The James Logan Courier

By Frances Robles
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

MIAMI — Cuban punk rocker Gorki Aguila is irreverent, vulgar — and bolder than any other performance artist in modern Cuban history.

His lyrics blasting the Cuban dictatorship are so strong, the Miami Herald can't print too many of them. The founder and lead singer of the 10-year-old group "Porn for Ricardo" walks around the streets of his western Havana neighborhood with T-shirts that say things like, "59: Year of the Mistake."

In a case that has drawn attention around the world, the 39-year-old rocker went on trial Friday on charges of "pre-crime social dangerousness" that could send him to jail for up to four years.

By Roger Moore
The Orlando Sentinel (MCT)

Josh Peck of TV's "Drake & Josh" left his kiddie TV show days behind him with the indie coming-of-age dramedy "The Wackness" this summer, playing a pot dealer who finds love and sex over one magical summer before college. Drake Bell of TV's "Drake & Josh" — he plays Drake, y'see _ tries to go Josh one better, or worse, in "College," a raunchy comedy that plays like a Superbad without the smarts, the heart, the originality or the laughs.

Oh, to have a 16-year-old son or daughter, just so I could tell them, "No way you're seeing that junk."

Kevin (Bell) is a high school senior heading off to his visitation weekend at Fieldmont University. His girlfriend has just dumped him for being boring. His bookish classmate Morris (Kevin Covais) wants to really go and tour the campus, maybe land a scholarship. But slovenly, party-hearty pal Carter (Andrew Caldwell) figures it's time for Kevin to get his freak on.

From wikipedia:
Larry Neal or Lawerence Neal (September 5, 1937 – January 1981) was a scholar of African-American theatre. He is well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Neal was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1961 and received a master's degree in 1963 from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1968 to 1969, Neal taught at the City College of New York. The following year he taught at Wesleyan University. He taught at Yale University from 1970 to 1975. Neal is known for working with Amiri Baraka to open the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. His early writings—including "The Negro in the Theatre" (1964), "Cultural Front" (1965), and "The Black Arts Movement" (1968)—were influential in defining and describing the role of the arts in the Black Power era. His essays and poems appeared in publications such as Liberator, Drama Critque, Black Theatre, Negro Digest, Performance, and Black World. He also uncovered Ed Bullins's plagiarism of Albert Camus's play The Just Assassins. Neal died from a heart attack in 1981.

Learn more about Larry Neal and his work, free from the African American Literature Book Club.