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Prince publishes a memoir from the other side and much more! $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
MY FAVOURITE THINGS
When Doves Cry
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“Time is something we created in order to measure the span of our lives. It’s not meant to create fear in you or paralyse you from moving forward. You are never too old and it is never too late to start over.”— PRINCE
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It’s been a funny old week, filled with ups, downs and emotional turnarounds. My little sister passed her driving exam and while I’m incredibly proud of her achievements I’m also a little blue that this chapter has come to a close. After spending more than seventy five hours in the car with her, teaching her the ins and outs of urban road rules, I now have to accept that my services have been made redundant.
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While driving up to Newcastle last Sunday I came across this Fresh Air podcast on the release of The Beautiful Ones, a new biography on Prince written by Dan Piepenbring. The conversation begins with Piepenbrings’ initial invitation to Paisley Park, Prince’s famed Minnesotan estate, in January of 2016, of being commissioned to help write the artist’s autobiography and having to deal with the fallout of the star’s premature death from an accidental overdose of fentanyl a few months later. It reminded me of Piepenbring’s confessional recollections from his recent article in the New Yorker which offers such a candid look at the life of the Minnesotan talent. It’s astounding to accept that the artist, born Prince Rogers Nelson, made some of the most culturally defining music at such an early age and never lost sight of the bigger picture. Here was a uniquely celebrated talent who could expound on the intricacies of the music industry and its blatant exploitation of African American talent and in the same breath would joyfully sit through a screening of Kung Fu Panda 3 at the local cinemaplex. It is this very dichotomy that I lean into on a consistent basis these days. Sure it’s important to take our work and brand seriously but it’s also inherently important to know how to let our hair down and have a good giggle at ourselves.
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While holed up in my Airbnb Sunday night, the rain coming down in droves, I pressed play on Mike Leigh’s latest cinematic epic and found myself getting lost in this intricate period drama. The film retells the true to life story of the Peterloo massacre, a heartbreaking examination of a peaceful protest gone wrong in nineteenth century Manchester, offering us a glimpse at life as it was exactly two hundred years ago. This unfortunate showdown between the working class and the establishment was the culmination of years of bitter famine and chronic unemployment, the after-effects of the Napoleonic wars. Leigh captures the details of the period with exacting precision, breathing so much truth into every single line of dialogue from its wide array of characters. In doing so he helps us to see the layers of class and distinction, much the way we might the different rooms of a doll house. I stumbled across Leigh’s last picture, Mr. Turner, sometime last year and was captivated at the way in which he brought J.M.W. Turner — the Romantic English painter — and its ensemble cast and setting to life. We are truly lucky to have such an anachronistic artist giving life to such stories in these modern times, allowing audiences an opportunity to understand just how much we owe those that have come before us.
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Ever since I came across Jia Tolentino’s indelible voice last year within the pages of The New Yorker, I’ve been harnessing a newfound appreciation for the modern economy. She has helped me to make sense of the ever-changing landscape in which we live and the tools our generation currently harness to (seeminly) make the world a better place. I’ve been meaning to get my eyes on Trick Mirror, Tolentino’s debut non-fiction release — a collection of confessional and reflective essays — ever since she posted a photo of the galleys on Twitter earlier this year. As I close in on the final chapters, I must concur with Rebecca Solnit that the Texan native is one of the best essayists of our generation. Tolentino is a woman of my generation (born a month after moi!) who is constantly working at bettering herself (and by extension her peers) through intensive scrutiny and self reflection. Much like Tolentino, I’ve found myself devoting more and more of my time to self-reflection on my laptop, diving into my thoughts and feelings in this newsletter and other creative outlets in an attempt to make sense of the endless noise. While I am nowhere near as prolific as the thirty year old journalist, I’ve come to discover that the mind is an incredibly resilient instrument. Capable of so much more than we give it credit for.
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I stumbled back across this book while devouring an obituary on Robert Evans, the prolific Hollywood producer and former studio executive, who passed away last week. Written by Peter Biskind, the acclaimed American critic, this seminal classic from the late nineties, offers a fascinating look at the men and women who came to define what would later be termed the ‘New Hollywood’. Downloading a copy on Audible, the book is narrated by Dick Hill, an actor who paints such a vivid picture of the swinging sixties and scintillating seventies with his rich-baritone voice (I was amazed to discover Hill has narrated over 1000 audiobooks!) While this is my third outing with Easy Riders, I always find something exciting to dig my fangs into. Biskind brings the colourful cast of characters to life with such wit and compassion, giving off aspirations of a hungry young novelist. The stories behind the rise of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty are so perverse (and yet so astounding) that they leave you with a whole new perspective on Tinseltown. For anyone with an interest in the films and or personalities of the counter-cultural age, this book offers so many juicy pieces of gossip that it’ll make you feel all hot and bothered under the collar. A delicious treat for cinephiles young and old.
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While I’ve been getting better at rising above clickbait headlines, this one got through the gates and has brought so many feelings to the surface. Last weekend, Martin Scorsese, the cinematic guru, published an op-ed piece in the New York Times. It was only last year that I began to binge the entire Marvel catalogue on the advice of a good friend and while I have been floored at the scope of the MCU, at the technological precision and its ability to leave me feeling all warm and cosy, there was something intrinsic missing from the recipe. I’m the first one to admit that escapism is tantamount to a good life. I know firsthand how dull adult life can be and love tuning out after a long week with readily digestible content. But when I compare it to the films I came up on — films like Alien, The Godfather, Scarecrow and Blade Runner — cinematic narratives that explored the depths of humanity, they come up short time and again. Like it or not, we are fragile and brittle creatures. We can’t time travel, move through walls or shoot spider webs from our wrists. And while I can understand the innate desire to rise above our inherent weaknesses through these heroic characters, we risk losing touch with reality itself. Yet with Disney+ set to debut next week with a string of premium content that includes The Mandalorian, a Star Wars TV series priced at $15 million an episode, such theme park content is here to stay.
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I fell in love with this album as soon as the first few bars kicked in over my Bose headphones. Having developed a love of modern African jazz and rhythmic soul in my twenties, I’ve always been hungry to jump on the work of artists overlooked by the gatekeepers of yesteryear. Hailu Mergia is just one such talent, an Ethiopian jazz musician who worked the club scene of Addis Ababa in the sixties and seventies and would record a string of LPs during this formative period. Wede Harer Guzo, translated as ‘Travel to Harer’, a city in Eastern Ethiopia, is littered with music that leaves you nourished in the best way possible. Recorded with the backing of the Dahlak Band in 1978, the finished recording is imbued with such a nostalgic joy that it makes you want to slow jam the night away. As this Washington Post article highlights, Mergia would go on to make Washington D.C. his home in the mid eighties. And while the Ethiopian talent would come to trade in his keyboard for a restaurant, he always found time to dive back into the music. With the arrival of summer just around the corner, I went ahead and treated myself to a vinyl recording of the LP via Bandcamp. There’s something about this record that has already stolen my heart.
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I’d never heard of Clarence Avant but after coming across The Black Godfather by way of Edward Norton, I got excited to get my eyes on this new Netflix documentary. The whole film is a tribute to a man whose legacy seemingly reached across every single industry of the twentieth century in lifting up the mantle of African American excellence. Here was a man who protected the talents of Diana Ross and Dinah Washington and championed sports stars Jim Brown and Hank Aaron into receiving the acclaim they deserved. Born into great poverty in Greensboro, North Carolina, Avant fled north to New Jersey as a teenager and worked as a stock clerk for Macy’s. After getting a job managing a lounge bar in Newark, he would be introduced to Joseph Glaser, a famed music manager who would shepherd the young talent and teach him the tricks of the trade. For all his success, Avant was more than a gifted matchmaker. He was a man who devoted himself to bringing the rights of African Americans into the mainstream. I loved the way Avant saw the inherent value in people and never stopped fighting for the same levels of success as their caucasian counterparts. It was this selfless mission that drew all the major personalities to feature as talking heads — Barack Obama, Diddy, David Geffen, Bill Clinton, Snoop Dogg, Bill Withers — on the doc. The man had the rolodex of A-list talent that stretched far and wide and made him impossible to ignore. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” — Clarence Avant
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Thanks for tuning in. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to someone who’d like it. Until next time. Xo
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