This news is not surprising (folks on the Web have been re-attaching Tennant to the role for months), and I think it smacks of desperation after a serious ret-con left a bad taste in many mouths. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy to see these two again!
A Revolutionary For Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story.
Leo Zeilig.
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 340 pp., $22.95.
Quite a revelation about the power and pitfalls of complete faith in a revolutionary Tanzania and Guyana. The un-mentioned truth of this just-the-facts bio is that the Black world still produces people exactly like this in terms of energy and focus, but the difference is that they are completely and happily colonized. Reading this book from the 2022 prism was like absorbing very detailed speculative fiction. Rodney is the grassroots servant-hero personified, the Bizzaro version of what Harvard Law School will continue to turn out, thanks to its success with Barack and Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
My God, who wouldn’t want to adopt Buffy, Jody and Cissy? As a lark, I started binging Family Affair on Prime. It’s a show I vaguely remember from early-to-mid 1970s syndication, since its span (1966-1971) reaches into my zygote-to-“I’m tree-years-old” period. This New York City sitcom was so goody-goody CBS added it to the list of popular rural shows it canceled–all those segregated Mayberrys and Junctions–so the network could enter into the Norman Lear years.
I admit to thoroughly enjoying the show, but I get CBS’ point. Star Trek is more realistic than some episodes. 🙂 Viewed from a 21st-century cultural mirror, the premise could be described as almost a monochrome Diff’rent Strokes: Bill Davis (Brian Keith), a well-off Westside playboy who is Hugh Hefner’s vision personified, adjusts to his dead brother’s kids, who are dumped on him and his valet, Giles French (Sebastian Cabot, also known as the narrator of the original Winnie-the-Pooh Disney animated classics). Davis’ and French’s smoothness-ness interruptedus, the upscale, not-motley crew quickly gel as a family. Although this first season is about the children’s trauma of being orphaned, separated and emotionally abandoned (“Do you really love me? Am I really staying here?” is a common and recurring theme), the tyke’s tears are always dried, their concerns forever found and met.
One particular episode had me on a steady chuckle. Through a misunderstanding, Buffy and Jody, the 6-year-old twins, are left on their own in New York City. They walk around by themselves, Buffy holding a $20 bill visibly in her hand, and nothing bad happens to them. In fact, a nice Latino sees the little darlings and immediately helps them find their way back to Uncle Bill. I mean, who wouldn’t?
Then there is reality:
No Buffys, Jodys or Cissys in Haiti or Cameroon. Wah-wah.
When I saw Biden with this kid, I subconsciously thought, “Whew! Buffy’s no longer in danger! Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming” 🙂
A film unafraid to show great clarity about the true nature of America and American life.
….for its daylong telethon for Dhrouba bin Wahad. I have long thought he is an important Black decolonized political analyst and public intellectual and I think, as an important Black Power-infused thinker, he is beyond worthy of both support and assessment.
Those who know and love the top stories of the last 30 years or so of Batman comics–particularly those of the last 15 years–will think this is two-thirds of a masterpiece and forgive the exposition-ish info dump at the beginning of the third act. The film’s last part attempts to serve the needs of both epilogue and the now-customary post-credit let’s-set-up-the-next-two-films. This outing is so powerful it will make you forget any Batman film not named The Dark Knight. After this soon-to-be trilogy, the only future film direction I’d see is Batman Beyond because it would be the only part of this soon-to-be 90-year-old character that will not be mined by then.
Drums in the Global Village 