culture

Making films is hard and making good ones even harder, so the American Black Film Festival, held last weekend in Los Angeles, adheres to the old adage that 90 percent of life is just showing up. To paraphrase a panelist during one of the festival’s events, “I’ve seen Citizen Kane and that shit was boring.…

Nearly every year, some baseball team has a Cinderella season, rising from the depths of many losing or mediocre seasons and jostling among the perennial contenders for first place. But no team fits the metaphor as well as this year’s edition of the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays, who changed their name from Devil Rays…

My son, Liam Kojo Johnson, entered the world pink and screaming, slate blue eyes squeezed shut. Peach fuzz covered his perfectly shaped head, a place-holder for the blonde hair that would soon grow there. His twin sister, Chloe Adjoa, came in peace. She was the color of gingerbread, with jet-black hair. Her calm, stoic face…

Let me relate one of my most unpleasant dining experiences. ABoston journalist was passing through Los Angeles for a night and hoping to see as many of her LA-based friends as possible. To help keep things sane, one of her local buddies organized a group dinner so she could see everyone at once. The evening…

Sometimes when the planets align and all the stars have found their height, there is a second when the world slows to a crawl and your ears stand at attention, and in that moment it all makes sense. Jean Grae caught that second like a firefly and stuck it a Mason jar when she hooked…

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove has beaten the odds. Hargrove hit the New York City jazz scene in the late ’80s amid of a blaze of hype calling him the new trumpet star. Blazes of hype were somewhat common in the jazz world then, as a succession of young, good-looking musicians seemed to take turns being flavor…

The news of Bernie Mac’s death has his fans learning a new word—”sarcoidosis”—as they grieve over the comedian whose blunt, earthy humor took him from Chicago’s streets to Hollywood’s boulevards. Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that usually hits the skin, the eyes, lymph nodes and lungs. Mac had been treated for the condition, and it…

We actually don’t know yet what killed Bernie Mac, born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough in 1957, so it’s hard to say just yet what lessons grieving fans should be reading into the comedian’s demise. (Keep your weight down? Rest? Eat right? Take your statins? None or all of the above?) Mac did suffer from an inflammatory…

My father grew up without his father. Actually, he’s not entirely sure it was his biological father, but in any case, the man left when my father was 6 years old. Growing up without a father had a devastating effect on his material and emotional well-being, and he constantly tells me about the hardships he…

At my second wedding, I had the piano player play the theme song from Shaft as I walked down the aisle. For my MFA, I wrote my critical thesis on the ’70s film classic. Ernest Tidyman, the white author/screenwriter who created John Shaft (and many more iconic characters), was a cops reporter for Cleveland’s Plain…