A FEW MONTHS after his "Sleeping With Strangers" left fans teetering on a cliff, author Eric Jerome Dickey is back with its sequel, "Waking With Enemies."
After a job in Tampa left him uneasy, hitman Gideon is now across the Atlantic and in a race against the clock to discover and outwit the person trying to have him killed.
Dickey reads on Wednesday at Karibu Books in Hyattsville, and he talked to Express about his action-packed departure from the steamy romance novels that fans of the New York Times bestselling author have come to expect.
Continue Reading "Lust, Lies & Hitmen: Eric Jerome Dickey" »
HERE'S A PHRASE you might not have heard before: "Let's go hang out in Hyattsville." The Prince George's County town isn't exactly known for its shopping districts, after all.
But with the opening of a new shopping center modeled after retail and dining areas of Bethesda and Clarendon, Hyattsville could quickly transform into a commercial hub.
The development, called University Town Center, seen at right, is part of a $1.2 billion project that will eventually include office buildings, condos and apartments. One block from the Prince George's Plaza Metro station on the Green Line, the development could attract shoppers from around the county — including students from the nearby University of Maryland at College Park.
The development recently opened with a 14-screen movie theater — the first one built in Prince George's County in the last ten years. A Safeway supermarket, specialty shops and more than a dozen restaurants, including an Old Dominion Brewhouse and upscale fast food chains like Qdoba Mexican Grill and Five Guys Burgers and Fries, are slated to open by Labor Day.
» "An Opening Scene for a Developer's Dream" [WaPo]
» "Ground Broken Near Prince George's Plaza" [Free Ride/Express]
IT'S BEEN A LONG ROAD back home for music critic and professor William Jelani Cobb, a onetime boombox-toting kid from Queens. Cobb was a member of the hip-hop nation who gradually lost interest in the movement. Fortunately for true hip-hop connoisseurs, it was the journey back that allowed him to pen "To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic." He'll be signing and discussing the book at Karibu on Saturday.
» EXPRESS: Is hip-hop really dead?
» COBB: It's not dead, probably though it is on life support. The vitality of the culture is still in existence but there's a real question as to how much of it exist in the U.S.. What I usually tell my students is that hip-hop culture exists clinging by its fingernails to the very periphery of the music industry of rap, and so there are places where it is real. There was a Cuban rapper who said to a friend of mine that you all created hip-hop in America but it doesn't live there anymore. And he had a good point.
» EXPRESS: It could be just a phase?
» COBB: I don't think so though because within the music so much of it is gimmickry and so much of it is apathetical to its origins. Rock has gone through that same stage but the commercialism and the dependency upon the major labels and the extremely narrow range of marketable personalities that are pushed out in front of the public every year make it seem to me like the music is being driven more by CEOs than it is by people who are loving what it stood or stands for.
» EXPRESS: Luckily Jay-Z is back to save it.
» COBB: I always say when people talk about trying to save hip-hop it's like thinking that you can keep the Titanic from sinking with a mop. It's a whole bigger array. Hip-hop is vapid and commercial for the same reason that Wal-Mart put your local hardware store out of business. Or why your storefront churches are dwarfed by the 20,000-member megachurches and so on. It's just the nature of the time we live in. Hip-hop's relationship to globalism is a canary; it's just a canary in the mineshaft.
» EXPRESS: Maybe the Internet will help the artists regain some control?
» COBB: I think so. I think one of the things that I've really liked is coming across people that will email me an mp3 of their music. Recently there was a brother who sold me his CD on the street and I got home and it was really good. There are people who are out there doing it and hopefully the Internet will enable you to get more access to them. But if you're talking about people who are likeAsheru or [Talib] Kweli or Mos [Def] or Jean Grae ... I don't know.
Click here to read a story about the Urban Film Series.
ATLANTA NATIVE, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER and self-proclaimed independent hip-hop media mogul Hotep, a.k.a. Hustle Simmons, will be showing his debut film, "Independent, Doin' Major Things," at this weekend's Urban Film Series. The film features exclusive, behind-the-scenes interviews with the likes of Ludacris, TI, Big Boi, Young Jeezy, Jill Scott, Lil Scrappy, KRS-1 and many more luminaries of hip-hop and R&B talking about the entrepreneurial spirit of Atlanta, the "Motown of the South."
Hotep will also being signing copies of his book, "The Hustler's 10 Commandments," at a Karibu Books-sponsored signing Friday at 6:30 p.m. at The Mall at Prince George's.
» EXPRESS: How you get into all those private events in the film?
» HOTEP: One of the hustler's 10 commandments is "It's not what you know or who you know, it's who knows you." And because I've made a decent reputation for myself in the city of Atlanta, I'm able to do things that the average person isn't able to do.
» EXPRESS: Was this your first venture into film?
» HOTEP: Yeah. It started as a promotional piece for my music. I make it a habit to think outside of the box and separate myself from the common person. And so while a lot of musicians were going to showcases and continually putting out albums I decided to try through video. As I went around shooting, I kept running into more and more people that like myself embodied the independent spirit and were doing major things in their industry.
So it grew from being about what Hotep was doing to what Atlanta was doing. Then, it moved from the music industry to film, spoken word, fashion and modeling. There's also the whole entrepreneurial business spirit that's really blowing up here in the city of Atlanta. So I dubbed the term "Atlanta Renaissance," and within the next 10, 20 years from now history books will quote this time here in Atlanta as the Atlanta Renaissance.
» EXPRESS: You talk about Atlanta as if the streets are paved with gold.
» HOTEP: It's a great place to make your mark, to network and find other likeminded people. It's a good place to nurture forward-thinking ideas, but you will find that it's a very small city. It's not New York; there's not enough room for everybody to make it big in this city. Once you do well, you have to go to other cities in order to expand.
PRINCE GEORGE'S PLAZA is to some a far-off Metrorail station on the Green Line. To others it is a shopping center on East-West Highway, at left. But the station, only five stops away from the U Street corridor and eight from Gallery Place-Chinatown, may become more of a destination in the coming years.
Ground was broken earlier this week on University Town Center, a mixed-used development by 81-year-old developer Herschel Blumberg. According to Paul Brandus of WTOP, the 56-acre project adjacent to the Prince George's Plaza station will include a Safeway, 14-screen movie theater and restaurants like Old Dominion Brewery and Five Guys. Developments like this, added to the boom along the District's Mid-City Green Line corridor, may cause a noticeable spike in rush-hour traffic on the line in the near future.
What's next, large scale development at Fort Totten? With so much underutilized land on two Metrorail lines there, it seems like a logical step.
Photo by James M. Thresher/The Washington Post
» "New Town Center Looks to Capitalize on Prince George's Co.'s Economy" [WTOP]
» University Town Center
Addison Road