October 5, 2011

Book Reading: The Plot Against Hip Hop by Nelson George

Filed under: Events — Tags: book, music, Robin's Bookstore — V. Shayne Frederick, Editor @ 11:06 am

Wednesday October 26, 7pm – fiction

Moonstone Arts Center, Robins Bookstore, 110A S. 13th Street, Phila, PA.

Nelson George author of The Plot Against Hip Hop ($15.95 Akashic Books)

”George is an ace at interlacing the real dramas of the world . . . the book’s slim length and flyweight depth could make it an artifact of this particular zeitgeist in American history. Playas and haters and celebrity cameos fuel a novel that is wickedly entertaining while being frozen in time.” –Kirkus Reviews

”This hard-boiled tale is jazzed up with authentic street slang and name-dropping (Biggie, Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, and Chuck D) . . . George’s tightly packaged mystery pivots on a believable conspiracy . . . and his street cred shines in his descriptions of Harlem and Brownsville’s mean streets.”–Library Journal

“The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time.” –New York Journal of Books

“Nelson George comes from an older generation that still remembers Hip Hop as the vital and dangerous voice it once was. This feeling for the past carries throughout the novel, and manages to convey the weight and importance of this profound shift in values without being nostalgic . . . The Plot Against Hip Hop is a fine piece of ‘edutainment’ — both exciting and thought provoking . . . it’s great to finally have a novel about Hip Hop written by one of it’s original documentary journalists.”–ABORT Magazine

”There are few people who can put the past seventy years of urban reality into the perspective of the most recent hip minute like Nelson George. The Plot Against Hip Hop is no exception. Nelson George braids actual facts and fictional characters flawlessly into a time-tunneled walk along various developments in this now-megabusiness called hip hop. For those that say they love hip hop as well as the total legacy it evolved from, it bodes well for them to keep this very close to their head, heart, and attention.”–Chuck D, Public Enemy

THE PLOT AGAINST HIP HOP is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard/security expert D Hunter, suspects there’s much more to his death. An old cassette tape, the theft of a manuscript Robinson was working on, and some veiled threats suggest there are larger forces at work. D HUNTER’S INVESTIGATION into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hard core fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, as the Illuminati, FBI agents, and West Coast gangstas roam the hard streets D Hunter walks down. D HUNTER IS A TOUGH, BLACK-CLAD product of crime-ridden Brownsville, Brooklyn, a man whose family has been devastated by violence and who has dedicated himself to protecting people in an age of insecurity. Hunter has his own secrets, his own vulnerabilities, which he fights to overcome as he becomes a reluctant private eye. After reading The Plot Against Hip Hop, you’ll never hear the music the same way.

NELSON GEORGE is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture and is the author of several award-winning books on the subject, including Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues; he also coauthored (with Simmons) Russell Simmons’s autobiography Life and Def. He directed Queen Latifah in the HBO film Life Support, and is an executive producer of VH1′s long-running Hip Hop Honors broadcast.

Comments (0)

May 20, 2011

Book Event: Awakening Creativity

Filed under: Events — Tags: book, community, philadelphia, Robin's Bookstore — V. Shayne Frederick, Editor @ 12:23 pm

Wednesday May 25, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Lily Yeh author of

Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms ($34.95 New Village)

Once described as the “Mother Theresa of community arts,” Lily Yeh is a Philadelphia-based visual artist by way of China and Taiwan. She has won numerous awards, including an Arts and Healing Network Award as well as a Founder’s Award from the Fleisher Organization. She has completed residencies and given keynote speeches at universities throughout the United States. Lily emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate school of Fine Arts. A successful painter and professor at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Lily traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. Over the 1980s, Lily gradually realized that being an artist “is not just about making art . . . It is about delivering the vision one is given . . . and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself.” She founded The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia and continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world. Lily is most noted for transforming an urban neighborhood in North Philadelphia into an inner-city work of art. Once an empty lot, Yeh worked with the community to create an interactive park space filled with gardens and mosaics. Lily’s vision has rippled out far beyond North Philadelphia’s borders. She inspires and collaborates with prison inmates to create beauty and art, and does the same with thousands of adults and children who live in some of the world’s most broken communities. She has collaborated with residents of the Korogocho slum near Nairobi to enliven a barren churchyard with colorful murals and sculptures and traveled to Ghana, Ecuador, The Ivory Coast and the Republic of Georgia to work on similar projects. Her most recent endeavor is the Rwanda Healing Project, in which she worked with hundreds of children and families to transform their bleak village into a place of beauty and joy.

Comments (0)

March 2, 2011

Book Reading: Pym

Filed under: Events — Tags: book, Robin's Bookstore — V. Shayne Frederick, Editor @ 12:43 pm

http://www.moonstoneartscenter.org/moonstone-arts-center-events/mat-johnson-author-of-pym-a-novel-2/

Friday, March 4, 7pm – Fiction

Mat Johnson

A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers. Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation. He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson grew up in the Germantown and Mount Airy sections of the city. His first novel, Drop, was a B&N Discover Great New Writers selection. His second novel, Hunting in Harlem, won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has written for a variety of publications, including a stint as a columnist for Time Out-NY. His latest books are The Great Negro Plot, a history of race and hysteria in Colonial New York, and Incognegro, a graphic novel (illustrated by Walter Pleece) set in the 1930s, and the newly released PYM. He teaches at University of Houston.

Comments (1)

November 21, 2010

Dr. Thabiti Lewis: Racism & Sports In American Culture

Filed under: Bronet Sponsored,Events — Tags: Robin's Bookstore, society, sports — V. Shayne Frederick, Editor @ 3:19 pm

Thabiti Lewis teaches English and Black studies at Washington State University Vancouver. The former editor, radio show host, columnist, and freelance writer for The Source. The St. Louis American and News One lectures on topics ranging from images of African Americans in popular culture (sports and hip hop) to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the responsibility of youth. His book Ballers of the New School: Race and Sport in America challenges to alter the landscape of race and sport culture.

Thabiti Lewis is an emerging, fresh, studied voice. Dr. Lewis has been sought to do lecture at Vancouver University, Princeton University, University of Virginia, Lenoir-Rhyne, Evergreen State University, and Northern Arizona University, among others. He has served as a community member on the editorial board of The Statesman Journal newspaper. His work has also appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers such as Mosaic Literary Magazine, Oregon Humanities, and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, AmeriQuests and book chapters.

In addition to teaching courses about African American literature and culture he teaches courses on hip-hop and film, black masculinity, and race and sport in America.

Ballers of the New School

Dr. Lewis’s book Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America challenges the notion that sports culture has been and is now a pioneer for racial progress. He contends that American sport has not contributed to racial progress as much as it is mythologized to have done. This is more media spin than truth he contends; a figment of imagination aided by a modern technology armed with 24hour sports reporting, unlimited sports television channels, and a culture that cultivates anti-intellectualism.

Robin’s Bookstore

110 S. 13th Street

Saturday, December 11, 2010

5 P.M.

Comments (2)

August 22, 2010

New Play Reading: “Hello, America… my name is Jimmy Baldwin”

Filed under: Events — Tags: art, Robert H. Miller, Robin's Bookstore — R. Eric Thomas @ 8:39 pm

What: Reading of the new play “Hello, America… my name is Jimmy Baldwin” by Robert H. Miller, Ph.D.

When: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 7 p.m.

Where: Robin’s Bookstore ~ 110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA

Before he died in 1987, James Baldwin was one of the most sought after speakers
of his time. His books “Go Tell it On the Mountain,” ”The Fire Next Time,” “If
Beal St. Could Talk,” and countless articles won him critical acclaim around the
world, but it was his take on American racism and the Civil Rights movement that set him apart from his contemporaries.

He’s been away for awhile, but now he’s back to deliver a message and reintroduce himself.

Join us at Robins Bookstore, 110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 7pm for a reading of the play: “Hello, America…my name is Jimmy Baldwin”, written by Delaware Valley playwright, Robert H. Miller, Ph.D. and directed by Donovan Hagins.

Featuring:
Frantz T. Excellent and Carla P. Morales