Not P but Baldwin

[David Morris]

James Booker was a queer black junkie.  His voice was piano and song.  He
was a genius.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/james-booker-tragic-piano-genius

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 1:32 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess it didn't help Baldwin like Bayard Rustin being queer. Homophobia
> being a well known quantity in southern black churches as well as elements
> in the civil rights movement.
> These voices were muted. I had never heard of Rustin until recently. Yes
> Baldwin lived in exile but its unfortunate these other voices (including
> many women) were pushed to the side for so long
>
> rich
>
> On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 6:54 AM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Not as far as I know.
>>
>> It was on my list of 'things-to-see' when I last went to NYC but,
>> unfortunately, it closed a long run the night before I got there.
>>
>> -Allan in WV who also wants to see that movie about Alice Waters' lover
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 2:09 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Was it not shown in the movie theaters in West Virginia?
>>>
>>> The movie is great when Baldwin is on the screen. When you hear him
>>> speak it's even better. That man was a born rhetor, and his surprise when
>>> he gets a standing ovation in Cambridge is hard to believe. (Buckley, the
>>> poor sod, looks lost. (And he is, has, of course.))
>>>
>>> If you don't know his The Devil Finds Work go and read it. (What he says
>>> about his teacher is heartbreaking; I think it's quoted in the movie.) The
>>> man had an uncanny way with antinomy, dichotomy, antithesis – no wonder.
>>>
>>> That said, I think OJ – Made in America is a far better film, not only
>>> regarding racism at the basis of your society.
>>>
>>> 2017-06-25 3:14 GMT+02:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> Yes!  Watch it!
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 7:26 PM Allan Balliett <
>>>> allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> It's been a long wait but the film ("I am Not Your Negro")  about
>>>>> James Baldwin's unfinished final book has gone to DVD and streaming. You
>>>>> can stream it at both iTunes and Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime, you can
>>>>> stream it for free! Here
>>>>> <https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro/dp/B01N6Q00JM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498347244&sr=8-1&keywords=i+am+not+your+negro>
>>>>>
>>>>> I've watched about a third of it (will watch the rest this evening)
>>>>> and have to admit that, yes, it is a life changing film. It also has
>>>>> reminded me how careless I have been to not think of James Baldwin for all
>>>>> these decades.
>>>>>
>>>>> -Allan in Shepherdstown, WV where we are so progressive we've given
>>>>> Blacks two sides of town
>>>>>
>>>>> *I Am Not Your Negro” is a thrilling introduction to his work, a
>>>>>> remedial course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial
>>>>>> politics — a concise, roughly 90-minute movie with the scope and impact of
>>>>>> a 10-hour mini-series or a literary doorstop. It is not an easy or a
>>>>>> consoling movie, but it is the opposite of bitter or despairing. “I can’t
>>>>>> be a pessimist because I’m alive,” Baldwin said. “I’m forced to be an
>>>>>> optimist.” AO Scott*
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> AO Scott's Review is at http://bit.ly/legacyNword (or below)
>>>>>
>>>>>  A few weeks ago, in reaction to something we had written about
>>>>> blackness and whiteness in recent movies, my colleague Manohla Dargis and I
>>>>> received a note from a reader. “Since when is everything about race?” he
>>>>> wanted to know. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
>>>>>
>>>>> A flippant — though by no means inaccurate — answer would have been
>>>>> 1619. But a more constructive response might have been to recommend Raoul
>>>>> Peck’s life-altering new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” Let me do so
>>>>> now, for that reader (if he’s still interested) and for everybody else,
>>>>> too. Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called
>>>>> “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer
>>>>> English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your
>>>>> mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist
>>>>> James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be
>>>>> hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater
>>>>> clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark
>>>>> lessons from the shadows of history.
>>>>>
>>>>> To call “I Am Not Your Negro” a movie about James Baldwin would be to
>>>>> understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration,
>>>>> an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous
>>>>> work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the
>>>>> Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject. The
>>>>> voice-over narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from
>>>>> Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the
>>>>> mid-1970s, when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book,
>>>>> never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm
>>>>> X and Martin Luther King Jr.
>>>>>
>>>>> Reflections on those men (all of whom Baldwin knew well) and their
>>>>> legacies are interspersed with passages from other books and essays,
>>>>> notably “The Devil Finds Work,” Baldwin’s 1976 meditation on race,
>>>>> Hollywood and the mythology of white innocence. His published and
>>>>> unpublished words — some of the most powerful and penetrating ever
>>>>> assembled on the tortured subject of American identity — accompany images
>>>>> from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own
>>>>> decidedly non-post-racial present.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Baldwin could not have known about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter,
>>>>> about the presidency of Barack Obama and the recrudescence of white
>>>>> nationalism in its wake, but in a sense he explained it all in advance. He
>>>>> understood the deep, contradictory patterns of our history, and
>>>>> articulated, with a passion and clarity that few others have matched, the
>>>>> psychological dimensions of racial conflict: the suppression of black
>>>>> humanity under slavery and Jim Crow and the insistence on it in
>>>>> African-American politics and art; the dialectic of guilt and rage,
>>>>> forgiveness and denial that distorts relations between black and white
>>>>> citizens in the North as well as the South; the lengths that white people
>>>>> will go to wash themselves clean of their complicity in oppression.
>>>>>
>>>>> Baldwin is a double character in Mr. Peck’s film. The elegance and
>>>>> gravity of his formal prose, and the gravelly authority of Mr. Jackson’s
>>>>> voice, stand in contrast to his quicksilver on-camera presence as a
>>>>> lecturer and television guest. In his skinny tie and narrow suit, an
>>>>> omnipresent cigarette between his fingers, he imports a touch of midcentury
>>>>> intellectual cool into our overheated, anti-intellectual media moment.
>>>>>
>>>>> A former child preacher, he remained a natural, if somewhat reluctant,
>>>>> performer — a master of the heavy sigh, the raised eyebrow and the
>>>>> rhetorical flourish. At one point, on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Baldwin
>>>>> tangles with Paul Weiss, a Yale philosophy professor who scolds him for
>>>>> dwelling so much on racial issues. The initial spectacle of mediocrity
>>>>> condescending to genius is painful, but the subsequent triumph of
>>>>> self-taught brilliance over credentialed ignorance is thrilling to witness.
>>>>>
>>>>> In that exchange, as in a speech for an audience of British university
>>>>> students, you are aware of Baldwin’s profound weariness. He must explain
>>>>> himself — and also his country — again and again, with what must have been
>>>>> sorely tested patience. When the students erupt in a standing ovation at
>>>>> the end of his remarks, Baldwin looks surprised, even flustered. You
>>>>> glimpse an aspect of his personality that was often evident in his writing:
>>>>> the vulnerable, bright, ambitious man thrust into a public role that was
>>>>> not always comfortable.
>>>>>
>>>>> “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” he wrote early in his
>>>>> career, in the introductory note to his first collection of essays, “Notes
>>>>> of a Native Son.” The disarming, intimate candor of that statement
>>>>> characterized much of what would follow, as would a reckoning with the
>>>>> difficulties of living up to such apparently straightforward aspirations.
>>>>> Without sliding into confessional bathos, his voice was always personal and
>>>>> frank, creating in the reader a feeling of complicity, of shared knowledge
>>>>> and knowing humor.
>>>>>
>>>>> “I Am Not Your Negro” reproduces and redoubles this effect. It doesn’t
>>>>> just make you aware of Baldwin, or hold him up as a figure to be admired
>>>>> from a distance. You feel entirely in his presence, hanging on his every
>>>>> word, following the implications of his ideas as they travel from his
>>>>> experience to yours. At the end of the movie, you are convinced that you
>>>>> know him. And, more important, that he knows you. To read Baldwin is to be
>>>>> read by him, to feel the glow of his affection, the sting of his scorn, the
>>>>> weight of his disappointment, the gift of his trust.
>>>>>
>>>>> Recounting his visits to the South, where he reported on the civil
>>>>> rights movement and the murderous white response to it, Baldwin modestly
>>>>> described himself as a witness, a watchful presence on the sidelines of
>>>>> tragedy and heroism, an outsider by virtue of his Northern origins, his
>>>>> sexuality and his alienation from the Christianity of his childhood. But he
>>>>> was also a prophet, able to see the truths revealed by the contingent,
>>>>> complicated actions of ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. This
>>>>> is not to say that he transcended the struggle or detached himself from it.
>>>>> On the contrary, he demonstrated that writing well and thinking clearly are
>>>>> manifestations of commitment, and that irony, skepticism and a ruthless
>>>>> critical spirit are necessary tools for effective moral and political
>>>>> action.
>>>>>
>>>>> “I Am Not Your Negro” is a thrilling introduction to his work, a
>>>>> remedial course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial
>>>>> politics — a concise, roughly 90-minute movie with the scope and impact of
>>>>> a 10-hour mini-series or a literary doorstop. It is not an easy or a
>>>>> consoling movie, but it is the opposite of bitter or despairing. “I can’t
>>>>> be a pessimist because I’m alive,” Baldwin said. “I’m forced to be an
>>>>> optimist.”
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
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