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From the New York Times:
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ Is Coming to the Apollo
By ANDREW R. CHOW APRIL 26, 2017“Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s award-winning book exploring racial injustice in America, will be brought to the Apollo stage next April.
Mr. Coates’s fiery work — which made him the National Book Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist — will be adapted into a multimedia performance, with excerpted monologues, video projections, and a score by the jazz musician Jason Moran.
This sounds lame, like some beatnik nightclub poetry reading from 1959:
Portions of Mr. Coates’s letters to his son would be read aloud, while narratives of his experiences at Howard University and in New York City could be performed by actors. …
Mr. Coates will be involved with the project going forward to give “creative guidance,” Ms. Forbes said, and may appear in the production. …
Casting has yet to be announced, but will be fluid over the show’s short run. (Exact dates have not been specified.) “There’s a mix of everyday folks and celebrity voices,” Ms. Forbes said. “One night is going to be vastly different from the next.”
Part of the problem is that Ta-Nehisi’s life story is almost as boring as mine: guy sits at desk and intermittently taps on keyboard.
They’ll need to really gay it way up if they want this show to transfer to the Great White Way. I’m thinking, live on stage, a Giant Escalator on such a huge scale that TNC feels like he’s four-years-old again
Like this, but with dancing black chorus boys in hoodies
with lots of ensemble 1990s hip-hop In Living Color dancing and metaphors lifted from the 1967 movie “Up the Down Staircase.”
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
In fairness to Alexander Hamilton, Coates should be played by an Englishman who has lived in the Caribbean. Barry Obama’s buddy Charles Branson, perhaps?
Proper intersectionality insists that the role of Coates be played by a white man.
There’s a fantastic clip on YouTube of Martha and the Vandellas doing one of their best songs, “Come and Get These Memories,” at the Apollo in ’63.
It’s a long, long, long way downhill from that to this.
My guess is they award him a Tony. When it is made into a movie, he gets an Oscar.
Blaming Whitey, exhibit #43,965,738,
Fish in a barrel, man, fish in a barrel.
Sensing that this won’t be the next Hamilton, I can keep my envy in check knowing that this won’t be some gigantic payday for Genius Coates.
“Footloose” with TNC in the Kevin Bacon role?
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, that is. Those English guys from the Carribean are so fancy that I get all their names mixed up. I’ll just call him the goofy-stuntman-billionaire who owns the island where our last president just spent weeks on the beach (probably smoking weed with Sir Richard).
Sadly this will be as close as we can come to a parody.Will bring a whole new crew of white interlopers to 125th Street-
HBD data point: Up the Down Staircase was written by Bel Kaufman. Her grandfather was the famous Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, upon whose Tevye stories Fiddler on the Roof was based. Her mother was also a writer (in Yiddish).
Isn’t Coates embarrassed by this? I mean, it’s clear from his writings that he is a humble man. Surely he cannot think it’s less than presumptuous to have his life story staged in a place where Duke Ellington and James Brown once performed?
Or Lisa Stansfield, for that matter.
This strikes me as one of those “eat your vegetables” productions that all the “right” kind of people go to and praise but no one really wants to say, rather like Hamilton, except without the veneer of crap-level rap songs to distract you.
If this were the 19th Century, it would be a religious speech by a “groundbreaking” Protestant theologian promoted as “uplifting” people.
They are going to stage a play in Buffalo, called the “Trial of Trayvone Martin.” The premise is that Martin killed Zimmerman and is now being railroaded because the shooting was justified but Martin was black. Of course the opposite while true, is racist.
Completely O/T but potentially of interest to Mr Sailer. It turns out that different peoples and cultures can differ deeply.
http://cardiobrief.org/2017/04/26/serious-questions-raised-about-integrity-of-international-trials/#comment-113785
The 1959 Beatnik reference might work were TNC’s life to be modeled after the hapless nerd busboy at a beatnik joint in the Roger Corman B movie “Bucket of Blood”. From Wikipaedia.
“a dimwitted, impressionable young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomes murderous…”
"a dimwitted, impressionable young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady's cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomes murderous..."Replies: @unit472
Here is a ‘trailer’ featuring a poetry reading at the beatnik club to saxophone accompaniment.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-mozilla-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=mozilla&p=bucket+of+blood+movie#id=1&vid=23fbbc132c25bb21562c670f9e962db5&action=click
Its perfect for TNC stage debut. He could even plagiarize the poetry.
Opening voice-over: “I was born a poor black chile.”
>This sounds lame,
Talk about an understatement
The Black Body Monologues. There has never been a bigger fraud in the literary world than Mr. Coates.
Will the climax depict the drama of the white woman, the escalator, and Coates’ obstructionist son?
Dang, Steve beat me to it.
Maybe Ta Nehisi will obsess about getting the full-set EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) like Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock.
Well, it’s the Apollo. That’s like being made a vice president in your Daddy’s company.
I have thought about that character so many times in the past six months….
Yes, but they should give him a Tony before the play goes on stage, just like how BHO got his Nobel Peace Prize in his first few months of office before he had actually, you know, done anything.
In Living Color was a funny funny show that could not be broadcast today. Even on cable.
Even when originally broadcasted I was always puzzled/amazed with what they got away with!Replies: @Jim Don Bob
Yup. He will be played by Aaron Eckhart.
Why go to the stage play when you can see just see this clip from the terribly under appreciated movie CB4? Coates will say nothing more intelligent than what’s expressed in this rap.
I bet his life has been as uneventful as Soledad O’Brian’s.
Recalling Coates’ escalator story and Obama’s typical white people grandma on the bus story, look how far these supposed geniuses have to reach for evil racist white people drama in their lives. And it’s entirely invented for literary drama. SWPL may eat it up but suspect everyone else, especially other black people, knows it’s a story.
“Ragtime” it is not. A musical about a rude or clueless white lady on an escalator; if only Andrew Lloyd Weber was a brother, but Lin Miranda will do. Who remembers anything from the age of 4?
The opus sounds like one which Ignatius J. Reilly’s friend Myrna would back (with daddy’s money):
Edit
Myrna Minkoff, referred to by Ignatius as “that minx”, is a Jewish beatnik from New York City, whom Ignatius met while she was in college in New Orleans.[2] Though their political, social, religious, and personal orientations could hardly be more different, Myrna and Ignatius fascinate one another. The novel repeatedly refers to Myrna and Ignatius having engaged in tag-team attacks on the teachings of their college professors. For most of the novel, she is seen only in the regular correspondence which the two sustain since her return to New York, a correspondence heavily weighted with sexual analysis on the part of Myrna and contempt for her apparent sacrilegious activity by Ignatius. Officially, they both deplore everything the other stands for. Though neither of them will admit it, their correspondence indicates that, separated though they are by half a continent, many of their actions are meant to impress one another.
C’mon. You also cleaned your garage that time. And had an adorable pet lagomorph.
I wonder whether they’ll musicalize and terpsichorate that part where he bought the $2.1m five-bedroom historic brownstone, but then didn’t move in coz of the lynchings that were happening every hour in Prospect-Lefferts.
Not beatniks, host. I think the kickline will look something like this:
Hopefully more melanin.
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-overweight-women-rehears-new-high-res-stock-photography/105473582?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect
Yeah, like that-ish.
If this were the 19th Century, it would be a religious speech by a "groundbreaking" Protestant theologian promoted as "uplifting" people.Replies: @Ivy
There will probably be a metal detector at the door, but that wouldn’t detect or stop the enterprising vegetable flinger. Imagine flying rotten tomatoes, cabbages, onions and other produce. Brings a tear to my eye just imagining it.
I don’t know. This could be good if they did it like BET used to do “Live At The Apollo” back in the nineties, where they would show the crowd members going into fits of almost apopleptic laughter over every stupid thing every comedian said.
I’d watch that.
This, I could see. It could be really great if his experiences in New York City included a guy dressed up like the Monopoly man handing Coates a giant sack with a big dollar sign on it, and Coates skipping away, grinning ear to ear, while he clutched a big airplane ticket reading “PARIS”.
I think I missed my calling.
Jim Don Bob,
Even when originally broadcasted I was always puzzled/amazed with what they got away with!
Has any group had it easier, through all of history, than black men with a three digit iq have it now? They’re born into a society that defines itself by its ability to rid their lives of obstacles.
I’m trying to think of something. Maybe a 19th century first son of a member of the house of lords.
http://cardiobrief.org/2017/04/26/serious-questions-raised-about-integrity-of-international-trials/#comment-113785Replies: @Old fogey
Many thanks for the link. I worked for many years for a grant-making institution and often wondered when reading grantee reports whether the results were fabricated by the principal investigator or real. I recall only one study that came up with results that questioned the basis of the foundation’s program. Needless to say that institution (a small NGO in Asia) did not receive further funding and the results went no further than the files.
Wow, that Up the Down Staircase trailer was fascinating… but was it supposed to be about Alice Goffman or Emmanuel Macron?
(That’s called “intertextuality” for all you academic wordmongers… NOT the same thing as “intersectionality”!)
Speakig of beatnik poetry, none beats this with. With “Uncle Fester” playing piano and Drew Barrymore’s father along for the ride.
“I had a canary who couldn’t sing, I had a cat who left me share her pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat who killed the canary. What is truth?”
It’s pronounced:
eksalator
"I had a canary who couldn't sing, I had a cat who left me share her pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat who killed the canary. What is truth?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzywcEgjlhwReplies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @PiltdownMan
Now that’s a hot-cool poet! Who is she?
Rather pessimistic, but pleasing.
More of a Duke-sized bust, but I’m just a commoner.
Rather pessimistic, but pleasing.
Yep. The fictionalised hero story of a child of blacks who lives a Middle Class lifestyle a thousand times better than the President of an African Country that still grows up into an angry black ingrate that hates YT. There are some good ones though. Like OJ the murderer and Cosby the rapist.
Civil Rights, where Civilization goes to DIE.
http://phillipafallon.blogspot.com/
"I had a canary who couldn't sing, I had a cat who left me share her pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat who killed the canary. What is truth?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzywcEgjlhwReplies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @PiltdownMan
Sometimes, things take decades to click. I realized only just now that the Jackie Coogan who played Uncle Fester is the same person as the child actor who played the title role in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid.
Needs Morgan Freeman to fill out the cornucopia of suck.
Surprised Obama didn’t beat TNC to the punch on this bad idea. I guess Barky can’t write a book and chew scenery at the same time anymore.
Hold on, is this what I think it is? A shameless plagiarism of ‘Invisible Man’? For shame, for shame.
This is one of those plays and movies that earnest SJW (Social Jewish Warriors) make school trips to force children to see, because it’s supposedly “good for them”.
Yes, it is like mothers and grandmothers trying to force little boys to eat the worst mushy, vegetables because it is supposedly
Good for them.
My mother and maternal grandmother were once literally chasing me around a dinner table trying to force me to eat something called
“Swiss Chard” – a mushy dark green leaf vegetable that is even worse than spinach.
Fortunately my father intervened and saved me from my (that day) evil mother and evil grandmother.
Even when originally broadcasted I was always puzzled/amazed with what they got away with!Replies: @Jim Don Bob
They got away with it because they were black, but even that would not work today. Can you imagine Men on Film today?
To Coates I’d say what my Uncle Mike used to say to the child me when I acted the fool:
“You ought to be on the stage! There’s one leaving in five minutes.”
In the opening frame of that “Up the Down Staircase” clip, is that Warren Beatty in drag???
Thanks!
And Jackie Coogan in that 1950s clip is a dead ringer for Steve Ballmer.
Don’t forget that great slam poet – Herman Munster!
GETO