Red Shed Poetry Competition

The second Red Red Shed Readings Open Poetry Competition has now been launched. Don't miss out! Our judge this year is Gerard Benson and entry forms are downloadable from the top menu bar. Give it a shot and good luck.    

Download the competition entry form here

 

Over two hundred poems were entered for the 2009 Red Shed Poetry Competition. Below are the summarising notes of Michael Yates, the competition judge.

 

A big thank you is extended to Michael and to all of the poets who took the time and effort to enter the competition. The details of the 2010 competition have now been released, please have another bash at achieving poetic immortality by entering this year.

 

 

Dear Poet,

 

Thank you for entering the Red Shed Competition. The results are enclosed.

 

Red Shed Open Poetry Competition Results

 

£100 first prize – Nest by Margaret Eddershaw,

£50 second prize – Beehive by Julie Mellor

£25 third prize – Consolations of the Geriatrics’ Porter by Noel Williams

 

I found the selection of poems broad, the mix idiosyncratic, the individual verses enjoyable.

 

But judges are human; they are not Poetry Appreciation Machines. And reading poems, like writing them, is first of all an instinctive thing. Do we like this, are we thrilled by that? Only later do we rationalise the choices.

 

It seems to me a good poem has to be accessible, though not simple-minded; and have its feet on the well-trod ground of reality even if its head wanders skywards now and again to get a loftier view.

 

A poem may be a clever parody of the form, but it should also have some moral weight; it may tease a lesson out of life but it should not sermonise; it may be meticulous in its description but it also has to sing.

 

Nest by Margaret Eddershaw begins with discovery and detailed observation (a wagtails’ nest with its tiny skeletons) then proceeds to a revelation about the nature of love and loss, inferred from the swooping return of the fledglings’ parents. But the human observer is always fallible (she only recognises the wagtails by Googling) and her conclusions are framed as questions rather than confident insights. Finally, the image of a woman in Saigon searching for her children (“during the American War/ as the Vietnamese call it”) makes a general point from a surprisingly specific image. The conversational style provides an unforced, rueful tone; and the ending is satisfying without being glib. I wouldn’t change a word.

 

Beehive by Julie Mellor also begins with detailed observation but mixes it with the surreal and the humorous (“There are spiders in her head….you might think she had encouraged them/ back-combing her hair, setting it with sugar water”). Its constant sense of discomfort (“The point of a pencil is handy to scratch/ between the hardened strands”) is ably communicated. Finally, the image of the heroine, who every six months “shampoos it, rinses it with beer/ leaves a web of silk in the plug hole” is sad, but also redolent of that universal humour which is a necessary part of being resigned to life.

 

Finally, Consolations of the Geriatrics’ Porter by Noel Williams is a sharp little tale of living among the dead, of getting on with things, of staying sane. It is full of original phrases like “a midnight scratched by torches” and the inescapable voyeurism of the porter’s job is captured in “the eloquent locks of nurses’ homes/ as I test them.” Creepy but nice.

 

Michael Yates

Competition Judge

The Almost Famous Authors' Faire is proud to announce its Second, Annual Almost Famous Authors' Faire Writing Contest will begin on January 15, 2010! Thanks to all that participated in the 2009 contest. We hope to be able to read your submissions in the 2010 contest.

The Second, Annual Almost Famous Authors' Faire Writing Contest will be a bit different than the first. How will it be different? It will be different in that there will be three quarterly contests being held. The first will run January 15-March 15, the second April 15-June 15, and the final July 15-Sept. 15.

First, Second and Third place entries from both arms of the contest, unpublished and published will be announced at the SECOND Almost Famous Authors Faire being held March 27, 2010 at the Green Tree Mall in Clarksville, IN. But only the top three unpublished entries will receive cash awards. The top three published works will receive certificates of honor noting how they placed. The cash award for the published works will not be paid out until the FALL Almost Famous Authors' Faire, to be held in October or November 2010.

Winning entries (first, second & third) from each quarter will go forward to be judged against the top three published and unpublished in each of the other quarter contests. And at the end of the third quarter contest, an overall top prize will be awarded to the top three published books, and top three unpublished entries. So for the unpublished arm of the contest, your one entry fee gives you a chance to possibly win two prizes.

And of course, the top 30 unpublished entries in the overall 2010 contest will be published in the Second, Annual Almost Famous Authors' Faire Top Thirty by Bearhead Publishing LLC.

Our judges look forward to reading your entries!

2010 Application

An American Cry for Help (Video)

Wednesday 24 February 2010

by: Keith Olbermann  |  MSNBC "Countdown"

(Photo: gamera_obscura; Edited: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

Finally tonight, a Special Comment about health care reform and tomorrow's summit at Blair House. If I prove to have trouble getting through this, I apologize in advance. Last Friday night my father asked me to kill him. We were just shy of six months since he was hospitalized and it was the end of a long day at the end of a longer week.

Not to get too clinical or too grotesque on you, but he'd had his colon removed at the end of September and that went so well that it was no more complicated than an appendectomy. But what followed was a series of infections, like storms in the monsoon season, one arriving, blossoming, inundating him, my Dad shaking it off and cheerfully bouncing back, and then within days another one coming in to flatten him once again.

Part 1:

Part 2:

 

Pneumonia, three or four times — I've lost count. Kidney failure, liver failure — the liver failure got better, remarkably enough. Dialysis, feeding tubes, drainage taps, drainage tubes, breathing tubes. Couldn't talk through that. Then he got strong enough and they could put a cap on the breathing tube and one day he scared the crap out of a friend of his who didn't know, who came in and gave him the customary "how you doin' Ted?" only to jump out of his shoes when my father suddenly and gleefully answered him in a strong full voice, "surprisingly well."

Sometimes he swelled up and looked like as puffy as prizefighter who'd had a bad night. Sometimes he'd get dialysis so effective or an antibiotic so specific that he would look like he did twenty-five years ago.

Three weeks ago they had found something extraordinary. A nurse noticed what seemed like a minor infection just below the surface of the skin, a kind of super-pimple if you will. It was actually the edge of a series of abscesses which would be drained and would produce, all told, about six liters of infected stuff. Six liters. You know how much that is? You know what that looks like? You don't want to know.

But you do want to know it's been found because it means he hasn't been weak all this time, he's been incredibly, inhumanly strong. The abscesses were swimming pools for these infections. The strongest one would emerge, then my Dad with the help of the antibiotics would kill it off, then the antibiotics would be discontinued, and the next infection would pop out and challenge him.

As he pointed out you know: just like the organized crime families. Then last week they found another abscess of sorts, in the chest. So they needed to put in drains there, too. This was Friday morning. His surgical team came to see him, he did his non-verbal caricature of their chief, they laughed like hell, they numbed him up, snip snip, plug plug, and this infection starts draining, and they leave him alone for awhile.

And then in the afternoon they changed a few of the plugs the IV's attach to. And the respiratory therapist had been in, checking the ventilator and his tubes because there was a leak somewhere. And to improve dialysis, they changed his dialysis port. And then in the evening they needed a CAT-scan of his chest to make sure the drains were in the right place. And they had to change a dressing on some bad skin. And every hour they had to draw blood to check how well he was getting oxygen. And then at night it was time for dialysis using the new port.

And that's when I showed up. My father was a little annoyed, the way he often gets in there annoyed about all the activity. That day, it was like being Sisyphus with the boulder, only at the top of the hill, when he loses the boulder, it doesn't just roll back down hill, it rolls over him, first.

He's brave about pain, provided you warn him in advance, and provided the sheer volume of activity doesn't terrify him. As in terrorism, it isn't just terror when it happens, it's terror that it might happen. So he's annoyed, but in a good mood, and, as I usually do, I sit down to read to him. Thurber. I've been reading him a lot of James Thurber short stories lately and he's insisted that I should do it on the show, and we'll see about that. But a few pages in, the x-ray technician shows up.

They have to take one more picture of him, to see if those new drains in his chest are working. And I have to leave his room for, at most, three minutes. I come back in and my father is thrashing his head back and forth. You can't hear him, he can't speak at the moment, but you become a lip-reader in those circumstances and this one word he keeps repeating is not tough to discern.

"Help." He is mouthing the word "help," over and over and over again. And I get his attention. He is in full panic. Maybe the x-ray tech hurt my Dad's back, or touched those new chest drains — more likely he did nothing very much at all. But it was just too much for my father. "Stop this," he mouths. "Stop, stop, stop." And I say to him: I know for a fact they are not doing anything more to you tonight. And he looks at me and starts thrashing his head again: "Help, help, help."

I get his attention again. I ask him: do you want me to stop all of this? And he looks at me and mouths "yes." And I ask him: you understand what happens then. And he looks at me and mouths "yes." And I ask him: you realize you are not terminally ill, and if we do stop all of this, it might not be quick. And he mouths "stop this." And I say, trying to joke him out of it — and trust me, gallows humor is your best defense in this situation — "what? You want me to smother you with a pillow?" And he mouths "yes — kill me."

I told him that obviously I wouldn't do that, but I would go and talk to the doctors. When I came back, I told him they'd be really put out by this, because he wasn't sick enough and all the indications were he could still fight off what remained of the infections. And he went back to thrashing his head and mouthing "help" because clearly I was not giving him the sense of relief — relief from the paradoxical truth that people desperately trying to save your life, sometimes manage only to torture you. Of course, I actually was getting him that sense of relief.

When I went to see the Surgical Intensive Care Unit resident I told him my Dad had hit his wall. That he couldn't take any other work, that it was now terrifying torture, that he needed it to stop. But I said, look, I'm his health proxy, we've had conversations about end-of-life care — we've had them in here, we've had them when he was home and well, I'm not operating in the dark here. I said I think he really wants the one word he keeps mouthing: He wants help. Is there any medical reason not to give him some sedation, a little mental vacation from being a patient?

The resident thought that was a damn good idea and that it would help his breathing, which the respiratory therapist had noticed wasn't quite right. So when I came in and gave my father the song and dance about how "put out" the doctors were, really, I was just stalling. I started to read to him again, and he was still thrashing his head from side to side in frustration, and then he started to calm down and enjoy the story and as he began to rest, the nurse slipped in and injected a sedative into one of his IV's.

And as I left that night the full impact of these last six months washed over me. What I had done, conferring with the resident in ICU, the conversation about my father's panicky, not-in-complete-control-of-his-faculties demand that all treatment stop, about the options and the consequences and the compromise — the sedation — the help for a brave man who just needed a break… that conversation, that one — was what these ghouls who are walking into Blair House tomorrow morning decided to call "death panels."

Your right to have that conversation with a doctor, not the government, but a doctor and your right to have insurance pay for his expertise on what your options are when Dad says "kill me" or what your options are when Dad is in a coma and can't tell you a damn thing, or what your options are when everybody is healthy and happy and coherent and you're just planning ahead your right to have the guidance and the reassurance of a professional who can lay that out for you that's a quote "death panel."

That, right now, is the legacy of the protests of these sub-humans who get paid by the insurance companies, who say these things for their own political gain or like that one fiend or money. For money Betsy McCaughey told people that this conversation about life and death and relief and release, and also about no, keep treating him no matter what happens, until the nation runs out of medicine, she told people it's a death panel and she did that for money.

It's a life panel. A life panel, it can save the pain of the patient and the family it is the difference between you guessing what happens next, and you being informed about what probably will, and that's the difference between you sleeping at night or second-guessing and third-guessing and thirtieth-guessing. And it can also be the place where the family says 'we want you to keep him alive no matter what, we believe in miracles' and the doctor saying yes.

Nobody gets to say no except the patient and the family. It's a life panel. And damn those who call it otherwise to hell. And that brings up the other point of all this. They've rolled my father under every piece of machinery in there except an atom-splitter. They've pumped him full of every drug and remedy. And he's got Medicare and a supplemental insurance and my out-of-pocket medical bills over the last six months have been greater than my Dad's have.

And why in the hell should that not be true of everybody, in every hospital, in every sick room, in every clinic, in this country? What is this country for if not to take care of its people? Because whatever I've been through these last six months and whatever my Dad's been through, not once were our fears or our decisions amplified by the further horror of wondering how in the hell we would pay for this. What about families having these conversations tonight about kids? Or about uninsured adults?

Or what about the guy out there whose father is 50 and he's mouthing the word "help" and the guy knows what his father doesn't know that the insurance company has just declared the illness the father has is a "pre-existing condition" and he has no insurance, and when that son goes out to talk to that doctor about what to do next, even if there's a chance of recovery, that son can't afford to pay for it! That is the goddamned death panel, Sarah Palin.

Since Friday night, my father has been comfortable. He has been breathing well, and there has been no sign of stress or discomfort. He has also not awakened. His white blood cell count, the indicator of infection, is now at about four or five times normal. Doubtlessly, in removing that much infection from him, some of it got loose and into his bloodstream.

He's not being sedated any more; he only has the strength to fight off the infections, or wake up — not both. We're hoping he does the first, then the latter. We're prepared for the probability that he will do neither. His team and I had another "life panel" discussion not six hours ago. And thank God I had those conversation with my father.

Thank God I got his instructions about when to use my judgment and when to stick with his; when if he's capable of recovery to let them use everything they have and when to make sure they're not just keeping him alive with no hope; when to listen to the instruction "help" — first, and then the one about "stop" — later.

So, considering that if he does not recover, you will not see me here for awhile, I have some requests. First of you: Please have this conversation with your loved ones. Don't wait. Do it now. It's tough. It acknowledges death. And it also narrows the gray area you or they will face, from infinity to about a foot wide. It is my greatest comfort right now and I want it to be yours.

And to the politicians who go into Blair House tomorrow for the summit: I have some requests as well. Leave your egos at the door. I want, I demand, that you give everybody in this country a chance at the care my father has gotten. And I demand, that you enact this most generous and most kind aspect of the reform proposed: the right to bill the damned insurance company for the conversation about what to do when the time comes, the Life Panel.

And I want all of you to think of somebody lying in a hospital bed tonight who needed that care and needed that conversation, and imagine that that is your father, or mother, or son, or daughter, or wife, or husband, or partner. If you cannot do that, if you cannot put aside the meaninglessness of your political careers for this, my request to you then, is that you not come back out of that meeting for you would not be worthy of being with the real people of this country who suffer, and suffer again because you have acted on behalf of the corporations and not the people.

If you cannot do this, go into that room and stay there and we'll get new ones to replace your worthless roles in the life of our country. My father cannot speak for himself. He appointed me to do so for him and I haven't the slightest doubt he wants me to say this tonight, right now. He mouthed the words to me and I will now give them such voice as I have to you going into that summit tomorrow. Help. Help. Help. Help.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Coeds Lock Horns and Lacrosse Sticks in Cross-Cultural Drama

Toe to Toe (2010) 

Running time: 104 Minutes

Film Review by Kam Williams

Excellent (4 stars)

For my money, the British flick Fish Tank was easily the best movie released in the first month of 2010. And if I were handing out another accolade for February, that would have to go to this compelling, super-realistic indie, a character-driven affair written and directed by Emily Abt. Ms. Abt, an award-winning filmmaker previously known for such documentaries as Take It from Me and All of Us, makes her first foray into dramatic fare here.

This film made a big splash at Sundance a year ago, when it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Set in the Washington, DC area, it revolves around an unlikely love triangle which comes to test the already tenuous bond of friendship forged between a couple of high school classmates, one black, one white, who play on the lacrosse team.

African-American Tosha (Sonequa Martin), who hails from Anacostia, can only afford to attend the exclusive prep school because she’s on a full scholarship. She’s and her two siblings are being raised in the ‘hood by their doting grandmother (Leslie Uggams) while their overworked single-mom (Dionne Audain) works double shifts to keep a roof over their heads on her security guard salary.

Tosha is the hope of the family because her younger brother, Miles (Thulis Dingwall) is weak and sickly, and her older brother, Kevin (Gaius Charles) is unemployed and lazy. Despite already being a father, the latter lays around the crib getting so high he lets his baby daughter (Jonnie Marie Home) crawl out onto the street unattended.

Somehow, Tosha keeps her nose to the grindstone, ignoring the dysfunction at home and the daily taunts coming from jealous girls on the block. They love teasing her mercilessly as she walks down the street to catch the bus for everything from acting white to having once allowed the boys to see her panties for a couple of bucks.

Tosha doesn’t find much relief at school either, where she finds it hard to fit in with the spoiled-rich kids. Because of all of the above, she focuses intently on her goal of being admitted to Princeton, which she sees as her ticket out of the ghetto.

Jesse, at least by outward appearances, has a relatively-easy go of it in life. After all, she lives in a sprawling mansion in the suburbs and has her own sports car. However, because her absentee single-mom is always away on business, the unsupervised teen suffers from loneliness and the consequences of a series of poor choices that have led to promiscuity, substance abuse and STDs.

For Jesse spends the bulk of her free time slumming, since she has a thing for Go-Go music and Jungle Fever for brothers, which explains why she gravitates towards hanging out with Tosha. But the plot thickens when she falls for the charms of a smooth-talking DJ (Silvestre Rasuk) already involved with Tosha. At that point, all bets are off, and the two go “Toe to Toe.”

Hell hath no fury like a sister scorned, especially for a wigger.
_______________________

 

Photo Essay: From Quake Victims, a Stirring Refrain

Emily Troutman Contributor

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Feb. 25) -- I woke up Monday morning, stumbled out to get something to eat in Petionville and suddenly found myself in the middle of a wordless mob. A hundred people were standing in the road, between the intersection of Rue Lamarre and Rue Rigaud. Mobs pop up everywhere these days as people seek out food and water. But this group seemed somber, not needy.

I pushed through the crowd and at its center discovered the body of a young woman -- her left foot, missing; her blood, traveling in a small stream downhill. She was killed on her way to work at 7 a.m. by a reckless driver who fled the scene.

"But that's Haiti," everyone says. People are using the earthquake as an excuse to ignore traffic laws. Even when there is a body in the road: "That's Haiti."

By now I've heard that phrase a thousand times. This week I finally settled into it. But until I learned what it really means, it invariably raised my blood pressure.

An architect, describing to me the governmental process that led to houses being built without standards: "Emily, that is Haiti."

Emily Troutman for AOL News

"That's Haiti." It's a phrase the author has heard over and over again to describe the country's post-earthquake chaos. But the phrase has been around a lot longer than that.

A United Nations official, speaking to me about the current state of affairs: "The apathy of Haitians knows no bounds. Just be frank about it." She concluded, "That's Haiti."

My friend, describing trying to distribute food in her neighborhood only to be swiftly accused by her neighbors of taking money from abroad and squandering it: "I don't try to do anything anymore. You know? That's Haiti."

It is another way of saying, "What do you expect?" Eventually I started saying it myself.

Walking through the neighborhood, I passed another body in the street. This time, the man wasn't quite dead, just very close. He was passed out drunk, and swarms of flies circled his face. Two non-earthquake bodies in two days? It was near noon, and the sun was beating down.

 

More Emily Troutman Essays:
- Learning From the Past
- Haiti Before the Quake
- Help Can't Get Here
- Searching for Friends
- Life Beyond the Headlines
- Haiti's Story Rolls On as Journalists Roll Out

I decided to call my friend Karl Jean-Jeune. Karl is Haitian, but he returned from Miami only six months ago. I didn't need sympathy, just a witness.

"Hey, um, I don't know why I'm calling," I said, "except that there's this guy here, on the side of the road, and he looks dead. But, um, I guess he's not."

I laughed. Karl laughed. I took a deep breath. I don't remember what I said next, but it was probably an expletive, something about the surreality of our lives these past few weeks, our general state of seeing horrible things and not being able to do anything.

It's not the first time in my life that I've felt this way. Nor the only place in the world. But what I said was, "Well, that's Haiti."

Taken at face value, it's a phrase I dislike, and one I don't feel entitled to say. Maybe Haitians can say it about Haiti, or people who've been here long enough to be fully exasperated. I am neither.

Emily Troutman for AOL News

"That's Haiti" has been around for years. And most people who say it are Haitians. They say it with humor, as a way of explaining the unexplainable.

When I finally started asking my friends about it, though, everyone told me not to feel so bad. "That's Haiti" has been around for years. Clearly, it's what people say when there are no more words for what's gone wrong. But "That's Haiti" is not an accusation, it's love. It's not denial -- it's a form of acceptance.

I was surprised to learn that the people who say "That's Haiti" the most are Haitians, and they're not angry; they're smiling. Ex-pats especially love to point out what's "Haitian," or when things go awry, turn to me and say, "Welcome to Haiti."

"Do you see how people wash their face like that? That's so Haitian."

"I didn't get the generator from the mechanic. He says he was afraid to turn it on. Welcome to Haiti."

These days, when the Ordinarily Shocking is only a footnote to the Really Shocking, and the Really Shocking isn't shocking at all anymore, it seems easy to sum everything up with, "That's Haiti." But for the people who say the words, it's less easy than it seems.

Life is less easy than it seems. Friends pull out their cell phones at cafes and scroll through photos of the very dead -- bodies, limbs, the bloated, the unnamed. We sleep in tents. We see no progress. We laugh. We witness deeply private moments as they unfold in the streets. We take cold showers and we don't complain. We feel terribly lucky and unlucky all at once.

Again and again, I am startled by everyone else's calm. But now I see "That's Haiti" might be at the center of it.

The reason that the chaos and looting never materialized is that Haiti is a dysfunctional family, writ large. And the earthquake is just another Thanksgiving dinner gone wrong.

Emily Troutman for AOL News

Children in the suburb of Petionville find diversion by creating a makeshift ride out of crushed plastic bottles and a steep driveway.

President Rene Preval is Haiti's absentee father. The U.N. is its drunk uncle. The fight over aid is that painfully awkward argument during the turkey dinner. But by evening, Haitians are sitting back, like friends at the bar, laughing at how some things never change.

It's true, when people say, "That's Haiti," they are saying, "What do you expect?" It begs the question: What do you expect? These are tough times, no getting around it. Haitians love Haiti, unconditionally; and sometimes, unconditional love just looks a lot like patience.

Today, this is what Haiti can teach us: We can mourn and complain, we can be shocked and appalled. Or we can breathe and go forward, smile and move on. Yes, that's Haiti.

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Filmmaker Angela Carroll on her new film ‘Angela Y. Davis: Radical Pedagogy’

by Minister of Information JR

Up and coming filmmaker Angela Carroll has jumped on the independent film scene in a major way with three films set to come out in 2010. She just finished editing the new film about police terrorism in Oakland, “Operation Small Axe,” she is working on editing a film about her recent trip to Haiti after the earthquake and she is getting ready to embark on a West Coast tour to begin showing her film, “Angela Y. Davis: Radical Pedagogy (Who Is Angela Davis?).”

Angela Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a radical professor at UCLA. Most people mistakenly identify her as a member of the Black Panther Party because of her affiliation with Field Marshal George Jackson of the Black Panther Party and heading the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee.

She also came to the world’s attention when she caught a case after the Aug. 7, 1970, massacre at the Marin County Courthouse, where Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of George, came in the courthouse armed and took the judge, D.A. and other hostages to trade for Field Marshal Jackson, who had been held a decade for being questionably convicted of a robbery of less than $100. In the interaction, the police killed everybody, except Angela Davis’ codefendant, who still languishes behind enemy lines, Ruchell Cinque Magee.

“Angela Y Davis: Radical Pedagogy” talks to students, academics, grassroots organizers, rappers and everyday people on the streets about the contributions of Professor Angela Davis. It is a must see if you are in any way interested in radical politics or women’s studies. Here is filmmaker Angela Carroll in her own words …

M.O.I. JR: Can you tell us about your new film? How did you pick your subject?

Angela Carroll: “Angela Y. Davis: Radical Pedagogy (Who Is Angela Davis?)” is a short featuring students, supporters and colleagues of Professor Davis engaging in conversations on her academic and activist work. The film experiments with traditional documentary and classic animation styles, often filling the frame with glitches of color and static. As textured academic heads speak, a clay Angela Davis narrates and guides the dialog with excerpts from prison industrial complex, race, gender and sexuality and critical pedagogy lectures.

While I was a graduate student at UCSC, several History of Consciousness professors visited an exhibition featuring four of my animated films entitled “Peaced2GatherHerstories.” I received an email several days after the exhibition closed with an offer to render a film on Angela Davis. The project premiered Fall 2009 at “Angela Davis: Legacies in the Making,” a symposium celebrating her scholarship and retirement from UCSC.

I collaborated with friend and colleague Eric Stanley, a student of Professor Davis and notable filmmaker, on the short. I felt and still feel incredibly honored and humbled to have had the opportunity to participate in this project.

M.O.I. JR: Be it that claymation is seen as for children, what made you experiment with claymation in dealing with the politics of Angela Davis in this film?

Angela Carroll: My undergraduate work focused on animation. I have a deep love and appreciation for films that play with space, color and texture. Some of my favorite artists, Romeare Bearden and Jan Svankmajer, are masters of mashing mediums together into beautiful and disturbing images and films.

Similarly, I wanted to combine mediums and take a subject as seemingly static as academic dialog and examine the ways images and sounds work to engage the viewer within the frame. Claymation is just one of many aesthetic choices in the film made towards that end. I want these conversations to be accessible to all ages.

M.O.I. JR: How did you pick who you would interview for this film? What kind of feel were you looking for in the completed product?

Angela Carroll: We began with a long list of notable scholars and activists suggested by peers. It quickly revealed problematic class and racial divides between those included and left off the list. The initial group were all academics, very few of color, all well known within higher educational circles but invisible to everyday folks.

Angela Carroll

I wanted my students to be able to watch the film and see themselves reflected. The final product is more balanced, displaying conversations between grassroots organizers, hip hop artists, historians and a wide range of scholars. I also shot and interviewed random people on the streets of Berkeley to get their insights on the work and relevance of Angela Davis.

M.O.I. JR: I know that you first showed your film at Angela Davis’ retirement party. What was her response to it?

Angela Carroll: The film premiered on the last day of an intensive symposium with panel discussions and lectures. It was the last thing seen before Professor Davis gave closing remarks and officially retired. She was pleased with the film and overwhelmed with emotion by some of the commentary made by her students. She was really cool about it all.

There is a segment of the film where people on the street are asked who Angela Davis is. Nearly all of them responded that they did not know who she was. While some in the audience gasped, Angela laughed. She’s incredibly accessible, humble and open to criticism. I was relieved that she wasn’t offended by the realities that some in the academy don’t want to accept.

There is a divide between the vocabularies developed in the academy and the most impacted bodies that the vocabularies are supposed to support. Angela’s work is largely around trying to close those divides. I think she really appreciated the piece.

M.O.I. JR: What does Angela Davis mean to you? What was her biggest contribution to public discourse?

Angela Carroll: I think that, like many people, I knew Angela’s image before I knew about her scholarship. I confused her political involvement with the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party. I knew I liked her afro and heard that she was powerful. It wasn’t until high school when an English teacher gave me her autobiography that I began to develop a more critical perspective about her academic and activist practices.

I was especially impressed and informed by “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” which discussed blues and jazz singers of the 1920s and the empowerment and example their work created for women past and present. I am also incredibly interested in her work around the PIC (Prison Industrial Complex) and the intersections she describes between slavery, prison labor and capitalism.

I sat in on many of her lectures at UCSC and never tired of her teaching style and engagement with the class. She is an important thinker in this moment.

M.O.I. JR: Is she still relevant? Why or why not?

Angela Carroll: The film grapples with this question of relevance and impact. I personally think she is relevant. Her works encourage us, the readers, students, everyday folk, to develop our own language and movements around breaking down the systems that oppress us; to actualize those vocabularies and crush those oppressive systems.

The film doesn’t necessarily agree with my perspective. It covers varying ideas. The film dissects practice vs. theory through analysis of Angela Davis’ pedagogical and activist approach.

M.O.I. JR: What other projects are you working on or have you worked on?

Angela Carroll: 2009 was an extraordinary year. I acted as lead editor and production designer in collaboration with 393Films Director Adimu Madyun on an amazing feature film entitled “Operation Small Axe.”

I just returned from Haiti with Minister of Information JR Valrey, photojournalist and videographer Siraj Fowler and a medical team sponsored by Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. We are collaboratively rendering a feature length film about what we witnessed on the ground in Haiti. Look forward to seeing a series of vivid interactive animation-installations written and invented by myself and an amazing team of dreamers from my film/new media company MerKaBaFilms in the summer 2010.

I feel extremely excited about the future and about being an artist in this moment. I feel blessed to have support systems, community and family that afford me the opportunity to create critically beautiful media.

M.O.I. JR: How could people stay up on your work? How can they see the trailer?

Angela Carroll: Check me out on Vimeo at MerKaBaFilms. You’ll see the “Angela Y. Davis: Radical Pedagogy” trailer and some other experiments in film.

Email POCC Minister of Information JR, Bay View associate editor, at blockreportradio@gmail.com and visit www.blockreportradio.com.

 

Trailer_Angela Y Davis Radical Pedagogy from MerKaBa Films on Vimeo.

A trailer for the short film “Angela Y. Davis: Radical Pedagogy” featuring students and colleagues of Angela Y. Davis discussing the import and impact of her pedagogy.

Trailer: Angela Y Davis Radical Pedagogy

by MerKaBa Films

 

Nina Simone, Diva Out of Carolina

By ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Published: February 25, 2010

Getty Images

Nina Simone in 1964.

PRINCESS NOIRE

The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

By Nadine Cohodas

Illustrated. 449 pp. Pantheon Books. $30

Related

Excerpt: ‘Princess Noire’ (February 19, 2010)

Dwight Garner’s Review of ‘Princess Noire’ (February 19, 2010)

 

“I will never be your clown,” Nina Simone shouted at a restless nightclub audience in Cannes in 1977. The mostly French-speaking crowd was either unable or unwilling to join her in a singalong, and she took it as a personal affront. “God gave me this gift — and I am a genius. I worked at my craft for six to 14 hours a day, I studied and learned through practice. I am not here just to entertain you. But how can I be alive when you are so dead?” Her speech only prompted more requests for her to “SING!” She managed to get through some songs before delivering her parting words. “You owe me,” she railed. “I don’t wear a painted smile on my face, like Louis Armstrong.”

Scenes like this were all too common, especially during the latter half of Simone’s career. Her reputation as mercurial, moody and combative was well established, and she did little to dispel this image in her memoir, “I Put a Spell on You.” She was nothing if not paradoxical. She promoted black militancy and spoke of her love for “my people,” but often treated black audiences with contempt and condescension. She beat up white audiences, too, sometimes declaring her disdain for white people, and yet sustained a substantial crossover following with covers of songs associated with their youth culture. She might show up an hour or two late, ramble incoherently onstage and suddenly give a performance that could bring a weary crowd to tears.

But when she called herself a genius — a term usually reserved for male artists — it was not mere hyperbole. Indeed, Nadine Cohodas’s disturbing portrait in “Princess Noire” sets out to confirm Simone’s genius. The author lingers on her stage performances, her musical decisions, her sartorial choices — the alchemy she created in sound and fury. Cohodas, who has written books about Dinah Washington and Chess Records, devotes more space to Simone’s music than any biography to date. But as hard as the author tries, she can’t avoid the fact that Si­mone’s fame has more to do with her tempestuous behavior, both on- and offstage.

Before Nina Simone arrived, there was Eunice Waymon, born in Tryon, N.C., in 1933, the sixth of eight children. Her father, J. D. Waymon, was a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur, and her mother, Kate, was a domestic worker whose primary vocation was preaching the Gospel. Eunice was just a small child when she started playing piano in church. Cohodas paints a complex picture of Tryon and its environs, a community ruled by Jim Crow but with a color line porous enough for the Waymons to live fairly comfortably and for young Eunice to take piano lessons from Muriel Mazzanovich, known affectionately as Miss Mazzy.

Eunice depended on a white patron to pay for her lessons, and she remained fairly sequestered in the quiet, cloistered world of Miss Mazzy’s home, studying Bach and dreaming of a different path. But the walls between Tryon’s polite society and the realities of racial subjugation were thin and vulnerable, occasionally tumbling down — as on the night her parents were asked to move out of the front row during one of her public recitals. ­Eleven-year-old Eunice threatened to refuse to play if her parents could not remain in their seats. Even then, she under­stood her power as an artist.

Eunice continued her music studies at the Allen School, a private high school for black girls in Asheville, probably with the support of white benefactors. Upon graduation, she took classes at Juilliard and worked long hours to prepare for her audition to the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She was rejected, her dream of becoming a concert pianist crushed. In Simone’s eyes, the school’s rebuff was a racial slight. While Cohodas quotes a Curtis faculty member, Vladimir Sokoloff, who suggests Simone simply wasn’t up to the task, she is unwilling to admit that Si­mone’s piano skills were less than brilliant. She may have been the greatest prodigy to come out of Tryon’s black community, but in New York City pianists of her caliber were plentiful.

Simone’s genius lay elsewhere, and it seems she discovered it quite by accident when she accepted a solo piano gig at an Atlantic City nightclub for the summer of 1954 and began singing when pressed by her boss. Adopting the name Nina Si­mone, she used her deep, husky voice, wide-ranging knowledge of musical genres and eclectic tastes to push her performances to the foreground in clubs where cocktail piano was meant for atmosphere. And as Cohodas observes, Simone replaced the sexuality of a torch singer with the elegance of a concert pianist, evoking respectability and “race pride” along the way. After reaching the pop charts with her 1959 cover of George Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” she quickly became an international star. She gave audiences more than a concert; she presented an overall cultural experience, different from pop and jazz, so original that she belongs in a category unto herself.

Music made Simone a star; politics made her a force. She joined a small circle of New York-based intellectuals in support of the civil rights movement, speaking out against racism and injustice from her own platform, performing protest songs and writing a few of her own. Her “Mississippi Goddam,” written in the wake of Medgar Evers’s assassination and the murder of four black girls in a church bombing, became a veritable anthem. Although Si­mone believed that her politics cost her jobs, by the late ’60s she had embraced her role as songstress of black militancy, composing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a powerful tribute to the memory of Lorraine Hansberry. Surprisingly, Cohodas devotes little space to understanding the source of Simone’s political views and her engagement with the likes of Hansberry, James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael, or how the larger context of African liberation shaped her own vision.

After establishing Simone’s musical gen­ius, international success and political prominence, Cohodas details her long downward spiral. To the author’s credit, she tries valiantly to keep our attention on the stage and Simone’s music, even when it is subpar, and even when Simone’s life becomes a litany of self-destructive acts and bitter disappointments. Yet while Coho­das provides vivid descriptions of Simone’s behavior, she offers very little by way of explanation. How shy Eunice Waymon became a demanding diva almost overnight remains a mystery. Not until the last 50 pages do we learn that Simone probably suffered from schizophrenia. But was her anger a manifestation of an undiagnosed chemical imbalance, or did it reflect a life of failed marriages, failed affairs, failed motherhood, dislocations, financial woes, and a history of racial and sexual discrimination? Apparently, Simone also survived domestic violence and rape. (Her bisexuality, as well as the manner in which marriage suppressed it, deserves more than the few sentences it receives.)

During her final two decades (she died in 2003), as her illness progressed, financial considerations compelled Simone to work. She had to make money — for herself and her handlers, whose livelihoods depended on her — and her shows became exhibitions of her deteriorating life and mental health. Cohodas captures a piteous moment when, after a gig at Swing Plaza in New York in 1983, federal agents turned up to confiscate her earnings. But they didn’t touch the cash left out front in a bucket labeled “the Society for the Preser­vation of Nina Simone.”

By the end of her “tumultuous reign,” Simone was a shadow of her former self, a woman practically broken by an unscrupulous industry, exploitative men and her own demons. Like her performances, the book’s final chapters are hard to experience but impossible to ignore. And like so many of us who saw Simone onstage when she should have been convalescing or simply enjoying life, readers may feel an urgent need to listen to her old recordings to remind themselves of what they loved about her in the first place.

 

Robin D. G. Kelley’s most recent book is “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.”