News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Saturday December 20th 2025
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 (★★★★★)”
Returning Chapter 16: Split Screen
by Patrick Cabello Hansel
Picture this if you will: in one frame, Brian Fleming lording it over our poor family; drawing out the encounter in the basement in search of his own twisted pleasure. Luz has faced his evil before, as a young girl, an encounter that scarred her, but one which she has overcome through tears and sheer force of will. Angel, her husband, knows but a little of this part of his wife’s story. He is trying to keep his anger in check so as to not antagonize this man, who holds — somewhere, God knows where — his beloved daughter Lupita as ransom. Ransom for what, Angel can only guess.
In another frame, little Lupita is sitting on a rug with a race track pattern. The asphalt lanes abut images of the pit stop, grandstand and concession areas. She was playing with a Match Box Car, racing it around the track, but now she is playing with an old stuffed rabbit, who looks as if he has been in too many scrapes with angry gardeners. One of the rabbit’s ears has been stitched back onto his head, and the fur on his belly worn down. But Lupita doesn’t care.… Read the rest “Returning Chapter 16: Split Screen”
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