THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

So after months of waiting, I finally watched the Raoul Peck documentary I Am Not Your Negro , even if I had to drive to Grand Rapids to do it. (It's opening in Harbor Springs on March 3rd, I found out yesterday. Oh well.) It was as disturbing and depressing and compelling and engaging as I hoped it would be, and in a year of fantastic documentaries on race and culture (including but not limited to the ESPN event O.J.: Made In America and 13th on Netflix) that are in Oscar contention, I Am Not Your Negro still managed to rise above them all by narrowing the perspective to one man -- James Baldwin -- thematically examining three black male leaders murdered in the '60s -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- united by agitation and assassination and the color of their skin. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.  Heaven knows there are more biting and trenchant quotes than the above nugget from Baldwin...

People who fondly remember The Eighties most likely didn't have to live through The Eighties, a time largely marked in my nape of the way by Rust Belt social and economic desiccation and devolution. With the cruel packaging of Reaganomics and deregulation and institutional racism and prosperity gospels grafted together like some horrible Marvel Team-Up designed to spark a 1% for the 1%, the crisp harshness on the wind was mirrored in the new digital audio/visual technology, designed to drag queer and shambolic rock and roll fantasies into the ordered realm of ones and zeroes, forever in the air tonight with no jacket required. So (un)naturally, when the most cocaine-y chopped-up drums ever to be recorded exploded out of the boom boxes courtesy of "Some Like It Hot" during that sun-drenched summer of 1985, it was less an invitation to listen than a directive, an imperative to soak in all that The Power Station -- not so much a band as a corporate merger, and how Eighti...

On the cusp of the new digital decade, it was called "New Wave" to make radio and retail and the straights in the flyover states feel less scared by the punk rockers who had commercial potential. In New Wave, the brash energy of punk met the showy artifice of glam and disco, filtered through the newest synthesizers and drum machines, the guitar downgraded from rock's thrusting squall to funk's nervy accent, and the tent of New Wave opened for artists old and new to see how The Eighties would play. And there was room in that tent for nearly everyone. '70s American rockers like Linda Ronstadt and Alice Cooper dipped their platinum toes in the New Wave pools, while British bedsit introverts like Soft Cell and Gary Numan (and even aged Elvis-era holdovers like Cliff Richard) discovered the strong public appetite, albeit ephemeral and fleeting, for this New Pop. But the award winner in the pivot period of 1980, a year before MTV changed the look and sound of New Wa...