Search the Community
Showing results for 'movies that move we' in status updates.
-
This year's Lena Baker Women's Health & Domestic Violence Summit will explore the mental health effects of continuous physical and psychological traumas that plagues American of the slavocracy system (ADOSS) through the music of Curtis Mayfield (Jun 03, 1942 - Dec 26, 1999). Mayfield was a prolific songwriter that wrote about being Black in America and black consciousness. We will explore Mayfield's most iconic songs that address internal colonization "We the People Are Darker Than Blue", Identity production "This Is My Country", and "People Get Ready". We will also explore the question, "Is there a time to heal?" with Mayfield's "Choice of Colors".
Min. Loretta Green-Williams
Summit Moderator
Postcolonial Theorist | Fd, CEO WOCPSCNSpecial Guest Speaker
Denise Jackson
COVID: Mental Health of Domestic Violence
Thursday, October, 27, 2022, 11 am est
Series One: "We Are People Darker Than Blue" When Colorism Destroys the HeartBased on the lyrics of Curtis Mayfield, this conversation will consider the difficulties of misogynoir, and colorism, among women of color.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2022 12-noon pm est
Dr. Tamu Petra Browne
Growth & Innovation Coach for Women Entrepreneurs
Thursday, October 27, 2022Dr. LaTarsha Holden, MBA
Leadership Consultant | Author
Series Two: "This Is My Country": When They Share Their Care
This conversation will consider the physical and physiological trauma of racism and what it currently feels and looks like.FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2022 12-noon est
Vaneese Johnson
Global Speaker | Author
Friday, October 28, 2022Desheen-in-the-chair-683x1024_edited.jpg
D'Sheene L. Evans
Visionarypreneur| Trauma Recovery Coach
The Trauma of Community
Friday, October 28, 2022
Series Three: "People Get Ready": When Being Sick Is When You Are Sick-n-Tired
"People Get Ready" was released the year of the voting rights act (1965), Americans that were descendants of the slavocratic system were given reason for optimism. However, with the reversal of recent American rights, and new traumatic occurrences, how do the people get ready when the train is derailed?
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2022 4:30 PM EST
Special Guest Speaker
Lola Russell, Ph.D.
Health Communications at CDC and Prevention
The Intersectionality of Trauma: Exploring the Patchwork of BeingDr. Mustafa Ansari
Dean Afro-Descendant Institute of Human Rights Chief Facilitator African Descendant NationSeries Four: "Choice of Colors": When the Horrors of History Claim We Are Still Americans
The US big city hate crimes spiked by 39% in 2021*, and with one of the more horrific racial crimes, the Buffalo shooting, the conversation will center around healing processes. Mayfield's "Choice of Colors" will be the foundation of discussion. We will consider the historic formations that has created the American construct of racism. We will discuss what components towards racial healing can be considered. We will also consider how we can move forward, "...in order to form a more perfect union,..(Preamble of the United. States of America Constitution, 1787)".
Sunday, October 30, 2022 4:30 PM EST
Joan Babiak
Moderator
Attorney |Board of Trustees Member
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Dr. Camelia Straughn
Transformational Coach | Author | International Speaker
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Lorlett Hudson FRSA
Leadership Coach | Working with African and Caribbean Leaders and Entrepreneurs-
MY COMMENTS
It is not always fear, sometimes it is desire. If a white man owns a business and has a sign, no black people, is it fear? A person has the right to want to only serve a certain people. But , the problem is, in a country that invites or publicly states it is for all people, how do you have people who don't want to be around all types side people who do want to be around all types ?
circa 10:00 It is not always fear, sometimes it is desire. If a white man owns a business and has a sign, no black people, is it fear? A person has the right to want to only serve a certain people. But , the problem is, in a country that invites or publicly states it is for all people, how do you have people who don't want to be around all types side people who do want to be around all types ?
circa 18:00 I oppose the idea of focusing on the youth. I concur to Dr. Camelia Straughn that people do not change , I amend, specifically to being bullied or pushed or canceled. But, history proves negative bias is emitted by youth when people think the youth are enlightened from the elders. I think all need to be focused on. The problem is, and you see this with the cancel culture, the youth in the usa who are supposedly liberal are very constrictive or restrictive in what they can accept being said, which means they are replacing a rigid culture to another.
circa 21:00 I concur to Loretta Green that people in the usa do not acknowledge problems. The biggest is the native american. Most liberals in the usa don't acknowledge the inability of liberalism to empower the most oppressed people in the USA or before it. Those people being the native american. But why? Like those who ancestors were enslaved, the scope of the problem is massive. So it is financially or organizationally easier to evade admitting a problem, then to admit a problem and then have to deal with healing from it. It is easier to say, all is good now.
circa 28:00 great point from Loretta, I add to her point that Black people in the USA itself are unwilling to accept the structural problem with descendents of enslaved people's having to wait later to get what other people of color: non european whites, have been able to have with an existence in the usa after 1965
circa 31:00 yes, Curtis Mayfield comprehended the complexity of a country where the peoples in it are not on the same page. James Baldwin said it simply. The world is not white, and the world is not black either. I admit, I have never felt fear walking in harlem. ... I add that Baldwin suggested the key is flexibility. His father wasn't flexible. His father was a black man who hated whites, to the bone. But couldn't retaliate or injure whites, so the hate is deep inside, and anything that has involvement from whites which means the entire government of the usa, is hated by such a black person.
circa 35:00 Maybe one day, the day a Black woman doesn't have to be strong no matter what in the USA, will be a great day
circa 41:00 great point about Loretta about the problem with speaking to doctors who are not as delicate to their role as guide. The scene in a film, as good as it gets, says it all. The female lead in the film is a mother with a child who is going to doctors constantly, but only when the male lead provides a private doctor is her son properly diagnosed. The point, doctors are business people, and if you don't have money, most will treat you as the lawyers do to the fiscal poor in a court room.
circa 44:00 Important point by Bablak, the quality of advocacy , which doesn't mean from elected officials but from community agents, has changed since the legendary 1960s. It can be argued it is less than, fro a larger perspective. But her point that it needs to be stronger from the individual is functional. I think the affordable care act, never spoke to quality of care, and focused on accesible care. So everyone can afford healthcare theoretically but the quality of healthcare that most can afford is very low quality.But quality is expensive.
Circa 48:00 Straughn speaks that people carry trauma's in them but I argue that all children reflect the negativty from their parents. If your parents in a white town in appalachia or a black town in mississippi or a native american reservation in a western state are unhappy and full of negativity or doubts then the children will reflect that in various negative ways.
circa 51:00 I concur to loretta 100% , I feel black elders in the past were done a disservice by their children or grandchildren who could write, by not getting them to tell their stories. Zora Neale Hurston was right.
IN CONCLUSION
The theme of the multiracial populace having problems handling itself in the USA is common as it was how the usa started.
I think the youth may not be the answer some suggest. But I will say that all peoples in the usa need guidance to what the usa has never been, a country where all groups or individuals are empowered.
-
My gosh, this was an awesome article.
I will try to locate the video.
It strikes a nerve to read about the purpose that the affordable Care Act serves. It really hurts, because I feel this reality all of the time now, when I go to the doctor. Before this act, my insurance was paid for and reasonable and I feel I had better care, a little better. But now, I have this low paying insurance because othe REGULAR INSURANCE is very expensive now that this affordable care act is law, and well, the medical attention I receive is awful, just awful. I now try to find other ways to get healthy and stay healthy if possible, and going to the clinic is a last resort... again, that is pathetic.
Anyway, again, love this article.
-
@Chevdoveyes, it was shared to me by a connection elsewhere.
just click on the links, I saw the videos I think it sad that the subject matter of rape demands these videos be viewed only on youtube, i think that is very silly but...
Well, in defense to the affordable care act, obama wanted to kill it, it was nancy pelosi who pushed it through. Like the student loan debt, the goal of these laws in the obama or biden era isn't betterment for all, it is betterment for minorities while majorities adjust.... whether it is people who couldn't get healthcare before the affordable care act or people who have massive student debt before debt relief. Both of those groups are minorites, not 50$ or 70% or 40% of the people in the usa. but the concept is majority make way for minority. that is the larger policy structure.
In parallel, biden or the party of andrew jackson was opposed to the another round of emergency checks which covered most people in the usa while the party of abraham lincoln supported continuing the checks.
yeah, good article,glad you liked it
-
-
Celebrity DJ’s Wife Faked Orgasms for 10 Years of Marriage because of ‘Not Knowing Her Own Body’
(Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)
Popular daily radio and vlog show, The Breakfast Club co-host DJ Envy and his wife Gia Casey have been in the news lately, and not for their job. Gia has admitted she had faked orgasms for 10 years of her marriage. It was something she said she did repeatedly and consistently. The couple sat down with The Shade Room to have an intimate chat and discuss their new book Real Life, Real Love: Life Lessons on Joy, Pain & the Magic That Holds Us Together.Casey started the conversation about her struggle to reach a climax with her husband because it is a part of the book, which is available now. The radio personality, as Casey shared, was her first and only because they met in high school.
“Most young girls and even many, many, many women, I’m sure so many women can relate, don’t know how to achieve an orgasm,” she said. “A lot of women have no idea what it feels like to have an orgasm through sexual intercourse.”
“We would be intimate and he would be putting his best foot forward…he lives to make me happy. So I would see him trying and really going to work,” she continued. “You want to reward that man for that work and the only reward that you have to offer is an orgasm. But even if I didn’t feel it, I would still be performative.”
In retrospect, Casey says she realized he couldn’t help her reach orgasm because she didn’t know what she needed to get there.
“He was doing everything a man could do to please a woman. The problem was, I didn’t know my own body,” she admitted.
This is more of a common problem for women than you think.
According to the published Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, a whopping 81.6% of women don’t orgasm from intercourse alone (without additional clit stimulation). And nearly 15% of women have never orgasmed ever!
Not reaching an orgasm makes a great number of women feel inadequate, as if her sexual equipment is broken, leading her down a path of exploration to seek and find the BIG O. After trying many positions, reading self-help books and buying dozens of toys, some women remain unaware of exactly what an orgasm is and why it is so difficult to reach one. So the question is, why is it so difficult for women to reach orgasm when men seem to be able to reach sexual bliss so easily?The answer actually consists of a few parts:
1. Women need more than entry to orgasm.
Inserting part A into slot B is the typical sexual situation that the average couple believes will enable both partners to reach a climax, but in actuality women need more than vaginal penetration in order to reach an orgasm. About 70% of women need clitoral stimulation along with penetrative sex in order to reach an orgasm. The clitoris is made up of 8000 nerve endings making it the most sensitive body part on a woman, so it needs love and attention as does the rest of the body during sex!During penetration, the clitoris is stimulated from the inside because of its legs that extend deep into the vagina, but for most women that internal stimulation isn’t enough. DIRECT contact is where it’s at! Sex positions that position the pelvises close together, oral sex during foreplay or using a clitoral vibrator during sex are great ways to ensure clitorial stimulation is achieved during intercourse.
2. Women’s sexual energy starts in the brain.
Sexual energy is a vital source of energy that gives life to every living being on the Earth. When it comes to men and women, sexual energy originates in different parts of the body. In men, sexual energy originates in the pelvis, which explains why men are ready for sex in 20 seconds as opposed to the 10 minutes it typically takes a woman’s body to be ready for intercourse. Women’s sexual energy originates in the head, so in order for the genitals to be in a state of welcoming and wanting, the energy has to travel down the spine into the pelvis, and that is some distance to travel!
This fact is one that many women are unaware of, and furthermore, many women have no idea how to move the energy from the brain into the pelvis. Through meditation, concentrated breathing and focusing the mind on the pelvis, sexual energy can move from the brain into the genitals where it belongs during sex. This technique has to be learned and it takes some time to master, but once a woman knows how to transfer that energy where it needs to be, orgasm during sex can be achieved with ease every time.3. Women live in their heads
“What should I make for dinner tomorrow?” “I wonder what the kids are doing right now.” “OMG! I s he looking at my stretch marks?” “Ew, his breath smells like Doritos!” These thoughts and more are things that can roll through the minds of women during sex. Women tend to live in their heads and think about everything but sex during sexual experiences, which causes disconnect between the brain (where sexual energy originates for women) and the genitals that need to connect with the sexual energy. When the mind is everywhere else besides the moment of sexual pleasure, the body will not respond to the typical triggers that should send it into an orgasmic frenzy.
In order to bring the body closer to a climax, the mind needs to be cleared and freed of anything that isn’t sex within that moment. Meditation, a pre-performance massage, stretching or even a hot bath or shower are all great ways to mellow out before the fun begins. Leave all of the thoughts about work, children and body issues at the door. Leave the mind open to register touch, smells, sounds and every other sensation associated with the sexual rendezvous taking place in the moment. Live in the moment!Every woman has the parts necessary to orgasm and can learn how to achieve the greatest climax of her life; it just takes dedicated and focused intention and a little practice to get there.
April 27, 2022 by Tamara Gibson
ARTICLE
https://blackdoctor.org/dj-envy-wife-fake-orgasm/
MY THOUGHTS
I said the following a trillion times and I will say it a trillion and one, If you define virginity by first orgasm, most women are virgins into their 30s. ... I want to state other, most women in the usa are virgins based on the stated elemental into their 30s but outside the usa into their late 40s.
What is telling? Somehow this isn't common knowledge.
When a woman orgasm what happens? The vaginal walls pulse rapidly. This is to coax the penis to ejaculate. Saying the vagina will aid in pushing the sperm to the egg.
Why are vaginas tight? Lack of use. Girls, meaning any female who never was head of household, have no experience fornicating, thus tightness. Usually , women , meaning any female who lived or lives as head of household, has tightness if she has not fornicated in a long time, side another or with a tool. Tightness of vagina has nothing to do with vixen qualities. Think of the vagina like your leg. Have you ever sat down to o long and your leg started to cramp. Well that is something like a vagina unused for months. If someone told you to start running as fast as you can after sitting down without moving for hours it will hurt right? that is what happens when a vagina has a penis rummaging in it. The better thing for your leg is a massage to prepare to run. The vagina needs the same patient care when unused.
In the article the woman in question states a simple truth. No matter how much a man is gentle or caring, a woman may not orgasm. It isn't about being loved it is about knowing oneself. This knowing requires experimentation with one self.An eventually side the partner. Being great in bed as a couple demands the two learn what will make them great in bed. It can not be assumed or forced.
In terms of pleasure, everyone is unique in what gives them pleasure and how two people find pleasure is also unique, but in either case it takes time, trial and error to know.
-
Lupita Nyong'o On Why She Decided Not To Star In 'The Woman King'
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022Lupita Nyong’o is talking about why she decided to not star in The Woman King.
The actress was set to star alongside Davis in the upcoming historical film The Woman King. But back in 2020, the actress walked away from the film in which she was to play an Agojie warrior.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nyong’o opened up about why she decided against starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film.
Nyong'o didn't feel like the role was right for her.
According to IndieWire, Nyong’o was set to play an Agojie warrior in The Woman King starring Viola Davis, who also produces. The Agojie tribe inspired the fictional Dora Milaje female army in Black Panther.After she was cast in the film, the actress made a short documentary about the Agojie tribe called “Warrior Women With Lupita Nyong’o.”
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Academy Award winner “grapples uncomfortably with the tribe’s legacy of violence.” After the documentary, Nyong’o decision to exit The Woman King though she hasn’t specifically revealed why.“It was very amicable, the departure from it,” Nyong’o said. “But I felt it wasn’t the role for me to play.”
Thuso Mbedu took over the role Nyong’o was slated to play.
After her departure, Lupita Nyong’o’s role was given to Thuso Mbedu.In addition to The Woman King, Nyong’o also exited the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake, which stars Natalie Portman. Moses Ingram replaced her in that series.
“I’m desperate for small projects,” Nyong’o told THR. “They’re harder to get off the ground, they’re harder to stay on track. Bigger movies elbow them out of the way. The pandemic and the fiscal stress on the industry has made it even harder for those movies to get made.”
Nyong'o is currently balancing large projects with smaller independent roles.
“I think to be culturally prosperous, to be artistically prosperous as a people, is to have options. I personally love a good Marvel movie, but it doesn’t take me away from really wanting the little character-driven film,” the Us actress shared. “I believe in the fight for those things to be kept alive because the one thing we always want, the ultimate privilege, is choice.”She concluded, “It becomes a philosophical question about what is art and what is its purpose. I believe that art plays a role in moving the people that experience it, and a lot of people are moved by Marvel. Is you being moved by this thing less important than me being moved by Picasso?”
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022ARTICLE
https://shadowandact.com/lupita-nyongo-on-why-she-decided-not-to-star-in-the-woman-king
THE BLACK DRAGON'S REVENGE - RON VAN CLIEF - FULL HD MARTIAL ARTS MOVIE IN ENGLISH
imdb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072858/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16
film
LINK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOoWRtASY4Is Kanye Finally CANCELED? from Bad Faith
LINK
https://youtu.be/wxHAm-bgFyM
Referral
https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1580952441839026179
Art Block and Burnout from chrissa bug
LINK
https://youtu.be/e_tYHhkjC4s
REFERRAL
https://www.deviantart.com/chrissabug/status-update/New-Video-about-Art-Block-93374057228 Stories You Can Read Online for Black History Month
“Anything Could Disappear“
By Danielle Evans
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/anything-could-disappear-danielle-evans/“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere“
By Z.Z. Packer
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/drinking-coffee-elsewhere“The Era“
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-era/“Suicide, Watch“
By Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Dissent Magazine
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/suicide-watch-heads-colored-people-social-media“French Absolutism“
By Brandon Taylor
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/french-absolutism/“What’s For Sale“
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/5/14/whats-for-sale-by-nicole-y-dennis-benn?rq=What's“Sunflowers“
By Bryan Washington
Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/bryan-washington-sunflowers“Dangerous Deliveries“
By Sidik Fofana
Epiphany
https://epiphanyzine.com/features/dangerous-deliveries-fofana“Williamsburg Bridge“
By John Edgar Wideman
Harper’s Magazine
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/11/williamsburg-bridge/“The Key“
By Nnedi Okorafor
Enkare Review
https://enkare.org/2016/11/14/key-nnedi-okorafor/“Milk Blood Heat“
By Dantiel W. Moniz
Ploughshares
https://www.pshares.org/issues/spring-2018/milk-blood-heat“Bear Bear Harvest“
By Venita Blackburn
Virginia Quarterly Review
https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2018/12/bear-bear-harvest“Beg Borrow Steal“
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Kenyon Review Online
https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-summer/selections/maurice-carlos-ruffin-342846/“How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)“
By Kim Coleman Foote
Missouri Review
https://www.missourireview.com/how-to-kill-gra-coleman-and-live-to-tell-about-it-vauxhall-nj-c-1949-by-kim-coleman-foote/“Allentown, Saturday“
By Gabriel Bump
Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/06/fiction/Allentown-Saturday“Books and Roses“
By Helen Oyeyemi
Granta
https://granta.com/books-and-roses/“God’s Gonna Trouble the Water“
By Randall Kenan
Oprah Magazine
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a33350187/randall-kenan-short-story-gods-gonna-trouble-the-water/“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky“
By Lesley Nneka Arimah
Catapult
https://catapult.co/stories/some-mathematicians-remove-pain-some-of-us-deal-in-negative-emotions-we-all-fix-the-equation-of-a-person“The City Born Great“
By N.K. Jemisin
Tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/“202 Checkmates“
By Rion Amilcar Scott
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/202-checkmates-by-rion-amilcar-scott/“All This Want and I Can’t Get None“
By Tia Clark
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/all-this-want-and-i-cant-get-none/“Wet Paper Grass“
By Jasmon Drain
Terrain
https://www.terrain.org/fiction/26/drain.htm“Emperor of the Universe“
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/10/10/emperor-of-the-universe-by-kaitlyn-greenidge“Ark of Light“
By Victor LaValle
Lightspeed Magazine
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ark-of-light/“False Cognates“
By Ladee Hubbard
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/false-cognates-1991/“Whiskey & Ribbons“
By Leesa Cross-Smith
Carve Magazine
https://www.carvezine.com/story/2011-fall-cross-smith“A Selfish Invention“
By Donald Quist
Storychord
http://www.storychord.com/2017/03/issue-140-donald-edem-quist-tracy.html“Best Features“
By Roxane Gay
Barrelhouse
https://www.barrelhousemag.com/onlinelit/2010/11/1/best-featuresARTICLE
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/02/01/28-stories-you-can-read-online-for-black-history-month/ -
Lupita Nyong'o On Why She Decided Not To Star In 'The Woman King'
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022Lupita Nyong’o is talking about why she decided to not star in The Woman King.
The actress was set to star alongside Davis in the upcoming historical film The Woman King. But back in 2020, the actress walked away from the film in which she was to play an Agojie warrior.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nyong’o opened up about why she decided against starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film.
Nyong'o didn't feel like the role was right for her.
According to IndieWire, Nyong’o was set to play an Agojie warrior in The Woman King starring Viola Davis, who also produces. The Agojie tribe inspired the fictional Dora Milaje female army in Black Panther.After she was cast in the film, the actress made a short documentary about the Agojie tribe called “Warrior Women With Lupita Nyong’o.”
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Academy Award winner “grapples uncomfortably with the tribe’s legacy of violence.” After the documentary, Nyong’o decision to exit The Woman King though she hasn’t specifically revealed why.“It was very amicable, the departure from it,” Nyong’o said. “But I felt it wasn’t the role for me to play.”
Thuso Mbedu took over the role Nyong’o was slated to play.
After her departure, Lupita Nyong’o’s role was given to Thuso Mbedu.In addition to The Woman King, Nyong’o also exited the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake, which stars Natalie Portman. Moses Ingram replaced her in that series.
“I’m desperate for small projects,” Nyong’o told THR. “They’re harder to get off the ground, they’re harder to stay on track. Bigger movies elbow them out of the way. The pandemic and the fiscal stress on the industry has made it even harder for those movies to get made.”
Nyong'o is currently balancing large projects with smaller independent roles.
“I think to be culturally prosperous, to be artistically prosperous as a people, is to have options. I personally love a good Marvel movie, but it doesn’t take me away from really wanting the little character-driven film,” the Us actress shared. “I believe in the fight for those things to be kept alive because the one thing we always want, the ultimate privilege, is choice.”She concluded, “It becomes a philosophical question about what is art and what is its purpose. I believe that art plays a role in moving the people that experience it, and a lot of people are moved by Marvel. Is you being moved by this thing less important than me being moved by Picasso?”
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022ARTICLE
https://shadowandact.com/lupita-nyongo-on-why-she-decided-not-to-star-in-the-woman-king
THE BLACK DRAGON'S REVENGE - RON VAN CLIEF - FULL HD MARTIAL ARTS MOVIE IN ENGLISH
imdb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072858/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16
film
LINK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOoWRtASY4Is Kanye Finally CANCELED? from Bad Faith
LINK
https://youtu.be/wxHAm-bgFyM
Referral
https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1580952441839026179
Art Block and Burnout from chrissa bug
LINK
https://youtu.be/e_tYHhkjC4s
REFERRAL
https://www.deviantart.com/chrissabug/status-update/New-Video-about-Art-Block-93374057228 Stories You Can Read Online for Black History Month
“Anything Could Disappear“
By Danielle Evans
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/anything-could-disappear-danielle-evans/“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere“
By Z.Z. Packer
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/drinking-coffee-elsewhere“The Era“
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-era/“Suicide, Watch“
By Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Dissent Magazine
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/suicide-watch-heads-colored-people-social-media“French Absolutism“
By Brandon Taylor
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/french-absolutism/“What’s For Sale“
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/5/14/whats-for-sale-by-nicole-y-dennis-benn?rq=What's“Sunflowers“
By Bryan Washington
Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/bryan-washington-sunflowers“Dangerous Deliveries“
By Sidik Fofana
Epiphany
https://epiphanyzine.com/features/dangerous-deliveries-fofana“Williamsburg Bridge“
By John Edgar Wideman
Harper’s Magazine
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/11/williamsburg-bridge/“The Key“
By Nnedi Okorafor
Enkare Review
https://enkare.org/2016/11/14/key-nnedi-okorafor/“Milk Blood Heat“
By Dantiel W. Moniz
Ploughshares
https://www.pshares.org/issues/spring-2018/milk-blood-heat“Bear Bear Harvest“
By Venita Blackburn
Virginia Quarterly Review
https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2018/12/bear-bear-harvest“Beg Borrow Steal“
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Kenyon Review Online
https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-summer/selections/maurice-carlos-ruffin-342846/“How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)“
By Kim Coleman Foote
Missouri Review
https://www.missourireview.com/how-to-kill-gra-coleman-and-live-to-tell-about-it-vauxhall-nj-c-1949-by-kim-coleman-foote/“Allentown, Saturday“
By Gabriel Bump
Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/06/fiction/Allentown-Saturday“Books and Roses“
By Helen Oyeyemi
Granta
https://granta.com/books-and-roses/“God’s Gonna Trouble the Water“
By Randall Kenan
Oprah Magazine
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a33350187/randall-kenan-short-story-gods-gonna-trouble-the-water/“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky“
By Lesley Nneka Arimah
Catapult
https://catapult.co/stories/some-mathematicians-remove-pain-some-of-us-deal-in-negative-emotions-we-all-fix-the-equation-of-a-person“The City Born Great“
By N.K. Jemisin
Tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/“202 Checkmates“
By Rion Amilcar Scott
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/202-checkmates-by-rion-amilcar-scott/“All This Want and I Can’t Get None“
By Tia Clark
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/all-this-want-and-i-cant-get-none/“Wet Paper Grass“
By Jasmon Drain
Terrain
https://www.terrain.org/fiction/26/drain.htm“Emperor of the Universe“
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/10/10/emperor-of-the-universe-by-kaitlyn-greenidge“Ark of Light“
By Victor LaValle
Lightspeed Magazine
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ark-of-light/“False Cognates“
By Ladee Hubbard
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/false-cognates-1991/“Whiskey & Ribbons“
By Leesa Cross-Smith
Carve Magazine
https://www.carvezine.com/story/2011-fall-cross-smith“A Selfish Invention“
By Donald Quist
Storychord
http://www.storychord.com/2017/03/issue-140-donald-edem-quist-tracy.html“Best Features“
By Roxane Gay
Barrelhouse
https://www.barrelhousemag.com/onlinelit/2010/11/1/best-featuresARTICLE
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/02/01/28-stories-you-can-read-online-for-black-history-month/
-
Beloved (1998) reviewed by Movies That Move We
MY THOUGHTS WHILE I VIEWED
3:44 ahh it came out a bad week. Ants/Rush Hour/Bride of Chucky/Practical Magic all were hits. Ants is animated. Rush Hour is funny and with jackie chan a global hit and rush hour was his finest usa based film. Chucky for the horror addicts, chucky is a superstar. PRactical magic had nicole kidman and sandra bullock in a women's empowerment film about new england witches... beloved
12:35 good point, I want to add, the multitude of stories is the problem. I argue the problem is, the truth is complex right. Some people were violent, some suffered, some had good fortune. it is a blend of stories. Blend of stories make the end of the civil war /13th amendment/end of slavery complicated
15:16 yes, this is a poltergeist. But i concur, the message is, what is more frightening is the human activity, the enslavement of whites onto blacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Garner
I think it is an important story change from morrison that is carried in the film is that the real life garner was mulatto. she had a white parent. and all her children were from her owner.
I find it also interesting that most of the people they fled, with, the historical garner made it to canada. they didn't stay in the usa but most made it. supposedly seventeen in total with nine making it to canada. And i find it historically compelling that the Garner's owner/former owner/owner in moving the garner's around kentucky to escape an extradition order for murder from ohio which was going to lead to a pardon, he had to leave kentucky and on a boat to take the garner's to new orleans the baby child was thrown into the water by margaret and died. And then in the end, margaret lived, telling her husband never to marry and bring forth life into the world of slavery. I argue, margaret never let her black enslaved husband bed her or at least bed her in good time for pregnancy. I think margaret hated the idea of being pregnant. Only know have I did any research concerning the true story, thank you Nike, I have more thoughts for a story I am composing myself now.20:30 great point, i agree, from the beginning I saw this film as the poltergeist while present, while dangerous is not as dangerous as the white slave owners, not really. The poltergeist is easier to handle and is handled easier than white folks.
21:53 yes, we don't talk about the truth in the black community. because black parents can not guarantee black chidren will react positively to whites or the usa with knowing it. I have always felt most black parents in the usa, are frightened of the truth because all black parents know, 100% of black children will not reach positive conclusions to whites or the usa with the truth. And I think black parents in majority just don't want that risk so they lie.
22:44 how can the movie be better in your view Nike?
24:09 I can tell you I know black people were not dancing about based on knowing about my mother's father's mother's life. I do not go into my personal.
24:38 yes, trauma
25:02 i think the black community in the usa made an effort to kill the life of that past in the black community in the usa, even while white people keep it alive with their actions. and i think, those black people succeeded in killing it. The modern black community in the usa, to be blunt, does not reflect a community that used its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa, that being when enslaved to whites, as a root element of a heritage to empowerment. The Black community in the usa , is a community that reflect a discarding of its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa. Which has been beneficial. The USA today would not be the country it is if the Black community or the Indigenous community didn't at some point do what both did and that was, start at day one when at day 99. Black people talk about fighting in world war II and owning homes in the antebellum south. Enslavement was Black folk in the usa 300 year old epoch in the usa, that predated the usa itself. Our forebears who wanted that reboot, got what they wanted. at the price of it was the gullah language or culture like other unique cultures in the black community in the usa that predate the end of slavery, high john the conqueror and a horde of fiction fantasy that black people had created during slavery/the black free towns no one recalls today. Black people like henry louis gates jr and others like to emphasize the time after slavery cause , like frederick douglass, they want the black community in the usa to be statian, of the usa. The problem with black enslavement to whites being alive is the question of the usa itself. it has to live as well and when you question the country you live in, again the resulting answer may not be positive or convenient or majority. And I think many black people in the past have always feared and some today still fear that possibility in the black community in the usa. thus why said black people adore modern black immigrants who have more in common with whites when it comes to their initial relationship to the usa than DOSers.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What did you think of this film the first time you saw it?
I didn't like the whites, which says little to nothing. but, I enjoyed the end. Maybe cause I was raised in a home with two loving parents. I enjoyed the resolution at the end, between d and sethe.Did you know at the time, about Margaret Garner?
No, I did not. I never thought to research this until now. I think the true story is very compelling, about many issues of mulattoes, of black children in the usa,of the end of slavery or as I like to call one of the mutations of slavery. cause the truth is, slavery simply changed, it did not die. But I always remind people, new orleans was the las vegas of the usa in the 1800s and all the top female prostitutes of new orleans claimed black ancestry. why? white men had created a media myth, like modern day Black women behinds or white women breast. that mulatto women was the sexual best. And I even see the lustful logic. You have a white woman/a light black woman/a luscious black woman all in one white man's house. he is married to one, the white one. her role is to make heirs, she owns nothing. he uses one for general labor and mating for more produce<meaning aside black men>, the luscious black woman. but who is the best of both worlds. it is the light black woman, the mulatto. She is publicly owned by the white man. he has no worry of legal problems with anything he does to her, like the luscious black woman but she may in appearance look no different or more similar to a white woman. So, it is to a white man in a position of total power, the best of both worlds. Most mulattoes look like a thandie newton or halle berry where it is clear, they are a mix, but some look like Christina Cox <she was in chronicles of riddick> or rebecca hall <the director of passing>who in my view can attempt to pass in the old environment in the usa way better than ruth negga or tessa thompson. And I use myself as the proof. I never doubted ruth negga or tessa thompson or halle berry have black ancestry but christina cox or rebecca hall i did not know. and this is powerful. Remember twelve years a slave. paul giamatti's character pointed to the mulatto daughter of the luscious black woman, whose tears and constant crying in light of margaret garner is well balanced, and said, i paraphrase, that little girl is worth all of the rest.. to cumberbatch. In latin america, they are called Alvino's meaning. this is someone with known black ancestry but who does not look black. That is priceless to a white man with money back in slave times.
Thanks again Nike, In cheap retrospect, I Would had went another way than Morrison story wise, plot wise. But morrison being a woman, i think she wanted to redeem the black mother more than anything. I think beloved, as a poltergeist, was betrayed a little bit. I daresay, beloved is more a wraith than a poltergeist. A poltergiest for me acts wildly as a spirit but doesn't necessarily have agenda. a wraith has agenda. the woman in black is a wraith. I think beloved is a wraith. She wants her mother to give take her own life through a slow pain of neglect. that is purpose. Beloved goes away as a poltergiest not a wraith.Did you feel differently about the meaning of the film between your first watch and the last time you viewed the movie?
Meaning, no , the meaning didn't change. I only add the comparison to the real event know. I remember relatives not liking that she didn't kill herself. The funny thing in the historical record it seems she was literally stopped by the whites coming to take her back to slavery. but I like how in the historical record she tried to kill herself with the youngest, but simply failed.Do you think of this as a horror movie?
Yes, but I want to say, this film is a visual representation of what I will call Black Statian Slave Ghost Stories. Growing up as a kid, I was told and then later read many of these kinds of stories, usually shorter in length but the same idea. Being enslaved while dealing with a negative spirit is uncommon theme or shall i say a specific theme to the Black DOS community in the USA. this isn't for willing immigrants or whites or native americans mostly, this is a very specific genre culturally. You have a character dealing with a scenario where they are born disempowered with problems stemming from a past before they were born they can not control while now a negative spirit. I think in these stories the problem is, the horror of the ghost is less important than the horror between humans and that goes against the horror movie genre as a whole in the usa. yes, the ghost is bothering me, but I had my foot cut off and my testicles branded last month. I can't afford any more from this white man so spirit, pick a number.yeah, good one:)
THIS IS THE END (of October): Episode 10 ft Tristan Roach of Xion NEtwork
VIDEO INTRO
Welcome to the tenth episode of "This is the End" with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.In this special halloween edition, tune-in to Mohz, Jess, Ian, Cam and Roun as we interview one of the most scarily talented comic book artists on the island, before doing a quick recap of major pop-culture events that resonated with us this month.
MY COMMENT
Dune was a serial in a magazine, turned into a book. but star wars was based on John Carter of Mars over Dune. The multiversity of characters in star wars reflects John carter more than Dune.
SARCASM Fans enjoy
@charityekezie Replying to @musubifamily No but we also apply some honey on stones and lick it. 
#sacarsm #charityekezie #Africa ♬ original sound - Charityekezie
straight to the forest:) ok the spirit of the black panther:) Anyone who loves sarcasm will love this... the community giraffe
-
Movies That Move We review US 2019
My THoughts
like the montage of reviews
2:10 so many black female writers enjoy PEele's style. I do to but many black female writers tend to start off saying that.
5:40 exactly, I wonder if a 1960s hippie's old plan written on home made paper somewhere wasn't what hands across america stemmed from
7:50 spider grandmother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Grandmother
11:36 yes, anansi, the story teller, remember anansi has a caribbean version , same name, different stories
13:09 random thought, was the homeless guy taken to a hospital carrying the sign some sort of guard for the doppels/tethers?
Questions how we respond to those who have less than us? What would you do if you came face to face with your darker side?
Your questions are strong. Collective reply as opposed to individual reply. In the film US, the tether abigail answers the question to individual reply by exchanging places. but the originally untethered abigail, replied to her individual revenge with a collective reply, leading all the tethers. and oddly enough, in the end, both abigails got what they wanted, in the end, the collective reply of the originally untethered abigal with hands across america happened with her side her household all killed while the tethered got her replacement life with only her male son, the "mulatto" knowing the truth about her. and her whole household lives. The power of nature here is underrated. I even argue an element of "The man who fell to earth" is used very well in this film's premise. In a man who fell to earth, the government keeps the "alien" man in a base but over time the base is forgotten. How isn't fully explained but whatever happened, the people in government who knew about this or kept it organized died or forgot or moved on, so the installation ran on autopilot, and became decrepit. like the tether's world, its sitting there. Whomever in government was supposed to manage them, stopped or moved on or died or something, where they still get electricity, but their existence is uncared for. And I like that theme of whatever the government was planning couldn't survive nature. But to your first question, to whether people have more or less, whether we want freedom or revenge, we can respond as part of a group or individually. But nature does have influence over things, At the end the tricked abigail was still naive when she was originally tricked and the tethered abigal is still dangerous when she originally forced a switch. Their varying sense of individualism or community didn't change. The tricked abigal, felt the tethered abigail in the first place, she was always communal. the tethered abigail was always an individual, never once interested in helping another tethered escape. So no matter how you respond to another, you will always be yourself eventually.
Well, I will answer, what will I do if I come into contact with one of my infinite other sides? There is a version of me that is more positive than me. and thus, I am the more negative to that version. to answer the question. I don't know. Good question. the engineer in me wants to ask, how did we even meet in the first place. Nature has rules. how are we meeting is my first question, not necessarily how we will get along. But I will say this. The key to coexisting side another interpretation of you, is to be anti christian. I will explain. If you look at zoarasters-ancient kemet-aztec mythology-taoism, most spiritual belief systems accept that nature is not good or bad but all things. But the christian belief system is starkly variant. the christian tradition says god is good, thus that which is not good is not of the essence of life. If you see a version of you doing negative things that you wouldn't do, if you have in your mind the idea that to do negative things is against nature, then you will imply that the other you is unnatural and thus communication problems, coexistence problems.Thistle and Verse
Live Discussion
Kat Blaque
Logan Paul is WRONG about NOPE
Thistle and Verse
Trivia Night
Recommendations Gender Bender
Recommendations Author You've Never Read Before
Recommendations Rocks and Gems
Post-Ignyte Award Thoughts- Doesn't she look pretty
-
‘Is That Black Enough for You?!?’ Review: Elvis Mitchell’s Intoxicating Deep Dive into the Black Cinema Revolution of the ’70s
A critic's movie-love documentary artfully celebrates and deconstructs the decade when African-American audiences, for the first time, could see themselves onscreen.
By Owen Gleiberman
In “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary about the American Black cinema revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, Billy Dee Williams, now 85 but still spry, tells a funny story about what it was like to play Louis McKay, the dapper love object and would-be savior of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues.”
The year was 1972, and African-American audiences had rarely (if ever) been given the chance to gawk at a movie star of color who was not just this sexy but this showcased for his sexiness. Louis was like Clark Gable with a dash of Marvin Gaye; when he was on that promenade stairway, Williams says, with a chuckle, that he just about fell in love with himself. That’s how unprecedented the whole thing was. The actor recalls how the lighting was fussed over (we see a shot in which Louis appears bathed in an old-movie glow), and how unreal that was to him on the set. At the time, Black actors didn’t get lighting like that. But Black audiences drank it in with a better-late-than-never swoon, even as they knew that this was a representation they’d been denied for more than half a century.
“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” tells the story of Black film during a singularly creative and unprecedented time — the decade from 1968 to 1978, when Black actors, Black stories, and Black talent behind the camera exploded, in Hollywood and in the adjoining universe of independent film. The actors who came to the fore during this period are legendary: James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Ossie Davis, Diana Ross, Pam Grier, Jim Brown, Tamara Dobson, Max Julien, and many more. The directors, like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles, were wily and paradigmatic game-changers. And the way that Black talent began to flow through a vast array of forms and genres — action movies, historical dramas, film noirs, musicals, close-to-the-bone indie love stories — made the Black film movement a parallel of the New Hollywood, with new voices overthrowing old strictures.
Mitchell, who wrote, directed, and narrates the film, is a veteran critic who has a unique, at times almost musical ability to nail a film’s unconscious essence. “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is subtitled “How one decade changed the movies (and me),” and it’s very much Mitchell’s statement about what the rise of Black cinema meant to him, as a Black moviegoer born into a world where movies were still an engine of racial division. His pithy evocation of each movie — the history, the fantasy, the meaning — turns the documentary into a film fanatic’s diary that never tries to separate the importance of these movies from how each of them made him feel. As a critic-turned-filmmaker, Mitchell puts his soul right out there. His conceit is that the very existence of these movies was life-changing, because African-American moviegoers, at long last, had the catharsis of a big-screen mirror. For the first time, they could see themselves onscreen — not degraded or reductive images of themselves, but a reflection of who they were.
The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema. “My grandmother,” recalls Mitchell, “told me that movies changed the way she dreamed.” That’s as perfect a summation of the power of movies as I’ve ever heard. Movies change our dreams; they change us. But who, in that formulation, gets to be the “us”?
From the start of the 20th century, white audiences could go to the movies and see themselves. Mitchell, born in 1958, grew up in the Detroit area, where he saw the tumult of the inner-city riot/insurrections of the ’60s, but where he also went to the movies to discover who he was and who he wanted to be. Early on, he takes us back to the studio-system days, where Black actors were reduced to playing hideous racist caricatures. His survey of those images — the servility of Stepin Fetchit, the odd-child-out surrealism of Buckwheat, the shocking minstrel moments that could creep into even a movie by Hitchcock — is searing, not only because of the violence of the racism that defined those roles, but because part of the racism lay in what was not being depicted: Black people in their humanity.
We know that Sidney Poitier was the actor who tore down that wall. But Mitchell, while paying due homage to Poitier’s electric intensity, focuses on another Black actor of the period — the outrageously gifted and charismatic Harry Belafonte, the Calypso singer who’d become a screen actor, appearing opposite Dorothy Dandridge in films like “Carmen Jones” (1954), but who abandoned the movies after the remarkable but mostly ignored film noir “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959), because he couldn’t accept the roles that he was being offered. He didn’t want to be a compromised, patronized, back-of-the-bus movie star; he wanted the whole thing or nothing. Mitchell presents Belafonte as a great actor who became, for a decade, a kind of vanished specter of the star he might have been in a better world.
And then, even with those odds against tomorrow, that world began to come into being.
If you say a phrase like “the Black films of the ’70s,” the first thing that will pop into a lot of people’s heads is the word Blaxploitation. But apart from the reductive and problematic quality of that word, it simply doesn’t do justice to the astonishing range of movies that made up the Black film renaissance. Many, though far from all of them, were written and directed by white filmmakers, yet even as whites continued to commandeer the means of production, these movies became an authentic showcase for the Black experience through the existential expressiveness of the Black actors who starred in them. What those actors had, according to Mitchell, was “the self-possession that would become the core of Black film,” a quality that “created a warrior class where there hadn’t been one before.”
Liberating the films from their too-easy-to-slot-in categories, Mitchell feeds on the eclectic cornucopia of what a “Black movie,” starting in the late ’60s, could be. He explores the emotional transcendence of “Sounder” (1972). The exhilarating, dread-soaked hustler authenticity of “Super Fly” (1972). The performance of Rupert Crosse, the first Black actor to be Oscar-nominated for best supporting actor, in “The Reivers” (1969), where he sparred teasingly with Steve McQueen in a way that subverted racial power dynamics. The conspiratorial paranoia of “Three the Hard Way” (1974), about a serum dumped into the water in Black cities, which the teenage Mitchell thought was funny until his father told him about the Tuskegee Experiment. The jocular knowingness of “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1971), with its wryly repeated catch phrase “Is that black enough for you?”
And then there’s the deliverance of the opening credits of “Shaft” (1971), a vérité epiphany in which the camera, accompanied by the snaky imperiousness of Isaac Hayes’s theme song, didn’t just follow Richard Roundtree as he walked through Times Square but worshipped him. The rebel-blues-meets-burn-baby-burn mythology of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971). The “early, all-out glam shower” that was “Lady Sings the Blues.” The way Duane Jones, playing the Black hero of “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), goes through the entire movie without his race being mentioned — and then, after saving the white people, gets paid back by being gunned down. The jaunty self-mockery of Poitier in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974). The melancholy of William Marshall in “Blacula” (1972). The cowboy effrontery — and haunting commercial failure — of “Buck and the Preacher” (1972). And the clandestine complexity of “Coffy” (1973), in which Pam Grier played a woman bent on vengeance whose every lethal move is weighed down by the gravity of responsibility that’s tearing her in several directions.
“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is built in a formally simple yet elegant kaleidoscopic way, examining one movie after another but looking at each through a different lens. Here’s how Ron O’Neal jumped a chain-link fence in “Super Fly” and why it mattered, here’s Diahann Carroll’s “core of calm” in “Claudine” (1974), here’s why “The Wiz” (1978), which should have been a crowning achievement of the Black film renaissance, turned out to be its swan song. And Mitchell never stops weaving the past — Hollywood’s and his own — into the narrative, so that we see how this era was anticipated by the career of Oscar Micheaux (who from 1919 to 1948 made 44 features), and how Isaac Hayes’ performance at the 1972 Academy Awards was, for Mitchell, as profound and transporting as any of the films he talks about.
Elvis Mitchell celebrates the moment when Black people, for the first time in movie history, had a popular culture of heroes to respond to. Which gave life, of course, to the heroism within themselves. But even as Hollywood, for the first half of the century, was defined as a place of cinematic apartheid, Mitchell argues against the glib and easy liberal separatism that would sanctify Black cinema — or Black moviegoing — as a hermetic experience. He interviews a host of Black artists, like Belafonte and Laurence Fishburne and Whoopi Goldberg and Samuel L. Jackson and the director Charles Burnett, many of whom testify to the mythology they embraced in old Westerns. They felt discriminated against but not shut out; those “white” movies were for them as well.
And Mitchell offers a head-spinning insight when he talks about the place in the larger movie cosmos that Black cinema came to occupy. During the ’70s, the American hero had gone underground, replaced by the disaffected antihero. Mitchell makes the case that Black cinema brought the hero back. “Audiences of all races came to see these movies,” he says, “because they could feel the adrenaline in the actors.” He also argues that the way Black filmmakers interwove the aesthetics of movies and pop music, down to the bold marketing idea of releasing a soundtrack prior to the movie (a tactic Van Peebles innovated with “Sweetback,” and was then repeated with such seismic soundtracks as Curtis Mayfield’s music for “Super Fly”), paved the way for the fusion of those two industries. “Saturday Night Fever,” in Mitchell’s view, was one culmination of the Black cinema renaissance, with John Travolta appropriating Black nihilistic swagger and the movie selling itself in the spirit of Black movie/music synergy. The ultimate message of “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is that Black cinema, for all the racism of Hollywood (and America), was never separate from the cinema that wasn’t Black. How could it be? They shared the same dream space.
ARTICLE
https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/is-that-black-enough-for-you-review-elvis-mitchell-1235396637/
P.S.
Blackwood introduction
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1837&type=status
Carib Gold
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1860&type=status
South Side Home Movie Project
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1882&type=statusYemenyah+ Storm and Rain the movie
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1981&type=statusWhy merit doesn't work and the need for communal zones of opportunity in media
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2006&type=statusBLACKWOOD discussions
-
The Epps will buy and fix up houses in Indianapolis , the city he was raised in. I get the message to black people with money who are from financially leaner statuses, to go back to the communities they left and become real estate barons ala Generational wealth. I will never forget when berry gordy moved motown to los angeles. He spent so much money to make motown a multimedia entertainment firm based in los angeles... he could had spent all that money in detroit to do the same thing and would had a greater influence on detroit long term...and many musicians left him for that move too. so... I get the epps point. I wonder who will live in the epps homes? If this show is "buying back the block" then the sequent reality show needs to be "living on the block" . Epps couple buying and fixing homes is only one part of the story, the next is who lives in those homes? What is their rent? Reality T.v. is so unreal.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/mike-epps-and-his-wife-partner-with-hgtv-for-buying-back-the-block-in-indianapolis/
-
We were Hippies from John Amos, did the country road guy hear this once?
Happy Belated birthday, still love his character in the beastmaster film. The beastmaster is a book written by a white man about an indigenous man who is a space traveler who talks to non humans on mars... so the beastmaster in the film is its own creature completely.
John AMos:)John Amos in his 1958 East Orange High School yearbook photo.
John Allen Amos Jr. (born December 27, 1939) is an American actor known for his role as James Evans, Sr., on the CBS television series Good Times. Amos's other television work includes The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a recurring role as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace on The West Wing, and the role of Washington, D.C., Mayor Ethan Baker in the series The District. Amos has appeared on Broadway and in numerous films in his five-decade career. He has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and an NAACP Image Award. On film, he has played numerous supporting roles in movies such as The Beastmaster (1982), Coming to America (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990) and Coming 2 America (2021).
John A. Amos, Jr. Was born in Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, and graduated from East Orange High School in 1958. He enrolled at Long Beach City College and graduated from Colorado State University, qualifying as a social worker with a degree in sociology. Amos also played on the Colorado State Rams football team. After college, he was a Golden Gloves boxing champion.
In 1964, Amos signed a free agent contract with the American Football League's Denver Broncos. Unable to run the 40-yard dash because of a pulled hamstring, he was released on the second day of training camp. He then played with the Canton Bulldogs and Joliet Explorers of the United Football League. In 1965, he played with the Norfolk Neptunes and Wheeling Ironmen of the Continental Football League. In 1966, he played with the Jersey City Jets and Waterbury Orbits of the Atlantic Coast Football League.
In 1967, Amos signed a free agent contract with the American Football League's Kansas City Chiefs. Coach Hank Stram told him, "You're not a football player, you're a man who is trying to play football." He returned to the Continental League, where he played that year with the Victoria Steelers.
➡From a graduation speech by John Amos in 1987 at Drew University:
"I really didn't decide on an acting career until after I had exhausted just about every other job possibility in the world. I'd been a truck driver, a garbage man, right in the streets of East Orange, a job that I got immediately after graduation that was to be a summer job. And I found I was capable of doing a job society looks on as being demeaning, but to do it with a certain amount of pride.
It was ``Roots,'' and the character of Kunte Kinte, that gave me the greatest satisfaction as an actor, and as an Afro-American. While attending grade school here in New Jersey, Stockton School, and Columbian Junior High, I was given the unique opportunity of being one of a small group of black students that integrated both those."
Amos became well known in his first major TV role, playing Gordy Howard, the weatherman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, from 1970 until 1973.
In 1971, he appeared with Anson Williams in a commercial for McDonald's.
He is best known for his portrayal of James Evans, Sr., the husband of Florida Evans, first appearing three times on the sitcom Maude before continuing the role in 61 episodes of Good Times from 1974 to 1976. Although cast as a hard-working middle-aged father of three, Amos was 34 when the show began production in 1973, only eight years older than the actor who played his oldest son (Jimmie Walker) and 19 years younger than his screen wife (Esther Rolle).
He has guest-starred in a number of other television shows, including Police Story, The A-Team, The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In the House, Martin as Sgt. Hamilton Strawn (Tommy's father), Touched by an Angel, Psych, Sanford And Son, My Name Is Earl, Lie to Me, and Murder, She Wrote. He has also appeared as a spokesman for the Cochran Firm (a national personal injury law firm).
Amos wrote and produced Halley's Comet, a critically acclaimed one-man play that he has performed around the world. Amos performed in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean on Broadway and later at the McCarther Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
Amos starred in the TV Miniseries Roots, as the adult Kunta Kinte, based on the book and real life family history of author Alex Haley. Amos was featured in Disney's The World's Greatest Athlete (1973) with Tim Conway and Jan-Michael Vincent, and also starred as Kansas City Mack in Let's Do It Again (1975) with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. His other film appearances include Vanishing Point (1971), The President's Plane Is Missing (1973), Touched by Love (1980), The Beastmaster (1982), Dance of the Dwarfs (1983), American Flyers (1985), Coming to America (1988), Coming 2 America (2021), Lock Up (1989), Two Evil Eyes (1989), Die Hard 2 (1990), and Ricochet (1991). He appeared in the 1995 film For Better or Worse and played a police officer in The Players Club (1998). He played Uncle Virgil in My Baby's Daddy (2004), and starred as Jud in Dr. Dolittle 3 (2006). In 2012, Amos had a role in the movie Madea's Witness Protection, as Jake's father. He also appeared in Ice Cube and Dr. Dre's 1994 video for "Natural Born Killaz."
In 2009, he released We Were Hippies, an album of original country songs by Gene and Eric Cash.
In 2021, Amos starred in Because of Charley, as the patriarch of an estranged step-family riding out the hurricane that tore through Florida in 2004.
AWARDS
In addition to his Emmy nomination for Roots, Amos has also been nominated for a CableACE award, an NAACP Image Award, and a DVD Exclusive Award. Amos has won three TV Land Awards, taking home trophies for his roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times and the TV miniseries Roots.
In 2020, Amos was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
**Amos was a member of the 50th Armored Division of the New Jersey National Guard, and he also became an honorary master chief of the U.S. Coast Guard.
#veterans
-
Why Plots Fail
September 26, 2022 by Tiffany Yates Martin
Many authors embark on a new manuscript with one of two common inspirations: a great idea for a plot, or a fascinating character and situation.
Both can be good springboards for story, yet without more development, each may result in stories that peter out, dead end, or get lost in rabbit holes (especially during the breakneck pace of NaNo).
Plots most commonly fail when:
- they’re approached as an isolated element of story, a series of interesting events for authors to plug their characters into, or
- when interesting characters are randomly loosed into an intriguing situation with no specific destination or purpose.
Characters must take action, but action is not plot, and plot is not story.
The role of plot in story
The basic definition of story is a character pursues something he desperately wants, and he is changed by that pursuit and his success or failure in achieving his goal. Plot is simply the road the character travels on that journey.
I often reduce it to a simple formula:
Point A + Plot = Point B
In other words, story equals character arc plus plot.
Creating an elaborately structured plot and calling it story is like mapping a trip and calling it a vacation. What makes it complete is the character’s experience of it. Character drives plot, not the other way around.
Don’t panic, plotters. That doesn’t mean you can’t map out your plot ahead of time. And fear not, pantsers—it doesn’t mean you have to painstakingly develop or outline the whole story before you begin.
But creating compelling, cohesive stories does mean considering how these two crucial story elements work together.
Know what your character wants
Before you can put a character in motion, you have to know where she is headed and why. What drives your characters is the engine and the fuel for the actions they take and fail to take in the course of the story, the reason they—and we—take this journey.
Your character’s goal(s) and motivations determine those actions, as well as her reactions, inaction, and interaction; they dictate every choice she makes that pushes her along the plot. It’s essential to understand at least these basics about your characters before trying to put them in motion.
In director Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie Elvis, the titular character’s main motivation is evident from almost the first scene: Elvis loves music, especially blues and gospel. It literally moves him—in an early scene he wanders into a tent revival and his body starts shaking and swaying seemingly without his volition.
That dictates his main goal—to make his own music—which is the propulsive force for every subsequent action he takes (or doesn’t take) in the course of the story, starting with recording his own version of the one of the songs by a local blues musician that fascinated him, accepting Colonel Tom Parker’s offer to tour him on the carnival circuit, and every subsequent choice he makes.
But characters may have other goals and motivations as well, and will also continue to evolve as the story develops and as the author’s understanding of them deepens and grows—which will also affect the choices they make and the paths they take.
Elvis’s desire to pursue his music begins to morph early in the story as he is seduced into a new goal—fame and fortune—which evolves from his deeper motivation: a desperate need for love.
These are powerful and universal desires, the kind many readers can relate to. But they’re vague—another reason plots can falter or lose focus.
Create tangible as well as intangible goals
Pinning your character’s intangible longings to a concrete goal gives readers something to root for—or against—and tells us when the character has “won” (or lost).
Without that, momentum may stall, like a footrace with no definitive finish line for runners to orient themselves toward or to tell them when they’ve reached it.
Or the story may lose cohesion and feel episodic: “This happens…and then this happens…and then this happens…” but because the plot has become disconnected from the character arc, the actions lack meaning or impact.
Tie your character’s more generalized motivations to some specific, tangible “brass ring” that represents them.
For Luhrmann’s movie version of Elvis, each element of what drives him is pinned to a definitive representation of that longing:
- His love of music—his kind of music—is tangibly represented by a Christmas special where Colonel Parker demands he sing sanitized traditional carols and not swivel those hips, as well as the broader concrete representation of Parker’s pushing him to shift his career to inoffensive, bland music, against a new manager who wants to encourage Elvis to play his own kind of music and swivel at will. This sets up a clear story conflict that serves as a powerful propulsive force.
- His desire for fame and fortune is represented by specific, tangible goals that Elvis associates with money—wanting to buy his mother a pink Cadillac, Graceland, his own plane, etc.—and popularity and acclaim, like bigger venues, Hollywood movies, and eventually a European tour.
- His longing for love is represented by his profound devotion to his mother, Gladys (and to a smaller degree his father); the Colonel; Priscilla and Lisa Marie; and, as the Colonel himself reminds viewers throughout, the fans. Elvis thrives on attention and confuses it with love—and that motivates every decision he makes in the story.
Defining what your character wants and why allows you to grow a cohesive, integrated plot as you throw obstacles in the path between your characters and what they want, and let their “why”—what drives them toward that goal—dictate the choices they make. Each choice sends them on the next step of the path as your plot develops organically, always driven by the characters.
Know how your character changes
One final reason plots may fail is that the character’s point B—how they change by the end of the story, externally, internally, or both—is not directly related to or a result of what happened to them in the course of it.
But if you let their goal and motivation dictate their actions and behavior at every decision point, then readers will see on the page, step by step, how your character moves along her arc: how each challenge she faces, every choice she makes, affects her, shifts her perspective, and causes her growth or change.
This direct, intrinsic relationship between plot and character—the character’s struggles, choices, longings, and goals that drive the actions they take in the course of the plot—is what makes for dynamic stories that feel organic, cohesive, and satisfying to readers.
Article
https://www.janefriedman.com/why-plots-fail/My Thoughts
the following is a little aside. but, what do you think about short stories that contain key tenets or rules in a world that can prepare an author in making a longer story in the same world ? I use as an example. ursula leguin's earthsea. she wrote three short stories that like any good short story stand on their own but also displayed key principles of the world in the later books. I have a larger work I am working on, the plot is not finished, but that is based on what I want a few major characters to do at or near the end and it is an important choice. But a smaller story, in the same world , is near complete, The characters , The plot, the story is done. The ending resolution even relates to where I want the larger story to go. And some key rules are displayed. Maybe some plots fail because authors are unwilling to give glimpses, ala short stories, into the world first? I will be blunt, I never wrote a short story at the same time working on a larger one in the same world. Maybe if plotters:) or pantsters step back from the big book and make an intentional short story in the same world, it can help them with the cohesiveness between the plot side characters lives in the longer story.
Writers of the future talk
-
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d'Italia, at a meeting in Palermo for the 2022 Italian elections. (Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
MY THOUGHTS BEFORE YOU READ THE ARTICLE
I apologize, recently, I have been courteous and not manipulated or coerced a reader's mind with my thoughts, before. But I am compelled this time from my own energies.... you see , as a Black person from the USA whose bloodline has been in the USA too long. I am used to hearing from blacks or whites of the multiracial acceptance of Europe. The old black lindyhop teacher who teaches all age groups in finland. that kind of thing. I have sad it a billion times, most humans despise immigration when it next door. Many countries in Europe never dealt with immigration. This goes back to European empires, where people from Indochine rarely traveled to france. People from the gold coast rarely traveled to england. People from Nova spain rarely traveled to Spain. But, quietly, the European Union, and the poverty in humanity has pushed into europe enough immigrants for the european local farmer or small town resident to notice and as usual, all hell broke lose.
Europeans love coming to New York City, they spend money, see the rainbow, but they go home to a white village usually, and they can make a diary of their journey. But, dealing with immigration next door is another cultural being and it is clear most Europeans in Europe are not ready.
I do think of angela merkel who once said, germans must teach people how to be german. I said she was right then and she is clearly right in hindsight.
But what does this have to relate to Black people in the USA. well... the Black community in the USA has historically had a tribe in itself that is related to other black tribes in the usa , financially rich. Said black rich have always pushed or supported immigratory activities in the usa.
They were the ones always pushing the black kids de segregate the schools, not get more money for black schools. Desegregate the white communities, not get more money for black communities.
Meaning, a large percentage of black people support the immigration of non blacks into the black community and the act of blacks immigrating into non black communities.
I find it funny how europe, often touted by financially wealthy black people as accepting to immigration, is showing the truth we all know to immigration. No one wants the immigrants near them. Russia/China are closing up shop. Texas is sending immigrants to New York. European countries are proving putin is not a european outlier. If Putin holds out, Russia will have destabilized the european union and exposed the countries that stood quietly against russia while changing many countries in Europe into their honest selves.
I wonder can the black community in the usa be honest?
Immigration, crime propel Europe's move to right, analysts say
Melissa Rossi
·Contributor
Thu, September 22, 2022 at 4:27 PM·10 min read
In Europe, political analysts are pointing to Sweden and Italy as possible harbingers of a political mood shift across the continent driven by a growing wariness of immigrants as well as anger over rising crime rates.
The startlingly strong performance of the far-right Sweden Democrats in this month’s Swedish parliamentary elections and polls showing that the nationalist Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) party is poised for victory in this weekend’s contests in that country have both been spurred by those two issues, analysts told Yahoo News.
“Gang violence in Sweden was the issue in the election,” said Gunilla Herolf, a researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs who specializes in European integration. It’s a problem, she added, that is weighing on every Swede. “Some are furious. Some are just terribly upset.”
In Italy, “security issues are being exploited by right-wing forces,” sociologist Giovanna Campani told Yahoo News.
At a glance, the two countries share relatively few commonalities. Sweden is a wealthy, cohesive welfare state, which over the past 90 years has typically been led by leftist coalition governments. By comparison, Italy’s economy, which is burdened by massive debt, is reeling. Costs of living are soaring, and over the past decade, its government has changed nearly every 18 months. But in both places, rising crime and misgivings about immigrants are prompting a political realignment.
The Sweden Democrats, originally formed as a neo-Nazi party in 1988, were one of four right-leaning parties that won a combined 176 of 349 seats in Sweden’s Parliament in last week’s election, besting the center-left coalition by six seats. Now, details of which parties will partake in the new coalition government, and how much influence the Sweden Democrats will actually have, are being hammered out. Despite being ostracized by mainstream Swedes, the party won 20.5% of the vote, elevating it from the fringes to Sweden’s second-most popular party. Its campaign in Sweden — where 20% of the population is now foreign-born, and the country has become known as “the gun violence capital of Europe” — was built on promises to control crime perpetrated by young migrants and to deport some foreign-born Swedes.
Jimmie Akesson, the new leader of the Sweden Democrats, insists his party has shed its fascist leanings, though the party remains staunchly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and keeps pounding home its messaging linking foreign-born Swedes and crime. The party points to recent crime trends showing that drug-peddling armed gangs have emerged in some migrant communities during the past five years. In 2021, Sweden experienced some 360 gang-related shootings and 47 deaths; by September of this year, 47 had already died in shootings.
“Sweden used to be a completely peaceful country — and safe,” Brussels-based Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the independent think tank GLOBSEC, told Yahoo News. “Now it’s become one of the most unsafe places in Europe” — not only because of its gang shootings but also because of high number of incidents of rape. “So that’s brought an end to the political correctness,” he said. “Even the [liberal] Social Democrats are talking about immigration, law and order, and getting tough on crime.”
The rate of armed violence is growing faster than anywhere else on the continent, according to a 2021 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “The increase in gun homicide in Sweden is closely linked to criminal milieux in socially disadvantaged areas,” according to the report.
Until recently, it was all but taboo in Sweden for mainstream politicians to acknowledge the problem.
“That's why the Sweden Democrats are gaining in popularity,” said Eric Adamson, a Stockholm-based project manager at the Atlantic Council’s Northern Europe office. “They were the only ones talking about this” in recent years. Both socially and politically, he said, the topic had previously been off limits for Swedes to discuss.
In Italy, a Sept. 25 snap election necessitated by the July collapse of the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi seems likely to result in the most conservative leadership there since Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922. The likely new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has also run on an anti-immigrant platform, vowing to mobilize the Italian navy to prevent African refugees from reaching her country.
Like Sweden, Italy has also been dealing with rising violent crime, though much of it doesn’t involve the immigrants who have sought safe haven there in recent years. Youth gangs of Italians, which some 6% of Italian teens are believed to belong to, are becoming a nightmare for the country, especially around Naples and the south, though some African migrants appear to be starting to form them as well.
This June, however, an estimated 1,500 African youths went on a rampage in the northern town of Peschiera, breaking windows, roughing up tourists and allegedly sexually assaulting young women on a train. Matteo Salvini of the League, a right-wing political alliance he formed with Brothers of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia for the upcoming election, lambasted the attack. Meloni, the Brothers of Italy leader, who has promised to protect Italy from “Islamization,” seized on the uproar, posting a video on her Twitter account of an African man allegedly raping a woman in broad daylight.
The bigger issue for Meloni, however, may be the changing face and complexion of Italian citizens. The woman who promotes “God, homeland and family” frequently laments Italy’s low birth rate and fears the extinction of Italians and their replacement by immigrants from Africa, a conspiracy she has accused the government of the European Union of orchestrating. “The EU is complicit in uncontrolled immigration, the invasion of Europe and the project of ethnic replacement of European citizens,” she wrote on her website in February.
Campani thinks there are a number of factors at work in Italy that end up working in the right’s favor — including anger over the bureaucracy of the European Union, which imposes rules on many aspects of Italy’s government, such as the treatment of migrants, how to utilize COVID funds, what sorts of energy to invest in and how to handle its debt crisis.
Meloni has promised to challenge Brussels’ authority, vowing that if she’s elected to lead Italy’s government, “the fun is over.”
If she does become prime minister, Freudenstein said, European policymakers will find “a more pugnacious and feistier Italy.”
“She’s a fresh face — and I think Italians want to try out something new,” he added.
According to a December 2021 YouGov poll of residents in 10 European nations, both Italy and Sweden were among the top three European countries saying that the number of foreigners allowed to immigrate to European countries has been excessive — a statement with which 77% percent of Italians and 73% of Swedes agreed.
In April, young migrant men, protesting the planned burning of the Quran by a Swedish provocateur in towns across the country, kicked off riots in three cities that injured more than 100 Swedish police — just one disturbing event that forced then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, a Social Democrat, into admitting a problem with violence among some migrant communities, and the existence of “parallel societies” of many foreign-born in Sweden. “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden,” she told reporters. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”
The issue in Sweden, said Herolf of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, isn’t immigration itself. It’s the mafia-like Eastern European clans and gangs that made it into the country along with legitimate asylum seekers and refugees.
“There are people coming into Sweden who bring criminality with them,” she said, including some from the former Yugoslavia. “But there were also loads of decent hardworking people from there too. So [previously] we didn’t want to talk about that and risk hurting the good people.”
What’s more, she said, it’s now widely recognized that Sweden has taken in far too many refugees since 2015, when the civil war in Syria broke out creating a refugee crisis, and that the government in Stockholm has been reticent to force them to integrate into Swedish society. “We have a responsibility to make demands on them to learn Swedish, to join in Swedish society," and not just live in foreign bubbles.
“Sweden has been an extremely tolerant and antiracist country,” Johan Martinsson, a political science professor and research director of the Laboratory of Opinion Research and the Citizen Panel at the University of Gothenburg, told Yahoo News. He pointed to an incident in 2002 when a politician suggested that foreigners should be given a basic language test before being given citizenship. “It was considered an outrage,” Martinsson said. “He was called a racist for even suggesting it.”
The increasing popularity of nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, such as Marine LePen’s rise in France, underscores the need for mainstream politicians to openly admit to issues as they emerge, and to stop worrying that acknowledging them simply reinforces the radical right, said Freudenstein. “Integration policies for migrants have to become much tougher,” he added, and governments need “to be tougher about language, about [banning the wearing of] burqas, and about prohibiting afternoon [Islamist] schools where children unlearn what they learned in the morning about women’s rights and the separation of church and state.”
Freudenstein, for one, is concerned about what the rise of far-right parties will mean for the cohesion of the European Union — all the more with soaring energy prices and potential shortages, even the possibility of natural gas rationing — as the continent heads into the colder months. “We know a crisis winter is coming,” he said. “And it’s going to reinforce this feeling of ‘Let’s try something new,’ and the feeling that the structures and powers in place have failed.” He points to the growing possibility of “a severe recession that will dramatically increase social tensions.” The next six months will be crucial, he believes, and will “decide the future of politics in Europe.”
ARTICLE
https://news.yahoo.com/immigration-crime-propel-europes-move-to-right-analysts-say-202748280.html
-
Students pour out of a Jewish school, known as a yeshiva, in Brooklyn, June 8, 2022. (Jonah Markowitz/The New York Times)
New York Lawmakers Call for More Oversight of Hasidic Schools
Eliza Shapiro, Brian M. Rosenthal and Nicholas Fandos
Tue, September 13, 2022 at 7:51 AM·5 min read
NEW YORK — Top New York officials voiced grave concerns about the quality of education in Hasidic Jewish private schools on Monday, a day after The New York Times revealed that many of the schools taught only rudimentary English and math and virtually no science or history.
Two Democratic congressmen — Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus — said they had serious concerns, with Nadler saying it was clear that some of the Hasidic schools were “utterly failing.”
“It is a paramount duty of government to make sure that all children — whether it’s those educated in parochial, private or public schools — are provided a quality education,” said Nadler, the senior Jewish member of the House, whose current district encompasses a major Hasidic neighborhood and who was himself yeshiva-educated. “It is our duty to all New York students to ensure that the law is enforced.”
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
Jeffries, who represents parts of central Brooklyn, called for “a rigorous inquiry in order to make sure that the health and well-being of all children is protected.”
Daniel Goldman, who recently won a contested Democratic primary for a new congressional seat that includes Hasidic areas in Brooklyn, said he hoped the schools would work to comply with the law, adding that the Times report “paints a damning picture of an inadequate secular education that does not comply with state law.”
At the state level — where politicians routinely court the cohesive Hasidic voting bloc — the state Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said she was concerned about the lack of secular education in the Hasidic schools.
“The allegations in the story are deeply disturbing and must be addressed,” she said.
State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, both Democrats who represent heavily Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said they were particularly alarmed by accounts of corporal punishment in the schools and would introduce legislation to ban such punishments going forward.
Other leaders, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and members of a powerful state education board, showed less willingness to criticize the Hasidic schools.
Hochul, a Democrat who has sought to appeal to Jewish voters before this fall’s gubernatorial election, declined to take a position on the Hasidic schools. She is ahead in polls, but, only a year after taking office, is still forging relationships with key groups across the state.
“People understand that this is outside the purview of the governor,” Hochul said Monday at an event in Harlem.
Although the state Board of Regents, not the governor, controls the state education department, Hochul is the most powerful politician in New York and can have significant influence over education issues.
For their part, members of the Board of Regents made no mention of the Times report in discussions Monday before an expected vote on new rules that would hold private schools, including the Hasidic schools, known as yeshivas, to minimum academic standards.
An attorney who has represented many Hasidic yeshivas, Avi Schick, recently said that Hochul’s chance of being reelected this November could be threatened by the Regents vote, even though the governor has not taken a public position on the rules.
Other New York Democratic officials either did not respond to inquiries or declined to comment Monday about the Hasidic schools, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, the majority leader; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, chief of the House Democratic campaign committee.
New York Republicans, including Rep. Lee Zeldin, defended the schools and criticized the Times report. At a campaign event outside City Hall on Monday, Zeldin, who is running for governor against Hochul and is Jewish, suggested that public schools ought to be emulating “the values” of Hasidic schools, not the other way around.
Other state Republicans said they believed the government should not interfere with private religious education or parents’ ability to choose where their children are educated.
Benine Hamdan, the long-shot Republican candidate challenging Goldman in Brooklyn, said she opposed the state regulations, taking a shot at critical race theory. “While public schools are teaching CRT and sexuality, Hasidic schools should continue to have the right to teach Judaism,” she said.
“At my core, I believe all parents have the right to choose the educational setting they think is best for their children,” said Mark Martucci, a state senator who represents a district just north of New York City and added that he had toured yeshivas and had been impressed by the students.
In a state where Republicans are largely locked out of power, the party has been increasing its outreach to Hasidic voters who have consistently voted for Democrats in local elections but have begun favoring Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, in national races.
Published on Sunday, the Times investigation showed that Hasidic schools appear to be operating in violation of state law by denying thousands of students a basic education. The community operates more than 100 all-boys schools across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, which have received more than $1 billion in government money over the past four years alone.
The schools typically provide only 90 minutes a day of secular instruction, just four days per week, and only for boys ages 8 to 12. As a result, the students are failing to learn secular subjects at extraordinarily high rates, the Times found. More than 99% of students who took standardized tests in 2019 failed, according to state data.
At a news conference Monday, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said he was “not concerned” about the Times’ findings but stressed that his administration was continuing a long-delayed city investigation into some Hasidic schools.
“I’m not going to look at a story. I want a thorough investigation. I want an independent review, and that’s what the city has to do. And we’re going to look at that,” Adams said. The mayor added that any instances of child abuse in the schools should be reported and investigated.
Over the past few years, Hasidic leaders have made keeping government out of schools their top political priority and have relied on officials elected from their community to help block the regulations.
One Hasidic politician, David Schwartz, a Hasidic district leader in Brooklyn, disputed reports of problems in the schools, including regular use of corporal punishment, saying, “I and my community — tens of thousands of caring parents and educators — are unfairly being paint-brushed due to the accounts of a few.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company
ARTICLE
https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-lawmakers-call-more-oversight-115132238.html
MY THOUGHTS
I want to first restate the key points in the article.
- The white jewish schools are operating with some level of illegality for an extended time
- government officials at the federal level <senator chuck schumer> new york state <governor hochul> or new york city level <mayor adams>are so frightened of the white jewish voting block aside the white jewish financial power that none have accepted the findings as true publicly while all want an extended time of deliberations which they would not give the black community or any part of the black community
- The defenders of the white jewish schools say parents have the right to place children where they want and to preserve the heritage in their community, in this case jewish. I think of the Black descended of enslaved MOVE movement in philadelphia and how a black mayor treated them for wanting to preserve their own culture.
- The white jewish schools , over one hundred all boys schools at least, received over one billion dollars in four years while providing per week only four days with ninety minute secular instruction.
- More than ninety nine percent of students in the white jewish private schools who took standardized tests failed in 2019, this is 2022.
Now what is my position. I don't care about: the white jewish schools whether committing illegality or not, the financial power of the white jewish community in New York City, the influence by the white jewish community on government officials<federal, state, city>, the white jewish community's heritage or culture being preserved or maintained, or the failure of white jewish students.
What I care about is the Black community all throughout humanity and in particular, the black community in New York City.
The Black community in New York City doesn't have a large private school system internally and yet Black teachers in public schools have been removed for the crime of disagreeing with administrators, on a first time offense, not for years of neglect doing their job.
I know the black community in NYC is fiscally poor, it started that way for enslaving black people was legal when new york was new amsterdam before the creation of the United States America. Sequentially, the Black community in NYC doesn't demand the trepidation from elected officials even though it historically votes as a block too.
From the Black Panthers to The Nation of Islam to the Rastafarians the Black community in NYC tends to have the loudest opposition internally to heritages or cultures from within a community. I can see a Black newscaster in New york city asking, what does it mean to have a Black school.
The black children of New York City have a financially impotent Black adult community, which includes me, who in majority, I am part of the black adult minority, continually preaches to them about merit or equality or voting while providing black children in new york city nothing. The black adult community in new york city, includes me, have failed the black children of new york city hiding behind a cheap veil of individual decency or merit when in truth we black adults are just flat broke and are too proud to admit it. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black children about the need to be more educated and start making money and giving it to black kids regardless of their scholastic quality. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black children about competitive spirit and start making sure governments give money for black kids to enjoy life more regardless of their demeanor. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black kids what they have to do and start telling black kids what you can't do, admit your impotency your weakness your poverty and tell the truth of you to black children.
I feel sorry for Black Children in new york city. I was once one, and while I was fortunate in the time span of my childhood from a homelife perspective or communal perspective, I despised local media in new york city which was and is ninety nine percent white owned. White owned new york city media never stopped reminding black children how they needed to do better in my childhood days, comparing black children to various children anywhere with one thing in common. At the time of comparison they are better than black children in New York City. While the same white owned news media of New York City, couldn't find time to discover how the French don't count the schools in the Balieues as part of their main surveys to the world , the japanese don't count the children who don't come to school at higher rates, the schools in the white towns or villages in the midwest where the curriculum is lower isn't admitted in the assessment to comparing the black children in new york city. Black children in NYC have been falsely attributed as consistent failures when in truth it is a mere trick of statistics. Any thing can be proven statistically, anything, the key is in the details. Black children in education have been attacked by statistical warfare and black adults, like me,let it happen.
- Show previous comments 3 more
-
@Chevdove Education is a part of life:) I will never deny the need to keep an open mind, to want to keep learning... but when it comes to scholastic achievement in the USA. Black adults, to be blunt, have to change tact. We have to stop suggesting our children whom we can not provide for like White adults can to white children must overcome Black adult inability. I am not suggesting Black Adults tell Black Children to stop dreaming or working or desiring. But, this story not only confirms what many in NYC already knew. I can speak to that. But the story also exposes how unfair Black adults, who can't provide the kind of financial or environmental scenario for black children as a community, are to black children in asking them to overcome those walls. White children failing 99% with an average scholastic test, are going to a school getting billions. That is the power of the white adults. What are we black adults actually asking our children to to?
-
-
1
-
- Report
-
Yes. How can Black children overcome our inabilities without help?
Black adults do need to give children more than just words.
But then, another problem, I believe, is that many Black adults become parents at too young of an age and part of our failures has to do with maturity.
I believe we need elders, a community of elders to come together, and pool resources to help young
parents as well.
-
-
1
-
- Report
-
-
Tijan Njie as Robert Pilatus and Elan Ben Ali as Fabrice Morvan in the upcoming Milli Vanilli biopic, 'Girl You Know It's True' | CREDIT: DENIS PERNATH, COPYRIGHT: LEONINE STUDIOS / WIEDEMANN & BERG FILMMY THOUGHTS
I rather it be the Frank Farian story. What convinced him to use two black models from germany and have them have lyp synching careers? I think that kind of story could had led to discussions of how white artists from the USA or Europe made careers being talentless and living off of black artists. I think that was what made Farian who was old enough to see this, be inspired to create and orchestrate milli vanilli. and then in the second act of the film. The fact that he was able to labeled blameless by the media as the producer of milli vanilli while also able to place all blame on milli vanilli, like either of them paid for the singers who were totally complicit as well. so... as always, the film has potential but I would had gone another way.
THE ARTICLE
Milli Vanilli biopic first look teases controversial music duo's looming vocal storm
Girl You Know It's True is produced by Netflix's Dark masterminds Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann.
Joey Nolfi
By Joey Nolfi September 01, 2022 at 11:48 AM EDTGirl, you know it's true: A Milli Vanilli biopic is on the way, and the studio behind the planned project has unveiled a first look at its stars.
Lead actors Tijan Njie and Elan Ben Ali appear in the new photo as Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, the faces of the ill-fated German-French pop duo who notched three No. 1 singles in the United States in the late '80s. It was later revealed that the pair had taken credit for vocals actually provided by several other singers, including John Davis, who died in 2021.
Matthias Schweighöfer will star as Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian in the Leonine Studios- and Wiedemann & Berg–produced film, currently titled Girl You Know It's True.
Simon Verhoeven will direct from a script he wrote. Producers on the film include Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann, who previously worked on the Oscar-winning international film The Lives of Others, the Oscar-nominated movie Never Look Away, and Netflix's popular thriller series Dark.
The movie's plot follows the duo's scandal, which was allegedly orchestrated by Farian and saw the frontmen lip-syncing to the voices of other artists who were only credited as background vocalists on their official releases.
Milli Vanilli initially won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990, though they ultimately returned the award.
Controversial filmmaker Brett Ratner was previously working on a Milli Vanilli biopic, though that project was dropped by production company Millennium Media in February 2021, after its announcement received intense backlash in the wake of Ratner being accused of sexual misconduct in 2017. (Ratner "categorically" denied the allegations through his attorney Marty Singer at the time.)
Girl You Know It's True does not have a release date yet, but it is expected to film in Munich, Berlin, Capetown, and Los Angeles before wrapping in December.
ARTICLE URL
https://ew.com/movies/milli-vanilli-movie-first-look-photo/
IN AMENDMENT
beverly hills cop 4...many stockholders of the redstone company want the white jewish clan to sell the firm to an investment firm. But they are being adamant against it, which I think is the better strategy. but, having said that, they don't have the money for a high quantity of big budget films, thus why fox sold its movie division to disney and at&t sold warner bros with debt to discovery channel. The screenwriter to this film is a former law enforcer so I don't know how funny this will be. I am not a true fan of beverly hills cop so I can't speak for the audience or the fanbase.
-
A Festival That Conjures the Magic of H.P. Lovecraft and Beyond
At the Rhode Island event, revelers danced to murder ballads and celebrated all things weird. They even found time to reckon with the writer’s racism.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli https://www.evincentelli.comMatt Cosby of NY Times is the photographer
Aug. 28, 2022There’s bacon and eggs, and then there’s bacon and eggs at the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast. Named after the cosmically malevolent and abundantly tentacled entity dreamed up by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the event, among the most popular at NecronomiCon Providence 2022, filled a vast hotel ballroom at 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday.
To the delighted worshipers, Cody Goodfellow, here a Most Exalted Hierophant, delivered a sermon that started with growled mentions of “doom-engines, black and red,” “great hammers of the scouring” and so on.
Then the speech took a left turn.
“I must confess myself among those who always trusted that a coven of sexless black-robed liches would change the world for the better,” said Goodfellow, who had flown in from the netherworld known as San Diego, Calif. “But the malignant forces of misplaced morality have regrouped from the backlash that stopped them in the ’80s, and the re-lash is in full swing.”
And so it went, with delicious jabs at incel culture (of which, one might argue, Lovecraft was a proto-member) and plutocrats.
The conference, which took place on Aug. 18-21 in Providence, R.I., for the first time since 2019, is named after Lovecraft’s hometown and another of his literary inventions — a grimoire so dangerous that those who read it meet ghastly ends. (The biannual convention takes place around his birthday; he was born on Aug. 20, 1890.)
The problem is that Lovecraft was a deeply racist and xenophobic man. How we deal with the legacy of a decidedly unsavory person is an issue of great political and cultural relevance nowadays, and the event has tackled it not by retreating or trying to defend the indefensible but by opening up its programming and the range of people invited to participate.
Cordelia Abrams, 49, a Bostonian life coach dressed as an anglerfish at the breakfast, has been attending these events for almost a decade. “This is weird and literary and local,” she said.
Although the event was Lovecraft-centric in its 1990s iteration, it has broadened since a 2013 reboot under the aegis of the nonprofit Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council and is now subtitled “the international festival of weird fiction, art and academia.” Which, of course, poses the question: What does weird even mean when swaths of the mainstream have a slipping grip on reality? A large number of folks, after all, falsely believe that satanic pedophiles operated out of a pizzeria.
At the “Welcome to the New Weird” panel, the editor and publisher Ann VanderMeer, one of the festival’s guests of honor, posited that “the weird is a way to connect with the world around us and make sense of it.” Most people I met or heard speak over the weekend agreed there was a common element of unease and unsettlement, which explains the panels dedicated to simpatico artists like Clive Barker, David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard.
What was striking was how many of the participants have worked through the problem of Lovecraft himself to repurpose the basic tropes in his fiction. They are appropriating its overarching themes — the powerlessness of humanity against great, unknowable forces — and turning the weird into an instrument of self-exploration, liberation and creativity.
“What really brought me here is the fact that I love horror,” said Zin E. Rocklyn, a 38-year-old queer Black writer from Florida who was on three panels. “I love the catharsis that it brings, the truth that it brings. An incredible imagination came up with some really shady” garbage, she added, using a stronger word to describe Lovecraft’s views. “It’s based in ignorance and fear, but it taps into a universal fear. Being able to examine that and talk about that and expand on that is a great example of what you can do with such an ignorant business.”
Besides academic papers, the convention offered an abundance of panels sharing a dark sensibility: “Not Just Three Acts: Narrative Structure and the Weird”; “Out of the Shadows: A History of the Queer Weird”; and “The Horizon Is Still Way Beyond You: Zora Neale Hurston’s Life and Legacy.” For the last session, the panelists somehow wrangled an interesting 75 minutes out of Hurston’s and Lovecraft’s irreconcilable differences — contrasting, for example, her searching curiosity about other people with his bigotry.
Among the most eye- and mind-opening panels was the one on body horror, which, for you literary fiction folks, included a reminder that the subgenre encompasses classics like “Frankenstein” and “The Metamorphosis.” That panel felt pointed at a time when control over one’s body is being hotly debated in issues relating to transgender lives and abortion.
Another bracing session dealt with Lovecraft and Southeast Asia, in which the Indonesian-American writer Nadia Bulkin said she loved the idea that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (ancient gods as powerful as they are malignant) “are the European invaders trampling on lands that aren’t theirs.” Cassandra Khaw, a Malaysian-born writer and another guest of honor, pointed out an essential distinction between Asian horror movies and their American remakes: The American versions are inferior because they add an element of salvation or moral redemption where there was none.
But many attendees preferred gaming over metaphysical discussions. Several sessions were spread over various tables, mostly on two floors, and ranged from the popular (“Call of Cthulhu,” which is widely credited to have reignited interest in Lovecraft when it came out in 1981) to the willfully obscure (“Hecatomb,” a failed collectible-card game meant to be a dark version of “Magic: The Gathering”) and the hilariously entertaining (“Pirate Borg,” complete with swashbuckling outfits and a screen showing close-ups of the dice rolls).
The volume and variety of the programming was enough to make your head spin like Regan MacNeil’s. There were also film screenings, readings, concerts, live podcasts, walking tours of Lovecraft’s Providence, an art exhibit and theatrical performances. There was even a mushroom jaunt in a nearby park, in tribute to the recurrence of things fungal in Lovecraft’s fiction.
According to Niels Hobbs, the “arch director” of the convention and a marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island (he was on the “Under the Sea: Horrors of the Deep Ocean” panel), this year’s edition drew around 200 guest panelists, artists and reading authors; over 100 volunteer staff members and “minions”; and 1,400 attendees. (Absent from the official proceedings was the pre-eminent Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi, who later wrote in an email that he had been at NecronomiCon but “kept a low profile.”)
Some preferred focusing on the core mythos, like Brian Vann, 53, a data analyst from Costa Mesa, Calif. “His characters are so frequently warned off: ‘Don’t go there, bad things happen,’” Vann said. “But they go, with terrible results. That speaks a lot to the human condition: How do we just ignore the warnings?”
In comparison to commercial enterprises like Comic Con, Providence had no Hollywood presence and only an infinitesimal amount of cosplay. The one big event that involved dressing up, the Eldritch Ball, had a theme, “Masque of the Red Death,” that freed up the imagination rather than constricted it to trademarked characters — instead of, say, Darth Vader, there was a woman dressed as Persephone, queen of the underworld, and a tuxedoed man in what looked like a green crochet Cthulhu mask. Revelers slow dancing to murder ballads was a sight to behold.
Lovecraft himself might have been surprised to see his work bringing together such an inquisitive, welcoming congregation. But to Goodfellow, 53, the conference is a good antidote to the nihilism ravaging parts of America.
“Instead of rooting for the apocalypse, we’re rooting for sustainability and for people to radically accept each other as who we are and all move forward together,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully ironic backhanded way of finding positivity in absolute negativity.”
Article link
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/books/necronomicon-providence-hp-lovecraft.html
My Thoughts
I am not a fan of the squid god:) But I never knew of the festival and it seems on reading like what the comic con used to be in NYC, what jazzmobile used to be in harlem, what many festivals used to be that I liked once upon a time.
I oppose the idea that Lovecraft was unsavory. Hitler as leader in the german government did many things that hurt people, whether german or not, ala The romani. But, Hitler had friends. I have never supported Donald Trump's as a real estate man or reality television mogul or president of the united states of america. But I don't know Donald Trump. The white men of european descent who enslaved my forebears , before during or after slavery , I do not like or support or have positive thoughts to. But that doesn't mean they were unsavory. Said white men had friends and loving ones. JK rowlings isn't unsavory. She has positions or viewpoints many do not like, many oppose, many despise, but that doesn't mean she is unsavory. An artist person not fitting a heritage or cultural mold in any community isn't a problem. Their art can still be liked. The problem is communities who confuse liking an art to liking an artist. I don't like the Nazi German party as I am black and by their law I am unfit to live or be treated with positivity if they have control to determine things. But, their night marches are lovely.
The article shows in this convention, the people who attend it were able to do what I have heard or read many artist say they can not do, to Michael JAckson or R Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or DW Griffith and that is separate the artists from the art. And that shows a maturity that is rarer or rarer within the consumers or creators of art. -
REVIEW OF NOPE FROM MOVIES THAT MOVE WE
Some points without spoiling the review
8:04 or 23:44 Nike - the role of Perception in the film
25:40 Nicole - description of the films place in genres
33:35 Both- the nonchalance against common sense:) very funny
37:54 Nike- Lovely real life example of how people judge a film strictly, advertise their judgement to influence others, but don't even fully assess a film, by their own admission. But how can one recant in real time
40:16 Nicole- yes, I concur to the relationship to both Peele and the director you mention who in their time in the sun:) had the ability to make films that be thought provoking or artful WHILE also commercial. I don't think it is unimportant to say that Nope covered its cost of production.
49:44 Both - Keith David is a very fortunate thespian. Not merely being a thespian having less opportunty, cause he is black and media in the USA is owned by whites, who do favor giving opportunity to whites. But, Keith David has been able to be part of many thoughtful films in the film itself or its role in genre setting in various genres: The THing;The Live;Pitch Black;Nope<science fiction>[Keith David has successfully been a black character in a science fiction film that has lived at the end more than once, died before the 15 minute mark and died just before the end:) ] / Platoon<war film>/ Bird<documentary> [where he played a criminalized version of buster smith] /Roadhouse<action>People don't realize how some films hollywood has been heavily inspired by and never been able to repeat /The Quick and the Dead<western> [a female led western back when it wasn't so easy to see being financed]/PRincess Mononoke <anime>[the studio ghibli collection itself is something else... his voice is everywhere, ever since, and shout to tv show gargoyles]/Crash <social commentary vignettes>[hollywood has tried to find the next crash since crash]/The Inheritance<My personal favorite film with him in it, the story is a rare thing in its message>
Prior Movies That Move We entry
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1989&type=status
MOVIES THAT MOVE WE entries
-
Congrats to Jordan Peele side all the creators involved in NOPE
Box Office: Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ Opens to No. 1 With $44 Million
By Rebecca Rubin
Audiences responded with a resounding “yep” to Jordan Peele’s science-fiction thriller “Nope,” which topped the box office with its $44 million debut.
Those ticket sales were slightly behind projections of $50 million and fall in between the results of Peele’s first two films, 2017’s “Get Out” (which opened to $33 million) and 2019’s “Us” (which opened to $71 million). “Nope” may not have cemented a new box office record for Peele, but it demonstrates the director’s popularity at the movies and marks a strong start for an original, R-rated horror film.
In fact, “Nope” stands as the highest opening weekend tally for an original film since “Us” debuted more than three years ago. Yes, that includes Quentin Tarantino’s star-studded “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which started with $41 million in July 2019.
“The opening isn’t as big as ‘Us,’ but it’s still extremely impressive,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “The weekend figure is far above average for the genre.”
It’s worth noting that Peele’s sophomore feature “Us,” a scary story about menacing doppelgängers, enjoyed an especially huge opening weekend because it followed the runaway success of the Oscar-winning “Get Out.” After his directorial debut captured the zeitgeist by delivering scares while encouraging audiences to think, fans of the filmmaker were more than a little eager to watch Peele’s next mind-bending nightmare. Though Peele still has outsized goodwill with audiences, box office expectations for “Nope,” another anxiety-inducing social thriller, should have been comparatively a little more Earth-bound.
“Nope” cost $68 million, which is significantly more than “Get Out” (with its slender $4.5 million budget) and “Us” (with its $20 million budget). So the movie will require a little more coinage than Peele’s past films to turn a profit. Word-of-mouth will be key. “Get Out” and “Us” were wildly successful in theaters, with each collecting $255 million at the global box office. “Nope” does not open at the international box office until mid-August.
“Nope” reunites Peele with “Get Out” star Daniel Kaluuya — and adds Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun to the mix — in the story of siblings who live on a gulch in California and attempt to uncover video evidence of a UFO. Critics were fond of “Nope,” which holds an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave the film a “B” grade, the same CinemaScore as “Us.”
Universal’s president of domestic distribution Jim Orr points out that “Nope” is appealing to all demographics; according to exit polls, 35% of ticket buyers were Caucasian, 20% were Hispanic, 33% were African American and 8% were Asian. He says that’s a good sign in terms of its theatrical run.
“We’re thrilled with the results this weekend,” Orr says. “Jordan Peele is an incredible talent. His films are layered and thought-provoking and ridiculously entertaining.”
Since “Nope” was the only new movie to open this weekend, several holdover titles rounded out North American box office charts.
...ARTICLE LINK
https://variety.com/2022/film/box-office/nope-box-office-opening-weekend-jordan-peele-1235324105/
Post Script NOTE: the purple outfit in the article linked above
-
Miss Juneteenth - film review by Movies That Move We
facebook group link
https://www.facebook.com/groups/162792258578547/permalink/437616257762811/Prior Moviess That Move We Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1983&type=statusList of Movies That Move We Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q="movies that move we"&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status
juneteenth art
Title: Black YEar Round
Artist: RoseberriiDotart
https://www.deviantart.com/roseberriidotart/art/Black-Year-Round-888032233
ARTICLE
https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/Celebrate-Juneteenth-2022-918659475
-
THE HISTORIC MICHIGAN STREET BAPTIST CHURCH
Yesterday, along with many other people across the city, I partook in Doors Open Buffalo where many buildings and businesses across the city--as the name suggests--opened their doors to the public. Planning on stopping at and photographing 4 or 5 churches I ended up at just this one; the Michigan Street Baptist Church.
This church is important and historic for many reasons. One is its age. The congregation was first formed in 1836 and the building itself completed in 1849. But it is the congregation itself that is important as well..this was the first black church of any denomination in the city of Buffalo. This, and also the fact that they were instrumental in the success of the Underground Railroad. Not only did they hide freed slaves, they helped get them safely across the border to Canada.
After visiting their humble sanctuary I was about to leave and move on the the next church when I heard someone say, "Don't forget to visit the basement, Bishop Henderson is giving tours."
Upon entering the small basement I saw an elderly man who looked more like a Rabbi talking with a handful of people. This was Bishop Henderson. Affiliated with the church for more than 50 years, he was a wealth of knowledge and more than eager to talk about what he knew. When I asked if he still preached he turned to me and said simply, "Why yes, I still do." He also seemed a bit surprised and shy when I asked if I could take his photo but he obliged. His first name is William and he was originally refereed to as Brother Billy because he began preaching on Buffalo's East Side street corners at the ripe age of 14 [source].
Among the many things he told us ("Should I go on?" he would ask, "because I can talk about this all day") two of the most moving things to me were the poster directly below and also the small passageway where they hid escaped slaves.
The poster is a replica of an actual one that was common of the time. There were a few deeply disturbing things the Bishop pointed out. Out of the 18 women for sale, 8 of them came with "future insurance," meaning they could still bear children. So in essence, pay for the price of one human and you have the potential of receiving more. Even more chilling is on of the descriptions for the 6 girls, "bud'n out." This meant two things. Because the girls were in puberty ("bud'n out") they were available for the slave owners personal pleasure and also had the possibility of having children; more "future insurance." He also pointed to the bottom of the poster where these humans for sale were lumped into the same category as horses, cows, hogs, bulls, goats, and even wagons.
The cramped passage in the building where they hid escaped slaves--between the foundation and a wall--was at one time covered over, the Bishop told us, but at some point years ago they uncovered it as not to forget. How could anyone possibly forget this, I thought to myself.
After spending some time listening to Bishop Henderson I left and felt sad and weak. I also felt inspired. While slavery was, as Bishop Henderson put it, "A very dark period in our country's history," and without doubt racism is alive and well in America, there is also a new awareness which to me is a new hope. Nearly all of the visitors in the church yesterday were white, which I found interesting.
As I left the church and turned and looked back the front door was open; it looked so welcoming. I felt a slight chill in the air, and I thanked our creator for the work this church has done.
https://www.urbansimplicity.com/2019/06/the-historic-micigan-street-baptist.html
-
-
1
-
- Report
-
-
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKx5Zz_tGFM
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/162792258578547/permalink/458736035650833/list of post
Movies that move we
-
SISTER ACT review on Movies that move we
3:29 I do have a question of the legitimacy of the ignorant spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend character in films? Can a mob man that brazzen really keep his activities secret? hmmm 4:35 haha bette midler was cast first, of course throw away role 5:10 Dolores , has whoopie ever explained the source of this 5:50 didn't know about Carrie Fisher 6:50 whoopie sang all her parts, wow! didn't know about the other 7:47 that is a great story, I will love to have seen them, dancing on the tables when they won:) *:23 yes, your right I will:) even though you told me before:) haha 8:25 25 years that show been on , wow! 9:20 that is a great question, with audio copying, I guess it fell like the rest of audio recording industry 10:47 didn't know they came out back to back , love lauryn hill 11:23 sister act 2 may challenge parents with teenage kids:) 12:02 it was relatives who introduced me to both films.
PRIOR Movies That Move We Post < videos viewable>
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=%22movies%20that%20move%20we%22&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&search_and_or=or&sortby=relevancy
link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptpTJchGnp4
-
I admit, I don't know how she will do in government for she has no experience in government. But I wish her well as vice president of Colombia. Government is complicated and all too often nasty absent the media's view. but I am happy for Francia Márquez, but especially the larger Black community in South America. The reality is, even though Black people from the usa dominate the identity of Black Americans the truth is, from Ecuador to Bahia, is a much larger population of black people than in North America or the Caribbean. My only concern for Black people in South America is their dangerous mirroring of Black North Americans in government affairs. I realize Francia Marquez is in that line but I hope she learns the lessons of Black people in the Caribbean the center of the american continent or Black people in North America... don't be silly. Take this opportunity to lead Black people in colombia and greater south america with wisdom with focus with efficiency with community with collectivity, even while peaceful or nonviolent. Don't mirror the likes of Kamala Harris, the likes of Barrack Obama, the likes of John Lewis, the likes of maxine waters, the likes of corey booker , the likes of eric adams, the likes adrienne adams, the likes of Clarence Thomas, the likes of Colin Powell, the likes of condoleeza rice, please don't mirror the likes of all the Black charlatans in government in North America or elsewhere like Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Think on Black people , plan for Black people, like Winnie Mandela, like Malcolm X, like Jean Jacques Dessalines, like Adam Clayton Powell jr, like Shirley Chisholm.
Gustavo Petro is Colombia's first leftist leader
Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime legislator, won Colombia's presidential election Sunday, galvanizing voters frustrated by decades of poverty and inequality under conservative leaders
BY JULIE TURKEWITZBOGOTÁ, Colombia — For the first time, Colombia will have a leftist president. Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime legislator, won Colombia’s presidential election Sunday, galvanizing voters frustrated by decades of poverty and inequality under conservative leaders, with promises to expand social programs, tax the wealthy and move away from an economy he has called overly reliant on fossil fuels.
His victory sets the third-largest nation in Latin America on a sharply uncertain path, just as it faces rising poverty and violence that have sent record numbers of Colombians to the United States border; high levels of deforestation in the Colombian am*zon, a key buffer against climate change; and a growing distrust of key democratic institutions, which has become a trend in the region.
Petro, 62, received more than 50% of the vote, with more than 99% counted Sunday evening. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who had energized the country with a scorched-earth anti-corruption platform, won just over 47%.
Shortly after the vote, Hernández conceded to Petro.
“Colombians, today the majority of citizens have chosen the other candidate,” Hernández said. “As I said during the campaign, I accept the results of this election.”
Petro took the stage Sunday night flanked by his vice-presidential pick, Francia Márquez, and three of Petro’s children. The packed stadium went wild, with people standing on chairs and holding phones aloft.
“This story that we are writing today is a new story for Colombia, for Latin America, for the world,” Petro said. “We are not going to betray this electorate.”
He pledged to govern with what he has called “the politics of love,” based on hope, dialogue and understanding.
Just over 58% of Colombia’s 39 million voters turned out to cast a ballot, according to official figures.
The victory means that Márquez, an environmental activist who rose from poverty to become a prominent advocate for social justice, will become the country’s first Black vice president.
Petro and Márquez’s victory reflects an anti-establishment fervor that has spread across Latin America, exacerbated by the pandemic and other long-standing issues, including a lack of opportunity.
“The entire country is begging for change,” said Fernando Posada, a Colombian political scientist, “and that is absolutely clear.”
In April, Costa Ricans elected to the presidency of Rodrigo Chaves, a former World Bank official and political outsider, who took advantage of widespread discontent with the incumbent party. Last year, Chile, Peru and Honduras voted for leftist leaders running against candidates on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America.
As a candidate, Petro had energized a generation that is the most educated in Colombian history, but is also dealing with 10% annual inflation, a 20% youth unemployment rate and a 40% poverty rate. His rallies were often full of young people, many of whom said they feel betrayed by decades of leaders who had made grand promises but delivered little.
“We’re not satisfied with the mediocrity of past generations,” said Larry Rico, 23, a Petro voter at a polling station in Ciudad Bolívar, a poor neighborhood in Bogotá, the capital.
Petro’s win is all the more significant because of the country’s history. For decades, the government fought a brutal leftist insurgency known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with the stigma from the conflict making it difficult for a legitimate left to flourish.
But the FARC signed a peace deal with the government in 2016, laying down their arms and opening space for a broader political discourse.
Petro had been part of a different rebel group, called the M-19, which demobilized in 1990 and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution. Eventually, Petro became a forceful leader in the country’s opposition, known for denouncing human rights abuses and corruption.
On Sunday, in a wealthy part of Bogotá, Francisco Ortiz, 67, a television director, said he had also voted for Petro.
“It’s been a long time since we had an opportunity like this for change,” he said. “If things will get better, I don’t know. But if we stick with the same, we already know what we’re going to get.”
The win could also test the United States’ relationship with its strongest ally in Latin America. Traditionally, Colombia has formed the cornerstone of Washington’s policy in the region.
But Petro has criticized what he calls the United States’ failed approach to the drug war, saying it has focused too much on eradication of the coca crop, the base product in cocaine, and not enough on rural development and other measures.
Petro has said that he embraces some form of drug legalization, that he will renegotiate an existing trade deal with the United States to better benefit Colombians and that he will restore relations with the authoritarian government of president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, all of which could create conflict with the United States.
About 2 million Venezuelan migrants have fled to Colombia in recent years amid an economic, political and humanitarian crisis.
Petro believes the economic system is broken, overly reliant on oil export and a flourishing and illegal cocaine business that he said has made the rich richer and poor poorer. He is calling for a halt to all new oil exploration, and a shift to developing other industries.
He has also said he will introduce guaranteed work with a basic income, move the country to a publicly controlled health system and increase access to higher education, in part by raising taxes on the rich.
“What we have today is the result of what I call ‘the depletion of the model,’ ” Petro said in the interview this year, referring to the current economic system. “The end result is a brutal poverty.”
His ambitious economic plan has, however, raised concerns. One former finance minister called his energy plan “economic suicide.”
Petro's critics, including former allies, have accused him of arrogance that leads him to ignore advisers and struggle to build consensus. When he takes office in August, he will face a deeply polarized society where polls show growing distrust in almost all major institutions.
He has vowed to serve as the president of all Colombians, not just those who voted for him.
On Sunday, at a high school-turned-polling station in Bogotá, Ingrid Forrero, 31, said she saw a generational divide in her community, with young people supporting Petro and older generations in favor of Hernández.
Her own family calls her the “little rebel” because of her support for Petro, whom she said she favors because of his policies on education and income inequality.
“The youth is more inclined toward revolution,” she said, “toward the left, toward a change.”
©2019 New York Times News Service
https://www.forbesindia.com/article/news/gustavo-petro-is-colombias-first-leftist-leader/77421/1
IN AMENDMENT
Odd how I read this in the new york times, but the exact article is elsewhere online. why is the times online article user blocked. I guess they are making money off of subscribing and the delay from their website to the larger web
-
I wonder how many Black women have reached orgasm before 30 while interacting with a black man. The only way is to ask all black women and no one has done that for any question. all polls are merely averages. But I bet most black women have never reached an orgasm in their entire life time side any man and that includes sadly, my fellow Black men.
The article below deals with a film that is a fiction about a woman on a quest to have an orgasm who never did before and is a mother of adult children and the wife of a deceased man.
But I think the topic is true. Many of my fellow males, including me, can be insensitive to women in intimate scenarios and that leads to women not being pleased. I know for sure, through offline talks that many men, not all but many, believe all every woman needs is a thick penis in them to be aroused and that simply is a lie.
But it is a lie that many men have been taught to be truth by other men, especially their elders in their homes.
But I wonder, I think if every black woman can say by her third intimate experience with a black man she had an orgams, regardless of when that will be a nice communal achievement of change.
Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63
The actress made the choice to disrobe. Still, she says, it was the most difficult thing she’s ever done in her four-decade career.By Nicole Sperling
June 15, 2022
It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”
We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.
Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.
“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”
Thompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.
Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.
She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”
“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”
For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.
“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”
She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”
There is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.
To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.
“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”
Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”
“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”
The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).
To the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.
“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”
Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”
The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.
Thompson doesn’t mind. “It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.
That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.
“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”
Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.”
Nicole Sperling is a media and entertainment reporter, covering Hollywood and the burgeoning streaming business. She joined The New York Times in 2019. She previously worked for Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angeles Times. @nicsperling
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/movies/emma-thompson-good-luck-to-you-leo-grande.html
IN AMENDMENT
Again, the problem with Black people is we talk about finance in such a legal way, White people make money based on whatever it takes, not within a system. and the reality is, black people's leaders in the usa have chosen to lead the legal way for their own agenda , which doesn't help black people en large.
Lavish Money Laundering Schemes Exposed in Canada
Government officials in the province of British Columbia were aware that suspicious money was entering their revenue stream, but took insufficient steps to stop it.By Catherine Porter, Vjosa Isai and Tracy Sherlock
Published June 15, 2022
Updated June 17, 2022
VANCOUVER — Self-professed students were buying multimillion-dollar homes in the Vancouver area, with dubious sources of income, or none at all.A family of modest means transferred at least 114 million Canadian dollars to British Columbia.
Loan sharks cleaned their dirty money by giving garbage bags and hockey bags full of illicit Canadian 20 dollar bills to gamblers who took it onto casino floors.
Those were just some of the findings from a long-awaited report into money laundering in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, which after two years of testimony was finally released by a special commission on Wednesday.
Canada is a “major money laundering country,” with weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, that put it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia, according to a 2019 report by the State Department.
Few places in Canada launder as much money as the province of British Columbia, specifically the region around Vancouver, which has one of the country’s biggest underground economies. The province has earned an international reputation as a haven for “snow washing” — a term for money laundering in Canada, according to government officials.
Billions of dollars a year have been laundered there by criminals, using tactics such as gambling in casinos, buying and selling luxury goods and taking out residential mortgages that are paid off in cash installments small enough not to trigger any alarm bells.
British Columbia’s gambling industry is a cash cow for the provincial government. At its height in 2015-2016, gambling generated a record 3.1 billion Canadian dollars in revenue, about one-third of which went to the government and was used to finance hospitals and health care, community organizations and other projects.
The commission was tasked to delve deeply into how bad money laundering in the province had gotten, and whether regulatory organizations, as well as the government itself, had failed to stem it, or even worse, turned a blind eye to it. While the report found no evidence of corruption, some elected officials were aware that suspicious funds from the gambling industry were entering the provincial revenue stream, but took insufficient action to stop it. One official, the minister then responsible for gaming, took no action.
The report, more than 1,800 pages long, lays out the staggering scope of money laundering in the province and sets out more than 100 recommendations for addressing it.
The province should create an anti-money laundering commissioner and a dedicated money laundering investigation and intelligence police unit to address this “corrosive form of criminality,” the report says.
“Money laundering is fundamentally destabilizing to the society and the economy that we all want for the province,” Austin Cullen, the head of the commission and a former British Columbia Supreme Court Justice, told reporters on Wednesday. “Sophisticated money launderers have used British Columbia as a clearing house or a terminus for laundering an astounding amount of dirty money.”
The provincial government announced the inquiry in May 2019 after a series of government-sponsored reports found what the commission called “extraordinary” levels of money laundering in the real estate, casino, horse racing and luxury car sectors, fueled in part by the illegal drug trade.
Books, podcasts and news reports had raised the alarm across the country, accusing gangs in China of importing fentanyl to the Western province, and then laundering the proceeds through casinos and high end real estate, helping to further inflate housing prices in a city already deemed the most expensive for housing in the country.
A 2019 report to the province estimated that in the prior year, up to 5.3 billion Canadian dollars in laundered money flowed through real estate investments in British Columbia, inflating housing prices by as high as 7.5 percent because they were purchased with the proceeds of crime as a way to clean — or legitimize — that money.
The commission, headed by Mr. Cullen, a well-respected judge, has been a constant drum beat across the country throughout the pandemic, hearing from almost 200 witnesses, including a former premier, a government minister accused of ignoring warnings about money laundering in casinos because they offered huge revenue for the government, and police officers alleging their investigations into illicit gambling were shut down for similar political reasons.
Witnesses told the commission how one scheme worked. Rich gamblers from China flew in, wheeling hockey bags stuffed with tens of thousands of Canadian 20 dollar bills to play baccarat at private salons inside Vancouver-area casinos. The money was suspected to come from loan sharks connected to Chinese criminal gangs and drug traffickers. The loan sharks laundered their drug money by lending it to the gamblers, who would in turn repay them with clean money deposited to bank accounts in China or Hong Kong. This became known as the “Vancouver Model.”
Specialized gambling police and lottery investigators raised an alarm but found their investigations shut down or blocked, or even worse, they were fired, the commission heard. The betting limits in casinos were hiked to 100,000 Canadian dollars per hand, allowing even more money to be laundered.
British Columbia’s Attorney General David Eby, who has been campaigning against money laundering for many years, told reporters earlier this month he hoped the report would offer his government a road map for turning the province and Vancouver, “into a model for fighting money laundering instead of a center where it takes place.”
Already, the British Columbia government has taken some steps to combat the problem. It has tightened the rules at casinos, requiring gamblers to declare their source of funds and in 2019, launched a public land ownership registry, requiring certain real estate holders in the province to disclose their owners, particularly those hidden behind shell companies, trusts, partnerships and other “beneficial owners.”
Correction: June 16, 2022
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the actions that the Cullen commission report said provincial government officials in British Columbia took to address money laundering in the gaming industry. The report said that some officials took actions that were insufficient and that one official took no action, not that all officials took no action.Catherine Porter, a foreign correspondent based in Toronto, has reported from Haiti more than two dozen times. She is the author of a book about the country, “A Girl Named Lovely.” @porterthereport
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/world/canada/canada-money-laundering.html
-
forum post
-
-
as a fellow truth telling writer, I realize it takes time for us to learn how to be commercial writers, a finesse must be learned that I haven't, that Rod Serling was able to learn on the go so to speak, that I think most of the most profitable writers today comprehend
An Early Run-In With Censors Led Rod Serling to ‘The Twilight Zone’
His failed attempts to bring the Emmett Till tragedy to television forced him to get creativeJackie Mansky
April 1, 2019
In August of 1955, Emmett Till, an African-American boy from Chicago was abducted, beaten, and shot while visiting family in Mississippi. A nation divided by race dug in its feet in the aftermath. While Jet magazine disseminated photographs from the open-casket funeral, showing the full mutilation of the 14-year-old’s corpse, another story played out in the courtroom. That fall, an all-white jury acquitted the two killers, both white, of all charges.
The miscarriage of justice proved a galvanizing point in the Civil Rights Movement. Rod Serling, a 30-year-old rising star in a golden age of dramatic television, watched the events play out in the news. He believed firmly in the burgeoning medium’s power for social justice. “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”
Soon after the trial concluded, Serling, riding off the success of his most well-received teleplay to date, felt compelled write a teleplay around the racism that led to Till’s murder. But the censorship that followed by advertisers and networks, fearful of blowback from white, Southern audiences, forced Serling to rethink his approach. His response, ultimately, was “The Twilight Zone,” the iconic anthology series that spoke truth to the era’s social ills and tackled themes of prejudice, bigotry, nuclear fears, war, among so many others.
Tonight, “The Twilight Zone” enters another dimension led by Jordan Peele. Peele has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most interesting auteurs, using a toolbelt of humor, horror and specificity to explore the human experience, especially through the construct of race. That through line can be found throughout his body of work from the witty sketch-comedy episodes of “Key & Peele” to his latest offering, the box-office record-setting Us. His perspective makes him a natural choice to step in as host and executive producer of the buzzy reboot coming to CBS All Access.
But unlike Serling, Peele will also be able to take the franchise in a direction that the dramatic writer wanted to go but was never able to get past the Cold War censors during the original show’s run from 1959-1964. For all that his Oscar-winning directorial debut Get Out, for instance, shares the DNA of “The Twilight Zone,” Peele’s allegory about black people in white spaces is direct in a way that Serling could never have been. To get on air, the story would have been forced to compromise in some way—camouflaging its intent by setting the story on a distant planet or another time period. Peele commented on that in a recent interview < https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/television/jordan-peele-twilight-zone.html > with Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times: “It felt like, if Serling were here, he’d have a lot to say and a lot of new episodes he couldn’t have written back in his time,” he said.
Few examples tell Serling’s struggles better than his attempt to bring the Till tragedy to television. Already, when he first pitched the idea to the advertising agency representing the U.S. Steel Hour, an hour-long anthology series on ABC, Serling was pre-censoring himself. Aware that he’d have to make concessions to get the script on screen, he sold the representatives on a story of a Jewish pawnbroker’s lynching in the South. When the idea was greenlit, Serling worked on that script as well as an adaptation for Broadway, where he knew he would have the freedom to tell Till’s story more directly, centering that plot around a black victim.
But Serling misjudged just how restrictive 1950s television could be. After he mentioned that his script-in-progress was based on the Till murder trial in an interview with the Daily Variety, papers around the country picked up the scoop. Thousands of angry letters and wires from the likes of white supremacist organizations followed, threatening both Steel Hour and ABC, who quickly capitulated and ordered changes to Serling's script. Recounting the incident several years later during an interview < https://books.google.com/books?id=C_Z1DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=to+suggest+an+unnamed+foreigner,+then+the+locale+was+changed+from+the+South+to+New+England,+and+Im+convinced+they+would+have+gone+up+to+Alaska+or+the+North+Pole+using+Eskimos…except+I+suppose+the+costume+problem+was+of+sufficient+severity+not+to+attempt+it.&source=bl&ots=HUvHNRKWDW&sig=ACfU3U0-tiDUmMXyHM37Ig7rlkS6entsrQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjoxrPwkKbhAhUGj1kKHT0zBAcQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false ;
“Station owners and advertising agencies were afraid to offend any segment of their white audiences, even racists, for fear of losing income,” explains < https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/arts/television-radio-battling-the-bottom-line-in-tv-s-earliest-days.html > journalist Jeff Kisseloff, author of The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961. As television gained a national audience in the 1950s, the creative freedoms that permeated the earliest days of the medium were quickly being pushed out in an attempt to sell to a white consumer market. Black purchasing power wasn't taken into account. “[A]s late as 1966, one study indicated that black performers constituted 2 percent of the casts of commercials,” according to research < https://books.google.com/books?id=PP1tHJN8h6AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=james+l+baughman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjoxsr8o6fhAhUMxVkKHdQhAdMQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=james l baughman&f=false> by media theorist James L. Baughman. The great Nat King Cole surmised the situation at hand succinctly, “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.”
When Serling's teleplay,“Noon on Doomsday,” finally aired on April 25, 1956, any hint of the South was removed from the plot; not even a Coca-Cola bottle could appear, lest viewers invoke the idea of the region. Instead, the opening crawl made clear that the story was set in New England. (Really, all that mattered was that it was set far away from the South: “I’m convinced,” Serling said in the Wallace interview, “they would have gone up to Alaska or the North Pole…except I suppose the costume problem was of sufficient severity not to attempt it.). The victim was now depicted as an unknown foreigner. “Further,” Serling fumed, “it was suggested that the killer in the case was not a psychopathic malcontent but just a good, decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong…”
It should be noted that some details of this ordeal might be exaggerations on Serling’s part or conflations of the two scripts he was working on simultaneously for stage and screen; Rod Serling Memorial Foundation board member Nicholas Parisi cautions in his recent biography of Serling that “a good deal of myth has crept into the narrative surrounding the production of ‘Noon on Doomsday.’” For instance, the Jewish Southerner that Serling said was initially cast as the victim, he writes, actually appeared in a draft of the theatrical script, instead. The unknown foreigner was already in Serling’s initial teleplay draft.)
Whatever the case, by the time everything was said and done, the message that aired in the teleplay of “Noon on Doomsday” was thin and garbled. When Serling read the New York Times’ review of it, he realized just how so. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “I felt like I got run over by a truck and then it back[ed] up to finish the job.” Meanwhile, his relationship with the Theater Guild, whom he’d sold an option of the Broadway script and also produced the teleplay, had soured. Despite attempts to salvage it, the theatrical version of the story was not performed or published in his lifetime.
But Serling wasn’t done with the Till tragedy. Once again, this time for CBS’ “Playhouse 90” series, he attempted to tell the story of a lynching in a small town, this time setting the plot in the Southwest. After haranguing from CBS executives, Serling had to move the story back 100 years, erase any direct allusion to Till, as well any black and white racial dynamics in the script. Unlike “Doomsday,” however, this production, titled “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” still communicated, if more universally, Serling’s desired message on prejudice and hatred. The closing soliloquy, delivered by a journalist signing off a telegram to his editor, already had the feel of the best of the “Twilight Zone” epilogues Serling himself would go on to deliver:
Dempseyville got rain tonight for the first time in four months. But it came too late. The town had already turned to dust. It had taken a look at itself, crumbled and disintegrated. Because what it saw was the ugly picture of prejudice and violence. Two men died within five minutes and fifty feet of each other only because human beings have that perverse and strange way of not knowing how to live side by side, until they do, this story that I am writing now will have no end but must go on and on.
Scholar Lester H. Hunt argues that the lessons Serling took from the experiences of “Doomsday” and “Dust” laid the groundwork for what was to come in “The Twilight Zone.” Based on the censors, Hunt writes in an essay < https://books.google.com/books?id=qOfuslNpHE4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=twilight+zone+rod+serling&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjA7ILt0KLhAhXpx1kKHQe8C_oQ6AEIWDAI#v=onepage&q=twilight zone rod serling&f=false > , “[Serling] changed, rather abruptly and driven by the pressure of circumstance, from an artist who thought it was his highest calling to comment on the problems of the day by depicting them directly to one who commented on principles and universals involved, not merely in the problems of the moment, but of human life itself.”
Or, as Serling himself later put it, “If you want to do a piece about prejudice against [black people], you go instead with Mexicans and set it in 1890 instead of 1959.”
Serling had also learned his lesson from his earlier dust-up with the Daily Variety. In his interview with Wallace, he demurred about whether or not his new show would explore controversial themes. “…[W]e're dealing with a half-hour show which cannot probe like a [Playhouse 90 production], which doesn't use scripts as vehicles of social criticism. These are strictly for entertainment,” he claimed. After Wallace followed up, accusing him of giving up “on writing anything important for television,” Serling easily agreed. “If by important you mean I'm not going to try to delve into current social problems dramatically, you're quite right. I'm not,” he said.
Of course, that couldn’t have been further from the case. His missteps with adapting the Till tragedy for television forced him to realize that to confront issues of race, prejudice, war, politics and human nature on television he had to do so through a filter.
The Twilight Zone is actually a term Serling borrowed from the U.S. military. Serling, who served as a U.S. Army paratrooper in World War II, an experience that marked many of the stories he went on to write, knew it referred to the moment a plane comes down and cannot view the horizon. As the title of the anthology drama, it spoke to his mission for the show: to be able to tell bold stories about the human conditions on screen by obscuring the view somehow.
As Peele steps into Serling's iconic role, he does so knowing he has a chance to speak more directly to those concerns. The veil that held Serling, who died in 1975, back has lifted somewhat, opening up the narrative for bolder stories to now enter “The Twilight Zone.”
ARTICLE
IN AMENDMENT
to see some pretty photos, I wish my underater train design could had been implemented , fortunate engineers
China completes Rail Line around Taklamakan Desert on the old Silk Road
By baronmayaChina has finished the new Hotan-Ruoqiang rail line and completed the circle around the huge Taklamakan Desert on the old Silk Road.
Ancient Silk Road travelers cursed China’s largest desert as Takla Makan, an ominous Persian-Turkic expression that translates as “Enter and you may never Return.”
Undeterred by its sandstorms and merciless terrain in the oblong basin north of Tibet’s glacier-packed peaks, China has announced the completion of the final section of a Taklamakan Desert railway loop line, the world’s first to encircle a desert.
Elsewhere, China is constructing Maglev train systems capable of hurtling passengers and freight hundreds of miles per hour, including an underwater route near Shanghai to reach tiny offshore islands.
These latest railways increase China’s military, industrial, agricultural and political prowess, amid escalating rivalry with the USA over each nation’s capabilities.
The Taklamakan Desert railway loop also allows Beijing greater access to rebellious Xinjiang province’s Kashgar, a distant southwestern city near vulnerable borders with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang comprise a large population of restive Muslim Uighurs of ethnic Turkic origin.
The railway loop also enables exploitation of the Tarim Basin oilfield, estimated to cover 350,000 square miles, or 560,000 square kilometers, under the Taklamakan’s huge dunes and shifting sands.
According to China’s official Xinhua news agency, workers tighten the screw of the rail and finished the final Hotan-Ruoqiang link on September 27, 2021. From the oasis town of Hotan, an existing line continues to Kashgar.
This railway line runs through the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert,” said Yang Baorong, chief designer of the final 513-mile section. Sandstorms pose a serious threat to railway construction and operation, as tracks can be buried underneath.
Tickets to use this newest link are expected to go on sale in June 2022, allowing travelers to ride the entire loop to encircle the Germany-sized Taklamakan, which is second only to the Sahara Desert in size.
The Taklamakan loop is hailed by Beijing as a way to help the region, especially Xinjiang’s impoverished southern edge near northern Tibet.
That edge includes an existing Golmud-Korla Railway which now joins the new loop. Other trains already go south from Golmud to Lhasa in Tibet, and future plans envision continuing those tracks south from Lhasa to Nepal’s capital Kathmandu.
More than 2,000 years ago, Bronze Age inhabitants buried mummies in the Taklamakan, according to a French-funded excavation. As the desert expanded southward, ancient kingdoms crumbled into ruins or were buried.
These included the flourishing Loulan kingdom on vast Lake Lop Nur, before its water evaporated in the 5th century.
By constructing a railway around the desert, Chinese engineers have recreated Silk Road caravan routes that linked China and Europe by skirting the Taklamakan’s rim.
Buddhist monks also trudged those routes spreading their religion east, until medieval sea routes replaced hazardous overland treks to East Asia.
The Taklamakan Desert parches 124,000 square miles and is about 600 miles east to west.
It bulges up to 260 miles across, flanked by the snow-capped Tian Shan range on the desert’s north and the Kunlun Mountains along its southern curve. Rugged Pamir peaks form its western ridge.
The railway had to cross, or route around, elevations up to 5,000 feet. Grass grids were laid across 165 million square feet of dunes which were virtually devoid of plant life, officials said.
Anti-desertification programs planted 13 million seedlings. In the harshest, most unpredictable zones – battered by sandstorms and smothered by swollen dunes – engineers designed lengthy bridges above chaotic sand.
Closer to Beijing meanwhile, a Maglev train project is starting in Shanxi, a north-central province. Magnets allow Maglev train carriages to float without wheels.
The high-speed train uses superconducting magnetic levitation technology to disengage from the ground to eliminate frictional drag.
This Maglev uses “a near-vacuum internal duct line to dramatically reduce air resistance, to achieve travel speeds of more than 1,000 kilometers-per-hour.
China already boasts the world’s fastest commercial Maglev on a 19-mile route in Shanghai, linking Pudong Airport to an urban metro system on the city’s edge within seven minutes, at up to 268 mph.
Nearby, a bullet train is preparing to zip under the sea at 155 miles-per-hour. Construction is well underway,” the UK-based website IFL Science reported in May 2021.
It would be “the world’s first underwater bullet train, which would extend nationally from Ningbo, a port city near Shanghai, to Zhoushan, an archipelago of islands off the east coast.
Covering a 47.8-mile stretch of almost entirely newly-built railway, the new route will include a 10-mile underwater section.
Verified post
https://weibo.com/2286908003/LxXRGg1aUArticle
https://cosmoschronicle.com/china-completes-rail-line-around-taklamakan-desert-on-the-old-silk-road/
-
Makes sense, a few days ago someone in my gaming group shared a video of all the video game remakes being made. The one thing the author misses is the idea of the consumer. Consumer freedom aside a market with industrial tools for anyone to market themselves means consumers have to learn to be daring, more open minded and not as convenient. The good news is, in the USA alone during the sars cov 2 it was revealed how many homes didn't have an internet connection. what does this mean? Many children are actually growing up not as immersed as some thought in the mass advertised media storm. Thus space exists for the content at the bottom of the pyramid to be viewed and it does get viewed. For artists this means nothing new. If you have another way to make income or pay rent while be an artists, keep it. And while the odds your living imagination will be accessed is daunting in some media spaces, the potential always exists cause to those who have the full fledged media capability they can access you
Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?Adam Mastroianni
You may have noticed that every popular movie these days is a remake, reboot, sequel, spinoff, or cinematic universe expansion. In 2021, only one of the ten top-grossing films––the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy––was an original. There were only two originals in 2020’s top 10, and none at all in 2019.
People blame this trend on greedy movie studios or dumb moviegoers or competition from Netflix or humanity running out of ideas. Some say it’s a sign of the end of movies. Others claim there’s nothing new about this at all.
Some of these explanations are flat-out wrong; others may contain a nugget of truth. But all of them are incomplete, because this isn’t just happening in movies. In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one.
I’m inherently skeptical of big claims about historical shifts. I recently published a paper showing that people overestimate how much public opinion has changed over the past 50 years, so naturally I’m on the lookout for similar biases here. But this shift is not an illusion. It’s big, it’s been going on for decades, and it’s happening everywhere you look. So let’s get to the bottom of it.
(Data and code available here.) < https://osf.io/8k23f/ >
Movies
At the top of the box office charts, original films have gone extinct.I looked at the 20 top-grossing movies going all the way back to 1977 (source), and I coded whether each was part of what film scholars call a “multiplicity”—sequels, prequels, franchises, spin-offs, cinematic universe expansions, etc. This required some judgment calls. Lots of movies are based on books and TV shows, but I only counted them as multiplicities if they were related to a previous movie. So 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t get coded as a multiplicity, but 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze does, and so does the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake. I also probably missed a few multiplicities, especially in earlier decades, since sometimes it’s not obvious that a movie has some connection to an earlier movie.
Regardless, the shift is gigantic. Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.
Original movies just aren’t popular anymore, if they even get made in the first place.
Top movies have also recently started taking a larger chunk of the market. I extracted the revenue of the top 20 movies and divided it by the total revenue of the top 200 movies, going all the way back to 1986 (source). The top 20 movies captured about 40% of all revenue until 2015, when they started gobbling up even more.
Television
Thanks to cable and streaming, there's way more stuff on TV today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows ruled the early decades of TV, and now new shows constantly displace each other at the top of the viewership charts.Instead, the opposite has happened. I pulled the top 30 most-viewed TV shows from 1950 to 2019 (source) and found that fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves. In fact, since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).
Two caveats to this data. First, I’m probably slightly undercounting multiplicities from earlier decades, where the connections between shows might be harder for a modern viewer like me to understand––maybe one guy hosted multiple different shows, for example. And second, the Nielsen ratings I’m using only recently started accurately measuring viewership on streaming platforms. But even in 2019, only 14% of viewing time was spent on streaming, so this data isn’t missing much.
Music
It used to be that a few hitmakers ruled the charts––The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson––while today it’s a free-for-all, right?Nope. A data scientist named Azhad Syed has done the analysis < https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years-of-billboard-hot-100-data-21e1a02cf304 > , and he finds that the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades.
And since 2000, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been increasing.
(Azhad says he’s looking for a job––you should hire him!)
A smaller group of artists tops the charts, and they produce more of the chart-toppers. Music, too, has become an oligopoly.
Books
Literature feels like a different world than movies, TV, and music, and yet the trend is the same.Using LiteraryHub's list of the top 10 bestselling books for every year from 1919 to 2017 < https://lithub.com/here-are-the-biggest-fiction-bestsellers-of-the-last-100-years/10/?single=true > , I found that the oligopoly has come to book publishing as well. There are a couple ways we can look at this. First, we can look at the percentage of repeat authors in the top 10––that is, the number of books in the top 10 that were written by an author with another book in the top 10.
It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each.
We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous––say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too.
In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.
Video games
I tracked down the top 20 bestselling video games for each year from 1995 to 2021 (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and coded whether each belongs to a preexisting video game franchise. (Some games, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, belong to franchises outside of video games. For these, I coded the first installment as originals and any subsequent installments as franchise games.)The oligopoly rules video games too:
In the late 1990s, 75% or less of bestselling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%. At the top of the charts, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto.
Why is this happening?
Any explanation for the rise of the pop oligopoly has to answer two questions: why have producers started producing more of the same thing, and why are consumers consuming it? I think the answers to the first question are invasion, consolidation, and innovation. I think the answer to the second question is proliferation.Invasion
Software and the internet have made it easier than ever to create and publish content. Most of the stuff that random amateurs make is crap and nobody looks at it, but a tiny proportion gets really successful. This might make media giants choose to produce and promote stuff that independent weirdos never could, like an Avengers movie. This can’t explain why oligopolization started decades ago––YouTube only launched in 2005, for example, and most Americans didn’t have broadband until 2007––but it might explain why it’s accelerated and stuck around.Consolidation
Big things like to eat, defeat, and outcompete smaller things. So over time, big things should get bigger and small things should die off. Indeed, movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. Maybe it’s inevitable that major producers of culture will suck up or destroy everybody else, leaving nothing but superstars and blockbusters. Indeed, maybe cultural oligopoly is merely a transition state before we reach cultural monopoly.Innovation
You may think there’s nothing left to discover in art forms as old as literature and music, and that they simply iterate as fashions change. But it took humans thousands of years to figure out how to create the illusion of depth in paintings. Novelists used to think that sentences had to be long and complicated until Hemingway came along, wrote some snappy prose, and changed everything. Even very old art forms, then, may have secrets left to discover. Maybe the biggest players in culture discovered some innovations that won them a permanent, first-mover chunk of market share. I can think of a few:In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
In music: sampling. Musicians seem to sample more often these days. Now we not only remake songs; we franchise them too.
In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them. Marvel, DC, and Star Wars are the most famous, but there are also smaller universe expansions like Better Call Saul and El Camino from Breaking Bad and The Many Saints of Newark from The Sopranos. Video game developers have understood this for even longer, which is why Mario does everything from playing tennis to driving go-karts to, you know, being a piece of paper.
Proliferation
Invasion, consolidation, and innovation can, I think, explain the pop oligopoly from the supply side. But all three require a willing audience. So why might people be more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again?As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.
Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance. When the only way to watch a movie is to go pick one of the seven playing at your local AMC, you might take a chance on something new. But when you’ve got a million movies to pick from, picking a safe, familiar option seems more sensible than gambling on an original.
This could be happening across all of culture at once. Movies don’t just compete with other movies. They compete with every other way of spending your time, and those ways are both infinite and increasing. There are now 60,000 free books on Project Gutenberg, Spotify says it has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and humanity uploads 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. So uh, yeah, the Tom Hanks movie sounds good.
What do we do about it?
Some may think that the rise of the pop oligopoly means the decline of quality. But the oligopoly can still make art: Red Dead Redemption II is a terrific game, “Blinding Lights” is a great song, and Toy Story 4 is a pretty good movie. And when you look back at popular stuff from a generation ago, there was plenty of dreck. We’ve forgotten the pulpy Westerns and insipid romances that made the bestseller lists while books like The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, and Animal Farm did not. American Idol is not so different from the televised talent shows of the 1950s. Popular culture has always been a mix of the brilliant and the banal, and nothing I’ve shown you suggests that the ratio has changed.The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk. Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs. It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy.
We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us. How much does it stunt our imaginations to play the same video games we were playing 30 years ago? What message does it send that one of the most popular songs in the 2010s was about how a 1970s rock star was really cool? How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999? How inspiring is it to watch tiny variations on the same police procedurals and reality shows year after year? My parents grew up with the first Star Wars movie, which had the audacity to create an entire universe. My niece and nephews are growing up with the ninth Star Wars movie, which aspires to move merchandise. Subsisting entirely on cultural comfort food cannot make us thoughtful, creative, or courageous.
Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns.
ARTICLE LINK- graphics are present
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-become-an-oligopoly
This article suggest one in three women in prison is lesbian. If true, with black women in prison over the percentage of the total population in general that means, many Black women are lesbian in the USA. But when you look at within the black populace in the usa it doesn't seem recognized or visible or...
Why we didn't celebrate Gay Pride Month in women's prison
Opinion by Keri BlakingerWhen I was in prison, we relished things we could celebrate. There were the obvious ones — like releases and legal victories. And the traditional ones — like New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July. We also celebrated Labor Day and birthdays and the Super Bowl and holidays for religions we didn’t even believe in.
But we did not so much as acknowledge Gay Pride Month.
The presence of homophobia in men’s prisons is a known problem. But in the women’s lockups, it was completely different. In fact, women’s prison was the queerest place I’ve ever been — we just didn’t celebrate it. That’s because queerness, like a lot of things behind bars, carried extra risks.
That realization was a surprise for me, too. It was just a few weeks after I’d been arrested in December 2010 with a Tupperware container full of heroin. I was awaiting sentencing in an upstate New York county jail when the facility’s one openly lesbian guard pulled me aside to warn me: The higher-ups thought I was “too close” to my cellmate, who had become a good friend. Don’t sit next to each other on the bunk, the guard advised. Otherwise, we might get separated or transferred to another jail. We were annoyed at the assumption that any strong bond between women was somehow a cover for sex. But we were both scared enough to take the advice without asking questions.
A few weeks later, I was sentenced to 2.5 years behind bars, and eventually went to state prison where the staff seemed even more invested in “catching” people being gay — which was not that difficult because so many people were. Research shows that 1 in 3 women in prison identify as lesbian or bisexual. But in New York women’s prisons, it seemed like the real numbers were much higher.
That’s because a lot of the people in New York women’s lockups had prison girlfriends, even if they had identified as straight in the free world. The shift was so common we even had a catchy phrase for it: “Gay for the stay, straight at the gate.” Sometimes those prison relationships were in addition to a boyfriend or husband on the outside, and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes they mostly resembled a close platonic friendship with a different label, and sometimes they turned into torrid affairs that led to sex in the rec yard port-a-potties. Most ended when one person got transferred, but some outlasted prison by years.
I didn’t consider myself gay for the stay because I already identified as queer before my arrest. But over the 21 months I was locked up, I dated two women. We went to the mess hall and gym together, passed notes when we couldn’t meet and sometimes made out in closets or bathroom stalls.
But even that kind of PG contact was a risk. Though sex with other prisoners was against the rules, so was hugging, holding hands or kissing. On some units, the staff made it a mission to zealously police any such activity, and we had to emphasize our supposed straightness lest we become targets for added scrutiny.
Not surprisingly, research shows queer people in women’s prisons are far more likely to spend time in solitary than straight prisoners. After all, if you got caught showing any sort of same-sex affection, you could get written up and punished with anything from a loss of phone privileges to weeks in isolation, and the sort of negative disciplinary record that left you less likely to make parole.
In theory those sorts of regulations were not inherently homophobic, and would just make it harder for prisoners to get away with sexually exploiting each other. But even the name both prisoners and staff used for the kind of disciplinary ticket you’d get reeked of stigma: Sexual transgressions were known as DGs — short for degenerate acts.
To some extent, I think we bought into that sort of institutional bigotry. Even though so many of us had girlfriends, being labeled “gay for the stay” carried a bad connotation. Some people who didn’t have girlfriends openly looked down on those who did — as if we were all just sex-starved deviants willing to risk our freedom for foolish things. (There’s probably a lengthy aside that could be made here in terms of the prevalence and stigma of biphobia in prison specifically.)
When I was writing this, I called one of my friends from prison to talk it through. Stacy pointed out that when women got caught having sex with male guards, they’d get isolated ostensibly for their own protection — and we’d all feel sorry for them. When they got written up for hooking up with a girlfriend, we had no such sympathy.
“There was no greater shame than getting a DG,” she confirmed. “You definitely internalize that.”
Even though we were gay, there was no pride.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. When I read about book bans and “Don’t Say Gay” laws, I wonder what the downstream effects of such institutionalized bigotry will be. Already, it seems, I’m beginning to see them.
Over the past few months, for instance, I’ve been hit with hundreds of homophobic slurs and insults online — a volume of internet bigotry I’ve never gotten before, almost all in response to social media posts. To be sure, I know that queer people of color and trans folks in my position would face far more vitriol. And so far none of it has been enough to make me fear for my safety. But lately I’ve found myself questioning whether I look too queer in certain settings — both online and where I live now, in Texas. And when I think about the last time I had to ask myself that question, it’s a quick answer: It’s when I was in prison.
IN AMENDMENT
Eklil hakimi as a government official is poor, one of the lowest. but as a survivor of usa imperialism is a legend.
QUOTES FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"U.S. property and company records show that
@EklilHakimi
, the president’s longtime finance minister and ally, bought at least 10 properties in California, including during Mr. Hakimi’s time in office, and after leaving in 2018."....
"After stepping down, Mr. Hakimi and his wife, Sultana Hakimi, transferred eight of those properties to a company called Zala Group in her name at their Laguna Niguel address. His wife is the owner of the company, company records show."
......
According to California property records, their property includes a five-bedroom home and pool, in a luxury Laguna Niguel community near the beach. It is worth $2.5 million, according to the real-estate company Zillow.
..
"In total, the 10 properties are worth more than $10 million. The couple’s latest acquisition, made early this year, was a $1.1 million beachfront South Cove condo in a new development in California, according to Orange County property records." -
AMERICAN BLACK FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2022 TALKS, PANELS AND TOP LINE TALENT FOR 26TH ABFF JUNE 15-19, 2022
Following is the schedule of 2022 ABFF talk series events to date.Live Events
Thursday, June 16, 2022
The NFT Masterclass for Creative
NFTs have risen as one of the hottest topics in the entertainment industry. Understanding the intellectual property issues in NFTs is essential to our protection and advancement. This session will address the ABCs of NFTs, including copyright, trademark, publicity issues and tax matters surrounding NFTs. Instructed by Kimra Major-Morris, attorney at law.Leading From Within
Presented by Prime VideoFrom the suffrage movement to the civil rights movement, history has shown us we all win when Black women lead. Join three Black women executives from Prime Video for an intimate discussion on how they are leading the charge to create content across series and features that all audiences will love.
Moderators: Latasha Gillespie (head of diversity, equity and inclusion, Prime Video)
Panelists: Amber Rasberry (senior executive development, Movies – am*zon Studios),
Lauren Anderson (co-head Content and Programming, am*zon Freevee) and Larissa Bell (development executive, am*zon St.)
The Black Beauty Effect Panel
Presented by Black Experience on XfinityAn intimate discussion on the global impact of Black Beauty in the upcoming docuseries, The Black Beauty Effect. This discussion will highlight black women and their overall impact in the beauty industry, despite its historical exclusion and oppression of black women.
Panelists: Andrea Lewis, series creator, Kahlana Barfield Brown, beauty expert, Whitney White, natural hair entrepreneur, CJ Faison, executive producer
Funding Your Story: The Nuts and Bolts of Film Finance
Presented by the Motion Picture AssociationYou can be a great storyteller and writer of words that captivate the masses. However, you can’t share that story with the world without having a financing plan in place to get the story made! In this panel, representatives from major studios and a lead film finance company will provide an overview of the variety of ways content creators can finance their production. As each panelist has a unique background in the film finance world, this panel will provide filmmakers with a basic understanding of what to expect when putting together a financing package.
Moderator: John Gibson, vice president, External and Multicultural Affairs, Motion Picture Association
Panelists: Donyelle Marshall, LATAM business and tax analyst, Florida Office of Film and Entertainment; Chiquita Banks, Esq., senior vice president, TPC; Graham Lee, Esq., vice president, Tax Counsel-Production, Paramount; Brian O’Leary, Esq., senior vice president Tax, NBCUniversal (Invited)
Bel-Air: Clips and Conversations
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversalPeacock presents an intimate conversation with the cast members from Bel-Air about celebrating Black on-screen characters and discussing story themes such as love, family and relationships.
Moderator: Scott Evans
Panelists: Rasheed Newson, Adrian Holmes, Cassandra Freeman, Coco Jones, Akira Akbar, Jimmy Akingbola and Jordan Jones
Bust Down in Laughter with NBCU’s Comedy Crew
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversalJoin talent from NBCU’s hit comedies for a lively conversation about celebrating and shaping Black culture through stories of family, friendships, love and joy on TV.
Moderator: Danielle Young, journalist and host of Real Quick
Panelists: Nicole Byer, Phil Augusta Jackson and Carl Tart from NBCU’s “Grand Crew” and Sam Jay, Langston Kerman, Jak Knight and Chris Redd from Peacock’s “Bust Down”
Shoot Your Shot
Presented by ALLBLKALLBLK, the first and largest streaming service for Black TV and film from AMC Networks, is partnering with the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) to kick off a nationwide casting call for the co-star of its latest original production, “Judge Me Not.” A new hour-long psychological/legal drama created by TV icon, Judge Lynn Toler.
“Judge Me Not” focuses on a millennial Black female attorney navigating mental health issues, a rocky romantic relationship and a volatile family, who shocks everyone when she wins a judicial seat at 31. Once there, she fights her demons while managing the chaos of a busy court.
25th Annual HBO Short Film Award Showcase
Presented by Warner Bros. Discovery and HBOFive finalists will compete in ABFF’s HBOÒ Short Film Award. The prestigious showcase will celebrate 25 years of HBO’s commitment to recognizing the next generation of diverse, artistic and creative talent at ABFF. This year’s groudbreaking directors with diverse style of filmmaking are: Sherif Alabede (Another Country), Elisee Junior St. Preux (Aurinko in Adagio), Gia-Rayne Harris (Pens & Pencils), Destiny J. Macon (Talk Black) and Rebecca Usoro (The Family Meeting)
Friday, June 17, 2022
Masterclass: Legal Aspects of Indie Filmmaking
Presented by Arrington and PhillipsThis seminar will introduce filmmakers to the legal and business aspects of independent filmmaking. From conception to distribution, attendees will learn all the basics needed to make, produce and distribute their own independent film. Instructed by Marvin Arrington and Vince Phillips.
Johnson: Clips and Conversations
Presented by Bounce TVJoin the cast and producer of Johnson for a conversation around the anticipated return of season two. Johnson focuses on life-long best friends and their sometimes-complicated journey of love, friendship, heartbreak and personal growth as told from the Black male perspective. The show is executive produced by Eric C. Rhone and Cedric The Entertainer’s A Bird and A Bear Entertainment.
Moderator: David J. Hudson, head of Original Programming for Scripps Networks
Panelists: Deji LaRay (series creator and show runner); Thomas Q. Jones (show runner, “P- Valley,” “Luke Cage”); Philip Smithey (“Switched at Birth,” “The Rookie”); and Derrex Brady (“NCIS,” “First”) with Earthquake (“The Neighborhood,” “Chappelle’s Home Team – Earthquake: Legendary”) and Eric C. Rhone (executive producer)
Finding Happy: Clips and Conversations
Presented by Bounce TVMeet the cast of Bounce’s newest series, Finding Happy, a show created about, for and by Black women. The dramedy follows Yaz Carter as she navigates her loving-but-complicated family, her stagnant career and a merry-go-round of unrequited love as she looks to find her happy. The show is executive produced by Eric C. Rhone and Cedric The Entertainer’s A Bird and A Bear Entertainment.
Moderator: Keisha Taylor Starr, chief marketing officer for Scripps Networks
Panelists: B. Simone (MTV’s “Wild ‘n Out”); Kim Coles (“Living Single”); Marketta Patrice (“Black Jesus”); Angela Gibbs (“Hacks,” “The Fosters”); and Kendra Jo (series creator and show runner)
A Champion of Independent Black Film: Celebrating the Legacy of Michelle Materre
Presented by MetaMichelle Materre, prolific film distributor, professor, curator and fervent supporter of women and BIPOC filmmakers, passed away in March. To honor her decades as a champion of independent film and her mission to lift the voices of underrepresented people in cinema, ABFF and Daughters of Eve Media will present a roundtable discussion featuring trailblazing and renowned women filmmakers.
Moderators: Terri Bowles and Dr. Michele Prettyman
Panelist: Ayoka Chenzira
Fierce Female Filmmakers of TriStar Pictures
Presented by Sony Pictures EntertainmentJoin three trailblazing fierce, female, filmmakers — Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), and Nicole Brown (TriStar Pictures President) for an intimate sit-down conversation as they open up about their highly anticipated Sony Pictures releases: The Woman King starring Viola Davis, and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody starring Naomi Ackie. This conversation will dive into the importance, power and future of Black film while providing a sneak peek of what audiences can expect in their upcoming releases via exclusive content.
Moderator: Brett King, vice president, Creative Programming, Diversity and Inclusion for Sony Pictures Entertainment
Panelists: Nicole Brown, president of TriStar Pictures; Kasi Lemmons, director, I Wanna Dance with Somebody; Gina Prince-Bythewood, Director, The Woman King
Flipping the Script: Defining your own Path to Success presented by Warner Bros. Discovery Equity and Inclusion
Presented by Warner Bros. DiscoveryOver the last few decades, the road to stardom and success in Hollywood has changed significantly. With the emergence of the digital age, social media and waves of new talent, many are finding success, their own way and on their own terms. This engaging and motivating panel discusses the impact of breaking into the entertainment industry both traditionally and non-traditionally; and ways to stay relevant in an ever-changing production landscape that is no longer one size fits all.
Moderator: Karen Horne, senior vice president, Warner Bros. Discovery, Equity and Inclusion
Panelists: Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Winning Time and The Gilded Age, HBO), Carlos King (Love & Marriage Franchise, OWN), Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins (Trials to Triumphs Podcast, OWN), Bashir Salahuddin (South Side, HBO Max), Diallo Riddle (South Side, HBO Max). Networking Reception to follow. RSVP and COVID vaccination required.
“This Is Us”: From Script to Screen
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversalGo behind the scenes of NBC’s beloved drama “This Is Us” with actress and writer Susan Kelechi Watson, writer and producer Eboni Freeman and producer Christiana Hooks. Delve into a poignant conversation about the final season and the episode “Our Little Island Girl: Part Two” that is centered on Beth Pearson and was co-written by Susan and Eboni. Learn about the show’s unique approach to bringing multidimensional narratives to life by reflecting on the past, inspiring the future, and creating beautiful stories that transcend generations.
Moderator: Danielle Young, journalist and host of Real Quick
Panelists: Susan Kelechi Watson, actress and writer; Eboni Freeman, writer and producer; Christiana Hooks, producer
Life Of A Showrunner
Presented by UPSThis panel examines the road to becoming a television showrunner, the duties and demands it entails, career strategies to be considered, the parameters of creative control as well as the freedom it affords and what running a writers room looks like.
Panelists: Robin Thede (A Black Lady Sketch Show), Rikki Hughes (The Hype), Randy Huggins (BMF)
ABFF Comedy Wings Showcase
Presented by Warner Bros. Discovery and HBOA night of laugher hosted by Aida Rodriquez and introducing: Marshall Brandon, Cherie Danielle, Shanna Christmas, Rob Gordon and Alan Massenburg
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Academy 365
Presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a 95-year-old organization that has long been known for the Oscars, often called “Hollywood’s biggest night.” But what goes on the other 364 days of the year? In this panel, key leadership shares how the Academy engages their membership of over 10,000 members on a year-round basis and leads industry initiatives that celebrate the history of film, amplifies its global community of artists and advocates for increased representation across the industry.
Moderator: Scott Evans, Access Hollywood
Panelists: DeVon Franklin, governor-at-large; Christine Simmons, chief operating officder, Academy; Shawn Finnie, executive vice president, Member Relations and Awards, Academy; Meryl Johnson, vice president, Digital Marketing, Academy
Best of ABFF Awards Presentation
Hosted by Dondré WhitfieldJoin us for the announcement of the festival winner of this year’s competitions including: Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, John Singleton Award for Best First Feature, Best Documentary, Best Web Series and HBO Short Film Award. This event will be live-streamed on ABFF PLAY.
Cocktails, Conversations, and Financial Facts with LisaRaye McCoy
Presented by Prudential FinancialActress and Entrepreneur LisaRaye McCoy will share her journey with money, finances, and setting financial goals from her life on the South Side of Chicago to her life in the film industry. Prudential financial professionals will be available to answer financial questions.
Moderator: Delvin Joyce (Prudential Financial Planner & Founder of Prosperity Wealth Group)
The Leading Man
Presented by CadillacA panel of esteemed male actors examine the images of Black men in film and television, share stories about their journeys to success and discuss the messages they wish to convey to boys and young men in the community.
Moderator: Malinda Williams
Panelists: Trevante Rhodes, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Michael Ealy
Critter Fixers: Clips and Conversation
Presented by Disney+Join veterinarians Dr. Terrence Ferguson and Dr. Vernard Hodges as they discuss some of their most unique animal cases and provide great tips and techniques to help care for your pets.
Moderator: Jill Tracey, Morning Show co-host on WHQT Hot 105 Miami
Panelists: Dr. Terrence Ferguson, Dr. Vernard Hodges
Closing Night Screening
Rap Sh!tCourtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max
Rap Sh!t follows two estranged high school friends from Miami, Shawna and Mia, who reunite to form a rap group.
Cast: Aida Osman (Shawna), KaMillion (Mia), Jonica Booth (Chastity), Devon Terrell (Cliff,) RJ Cyler (Lamont), Executive Producer and Writer: Issa Rae (for HOORAE); Executive Producer and Showrunner: Syreeta Singleton; Executive Producer: Montrel McKay (for HOORAE); Executive Producers: Dave Becky and Jonathan Berry (for 3 Arts Entertainment); Executive Producer: Deniese DavisHip hop duo Yung Miami and JT of City Girls serve as co-executive producers, along with Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas for Quality Control Films and Sara Rastogi for HOORAE. Sadé Clacken Joseph directed the pilot. Rae’s audio content company Raedio will handle music supervision for the series.
Sunday, June 18, 2022
ABFF Community Day
Sponsored by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB)The festival, in partnership with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, presents a day of entertainment curated for family audiences.
Virtual Events available on ABFF PLAY https://abffplay.com/
Life As Entrepreneurs
Presented by Morgan StanleyA discussion exploring what it takes to build a family brand, the importance of being financially literate, and the value of building generational wealth.
Panelists: Husband and wife team DJ Envy and Gia Casey
Mathis Family Matters
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversalE! Entertainment presents an intimate conversation with the cast of E!’s new docuseries, “Mathis Family Matters” about representation, the black family on television today, their personal experiences and perspectives around diversity both in front of and behind the camera. To further the dialogue regarding unscripted television, they will exchange thoughts on the importance of Black producers ensuring that our stories aren’t overlooked and we are represented equally in today’s diverse culture.
Moderators: Ebony Magazine
Panelists: Judge Greg Mathis, Linda Mathis, Jade Mathis, Camara Mathis, Greg Mathis Jr., Amir Mathis
Universal GTDI’s Five Years of Creative Impact
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversalIn celebration of Universal’s Global Talent Development & Inclusion (GTDI) five-year anniversary, this panel spotlights friend-of-GTDI director Jude Weng, accompanied by four incredible alumni who have participated in GTDI’s flagship programs. Moderated by Rotten Tomatoes Awards Editor Jacqueline Coley, this panel aims to highlight the participants’ journeys towards establishing a career in the industry, as well as provide their perspective on how they view representation and access in the industry.
Moderators: Jacqueline Coley
Panelists: Jermaine Stegall, Juel Taylor, Jude Weng, Marielle Woods
Gate-Opening: Black Exec Round Table
Presented by Lionsgate and StarzA candid conversation with Black development executives at Lionsgate and Starz demystifying the studio system, providing helpful guidance and insight into the initial development stages to support rising Black filmmakers.
Moderator: Kamala Avila-Salmon — head of Inclusive Content at Lionsgate
Panelists: Kathryn Tyus-Adair, senior vice president of Original Programming at Starz, Jade-Addon Hall, vice president of Current Series at Lionsgate TV, Aaron Edmonds, vice president of Production and Development at Lionsgate
ABFF 2022 sponsors and partners to date include Warner Bros. Discovery & HBOÒ (Founding); Cadillac, City of Miami Beach, Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Prime Video (Presenting); American Airlines, Comcast NBCUniversal, Meta, Bounce TV, Black Experience on Xfinity, UPS, IMDb (Premier); ALLBLK, Prudential Financial, Variety, TV One, Netflix, Starz, Disney+, Onyx Collective (Official); Accenture, Motion Pictures Association (MPA), A&E, The SpringHill Company, The Boston Globe, Color Of Change, Confluential Films, Arrington & Phillips, Fulton Films, BET Her, Morgan Stanley, Miami Beach VCA, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Supporting); Endeavor Content and DC Office of Television (Industry).
-
In this very community I stated and state that one of the problems the Black populace in the USA has is the lack of one attempted idea in its history?
Do you know what that is?
No it isn't starting businesses. It isn't going to ivy league schools or historical black colleges. It isn't becoming elected officials. It isn't joining the USA military or a local law enforcement. It isn't having many lawyers or doctors or business owners.
The Black populace in the USA has financially tried everything, as individuals or groups.
The Black populace in the USA has governmentally not tried everything, as individuals or groups.
Yes, Black populace has many independent voters, people who vote based on candidate agenda, in the voting stream.
The one major absence in the Black populace historically or modernly is a Black Party to Governance. I rephrase, the Black populace in the USA has never had a rival to the Republicans or Democrats solely for the Black populaces benefit.Now, why is that? The answer is long winded , a long history, but simple in function. From the Black minority that fought with the colonists against the British <the Black majority were enslaved> to Frederick Douglass who publicly opposed Haiti, leaving the usa, or Black segregation from whites to former president Barack Obama. Many, usually most in history, Black leaders in the USA support a positive phenotypical integration to Whites.
A Black party of governance by default is segregatory in nature. Sequentially, that is why it has not been attempted with the vigor of Black business communities in white cities or Black membership in the US military or other ventures, all of which demand positive integration with whites at their heart to work
But, a white man in the article given in total below, states a simple truth.
The USA government has a need to be restructured that goes beyond a law being passed. He doesn't suggest a new party of governance is the answer. He suggest the answer is a change in the membership of the donkeys or the elephants. A membership change with those willing to be effective over alliances in public or private or to institutional structures.
But I argue, from the NAtive American populace to the Black populace < descended of enslaved plus not descended from enslaved> each peoples of color in the USA <non white europeans> have specific needs that can not be handled by one party of governance.
I restate, in the USA no one party can help everybody. Every party of governance has to fail somebody.
Thus, Black people in the USA don't need to be an option, they need to be the purpose.
ARTICLE
EZRA KLEIN
What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds
May 29, 2022Early in Joe Biden’s presidency, Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-felicia-wong.html > that Biden was badly misunderstood. He’s been in national politics for decades, and so people look at him and “default to a kind of old understanding of what Democrats stand for, this idea that Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals.” Wong thought he wanted more: “What Biden is trying to push is much more about actually remaking our economy, so that it does different things and it actually regularly produces different outcomes.”
I think Wong was right about what Biden, or at least the Biden administration, wanted. But its execution has lagged its vision. And the reason for this is uncomfortable for Democrats. You can’t transform the economy without first transforming the government.
In April, Brian Deese, the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, gave an important speech on the need for “a modern American industrial strategy.” This was a salvo in a debate most Americans would probably be puzzled to know Democrats are having. Industrial strategy is the idea that a country should chart a path to productive capacity beyond what the market would, on its own, support. It is the belief that there should be some politics in our economics, some vision of what we are trying to make beyond what financial markets reward.
Trying to build clean energy infrastructure is a form of industrial strategy. So is investing in domestic supply chains for vaccines and masks and microchips. For decades, the idea has been disreputable, even among Democrats. You don’t want government picking winners and losers, as the adage goes.
The argument, basically, is this: When governments bet on technologies or companies, they typically bet wrong. Markets are more efficient, more adaptable, less corrupt. And so governments should, where possible, get out of the market’s way. The government’s proper role is after the market has done its work, shifting money from those who have it to those who need it. Put simply, markets create, governments tax, and politicians spend.
It’s remarkable, the assumptions that lurk beneath what’s taken for common sense in Washington. Consider the phrase “winners and losers.” Winners at what? Losers how? Markets manage such questions through profits and losses, valuations and bankruptcies. But societies have richer, more complex goals. To criticize markets for failing to achieve them is like berating a toaster because it never produces an oil painting. That’s not its job.
So I won’t say markets failed. We failed. Growth slowed, inequality widened, the climate crisis kept getting worse, deindustrialization wrecked communities, the pandemic proved America’s supply chains fragile, China became more authoritarian rather than more democratic, and then Vladimir Putin’s war revealed the folly of relying on countries we cannot trust for goods we desperately need.
No one considers this success. Deese, in his speech to the Economic Club of New York., declared the debate over: “The question should move from ‘Why should we pursue an industrial strategy?’ to ‘How do we pursue one successfully?’”
I am unabashedly sympathetic to this vision. In a series of columns over the past year < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progressivism.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opinion/yellen-supply-side-liberalism.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollment-climate-crisis.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/opinion/biden-obama-economy.html > , I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds. Scratch the failures of modern Democratic governance, particularly in blue states, and you’ll typically find that the market didn’t provide what we needed and government either didn’t step in or made the problem worse through neglect or overregulation.
We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.
This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.
The first step is admitting you have a problem, and Deese, to his credit, did exactly that. “A modern American industrial strategy needs to demonstrate that America can build — fast, as we’ve done before, and fairly, as we’ve sometimes failed to do,” he said.
He noted that the Empire State Building was constructed in just over a year. We are richer than we were then, and our technology far outpaces what was available in 1930. And yet does anyone seriously believe such a project would take a year today?
“We need to unpack the many constraints that cause America to lag other major countries — including those with strong labor, environmental and historical protections — in delivering infrastructure on budget and on time,” Deese continued.
One answer — the typical Republican answer — is that government can’t do the job and shouldn’t try. But the data doesn’t bear that out. The Transit Costs Project tracks < https://transitcosts.com/what-does-the-data-say/ > the price tags on rail projects in different countries. It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison here, because different projects are, well, different, and it matters whether they include, say, a tunnel, which is expensive for all the obvious reasons.
Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.
The problem isn’t government. It’s our government. Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?
One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, the director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper < https://www.niskanencenter.org/state-capacity-what-is-it-how-we-lost-it-and-how-to-get-it-back/ > titled “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back.” His definition is admirably terse. “State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively,” he told me. When a government can’t collect the taxes it’s owed or build the sign-up portal for its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail it’s already spent billions of dollars on, that’s a failure of state capacity.
But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:
Highlight : What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades; embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state; and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s; reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts; and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.
The Biden administration can’t do much about the right’s hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.
A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In “The Procedure Fetish” < https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/ > he argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that’s because American politics in general and the Democratic Party, in particular, are dominated by lawyers. Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. “Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States,” Bagley writes. “And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”
This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”
The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.
Rebuilding that kind of government isn’t a question of regulatory tweaks and interagency coordination. It’s difficult, coalition-splitting work. It pits Democratic leaders against their own allies, against organizations and institutions they’ve admired or joined against processes whose justifications they’ve long ago accepted and laws they consider jewels of their past.
The environmental movement cheers when Biden says he wants to decarbonize and fast. But if he said that in order to achieve that goal, he wanted to reform or waive large sections of the National Environmental Policy Act to speed the construction of clean energy infrastructure, he’d find himself at war. What if he decided to argue not just that government workers should be paid more but also that they should be easier to both hire and fire?
I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems. When I go looking for ideas on how to build state capacity on the left, I don’t find much. There’s nothing like the depth of research, thought and energy that goes into imagining health and climate and education policy. But those health, climate and education plans depend, crucially, on a state capable of designing and executing policy effectively. This is true at the federal level, and it is even truer, and harder, at the state and local levels.
So this is what I have become certain of: Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/biden-liberalism-infrastructure-building.html
