Daily Archives: July 15, 2013

6 posts

When Will Being Young, Black and Male Cease to be a Crime?

When we think of racial profiling and subsequent murders leading from the act, so many of the stories host a common thread, “A suspicious black male…” This is the thread that binds many young, black men across regions, through time, and through shared history. This is something Emmett Till, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and numerous others can count as their experience in life and…in death. Continue reading

A Week With An Electric Car

windshieldThe 2008 to 2012 Tesla Roadster was one of the first “mainstream” electric cars sold. The car itself was based on a Toyota-powered Lotus Elise sports car. The cars were built by Lotus in Britain without the engine and transmission and then shipped to California, where they were mated with an electric motor, a control unit, and thousands of little batteries. They were not cheap, as they started at $109,000. And even with a gasoline engine, the tiny car was not practical.

These are my impressions of driving my friend’s 35,000-mile Tesla Roadster for a week:  Continue reading

Pacific Rim is the Greatest Robot Monster Movie since ‘Robot Monster’

Pacific Rim is the Citizen Kane of robot monster movies. I’m referring, naturally, to the original cut of Citizen Kane, not the butchered, robot-free studio cut that most of us saw in film class. Making Rosebud a sled instead of a robot companion deprives Kane of both pathos and narrative coherence. Anyway. This film is, of course, a remake of the 1965 Orson Welles Japanese production, The Pacific Rim. The 2013 version of Pacific Rim is perhaps the deepest and most ambitious robot monster movie since Woody Allen’s 1982 Robots of Manhattan, and perhaps the most innovative cinematic take on robots and monsters since Francois Truffaut’s ground-breaking masterpiece, Les Robots Dangereux. Continue reading