Giving Credit Where It's Due

Todd Boyd in his theroot.com article discussed the demise of Vibe magazine. He called the hip-hop culture publication "the brainchild of Quincy Jones." I have no problem with that but he completely overlooked music journalist Scott Poulson-Bryant, a founding editor of the magazine. Poulson-Bryant, an openly gay man, stated in his book Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2005) that "I named Vibe magazine Vibe." Hip-hop culture is notoriously homophobic and it would have been a good idea to acknowledge that a major publication devoted to it was named by a member of a much-maligned but influential group. Let's give credit where it's due.

An Affordable Manhattan Apartment, In 1965

I  recently found Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2019) in a Little Free Library kiosk in Harlem. This historical novel is set in New York City, in 1965, when a young woman fresh from Ohio named Alice Weiss comes to the big city with the dream of becoming a photographer. To her complete surprise, she ends up as the secretary to the editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, on the heels of publishing her bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, has been chosen by the Hearst Corporation to revive the half dead Cosmopolitan magazine.

When I read the paperback's storyline on the back, I instantly knew I had to take it home with me. Novels like this one and Pete Hamill's Tabloid City (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) that take the reader inside a media workplace rarely fail to fascinate me. So far I'm enjoying Park Avenue Summer.

There is one thing in the book I should note that caught my attention. It's a scene in which Alice finds a semi-furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $110 a month (paid for by a weekly paycheck of $55). The thought came to me that if rents in 2025 were that affordable, there would be almost no homelessness anywhere in New York City.

Karmic Justice

The June 11, 2021 issue of The Week magazine published this item: "Good week for: karma, after a boatful of Memorial Day revelers on Washington state's Moses Lake shouted slurs and gave the finger to another boat that was flying Gay Pride flags. Minutes later, the harassers' boat exploded, and they swam to the other boat to be rescued while shouting 'Help us!'"

This item would make an excellent basis for a short story or film short.

Magazines For Writers Are Finally Acknowledging Writers Of Color

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, when I subscribed to Writer's Digest magazine, the only black writer I can remember seeing on the cover was Alex Haley of Roots fame. In all that time I never saw any articles about black writers or other writers of color in its pages. It was as if  other writers of color like John A. Williams, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Gaines didn't exist.

I recently resumed my subscription to Writer's Digest (no longer a monthly; it is now published every two months). I was delighted to see writers of color like Zadie Smith and Viet Thanh Nguyen featured as well as an article about Patrice Caldwell, a young black literary agent.

Finally, Writer's Digest and other writing magazines have ceased ignoring writers, editors, and literary agents of color in their pages.

An Emerging Writer Isn't Always Someone Young

 In the November/December 2020 issue of Poets & Writers, you will find the 5th Annual 5 Over 50 profiles of writers age 50 plus who have published a debut book.

I just started my subscription so I was unaware of this annual acknowledgment until now even though I've read Poets & Writers for several years off and on. Somehow I missed those previous 5 Over 50 profiles.

Nevertheless, I was happy to see them. Usually it's a celebration of writers under 30 or under 40 who get most of the ink.

Finally, the 50 plus demographic, of which I'm a member--AARP's constituency--are getting some respect from the literary community, who have been too youth-obsessed when it comes to first-time authors.

As the editors at Poets & Writers have rightly pointed out, " 'new' and 'emerging' are not synonymous with 'young.' "

Can I get an "Amen" to that?

Magazines I Would Like Brought Back

Three magazines that I miss and would love to see revived are Negro Digest (aka Black World), Quinto Lingo, and Book Digest. I have a few issues of each magazine.

Negro Digest published by Johnson Publishing, the publishers of Ebony and Jet, and later renamed Black World, was a magazine that featured articles, essays, short stories, poetry, and book reviews by leading writers and academics like Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Jr., et al. Despite that, it was accessible to a lay audience. If Black World were around today, I can see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edwidge Danticat, Walter Mosley, Michael Eric Dyson, among others writing for it for a new generation.

Quinto Lingo was for language enthusiasts. Stories were presented in five languages side by side (hence the magazine's name). Those languages were English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian. There were also English-only articles in each issue focusing on a particular language like the one called "If You Speak Spanish You Can Speak Ladino" (May 1969).

Book Digest was a Reader's Digest for book lovers like myself. Each issue carried a condensed version of fiction and nonfiction books like Peter Straub's supernatural novel Ghost Story (September 1979). Although the books selected were in the best seller category, a contemporary version could also include non-best sellers that would be of interest to bibliophiles.

These magazines are sorely missed by me and I would welcome them back in a heartbeat.

A Publication For Jazz Lovers

One jazz publication I make it a point to get each month at the Mist Harlem entertainment venue on 116th Street is the New York City Jazz Record. It's a free tabloid-size magazine published on newsprint and contains CD reviews, musician interviews,a calendar of events, a birthday column commemorating day by day musicians (living and dead) born in that particular month, as well as a jazz-related crossword puzzle. The latter is so esoteric and daunting it requires a near encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and its history. For example, the June 2019 issue had the following clues: "'50s Canadian RCA Victor catalogue prefixes";"'70s jazz critic for CODA magazine"; "What Lester did in Britain"; "Gerry Mulligan nickname." If nothing else, it'll encourage me to bone up on jazz history. (Disc jockey Phil Schaap of Columbia University's radio station WKCR could probably complete the puzzle within thirty minutes or less.)

As a longtime jazz lover and CD and record collector, the New York City Jazz Record is an important part of my jazz education and I recommend it to anyone interested in jazz and its practitioners.

I look forward to reading it each month and hope it'll be around for a long time.

An Early Article On "The Twilight Zone"

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), one of the writers on The Twilight Zone, wrote an article in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine's December 1959 issue about the now classic sci-fi/fantasy CBS television series, which premiered on October 2, 1959.

Beaumont's article revealed the initial resentment of people in the sci-fi community toward the show's creator, Rod Serling (1924-1975), "the eminent TV writer," who they felt was "an outsider." After Beaumont met Serling, he learned of Serling's "love [for] science fiction and fantasy." And when he read the first nine scripts that Serling wrote for The Twilight Zone and discovered their high quality, "I knew," wrote Beaumont, "that Serling was an 'outsider' in terms of experience; in terms of instinct, he was a veteran."

As it turned out, wrote Beaumont, "a circle of excitement surround[ed] the show. People [actors, directors, writers] want[ed] to be associated with it." Furthermore, "Serling and his associates...[did] their best to make this a first rate production."

And as everyone now knows, their efforts created a memorable, revered, thought-provoking, and timeless anthology series of half-hour dramas that examined human nature. "The Twilight Zone," noted the entertainment website IMDb.com, "featured forays into controversial grounds like racism, Cold War paranoia and the horrors of war."

Beaumont's brief article, if it hasn't by now, deserves to be included as a foreword to a Twilight Zone book. It chronicles the attitudes and expectations about the series from someone who was there as an observer and a participant during its creation.

Netflix Saves An Iconic Manhattan Movie House

The Paris Theatre, the last single-screen movie house in Manhattan, recently closed its doors. For a long time I'd thought about seeing a movie there but never got around to doing it. When the theatre closed, I thought my opportunity to visit was forever gone. Then I read in Time Out New York magazine (December 11-24, 2019, Issue 1177), that Netflix came to the Paris Theatre's rescue by signing a long-term lease.

Netflix, reported Time Out, will use the Paris Theatre "to stage screenings and special events." And since the Academy Awards only allows films that have had a theatrical release to be nominated for an Oscar, Netflix films will have a ready-made venue.

Now if we could just convince Netflix to take over the long-vacant Metro Cinema, located on Broadway and 99th Street, at one time a venue for art-house films. The Upper West Side was once the home to many movie houses. Now there are none. Bringing back the Metro Cinema would be a wonderful thing.

And while we're at it, maybe Netflix can also revive the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, which was located near Lincoln Center. It closed down about two years ago.

Remembering Forgotten Actors And Other Entertainment People

A website I stumbled upon recently is called forgottenactors.blogspot.com. I discovered it when I was looking up info on an actor named Sam Buffington, who I had seen on television in an episode each of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Highway Patrol. Both episodes were filmed in the 1950s. I learned that Buffington, a promising talent, died in 1960 at the age of 28, a victim of suicide. Buffington was a gay man at a time when being gay was not considered a cool thing.

I began thinking that Entertainment Weekly, a publication to which I subscribe, should do a column each issue devoted to forgotten members of all branches of the entertainment industry like Buffington, actor James Edwards (the up-and-coming black actor before Sidney Poitier), et al.

There should also be a "Where Are They Now?" feature in the magazine that brings readers up to date on the whereabouts and doings of people no longer prominent in the entertainment industry.


Note: Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" Title Is Meaningless

While channel surfing early this morning, I watched The Wendy Williams Show on the Bounce channel long enough to learn that singer John Legend was selected to be People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive.

To me, the title is meaningless since every year a different man is chosen. The Sexiest Man Alive title should be a lifelong honor instead of a temporary one. If John Legend is the Sexiest Man Alive this year, why wasn't he last year? And what happened to the guy who held the title last year and the guy chosen before him?

It's clearly a ploy to sell more copies of People magazine and nothing more.

Mere Clutter Or A Potential Goldmine?

When people enter my apartment for the first time and see piles of newspapers and magazines (and lots and lots of books) everywhere, their reaction tells me that they regard what they see as clutter and a possible fire hazard.

For me in those piles of printed material are potential literary goldmines--stories that are waiting to be clipped and filed and later turned into novels, short stories, poems, essays, screenplays.

What's one man's clutter is another man's treasure.

A Book On The Making of "Thelma & Louise"

I enjoy reading books that take the reader behind the scenes of classic Hollywood movies, especially movies I have seen and thoroughly enjoyed. So far I have read books on the making of Network, Rebel Without a Cause, Psycho, and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Now, according to Entertainment Weekly magazine (July 7, 2017), a book about the making of the 1991 classic Thelma & Louise has been published. The book, by Becky Aikman, is called Off the Cliff. Anyone who has seen the movie knows the significance of the title. Unfortunately, the title and the front cover photograph are spoilers.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading it.

A Detachable Book Mark

I found a discarded copy of the April 2017 issue of the Reader's Digest. On the front cover was a detachable book mark (courtesy of Geico, the insurance company, with an ad for the company on the reverse side). The book mark listed selected stories in the issue and their page location, like "13 Things Pharmacists Won't Tell You," on page 124. I don't know if the Reader's Digest does this every month. If not, they should. It's an excellent idea because it offers a reader an alternative to dogearring a page. Other magazines of similar size should adopt this idea.

Note: Today is Earth Day and Record Store Day.

Is There A Trump Sitcom In Our Future?

Entertainment Weekly's April 7/14, 2017 Double Issue is devoted to "Hollywood's Greatest Untold Stories," from the 1970s to the early 2000s. (A great idea!)

One of the stories is about the 1990 British sitcom Heil Honey, I'm Home! that was canceled after one episode. It became "the most controversial TV show ever" because it depicted Adolf Hitler and his wife living next door to a Jewish couple named the Goldensteins.

Geoff Atkinson, its creator, told EW that "I've never felt embarrassed by it, because I know the motives were good. If we were trying to make fun of the Holocaust, we'd deserve [the hate].I never felt we were trying to belittle that at all. But to not get it right, that was frustrating. It was fun, but it came at a price, and I wish I could do it again."

Atkinson also told the magazine this: "As we speak, somebody's probably writing a Trump sitcom. I would love to write a Trump sitcom." And I would love to see a Trump sitcom on TV. Maybe with Alec Baldwin as Trump. It would help us all get through the next four years. No doubt Trump would tweet up a storm complaining about it.

A Freelance Pay Rate Preference

During my years as a freelance writer, I've always preferred being paid a flat fee rather than by the word or the column inch. If I'm paid a flat fee, and the article has to undergo some cuts, I still get the same amount of money. But if I'm paid by the word or the column inch, and cuts have to be made, I'm losing money.

Telling Lies To Tourists

Time Out New York magazine has a weekly feature called "Lies To Tell Tourists." This is very disturbing to me because this says that it's all right to lie to tourists and look upon them as gullible and/or stupid. It also undermines the trust of the tourists when they find out that they've been lied to. Also, it gives New York a bad image.

On New Yorker Cartoons

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this: at the bottom of the table of contents in each issue of The New Yorker, the cartoonists are listed in the order of appearance in its pages.

P.S. The New Yorker has the funniest, cleverest, and most thought-provoking cartoons that are worth clipping and saving or sharing with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and others.