“I rode a bus, a train and sometimes/ strolling for miles to a movie show/ singing a song, “Shoobedoo” while birds and rich folks flew right on by,” sang the Milwaukee-born Al Jarreau, in the title song of the album We Got By, a recording with themes of survival, pleasure, love, trouble, and mythology. Jarreau, the son of a vicar, first sang in a church choir, an upbringing that may account partly for his perceptible sensitivity, and Jarreau is a vocal inventor—he improvises sounds that suggest emotion and thought and create a unique atmosphere—and his albums are some of the most expansively human, gorgeously sung, produced in the last forty years: his 1970s recordings We Got By and Glow are masterpieces, as far as I’m concerned, and his discography includes Look to the Rainbow, All Fly Home, This Time, L is for Lover, Heaven and Earth, and Tenderness, a live recording that brings together his various musical directions, and the recent Accentuate the Positive, on which he sings “The Nearness of You,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and “My Foolish Heart.” On We Got By, Jarreau performs, “Susan’s Song” about the fear of love, the existence of lasting pain, and the possibility of tenderness between two people; he sings, “I been blind a long time.” In “You Don’t See Me” he sings about frustrated ambition, social isolation, the comfort of drugs, the trajectory of crime and violence—it is a song about a neglected person whose gifts are wasted, and who becomes society’s trouble: “You don’t see me…I’m in your mirror.” In Glow, along with songs by Leon Russell, Elton John, James Taylor, Sylvester Stewart (Sly Stone), and Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jarreau sings several songs he wrote: “Have You Seen the Child,” “Milwaukee,” and “Glow,” with passion, and his songs—about faith, family, and community—themselves nearly have the power of rituals that invoke and fulfill.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a rather predictable man, moving from office to office: he was Virginia governor, then ambassador to France, then national secretary of state, then vice-president to president John Adams, and finally was himself president of the United States in 1801 until 1809. Jefferson was played by Nick Nolte in James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris (1995), and a too-guileless Thandie Newton played Sally Hemings, the slave girl Jefferson was involved with. Jefferson’s commitment to education and fine principles, his pragmatic political projects, and his contradictory relationship to blacks are a lasting and flawed legacy.

Bill T. Jones has achieved through talent and self-assertion as well as social philosophy a presence in American culture that is unusual for a dancer: one thinks not only of his moves, but of his ideas. Jones met and fell in love with his partner Arnie Zane in college, at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and with Zane formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Zane died in 1988. Jones kept the company going, and has also been involved in collaborations with Alvin Ailey ‘s company, and Lyon Opera Ballet and Berlin Opera Ballet as well as with artists such as Toni Morrison and Max Roach. Bill T. Jones has tried for a personal performance style that did not overtly owe Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and other dance masters; and he has worked with people of different body types and dance techniques, seeing his work as visual art and entertainment. Jones has addressed such issues as illness and death, and thinks art can stimulate social change.

One of June Jordan’s poetry collections has a title—Things I Do In the Dark—that I never ceased to find provocative: the things done in the dark might be secrets, might offer danger or pleasure: one might rest in the dark or see films or make love or think quietly or plot revolution. Jordan, a poet and essayist, a teacher and an activist, wrote celebrations and elegies and protestations. My favorite of her poems is probably the timeless “On A New Year’s Eve,” which she begins with “Infinity doesn’t interest me,” and goes on to celebrate the fragile, valuable disappearing things—children’s pleasure, a sunrise, adulation, the movements of animals—and state that “the temporary is the sacred” and the intimacy between two people is what concerns her, what lives in her life and memories, as “all things are dear/ that disappear” (Things That I Do…, Random House, 1997; 73-76). A collected edition has been published of June Jordan’s work, called Directed by Desire (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), following Jordan’s death from cancer in 2002: she lives on in her work. I wish that she continued to live on the earth—and that Saul Bellow, Ray Charles, Shirley Chisholm, Shirley Horne, Ismail Merchant, Richard Pryor, Nina Simone, Luther Vandross, and August Wilson were still with us—all things are dear that disappear.

I am, of course, not an admirer of Michael Jordan, as I’m not a regular follower of basketball or any sport, though I learned rather late an obvious fact—some of the male camaraderie I wanted was more easily found in sports than among the literary. Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls, and was the leading scorer in the National Basketball Association. Driven from Within (Atria, 2005), a book about and partly by Michael Jordan, is basically a marketing book: it talks about Jordan’s life and career—his disciplined family upbringing, the competitive drive to excel, the challenging and supportive sports coaching he received, and his endorsement deals with companies such as Nike and Coke, emanating from and ending in what he refers to as the development of Brand Jordan: it’s mostly about how he has successfully marketed himself, advertising for advertising. The book, edited by Mark Vancil, with apparent contributions from VSA, a design agency, uses quality paper, different type faces, color pictures, and reproductions of various illustrations—drawings, logos, magazine covers, and fold-out photo spreads, to impress. It seems, like Jordan, the product not merely of monumental effort but possibly of monstrous effort: gargantuan ambition, boundless self-affirmation, extraordinary energy, and social power. (Fascinating how work we do not sympathize with seems suspect.) “Whatever I was going to do, I wanted to do it my way. I just wanted the freedom to express myself. It wasn’t about trying to be different for the sake of being different. I just wanted to follow what I felt,” says Jordan (96). These are admirable words and if they were said by someone I respected in a field of interest, they would have greater resonance in me. Jordan mentions being asked to film a commercial in which a marketing team wanted him to wear a hood and look thuggish and he decided to wear what he’d walked in with: clothes that exuded a manly elegance. However, I cannot forget the little I knew about Jordan before seeing this book: refusing to endorse Harvey Gantt, a democrat, against Jesse Helms, the notorious republican, Jordan said, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” and when asked about Nike sweatshops, in which, reportedly, some women were paid less than two dollars a day, Jordan refused to intervene. When I was a boy one of my teachers had wall illustrations with descriptions of people like mathematician and scientist Benjamin Banneker, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, United Nations mediator and Nobel recipient Ralph Bunche, scientist George Washington Carver, and minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr., important people, and while we children liked singers and sportsmen we didn’t confuse most of them with important people. With the greater emphasis on spectacle—and spectatorship—in American life, entertainers have become much more important. I know that Michael Jordan means a lot to many people, though he means nothing to me.

strong>Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film written and directed by Shane Black, and said to be based in part on Brett Halliday’s novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them, is a detective mystery and a black comedy, featuring Robert Downey Jr. as a petty thief who, in escaping from the police, stumbles into an audition and tries out for a part as a detective in a film, and is taken to California for further consideration. He meets a detective, a gay man, bluntly honest and professional, played by Val Kilmer, who is asked to give him pointers on how detectives work. As various mysteries and murders are introduced, and cases unfold, the line between truth and fiction is explored in this entertaining film. Downey meets a young woman he knew as a girl, who has a sad story about her father’s abuse of her younger sister. There’s a scene in which, to avoid detection of their nearness to a dead body, Downey and Kilmer kiss, a calculated distraction, and one that would have been provocative if presented in a film even ten years ago. Both men are entering middle age, and they do not project the same fresh sensuality they did in their youth: part of what is exciting and shocking about the sexuality of young people is their frisky animal quality, another is their innocence; and neither man, both with lines on their still handsome faces, has that kind of energy.

strong>The Libertine, written by Stephen Jeffreys and directed by Laurence Dunmore, was a disappointment to me—and that is to say that it did not fulfill the vague hopes I had for it (regarding beauty, intensity, and transgression). I found myself thinking, This is a minor work—but that is a strange thing to think, unless there is something about the work that challenges what one considers major concerns. The film, which looks like old paintings, is about a decadent writer, the seventeenth-century earl of Rochester, poet John Wilmot, played by Johnny Depp. While many of the men in the film wear makeup and wigs, Wilmot does not wear makeup and his own hair hangs long. He does not wear makeup that is until his syphillis has infested his face and the makeup only partly—and hideously—disguises the fact of disease. Depp’s performance, for me, was a little too comic, a little too flippant. I found other actors in the film more remarkable; and that was a surprise. Depp could have given us more sensual hunger—more need for contact, stimulation. Rosamund Pike plays his neglected and loving wife, Elizabeth; and the scenes featuring her had a quality of nobility, passion, and thought that raised my sense of the poet’s circumstances and possibilities. Pike gives us a woman seduced by her husband’s love letters, and bewildered and hurt by his in-person disregard. She holds out to him love and a sense of decency that he does not attempt to live up to. He acknowledges his self-division, his being more entertained by his own mind than the company of others and his betrayal of his better instincts. He is, as the dialog sugggests, a fascinating character, but while Pike gives us an interesting woman—despite her devotion being a cliché of romanticism—Depp does not truly give us an interesting man. How could such a man inspire this woman’s loyalty? Rosamund Pike was in Pride and Prejudice, as were Tom Hollander, Kelly Reilly, and Rupert Friend: and in Pride and Prejudice, Rosamund Pike was a humble, loving woman, and here, while loving, she declares herself a force, and Hollander, a pandering and pompous parson in Pride is here a confident, proud, sometimes jabbing writer and friend of Wilmot; Reilly, an arrogant, disapproving woman in Pride is here an actress-whore who surprises herself and us with her care for Wilmot, and Rupert Friend, a compelling opportunist in Pride is here a young, fatally brash friend to Wilmot. Friend’s Billy Downs first spoke to Wilmot after Wilmot came to the aid of a thief—Billy realizes that Wilmot’s intercession puts Wilmot at risk, a risk Wilmot acknowledges and accepts. In a brief scene, when Friend is applying stage makeup to Depp and they touch each other, there’s a suggestion of erotic complicity, but the film does not develop that. It’s possible a scene or several scenes of homoeroticism were edited, as rumors of man-love came with the first announcement of the film’s production. Perhaps sex between men was one transgression too many, even for this film, which might be seen as the anti-??Pride and Prejudice??, a repudiation of the idea that personal desires can be reconciled with the dictates of society and nation. Nonetheless, when Depp’s Wilmot and Rupert Friend’s Billy Downs are finally seen after an absence—after Wilmot has fled the king’s anger—they are in a tavern with Wilmot leaning heavily against Downs. Rupert Friend is an able member of the cast, but as he is new to film, it’s odd to see Friend given a death scene so soon (he handles it mostly well)—and Friend, along with other cast members, was nominated (Friend for best newcomer)—as the newspaper ads trumpet—for an British independent film award. Samantha Morton plays an actress-whore Wilmot falls for (neither he, nor we, know why), and to whom Wilmot gives acting lessons; and at first Morton’s own performance was undistinguished but it grew in form and feeling. John Malkovich plays the king, Charles II; and he too conveys the potential of John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester: Charles says that he loves him and that Wilmot could be his Shakespeare and his persuasive public voice in the parliament, but Wilmot satirizes the king in pornographic verse and theater—and the king condemns him: to simply be himself, without recognition or encouragement from the king. As Wilmot’s disease worsens and he looks horrifying, Depp’s performance has a simplicity and vile toughness that come close to making up for his earlier lightness: it is also the character’s punishment for his life, for the risks he took.

Alain Locke’s works—whether the anthology The New Negro, or his anthology of journalism, The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture, edited by Jeffrey C. Steward (Garland, 1983), or his philosophy—The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, edited by Leonard Harris (Temple University Press, 1989)—are inspirations.

Will Jennifer Lopez be allowed to embody more than personal ambition and personal trouble in films, and more than ethnic ambition and ethnic trouble? Will she be placed in stories in which her personality, priorities, and purpose are allowed to affect strangers, the world at large? She has, in addition to producing music recordings and becoming involved in various business ventures, appeared in the films My Family, Selena, Out of Sight, The Cell, The Wedding Planner, Angel Eyes, Maid in Manhattan, Gigli, Jersey Girl, Shall We Dance, Monster-in-Law, and An Unfinished Life. As with Oscar de la Hoya, Beyonce, and Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez’s career carries not only her own hopes, or that of a people, but it often seems a sign of the health of American culture: if she can be loved and respected, maybe we are who and what we have claimed to be all these years.

Yo-Yo Ma is beautiful, as is his music, and both the man and the music have a deepened sense of purpose, and that makes him one of the more rewarding musicians to contemplate. His discography of more than fifty albums includes Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites, Brahms: Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Appalachia Waltz, Japanese Melodies, Made in America: Bernstein, Gershwin, Ives, Kirchner, and Piazzolla: Soul of the Tango, Silk Road Journeys, The Essential Yo-Yo Ma, and Hush with Bobby McFerrin. I still recall that in Yo-Yo Ma’s appearance on morning television with McFerrin (Spontaneous Inventions, Medicine Music, Bang Zoom), these two married men with children held hands at one point and the reporter ignored the gesture, not knowing what to make of it: and I thought their comfort level with their affection and respect for each other terrific. Recently, Yo-Yo Ma has been exploring with other artists the Silk Road heritage—the cultures that arose or intermingled as a result of travels along the ancient trade routes connecting China and Europe, and even Iran (Persia), collectively known as the Silk Road. Born in Paris to Chinese parents, this is part of his personal heritage but Yo-Yo Ma realizes that it is also part of ours: “the internet of antiquity” he called the Silk Road in BBC Music Magazine (November 2005). Yo-Yo Ma was a prodigy, making his Carnegie Hall debut at nine, and he, in middle age, remains in perspective ever open, ever youthful.

Nelson Mandela is one of the rare persons who do not have to sing his own praises, who does not have to remind the world about his significance. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for his activities against apartheid—officially charged with unlawfully leaving the country (to attend a Pan-African conference in Ethiopia) and with incitement to strike—and he was in custody from November 1962, for a five-year sentence that became, after a subsequent conviction for a charge of sabotage, a life sentence, but he was freed, with the help of an international movement against apartheid, in February 1990. Mandela became the first elected president of the free South Africa in May 1994. Nelson Mandela embodies commitment, courage, integrity, the very best of humanity. He was a man of whom much had been expected; and he fulfilled those expectations: he had been born at Qunu, near Umtata, in the Transkei in 1918, and after his father’s death he became the chief’s ward and was groomed for office, but he wanted to become a lawyer. Mandela studied at the University College of Fort Hare; and he joined the African National Congress in 1942, and with people such as Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu he was a youth section leader advocating national self-determination, emphasizing culture and education and land redistribution and trade union rights. They believed in nonviolent activism. Mandela had a law practice with Oliver Tambo that served poor blacks. The African National Congress (ANC) became a prohibited group in 1960; and Mandela began to conduct most of his activities in secrecy, sometimes in disguise. After realizing that no matter how peaceful their activities, they would be met with violence—it had happened again and again—ANC members took up armed struggle. Not long after Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, but he always refused enticements to recant for his release—and people around the world argued and marched for his release, especially during the 1980s. He was released in 1990, then he suspended the armed struggle. Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and was elected in 1994 as the South African president, which he remained until his retirement from public life in 1999.

Thurgood Marshall, worked as a lawyer on behalf of civil rights, and won more cases before the Supreme Court than any other American; and he became a Supreme Court justice in 1967. Marshall, who was born in 1908 and died in 1993, attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and the law school at Howard University in Washington, both Negro schools. Marshall spoke about the distinguished lecturers received by Howard when he was a student: Harvard Law school dean Roscoe Pound, Negro lawyer and United States assistant attorney general Bill Lewis, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Garfield Hayes, and Clarence Darrow, among them. Marshall had been refused admission to the University of Maryland law school because of his skin color, and the first major case he won was suing that university to allow the attendance of an African-American, Donald Gaines Murray. Marshall became chief counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and his cases fought negative discrimination in education, housing, and voting, and included the Brown vs. Board of Education case. He was appointed by John Kennedy to the second circuit’s U.S. Court of Appeals, where he wrote more than one-hundred and fifty decisions, with no major decision being overturned by the Supreme Court. Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall U.S. Solicitor General in 1965 and a Supreme Court judge (formal title: associate justice) in 1967. Thurgood Marshall is for many of us an untarnished legend; and it was a surprise to me when I read a commentary about Marshall by an admirer, writer Juan Williams, “The Many Masks of Thurgood Marshall,” published in the January 31, 1993 Washington Post, in which Juan Williams discussed attempts to withhold from Marshall what he had earned and also to undermine Marshall’s reputation: attorney general Robert Kennedy had been wary of making Marshall an Appeals Court judge, preferring to give him a district court job; Marshall’s confirmation for the Appeals Court position lasted nearly a year, during which his credentials and knowledge of the law were thoroughly questioned; and after his Supreme Court appointment, it was suggested he was not as intellectual or detail-oriented as he might have been; a Carter administration person actually asked Marshall to step down so Carter could appoint someone to the Court; and a book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren, described Marshall as too dependent on his law clerks. Juan Williams wrote about the styles Marshall used to protect himself from various slights that seemed rooted in lack of belief in black competence and intellectual range—by being cantankerous or joking—but that “Unmasked, Marshall was a man who wanted to be appreciated and respected as a hardworking, thoughtful advocate who stood up for individual rights before the American bar. That’s what he wanted and that’s what he was.” In the year 1998, Williams published the hardcover book Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary with Crown, and the paperback was done in year 2000 by Three Rivers Press. It’s been said that Clarence Thomas replaced Marshall on the Supreme Court, but it’s not possible that anyone could.

I sometimes think that Woody Allen’s films might benefit from reviews by architects, interior designers, etiquette counselors and psychoanalysts: his sensibility has become so refined, so special, that it is hard to imagine that many ordinary viewers will have the patience to see that accessible thought and feeling remain at the core of his work, that real questions and dilemmas about relationships, morality, and fundamental human purpose are asked and answered by his films. In strong>Match Point, set in the United Kingdom, Woody Allen has created a film that I imagine would interest, if not satisfy, Henry James and James’ admirer Patricia Highsmith: the film is about a talented, somewhat well-known but struggling young man who becomes involved with a rich London family and through them meets his future English wife and also a young American woman he becomes erotically infatuated with, with the quest for place and pleasure confounding morality, and leading to fatal considerations. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the sun-kissed but sensitive Chris Wilton, a tennis player who becomes a coach at a private club, where he meets Matthew Goode’s Tom Hewett, who introduces Chris to Tom’s sister, loving and understanding Chloe Hewett, played by Emily Mortimer. Scarlett Johansson plays the recklessly sensual Nola Rice, who is Tom’s fiancée. Chris marries Chloe and has an affair with Nola. Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson are almost ridiculously good-looking: a fire-alarm probably should sound when they look at each other—they are dangerous together, and the film might have been called An American Tragedy in London, or What Nola Knew and What Chris Did About It. The film begins with a tennis ball going back and forth over a net, and commentary about luck—but it is also about character-driven fate; and yet there were times when I had no idea what would happen next, a rare occurrence in a contemporary film.

The body’s experience of the world, and the relation between perception and thought, are given recognition in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and that gives him a special value for people interested in philosophy and in the world, and possibly for people interested in film, which inevitably depends on experience, observation, and thought…

Money is the blood of social life, the currency on which all else flows. Decades ago, Pauline Kael described the effects of money on film production; and more recently Susan Sontag did the same when she wrote about the industrial production of film and the diminishment of knowledgeable love of cinema. I was shaken when I read a September 2005 Variety magazine table listing the small amounts of money that the better films—independent, foreign, and just basically intelligent films—had made in the preceding year. Not long after that, there were several articles about the industry’s disappointment regarding year 2005’s cumulative box office take. I continue to think, as Kael and Sontag did, that the effects of money, in the forms of film cost and desired and actual profit, are important and should be discussed, as the kinds of films that get made, distributed, discussed, and seen are a principal consequence. The promise of a popular art is that it can make reference to and sense out of our lives, that it can show us possibilities we have not imagined or yet embraced: and it is our varying needs and wants that can test, affirm, and expand an art form. When the range of a popular art narrows, it becomes more difficult for radical experiments in that art to take place and be accepted.

Part 2