Listening to saxophonist Anthony Braxton’s album, Duets (1993), with bassist Mario Pavone, on the label Music & Arts, it’s gratifying how much the music actually does sound like a conversation, with one speaker telling a long oddly exhilarating story to someone who listens and makes somber comments. Without words or the human voice, the breath that enters a saxophone, or the fingers on the strings of a bass, must be deft enough to produce a tone, a pace, and an intensity that compel listening, inspire thought, and bring forth feeling. That returns music to a very individual, very private realm. I haven’t listened to jazz in the last several years as much as I used to, as I have been impatient to hear direct and explicit thoughts, though there’s an expansive feel to jazz that I miss: and Anthony Braxton, devoted to music, mathematics, and chess, is a legendary and legendarily complex figure, and he has been the subject of various critical studies, including Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton by Graham Lock (Da Capo, 1988) and The Music of Anthony Braxton by Mike Heffley (Greenwood Publishing, 1996). Ronald Radano in New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (University of Chicago, 1993) discusses Braxton’s embrace of European modernist and African-American music traditions, specifying “a series of oppositional modalities: composition vs. improvisation, control vs. freedom, order vs. indeterminacy, lyricism vs. abstraction, tonality vs. atonality, jazz vs. concert music, black vs. white” to be found in Braxton’s music (188). However, listening to Braxton’s early Three Compositions of New Jazz (Delmark, 1991; originally released in 1968, Braxton’s first record) sounds like hearing a family argument, hysterical, with deceptive lulls of understanding and agreement. The liner notes quote Braxton as saying the time of the individual is gone—which now seems one of those bizarre things an artist says when he’s trying to grow beyond his previous limitations, as no one is more individual than Braxton.

Don Byron: “It’s just that the clarinet takes you to a different type of work than people are accustomed to seeing black musicians play. Okay, you want to play classical music, you can do that on the clarinet. You want to play Indian music authentically, you can do that on the clarinet. You want to play all kinds of Eastern European, not just the Jewish stuff, but Macedonian, Romanian, Bulgarian, all those things are part of the legacy of the clarinet. Clarinet is a very international instrument and people just don’t expect me to do it. If anybody else does it, ‘Oh, he’s just doin’ that.’ But people don’t expect me to do it. And that’s their thing. It’s not my thing” (Interview with Byron in “Visionaries and Eclectics,” Growing Up with Jazz, by W. Royal Stokes, Oxford, 2005; 135). Don Byron’s discography includes Tuskegee Experiments, Don Byron plays the Music of Mickey Katz, Music for Six Musicians, Bug Music, A Fine Line, and Ivey-Divey. I first heard Bryon’s Tuskegee Experiments and liked it—it opens the ears, opens the mind—but I liked his Mickey Katz album more as it was more melodious. Byron’s explorations make him always interesting to listen to.

A canon can be described as a code of laws, a calendar of saints, or a list of essential works. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written a book, Essential Canon (Johns Hopkins, 2004), in which he lists hundreds of domestic and international films he considers important. Harold Bloom has produced The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (Harcourt, 1994), which of course has ancient and international roots. A canon offers reference to what we value of the past, but also offers an indication of our values now. The usual literary titles that come up when folk discuss a canon include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the works of Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Henry James, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. A film canon of 1980 might have included works by directors such as Antonioni, Bergman, Bertolucci, Godard, Kurosawa, Pasolini, Rohmer, Truffaut, and Welles, but now it would be likely to include Robert Altman, Claire Denis, Hsiao-hsien Hou, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, Sokurov, Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Ming-liang Tsai, and Agnes Varda. Must the new replace the old, or can they both exist, for artists and audiences? The African-American painter Kerry James Marshall said, in a February 1998 interview, “I think as artists in the late 20th century, we inherit or are the beneficiaries of all of the stylistic and conceptual developments that artists from previous generations have handed down to us. And it’s not that we necessarily have to react against it all the time, but I think we simply incorporate it and then find ways to synthesize all of those things into something that none of the artists who preceded us had access to or had an opportunity to achieve. If I look back at da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, you know, Raphael, Delacroix, all of those people. If I look back at those artists’ work, none of them had access to the kinds of formal developments that came with people like Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock and De Kooning and Rothko. They didn’t have access to that. So there was a way in which they didn’t have the ingredients to put things together in ways that artists who are operating in this historical moment can. So I’m not reacting against tradition—I’m simply trying to find a way to extend the dialogue and make paintings that appear to be fresh in some way” (Callaloo, Vol. 21 No. 1; 263-272). That seems like a useful approach for the early twenty-first century and ever onward.

South Africa has not been much on my cultural radar recently. Except for hearing that Diana Ross had been a performer with Christina Aguilera, Deborah Cox, and Westlife in a November 2005 benefit concert in South Africa for two charities, Unite Against Hunger and The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, I have heard little about the country. The film Cape of Good Hope, set in South Africa, seems designed to appeal to a broad South African audience—and features a white South African, Kate (Debbie Brown), who runs Good Hope, an animal rescue center, and the Indian woman who works for her, Sharifa (Quanita Adams), and a Congolese immigrant who helps with the dogs, Jean Claude (Eriq Ebouaney), and the little black African boy, Thabo (Kamo Masilo), whom the proprietor runs into and gives a part-time job to, an opportunity that leads to the boy introducing the Congolese man to his mother, Lindiwe (Nthati Moshesh). The film offers a view of the new South Africa, a view that may be appealing to an international audience, and the spirit of the film is open and pleasant, and the film recognizes the difficulties in people’s lives while suggesting the value of compassion, common sense, hard work, sacrifice, and study. Cape of Good Hope bears some resemblance to sentimental Hollywood comedies—it is a film during which one can take deep breaths, as there’s a sense of an unfolding human story that will not betray one’s hopes—but I haven’t seen many Hollywood comedies in which, as in this film, a woman guiltlessly has an affair with a married man; or in which a much-married aging mother with a lover younger than her daughter, a mother with a good relationship to her daughter, tells her daughter that the many marriages that her daughter disapproves of have given that daughter her trust fund and then calls her daughter a little ungrateful bitch; and in which a white employer lusts after and tries to rape his African cook and housekeeper and railroads her into jail on a false charge that she burglarized his house—with the legacy of racism, sexual exploitation, and poverty observable. They’re just not turning out a lot of those kinds of romantic comedies in Hollywood—and this is a film in which people’s ordinary lives are complicated: the Indian woman coworker, Sharifa, feels great stress as she and her husband Habib (David Issacs) try to conceive a child; and the animal rescue center owner, Kate, is letting her affair with a married man blind her to the fact that the local vet, Dr. Morne (actor Morne Visser, who seems like a cross between Russell Crowe and John C. Reilly), is interested in her. Kate (Debbie Brown) is alienated from her father, who left her mother when Kate was six, as she assumed her father was the betraying parent; and that, one assumes, has affected her relation to men. The vet who likes her is getting over his wife’s death. The drama in Cape of Good Hope, for the most part, only raises the temperature—the conflict and tension—slightly and that is quite enough. There are enough story-lines for several films, and that makes the film a lot like life. The Congolese immigrant Jean Claude is a trained astronomer, and was a professor in his own country, and he is doing menial labor for the animal rescue center Good Hope, while volunteering during weekends at a planetarium; and he is also applying to emigrate to the West. The boy Thabo—likable, and smart to the point of being cunning—holds his own in every scene he’s in (a good actor already, what a better actor Kamo Masilo might become with training and support); and his eyes contain adventure and an understanding beyond his years. His mother Lindiwe studies hard but is forced too often to sacrifice her education for her job (she’s reprimanded by a black woman professor). Lindiwe’s mother, Lillian Dube as Mama Daraza, wants her to marry the local preacher; and the mother is brutal in her attempts to get her daughter to marry for financial security (who would expect to find Jane Austen themes in Africa?). The scenes in which Lindiwe (Nthati Moshesh) and Jean Claude (Eriq Ebouaney) get to know each other have a lot of silence in them but they’re not empty—they’re full of attraction and hope; and when he finally proposes to her, offering nothing but his good character and intentions and willingness to give up his immediate plans to emigrate, it is entirely moving (I cried). The ending of Cape of Good Hope is precipitated by Lindiwe’s male employer’s uncompleted sexual assault and baseless charges, which come to involve everyone; and while that may make the denouement too tidy, it has a symbolic completeness. This is an easily enjoyable film that does not disrespect the viewer’s intelligence. The level of the acting is generally good—and I had never seen Debbie Brown before, but she quickly became an intimate acquaintance. The locations in the film are all perfect—all look authentic, from the shanty towns to the wealthy estates to the animal shelter to the fish and chips place where Dr. Morne takes Kate for a late night meal. Cape of Good Hope was directed by Mark Bamford, who was born in Kentucky, reared in New York, and has been living in South Africa for a few years.

The celibate refuses sex; and amuses, bores, disgusts, mystifies, shocks, outrages. The celibate rejects not only an act or experience, but a metaphor—a whole symbology of human existence as revolving around communion and climax. The celibate believes life has something, or many things, to offer other than fucking. The Society for Human Sexuality (Sexuality.org) has noted several reasons for celibacy: chastity before marriage; spiritual profession; response to molestation; low sex drive; sexual fasting to make sex more intense and special; and feminist rejection; and has named several well-known celibates: Isaac Newton, Cliff Richard, Stevie Smith, Nikola Tesla, and Simone Weil.

How do we know we have learned something? We change.

One random thought: I have looked forward to the death of a White Witch, but the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, a film directed by Andrew Adamson, based on C. S. Lewis’s novel, was not what I had in mind. Another random thought: The technical resources of film are now greater than that of almost any art that has existed, and that means that even films we consider deficient often have something to recommend them—basic professionalism, if nothing else. One more random thought: People have spoken about the casting couch that some actresses have tripped over, but has anyone tracked the careers of casting directors consistently faced with the delectation of child actors? Are there some who have ended their days in jail for pedophilia? I found myself thinking these random thoughts during the first third of Chronicle of Narnia, a family film about magic and war, betrayal and redemption. It is actually a story one can imagine a parent telling a child, but there is not enough intellectual depth or genuine spiritual substance in the story: after four children of varying ages have been sent by their mother to live with a rich acquaintance in the country, rather than have them chance the war-time bombing of London, the kids amuse themselves by playing hide-and-seek and the youngest child, a girl, enters a wardrobe and finds the entrance to a magical world, Narnia, where she meets a faun (Mr. Tumnus, played by James McAvoy), who tells her about the one-hundred year winter instituted by the icy authority of Jadis, the White Witch (Tilda Swinton). Eventually all four children enter Narnia and become involved with a battle against the White Witch, who takes one of them prisoner, the headstrong, sometimes untrustworthy Edmund (Skandar Keynes), the youngest of two brothers. Valiant and chaste Peter, the oldest child and brother (William Moseley), and the next oldest, the changeling Susan (Anna Popplewell), in between being a girl and a young woman, and the youngest child of all, the sweet and smart Lucy (Georgie Henley), seek the help of the heroic lion Aslan (Liam Neeson) to retrieve their brother Edmund. Chronicles of Narnia is full of talking animals and frightening beasts. Its pacing and its mood are like that of a lullaby, which is not entirely a good thing, though I prefer that to an artificially restless style. The film looks sumptuous, but not overwhelmingly so. Chronicles of Narnia began to work for me when the children meet helpful, funny beavers (Ray Winstone, Dawn French) who feed and counsel them. The three children are soon on the run from the White Witch and her wolves as they try to reach Aslan, the lion, for help. Aslan also expects their help, as there had been prophesy that two human males and two human females would help overthrow the reign of the witch. The children go into training in the lion’s camp, and Aslan’s troops rescue Edmund, and Aslan is called to make a sacrifice. By the time of rolling of the closing credits, I had found the production likable, though it left me with unanswered questions—such as, don’t the children, who seem inclined to stay in Narnia, miss their parents?

Clifford’s Blues (1999), the novel by John A. Williams from Coffee House Press, about a black male jazz musician who is in Germany during Hitler’s reign and who, after his affair with a German man is discovered, is sent to a concentration camp, to Dachau, where he becomes the sexual pet of an officer who had been someone he avoided when he was free. The novel, which covers years, is full of the horror of the world war and the rapacious murder of people considered decadent or inferior or socially rebellious—gays, Jews, communists; and the novel lives on more than one level—and has scenes of high and low comedy as well as political drama and existential tragedy. While I admire John A. Williams’ other books—particularly his novels Sissie and Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light and his work of fact, The King God Didn’t Save, which was about Martin Luther King Jr.—I think his novel about a serious writer, !Click Song, and Clifford’s Blues are probably his best. Clifford’s Blues seems his most outrageous, his most unpredictable novel; and yet, for all its transgressions, it is a book with a moral center. Clifford Pepperidge performs in a jazz band for German officers and their wives and lovers who like the music, and he becomes a cook and houseman not only for the German officer who desires him but for the ignorant farm girl who becomes that officer’s wife and Clifford’s sometime lover. Sexual indulgence, liquor and drunkenness, fear, malice, black marketeering, stealing the gold out of the teeth of dead people and more are found here. I’m not sure that James Baldwin, who wrote works exploring issues of being and community, and race and sexuality, ever created a work as rich. James Baldwin chronicled folk beliefs (Go Tell It On the Mountain) and was a literary modernist exploring consciousness (Another Country), a sex radical (Giovanni’s Room), a social prophet (The Fire Next Time), a memoirist of bohemian youth (Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone), and a reconciler of painful differences (Just Above My Head), but he may have been too self-conscious—too much the public intellectual—to produce anything so free. Baldwin, whose prominence meant he was subject to the disapproval of men who preferred their rhetoric simple and hostile (Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver), and who envied his fame (Ishmael Reed), has also been criticized more recently by people who would have preferred him to be sexually crude—such as novelist Edmund White; and while White gave Baldwin’s Just Above My Head a good review while Baldwin was alive, now that Baldwin is dead, White says disparaging things about Baldwin’s work—which is in accord with White’s sister saying that White “charms everyone he’s with but then he turns around and talks about you behind your back” (according to Original Youth: The Real Story of Edmund White’s Boyhood by White’s nephew Keith Fleming, quoted in the January 22, 2005 Guardian, a British paper). About Giovanni’s Room Edmund White was quoted in the January 22, 2005 Guardian as saying, “I mean, Giovanni’s Room is a very beautiful book, but in terms of gay politics, if you care about that, it’s not a very evolved book, because the idea behind it is, the only desirable men are straight men. And if they ever submit to your blandishments they’re worthless, because they’re now gay. It’s that self-hating attitude of the 1950s, which I knew when I was a boy.” Giovanni Room’s does not reject homosexuality but the rather a practice of sexuality that does not respect individuality or dignity or personal passion. Also, the fact is that in Giovanni’s Room David, in rejecting the genuine love of Giovanni, has done something that damns him in his own eyes, a moral judgment beyond Edmund White’s perception. Edmund White is, of course, a fool’s fool; and he thinks that the preening and promiscuity that Baldwin rejected in Giovanni’s Room is to be affirmed: White was quoted by The Guardian as having said, “I do believe sex is worth dying for”; and White’s own works are reputed to cater to a provincial cult. (If one were to write honestly about homosexual life in the western world today, one would have to talk not only about increased social acceptance, public representation, and the push for marriage rights: one would have to talk as well about the ongoing practices of unsafe sex in a time of disease, crystal meth and other addictions, xenophobia, and big-cock and best-ass contests held in gay bars, things the New York gay press has reported on.) The matter of self-hatred is also one that must be examined: the men in Giovanni’s Room who hate themselves are the gay bar habituates who cannot resist promiscuity and find it impossible to establish long-lasting relationships: it is not Baldwin’s novel that lacks evolution but the white gay men he depicts in Paris bars. Baldwin, who respected himself enough to situate his own sensibility as the central consciousness in all his work, and who wrote on behalf of the American civil rights movement benefiting blacks, and who went to England to publish a work, Giovanni’s Room, that his American publisher refused to publish and told him would ruin his career because of its frank description of love and sex between men cannot be said to be self-hating in any terms understood by sane men. Baldwin, like Gore Vidal, assumed that bisexuality and homosexuality were facts that were part of a larger world; and depicted them as such: and that is what John A. Williams also assumes in Clifford’s Blues—Williams presents various transgressions without ever forgetting what the applicable moral, personal, and social standards of his characters are, and those standards are named without preaching: his main character Clifford Pepperidge thinks after a bout of sex with two wives of German officers that it “was like all of us shuffling toward the end of the world, and since we were on our way, nothing mattered” (Clifford’s Blues, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 1999; 118). What many minorities want, and what white gay men seem to expect (possibly as part of their white male privileges), is acceptance without standards, without ever being subject to criticism, but that is the exact opposite of the way genuine artists and intellectuals respond—with their mission to tell the truth, to establish values, to discuss what is useful.

Cold Fever is a film about a Japanese man who travels to Iceland to perform funeral rites for his parents who died in a river accident there seven years before; and it is a very strange film—and more than fifteen years after I had begun seeing foreign films, and independent and quirky Hollywood films, it confirmed for me the absolute wonder of cinema. It renewed my vision; and confirmed a high standard. The films of Bertolucci, Bergman, Bresson, Malle, Von Trotta, Welles, and others had not been inoculation against liking Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling or the acting of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in Dracula, but Cold Fever made such pleasures less desired, less likely. Directed by Fridrik Fridriksson, Cold Fever features Masatoshi Nagase as Hirata, the young Japanese man, and Seijun Suzuki as his grandfather, who encourages him to make the trip, and also presents American actors Lili Taylor and Fisher Sevens as tourists, among local Icelandic actors. “The volcanic Icelandic landscape with its plumes of steam jetting up through ice-crusted crags has the hallucinatory beauty of a science-fiction wonderland,” wrote Stephen Holden in his April 5, 1996 New York Times review, in which he described the film as having a “steady allegorical resonance,” with a “humor so disarming that it lends an alluring sweetness to a film that is essentially a meditation on the nature of death.”

I recall that in the mid-1980s there were a lot of people writing poems about musicians John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis in a writing workshop I attended, House of Poets, in Harlem, with a group of writers young and old, male and female. John Coltrane (1926-1967), especially, was a kind of secular saint; although in light of Coltrane’s spiritual concerns, including a concern for a closer relationship with divinity, the word secular may be inappropriate. Many consider his greatest work to be A Love Supreme; and Coltrane has been inspiring other musicians and writers for decades. A Love Supreme, recorded in December 1964 and released by Impulse the next year, features Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. The music album does sound like prayer and praise, and it’s hard not to be impressed by Coltrane’s confidence and sincerity, and his being unafraid of sounding (and looking) like a serious man. Those were the days—or rather, that was the man. “Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts/ fears and emotions—time—all related/ all made from one…all made in one./ Blessed be His name,” are lines from Coltrane’s poem “A Love Supreme.” One can accept an idea of a god as the symbol of the connection between all of life’s energies, and all human spirits, though it is a symbol Coltrane, like many, grants authority and personality. “No road is an easy one, but they all/ go back to God.”

Lonnie Rashid Lynn, the hip-hop artist better known as Common, formerly Common Sense, has a discography that includes Can I Borrow a Dollar?, Resurrection, One Day It’ll All Make Sense, Like Water for Chocolate, Electric Circus, and Be. People who do not know who Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Canada Lee, or Paul Robeson are, know what Common looks like, as he has been presented in a wide range of magazines and newspapers, dressed in sweaters, ties, hats, and jeans, mixing the casual and the formal. People, especially the young, who may not have read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison, people who have not seen the choreography of Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, or Bill T. Jones, people who wouldn’t recognize the art of Henry Tanner or Beauford Delaney if it was twelve inches in front of their eyes, people who have not heard the voices of Leontyne Price, Denyce Graves, Shirley Verrett, or Jessye Norman, know what Common sounds like. That is the triumph of rap, and the hip-hop culture it is part of, in our time; and the thugs who have harassed African-American communities for decades find celebration in the work of many rappers, but not all—and Common seems to be trying to grow into something new, not confined to the music, breakdancing, graffiti, record-scratching disc jockeys, rhyming masters of ceremonies, and producers usually affiliated with hip-hop, as evidenced by Electric Circus (2002), which was controversial—and for which Common was saluted by established critics but subjected to harsh evaluations and rumor by men on the street, for its references to elements outside of hip-hop. (Even Common’s wardrobe received comment.) Mark Anthony Neale in an online January 10, 2003 PopMatters column wrote, “Electric Circus is part of a conscious attempt by Common and his fellow travelers, like The Roots and Talib Kweli, to wrest control of the artistic vanguard within hip-hop. While Talib’s Quality and The Roots’ Phrenology break new ground for both acts, Electric Circus is clearly the most adventurous of the trio of releases.” Neale commends Common for his move away from sexism and homophobia, and admires Common’s collaborations on the recording with Jill Scott and Erykah Badu. Matt Cibula, writing in Ink Blot magazine available online, wrote that Electric Circus “makes no concessions to anyone. This album is drenched in musical color that has nothing to do with any fashion or fad: several songs eschew hip-hop altogether,” and he approvingly commented on the fusions of soul, rock, and harmonic pop musics. The beginnings of a rap tradition that is comprehensive—embodying all we are, know, and want—as well as innovative may exist in the work of Common, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Dead Prez, Digital Underground, Disposable Heroes, Kanye West, Talib Kweli, LL Cool J, MCLyte, Me Phi Me, Mos Def, Nelly, Paris, Queen Latifah, the Roots, and Sister Souljah, but it is not yet the developed or dominate one. (Are artists in hip-hop allowed to age and continue their creativity with a significant public?) I liked Common’s album Electric Circus when I heard it, but the standards of creativity and knowledge are so low in hip-hop that I wonder if there would have been as much note taken of the recording if it had been done by a rhythm and blues or rock musician.

I always think of Sam Cooke as a suave figure of pleasure, but he had a sound that was both mellow and melancholy, something I’m reminded of when listening to his Portrait of A Legend 1951-1964 (Abkco, 2003) and Night Beat (Abkco, 1995; originally released in 1963 by Tracey Ltd.). Portrait of A Legend collects songs such as “You Send Me,” “Only Sixteen,” “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha,” “Cupid,” “(What A) Wonderful World,” “Chain Gang,” “Bring It On Home to Me,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The devotion and thrill of gratified infatuation, in which love creates serenity and security rather than anxiety or frantic intensity, is the subject of “You Send Me,” and disappointment in young love, ending in sad regret and understanding is the subject of “Only Sixteen.” Cooke’s songs—whether an affirmation of dance, a wistful call for help, a humble declaration of love, a recognition of prison as a fact, an expression of sexual assurance—were a young man’s testament and they often carried a young man’s tenderness. Cooke’s phrasing bears traces of the sung spiritual, but his is obviously not a voice that could ever be anonymous, buried within a tradition. Peter Guralnick suggests in Dream Boogie (Little, Brown, 2005) Sam Cooke’s native gifts and his dedicated effort to develop his craft and appeal, as well as the sometimes unhappy private life that accompanied his work. That Cooke wrote many of the songs he sang is not only admirable: it is the fulfillment of the individuality one hears in his voice: an imaginative and empathic sensibility with a masculine strength and a sweet softness that is almost feminine. Cooke sings as part of the Night Beat collection songs by men such as Charles Brown and Willie Dixon and songs like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” as well as his own “Mean Old World,” in which he says it’s a mean old world without someone to love, and “You Gotta Move,” in which he demands respect in love. Cooke had a singular range and moved acrossed it cooly, without excessive emphasis, without strain. Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 (originally released on vinyl in 1985, and re-released by RCA on compact disc, 2005), recorded in a Miami club, captures the singer on the cusp of a new era, allowing feeling and raw sound to reign over the beauty of form. Cooke, inspired by men such as Louis Armstrong and Charles Brown, inspired artists like Aretha Franklin and Smoky Robinson and the Supremes did a tribute album to Cooke. Sam Cooke was a marvel.

I read Angela Davis’s biography years ago, when I was in high school; and later I read some of her work on women and music and still later I read some of her commentary on prisons. In her biography, first published in 1974 by Random House and republished by International Publishers in 1988, she mentions how she and her sister would speak French and pretend to be from Martinique in a shoe store in Birmingham, Alabama, and how they were subsequently treated well by whites who thought them foreigners but who would have treated them harshly if they had been thought American (local blacks). She described reading The Communist Manifesto and its hitting her like a lightning bolt: she recognized the capitalist system that encouraged social division while it reaped profits. She described her study of literature at the Sorbonne and her political travails. I recall that when she was on the run from the law, after she befriended prisoner George Jackson who was found with a gun it was claimed she had given him (he was killed in what was described as an escape attempt), there were people who kept signs in their windows letting Davis know she could find refuge with them, before she was acquitted in court. It has been reported that her protest against the 1995 all-male march on Washington (the million man march) may have damaged her reputation in the African-American community (what’s the value of an intellectual who simply affirms what a community already thinks; and whose view is not taken as a challenge by a community to grow?); and that she is no longer a member of a communist political party and that she has publicly declared herself a lesbian. She continues to teach at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man (1995), starring Johnny Depp, re-imagines the American western film. Its silvery black-and-white look is the first thing one notices and likes. In the film, Depp is moving to a new place for a job—that is not only a practical matter, it also means that he’s a seeker: and the whole film, what he finds, is then a fulfillment of a journey, vision, a revelation. It is a spiritual and a political film. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote a book about the film, said, “I would define the political and ideological singularity of Dead Man in two ways: that it is the first Western made by a white film-maker that assumes as well as addresses Native American spectators, and that it offers one of the ugliest portrayals of white American capitalism to be found in American movies” (Dead Man, British Film Institute, 2000; 18). Depp stumbles into other people’s beds and in front of their guns—and he kills a man who shot a woman in jealousy when Depp is found in her bedroom, the son of a powerful man who sends trackers after Depp. One of the men involved is one of my favorite villains, Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen)—he raped, killed, and ate his parents. Depp as William Blake is befriended by a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who mocks but protects him and allows him a dignified death.

The star of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Belle De Jour, The Last Metro, The Hunger, Indochine, My Favorite Season, Thieves, Place Vendome, Time Regained, Dancer in the Dark, and 8 Women, Catherine Deneuve may be the only woman worthy of comparison to Garbo. Deneuve’s beauty—whether perceived as girlish, chilly, sensual, or mature—and her subtle, suggestive technique have enriched the film lives of generations.

Sometimes life is just an embarassing mess. I can think of times I crossed the street rather than try to explain to an old acquaintance just how messy things had become. In Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, life is as chaotic as it could be—it is a story about New York and summer heat and desperation and crime and love: a man (Al Pacino as Sonny) robs a bank to pay for the sex-change operation of his lover (Chris Sarandon as Leon), a bad idea, and nothing goes as the robber planned. Al Pacino could not be more dramatic, but this is honest drama—before he gave in to technique and caricature.

It was seeing Placido Domingo in Stiffelio, an opera about a Protestant minister and his wife, on PBS in the 1990s, before I gave up watching television in the mid-90s, that convinced me not only of this singer’s talent, but of his character: he suggested a strength and integrity that are difficult, probably impossible, to fake. Seeing Domingo made me want to see many operas, a still ungratified wish. “Opera is total spectacle, and perhaps for that very reason it is off limits: to go to the opera is a complicated enterprise, you have to reserve seats well in advance, the tickets are expensive, and so you feel you must stay until the end of the performance. I would like to see opera as free and as popular as a movie theater or a wrestling arena…” said Roland Barthes (“The Phantom of the Opera,” The Grain of the Voice, Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus, 1985;186).

William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and died in Accra, Ghana. DuBois, humbling and inspiring, is considered by many the principal African-American intellectual. He wrote for the New York Globe at fifteen, attended Fisk, taught summer school, then attended Harvard and studied philosophy and history and received his master’s degree in 1891. He spent two years studying at the University of Berlin. His Harvard doctoral thesis The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America is still considered a definitive work. DuBois conducted a research project for the University of Pennsylvania, research that led to his book The Philadelphia Negro. He taught at Atlanta University for more than a decade, and entered a disagreement with Booker Washington over the interpretation and direction of Negro life (Washington did not believe in higher education or full political participation for blacks; DuBois did). DuBois offered a respectful but incisive critique of Washington, as well as a celebration of black striving in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, before helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—and DuBois edited the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, though he would become increasingly disenchanted with the organization. “How does it feel to be a problem?” is the question that DuBois and other Negroes were asked, and it is the question with which DuBois begins The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays that reads like a single, complex and digressive thought, answering the question and going beyond it. “Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness,” he wrote (6). However, he felt that progress depended on exceptional men: “Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground” (96). DuBois wrote about barbarity and hope, suffering and practical work, all with a lucid, serene eloquence, an eloquence that was matched with how he lived his life, with wisdom and grace. DuBois was also impressed by the ideals of the 1917 Russian revolution, and visited Russia in 1927. DuBois would publish Black Reconstruction, Dusk of Dawn, and The World and Africa; and he was very interested and involved in the hope for revolution in Africa.

What happened to Faye Dunaway? She was once one of the pillars of the film community, and now, though active, her presence has grown small. Bette Davis, the unforgettable star of All About Eve, Dark Victory, Jezebel, and many other films, used to say that the public was inclined to—wanted to—identify performers with the parts they played. Certain actors, women especially, embody the power and weakness that is the truth about many of us. However, the desire to see star and part as inseparable seems to have worked against Dunaway. Those who care often point to Dunaway’s portrayal of an unhinged Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest as the part that derailed Dunaway’s career. (Mommie Dearest was probably unfair to both Dunaway and Crawford.) However, that film simply may have cemented a growing perception: Dunaway, among her panoply of characters, has played several women of insatiable hunger and indestructible ambition. (She was unafraid of being threatening; and once having seen certain things in someone’s face it is hard to forget them.) Faye Dunaway was in Hurry Sundown, Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Chinatown, and Network before Mommie Dearest; and after Mommie Dearest she was in a large number of theatrical and television productions but few of them equal to her early work—with the possible exceptions being Barfly, Arizona Dream, Don Juan DeMarco, Albino Alligator, The Yards, and The Rules of Attraction.