• Arts & Culture

Forty Years of

Philadelphia Sound

Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble | Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff first met in an elevator in Philadelphia's Schubert Building, where they were working as songwriters on separate floors.

 

Songwriters Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble composed tunes with political messages for chart-toppers like the O’Jays and Billy Paul

• By Jim Morrison
• Smithsonian.com, February 18, 2011

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After minor chart success, the O'Jays had considered calling it quits before Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble revived their career with chart-topping hits. / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

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When Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble would huddle to write songs, they’d each bring a long, yellow legal pad of potential titles, sometimes 200 or 300 each. Huff would sit at the upright piano in his office with a tape recorder rolling. He would start playing and Gamble would riff lyrics. “Sometimes [the songs] would take 15 minutes to write and sometimes they’d take all day,” Gamble recalls. “The best ones came in ten, fifteen minutes.”

The two first ran into each other in an elevator in Philadelphia’s Schubert Building, where they were working as songwriters on separate floors. Soon after, they met at Huff’s Camden, New Jersey home on a Saturday and wrote six or seven songs the first day. “It was an easy, easy fit,” Gamble recalls.

During the 60s, they had moderate success with hits like “Expressway to Your Heart” by the Soul Survivors, “Cowboys to Girls” by the Intruders and “Only the Strong Survive” by Jerry Butler.

But they wanted to be more than writers and producers of regional hits who occasionally made a national mark. The opportunity came 40 years ago in 1971 when Columbia Records, hoping to finally break into the black music market, gave them a $75,000 advance to record singles and another $25,000 for a small number of albums. With the money, Gamble and Huff opened their own label, Philadelphia International Records (PIR).

As they sat down to compose following the deal, the Vietnam War raged on, conflicts over desegregation spread across the country and civil war ravaged Pakistan. “We were talking about the world and why people really can’t work together. All this confusion going on in the world,” Gamble says. “So we were talking about how you need something to bring people together.”

One of the titles on a legal pad had promise: “Love Train.” Huff fingered the piano. Gamble, the words guy, began singing, “People all over the world, join hands, form a love train.”

Within 15 minutes, he recalls, they had a song for the O’Jays, a group from Canton, Ohio, that had considered calling it quits after a couple of minor chart successes. Gamble and Huff had spotted them three years earlier opening a show at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. While Eddie Levert had been singing lead for the trio, they liked the interplay between Levert and Walter Williams they saw onstage. So for the first singles on PIR, they wrote songs featuring the two trading vocals. “I knew once we put our leads on Back Stabbers it had the potential to be something special, but I didn’t know to what magnitude,” Williams says.

“Love Train” was the third single released from their album Back Stabbers, issued in August 1972. By January 1973, the song was number one on the Pop and R&B charts and on the way to selling a million singles, just the kind of crossover hit Columbia envisioned when it invested in Gamble and Huff.

A little more than a year after forming PIR, they also had produced hits with Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” Clive Davis, then chief operating officer of Columbia, wrote in his memoir that Gamble and Huff sold ten million singles. Just as important, they were Columbia’s foray into the market for albums by black artists. Back Stabbers sold more than 700,000 copies that first year.

They’d created the Sound of Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love joined Detroit, the home of Motown, and Memphis, the home of Stax Records, as sanctuaries of soul.

Their sound bridged sixties soul and the arrival of funk and disco. Gamble once said someone told him they’d “put the bow tie on funk.” During the 1970s, they arguably dethroned Motown as the kings of R&B, selling millions of records, and in 2005, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“They found a way to marry the Motown machine with the Stax grit,” says Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. “So you get this sound on one level that is glossy and smooth, but at the same time it kind of burns the way we think about Stax.”

Gamble admired Motown, which he calls “the greatest record company that’s ever been in the business.” He and Huff set up a house studio band, MFSB (Mother, Father, Sister, Brother), like Motown’s Funk Brothers. The band featured the rhythm section from the Romeos, a band Huff, Gamble and producer and writer Thom Bell played with on weekends, a group of horns they saw playing a local theater, and a string section composed of retirees from the Philadelphia Orchestra. MFSB’s palette was broader, more ambitious. Mono sound and a focus on hit singles had given way to stereo and the album format. “Stereo was worlds away,” Gamble says. “The music sounds so much better.”

They found seasoned artists and transformed them into national acts. The O’Jays had been around for a decade. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes had been singing for 15 years. Billy Paul was a star only in the Philadelphia-New York corridor. “They knew how to package certain kinds of artists in certain ways,” Neal says. “One of their really big early hits was Billy Paul’s ‘Me and Mrs. Jones.’ What’s more mainstream than a tale about infidelity?”

Like Berry Gordy at Motown, Gamble and Huff set up competing teams of writers. Walter Williams of the O’Jays recalls going to Philadelphia to record (two albums per year in those days) and listening to 40 or 50 songs auditioning for an album. They’d narrow them to 15 or 20 to rehearse extensively and cut in the studio, and then 8, 9 or 10 would make the record.

How involved were Gamble and Huff? “Like they might have been the fourth and fifth member of the group,” Williams recalls. “If Kenny wanted it sung a certain way, he would actually sing it for you. I would always try to outdo him. I’d sing it better and put more into it.”

There was a formula to the albums, Gamble says. “We would pick three or four songs with social messages and three or four songs that were nothing but dance, party songs, then we’d have three or four that were lush ballads, love songs. We tried to write songs that people would relate to for years to come.”

While the business model was based on Motown, the message was different. “This is a black-owned company, but unlike Motown this is a black-owned company that is going to put its politics into the music,” Neal says.

The songs had titles like “For the Love of Money,” “Only the Strong Survive,” “Am I Black Enough for You,” “Wake Up Everybody” and “Love Is the Message.” Neal is partial to “Be for Real,” a Harold Melvin cut that opens with singer Teddy Pendergrass lecturing a girlfriend about her desire for empty possessions. Gamble likes “Ship Ahoy,” a tune about African captives being transported during the slave trade that opens with the sound of whips cracking. Neal says PIR’s songs and artists endure because Gamble and Huff focused on making timeless music, not just making money.

“You cannot explain how you write a song,” Gamble says. “It comes from within your soul. You just pour out your feelings, whether it’s something you personally have gone through or a friend of yours has gone through or someone you didn’t even know.”

The duo still occasionally gets together to write. And advertisers keep knocking to use their songs, as exemplified by the ubiquitous Coors Light spots using “Love Train”. Hip-hop artists are fond of sampling PIR tunes, keeping the royalties flowing. (Sony Legacy and PIR released a four-disc boxed set, Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia in 2008).

Gamble notes there’s still conflict raging in some of the countries listed in “Love Train” nearly 40 years ago. “I think it’s even more relevant today than it was then,” he says. “Those songs turned out to be anthems. We were talking about our feelings, but evidently they were the feelings of millions of people all over the world.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Forty-Years-of-the-Philadelphia-Sound.html#ixzz1IWI6TCNp

Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Life and Times

of Eddie King, Jr.

 

 

The Life and Times of Eddie King, Jr.
by Mark Anthony Neal

Filmmaker Robert Townsend didn’t have to conjure Eddie King, Jr., the lead singer from the fictional soul group The Five Heartbeats, the subjects of Townsend’s 1991 film of the same title. Well known at the time was the role of The Dells, legendary hit-makers with songs like “Oh What a Night” and “Stay (In my Corner),” as the film’s consultants. And while the Dells’ career resembles nothing like the drama that shapes The Five Heartbeats, as veterans of the chitlin’ circuit, they of course had stories to share.

Townsend also could draw on the tradition of the male Soul singer—the proverbial Soul Man—an iconic figure from the 1960s and 1970s that congealed grand narratives of tragedy—shot dead in a motel; shot dead by your father; shot dead in a game of Russian Roulette; killed in an airplane crash; scorched by a pot of boiling grits, paralyzed in a car accident, marrying your dead mentor’s wife months after his death—wedded to even more complicated personal demons—physical abuse of wives and girlfriends; sexual assault of younger female artists; sex with underage girls.

Conventional wisdom is that these tragedies were the price that these men were damned to pay for offering their Godly gifts of voice for sale in the marketplace of the flesh. And immediately we can see Choir Boy, the Five Heartbeats’ falsetto voiced singer, arguing with his preacher dad about the temptations of being out on the road. What was Choir Boy’s story line was likely applicable for the majority of these men who took a leap of faith—literally—and hoped that those gifts from God would translate into some modicum of fame and the ability to live the “good life,” for a generation of black folk, for which such themes were always simply an ideal. The glitz and glamour of those early Motown days were more wishful thinking than anything—just look at the building in Detroit that housed the famed “Hitsville, USA.”

And whatever the tragedies that befell these men, they were not occur in isolation; in the decades before the internet and 24-hour new cycles, and when Jet Magazine was effectively Black America’s social media, the Soul Man was the secular brethren of the equally iconic Race Man—figures who were dually in a noble (and decidedly patriarchal) struggle against good and evil; blackness and whiteness; military aggression and pacifism; sex and love; and “class and crass” to quote another fictional Soul Man, Dream Girls’ Curtis Taylor. These men existed at the same crossroads where legendary Bluesman Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil (and damn if his BET founding namesake ain’t been every bit the devil); a subtle reminder that if Huey Newton or Medgar Evers had been able to carry a tune or two over a Motown backbeat or a Stax horn chart, they might have still been in the line of fire.

When Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats was released in March of 1991, audiences might have still been aching over the shocking murder of Marvin Gaye, 6 years and 362 days earlier. In truth, Michael Wright’s Eddie King, Jr., most evoked the troubled and tragic soul that was David Ruffin, lead singer of the most classic Temptations’ lineup from 1964, until his ouster in 1968, though Five Heartbeats cast-mate Leon would better perfect Ruffin’s cavalier brilliance in his portrait of him for the television mini-series The Temptations (1997).

Townsend’s movie was released only months after the first of two box-set collections of Gaye’s musical career was released, a moment that demanded a re-evaluation of Gaye’s career, which could be heard in the generation of R&B singers that emerged in the 1990s including Kenny Lattimore, Maxwell, D’Angelo and perhaps, most dramatically, Robert Sylvester Kelly. As the quintessential Soul Man (save Sam Cooke, who served as the template), it was not difficult to read Gaye onto Eddie King, Jr. or a generation later, Eddie Murphy’s stellar portrait of the fictional James “Thunder” Early in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls.

In many ways the specter of Marvin Gaye continues to haunt contemporary imaginations of Soul Men. Perhaps it’s because Marvin Gaye was a project incomplete—we all long for what Gaye might have had to say about the Hip-hop generation that was just emerging when he took his last breathe and how he might have engaged the music that was produced in its wake. I for one, wonder what Gaye might have had to say to Mr. Kelly—men who could be accused of, but never convicted of the same crime; like I said there are stories to tell.

But what makes Gaye’s music so singular, is that he never seemed to seek redemption—he seemed almost tragically comfortable with the duality of his experiences and his duel lust for God and the flesh—thinking of his description of sex, fucking really, as “something like sanctified.” Indeed figures as diverse as Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, Ronald Isley, Charlie Wilson—and yes, even Mr. Kelley, have actively sought, and in some cases found redemption.

Even Eddie King, Jr. found his redemption, singing Rance Allen’s “I Feel Like Going On” in one of the most memorable scenes from The Five Heartbeats. There are no such moments in Gaye’s career—even his most lasting performance, singing the National Anthem at the 1983 All-star game in Los Angeles, was not so much an attempt at redemption, as it was one last dig at the failings of American Democracy—that programmed back-beat a reminder of the Black humanity that lie at the center of a radical Democratic project.

And it is perhaps this lack of resolution that makes Marvin Gaye such a difficult cinematic subject—and perhaps the very reason the idea of Eddie King, Jr.—and all the men who contributed to his mythic creation, will continue to resonate well after The Five Heartbeats are forgotten.

 

Posted by MAN

Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Triumph of White Supremacy

 

Black self-loathing has persisted for centuries

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. - Steven Biko

Harriet Tubman risked her life for this?

In this tragic video, young black people demonstrate, with dreadful precision, how the Color Complex still maintains a vice grip on the black psychology. The Color Complex is a concept that explains the pathology of blacks who place enormous value on lighter skin and other Eurocentric features and degrade darker skin and traditionally African aesthetics (In some rare cases, as shown in the video, the reverse is true: Almost in retaliation, darker skinned black folks denigrate lighter skinned black folk). It is a form of internalized racism, a psychosis transmitted from generation to generation.

The most astounding things about this video are the irony and cognitive dissonance.  Often, it is the darker skinned blacks who seem most disgusted by darker skinned people, as if they have never been in possession of a mirror--or have purposely avoided it. (One girl says, "Light skinned people, like myself...." but she is not light skinned by any stretch of the imagination; the extent of the delusion is astonishing.) They assigned characteristics to skin color that have nothing at all to do with the color of one's skin, but everything to do with the content of one's character.  What is most heartbreaking is that so many of these children are convinced of their righteousness and so few are proud to be black.  Thank goodness for the few.

It is almost understandable.  After all, when you live in a society that tells you, overtly and covertly, that blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin are the aesthetic ideal--and that the further you are from that, the less attractive and valuable you are--it is bound to profoundly disturb the psyche.  And the children in this video are profoundly disturbed; let us not pretend otherwise with faulty and myopic arguments about "personal preference."

White supremacy and racism are frightening not simply because they are so insidious, but because they are so incredibly effective.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome has never been more apparent. Or tragic.

Brace yourselves.

 

 

 

 

Friday, April 1, 2011

Fools

 

Zip-a-dee-doo-da

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. — James Baldwin

Remember how blatant racism used to be back in the day?

 

Nowadays, it's much more covert--just as pervasive, but strategically surreptitious.

And remember how whites used to caricature blacks?  These days, they do it in subtle ways.  But they really don't have to.  Thanks to people like Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, and 50 Cent, we get along just fine doing it to ourselves.

 

 

Cloudbank is now accepting poetry submissions for Cloudbank 5.

A prize of $200 will be awarded for one poem or short prose piece.

Address for submissions:
Cloudbank
PO Box 610
Corvallis, Oregon 97339-0610

The deadline for contest submissions is April 30, 2011.

 

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Guidelines:

  1. The contest fee is $15.00 The check should be made out to Cloudbank. All writers who enter the contest will receive a one-year (two-issue) subscription to Cloudbank magazine. (Your subscription will start with the next issue of Cloudbank, unless you request the current issue.)
  2. Submissions without payment will also be considered for publication, but will not be eligible for the prize. We read submissions year-round.
  3. Please do not send more than five poems or short prose pieces (500 words or less) for either the contest or regular submissions. The $15 fee covers up to five poems.
  4. For contest submissions, the writer’s name, address, e-mail address, and the titles of the poems being submitted should be typed on a cover sheet only, not on the pages of poems or short fiction. For non-contest submissions, the writer’s name and address should appear on each page.
  5. We do not accept electronic submissions.
  6. The submitted work may not have been published elsewhere.
  7. Simultaneous submissions: Please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.
  8. Your submissions will not be returned. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) so that we can notify you of acceptance.
  9. Feel free to send prose poems, reviews, essays on poetry, short fiction (500 words max.). We are open to all types of quality writing.
10. For those who do not enter the contest, one-year (two-issue) subscriptions to Cloudbank magazine are $15.00. Individual copies are $8.
11. Two contributors’ copies will be sent to writers whose work appears in the magazine. 
12. If you already have a subscription and want to enter the contest, your subscription will be renewed for two more issues.

Address any questions to:
Michael Malan
Cloudbank, PO Box 610,
Corvallis, Oregon 97339-0610
or michael@cloudbankbooks.com

 

 

 

Children and War

J.L. Powers

www.jlpowers.net, jlpowers@evaporites.com

 May 17, 2010

 Children and War

(working title)

 When American politicians mention the “hidden costs” of war, they are referring to inflation, higher taxes, and medical care for veterans of U.S. wars. Even when we invoke images of human suffering, children and teenagers are often the forgotten part of the story.

Yet who can forget images of the Vietnam “baby lift,” when Amer-Asian children were flown out of Vietnam to the U.S. to be adopted by American families? Who can forget the horror of learning that Iranian children were being sent on suicide missions to clear landmines?[1] Who wasn’t captivated by stories of the “lost boys” of Sudan, who traveled thousands of miles alone through the desert, seeking shelter and safety?

Children, like adults, lose their homes and families during war. They may travel for miles, alone or with others. They become refugees and victims of rape; they are recruited as soldiers; they suffer from PTSD, starvation, malnutrition, disease, and disability. In a recent report, UNICEF stated that from 1985-1995, over 2 million children had been killed in war; 4-5 million had been left disabled; over 12 million had become homeless; more than 1 million had been orphaned or separated from their parents; and over 10 million suffered psychological trauma.[2] Their experiences affect the next generation as well.

This anthology, to be published by Cinco Puntos Press in 2012, will explore all angles of children’s and teenagers’ experiences in war. The core of the book will be personal essays, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and historical narratives, both previously published and original pieces. It may also include photos, artwork, posters, and other debris that depicts the effects of war on children and teens. Though the book will be primarily non-fiction, we may include some fiction, and we are willing to consider pieces about both current and past wars. “War” is defined liberally to include both “official,” declared wars as well as secret, unofficial wars, such as those carried out by governments on civilians in places like Chile, Argentina, and Zimbabwe. All submissions, queries, and suggestions should be sent to J.L. Powers at jlpowers@evaporites.com by June 1, 2011. Pieces of up to 6500 words are fine. If a piece has a higher word count, please email and ask me about it–exceptions can be made. All acceptances are conditional. The publisher exercises final editorial control over which pieces will be included. All contributors will receive payment.

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[1] Steven Stalinsky, “Iran’s Top Strategist, In His Own Words,” The Sun (New York) 14 February 2007. http://www.nysun.com/foreign/irans-top-strategist-in-his-own-words/48638/

[2] UNICEF, “The State of the World’s Children 1996,” http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/1cinwar.htm.

Explaining Congo’s

Endless Civil War

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

A rape vicitm in Livungi, Congo, 2010.

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Published: April 1, 2011

________________________

 

DANCING IN THE GLORY OF MONSTERS

The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

By Jason K. Stearns

380 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.99.

 ________________________

 

 

Some months ago, in a ditch beside one of the main streets of Bunia, a dusty, war-battered city in northeastern Congo, I noticed a small, broken-down, dull green armored car, the gun barrel in its turret tilted awkwardly toward the sky. Removing war debris can be an expensive luxury in a poor country, and the wreck seemed an apt symbol of the indelible mark that 15 years of intermittent conflict has put on this nation.

The fighting has left tens or even hundreds of thousands of women gang-raped and led to what may be millions of war-­related deaths; at its peak, some 3.4 million Congolese (the only one of these tolls we can be remotely sure of) were forced to flee their homes for months or years. But it draws little attention in the United States. As Jason K. Stearns, who has worked for the United Nations in Congo, points out, a study showed that in 2006 even this newspaper gave four times as much coverage to Darfur, although Congolese have died in far greater numbers.

One reason we shy away is the conflict’s stunning complexity. “How,” Stearns asks, “do you cover a war that involves at least 20 different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?” “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is the best account so far: more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitor, Gérard Prunier’s dense and overwhelming “Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.”

A fatal combination long primed this vast country for bloodshed. It is wildly rich in gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium, timber, tin and more. At the same time, after 32 years of being stripped bare by the American-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, it became the largest territory on earth with essentially no functioning ­government.

Then it was as if waves of gasoline were poured onto the tinder. When the Hutu regime that had just carried out the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis was overthrown in 1994, well over a million Hutu fled into eastern Congo, then known as Zaire. These included both the génocidaires and their defeated army (the abandoned armored car in Bunia was theirs) as well as hundreds of thousands of Hutu who had not killed anyone but who feared reprisals at the hands of the Tutsis now running Rwanda.

In their militarized refugee camps, the génocidaires rearmed and began staging raids on Rwanda. To try to put a stop to this and install a friendly regime in the huge country next door, Rwanda, along with Congolese rebel allies, invaded its neighbor in 1996 in what is known as the “first war.” Mobutu’s kleptocracy in Kinshasa rapidly crumbled; the dictator fled overseas and died a few months later. Laurent Kabila, a portly veteran of some years as a rebel in the bush and many more as a shady businessman in exile, now found himself leader of a Congo where almost all public services had collapsed. He was not the man to fix them. Stearns gives a vivid anecdotal picture of Kabila as someone far out of his depth, trying to run a government by literally turning his house into the treasury, with thick wads of bills stashed in a toilet ­cubicle.

Kabila soon parted ways with his Rwandan backers. Then came the “second war”: an invasion by Rwanda and its ally Uganda in 1998. They failed to overthrow Kabila, however, because, dangling political favors and lucrative business deals, he enlisted military help from several other countries, principally Angola and Zimbabwe. A few years later he was assassinated and succeeded by his son Joseph. Eventually, a series of shaky peace deals ended much of the fighting.

But, as Stearns says, “like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars.” For example, Uganda and Rwanda fell out badly with each other and fought on Congo soil. Each country then backed rival sets of brutal Congolese warlords who sprang up in the country’s lawless, mineral-rich east. And when Rwanda’s Hutu-Tutsi conflict spilled over the border, it fatally inflamed complex, longstanding tensions between Congolese Tutsis and other ethnic groups. This is merely the beginning of the list.

The task facing anyone who tries to tell this whole story is formidable, but Stearns by and large rises to it. He has lived in the country, and has done a raft of interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got there. Occasionally the chain of names of people and places temporarily swamps the reader, but on the whole his picture is clear, made painfully real by a series of close-up portraits.

In one crowded refugee camp there were no menstrual pads; women could use only rags that, repeatedly washed out, left rivulets between the tents streaked with blood, as if a reminder of the carnage they were fleeing. Or here is a Rwandan Army officer from a death squad that took revenge on Hutu refugees, including women and children, telling Stearns: “We could do over a hundred a day. . . . We used ropes. It was the fastest way and we didn’t spill blood. Two of us would place a guy on the ground, wrap a rope around his neck once, then pull hard.”

Congo’s history is interwoven with all of its neighbors, but none more closely than Rwanda, whose government in the 1990s understandably feared that Congo-based génocidaires could continue to rampage over the border and slaughter more Tutsi. But the genocide in no way excuses subsequent Rwandan massacres of tens of thousands of Hutu in Congo. Nor the way Rwanda quickly became the latest in the long string of outsiders — from Atlantic slave traders to Belgian colonizers to mining multinationals — who have so plundered this territory.

Stearns is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a United Nations report he contributed to. But he does quote the Rwandan strongman and current president Paul Kagame as calling his military intervention “self-sustaining,” and cites an estimate that the Rwandan Army and allied businesses reaped some $250 million in Congolese minerals profits at the height of the second war. Such figures are backed up in abundant detail in a series of United Nations reports, and ultimately led Sweden and the Netherlands to suspend aid to Rwanda.

Not so the United States. It has supported Kagame for years, contributing indirectly to Congo’s suffering. How this media-savvy autocrat has managed to convince so many American journalists, diplomats and political leaders that he is a great statesman is worth a book in itself.

No account of Congo can yet have a happy ending. Although Stearns dutifully makes some policy proposals — more carefully directed aid with conditions on it; more stringent regulation of “mining cowboys”; a mechanism for holding the worst perpetrators to account — he is wise enough to know how difficult it will be to halt 15 years of violence and pillage. Indeed, the price of recent peace deals has been the incorporation of a number of rapacious warlords and their troops into the ill-­disciplined Congolese national army.

That wrecked armored car by the roadside in Bunia? It’s still there. A friend sent me a cellphone photo the other day. Only now, like a trophy, it has been lifted up onto a concrete pedestal, which is painted with the name of a nearby army unit.

============

Adam Hochschild’s “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” will be published next month.

Global Film Series:

"The World Through

Women's Eyes"

On April 7-8, The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism will host our inaugural film series.  This year’s theme is “The World Through Women’s Eyes” where we explore social issues related to women worldwide through documentary film and panel discussions.  The series will also explore the intersection of journalism, documentary film and activism.  Our goal is to support filmmaking and reporting on women’s human rights while furthering discussions of solutions to these pervasive issues.

The series will bring together filmmakers, journalists, students, activists and scholars such as Abigail Disney, filmmakers Virginia Williams, Renée Bergan. Dawn Sinclair Shapiro, and Risa Morimoto, documentary photographer Marcus Bleasdale, and activists Agnes Kamara-Umunna, Naheed Bahram and Sunita Viswanath from Women for Afghan Women to name a few.  We will feature films from Afghanistan, India, Haiti, Liberia and the Congo over this two-day event.

“We intend to use this series as a platform for not just viewing films but for significant discussions about continuing the wonderful filmmaking and finding ways to forge partnerships among foreign correspondents, filmmakers, producers and student journalists. We want to listen to activists and come up with ideas to keep the world’s most horrific practices against women in the public discussion,” said Associate Professor Lonnie Isabel, chair and founder of the event and director of the school’s International Reporting Program.

This series is planned as the first of an annual festival that will, in subsequent years award grants for student documentary filmmakers.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism opened in 2006 under its Founding Dean Steve Shepard, former editor-in-chief of Business Week. The three-semester master’s program offers a converged curriculum and a state-of-the-art facility.

Co-sponsors of the film series include the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the International Reporting Project. Partners include the Daphne Foundation, the Overseas Press Club and Women for Afghan Women.

For more information, please contact festival coordinator Brianna Hyneman recreatingbri@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter for updates and to make suggestions for films you’d like to see at the festival. We hope to see you there in April!

To learn more about us, check out the International Reporting Program and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

LOCATION OF EVENT

APRIL 7: CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
219 W. 40th Street, Third Floor, New York, NY
(between 7th and 8th Avenue)

APRIL 8: TIME LIFE BUILDING
1271 Avenue of the Americas (50th), 8th floor
New York, NY

Haiti:

Where Did the Money Go?

- Film@11 series on NGOs in Haiti

Submitted by CHAN on March 25, 2011 - 14:04

In January 2011, Film@11, a media group based in New York, released an informative documentary called 'Haiti: Where Did the Money Go?' that explores NGO work in Haiti post-earthquake.

Ten months after the January 12th earthquake, we traveled to Haiti to see what was being done with the $1.4 billion dollars US citizens had donated to help the Haitian people rebuild. Upon our arrival, we learned Hurricane Tomas was scheduled to hit Haiti that week and an outbreak of cholera was just starting up. In the first episode of this 5-part series, we take you into the Canaan II displaced persons camp outside Port-au-Prince. We’ll let the footage speak for itself.

You can watch all five episodes below (via YouTube):

Part 1:Part 2:Part 3:Part 4:Part 5: