Category: Arts & Culture
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Prodding the Bell Jar
“Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.” – Sylvia Plath. Fifty years into the demise of Sylvia Plath, her life and work resonate with themes still largely relevant to the plight of the individual today. With a…
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The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks
The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks + Beacon Press + 303 pages “A tired seamstress” is how we remember Rosa Parks in our national imagination. Accordingly the tired seamstress was not a troublemaker just a simple woman who in a single act of defiance launched the modern civil rights movement. The political history of Rosa…
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Cody Chesnutt, Old Soul
Huddled in the basement with a 4-track cassette recorder, an eccentric youngish soul singer laid a critically acclaimed double cd, The Headphone Master Piece. Through the album sold poorly it was a critical success. Cited for its low-fi grittiness and biting social commentary, “Headphone Masterpiece” caused industry insiders to take notice. Cody Chesnutt’s genius status…
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Boston, Barrence, & Blues
Award winning poet and writer Maya Angelou, fresh off a collaboration with Common on his latest album, in response to queries regarding the two artists’ different beliefs, as in: ‘what would she do about it?’ replied “Nothing,” and ruminated on philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli’s principle that “‘the surest way to control people was to divide them.’”…
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Teddy Pendergrass, Soul Man
Theodore Dereese “Teddy” Pendergrass was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a working class father and mother. After his father left the family, he was raised by his mother, Ida Pendergrass, a religious sharecropper’s daughter from South Carolina, the rhythm-and-blues state. Theodore’s mother discovered his voice when he began singing in church at only 2 ½…
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Sex & Soul Music
It was simply a brief introduction to the career of Rod Temperton, the British-born songwriter, who first came to prominence with the group Heatwave. Specifically, I was reminiscing about Heatwave’s “Always and Forever,” a classic Soul ode to longstanding love and romance. Unfortunately, my class of 60-plus millennials were not quite as excited by the…
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Bob Marley, Soul Rebel
“Live if you want to live / That’s what we got to give,” were the first lines sung by Bob Marley at the Amandla Festival held at the Harvard Coliseum some 34 years ago in 1979. Marley’s plea for life eternally resonates in the minds and hearts of all his listeners, which is exactly why…
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James Baldwin: A Prophet in Exile
Millions of African-Americans migrated from the Jim Crow South in search of a better life. The North represented The Promised Land—free of the limits on Black mobility and opportunity so rampant in the southern states. In Notes of a Native Son, America’s greatest essayist, James Baldwin recalls there was no milk and honey to be…
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Book Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all the…
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Django Unchained: A Review
Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino (Weinstein Company, $29.99) I expected the epithet “nigger” to be overused in Django Unchained. It is a Quentin Tarantino film after all, and Tarantino is proficient in hyperbole. I was not prepared, however, for the countless eruptions of laughter following those scenes — and there were many — in which “nigger” was used…