Maynard Institute archives

Where Is the Gil Scott-Heron Documentary?

by richard0640

BBC’s 2003 Film on American “Bluesologist” Yet to Air in U.S.

. . . Jay T. Harris Says His College Buddy Retained His Values

Hacked PBS Site Reports That Tupac Is Alive

U.S. and Israel: Two Governments, Two Photo Preferences

Psychology Today Apologizes for Post on Black Women

Rodgers Sees Multicultural Networks, Digital in Future

Film Airs From Journalist Embedded in Iraq

Short Takes

 

Gil Scott-Heron said in 2003 documentary, “We lost our focus on issues, and started to focus on the tools as opposed to the goals.” (Video)

BBC’s ’03 Film on American “Bluesologist” Yet to Air in U.S.

Since the death of spoken word musician Gil Scott-Heron on Friday, more than one post-Boomer — Scott-Heron was 62 — confessed online that the so-called “godfather of rap” was unknown to them.

Don Letts (credit: BBC)Savvy television producers might rush to fill the vacuum by obtaining a 2003 documentary from the BBC, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Don Letts, a black British filmmaker who multitasks as a disc jockey and confidant of the English punk band the Clash.

The documentary has been sliced into chunks and posted on YouTube, but is not believed to have ever been televised in the United States.

It’s our loss. Scott-Heron admirers tried to fill the void in social media by swapping video clips and articles. Letts takes a more comprehensive approach, telling the Scott-Heron story through interviews with longtime partner Brian Jackson, rappers Chuck D and Mos Def, writer Greg Tate, crossover folk singer Richie Havens, spoken word pioneers the Last Poets, playwright-performer Sarah Jones, record executive Clive Davis and others, including Scott-Heron, the self-described “bluesologist.”

Sam Delaney of Britain’s Guardian newspaper wrote at the time, “. . . when Letts travelled to America earlier this year to meet Scott-Heron he found a slightly derelict figure, struggling with a fading career and a seemingly hopeless drug addiction. What might have been a harmonious meeting of minds turned out to be a fractious encounter that became strained almost to breaking point.

“. . . The result of this frosty encounter is a compelling documentary. There’s Chuck D and other Scott-Heron fans putting him in cultural context. There’s very funny archive footage of him ad-libbing a stand-up routine on stage in the 1970s. . . . But best of all are the eloquent thoughts of Scott-Heron today, taken from the rare moments in which Letts managed to get him to sit still.”

. . . Jay T. Harris Says His College Buddy Retained His Values

Jay T. Harris compares the failure of American television to broadcast the BBC documentary on Gil Scott-Heron with the reluctance of U.S. media to air the views of those whose perspectives populate the Al Jazeera network, the Qatar-based news operation that has a difficult time gaining access to U.S. cable and satellite television.

Jay T. Harris“They have a very different perception of what’s going on,” Harris said of American and Al Jazeera news executives.

Harris, 62, is in a unique position to make such a comparison. He made his way up the ladder in the American media, having been publisher of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. He is now the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Democracy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. And Harris went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania with Scott-Heron and considered him a close friend.

Scott-Heron “came in my sophomore year. . . . He was funny as hell and unbelievably smart. A really great person to be around.” In his “negative critique of American society, there was a hopefulness about it,” Harris said. “That if you call things by their name, change is possible.”

It is important to remember the context of the early ’70s, when Scott-Heron burst on the scene, Harris said in a telephone interview.

With “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” the maiden work that has come to be the most referenced in the Scott-Heron obituaries, “for some people, ‘revolution’ was the key word, not ‘televised’ — that revolution was going to happen. We saw it happen in Africa, in various countries. . . . These were the times of Frank Rizzo,” the Philadelphia mayor and former police chief considered by some to be unduly harsh with blacks, and the activist poet and playwright Amiri Baraka.

Harris remembers the day in 1970 that Lincoln University closed after incidents that left students shot and killed at majority white Kent State University in Ohio and historically black Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Scott-Heron, Harris and a handful of others drove to Washington, Harris’ hometown, to demand of the Justice Department that the killings at historically black schools be treated as seriously as the others. The students carried weapons, but left them at the Harris family home before their confrontation at Justice.

That most major newspapers ran Scott-Heron’s obituary was a victory, Harris said. “In the world of the white press in 1973, he didn’t exist,” he said of Scott-Heron. “We would have had to fight tooth and nail to put it in the paper. The fact that it was there spoke to what a lot of us in our various areas of endeavor — music, journalism — we were trying to make that happen.”

In another striking development, nearly all the obituaries were written by white journalists, despite Scott-Heron’s strong identification with African American issues. The Washington Post ran his photo above the nameplate in the Sunday paper, with a key to his obituary. There was universality in his message, Harris said. “He had a way of telling a story that you knew was real. You knew that as a moral perspective it was correct,” regardless of your political philosophy.

Scott-Heron’s songs preached against addiction and alcoholism, but he fell victim to crack addiction and served prison time for cocaine possession. He looked years older than he was.

In the documentary, Scott-Heron, Chuck D, Sarah Jones, Mos Def and Brian Jackson, longtime collaborator and Lincoln schoolmate, all comment on the change in popular culture brought about in the mid-’70s disco era.

Chuck D said, “What happened to black music as a social message once it was appropriated by the record companies and they could put soul and culture into a package or a box and regurgitate it back to the masses is that it was limited to that, and it doesn’t transcend the original meaning that spawned it in the first place.”

That helped lead to “the frustration, the helplessness,” Harris told Journal-isms. “He was sadly increasingly marginalized, as was the black cultural scene. The hopelessness that was in his songs . . . the isolation, the growing sense that the ideals would not be realized hit him very hard, not unlike the artists who left the country in the ’30s and ’40s. It’s a terrible thing to be rejected by your own country. That happened to Gil.”

Others of his generation were “willing to make compromises in order to succeed. That’s not something that he did. It turned into a self-destructive set of behavior that you see in our community today.

“It’s a story that’s not new, but you hate to see it happen,” Harris continued. Yet “he stayed with his values all the way through. He found comfort and solace in the very worst places to find them, but he never left his values.”

[Washingtonians and former Washingtonians: Wayne Tucker of WPFW-FM is asking for emailed remembrances of Scott-Heron at waynemassey (at) msn.com. You are also urged to comment below.]

Hacked PBS Site Reports That Tupac Is Alive

“The PBS Web site briefly carried a fake story claiming that the famed rapper Tupac Shakur was alive and living in New Zealand after a group of hackers took over the organization’s computer systems on Saturday night,” John Markoff reported Monday for the New York Times.

“In addition to posting the fake news story, the group, which identified itself on Twitter as @LulzSec or The Lulz Boat, began posting passwords and e-mail addresses of people from a wide range of news organizations and other information belonging to PBS.

“As late as 2:30 a.m. on Monday, PBS had still not regained control of its Web site as the hackers continued to post defaced pages.

“Comments posted by LulzSec indicated that the group was unhappy with a Frontline program about WikiLeaks that recently aired on PBS.”

President Obama talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as they walk from the Oval Office to the South Lawn Drive of the White House after their May 20 meetings. (Credit: Pete Souza/White House)

The body language in the Israeli government’s version of the same scene at the White House could be interpreted as showing that Netanyahu isn’t buying what Obama is selling. (Credit: Avi Ohayon/Israeli government via european pressphoto agency)

U.S. and Israel: Two Governments, Two Photo Preferences

“President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel were clearly of two very different minds about the prospect of Israel reverting to its pre-1967 borders. The official White House photo by Pete Souza — showing the two leaders huddling outside the Oval Office . . . — didn’t make life easy for picture editors, Stephen Crowley wrote last week for his “Lens” column in the New York Times.

“By releasing this single picture, was the White House trying to convey a sense of comity? Of presidential confidence? Of a deep understanding between president and prime minister? There was no answering these questions, because no journalists witnessed the moment.”

Psychology Today Apologizes for Post on Black Women

“Earlier this month, the popular magazine Psychology Today published an article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa titled ‘Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?’ that was met, expectedly, with mass outrage,” Ujala Sehgal reported Saturday for the Atlantic. “The article used data based on another study to make several claims such as ‘black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women’ yet ‘subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.’

“After some attempted editing of the title, the magazine retracted the post from its website in its entirety. Kanazawa in turn is facing an investigation by the London School of Economics, where he is a professor, after a unanimous vote for his dismissal by the student union.

Contributing writers to Psychology Today moved quickly to do some damage control. Dr. [Scott Barry] Kaufman, in his blog for the magazine “Beautiful Minds,” wrote a post re-analyzing Kanazawa’s data.

“. . . Considering the level of outrage,” Sehgal wrote, “the apology was some time coming. Kaja Perina, the Editor-in-Chief, issued the following statement on Friday:

” ‘Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published — and promptly removed — from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today’s mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.’

“However, there was no word on whether the magazine will continue to publish articles by Kanazawa. He has not published on entry on his blog since the one removed, although there is no indication that the blog will be terminated.”

Rodgers Sees Multicultural Networks, Digital in Future

Johnathan Rodgers, retiring as CEO of the African American-oriented TV One network, said he sees “multicultural networks” on the horizon and digital television channels rather than cable.

Johnathan Rodgers

Rodgers was asked by Thomas Umstead of Multichannel News last week: “How do you see the African-American cable market developing over the next few years?”

Rodgers replied, “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if BET and TV One remain the only major [African American] targeted networks. What I do foresee is a large number of multicultural networks where you don’t know whether [it’s] black, brown, green, yellow or whatever, but it has multicultural sensibilities that I think we as a nation are headed towards.”

Umstead also asked, “If you were to return to the entertainment industry, would you remain in cable or do you see the future in other distribution platforms?”

Rodgers said, “I still love cable, however I do believe that digital is the real future.”

According to the Federal Communications Commission, “Digital Television (DTV) is an advanced broadcasting technology that has transformed your television viewing experience. DTV has enabled broadcasters to offer television with better picture and sound quality. It also offers multiple programming choices, called multicasting, and interactive capabilities.” Since June 12, 2009, full-power television stations nationwide have been broadcasting exclusively in a digital format.

A survey for the Radio Television Digital News Association [PDF] found that broadcasters were using their digital channels for news, weather, informational programming, sports, traffic and programming in another language.

Film Airs From Journalist Embedded in Iraq

“Full Disclosure,” based on Brian Palmer’s experience as an embedded reporter with a Marine battalion in Iraq, airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times, the Documentary Channel announced. “Premiering on the fourth Tuesday of the month, ‘Full Disclosure’ is also presented as part of Black Documentary Cinema.”

Brian PalmerPalmer is a fellow at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security and a faculty member at the School of Visual of Arts and Baruch College in New York. He was a New York-based correspondent for CNN from 2000 to 2002.

He “followed dozens of missions of the First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment during two of their deployments in Iraq,” according to the Documentary Channel. “Tuesday’s ‘Full Disclosure’ documents the consequences of the unit’s actions for both Americans and Iraqis. Footage shot on patrols and missions with rank-and-file Marines forms the bulk of the documentary,” which has already been shown in some theaters, “but it also reaches into the present through interviews at home with one Marine who suffers serious physical and emotional damage from his experience in Iraq. ‘”Full Disclosure” is a cautionary tale for all Americans about the hidden but very real consequences of war,’ says filmmaker Palmer.”

On NPR’s “Tell Me More” on Monday, substitute host Allison Keyes asked, “You yourself describe this documentary as, quote, ‘a cautionary tale about the hidden but very real consequences of war.‘ What do you mean by that and do you think people here that are not in the military get it?

“PALMER: In a word, no. When I started this project as a journalist in 2004, just writing articles and taking pictures I thought I could affect the national debate on Iraq. I don’t believe that anymore. What I do believe is that I can reach people on a one-to-one basis. If they’ll look at this film and they’ll see the individuals behind it, maybe they’ll have some understanding of what such occupations are about. Maybe they’ll start to think a little bit more critically and perhaps a little bit more empathetically about what’s going on in Afghanistan.

“You know, troops coming into someone’s living room in Helmand province or a firefighter, something like that, we don’t know that. I think we need to develop a curiosity, a hunger to learn about these things, because these policies are being made in our name and they will affect us.” 

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