Malcolm in the Break Room

Someone donated three boxes containing every New Yorker from the past 7 years, from 2016––now. That's more than 300 issues. Since a lot of the magazine's content remains interesting, they do sell, but we happen to have about 50 issues spilling off the magazine rack right now. 

I decided to take off and frame some of the coolest covers. We usually have lots of picture frames priced at 99 cents, and I think the framed covers would sell in BOOK’s for a coupla bucks. Not the best time-per-penny ratio, but I’d enjoy doing it, and I always like to snazz up my area.

But this first cover (2/22/2016) I framed, for which I even found a mat, I put in our break room, underneath the MLK Time cover I’d framed a while ago.
When Mr Furniture came in, I said, “Look, I put up Malcolm X to balance out MLK, like you and Big Boss.”

“He’s no MLK,” Mr Furniture said. “More like Dr. Phil.” 

(Mr F’s a nick-namer. He calls Big Boss 'Dr. Phil' to his face, and me 'San Francisco'. Asst Man is 'Opie' from Mayberry.)

Mr Furniture paused. “But I could be Malcolm .”

See the art close-up, at The New Yorker:

Kadir Nelson's painting “celebrates the Schomburg Research Center [for Black Culture--a branch of the NYPL] in Harlem.
He wanted to create ‘an homage to the great Harlem Renaissance painters Aaron Douglas [the background painting, “Into Bondage”], William H. Johnson [“Café” couple, 1940]…
Also …artists and performers the Nicholas Brothers, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington; the activist Malcolm X;
and writers James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston.'"

THE BEST: the famous Nicholas Bros. 3-minute dancing scene (the staircase!), here on youTube—from Stormy Weather (1943, Cab Calloway at the start):