"Brooklyn photographer Marc Bushelle and his wife, Janine, didn’t anticipate the overwhelming attention they would receive when they first had the idea to feature their 5-year-old daughter Lily portraying photos of iconic African-American women."
I recently discovered a blogger that posts very interesting pieces. I don't know much about the person, except that the writer uses the name Abagond. I'm sharing the May 18, 2015 blog, because it relates to a post I wrote back on November 26, 2009. Abagond and I both are illuminating the Disney Film Company's relationship with the concept of a Black or African princess. I thought you might find it interesting to juxtapose the two posts and see what that process reveals. Please read the Abagond blog post below and then click this link to revisit the two posts I did back in 2009.
I definitely think following the production of this film would be worthwhile. I mean, 2014, and a white man is trying to claim a piece of Sudan as his, so that his daughter can be a princess.....?!???!? LHM!!! Or as my Grandma used to say, "Lord, Have Mercy!"
"The Princess of North Sudan" will be Disney's first film about an African princess. She will be White.
It will be based on the true story of Emily Heaton, a White American girl who wanted to be a princess. Her father, Jeremiah Heaton, went to Africa in 2014 and, on her seventh birthday, planted a flag in Bir Tawil, a bit of land not claimed by any government. He called it the Kingdom of North Sudan, making himself king and his daughter a princess.
Bir Tawil is on the border between Egypt and Sudan. It is about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, larger than Bahrain or Singapore, though it is landlocked and largely desert. Neither Egypt nor Sudan want to claim it because that would mean giving up their right to the Hala'ib Triangle, a much bigger piece of land further east on the Red Sea. Bir Tawil has been claimed by several people on the Internet. Heaton is the first one to go there and plant a flag.
No government recognizes his claim, nor does the United Nations.
He says no one lives there. "No one" must means "no one White". The very reason Bir Tawil became a matter of dispute is because it was part of the grazing lands of the Ababda people. They have been there for thousands of years: they were part of the Blemmyes who fought the Roman Empire in the 100s and 200s.
Jeremiah Heaton is a White American farmer who runs a mining-safety company. He lives in south-western Virginia, where he owns Cherokee land claimed by Whites.
Heaton does not see himself as a White colonialist:
Academics at universities saying this is modern day colonialism, really that’s a euphemism for racism. I can’t help any more that I was born in America as a white man than an Asian person born in Asia can [help that]."
Implying that the US is a White country. Heaton says he has never viewed the world through a racial lens.
The film: Morgan Spurlock, of "Super Size Me" (2004), will be a producer. Stephany Folsom is writing the script. On May 14th 2015, she tweeted:
There is no planting a flag in Sudan or making a white girl the princess of an African country. That's gross. #PrincessOfNorthSudan
But then she deleted it. It seems to contradict the fact that it is a film entitled "The Princess of North Sudan" based on the Heatons.
Rushaa Hamid, a British writer who grew up in Sudan:
"Stories of the Sudan are still told through white voices, and 'The Princess of North Sudan' continues that trend. We Sudanese are linked with teddy-bears, scandalous trousers, and people who marry goats, but we are never the Kushite kingdom or the Mahdi or our own ancient fairy tales. Disney would rather embrace a story that should have ended with independence in 1956, and that's simply wrong."
Not only is Heaton trying to colonize Africa - so is Disney.
'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' Searches for Home in a Fast-Changing City
Now fundraising on Kickstarter, a film by two S.F. natives will grapple with race, class, displacement, and the importance of friendship.
May 18, 2015
Laura Bliss @mslaurabliss
Among the more worrying trends out of San Francisco in recent years—and the greatest tarnish to the city’s reputation for diversity—is the displacement of longtime residents of color. It’s not only Latinos being pushed out of the Mission District: Census numbers reveal a staggering 35.7 percent decrease in San Francisco's black population between 1990 and 2010.
Third-generation San Franciscan Jimmie Fails has witnessed that flight first-hand. As a black kid growing up in the Fillmore District, he watched his beloved family home go into foreclosure, and his aunts, uncles, and cousins disperse from the Bay Area. Soon after, he moved to the Army St. Housing Projects near the Mission, where he met fledgling film director and fifth-generation S.F. native Joe Talbot.
“Everyone always kicked it at Precita Park,” he says. “We started hanging out, shooting videos.”
It’s an understatement: One of those shorts won an honorable mention at the 2013 San Francisco Independent Film Festival.
Now 20 and 24 respectively, Fails and Talbot are gearing up to create their first feature-length film, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” inspired by some of Jimmie’s real-life stories. They’re well on their way to raising $50,000 to fund the project on Kickstarter. The frankly heartbreaking teaser-trailer is above.
“Friendships like Jimmie and mine don’t exist in the future of San Francisco.”
Written and directed by Talbot, the film follows Fails—also a co-writer—and his best friend, played by Prentice Sanders. Neither quite at ease in their far-flung neighborhood, Hunters Point, or in the newly tech-ified San Francisco core, Jimmie and Prentice are outcasts at heart, searching for home in their native city as it changes before their eyes.
Though the film is heavily fictionalized, a central arc is Jimmie’s character’s attempt to buy back the house he lost as a child.
“There is this major question of whether he can stay in the city,” says Talbot. “Do you fight to protect the city you love, or do you accept these big changes?”
Issues of race, class, and displacement loom over the film, but both Jimmie and Joe say it’s really about friendship. “What ties you to the city are your friends who are from here,” says Fails. “You gravitate towards each other. When I look at someone, I can tell if they were born and raised here. There aren’t many of us left.”
Their own connection feels increasingly like an exception, as the city’s black community shrinks and shrinks. “One thing we always say is that friendships like Jimmie and mine don’t exist in the future of San Francisco,” Talbot says. “When we were kids, Precita Park used to be the meeting point for everyone from the area: White kids from Bernal Heights, black kids from the projects, Latino kids from the Mission. Now that park is very different. There isn’t that crossover.”
Now both living at Talbot’s family home in the Mission, Jimmie and Joe say they’re working toward ways to stay in the city, and that there’s plenty to keep them both there for now, even as they worry about what’s to come.
“I hope we can bring the diversity back,” says Fails, “and that there can be more of a black community. I also hope the weirdness stays. The whole reason white people came was it was a city where people who felt like outcasts could come and feel accepted.”
Everybody likes movies, and now with the technology available, everybody is making them. This article is so rich with many wonderful examples of people being true to their highest dreams and expressing their creativity. Let these stories inspire your imagination to flow again, and then 'play'. Let your mind and actions follow those ideas that just won't die, and see what happens.
Check out the creative genius of one of Uganda's directors, and the talented local actors and craftspeople that have made some 40 films. Move over film studios of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nigeria's Nollywood. Make room for Uganda's "Wakaliwood" to join the ranks. en-joy! Kendke
A Ugandan film company that makes low-budget action movies in the slums has found a cult following online. One US fan liked their films so much, he abandoned New York to become an action movie star in Kampala.
It was December 2011 and things were not going well for Alan Hofmanis.
"My girl dumped me the day I bought the wedding ring," he says. So a friend took him out to a Manhattan bar and, to cheer him up, showed him a video clip on his phone.
It was the trailer for Who Killed Captain Alex? billed as Uganda's first action movie. The minute-long video showed bloody gun battles, speeded-up kung fu fights and computer-generated helicopters bombing Kampala. If you looked closely, you could see that the machine guns - replicas of Rambo's M60 - had been welded from scrap metal, and the bullets carved from wood. Much of the action took place in mud. A high-pitched voiceover announced this was the work of Ramon Productions, and gave a phone number. The replica of Rambo's machine gun, welded from scrap metal
The clip had an electrifying effect on Hofmanis. "Around 40 seconds into it, I decided: I'm coming to Uganda," he says. "I realised what I'm looking at makes no sense - but it's complete genius."
As programme director for the Lake Placid Film Festival, Hofmanis was used to spotting emerging talent, but he says what he saw here was "off the charts" in its ambition. "In the West, when you have no money, you shoot two people having a conversation… You don't make a war film."
Two weeks later he travelled to Uganda. He didn't bother to call ahead, his mind was made up.
On his first day in Kampala he was at a busy market, when, far in the distance, he spotted a man wearing a T-shirt that said Ramon Film Productions. He immediately gave chase. "I just start running, and I'm chasing him… so he starts running, but we eventually catch up, and we calm down, and I say: 'Look, I'm just a fan from New York City - can you take me to the film-maker?'"
The answer was, "Yes," so Hofmanis jumped on the back of a motorcycle and 30 minutes later arrived in Wakaliga, a slum on the outskirts of Kampala. "There are goats everywhere, there are chickens everywhere… That's raw sewage that's going right in front of the house - and that actually plays a major role in the films, because it's life here - it's dust, it's heat, it's children, it's animals… and it's pure joy," he says.
Film-maker Isaac Nabwana in actionIsaac Nabwana, the film director and brains behind Ramon Productions, was not fazed by the unexpected arrival. "I asked him, why didn't he call me? He said: 'I am a friend, I had to reach you.' That's when I realized that he's a true friend," he says. Nabwana offered his visitor some tea, and they spoke for five hours.
"I thought I was going to meet someone like myself - a little crazy with a camera and some friends - and very quickly I realized this is the real deal," says Hofmanis.
He had arrived in "Wakaliwood", where over the past decade, self-taught film maker Nabwana has shot more than 40 low-budget action films. He is not sure how much each one costs to make, but guesses it might be around $200 (£130). "It is passion that really makes a movie here," Nabwana says.
The volunteer cast and crew source props wherever they can. The green screen is a piece of cloth bought at the market, draped over a wall. The camera crane is made from spare tractor parts - Dauda Bissaso, one of the regular actors, is a mechanic and builds all the heavy gear and weapons. "He's just a genius with a blowtorch, he makes everything," says Hofmanis. Another key member of the team is Bruce U, a Bruce Lee fan who choreographs the fight scenes and runs a kung fu school for the children of Wakaliga.
Supa kung fu Master Bruce U-his beard and moustache are attached with shoe glue
To recreate gunshot injuries, they use free condoms from the local health clinic, filled with fake blood - they burst quite realistically. They used to be filled with real animal blood, but when one of the actors got sick with brucellosis, a disease passed on from cows, they switched to food colouring.
Fake blood is needed in vast quantities because the films are violent - but in a cartoonish way, and quite unlike the real violence Nabwana witnessed growing up during Uganda's 1981-86 civil war. "I don't put that in my movies, what I saw in the past," he says. "I include comedy - there was no comedy in the violence which I witnessed."
His cinematic hero is Chuck Norris, although he also likes Rambo and The Expendables. Hofmanis, on the other hand, compares him to directors like Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez and Martin Scorsese - "in terms of creativity and what they're contributing to cinema".
Isaac Nabwana and his biggest fan, Alan "Ssali" Hofmanis
Nabwana's love for films began long before he was allowed to watch any - his older brother Kizito would return from the local cinema hall and describe what he'd seen in vivid detail. "I remember the gestures he used… there was a guy who used to crush people, so I liked that," says Nabwana. "Even now I see them in my head."
At senior school, Nabwana decided he would make his own action movies one day. "I had that art in me, I wanted to make a movie - I had to fulfil that dream," he says.
But there was not enough money for him to even finish school. "So I started making bricks and digging sand to sell to people around here," he says.
Finally, in 2006, at the age of 32, Nabwana had saved up enough to pay for the first month of a six-month course in computer maintenance. "That was enough to know how to assemble a computer," he says. He then taught himself how to use editing packages such as Premiere Pro and After Effects, and borrowed a camera from a neighbour. "And with that I started… I did not know how to write a script. But then I thought of these drama actors, how do they do it? And I started figuring it out."
This replica wooden machine gun is veteran of about a dozen films
Tebaatusasula was one of his earliest successes - the name translates loosely as "They never paid us."
It mixes comedy, action and witchcraft - one character bewitches a man who has stolen his wife. "In Tebaatusasula things jumped out of the house... chairs, the TVs and everything, and people loved that very much," says Nabwana.
But his biggest challenge was yet to come.
Unable to find a distributor, Nabwana came up with an ingenious solution: the actors and crew work for nothing, but get to keep half the profits from any DVDs they sell. "We do man-to-man, door-to-door all over the country to sell them," he says. The films can sell for up to 3,000 shillings - about $1 - but the team only has a window of about a week before they are pirated. They sometimes wear full costume to maximise sales.
Selling DVDs in full costume can improve sales
It was on such a sales trip that they had bumped into Hofmanis.
As soon as they met, Nabwana agreed to write a role for Hofmanis, who felt like he was 10 years old again. "When I was a child, I would go through my father's closet, find two belts of his, tie them together, and now I'm Indiana Jones. And the trees are Nazis. That's what this is," he says.
So, two days after arriving in Uganda, he found himself filming a fight scene. It didn't quite go to plan. "I grab someone in the scene and we fall into the raw sewage and we start fighting there." He says everyone was amazed to see an American rolling around in sewage. "That in some ways was my baptism here. Only people who are from the slums behave this way - because they grow up with sewage it doesn't mean much to them." They honoured him with a Ugandan name: Ssali.
Sewage plays a part in all of Nabwana's movies. He purposely includes such details because he wants to reflect his surroundings - his films are from the slums, by the slum. It's part of their appeal. "What I've found out… is that people want to see what they live in. They want their life to be put on DVD. They like it very much," he says.
But he admits that this puts off distributors, whom he has accused of "trying to copy exactly what is done in the West and exactly what is done in Bollywood and Hollywood".
"I'm going to show the world the kind of life we enjoy or we grew up in," Nabwana said in an interview for the 2012 documentary Wakaliwood. "It's called a ghetto life but you know it's good… and it's hostile."
After that first trip in December 2011, Hofmanis visited six more times. Then in March 2014, the 45-year-old sold his possessions and moved to Wakaliga. "Back in New York I got rid of everything. I had put my stuff in storage but I couldn't even afford the $22 (£14) per month it cost," he says. "I'm all in."
Like the rest of the crew, Hofmanis gets involved in all aspects of production
"He's now part of my family," says Nabwana, 42, who lives with his wife Harriet and three children. Hofmanis moved in next door.
They have big plans for the studio. A Kickstarter fundraising project launched in March exceeded all expectations. "All we asked for was $160 (£105) to make a movie, but we got $13,000 (£8,500)," says Hofmanis.
They immediately went on a shopping spree, buying toy cars and trucks to blow up - the trick is to match them to what Bissaso can find in the local scrap yards, so they can be used for stunts.
The design for a spinning gun, inspired by the film Predator
The team spend a lot of time discussing weapons. Nabwana now plans to build a full-scale helicopter from scrap. He has a fondness for choppers, and remembers being chased by one during the civil war when he was about 12 years old. His brother's cinematic knowledge kicked in and they tried to outrun it - the helicopter followed. He chuckles at the memory.
Wakaliwood currently has six films in production, including Bad Black, a kind of reverse Karate Kid, starring the children of Wakaliga. And they are inviting fans from around the world to submit scenes for "the world's first crowd-sourced action film" - called Tebaatusasula: EBOLA.
The studio's kung fu school keeps children off the streets and trains them as future stars
Hofmanis describes life in Wakaliwood as a "lazy country afternoon punctuated by the unpredictable". As one of the few white men around, he's in demand as an actor. He has played Jesus in a chart-topping music video. For another role he had to crawl into a fresh goat's carcass "so when the cannibals plunge a knife into my chest they're pulling out the goat's intestines and not my own."
The moment Hofmanis realises a dead goat is his "costume"
But on his personal blog - Mud, Blood & Wooden Guns - he hints at darker moments. He has lost 55 lbs (25kg) in weight since he arrived 15 months ago. In October last year he compared his situation to the 70s cult thriller, Sorcerer: "I wound up in a third world country with no way to get home… It does not end well."
He has swapped a comfortable Western existence for life in a slum - without running water or plumbing, no sewage system and with barely any electricity. "People can be confused that they see us with internet - a 3G modem that I brought here - and making movies, so the default is it cannot be a slum," says Hofmanis.
"But that's the whole point. Wakaliwood should not be able to do what it does. But it's happening.
"The story is still being written. This is just the beginning, or the Beginning of the Beginning, as Isaac says."
But in the end, it may be Hofmanis' story that attracts Hollywood's attention.
An actor has lunch in full horror make-up
Bosa, the dummy used as a dead body in every film, was named after an actor who quit
Make-up test for a woman who turns into a snake
Isaac Nabwana and Alan Hofmanis spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service Listen to their interview. Visit the link for more photos and a short video: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32531558
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Going to the movies in Uganda
VJ Emmie at work in his video hall, which is near Wakaliwood Watching a movie can be a raucous affair - films are translated into local languages such as Luganda by VJs, or video jokers, who add their own jokes and improvised commentary, live. "When you are translating the movie you have to feel like you are in the movie," says VJ Emmie, whose video hall can attract an audience of up to 200 for a live show. "We normally do not change the meaning of the film, but we spice it up."
Emmie wanted to be a VJ from the age of six, because he realised it would make him popular. "I went to the cinema hall and watched this guy translating a movie and the first benches around him - it was women. When I went back home I told my mother, 'I want to be a VJ' - mother wanted me to be a tailor."
Wakaliwood has now re-released Who Killed Captain Alex? with commentary by VJ Emmie.
A belated gift for the mother's of the world. Look what the children create and become when they are allowed to attune to love and the music in their soul.
Be sure to watch each video. Great music, great stories. Keep your spirit inspired with the beauty of Life's possibilities. Awaken your imagination.
lovu all, Kendke
Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines
Joey Alexander at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
The cheers rang loud and long for Joey Alexander after he had played his last delicate piano chord in a recent sold-out set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan.
Beaming at his standing ovation, he stood between his bassist and his drummer, intent on taking a group bow. The scene was sweetly comical: The top of his head barely grazed their chests.
Which only made sense, given that Joey, jazz’s latest media star, is 11 years old.
This was far from his first turn in the spotlight. He became an overnight sensation — not too strong a term — with his guest performance a year ago at a Jazz at Lincoln Center gala, which won him rave reviews. His debut album, “My Favorite Things” (Motéma), is out this week, and he is booked for a series of notable appearances in the coming months, including one at the Newport Jazz Festival in August.
Discovered in Jakarta, Indonesia, about three years ago, Joey moved with his parents to New York last year, with the help of jazz luminaries like the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who called him “my hero” on Facebook and with whom he now shares a manager.
Playing a Classic
This is the title track from Joey Alexander’s debut album.
It’s all part of the improbable life of a child prodigy. Joey may be the most talked-about one that jazz has seen in a while, though he is hardly alone. There’s José André Montaño, a 10-year-old blind pianist from Bolivia; Kojo Roney, a 10-year-old drummer who had a concert residency last month in Brooklyn; and Grace Kelly, 22, an alto saxophonist who made her first album at 12. The list goes on, with some prodigies developing major careers and others falling short of their early promise.
It is natural to harbor mixed feelings about this phenomenon, and for a critic it’s all but imperative. The acclamation given to musical prodigies usually involves some mix of circus-act astonishment and commodity futures trading. All the attention lavished on them can distort the ecology of an art form, even while bringing encouraging news about its survival. And, as with any celebrated young talent, there is a question of intention: Who benefits most from the renown these performers receive? Is there a way to marvel at mind-blowing precocity without stunting an artist’s development?
Joey looked like a cherub several years ago when his reputation began to build in jazz circles: small in stature, with a thick mop of black hair over a face that still showed traces of baby fat. He is taller now, though the sight of him at a grand piano can still be disconcerting, especially when you hear what he plays.
In person he comes across like any polite, intelligent middle-school boy with highly focused interests. He showed up for a stroll in Central Park last week in jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt. “Um, I don’t know the band so much,” he admitted, “but I like the shirt.”
He clearly loves and respects his art form. “Jazz is a hard music,” he said in response to a question about heightened expectations, “and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that’s the most important thing.”
Jazz prodigies rarely have full command of their artistry. They tend to exhibit a superabundance of technique and core knowledge but a more deficient supply of the intangibles — what jazz partisans mean when they praise with the word “maturity.” And even the most virtuoso interpretation of composed material is of limited use in jazz, at least when it comes to a solo career.
For a jazz pianist, the mastery entails a staggering breadth of knowledge about harmony, rhythm and orchestration, all converging in an eloquent synthesis.
Joey Alexander has a handle on a good deal of that. “My Favorite Things,” produced by Jason Olaine, the director of programming and touring for Jazz at Lincoln Center, shows him to be a thoughtful musician as well as a natural one, with a sophisticated harmonic palette and a dynamic sensitivity.
On the album, Joey worked with top-tier players like the bassist Larry Grenadier. “I was wary,” Mr. Grenadier said of the invitation to record. “What I typically find with kid prodigies is that they come from this clinical, Western European way of accumulating knowledge. What I found with Joey is that he’s coming from a more intuitive, communal way of playing music, which is so beautiful to see.”
By and large the album is characterized by disarming self-possession, especially in light of its back story, which is hard to ignore. Joey, whose full name is Josiah Alexander Sila, was born in Bali, many miles from the nearest major jazz hub. His earliest encounters with jazz were through the CDs that his father, Denny Sila, had brought home in the 1990s, after earning a degree in finance at Pace University in Manhattan.
He and Joey’s mother, Fara, ran a tourism business. They are soft-spoken, friendly and unassuming: seemingly the furthest thing from stage parents, although they take clear pride in Joey’s talent. As for his career, “We’re flowing with it,” Mr. Sila said over lunch in Central Park. “We never expected anything.”
Joey Alexander, My Favorite Things Yasunari Rowan on behalf of Motema Music
Joey began playing piano at 6, picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear, which led Mr. Sila, an amateur pianist, to teach him some fundamentals. Beyond that, Joey recalled, “I heard records, and also YouTube, of course.”
He played at jam sessions in Bali and then in Jakarta, when his family moved there. At 8, he played for the pianist Herbie Hancock, who was in Jakarta as a Unesco good-will ambassador. (“You told me that you believed in me,” Joey recalled last fall, addressing Mr. Hancock at a gala for the Jazz Foundation of America, “and that was the day I decided to dedicate my childhood to jazz.”) He was 9 when he entered the first Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine. He won its grand prize.
Soon one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Mr. Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to appear at the organization’s 2014 gala. Joey played a solo version of the Monk ballad “‘Round Midnight” as the finale, earning a standing ovation, glowing reviews and some influential supporters.
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the photographer and widow of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, invited Joey to perform at the Arthur Ashe Learning Center gala, for a crowd including former President Bill Clinton. She later introduced Joey and his family to Gordon Uehling III, founder of the CourtSense Tennis Training Center; he has put them up at his estate in Alpine, N.J., where Novak Djokovic often stays during the U.S. Open. (Joey has access to a Steinway there, which he plays when he isn’t catching up on school online.)
Jazz at Lincoln Center sees not only a prodigy, but also an ambassador. “We are really interested in incorporating Joey into our educational outreach,” Mr. Olaine said, “to get him out into middle schools and play in front of kids his own age. He could inspire young people to listen to and enjoy jazz music.”
Still, the salient question with a musician as young and good as this is whether it’s premature to pursue a solo career. Normally, a prodigy learns at the side of the masters, Mr. Olaine said. “But Joey is such an extraordinary case that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before. He’s not a fully formed musician yet; we don’t know who he’s going to turn out to be. But right now, he’s ready to be a leader.”
That may be true. But there was room for growth in Joey’s recent trio set. Working with the drummer Sammy Miller and the bassist Russell Hall, who appear on his album, he delved into ballads, blues and standards — including “Giant Steps,” the John Coltrane étude whose harmonic intricacies have long been a proving ground for improvisers. (It’s the opening track on Joey’s album.)
The tune reached an impressive fever pitch, eliciting hollers, but during the buildup, Joey wasn’t always on the surest rhythmic footing. An original, “Ma Blues,” was cute but derivative. And while he fashioned a beautifully restive intro to “Monk’s Mood,” his solo didn’t address the song’s internal architecture, occasionally settling for a rote blues lick.
There’s a reason even the most dazzling jazz prodigies serve apprenticeships. This has been true for Gadi Lehavi, from Israel, and Beka Gochiashvili, from Georgia — pianists accustomed to adulation since childhood, both now 19, with heavy sideman credits. It was true for Julian Lage, a guitarist who received national attention as early as 8, yet prefaced his solo career with years of mentoring by the vibraphonist Gary Burton, a former prodigy himself.
For all his exceptional talent, Joey is a prime candidate for similar counsel. Asked at one point to recall treasured advice from a jazz elder, he was momentarily at a loss for words. “You know,” he said finally, his eyes lighting up, “one thing people always say to me: ‘Keep playing.’"
RedJar/Flickr
Last summer, the Michigan town of Grosse Pointe Park erected a farmer's market
in the middle of one of the few remaining streets that allowed cars to
pass between the tony suburb and the urban Detroit neighborhoods at its
border. It was the latest of many
attempts by Grosse Pointe Park residents to close off roads and block
traffic between what has become a predominantly white, affluent suburb,
and its poorer, urban neighbor.
There were protests about the border, and Grosse Pointe Park later said it would tear down
the farmer's market and re-open the road, but the incident speaks
volumes to the segregation that exists in Detroit, and the tensions that
can grow as a result. The barrier erected in Grosse Pointe (Alana Semuels)The
fact that these two areas are so close is unique—the border between
Grosse Pointe Park and the city of Detroit is the only place in any of
America's biggest citieswhere a very wealthy, predominantly-white area abuts a very poor, black one, according to research from a new working paper
from the University of Minnesota. But the existence of self-segregated
wealthy white areas close by low-income minority ones isn't unique,
according to the Minnesota researchers. They have sorted census tracts
in 15 of America's 20 biggest cities into "racially concentrated areas
of affluence" and "racially concentrated areas of poverty," and find
that many cities have more areas of segregated affluence than they do
poverty.
Racially concentrated areas of affluence, by the researchers'
definition, are census tracts where 90 percent or more of the population
is white and the median income is at least four times the federal
poverty level, adjusted for the cost of living in each city. Racially
concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are census tracts where more
than 50 percent of the population is non-white, and more than 40
percent live in poverty.
Detroit has 55 racially concentrated areas of affluence and 147
racially concentrated areas of poverty, according to the research, done
by Ed Goetz, Tony Damiano, and Jason Hicks. Detroit's racially
concentrated areas of affluence are just 1.1 percent black. Its racially
concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are 76 percent black.
Cities such as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Minneapolis have
more racially concentrated areas of affluence (RCAAs) than they do
racially concentrated areas of poverty (RCAPs). Boston has the most
RCAAs of the cities they examined, with 77. St. Louis has 44 RCAAs, and
36 RCAPs. Other cities with a large number of racially concentrated
areas of affluence include Philadelphia, with 70, Chicago, with 58, and
Minneapolis, with 56.
In Boston, 43.5 percent of the white population lives in census
tracts that are 90 percent or more white and have a median income of
four times the poverty level. In St. Louis, 54.4 percent of the white
population lives in such tracts.
Programs may still integrate schools between white and black areas, as I’ve written about before, and they may move black families to white neighborhoods, as I’ve also detailed.
But government programs don’t—and probably shouldn’t—move white
families from wealthy areas to somewhere else (although they do provide
incentives for home buyers or builders to locate in certain lower-income
neighborhoods, thus beginning a process of gentrification).
Public policy has “focused on the concentration of poverty and
residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and
high-poverty neighborhoods,” said Goetz, the director of the Center for
Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when
presenting his findings at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s
shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny—to the point where
we think segregation of whites is normal.” Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence and Areas of Poverty in Large Metro Areas
Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks/University of Minnesota
Goetz
and his team are still researching the effects of this self-segregation
of whites, but he thinks that a high number of RCAAs may be a negative
factor for cities.
“Some people argue that when whites and affluent people segregate
themselves, it can erode empathy, and it can inhibit the pursuit of
region-wide remedies,” he told me. “It can inhibit a sense of shared
destiny within a metropolitan area.”
This brings to mind a metro area such as Detroit, which emerged from bankruptcy
last year, and was characterized by a poor and segregated urban core
and wealthy white suburbs that did not contribute to the city’s revenue.
The executive of Oakland County, to Detroit’s north, which is one of
the whitest areas in the nation, has said publicly he doesn’t feel any incentive to help the city of Detroit.
Goetz and his team also researched the RCAAs’ and RCAPs’ distance to
downtown. Areas of affluence are located, on average, 21.1 miles from a
metro area’s downtown. In Detroit, racially concentrated areas of
affluence are, on average, 24.2 miles from the city’s downtown. In
Washington, D.C., racially concentrated areas of affluence are 25.1
miles from downtown; in Chicago, they’re 22.1 miles. Racially
concentrated areas of poverty, on the other hand, are on average 6.6
miles from downtown, and in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, and
Philadelphia, they’re much closer. RCAAs and RCAPs in the Detroit Metro Area RCAPs,
in blue, are concentrated in the city of Detroit, while RCAAs, in red,
are all in the suburbs (the Grosse Pointe border is on the right side of
the right map) (Goetz, Damiano and Hicks/UMN)There
is less self-segregation of metro areas in the West: San Francisco and
Houston have just five racially concentrated areas of affluence each,
Seattle has nine, Los Angeles, 11. Seattle has just six racially
concentrated areas of poverty and San Francisco has 12. These westerncities
have larger populations of affluent minorities, and are, in general,
more diverse. Only 1.1 percent of affluent households live in RCAAs in
San Francisco and only 3.1 percent do in Seattle, but in St. Louis, by
contrast, 23.1 percent of affluent households live in a racially
concentrated area of affluence. In cities in the North and East, there are also still lingering effects of the housing policies that, for decades, kept non-white families from buying in certain neighborhoods.
The racial makeup of concentrated areas of poverty differs between
regions, too: they're predominantly black in Atlanta, Baltimore,
Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington, predominantly
Latino in Houston and Los Angeles, and mixed in Boston, Minneapolis,
and San Francisco.
Goetz and his fellow researchers are planning on looking into why
these areas form in certain cities and certain places, and whether
people pay a housing premium to live in segregated areas of affluence,
as opposed to more racially diverse areas of affluence. Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence in the Boston Metro Area RCAAs in the Boston area are located in both the city and the suburbs (Goetz, Damiano and Hicks/UMN)
Some
of their further research has already generated interesting results.
They looked into how federal housing dollars are spent in areas of
poverty and areas of affluence in the Twin Cities, and found something
surprising: The government spends just as many housing dollars in areas
of poverty as it does in areas of affluence.
In racially concentrated areas of affluence, federal dollars come in
the form of the mortgage-interest deduction. In areas of poverty, they
come through vouchers and subsidized housing units. In the Twin Cities,
the total federal investment in the form of housing dollars in RCAAs was
three times larger than the investment in RCAPs. On a per capita basis,
it was about equal.
Federal dollars are now being spent to “subsidize racially concentrated areas of affluence,” Goetz said.
Watch The American Home Get Supersized Over 40 Years
Mark Wilson April 15, 2015 | 2:00 PM
We had to store all those beanie babies somewhere.
American homes have gotten bigger. From 1974 to 2013, the
average American single family home ballooned from 1,560 square feet to
2,384 square feet.
A CNN Money animation from data viz specialist Bård Edlund
visualizes that extraordinary growth by taking a two-story house and
stretching it sideways. What may at first glance seem like just a cute animation is actually a highly accurate portrait of the changing American home. The 1970s marked the tail end of the Second Great Migration, a 30-year period during which 5 African Americans moved from rural areas to cities. White Flight
ensued, with many middle-class families moving from cities into
suburban homes, and the money went with them. Urban areas decayed while
suburbs blossomed. This visualization begins in the '70s because that's
as far back as this Census data set goes, but it's a good starting point
to show the growing aspirations of the American homeowner.(my emphasis)
The square footage in Edlund's home is accurate at each step of the
animation. (As for the vinyl-sided, two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath
house that Edlund chose to stretch, that format was actually the most
commonly constructed home over the entire period—save for 1975 when a
half bath was added, removed immediately in 1976, and 2013 when that
half bath trick was tried again.)
But that doesn’t mean homes grew consistently over 40 years. "Perhaps
naively, I expected the median home had just gotten larger and larger
and larger," Edlund tells Co.Design. "As the animation shows, the growth
is a lot less straightforward, with several periods of contraction."
Indeed, in the recessions of the 1980s and the late aughts, you see
blips as homes get smaller.
The data set Edlund used for the animation
doesn't capture everything. He points to now-standard luxuries like
supersized kitchens with premium appliances and countertops, and
bathrooms with double sinks, as trends lost in the spreadsheets of data.
I’d add that you don’t see all the furniture filling those extra square
feet, or the home theaters, either.
It’s a good example of how source data sets, no matter how deep or
well researched, don’t often tell an entire story. And in this case, not
only did we distend the average American home to the size of a small
castle; we began decorating it like one, too. See the animation here.
The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year is called “Welcome to Braggsville.”
The 44-year-old author, T. Geronimo Johnson, plays cultural criticism
like it’s acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of
the American body politic. Arriving smack dab in the middle of Black
History Month — our shortest month, naturally — “Braggsville” lashes
self-satisfied liberals in the academy and self-deluded Confederates in
the attic. As we feign surprise at police brutality and our Twitter
outrage flits from Ferguson to Staten Island to Cleveland, this is just
the discomfiting book we need.
The story opens with Johnson’s
scat-singing introduction to a polite white teen from Georgia named
D’aron Little May Davenport. His whole life, D’aron has been mocked and
bullied for his academic skill — a sure sign of wimpiness and
questionable sexual orientation in a community that “produced more
Special Forces soldiers per capita than any other town in America.”
Desperate to get out of Braggsville, D’aron composes a series of college
application essays — reproduced here in all their pimply teenage
earnestness — that would excite any admissions officer’s savior complex.
The
class of academic satires has been overenrolled for a while now, but
make room for this brilliant send-up of the postmodern, hypersensitive,
non-essentializing, gender-neutral world of the University of California
at Berkeley. (Johnson must have gorged on its absurdities when he
earned a master’s degree there.) In this strange place, “where the
elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity,” D’aron arrives like some
Southern-fried Candide, dazzled by the foreign nomenclature, the
“designer-sneaker Zapatistas” and the rainbow of races.
Of
course, satirizing this politically correct world is tantamount to
euthanizing fish in a cruelty-free barrel, but Johnson is better at
mocking academia than anybody since David Lodge, and his narration has
such athleticism that you feel energized just running alongside him — or
even several strides behind. His sentences are long and jaggy, sparked
with stray cultural references. He dips unpredictably into other
characters’ voices, volleying their jokes and pet phrases, nesting
ironies within ironies. He feints between first and second person, he
moonwalks into history, he spins from comedy to tragedy to editorial in a
single paragraph. In short, Johnson does things you don’t think are
advisable, which makes his success all the more awesome.
But
“Welcome to Braggsville” isn’t all linguistic acrobatics at the expense
of its characters. Johnson writes about D’aron with real heart. He
cradles this young man’s innocence and sympathizes with his desperation
to fit in — which D’aron finally does during the second semester, when
he meets a group of oddballs who call themselves “the 4 Little Indians”
(Ironical reclamation of racist tropes is so empowering!) There’s
Louis, a Malaysian American from the Bay Area, who wants to be “the
next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian”; Charlie, an African American
from Chicago who looks like he’s on the football team; and Candice, who
claims she’s part Native American and can out-outrage even the most
self-righteous posers. (Don’t discount Johnson’s Apache middle name. To
D’aron, so long denied any interesting friends, these three are a gift.
He “desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the
huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.”
”Welcome to Braggsville”
By T. Geronimo Johnson.
(William Morrow)
The
whole novel turns on a stray comment in a class called “American
History, X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives”: D’aron mentions that
his home town stages a Civil War reenactment every year during its Pride
Week Patriot Days Festival.
The class is shocked. “They’d heard
tell of Civil War reenactments,” Johnson writes, “but they were still
occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another
country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still
sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing? Like an old Looney Tunes
skit, Tex Avery tag ensued. Charlie gawked at Louis, who gawped at
Candice, who generously suggested it as a capstone project to the
professor, who Googled the event and announced that it coincided with
spring break. Serendipity has spoken.”
“In the wink of a cat’s
eye,” a clever, incredibly offensive, potentially disastrous plan is
born: D’aron and his three friends will travel back to his hometown and
stage a “performative intervention”: a mock lynching. “You can force
States’ Rights to take a look in the mirror,” the professor crows, “and
they will not like what they see.”
From that bizarre premise
hangs a story that will shock and disturb you. The trip to Braggsville —
population 712, once a contender for the capital of Georgia — offers
Johnson a chance to descend into the fetid pool of Southern pride that
still romanticizes the antebellum era. D’aron’s parents and neighbors
are perfectly pleasant people who just happen to have black lawn jockeys
in their yards and racist bumper stickers on their trucks. It’s all in
fun — Don’t you get it? How could these nice people be racists? —
Braggsville is, after all, “The City That Love Built.” Everybody knows
that the black people who live way off on the other side of town in the
Gully are happy there. And that enormous Confederate flag wrapped around
the watchtower? Just a symbol of civic pride. Yes, the town’s Civil War
“reenactments were reinstated back in the 1950s in response to mandated
integration,” but that doesn’t mean those nostalgic battle skits have
anything to do with slavery. The war was about states’ rights, don’t you
know?
Johnson is a master at stripping away our persistent myths
and exposing the subterfuge and displacement necessary to keep
pretending that a culture built on kidnapping, rape and torture was the
apotheosis of gentility and honor. But “Welcome to Braggsville” is not
just a broadside at the South. It’s equally irritated with liberalism’s
self-righteousness. The 4 Little Indians imagine that their moral
superiority and clever theatricality will somehow shame and cleanse the
townspeople who witness the faux lynching.
When that
ill-conceived plan goes horribly wrong, the narrative begins to bend and
fracture — a virtual reflection of America’s crafty efforts to disguise
and obfuscate its history of racial violence. Flecked with surrealism,
the novel loops back on the “performative intervention” and its
aftermath from different perspectives, exploring the malleability of
meaning and the deadly effects of a culture that ignores or
misunderstands its own prejudices. (Amid the op-ed frenzy that explodes
after the mock lynching goes viral, Berkeley responds with a colloquium
called “The Body Linguistic: Syntax, Sexicons, and Civil Rights.”)
At
times in this comic novel, I could hear strange echoes of another one
about a well-meaning white kid striking out against the racist system of
his day: Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
It, too, concludes with a humiliating “performative intervention”: a
mock slave escape. But that comparison is clouded with complications as
muddy as the Mississippi. A more contemporary soulmate may be Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson, who works in the same disorientingly witty way to explore the persistence of anti-Semitism. You think you know where both men stand, but the ground around them is slick with irony and blood.
T. Geronimo Johnson
(photo by Elizabeth R. Cowan)
In light of new research from the Equal Justice Initiative
about the prevalence of lynchings and the country’s demonic success at
rendering them historically invisible, this extraordinary novel could
not be more relevant. With young D’aron, Johnson forces us to consider
our determined ignorance and naivete. Part of growing up in America, he
knows, is learning how to negotiate that national amnesia.
Welcome to Braggsville. It’s about time.
Ron Charles is the editor of Ron Charles is the editor of
The Washington Post's Book World.
You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
