One member of my panel at last month’s West Hollywood Book Fair said he doesn’t attend a film without the flick first getting approval from critic Ernest Hardy. I assume he was excluding DVDs here. Still I denounced the strategy as absolute bullshit. At least, that kid Ernest skips out on a lot of action fare; it’s not even clear that he’s yet seen Jackass: Number Two.

But where reliance on the LA Weekly contributor’s capsule reviews is utterly dodgy, consumption his best cultural criticism is required like vitamins.

Ordinarily I don’t cotton to gay men staring at me while I take a whiz. In spite of this, Hardy’s collection bloodbeats: vol. 1 stayed posted on my toilet’s back. And the book’s soft cover show’s the author’s eyes looking out from behind nerdly black frames. (Upon spanking the monkey, I flip bloodbeats over; a nigga’s progressive, but he’s not tryna get toooo crazy!)

As Philadelphia Weekly just pointed out, Ernest, “has a low tolerance for bullshit. He’s also immune to the hype that comes with a new release.”
And those qualities are hard to come by in a genuinely hip critic.

There’s intense competition for the title of best quality in Hardy’s prose. I’m inclined to prefer 1) its ability to swivel between film and black pop music subjects while keeping an eye toward trends in American politics, and 2) the (seemingly) effortless elegance of his sentences. Here’s something from his take on Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine:

“There’s a dazed hum vibrating in Velvet Goldmine, a sense of spiritual hangover specifically located in scenes set in the ’80s, a measured lament that answers, yes, there was such a moment. And it’s gone.”

My whole shit with criticism is, ultimately: Nigga, don’t tell me what to think. That’s why I don’t fuck with too many of those scribes. Hardy, who was in large part mentored by NY Times critic Manohla Dargis, is however one of a handful who transcend the ability to be the boss of one’s mind. In all honesty, I disagree with him a lot more than I do the average critic, his aesthetic being a very distant cousin of mine. The number of new ideas in a typical Ernest Hardy review is high enough — and the prose liquid enough — that I’ll put the petty disagreements aside though.

Full disclosure: the subject of this blog item is a longtime friend. Yet’s such a difficult twerp that there’s no way I’d be trying to help the motherfucker on purpose. This praise is about the product and about you, the reader, as your life will be much better with bloodbeats in it. His writing on MeShell NdegeOcello is enough to justify every party of mine that he failed to show up to, each argument about the culture of gangsta rap that ended in stilted silence and bullshit reasons for hanging up. He’s got great pieces on Lauren Hill, D’Angelo, homo-thugs, Warren Beatty and a dozen other topics.

Go cop, for real. Vol. 2 hits in ‘07 and you’ll need to be ready for that.

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