They pick up Tommy Johnson, a young black man who claims he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play guitar (a legend told about blues musician Robert Johnson). In need of money, the four stop at a radio broadcast tower where they record a song as the Soggy Bottom Boys. That night, the trio part ways with Tommy after their car is discovered by the police. Unbeknownst to them, the recording becomes a major hit.
Young Black Brotha – Constant Drama (1998)
Jeffrey Jacob Abrams (born June 27, 1966)[1] is an American filmmaker and composer. He is best known for his works in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. Abrams wrote and produced such films as Regarding Henry (1991), Forever Young (1992), Armageddon (1998), Cloverfield (2008), Star Trek (2009), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
"The Players Club," written and directed by hip-hop star Ice Cube, is a gritty black version of "Showgirls," set in a "gentlemen's club" where a young college student hopes to earn her tuition. Rich with colorful dialogue and characters, it's sometimes ungainly but never boring, and there's a core of truth in its portrait of exotic dancers.
Thirty years ago, this material would have been forced into the blaxploitation genre--dumbed down and predictable. But Ice Cube (who also co-stars) makes "The Players Club'" observant and insightful; beneath its melodrama lurks unsentimental information about why young women do lap dances for a living, and what they think about themselves and their customers.
Analyzing assailants' self-disclosed motivations illustrates how a combinationof primarily social factors, rather than a simple and singular psychologicalelement such as hatred or repressed homosexuality, explains antigay violence.The mutually reinforcing melding of hierarchical gender norms, peer dynamics,youthful thrill seeking, and economic and social disempowerment explains howindividuals as divergent as Brian, Andrew, and Eric ended up on such parallelmissions. In a nation that glorifies violence and abhors sexual diversity, aminority perceived to violate gender norms functions as an ideal dramatic propfor young men to use in demonstrating their masculinity, garnering socialapproval, and alleviating boredom. This becomes more true as heterosexualityincreasingly becomes a primary measure of masculinity and as gay men andlesbians become increasingly visible in the media and popular culture.Furthermore, for members of economically and socially marginalized groups, gaymen in particular are ideal targets because of their symbolic identificationwith upper-class privilege.
Gosselaar recently starred as Bow's dad on the black-ish spinoff mixed-ish. He also reprised his defining role in Peacock's Saved by the Bell revival, appeared in an episode of Barry, and stars in the new crime drama, Will Trent.
Sarah Kane by Aleks Sierz 'There may be some people who kill themselves,' wrote Al Alvarez in The Savage God, his classic 1971 study of suicide, 'in order to achieve a calm and control they never find in life.' He went on to claim that for poet Sylvia Plath, a personal friend who'd committed suicide in 1963, it was a desperate way out of a corner she had boxed herself into. The case of Sarah Kane, the 28-year-old playwright who hanged herself on 20 February 1999, inevitably recalls Plath. Once again, here was a precocious but self-destructive young talent whose death changed the way we look at her work. Kane's short career began in January 1995, with Blasted, a shocking play whose raw language and powerful images of rape, eye-gouging and cannibalism provoked critical outrage. The Daily Mail denounced the play as 'this disgusting feast of filth', the Sunday Telegraph fulminated against its 'gratuitous welter of carnage' and the Spectator called it 'a sordid little travesty of a play'. But if Blasted shocked because of its explicit sex and violence, it was also disturbing because of its innovative structure: after a naturalistic first half, Kane exploded theatrical convention by making the second part richly symbolic and earily nightmarish. In her subsequent plays - Phaedra's Love (1996), Cleansed (1998) and Crave (1998) - Kane developed a characteristic mix of extreme emotional content and theatrical innovation. Although her savagery attracted more attention than her tenderness, Kane's special talent lay in taking apart theatrical form. In Crave, for example, the four characters have no names and most of their speeches could be addressed to any of the other characters on stage. Since her death, an enormous amount of interest has been generated by rumours that her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, which is now being produced by the Royal Court in London, tackles the subject of suicidal depression. When speculation about it first began, in September 1999, Simon Kane - Sarah's brother and executor of her estate - pointed out that 4.48 Psychosis is 'about suicidal despair, so it is understandable that some people will interpret the play as a thinly veiled suicide note'. But, he said, 'this simplistic view does both the play and my sister's motivation for writing it an injustice.' You can see his point. If 4.48 Psychosis is worth seeing, it should be because it's a good play and not because it hints at its author's depression, her voluntary stays at London's Maudsley Hospital or her previous attempts at suicide. For this reason, the Royal Court is discouraging publicity. The poster advertising the play is black, with no picture, and includes a quote from the play which simply conveys Kane's bleak humour: 'I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live - I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.' In view of her ceaseless desire to innovate in form, audiences should expect 4.48 Psychosis to be more of a poetic extravaganza than a traditional three-act play. Watching it will probably involve being exposed to a text in which lyricism is laced with powerful stage images and where missives from the edge of extreme experience are laced with a wry humour. But 4.48 Psychosis inevitably raises troubling questions about the literature of despair. On the one hand, sceptics see Kane's work as a literal reflection of her life. The Telegraph's critic, Charles Spencer, wrote in May 1998 that 'you feel her work owes much more to clinical depression than to real artistic vision'. You could argue that her writing simply reproduces the fears and confusions of mental illness. On the other hand, Kane's defenders - such as Graham Whybrow, the Royal Court's literary manager - emphasise her dramatic technique. Not only did she have a first-class honours degree in drama, but her work never stayed still. 'Each new play,' he says, 'was a new departure and to some extent an investigation of form. She left behind a body of work which is consistent in vision and diverse across a range of subjects.' But Kane was also 'acutely aware that she was living an accelerated life, personally and artistically,' says Whybrow. 'She was only too aware of the tragedies of other artists who died young: she was conscious of Buchner and so on.' In fact, Kane directed Georg Buchner's Woyzeck in 1997. Was she part of what Alvarez calls the 'black thread' of morbid writers who were fascinated by suicide and death? Playwright Mark Ravenhill, who knew Kane and whose Shopping and Fucking (1996) also caused a stir at the Royal Court, says: 'Actually, I see her more as a classical writer. Her work is connected with a form of theatre that is quite confrontational because it doesn't reassure you with social context or Freudian psychology - it doesn't explain things. It just presents you with these austere, extreme situations. She is the only contemporary writer who has that classical sensibility.' Did she pay the price of being encouraged by theatre managements to explore the dark sides of life? 'Not at all, she was a very stubborn, strong-willed person,' says Ravenhill. 'She wrote what she wanted to write. For every person who praised her work, there was one that condemned it. She just went her own way.' Perhaps her restless desire to innovate pushed her further and further into a corner from which death offered the only escape. 'I don't agree,' says Simon Kane. 'I don't think fears about her work were a significant factor in her decision to commit suicide. I think Sarah's work was much more the effect of who she was and what she cared about, than it was the cause of her depression.' Similarly, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon sees her work as speaking for itself. 'People should admire the boldness of it, the starkness of the images and her influence will encourage writers to be courageously theatrical.' But there is also a dangerous side to her legacy. 'Because of her death, some young people might think they have to live in despair to be proper writers. And that you have to kill yourself to become profound.' At the time of Kane's death, Kenyon was quoted as saying that Kane was an artist who suffered from 'existential despair'. But, as fellow Royal Court playwright Anthony Neilson pointed out, the same depression affects both artists and check-out girls, so why 'canonise one and stigmatise the other'? Mental illness is no respecter of professions. And David Tushingham, who included Kane's work in Live 3: Critical Mass, an anthology of new writing, before she became notorious, says: 'Sarah Kane's career as a mental patient was briefer and much less exceptional than as a dramatist - the only freakish thing about her was her talent.' Simon Kane adds, 'It is very narrow and trivial to look at a play simply as an expression of someone's biography - it limits interpretation and closes off other possible meanings. Her work is much richer than just an expression of personal anguish.' When I interviewed Kane for my book on young playwrights - called In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today - in September 1998, she gave few clues about her pain. She wasn't the kind of person to offload problems on strangers. Her responses to my questions were helpful and polite, and her subsequent letters generous in answering my queries. Since her death, however, some references inevitably seem to scream from the page. Her favourite band was Joy Division, purveyors of dark and doomy music whose lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide by hanging. When discussing Blasted, Kane once mentioned a haunting newspaper image - of a Bosnian woman hanging from a tree - that emphasised the stark realities of civil war. In Cleansed, a young man hangs himself when he realises how long his prison sentence is, an incident which Kane took from a true story about a black activist on Roben island in South African during the apartheid years. In her plays, the portraits of depression and desperation - whether it's the character of Hippolytus in her retelling of the Phaedra story or the inmates of the corrective institution in Cleansed - were not just the results of research, but came from the gut. In her lifetime, she was accused of posing as the 'naughtiest girl in class', but the truth is that she meant it. But seeing connections between Kane's life and her writing does tend to be reductive. After all, her friends will tell you about her sense of fun as well as her depression. Her taste in music and theatre may have been bleak (Beckett was a favourite) but she also loved Manchester United football team - hardly a melancholic's choice. Besides, what she admired most about Beckett was his sense of overcoming the darkness. When I talked to her, she emphasised that she was essentially interested in love and affection. 'I don't find my plays depressing or lacking in hope,' she said. 'To create something beautiful about despair, or out of a feeling of despair, is for me the most hopeful, life-affirming thing a person can do.' If anything, her ultimate failure to survive the pain of mental illness excites compassion and pity. In the end, her decision to kill herself probably had more to do with escaping the agony of depression and her feelings of loneliness than with her work. If, as Alvarez suggests, some people kill themselves to gain control and find calm, the irony is that Kane, who all her life struggled against being pigeonholed as a 'woman writer', is now powerless against being labelled a suicidal artist. And the problem with seeing Kane as an example of the Sylvia Plath syndrome - with her work refracted through the optic of her death - is that it reduces her art to biography, and limits its meaning. 'It will be very hard for 4.48 Psychosis to be seen solely as a play,' says Ravenhill. 'How can an audience engage with it without the author's biographical details getting in the way?' Perhaps the best way to approach the play is to do what theatre audiences always do: suspend disbelief - forget that the actors are only acting and that the writer is no longer living, and open yourself to the experience of the work. An earlier version of this article appeared as 'The Short Life of Sarah Kane' in The Daily Telegraph on 27 May 2000 2ff7e9595c
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