richardmurray

OMELETO

My thoughts
I watched this... this is lovely this is lovely ... I will be blunt, the black community globally has a problem. It has been oppressed for hundreds of years and has gained a majority 
URL
https://youtu.be/ab8IUtHG1iA

Marvin Gaye 1983 Interview

paraphrases

One can't have hits if one isn't commercial

I won't have any credibility unless I am on top

People don't comprehend record artist like painters 

I am awfully afraid of getting there, looks like only one way from there

So if I have to do sex so they can listen to social topics 

Worst rock bottom moment in the last seven years when i tried to commit suicide by an overdose of cocaine

I was in love with my wife at my time, and I couldn't handle the rejection... I thought I was king of the world now I am prince

I never played with the other kids when I was little.

One can never be a fine artist if one hasn't lived and experienced life's negatives. 

I look upon the motown days as times I wouldn't pay a million dollars for but I also would pay a million dollars to have the experience again.

I would like to start with motown again but i would like to write the script different to be a little happier.

I hate those human feelings, I like the feelings of an artist

The last time Lou Rawls won one he gave me a smile, it gave me chills , I told my wife i would tackle him and grab the award

In music, disk jockeys, feel free to edit and tamper... in fact its the reason why I left motown and asked berry gordy to release me. my last album was tampered with horribly and .. is hwy i asked to be released. 

I'd rather never have a hit than for my music to be touched

It's taken about a few years, about 400 or so , for white america to come to the point where they feel rhythm and blues... or rhythm and pop , these categories kill me too, is acceptable

There was a time you couldn't bring a soul record into the home in white america

It all started in the rock and roll era when elvis and everybody was taken after chuck berry it slowly started to change

Basically it is a white artist doing the same thing a black artist is doing but it is acceptable when a white artist, with black artist it is raw

let's take reggae for instance, bob marley is very interesting, he has taken his roots music, but bob marley is intelligent enough, or was , god bless him and i love him, he took the roots music and was smart enough to incorporate some of the western music. 

And he took the rawness from it so it can be accepted by other nationalities.

After a while there will be no categories, music will be music

There are those who want to hold on to the last vestiges of their prejudices, meaning , a little thing, like winning an american music award and winning in all categories and then you watch the television the next day and who won the pop category dah dha dha dah and they will not show who won the soul category. we will not admit that. I am a rhythm and blues artist and soul artist and black singer, it doesn't take anything from my humanity

Marvin gaye won in the soul category, other artist take my work and can be announced as winners in their categories , why can't I be announced. That's not very nice

I want to say the ted turner news agency out of atlanta showed the r and b winners.I just thought i wanted to share that, good man.

Maybe a far right station in ohio. 
URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L63XR2hFgpg

IN AMENDMENT

Marvin Gaye stated his success with sexual healing was a sort of revenge. And it made me think about so many different types of artists who have said similar in my memory. Artists who came back to the top always speak of the people, whose names can't be mentioned or will not be mentioned, that basically knocked down or didn't support when they were down, and I wonder how to end that aspect of entertainment culture.
I am not ignorant, I comprehend the commonality, but I also realize, something in the USA keeps it alive. Is it the fiscal capitalism? the greed of people is so pure when one stops making money they are treated as if they never did. IS it the yes culture to success? People who can't  stand you are trained in USA culture to act like loving friends till they can finally kick you without penalty. I wonder.

IN AMENDMENT PART 2

In some ways he is right. Pop music, which is short for popular music, which at its roots means, music of the people, is the last label, cause modern music labeled pop contains hybrids of many musical styles, so that day is coming where the way in which music is advertised or approached will require a major linguistical shift.

IN AMENDMENT PART 3

Marvin Gaye said reaching the top only has one destination from there, going down, his transcendence is the only out. I wish it would had not been forced.

Octavia Tried To Tell Us XXIV: KINDRED Goes Hollywood

Some thoughts on making black male characters impotent in film and the use of black literature in film as an adaptation

In the discussion between Tananarive Due side Monica Coleman many excellent points were made but two I want to focus on.

First, I thought of Denzel Washington's career and the only three earliest films I can think where he wasn't married already or physically unable to fornicate <the bone collector> was the mighty quinn , mo better blues, plus devil in a blue dress. 
In devil in a blue dress he has various interest from various females, so the only normal for a male lead of a certain age. 
In mighty quinn, he desires a single mom whom he knew before the baby. 
And in Mo Better Blues he ignores the woman he has known for a while for a stylized woman but when he falls, he goes to the women waiting for him:) I know poor lauren bacall in Bright Leaf. Few women in my view matched patricia neal's "villainous" in this film
So I concur it is rare for black males in hollywood <white financed film> historically

Second, I thought on Tananarive Due's thoughts on adaptations. 
From Oscar Michaeux to Ousmane Sembene to Julie Dash many Black filmmakers are used to writing their own work to be filmed. and white filmmakers created a heritage of using white literature to make films that have black characters, ala Uncle Remus or Porgy and Bess. 
It is rarest for films to be adapted from black literature absent the black writer being the black director. 
Sequentially, a the goal by denzel to adapt all of august wilson's works into films, while a start, needs a greatr follow up of adaptions by black literary work from the 1800s.                                               

URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=178amUHLmRA&feature=emb_imp_woyt
IN AMENDMENT 
A great scene in 12 years a slave is when the white wife of fastbender the slaveowner demands lupita nyongo's slave be sold and fastbender says with a reality that the two panelist support as real, that patsy is his best earner, she can't go, but fastbender in his expression also shows, how his slave master would love to put his white wife out in the field after her demand, displaying from his vantage point she is merely one step from the enslaved.

prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2182&type=status

The items returned on Tuesday included an ivory mask that formerly belonged to a museum in Stuttgart, Germany.Credit...Kola Sulaimon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

How Germany Changed Its Mind, and Gave the Benin Bronzes Back
A ceremony in Nigeria on Tuesday was the culmination of a yearslong process that upended Germany’s approach to museum items looted during the colonial era.

By Thomas Rogers, Rahila Lassa and Alex Marshall
Dec. 20, 2022

When the airplane of Germany’s foreign minister touched down in Abuja, Nigeria, this past weekend, it carried precious cargo: 20 Benin Bronzes, priceless artifacts that were looted in a violent raid more than a century ago, and which were finally coming home.

At a ceremony in Abuja on Tuesday, the German official, Annalena Baerbock, handed the stolen items back to Nigerian officials. “It was wrong to take the bronzes, and it was wrong to keep them for 120 years,” she said.

In a legal sense, the 20 artifacts Baerbock brought with her belonged to Nigeria even before she took off from Berlin; more than 1,100 bronzes in German museums have become Nigerian property since the countries signed an agreement in July. But Tuesday’s handover was an important symbolic gesture, and many more of the artifacts are expected to come back to Nigeria next year. Others will remain in Germany on long-term loan.

The foreign minister’s trip is the culmination of a yearslong process that upended Germany’s approach to handling cultural items unjustly obtained during the colonial period. It is also part of a pioneering model for large-scale restitution, in which ownership is swapped before any artifacts change hands. Crucially, that approach allows for items to be restituted even if the country of origin does not yet have the facilities to store and exhibit them.

Baerbock described the return of the bronzes as “just the first step.”

“More of these agreements will follow,” she said. “And this moment is also historic to us. We are facing up to our history of colonialism.”

The bronzes consist of thousands of sculptures and plaques that British forces looted from Benin City, in what is now southern Nigeria, during a raid in 1897. Many wound up in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the British Museum, in London; and several major German institutions.

Nigeria has been calling for the objects’ return for several decades, and its deal with Germany is the largest yet. It is also notable because the effort was spearheaded not by individual museums, but by a national government.

The items returned on Tuesday included an 18th-century throne stool and a sculpture commemorating a Benin “oba,” or king. A pavilion to store and display the treasures is being built in Benin City and will most likely be completed in 2023. The building will be next to the planned Edo Museum of West African Art, an ambitious institution designed by the acclaimed Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye.

This outcome had seemed far-fetched as recently as five years ago. As in other European countries, the subject of restitution had been largely ignored in Germany until recently, and some museum leaders had been reluctant to part ways with artifacts.

The about-face was driven — as interviews with eight German and Nigerian officials showed — by a changing social consensus about the ethics of holding on to such items, and further strengthened by a backlash against Germany’s flagship cultural project: the Humboldt Forum, an $825 million institution in Berlin, conceived as Germany’s equivalent to the Louvre or the British Museum.

According to Andreas Görgen, the secretary general of Germany’s Federal Culture Ministry and one of the architects of the restitution agreement, the deal was also a testament to a careful, incremental strategy, which he contrasted with a flashier approach from France.

In 2017, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gave a groundbreaking speech during a visit to Burkina Faso in which he pledged to make returning unjustly acquired items to African countries “a top priority.” Although some objects have been given back, the French effort has floundered, in part because museum objects are property of the French state, meaning Parliament must sign off on transfers of ownership.

“Macron took the very French route: a great speech by a great president, then it takes years for reality to match those words,” Görgen said. “We are operating in a German way,” he said. “It isn’t especially sexy, but it can be efficient.”

Germany’s approach also contrasts with those of the United States and British governments, which have left decisions up to individual institutions. Some organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, have acted alone. Last month, the Horniman Museum, in London, held a ceremony to transfer ownership of 72 objects, including bronzes, to Nigeria’s government, and immediately returned six to Nigerian hands. A museum spokeswoman said the other 66 items would stay in London, on loan from Nigeria, for at least the next year.

Yet some of the most important museums in England cannot return their Benin Bronzes, even if they wanted to, without a change in the law. That includes the British Museum, which owns about 900 of the artifacts, arguably the world’s finest collection.

According to officials in Germany, a key turning point there occurred in 2019, amid growing public pressure. It was partly spurred by Macron’s speech and a rising awareness in Germany of its own colonial crimes — including the killing of tens of thousands of Nama and Herero people in what is now Namibia. The atrocity, carried out between 1904 and 1908, is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Until then, the main vehicle for discussing the return of the Benin Bronzes had been the Benin Dialogue Group, a network founded in 2010 that brought together Nigerian representatives and figures from European museums with bronzes in their collections. The group, however, favored loans over transfers of ownership.

Some prominent German museum officials were already on the record opposing complete restitution. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel in 2018, Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which held the largest collection of Benin Bronzes in the country, said, “It is too simple to say that they were all stolen and to send them back.” He added, “Politicians should not try to outdo each other with pronouncements.”

Parzinger was among those overseeing the construction of the Humboldt Forum, a controversial project uniting several museums’ collections in a reconstructed Baroque palace in the center of Berlin. Although many Germans initially bristled at the project because it required the demolition of the former East German Parliament, which was seen as an act of historical erasure, that anger soon refocused on the provenance of many objects to be exhibited in the building, including about 500 Benin Bronzes.

In 2017, Bénédicte Savoy, a historian who advised Macron on restitution, resigned from the Humboldt Forum’s advisory board in protest, comparing the project to the Chernobyl nuclear accident site. Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian at the University of Hamburg, accused the Humboldt Forum’s leaders, including Parzinger, of having “colonial amnesia.”

As public anger mounted, German lawmakers began looking for ways to salvage the country’s most ambitious cultural project in decades.

According to Zimmerer, a key moment occurred in February 2019, when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, invited a small number of historians and experts to a dinner to discuss restitution. Zimmerer recalled telling Merkel that an agreement with Nigeria about the bronzes needed to be reached before the Humboldt Forum’s upcoming opening, lest “the spotlight of the entire world” be focused on criticism of the project. He recalled her saying later that evening, “Then why don’t we give them back?” (A spokeswoman for the former chancellor declined to comment.)

Germany’s federal and state culture ministers convened the following month to approve guidelines for handling museum items from “colonial contexts.” The agreement stipulated that all objects that had been obtained “unethically” would be liable for return and directed institutions to facilitate claims by producing publicly available inventories.

Those guidelines also overruled reluctant museum leaders. “Society applied the pressure on the politicians,” Zimmerer said, “and the politicians applied the pressure on the museums.” He argued that the sudden rise in public support for restitution had been enhanced by an awareness of earlier moves to return artwork stolen by the Nazis. “People know that looted art is something you give back,” Zimmerer said.

In an interview, Parzinger, the museum official, explained his own change of heart. “The Benin Bronzes are so symbolic for colonial-era cultural theft that one cannot simply push it away,” he said.

A group under the leadership of Markus Hilgert, a leading cultural official representing Germany’s 16 states, began working on an online catalog listing the bronzes being held in disparate collections. “Objects are often not inventoried or digitalized, and it raised the question of how you can have a dialogue with a country of origin when you don’t even know what is in Germany,” Hilgert said. The resulting database, he said, “was the material foundation for taking up conversations with Nigeria.”

As the Germans signaled they were moving toward restitution, obstacles remained on the Nigerian side. Although the country had requested the return of the bronzes since the 1970s, there was conflict over who would take ownership of the artifacts. Both the Nigerian government and the oba of Benin, whose family ruled the historical Kingdom of Benin from which they were looted, claimed that they owned the items. Godwin Obaseki, the governor of Edo State, where Benin City is, said he acted as a facilitator to resolve the dispute.

“Things happened so quickly that we couldn’t get everybody on the same page fast enough,” Obaseki said.

Nigeria also lacked the facilities to safely store and exhibit the delicate items. Phillip Ihenacho, a Nigerian financier, said that in 2019, Obaseki asked him to find a solution to the country’s “deficit in museum infrastructure.” He noted that “there was pressure from the German end.”

Ultimately, he said, the oba’s family, Nigeria’s museum commission and the government of Edo State agreed to join a trust together, with independent directors that oversee the construction and operation of the new museum.

Görgen, the culture ministry official, said the announcement of the museum plans in late 2020 helped eradicate any remaining doubts in Germany. After several rounds of negotiations in the spring of 2021, Germany and Nigeria signed a “memorandum of understanding,” and then the official agreement in July 2022. The agreement was finalized weeks ahead of the opening of the Humboldt Forum’s ethnological exhibits.

Visitors to the Humboldt Forum can still view several dozen Benin Bronzes, accompanied by signage clarifying that the objects belong to Nigeria. According to Parzinger, the agreement allows for 168 pieces chosen by Nigeria’s museum commission to remain in Germany “so that Benin’s art can be shown to the world.” The approximately 350 other bronzes that were part of the Berlin museum collections will be transported to Nigeria once the pavilion is completed.

Officials in Benin City hope the return of the artifacts and the construction of the Edo Museum of West African Art will herald a cultural revival and a boom in tourism. Obaseki, the Edo governor, said its effects would ideally resemble those of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is credited with transforming the fortunes of that formerly gritty port city.

Ihenacho, however, made it clear that the bronzes’ return brought with it a new set of practical challenges for Nigeria. It remains unclear who will pay for the shipment and insurance of the remaining items in Germany, and he noted that the bronzes’ storage and upkeep will come at a considerable cost, including electrical bills for climate control. “These objects are going to cost a lot of money, so you had better be prepared,” Ihenacho said, noting that the country’s museum infrastructure was still being built up.

“To the West, this story is very much about the return of the Benin Bronzes,” Ilhenacho said, “but for most Nigerians, this is the beginning.”

URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/arts/benin-bronzes-nigeria-germany.html
 

MY THOUGHTS

Many talk of Black Unity in black countries  but this history highlight  one of the true problems with black unity in black countries. The fact that when Germany on its own, said nigeria owned all the bronzes that Nigeria had an internal battle to figure out who in nigeria will own them speak volumes to me. The first question in my mind, is how many other black countries will have similar difficulty? The good news is Nigeria figured out how to find a solution between all the parties in nigeria. and maybe this art venture may create a new approach in nigeria to administration. As Ilhenacho said, this is the beginning.

Black Home Movies

Sir Solomon Jones’ Home Movies, 1925-1926

The Sir Solomon Jones home films are a dynamic showcase of Black living. His movies are some of the earliest accessible intracommunity chronicles of Black life. Solomon Jones displays the intimacy of hairdressing, football games, and Turkey Day in this silent survey.

URL

https://blackfilmarchive.com/Sir-Solomon-Jones-Home-Movies-1925-1926

URL

https://beineckelibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1058/collection_resources/35014

Wedding Reception

What does tenderness look like? In this short home movie, Thomas F. Freeman records the pomp and circumstance of the union of two hearts.

URL

https://blackfilmarchive.com/Wedding-Reception

URL

https://texasarchive.org/2011_00779

Zahera of Nalak-bel
The poem is entitle=> Yerewfo, The Bard to Zahera: The cup of Zahera plus six fool
Audiobook
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/yerewfo-the-bard-to-zahera-the-cup-of-zahera-plus-six-fool
Book cover black and white version
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Zahera-of-Nalak-bel-BW-941242244
Book cover color version
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Zahera-of-Nalak-bel-Color-941248429