The Ringer: All Posts by Hannah Giorgis2018-02-20T15:54:08-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/hannah-giorgis/rss2018-02-20T15:54:08-05:002018-02-20T15:54:08-05:00Winston Duke Is the Best Surprise of ‘Black Panther’
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<img alt="A photo illustration of Winston Duke as M’Baku in ‘Black Panther’" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fHvoP-S-yNtDp3K5-y2q5SGGvOc=/296x0:2963x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58760147/winston_duke_black_panther_disney_ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Marvel Studios/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Winston Duke is one of the film’s least well-known actors, but his performance causes quite the stir</p> <figure class="e-image">
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<p id="jBiZud">Toward the end of <em>Black Panther</em>, a group loyal to the recently overthrown T’Challa climbs the mountains of Wakanda and pays a visit to M’Baku, the leader of the Jabari tribe. First, T’Challa’s mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) plead for M’Baku’s help in reclaiming the throne. M’Baku, played by the relatively unknown Winston Duke, is unmoved but respectful. Suddenly, the unthinkable happens: A (white) CIA agent named Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) chimes in. M’Baku balks. </p>
<p id="JuzUNU">And then, in one of the film’s most viscerally satisfying sequences, he barks. And barks. And keeps barking.The scene continues well past the initial moment of vindication, and it just <em>feels good</em>, especially as a reprieve from the attempted-regicide-focused plotline that it interrupts. M’Baku barks not just with annoyance, but with disgust, as his tribesmen join in with him. Where most of <em>Black Panther</em>’s male characters regard Ross with curiosity if not appreciation, M’Baku cannot be bothered. As M’Baku, Duke gently contorts his face into an avatar of disdain, conveying (black) audiences’ irritation with this fly-in-the-ointment-ass federal officer.</p>
<p id="8lL6mT">“If you say one more word, I’ll feed you to my children!” M’Baku bellows.</p>
<p id="TQqr13">When Ross immediately clams up and looks visibly shaken, M’Baku laughs. “I’m kidding. We’re vegetarians.”</p>
<p id="0292DN">Duke extends his laugh with a knowing humor; it echoes throughout the throne room. He is commanding, unnerving, and … somehow also adorable, giggling to himself with all the abandon of a substitute teacher who’s just made an accidental pun.</p>
<p id="IQ64gc">Winston Duke is <em>Black Panther</em>’s biggest surprise.</p>
<p id="sERtB3">Where M’Baku easily could have become a hypermasculine character relegated to the margins of fight scenes and one-dimensional villainy, Duke’s sly charm paints a far more complex emotional landscape. It is no surprise, then, when the film reveals that M’Baku and his people saved T’Challa and have been keeping him alive. When T’Challa is revived, the two share a solemn, gentle dialogue; M’Baku rebukes T’Challa for the monarchy’s past neglect of the Jabari tribe, an admonition laced with anger but rooted in quiet disappointment. Their conversation ends with the Jabari leader refusing to “[sacrifice] Jabari lives” to help T’Challa reclaim the throne. </p>
<p id="fUfM0d">Duke’s performance makes it clear M’Baku’s stubbornness is rooted in concern for his tribe. Where Erik Killmonger seeks only vengeance on his bloodlust-fueled rampage, M’Baku’s reasons for desiring the Wakandan throne encompass multitudes. That many of these scenes take place within the confines of his mountainside lair in Jabari Land only heightens the catharsis of both M’Baku’s throaty admonition and his commitment to protecting his people; it’s the only part of the film spent focused on M’Baku’s territory.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">no offense but my vegetarian mans m'baku had greater character development in a single movie than most mcu characters did in trilogies <a href="https://t.co/PYgrFfsgg2">pic.twitter.com/PYgrFfsgg2</a></p>— shine || BP OUTSOLD (@vvakandha) <a href="https://twitter.com/vvakandha/status/964869799133065221?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 17, 2018</a>
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<p id="mS5TIU">The Ryan Coogler–directed film boasts no shortage of Hollywood heavy hitters. The titular role is played by <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/2/15/17017080/chadwick-boseman-superheroes-black-panther-biopic">biopic/superhero titan</a> Chadwick Boseman; frequent Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan takes on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/2/16/17017938/erik-killmonger-black-panther-best-marvel-villain">the villainous Killmonger</a>; Nyong’o plays loyal humanitarian Nakia; Danai Gurira leads the Dora Milaje as the fierce Okoye, with Daniel Kaluuya playing her lover W’Kabi; Bassett, Forest Whitaker, and Sterling K. Brown round out a cast culled from black Hollywood’s elite. But amid the star-studded ensemble, the relatively unknown Duke breathes life into the role of M’Baku. One of the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/black-panther-winston-dukes-mbaku-transcends-comic-book-origins-1086344?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral">comic’s lesser villains</a>, M’Baku first appears in the film during King T’Challa’s coronation ceremony. Imposing and impatient, he insists on challenging T’Challa, the latest successor in a line of kings who have ignored the needs (and existence) of the Jabari tribe. The resulting struggle is one of the first moments we see T’Challa falter; he is almost no match for M’Baku’s Herculean strength. But T’Challa eventually gains control over his much larger foe with a dubious leg lock, and M’Baku cedes the challenge in a moment of quiet, vulnerable strength. Duke imbues the rugged leader’s surrender with both irritation and grace; when the Jabaris retreat, he remains forceful even in defeat.</p>
<p id="Y119r9">Though M’Baku technically <a href="https://twitter.com/youresteve/status/965034756986454017">isn’t new to the Marvel universe</a>, Duke grants the relatively minor character outsized dimension. <em>Black Panther</em>, a superhero film, features no shortage of intense fight scenes and conflicts over the future of the (semi-)free world. As M’Baku, Duke excels at interrupting these fraught moments with both quiet dignity and unexpected humor.</p>
<p id="k8qWUy">Where Boseman’s T’Challa is often reserved and Jordan’s Killmonger reactionary, Duke’s M’Baku is both steadfast and cooperative. The actor brings an undeniable dynamism to the comparatively small role, an unexpected treat in a film packed to the gills with talent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is bloated with star power; for every newcomer to the scene, the studio relies on 10 established industry darlings. Duke, a Yale graduate with roots in Tobago, shakes up both <em>Black Panther </em>and the MCU (alongside Wright). His costars have decorated résumés spanning decades; Duke was in seven episodes of <em>Person of Interest</em>. Still, he offers <em>Black Panther </em>and the MCU a foreboding presence, a robust physique, and a surprisingly warm heart. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="BzhroD">It may not have been expected, but it’s certainly welcome. There’s no question who(se arms) I’ll be keeping an eye on during <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em>.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/2/20/17033330/winston-duke-mbaku-black-panther-breakoutHannah Giorgis2018-02-08T10:19:40-05:002018-02-08T10:19:40-05:00“Vindicated”: The Return of Dashboard Confessional
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<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Talking to Chris Carrabba about the band’s first album in eight years</p> <p id="5UZW6k">It was no surprise that Dashboard Confessional became synonymous with the emo movement of the midaughts. As pop punk proliferated on the airwaves, Dashboard cemented their role at the vanguard of the emo music scene with impossibly catchy, angst-ridden songs that charted volatile emotional territory. Where Fall Out Boy records were goofy and Taking Back Sunday tracks morose, Dashboard songs traced familiar aches with tenderness and precision. “Hands Down” became something of an unofficial teenage makeout anthem, “Screaming Infidelities” the soundtrack to a million heartbreaks.</p>
<p id="bwnEcY">The band rocketed to national success as emo music enjoyed mainstream popularity: Two consecutive Dashboard albums — 2003’s <em>A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar</em> and 2006’s <em>Dusk and Summer</em> — peaked at no. 2 on the Billboard 200, with the latter reaching no. 1 on the rock chart.</p>
<p id="SHUBlX">It’s been more than eight years since the last Dashboard Confessional album, but frontman Chris Carrabba hasn’t stopped working. In the time since 2009’s <em>Alter the Ending</em>, he has toured extensively with the band, collaborated with new indie darlings like Cash Cash and Lindsey Stirling, and served as lead songwriter for folk rock band Twin Forks.</p>
<p id="EfqgeW">Now Carrabba is ready to refocus on the art that first moved him. On Friday, the band will release <em>Crooked Shadows</em>, their first full-length project since <em>Alter the Ending</em>.<strong> </strong>Ahead of the LP release, <em>The Ringer</em> spoke to Carrabba about the band’s hiatus, overcoming artistic fear, and the future of emo. This interview has been condensed and edited.</p>
<p id="Yx7pwA"><strong>Where does the story of this record begin for you?</strong></p>
<p id="qr5lDj">I guess it began with trying to fight it off. Dashboard had taken a hiatus from touring after quite a long time of a heavy touring schedule. And when we came back to touring again [in 2015], we were kind of shocked that we didn’t have to start back in clubs and basement shows and stuff. Our fan base had stayed active in our absence, so we were playing amphitheaters and large venues. So I started to get real anxious about this need I started to feel to write new Dashboard songs. Wherever I was as a writer at that time was not the same place that I came to be later when that record started to develop. I was hyperaware of that. And so I tried really hard not to write a record for a few years, probably a good two years or more after we began touring again [in 2015].</p>
<p id="2eiVMD">Then the songs just sort of began to arrive and I was still hesitant and resistant. I began to realize that, if this is clear to me that if I was going to make a new record, it had to be important by my estimation and by a definition that I couldn’t even tell you. Some metrics that I figured that I would know with a gut check. And so I just waited. I don’t think anybody was super-psyched that we were waiting to put out new music after waiting to come back and tour. I think even my bandmates were like, “We get to record now, right?” But once I did start writing, and once I realized that whatever it is that I feel that I have to say now about things that range from as broad as the state of the political world and to as small as the relationships I’m involved in in my life, that I realized I have something important to talk about within that framework. And the songs just kind of came.</p>
<p id="ynhYoY"><strong>What made now feel like the right time to share the LP?</strong></p>
<p id="DVJX96">I think, strategically, a couple years ago might’ve been the right time to do it. I just put out records when I have a record. And I wish I could tell you that I had some grander design, but I never thought of this. One of my brothers, the other day, I think I said something like, I’m kind of lucky in that I haven’t overly had a career driven by design. And I’m also pretty lucky that I think I have it in me to be a really great songwriter, but I haven’t learned how yet. I think that’s helped me in that it does sound like I’m reaching for something.</p>
<p id="U1RWGm"><strong>Is putting more time and energy into the craft of songwriting something that you want to pursue in the future?</strong></p>
<p id="nKEIvG">The way I write songs, it’s like this hurling and hulking kind of thing where things are going really, really fast and stop and then go really, really fast and then suddenly stop. The practice time that I put in serves its purpose when a song comes to a screeching halt when [I’m] writing it, and I can just wait for a second and not get scared off or just cast it aside and say, “Maybe that wasn’t as special a moment as I thought it was.” I just learned to have the patience. Even if it’s just a minute or two, to wait for the cycle to come around again.</p>
<p id="ORZQYw"><strong>Was the process of putting together </strong><em><strong>Crooked Shadows </strong></em><strong>different than prior albums? </strong></p>
<p id="ScrrEH">I take some time to assess the work that I’ve done and where I thought it was most effective for me personally. So I didn’t really listen to the records that we made. But once we came back as a touring act, of course you start playing these songs. And it’s strange. You’re not really like assessing anything about the song, you’re completely in the moment.</p>
<p id="DD6j68">Later, when you’re offstage and you’re reflecting on why things were powerful, that can be a slippery slope because you don’t really want to know. Because then you’ll expect it to be there, and it for sure won’t be if you expect it. You can trust it, but you can’t just expect it. One thing I did discover through reflection was that with <em>Dusk and Summer</em> and <em>Alter the Ending</em> — I guess after <em>A Mark, A Mission</em> and halfway through <em>Dusk and Summer</em> — if there was a proverbial fork in the road, I got pushed down one. And my own instincts would’ve taken me down the other path. But I wanted to grow and learn and I did. I’m grateful for the push.</p>
<p id="TCHqli">But with this record I really wanted to explore what would things have been had I gone down the other path. It was the approach to the writing, but it was also the approach to the foundation for how I decided to record the record, which was in my basement, not in some fantastic studio that had the best equipment in the world and the nicest furniture. Instead I wanted to find a place or make a place that was not intended for what I was using it for.</p>
<p id="VsvaER"><strong>There’s a sort of intimacy to this record that feels kind of personal and also shared. And it reminds me of some of the best moments from your 2002 </strong><em><strong>MTV Unplugged</strong></em><strong> set.</strong></p>
<p id="dkPrXp">I would write these songs on my couch and then, within minutes, I’d be recording pretty much the version that you’d hear. It is the piece that I think has been missing from, or not there enough, in my records. Every band has this thing. Whatever our thing has been has always showed through better live. Which isn’t to say that I’m disappointed in the quality of our records — I’m not. I think we got there many times. But this is probably the most I think we’ve been able to catch in a microphone.</p>
<p id="2iggm6">Sometimes when you make a record, you have the option of redoing things that maybe you don’t know at the time you shouldn’t redo, and so I tried not to do that much on this record. Instead I thought, let’s just capture this moment. Maybe if we need to go back, we’ll come back and see if this needs another attempt. But largely, you’re hearing our song, you’re hearing a recording that was done moments after the inception of the song.</p>
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<p id="piztnK"><strong>What were some of the driving themes that you brought to the writing of </strong><em><strong>Crooked Shadows</strong></em><strong>?</strong></p>
<p id="a0B99C">I don’t often set a topic and then chase it. I really admire people that can set a framework and just write hits for other people. <em>Well I’ll just write in the style of this so they can have this song and then I’ll write this whole other thing.</em> I think that’s really impressive. I wasn’t dealt that hand. The way I write music, I’m only concerned with the song at hand. I get lucky later — if I write enough songs I can put together a record that tells a clear picture of where I must’ve been as a writer. But generally speaking, I’ll write three, four, five times the songs represented on the record in order to get to that place.</p>
<p id="CQ1YEr">I would say that I’m introspective. But I’m also empathetic, I think. Sometimes the things I write about are the inner workings of my relationships, my life, or relationships I’ve had in the past. And I don’t know that I’m thinking about those things before I sit down and I hear a chord progression that just has a feeling to it. I just kind of follow the bread crumbs of that feeling of it, so to speak. When you’re in relationships with people, romantic ones with your wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend, sometimes you really can feel what they feel. But that’s true of relationships of every kind. Your friend’s going through something difficult; you internalize these things.</p>
<p id="pSLfSS">I’m not sure I realize that until I’m looking at a lyric that I thought only had to do with my life and then I realize, “Oh, wow. I was carrying that person’s weight with me, and now it’s a little bit off my shoulders.” Where it gears toward the other end of the spectrum is where I’m [inspired by] societal politics. I live in the real world. And it’s heated and ugly most of the time, unfortunately. I think it’s worth dissecting as a writer, and it’s not often that I am successful writing in that topic, because it’s a short format of writing. But once in a while I think I can whittle it down to its barest essentials and still get the grand point across that I’m trying to get across. That’s not so easy.</p>
<p id="efiknR"><strong>[“We Fight”] starts the record off with a challenge to the listener to believe and invest in the spaces and places and people who allow us to fight. And it’s clear that for you it’s been this community, this art.</strong></p>
<p id="r0gy8U">And then all the way at the end of the record, [I explore] the way I feel about who I ended up being because of all of this. The things that you’ve experienced in life shape who you become. I think in the moment of writing [“We Fight”] I realized that that can really be wonderful, but in this case I probably could have gained more. I gained so much in quality of life, in every sense of the phrase, in my connections with people. I make a better living than I would have otherwise. I have tighter bonds with people because of this music that I make. It’s just as simple as that, because I endeavor down that road.</p>
<p id="F36Tt3">But I also think I might hold back a little bit from living all the way in the real world sometimes. There’s most of me that’s living the life that I’m living every moment. And then there’s a piece of me that’s saving this moment for later and will abandon this moment I’m in in a heartbeat to go chase a song. It’s thrilling. It’s hard, it’s very hard work, and sometimes it’s not very rewarding. Probably most often, it’s not rewarding. But when it <em>is</em> rewarding, it is exponentially rewarding.</p>
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<p id="w0Q8wx"><strong>How has the scene you see yourself as part of changed in the time that you’ve been a part of it?</strong></p>
<p id="yjdgIT">For me, it was like the land of the misfit toys or something. All of these characters came together from wildly different backgrounds. Especially where I grew up, it was the very racially diverse South Florida scene. Split pretty much down the middle, gender-wise. I guess it was reactionary to the state of what we thought rock ’n’ roll was, so what we were was ethos-driven (or what I was <em>invited</em> into, I shouldn’t say this as if I created it).</p>
<p id="rdYftG">I didn’t know if this was common or not back then, but the most proactive members of our scene I think were women who were putting on the shows, girls even, teens. [They] were putting the shows together, starting record labels. So I never thought of this as a place for inequity. It seemed like a place where you could be yourself, and you were going to belong. And being yourself did not mean conforming to the rest of everybody else. I did find that it was influenced by the punk and hardcore and post-hardcore scenes so much that those rock ’n’ roll clichés were thought of as just that — clichés. A lot of people pick up guitars to meet girls. Probably everybody that does wants to hide behind it a little bit, but also it’s an invitation: “Come talk to me about this thing I do. I’m not comfortable coming to talk to you myself. But look I’ve got this thing around me, you can ask me about it.” [<em>Laughs</em>]</p>
<p id="kCZKFX">So I would say that I’ve always trusted that it was a place for trust. And just like in the real world, that can be taken advantage of, and has been. I can only speak to my corner of that music scene. I feel like it remains a safe place, but the onus is on all of us to safeguard it. To keep it that way.</p>
<p id="oozOK8"><strong>How do you grapple with the knowledge that that trust has been tampered with? How do you square with [something like the </strong><a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/two-alleged-victims-of-brand-news-jesse-lacey-detail-years-of-sexual-exploitation-of-minors/"><strong>sexual misconduct allegations</strong></a><strong> against Jesse Lacey, frontman of former Dashboard tourmate Brand New] as a person and as a member of the scene?</strong></p>
<p id="QeLAbk">I feel more a <em>part</em> of a scene than a shepherd of it. I’ve said it before and I’ll be straight with you: I’m just really kind of shocked. When I was a kid, before I had a band and I was just part of the scene, I never saw this kind of behavior. Or heard about it within those walls, within that community. So it never once occurred to me that it was something that needed to be addressed.</p>
<p id="LdGQbd">I know that that’s naive, but it’s not borne out of inexperience. It was just the experience that I had. It wasn’t like this big, open secret. The kids that were just a couple years older really helped define how we were going to behave in the scene, and then hopefully we designed that for the people that came up after us and left it to them to carry it forward to the people after them. And I’m still part of the scene. I feel like we were taught to respect each other; I think that was the biggest cornerstone of the scene.</p>
<p id="rJBfDD">So I look at all this, just from my own personal experience, as a horrifying anomaly. I think it’s all of our jobs everywhere to right the ship.</p>
<p id="GcHPJT"><strong>Is there anything about Dashboard that you feel you don’t get to talk about often enough?</strong></p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="4twsaT">I think that this band has rewarded me with lasting friendships and the kind of friendships that I wish everybody could have. I guess eventually, everybody’s friends are just their work friends, right? Along the timeline, maybe that’s what you’re left with. But the music and skate culture that I come from has been so personally rewarding for me with friendships and connections that have lasted so many years and continue to last. And I would say that if that would be the only thing I’d ever gotten from Dashboard, it’d have been more than enough. And I’ve done so much more than that.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/2/8/16990412/chris-carrabba-dashboard-confessional-interview-crooked-shadowsHannah Giorgis2017-09-08T00:00:58-04:002017-09-08T00:00:58-04:00Channel 33: ‘Insecure’ Season 2 Finale Preview
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<p>Hannah Giorgis and Alison Herman discuss the comedy’s place in the TV landscape and offer predictions</p> <div id="soVaWY"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/3ExCstS68UmVVlFGyzMval" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="VUAuMa"><a href="https://art19.com/shows/the-press-box/episodes/9d8b4463-f7bc-4acb-a9dc-aa0ac77e30cc">Hannah Giorgis and Alison Herman</a> look ahead to the season finale of HBO’s <em>Insecure</em> by first celebrating the nuanced character developments in Season 2 (2:50), highlighting the show’s place among the summer TV landscape (8:15), and giving recognition to the showrunners’ even-handed approach in tackling the issues facing black employees in the workplace (10:40). Then they voice their expectations about how the finale will address the protagonists’ various romantic relationships (19:40), whether <em>Insecure</em> will head the route of a sitcom or a more in-depth social commentary (23:30), and whether perhaps the Issa-Lawrence relationship will be reconciled (27:00).</p>
<p id="RLZzRR"><em>Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in </em>The Ringer<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2017/9/8/16272486/insecure-season-2-finale-previewHannah GiorgisAlison Herman2017-09-06T13:35:37-04:002017-09-06T13:35:37-04:00 ‘Insecure,’ ‘Two Can Play That Game,’ and How to Do a Battle of the Sexes Right
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<p>In a season of cringeworthy behavior from its main characters—and robust dialogue among the fans who identify with them—Sunday night’s episode of ‘Insecure’ pointed to a deeper exploration of its protagonist</p> <p id="mJaca5">In the final scene of Sunday night’s <em>Insecure</em>, a wounded Issa (Issa Rae) returns home to the one-bedroom apartment she once shared with her ex, Lawrence (Jay Ellis). Following a heated confrontation with Lawrence outside a friend’s birthday dinner, Issa is greeted by a rent-increase notice tacked to the door. With the stress of a new financial burden compounded by the conspicuous absence of a second name on the lease, Issa desperately seeks catharsis. And wine. And destruction. In a fit of frustration, Issa screams as she kicks her chairs, throws her table, knocks down her bookcase, and tosses her wine bottle at the wall. </p>
<p id="xOgIkX">Both the precipitating argument and the impromptu apartment redecoration were raw, rare breakthroughs for a character whose problems stem primarily from a refusal to confront—and communicate—her emotions. But the apartment trashing is notable beyond its function as an unusually transparent window into Issa’s distress. The scene evokes a particularly memorable vignette from the 2001 romantic comedy <em>Two Can Play That Game</em>, the battle-of-the-sexes romp that follows Shanté Smith (Vivica A. Fox), a marketing executive and self-appointed relationship guru. While the film focuses on Smith’s own relationship woes, one early scene finds her narrating a confrontation between her friend Tracey (Tamala Jones) and Tracey’s boyfriend, Dwain (Dondre Whitfield). Enraged that Dwain doesn't have a plausible excuse for her questions about his infidelity, Tracey proceeds to break several items in his living room. Delivering the final blow to their relationship with a pre-<em>Lemonade</em> bat, Tracey demolishes one of Dwain’s lamps. Breaking the fourth wall in a signature move, Shanté delivers some advice to male viewers as Tracey wrecks the wayward Dwain’s apartment: “Let me ask you … why do men let women come over their house and break shit? That don’t make sense. When you do your dirt, go over <em>her</em> house … so when she gets mad, she can bust up all of <em>her</em> shit.”</p>
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<p id="UiZVL4">I thought of Shanté and Tracey as I watched <em>Insecure</em> on Sunday night. While Issa’s tantrum didn't occur in Lawrence’s space, or with him even in sight, it’s hardly surprising that she busted up all of her own shit. Throughout the series, and Season 2 in particular, both Issa and Lawrence have avoided any meaningful self-reflection—to disastrous effect. Both parties sulked, slept around, and spoke ill of one another; we may not have seen any subtweets, but we knew they were flying. In their F-bomb-laced fight outside the dinner party, Issa mocks the app Lawrence worked on while she “supported [his] depressed ass” and he calls her a “hoe” for cheating on him. Their exchange is uncomfortable, but not outside the boundaries of what jilted exes might say to one another. Post-breakup behavior is rarely cordial. </p>
<p id="edvDJx">While it is not rare for a TV show to serve as a mirror for its audience, it has often felt like <em>Insecure </em>has spent more time banking on its viewers’ reactions than it has fleshing out the characters’ stories. It is natural—and <em>easy</em>—for viewers to <a href="https://twitter.com/ChampagneMalc/status/904545049286979584">cringe at harsh words</a> exchanged between former lovers; it is harder to develop the motivations and character history that ground those flashy outbursts. It is the show’s choice to decide how to spend its time and viewers’ prerogative to interpret the material. In the contentious, conflict-driven arena that is Twitter, it’s hardly surprising that <em>Insecure</em>’s romantic chaos propels the most passionate dialogue. </p>
<p id="WyTtuW"><em>Insecure</em> has given us a breakup without a relationship, and the Season 2 tension between Lawrence and Issa has required viewers to fill in the emotional gaps. Naturally, audiences have done so along gendered lines, with Lawrence and Issa becoming unlikely heroes to the men and women who watch the show and relate to their struggles (and, frequently, their pettiness). These gendered camps also recall <em>Two Can Play That Game</em>’s central tension: Shanté spends much of the film explaining a “playbook” for keeping her boyfriend in line. Even in 2001, when the comparatively regressive gender politics of <em>Girlfriends </em>and <em>Sex and the City </em>reigned supreme, the most gratifying part of Shanté’s scheme was the moment she realized it wouldn’t work. For Issa—and the show, if not its Twitter followers—it seems a similar light-bulb moment may finally be just around the corner. After the games get old, you have to look in the mirror and decide to face yourself. <em>Insecure</em>’s references to a romantic comedy forerunner that culminated with its lead abandoning her bullish commitment to gendered “rules” may very well signal a necessary self-awareness for the show itself. </p>
<p id="LMarMn">But viewers take <em>Insecure</em> personally. Every Sunday night, the show offers an opportunity for Twitter users (especially black Twitter users) to participate in a loosely pegged referendum on modern dating. Allegiances are claimed, and anxieties are (sometimes unwittingly) broadcasted. Even when the episodes themselves <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/insecure-blowjob-scene-felt-weirdly-regressive.html">deviate from modern conventions</a>, viewer dialogue remains robust and contentious, tracing everything from proper blow-job etiquette to threesome soundtracks to “hoetation” maintenance tips. It’s fitting, then, that the show, with its own crew of upwardly mobile black people lamenting their dating woes over mimosas, also owes much of its gendered engagement to <em>Two Can Play That Game</em>. When it was released, the movie was particularly notable for its depictions of middle-class black people gambling on a playbook to guide them through love and lust. Writer and director Mark Brown intentionally envisioned the film as a female-driven battle of the sexes: “I think women drive the market. But men liked [male lead Morris Chestnut’s] drive, they loved the fact that he showed up with another girl at the party,” Brown said when I <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahgiorgis/coup-de-grace?utm_term=.mfDk1Xda6p#.taRrwnEjmW">interviewed him last year</a>. “Even during the premiere, you would hear guys cheer during those particular scenes. And it’s funny, because a lot of the cheering was divided purely along gender lines.” </p>
<p id="jTOrjo"><em>Insecure</em> leans into this gendered dynamic, especially in the character of Lawrence. His final scene in Sunday night’s episode—aptly titled “Hella Disrespectful”—is set at a bar, where he leans in to kiss the coworker he’d unwisely brought along to the dinner party where he wound up lashing out at Issa. The post-dinner spark with his coworker is a temporary win, guaranteed to both delay and complicate Lawrence’s eventual healing. But the male viewers who have rallied behind Lawrence as their middling everyman have defended him fervently since first embracing him toward the end of Season 1. Ellis himself notes the character has exhibited “fuckboy” behavior but <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/men-who-love-insecure-hbo-lawrence.html">told <em>The Cut</em></a> that his character’s actions are informed by the show’s larger themes: “Men have feelings, too, and want those feelings to be heard. Even if we don’t know how to articulate them in the best way — I know I don’t, I’m a total baby — but still, we want them to be heard, and I think that’s where this conversation starts to bubble, and you hear perspectives.” While Lawrence rarely reflects on his actions, the discussion generated by his moments of vulnerability does offer rare space for black male viewers to unpack their own experiences—even if much of #LawrenceHive’s chatter <em>is</em> devoted to the character’s sordid conquests.</p>
<p id="Cjz0qS">Beyond <a href="https://twitter.com/JayREllis/status/896858156411834368">impromptu screenings</a> with cast members like Ellis, <em>Insecure</em>’s dramatic divide is encouraged with each postshow “Wine Down,” in which Rae and cast explore the episode’s themes—and fuel those same gendered fires with a wink and a nudge. Even with Rae as the consistent host, guests like Ellis and <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2017/09/01/insecure-daniel-interview-ylan-noel">Y’lan Noel</a> (who plays Issa’s sometime lover Daniel) offer a steady platform for the perspectives of the men they have come to represent. The result often <em>feels</em> exactly like a lengthy black Twitter debate, a wheel spun to one of many “relationship drama” options. All we’re missing is $200 dates.</p>
<div id="f3qoBu"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1SEIJm4JlM?rel=0&" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p class="c-end-para" id="HpixnI">The space between Rae and each <em>Insecure</em>-affiliated guest is open, a visual nod to audience members tuning in across a range of ages, races, and genders. Sure, Issa’s couch may be plusher and her prosecco pricier than yours now, but she addresses viewers as peers both in the videos themselves and in the show’s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/insecurehbo?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Ehashtag">wildly active hashtag</a>. (The show is particularly attentive to its internet economy, with Rae even addressing more serious fan chatter like <a href="https://twitter.com/issarae/status/896952449562320897?lang=en">admonitions to more clearly depict safe sex</a>.) Like Shanté’s addresses to the <em>Two Can Play That Game</em> audience mid-conflict, Issa’s postshow reflections both break the fourth wall and apply well beyond the specter of <em>Insecure</em>’s plot. To watch <em>Insecure</em> is to become invested in the ways its characters act out common dating fumbles; to tweet about it is to keep score. Even if audiences remain wedded to the antipathy between Lawrence and Issa, the show may slowly be moving toward an exploration of what the two have in common: a desperate need to finally invest in themselves. </p>
<p id="8GS65K"><em>Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in </em>The Ringer<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2017/9/6/16262774/insecure-two-can-play-that-game-battle-of-the-sexesHannah Giorgis2017-08-24T08:30:14-04:002017-08-24T08:30:14-04:00Chef Michael Twitty Is Reclaiming Southern Food
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<p>The chef, whose book ‘The Cooking Gene’ was released earlier this month, talks about mixing race and history in the kitchen</p> <p id="j8bpS4"><em>Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/21/16177760/the-south-week"><em>The South Week</em></a><em> at </em>The Ringer<em>. For the next several days, we’re celebrating — and reporting on — the richness of the region. You’ll find stories from all over the map, exploring topics such as the enduring legacy of Confederate monuments in Richmond and Montgomery, the evolution of Charleston barbecue, and the intersection of faith and football in Lubbock. We’re also ranking the best Southern rap albums, imagining the André 3000 mixtape we all deserve, and arguing about what even constitutes the South anymore. In the words of two great Southerners, nothin’ is for sure, nothin’ is for certain, nothin’ lasts forever.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="hg7eHJ">Chef Michael Twitty wants me to know that okra is more versatile and storied than I could possibly imagine. The vegetable, which forms the basis of gumbos most often traced to the American South, finds its roots in Africa, most notably the Western countries of the continent—though he notes that my parents’ native Ethiopia also stakes a claim. But here, in the cultural garden Twitty tends to behind the Benjamin Powell House of Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, it’s not the vegetable’s slimy, well-known pods he says I should be examining. Here, Twitty wants me to pay special attention to—and carefully pick—its leaves. </p>
<p id="kQTsBK">Together with leaves from a nearby sweet potato plant, the okra leaves will form the foundation of a dish Twitty cooks later in the kitchen of Colonial Williamsburg’s Peyton Randolph House, the former home of one of Virginia’s wealthiest slaveholding families. Standing in the same kitchen where the Randolphs’ enslaved cooks prepared meals for both the two-person family and for themselves, Twitty heats a cast iron skillet in an exposed, wood-burning wall stove. As the room grows warmer, he tells me—and intrigued, international visitors to Colonial Williamsburg (CW)—about the painstaking methods enslaved people took to prepare food under unthinkable conditions in kitchens including this one. In the increasingly merciless heat, Twitty adds oil, then the ingredients we picked from the Powell House cultural garden: okra leaves, shallots, sweet potato leaves, peppers, tomatoes. A dash of water and a pinch of his “kitchen pepper” (a mix of black pepper, white pepper, red pepper flakes, ground mace, nutmeg, allspice, and ginger) season the greens, which later emerge from the flame enriched by Twitty’s clear attention to the dish’s harmony. On our plates, Twitty pays tribute to both plant and predecessor.</p>
<p id="tTbWSS">Twitty first gained national attention when his <a href="https://afroculinaria.com/2013/06/25/an-open-letter-to-paula-deen/">open letter to Paula Deen</a> went viral amid her public reckoning for a <a href="https://www.eater.com/2013/6/20/6417349/heres-the-racist-paula-deen-deposition-transcript">series of racist actions</a>, most notably using the N-word, making racist jokes, and expressing her desire to attend a plantation-style wedding with an all-black wait staff. Deen’s racism may have been galling, but it was <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/paula_deens_racism_isnt_shocking_at_all/">hardly surprising</a> that a white woman whose culinary legacy is built on recipes associated with—and derived from—black Southerners would hold Deen’s views. Twitty’s letter addressed both her acts and the larger ecosystem that fuels her celebrity:</p>
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<p id="kVsZA6"><em>I want you to understand that I am probably more angry about the cloud of smoke this fiasco has created for other issues surrounding race and Southern food. To be real, you using the word “nigger” a few times in the past does nothing to destroy my world. It may make me sigh for a few minutes in resentment and resignation, but I’m not shocked or wounded. No victim here. Systemic racism in the world of Southern food and public discourse not your past epithets are what really piss me off. There is so much press and so much activity around Southern food and yet the diversity of people of color engaged in this art form and telling and teaching its history and giving it a future are often passed up or disregarded. </em></p>
<p id="fxHYdF"><em>Gentrification in our cities, the lack of attention to Southern food deserts often inhabited by the non-elites that aren’t spoken about, the ignorance and ignoring of voices beyond a few token Black cooks/chefs or being called on to speak to our issues as an afterthought is what gets me mad. In the world of Southern food, we are lacking a diversity of voices and that does not just mean Black people—or Black perspectives! We are surrounded by culinary injustice where some Southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating. Barbecue, in my lifetime, may go the way of the Blues and the banjo … a relic of our culture that whisps away. That tragedy rooted in the unwillingness to give African American barbecue masters and other cooks an equal chance at the platform is far more galling than you saying “nigger,” in childhood ignorance or emotional rage or social whimsy.</em></p>
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<p id="DzFOnZ">Twitty’s commitment to documenting the contributions of black culinarians—including those formally trained as chefs and those whose experience is a mélange of family recipes, intercontinental muscle memory, and forced labor—began years before Deen’s controversy. His work “interpreting”—not acting or role-playing—the work of enslaved cooks serves as a literal embodiment of both the visceral and educational elements of his book, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cooking_Gene.html?id=uE1vjwEACAAJ"><em>The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South</em></a>. Released earlier this month, <em>The Cooking Gene</em> traces the story of Twitty’s family—and of black culinary contributions—across the Atlantic and back. Twitty writes with an empathetic hand, hewing close to both historical trajectories and contemporary understandings of food, geography, and identity. He connects stories of enslaved peoples—like James Hemings, the brother of Thomas Jefferson’s child mistress—to both their continental counterparts and to current trends in what constitutes “Southern food” (and who gets to determine that).</p>
<blockquote><p id="HWmSpu"><em>There is being American and then there is being Southern, and when you move across its face, the South feels endless. For all its familiar tropes, there are multiple Souths, not just one, just as there are multiple ways of being Southern. Differences in the landscape are subtle, and like going from lover to lover, things seem to meld until names are meaningless. Another battle eld, another burial ground. Soulscapes and foodsteps and mysteries and myths. Then, before you know it, the stories begin to pile up like particles of clay and loam and sand until you can’t breathe. We Southerners are now as Vietnamese and Mexican and transgender as we were once Muskogean, Anglo-Celtic, Gallic, and fundamentalist. Add the exile of fifty-plus nations of Africa, and this is my heritage, and for some reason, I wrestle with it endlessly—how could I not; I have nothing else. I am African American, and for the majority of us, this is the genesis we freely share with the New South as we did with the Old.</em> —An excerpt from<em> The Cooking Gene, </em>used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.</p></blockquote>
<p id="Oz9Omq">After his lesson in Colonial Williamsburg last month, Twitty and I discussed Southern food, black culinary legacies, and their futures. </p>
<p id="pgThme"><strong>How did you first become invested in the story behind the food?</strong></p>
<p id="xQBSv5">I just really wanted to know why we were eating certain things and why my grandfather put an emphasis on certain types of foods. I was interested in foods my mother just would not give up even if she didn’t like them. </p>
<p id="ap7don">I really wanted to know more about the stories behind the food and what we eat. That’s how you get into your culture—you can either passively be a part of it or you can actively be a part of your culture. So I wanted to be an active part of my culture.</p>
<p id="7pwzVn"><strong>You talk a fair amount about your family in the book. Can you tell me a little bit more about your family in general and what cooking means to them?</strong></p>
<p id="cXV5Lr">We had an extended-family household. My grandmother had just retired for health reasons and I did not go into that in great detail in the book because I didn’t want anybody to challenge my kinfolk. My grandmother was not obese or overweight, but she had heart issues. Those heart issues partly stemmed from the fact that she had years of untreated hypertension. She had it treated, but she was still a smoker, and other things were going on, and I didn’t want to go into that in the book … </p>
<p id="c1GJv0">Our table was international. Our table had things from all around the world, and little did I know that the people who were at the table were international. The fact that we grew up [in a diverse environment]—we had Italian, we had British, we had Sri Lankan food at the table, Indian food—was a testimony not to the restaurants that were around, but the people who had been in and out of my family’s life. So that was something unique that I didn’t even think about until much later. And then there was, of course, the element of and the rituals of black culture in America.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="yLxWsi"><q>“I don't really define Southern food by sugar or not in cornbread or what kind of barbecue you have or any of that nonsense because if you're Southern you know you’re Southern.”<br>—Michael Twitty</q></aside></div>
<p id="kOGF3p"><strong>How do you define the boundaries of what constitutes the South and what constitutes Southern food?</strong></p>
<p id="knSP4K">I don’t get into all that. I gotta tell you, there are no boundaries. I don't really define Southern food by sugar or not in cornbread or what kind of barbecue you have or any of that nonsense because if you’re Southern you know you’re Southern. There’s no way around it. If you don't want to associate with it, you don't. So it gets me mad, sometimes, people who are born and raised in the typical South, but they never stay. They never stay. They’ve gotta get the hell out. Sorry, some of this is something that migrates with you. One point I tried to make in the book is that we’re a migratory people. Of course, for African Americans, this has been a forced migration; I'll even consider going North a forced migration. We had to leave a lot of things behind because we were being oppressed—and being hounded and being harassed and being killed. We had to make the painful decision to leave the home we had for a generation or two, but the fact of the matter is we kept moving. We had to keep moving. We’re a people in motion.</p>
<p id="x3nghk"><strong>The book is very personal but also archival in a lot of ways. Why did it feel important to have both of those elements?</strong></p>
<p id="XWNVXX">I want people to understand this is real. This really affects people’s lives. People’s stories are affected by their past. And then our current lives will affect history to come.</p>
<p id="5pRGUj"><strong>When did you first start writing for an audience?</strong></p>
<p id="yLTfJq">I think when my blog started it was 2006 to 2011.</p>
<p id="QbaWIt"><strong>And how did the process of going from being public in that way to writing this book come together?</strong></p>
<p id="66keCP">My letter to Paula Deen moved me beyond what I was gonna do, which was write more culinary history. But I learned that it didn’t really make a lot of money. It was really valuable information, and everybody would steal your stuff … When I wrote my letter to Paula Deen, that got a lot of agents’ attention. Agents started contacting me. And then I decided after some hemming and hawing that cooking was gonna be a book project. I didn't plan it that way, but I didn't know how I was gonna do it. I didn’t have an answer for anybody.</p>
<p id="zBisD4"><strong>What surprised you as you were working on the book?</strong></p>
<p id="j7n0Z7">What surprised me is how infinitesimal human beings are. How unbelievably infinitesimal our relationships to other human beings are. Especially when they're mixed up. … We become family with millions of people who don't look like you and never will and that is so unbelievably hard to conceive of. When most people think of family they think of people who look like them. And I don’t know if that's an advantage or disadvantage in my story. All I know is it’s a fact. </p>
<p id="5QOWAE"><strong>Can you tell me a little bit about the name and where it came from?</strong></p>
<p id="YRHuJF">You know that phrase, “Some people have the cooking gene. Some people don’t”? I thought about that, the word <em>genes</em> in this refers to genealogy, refers to pedigree. And then the gene to <em>us</em> means something else. So I wanted to play on [that]. ... And also <em>gene</em> means in Greek and Latin “race” or “kind.” So it’s a triple play there: the idea of race, ethnicity; the idea about genealogy; and the idea about DNA. </p>
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<p id="zBz3hK"><strong>How does your book relate to your work interpreting in Colonial Williamsburg?</strong></p>
<p id="AOmHbv">People mostly don’t understand what being a black interpreter means, and how hard it can be. Honestly, I want this book to open up doors so we can actually write about these things, talk about these things, have them be their own conversation. We’ll see if it happens. There are so many different stories to tell, and so many narratives. Not just about the people who have passed on—the ancestors—but the people who are living today. </p>
<p id="X62GwF"><strong>Do you think about food as an arena for possible racial restoration or an educational space?</strong></p>
<p id="1r3gT0">I’m still trying to develop a thing where we have chefs come to CW and cook with African Americans’ contributions and actually get into the ground, go into the water, learn to butcher, learn different heritage [and] learn about the whole process. I want not just chefs but foodies, bloggers, anybody who is interested [enough] in food to spend a week there and get immersed. … I just want people to have hands-on knowledge and be able to really get into it and not just read it from a book. I want them to learn from black people. It's one thing to kind of admire us from afar, another thing to be stamped and certified by folks of color, which rarely happens.</p>
<p id="PTvb2k"><strong>Have you seen a shift in a way that black food or black chefs or traditions associated with black people have been reported on or discussed in the time since your letter to Paula Deen?</strong></p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="70WrZv">Oh yeah. Because it can’t be ignored. I think a lot of us were kind of like, “I just want a job. I can't make waves.” That’s why it’s important for us to be able to make those waves and not have to answer to anybody. And that's what I do. I’ve enabled ... hopefully given black culinarians a means of being able to change things and being able to speak up for themselves.</p>
<p id="a5rQoB"><em>This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/24/16186812/michael-twitty-the-cooking-gene-interviewHannah Giorgis2017-07-14T09:10:12-04:002017-07-14T09:10:12-04:00Beyoncé Would Now Like You to Meet the Twins
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<p>They’re here! They’re really, really here!</p> <p>Around 1:10 a.m. Friday, Beyoncé <a href="https://theringer.com/a-brief-history-of-beyonc%C3%A9-announcements-totally-disrupting-your-life-232f086200af">once again</a> took to Instagram, the only medium she prefers over the quasi-anonymous Tumblr, to regale the world with her maternal joy. She posted a photo of herself standing in front of a large wreath, with the ocean behind her, a continuation of the lush, verdant theme from her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/arts/design/beyonces-pregnancy-photographer-is-opening-an-anti-trump-art-show.html">Awol Erizku</a>–shot maternity photos. The picture was captioned simply: “Sir Carter and Rumi 1 month today. ❤️ .”</p>
<p>In the photo, Beyoncé holds Sir Carter and Rumi, her and husband Jay-Z’s new twins, and stares at the camera intently, her skin flush. The shot is pastel, ornate, <em>extra</em>. And very … Beyoncé.</p>
<p>The Instagram post is both the first time Beyoncé has shared photos of the 1-month-old twins, and the first official Knowles-Carter camp confirmation of their birth. In the month since they arrived, multiple outlets <a href="http://jezebel.com/the-tabloids-are-having-a-hard-time-reporting-on-beyonc-1796427607">struggled to even report on the twins’ birth</a>, despite Beyoncé’s father and former manager, Mathew Knowles, <a href="http://www.eonline.com/news/861740/beyonce-s-father-mathew-knowles-confirms-twins-are-here-but-beyhive-is-not-having-it">tweeting a (likely unvetted) confirmation of their arrival</a>. But Beyoncé controls her public image with laserlike precision; this shit is not a game. Instagram has become her preferred platform for announcing everything from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/h2YFO6Pw1d/?hl=en">surprise albums</a> (RIP, my December 2013 sleep patterns) to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BP-rXUGBPJa/">pregnancy</a>, largely because it dispenses with the need for an intermediary.</p>
<p>That the circumstances of the twins’ births were — and still remain — largely a secret is hardly unsurprising. The Knowles-Carters are notoriously private, and they have struggled with bearing children. But this announcement also comes two weeks after the release of father Jay-Z’s <em>4:44</em>, an album <a href="https://theringer.com/jay-z-midlife-crisis-over-444-c52962ec4907">dedicated largely to familial apologia</a>. The album and its attendant artistic offshoots — including and especially the confessional addendum, <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/07/jay-z-marriage-beyonce-footnotes-for-4-44.html?">“Footnotes for 4:44”</a> — grapple with Jay-Z’s shortcomings as a father and husband, most notably his infidelity. “I just ran into this place and we built this big, beautiful mansion of a relationship that wasn’t totally built on the 100 percent truth and it starts cracking,” Jay-Z said of his motivation for using the post-<em>Lemonade</em> record to excavate his marriage’s wounds. “Things started happening that the public can see.”</p>
<p>Though she was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/arts/music/jay-z-444-no-id-interview.html">heavily involved in the album’s production</a>, Beyoncé had been noticeably inactive on Instagram both ahead of the album’s release and after its warm, but presumably dizzying reception (her last post before this announcement, a photo with the Knowles-Carters’ 5-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, was posted on May 30). But now, after the initial tidal waves following <em>4:44</em>’s release and Jay-Z’s public (if also awkward) atonement, posting photos of the twins is less fraught. After the public catharsis of <em>Lemonade </em>and subsequent self-castigation of <em>4:44</em>, the Knowles-Carter family can (re)write its future on a far cleaner slate. The sins have been confessed; the forgiveness tendered.</p>
<p>For spectators, there is little left to do but marvel at the meticulousness with which Jay-Z and Beyoncé rendered the fissures of their marriage irrelevant. Sir Carter (so is it Sir Carter Carter? Sir Carter Knowles-Carter?) and Rumi are here now, unsurprisingly adorable and blissfully unaware of our interest in their parents’ distress. Here’s to hoping Blue’s willing to hop <a href="http://www.tmz.com/2017/07/07/blue-ivy-raps-jay-z-4-44-album/">off the mic</a> long enough to lend them tips on keeping everything in shaka.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/14/16078318/beyonce-jay-z-rumi-sir-carter-instagram-twins-birth-4fd5198f90e3Hannah Giorgis2017-06-21T08:30:11-04:002017-06-21T08:30:11-04:00Beyoncé, the Good Bad Movie Star
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<p>For the pop star, 2009’s ‘Obsessed’ is a rare misstep — which is why it’s so incredible</p> <p><em>All week, </em>The Ringer <em>will be celebrating </em><a href="https://theringer.com/good-bad-movies-week/home"><em>Good Bad Movies</em></a><em>, those films that are so terrible they’re endlessly amusing and — dare we say it? — actually good. Please join us as we give the over-the-top action movies, low-budget romance thrillers, and peak ’80s cheese-fests the </em><a href="https://theringer.com/the-50-best-good-bad-movies-a9add81b5b7f"><em>spotlights they deserve</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<p>Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is many things — singer, dancer, House of Deréon model, Popeyes aficionado, mother to Blue Ivy (and perhaps now also a set of Gemini twins) — but she is not, for all her talents, the world’s best actress.</p>
<p>The bronze in Beyoncé’s otherwise platinum résumé is commonly, if also quietly, acknowledged even by most members of the BeyHive. But even when her theatrics fail to land, Beyoncé knows how to make a film float on the wind of her voice. While her less-than-stellar acting in films like <em>The Fighting Temptations</em>, <em>Dreamgirls</em>, and <em>Cadillac Records</em> have all been bolstered by her musical capacity, one film in Beyoncé’s oeuvre stands in stark contrast to the other relatively passable efforts.</p>
<p><em>Obsessed</em>, the 2009 Steve Shill–directed romantic thriller, stars Beyoncé alongside leading man Idris Elba in a <em>Fatal Attraction</em>–esque story. Elba’s character, Derek, is a successful asset manager who met his wife, Sharon (Beyoncé), years earlier when she came to work as a temp at his company. Now, a new temp (Ali Larter) develops an increasingly eerie infatuation with Derek as her time at the company goes on. Her advances jeopardize Derek’s career and his marriage — and both Derek and Sharon have to fight for what they’ve built.</p>
<p><em>Obsessed</em> is, frankly, not a good film. The dialogue veers often into caricature (especially in the case of Patrick, Derek’s gay assistant); few characters are complex; and the acting is almost painful to watch at times. The film garnered a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1207523_obsessed">19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes</a>, and <em>Rolling Stone</em>’s Peter Travers, one of many critics who panned it, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/obsessed-20090424">wrote</a> perhaps the most vivid description of its lack of direction: “Movie? <em>Obsessed</em> doesn’t move at all. It lays there like undigested latkes.” Travers wasn’t wrong; the film develops at a languid pace, and every step is forecast for viewers with either musical cues, lengthy shots of key objects, or painfully obvious writing.</p>
<p>But eight years later, the film is almost endearing in its commitment to its own absurdity. <em>Obsessed</em> is a hallmark of the Good Bad Movie genre: It’s outrageous if you take it seriously, and unimaginably entertaining to watch if you don’t. It features post-<em>Wire</em> Idris Elba somehow unable to outwit a relatively uncomplicated antagonist. But most importantly, we get to watch Beyoncé not just succeed a little less than usual, but be actively <em>bad</em>. You could even make the case that <em>Obsessed</em> is secretly an inspirational movie disguised as a romantic thriller: If Idris Elba and Beyoncé — paragons of Good — are capable of being this Bad, doesn’t that mean maybe the rest of us are capable of achieving at least … mediocrity?</p>
<p><em>Obsessed</em> may not — OK, will not — win Beyoncé or Elba any lifetime achievement awards, but the two are genuinely fun to watch as a couple. No shade to Jay-Z, but can you <em>imagine </em>what that alternate universe would look like? <em>Obsessed</em>’s casting director<em> did</em>, and we were blessed with 108 minutes of a world in which the world’s most talented Houstonian was the wife of London’s finest export since … well, ever. Just look at them! Have you ever seen a couple more eligible for the February cover of <em>Martha Stewart Living </em>(assuming Snoop Dogg hadn’t already filled the role of Martha’s most famous black friend)?</p>
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<p>Like Nicole Kidman’s wig on <em>Big Little Lies</em>, Beyoncé’s follicular accessory in <em>Obsessed</em> is a character of its own, perhaps 2009’s greatest addition to the Pantheon of Notable Movie Wigs (sorry, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417741/">Hermione</a>). A departure from her usual honey blond, this wig was a rich auburn color. The one she wears for most of the film frames her face delicately — but almost never moves. This wig is an amusing distraction, a wet ’n’ wavy number that Beyoncé noticeably never covers with a scarf when she’s in bed. (I mean, really, how much disbelief can we possibly be expected to suspend here?) The night of a possible reconciliation dinner with Derek, Sharon changes her wig for the first time. This new wig is straight, sleek. Sharon does not have time to play games.</p>
<p>For a woman whose musical career has carried millions of fans through some of their most intense emotions, Beyoncé the actress frequently struggles to deliver lines with the kind of understated facial expressions or verbal nuances that convey <em>subtle</em> shifts. The resulting gestures all lend themselves toward the film’s overall camp: When Beyoncé’s eyebrows move in tandem with the wig, her scenes become a kind of choreography. Audiences may initially think she’s telling Derek this with her words, but if you pay proper attention to the movie, you’ll realize it’s her wig that does the talking. That’s likely not intentional, but even with no chords behind her, Beyoncé and her wig make <em>Obsessed</em> a music video.</p>
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<p>When Beyoncé <em>does</em> talk in <em>Obsessed</em>, it’s most often in phrases that are as catchy as they are ridiculous. Everything she says to Lisa, Larter’s character, is outrageous and Twitter-ready. The entire film is “what would you do if”–worthy, like it exists less on movie screens and more in the nebulous cyber mosh pit where Black Twitter hypotheticals are born: In their first interaction, Sharon insists on calling her “Liz” because Lisa had previously told Derek that “Shannon” left him a voicemail. The stakes are low, but the dig is high-school-level petty. It’s begging for a “lemme tell y’all how …”</p>
<p>But the best lines come as the film reaches its climax. After Lisa comes into Sharon and Derek’s home while they’re on a date, a voicemail Sharon leaves for Lisa yields one of Beyoncé’s most iconic, hilariously delivered lines: “You came into my house? <em>You touched my child?</em> You think you’re crazy? I’ll show you crazy. Just try me, bitch.”</p>
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<p>Sharon’s cursing is a rare moment of (overacted) emotion from Beyoncé, and it’s delightful to watch. For all her theatrics as a performer, Beyonce is a generally reserved speaker. For fans, watching her curse is more thrilling than anything in the film’s plot.</p>
<p>As giggle-worthy as some of her early lines are, Beyoncé’s performance in the film’s (admittedly anticipated) final scene still elicits a genuine cheer-at-the-movie-screen feeling. In a scene not wholly unlike the ending of <em>Get Out</em>, Sharon goes heeled-toe-to-barefoot-toe with Lisa after finding her lying in bed wearing Derek’s shirt. The two get some verbal jabs in before the fight begins, and Beyoncé spits out a line I imagine she had previously only reserved for competitors within the music industry: “Come here, bitch! I’ma wipe the floor with yo’ skinny ass.” And then, of course, she bangs Larter against the stairway railing to begin perhaps the most iconic interracial girl fight since Pumkin and New York’s <em>Flavor of Love</em> showdown. The fight has everything you could possibly need: smashed furniture, gratuitous decor shots, lots of implausible shrieking, a quick interruption from Derek via phone, and plenty of hair-pulling (never fear, Bey’s wig remains intact). Naturally, Beyoncé emerges the victor — even in impractically heeled boots.</p>
<p>It’s terrible, but mostly glorious. Lisa — and film-criticism concepts like “good,” “bad,” and “taste” — never stood a chance.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/21/16042220/obsessed-beyonce-good-bad-movie-star-9bd3dcf8fc6aHannah Giorgis2017-05-03T12:30:49-04:002017-05-03T12:30:49-04:00‘Dear White People’ Doesn’t Know How to Reckon With 2017
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<p>The Netflix adaptation is a perfectly entertaining show that often feels corny and outdated</p> <p>“Look, bro, just because you got a black chick on your arm doesn’t mean you get to Miley Cyrus our pain” isn’t something I expected to hear in 2017.</p>
<p>The line, said by one of the main characters in the first episode of <a href="https://theringer.com/justin-simien-interview-dear-white-people-netflix-4b35fbaf71c0">Justin Simien</a>’s new Netflix series, <em>Dear White People</em>, is meant to serve as a mic drop. It’s Reggie’s (Marque Richardson) first triumph over the nebulous serieswide antagonist that is white liberal racism, a line meant to elicit slam-poetry snaps heard round the world. In this case the mild-to-moderately-racist vessel is Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), the #WokeBae of outspoken “Tracee Ellis Ross biracial” protagonist Sam (Logan Browning).</p>
<p>Reggie’s point itself <em>is</em> valid: Close proximity to a person of color, even a romantic partner, does not make white people <em>victims</em> of racism — nor does it absolve them of their own investment in white supremacy. But any larger truth in Reggie’s statement is obscured by his usage of “Miley Cyrus” as a verb. The rhetorical twist is finger-gun funny — which is to say, not funny at all — and it’s neither thematically relevant nor timely. Cyrus is off on a beach somewhere with Thor’s little brother now. She hasn’t been in the news for egregious cultural appropriation since 2015. It’s 2017, and <em>Dear White People</em> doesn’t know how to reckon with that.</p>
<p>With more space than the original 2014 film afforded, the <em>Dear White People</em> series does an excellent job of thrusting viewers into the hostile world of Winchester University, a fictional Ivy League college. The school is both generic and recognizable enough to be modeled after nearly any elite, predominantly white American university. Each of the campuswide issues raised in the series — underfunded programs for students of color, rampant racism in campus publications, even a blackface party — reflects long-simmering tensions at schools just like it. But the overwhelming whiteness of Winchester — and its antagonistic effect on black students — is perhaps the only fully realized character in the show. <em>Dear White People </em>overwhelmingly sacrifices character development in service of its mission to “start a conversation,” and isn’t self-aware enough to recognize where it fits within that dialogue. The result is a perfectly entertaining show that frequently feels corny and outdated — and sometimes even tiptoes into caricature.</p>
<p>Overt parody on the show functions surprisingly well — riffs on <em>Scandal </em>and <em>Iyanla: Fix My Life</em> are particularly delightful — but too often <em>Dear White People</em> stumbles when trying to capture any sort of modern zeitgeist. The show is rife with cultural references that feel anywhere from two to 15 years too late. We are expected to believe black college students still use “woke” unironically enough to create an app called “Woke or Not?” and then <em>actually use it</em> <em>and care about the rankings.</em> Reggie tells Sam he’s going to oust her from the no. 1 spot, and it’s clear he doesn’t mean the entire shtick as an elaborate joke. (Relatedly, Sam is never properly taken to task for being simply insufferable.) It’s not unthinkable that modern college students would extend yet another facet of their self-identification to technology, but the awkward app idea is emblematic of the show’s overarching pitfall: <em>Dear White People</em> leans so heavily on its commitment to being Message Art(™) that it neglects the details of how younger black people actually communicate with one another. The larger issue the app’s creation points to — the desire to be seen as smart and socially conscious by our peers — is understandable, noble even. But “woke” <a href="https://theawl.com/watching-the-woke-olympics-f41809d86955">hasn’t been strictly <em>ours</em></a> since … 2015? Wouldn’t young black people, creators and innovators and shapers of culture that they are, know that viscerally?</p>
<p>For all its highly integrated depictions of modern technology, <em>Dear White People</em>’s understanding of young black people could have been culled directly from the most-liked pages of sites like Twitter and Tumblr circa 2012. The incessant emphasis on hashtags — even and especially when said <em>aloud</em> — is jarring and unnecessary. The kids communicate in lots of ways these days, and hashtagging #makeupsex isn’t high on the list of preferred textual quirks. Those awkward, “How do you do, fellow kids?” moments are uncomfortable and abundant. Even the side arguments the black students have with one another feel like lazy re-creations of #diasporawars: In one scene, the show’s token African character (a ridiculously quirky, sage young man who has no identity beyond his Kenyan-ness) says <em>Pinocchio</em> is one of his favorite films, and a (presumably) black American student asks if <em>Pinocchio </em>is pronounced with tongue clicks in his language. It’s icky, uncreative material that doesn’t critique itself well enough to function as satire.</p>
<p>Cumbersome race discussions are indeed a hallmark of the show. Writing instructive, accessible dialogue about race that still feels <em>human</em> is an immense challenge — one most deftly achieved through the experiences and conversations of nuanced characters. Unfortunately, <em>Dear White People</em>’s characters speak like parodies of Sociology 101 students, and their backgrounds and motivations are not developed enough to overcome the microwaved dialogue. They are at their most eye-roll-inducing when an exchange is meant to be playful: In a scene after Reggie’s misfired Miley Cyrus mic drop, Sam asks Gabe if he owns any J’s (as in Jordans, you know, the sneakers) to wear to a black student event she’s invited him to. He responds with a line worthy of Matt McGorry: “So in this instance you want me to appropriate your culture?” (Get it? Black people like sneakers!) In a later episode, a flashback to pre-Gabe, freshman-year Sam shows her being asked who her type is. Before she can answer, she’s reminded “Malcolm X is dead, and DeRay Mckesson is strickly dickly.” Rather than make room for complex characters who grapple with both love and injustice, <em>Dear White People</em> often winks its way through shortcuts that hinge on lazy assumptions about both.</p>
<p>The show does, however, improve immensely toward the middle of its 10-episode run, with episodes 4 and 5 easily the strongest of the series. Episode 4 traces the backstory (and attendant motivations) of Coco (Antoinette Robertson), whose character development is by far the biggest improvement the series makes over the film. Episode 5, directed by <em>Moonlight</em>’s Barry Jenkins, both grants Reggie depth and captures the specific, harrowing reality of the primary and secondary trauma that result from encounters with police. The episodes feel like a breath of fresh air when compared with the zinger-heavy episodes that bookend them: They track both the respective characters’ backstories, their responses to catalyzing events, <em>and</em> how others around them process those changes in their demeanor. Episode 5 in particular adds a layer of gravity to a show that otherwise feels overly pithy. Still, the writing feels atemporal when presented in 2017. Black people have <em>been</em> having these conversations, so who is this for?</p>
<p><em>Dear White People</em> the concept was always going to face tremendous resistance and attract racist vitriol. But pouring more energy into depicting the racism its characters face than writing the characters themselves makes it hard to root for <em>Dear White People</em> the show. Since the film was released in 2014, the project has done little to update itself beyond paying lip service to technology and social media. The film already felt dated; three years later, that chasm has widened dramatically. As a series that markets itself partly based on its conversation-starting qualities in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, the show falls short of creating black characters who feel like they exist <em>today</em>. Drake references may be eternal, but culture evolves quickly — and <em>Dear White People </em>hasn’t leveled up. Sometimes #relatability alone isn’t enuf.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/5/3/16046316/dear-white-people-netflix-tv-show-2017-473a56842803Hannah Giorgis2017-04-24T09:30:07-04:002017-04-24T09:30:07-04:00Who Owes the Henrietta Lacks Family?
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<p>The Oprah-led HBO film is a moving portrayal of a black family’s struggle for justice. But is being seen enough?</p> <p>When a medical researcher pulls cells out of the cryo-chamber that keeps them alive, an astonished Deborah Lacks (Oprah Winfrey) cradles the vial in her hands. "You’re famous," she whispers to the cells, blowing vapor away from their container. "Just don’t nobody know it."</p>
<p>Moments later, with the laboratory lights dimmed, the researcher projects images of the cells onto a wall. Deborah and her brother, Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman (Reg E. Cathy), stand awestruck in the glow of the cells’ projection, basking in their mother’s light. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to her as adults.</p>
<p>Their "unknown" late mother, a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lacks (played in the film by Renée Elise Goldsberry), died of cervical cancer when Deborah was a toddler. <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</em>, the HBO adaptation of journalist Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling 2011 book, chronicles the real-life saga of Henrietta’s cells and the children they still haunt. Before the cancer killed Lacks in 1951, Johns Hopkins Hospital removed some of her cells during a biopsy and used them for research experiments without permission from Henrietta or any family members. Named HeLa for the first two letters of Lacks’s first and last names, the sample became the first "immortal" cell line — meaning the cells could be reproduced in a lab, outside Henrietta’s body, making them invaluable for research. They spread to facilities far and wide, eventually being used for studies that would herald unimagined breakthroughs in treating everything from leukemia to Parkinson’s disease to the flu.</p>
<p>For years, the Lacks family has pursued restitution for their mother’s involuntary contribution to science. Patient consent for research using tissue removed during a procedure was not required in 1951; the medical providers’ reasoning was that such research would benefit the common good. But for black people like the Lacks family, especially those from poor or working class backgrounds, limited access to health care made that premise effectively inapplicable. Skloot’s book lays out the ethical concerns in the Lacks family’s ongoing struggle to receive compensation and explores tangled histories of race, medicine, and exploitation in the process.</p>
<p>The Lacks’s story is at once singular — certainly, HeLa cells are unique in their massive application — and emblematic of a larger, shameful pattern: Black people have long served as unwitting, involuntary subjects for (sometimes violent) medical research. Whether from HeLa cells or the Tuskegee Experiment, a 40-year medical study in which hundreds of unconsenting black men were denied treatment for syphilis so researchers could study its effects, countless medical advancements have come as a direct result of materials or labor forcibly extracted from black bodies. That their families rarely see the fruits of the donors’ sacrifice — and that black people <a href="http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=challenge">face unique barriers when trying to access health care</a> — compounds the original exploitation.</p>
<p>Both the book and film version of <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</em> grapple with Henrietta’s history, weaving together details of her short life and her family’s journey to uncover it with a deft, compassionate hand. In the process, the projects raise larger questions about ethics, discrimination, and erasure within the medical industry and the country writ large. The film is especially affecting: that the Lacks family never sees compensation for Henrietta’s gift to modern science feels viscerally <em>wrong</em>; seeing their anguish embodied drives home the magnitude of that intimate injustice. But just as it’s easier to identify rac<em>ism</em> than rac<em>ists</em>, so too does <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</em> stop short of directly indicting specific parties on the family’s behalf. The resulting film is moving and accessible, but it offers no absolution. <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</em> — and the circumstances around its production, which mirror the film’s central issues — instead poses the question of whether justice for the Lacks family is even possible.</p>
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<p>With a breezy 92-minute run time, <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks </em>is at once compact and complex. Writer/director George C. Wolfe, along with screenwriters Peter Landesman and Alexander Woo, reinforce the fundamentally human approach of Skloot’s book. Rather than overwhelm viewers with scientific or legal history, their film traces the story of the Lacks family’s attempts to both receive restitution and grapple with the trauma they inherit. At times, it’s hard to watch the siblings argue so intensely over their mother’s legacy around the proverbial kitchen table. Deborah often looks defeated by the way her male relatives treat her; even and especially within the fabric of a large family, Deborah somehow seems fundamentally lonely, the only child without any real knowledge of her mother, her roots.</p>
<p>Crucial to that character calculus is Oprah’s portrayal. The role of Deborah is <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/bimadewunmi/how-oprah-got-her-acting-groove-back">quintessentially Oprah</a>: heavy, complicated, and ultimately revelatory. Speaking with University of Pennsylvania professor Salamishah Tillet <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/arts/television/oprah-winfrey-on-the-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks.html">for <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em></a>, Oprah, who also serves as an executive producer for the film, said HBO Films president Len Amato and actress Audra McDonald convinced her she needed to work with Wolfe as an actress, too: "He was the person who was able to take a script that felt overridden by the science and re-adapt that into a story about a woman in search of her identity through her mother. That’s why it happened." Deborah Lacks is, in turn, the film’s identity. Through her eyes viewers see — and feel — the burden of being denied access to family history, of having one’s hopes lifted and dashed, of never receiving justice. Deborah’s medical issues — anxiety among them — present not just as preexisting conditions, but partially as natural responses to all her family has endured and the result of going years without accessing adequate treatment.</p>
<p>Deborah, and all the Lacks siblings, are exhausted by the legion of (primarily white) people who contact them only to benefit from their mother’s cells. Every person who has claimed to champion the Lacks’s interests fades away as soon as their own needs are met, and Deborah is understandably suspicious of Skloot (Rose Byrne), a white woman who suddenly appears in her life hoping to tell her mother’s story. Deborah is at times even hostile, convinced Skloot is working for Johns Hopkins or another institution that’s sent her to drudge up Henrietta’s memory in service of a mission that will never benefit the Lacks family. In one scene, Deborah grabs all of Skloot’s documents, financial and otherwise, demanding to know who is paying her. Their interaction is layered with distrust and shared desperation. Skloot understands that the Lacks family has every reason to be wary of her, and Byrne imbues her character with well-meaning exasperation and dogged commitment to Lacks’s story. The honest portrayal of desperation is a balm, but it is not necessarily a solution.</p>
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<p>That the Lacks family <em>is owed</em> remains painfully clear, but the question of who exactly is responsible for that debt hangs over the film, at times uncomfortably. Is it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/henrietta-lackss-family-wants-compensation-for-her-cells/2017/02/14/816481ba-f302-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?utm_term=.296fba352023">Johns Hopkins</a>, the medical facility where doctors first harvested Henrietta’s cells? The institution <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-hs-lacks-legacy-20170217-story.html">insists</a> it hasn’t patented or profited from sales of the cells, so it is not <em>legally</em> indebted to the Lacks family. (The institution did, however, announce a joint agreement with the <a href="https://hub.jhu.edu/2013/08/08/henrietta-lacks-hela-cells-agreement/">National Institutes of Health in 2013</a> to grant the family some measure of control over how their mother’s genetic material is used.) Drug companies, many of whom have developed breakthrough treatments as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/23/henrietta-lacks-cells-medical-advances">direct result of access to HeLa cells</a>, have avoided sharing their profits. The film wrestles with Skloot’s introduction into the web of people and institutions who ultimately profit from the Lacks family. Deborah’s suspicion slowly gives way to an unlikely camaraderie with Skloot, even as some members of the family remain less thrilled about the project and the white woman and its helm. The film’s final credits reference both Skloot’s creation of the <a href="http://henriettalacksfoundation.org/">Henrietta Lacks Foundation</a> and the fact that the Lacks family never received compensation for Henrietta’s cells.</p>
<p>In advance of the film, the family’s continued attempts to reckon with that fundamental question <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-the-eve-of-an-oprah-movie-about-henrietta-lacks-an-ugly-feud-consumes-the-family/2017/03/28/d33d3418-1248-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html">resurfaced</a> in the news. Several members of the Lacks family have been actively participating since Skloot’s early book events. Many of them — including Henrietta’s children Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman and David Lacks Jr. and grandchildren Jeri Lacks Whye, Alfred Carter Jr., and La Tonya Carter — served as consultants on the film. But even as a wave of relatives support both the book and production, Henrietta’s son Lawrence Lacks remains unmoved by Skloot, HBO, and Oprah’s endeavors. Lawrence, the eldest of Henrietta’s five children and the only living executor of her estate, expressed dismay once again at his family’s portrayal in both the book and film. "It’s bad enough Johns Hopkins took advantage of us," he said in a <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/z-on-tv-blog/bal-henrietta-lacks-son-includes-oprah-hbo-complaints-20170320-story.html">March press release</a>. "Now Oprah, Rebecca, and HBO are doing the same thing. They’re no better than the people they say they hate." Lawrence, who takes issue with the book and has refused to watch the movie, insisted his siblings and other relatives stop making speaking appearances in connection with both works.</p>
<p>For other relatives, those venues are valuable not just because they are opportunities for the family to earn money for Henrietta’s contribution, but also because they offer platforms from which to share her story: "We’re trying to create something positive around my grandmother’s legacy," Whye <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-the-eve-of-an-oprah-movie-about-henrietta-lacks-an-ugly-feud-consumes-the-family/2017/03/28/d33d3418-1248-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?utm_term=.f38baee2a358">told <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em></a><em>.</em> That legacy — not profit or prestige — is what Oprah, Skloot, and HBO all herald as the the film’s raison d’être. Still, even as other Lacks children and grandchildren celebrate the newest rendering of Henrietta’s story, Lawrence insists on his right to determine what’s best for his mother’s estate and her memory. With the help of a publicist, both Lawrence and his son Ron remain steadfast in their objection to the production.</p>
<p>The Skloot-related projects seem to especially upset Lawrence, whose attachment to the role of familial patriarch has produced a specific vision of justice (namely, his own). Channeling the desire to receive restitution for his mother’s contribution, Lawrence made an especially bold demand, one which even <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2017/04/13/oprah-winfrey-disappointed-lacks-family-drama/100406764/">"disappointed"</a> Oprah: that Skloot transfer control of the foundation she started in his mother’s name and that HBO and Oprah’s Harpo Films each donate $10 million to a foundation to be started in his name, which even Ron <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-the-eve-of-an-oprah-movie-about-henrietta-lacks-an-ugly-feud-consumes-the-family/2017/03/28/d33d3418-1248-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html">called</a> "kind of a stretch." Both demands stand in stark opposition to the rest of the family’s cooperation with Skloot, Oprah, and HBO — and the position Oprah understands herself occupying as a producer and actress:</p>
<p>It is a familiar but no less vexing question, and one that echoes the concerns in the work itself: What is the author and filmmakers’ responsibility to their subjects? Deborah — who died in 2009, nine months before the book’s release — could not sign off on the film’s portrayal of her. Henrietta is, of course, long deceased. Neither woman can speak to the book or the film’s reflection of her story. Are Lawrence’s objections steeped in rightful indignation, bitterness, or some amorphous mixture of the two?</p>
<p>So often in American history, those whose contributions — physical, musical, written, or otherwise — get subsumed without credit or compensation have been black. Whether it’s the <a href="http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/03/08/soul-food-gentrification/">creators of now-trendy Southern fare</a>, the <a href="https://theringer.com/chuck-berry-rock-n-roll-obituary-de68f33f5dae">progenitors of rock ’n’ roll</a> and countless other musical genres, or the human chattel whose disembodied flesh augmented both land and <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/video/lives.html">legislators</a>, black people have been the source of America’s most precious, violently extracted gifts. If we recognize these as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">debts largely unpaid</a>, what bearing does that have on cases like Henrietta’s, in which the law is ill-equipped to solve an economically complicated moral imperative? If the medical industry owes Henrietta compensation for her cells, do the publishing and entertainment world owe the living Lacks family members (further) resources for access to the content these industries also profit off of?</p>
<p>The Lacks case — and the myriad smaller, less publicized stories of black people in America whose families have yet to receive restitution for an irreplaceable contribution — underscores the limits of journalism and art as activism. Skloot’s foundation and Oprah’s contributions are both extracurricular ventures, each attempting to remedy the simple truth that it is not enough for Henrietta’s story — and her family’s — to be everywhere, to hover over patients and readers and audiences as a gentle nod to the Lackses’ benevolence. But <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks </em>is a poignant reminder of its own truth: The satisfaction of scientific advancement or critically acclaimed art doesn’t pay medical bills on its own; a family cannot walk into Johns Hopkins and receive care simply with a whisper of an exploited black woman’s name. Henrietta’s cells may be immortal, but her descendants are not; while they are alive, they deserve to bask in riches both symbolic and literal.</p>
<p><em>Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in </em>The Ringer<em>.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/4/24/16037850/immortal-life-henrietta-lacks-hbo-film-oprah-winfrey-rebecca-skloot-82a1e94009f3Hannah Giorgis2017-04-07T13:44:11-04:002017-04-07T13:44:11-04:00Aminé Dares You to Call the NWACP
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<p>The Portland rapper trades the Honda Accord from “Caroline” for something bolder — and offers playful satire along the way</p> <p>Portland-bred rapper Aminé loves cars. In his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j8ecF8Wt4E">video for “Caroline,”</a> the buzzy breakout single that soundtracked summer 2016, the newcomer rode around the city goofing off with friends. Sunshine and bananas both abundant, the video took place largely inside or around a mid-2000s Honda Accord.</p>
<p>But a year later, things are different for Aminé. After the success of “Caroline” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjLv9lqoMs">“Baba”</a> (a track in which he raps partly in Amharic), he’s poppin’ — so naturally his car has to reflect that. Now the precocious artist is back with a video for “REDMERCEDES,” a track with bold, hypnotic production that matches its confident lyrics (“With my niggas in my red Mercedes / Attitude like fuck you, pay me”).</p>
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<p>In the retro-styled video, he plays both Thad, a black car salesman, and DeAndre, a white customer. With cameos from Kari Faux and Leon Bridges, it follows a satirical encounter between DeAndre and the black employees of a car dealership Aminé teased in a video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDwDvH5aSTg">released Wednesday</a> (featuring the same friends who flanked Aminé in “Caroline”). The video’s moments of racial tension offer tongue-in-cheek commentary: At one point, DeAndre’s friend threatens to call the “NWACP” on a black woman employee (Kari Faux) after she asks to shorten his name to “D” because “It has a nice little ring to it, homie.” Thad later explains to her that the acronym stands for “National White Association for Care and Pleasure.”</p>
<p>“REDMERCEDES” is boastful and fun, and the video magnifies the song’s effect with surprisingly mature comedy. Watching Aminé rap “tint so black, look like my complexion” while in whiteface is both hilarious and striking. The Ethiopian and Eritrean American rapper’s attention to race is pointed but unsurprising given his past willingness to confront the issue <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-young-rappers-bold-anti-trump-message-on-the-tonight-show-starring-jimmy-fallon">on a national stage</a>. Aminé, who turns 23 later this month, brings both youthful energy and a surprising gravitas to his work; “REDMERCEDES” is no different.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/4/7/16042050/amine-music-video-redmercedes-340b148b923cHannah Giorgis