“She can sing anything. She can sing Three Blind Mice. Any-thing,” the Reverend James Cleveland tells the congregation gathered at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles. It’s January 1972, and Cleveland is welcoming the congregation to the 2-day recording that Franklin is about to begin — a recording that will go on to become the best-selling album of her mighty career. The late Cleveland, who died in 1991, was the best person for the job of introducing Franklin and setting the scene for the recording. As Franklin’s father — he, too, no longer with us — will later relay towards the end of the session, Cleveland…
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Free Solo
File this one under Movies That Simply Must Be Seen on the Big Screen. If you were a fan of Meru, the 2015 documentary from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi about Chin’s ascent to the 21 000 foot-high Meru Peak in the Indian Himalayas, you’ll definitely appreciate the magnificent feat Free Solo achieves. This one turns the thrill level up a whole dozen notches more, following climber Alex Honnold, as he seeks to make it to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite – without the kind of traditional gear that Chin and his crew, and basically most climbers, usually use. For that is what it means to free solo,…
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Of Popstars and Addicted Boys – The 2018 Toronto International Film Festival
This year’s Toronto Film Fest overlapped in theme for more than a few movies. There were tales of addiction and rehabilitation in Ben is Back, Beautiful Boy, Boy Erased — and yes, about boys. There were tales of female pop singers – from Vox Lux to Teen Spirit to the much-anticipated A Star is Born. Then there were films we need, and want, to see more of: the female-fronted heist drama with a touch of social commentary from Steve McQueen in Widows, the understatedly brilliant tale of Black love in the face of incarceration in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, the of-our-times The Hate U Give, the exquisite this-is-why-we-have-movies…
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It’s Janet. Miss Jackson, if you’re Nasty.
When I first moved to New York, Prince was playing at Madison Square Garden. I wanted to go. A friend who had been living here for years before I did, told me not to bother because I’d be paying $200 and he’d be too tiny to see anyway. He didn’t tour New York again before his death. Never seeing Prince in one of his legendary 3-hour concerts will forever be a major regret in my life. Thing is, seeing concerts is also a major planning operation in New York. You have to be on top of when the tickets go on sale, so they don’t sell out. You have to…
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Arctic Monkeys in Queens.
“I don’t like it, man. I just can’t get into it. It’s too lounge-y for me. It’s like a solo album, or something…” “Yeah, it took me a few listens, but then I was hooked. It’s a phenomenal album, man! You need to listen again.” Waiting in line to get into Forest Hills Stadium, in Queens to see Arctic Monkeys, I was privy to a bunch of friends debating the merits of the band’s latest album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. Their sixth album, it really is a sonic step-away from the previous tracks released by Alex Turner and co. As Pitchfork notes, a “left-turn if ever there was one,” with Turner…
