Ernest Hardy

article placeholder

What Lies Beneath

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Felicia Megginson Carl Hancock Rux, the 34-year-old poet, actor, playwright, spoken-word artist and musician, is now also a novelist. Asphalt, written largely before 9/11, is thick with images of and meditations on terror and terrorism, personal and cultural devastation, a post-apocalyptic New York, U.S. citizens living under a......
article placeholder

Fear of a Black Titty

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Patrick Demarchelier You live by the pop machine, you die by the pop machine. The sleek commodity known as Janet Damita Jo Jackson DeBarge Elizondo Jackson has done her share of living and dying lately, often simultaneously. She’s been all over editorial pages and gossip columns; her Super......
article placeholder

Of Ass and Ax

Ernest Hardy
PRINCE at Staples Center, March 29 Prince’s signature high-pitched “Owwooo” on “DMSR” was piercingly intact, but he no longer pleaded with the femme of his obsession to “work your body like a whore.” And he assured her that “I’m spiritually attracted to you” on his deft reclaiming of “I Feel......
article placeholder

California Dreaming

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Christian Lantry L.A.’s Ozomatli are a band that is fundamentally futuristic, a quality they arrive at by artful mining and molding of the past. Their sound is an amalgam of almost everything you’ve ever heard — hip-hop, rock, cumbia, salsa, Afro-Latin grooves, funk, rock en español. Unlike so......

Straight Shooters

Ernest Hardy
Photos by Wild Don Lewis “What kinda jobs are two niggas wit art degrees gonna get in these economic times?” Sitting in the bedroom-cum-workspace of Jason Van Veen’s Inglewood home is to both glean the inner workings of PSTOLA, the guerrilla filmmaking collective he co-founded in 1999, and to peep......

Sundance and the New Negro Cinema

Ernest Hardy
Ever since it morphed from granola and grassroots to Pilates and Prada, Sundance has been defined by conflicting impulses and agendas. The schizo dynamic is in full effect this year, nowhere more than with regard to black American film. To its credit, the festival is committed to creating a level......
article placeholder

Forgive Me, Meshell

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Mark Seliger One of the luxuries afforded the late film critic Pauline Kael in her 1970s gig at The New Yorker was that of revisiting films she’d already written about — either elevating them or knocking them down a notch from earlier assessments. With the nonstop barrage of......

Misplaced Persons

Ernest Hardy
There is so much that is striking, and devastating, about José Padilha’s documentary Bus 174 it’s hard to know where to begin. Constructed from television news clips (many of which consisted of images taken from traffic cameras), as well as from original footage shot on DV and 16mm, the film......
article placeholder

The Whole Damn Thing

Ernest Hardy
Genius is a word tossed about a little too freely nowadays, and context is everything: What exactly does it mean to be a genius in an age of mediocrity? OutKast’s new Speakerboxxx/The Love Below arrived in stores on a tsunami of media hype, desperation-tinged good will and gushy declarations that......
article placeholder

The Real Black Realness

Ernest Hardy
After firing off Mama’s Gun, what could Erykah Badu possibly do for an encore? That 2000 album has quietly gone from being a misunderstood, largely slept-on cult item to an unconditional classic. Simply put: It’s one of the best albums of the last decade, regardless of genre. Using a failed......