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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Mr. Soul! Review: TV Has Never Been So Radical

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Just past the halfway point in the documentary Mr. Soul!, poet Felipe Luciano calls Ellis Haizlip “the most effective, insidious revolutionary that I have ever met.” It isn’t meant as a specific accolade, but it is a badge of honor for a man who honored the true meaning of sedition. Subversion in the arts is a skill which can be expressed as simply as putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Seditious political expression is rarely so subtle. The creator and host of the all-too-short lived public television variety program Soul! achieved a dream mix of diverse thought, some which went under the radar, some designed to be unnoticed, all of which was riveting, and everything absolutely accessible.

Soul! captured everyday insurrection. Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 independent feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song proclaimed to be unapologetically Black, Haizlip saw no reason to bring apology into the equation. Nothing he was doing, no act he was showing, no poem or word or emotion needed clarification, only amplification. Everything Haizlip brought to the soundstage was an ordinary pain or exultation expressed with unadulterated realism. Yet, it subverted every expectation, and proved a street battle could be fought on the airwaves. In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron frustratingly sang “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but from Sept. 12, 1968 through March 7, 1973, not only was a coup mounted on small screens, but it had great beats you could dance to. Even the spoken word performances had rhythm, the oral arguments and affirmations of the interviews were lyrical blasts of staccato, flowing, chaos.

Patti LaBelle was the first musical guest. Backed by the Bluebelles, their voices brought home audiences “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Stevie Wonder got so caught up in the energy of the studio audience, cameramen had to change reels and excitedly wondered if he would ever get tired of playing. Earth, Wind & Fire showed how live playing on TV could be done. There was no lip-syncing on Soul!. It would be another few years before Soul Train would answer for American Bandstand, but Soul!’s host Ellis Haizlip never tried to be a hip Johnny Carson.

Mr. Soul! is the story of the man behind the first Black variety show on American television. The documentary explains how the March 1968 Kerner Commission Report found the media played a big part in the racial divide in America. Black Americans rarely saw themselves reflected on the small screen. Shows with African-American actors, stars, and hosts had been produced by networks, but most were only short-lived, no one was really allowed to be themselves, and their social limitations were strictly enforced. African Americans did get one featured role in nationally broadcast network and affiliate television.

The Six O’clock News guaranteed on-the-spot footage. They showed every graffiti-tagged trash can left overfilled on ghettos streets. They fetishized poverty, and promoted riot coverage before the first windows shattered. They didn’t cover much of the burgeoning renaissance which was happening in the culture. Public broadcast stations led the first charge, the documentary details, programming shows like Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, Say Brother, Black Journal, and Like It Is, socially conscious and educational content made by and for African Americans. Haizlip, was asked to help create a “Black Tonight Show” in the late ’60s. Mr. Soul! shows nothing could have been further from his mind. “What he was doing, every night he was on that program, was changing someone’s mind about Black folks,” poet Sonia Sanchez says in an interview.

The documentary casts the show as much more than a groundbreaking arts showcase. It presents it as an in-your-face avant garde performance art entity in itself. One that could take on any character, as long as it was real. Soul! was also the first true poets’ coffeehouse on television, the film points out, and it danced all over any rhymes the Beats might have snapped to. The Last Poets bounced epithets off percussion onto an audience who shook words like maracas, and fed a need to the people watching at home. Mae Jackson’s words could build a castle of words big enough to transition from the frenetic ensemble jazz of the McCoy Tyner Quartet to the somber acoustic guitar of Bill Withers..

The show also served as a church, its congregation reaching far beyond West 55th Street, the studio at WNET in New York, where it was filmed. The documentary makes a great case for the show as a conduit of spiritual affirmation. Haizlip was brought up in the church, and brought the fervor of his faith in all things Soul!. Wilson Pickett and gospel singer Marion Williams’ rendition of “Oh Happy Day” lifted the faithful off their seats and onto their feet. Billy Preston and the God Squad channeled holy spirit through his fingertips. Meditations proclaiming the inner beauty of blackness raise the very chakras of the viewing community.

The program was a political roundtable, in the round, surrounded by a studio audience constituency, as well. The conversations ranged from the global environment to the nature of creation. The interview guests ncluded Cicely Tyson, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, Kathleen Cleaver, and Harry Belafonte. Haizlip, who was gay in the world before Stonewall, gets Louis Farrakhan to find a place in the heart of The Nation of Islam for those whose sexuality deviated from proscribed norms. James Baldwin grants more than an interview to poet Nikki Giovanni. The documentary brings out how each of these lives touched one another more than what could ever be shown on screen.

Don’t let this fool you into thinking the documentary is all righteous rage and rhythm and blues. Mr. Soul! has many funny bits, and not just from the performers. Soul! was usually taped live, and this proves to be problematic for the limits of public television. Live broadcasts mean no interruptions and no censorship. Haizlip was brilliant, no doubt. More than educated, he had an inner emotional wisdom which transcends even artistic thought. But he never quite understands the meaning of the word censored. When he’s finally forced to bleep the shit out of a poem by Amiri Baraka on heroin addiction, Haizlip makes sure everyone hears his reluctance to cut it. He instructs the sound engineers to turn the volume way up so the fill-in noise on TV is as ugly as viewers are supposed to think the word is. This is more than a poetic choice. It is a punchline in a running gag.

Everyone interviewed behind the scenes has a funny story. What they are trying to say may be painful, hurtful, or even dangerous. But they know which words bite, and when to chew. Whether it’s the true stories behind the accepted myths or on-the-spot improvisations to cover technical difficulties, each anecdote ends with a shake of the head and an appreciative grin. Haizlip created Soul! with producer Christopher Lukas, who stuck the exclamation point on the title, and brings funny behind-the-scenes stories throughout. The theatrical producer Haizlip took on host duties out of necessity after trying academics, like Harvard psychiatry Professor Dr. Alvin Poussaint. With his horn-rimmed glasses, ultra-calm demeanor, and “right on” encouragements, Haizlip made some big gaffes on live TV. All of these are celebrated gleefully.

President Nixon wasn’t a fan, but the documentary shows he watched. He may not have tuned in, and he certainly wasn’t turned on, but inasmuch as he could be, the paranoid president was aware of the sounds and voice of Black life. Mr. Soul! shows how the Public Broadcasting Corporation suffered a tidal shift in programming after the Johnson administration vacated the White House. The show lasted five years before it was cancelled by the Nixon administration, which cut PBS funding so deep, it needed The Electric Company to pay its bills. But how cool it must be for Bill Moyers to be the only person specifically named, besides the Black cultural programming, as someone Nixon didn’t want to be blamed for silencing.

Mr. Soul!’s finest cinematic achievement is translating a feeling of exhilaration and expectation. Heizlip had an eye toward the future, a radar for young talent, and the sense to balance established acts with rising talent. Dancers like Carmen de Lavallade might find themselves free to experiment with cutting edge moves to a solo piano performance by Stevie Wonder. A 25-year-old Al Green is as surprised as the audience at how much he is instantaneously embraced. Hit-writing songwriters Ashford and Simpson never even thought about performing until they were approached to perform on the show. Haizlip saw art in individuals before even some artists noticed it in themselves.

B.B. King brought old school blues, while jazz be bopper Max Roach teases the future of avant garde jazz. Haizlip asks Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whose innovative, all-inclusive, impresario reed playing laid seed for Jethro Tull, to sit in just because he is crazy.

Haizlip died in 1991. Mr. Soul! was co-directed by Samuel D. Pollard and Ellis’s niece Melissa Haizlip, who also wrote it. The documentary profiles a man who stayed true to his mission by remaining true to himself. He electrified public television through his vision of “Black love and Black strength and Black encouragement.” With a voiceover delivered by Blair Underwood, Mr. Soul! captures a historic run of unique and visionary television. It is as much fun to discover the show as it must have been when it first aired, in a three-networks climate expertly captured in the documentary’s opening, “in living color.”

CNN recently did a special on the history of sitcoms. Everyone watching will remember most of the clips they show, certainly every series they highlight, and almost all the stars in the highlights. There are some very recognizable faces strewn throughout Mr. Soul!, and you really have to keep a sharp eye out at all times, especially in the photographs. Younger versions of household names are all over this documentary, even a 15-year-old Arsenio Hall pulls a rabbit out of a hat.

Soul! is an important chapter of television history, but it feels unfinished because of its unrealized potential. “Can you imagine what Soul! would have been like for a 20-year run,” Questlove asks towards the end of the documentary. “Like, how different would our lives have been?” Mr. Soul! finds hope in the sting of lost possibilities.

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Mr. Soul! launches on HBO Max on August 1.

The post Mr. Soul! Review: TV Has Never Been So Radical appeared first on Den of Geek.

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lodelss · 4 years

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To lose Toni Morrison is to lose a great earthly guide. It feels personal, familial, yet I am aware that it is not. She had her own, very full life, with two sons, Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Morrison (who died in 2010), as well as grandchildren and other extended family. Still, I was born into her world. When she died last Monday night after a short illness at 88, Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, had published eleven novels, nine volumes of non-fiction, five children’s books (in collaboration with Slade), two plays, a libretto, and more over four-and-a-half decades. After her third novel, Song of Solomon, Morrison left her job at Random House, where, as senior editor, she shepherded work by Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis. She “single-handedly produced a black literary canon,” poet Harmony Holiday wrote as part of a longer reflection. A good amount of this work, including Clifton’s memoir Generations and The Black Book, from 1974, is out of print. The essayist Michael Gonzales told me The Black Book was “a breathtaking tome of black life from the Motherland to the Otherland, sheet music and slave notices, pictures of baptisms and black bodies burning as hordes of white men laughed.” In her foreword to the 35th anniversary edition, Morrison called it a “requirement for our national health.”

My earliest years overlap with the publication of Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 and became a Nobel Laureate in 1993, when I was not yet a teenager. In their tributes, many writers have spoken of a maternal transmission — how they came to Toni Morrison through their mothers, aunts, older sisters. I remember early edition hardcovers with bold plain fonts, laid out in different spots around my first home, protected in slick plastic, tucked under my mother’s arm or in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats for a return trip to the library. Morrison was grown-woman business and I burned to be let in on it. I’ll never know the force of what made my mother — born in 1943 to a woman born in Mississippi in 1906 — truly reach for those books and hold on to them the way she did. I’m lucky to have come of age with Toni Morrison fully formed, her books on the typewritten reading lists teachers pass around at the start of the school year, on Oprah’s show, in the glossies. We do not deify the pursuit of learning — we’d pay teachers and journalists more in money and respect if we did. When a person who reads for pleasure and reads for work, who takes the lessons of what they read to heart, who allows the lessons to wash over them is held up as an American celebrity, it is its own kind of coup. This coup made a different country possible. By being born and coming of age in the last years of the 20th century, I received the gift of the challenge Morrison waged on behalf of literacy, learning, and language, and, to some degree, won.

* * *

I finally read my first Toni Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, at 16. Before then I breezed through every book I read for school or fun with a haughty ease, memorizing names and dates and the facts of plots in order to recite them back for tests. I do not know that anything before made me stretch and reach for my intelligence. The village in which the protagonist, Milkman, comes of age, the circle of women who surround him, the language they speak to each other, all had the texture of home. But Morrison’s experimentation with narrative and her conception of time — the gaps and dynamism that make a reader slow down — were too much for tenth grade me to breezily absorb. It got better the second time; I could understand enough to talk about it. “That, my dear, is called reading,” Morrison said to Oprah when Winfrey phoned about adapting Beloved for the screen. I hadn’t known before then that if something did not come easy, I could struggle with it until it changed me. That it would be meaningful; I could be made myself by the struggle. Not an egoistic pursuit of struggle, not a flirtation with martyrdom or self-deprecation. But a grown-woman struggle made of will and a desire to extend myself. Reading is re-reading, trying means trying again.

There would be other lessons. Sula sees possibility in a matriarchal upbringing and pushes me to recommit to my own women friends. “My sister? I need her,” Morrison told the writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah during their time together. I am thinking of black women like my mother who rushed the bookstores and signings when Toni Morrison began publishing her own work in 1970, before she’d won any of the awards that signaled her significance to white America. I am thinking of the black women she shared the New York Times bestsellers’ list with, like Alice Walker and Terry McMillian, who, together, created a renaissance of black women’s fiction. I am thinking of the poet Sonia Sanchez, one of the early instructors to teach Morrison’s work in the university. I am thinking of the 48 signatories of the January 1988 open letter to the New York Times, published shortly after the publication of Beloved and fresh off the loss of James Baldwin, whose defiance helped write Toni Morrison’s work into posterity. I am thinking of the black women she wrote alongside (“Some of us thrived; some of us died,” she writes in a foreword to Sula), with whom she dreamed:

I was living in Queens while I wrote Sula, commuting to Manhattan to an office job, leaving my children to childminders and the public school in the fall and winter, to my parents in the summer, and was so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity. Every rent payment was an event; every shopping trip a triumph of caution over the restless caution of a staple. The best news was that this was the condition of every other single / separated female parent I knew. The things we traded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory—and daring. Daring especially, because in the late sixties, with so many dead, detained, or silenced, there could be no turning back simply because there was no “back” back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves.

Morrison’s passing is an enormous loss. She was a singular writer and editor with a complex body of work, a rigorous, unwieldy mind who wrote and thought us toward a more capacious humanity. She defies any impulse toward summary. She taught us what reading is, and will be teaching it into all the futures we actually have. May we also remember the witnesses who saw her early on.

For more on Toni Morrison, selected profiles, interviews, and tributes:

“Ghosts in the House,” Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2003

“Toni Morrison’s Truth,” Postscript Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2019

“The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison,” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, New York Times Magazine, 2015

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134, Elissa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour, The Paris Review, 1993

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Magnolia Pictures, 2019

Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez Pay Tribute to Toni Morrison, Democracy Now!; TruthOut, 2019

Toni Morrison and What Our Mothers Couldn’t Say, Doreen St. Felix, The New Yorker, 2019

Toni Morrison’s Cosmos, Jesse McCarthy, The Nation, 2019

Toni Morrison and Nina Simone, United in Soul, Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, 2019

For more of Toni Morrison, a short story and selected essays:

Recitif, (a short story), annotated, 1983

James Baldwin Eulogy: December, 1987

“The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinser, Houghton Mifflin, 1987

Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture , 1993

“What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times, 1971

“On To Disneyland and the Unreal Reality,” New York Times, 1973

The Black Experience; A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say) Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say), New York Times, 1976

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greyreign · 5 years

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Original video from SOUL! and then shoutfactorytv. All rights and love to Soul! and shoutfactorytv for broadcasting this. Taped in London, 1971. Original links: (part 1) http://bit.ly/2T0evE9 (part 2) http://bit.ly/2ASKdMU -Find more audio and video of Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin on this channel. &check out this playlist of other Baldwin videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvbZAprCHO2Wf7Hl90O3-4kigGv3Bt6F3 Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.(born June 7, 1943) is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution." James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America. Some of Baldwin's essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award–nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro. Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only African Americans, but also gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement. Soul! or SOUL! (1967–1971 or 1967–1973) was a pioneering performance/variety television program in the late 1960s and early 1970s produced by New York City PBS affiliate, WNET. It showcased African American music, dance and literature. http://bit.ly/1BavXo6! more on Soul! here: http://bit.ly/2ATnujK Ellis Haizlip was born on September 17, 1929 (to January 25, 1991). He was a pioneering broadcaster, television host, theater and television producer, and cultural activist. Often host of Soul! If you are a copyright holder that would like something removed from my channel please message me on YouTube & I will respond so you do not need to file a DMCA Copyright Takedown Request with YouTube. Thank You. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni, a conversation [FULL] https://youtu.be/eZmBy7C9gHQ

#James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni #a conversation [FULL] Original video from SOUL! and then shoutfactor

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lodelss · 5 years

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Toni Morrison, 1931-2019

* * *

For more on Toni Morrison, selected profiles, interviews, and tributes:

“Ghosts in the House,” Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2003

“Toni Morrison’s Truth,” Postscript Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2019

“The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison,” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, New York Times Magazine, 2015

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134, Elissa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour, The Paris Review, 1993

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Magnolia Pictures, 2019

Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez Pay Tribute to Toni Morrison, Democracy Now!; TruthOut, 2019

Toni Morrison and What Our Mothers Couldn’t Say, Doreen St. Felix, The New Yorker, 2019

Toni Morrison’s Cosmos, Jesse McCarthy, The Nation, 2019

Toni Morrison and Nina Simone, United in Soul, Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, 2019

For more of Toni Morrison, a short story and selected essays:

Recitif, (a short story), annotated, 1983

James Baldwin Eulogy: December, 1987

“The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinser, Houghton Mifflin, 1987

Toni Morrison Nobel Lecture , 1993

“What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times, 1971

“On To Disneyland and the Unreal Reality,” New York Times, 1973

The Black Experience; A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say) Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say), New York Times, 1976

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