His widow Simone Ledward Boseman accepted on his behalf [left]. “He would thank God. He would thank his parents. He would thank his ancestors for their guidance and their sacrifices,” she said. “He would say something beautiful, something inspiring, something that would amplify that little voice inside of all of us that tells us you can, that tells you to keep going, that calls you back to what you are meant to be doing at this moment in history.”
Boseman died at 43 last summer following a four-year battle with colon cancer, a diagnosis he hadn’t shared publicly. His performance as in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was his final film role, following Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and his megastar status as the Black Panther in the Marvel universe.
Filmmaker Merrill Aldighieri
remembers Carl Anderson
Today is the 76th anniversary of the birth of the late, great American singer and actor Carl Anderson (1945-2004), whom I’ve been honoring throughout February – the month of both his birth and death.
This honoring concludes today with something very special: my recent interview with filmmaker Merrill Aldighieri (right) who worked with Carl on a number of projects in the mid-1980s.
Merrill’s first project with Carl was in 1986 when she directed the music video for his recording of “Buttercup.” Later that same year she filmed Carl in concert at Washington, D.C.’s Carter Barron Amphitheater. At that same time she interviewed him in Rock Creek Park, Carl’s favorite place in Washington.
As you’ll see, in my interview with her, Merrill reflects upon working with Carl on all of these projects and more. First, though, here is the “Buttercup” music video that Merrill directed for Carl. Enjoy!
Michael Bayly: How did it happen that you came to work with Carl?
Merrill Aldighieri: I was invited to make a music video for “Buttercup” by his manager Mike Caplan. It had to be done ASAP so we got to work right away. There was no time for him to mail me a copy of the song, so Carl sang it to me over the phone. When he was done, I said, “You sing just like Stevie Wonder.” Carl replied, “You mean Stevie Wonder sings just like me!” It was many years before I learned how Carl mentored Stevie Wonder, and then the conversation came back to me!
Before your professional relationship with Carl, what did you know about him and his career?
I knew nothing, zip about Carl before that singing phone call.
What was Carl like to work with?
Carl was wonderful to work with, very open to direction. His experience working on the soaps [most prominently Days of Our Lives] was a great asset. [In making the music video] he was surrounded by amateurs yet they all blended in an ensemble. There was no script and I was improvising on the spot. It was more like play than work. Carl went with the flow. The shoot went great and we were shooting all over the place, including Grand Central Station. We did the whole shoot in one day and night.
Right: Merrill Aldighieri in 1986 (photographed by John A. Mozzer).
What was he like as a person? What qualities stand out for you, even after all these years?
Carl’s laugh, smile, openess all stand out to me. The interview I did with him by the river was the most challenging, and I asked a lot of him. He had some reluctance, but I won his trust.
The music video you made with Carl in 1986, “Buttercup,” is very much of its time in terms of outfits, hairstyles, colors, etc. . . .
Where did the ideas for the visuals, locations and story line come from? What was it like making the video? What memories of it stand out the most for you?
The ideas came from me. I started with the lyrics and planned scenes based on the words. As I look at the clip, I think there is a touch of Jean Cocteau influence in there. I was friends with the artist who made the furniture. He and his brother also designed the package art for the DANSPAK series. I built one scene around that.
At the time I did not know any tall black women except one I met when I was in Washington D.C. speaking at the Kennedy Center, so I called her and flew her to NYC to play opposite Carl. I just thought they would look good together. It turned out she was the younger sister of [Susan Beaubian] the woman Carl acted with who played his wife in The Color Purple. I thought this was an extraordinary coincidence. The other performers in the video were friends, neighbors, and friends-of-friends. One was a 14-year-old boy who just hit puberty and grew about a foot in one month. I bumped into him in my elevator and invited him to be in the clip. He was part of my ensemble from then on.
What is the story behind the 1986 concert at the Carter Barron Amphitheater? What was it like filming that concert? What are your fondest memories of it? Were there challenges that you recall?
The Carter Barron Concert production was the idea of Carl’s manager Mike Caplan. He expected we would be able to sell it to BET, and Gloria Loring's cameo appearance seemed like a great bonus. The production was expensive so we were kind of stressed. The filming I shot during the rehearsal was the most fun I had. The concert was really tough. Very hot, unpredictable. My camera was on a tripod and I was used to doing hand held camera, so I was a bit of a fish out of water. I did the editing from U-Matic working dubs of the Betacam masters. We were very disappointed to never sell the concert to BET. The programmer said Carl was not “Black enough.” I was pretty miffed. This was at a point when rap was huge. So this sat on the shelf for decades.
What was it like to work with Carl on this particular concert project? He seems very energized and animated. Was this how he was most of the time? Were there quieter, more reflective moments for him? What was he like during those quieter times?
The interview by the river is a good example of his more quiet times, and he was very philosophical, very warm and honest. It was a powerful moment. We also were in Washington, D.C. making a fundraising film to save a historical Black theatre, the Lincoln Theatre. I will have to upload that one of these days. The odd thing about that, a wonderful project, is that we were so excited to have secured an interview with the Mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry. You can imagine our horror and shock when after finishing our editing with the intro by Mayor Barry, he was all over the news after being caught in that awful sting operation. This kind of sunk our fundraising video.
In working with Carl, do you feel you got to know him as a person and not just a work colleague? Did you ever meet or get to know his family? Or did he have clear boundaries around things like that?
We only had a few days together over the years and I did not get to know him, except that even in a few hours I felt like I did get to know him. I was New York-based, he was not, so our paths only crossed creatively. My partner’s parents took a shine to him and went to see him whenever he performed at the Atlantic City casinos, and he always remembered them warmly.
I’ve always felt that Carl never received the attention and accolades that he and his music deserved. Why do you think he never achieved a higher profile in the music industry and thus never became more well-known with the general public?
I think that rap music shifted the audience attention and ballads and traditional melodic crooning was geared to an older audience. I am not really well placed to judge though, as I was involved with experiemntal, no wave, and new wave music which was on the fringe of the market share. But the series I released with Sony was meant to break new music on video and give lesser known artists a foot in the business. Carl was, under this guise, a big headliner compared to some of the other groups in my ecclectic compliations.
When you heard of Carl’s death, what were your first thoughts? As the years have passed, what do you find yourself missing or regretting most about his life so sadly cut short?
I can’t answer. I can't think about him as dead. I know that sounds weird, but there it is.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your memories of Carl?
He was bigger than life! Speaking with him was like communing with a great whale, some deep sea creature that knows depths us minnows can’t imagine.
POSTSCRIPT: Merrill Aldighieri has produced a DVD entitled Carl Anderson: The Work Tapes. It contains all of the projects mentioned in my interview with Merrill, including Carl’s live 1986 performance at the Carter Barron Amphitheater, the official promotional video for “Buttercup,” and the “river interview.” All in all, it’s a must-have for admirers of Carl and his music.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [AOC] believes that faith is about more than just spittle from a pulpit. If Jesus came to transform us, then AOC is the living embodiment of what it means to be transformed by the personhood of Jesus.
She isn’t into name-dropping her relationship with Christ. Instead, she has taken to heart the principles that Christ lived by and is doing her damndest to live by the example Christ set. Well, I don’t have to tell you. Listen to what she says about her own faith: “By nature, a society that forgives and rehabilitates its people is a society that forgives and transforms itself. That takes a radical kind of love, a secret of which is given in the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And let us not forget the guiding principle of “the least among us” found in Matthew: that we are compelled to care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick and, yes – the imprisoned.”
AOC believes faith should compel us toward caring for others. You know, the way Jesus did.
Image: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is seen on the House steps of the Capitol before the House passed a $2 trillion coronavirus aid package by voice vote on Friday, March 27, 2020. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP Images)
The best tool for cultivating a capacity to respond quickly and powerfully to fast moving circumstances is the cultivation of stillness. That’s why meditation is the best preparation for the urgency of [the times we are living through]. It prepares the nervous system to act quickly without wasting energy or leaking life force.
We can’t achieve the transformational possibilities of this moment unless we’re willing to build the internal musculature that will give us the strength to do so.
It’s nothing we can get to by rational or psychological analysis alone, accumulating more data, or by doing more work of any external kind. Inner peace comes from inner work. It builds non-reactivity. It builds detachment. It builds courage. It builds insight and intuition. It deepens the mind. It expands the heart. And through us it will build a new world.
Today is the 17th anniversary of the passing of singer and actor Carl Anderson, whom I’ve been honoring throughout February – the month of both his birth and death.
This honoring continues today with the sharing of “Nightingale,” a hauntingly beautiful song written by Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas, and dedicated to Carl.
“Nightingale” first appeared on Cohen’s album Dear Heather, released in October 2004, eight months after Carl’s death. The song features the vocals of Cohen, Thomas and Sharon Robinson. Thomas composed the music for the song using an abandoned poem of Cohen’s. Because Anjani Thomas had known and worked with Carl, “Nightingale” was dedicated to him.
According to the official Leonard Cohen message board, Cohen’s poem helped Thomas through a difficult time in her life, and she not only “connected its romantic lines with Carl’s voice,” but “heard the melody immediately.” The album Dear Heather was also dedicated to Carl, along with Cohen’s ailing friend Irving Layton and the late Canadian poet A. M. Klein.
In 2006, Anjani Thomas re-recorded “Nightingale” for her album, Blue Alert. I actually prefer this version of the song to the one on Dear Heather, and so it’s the one I share today in honor of Carl.
I built my house beside the wood
So I could hear you singing
And it was sweet and it was good
And love was all beginning
Fare thee well, my nightingale
’Twas long ago I found you
Now all your songs of beauty fail
The forest closes ’round you
The sun goes down behind a veil
’Tis now when you would call me
So rest in peace, my nightingale
Beneath your branch of holly
Fare thee well, my nightingale
’Twas long ago I found you
Now all your songs of beauty fail
The forest closes ’round you
Fare thee well, my nightingale
I lived but to be near you
Tho’ you are singing somewhere still
I can no longer hear you
Try as I might, I can’t produce the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recolouring of the world into sparkling white, the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purplish clouds that loom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow. Heading out in a snowstorm to catch the flakes on my gloves, I love the feeling of it fresh underfoot. I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow. It swings me into reverse gear.
Snow creates that quality of awe in the face of a power greater than ours. It epitomizes the aesthetic notion of the sublime, in which greatness and beauty couple to overcome you – a small, frail human – entirely.
As regulars readers will know, I’ve long admired Buffy Sainte-Marie and enjoyed her music. Indeed, I find her to be a very inspiring figure. (I even chose her song “It's My Way” as my theme song when I turned 50 in 2015!)
I especially appreciate and am inspired by Buffy’s passion and purposefulness – and by the way she blends her art and social activism. I’ve seen her four times in concert, and had the privilege of meeting and talking with her on three of these occasions. She’s creative, articulate, warm, and funny – a very human human being.
[Medicine Songs] is a collection of front line songs about unity and resistance – some brand new and some classics – and I want to put them to work. These are songs I've been writing for over fifty years, and what troubles people today are still the same damn issues from 30-40-50 years ago: war, oppression, inequity, violence, rankism of all kinds, the pecking order, bullying, racketeering and systemic greed. Some of these songs come from the other side of that: positivity, common sense, romance, equity and enthusiasm for life.
I really want this collection of songs to be like medicine, to be of some help or encouragement, to maybe do some good. Songs can motivate you and advance your own ideas, encourage and support collaborations and be part of making change globally and at home. They do that for me and I hope this album can be positive and provide thoughts and remedies that rock your world and inspire new ideas of your own.
In celebrating Buffy today at The Wild Reed I share a 22-minute bio of Buffy, part of the Catch the Dream series hosted by actor Adam Beach.
Directed by Jesse Green, this “intimate portrait,” made just last year, “offers a deeper understanding of Buffy’s relationship to music and the challenges she faced as a blacklisted musician on account of her political activism. Buffy reveals her creative process and encourages others to find and use theirs.” (NOTE: There are short breaks between the three parts of this video.)
I love that Audre Lorde is getting attention today (Google is featuring her in a series of graphics at its search page). As a Black lesbian, she lived intersectionality in the very same way James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin lived it as Black gay men – spending time on two crosses, Bayard Rustin called it.
In a talk I gave some years back at an international religious studies conference, I said that, if I had my druthers, the canon of classic works people in seminaries read as part of their education would include people like Audre Lorde and not just Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas.
Many folks in the audience looked shocked, but I believed that then and believe it now. People doing pastoral ministry need to understand and appreciate lives different from their own, since, as Russian poet Konstantin Simonov said, “There is no such thing as foreign suffering.”
In her latest dispatch, reprinted below, Heather examines the connected historical contexts of the current crisis in Texas and the type of rabid conservatism espoused by Rush Limbaugh, whose death was announced earlier today.
The crisis in Texas continues, with almost 2 million people still without power in frigid temperatures. Pipes are bursting in homes, pulling down ceilings and flooding living spaces, while 7 million Texans are under a water boil advisory.
Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, put on Facebook: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! [sic]. . . . This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts…. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!” “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic],” he said.
Boyd’s post was a fitting tribute to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who passed today from lung cancer at age 70. It was Limbaugh who popularized the idea that hardworking white men were under attack in America. According to him, minorities and feminists were too lazy to work, and instead expected a handout from the government, paid for by tax dollars levied from hardworking white men. This, he explained, was “socialism,” and it was destroying America.
Limbaugh didn’t invent this theory; it was the driving principle behind Movement Conservatism, which rose in the 1950s to combat the New Deal government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. But Movement Conservatives’ efforts to get voters to reject the system that they credited for creating widespread prosperity had little success.
In 1971, Lewis Powell, an attorney for the tobacco industry, wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outlining how business interests could overturn the New Deal and retake control of America. Powell focused on putting like-minded scholars and speakers on college campuses, rewriting textbooks, stacking the courts, and pressuring politicians. He also called for “reaching the public generally” through television, newspapers, and radio. “[E]very available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks,” he wrote, “as well as to present the affirmative case through this media.”
Pressing the Movement Conservative case faced headwinds, however, since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforced a policy that, in the interests of serving the community, required any outlet that held a federal broadcast license to present issues honestly, equitably, and with balance. This “Fairness Doctrine” meant that Movement Conservatives had trouble gaining traction, since voters rejected their ideas when they were stacked up against the ideas of Democrats and traditional Republicans, who agreed that the government had a role to play in the economy (even though they squabbled about the extent of that role).
In 1985, under a chair appointed by President Ronald Reagan, the FCC stated that the Fairness Doctrine hurt the public interest. Two years later, under another Reagan-appointed chair, the FCC abolished the rule.
With the Fairness Doctrine gone, Rush Limbaugh stepped into the role of promoting the Movement Conservative narrative. He gave it the concrete examples, color, and passion it needed to jump from think tanks and businessmen to ordinary voters who could help make it the driving force behind national policy. While politicians talked with veiled language about “welfare queens” and same-sex bathrooms, and “makers” and “takers,” Limbaugh played “Barack the Magic Negro,” talked of “femiNazis,” and said “Liberals” were “socialists,” redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to the undeserving.
Constantly, he hammered on the idea that the federal government threatened the freedom of white men, and he did so in a style that his listeners found entertaining and liberating.
By the end of the 1980s, Limbaugh’s show was carried on more than 650 radio stations, and in 1992, he briefly branched out into television with a show produced by Roger Ailes, who had packaged Richard Nixon in 1968 and would go on to become the head of the Fox News Channel. Before the 1994 midterm elections, Limbaugh was so effective in pushing the Republicans’ “Contract With America” that when the party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952, the Republican revolutionaries made him an honorary member of their group.
Limbaugh told them that, under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Republicans must “begin an emergency dismantling of the welfare system, which is shredding the social fabric,” bankrupting the country, and “gutting the work ethic, educational performance, and moral discipline of the poor.” Next, Congress should cut capital gains taxes, which would drive economic growth, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and generate billions in federal revenue.
Limbaugh kept staff in Washington to make sure Republican positions got through to voters. At the same time, every congressman knew that taking a stand against Limbaugh would earn instant condemnation on radio channels across the country, and they acted accordingly.
Limbaugh saw politics as entertainment that pays well for the people who can rile up their base with compelling stories – Limbaugh’s net worth when he died was estimated at $600 million – but he sold the Movement Conservative narrative well. He laid the groundwork for the political career of Donald Trump, who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a made-for-tv moment at Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. His influence runs deep in the current party: former Mayor Boyd, an elected official, began his diatribe with: “Let me hurt some feelings while I have a minute!!”
Like Boyd, other Texas politicians are also falling back on the Movement Conservative narrative to explain the disaster in their state. The crisis was caused by a lack of maintenance on Texas’s unregulated energy grid, which meant that instruments at coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants froze, at the same time that supplies of natural gas fell short. Nonetheless, Governor Greg Abbott and his allies in the fossil fuel industry went after “liberal” ideas. They blamed the crisis on the frozen wind turbines and solar plants which account for about 13% of Texas’s winter power. Abbott told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Tucker Carlson told his viewers that Texas was “totally reliant on windmills.”
The former Texas governor and former Secretary of Energy under Trump, Rick Perry, wrote on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website to warn against regulation of Texas’s energy system: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” he said. The website warned that “Those watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals. Two phrases come to mind: don’t mess with Texas, and don’t let a crisis go to waste.”
At Abbott’s request, President Biden has declared that Texas is in a state of emergency, freeing up federal money and supplies for the state. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sent 60 generators to state hospitals, water plants, and other critical facilities, along with blankets, food, and bottled water. It is also delivering diesel fuel for backup power.
– Heather Cox Richardson via Facebook
February 17, 2021
