Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing Thanks to Nickie Ashford and Valerie Simpson for personally allowing me to lift the title of one of their finest songs for the hed of today's entry - and I mean personally. I mean, very nearly so, at any rate. Because when we talked - which we didn't but if we did, y'see? - I'm sure they would have said something like, "Hey, sure, T, you wrote the liner notes to that fabulous vinyl reissue of Aretha's Live At The Fillmore West released a couple of years ago by Berkeley's 4 Men With Beards. And of course I'd have said, "Yes, I did, thanks." In any case, I want to draw your attention to L.A. Observed - the digital stairway to heaven which I climb each day - who pulled my coat (yeah, yeah, I'm in L.A. now, which means no coats - allow me to use a figure of speech, ok?) to what LAO calls "Jacko Trial As TV." Mr. LAO - Kevin Roderick - goes on to report that E! will be recreating the trial of the Thriller himself, with actor Edward Moss, whose resume includes (and may well depend upon) impersonating the overgrown kid, or whatever he is. Moss is the one on the left. I don't know if he's the one on the right, too. So maybe E! is on to something. Or not. I'd like to link to E! like Rodrick did, but when I clicked through myself I couldn't find a thing about Jacko, and besides, as a link, E! leaves something to be desired. So I'm taking LAO at its word (but remember, L.A. is all about image, or something, which diminishes the value of the written and spoken word). Which is to say, maybe it ain't the real thing. And while you're pondering that, stop by the incredible Phil Hendrie's website and you'll really get confused. Then consider that Hendrie's show was just moved to 570 AM, a station that, I believe, is all sports talk. "The Greatest Show In The History Of Radio," is many things, but it ain't nothing like Sports Talk. posted by TommyT @ 11:36 am | Permanent link

Sunday, February 6, 2005

Words Of Wisdom From Mookie and Da Mayor An essential conversation between the late Ossie Davis amd Spike Lee, during Lee's essential Do The Right Thing Da Mayor: Doctor . . . Mookie: C'mon, what. What? Da Mayor: Always do the right thing. Mookie: That's it? Da Mayor: That's it. Mookie: I got it, I'm gone. So is Ossie Davis - the man who eulogized Malcolm X as "Our shining black prince," and who said and did the right thing as much as any public figure in our lifetime. R.I.P. posted by TommyT @ 5:07 pm | Permanent link

Saturday, February 5, 2005

What Time It Is New York- ex-Bay Area writer Danyel Smith is blogging at a spot she calls Naked Cartwheels. She is one of my favorite writers, and one who I enjoyed working with as much as anyone I've edited over the years - we weren't great friends, but she liked my son a lot, and I liked that a lot. Anyway, she's just about one of a kind - a tough, honest, and intelligent writer - and to prove my point, check out her thoughts on the T-Wolves currently miserable Latrell Sprewell, privilege, and the necessity of finding one's way when privilege hasn't arrived with the birth certificate. Then bookmark her blog. Spree, by the way, is my favorite player on the hellacious ex-Warriors squad that's currently tearing up the league - I mean check out what Gilbert and Antawn are doing with the Wizards (this is what a Golden State fan is stuck with, and wouldn't you know I moved to L.A. the year the Lakers fell apart). Anyway, here's Danyel: Sprewell haters, and I'm not talking game here, pay attention. Smith calls her post "Money, Money, Money, Money -- MONEY," and opens with a line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing." So says Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928), in Love in the Time of Cholera. And no, I have not read it. I've only ever made it halfway through his One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's pretty, for sure, but it's a tuffy. Money makes me think of basketball (and my own little bank account), and while I adore Kevin Garnett, I'm not liking the Timberwolves. I'm riding with them, though. They're my team. But it does look like I'll end up rooting for my second-fave team, the Suns, during the playoffs. The T-Wolves just don't have it like they had it last year. I firmly believe--as much as I love them--they are going to Lose And Go Home. I mean, let Spree go already. I wrote a piece about him (damn, is it five years ago, already?) when his braids looked better, and he was all but centering for the Knicks, and as much as I like him (he rocked Golden State, if you recall; PJ incident notwithstanding), he's clearly a mercenary, one of those cats who likes being an NBA player, but doesn't love it. He loves the dough (and who can blame him?), but he's not the kind of player who's fun to watch (right now). It's a fantasy the NBA tries (unsuccessfully) to maintain—that it's just a bunch of brothers and a few white and one Asian guy out there, shooting around like some vaguely elevated intramural league. I do like it when it's like that, though. When I can suspend disbelief, when the guys look like, if they win, the prize is a five-topping special at Round Table and the beer is on Carmelo. All this said, I never was mad at Spree for last year's "feed my fam" comment. See this excellent Ron Artest piece, if you want to know why I chose the Marquez quote to start this post. I even stuck up for Spree's crazy self (in my lame way; some smart comment) at a recent Knicks vs. T-Wolves night at the Garden: Spree was about to pass the ball in when a guy next to me yelled something about "So can you feed your family, now, Spree?" Latrell heard him, and yelled right back in our direction, "Kiss my ass! Don't talk about my fucking family." And this was the week right after Spree had yelled toward a fan in another arena, "Suck my di*k!" And got suspended or got a demerit or docked or whatever it is the NBA does to "control" players. When Spree yells this kind of stuff, what he's really yelling is, This is not a game. One of things Sprewell said to me during our long-ago interview was that at a certain point, in high school, after his girl had a baby, he realized he needed to get serious about his life, so he decided he was going to go to the NBA. This was not a "hoop dreams" type of teenager. He was going to go to the NBA for a job like some folks decide to apply at FedEx, others apply for an internship at a daily newspaper. There was no romance about it for him. He went to the NBA because he had to feed his family. And even with his current contract (again, see the Artest story if my meaning is still unclear), Spree is not a rich man. He's a poor man with money. So let that negro out of his damn contract so he can go, journeyman-style, to another team. Rest assured, when he gets there, he will pull out all the stops, make four threes a game, defend like maniac, and float through the post-All-Star season on the bubble of double-doubles. Now, what that means for the T-Wolves and me ... there's always '06, I guess. I got a wedding to plan, anyway. I turned in work, too, yesterday--to school , and to a lovely magazine (we'll see if they run it, though). I have another story due tomorrow. And I have to read for Prose Lit a book I have not even purchased yet. I didn't cook last night (class!), so tonight I think I will ... make maybe ... some salmon with lemon and parsley. Green beans. Like the man says, I gotta feed my family. posted by TommyT @ 11:05 am | Permanent link

One More Pop Life On the really real side of things, I woke up this morning and found an email from Oliver Wang- colleague, compadre, writer, and all-around jefe in the hip-hop blogging world. In it he announced that last night at 10:29pm, Ella Sakiyo Jian-Yi Mizota-Wang was born, 5. 7 lbs, 8.6 oz, 20 inches. Mom Sharon Mizota and Baby are reported to be doing well, and photos are said to be on the way (Oliver has a photo blog, and I think it's got a future...). Congratulations are in order. I've never understood where Oliver found the time to do so much writing (the phrase "we all got some time to kill" sits proudly beneath the title of his main blog, Pop Life). It's something he and I have talked about on occasion. I think, at least for a while, that's going to change. posted by TommyT @ 9:33 am | Permanent link

Friday, February 4, 2005

Ossie Davis died today at 87 Here's the NYT obit, all of it (I'm not sure how long the link lasts before one must pay, so...). The LA Times plugged Max Schmeling over Ossie. I don't think that's very cool. Ossie Davis, Actor, Writer and Eloquent Champion of Racial Justice, Is Dead at 87 By RICHARD SEVERO and DOUGLAS MARTIN Ossie Davis, the imposing, deep-voiced actor who with his wife and acting partner, Ruby Dee, helped widen horizons for blacks on stage and screen while fighting zealously for civil rights from Washington to Hollywood, died yesterday in Miami. He was 87. His son, Guy, said Mr. Davis was found dead at a hotel. He said that the cause had not been determined, but that his father had a history of heart problems and had recently recovered from pneumonia. Mr. Davis initially intended to be a writer, but his fame came from his incisive and wide-ranging acting performances over five decades, even as he wrote plays and screenplays and directed and produced in both media. So many of his performances were with Ms. Dee - 11 stage productions and five movies during long parallel careers - that the two have been compared with the Lunts or Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Together they helped pave the road for two generations of black performers, Sean Combs said when the couple was honored at the Kennedy Center in December. Mr. Davis replied: "We knew that every time we got a job and every time we were onstage, America was looking to make judgments about all black folks on the basis of how you looked, how you sounded, how you carried yourself. So any role you had was a role that was involved in the struggle for black identification. You couldn't escape it." Lloyd Richards, who directed plays involving both actors from their earliest days in New York, said in an interview yesterday that they were part of a large evolution by blacks from the roles of "maids, butlers or some such" to considerably more varied fare. "You could not be exposed to Ossie and not be affected by him," Mr. Richards said. Last night, before curtains rose at 8, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights in Mr. Davis's honor. Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee first performed together in the plays "Jeb" in 1946, and "Anna Lucasta" in 1946-47; Mr. Davis's first film, "No Way Out," in 1950, was Ms. Dee's fifth. Both had significant roles on television in "Roots: The Next Generation" (1978), "Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum" (1986) and "The Stand" (1994). The two also fought in broader arenas. They helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and were master and mistress of ceremonies. At a news conference in Manhattan yesterday, Harry Belafonte, with tears in his eyes, compared Mr. Davis to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W. E .B. DuBois and Fanny Lou Hamer, all of whom were Mr. Davis's friends. In particular, Mr. Davis remained fiercely loyal to Robeson even as he was denounced by other show-business figures for his openly Communist sympathies. In 1965, Mr. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X, calling him "our shining black prince," and he spoke it again in a voiceover for the 1992 Spike Lee film, "Malcolm X." In 1968, he eulogized Dr. King. It was partly through Spike Lee movies that Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee became known to a new generation. Mr. Davis appeared in Mr. Lee's "School Daze," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever." Ms. Dee appeared in the latter two. Early in their careers, Mr. Davis co-starred with Ms. Dee when, on Aug. 31, 1959, he took over from Sidney Poitier the role of Walter Lee in "A Raisin in the Sun, " the hit drama about the aspirations of a black family. (Ms. Dee created the role of his wife, Ruth.) It was written by Lorraine Hansberry and directed by Mr. Richards, and is often seen as a milestone in drama by and about blacks. Mr. Davis never stopped working, his son recalled, adding that he used his waiting time on the set to write plays on his laptop computer. In 1996, he recreated a 1986-87 stage role in the movie "I'm Not Rappaport," and in 1997 he appeared on television in "Miss Evers' Boys" and "Twelve Angry Men." Raiford Chatman Davis was born on Dec. 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Ga. He was the oldest of five children of Kince Charles Davis and the former Laura Cooper. He became Ossie when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch River, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was "R. C. Davis." The clerk thought she had said, "Ossie Davis," and she was not about to argue with a white person. He grew up in Waycross, Ga., where one of his earliest memories was bigots' harassing his father because his occupation was considered a bit sophisticated for blacks at that time. His father planned and supervised the building of railroads. A member of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to shoot his father "like a dog." Ossie said that thinking about this inspired him to become a writer. Despite this early consciousness of racism, Mr. Davis remarked in his adulthood that his favorite movie actor as a child was Tom Mix, the cowboy star, who was white. A happy memory was growing up in a family of preachers and storytellers, and he said that early on he learned to think of the church as theater. During the Depression his father lost his job and eked out a living selling homemade herbal medicines. Ossie found solace from poverty in school, where he developed a passion for reading Shakespeare. In 1935, after his high school graduation, Mr. Davis set off to hitchhike from Waycross to Washington, where he stayed with his mother's two sisters; his mother had sewed a $10 bill into his underwear. With the aid of a National Youth Administration Scholarship and a library job, he entered Howard University, where he encountered the likes of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen in a course on black literature. He fell under the wing of Dr. Alain Locke, a philosophy professor whom American Visions magazine in 1992 called "midwife to a generation of younger artists, writers and poets." Dr. Locke urged Mr. Davis to learn more about the theater. The student acted on his advice, perhaps more hastily than the professor had intended him to. He dropped out of Howard at the end of his junior year and moved to New York. He later said that he believed college was a place to "learn to spell and where the commas go," and that since he had mastered those things, there was no reason to remain. He joined the Rose McClendon Players, a little theater group in Harlem, in order to learn more about plays, which he hoped to write himself. He swept floors, painted sets and sometimes acted in plays performed in church basements and union halls. He was occasionally reduced to sleeping on a park bench, but he mingled with the intellectual giants of black America, including Richard Wright, DuBois and A. Philip Randolph. While still in high school, Mr. Davis had dreamed of joining Ethiopia's struggle against Mussolini, although he confessed he was not sure where Ethiopia was. He had a brief flirtation with the Young Communist League, which he said ended when he was drafted into the Army in 1942. He spent much of World War II as a surgical technician in an Army hospital in Liberia, where he served both troops and local inhabitants. After his discharge in 1945, Mr. Davis returned to Georgia but was soon approached by Richard Campbell, who urged Mr. Davis to audition for the title role in "Jeb," a play about a Purple Heart winner who returned to Louisiana and is thwarted by racism in his efforts to find work. The play ran less than two weeks on Broadway, but critics were impressed with Mr. Davis. More importantly, the young actress playing the female lead could not get the Southern accent right. So the understudy, who knew all the lines, Ruby Dee, took over. She and Mr. Davis had previously appeared in different productions of the same play, "On Strivers Row," in 1940, but had never met. Ms. Dee said in an interview with CBS News last year that her first impression was that Mr. Davis was "a country bumpkin." But it was the beginning of a spectacular personal and professional collaboration. In December 1948, they took the day off from rehearsals for another play, "The Smile of the World," and rode a bus to New Jersey to be married. In addition to his wife and his son, Guy, of the Bronx, Mr. Davis is survived by his daughters, Nora Day of Montclair, N.J., and Hasna Muhammad of Brewster, N.Y.; a brother, William, of San Antonio; and seven grandchildren. One of Mr. Davis's best-known works was "Purlie Victorious," which used comical stereotypes to make stinging points abut racism. Mr. Davis wrote the play and played the title character, a preacher trying to open an integrated church in an old barn. In 1999, the reference book Contemporary Southern Writers said it offered "a brilliant exploration of how archetypes and stereotypes can be overstated to the point of absurdity." Mr. Davis repeated his role in the 1963 film version, titled "Gone Are the Days." It was at first unsuccessful at the box office, but it was re-released with the title of the play under the sponsorship of Paul Newman, Fredric March and other celebrities. In 1970, "Purlie" was made into a hit musical, propelled in part by Melba Moore's performance and a strong score. From March 31 to April 3, the musical version will be staged in concert as part of the "Encores!" series at City Center in Manhattan. What may be have been Mr. Davis's last interview will be broadcast on Feb. 21, the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, on "Tavis Smiley," the PBS show. Mr. Smiley asked Mr. Davis how he had prepared himself to deliver eulogies for Malcolm X and for Dr. King. He answered, "The first thing, I should think, would be to sit quietly for as long as it takes and think long thoughts about the subject." posted by TommyT @ 8:06 pm | Permanent link

Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Keepin' It Keen Shortly after midnight, every Tuesday morning, I drop by I-Tunes.At first, I was taken by the novelty of it all, and then by the site's utility. In the past few weeks, however, iTune and I have taken our games to a lower level - together we bring you the Al Gore of hip-hop, Winta aka Big Young, the DJ with the flava of a monogomous Mormon missionary. Here's what Winta's got to say about Street Official, Vol. 3, whick "kicks off the new year with bangers from some of the industry's heaviest hitters...Vol. 3 is straight up fire!" "Street Official Mixtape, Vol. 3" (Track 1): Tha Mix! Remember, no selling out - we are trying to bring you the "real" hip-hop heat that you may or may not hear on the radio." That said, the download was free, which is more than I can say for the rest of it - and I should know, I dropped nearly $50 tonight. posted by TommyT @ 3:15 am | Permanent link