Busboys and Poets Getting Some Love

What does it mean to say that Busboys and Poets has been getting a lot of love from a lot of corners lately? It means that the great events that take place here are receiving favorable mentions from various writers and press outlets.

St. Patrick's Day has already come and gone-- or one could say that we're now approximately 354 days away from the next one-- but that's no reason not to note that the Progressive Democrats of America gave us a shout-out in conjunction with the holiday's happenings:

National radio commentator, author, and speaker Jim Hightower will bring his unique combination of political insight and down-home humor to Busboys and Poets Restaurant on March 17 to celebrate St. Patrick's Day with Capital Area members of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and help kick off PDA's "Healthcare NOT Warfare" national campaign.

Another thing that's recently taken place is, of course, Split This Rock: the four-day festival wherein poets and activists from all over the nation converged on the Capital City to collectively protest the Iraq War on the fifth anniversary of its inception. David Montgomery at The Washington Post wrote about it, and he didn't forget to mention us:

In long, disheveled columns, they are prowling Langston Hughes's old neighborhood around U Street NW. They are eating catfish at Busboys and Poets (where else?) and quoting Hughes, Shelley and Whitman back and forth -- "Through me many long dumb voices" -- over the hummus and merlot.

Catherine Andrews at the Washingtonian wrote about Split This Rock, and Busboys, too:

Timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, the Split This Rock Poetry Festival brings in writers from all over the world. They’ll be reading in a variety of locations along the U Street corridor. (Definitely check out Busboys & Poets, where several readings will take place.)

That's a lot of love. Thanks, everyone-- right back at you!

Bomani Armah, not a rapper but a poet with a hip-hop style, is hitting the big time

(Photo credit: By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

Bomani Armah is a Busboys and Poets regular. For the Busboys family, he often leads Open Mic Night while inspiring his fellow poets, poetesses and audience members alike.

We were thrilled to crack open this morning's Washington Post and see that they had featured Bomani on the cover of the Arts & Living Section (C01). The article's title is aptly written: His Punch Line Smarts: Hip-Hop Parodist Bomani Armah Juggles Sense of Humor and Identity, and the contents of the article are even better.

A few of our favorite passages on his provocative and now infamous song "Read a Book" (for the full article from today's paper, please click here)

[Its] rise to [the] consciousness:

He's fixated... on what has happened to him over the past four months, how he somehow became a symbol of the coarsening culture. All because he wrote a crunk song, "Read a Book," that traveled the Internet, that was discovered by Black Entertainment Television, that was made into a video, that ignited a controversy, that turned Bomani Armah into a person he didn't recognize, someone accused of "setting my people back 100 years." Between the irate blog posts and the snippy interviews by the likes of CNN's Tony Harris, Armah discovered that he had suddenly become somebody.

Bomani's follow-up thoughts [below the surface] of "Read a Book":

" 'Read a Book' was a joke from the beginning," he says. "It was more about parodying the state of hip-hop." And now it has become the thing that defines him. He thought about that for a moment. "Damn, do this many people not get me?"
[...]

"I feel like I'm a sergeant out here in the field, showing how ridiculous the culture is," Armah says. He began performing his song around the Washington area and it caught on. He made it available for free download on his MySpace page, and the buzz grew. At some point the "Read a Book" MP3 reached the inbox of Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for BET, who passed it on to the network's animation division, which loved it and wanted to create an animated video off the track. Which is where Tyree Dillihay, a Los Angeles-based animation director, comes in.