Et Als

Let me tell you something about Daddy. He was very handsome, a lady killer who buried two partners while he lived in his own isolation. You could not reach him except by telephone; he was inviolate, the chief citizen in…

When I was a little boy, I loved to sing. I don’t think I associated it with being a performer; singing was an extension of the music I loved, and words, and the singers I loved–Dionne Warwick, that kind of…

These photographs are by Jill Krementz, and were taken of the author Toni Morrison while she was an editor at Random House, in the nineteen-seventies. On Fridays, the esteemed author taught a class at Yale, in the African-American studies department…

Yesterday, on my mother’s birthday, I went with two friends to the Watts Towers–one of the more significant spiritual journeys I have ever had in the company of other people, let alone a neighborhood. Poverty in LA (unlike poverty in…

When Jean Genet’s play,”The Balcony,” premiered in London in 1957, he was two years away from writing “The Blacks,” which dealt with negritude, among other issues. By the time Joseph Strick directed “The Balcony,” for the screen, in 1962, Genet’s…