Ernest Hardy

article placeholder

Princess Power

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Piotr Sikora, D.R.IT'S IN THE VOICES: THE PHRASING, INTONATION, blended tones. The fact that the songs are parlayed in French makes them exotic but not alien; it's merely the stretching of different skin over a familiar body. The conversations exist beyond the lyrics, and the chords struck are......
article placeholder

Homegrrrlz

Ernest Hardy
THE LOW CEILING TRAPS THE CROWD'S COLLECTIVE body heat and evaporating sweat close to the dance floor. There's little room to move in the dimly lit space, and every breath drawn is a thick one. But the black/Asian/ Latino gathering of funkdafied boys on the d-low doesn't seem to notice;......

Renaissance Man 1999

Ernest Hardy
Photo by David LeeSPIKE LEE'S FEATURE DEBUT, THE 1986 FILM SHE'S Gotta Have It, opens with a quote from Zora Neale Hurston's literary classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, a touchstone of the Harlem Renaissance. The quote, lyrical and incisive, lays out the different ways that men and women dream,......
article placeholder

A Funky Epiphany

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Debra DiPaoloIn the book Sister Outsider, a collection of speeches and essays by the late Audre Lorde, there's an excerpt from an exchange between Lorde and fellow poet Adrienne Rich that first appeared in the magazine Signs. In the conversation, Lorde says she thinks of their dialogue-in-progress as......

The Femme Mystique

Ernest Hardy
Photo courtesy American Cinematheque "I am what I hate most in this world," says a male character in Didier Haudepin’s Those Were the Days. "I am a coward." He’s also just one example of the frayed and flawed hommes that flicker through the darkness during the American Cinema theque’s "French......

Buzz (Not Buzz)

Ernest Hardy
The buzz at Sundance this year — and it was deafening — was no buzz. "I’m waiting to be blown away" and "Nothing stellar" were the most frequent answers to the question "What have you seen that’s good?" No film arrived at Park City with the must-see imprimatur, and few......

Schlichtmann’s List

Ernest Hardy
Photo by David James A Civil Action opens with personal-injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) ranking, in a droll voice-over, clients according to their courtroom profitability. "A white male in his 40s, at the height of his earning power," we’re told, tops the list — though Schlichtmann cautions us not......
article placeholder

Home of the Brave

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Mike DiverFuture hip-hop/pop/R&B archaeologists will be kinder to P.M. Dawn than are folks in the here and now. Twenty-first-century Negro musicians will cite them as a touchstone, speak in hushed and baffled tones about the lack of love given them by the black folk of their day --......

Head Trip

Ernest Hardy
Photo by Kathleen Clark"It is difficult to be a deep-thinking, sensitive individual and not get tagged for it in some way or another," says Bennett Miller, the 31-year-old director of the documentary The Cruise. "If you are going to face, as Walt Whitman put it, 'the quick, abrupt questions that......

Ziggy Stardust Memories

Ernest Hardy
Velvet Goldmine is a celebration of the '70s, and of the fact that for a fleeting moment there was a seamless blend of lo-fi sci-fi with the gay underground, of the vibrant sexual avant-garde with feather-boa glamour and mascara. It was a moment in which rock & roll was pushed......