Daily Archives: July 21, 2020

At least six Black children were killed during the Fourth of You Lie weekend. They werent doing anything wrong, just attending a community picnic, or going to visit a grandmother, or riding in a car.

One of the children, Secoriea Turner, 8, lived in Atlanta. The day after the killing, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, emotionally addressed the killers.

You shot and killed a baby, she said. This random Wild, Wild West, shoot em up because you can, has got to stop. It has to stop. She went on to say, Enough is enough. You cant blame this on a police officer. You cant say this is about criminal justice reform. This is about some people carrying weapons who shot up a car with an 8-year-old baby in the car. For what?

In Washington, 11-year-old Davon McNeal, ironically attending an anti-violence cookout organized by his mother, was shot in the head. An 18-year old has been arrested, and there are two other suspects.

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, our children are being murdered. We can get thousands to the streets for a Black Lives Matter protest. How many can we get out for Natalia Wallace, 7, killed in Chicago, or Jace Young, 6, of San Francisco who was killed attending a birthday party?

In 2019, 692 children under the age of 12 were killed or injured. In 2014, 603 were killed or wounded. The Gun Violence Archive, which has been counting gun deaths since 2013, states there were 733 child deaths or injuries in 2017, the peak year since the organization began collecting the data.

The murdered children are never the intended victims. Instead, somebody with more firepower than sense shoots into a crowd, not caring who they hit. And theyve been killing our children.

I could write dissertations about why angry and unemployed young men are running around with guns, settling scores and securing reputations with no regard for others. But Im sick of the sociological explanations and the excuses. Im with Mayor Bottoms. Enough is enough. How do we stop it? How do we dismantle the gun culture that dominates so many of our inner cities? Will it take new laws? Harsher penalties for illegal gun use?

Conservatives are right to say we may lose fewer Black lives to police violence than to street gun violence. Even as we resist police brutality, structural racism and other inequities, we must fight the enemy within, the callous young men who engage in gunplay on public streets when anybody could be walking by. How to get through to them?

Dr. Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, once described these young men as nihilistic, believing that life has no intrinsic value, simply not caring about social norms and moral values. Anyone who would shoot a deadly weapon into a crowd has no regard for human life. And perhaps one could argue that these young men do not value human life because human life has not valued them.

But Im sick of making excuses for sociopaths, even as I understand the forces that created them. These shootings have to stop!

I love looking at Black children, looking at their small, partly unformed faces and wondering what kind of adult they will evolve into. Too many gun-toting criminals ensure that some of our children wont have the opportunity to grow up.

Class differences among African-Americans mean that some fall asleep to the sounds of gunfire while others know shooting from television.

When we say it takes a village to raise a child, what happens to the villagers that would rob a child of life? We need to call these villains out. We need to ask their associates to call them out.

When you say Black Lives Matter when you march and chant, think of 11-year Davon McNeal, 6-year-old Jace Young, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner or 7-year-old Natalia Wallace. Their Black lives matter, too. What must we do to protect our children?

The writer is an author, economist and educator.

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The enemy within, by Julianne Malveaux - Richmond Free Press

I know a lot of you are missing summer-blockbuster season, and I'm certainly not thrilled to be missing it, either, given that this year's lineup of delayed potential hits includes a new Christoper Nolan, a new Pixar, and a new Wes Anderson (even if Wes Anderson and blockbuster hardly belong in the same sentence). But here's a short list of previously scheduled titles that you and I thus far haven't seen due to closed cineplexes: Top Gun: Maverick. Wonder Woman 1984. Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The James Bond continuation No Time to Die. A Quiet Place Part II. Minions: The Rise of Gru. Candyman. And, lest we forget, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. So, you know . Silver linings.

To be fair, some of those sequels might be good. Hell, some might be great. And some might be so great that our experiences dwarf even the fond feelings we have for their cinematic inspirations. So as we continue to cross fingers that something anything will soon be playing at a theater near us, let's take a look at five direct sequels from 1980 to 1993 that, for me, are all significant improvements on the blockbusters that preceded them. And even though I strongly considered including it, you're welcome, in advance, for my decision to not cite Ghostbusters II. There's only so much hate mail a reviewer can take.

Addams Family Values: Considering the movie had Raul Julia playing Gomez, Anjelica Huston portraying Morticia, Christoper Lloyd enacting Uncle Fester, the deadpan cutie Christina Ricci channeling Wednesday, and Carel Struycken the giant from Twin Peaks! glaring and groaning as Lurch, the casting for 1991's The Addams Family was the main reason everyone I knew wanted to see it. In the end, the casting was really the only reason to see it, and I consequently, politely avoided director Barry Sonnenfeld's 1993 sequel when it debuted around Thanksgiving. Plenty of others did, too. Yet in a kooky-spooky-ooky slapstick crammed with jokes, the biggest one turned out to be on those of us who prematurely dismissed the film and waited for home video to see it, because Sonnenfeld's follow-up is just about flawless for what it aims to be nothing more, or less, than 90 minutes of madly inspired, laugh-out-loud silliness. On paper, the subplots may sound only mildly promising: Gomez and Morticia have a new, apparently indestructible baby (Pubert!); Fester falls in love with a money-grubbing murderess; Wednesday and Pugley go to summer camp. In practice, though, the script by that fiendish wit Paul Rudnick is flooded with deliciously nasty jokes most of the best ones delivered by Joan Cusack as a venomous Black Widow and everyone involved seems encouraged to aim toward the highest peaks of comic lunacy imaginable. They all get there, and I've watched Sonnenfeld's outing many times over just for the zany pleasures of Peter MacNicol and Christine Baranski as hyper-chipper camp counselors and Wednesday escaping the Harmony Hut and offering the series' most hilarious/terrifying sight ever: Ricci's fixed-straight-line mouth slowly, painfully morphing into a hideous smile. She's scaring me! screams a fellow camper. Me, too, kid. I'd be traumatized if it weren't so freaking funny.

The Empire Strikes Back: Nowadays, the world-building nature of franchise culture dictates that sequels don't end so much as end, leaving us with cliffhangers and credit cookies designed to get us psyched (and shell out more dough) for future adventures a year or more down the line. So unless you saw Star Wars' first sequel in the summer of 1980, there's probably no way to adequately describe how unsettling it was to exit The Empire Strikes Back with so many unanswered questions: Would Han Solo remain forever frozen in carbonite? Was the turncoat Lando Calrissian actually to be trusted? Was Darth Vader really Luke Skywalker's fa- ? Um . Spoiler Alert? Leaving director Irvin Kershner's sci-fi mind-blower as an 11-year-old, I remember being dazed and overwhelmed, like I'd seen something too majestic, too adult, to fully grasp. I also remember wanting to get home and play with my Star Wars action figures (in their Vader-mask carrying case) pronto, because this startling upgrade on George Lucas' 1977 blockbuster did a miraculous job of expanding the Jedi universe in your mind: You not only wanted to re-enact the film in moveable plastic, but create your own conceivable follow-ups to the one you just saw. Today, of course, Empire is largely considered the finest of the nine films in the three Star Wars trilogies, and certainly a more polished work than its immediate forebear better written, better acted, better at conveying mood and atmosphere and crisis. Given the expanded visual palette and additions of Yoda, Lando, the gutted Tauntaun, Laugh it up, fuzzball, et cetera, it's also more fun than Star Wars, even if we pre-teens did cry Ee-e-e-ew-w-w! when Han and Leia kissed. Now that we're adults, we only say that when Leia kisses Luke. I'd explain why, but ya know . Spoilers.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch: Plenty of unimaginative sequels get mileage merely from re-staging their first films' setups in new locales, and at first glance, you could say that's what director Joe Dante is doing in the follow-up to his 1984 smash trading Gremlins' sleepy small town for the interiors of an imposing Manhattan skyscraper. But what Dante has actually done is far more subversive: He's traded the real world of the original for the cartoon universe of a Looney Tunes short. I mean this almost literally. Before the sequel's narrative gets underway, that familiar Looney Tunes logo with its accompanying peppy score pops on-screen, and audiences are right (if a little confused) to expect a Chuck Jones animated short to precede the movie. In quickly becomes clear, however, that these early slapstick antics involving Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are connected to the movie, and all throughout, the tone is so deliriously manic and over-the-top that you wouldn't be surprised for human co-stars Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates to share scenes with Porky Pig. The first Gremlins is a terrific time, but 1990's Gremlins 2: A New Batch is the superior one because it's so breathtakingly nuts: the brainy beastie voiced by Tony Randall; the New York, New York musical sequence; the unholy half-gremlin/half-spider creature; the unexpected film break followed by shadow puppetry and the threat of a Hulk Hogan smack-down. Absolutely nothing about Dante's follow-up is meant to be believed, and its exuberant I can't believe it! fearlessness and gonzo unpredictability make it one of the most joyously satisfying of all 20th-century-blockbuster sequels. And man how I wish we had a new one now, given that John Glover's villain in the film is an eccentric billionaire named Daniel Clamp. Who else is up for seeing Dante's gremlins thrive in the White House?

Superman II: As previously mentioned, my 1980 screening's largely young crowd audibly reacted, not entirely favorably, to Han's and Leia's Empire Strikes Back kiss. Yet just one summer later, in the sequel to 1978's Superman the Movie, our hero and Lois Lane were shown lying in bed together presumably naked, presumably after having sex and our packed auditorium primarily composed of kids didn't make a peep. I'm guessing we were all in shock. And Superman II was a shock, partly because director Richard Lester had the nerve to stage the formerly unthinkable. (What could that union have possibly been like?!? I might've asked, had 12-year-old me known what I was talking about.) Mostly, though, it was shocking to see so much that was treated with portentous seriousness in the original the trio of Phantom Zone captives, the cataclysmic action finale handled with a breezy insouciance that was sometimes inseparable from parody. In their brief 1978 appearances, the malevolent Ursa, Non, and General Zod seemed pretty darned scary. In Superman II, though, they're enjoyably evil, and consequently mesh perfectly with a presentation that goes for laughs whenever possible; everything from Lois' planned unmasking scoop at Niagara Falls to the flying baddie knocked into the neon Coca-Cola billboard is designed to get you giggling. Christopher Reeve, meanwhile, appears intent on making you think about, and actually feel for, his dual identities as Clark Kent and Superman, and that this sequel works as well emotionally as it does as a comic-book kick is testament to Reeve's and the indispensable Margot Kidder's touchingly profound understanding of character. The visuals may be slapdash; they were in the original, too. But like Gene Hackman's expression when revealing Lex Luthor's endgame Australia! the majority of Lester's movie is one massive grin.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day: I'll readily go on record citing James Cameron's 1986 Aliens (which I wrote about in April) as my all-time-favorite sequel. But if I had to name the blockbuster follow-up that most successfully expanded, complicated, and improved upon its source material, I'd probably go with this other Cameron sequel 1991's Oscar-winning sci-fi-action behemoth that's like the mighty-oak version of his original Terminator. That isn't meant to suggest that 1984's unstoppable-killer saga was an acorn. When I re-watched the film a decade ago, I was impressed at how well that scrappy, nihilistic little thriller held up a quarter-century after unleashing Arnold Schwarzenegger's pitiless, catchphrase-happy cyborg upon an unsuspecting world. T2, though, is T1 super-sized. (I was tempted to write on steroids, but in deference to Arnold's bodybuilder past .) Its chase scenes are louder, longer, and more intricately choreographed; its time-travel possibilities more complexly designed; its relentlessly grim worldview more open to spontaneity and humor. (There's a lot of E.T. in Edward Furlong's attempts to humanize Schwarzenegger's inhuman protector.) Best of all, while Michael Biehn's absence was unfortunate (if understandable), Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor transformed from perplexed victim to bona-fide, Sigourney Weaver-style ass-kicker, allowing the performer to create an iconic heroine whose anguished gravitas continually kept the movie from merely being exceptionally realized popcorn entertainment. The success of Cameron's epic led to more sequels than I can remember, including one from last autumn that's only memorable for being so disheartening. None of them, however, hold a candle to this wildly effective audience-grabber with its supple liquid-metal effects and frighteningly dead-eyed Robert Patrick, and precious few sci-fi films have ever landed the perfect blend of emotionalism and corn that accompanies Schwarzenegger's final thumb's-up descent into molten lava. Hasta la vista, baby. See you, for increasingly diminished returns, in a dozen years.

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Second-Round Knockouts: Five Sequels That Improve on Their Blockbuster Originals - River Cities Reader

"Untitled (Private)," William S. Burroughs, 1986.Courtesy photo

"Secret Service Agent," William S. Burroughs.Courtesy photo

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The Beat Generation literary lions William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are together again in a new show at the Gonzo Gallery in downtown Aspen.

The pop-up gallery which this week expanded into a large commercial space at the corner of Hyman Avenue and Hunter Street from its more modest adjacent space will open a new exhibition Friday presenting side-by-side the visual art of these eternally rebellious American authors.

Their lives were works of art, said gallery director Daniel Joseph Watkins. They were writers, of course, and their work spread into the visual realm as well.

The show includes 27 works by the pair, among them black-and-white photos by each, shotgun art and collages by Burroughs from the 1980s and 1990s and drawings by Ginsberg from the same period.

The pair, both of them lightly fictionalized by Jack Kerouac in On the Road and elsewhere, emerged as polar ends of the Beat movement: Ginsberg the poet who birthed the watershed Howl and later the Flower Power peace movement; Burroughs the brilliant nihilist and prose innovator behind Naked Lunch and Junky known for his cut-up method.

Their later-in-life artwork reflects those differing viewpoints. Titled Flower Power x Fire Power, the show aims to display how Ginsbergs peace-loving and gentle outlook existed harmoniously with Burroughs scabrous and grim life philosophy from the Beats brief 50s heyday through their deaths in 1997.

They were pushing each other and their differing viewpoints forced them to rethink some of their perspective on things, Watkins said.

Curator Yuri Zupancic noted that Burroughs and Ginsberg were in dialog about visual art in correspondence from soon after they met in the 1940s, and both were serious visual artists. But they rarely exhibited their work.

They felt pressure in their time not to present themselves as visual artists, said Zupancic. It was taboo, in a way, to present yourself as more than one type of artist.

Curators like Zupancic, through galleries like the Gonzo and museum shows like Beat Generation at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2016, have in recent years shed light on the Beats, Burroughs and Ginsberg as interdisciplinary artists.

Anyone interested in the mythical lives of the Beat Generation authors will find some delight in seeing the photographs in the show, which capture the pair as well as Beat figures like Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky together in Tangier where Burroughs, a Kansan, spent much of his life and of Burroughs with fellow expat author Paul Bowles.

The artworks on view ranging in price from $750 to $32,000 include Burroughs paintings on file folders from the early 1990s and his works of shotgun art from Watkins collection (a March 2013 show at an earlier iteration of the Gonzo Gallery focused solely on Burroughs shotgun art and included rare pieces from the Burroughs archive in Kansas).

Burroughs shotgun art, a body of work the author began making in the 1980s, created imagery made by shooting paint onto and holes through nontraditional art surfaces like targets, books and posters. Among the most striking in this show are a colorful metal no trespassing sign shot up and sun-faded, and Secret Service Agent, a sepia-toned poster of a man in a suit pointing a gun at the viewer, with a Burroughs-drawn red target on it and gunshots through the paper.

Aspenites may be familiar with the shotgun art form through the works of Hunter S. Thompson, with whom Burroughs collaborated on artworks and who made his own beginning in the 1990s. Thompsons longtime creative partner Ralph Steadman also worked with Burroughs on shotgun art pieces. One is included in the Gonzo Gallery show.

The show also includes a handful of absurdist ink-on-paper drawings by Ginsberg from the 1980s (the double entendre-inspired Dragon Coming a highlight), a bullet casing signed by Burroughs, ephemera and posters.

With social distancing practices and mask wearing mandatory inside the Gonzo in keeping with public health restrictions, the gallery is hosting receptions Friday and Saturday night. Outside on Sunday evening it will stage a panel discussion with the Ginsberg Trusts Peter Hale, former Burroughs estate curator Yuri Zupancic, musician and activist DJ Spooky and Watkins.

atravers@aspentimes.com

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Gonzo Gallery in Aspen showcases the visual art of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg - Aspen Times

The arson attack on Nantes Cathedral is a terrible yet apposite metaphor for our troubled times. We do not know who tried to destroy this beautiful place of worship, but we should understand the significance of the action.

Attacks on churches in France, common in recent years, have been carried out by anarchists, nihilists, Islamists and others. But regardless of the cause or lack of one behind this attack, its symbolism is unmistakable.

Churches and cathedrals stand for religious faith, of course. They represent Europes Christian heritage, too. They are part of our cultural and national identities.

Some have stood for hundreds of years, physical monuments to the long sweep of history, and a reminder, through wars, plagues, recessions and depressions, of the continuity of the institutions and traditions of our societies.

The Church is just one institution, and Christianity just one traditional belief, that for generations have encouraged us to compromise with one another, and make sacrifices for one another, in the name of community. They have taught us to pursue not only our own material benefit but the common good.

Other institutions have played similar roles of course, such ascharities, trades unions and philanthropic foundations. And other beliefs systems, from other religions to political creeds such asconservatism and social democracy, have also sought to foster a sense of solidarity to build a cohesive society.

And yet Western countries are today hardly cohesive societies. In Britain, the wealth of the richest 10 per cent of families is five times higher than the wealth of the bottom half of all families combined. With children's life chances defined more by their parents' prosperity than talent, social mobility is in crisis. With the working class demonised and despised by many, social solidarity is in crisis too.

Then there is the pernicious effect of cultural liberalism and militant identity politics. While elites debate the number of black students at Oxbridge with guilt and urgency, few acknowledge that white students are less likely to go to university than any other ethnic group, and white working-class boys fare worse than anybody else at school.

While the powerful engage in exclusively elite equality debates, such asthe number of women on boards, they give little thought to the availability and affordability of childcare for low-income parents.

Those who try to raise the plight of the white working-class are often written off as racists and cranks. And those who argue in favour of unifying identities made possible by patriotism, or our attachment to more local communities are lampooned as reactionary and ridiculous.

Like letters through a stick of rock, running through each of these problems is liberalism, the ideology that made our modern Western world.

The pursuit of the common good has little place in liberalism, for liberalism is principally concerned with the maximisation of individual freedom. Liberals have always tended to underestimate how the freedom of the rich and powerful can undermine the freedom of the poor and powerless. But it is only now that this reality is becoming so blatant, prevalent and, in the eyes of many, inevitable and even legitimate.

So we have a mirage of meritocracy, in which many of those who reach the top do so not through their own achievement but the headstart handed to them by their parents.

Believing they succeeded on their own merits, however, they feel they owe little to those who "failed" to make it. This is just one reason we see a selfish corporate class, paying themselves sky-high wages and marking one anothers homework, tax avoidance by rich families and big business, and faltering support for progressive taxation and universal public services.

Also to blame is the misplaced universalism of liberalism. Partly because much of liberal thought starts with a misconceived "model" of human nature and political organisation, liberals underestimate the cultural and institutional context and history of communities and countries.

They assume we are all rational freedom-seekers, the same the world over. This leads liberals to all sorts of flawed judgments about foreign policy (think Iraq), democracy (think European Union) and immigration.

Viewing countries as little more than a platform, upon which anybody from anywhere in the world can live and work with only minimal obligations towards others, liberals support mass immigration.

In fact, they are often maniacally in favour of it, because for many of them, borders are a restraint on freedom, and culturally diverse countries are more likely to put irrational attachments to majority culture and identity behind them.

But study after academic study shows that the more diverse a society becomes, the less trust and reciprocity there is, and less willingness to pay taxes to fund universal public services and welfare systems.

Liberalism attacks the institutions and traditions that bring us together, in part because they are seen as hindrances in the pursuit of freedom. But this destructiveness is also down to the problematic relationship liberalism has with the idea of inevitable progress.

Because some liberal thinkers justify pluralism and tolerance on the basis that they create trial and error that leads to an increasingly perfect society, liberalism can become illiberal and intolerant: conservatives who worry that change can bring loss and not just gain, institutions and traditions that ask us to put others first, and beliefs that seek to achieve the common good are mocked, undermined and attacked.

The irony is, the more we see the full extent of the crisis of Western society, it becomes clearer that liberalism has always depended on those very institutions and traditions and ways of life it attacks.

Perhaps liberalism can survive without Christian virtues and stable national identities, but we cannot yet know that for sure.

And so we return to the tragedy of Nantes Cathedral. We saw on Saturday a place of worship going up in flames, but without a greater willingness to pursue the common good, it will be more than a cathedral that succumbs to fire. The very basis of Western civilisation will be in serious danger.

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Liberalism made the Western world, but now it is destroying it - Telegraph.co.uk