Feed aggregator

2012 will probably see Nicholas Sarkozy re-elected as French president, despite the poll surge of his far-right rival Marine Le Pen and the socialist candidate François Hollande. The Euro crisis, a recession, and high unemployment, makes Sarkozy very unpopular to voters now, but a combination of factors (he’ll make rightwing noises on immigration and Muslims to woo rightwing voters away from Le Pen and the National Front; and Hollande’s bad campaigning) will hand Sarkozy the presidency. My friends and the musicians we listen to, mostly the children of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, prefer Hollande and the Socialists, but know he won’t win. We can’t forgive Sarkozy for his behavior as Minister of the Interior in 2005 when he referred to rioting residents of the Parisian banlieues as “scum.” Marine Le Pen has referred to Muslims praying on sidewalks as an “occupying army” and the banlieues resembling “tribal areas like in Pakistan.” Most of the rappers I’ve featured already in this series make digs at Sarkozy and Le Pen (like L’Algerino for example). However, the most direct example of this kind of rap against Sarkozy, for me at least, is that by female rapper Diam’s.

It comes at the 3:00 minute mark when Diam’s (mother French, father is Cypriot converted to Islam and married an Algerian), referring to Le Pen and Sarkozy, stops her rapping and addresses her audience: “I have a note for the President, as usual I have something to tell to the president: The President does not like us, I read it in his wishes, by the way he doesn’t like himself either, I can see it in his eyes. I have the love in me, and very little hate which I reserve for few journalists of shit. And about Le Pen (Marine) I’ll try to be polite. Ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t like us, go look elsewhere, because we’ll stay and we’ll take what we have of this country …”

A close second is Joey Starr’s track “Sarkozy.” This song was supposed to be on his new album but he was forbidden to include it because the CSA [Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel; the French media regulating body] decided it was “too insulting against Sarkozy.” There’s a line in here reminding Sarkozy “you’re nothing but an immigrant” (referring to his Hungarian father) — an immigrant like us.

For the weekend we have two awesome mixtapes ready for download. First up is a collaboration between South African MC Tumi (from one of my favourite bands ever, Tumi and the Volume) and Zubz. The mixtape, entitled “Where were you,” is a nostalgic tribute to Kwaito, the genre that captured the jubilation of South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 90′s. Basically, Tumi and Zubz took some of the biggest kwaito hits and laid some verses over them. For those not familiar with the genre, it’s a great recap of what you missed. Download the mixtape here.

Second up is DJ Obah’s brilliant, high energy “Hey Mama” mixtape, part of the Africa in Your Earbuds mixtape series by Okay Africa. It’s mostly a collection of American tracks or artists that have been inspired by the continent, including some African classics. The highlight for me has to be Mulatu Astatke’s Yegelle Tezeta mixed with the hip hop track that went on to sample it, ‘As We Enter’ by Nas and Damian Marley. Download link here.

I was going to post the link to Das Racist’s latest offering too, the funny, irreverent and poignant ‘Nehru Jackets’ by Heems AKA Himanshi Suri, unofficial leader of  the NYC rap group, but the FBI has just shut down the file sharing site Megaupload (which Heems used to post his free mixtape). Apparently Megaupload has been accused of pursuing a business model based on copyright infringement. This comes after a week of high profile protests against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Interesting times indeed.

“Haywire,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring the mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, delights in its own action.

A huge drilling rig arrived Thursday in the warm Gulf waters north of Havana, where it will sink an exploratory well deep into the seabed, launching Cuba’s dreams of striking it rich with offshore oil, the Associated Press reports.

The Scarabeo-9 platform was visible from Havana’s sea wall far off on the hazy horizon as it chugged westward toward its final drill site about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, and 60 miles (90 kilometers) south of Key West.

Spanish oil company Repsol RPF, which is leasing the rig for about a half-million dollars a day, said it expects to begin drilling within days to find out whether the reserves are as rich as predicted.

“The geologists have done their work. If they’ve done it well, then we’ll have a good chance of success,” Repsol spokesman Kristian Rix said by phone from Madrid. “It’s been a long process, but now we’re at the point where we discover whether our geologists have got it right. It’s a happy day.”

It’s been a long, strange journey for the Scarabeo-9, Repsol and Cuba, a process shadowed at every step by warnings of a possible environmental debacle and decades of bad blood between Cuba and the United States.

The U.S. trade embargo essentially bars U.S. companies from doing oil business with Cuba and threatens sanctions against foreign companies if they don’t follow its restrictions, making it far more complicated to line up equipment and resources for the project.

To avoid sanctions, Repsol chose the Scarabeo-9, a 380-foot-long (115-meter), self-propelled, semisubmersible behemoth built in China and Singapore and capable of housing 200 workers. The rig qualifies for the Cuba project because it was built with less than 10 percent U.S.-made parts, no small feat considering America’s dominance in the industry.

While comparable platforms sat idle in the Gulf of Mexico, the Scarabeo-9 spent months navigating through three oceans and around the Cape of Good Hope to arrive in the Caribbean at tremendous expense.

Even after the rig is in place, the embargo continues to affect just about every aspect.

The Scarabeo-9′s blowout preventer, a key piece of machinery that failed in the 2010 Macondo-Deepwater Horizon disaster, is state of the art. But its U.S. manufacturer is not licensed to work with Cuba so replacement parts must come through secondary sources.

It’s also more complicated to do things like the maintenance necessary to keep things running smoothly and decrease the chances of something going wrong.

If it does, Cuba would be hard-pressed to respond to a major spill on its own, and getting help isn’t as simple as making a phone call to Washington. The embargo would require licenses to be issued for all manner of equipment and services for an emergency response.

Few U.S. companies so far have gotten permission to work with the Cubans in the event of a spill — representing just 5 percent of all the resources thrown at the Macondo blowout, according to an estimate by Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

Two U.S. companies have received licenses to export capping stacks, crucial pieces of equipment for stopping gushing wells, but related services like personnel and transportation have not been green-lighted, Hunt said.

“So what you have is a great big intelligent piece of iron without a crew,” he said. “You can’t just drop it on the hole and hope (the spill) will stop. It’s not a cork.”

Even Tyvek suits worn by cleanup crews cannot currently be exported to Cuba because potentially they could be used for the construction of bacteriological or chemical weapons, Hunt added.

Meanwhile cooperation between the two governments, which often struggle to see eye-to-eye on things as basic as delivering each other’s mail, has been only bare-bones.

“With any other country — Mexico, Canada or Russia — we would already have in place agreements between the coast guards of the two countries,” said Dan Whittle, Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “There would be contingency plans written and publicly available. There already would have been drills, a comprehensive action plan for responding to a spill.”

“We don’t have that yet.”

There has been some movement.

U.S. inspectors examined the rig last week in Trinidad and gave it a clean bill of health, though notably said that did not constitute any certification. And American representatives at a regional oil meeting last month in the Bahamas were left impressed by their Cuban counterparts’ openness and willingness to share information.

But the countries’ proximity has increased fears of a disastrous spill with the potential to foul not only Cuba’s reefs and gleaming, white-sand beaches, but also, swept up by the Gulf Stream, the coast of Florida and the Atlantic Seaboard up to North Carolina.

Curiously, those fears have been cited by people on both sides of the embargo issue: Some say the prospect of environmental disaster shows the U.S. needs to lift the embargo and work with the Cubans in the interest of safety; others say the fact that the trade ban failed to prevent Cuba from drilling shows it needs to be made even tougher.

Some of the harshest criticism has come from Cuban-American members of Congress such as House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who recently accused the Obama administration of dropping the ball on Cuban drilling.

“Oil exploration 90 miles off the Florida coast by this corrupt, unaccountable dictatorship could result in horrific environmental and economic damage to our Gulf Coast communities, in addition to enriching the Castro tyranny,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

The exact size of Cuba’s offshore reserves, estimated at 5 billion to 9 billion barrels, is still unknown. And production would not come online for years, so any windfall is still on the horizon. But island officials are hopeful of a big strike that could inject much-needed cash into their struggling economy, and they’re not asking anyone for permission.

“Cuba is going through its own change regardless of American foreign policy,” said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate who met with Cuban officials in Havana this week on oil and other matters.

“This discovery, or potential discovery, of significant amounts of oil could dramatically change the economy of Cuba, and change the relationship with the United States in small ways and large,” Durbin said while visiting Haiti on Thursday.

For the original report go to http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jDc8hPz02rwSetJe3GF6wLaBchgg?docId=17641c8970354633802a689144daf494

The writer, comedian and Golden Globe host has made a great career of irreverence. But his best trick is being just reverent enough to keep getting invited to the party.

Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs attracted a huge audience when shown in the wake of last summer’s riots. His new film, The Nine Muses, uses Homer to explore mass migration to Britain. Sukdev Sandhu reviews the film in this article for London’s Guardian.

John Akomfrah, widely recognised as one of Britain’s most expansive and intellectually rewarding film-makers, has never been afraid of a battle. Back in the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens, he tried to screen Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane at the film club of the Southwark further education college, where he was studying. “There were rows. Black kids were throwing chairs everywhere. They were saying ‘you can’t show this’. So we stopped the film and had a discussion: what do you mean, ‘We can’t show this film’? It was clear there were forms of propriety for black spectatorship. Rather than run back into the field, I thought: let’s just accelerate it. Let’s push these boundaries a little bit more.”

In 1982 he began to do just that, co-founding the Black Audio Film Collective with a group of friends he’d grown up with in London or met at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Over the next 16 years, moving as seamlessly between the form of cine-essay and what they called slide-tape texts as they did between the worlds of the gallery and the newly created Channel 4, they sought to create a new language for migrant cinema. They crafted diasporic films that eschewed social realism and agitprop, took aesthetics as seriously as they did subject matter, and were informed by the canon of non-western moviemakers (Ritwik Ghatak from Bengal, Senegalese Ousmane Sembène, Santiago Álvarez from Cuba), as much as they were by the giants of the Atlantic avant garde.

Not everyone thought this was possible. Akomfrah recalls that when he first approached the Arts Council for money for an avant-garde group, “they told us straight: you can’t be avant garde because blacks can’t be avant-garde film-makers”. Others, such as Salman Rushdie, who wrote a much-debated essay about Handsworth Songs (1986) for the Guardian, felt the collective’s work was pretentious and more preoccupied with theories of representation than with representing the second-generation migrants whose rioting had occasioned the film. In the US, according to the New York-based artist and writer Coco Fusco, the collective’s work was almost inexplicable. “There was shock, incredulity, negativity. They encountered chauvinism from African Americans who wanted to know: who were these blacks with funny accents? They were thought to be too intelligent for ‘the people’.”

Akomfrah finds the charge of being an apolitical dilettante absurd. He was born in Ghana in 1957, and both his parents were involved with anti-colonial activism. “My dad was a member of the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah‘s party. My mum had met Malcolm X in Accra in 1965. We left Ghana because my mum’s life was in danger after the coup of 1966, and my father died in part because of the struggle that led up to the coup. In 1976 my friends and I seriously considered going to enlist in the MPLA to fight in Angola. We wanted to be of use. I’m glad we didn’t. The generation before us spoke of going home; we realised what fighting we were going to do in both a literal and a metaphorical sense had to take place here.”

For Akomfrah, that fighting initially took the form of politics: “As a kid I went to an Althusserian study group; there were lots of young black kids there trying to get their heads around Althusser!” As a student activist he was a “serial occupier” and sit-in organiser, and consequently got expelled from many FE colleges. But the fight, for him, was also carried on in the realm of the imagination: he regularly sneaked in to see Tarkovsky and Fassbinder films at the Paris Pullman Cinema on the Fulham Palace Road. “I could see all these people were as fascinated with me as they were with the screen. They couldn’t work out why this kid was so transfixed.”

This commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films. Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) draws on the photographer James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968) to fashion a probing, internationalist vision of the black radical leader that is far removed from the conventional hero projected in Spike Lee’s biopic the previous year; The Last Angel of History (1995) advanced the concept of the “data thief” as part of its argument about science-fiction elements in the music of Sun Ra, George Clinton and Lee Scratch Perry.

Akomfrah’s new film, The Nine Muses, is a multilayered, gorgeously shot and affecting work that interweaves archival footage of black and Asian people travelling to and working in Britain with moody, elliptical shots of an anonymous black figure alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Split into nine chapters, each of which is dedicated to one of the Greek muses, and sprinkled with quotations ranging from the Odyssey to The Waste Land, it suggests that stories normally seen through the lens of postcolonialism could just as easily be seen in existential or mythic terms. In doing so, it invites viewers to reflect on the labels by which history – especially diasporic history – is framed and categorised.

“It’s important to read images in the archive for their ambiguity and open-endedness,” Akomfrah argues. “Migrants were often filmed in relation to debates about crime or social problems, so that’s how they get fixed in official memory. But that Caribbean woman standing in a 60s factory isn’t thinking about how she’s a migrant or a burden on the British state; she’s as likely to be thinking about what she’s going to eat that evening or about her lover.”

One of the most striking features of The Nine Muses is its sound design by Akomfrah’s fellow Black Audio founder, Trevor Mathison, which meshes Arvo Pärt liturgical pieces with spirituals and Indian courtly music. The desire to create new kinds of Afro-Asian ambience stems partly from Akomfrah’s youthful enthusiasm for post-punk bands such as Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire, which explored the subversive potential of noise. “The avant garde saw our emphasis on the audio as a thought crime, a heresy. It was all about the image for them. They frowned on the sonic, treating it as an impure intrusion into a hallowed field. It was a weird hangover from high modernism, especially as if you watch a Dziga Vertov film you’ll see the early avant garde was as interested in sound as in images.”

The work of Black Audio and Akomfrah has been increasingly celebrated by the art world recently. Kodwo Eshun, one half of the Turner prize-nominated Otolith Group whose experimental films owe a debt to Black Audio, says: “From the moment I first saw Handsworth Songs it became impossible for me to settle for anything less.” Moreover, a new generation of film-makers and students, frustrated by the format-driven orthodoxies of mainstream TV and weaned on the serendipities of YouTube, is also discovering the work.

In the wake of last summer’s riots, a screening of Handsworth Songs at Tate Modern attracted a huge audience, which then stayed for a three-hour conversation. “Especially after having spent much of the last 20 years being told by apparatchiks that there’s no life in experimental film, it was shocking,” Akomfrah says. “These were inquisitive, intellectual magpies confronted by the same questions as we were in the 1980s: how much can we call political, given that the powers that be are saying it’s all criminal or without any basis in politics? They believed, like I do, that the moving image has a role to play in galvanising these debates.”

• The Nine Muses was released on Friday 20 January.

For the original report go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/20/john-akomfrah-migration-memory?newsfeed=true

The horror director Ti West, whose latest film is “The Innkeepers,” likes to build suspense by subverting audience expectations.

Well, it IS the weekend and we just began the new semester, so here’s a bit of silly news. The Queen is about to be ousted as Jamaica’s Head of State and we have Prince Harry coming on a Caribbean tour to celebrate grandma’s 60 years as Queen. This weekend, however, the Duchess of Cambridge—yes, Kate of the humongous wedding herself—is reported to have flown to Mustique via St Lucia. Oh, joy! There are no photos so the pictures above are old—and for all we know she is shopping for groceries at her supermarket in Wales as I write this. But here is People magazine’s report:

Rainy and 48 degrees in London on Friday. No matter: The Duchess of Cambridge – with parents Michael and Carole, and sister Pippa – is off on a sunny vacation, PEOPLE confirmed in this report by Simon Perry.
Passengers on a British Airways flight from London’s Gatwick Airport to St. Lucia in the Caribbean were surprised to see the family in the first class section on Wednesday, a photographer blogged. Their presumed final destination: one of their regular holiday haunts, the private isle of Mustique.
It is believed that Prince William is not with them, as the search and rescue helicopter pilot is spending this week at his RAF base in Anglesey, Wales, after hunting last weekend on an estate in Spain with brother Prince Harry.

Mustique, where Kate and William have been frequent visitors, is a well-known, pricey haunt for such celebrities as Mick Jagger and Queen Elizabeth’s late sister, Princess Margaret. It was even inspected as a possible honeymoon destination for William and Kate.
The trip to the sun comes just days after Kate’s 30th birthday on Jan. 9 and before Carole’s 57th at the end of the month.
The Palace had no comment on Kate’s vacation.

Given that we are giving Kate’s vacation its own post, I don’t want other royal families to feel neglected by Repeating Islands (we may be refused press credentials for the next wedding) so we should also note that Prince Albert of Monaco and his new wife Charlene spend some time in Antigua a couple of weeks back. Here’s a photo of their romantic holiday (yuck!):

And, more formally, the Dutch Queen Beatrix, her heir Wilhem-Alexander, and his Argentine-born crown princess, Máxima, did a formal tour of everything connected to the Netherlands in the Caribbean region. Here’s a photo of the irrepressible Máx in Aruba so she does not feel slighted by our attention to Kate, as she, too, will be queen one day.

For the original People report go to http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20395222_20563244,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines

It might just be too little, too late for ABC, Alexandra Gratereaux reports in Fox News Latino. 

For the third week in a row members of the Puerto Rican community, led by the organization “Boricuas for a Positive Image,” have protested outside of ABC’s studios in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood.

ABC cancelled its new cross-dressing comedy “Work It” after just two episodes. According to reports from zap2it.com ABC has not acknowledged the reason for the cancellation.  The Puerto Rican campaign grew out of anger after one of the characters of the show said during the pilot episode: “I’m Puerto Rican. I would be great at selling drugs.”

The remark ignited a firestorm. Puerto Ricans to ABC: We are Not Drug Dealers!

Thursday was no exception as young and old protestors from the Latino and Black communities chanted in the frigid evening for ABC to apologize.

Julio Pabón, co-founder of “Boricuas for a Positive Image” along with Lucky Rivera, said that despite ABC canceling the show, they deserve a public apology. “Canceling the show does not cancel the problems,” Pabón told FOX News Latino during the protest Thursday evening. We are trying to prove them wrong. Just because [we are of this] race does not mean we do bad things.

- Kimberly Villanueva, 14 Yr-Old Protestor

“Racist jokes like these [cannot] continue to happen,” he added.  “We have to have an apology and a meeting to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The Puerto Rican and Latino community in New York City – we are 5 million strong. 1 trillion dollars in purchasing power deserves more respect.”

Rivera added that it’s a shame drugs are corrupting the community.

“The drugs in our community [and] in Puerto Rico that is the problem,” Rivera said. “Drugs are destroying our kids, our people and our island.”

New York City councilman Charles Barron thinks ABC should give the Puerto Rican and Latino community in NYC, “a program produced by the community, for the community.” “We are the children of Fidel Castro,” Barron said fired up in front of the crowd. “We are the children of Malcom X, we are the children of Che Guevarra and our weapon is our culture. We demand that ABC respect the Black community, respect the Latino community.”

The former black panther, who was involved  in having ABC take “Like It Is” off the air in 2001— a public affairs show about issues affecting the Black community— thinks the  protests should escalate if ABC keeps ignoring them.

“When I met with them for “Like It Is” they said the Black and Latino communities are a large part of their audience,” Barron said. “If you’re going to make dollars off of us then you better respect us.”

“We should keep the pressure on,” he added. “They should keep a Latino program on there that is representative of the community, produced by the community, for the community.”

Other bystanders, such as filmmaker and actor Stuart Luth, says he found the protests interesting and necessary.

Luth is white but married to a light skinned Puerto Rican, screen writer and actress Viviana Rodríguez a.k.a. Viviana Leo her stage name.

Luth is currently in the process of producing a film titled “White Alligator”  which focuses on racism in the entertainment industry and his wife’s experience trying to break down those barriers.

He says it is important to highlight these issues and plans to continue coming to the protests each week.

“This is the first protest of this sort that I’ve seen as we’ve been trying to make this film,” Luth said. “In the Latino community [there is] a misrepresentation of race.”

“People [are] trying to create labels and put them in boxes.”

Luth, 32, grew up in New Jersey and now lives in the Upper West Side. The filmmaker recalled his wife feeling some of the same emotions the protestors described when seeing “Work It.”

“My wife was always too white to be Hispanic and too Hispanic to be white,” he said. “So much of our perceptions are created by the entertainment industry. Their stereotypes are holding us back.”

Luth adds that he did not expect to see so many young people, in particular young Latino men protesting.

“As an outsider that didn’t know what was going on there was a lot of strong masculine energy there,” said Luth. “They were given a chance to express a part of them that was dormant for a while. A chance to join the conversation and say this is not the way we are.”

Some of the younger protestors were sisters and Bronx natives, Ashley and Kimberly Villanueva, who vow to continue attending the protests and spreading the word in their high school and on social media.

“We are trying to prove them wrong,” said Kimberly Villanueva. “Just because [we are of this] race does not mean we do bad things.”

Kimberly Villanueva, 14, and her sister Ashely, 16, attend Bronx Academy of Letters High School. They said they were compelled to join the protest after learning about the show “Work It” from their father, who is a part of “Boricuas for a Positive Image.”

“My dad works in a company where there are carpenters, construction workers, people that are not selling drugs and making good money,” said Ashely Villanueva. “I am going to bring this up to my teacher, [since] I’m taking a discrimination class.”

Closing up the protest by singing the Puerto Rican national anthem was Connecticut resident Héctor López.

López, 69, says that even though he lives far away, it’s very important for him to support this cause.

“This is a movement for all Latinos,” said López. “We need to claim our rights.”

For the original report go to http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/entertainment/2012/01/20/abc-protest-continues-puerto-ricans-demand-apology-want-new-programming/

Ambassador Dudley Thompson, a historic figure in Jamaica and the Pan-African global movement, died Friday, a day after his 95th birthday, Jacqueline Charles of The Miami Herald reports.

He was a historical figure in the politics of Jamaica and in the larger global struggle to unite people of African descent. Hard to miss with his cheerful disposition, intellect and passionate conversations, Ambassador Dudley Thompson drew crowds no matter where he went.

A former Jamaican cabinet minister who served as a minister of national security, justice and foreign affairs, Thompson died Friday morning in New York, the day after he turned 95. He was scheduled to celebrate the next week in New Jersey. He lived in Weston.

“We will miss his intellect, his stature,” said Jamaica’s Miami Consul General Sandra A. Grant Griffiths, whose office confirmed the death. “He was all over the place.”

Griffiths last saw Thompson in December when he attended a holiday gathering at her residence. There, like elsewhere, he drew crowds to his side as he discussed Jamaica, and Africa, the continent where he served as an envoy in several countries including Nigeria, Namibia and Ghana, and practiced law as a young man. It was while defending the late Jomo Kenyatta during his Mau Mau rebellion trial in Kenya that Thompson became well-known across Africa.

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller described Thompson as “a man of firm convictions, articulate, sharp on his feet and witty. Dudley Thompson loved his country with a passion and served it with honor and distinction.”

Thompson was up with the times. He blogged and had his own website. www.DudleyThompson.4t.com. His dream was to see a united Africa and was president of the World African Diaspora Union..

According to his website, he was born in Panama and raised in Jamaica. He served in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II, and he was a Rhodes scholar. In the early 1950s, he practiced law in Tanzania and Kenya, and became involved in the nationalists struggles in both countries.

In October, Thompson made history when the African Union made him the first person to become a citizen of the continent and gave him a passport. Dozens of African presidents attended the ceremony, said Djibril Diallo, senior advisor to the executive director of the UNAIDS and advisor to the President of Senegal on Diaspora Affairs.

Diallo said Thompson left him a voice mail on his cell phone just days ago telling him to call because he had some suggestions on their ongoing collaboration to promote Africa.

“I was working on getting him an honorary ambassadorship for the entire African continent,” said Diallo, whose relationship with Thompson dates back more than 20 years. “He’s amazing as a Pan-Africanist, and has worked to the last hour just preaching Africa and the diaspora.’’

For the original report go to http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/20/2599977/pan-african-and-jamaican-statesman.html

From the Chicago Reader (June 12, 1992). — J.R. HOUSESITTER ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Frank Oz Written by Mark Stein and Brian Grazer With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang. I’ve seen previews of two summer comedies so far — Sister Act and [...]

An influential coterie knows that dressing for the red carpet is not just about looking fetching for fans; it can also win roles and lucrative contracts.

Git on up in here! Dennis Cozzalio is our host for the second annual Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule Movie Tree House -- and you're invited, too. Join returning Tree Housers Dennis, Jason Bellamy, Sheila O'Malley and me, and welcome Simon Abrams and Steven Boone to the lofty branches, where we have been discussing such life-and-death matters as...

The art and science of year-end list-making (from Dennis):

As of January 2012, it's a chore for me to recall anything but fragments of images from The Tree of Life beyond that wonderful sequence in which the oldest boy's growing up amongst his two younger siblings is compressed into a beautiful visual essay about the way a child might see the surrounding world. It seems to me it is with this gaze that Malick most clearly relates. Unfortunately, a child's focus is also all over the map, and that too is a feeling I get from "The Tree of Life." So am I crazy in having to admit that I have higher regard for "Your Highness" or "Captain America: The First Avenger" or "Troll Hunter" or "Contagion" than I do for "The Tree of Life"? You tell me.

In compiling my list for the year I also had the strange experience of having my expectations for how that list might look at the end of the year scrambled and significantly altered by three very different movie experiences, two of which I just happened to have on the same night less than two weeks ago....

The acting! (from Sheila):

Coriolanus seems like a fantasy modern politician. But the true moral of this political fable, newly adapted by Ralph Fiennes, isn’t one we’re eager to embrace.

Cate Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, will end their tenure with the Australian theater company for which she starred in an acclaimed production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."

YardEdge announces that on Saturday January 21, 2102, Griot Music presents an art exhibition, a recital featuring the poetry of Cherry Natural, Randy McLaren, Najuequa Barnes, Ganja, Samuel Gordon, and Simone C. Simpson. There will also be a performance by the 2010 Global Battle of the Bands winner Dubtonic Kru and 2011 Global Battle of the Bands Jamaica winner Di Blueprint. Headliners Tanya Stephens and Tessanne Chin will follow with a live show. Then the after party will continue with selectors ZJ Electra and DJ Smoke (Rennaissance).

These events will take place at the Courtleigh Auditorium in New Kingston, Jamaica. Doors open at 7:00pm.

Photos: Tanya Stephens (above) and Tessanne Chin (below)

For more information, see http://www.yardedge.net/happening-on-the-edge-2012/eclectic-the-ultimate-concert-and-after-party-january-21

"There's a broodingly meditative tone to Chad Freidrichs's Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a film whose deceptively simple, by-the-books documentary template serves dual purposes," begins Ernest Hardy in the Voice. "Freidrichs's main goal, which is fully realized, is the painstaking illustration of how racism, classism, and government serving the interests of big business all shaped the now-myth-like horrors of St Louis's notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project. The massive complex, which at one time housed roughly 12,000 people in 33 buildings, was launched with much fanfare in the mid 1950s and touted as a solution to the city's many crime-ridden slums. It was demolished with even more fanfare in 1972 after being allowed to slide from a state-of-the-art planned community to a hellhole of violence and despair."

"Blisteringly high-res interviews with the now-grown children of Pruitt-Igoe, as well as urban planning students who studied the complexes firsthand, offer testimonial evidence to the germs of neighborhood pride that lived on there though surrounded by fear, ignorance, and insurmountable penury," writes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant. "Most haunting, however, is the relentless interweaving of archival footage with these talking heads — newsreels, photographs, and home movies, some of each repeated more than once in disparate contexts, which form a multimedia-driven collage of interlocking symbols not just about Pruitt-Igoe-the-historical-event, but Pruitt-Igoe-the-idea."

Rachel Saltz in the New York Times: "The film puts Pruitt-Igoe's history in the broader context of American cities after World War II, as they lost jobs and population — especially white residents — with the growth of the suburbs. And it shows how projects like Pruitt-Igoe were built, then left to struggle in declining cities with shrinking tax bases."

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History is "a heartbreaking alarm call for a society that desperately needs to learn from its worst mistakes," writes Eric Hynes in Time Out New York.

At the IFC Center through Thursday.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @thedailyMUBI on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

Apollo Theater, Harlem, 19.01.2012

 

2 Kommentare (ansehen)

As part of the activities honoring Cuban Theatre Day [Día del Teatro Cubano] on January 22, Casa de las Américas (Havana, Cuba) sends its first call for its Latin American and Caribbean Theater Season and Mayo Teatral 2012, during which various workshops will be held. Held from May 4 to 13, Mayo Teatral offers a cycle of events dedicated to the centennial of the great playwright and Cuban intellectual Virgilio Piñera.

La Casa de las Américas invites participation for its Latin American and Caribbean Theater Season and Mayo Teatral 2012, which will be celebrated on May 4-13, bringing together a representative sample of the varied work of the current Latin American and Caribbean theater scene. Theater groups from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic will participate for the first time in our event; therefore this edition will be characterized by the novelty of the proposals and the wide variety of languages, with ten scene guest stage performances.

In addition, Casa will present a selection of best material premiered on the island in the last biennium as well as a Piñera Cycle, with staging of Virgilio Piñera’s works, carried out by Cuban troupes and directors.

There will also be workshops by experts in the field, such as Ailyn Morera (Costa Rica); Antonio Zúñiga (Mexico); Rodolfo Guerrero (Mexico); Francisco Sánchez, Pablo Obreque and César Espinoza (Chile); and Lowell Fiet (Puerto Rico/USA).

For more information on events, lodging and more, see eventos@casa.cult.cu

For original post (in Spanish), see http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6649

Photo above: a scene from Mayo Teatral 2010, from http://www.caimanbarbudo.cu/artes-escenicas/2010/06/escenas-de-identidad/

Let’s do a Friday Diaspora edition. There are some half-baked attempts at linking the videos in here. But don’t take them too seriously. French-Congolese Youssoupha on living in France in ‘Irréversible’ (he couldn’t not refer to the charges laid against him):

Also residing in Paris these days is Togo’s YaoBobby. His ‘Afrique Enchantée’ comes with French lyrics:

The use of split-screen faces in music videos, in vogue in the diaspora and possibly with a second meaning, we also found in the video for ‘The Village’by Trinidad-Canadian Ian Kamau (he has a great music blog and we featured him here before):

Somali-Canadian K’naan (remember his World Cup days?) got a lyric video out for ‘Nothing to Lose’, a collab with Nas (what’s the latest news on Nas’s promoters in Angola and what’s up with his “Yo my Somali niggas know what war be”?):

Finally, UK-based Nigerian eL Flaco does a rap job a bit different from K’naan and Nas. His ‘Mind Move’ comes off last year’s Samurai Series: