News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Wednesday April 24th 2024
Why I Contribute to the Alley
By our wonderful contributors!
Dave Moore, cartoonist (with Linnea Hadaway), Dave’s Dumpster, Spirit of Phillips
1. Tradition. I’ve been in the alley almost monthly since the mid-80s.
2. Wendell Phillips. Our neighborhood is named after this freedom fighter. Linnea Hadaway & I are proud to illustrate quotations from his speeches.
3. I like sharing art with my neighbors. I wish some would say “I can do better than that” and send in their own.
Dwight Hobbes, writer, Something I Said
Because it is the only community newspaper I’ve written for that doesn’t serve a publisher’s propagandist agenda first and the community as an afterthought.
Marti Maltby, writer, Peace House Community
I started writing for the alley because they asked me to contribute a column each month from PHC, which seemed like an easy way to contribute to the neighborhood. As I’ve gotten more used to writing the columns, I’ve grown more comfortable being a voice for PHC’s community members and trying to find positives in trying circumstances. It’s a chance for me to help others understand important issues and to recognize a lot of special people.
Peter Molenaar, writer, Raise Your Voice
This person of northern European descent opposes all manner of terroristic threats.… Read the rest “Why I Contribute to the Alley”
Movie Corner – Passing (★★★★★)
by Howard McQuitter II
From a cinematic viewpoint, the rich black and white, crisp shadows inside and outside brownstone houses as well as the inside intimate jazz sessions are excellent. Passing displays for subtlety blossoms on celluloid.
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s debut film about two African American women, one is passing for white while the other is married to a dark-skinned Black man, at the time of the Harlem Renaissance when Black figures like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Jean Tommer, Claude McKay,
Augusta Savage, Aaron Douuglas, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Countee Cullen are on the scene particularly in Harlem.
Passing is based on the novel by Nella Larsen, who comes from a mixed background, similar to Hall. Hall gets to the central characters immediately with Clare Kendry Bellew (Ruth Negga) and Irene “Reenie” Redfield (Tessa Thompson). On one hot summer day sometime in the mid or late 1920s Irene, impeccably dressed and wearing a hat that partly obscures her face, enters a luxe white hotel. She’s uncomfortable sitting in a “whites only” hotel restaurant as she slowly turns her head by the gaze of a white woman sitting across from her. But there’s someone sitting several tables away who’s looking harder at Irene.… Read the rest “Movie Corner – Passing (★★★★★)”
Keep citizen journalism alive!
