Today’s kinté Links
Bridgett Hollingsworth of www.BahiyahWomanMagazine.com turns her attention to my publicist, Makeda Smith, of www.jazzmynepr.com, in “Confessions of a Hollywood Publicist.” I am pretty confident that the article in full or in portion is not online. This is the tradition of print businesses in general and “African American media” in particular. UPDATE (5/13): Actually the article “Confessions of a Black Hollywood Publicist!” is online in full! I stand corrected and look forward to making more mistakes like these! My peoples! My peoples!
(As an aside, it may be appropriate to mention the Web site for Black Enterprise Magazine. Even though this site has timely content and does attempt to establish parity with its print publication—and it even has an RSS news feed, the site suffers from severe neglect for technical standards as fundamental HTML 4.x: almost every page produces markup errors. The BE preoccupation with “traditional” radio and cable television leaves very little resources for streaming audio podcasts and a serious implementation of streaming video. There is no excuse, beyond classic white conservatism in a chocolate-colored form, for not having a Black Enterprise Magazine podcast for trendy chocolate iTunes users—of which I am not one of them. I can only hope that such a podcast or videocast exists.)
So I’m guessing that my publicist is having trouble with this Dog Whisperer guy, Cesar Millan, and it is this that brings her to covers of magazines. There is this lawsuit “requesting compensation for damages in excess of five million dollars for copyright infringement, breach of contract and breach of confidential relationship. The National Geographic Channel, MPH Entertainment, Inc and Emery/Sumner Productions, LLC are also defendants named in the complaint.” More on this later. I assume that lawsuits go on for a spell.
Trying to find Sekou Sundiata.
I’ve been trying to find Sekou Sundiata for last five years (at least). I saw his face on the cover of The Blue Oneness of Dreams and immediately saw myself in a few years—actually he looks more like the older, wiser brother of the late great Luther Vandross. Alas, I’m flattering myself about my physical appearance. So, anyway, this is a sketch of what I know:
- He and Bob Holman (and others) set up Mouth Almighty Records. The company no longer exists.
- He has had serious personal health issues. His manager had to literally donate her kidney to his body.
- He has moved to Righteous Babe records under the roof of a true talent, Ani DiFranco.Looks aside, the priority here is to celebrate his work.