James Baldwin - Search and Destroy

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.