Around 1990, I had recently returned to America from a year of dissertation research on East Africa's most famous playwright whose plays were all written and performed in Kiswahili (with the publication of my thesis, "Drama and National Culture: A Marxist Study of Ebrahim Hussein," I became, and probably still am, one of the leading Hussein scholars in the U.S. Since his works are untranslated, nobody's attempted to wrest my crown). I had spent 1988 at the University of Dar es Salaam working on the language, reading works of local criticism (also in Swahili), and befriending the great man himself. When Hussein began conversing with me in Kiswahili rather than English (which, along with German he had perfectly mastered), it marked a real advance in our friendship.    When I returned to the States, I was proud of my acquisition of Kiswahili. I had begun my formal studies of African literature at the University of Paris in 1977. My professors there were all French men and women who had spent time in France's former colonies, had become interested in and cultivated a knowledge of African authors writing in French but who made no attempt to learn an African language. In the 1980s, things were not significantly better for the study of African literature in the U.S. Professors who had mastered an African language usually taught in the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, or folklore. I swore I would be a different kind of Western scholar of African literature and made it my mission to learn Kiswahili.    So, puffed up with pride, I submitted a paper, "The Legacy of Swahili in American Culture," to the annual conference of The African Literature Association. The conference organizers correctly assumed that the panel on Swahili literature would not field a large audience, and I found myself in a small breakout room with a dozen Black professors sitting around a seminar table. I then set out my findings.    No Swahili loan words had made it into English, with the exception of "safari." However, the creation and dissemination of Kwanzaa in 1966 by Professor Maulana Karenga (then known as Ron Everett) brought in a whole raft of Swahili words. Karenga chose Swahili to name and describe the ritual objects and leading ideas of this new Black holiday because it was the most widely spoken indigenous language on the continent -- 5 million native speakers, 50 million with different levels of mastery. However, as an artificial borrowing, several linguistic usages which would not have been recognized or condoned by native speakers were introduced by Dr. Karenga, to wit:  Several of the Nguo Saba  (seven principles) were incorrectly listed as infinitive verbs rather than nouns ( kujichagulia  and kuumba )  Kujichagulia  (self-determination) itself was a neologism that literally translated as "to choose oneself," thus erasing the collective nature of the English term  The daily candle lit on each day of Kwanzaa was improperly termed in its plural form, mishumaa , rather than in the singular, mshumaa   And most egregiously (by my lights)  Adapted from the phrase matunda ya kwanza (first fruits), kwanza  is spelled with only one a . Kerenga added an extra "a" at the end so that each of his seven children could display their own letter in the celebration.  By the time I finished my presentation, the atmosphere in the room had turned noticeably icy. And then the attacks began. Who was I to set myself up as the arbiter of the correct usage of Swahili? What did I know about African American culture? How could I, as a white man, appreciate the value of these African borrowings to African Americans? Didn't this emphasis on "correct" usage entirely miss the point? Wasn't this just another way of asserting white superiority over Black practice? I sat in shocked silence as the conversation spun more wildly. One professor who lived in midtown Manhattan shook with anger as he described the consistent humiliation of being passed over by taxi after taxi trying to get to his job at Columbia University. "What does this have to do with the use of Swahili in America?" I thought to myself. I bolted the minute the panel was over.    "But I was right! " I complained to my dissertation advisor who was also at the conference. "I was just presenting facts ! I wasn't criticizing the people in that room!" She shook her head. "Do you think that having learned Swahili gives you a leg up on understanding African culture?" "Of course!" I replied. "I was able to get much further into the culture while living there than if I had relied only on English." "Book smart doesn't make you street smart," she said, handing me her profoundest lesson. "Be aware of what you're saying as a white person. Black people have been beaten down with facts during their whole time in the West. When you present yourself as an expert on anything Black, you have to be careful, especially if you think you're ‘right’. Humility is a much greater asset than knowledge."    I had to think about what she said all that night. The next day I went through the conference until I found Dr. Makonde, the man who complained about the taxis in New York. "I want to apologize," I said, suddenly getting throaty with emotion. "I didn't know that I had hurt you yesterday." He gave me a startled look, then softened. "Thank you," he said. "You didn't know and now you do. That's a much more valuable lesson than the proper usage of mishumaa ."  - Robert Philipson SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Being 17, the latest offering of the acclaimed French auteur, André Téchiné, at 73 is a visually gorgeous film. It tells of a lust/hate relationship that develops between two adolescent boys (no prize for guessing their age) in the rural French high school they go to. Smart and sensitive queer-in-incubation Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) stares longingly at his beautiful bi-racial classmate, Thomas (Corentin Fila), igniting the latter’s antagonism and initiating a protracted series of physical fights. Through a series of convenient plot twists, Thomas comes to live with Damien and his physician mother for a time, which does nothing to dampen the sexual tension between them but does finally prod Damien into coming out both to his understanding mother and to Thomas himself. “I don’t know if I’m into guys,” he tells Thomas, “or just you.” Thomas’ initial reaction reveals his deep ambivalence but he eventually gives into the lust on his own side. The plot itself brings nothing knew to the well-worn tropes of gay adolescent coming-of-age, coming out stories. There is always the lover and the beloved. And there are only two outcomes. Either the beloved returns the lover’s affection or he doesn’t. In Being 17, Thomas does return the love, and there are two tasteful-but-stimulating sex scenes between the boys to prove it. And just for that dash of political correctness, they both top one another. The film is beautiful, as I noted before, and the whiteness of the mountainous winter scenery makes Thomas’ darker beauty stand out all the more. With no backstory presented as to his biological origins, Thomas drops into this literally white world as the adopted son of a cattle farming couple, both of whom are grounded, loving parents. (Everybody in this film is, as the French would say, “hyper-kool.”) What’s notable, when you look at Being 17 through a racial lens is how invisible race is. Thomas loves his mountains, his cattle, his white parents. There is no trace of Black identity in his persona. At one point when the constant fighting between Thomas and Damien comes to the attention of the school principal, he says that Thomas fits the profile of a bully. That’s as close to a racial stereotype as the movie gets. (‘Cause, you know, black men are given to violence.) The movie takes a voyeuristic pleasure (as does Damien) in Thomas’ well-built naked body. That’s par for the course and aesthetically done. Thomas’ blackness, a blackness of appearance only, is entirely beside the point. His role could have been given to a white actor, and nothing would have to have changed. This isn’t exactly color-blind casting, as the musical Hamilton has so famously done with the Founding Fathers. It’s more like colorless casting. (I wanted to write a review of Patrick Ian Polk’s 2012 narrative, The Skinny, an ensemble romantic comedy about Black gays and lesbians, but that too featured a colorless script – no racial issues come up for any of the characters.) This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a famous essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin complained that when “the negro” was introduced to the pages of American literature, it was always as a problem or in reaction to white society’s prevailing racism. In that regard, colorless casting—while perhaps conjuring a post-racial utopia that can never come to pass (pace the Obama presidency)—represents an advance in consciousness. Then again, perhaps not. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

During December of 1977, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the remembered rituals and celebrations of the American Christmases I had grown up with on the suburban mesa of my Pasadena childhood. Even as an assimilated Jew, I had excitedly awaited Santa’s arrival on Christmas eve, sung carols in school and around the neighborhood, and decorated our tree with bulbs and tinsel. This was my fourth Christmas away from home. The previous three had been spent with the Peace Corps in the Central African Republic; this one I passed by myself in the studio apartment of a gritty working-class suburb of Paris. The stream-of-consciousness conjuration of my idealized childhood eventually got refined into a chapter of my family memoir, part of which was excerpted in last month’s newsletter. I had originally titled the chapter “Memories and Blood” but eventually swapped it for the less emotionally charged “Xmas.”    There was another change I made decades later. I was aware by this time that there was a certain dissonance in the fact that all my memories and sentiments around winter solstice derived from Christianity, a religion and tradition I had no interest in claiming as my own. So, in the final sentence, I wrote, “We were talking about Christmas, and we were also talking about Auschwitz …” I wanted to insert the knife blade of the Holocaust reference because if that wasn’t a touchstone of my atavistic Jewish identity, what was? And yet I felt as though I had written the sentence in bad faith. It nagged at me. And then, as I wrote about the African American massacres – the Red Summer of 1919, Tulsa in 1921, and now the Rosewood centenary – I thought about my own connection – or lack thereof – to the history of Jewish disasters.    This was the thing: we weren’t  talking about Auschwitz. I was born five years after the liberation of the concentration camps. My parents – that whole generation of Jews -- had learned about the systematic massacre of millions of Jews either first-hand through direct participation in the war, or through the loss of family members, or through the chilling, unbelievable news accounts as the monstrous scale of the disaster hove into view. Six million Jews. It was a number beyond imagining.     I never had to imagine it on my Pasadena mesa. The Philipsons no longer had Old World family roots, knew of no lost relatives or Holocaust survivors. We belonged to no synagogue, engaged in no intra-ethnic discussion, or lament, or reckoning with the enormity of a coordinated massacre that had been visited upon a people with whom we shared a label. I don’t remember my parents mentioning the Holocaust. They certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it by that name because “Holocaust” didn’t come into widespread use amongst English speakers until the 1978 TV film of the same name.    I was 28 then, well beyond my formative years. Eight years earlier, I had lived and worked on an Israeli kibbutz  for five months. I was mildly shocked when, riding a bus in Jerusalem, I saw the blue numbers tattooed on a woman’s arm. The kibbutzniks  I knew talked at length about the heroic war for Israel’s survival in 1948, not about the Holocaust. There was a Hebrew term for it, shoah , but I only learned about that word through Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary of the same name.  I don’t know when or how I learned about the Holocaust. There was no bolt of horrific lightning. It leaked into my consciousness somehow. By the time Schindler’s List  seared Spielberg’s Jewish agony onto the American consciousness in 1993 (the power of movies!), there were no surprises for me. I had picked it up from other sources: a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem, Elie Wiesel’s harrowing memoir of Auschwitz; Alain Resnais’ sober documentary "Night and Fog," bits and pieces of oral history I had gathered from friends and acquaintances who did have a personal connection.  The memorialization of the Holocaust, both in America and Europe, continues apace (I personally recommend the Jewish Museum in Berlin) but has added little to my highly mediated and personally distant relation to this thing. I am a Jew, and I shed Jewish tears. But I also shed tears upon viewing Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys  and the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry .   As for the Holocaust, when I recently tried to watch the 2020 Polish film, The Champion of Auschwitz , it was all beautifully staged and all too familiar: the haggard hopelessness of the stripped prison overalls, the cockscomb arrogance of the Nazi uniforms, the casual death and violence visited upon the inmates, the gray utilitarian buildings and “ Arbeit Macht Frei .” I turned the film off after 20 minutes. I’d had enough.    - Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Lynchings and Massacres SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

At the age of 30, my mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, met and fell in love with the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens while both were working in Hollywood in 1944. In an unexpected turn of events, Ivens was appointed Film Commissioner of the Dutch East Indies, a 350-year-old colony from which the Dutch had been driven by the Japanese during World War Two. By 1944, it was clear that the Axis powers would ultimately be defeated and the Japanese would eventually relinquish their conquests.     Ivens thought he was being hired to film the liberation of the islands from all colonial rule, but the goal of the Netherlands was to return to status quo ante. The "natives," though nobody had asked them, declared an Independent Republic of Indonesia, triggering an inevitable invasion of colonial reconquest.    Ivens and Marion were preparing crews and equipment in Sydney, Australia, home to the Dutch East Indies government-in-exile when they heard that Indonesia had revolted. Ivens lost no time throwing in his lot with the revolutionaries and redesigned his position, thereby losing his access to film equipment.     On the Sydney docks, two blocks from the apartment where Joris and Marion lived, Dutch shipments for a war of reconquest were being prepared. Waterside workers and crews began a boycott in support of the Republic. Ivens decided to make a short agitational film about the boycott with cooperation and a little bit of funding from the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Because of his notoriety, Ivens could not be present at any of the filming. He had to rely on Marion to shoot on a half-broken camera using disparate pieces of film scrounged up by left-wing supporters (Kodak refused to sell them any stock). She was on the ground, making the shot choices, running the camera and the risk.  The picture editing was barely completed when Ivens was hospitalized with serious asthma and bronchitis. Marion and the Australian screenwriter, Catherine Duncan, had to take over the post-production editing. This was a film that would never have seen the light of day without the women on its team.    In spite of the odds, INDONESIA CALLING, premiered in Sydney on August 9, 1946. Eventually a Malayan-language print was smuggled through the Dutch blockade where it was widely shown as motivational propaganda. Subsequent international screenings of the film always had political ramifications. Being for or against “Indonesia Calling” was a stand-in for a pro- or anti-colonial ideology. When the Dutch government finally recognized that Iven’s worldwide reputation as a documentary filmmaker was an asset to the country, the Minister for Cultural Affairs confessed in 1965, “history has agreed with you.”     And most probably, "Indonesia Calling" is an early example – perhaps the first –of guerilla documentary filmmaking, although the term hadn’t yet been coined because the genre itself hadn’t been invented. If it’s true, my cousin Marion made film history. Of course, she’s only a footnote, a sidekick, a paramour, an adjunct. She herself accepted her marginalization. After all, she had been raised in a Cleveland bourgeois Jewish family. Making socialist documentaries in Australia and Eastern Europe with a notorious Dutch filmmaker (not to mention the out-of-wedlock relationship) was already miles off the beaten path.    She eventually settled in Paris, and when my family came to live there in 1962, Marion had just wrested control of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) from the famous and imperious Henri Langlois, whose derelict leadership posed an existential crisis. But that, as they say, is another story. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Poetry and lynching -- not an obvious coupling. Poetry, of course, has never been only the hearts-and-flowers rhymes we now associate with Hallmark cards. The dawn of Western poetry, Homer's Iliad, begins with the promise of blood and slaughter. Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, Accursed, which brought countless pains upon the Achaeans, Hurled to Hades many strong souls of heroes, Served them up as carrion for the dogs and all the birds It was inevitable that lynching, that particular inhuman curse visited mostly upon African Americans, would enter the writing of American poets, mostly Black but not exclusively. The wonder is that it came so late. If you date the Age of Lynching from 1880, the end of Reconstruction, then it was 40 years before Claude McKay's poem, "The Lynching," brought this horror into verse. We've spoken of this elsewhere, specifically as part of the Shoga Treat on " The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill ." McKay's sonnet is a bit muddled in terms of its religious imagery, and the poetic diction of its octet (first 8 lines) evokes a kind of literary haze, but the sestet (final 6 lines) snaps everything into focus with a chilling commentary on the dehumanizing culture of the South. Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view The ghastly body swaying in the sun: The women thronged to look, but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue; And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee. How can you encompass lynching in a sonnet? You can't, and McKay doesn't entirely succeed, especially as he tries to bring in a Christian God. But when he turns an unvarnished language to the scene itself, the visual and poetic power of "The Lynching" is undeniable. Helene Johnson, one of the better female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, commits similar errors of overreach in her anti-lynching poem, "A Southern Road." (For those of you who have followed Shoga's adventures with Richard Bruce Nugent, this poem appeared in the single issue of the infamous arts journal, Fire!!) Johnson begins in a pastoral mode, using a blend of natural beauty and ominous imagery to lead the reader down this Southern road to reveal "a solemn, tortured shadow in the air." But the horror of the sight itself is fatally obscured by an arcane poetic language and a Baroque reach towards religious significance. In one lonely lingering hour Before the Sabbath. A blue-fruited black gum, Like a tall predella, Bears a dangling figure,— Sacrificial dower to the raff, Swinging alone, A solemn, tortured shadow in the air. "Sacrificial dower to the raff." Come again? (And, yes, I did have to look up "predella.") The most famous poem about lynching, of course, was written by a Jewish leftie school teacher in 1937, Abel Meeropol, under the title "Bitter Fruit." When Meeropol set his poem to music, Billie Holiday made it her own and immortalized the song now called "Strange Fruit." Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees The power of the poem comes from its straightforward use of language and the relentless beat of its controlling metaphor. There is no attempt at theodicy or metaphysical meaning. "Here is a strange and bitter crop." But the strangest, most compressed and suggestive use of lynching as a poetic metaphor comes from the pen of Jean Toomer during that brief period of time when he wrote under the mysterious power of a Black muse. Portrait in Georgia Hair -- braided chestnut coiled like a lyncher's rope Eyes - fagots Lips - old scars, or the first red blisters Breath - the last sweet scent of cane And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame Is this beautiful? I don't know. Is it poetry? Yes, of the highest order. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Poet SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

This is a gruesome way to kick off 2023, but because of our commitment to centenaries, we must acknowledge that 1923 began on New Year’s Day with a massacre, the razing of the Black town of Rosewood, Florida. But let us take a step back. The popular conception of racially motivated killing of African Americans readily accepts lynchings – it’s our very own specifically American contribution to the violence that human beings visit on one another. We are historically resistant to the concept of racially motivated massacres, even though they’re much splashier with elevated death tolls. Everybody knows about Emmett Till; everybody now knows about Ahmaud Arbery. (I’m purposely leaving police lynchings out of the account in order not to muddy the waters.) History witnessed a whole year of African American massacres, now known as the Red Summer of 1919: almost 40 race riots in cities and townships across the country. The historical evidence is easy to find, but this ravening racial injustice, the greatest and most prolonged spasm of white fury in our history, has left NO memory or mark upon our collective consciousness. Even African Americans are largely ignorant of it. Wilmington 1898; Atlanta 1906; East St. Louis 1917; Tulsa 1921; Rosewood 1923 – all Black massacres perpetrated by whites. The centenary of the Tulsa massacre combined with the popularity of HBO’s Watchmen series which used its historical context as a shocking season opener, has surfaced knowledge of and interest in this particular massacre, but who knows for how long? John Singleton gamely attempted to perform the same service for the township that was completely destroyed in his 1997 narrative film Rosewood. Given the fact that the centenary of the Rosewood massacre has elicited no interest in or revival of the movie, I’m guessing that Rosewood will go down as another case of voluntary amnesia in our national disinterest in massacres. Lynching stories, on the other hand, are right up our alley. They pit individuals against the mob, so there’s no messiness of judgment, as can happen with massacres when folks on both sides get killed. Rosewood provides examples of both lynchings and massacres. The first person to be killed was an unarmed Black man whom a white vigilante group believed (falsely) to be covering the escape route of a non-existent Black attacker of a white woman (who was probably lying about the attack to cover up an affair she was having with a white man). Even though he was shot by a trigger-happy member of the mob, the whites hung his corpse in a tree to signify “lynching.” A few nights later, a crowd of armed white men gathered around the house of a successful (and insufficiently subservient) Black resident of Rosewood in the mistaken belief that this uppity Negro was hiding the non-existent Black “rapist.” (Even though the woman whose lies had provoked the violence had specified that she hadn’t been raped, only beaten, nothing could stop the story from taking on the time-honored contours of the white Southern fever dream.) The African American matriarch of the Carrier house was shot and killed. When two white vigilantes broke through the front door with murderous intent, the Carrier son mowed them down before being shot and killed himself. Since both sides were armed and the casualties were equal, that was neither a lynching nor a massacre. But two white men had been killed by a Black man, and that was a disaster for the Blacks of Rosewood by any definition. They knew their fate was sealed and fled as best they could. For the next three days and nights, inflamed white men came from around the state to wreak “revenge.” No more white lives were lost in the ensuing racial fury, but a still-unknown number of Black ones, who could not escape the roaming mobs, died in any number of gruesome ways. (The vastly undercounted official number of deaths was reported as 2 whites and 8 Blacks.) Still unslaked, white rampagers burned down practically every building in Rosewood. That was a massacre. The obvious fact in this edifying taxonomy of racial violence is that the Blacks are always outnumbered, outgunned, outmaneuvered, although often only by sheer force of numbers, and generally abandoned by history. In the case of Rosewood, a white grand jury was convened the following month but found insufficient evidence to prosecute any crimes. Case closed. This too was a massacre, and the spirit of Rosewood (which had been a relatively prosperous Black community) was razed along with the town itself. The terrified escapees made no attempt to rebuild or return. They never talked about what had happened to others – not even to their children – and yet another African American bloodbath dropped into oblivion. However Rosewood proved to be the last massacre by whites of an African American community. (Lynchings continued throughout the 20 th century.) When racial violence broke out again, the Harlem riots of 1935 established the template for massacres that were self-directed (the destruction of urban ghettos) and exacerbated by armed agents of the state (the police, state militia, national guard). From henceforward, the fire and fury came from the Black community. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Distant Echoes of the Holocaust SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published with commercial presses, but MW was the real deal. A poet through and through. It was poetry that extracted him from the dead-end factory jobs at which he had labored for 16 years. He still lived in his hometown of Baltimore where he had married young and fathered a son, born with Down Syndrome and dead after ten months. He came as close to spiritual extinction as most people do under the grind of uncreative work and the responsibility of providing for his family, but he never stopped feeling, never stopped writing.   In 1985, at the age of 34, he got his break. A volume of poetry published by a major university press and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship sprung him from the factory, and he resumed his long-abandoned path in higher education, culminating in an MFA in creative writing from Brown University.   MW and I met at New York University where we were both aspirants to a secure berth in a prestigious institution of higher education (MW ultimately succeeded; I didn't). MW was hired as an adjunct to teach creative writing and courses in African American literature in the English Department. As a newly-minted Ph.D., I had received a teaching fellowship to develop courses in African literature in the Department of Comparative Literature. Our paths crossed when I audited his course on African American drama (and was appalled by the clumsily nihilistic Rachel , a play written by Angelina Weld Grimké in 1916 which advocated racial suicide).  During the two years, our professional paths paralleled in New York, we struck up an unlikely friendship based on literature, a respect for each other's intelligence, and his tolerance for my then-monumental ignorance for what the Black experience was really  like in spite of my years in Africa and subsequent academic studies. In so many ways we were opposites. MW was straight; on his second wife with whom I got along famously; was proudly and consciously working class, and was a poet. I was gay; conventionally promiscuous (NYU was a 20-minute walk from Christopher Street); arrogantly thought that my time in Africa and studies outside of the white middle class had broadened me; and wrote facile literary criticism.  And yet we were friends. Our agreements and disagreements about literature stimulated us both. As he educated me about the subtleties of class and color in the Black community, I spoke to him about the perplexities of race, class and internalized homophobia in the gay and lesbian world (this was 1990, and the queer alphabet hadn't been invented yet). Our personal discussions could occasionally go deep. MW had a lot of pain to exorcise, and I was a sympathetic listener to his songs of dissatisfaction -- the usual racist crap from white society; the elitist crap from the academic class into which he had "risen." During one of our conversations, he confessed to being sexually abused as a child. (I'm breaking no confidences here; he later brought it all up through therapy, confronted his abuser, and incorporated it into his poetry.)   We were maturing men at the beginning of promising literary careers in New York. The pace and crowd of the city could be oppressive: sensory overload was the norm; and it was hard to break through people's ambitions to SUCCEED and know them as vulnerable humans. MW and I immediately established a soul-to-soul communication (though his soul was immeasurably deeper than mine). We can both tell you of magic walks we took together through Brooklyn and Manhattan. I and my Trinidadian boyfriend went to his apartment in Orange, NJ where we danced the electric slide along with his wife's closeted gay uncle who beamed at us approvingly.  Life took us in different directions. With my academic path blocked, I returned to California to be with my family. MW prospered both as a teacher and a poet. He snagged a position at Rutgers and lived in Philadelphia for the next eight years. With frequent trips to the East Coast, I was able to maintain our friendship for a while. In 1993 I attended the premiere of his one produced play and was his confidant when he fell in love with the female lead, thus accelerating the failure of his second marriage. (The flirtation was only a notch on her belt but a serious wound to MW's heart.)  The geographical separation took its toll. I stayed in California working my dead-end job as a computer literacy consultant during the 90s. MW ended up in a nicely tenured position at a Boston college; he continued writing and publishing to ever-greater acclaim, the recipient of numerous awards.  He took a deep dive into Chinese culture not typical of African American writers. I had given up on fiction but not on the academic book that eventually got accepted by a university press and which nobody read. We eventually stopped communicating.   Poets are a special breed. They are attuned to language and all its ramifications in ways that we are not. "Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter," to quote John Keats. I've suspected that the most avid readers of poetry are other poets. Poetry is not the genre I turn to first when I choose to read for pleasure. Thus, I am not so familiar with the extensive oeuvre of "my poet." Years later, long after we had stopped communicating, I was asked to write a one-page summary of a number of African American writers for a coffee table photo book. MW became once again my poet, and so I dipped into his world of words anew. I found myself again enchanted. And this is part of what I wrote about his poem, "Beginnings."   "His vision transforms the modest house of his childhood ... into portals of transcendence and cosmic communion."  Inside it had no end; the stairs led to God's tongue   the basement was a warm door   to the labyrinth of the Earth.   We lived on the rising chest of a star.   "But all this is extinguished with the introduction of violence when the young boy draws his first blood in a fist fight."  The world became many houses,      all of them under siege   If you are lucky, you've been transfixed -- more than once -- by a lyric or a line that has captured you in all its senses.  "Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."  -- Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Poetry and Lynching SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There were no Blacks in my neighborhood and Pasadena High School at the time in the halcyon days before court-ordered bussing (Pasadena was the second city outside the South to have that mandate clamped down upon it) had an African American enrollment of 8%. During the 1930s, Ruby McKnight Williams moved to Pasadena from Kansas with the intention of working in the public schools only to discover that the city did not hire Black teachers. “I didn’t see any difference in Pasadena and Mississippi except they were spelled differently,” she remarked. My parents, being Jewish (and therefore suspect as the only Jewish family in our neighborhood), were good New Deal liberals, and though they endorsed an anti racist ideology, they didn't have much opportunity to put it into practice. Their musical taste wasn't particularly advanced, and though we had some Ella Fitzgerald LPs in their collection, I never heard the blues or had the blues even though I was plenty unhappy as a social reject. The blues wasn't about that.  My college days at the mostly white University of California Santa Cruz didn't increase my exposure significantly. I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth without much comprehension. (This was during the late 60s and early 70s.) The music I was listening to as part of the rock 'n roll generation was marinated in the blues, but I didn't recognize it as such. The only version of Robert Johnson's "Love In Vain" I knew about was that of the Rolling Stones. I certainly enjoyed "God Bless the Child" on the self-titled album by Blood, Sweat and Tears, but I was always a sucker for horns.Yes, I had heard that Elvis stole "Hound Dog" from Big Momma Thorton, but I never sought out any of her recordings. How could you top the King? With the exception of Motown, popular music was still fairly segregated, and I had never been one to comb through record bins searching for Blind Lemon Jefferson. Some of the white bands blasted the blues in your face (Cream, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers), and though I enjoyed the virtuoso guitar of Eric Clapton (still do), I never fell down amazed on the musical Road to Damascus. My soul was not open to the blues. Decades later, I was shepherded towards the blues through my research in the Queer Harlem Renaissance. I was confused at first because I had never heard of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, or Alberta Hunter. Wasn't the blues perfected by oppressed Black men during the Depression? There was martyred Robert Johnson, saint Leadbelly, B.B. King and his inamorta Lucille. Who were these women; what was the Classic Blues? Some of the songs I researched were cute but either sounded dated ("Kitchen Mechanic Blues") or were so poorly recorded that they were difficult to appreciate (any of Ma Rainey's songs put out by Paramount).  Fortunately Columbia had done right by Bessie Smith. Carl Van Vechten was so taken with Bessie's output that he bought two copies of every side, one to play and one to keep in mint condition for the future. So when I heard "Young Woman's Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues," I was softened up in spite of my advanced age. Furthermore, her renditions of such songs as "After You've Gone" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" dusted off the cobwebs from these pop classics. Many songs, especially Etta James' heartswept version of "At Last," helped pierce the cultural wax in my ears. For a more recent example, "Another Life Goes By" by Christone Kingfish Ingram stopped me in my tracks. And then it turned out -- who knew? -- that my hometown of Oakland not only claimed an important role in blues history but that it nurtures a healthy blues scene after a time of attrition due to the town's economic strangulation during the latter decades of the 20th century. Now we're solvent again, thanks to the Silicon Valley octopus (Frank Norris reference here). Blues collaborators such as Ronnie Stewart, Executive Director of the West Coast Blues Society, and Tia Carroll whose fantastic cover of Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me Blues" (not a blues) launched Shoga's film line-up back in 2005, also contributed to my education.  Apparently you can teach old dogs new licks. See y'all at the Everett and Jones BBQ on the first Saturday of every month. Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The First White Promoter of the Blues SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Before there was the record producer John Hammond (not to be confused with the white blues musician John P. Hammond), before there was the British Invasion of the 1960s, there was (sigh) the music and dance critic, successful light novelist, socialite and tastemaker Carl Van Vechten who, during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance in 1925 and 26, introduced the blues to white America. This he did through several articles in Vanity Fair, the monthly magazine of popular culture that exposed Americans outside of New York to trendy topics, modern graphics, and a tone of humorous cynicism. The first of these articles, "The Black Blues" (August 1925) stands up remarkably well even a century later. Van Vechten had immersed himself in Harlem culture and was nothing if not a quick study. Also, being a music critic of long standing, he appreciated and explained the technical aspects of the genre -- the pentatonic scale, the improvised vocalizations, the innovative combinations of instruments. "Notwithstanding the fact that the musical interest ... is often of an extremely high quality, I would say that in this respect the Blues seldom quite equal the Spirituals. The words, however, in beauty and imaginative significance, far transcend in their ... poetic importance the words of the religious songs. They are eloquent with rich idioms, metaphoric phrases, and striking word combinations." Van Vechten goes on to quote, with attribution, assessments of the blues culled from personal communications with W.C. Handy and Langston Hughes. The passage from Hughes' letter to Van Vechten has become foundational. "The blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to." Why the sigh preceding the introduction of Van Vechten earlier? Van Vechten was a complex and contradictory character. His "discovery" of Harlem in the 1920s and the good-faith efforts he exerted to publicize what was then known as The Negro Renaissance were both extraordinarily fruitful (he secured the publication of Langston's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues) and, in certain instances, quite toxic. The most bedeviling instance of Van Vechten's impact was the 1926 publication of his novel, Nigger Heaven, and this also involved his literal appropriation of the blues, although the title of his book was so incendiary that the inclusion of actual blues lyrics without permission might have seemed like a minor infraction except for the threat of lawsuits following its bestseller status. In a panic, Van Vechten asked his friend Langston to quickly come up with substitute blues lyrics for subsequent printings, and the young poet complied. Although that staved off legal action, Langston's evident support couldn't entirely mitigate the public relations disaster amongst the Black intelligentsia occasioned not only by the title but by Van Vechten's pulpy and sensationalistic depictions of Harlem's nightlife. (The novel begins with the lurid doings of a pimp known as The Scarlet Creeper.) Although W.E.B. DuBois scathingly reviewed the novel as "a blow in the face" and "an affront to Negro hospitality," that didn't hurt its popularity amongst the white readership, and Nigger Heaven was by far the most commercially successful of Van Vechten's novels. But we have strayed somewhat from Van Vechten's championship of the blues, a cultural stance far ahead of its time, not only for a white man but for many African Americans as well. In an astute comparison with the recuperated status of the Spirituals during the 1920s, he writes of the blues, "The humbleness of their origin and occasionally the frank obscenity of their sentiment are probably responsible for this condition [of being looked down upon]. In this connection it may be recalled that it has taken over fifty years for the Negroes to recover from their repugnance to the Spirituals, because of the fact that they were born during slave days. Now, however, the Negroes are proud of the Spirituals, regarding them as one of the race's greatest gifts to the musical pleasure of mankind. I predict that it will not be long before the Blues will enjoy a similar resurrection which will make them as respectable, at least in the artistic sense, as the religious songs." He was right about that. Fifty years after the publication of his appreciation, the genre's conquest of new audiences amongst urban Blacks (the Chicago Blues) and its fervent embrace by white British and American rockers (the Rolling Stones, the Beatles) sealed its status as one of the most creative and consequential contributions of African American culture to the world. (Queer nota bene. Van Vechten's next Vanity Fair article on the subject, "Negro 'Blues" Singers," [March 1926] profiled Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Clara Smith -- all bisexual women.)  Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in Growing Up Clueless SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

America hates old people. Aging out of relevance, health, and a community of peers as they die off is no fun even if one has wealth or family love to cushion these failings. The queers of the Harlem Renaissance were particularly vulnerable to the perils of aging – if they made it that far. Wallace Thurman committed suicide by alcohol at age 31. Countee Cullen died of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning aged 42. Hypertension killed A’Lelia Walker at 46, which was understandable since she was on the brink of losing her mother’s financial empire, the C. J. Walker Beauty Company, with the deepening of the Great Depression. Most of these men and women were in the prime of adulthood when they experienced the glory days of the Renaissance. Claude McKay was a good ten years older than the other writers whom he so influenced, and he contended with poverty, failing health, and a lack of community all the sooner. He turned to the Catholic church for support. Nonetheless his conversion in 1943 shocked his friends and literary fans; they didn’t see it coming. By then he had moved to Chicago entirely supported by the Church. He died three years later of a heart attack at the age of 58. Alain Locke never felt sufficiently at home or free to come out of the closet in the bougie Black community of Washington, DC, but that was where his career lay as a Professor of Philosophy at Howard University, and it was in DC that he lived alone and emotionally isolated until his retirement in 1953. He moved to New York City the following year where he was diagnosed with – what else? – heart disease. (I’m sussing out a pattern here.) He expired after a six-week illness at age 68 – a long and productive life but a lonely one. Richard Bruce Nugent also enjoyed a long life, one of the longest. He was only 19 when his drawings and stories were published in the Black publications at the time. He had a checkered career afterwards as an artist and entered into a sexless marriage with a professional woman so in love with him that she agreed to those terms in the hope that he would change. When she committed suicide in 1969, Nugent lived out his remaining years close to becoming homeless and almost entirely forgotten. But he survived long enough to witness the birth of the post-Stonewall culture, even though he was initially unwilling to accept the gay label or proclaim solidarity with the movement. Nonetheless the movement found him, and he saw his work anthologized, became the key figure in the rediscovery of the Harlem Renaissance arts journal, Fire!!, and witnessed his growing reputation as a Black gay pioneer before he died in 1987, age 80. Because of his longevity and relative visibility as gay, Nugent benefitted from the support of a queer community that, obviously, wasn’t available to others who died earlier or who remained deeply closeted. When Langston Hughes lived out his final years in a Harlem, he didn’t need the support of a queer community which he wouldn’t have recognized as his own in any event. He had the African American community where he was respected, beloved, and had held the unofficial post of poet laureate of Harlem for decades. (Hughes bucked tradition by dying of surgery complications related to prostate cancer, age 66.) Did it matter to Langston that, despite his attractiveness, generous personality, and talent, shared his life with no other? We don’t know and we won’t know. But had Langston been gay and ensconced in a community that accepted queer relationships instead of exiling their culture heroes for the merest whisper of homosexuality (pace Bayard Rustin) . . . ah, but one can only speculate Being Black, susceptible to hypertension, socially isolated, without a long-term partner, and probably without financial security guaranteed a difficult old age. There were sunnier scenarios, and the best of these fell to the lot of the white writer, tastemaker, and socialite Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten promoted the Harlem Renaissance and his own status as a cultural critic simultaneously and with great success. He possessed money, talent, social graces, and a wife who adored him through the gay liaisons of their 50-year marriage. (He died in his sleep, age 84, in their marriage bed.) During the latter part of his life, Van Vechten collected and created one of the most important literary and historical archives of African American culture, the James Weldon Johnson Collection housed at Yale. Although Van Vechten was, of necessity, discreet about his queer proclivities, he left boxes of his “queer-eye” photographs and eighteen scrapbooks recording a vibrant life of homosexual desire. Van Vechten, never troubled about his own sexuality (he had that in common with Nugent), thoroughly indulged a camp sensibility, which prances out of the scrapbook pages. Cataloguing Van Vechten’s vast donation took a quarter of a century, but when the venerable institution finally got around to unpacking the scrapbooks, Van Vechten, anticipating their surprise, had penned as an inscription the supremely queenie comeback: “Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be Just Jolly.” Snap! Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in On Aging as a Gay Man SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal trainer for the six months leading up to the 2019 Folsom Street Fair. I wanted a “Folsom Street body” at least once before I died, and I figured this would be my last shot. I was modeling myself, as we all did, after the mesomorphic hunks who flaunted their gym-built bodies. This was as close as I got.  I say this not to boast (well, a little of that) but to show how poorly the gay ideal fit into the realities of aging. In the popular gay imagination, success was measured by body image, athleticism, and the hotness of ones’ boyfriends. Never mind wisdom or loyalty or devotion to anything but sex, drugs, and house music. How could one sustain such a high bar when the gym routine became more onerous, the advancing decades less of a punchline and more a presentment of unavoidable loss. “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near."  A committed long-term relationship offered a possible soft landing, but heterosexuals had a hard enough time securing that berth, so what hope was there for me who wasn’t monogamously inclined to begin with? Money might buy me the facsimile of companionship, but everybody knew that was a sucker’s game.  Passing the 30 mark was the occasion of much hilarity and some real, if hidden, angst. Turning 40 required a support group. When I was going to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, the “Men Over 40” group shared their sadness at monthly potlucks. The specter of old age was terrifying. There seemed to be only two endgames, the sad aging transvestite and the bitter old queen – isolated, lonely, pathetic figures lusting after youthful bodies they could no longer attract.  My personal solution was to ignore the question altogether (vicious tongues have dubbed me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial). As long as my luck and my body held out, I could lead an active life, continue to bushwhack my way through the thickets of love and sex, and pursue interesting professional challenges. Each succeeding decade was better than the last. I’d finally learned to distinguish my ass from a hole in the ground. The 40s were good; the 50s were better; the 60s were positively wonderful! Obviously, I can’t keep this up. Already I live with a sense of horizon. I won’t dive the Blue Hole of Belize. I’ll never lay eyes on Iguazu Falls. And what did I come upstairs for?  What waits for me when old age takes me in its clammy embrace? I do not know when or how; I only know that it will. Aging, it seems, holds no consolation except for the dubious one of giving up.  And yet I have so much to offer! I could be a gay elder, but the term itself strikes as an oxymoron. Young gays have no interest in me or my life experience. Ironically, I survived the onslaught of AIDS in the 80s when 10% of my gay cohort perished. Diminished to begin with and succumbing in ever greater numbers to death, impairment, and disease, there are not many of my generation left.  It is a pity that no one cares, but generational indifference isn’t confined to the queer community. What could be more American than to devalue the past? It’s not new; it’s not now; it’s not next. I won’t accept marginalization until I have to. Then  I’ll be pathetic but not before. And yet the Africans have a proverb. When an elder dies, a library burns.  --Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Not-So-Golden Years of the Harlem Renaissance Queers SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Ask an American what areas and sectors of America are controlled by Jews, and you’ll get a variety of responses from “nothing” to “everything.” If you’re mildly anti-Semitic and given to conspiracy theories, you’ll respond with “banking,” “the law,” “Hollywood,” and anything else that strikes you as potentially exploitative. If you’re really anti-Semitic and completely detached from facts and history, you’ll cite organizations that secretly control government, international affairs and Zionism as a cover for world domination.   Jews themselves don’t like the question – its very formulation presumes an illicit dominance – and tend to downplay their overrepresentation in education, academia, popular entertainment, psychology, and the law. Nonetheless, the number of recent Ivy League presidents, Nobel Prize winners, billionaires or leading academics of Jewish descent is extraordinary, especially given that Jews comprise no more than 2.4 percent of the U.S. population. Looking at one tally: between 1965 and 1982,  Jews made up 40% of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20% of professors at the elite universities, 40% of partners in leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors and executives of the major print and broadcast media. This is impressive but overrepresentation is not dominance. If one out of every five professors is of Jewish descent, there are four who are not. Furthermore, Jews in any field do not speak with one voice nor work together towards any specifically Jewish goals. Louis Brandeis was Jewish but so was Roy Cohn. (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” to quote Prospero.) But Hollywood . . . that’s another matter. During the height of the studio system in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, five of the major studios and two of the minor ones had been founded by immigrant Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe. There were economic and sociological reasons for this. Many of these Jewish-Americans came from vaudeville and the garment trade, two areas of the economy hospitable to Jews. When movies were introduced in the late 1890s, success in this new industry required many of the same skills as vaudeville and the garment trade: salesmanship and chutzpah . Even as motion pictures became increasingly popular, Gentile industrialists wanted no part of them. The moviegoing audience was working-class and immigrant; tickets were cheap; and silent cinema had no language barrier. The Protestant cultural elite dismissed film as “lowbrow”, and major investors considered it a passing fad. But what about the dominance of Jewish composers in the music that is now known as The Great American Songbook? What explains the fact that, with the exception of Cole Porter, every major composer of the Broadway musical – and quite a few of the lyricists – were of Jewish descent. That kind of talent isn’t parceled out for sociological, or even ethnic, reasons. You can talk about vaudeville, the drive to assimilate, quick adaptation of American vernacular forms, but not all Jewish composers fit the up-from-immigrant narrative. Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, and Johnny Green were all of German Jewish descent whose families came from high culture and were already well established by the 1920s. From the international success of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1912) to the haunting strains of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In The Clowns” (1973), Jewish composers created the hits of Tin Pan Alley, the Broadway stage, and Hollywood that coalesced into The Great American Songbook before that musical world ceded its preeminence to rock ‘n roll, then hip hop. There were a few Gentile composers besides Cole Porter who made substantial contributions – Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen – but they were rare fish in an overwhelmingly Jewish sea. What explains this huge Jewish presence in an American musical genre that has no visible connection to Jewish ethnicity? It didn’t come from 2000 years of anti-Semitism; it didn’t come from 2nd Avenue Theater; it didn’t come from the cantorial traditions of the synagogue; it didn’t come from the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. It is a mystery and must remain so. Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience with this foray in My Aborted Jazz Career   SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts