Food, Freedom, and Black August in Brooklyn

In a Bed-Stuy storefront that used to be a 99-cent store, Ralph Warren built something else entirely: Brooklyn Blend, a juice bar where food is medicine and healing moves slower than the neighborhood around it.

Sixx sits down with Ralph for Black August — the month we remember George Jackson and Attica — to talk about staying when everyone else is scaling, feeding people who can't pay, and why "health is political" isn't a slogan here. It's the whole business model.

Hollywood Shuffle: The Conversation We're Not Done Having

In 1987, Robert Townsend maxed out his own credit cards and pieced together financing from friends to make a film Hollywood wasn't making room for. Nearly forty years later, we screened it — and we're still sitting with what it asks.

This is Culture Corner: where the movie isn't the whole point. The real question is what it costs to build something in your own voice when the industry keeps handing you somebody else's script.

We sat down for an in-depth conversation on ownership, legacy, and what's actually changed since 1987. Read it below.

There is a particular kind of unease that Black and Brown men know intimately.

Not hunger, exactly.

More like a hollow.

A restlessness that keeps you moving, filling, performing, achieving all while feeling like something essential is missing.

We fill it with whatever we can reach.

Work. Substances. Screens. Relationships. Titles. Noise.

We stay busy because stillness is terrifying when you haven't been told that you deserve to rest in yourself.

But busyness is not groundedness.

And filling a hole is not the same as healing one.

Everything in The Brothers Size is deliberate. From the weight of the African names given to its characters, to the way soundscapes of blues and soul breathe through each scene, this isn’t theater for spectacle. It’s theater for truth. Raw. Real. Unapologetic.

We have spent too long treating men’s mental health as a crisis to manage. May and June ask something different of us. They ask us to celebrate. They ask us to feel. They ask us, especially us, Black men to choose joy with the same intentionality we were taught to choose strength.

The Brother From Another Planet, explains the Alien Effect: the moment when a young Black man's developing body, evolving mind, and shifting social role collide with a world that has already decided he is a threat. He hasn't changed his heart. He hasn't changed his intentions. But the world has changed its gaze, and that gaze reshapes everything.