Chicago’s Legendary Minnie Riperton Sings: Lovin’ You

As a young girl, Minnie Riperton studied music, drama, and dance at Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Centre, an urban social and cultural center that was originally founded in 1905 as a settlement house in the historic Bronzeville community of Chicago’s South-Side.

As a teenager, she sang lead vocals for a Chicago-based girl group, The Gems. If you listen closely to Fontella Bass’ hit single Rescue Me you can hear the young Riperton, along with The Gems, singing the soulful chorus. Her early connections with the legendary Chess Records in Chicago gave her the chance to sing backup for many other acclaimed performers, including Etta James, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. While with Chess, Riperton also sang for the experimental rock/soul group Rotary Connection from 1967 to 1971. Riperton reached the apex of her short career with her number one hit single, Lovin’ You, in the spring of 1975. The single was the last release from her 1974 gold album Perfect Angel.

In 1976, at the age of of twenty-eight, Riperton was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. In 1977, Riperton became the first African-American woman to serve as spokesperson for the American Cancer Society and to receive the Society’s Courage Award from then-President Jimmy Carter. On Thursday July 12, 1979, at the age of 31, Riperton lost her valiant struggle with cancer. She died peacefully in her husband’s arms while listening to a recording of a song that Stevie Wonder had written for her. Stevie Wonder still considers Minnie Riperton to be one of the greatest singers of our time. In his remarks written about Mariah Carey in Time Magazine’s recent 2008 List of The 100 Most Influential People, Stevie Wonder wrote, “I’ve met only three people who had a truly wonderful voice and spirit to match: my first wife Syreeta, Minnie Riperton and Mariah.”

In addition to her musical legacy, Minnie Riperton is survived by her husband, Richard Rudolph; a son, Marc Rudolph; and a daughter, Maya Rudolph, who has been a cast member of Saturday Night Live.

Minnie Riperton: Lovin’ You

Stevie Wonder’s Tribute to Minnie Riperton: Perfect Angel (1979)

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Barack Obama Unequivocably Cuts Ties to Ex-Pastor

Earlier this morning, Barack Obama closely reviewed excerpts from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s reckless and freewheeling speech that was given at The National Press Club breakfast on Monday morning in Washington. Deeply and visibly angry, Obama insisted upon holding a second press conference about Wright today in Winston-Salem (NC) in order to unequivocally denounce Rev. Wright’s conduct, as well as to to completely sever himself from his ex-pastor’s tirades. I have waited to post about this matter. In the meantime, mainstream and blogger pundits already have rushed to fill the print and internet media with clairvoyant mind-readings and armchair psychobabble about Obama’s comments today. As for myself, this ongoing affair has bolstered my own conviction that it is not a matter of simple antiquarianism that we should always be mindful of our Founders concern for a separation of Church and State, and of the dangers inherent in allowing that distinction to become more and more obscure.

Marc Ambinder provided an accurate summary of Obama’s Winston-Salem comments this afternoon in The Atlantic Magazine:

“The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” Obama said. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs… If Reverend Wright thinks that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well and based on his remarks yesterday, I may not know him as well as I thought either.”

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church,” he said. “But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the U.S. wartime efforts with terrorism - then there are no excuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced, and that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”

“It is antithetical to my campaign. It is antithetical to what I’m about. It is not what I think America stands for,” he said.

Ambinder concluded his summary by noting that, “Obama has denounced Wright’s remarks before. But in the past, Obama gave Wright “the benefit of the doubt“–i.e., said he considered such remarks aberrations, outliers, deviations not in keeping with the sermons that he himself had heard over his two decades at Trinity. Now, according to Obama, Wright’s willingness to repeat such “ridiculous propositions”–in effect, “caricaturing himself”–has led him to the conclusion that either Wright has changed or that he was wrong about the minister all along. “Based on his remarks yesterday,” said Obama. “I may not know him as well as I thought.” By acting nutty in public, in other words, Wright gave Obama the license to openly say in public, “I now see why all of you think he’s nutty.”

Barack Obama Renounces Ex-Pastor Wright

I strongly encourage viewers to read an article by Peggy Noonan about her overall impressions of the current state of the presidential race, which was published last Friday in The Wall Street Journal and can be accessed here.

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Abused Chicago Riders Revolt Against Daley’s Decayed Subway System

After years of increasing abuse and neglect, Chicago subway riders finally got fed up, drew the line and revolted against Mayor Daley’s pathetic subway system. A jam-packed rush-hour subway train had been stopped underground in Chicago’s Loop for over an hour on Tuesday morning, held up by a broken-down train ahead. In the stifling, hot and stuffy air, passengers had turned nervous and impatient. Some were throwing up and getting sick from a complete lack of circulating fresh air. Finally, the Chicagoans revolted, ignoring the unpredictably intermittent announcements and pleas from transit workers, who were themselves in a state of total confusion about what was really going on. En mass, the riders decided to leave the stalled trains and to make a long and dangerous trudge through the dirty, dimly lit underground tunnel toward the eventual light of freedom.

As usual in Chicago’s disreputable world of machine politics, Hizzoner’s political flunky transit officials were quick to put all of the blame on the Chicago citizens, on the passengers, saying that the unauthorized evacuation caused bigger problems. Afraid that the passengers making to their freedom through the dark and dirty underground tunnel might be electrocuted by the subway’s electrically charged third rail, transit officials cut off all power to part of the Blue Line, which travels a large U-shaped route between Chicago’s West Side and O’Hare International Airport. Service was terminated for about four hours, and more than a thousand passengers had to be helped off several trains.

Esmeralda Cuevas, 26, who works in Chicago’s Loop as an administrative assistant, was on the train immediately behind the stalled one when she saw a number of haggard people walk by a window of her stranded subway car. “I felt a sense like I want to be with them,” Ms. Cuevas said. “I was impressed with their courage. I thought, ‘I can stay in here with these people and feel hot and uncomfortable, or I can start walking.’ ” And walk she did. So did most of the other stranded passengers from a total of four trains, who forged ahead despite intermittent, confusing public intercom announcements asking them to return.

Some two hours after her ordeal began, Ms. Cuevas finally emerged from the subway crying, with dirt all over her hands and face. An executive at her office downtown advised her to avoid the subway for a few days and to take cabs. But since he didn’t have the generosity to offer to pay for her cab rides, Ms. Cuevas said that she plans to take the train, but on an elevated line, not the underground subway.

At least seven of the Chicago subway passengers suffered injuries and breathing problems that required hospitalization. At the present time, none of their injuries or ailments is thought to be life threatening.

Revolt: Trapped in Underground Subway

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St. Genet: The Erotic “Un Chant d’Amour”

At the age of 15, Jean Genet was sent to a reformatory, The Mettray Penal Colony, where he was detained for three years.  Subsequently, Genet continued to serve time in and out of French prisons after being arrested for theft, the use of false papers, vagrancy, lewd acts and other offenses.  However, by 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays and numerous poems.  These works included his acclaimed Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief’s Journal (1949).  In 1949, when Genet was threatened with a life sentence in prison, after having received ten prior convictions, Jean Cocteau and other prominent figures, who included Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Francois Mauriac, Colette, Andre Breton and Andre Gide, successfully petitioned the French President Vincent Auriol to have the sentence set aside.  Genet never again returned to prison.

Un Chant d’Amour is French writer Jean Genet’s only film, which he directed in 1950.  Because of its explicit (although artistically presented) gay content, the 25-minute movie was long banned.  The film takes place in a French prison, where a prison guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory sexual acts. In adjacent cells, there are an older Algerian-looking man and a handsome younger convict in his twenties.  The older man is in love with the younger one, rubbing himself against the wall and sharing his cigarette smoke with his beloved through a straw.

The prison guard, apparently jealous of the prisoner’s relationship, enters the older convict’s cell, beats him, and makes him suck on his gun in an unmistakably sexual fashion.  But the older inmate drifts off into a fantasy world, where he and his object of desire roam the countryside.  In the final scene it becomes clear that the guard’s power is no match for the intensity of attraction between the prisoners, even though their relationship isn’t ever really consummated.

Genet didn’t use sound in the film, which forces the viewer to completely focus on closeups of faces, armpits, and other sensual images.  The film with its highly erotic atmosphere has later been recognized as a formative factor for works such as the films by Andy Warhol.  In addition, Genet’s novels have been adapted for film and produced by other filmmakers.  In 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder released Querelle, his final film, which was based on Genet’s Querelle de Brest.  It starred Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero.  Todd Haynes’ homoerotic movie Poison was also based on the writings of Genet.  In addition, several of Genet’s plays were adapted into films. The Balcony (1963), directed by Joseph Strick, starred Shelley Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Leonard Nimoy.  Tony Richardson directed a film, Mademoiselle, which was based on a short story by Genet, starring Jeanne Moreau with the screenplay written by Marguerite Duras.  The Maids, a play, was made into a film starring Glenda Jackson, Susannah York and Vivien Merchant.

Of particular significance to note, Genet’s play The Blacks was staged in New York.  It originally premiered in Paris in 1959, with its New York opening occurring in 1961.  The production of The Blacks was the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade.  The 1961 New York production ran for 1,408 performances, with an original cast that featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone.

Genet disdained the word intellectual, but it was in his role of a critical intellectual that in his later years he worked to sustain support from younger audiences and literary intellectuals for activist causes throughout the world.  Genet toured U.S. college campuses in support of Black Panther Bobby Seale after Seale’s arrest; he took credit for the recognition of gay rights in the Panther organization, mitigating the homophobia and sexism that touched many militant groups in the 1960s; he was a prominent participant in the bloody Chicago demonstrations during the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention.  Genet’s political commitments were pure and intransigent; despite his constant affirmation of treachery and betrayal in his novels, his work as a spokesman for activist politics illustrated his commitment to any struggle where identities were in the process of formation, whether these identities be gay, Black, or Palestinian.

Once released from prison, Genet’s personal life was a fairly isolated and solitary one, always living in small, nondescript hotel rooms.  He was found dead at the age of 75 on April 15, 1986, alone in a small Parisian hotel room.

In the video that is presented below, the most graphic content has been edited from the film.

Jean Genet: Un Chant d’Amour, Edited (Runtime 24 Min.)

The unedited version (25 min.) can be viewed here.

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Gov. Bill Richardson Delivers Ringing Endorsement for Obama

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson Endorses Senator Barack Obama

Bill Richardson, the nation’s only Hispanic governor, threw his strong support behind Senator Barack Obama for president Friday, enthusiastically delivering one of the most coveted and tightly held endorsements in the race for the Democratic nomination.  The New Mexico governor joined Obama at a rousing rally in Portland, Oregon, and claimed that the Illinois senator demonstrated his leadership abilities this week with his speech on race.  “You are a once-in-a-lifetime leader,” the governor said from the stage.  “Above all, you will be a president who brings this nation together.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama has the judgment and courage we need in a commander in chief when our nation’s security is on the line,” Richardson said.  “He showed this judgment by opposing the Iraq war from the start, and he has shown it during this campaign by standing up for a new era in American leadership internationally.”

Obama embraced the endorsement of Governor Richardson as a man who is an accomplished figure on the world stage who “understands the importance of restoring diplomacy as a central part of our national security strategy.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson Endorses Obama

Chris Matthews Touched by Obama’s Speech

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