Rapper Clifford “Tip” Harris Jr. and I lock minds, above, in the Westin Peachtree Plaza’s rotating Sundial Restaurant, 72 stories over downtown Atlanta. We’d stopped at the second tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere (and 16th tallest in the world) for an upcoming edition of BET’s Food For Thought. It airs in September, shortly after the release of the artist’s upcoming album, King Uncaged.

How did the convo go? T.I. has a sharp mind. He was frank about the issues he’s faced and the challenges now before him. Plus, the food was good, and skydiving off the Westin’s roof was a blast. I’m kidding.

Harvey Pekar, above, the renowned comics writer whose life’s own banalities formed his narratives, died from prostate cancer, Monday, at the age of 70.

A mainstay and elder of the underground comics movement, Pekar was an oft and early collaborator with artist Robert Crumb. Yet the Ohio native worked as a Veterans Administration hospital file clerk most, if not all, of his adult life.

It was only after retiring in 2001, that his American Splendor series—turned into a 2003 film starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar—brought him mainstream fame and acclamation.

I met Pekar at our WBAI studios on Wall St. in 2006, when he was promoting his latest American Splendor book, Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story, right, with its namesake subject, the contrary blogger and founder of Overheard in New York.

The late Harvey Pekar, and Michael Malice, are the guests today on this rebroadcasted edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 16th, at 2 pm ET.

You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm ET. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our live stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

Here’s a question for travelers in our security-minded era: Should the TSA put Pop Rocks, above—the fizzy, crumbly, kids candy from the ’70s—on its air travel prohibited items list?

I ask because it’s long been known what happens to the human digestive system when you swallow Pop Rocks, then mix it with Coca-Cola, a drink available on every commercial flight: Your stomach explodes!

The effect on the individual is, obviously, catastrophic. As for the craft’s airframe, well, suppose this were to happen while flying over the Pacific, right?

Heh, heh. Of course, it’s nonsense, the idea that these two substances, when combined, detonate. It’s a 30-year-old, urban myth. But, as every parent knows, kids have lots of questions about how our bodies are affected by all kinds of phenomena, and why we work as we do.

Andrea and Julia Ditkoff sure did. For example, they wanted to know:

Why do you get a headache when you eat ice cream too quickly?

What’s that small, dewdrop-shaped thing in the back of your throat?

Why do people hiccup?

…not to mention the query which forms the title of their mother’s book, Why Don’t Your Eyelashes Grow?: Curious Questions Kids Ask About the Human Body, right, by Dr. Beth Ann Ditkoff.

In fact, they came up with all the interrogatives Dr. Ditkoff uses in her text. She thought her daughters’ inquiries were, indeed, provocative, but commonplace. Other children, and other adults, would want to hear the answers, also.

They will: Dr. Ditkoff is the guest today on a repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, June 18, at 2 pm ET.

You can listen to this thoughtful writer / physician’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

Palestinian hip-hop trio DAM, above, wield the power of hip-hop as a force against the Israeli occupation of their homeland—the world’s longest—and their minds as well.

Formed in 1998 by brothers Suhell and Tamer Nafar, center and right (friend Mahmoud Jreri, left, was added later), they initially sought to make party records that would earn them cool points with peers and the ladies. Then it was still “just for fun,” says Tamer. They completed a six-track EP titled Stop Selling Drugs, the first time any Palestinian had ever recorded rap music.

What politicized them, however, was the Second Intifada of 2000…and the music of 2Pac. As Tamer poignantly told me, for my March 2008 piece in VIBE, “Straight Outta Palestine,”

“There was an article about two kids who killed an officer and they blamed Tupac’s lyrics. ‘Pump ya fists like this / Holla if you hear me’…I think, was the name of the song,” citing the lead single from 2Pac’s 1993 sophomore album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. “It made the first impression that they are talking something that I’m feeling, or that I’m seeing, or what I’m experiencing. It all started from 2Pac.” How did this happen? Tamer thinks back to “Holla”’s raw and chaotic B&W music video [right]. “When you see a Black man who’s being chased by the police, we get chased by the police, here. If I didn’t experience it, then my cousin did. If he didn’t, then my friend did. If he didn’t, then my neighbor did. When you see he’s talking about people in prison. Most of our friends are in prison. When he’s talking about drug dealing…. When he talks about slavery, you can compare it to the occupation.”

Out went the “I’m-so-dope,” records, in went tracks like “Meen Erhabe (Who’s The Terrorist?),” their brutal, anger-filled flamethrow against the hypocrisies of their colonizing government. The release of their self-financed, 2006 CD, Dedication, their appearance in director Jackie Salloum’s 2009 documentary, Slingshot Hip-Hip, right, and as much overseas touring as Israel will allow have solidified their reputation as part of Palestine’s leading edge in the music of resistance.

DAM (Da Arabian MC’s) are guests today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, April 30, at 2 pm ET. They’ll also be performing, as part of Homeland Hip Hop III, tonight, 9 pm, with a gang of other acts, at Southpaw in Brooklyn (125 5th Ave.; 718-230-0236).

Then, tomorrow, May 1, marks the 50th anniversary of the U-2 incident, one of the most harrowing moments of the Cold War. After pilot Gary Powers’ plane was shot down by the Soviets, the U.S. government accelerated their development of an aircraft that would fly faster and higher than any had yet done, while still keeping an electronic eye on our enemies and rivals.

The result was the Lockheed SR-71, below, designed by legendary aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, head of the company’s Advanced Development Projects division, popularly known as Skunk Works.

In his new book, From RAINBOW to GUSTO: Stealth and the Design of the Lockheed Blackbird, right, author Paul A. Suhler discusses the immense political, corporate, and, especially, technological challenges that faced Lockheed, and the U.S., when they set out to build this amazing machine.

You can hear DAM’s and Paul A. Shuler’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm ET. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our live stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

Cellist Stephanie Winters describes the sound of her 2004 debut album, Through the Storm, rereleased in an expanded version last year, as “beautiful sadness.”

In Portuguese the word is saudade—a sadness that makes one want to live again. In a spiritual sense this recording is my “blues”. I do not use that word to describe a musical style, but to suggest the transcendent honesty which musical expression enables.

Indeed, Winters, right, through often bottomless multitracking, saturates the newly added “Mercy Street,” made famous by Peter Gabriel; her vision of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”; or Thomas Dorsey’s renowned gospel standard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” with a somber cry. The whole work breathes with deep mood, yet not melancholy. In a way, it feels like a film, a wordless one, perhaps telling a story of love found, made, lost, and unforgotten.

Winters has performed and recorded with Richie Havens, Enya, Corrine Bailey Rae, Anne Murray, Paula Cole, and the O’Jays, among many others.

Stephanie Winters is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, April 23, at 2 pm ET.

You can hear her ideas and music by tuning in at 2 pm ET. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our live stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

The disappearing landscape is an issue in all communities, and the question of how to preserve the visual character of towns, cities and rural areas is always pressing.

This is even the case in Havana, Cuba’s capital and largest city, where political and economic isolation have compelled Cubans to retain the use of structures longer than many urban centers might.

Yet Havana is, indeed, changing. It’s a turn that Cathryn Griffith, in her new book, Havana Revisited: An Architectural Heritage, covers through an unusual technique of matching early 20th century postacards, bought primarily through the internet, to modern-day views, like these of Cuba’s famed Centro Gallago, above. Through this unusual technique, Griffith not only documents the historical form of the island’s architectural heritage, but creates a template for how communities may, perhaps, preserve that tradition in any place.

Cathryn Griffith is a guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, April 16, at 2 pm ET.

But first we’ll speak with Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker. Pennoyer is the principal partner of Peter Pennoyer Architects and chairman of the Institute for Classical Architecture and Classical America. Walker holds a degree in historic preservation from Columbia University, and has co-authored three books with Pennoyer. Their newest, The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury, tells the story the late 19th / early 20th century architect whose classical forms, resistant to modernist trends developing in Europe and other places, led to some of the most beautiful structures of his era. Many are well-preserved, even now, and commissions like these stone barns for the Rockefeller family, right, or his design of New York City’s Forest Hills Gardens, continue to delight and inspire.

You can hear Peter Pennoyer’s, Anne Walker’s, and Cathryn Griffith’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm ET. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our live stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

This week, Miramar, FL-based Spirit Airlines announced that, beginning in August, passengers would be charged up to $45 per bag, not to check luggage, but to carry it onto the plane.

Their foul money grab puts a cherry on top of what airline passengers have known, seemingly, for a generation: Unless you’re rollin’ solo, above, flying is the pits.

Not from outside the plane, however. It’s in that world, where flying’s grace and beauty is palpable, that aerial photographer Erik Hildebrandt reigns.

Hildebrandt, right, has released over half a dozen books of his work through his own company, Cleared Hot Media, Inc. (The title is a military expression meaning one has permission to engage a target.) These include Anytime, Baby: Hail and Farewell to the U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat and his Front Row Center: Inside the Great American Air Show series, now up to four volumes.

Erik Hildebrandt is the guest today on this rebroadcast from my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, April 9, at 2 pm ET. During our talk, we discussed the process of making pictures, how airplanes are built, the notion of warfare and the reasons for it, and more.

As well, in a few weeks, in a never-before-aired, upcoming piece, I’ll talk to him about his work as a self-publisher, that being an increasingly meaningful preoccupation in this era of media independence.

You can learn more about his work by visiting his Vulture’s Row web site, or by tuning in today at 2 pm ET. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our live stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.

The New York Times reports the death of svengali, impressario, and iconoclast Malcolm McLaren, above, today, at the age of 64.

His companion of many years, Young Kim, confirmed that Mr. McLaren died on Thursday, and said that he died of mesothelioma at a hospital in Switzerland.

McLaren is best known, and will be most remembered, for assembling and managing the sneering punk prototypes, the Sex Pistols. Fearsome and outrageous, especially in an era that had just come through yacht rock and disco, the quartet’s sole, 1977 studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, right, remains one of the most influential rock albums ever. (This fact later led McLaren, with typical, consumate bombast, to declare himself “the inventor of punk.”)

I didn’t know about any of that, however, until much, much later. I didn’t know who McLaren even was until one afternoon in 1982, when driving down Commercial Ave. in Freeport, listening to my ‘75 Impala’s radio, I heard the opening wails of his agglomeration with New York’s World’s Famous Supreme Team, “Buffalo Gals.”

The unholy bastard offspring of Appalachian square dance chants being fornicated by hip-hop beats and scratching, “Buffalo Gals,” right, seemed to rip through the spacetime continuum—and my ears—with the wild ferocity of a long overdue supernova.

I well knew what turntables did. Yet for the 3 1/2 minutes the song played, I was utterly dumbfounded. I literally could not comprehend what was coming out of my car’s speakers. I felt like my sense of reality was being pushed and challenged, as though to a duel. It is possibly the closest I’ve ever come to wetting myself over a piece of music.

Some portion of the song’s startling and abrupt displacement, no doubt, should be credited to its producer, the astounding Trevor Horn, right, one of pop’s greatest.

On “Buffalo Gals,” every element in the track is meatily recorded and arranged: A corpulent bass line lumbers with the force of a bull; Fairlight synths shimmer like breaking sunbeams through storm clouds; and the turntables saw at the vinyl like desperate escapees. It all culminates in a roiling, imploding, 20-second breakdown at the end that never fails to gives me chills.

The World’s Famous Supreme Team—here, right, from their own later masterpiece, “Hey, D.J.”—impart vocals, dee-jaying, and radio show sound snippets that give the track its gritty and authentic surface texture. This is a hip-hop record. and they are the content; the hip-hop artists that make “Buffalo Gals” what it claims to be. (Ironically, however, neither d.j. is listed as a songwriter on the credits, denying them publishing income, certainly a sore point for them and probably key to their break with the Englishman.

McLaren, though, is the recording’s glue. He’s certainly the person who brought the aforementioned team together. He was no doubt the one who heard rap and said, “This reminds me of hillbilly music.” Indeed, it’s his loopy voice, shouting square dance calls as though they were cargo manifests, that sends the disc wickedly off-balance.

(Later that year, a gifted artist and I would fashion a 90-second animated short—titled “Break!”, yet!—to McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals” dub, “She’s Looking Like A Hobo.” It was the first project on which Chuck D and I ever collaborated, and the hit of Adelphi University’s communications department’s mini-film festival, representing a small, personal victory, and the beginning of a vital, defining friendship.)

Looking back at “Buffalo Gals,” though, what is most amazing is that the record really shouldn’t have worked. The elements that McLaren was attempting to jam together could have so easily collapsed into something extremely corny.

So, why doesn’t it? I think what gives it its power is that everyone plays their position with utter conviction. There’s no “wink wink” moment on “Buffalo Gals.” There’s no joke, no punchline. “Buffalo Gals” takes itself completely seriously. Nearly thirty years later, when you hear it, you can’t help but do the same.

Rest in peace, Malcolm McLaren…Malcolm…Malcolm McLaren….

That’s author Colson Whitehead (John Henry Days) in the hed, on Twitter, taking a little spit out of Tiger Woods’s new Nike ad, above.

In the spot, the disembodied voice of Woods’ late father and golf mentor, Earl, who died of a heart attack in 2006, is heard urging the athlete to deeper self-examination and introspection:

“Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?”

And that’s it. That, and a very controlled, low-key camera dolly-in to Woods’ expressive, soulful eyes.

The spot, which ran before and after Tiger teed off during the Masters Tournament, is the first Nike piece with Tiger to air, post the golfer’s massive Bimbo-gate sex scandal. (During the controversy, over a dozen women surfaced, claiming they’d slept with the married superstar.)

This commercial moves me to ask the question my sister and I always did after watching each lame Kansas video on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, right, late Saturday nights when we were kids: What does it mean?

Nike explains,

“We support Tiger and his family. As he returns to competitive golf, the ad addresses his time away from the game using the powerful words of his father.”

One expert considers it a valid way to re-introduce the athlete.

“You’ve stayed with the man, how do you re-engage?” said John Sweeney, director of sports communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “It’s not a question of what we would like to do under perfect circumstances, it’s like we’ve stayed the course, he’s back, how do we address it?”

The ad also plays off Woods’ prodigy aura by using his father, who is partly credited with Woods’ early success.

Woods has repeatedly said since re-emerging into public life that he strayed from the values instilled in him by his parents.

Thoughts?

You’re watching one of the highlights from a great day in Iowa City, and Fear of a Black Planet, Twenty Years Later, right, hosted by the University of Iowa last week.

As yours truly gestures, above left, event organizer Kembrew McLeod, Keith Shocklee, Hank Shocklee, and Chuck D eye a monitor from the table. It displays that black & white, composite photo, by me, of momentary levity from our WBAU days in the early ’80s. In that image are, l-to-r, Chuck, Keith, radio show host Bill Stephney, Andre “Dr. Dré” Brown, Flavor Flav, Tyrone “T-Money” Kelsie, and his unidentified friend. Good times, friends, front and back.