Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue's JournalFourth "Matrix" Movie, Keanu Reeves And Carrie-Anne Moss Will Star
We could not be more excited to be re-entering The Matrix with Lana, said Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros, in a press release, calling Wachowski a true visionarya singular and original creative filmmaker.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sidneymadden/matrix-sequel-keanu-reeves-carrie-anne-moss-lana-wachowski?bftwnews&utm_term=4ldqpgc#4ldqpgc
We are going with the Indian Senator who respects the sovereignty of native people.
The Pechanga Band are in my neck of the woods, so I'm particularly happy to see this.
Waiting for others to endorse Warren, as well, after her fantastic speech yesterday.
https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1163912337071362048
When Women Are Accused of Complicity
No system of female oppression can function, it seems, without women being complicit in it.
The 2016 election, in which 53 percent of white women opted to vote for a man who has bragged about assaulting women, showed that many women will prioritize their assumed economic security over the well-being of others. On the simplest level, money and power can act as powerful motivators. Before Maxwell met Epstein, shed suffered a decline in her own fortunes when her father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, drowned in 1991 after falling from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of the Canary Islands. After his death, it emerged that Maxwell had plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his companys pension funds. His daughter was left with nothing but a personal trust granting her £80,000 a year. She fled to New York, leaving 32,000 of her fathers employees to deal with the emptying out hed done of their retirement accounts.
Maxwells indefinable relationship with Epstein seemed to restore her financial and social capitalhe apparently bought her a 7,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side, while his wealth renewed her access to socialites, playboys, and princes. But Epstein also seems to have had a hold on Maxwell that transcended status. She believed, according to reports in Vanity Fair, that if she did enough to please him, he would marry her. Maxwell allegedly had intimate knowledge of Epsteins predilections for girls and young women, and yet she appears to have hero-worshipped him anyway. She saw the girls she recruited for him, according to Vanity Fair, not as vulnerable teenagers, but as inconvenient obstacles to her ultimate goal, describing them as nothing and trash.
The truth is that, in the end, such purported betrayal of other womens trust seems to have its cost. Laterza lost her $2-million-a-year salary after Ailes was fired, and for her years of loyal service, he left her the relatively paltry sum of $30,000 in his will, from an estate totaling more than $100 million. Maxwell is the target of a new lawsuit accusing her of enabling Epsteins abuse.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-roger-ailes-judy-laterza-serena-waterford-handmaids-tale/596236/
Toni Morrison and What Our Mothers Couldn't Say
Luckily for me, my mom had me, her first child at 18 and was not worn out as the author says of her mom. "We grew up together," my mom said to me throughout her life. We grew up as girlfriends. But the delineation of who was mother was present - she made sure of that early on And that's the impression Prof. Morrison always conveyed to me. This good piece devoted to Ms. Morrison and who I think are Morrison Moms, whether aunties or just women who just happen upon us, the descriptive fortunate doesn't even come close to the bold and fiercely loving mothers who we have in our lives.
For years, it went on like this: I would become withdrawn, and my mother would hand me Sula, then Jazz, then Beloved. My early readings of the novels were hungry misuses. Her novels were the boundary between herself and her readers, an instrument of intellectual self-protection, but we violated the boundary, almost deliriously. By the time I was reading Morrison, the novel had allegedly lost its status as an influential factor in the making of society. We didnt know that. Morrison was our celebrity; it was only right that she appear on Oprah. We were poor in imagination, trained to think of our histories as sociological math. Morrison invalidated the lie, which taints black minds especially, that our people are either one way or the other. To her, we were naturally literary and epic. I got inebriated on the image of Pecola Breedlove, who was a long time with the milk, soused by a communitys predilection for a certain kind of beauty. The ghost in Beloved, swelling as she threatened to overcome the spiteful home at 124 Bluestone Road, made us think gothically. I wanted to build a retreat in the woods, like Denver. I thought that I was destined, one day, to become a Sula Peace, leaving home, and returning under the shelter of a great hat, carting havoc just under my breast.
In a foreword to Sula, Morrison wrote, Outlaw women are fascinatingnot always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. It is too seldom acknowledged that the greatest novelist this country has ever produced was a single black mother. She had two sons, one who passed before she did, and how many daughters? We know that it is problematic, or maybe just self-indulgent, to claim her as mother. And yet, if the business of mothering is to broker the link between two generations, then what else can she be?
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-and-what-our-mothers-couldnt-say?mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=tny
The Lily White Movement.
The Walton Act helped to keep political control in the hands of the Democratic party, by discouraging many Republican and African American voters from visiting the polls. Democrats also tried to alienate Republicans from white voters by stigmatizing them as the "party of the Negro." On November 9, 1898, The Daily Progress commented on the effects of Virginia's one-party system on the 1898 election results, in "A Quiet Day Everywhere and a Small Vote." The election was marked by voter apathy.
In an attempt to regain voter support, the Republican party urged local voters to form campaigning clubs in their ward or precinct. Despite continual African-American support, the Republican party increased efforts to recover white votes through a "lily white" movement. The Republican party proclaimed that it was a white man's party and had no room to accommodate African Americans. In "WILL IT WORK," published August 13, 1900, The Daily Progress questioned the feasibility and fairness of excluding African Americans from the Republican Party.
The African-American Republican leaders felt the full effects of the "lily white" movement when they, along with their delegation, were barred from the Republican Congressional Convention held at Luray in July, 1922. Charlottesville sent two delegations to this convention. One, led by R.N. Flannagan (President of the Henry Anderson Independent Club), was all white. The other, led by City Chairman L.W. Cox, included four African Americans. The convention decided to dismiss the Cox delegation and seat the "lily-white" faction of Charlottesville's Republicans.
http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/politics/party.html
Soul Survivor The revival and hidden treasure of Aretha Franklin.
"Her genius, her central place in American music and spirit, is undeniable." Revisit David Remnicks 2016 Profile of Aretha Franklin, who died one year ago today.What was with the sound? she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation. Feedback had pierced a verse of My Funny Valentine, and before she sat down at the piano to play Inseparable, a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a Mr. Lowery to fix the levels once and for all. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. For a time up there, I just couldnt hear myself right, she said.
On the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush, were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She collects on the spot or she does not sing. The cash goes into her handbag and the handbag either stays with her security team or goes out onstage and resides, within eyeshot, on the piano. Its the era she grew up inshe saw so many people, like Ray Charles and B. B. King, get ripped off, a close friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. There is the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. And she wont have it. You are not going to disrespect her.
Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes notice, sang Nessun dorma for him. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; its her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. Respect is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.
There are certain women singers who possess, beyond all the boundaries of our admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love, Ralph Ellison wrote in a 1958 essay on Mahalia Jackson. Indeed, we feel that if the idea of aristocracy is more than mere class conceit, then these surely are our natural queens. In 1967, at the Regal Theatre, in Chicago, the d.j. Pervis Spann presided over a coronation in which he placed a crown on Franklins head and pronounced her the Queen of Soul.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul?mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny
Well, I guess if you leave out "barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last
for the next 250 years" it might sound like an endorsement of slavery to some people. Never crossed my mind. You might want to listen to their evening of conversation to perhaps connect the dots between the two sentences and understand why TNYT is not spinning.
Introducing The 1619 Project
That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life. The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times memorializing that event on its 400th anniversary. The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.
Join us for an evening of conversation and performance, streamed below, featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jamelle Bouie, Mary Elliot, Eve Ewing, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wesley Morris, Jake Silverstein and Linda Villarosa.
Remember to look out for our 1619 Project on August 18 which examines how the legacy of slavery continues to shape and define life in the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/magazine/1619-project-livestream.html
Thanks for posting. I'd say that this swindle can be traced back to FDR, as well.
The last sentence in this excerpt is telling. Marshall is Thurgood Marshall. Walter White led the NAACP from 1929 to 1955.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=CFVhG3bEBtgC&pg=PT156&lpg=PT156&dq=memo+to+white,+marshall+cataloged+all+the+discriminatory&source=bl&ots=R-gTVrpKwg&sig=ACfU3U01huaF5WiE4hFmWRJ4f5xxh2OGVA&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=memo%20to%20white%2C%20marshall%20cataloged%20all%20the%20discriminatory&f=false
Afrofuturism: Still representing our way into the Future
A bit dated but the point is still relevant.
Just a few I've enjoyed this year includes, Spike Lee's full length See You Yesterday on Netflix and the short Watch Room.
Meanwhile in another garage ...
When Kate fails a key experiment, Bernard and Chloe insist they shut her down and go back to the drawing board, but Kate has other plans.
Unfortunately Octavia Butler's opus magnum Kindred as a motion picture is still too hot to handle. I think there's a connection with Toni Morrison's widely panned magic realism masterpiece Beloved. Though the movie was faithful to the book, I think that it was too honest for the white gaze to accept because it's based in brutal reality. But Butler's Dawn, another masterwork, is in the works directed by my girl Ava Du Vernay. Hopefully her treatment of Dawn will move Du Vernay more than just centering PoC as in A Wrinkle in Time.
Here's a good little chitchat about Afrofuturism, Butler, the writers she's influenced and excitement for Dawn.
Lastly, I'm looking forward to Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor's brilliant post-apocalyptic African Futurism book Who Fears Death is in development at HBO with Game of Thrones mastermind George R.R. Martin as executive producer.
In this video, she talks about her novel, Who Fears Death and her world of Ginen and other books.
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