Man, nobody wants to hear this news. It’s like hearing your grandpa just had a stroke. American actor Morgan Freeman was airlifted to a hospital in Memphis after the car he was travelling in drove off the road and flipped over several times.

From Reuters:

TUPELO, Mississippi (Reuters) - Oscar-winning U.S. actor Morgan Freeman was hospitalized in serious condition on Monday after the car he was driving careened off a rural highway and rolled several times, authorities said.

Freeman, 71, was airlifted late on Sunday night to a Memphis, Tennessee, hospital, about 100 miles from the accident scene, which is near a home he keeps in Charleston, Mississippi.

“The vehicle went off the edge of the road and flipped several times,” Mississippi Highway Patrol Sgt. Ben Williams said. No other car was involved in the accident.

From the direction Freeman was traveling, he appeared to be headed toward his home, Williams said.

Williams said it was “possible” that Freeman, who co-stars in the current blockbuster Batman movie the “Dark Knight,” had fallen asleep at the wheel, but he added that authorities had ruled out alcohol as a factor in the wreck.

Freeman was conscious and talking to arriving officers afterward, Williams said, adding that no citation had been issued in the accident.

A spokeswoman at Regional Medical Center in Memphis said Freeman was in serious condition but gave no further details.

Both Freeman and a female passenger, identified as Demaris Meyer, were wearing seat belts, but the air bags did not deploy in the 1997 Nissan Maxima registered to Meyer, Williams said. He said he did not know the extent of her injuries.

Reuters/Nielsen

That sound you just heard was Samuel L. Jackson’s workload doubling.

For a time Rage Against The Machine ruled my life. I got into my first car accident while listening to “Killing In The Name Of.” Had to stash the driver’s bong before the police showed up…

Then Audioslave happened. Yep. Kinda ground my teeth through that one.

All the while vocalist Zach De La Rocha was working on his seemingly never to be released solo album.

Rage fans ready to be stoked? The wait is over with the announcement of…no, not the solo album, but an EP from the new band One Day As A Lion, featuring De La Rocha and Jon Theodore, formerly of Mars Volta.
Seems like a good match. On 7/22, the One Day As a Lion EP will be available on Anti- Records.

From Artist Direct:

The endless wait for Zack De La Rocha’s solo album will finally come to a pseudo halt on July 22 with the release of One Day As a Lion’s debut EP. A collaboration between De La Rocha and ex-Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore, the duo has completed five songs for their self-titled disc. None of which feature DJ Shadow, Trent Reznor, or ?uestlove of The Roots—artists that have been tied to De La Rocha’s long-rumored solo recordings.

“It’s a sonic reflection of the visceral tension between a picturesque fabricated cultural landscape, and the brutal socioeconomic realities it attempts to mask,” the group explained in a statement.

In other De La Rocha news, Rage Against the Machine has seven festival dates lined up for this summer, including an appearance at Lollapalooza on August 2.

One Day As a Lion:

1. Wild International
2. Ocean View
3. Last Letter
4. If You Fear Dying
5. One Day As a Lion

For cryptic info on the band, check out their (currently music-less) MySpace profile.

[The following was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Emilie Clark. She can be reached at emilie@synthesis.net.]

Little Things: A Memoir in Slices
By Jeffrey Brown
Touchstone

So I’ll just come right out and say it: This is not a great book. People who are coming to Jeffrey Brown’s work for the first time should avoid this book entirely (try Clumsy and I Am Going to Be Small instead). But any book by Brown is better than a book by many other people, so let’s not disregard it entirely.
Brown started his career in comics tentatively, forced to publish his first books on his own. But now he’s become a household name — at least if you live in the kind of house where you discuss indie comics. He is famous for his realistic, heartbreaking dissections of the intimacies and distances in relationships. Little Things is his longest book to date, and, rather than being one autobiographical narrative he presents the events of two years of his life in smaller, unstructured narratives. As you might imagine the stories focus on the little, and often more mundane moments in life. Brown’s large-headed, stubble-heavy caricature of himself spends a lot of time having boring conversations with his friends, gets a cat, and goes on a lot of trips to visit friends. Even the more exciting parts of the narrative — including two hospitalizations and a car accident — are reduced to the smaller, quieter moments.

…more after the jump… (more…)