Archive for December, 2009
It’s a Wonderful . . . Scene
In an era of film actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman, whose priestlike devotion to their art makes them nearly unrecognizable from one role to the next, it is temping to say about the stars of Holywood’s golden age that they weren’t really actors at all — that they merely played themselves, or, [...]
A Brief Commercial Interruption
Pardon this shameless self-promotion — I am my own publicity department . . . The literary critic Mark Sanders of Emory University had this to say about my novel, Signifying Nothing: “[Signifying Nothing] simply nailed black middle-class America of the late ’70s. I knew that family; I went to that same church, heard the same [...]
Henry Blake, Hero
The sitcom M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in the fall of 1972, when I was nine, in the days when TV provided the background noise of my life. On the first floor of our house, if I wasn’t sitting in front of the set, I could hear it as I played on the floor, drew, [...]
