Apr 17, 20100
the future of the funk
Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu takes the Afrofuturism genre one step further with her short SciFi film “Pumzi.” The dystopic flick is set in an enclosed, underground future society, “35 years after water wars have torn the world apart,” and chronicles the efforts of one young woman to bring life back to the surface of the planet.
Unique opportunity to see this groundbreaking, award-winning film this sunday in Brooklyn, NY — at a free screening hosted by mtkalla keaton sunday evening, april 18th. details below.
“Pumzi” Brooklyn Screening @ Le Grand Dakar (Grand ave and Clifton Pl)
Sunday April 18th @ 8pm.
Please RVSP via text (917 771 2747)
Click below to see the trailer. Wow.
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On Monday, on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, Rosie Perez discussed the G word — gentrification — in Manhattan and in her childhood Brooklyn, specifically in Fort Greene and in Clinton Hill, where she now lives. You could say that Perez is on the anti-gentrification side of the ongoing citywide debate about how to preserve the old NYC while embracing the new. She complained that her neighbors don’t say hello to her. “When I walk out of my house, I used to know everyone on my block in Clinton Hill. I walk out there now, people move away from me because I’m a person of color and then once they recognize me, they go, oh. That’s a horrible feeling. That’s a feeling I didn’t grow up with,” she told Lehrer. This morning, at WNYC’s flashy new Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the conversation continued, with Perez’s signature feistiness in full force. She hosted a broadcast debate in which community activists and city-landmark officials argued over the nature of this changing city. “Let me tell you, since I said that [on the radio], now everybody is saying hello to me,” she told her mostly amused audience (many of whom seemed to be from Fort Greene). “Be careful what you wish for.” 
I remember the first time I saw George Carlin. I was maybe eight years old, and was flipping though channels at my father’s house. I came across this bearded man speaking to a large crowd of young people. In my mind he was a professor and those were his students… my father being a professor at Hunter College at the time was my only point of reference for that dynamic. He seemed almost too smart to be a comic. I remember watching him & being fascinated by the way he used words and thinking what school is this? Clearly he is teaching but what is the subject? And how fun it must be to be one of his students.
