James Baldwin - Search and Destroy

http://www.reclusland.com/compass/wp-content/uploads/HLIC/9f3ba5bd47c3ae8eadefbc52e21a13d5.jpg

I can't believe it hasn't been asked yet. Inspired by rereading The Devil Finds Work, a lacerating re-examination of Old Hollywood movies through the eyes of a man whose sexuality and race doomed him to exile from the romance sold.

I find his novels intelligent but dull, even Giovanni's Room; they're like nice tries. None of them has the weight and restlessness of "Notes From a Native Son," "Everybody's Favorite Protest Novel," "Equal in Paris," "The Fire Next Time," and at least a dozen other marvelous essays.

I have only read Another Country, and I think I was all of eighteen years-old at the time, but I thought it was just great. Seems like he was just such an amazing guy. I kinda wanna go search youtube for clips of him being interviewed on old talk shows

Beautiful voice.

i love that photo up there

i haven't been able to make it through his first novel yet, but i've taught 'the fire next time', and every time i'm reminded how much more awesome it is to teach great writing than, like, dumb old books about whatever.

"notes of a native son" is just. there's nothing like it. he had one of the best faces ever, also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUSMtyJjp8

man there is a whole lot going on here

bump

I've never heard Lopate's voice.

This was great. The dialectic was prototypically aligned but they mined a lot of insight out of it.

I spent Saturday morning listening. Thanks, deej.

np.

feel like locate was roasted by the Q&A

*lopate

who are these ppl

otherwise i agree w everyone else on this thread

1884 pages

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/

anyone seen/recommend the doc films here?

http://www.filmlinc.org/series/the-devil-finds-work-james-baldwin-on-film/#films

guess not

a good piece in Film Comment. Quoting a Baldwin 1968 essay on Sidney Poitier:

The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. . . And the black face, truthfully reflected, is not only no part of this dream, it is antithetical to it. And this puts the black performer in a rather grim bind. He knows, on the one hand, that if the reality of a black man’s life were on that screen, it would destroy the fantasy totally. And on the other hand, he really has no right not to appear, not only because he must work, but for all those people who need to see him. By the use of his own person, he must smuggle in a reality that he knows is not in the script.

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-devil-finds-work-james-baldwin-on-film/

fantastic piece http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelkaadzighansah/the-weight-of-james-arthur-baldwin-203

fantastic piece

Yes, that was beautiful. Thanks!

From upthread:

I find his novels intelligent but dull, even Giovanni's Room; they're like nice tries.

I have to defend his fiction. Giovanni's Room beautifully written, but it's flawed, and I can see how someone might not love it. I do, though. But Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is one of my top ten all time. Such a deep, achingly honest portrait of a man and what formed him. It's become part of me.

So, yeah, not dull!

this is p cool, I happen to stumble upon the somewhat recently declassified files the fbi had kept on Baldwin. sooo many memos. its also just nice that interviews/newspaper clippings etc are chronological and in one place to browse!

https://vault.fbi.gov/james-baldwin

oh huh I see morbs posted a thing on this upthread

My memorandum dated 7-17-64, which concerned the captioned individual's plans for a future book about the FBI has been returned by the Director with this question: "Isn't Baldwin a well known pervert?"

Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated docfilm/essay opens in NY today:

https://theringer.com/i-am-not-your-negro-raoul-peck-oscar-nomination-james-baldwin-d53738d8e0ca#.85fpbc65b

It's good.

Best Sam Jackson performance since the early '90s.

Somehow I didn't realise it was Jackson until the end credits. Like you say near the start of this thread, Baldwin has a very beautiful voice.

I kept wondering if anyone in the cinema was going to cry.

I hope I get a chance to see this this weekend. I've been obsessively listening to his interviews and lectures at work this week. So consistently on point and just as relevant today.

Opens here in a week or so. I saw James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket last week (same theatre) thinking I was seeing the new one, but that was an old PBS thing.

Reading The Fire Next Time after watching the film. His words are so much more powerful than the film, it's kinda a shame.

“It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

94th birthday yesterday

Baldwin has lots of great quotes, but this self-description is one of my favorites. happy birthday to a legend pic.twitter.com/zxZIFMJyxc

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) August 2, 2018

also, forthcoming film (i'm currently reading the novel)

http://gothamist.com/2018/08/02/if_beale_street_could_talk_trailer.php

“Every poet is an optimist,” he says. But on the way to that optimism “you have to reach a certain level of despair to deal with your life at all.” And where did that level of despair come, for him? “If you’re black, and short, and ugly, and pop-eyed, and you think maybe you’re homosexual though you don’t know the word, and you’ve got to support a family because your father is dying – that’s a stacked deal.”

...Two years ago, James Baldwin wrote in the Guardian a letter to Angela Davis, during her trial. In it, he said: “The American triumph ­– in which the American tragedy has always been implicit – was to make black people despise themselves... Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/18/james-baldwin-if-beale-street-could-talk-interview-1974

I read Just Above My Head last month, reminding me that his novels are just not compelling despite flashes of eloquence.

i thought Beale Street was, even though it's not A Great Novel.

I thought Giovanni's Room was incredible - I'm surprised to see that it's not so revered on here. He writes like all of his characters are under a fluorescent light - it's such blisteringly brutal writing, and with such an immediacy of space and time. With that book more than most I've read for a while, I feel like I can walk right back into the scenes and live in them.

Baldwin, opening track: "The cop may be a very nice man. I haven't got time to figure that out."

https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/93648

"God's only hope is us. We don't make it, he aint gonna make it either."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQejcZc4uFM

reread THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN last year after mindhunter featured the atlanta child murders. when it was published (1985) i remember it was generally received with polite but somewhat baffled embarrassment, as the misstep of a great old man losing his grip?

anyway even last year it seemed more like dead-on prophecy than misstep and right now it seems more darkly exacting and OTM than ever ffs

(what put this in my mind is the new yorker's timely reappraisal)

That's an excellent piece

Search: every video of Baldwin talking about police brutality

Jimmy Baldwin on police. Dick Cavett prodding him to cut them some slack. Jimmy refusing. pic.twitter.com/cWn7T3dR8B

— Harmony Holiday (@Harmony_Holiday) July 1, 2020

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

wonderful.

Watching “I Am Not Your Negro” for the first time today. Very intense watch.

yeah it's excellent

in fact definitely watch this wonderful doc tonight rather than Encanto pls!

so good

Peck's other work is also pretty decent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrnTTJPyJhY

fantastic 1961 interview by Studs Terkel from the archives