In the last decade alone, movie-makers have raped, murdered and mutilated more women than all the serial killers combined. Worse yet, they went about it and continue to do so with the same sadistic enthusiasm as the monsters they pretend to revile. Directors and writers
It was the first day of the 2001 Key West Literary Seminar — an annual event that attracts hundreds of readers and writers to the southernmost town in the United States — and one of the panelists was observing that the whole enterprise of literary
“I believe I’ll get drunk, tear this barrel house down.” —Drunken Barrel House Blues, Memphis Minnie. The juke joints are dying. “We used to have big crowds, every Friday night especially, and check nights,” said James Alford, manager of Smitty’s Red Top Lounge in Clarksdale,
On a small, nondescript farm in rural northeast Mississippi, between the towns of Senatobia and Como, is one of America’s last and most tangible links to its African musical past. African Fife and drum music was historically at the center of black musical and social
MEMPHIS, Tenn.–The woman is an Elvis fan from Boston. She is in her mid-thirties, has dark hair, and is thin, in that pale, pinched way that comes with being nervous. At the moment she is listening to one of the many Memphis men who dyes
MEMPHIS, Tenn.–They approach the grave in silence. A few yards from the gravesite they extinguish cigarettes in a foot-high bucket crammed with paper cups from MacDonalds, empty boxes of film, and Whattaburger wrappers. They leave a flower or a bouquet. They say a prayer. On
MEMPHIS, Tenn.–In 1954 Elvis Presley came to be known as the King of Western Bop. He was the white boy who “sang black,” the revolutionary, rockabilly cat whose body movements originated from the wild contortions of Southern preachers. He was lusty and evangelical, a combination
MEMPHIS, Tenn.–There is a small black camera on the lawn of Graceland, where Elvis Aron Presley, King of Rock and Roll, once lived, then existed, and finally died. The camera points at Graceland’s green and white wrought iron gate. At one time it transmitted to
By ‘jiving’ and ‘schucking,’…a man may avoid the undesirable consequences of his own misdemeanors…’ – Ulf Hannerz, Soulside 1 (NEW YORK) – In this passage Professor Hannerz is describing one of the central elements of black life style analyzed during his sociological study of a
LOS ANGELES – Fifty years ago Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit, reigned as the first and only black movie star. He had made his motion picture debut in the silent film “In Old Kentucky” (1927) playing opposite Carolynne Snowden; it was a
(LOS ANGELES) – “More important than even the directors and producers, the writer is crucial to the success of black television shows,” says Cleavon Little. (Mr. Little, who starred in the Broadway hit “Purlie”, was also a featured performer in the film “Blazing Saddles” as
(NEW YORK CITY) – “When I came to New York in 1931,” recalls Honi Coles, “Harlem was completely different. You can’t visualize it. You can’t possibly visualize it. In the first place, there was little crime, I mean street crime. There was no thought of
(NEW YORK CITY) – Booker has been a barber for nearly 40 years. Although he is officially retired now, he still drops into the small barbershop off Northern Boulevard in Queens, where he last worked. If one of the three regular barbers is absent he
The Public Humor Perhaps the most apt way to describe the public humor of black Americans prior to the mid-1930’s is to say that it was nearly always masked. Not only in the literal sense of grotesque, corked on blackface facades used in the
This is, in a sense, a catch-up newsletter. I’ve heard many nice comments about my first two newsletters on Roone Arledge and television news as well as one persistent criticism: Why didn’t I quote Arledge more, give him his fair say. A couple of people
Unlike non-electronic media, television has no simple way of determining the number of viewers who watch a particular show. There are no tickets to count, coupons to clip or unsold magazines to return. And yet the industry’s raison d’etre is not to deliver a show
Like a Raggedy Ann with glitter in her hair, the workaday world of television syndication has a bright new look. Until recently the business of distributing television programs on a station by station basis has been the poor country cousin of network television, accepting its
Every once in a while something comes along that encapsulates the banality of so much network television like one of those tinfoil snow scenes set in a paperweight. It seems to me that just such an incident occurred when novelist Dan Wakefield quit the show
Last spring when Fred Pierce, announcing Arledge’s appointment as head of ABC News as well as ABC Sports, remarked that “both departments require instant transmission of current events with uncompromising integrity,” there was a fair amount of tittering in the network’s newsroom along with the
There are other curious similarities between the two men. Both are genuine individuals in an industry whose top executives often seem to have been born at Groton and bred at Yale. Both seem to have some mysterious umbilical relation to popular taste — the so-called
