Gotham City Soul

I’m usually willing to give artistic expression, and many things quite a bit of latitude, but I’m going to go ahead and be grumpy about something today. I’m not going to see American Gangster . I like Denzel Washington’s work. I loved his directorial debut Antwone Fisher , and of course there is the well-known portrayal of Malcolm X ; and the lesser vaunted, but equally wonderful performance as Creasy in Man on Fire , the story of a burned out ex CIA operative and assassin who finds redemption in the process of saving the life of a little girl, whom he has grown to love as his own. The Hurricane, in which Washington starred as the embattled boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, is a topic for another blog entry altogether, as there is deep controversy over the facts surrounding the story of Carter’s life. But I loved Washington’s Oscar-worthy performance all the same. But I don’t want to contribute one thin dime to American Gangster . I fail to see why I should care to know the details of ...

I have to jump in here today to rant. I realize solving the homeless problem is a difficult one, but I've just about had enough of people "in charge", who either don't have a clue, or don't want to have a clue about living in the real world, the world where the majority of people on this planet live. For example, is it me, or do you think it is completely absurd of the city, and more specifically Mayor Bloomberg (whom I actually like well enough on many issues), to turn homeless families away from shelters, telling them that they should seek shelter with family members? Do the people who try to shape these policies have a lick of sense? Do they understand that the reason most of these people are homeless in the first place is because they DON’T HAVE FAMILY MEMBERS TO LIVE WITH? Even if the family members exist, how can we force them to take in their homeless relatives? This may seem like a simplistic solution but maybe if we built more shelters, and better yet, a...

Back to Vodou , In the wake of all of the Halloween revelry (note to rabid Christians: It’s not a holiday to celebrate the cult of death—it derives from All Saints and All Souls day on November 1 and 2 in the Roman Catholic Church, and may even stretch back further than that to early harvest festivals in Europe) I thought it might be interesting to speak about the African traditional religion of Vodou. It’s a bit easier to understand, I think, if you are Catholic, because the Church basically appropriated or blended ancient pagan rituals, such as the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, with its own to keep everybody happy. Followers of Vodou did the opposite—they (as well as a host of other African Traditional Religions) hid the rites they brought from Africa in the rituals of the Catholic Church, syncretising their spirits, called lwa (note that they are not gods; the Vodou religion recognizes one supreme God, Bondye ) to Catholic saints. The lwa and ancestors are spirits...

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes. So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction” . Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in a...