Lou Myers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/lou-myers-dies-different-world-actor_n_2729536.html

A Different World, yes. Most definitely. But people shouldn't forget his masterful turns as Wining Boy( The Piano Lesson) and Stool Pigeon ( King Hedley the II). On TV he was so charismatic as a comic griot, but on stage he reminded me of what Sisqueros said of Hart Crane, that he " could not paint his eyes open, for that there was too much suffering in them"

Wining Boy is one of the great ensemble characters in the history of theater. He is an faded recording star, a boozer, and a soul overwhelmed by all the stories in his head, and the way it pours out on stage (in inference and not exposition )makes it all the more palpable to watch. But he also survives. There is blues in his life, but there is humanity, kindness, and the way that he shows it points to two of the most powerful themes in Wilson's work: that black men suffered in this century, and that if we wallow in it, we will die. What an actor. What a life. Far thee well, sir

The Broken Tower

I think that no jaundiced and hesitant Hart Crane Fan( LOVE White Buildings, DETEST The Bridge) would be more hesitant to like The Broken Tower, the bio pic in which James Franco plays the doomed lyric poet in his rise and fall as a literary celebrity, than moi. I will say, however, that the movie is a bloodless train wreck. 

Crane had one of the first celebrity poet careers: he shot to a staggering stardom at a staggeringly young age with Buildings, lived the life of a poet-celebrity, crashed and burned with Bridge, a staggeringly pretentious failure of an epic poem, and committed suicide shortly afterwords. The sadness for me lies in how close the sketches of Key West were, how Crane the artist knew he had to reign it in, get back to basics, and focus on his gifts as a imagistic lyric poet. The Crane of White Buildings, and a good deal of the Key west had discipline, an ear, a eye for narrative, and sense of lyric that served a poem rather than drawing attention to itself.

That Crane was no where to be seen in The Broken Tower. The Crane of this movie, and the Crane of The Bridge was a fucking mess. Windy, grandiose, and a bit beyond ridiculous at times, the Bridge is an epic poem that tries to capture America line by grandiose pseudo shakespearean line. And though I was impressed by the relative professionalism of Franco, I got tired of the rote tortured artist scenes in Tower, and how they fed into the myth of The Bridge. Franco doesn't introduce crane to the modern world as much as he repackages and sells the archetype of the tortured artist to another generation that doesn't need it. A gay man who created his own lyrical idiom in poetry, who went against so many currents that he became a wave in himself, Crane suffered tremendously, and I do not discount that. But putting it on parade without giving any context to his work, the thing he did to mitigate that suffering, does no one any favors.

But it wasn't an unintentionally funny celebrity train wreck. I'll give Franco that.

On Inez Andrews.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5UDBf9Q2bc

My Grandmother had over two thousand records, eight tracks and cassette tapes. Though a fan of the Allman brothers, and the occasional Hall And Oates single, her record collection ran as a history of black music in America before hip hop, ranging from Louis Armstrong’s singles with the Hot Five to Prince’s Sign Of The Times. She collected them between 1942, when she started making decent money working for the army and running a pool hall, and 1990, when her health started to go bad and my father relapsed for the final time. Industrious enough with cash, she bought a house in 1961 that had  a remarkably decked out basement:  A bedroom, bathroom, and a living room space that accommodated two beds, a card table, a stocked bar, and more than enough room for her records.

If you asked her on the right day who her favorite artist was, her answer would have been a myriad of people. On a great deal of those days, her answer would have been Inez Andrews. I remember early Sunday afternoons, when my dad would leave my brother and I at her house to roam the streets, and she would sit in the basement, draw in the windows, turn on a little light beige lamp and listen to this record. She would sit with my uncle Moe, smoke a pack of Kool's, have me pour her two shots of gin and stare out into the brown and black of the room. She would not say a word, just listen and look the light and dark of a space that had so much history to her.

The thing that Christians so easily forget is how Andrews, like almost all of the great gospel women , faced vicious opposition from the church until people realized her talent could turn a profit. Her contralto, with its intensity and power, was considered improper for church ears, but if you listen to this, you can hear many of the things that made the patriarchy of the black church nervous. Like all the great gospel artists, Andrews’s art was almost exclusively in inference and metaphor. Her Mary, instead of a stock character in a bible narrative about Jesus, is placed at the center of the story. In Andrews’ hands, she is someone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired, who, in her shattering grief over her loss, is teetering between belief and heresy.

She doesn’t call on god, the stern god of the Old Testament who demands her endless sacrifice. She doesn’t even call on god in generalities. No, Andrews’ Mary calls on Jesus, the son, the one that offers a progressive vision of faith, and she demands that he fix her brother’s death Now. And the man she imagine in that poetic hook (“ Mary don’t you weep/ Martha don’t you moan/Pharaoh’s army is drowned in the red sea”) is a comforter directly in the black church’s sense of the word, a healer, someone interested in her humanity. In other words, someone completely divorced from modern church patriarchy.  There is so much here, in both form and content; so much in relation to power, faith, and expressing oneself as an artist in a medium that doesn’t want you to, and I thoroughly recommend that all of the smart people I know check her out.

She passed away in December. I didn't know she was from my grandmother's hometown.