#konch magazine

[back-and-totheleft]

"No way of doing it without tackling Black-white relations"

"You don't make a movie out of some intellectual idea, you've got to have it in your gut. I've always been an avid football fan, and the players have long been my heroes. But I see them as realistic heroes in the same way as the men that I have made other movies about, like Ron Kovic, Jim Garrison, and Richard Nixon -- all were people who went into the public arena, accomplished something but paid a heavy price. Players are tough, they can take it, but they're also destroying their bodies and then they're thrown away like old cars or washing machines. They take amphetamines or steroids or use dope, they have divorce problems, they hit their wives. With the Players' Union, they're more aware of being exploited, but very few people get out alive. The NFL covers all of that up.

Football is mesmerizing because it's a figurative war -- you go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond together, whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do, and in fact individuals don't excite me the way a team does. But the game changed radically in the '80s and '90s, and I wanted this football story to show that as well. When Jim Brown was playing, it was 60 minutes on the clock. Television ruined that -- now it's a three-hour game, determined by commercials, and it's all about product-placement. Combine the commercialism with salary cap restrictions and all the rest, there's little team loyalty any more, and this movie had to reflect that, too.

I also knew that the story had to center on the conflict between generations, the tension between younger players and older players, between younger players and a veteran coach, the role played by Al [Pacino] -- a man who's scared of change. Part of me identified with that character. There's something in our biological clocks when we get older -- we never forget, it's like the reptile brain -- and this concept of dying comes on us. Call it a middle-age crisis, but when you're in your 50's you have a real atonement to pay, and there is a re-examination of whether expansion is the proper activity for your character -- as opposed to focus and/or retreat, disappearance or suicide.

All of this was at work for me, but most of all I realized there was no way of doing football without digging deeper into black-white relations. That's the reality of football today since NFL teams are now 70% black, but this was also personally motivated. I was returning to what happened to me in Vietnam. I can't talk too much about drugs in Vietnam because of my parole [Stone was arrested on two misdemeanor counts of D.U.I. and hashish possession in Los Angeles last June] -- I'm going to obey the law, I may not agree with it but I intend to obey it -- but if it hadn't been for marijuana and my black brothers in Vietnam, I don't think I'd be the same person, I don't think I'd be alive.

It was during my fourth assignment that I met these guys, which was really my first experience with black people. I had already been wounded twice. The first time was just three weeks after I arrived, and then, again, two months later, during a night attack when you couldn't see the enemy but knew they were there, 10-15 meters away in the darkness. Men were being blown into the air, literally vaporized; one guy, all that was later found of him was a blood trail. Me, I tripped a satchel charge and was hit by shrapnel in my legs and ass. It's like what I said when I made Platoon, war on film cannot approximate the horror.

Then I met these six or seven black guys after my R & R, when I was sent to their infantry unit. They were very, very cool, and after a while they asked me, along with maybe one or two other white guys, into their bunker to party with them. It meant turning my back on the white guys, but they were with me all the way. And then they just blew me away with their music. It wasn't just Jim Morrison, that was a white trip, it was Soul. The Temptations, Smokey Robinson's "The Tracks of My Tears," Gladys Knight, Sam Cook, Jackie Wilson. I'd never listened to that stuff before, and it brought me humanity, it allowed me to relax.

What I realized was that these guys who were doing dope, who danced together, who allowed the feminine to come out, were the more humane, like they left the villagers, the women and children, alone. The guys who were into booze were usually the angry ones. The music, the dancing, the feminization, was liberating. If you danced with another man, it wasn't anything like sexual attraction as much as it was "synch-ing" -- in the music sense, you were in-synch with someone. That's why I did the bunker scene in Platoon, the bit with Elias and the shotgun reefer. Vietnamese grass is one of the most powerful, transforming herbs in the world. When I got high on that stuff listening to Smokey, that's when I began to understand that life is sacred, that life has great vibrancy, which, in my case, was a perception I couldn't get out of. Also, those guys wore bandannas and lots of beads, bands, bracelets, big rings and stuff, which I started wearing, too. In fact, I came home talking black. Every other word out of my mouth was, "Man!," "Hey, shit!", and my father, who was a Wall Street broker, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army and a Republican, was so upset that I gave him acid during a weekend visit to one of his rich friends in Southhampton.

The point is that in Vietnam I went to the other side of the coin. I'd always been the conformist, holding in a lot. I'd grown up lonely with divorced parents, then dropped out of Yale and gone into the Army to face myself. During my last six or seven months, I was with the black guys, and that changed my life. It allowed me to have faith in myself, to start writing a novel, to start using a camera, to become Oliver Stone.

All this had to have come from their generosity, being generous in the sense of being non-judgmental -- 'Just be who you are, no strings attached.' I needed the directness of that. It was a revelation for me that you could talk about your pain without being embarrassed! And these guys were like family. They were good tough soldiers, strong men, and yet, emotionally, they were there for me. I was their 'brother' -- that was the word back then, remember?"

-Oliver Stone interviewed by Peter Manso in Konch magazine [x]

[scotianostra]

On 23rd October 1940 playwright, poet and jazz musician, Tom McGrath, was born in Rutherglen.

He was a leading light in Scotland's theatrical scene and the founding editor of one of the famous 'underground' magazines, the International Times, which was launched at a Pink Floyd concert at the Roundhouse.

He was influenced by music hall and by the American Beat generation. In 1965 he appeared with Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz, Allen Ginsberg and Germaine Greer at the International Poetry Incarnation held at the Albert Hall – the first British 'happening' of that decade – filmed by Peter Whitehead and entitled Wholly Communion.

In 1969 his poems featured in a 1960s anthology Children of Albion, and he enrolled at Glasgow University to study English and drama. Here he came across a new wave of poets and joined a performance art troupe – the Other People. After this he immersed himself in the theatre, first of all as a musician in Tell Charlie Thanks For The Truss at the Traverse and then as musical director on The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, where he learnt a good deal about comic delivery from the young Billy Connolly.

He was artistic director of Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre and co-founded the Glasgow Theatre Club, later the Tron. His first success as a playwright was Laurel and Hardy  ) and his association with Glasgow former gangster Jimmy Boyle produced another successful play, The Hardman, both for Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. Other plays include Animal, Buchanan,  the story of the boxer Ken, and The Dream Train 

He also wrote for television and radio and, through his position as a literary director of the Scottish Arts Council, mentored new playwrights. In 2004 he became Emeritus Director of Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, an organisation designed to carry on the support of other writers.

He died on 29 April 2009, aged 68 from liver cancer.

Reasons

Sweet one I love you

for your lovely shape,

for the art you make

in paint and bed and rhyme,

but most because we see

into each other’s hearts,

there to read secrets

and to trust,

and cancel time.

                            Tom McGrath (b.1940)

Listen to  another of his poems here 

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/konch/there-was-that-time-charlie-tully-by-tom-mcgrath-r/

[mfgalaxy]

SHEREE RENEE THOMAS ON OCTAVIA BUTLER, THE POWER OF SHORT STORIES, WHY AFRICENTRIC WRITERS WORKSHOPS MATTER + EASY HACKS TO BOOST YOUR WRITING PRODUCTIVITY (MF GALAXY 119)

WHY GREG BEAR’S MOVING MARS AND OMNI MAGAZINE WERE IMPORTANT, CHANGING BLAH TO HUZZAH FOR POETRY, THE IMPORTANCE OF NATION LANGUAGE, PLAYWRIGHT AUGUST WILSON’S INGENIOUS TECHNIQUE FOR JUMPSTARTING THE NEXT PROJECT  

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD

Sheree Renee Thomas changed science fiction publishing by editing the anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.

Those books won the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards, and along with the novels of Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, and Steven Barnes relaunched Africentric science fiction and fantasy in the world of books and gave rise to the revolution which is growing around the African planet.

Thomas grew up in Memphis, Tennessee loving science fiction, but abandoned the genre until she encountered the work of Africentric SF luminary Octavia Butler and then found her own path to expanding the genre.

In addition to being an editor, Thomas is a poet and short story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies including Vibe, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Ishmael Reed’s Konch, The New York Times, Meridians, Strange Horizons, So Long Been Dreaming, and Hurricane Blues.

Numerous prestigious organisations have awarded her fellowships, including the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Ledig House Foundation. She also headed her own independent press, Wanganegresse, co-founded the journal Anansi: Fiction of the African Diaspora, served as a juror for several prizes, and taught creative writing across the US and in London.

In today’s MF GALAXY, Sheree Renee Thomas discusses:

The enduring and electrifying power of Kindred author Octavia Butler and why Greg Bear’s Moving Mars mattered so much to Thomas

Why short stories matter even while novels are king, and which anthologies rocked her world

The wrong way to teach poetry

The different ways people approach nation language—or what some people call patois or creole

The indispensability of Africentric writers’ workshops, and

Easy techniques to enhance your own productivity and creativity, including playwright August Wilson’s ingenious technique for jumpstarting the next project

https://about.me/wanganegresse

http://www.aqueductpress.com/authors/ShereeThomas.php

Interviews listed on Wikipedia

You Are Not Alone: An Interview with Sheree R. Thomas, ColoredGirls.com (2001)

Black Science Fiction and Fantasy with Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and Sheree R. Thomas on NPR, News & Notes, August 13, 2007 (Audio)

Creating Dark Matter: An Interview with Sheree Renée Thomas, Strange Horizons (2009)

Ambling Along the Aqueduct, "Aqueduct Press: Conversation Pieces" (2011)

Sources listed on Wikipedia

Sheree Thomas Bibliography site by Hachette Book Group

Joe Monti's Scifi.com review of Dark Matter

Pamela Sargent's review of Dark Matter: Reading the Bones

Steven Silver's review of Dark Matter

AALBC Author page with Sheree Thomas

SHOTGUN LULLABIES: Stories & Poems by Sheree Renée Thomas

Aqueduct Press Author page with Sheree Renée Thomas

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD

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