Can’t Wait For This Documentary To Reach Streaming

DECEMBER 19, 2023 UPDATE (ALMOST TO THE DAY, ONE YEAR LATER, MONTHS AFTER GOTTLEIB’S DEATH): https://apnews.com/article/robert-caro-power-broker-50th-anniversary-082914f15af81b79bf7882dc6f6a8c14

70-Word Review of “Avatar: The Way of Water”

The one-bullet-for-one-settler third act was impressive, but there was little new here. James Cameron, who has now shut everyone up forever, is over-emphasizing sensory immersion and love of environmentalism at the expense of story innovation. (The exception is his well-delineated complexity of one character’s insider-outsider strategy.) The political has to compete with the personal. This reviewer will probably skip the bathroom break and sit out on Nos. 3 through 5.

Juan Gonzalez’s Final NYC Lectures (Before Moving To Chicago)

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/23/latinos_race_and_empire_a_talk

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/6/juan_gonzalez_reflections_on_40_years

*****

*****

More on Juan Gonzalez can be found here.

Why Is This Meh-to-Bad Christmas Movie I’m Watching Reminding Me of ABC News’ T.J. Holmes And Amy Robach? LMAO!!!!

Like another mediocre rom-com I’m obsessed with (I’ve seen it at least 30 times in the last 20 years), the message resonates that the difference between Almost-The-One and The One can be vast.

Post-viewing Comments: Whenever this movie is in trouble, it homages better films, which is not a good sign. If this was a BET Original Movie I assume it would end with the montage at the 01:02:00 mark 🙂

2022 Freedom Scholar Dr. Jared Ball!

(BWMN)—Dr. Jared Ball, an increasingly important activist in Black radical and Pan-Africanist circles, has been named a 2022 Freedom Scholar, one of ten selected this year.

The prize—a one-time, no-strings payment of $250,000, awarded individually to all ten scholars—has been presented to renowned intellects such as Robin D.G. Kelly and many others since the Marguerite Casey Foundation created the Freedom Scholars award in 2020. Scholars are anonymously chosen by former recipients. 

“It is a surreal contradiction,” Dr. Ball commented exclusively to The Black World Media Network via email after the announcement. “But to be reminded or made aware of the value my work has to particular peers for whom I have tremendous respect is humbling, something I cherish, and am honored by. Most of us in academia are not disconnected, ivory tower scholars. We are just marginalized, unappreciated, and under-resourced. So this award is very much appreciated on several levels.” 

Ball, the host of iMiXWHATiLiKE! with Jared Ball podcast, the flagship program of the Black Power Media collective, is a professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University, Maryland’s leading HBCU. He is the author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, of which a second expanded edition is forthcoming in the spring. A board member of The Black Scholar journal and a frequent contributor to Black Agenda Report magazine, Ball is a co-founder of Black Power Media, which has reached a total of 21,000 subscribers since it launched on YouTube in February 2021.

The Morgan State University scholar’s professional multimedia website, imixwhatilike.org, lists his research interests as “the interaction between colonialism, mass media theory and history, as well as the development of underground journalism and cultural expression as mechanisms of social movements and political organization.” As an activist and advocacy journalist, he has been a longtime public champion of radical, independent media and political prisoners such as writer Mumia Abu-Jamal and Dr. Mutulu Shakur, the alternative-medicine specialist and godfather of slain hiphop superstar Tupac Shakur.

The other 2022 scholars are: Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin of Trinity College; Noura Erakat, J.D., of Rutgers University; Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore of the City University of New York; Dr. Sarah Haley and Derecka Purnell, J.D., of Columbia University; Mariame Kaba of Pratt Institute; Dr. Beth E. Richie of the University of Illinois-Chicago, Dean Spade, J.D., of Seattle University and Dr. Olúfémi O. Táíwò of Georgetown University.

Freedom Scholars “conduct research in cutting-edge areas of scholarship as varied as feminist prison abolition, global urbanism, alternatives to movement capture, Indigenous erasure and militarized policing—critical fields of research that are often underfunded,” according to the Casey Foundation’s website.

Dr. Ball’s award is “proof that principled radicalism and constant work—his 20 years of scholarship, activism and free, intelligent community broadcasting—always wins,” posted BWMN staffer Todd Steven Burroughs on social media after the announcement. He is co-editor with Dr. Ball of the anthology A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X.

Read the Casey Foundation press release here.

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Book Mini-Review: C.L.R. James, The Radical “Black European”

C.L.R. James: A Life Beyond The Boundaries.

John L. Williams.

London: Constable, 457 pp., $32.99.

The Old Man was once quite young–almost permanently so. And vibrant, always ready for socialist revolution. But not for the overthrow of European civilization and culture. In a new biography, John L. Williams pulls back the curtain just enough to show why intellectuals, particularly culturally complex ones, need platforms and bases. What results is a non-judgemental tale about a 20th-century charismatic Caribbean intellectual destined for the classroom, the typewriter, the lecture hall and the cricket field. His cultlike, harem-based sexism will rile 21st-century readers but his stamina and constant optimism never fail to impress. Most of all, James–whose long speaking and writing life spans the birth, revolutionary work, danger and martyrdom of fellow Caribbean Leftist world travelers such as Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop–shows that revolution requires a lot of work.