Knock Knock: terzo trailer dell'horror di Eli Roth con Keanu Reeves. Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the 'Harlem Renaissance' because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald. To explore, document and explain the great religious changes that are taking place in New York City. The website maintained by the author Robert Lipsyte. Two nights before the fight, I took an old boxing manager out to dinner. His name was Cus D'Amato. He told me about a gym he once owned in a tough neighborhood in Manhattan. Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music, restaurants, news and more. Find the latest sports news and articles on the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA college football, NCAA college basketball and more at ABC News. Get the latest Nation articles from NewsOne, the home of Breaking News for Black America. Jail Interview: How Charly Wingate Became Max BThe section of Trenton that lies in the shadow of New Jersey State Prison looks like the area around a poisoned tree where nothing grows. Stained mattresses lie in front of shuttered storefronts; broken glass from windows and bottles emits a dull luster across the street from a boarded- up bank; and large Budweiser banners hang outside bars that meet alleys full of rowhouses. More than 1,8. 50 inmates call the massive prison their home, but there’s probably only one that has been on MTV and recorded with some of New York City’s biggest names in 2. A quick Google search for this inmate will reveal stories of rap beef, different interpretations of the crime that put him in prison, and a huge trove of videos and photographs, all of which find him in the same uniform, like a superhero from the streets: a N. Y. Inmate 0. 00. 90. D. Cloaked in the lifestyle’s trappings—clouds of smoke, bottles of brown liquor, doe- eyed women—he appears in various settings: smoking a blunt on a stoop in Harlem; in a dimly lit studio, far from sobriety, with disparaging words for a former colleague; at the center of a frenzied crowd in a packed club; and always flaunting huge wads of cash, the material that was a blessing and a curse, the reason for his current incarceration. In this context, he is known as Max B, or “Biggavelli,” a play on the nicknames of three rap legends: “Biggie” (Smalls), . But in the current reality, his white tees and designer jeans have been replaced by the prison system’s khaki uniforms for the incarcerated. He won't be eligible for parole until November 9, 2. Even the Public Information officer from New Jersey’s Department of Corrections knows there’s something about this inmate: in a grey, windowless visiting room early one morning in May, he mentions that there have been numerous requests from the press for an interview, but this is the only one that has been granted. An hour has been allotted, after a lengthy period of no private visits at all. There’s a cage on one side of the room, which prison officials initially offered to put the inmate behind. Instead, an empty plastic chair sits under the harsh fluorescent lights, waiting for hip- hop’s unsung hero: Charly Wingate, 3. Harlem, a father of four. On the cover of February’s XXL, French Montana proudly displayed his “Free Max B” T- shirt next to A$AP Rocky. All this for an artist whose output—more than 2. New York City’s Dipset/Byrd. Gang crews—was recorded in a relatively short period of time, from 2. After serving eight years for robbery starting at the age of 1. Charly Wingate was released in 2. Cam’ron, a childhood friend, hooked up with the Harlem rapper Jim Jones and his Byrd. Gang crew. A series of hits (“Baby Girl,” “Confront Ya Babe,” “So Harlem”) followed, many of which had hooks and melodies that Wingate contributed, but disputes arose over compensation. Wingate’s contract with Jones limited his ability to earn what he felt was adequate, which resulted in frustration, and a nasty public beef ensued. Gina Conway, a woman Wingate had been involved with on and off, arrived after spending the day with Allan Plowden, whom the court describes as involved in “mortgage, real estate and credit card fraud.” He and his partner, David Taylor, were known for “driving expensive cars around New York City,” and Plowden “often carried a Louis Vuitton bag containing cash, sometimes as much as $4. I think they made an example of him because he’s Max B,” says Next, head of the Amalgam Digital label. At the hotel, he showed her the cash in his Louis Vuitton bag, which Conway estimated to be at “approximately $5. After giving her a key card to his room, he drove her back to Manhattan, then met up with Taylor — they took two women to a club and then returned to the hotel. After Plowden dropped her off, Conway took a cab to the basketball court to meet Wingate. She had called Wingate during her time that day with Plowden “to make him jealous,” and when she described Plowden’s money, Wingate reportedly made a plan. According to Conway, who was the only defendant to testify at the trial (on behalf of the State of New Jersey), Wingate directed Leerdam and Conway to go to Plowden’s hotel and steal his money. He called a cab driver, Mouhamadou Mbengue, to take Leerdam and Conway to Fort Lee. According to Conway’s testimony, Wingate pulled into a gas station when they stopped and told her he would “love her forever” if she “pulled it off.” He did not follow them to the hotel. Once they found Plowden’s car, Conway and Leerdam went to Plowden’s room. Leerdam pulled out a gun, gloves and a roll of duct tape. Conway says she had not realized force was “part of the plan,” according to her statement, and when she was instructed to knock on the door, one of the women, Giselle Nieves, answered. Conway and Leerdam forced their way into the room, duct- taped Nieves’s hands, feet and mouth, and woke Plowden up at gunpoint. After being threatened, Plowden told them that the rest of the money (he had hidden $1. Taylor’s room. With a gun to his head, Plowden called Taylor and asked him to come to his room. When Taylor arrived, Conway opened the door and Leerdam aimed the gun at Taylor, who tried to grab it. The gun was discharged and Taylor was killed. Conway and Leerdam took what they could from Plowden’s room and left; Plowden managed to free himself and chase them, but Leerdam pointed the gun at him and he backed down. Conway and Leerdam got back in the waiting cab and left. Wingate was not present for any of the events at the hotel. He did not testify at his own trial, at which Conway was a witness for the state and Wingate and Leerdam were charged together. The legal definition of a conspiracy means that Wingate’s absence from the scene of the crime did not exclude him from any of the charges; his involvement in any discussion of the crime before it took place qualified him for separate counts of murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, robbery and possession of a firearm for unlawful purposes. An appeal last August was denied. And so goes the great irony of Wingate’s career: for all the images of him flaunting wads of hundred- dollar bills, he and his family find themselves in a difficult financial period now, since all of his mixtapes are available for free online. He’s still not completely out of the public sphere, though. And Wingate’s voice, recorded over the phone from prison, utters the first words on Excuse My French, the latest French Montana album.“His words to me . Once I get this off my back, we gonna make it to the top,’” says Montana, who met Wingate through mutual friends and later sought him out to collaborate musically. Because we both had the same kind of dream.”Related: the 2. Picture Me Rollin’” —Public Domain 3, 2. The body of work that Wingate recorded as Max B varies wildly in tone and sound quality from release to release: the hallucinatory grime of the Coke Wave tapes with French Montana is a world apart from the crisp G- funk of Vigilante Season. And lyrically, the themes explored throughout his music adhere to many hip- hop templates — inebriation, crime, misogyny, money, and an aggressive stance toward anyone with doubt in his status as the greatest thing in New York City, if not the world. What stands out musically is Wingate’s sense of melody, his willingness to experiment with complex harmonies on verses, his ability to take the rhythmic pattern of a sample and expand on it vocally. The high notes he reaches on “Not Going Home,” from Coke Wave 2, teeter on the precipice of being out of tune but still form a maddeningly catchy hook.“I feel like there’s nobody like him. One of the most talented people I’ve ever met in my life,” says Montana. I used to always tell him, like, . He liked to hear the sounds — he doesn’t do the average music. He don’t want you to give him a beat and then he just go in — he’d want to build and create the song.”“However his case turns out, I would like the brother to be remembered. I feel like Max was too good of an artist to be swept under the rug and have people not remember,” Marciano says. The oldest of eight children, all of whom save one, she says, have battled with substance abuse, Sharon has been through her own personal trials. She served a year and half in prison after a period of crack addiction. Her son Eric was killed in Baltimore in 1. Her daughter, Sade, the youngest Wingate child, was born under the influence of crack cocaine. But Sharon has been clean for 1. Charly’s situation is shaped both by her experiences and her faith. Sitting in her parents’ apartment in Harlem, flanked by Sade, her niece Laura and her father, Gerald Barton, she cites the strong religious values her mother imparted to her children and grandchildren — including Charly, a talented kid who sang in the Boys Choir of Harlem, an older brother who would share whatever he had, a creative cut- up with a penchant for trouble. When he was little, he kinda had like an alter ego. He could always find a corner and play with whatever he had and knew how to keep himself content or create something.. He would have the towels around his neck so he could be like Superman.—Sharon Wingate“When he was little, he kinda had like an alter ego. He could always find a corner and play with whatever he had and knew how to keep himself content or create something,” Sharon says. There was no restriction as far as music was concerned.”A no- nonsense man who chooses his words carefully, Barton speaks with an equal amount of confusion at and empathy for his grandson’s situation.“Long terms of incarceration have a profound effect on psychological thinking and behavior. I mean, it’s abnormal. You take away a person’s freedom, and there’s not very much he has to hold on to,” says Barton. Like I was sharing, I used for like 1. Sharon adds. Being disobedient, not listening to my mom, not listening to my dad. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1. It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: . The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as 'the poet low- rate of Harlem.' Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. Bad enough to have white authors holding up our imperfections to public gaze. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too. Fuller commented that Hughes . Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other American blacks.) In Hughes's own words, his poetry is about . Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes' poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes' tragedy was double- edged: he was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was demode, and he didn't go much beyond one of his earliest themes, black is beautiful. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll. Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that 'we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,' and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people. He used his poetry and prose to illustrate that 'there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty, strength and power,' and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms. Before he was twelve years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: . If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if 'different views engage' us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it's over. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no- good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was . Dickinson wrote in his Bio- Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the . As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won't allow him to brood over a failure very long. Simple is a well- developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. He injects the ordinary with his own special insights. Simple is a natural, unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives. It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem—all of the Harlems—did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of his consciousness; but Simple's rock- solid commonsense enabled him to deal with them with balance and intelligence. Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knows that the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it can only be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions and false efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that the strength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle also exist within the Black community. Fuller believed that, like Simple, . Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that . And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is . His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson's or Robinson Jeffers'. By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own. The Block pairs Hughes's poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bears the book's title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, . Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that Hughes . Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.
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