Word: inner
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Among these segregated but proud institutions was the elementary school where generations received the sort of rigorous education that inner-city blacks today can hardly imagine. Another was the separate-but-more-than-equal "colored picnic," where blacks who worked at the paper mill gathered to dance, play bid whist and gorge themselves on soul food. Small wonder, as Gates writes, that for many of his parents' generation, "integration was experienced as a loss . . . Who in his right mind would want to go to the mill picnic with the white folks when it meant shutting the colored one down...
Much of the book's impact may be explained on these grounds alone: Who can resist an unauthorized peek at the inner life of a legend? Le Premier Homme has a confessional feeling, unmediated by any of the distancing ironies and disguises Camus employed in works published during his lifetime. It cannot be known whether he was reaching for the looser and more lush writing style of this narrative or whether he did not live to pare away what he might have considered its excesses. But his hero, Jacques Cormery (the surname of Camus's paternal grandmother), is indistinguishable from...
Spike Lee is better at setting agendas than he is at making movies. The laudable intention behind Crooklyn is, he says, to move beyond "the hip-hop, drug, gangsta-rap, urban-inner-city movies," which he claims constitute "a rut" into which black filmmakers have fallen. He has a point, though some of his competitors' work (for example, The Inkwell) has shown more range than he cares to admit. What he does not have here is a movie that attractively accomplishes his goal...
...obvious attempt at explore Jake's inner psyche, the movie gets lost along the way, caught up in its own artistic gimmicry. It fails to render any of its allegedly soulful characters believable--or even likeable. Instead, Jake's profound quest in life (for a brilliant career and a beautiful wife, of course) becomes a megalomaniacal alternate reality where the world centers upon him. Gorillas give him advice, faces carved into a stone wall give him advice, and important people from his life keep popping up at random times to give him advice. This kooky, off-the-wall style...
...though we learn that we are not Albert T.A. Toscanini, we do not respond by opening ourselves up to companionship, filling the inner loneliness. Instead, we come to this strange, seemingly utility-minimizing equilibrium of a lack of faith in ourselves and a lack of feeling for others...