty of screen stars -- or maybe it's the other way around.

[latestnews2018-blog]

'Looking' Made Raúl Castillo A Sex Symbol. Sheer Force Made Him A Star.

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/looking-made-raul-castillo-a-sex-symbol-sheer-force-made-him-a-star/

'Looking' Made Raúl Castillo A Sex Symbol. Sheer Force Made Him A Star.

In New York, in the middle of July, if the fickle subway system allows it, you’d be wise to arrive at a destination 10 minutes early. You’ll need that time to let the sweat evaporate, to stamp out the damp spots that have betrayed your outfit. 

Raúl Castillo forfeited his chance to cool down before shaking my hand at a Manhattan hotel restaurant on a sweltering Thursday morning. I didn’t mind. It was an honest mistake.

The “Looking” star was running slightly late and looking slightly frazzled when he bounded toward our table. He’d confused this hotel for another within walking distance where, the previous night, Castillo had attended a screening of the new Alexander McQueen documentary with his girlfriend, the costume designer Alexis Forte, who has the late fashion maverick’s biography at their Brooklyn apartment. 

It’s cute to see celebrities frayed, even ones who are still building their marquee value. Castillo is the type who hasn’t yet abandoned public transportation when navigating the city, even though it’s becoming harder to do so without attracting strangers’ gazes. While trekking home from the “McQueen” event, a Latina teenager tapped him to say she loved “Atypical,” the Netflix series in which Castillo played a charismatic bartender sleeping with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s married character. The teenager’s mother loved “Seven Seconds,” the Netflix series in which Castillo played a narcotics detective tending to a racially charged investigation. 

Raúl Castillo: a guy you can bring home to Mom, punctual or otherwise.

Eric Ogden for HuffPost

Photo shoot produced by Christy Havranek; Grooming by Claudia Lake; Clothing courtesy of Theory

It’s his voice that people recognize, the 40-year-old actor said, a modest notion considering his breakthrough role as the sensitive barber Richie on “Looking” made Castillo a veritable heartthrob, despite the HBO show’s modest ratings. But it’s true that his warm baritone gravel is a distinguishing trait. Earlier this year, when I saw “Unsane,” Steven Soderbergh’s scrappy iPhone thriller set inside a mental institution, I recognized Castillo’s intonation before his face appeared onscreen. 

That’s a significant feat. Castillo mumbled so much as an adolescent that a teacher recommended he see a speech therapist. He refused, instead reminding himself to enunciate or else using the impediment as a defense mechanism. “I have all these things wrong with my voice,” Castillo said, though few today would agree. 

Castillo’s cadence may be growing familiar, but fame hardly seems like his long game. This is, after all, a guy who studied playwriting ― hardly the creative pursuit that commands the brightest spotlight ― at Boston University, after which he paid about $300 a month to live in a garage in Austin and perform local Chicano theater. “We the Animals,” a Sundance indie opening this weekend, marks the first time Castillo is the one generating a project’s star power. He portrays the father of three tight-knit boys storming through a wooded town in upstate New York. The movie, adapted from Justin Torres’ autobiographical novel of the same name, combines elements of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Moonlight” to capture a domestic home life that’s equal parts tender and volatile, where abuse and affection are equally common.

Castillo’s enthusiasm about “We the Animals,” and about the possibly of again working with its director, Jeremiah Zagar (“Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart”), speaks to his ambivalence toward the celebrity ecosystem.

“He could be like Tom Cruise without the child slavery,” Zagar said, roasting the “Mission: Impossible” moneymaker’s Scientology association (and its alleged history of forced manual labor). “Raúl’s that kind of a dude. He’s a perfect-looking dude, and yet he’s incredibly real and honest and true. There’s never a false note. He’s also incredibly collaborative. As a director, that’s a wonderful thing. I didn’t know what I was doing, really, because I had never directed a narrative before, and Raúl had a way of making me feel comfortable and confident in my own beliefs and my own material. He’s so seasoned and so clear about what he needs to do to make a scene work and a character work and to elevate other people around him.”

Eric Ogden for HuffPost

It’s a small movie with grainy aesthetics and an impressionistic lyricism ― in no way the kind of thing that will make a killing at the box office. For someone who first fell in love with theater by discovering the plays of Puerto Rican and Mexican writers like Miguel Piñero and Luis Valdez in his high school library, playing the complicated patriarch of a mixed-race family feels like a destiny fulfilled. (Sheila Vand, star of the Iranian horror gem “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” plays Castillo’s wife.) At this point, opportunities to extend his commercial footprint ― guest spots as a cannibal on “Gotham” and a music teacher on “Riverdale,” for example ― will find Castillo one way or another. 

“I’ve always felt that I was never cookie-cutter,” he said. “For as much as I tried to fit my square peg into round holes, constantly, my whole career, I could never do it. Whenever I read ‘We the Animals,’ I didn’t think I would be cast in that film. […] I felt viewed more as a Richie. People think I tend to find those roles easier than I do a role like this, ’cause it’s harsh. I knew that I could do it. I’m so grateful for both Jeremiah and Justin, who did see that in me.”

Born in McAllen, Texas, a midsize agricultural town that sits on the Mexican border, Castillo’s triumphs were born out of people believing in him at the exact right moments. He belongs to a first-generation immigrant family, even if home was a mere 10 miles down the road. Castillo didn’t feel othered, but his dual identity instilled a sort of anti-establishment fluster.

“I just saw a lot of bullshit in the structures that were established for me,” he said. “I found a lot of hypocrisies. People valued money, and I think when I was very young, I valued money and I didn’t have it. I think I hated myself for it.”

Slowly shedding the Catholic mysticism that once awed him, he took up bass and played in punk bands. When his friend Tanya Saracho, who would go on to write for “Looking” and “How to Get Away with Murder,” likened his GPA to a lifeline out of McAllen, Castillo decided to care about school. But in Boston, he was suddenly the minority. His “bad attitude” kept him out of second-year acting courses, until mentorship from a professor of color let Castillo understand that he shouldn’t punish himself for being subjected to an overwhelmingly white institution. And when he moved to New York in 2002, his pal Mando Alvarado, now a writer for “Greenleaf” and “Vida” (on which Castillo will soon appear), posited presentation as a mark of self-worth; if he didn’t put care into his résumé and headshot, why should anyone put care into hiring him?

Eric Ogden for HuffPost

Of course, when success takes years to manifest, it’s easy to forget the lessons you’ve learned. Living with four or five roommates at once, Castillo worked his way into the Labyrinth Theater Company, an experimental off-Broadway troupe founded by Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz. He still wanted to be a writer ― in high school, Castillo only ever acted to impress girls anyway ― but in 2006 he found himself starring in a Labyrinth production of “School of the Americas,” a play by “Motorcycle Diaries” scribe José Rivera. The acting bug stuck. In 2009, his play “Knives and Other Sharp Objects,” a multigenerational drama about class in Texas, opened off-Broadway, earning a mixed review from The New York Times. 

Still, nothing quite lasted. The business side of things was grueling, and his coffee-shop gigs were getting old, even if he did count Lili Taylor and RuPaul as customers. An agent sent him on auditions for “huge” Hollywood movies ― which ones, Castillo wouldn’t say ― but dropped him after none proved fruitful. He was ready to give up altogether when “Looking” came around. Castillo had starred in the short film that became a prototype for the series. Its director, Michael Lannan, called him to audition for Richie (the character he’d initially played) and Augustin (a more prominent Latino character who worked as an artist’s assistant). He didn’t land either role, even though he’d originated one of them.

But by the time “Looking” was a week away from shooting, a Richie still hadn’t been cast. The producers called Castillo to read for Andrew Haigh, the gifted English director who shepherded the half-hour dramedy. Haigh had seen Castillo in an indie mystery called “Cold Weather” that gave him “street cred.” Crashing on John Ortiz’s couch in Hell’s Kitchen, wondering what else he could do with his life, Castillo was at a bar one night when he received an email with a contract attached. He had no representation to negotiate his salary, but it didn’t matter: After living check to check, he was on HBO.

“I was like, ‘Yes. Take my soul. I don’t care. Pay me. I need money,’” Castillo recalled. “I needed not just a paycheck but the affirmation. I needed something artistically that I could sink my teeth into that had value to it. Something that was substantial. Something that had a real point of view. I needed a character that gave me a platform to do what I do in a really great scale in the best way possible. And it ended up being that. That show was such a great gift to me.”

All of Castillo’s ensuing fortune can be linked to “Looking.” It made him a sex symbol, a love interest, a fan favorite, a rising star whose claim to fame meant a great deal to anyone hungry for frank depictions of queer intimacy. Richie was the good-natured, self-righteous ideal ― a perfect counterpoint for Patrick (Jonathan Groff), the series’ unsettled protagonist. It became gay viewers’ great disappointment when they learned that Castillo, their anointed hunk, was in fact straight. 

“His inability to be fake as a person translates directly into his acting,” Groff said. “There is nothing extraneous or false about Raúl, and he brought a grounded, honest integrity to the character that absolutely no one else could have. He’s also just innately magic on screen and has that ‘it’ factor.”

Eric Ogden for HuffPost

Perhaps it was Castillo’s dual identity as a Mexican-American that helped him shine as a gay, blue-collar Californian who was sure of himself despite being rejected by his family. It’s certainly what lets him shine as the cash-strapped paterfamilias, caught between unremitting love for his kin and an inescapable pattern of violence, in “We the Animals.” This dyad comes at time when Castillo sees his identity splashed across the evening news.

McAllen houses the U.S. Border Patrol’s busiest hub for detaining immigrants suspected of entering the country illegally. While Castillo was vacationing in Europe and playing make-believe on sets, children were being ripped from their parents’ arms in his hometown. 

“I would always have to explain where McAllen was, and now it’s this name you’re seeing constantly in the news for all these reasons that represent, for me, everything that’s wrong with this country,” Castillo said. “It was paralyzing. I was sitting in a beach in Europe, wondering why I deserved to be there. My parents had access to this country in ways that people who are coming from longer distances don’t. We had the great gift of citizenship, which is an incredible privilege. But my parents were immigrants, and they navigated that dynamic our entire lives. I saw my mom and my dad deal with all the insecurities and all the precarious nature of what being an immigrant in this country is. […] Having grown up going back and forth across the border throughout my whole life, it’s disheartening and upsetting to see what’s happening. And then to think about this particular movie that deals with children, who are especially in that age when their minds are being formed and their view of the world is taking shape, to think about [the ones] locked in cages is enraging.”

Castillo may be miles from that crisis now, but he’s done more to better the world for brown people than he can know. His goal hasn’t been to diversity Hollywood roles written for white ensembles; it’s been to find work that naturally accentuates the grooves of his Latino heritage. He saw almost no Chicano role models in popular culture growing up, and now he is writing and starring in artistic endeavors that paint all shades of the human experience ― gay, poor, brown, cannibalistic, whatever ― with a dynamic brush. 

Eric Ogden for HuffPost

Which isn’t to say everything’s gotten easy. He was slated to play the lead in “Mix Tape” (a musical drama set in Los Angeles) and appear on “One Day at a Time” (the Norman Lear reboot), but has since exited both series and would rather not disclose why. I got the sense, during our two-hour breakfast, that Castillo is still protective of how he is perceived. Maybe he always will be. He’s comfortable reflecting on his upbringing and his relationship with race ― concepts he’s spent his whole life processing ― but being candid about recent setbacks, as routinely asked of celebrities in interviews, does not yet come easy.

It’s the “ego business bullshit” that still eats at him. It’s what eats at most of us. But when someone makes a name for himself, that burden slowly fades to the periphery, replaced by a newfound comfort, even power. The man who once served RuPaul coffee now shares an agent with the drag dignitary. 

“For so long, it was all feast or famine,” Castillo said. “I just took work when I could take it. And at this point, I’m in a new place where I want to be more thoughtful about the roles that I take on from here on out. The projects, the roles, the people. I’ve learned so much in the journey that now I want to apply all that and also honor my experience, because at this point I want to work with people who challenge me in all the right ways and push me to become a better actor and a better artist.”

Photography by Eric Ogden. Photo shoot produced by Christy Havranek. Grooming by Claudia Lake. Clothing courtesy of Theory.

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[democratsunited-blog]

Democrats hope health care vote will hurt Denham's re-election

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4009

Democrats hope health care vote will hurt Denham's re-election

Democrats know they’ll need more than President Donald Trump to defeat an incumbent like Jeff Denham.

To understand the party’s real plan of attack in this Central Valley California district, go back to April 2017, to a town hall meeting teeming with a thousand angry activists. The now 50-year-old Denham, built like a hockey player and wearing a microphone clipped to his sport coat, was trying to explain his position on a GOP health care bill that would partially repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The event was contentious. Audience members who interrupted him — and they interrupted him frequently — held pieces of paper with their zip code written on it, to prove they were constituents, not out-of-town agitators.

After several minutes of explanation, Denham gave an answer they wanted to hear: “I have expressed to leadership that I am a ‘no’ on the health care vote until it is responsive to my community.”

Seventeen days later, he voted for the bill.

This — not Trump — is how Democrats plan to win in November.

“This is the center of the resistance because this is a district where that vote was really felt,” Josh Harder, Denham’s Democratic challenger, told me a week after he had won the de-facto June 5 Democratic primary here.

To win the House majority, Democratic Party leaders need to defeat battle-tested Republican members such as Denham. They’ve fallen short in recent elections — against Republicans such as Mike Coffman in Colorado and Barbara Comstock in Virginia — races in which GOP incumbents have convinced voters that they are independent enough to act as moderating voices in Trump’s Washington.

But GOP votes for Obamacare repeal make Democrats think they have a message that will stick in 2018 in California’s 10th district and 11 others like it across the country, seats where the party faces uncommonly strong incumbents.

“We’re going to make sure as many people as possible there know that Denham owns that health care bill,” said Charlie Kelly, executive director of the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC. “He voted to jack up costs and take away coverage. Good luck explaining that.”

The 10th district, located nearly a hundred miles east of San Francisco, isn’t part of the suburban backlash to Trump: the area is blue collar, with relatively high unemployment and a dependency on agro-business. It has a large Latino population (roughly 40 percent) and voters here supported both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2012, even as Denham was winning their support for re-election. It’s one of 25 districts held by a Republican that Clinton won in 2016 — two fewer than the number of seats Democrats must win to claim a majority.

“There is zero way that Democrats take back the House without taking back this district,” Harder said. “There is no way you can draw the map where we take back 23 seats and don’t take back this one.”

***

Denham was in a jail when he started talking about Tucker Carlson. The congressman had driven 10 minutes south of downtown Modesto to this new Stanislaus County detention center, to drop off a box of used books from the Library of Congress. His appearance this April day didn’t have much of an audience apart from the local sheriff and a pair of reporters: The facility did not yet house inmates.

Denham had just put the books down when he was asked about his recent tense appearance on the Fox News host’s show, in which the two men sparred over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, that protected from deportation young people brought illegally to America by their parents.

Related stories from McClatchy DC

Denham supports DACA; Carlson does not, and the Fox commentator is not shy about telling the California Republican that he’s on the wrong side of that dispute. (One chyron from Denham’s appearance read, “Tucker takes on pro-amnesty Republican.”)

“He’s a tough interviewer,” Denham said while walking out of the detention center, suggesting the dispute was nothing more than a good-faith argument between two men who simply see an issue differently.

That may be, but it doesn’t make Denham’s behavior normal: Republican congressmen don’t pick many fights with leading media personalities such as Carlson, much less send a press release afterward touting the appearance. (Denham even returned to the show a month later.)

But for Denham, unabashed advocacy for policies such as DACA is how he tries to separate himself from his party — something his team knows is a necessity in a district like this. Just in the last few weeks he led an effort, against the wishes of party leadership, to force a House vote on DACA.

And just a few hours before his visit to this detention center, in fact, his office — in a video it posted to Facebook — announced it had helped to locate and process a local high school student’s DACA paperwork.

“If you have a challenge with the United States government that we can help you out with … we hope you’ll let us work for you as well,” Denham said in the video.

Denham isn’t some kind of remarkable maverick within the Republican Party: He supported Trump in 2016, if reluctantly; he voted for the Obamacare repeal and the GOP tax cut bill; and even on a subject such as immigration, he talks as much about securing the border as he does making sure that the DACA kids (who are now young adults) are allowed to stay.

But he has deliberately pursued a course this year that strays from the path Trump has paved and that most Republicans are following. He’s trading his party’s sharp-edged cultural agenda for a more traditionally Republican, live-and-let-live approach.

“He’s not a bomb-thrower on the right or the left,” said Mike Lynch, a Democrat consultant from the district. “And he does his homework. Generally, when you talk to him about an issue, he knows what he’s talking about.”

When Lynch and I had lunch in Modesto, he showed me a picture on his phone of his front yard in 2016, which held yards signs for both Clinton and Denhan. A self-described moderate Democrat, Lynch was the chief of staff for former Democratic Rep. Gary Condit. He says he has voted for a Republican because, in part, he sees Denham as one of the few members of his party making a genuine effort for immigration reform.

Denham has successfully distinguished himself from Republican leaders in the past, winning his district by about 3.5 points in 2016 while Trump lost it by 3 points.

By every indication, he’ll need to repeat the feat in 2018: A poll commissioned last summer by pro-Democratic Super PAC California 7 Project found that Trump had just a 44 percent approval rating in the district.

And the poll estimated that of the persuadable voters in the district — people who might back either party — 43 percent of them were neither Republican nor Democrat.

Denham speaks Spanish (his wife’s father is from Mexico), and aides say he likes to converse with constituents who tell him they don’t speak English, only to find the congressman shift into his second language.

One of Denham’s former Democratic opponents, the Spanish-speaking Virginia Madueno, rated Denham’s Spanish a “B minus.”

“He can hold his own,” said Madueno, who has known the congressman for years. “He can definitely hold his own.”

Madueno — at the time still running to replace him in office — criticized Denham’s health care vote and said he was in the grip of wealthy special interests. But she acknowledged that, in her view, the congressman was also “charismatic.”

“A lot of people like Jeff Denham,” she said.

Latino outreach isn’t Denham’s only move to the middle of the electorate. Any conversation with the congressman about electoral priorities includes a lengthy discussion of water, an issue of special importance in the drought-stricken state. And a discussion about water soon segues to talk about the need for pragmatic representation focused not in Washington but here in the district.

“All things local,” Denham said. “You know, a lot of people here aren’t focused on what the national message is, or what the next Tweet was that came out. More people are focused on what are you doing right here in home and are you working with your local electeds.”

***

It gets repetitive to talk to Democratic strategists in Washington and across country when the conversation turns to November’s races and the message they want their candidates to emphasize. Nearly every assessment is the same: Avoid Trump, talk about health care.

They think this way for two reasons: First, the relentless attention paid to the president means people are hyper-aware of just about everything he does, so voters gain little from the extra information in a campaign ad.

Second, criticism of Trump tends to emphasize his personal shortcomings; voters care more about the status of their pocketbooks. It’s always the economy, especially in a blue-collar district like the 10th.

That’s why Denham’s opponent, Harder, is fixating on healthcare. In April, he and the rest of the then-Democratic field visited a modest church outside of Modesto, where the urban landscape of the city gives way to sprawling farmland and orchards. They were there for a bilingual candidate forum, where Harder — seated behind a table — would give answers that were immediately translated into Spanish for the 150 mostly Hispanic men and women in attendance.

It’s a key voter bloc in a district where about one-quarter of the electorate might be Latino.

Even here, however, Harder wanted to talk about health care, telling the crowd the story of his little brother, born premature and with a pre-existing condition, and how many like him wouldn’t have been able to receive care if the GOP’s bill had become law.

When I talked to him after June 5, Harder said his pre-primary ads featured so much talk about health care that they even began to worry his family.

“Health care was pounded again and again and to the point where my mom said, ‘Josh, people think all you care about is health care,’” Harder said. “And I said, ‘That’s OK!”

Harder is 31 years old, educated at Stanford University before receiving an M.B.A. from Harvard, and used to be a venture capitalist before teaching business classes at Modesto Junior College. Clean-shaven with short dark hair, he looks even younger than his age, though he promises that voters won’t hold that against him.

In the run up to June’s primary, Denham aides plainly wanted Harder to become the Democrats’ pick because of the contrast in experience.

They’ll accuse Harder of being more at home in San Francisco than Modesto, a potentially brutal criticism in an area that sees its coastal neighbor drawing ever more money, attention and resources at its perceived expense.

And they’ll push back on criticism that the health care bill would have been a disaster. Denham repeats endlessly that the problem with healthcare in the district is rooted in the unavailability of doctors, especially those who will accept patients on Medi-Cal. (California’s version of Medicaid.)

Local Democrats add that the push from some in-state liberals for a massive single-payer healthcare system could further complicate Harder’s criticism.

But, if it seems unlikely that a newcomer could defeat a strong Republican incumbent with a reputation for independence, recent political history suggests otherwise. Just eight years ago, in the summer of 2010, Democrats had convinced themselves that many of their incumbents could survive the coming storm even though they too had voted for a controversial health care bill, Obamacare.

They were wrong.

“It was a very high-profile vote that allowed my independent representation of North Dakota to be called into question,” said Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat who voted for Obamacare in 2010 and lost in November of that year.

Pomeroy had served in Congress for 18 years, overcoming the state’s strong Republican lean by crafting an image as an independent lawmaker. One vote, and he lost re-election by more than a dozen points. He sees the parallels in California’s 10th district, and the risk to Denham.

“In a Hillary district, an incumbent that voted to repeal the ACA better hope the voters are thinking about something else,” Pomeroy said.

***

As much as both Denham and Harder both want to minimize Trump’s role in this race, they won’t be able to block the Trump effect fully. What voters think about the president will shape the midterm elections, from who turns out to vote to how people regard the GOP’s legislative accomplishments.

“So many of the constituents feel he has aligned himself with Trump, although he’ll never quite say it,” said Rebecca Harrington, a Democrat and member of the local Hispanic community who attended a meeting with the Small Business Administration that Denham helped organize. “Yet when it comes down to voting and how things are addressed, his policies seem to align with Trump. And that is the problem and that is what’s caused so many people to be in an uproar.”

In 2016, Denham called then-candidate Trump’s words “disturbing,” “inappropriate” and “outlandish.”

In 2018, he’s more circumspect. After I asked Denham what criticism he would offer of the president, he stood in silence for 20 seconds, his mouth slightly agape as he searched for the right response.

“I wouldn’t say it’s much of a criticism, but it’s certainly a challenge that when he does Tweet out his ideas, they take us by surprise sometimes,” Denham said, breaking the silence.

“But if it’s his style, I’m willing to work with it.”

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How Miss Info Became Hip-Hop's Ultimate Insider

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/how-miss-info-became-hip-hops-ultimate-insider/

How Miss Info Became Hip-Hop's Ultimate Insider

Today, Minya Oh is the linchpin of Hot 97, rap’s most influential radio station. Getting there only took 20 years.

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Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed

On a winter-cold evening in late March at a comedy club near the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, a DJ and aspiring comedian named Cipha Sounds takes the stage for a short set before a screening of the first episodes of a VH1 show called This Is Hot 97. In the audience, music insiders and fashion bloggers mix with television suits. Ebro Darden, Angie Martinez, Funkmaster Flex, Peter Rosenberg, Laura Stylez, and Miss Info — radio personalities from the iconic New York hip-hop station Hot 97 who, together with Cipha Sounds, comprise the show’s cast — sit at front-row cocktail tables.

“All the black folks in the house, make some noise!” Cipha Sounds says, to applause from the crowd. “All the white people, make some noise! All the Latino people, make some noise! Other?” he asks. The room falls silent. “Anyone else in the house? Miss Info?” he says. This draws a handful of laughs.

At Hot 97, where she’s worked for 10 years and is now the news director, the Korean-American Miss Info is used to being the only Asian person in the room. She started her career in hip-hop as an outsider — a young Asian-American woman new to New York — but since she’s become one of the most respected and unlikely voices not only in New York radio, but in hip-hop.

Since 1994, Miss Info, whose full name is Minya Oh, has flouted prevailing notions about what sort of background a hip-hop expert should have. She’s helped reshape the content and tone of hip-hop journalism, with her own brand of meticulously researched celebrity gossip, emotionally revealing artist interviews, and explorations into tech and style. Starring in a VH1 show isn’t exactly like writing album reviews, but Info has gamely evolved over the years, working in magazines, television, radio, and on the internet. She’s now seen by fans and peers as an all-around spokesperson for hip-hop, but for all her success, Oh seems to still feed off a deep inner well of curiosity. No matter what she knows, or is able to uncover, she’s eager to learn more.

Then the episodes play — there is a sketch in which Martinez and Flex bicker about who’s better on Twitter, and a Macklemore cameo. Miss Info gets in a good line, calling on-air partners Rosenberg and Cipha Sounds the “rap Teletubbies.” Afterward, Info sits with her colleagues onstage, taking questions from the moscato-fueled crowd, whose members wonder why would Hot 97 would want to make a goofy, “unscripted” office comedy.

Since it became one of the country’s first hip-hop stations in 1993, Hot 97 has become as legendary as the artists it’s promoted. This is the place where Biggie debuted records, the proving ground where a freestyle could make you a king or burn your career, and where hip-hop lived. So what’s with all of the jokes? Ebro Darden, the station program director turned full-time on-air talent, responds with a gentle scold: Hip-hop people work and have families too, he says, not for the first time. At his side, Oh tenses her face, seemingly trying to avoid rolling her eyes. To her, this is a tired question with a simple answer: Hip-hop adapts to survive.

Twenty years deep in the game, Info knows this better than most. But as Darden answers the fan, she doesn’t jump in to support him. Straight-faced, she blinks and nods; she’s not shy, but quiet. Some radio personalities get off on confrontation, but Info is not one of them. She’s a scalpel, not a bulldozer. In the overlapping, loudmouth worlds of hip-hop and media, her success is strange, and hard-won.

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Minya Oh in the ’90s. Minya Oh

Minya Oh didn’t start from the absolute bottom, but she had to fight a lot on her journey to the top. She grew up in Chicago, where she says she was “a nightmare” for her immigrant parents — even though she went to a “hardcore academic school” and played “competitive piano” on weekends. Still, she was straddling two worlds: She skipped class to listen to Too Short and do “wildly” unsafe things like “partying, driving under the influence”; her prom night was a disaster because her “mid-level gang member” boyfriend got sent to jail.

“I don’t remember why he got picked up,” she says in March over salad at the Butcher’s Daughter, a yuppie-hippie East Village cafe. When she speaks, she tends to pause, carefully choosing her words. “I think I was kept out of the mix — which is why I was planning prom dresses and limo reservations, as if I was dating a regular high school student.” She took the SAT prep classes her parents insisted upon and got into Columbia.

Oh arrived in New York around “‘93 or so,” during what’s now considered a golden era for the city’s rap scene. “It was the best time to be a hip-hop fan. It was archaic, stone age. Imagine how hard the caveman worked for one meal? That’s how you felt as a hip-hop fan: ‘I walked 8 miles in the snow and and killed my own prey, just to find this one Ron G mixtape!’”

Even as a kid, Oh preferred to become consumed with something rather than casually enjoy it. Back in Chicago, she was obsessed with horses. So she “found a stable, took a bus, and rode horses” whenever she could. In college, she got into motorcycles, located a cheap bike on Long Island, and then, without any real prior experience, rode it back to her apartment in Harlem.

Her passion for hip-hop was just as encompassing, and while she was still in college, she wrote letters to the editors at The Source, and eventually convinced them to let her work as an unpaid intern. “Instead of staying up all night working on the sociology paper that I was supposed to be working on, I’d rather go downtown to the The Source and sit up all night listening to mixtapes and writing about why Outkast is so important.”

Oh transcribed interviews and made copies, and started to pick up assignments from Source editors Jon Shecter, Reginald C. Dennis, and James Bernard. “All of the people that really believed in me and mentored me were men,” Oh says. “A guy is just like, ‘I need this. This person is gonna get it done for me.’” Her bosses saw her as an industry outsider capable of writing impartial, accurate album reviews. In 1994, with their blessing, she famously awarded Nas’ debut Illmatic five mics, The Source’s super-rare, highest award.

Her review closes with this line: “If you can’t at least appreciate the value of Nas’ poetical realism, then you best get yourself up out of hip-hop.” This year, celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary, she suggested that statement wasn’t an attempt to neatly define hip-hop’s borders, but rather, a cry for hip-hop to acknowledge its own diversity — and her.

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Minya Oh in the ’90s. instagram.com

At The Source she was an “alien,” and unpopular with her female co-workers. “It was that classic I see you in my rear-view mirror and I don’t like it, and I might swerve a little to try and drive you off the road,” she says. “When you’re the only Asian-American girl in an office, you don’t have the luxury to say, ‘You have to listen to me because I’m different.’ You have to get in where you fit in. You have to show that you’re not just in it for the glamour, or ‘cause you wanna party, or ‘cause you love black guys.” To prove her mettle, she tasked herself to research twice as hard as her peers. “I don’t think it is anymore, but hip-hop was then a black music genre. And if you don’t have respect, or a desire, to learn more about black culture overall, people are gonna see right through you. You have to learn context.”

After graduating from college and The Source, Oh started working at Vibe in the summer of 1998. This was hip-hop’s “shiny-suit” era, when major label budgets were fat and black rap and R&B artists dominated the charts. Oh would later describe this period as a sort of puberty for rap: “The roots of the music are very ‘street,’” she said in 2005, observing the decline of The Source. “But that has to get along with its newer role, which is very big business.”

At Vibe she profiled Mase and wrote an ethnography of popular New York club The Tunnel, but didn’t do a lot of formal album criticism. Instead, she kept a column about new tracks that now reads like a proto-Pitchfork, and focused on seemingly peripheral stories that showed how rap culture influenced the mainstream. She talked to Diddy about being jealous of Jimmy Iovine’s home theater in 1999, 15 years before Apple’s acquisition of Iovine’s Beats Music made Diddy’s venture into cable television, REVOLT, look slight.

Oh made the leap from print to radio after a stint at MTV, where she produced segments and wrote copy for the news department. “Our hip-hop coverage was fucking groundbreaking,” says Sway Calloway, a California native who hosted one of the first rap-centric radio shows, on San Francisco’s KMEL, as a teenager, and later worked with Oh at MTV. There, the two collaborated on a personality-driven feature series called All Eyes On (early subjects: Beyoncé, Kanye West) and a newsmagazine series called My Block, which introduced mainstream audiences to underground regional talent like the Neptunes, Paul Wall, and Mac Dre.

In 2003, Hot 97’s popular morning show host Star stormed out, and the station called Sway to fill in. “It was supposed to be a week,” Sway says. “I said, ‘Do you have a team?’ There was nobody there. ‘Do you have a budget?’ No budget. I was like all right, shit, well, let me have fun with it. Let me get somebody who I know knows hip-hop that I think could add a different angle to radio in New York City, let me stir up the pot. Minya, that’s a funny-ass person. She’s very sarcastic, and she’s like an egghead. She would come with her notes and we would show her how to make news sound proper for radio.” It was Sway who gave Oh the name Miss Information: an admiring nod to her reporting skills, but also pegging her to the stereotypically Asian role of bookworm. Eventually, she shortened it down to Miss Info, for clarity and cool.

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Minya Oh in the ’90s. instagram.com

Sway says that while West Coast audiences were familiar with the idea of an Asian-American hip-hop expert, in 2003 New York, putting Oh on air still felt like a risk. “After she started, I would always try to get her to come out. But it took her a second before she was ready to show the world, ‘This is who I am, this is what I look like.’ ‘Cause mentally there was maybe a small concern that people might react because she was Asian.”

Those early years on the mic were awkward. “I was hysterical. My voice is like a dog whistle, it’s so high-pitched, and my entire body was clenched,” she says, speaking with a picked-up-from-the-air New York accent. “At one point, when I was doing the morning show, I developed nodes on my vocal chords from talking so much. I was used to typing, my body just rejected it, like, ‘Shut up!’”

Oh eventually loosened up, but her reservedness and atypical entry into radio were not always welcomed by her Hot 97 colleagues. In January 2005, a parody of “We Are the World” aired on the morning show. Called “The Tsunami Song,” it mocked victims of December 2004’s massive Indian Ocean tsunami with lyrics like: “So now you’re screwed / It’s the tsunami / You’d better run, or kiss your ass away / Go find your mommy, I just saw her float by / A tree went right through her head / And now your children will be sold into child slavery.” Oh, then a morning show host, publicly denounced the song. After doing so, she fought on air with co-host Miss Jones, who admonished Oh for not being a team player. “You feel superior, probably because you’re Asian,” she said. “Why do you always have to make it known that you’re separate? … But I forget, you’re a journalist, right?”

Occurring just a few years before the era of quick-spreading Twitter outrage, the incident generated critical calls and emails from listeners. Hot 97 parent company Emmis Communications suspended, then fired, Miss Jones, and gave over $1 million in apologetic donations to tsunami relief.

“That moment was only the culmination of a long history of tiny terrorism,” Oh says. “Lots of little comments: You should be so thankful that we allow you to be in hip-hop because we all know the only reason why you really wanna be here is to sleep with rappers. You think you’re better than us. I almost felt like it was a test: Let’s see whether we can push Miss Info to do what she knows is not right.”

Following the controversy, Oh was temporarily “put on a sort of probation, or a leave of absence, because the program director [John Dimick] felt I was in the wrong.” So she hired an attorney and waited. She eventually returned, and was reassigned to Funkmaster Flex’s afternoon drive-time show. In 2007, she took on a second, solo show on Saturday afternoons and launched a blog, Missinfo.tv. There, with the chance to directly address the audience who’d come to her defense after “The Tsunami Song,” she stretched her legs.

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Left: Cam’ron, Oh, and Jim Jones in 2014. Right: Oh with DJ Khaled, Wale, and record executives. instagram.com

At the time, the internet was becoming a music scene of its own, incubating would-be outsider rappers like Soulja Boy and Wale, and pushing them from obscurity to the center. Oh dove into internet culture, aggregating viral dance YouTubes and writing about a new Juelz Santana track and the coffee her sister sent her from Portland in the same sentence. “Early on, I was live-streaming from my living room while watching Lost and eating bok choy. There would be 30 other people, and we’re all just sitting there, reacting,” she says. Other hip-hop bloggers of the day — like then-college student Andrew Nosnitsky, muckraker Byron Crawford, and Atlanta’s snarky Freshalina — wrote about rap in a personal, entertaining way, but no one on the web combined approachability with access in the way Oh did.

Hot 97 didn’t interfere with Oh’s web venture; the station barely even noticed. “At that time, there was such a disconnect between traditional and ‘new’ media that blogging was seen as an unnecessary but fun diversion,” she says. “For a time, there was a policy against shouting out your MySpace handle on the air.” But some of Oh’s scoops were better suited for the internet than for radio. “I reported a scoop on my Saturday afternoon Hot 97 show, about Jim Jones blasting his Dipset co-founder, Cam’ron. That was the first time anyone publicly acknowledged tension within the group. But our talk breaks on air were less than two minutes at the time, so I could only touch on it, and then say, ‘I’m posting more of the details on my blog.’”

Seven years after its launch, the site employs three round-the-clock writers, and with around 250,000 unique visitors in the past month, it’s more popular than MP3 feeds like Rap Radar and Nah Right. It still uses its original blog roll format, and has a header banner with a dead Myspace profile URL. (Oh says the site’s so outdated that it’s got an air of “normcore” cool, but that a redesign is coming soon.)

Missinfo.tv doesn’t compete with more robust music and culture sites like Complex or Pitchfork, but it’s a well-trusted news source for those hubs, who regularly borrow videos her team captures or news they aggregate faster than anyone else. And true to its roots too, Missinfo.tv is bigger than hip-hop, covering EDM and R&B, sports news, and tech rumors. “There’s a lot of people who’ll full-on spazz out on an indie-rock song or a Waka Flocka song,” Oh says. “I’m just happy that this day in age, we have lots of people that will understand us.”

For this lucrative market — the twentysomethings who read her blog, go on rave cruises, and can find something poetic about both Nas and Chief Keef — Oh is in a unique position to become a figurehead. Recently, she’s been tapped by VitaminWater, Uniqlo, Red Bull, and Hennessy to host genre-blending events and pose for campaigns. This year, she brought on TMWRK, the management team that handles Diplo, to help her expand her profile.

The new opportunities can feel daunting. “It’s all about fighting that voice inside who says, ‘What the fuck do you have to talk about? No one wants to hear you.’ You’ve got to itemize the reasons why your inner Debbie Downer is full of shit, and know when you should ignore them, and when they might have a valid point.”

After all, even for Jay Z, it’s tough to get old in hip-hop — and for women in the industry, it seems especially fraught. The people who championed the genre in its first generation now struggle to define what rap is, or how they should participate in it at middle age. So it’s remarkable that Oh has remained at the center of that conversation as long as she has, and outlasted lots of the names that once appeared alongside hers on print mastheads. (There are a handful of others who’ve managed this kind of longevity — former Vibe writer Eliott Wilson founded the rap news site Rapradar.com and hosts a popular live interview series; Sway still hosts on satellite radio and MTV.)

“The fact that her relevance has only increased as time has passed really makes her an aberration and quite a big deal,” says Noah Callahan-Bever, a longtime friend of Oh’s who’s now the editor-in-chief of Complex. “Writers who were killing it in ‘93 and ‘94, those guys pop up at parties, and I’m sure that they’ve moved on to other interesting pursuits, but they are no longer voices within hip-hop culture that matter to 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds.” For the young journalists who walk through Complex’s doors, Callahan-Bever says, “Minya is absolutely a point of aspiration.”

Maybe that’s because she acts more like a young writer than a vet. (Oh declined to disclose her age for this article, though a back count suggests she’s 40, give or take a year or two.) “Everybody’s older than they say,” she says. “But women, if you’re young, you kind of have to downplay it, ‘cause you feel like people aren’t gonna take you serious. If you’re older, you have to downplay it cause people start wondering why you aren’t locked down. I’m 85 years old in many ways and 14 in others.”

When Oh got her start in media, hip-hop fans largely considered themselves a united front, standing up for a shared set of values. But a generation later, the people who identify as rap fans are a fractured bunch, without common tastes. Peter Rosenberg, for example, promotes local acts with mixtapes and makes silly internet videos, but accurately or not, he’s best known as a shit-slinging purist. In summer 2012 on a side stage of Summer Jam, the station’s annual marquee concert, he insulted Nicki Minaj’s pop-leaning single “Starships,” prompting her to hastily cancel her headlining performance. The two made up on air a year later, but Rosenberg stands by his positions that rap benefits from clear-cut bounds. “Nicki was supposed to be one of ours,” he told the New Yorker in April. “I didn’t want young kids looking at this dance-pop song, going, ‘This is what rappers do.’”

By contrast, Oh is less interested in defining what rappers should do than she is in forecasting what they might do next, and why. Her hip-hop world has room for rappers who are in bands, rappers who wish they were born in the ‘90s, and rappers who design capes — each of them fair game for loving, sarcastic critique. “She’s kind, and that’s different from nice,” says Mary H.K. Choi, a producer of the TV newsmagazine Take Part Live, who previously worked as an editor at Missbehave, XXL, and Complex. “But the loyalty she inspires is crazy. So many different people trust her with high-level, FBI rap-files shit.”

For Choi, Oh is a model of success not only because she’s earned so many people’s confidence, but because she’s been able to do so without compromising her happiness. “Her existing made me feel better about my decisions,” Choi says. “I moved to New York at 22 and took this back-breaking job. And then met someone who was Korean but also super cool with all the credibility. And she didn’t throw me any of that ‘Oh, here you are, this other Korean lady’ shade. And not only was she really hot and all the guys sweated her, but [they did] from afar, because they respected her. There’s just that unique quality that successful people in New York have where they can stay hungry. Not greedy, but really intellectually curious. The work didn’t destroy her. She didn’t shortchange every other aspect of her life.”

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The cast of This Is Hot 97: Laura Stylez, Miss Info, Peter Rosenberg, Ebro Darden, Angie Martinez, Funkmaster Flex, and Cipha Sounds. VH1 + Hot 97 / Via hot97.com

Today’s Hot 97, where hosts talk about going to therapy on podcasts and Lorde has entered heavy rotation, would be unfamiliar to early listeners. Angie Martinez, Hot 97’s anchoring “voice of New York,” was thrown on the air when she was 18. The station switched formats in 1993, becoming one of the first stations devoted exclusively to hip-hop, and she was the most hip-hop-seeming person in the building. Now, she’s pragmatic about how the tastes of Hot 97’s listeners have changed. “Everybody wants to be like, ‘This is real hip-hop,’” she says, “but at some point the younger generation coming up, the way their world is set up on the internet, there’s not those types of hard lines between genres. People don’t want that shit.”

Since 2003, Hot 97 has been steered by Ebro Darden, who’s tried to mature the station to welcome a more diverse audience (and high ratings) while honoring its roots in traditional rap — stuff with complex lyrics and kick drums. Via Sway, Darden brought in Oh, and he hired a female music director — Karla Stenius, who goes by Karlie Hustle in the industry — to take his place when he was promoted.

“There really are not a ton of female music directors in radio,” Stenius says. “Particularly in hip-hop. I’ve gone to many conferences and ultimately, it is a boys club. I don’t appreciate being the only woman in a room of male decision-makers.”

If women in boys club industries are sometimes masters of pretense — holding desires close to their chests, pushing toward advancement while working not to seem “pushy” — radio is a male-dominated environment that explicitly does not reward pretending. At Hot 97, success is given to agitators who shout what they really think. (Or, at least, people with the savvy to calibrate their personas to appear honest and uncompromising.)

“You can’t be a soft little prissy girl working here,” Martinez explains. “You can have emotions, yes. But you can’t be sensitive. People talk loud here. People are aggressive here. We all want to get shit done.”

In this only-the-strong-survive atmosphere, Oh is something of an exception. “Ebro can be pretty rough on the team, but he’s not that rough on me,” she says. “I think he can read that I’m always gonna be my biggest critic. If he plants a seed, I’m gonna water it and cultivate this huge tree of blame and then I’m gonna try and work on it. The very demanding and disciplinarian way I was raised still lends itself to who I am now.”

Oh has distinguished herself not by having the loudest voice, but by asking, and answering, questions others overlook.“I’m not built for shouting matches, and contests on who’s gonna be the most ignorant. I’ll lose that every time,” she says. Around Hot 97, she’s known as a super-smart, sourced-up veteran who’s still in touch with what kids are talking about.

“She would do the typical radio stuff [on her solo weekend show] for awhile,” Cipha Sounds recalls, “but it just never really fit. Ebro put her on as the news director, and she’s on top of every rumor, anything going on. Every time you talk to her, she tries to juice you for information.” Peter Rosenberg suggests she’s become, for her peers, a figurehead of thoughtfulness. “Her role is the serious voice of hip-hop news. There are not a lot of people like that, who report on it in a serious way. She’s arguably the main person like that in all of hip-hop.”

On This Is Hot 97, Oh plays a blown-out version of herself: Miss Info, the smartass with a gold tooth and huge rolodex. But, off-air, she can be unreasonably self-effacing. While making the press rounds for the show, Rosenberg called himself “the Jewish Johnny Carson” in the New Yorker. Meanwhile, taking stock of her own 20-year media career, Oh gave herself no such title. “I feel weary at times, and I also feel wildly immature,” she says. “I need to get my shit together.”

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instagram.com

A couple years ago, Oh moved from her adopted neighborhood of Harlem to quieter Fort Greene, in Brooklyn. Outside the office, she hangs out with a family of friends — some writers, some industry bigwigs, some “regular people” — goes to art fairs, and posts meals at hip restaurants on Instagram. She keeps her romantic life private. “I’m the secret dater,” she explains. People have wondered if she once dated Cam’ron, the Harlem rapper, a misunderstanding that arose after she dated one of his friends. “One of Cam’s mentors was a guy that I was in a serious relationship with. So my friendship with Cam instantly had a brother-sister bond. In over 15 years of friendship, Cam has never made the slightest innuendo toward me, nor tolerated anyone else making me feel uncomfortable or objectified. He’s always had my back.”

On a January episode of Juan Epstein, a podcast by Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg and Cipha Sounds, Oh tells the story of a nightmarish drive through Nicaragua with an unnamed beau, whom she called a “cool guy.” “In a world where everyone is screaming how they’re the greatest,” Callahan-Bever says, “she wants the work and the reputation to precede her.”

At the moment, though, neither she nor Hot 97 can really afford the luxury of aloofness. Oh previously declined an offer to appear on another reality series, Gossip Game, but she said yes to This Is Hot 97 because she, like her co-workers, wants people to turn on the radio. Hot 97 is no longer the city’s indisputably top-ranked rap station. Ratings from Nielsen SoundScan show Hot 97 falling just short of rival urban contemporary station Power 105.1 in cumulative listeners since 2011, then ekeing out a narrow lead in 2014. Meanwhile, Nielsen still ranks Power 105.1 as having a 3.2% average share of the New York radio market to Hot 97’s 3% share.

“Does it suck to lose? Yeah,” says music director Stenius. “Does it suck to be neck and neck with someone that you think you’re better than? Yeah, that’s the worst.” But in Hot 97’s new underdog role, Oh’s nerdiness and journalistic chops aren’t attacked as attempts to make herself “separate.” It’s not that her manner or interests have come to blend in with the rest of hip-hop’s, but now that’s seen as an asset, not a threat.

“People are becoming more open-minded about people who look different than them, act different, like different things,” Oh says, waving two hands forward as her voice rises an octave for emphasis. “We’ve all grown into really well-rounded people. Married, or having side projects. It wouldn’t have been the same before. We would have all individually been a little more antagonistic. But that’s also hip-hop. It’s just great when you have people fighting with you, instead of against you.”

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/naomizeichner/miss-info

[ryanjtrimble]

On the Value of Missed Shots

A friend or a photographer, I don't remember who, once told me, "Don't worry about the shots you miss. Those are the shots that stay with you forever."

This is true.

When I was in high school there was a used tire shop on Lehi's State Street called Victor's. I think it's still there, though now remodeled. Back then it was a dilapidated white shoebox of a building on a gravel lot and teenage hippies and stoners would go there when they needed new rubber on their early-model Subies and Hondas and VW buses.

There was joy in going to Victor's, even though it sucked having to remedy a car that had failed a safety inspection or gone flat in Provo Canyon. Going to Victor's meant you were growing up. You cashed a hundred-dollar check from your after-school job, convinced your friends to throw in another $15 a piece, and then scuttled into the tarnished garage to learn about tire sizes and tread patterns and expected mileage. And there amid stacks of black rubber and hissing compressors and ratcheting wrenches you'd negotiate with the honcho, a gruff and taut man that was at least part Latino, maybe full, and who resembled Randy Macho Man Savage. His hair hung down his back, and he chain-smoked cigarettes, spoke in hoarse staccato. Often he wore tank tops, and he never removed a pair of impenetrable blade sunglasses that adhered to his brow like the visor of motorcycle helmet.

I can't recall the honcho's name now. It might've been Victor, or it might've been Tito. Whatever it was or is, it had a certain gangster ring to my seventeen-year-old Utah County ears. In any case, I remember standing with Victor on the banks of that gravel lot and settling the details of shoeing my car with new gently-used rubber, mano a mano. Victor took each customer as he or she came, which was reassuring, and, for me, evoked a kind of self-confidence I didn't actually possess. The feeling was sublime.

But here's what I remember most about Victor's Tires. One day I'd gone there with a girlfriend to help her get her car sorted. After swapping her tires, Victor beckoned us into his office to settle up. The office was long and rectangular. Shoddy aluminum blinds draped over west-facing windows. At one end of the room was a metal desk, the kind you see in machine shops or schools and government buildings. Corners of papers and manila folders poked out of its drawers, slopped over its edges. My friend and I stood at the other end of the corridor-like office while Victor sat at the desk and filled out a receipt with a Bic pen. It was late in the day and sunlight was seeping through the cracks in the blinds. Victor held a lighted cigarette in his teeth while he wrote, his black sunglasses still affixed to his face despite the dimness, and smoke purled lazily in the room, which the sunlight illuminated like milky threads of cosmos.

The scene enveloped me. I saw in my mind a photograph of incomparable mystique, a decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson calls it, a space in time where man and nature combusted into a picture of inexplicable beauty. And I didn't have my camera. So I stood in awe, whispered to my friend, asked if she saw it too. Then Victor stood and the impression vanished, as though a ghost had left the room.

The shots you miss stay with you forever.

I once took a road trip through Oregon, traveling the Pacific Coast Highway from Port Orford north toward Portland. One afternoon, while driving through those towering pines riven by the 101, I saw a dirt turnoff that ran deep into the woods. Next to that turnoff stood a mailbox. As I approached at 50 miles per hour, I saw a young girl, maybe five or six, bounce on the balls of her bare feet down the dirt road and up to the box. She stood on her toes, opened the door, and peered inside as though she'd just found grandma's jewelry chest. She wore a white sundress, which flitted eastward in a coastal gale. Her untamed hair, too, as bright and iridescent as the flesh of a blood orange, flickered in the wind. There on tiptoes, with one hand on the mailbox door and the other reaching into the abyss, a chasm of sunlight lit her up like a meteor on a movie screen.

My camera was in the backseat and I tried to hit the brakes, but it was too late. I saw in the shadows of that forest all the omnipresence of God concentrated into a single frame, and in a second it flashed. I rolled past the scene, gawking, and the tiny fireball went dancing up the unpaved and shaded driveway, parcel in hand.

The shots you miss stay with you forever.

Sometimes, however, in order not to miss the moment, you must forego the shot. A couple years ago I solicited an old man of his time, for I believed time alone with this man would prove illuminating. He is, after all, a poet of 50 years, an educator, a father and husband, a performer, a gadfly and veritable Socrates, a true and living philosopher. Months passed before he agreed. We'd bump at the coffeehouse and I'd remind him of my interest, which was, roughly, to shadow and profile him. I left out the part about wanting to steal his wisdom and test it in life. He finally ceded not because of pressure, but because he needed photographic services. That was a year ago. We've spent hours together since, and I always approach time with him journalistically.

I recently visited the man at his home and before approaching his door I flung my camera over my shoulder and turned on my audio recorder. Forty-five minutes later I clicked the recorder off, set my camera down. And wouldn't you know that's when the conversation and the light turned interesting? The man and I stood in his garage, afternoon autumn sunshine leaking into the open space, and he stood there reflecting on his art, leaning on the broom he'd just used to sweep up the mess we'd made. (We'd been cutting sheetrock in order to fix a plumbing leak.) I wanted to make a photo, but refrained because lurching for my camera would've derailed the ensuing moment. Instead, I watched, noting the man's long and thick fingernails, the strands of white in his beard, the way his suspenders squeezed the sides of his belly, and the words he spoke. He said to me, when I asked him whether he ever doubts his creative impulses, questions his poiesis, "No. I take it as a given."

As a gift.

The shots you choose not to take stay with you forever, too.

You don't have to do photography to see and remember such images; you don't have to miss or forego a frame for it to stick. The heart alone makes snapshots, does so without warning or intention, and records them indelibly on the soul. Each of us has a few dozen or thousand floating around the psyche, occasionally replaying. A tickle or tremor arises when they do. I'm told that upon dying they play in succession and in full, across closed eyelids, like a film. Perhaps this is why photographs are considered memento mori, reminders that we die. One has to wonder whether images captured in the heart alone will outlive the body, as our feeble prints will do. And if they do, where do they go?

I've often thought about reconstructing those missed shots, about duplicating snapshots made by the heart. I could hire models, scout locations or return to them, same time of year, same time of day. I could use fans and reflectors to mimic weather conditions and lighting. I'd have my camera ready, light meter dialed in, extra rolls of film in my pocket. The image, of course, would be a lie, but only in the sense that a novel is a lie. Every story, after all, tells a truth. And every story, actual or not, is fabricated, posited by the one who tells it. So why not reconstruct these missed shots, tell the story? Alas, I'm made alive not by the photographing but by the seeing. The former serves the latter, not the other way around. I'd rather find in the world existing examples of the story I want to tell and be a witness, rather than fashion the story from scratch. Besides, it's difficult to construct a good lie.

Nearly everybody has a camera these days, and their cameras are more technically capable than those of yesteryear. They're quick, work in the dark, completely automated. One could document his entire life with a cellphone camera if inclined. But in the end, he'd still miss something. Life, after all, is little more than missed shots. A person can take only one path, and in choosing it he negates every other possible path. He must watch the infinitude of potential living go by for the sheer fact he can't be in two places at once, can't go back in time, can't know then what he knows now, can't capture what he might've by missing or foregoing or forgetting to document life, make the shot. For every time you point the lens, you lose what you might've felt or known had you not.