There will be better and more substantive testimonials and remembrances of this great, great man published this week. I met him briefly, on limited terms, but on news of his death, I found myself reliving the entire encounter. The worst of it left me dazed, shaking my head at myself, incredulous that it happened as it did. And while most of the joke is on me, there is enough in this tale to deliver some insight into how sharp, savage and charming a man Harry Belafonte was. In short, it’s always a shame to not share a good anecdote, so here we go: A few years back, HBO execs brought me in to look at a project that had been languishing at the network for too long: A proposed long-form miniseries on Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy of America in the King Years, perhaps the most definitive account of the critical years in the civil rights movement. Those who have read those three tomes will immediately understand that there is enough power and content in any one of them for...
Commentary: Memoriam
Dorothy Simon, 1923-2020
Dorothy Simon, a homemaker who returned to her college studies after 30 years to graduate with highest honors and undertake a late career as a crisis counselor and therapist, died Sept. 21 of natural causes at her Silver Spring home. She was 97. “I had the unusual pleasure of attending the University of Maryland campus at College Park with my mother,” said David Simon, the youngest of her three children. “We both graduated the same year, albeit she was summa cum laude and I was summa cum nothing. She was a far better student.” But even before her degree, Simon had embarked on a late career as a crisis counselor at Alternative House, a residential facility serving runaway adolescents and their families in McLean, Va. She also saw clients for personal and marital therapy in her Silver Spring kitchen. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. as Dorothy Ligeti, she was raised in Williamsburg, The Rockaways, and The Bronx before graduating from James Madison High School in 1940. She then attended...
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Ted Lippman (1929-2014)
It’s hard to scale the heights of requiem without stumbling into a deep ravine of sentiment and cliche, and I know some will measure what follows against the known place of the old Baltimore Sun in the pantheon of American newspapering. No, we were not a Washington Post of the last late century, with Bradlee’s feet on the desk and Watergate dueling scars adorning a set jawline, or a New York Times for the Middle Atlantic, our paper-of-record certitude enshrining our every effort. We certainly weren’t some rough-and-tumble tabloid squealing about headless bodies in topless bars, or even a Chicago broadsheet or Hearst rag for which Hildy Johnsons might labor with gin on their breath and cigarette burns between their typing fingers. We were pretty staid. Too staid, perhaps, and a little too proud of a noble, grey history. We were often accused by our younger sibling, the Evening Sun, of pretense and pomposity. H. L. Mencken, who we vaguely claimed but who had in fact...
Pete Seeger, 1919-2014
If there is an American who has lived a more honorable and creative life in the past century, the name cannot be readily conjured. Pete Seeger did everything possible to merge the power of popular song to the very idea of community. Share this:FacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint
Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)
A master departs. It isn’t that he merely took a blowtorch to all the affectations and pretenses of genre fiction. No, he made the lines between genre and literary fiction ridiculous and arbitrary for all time. Fuck your categorizations: This guy did some of the best writing in the last half of the Twentieth Century. He leaves behind narratives that make us think harder about the human condition, not to mention all of our presumptions about how our society actually functions — or doesn’t. I met him once. I was a newspaper reporter, and so proud of that simple fact that I never wanted to ever be seen “going civilian,” fawning on celebrities or artists or political leaders or whoever. Good journalists, Mencken said, can write about cats and kings. The day’s assignment — and the personages you encounter — shall not adulterate the requisite mixture of detached interest and dry, professional disdain. Observe everything, admire...
The Great Chuck Brown Has Passed
Just heard the news that the father of D.C. go-go has died. He was 75. Having heard Big G, The Backyard Band and the Soul Searcher horn section bring their funk to New Orleans last Friday, the news lands strangely. The guys on the stage of Tipitina’s last week are very much the proud children of Mr. Brown and his Soul Searchers. This man, who invented a musical genre and grooved so hard and for so long, is not yet in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. The Dave Clark Five, however, are comfortably settled in the shrine. Argument enough to burn that motherfucker down to the Lake Erie waterline. Share this:FacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint