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Danny Glover: Still Marching to a Different Drummer

portside.org

In recent years, Danny Glover has used his formidable acting chops and Hollywood connections to boost a series of independent films that might otherwise have struggled to find an audience. San Francisco’s most beloved home-grown movie star and political activist appeared in Sorry to Bother You, the widely acclaimed directorial debut of Oakland musician Boots Riley. In 2019, Glover played a key on-screen role in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the break-through film of director Joe Talbot and actor Jimmy Fails, both San Francisco natives.

Glover is now starring in The Drummer [view the trailer here -- moderator], released on Nov. 9. It’s a low-budget feature film co-written by Eric Worthman and Jessica Gohlke, who also serve as director and producer respectively. The subject matter is not call center worker exploitation or the gentrification of San Francisco. The Drummer tells the interlinked story of three soldiers who enlisted in the U.S. Army, became combat veterans in Iraq, and then try to avoid being sent back to the same disastrous George Bush-initiated conflict. Read more here.
Should African art be returned from colonial museums?
Langston Hughes Was a Lifelong Socialist

By BIlly Anania
www.jacobinmag.com

In the 1930s and ’40s, Langston Hughes wrote poetic tributes to the working class and socialist leaders worldwide. Some critics allege he abandoned his principles later in life, but they ignore the role of McCarthyist oppression — and Hughes’s creative resistance to it.

Few high-profile artists in the twentieth century were as openly socialist as renowned poet, playwright, and author Langston Hughes was in the 1930s and ’40s. Take, for example, these verses from a poetic tribute to Vladimir Lenin:

Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown, and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.
Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.

But by the mid-1960s, Hughes had changed his tune. Gone were the explicit homages to communism in the Soviet Union and China, replaced by stream-of-consciousness jazz poetry that more often referenced decolonial insurgencies in Africa.

Critics have argued that Hughes’s abrupt turn constituted an abandonment of his socialist values. This is complicated by the fact that for nearly a decade during the Second Red Scare, he was under investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy for his communist affiliations and sympathies, which helps explain the shift in his tone. Read more here.
A poet and a protester, Gil Scott-Heron captured his time — and ours

By David Dennis Jr.
theundefeated.com
  
This summer, billionaire Richard Branson took a plane to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, followed him into space a few days later. With the world in the throes of a pandemic and the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us growing wider, it was fitting that the phrase “Whitey on the Moon” was trending on social media.

Gil Scott-Heron, who will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Sunday with the Early Influence Award, wrote the poem Whitey on the Moon, which he performed on his breakout album Pieces of a Man, on the night of the moon landing in 1969. The song featured lines such as, “I can’t pay no doctor bill/ (but Whitey’s on the moon)/ Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still/ (while Whitey’s on the moon).”

The poem captured the precise political moment of the time while also speaking directly to inequality plaguing the country in 2021. The continued relevance of Whitey on the Moon underscores the continued relevance of his music, message and social commentary. And his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction is an acknowledgment that one man influenced social justice movements five decades apart while also helping birth one of the most popular music genres in the world — hip-hop.

LISTEN: Common on Gil Scott-Heron’s influence on hip-hop and Black life here.