Just when you thought it was safe to go to a San Francisco or Oakland comedy club without having Dave Chappelle show up unannounced ... Dave Chappelle is showing up unannounced. A spokeswoman for Cobb's Comedy Club says Chappelle will play two shows tonight, one at 8 and the second at 10:30. Admission is $55, and tickets are available on the Live Nation website.
Local boy done good Al Madrigal is so sharp, smart, and surprising in his stand-up comedy that it's not too much of a surprise that he's debuting tonight as a new Daily Show correspondent.
Instead, it's a confirmation of Madrigal's talents and The Daily Show commitment to "sharp" and "smart," a commitment that has been somewhat assailed since the hiring of Olivia Munn.
Munn has hardly been the disaster her detractors make her out to be. Still, even if she had turned out to be some kind of Wicked-Hot Colbert, we'd be thrilled to hell with this new acquisition, and not just because Madrigal went to St. Ignatius College Prep. He has long killed on the talk-show circuit, acquitted himself well on his own Comedy Central video, and even works S.F. life into his act, as you can see in the video after the jump.
Only problem: This ruins our in-office Daily Show correspondent brackets. I had top-seed Oliver vs. in-house favorite Schaal in the final.
For nearly a century in the U.S. it was illegal to send anything through the mail considered "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious." That included certain novels now considered classics (hello, Ulysses), educational material on birth control and female reproduction, and, yes, pornography and erotica. Anyone who broke these laws faced federal prison time and hefty fines. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was on the front lines of getting these so-called Comstock Laws overturned, risking his own liberty to challenge them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Starting in the 1970s, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt began another round of challenges to obscenity laws that applied not only to his much-maligned pornography empire but also to wide swaths of artists and writers. Love him or hate him (many people still choose the latter), Flynt was among the only people with the guts, stamina, and money to stand up to those in government and religious institutions who'd criminalize anything that runs astray of strict Christian morality. Wednesday night, the publisher speaks alongside David Eisenbach, a history professor, and author with Flynt of a book, One Nation Under Sex. In the clip above, Flynt speaks with talk-show host Tavis Smiley about the book and its contents.
Naiad? Yes, naiad. According to Dictionary.com, it can mean one of three things: "[A]ny of a class of nymphs presiding over rivers and springs; ... the juvenile form of the dragonfly; ... [or] a female swimmer, especially an expert one."
Not the easiest word to remember or to spell. That could be why it eliminated author Matt Stewart last night at the Bee-In, the annual fundraiser for Small Press Distribution at Crown Point Gallery. Among others competing were numerous authors, editors, and event producers (Charlie Jane Anders, Susie Bright, Cara Black, Bill Berkson) as well as the random musician (Jill Tracy), actor (Michael Gene Sullivan), and radio reporter (Laura Sydell). Hosting was the ever-lively Sedge Thomson of KALW-FM's West Coast Live. The judge was Geoffrey Nunberg, NPR commentator, UC Berkeley professor, and board member of the American Heritage Dictionary.
When Barack Obama took the presidential oath in 2008, the media buzzed with the phrase "postracial nation. " Few believed it a reality, but hardly anyone attacked the assertion with as much contempt and encyclopedic evidence to the contrary as Oakland writer Ishmael Reed.
A novelist, poet, graphic artist, and cultural critic, Reed has since the 1960s wielded angry art at racism in all its permutations. In Juice! (Dalkey Archive), his recent novel, Reed aims his assault at America's media, the big (MSNBC, Fox) and small (the Huffington Post), left- and right-wing outlets alike for their bigoted, deceptive representations of black men. Specifically, he hates their treatment of O.J. Simpson.
