Word: jefferson
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...middle of 1966, several old San Francisco friends had got together a promising rock band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Since the Jefferson Airplane had Signe Anderson (later replaced by Grace Slick), the boys sent for Janis to be their lead singer. She began to learn about rock 'n' roll, and to please her, they began to learn about the blues. By the time of the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, after months of hard practicing in Haight-Ashbury, they were ready. The documentary film Monterey Pop is the celluloid affidavit of their triumph...
...very title betrays the facile irony: The Great White Hope is a walk-on; the film, based on Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-prizewinning play, concerns the Doomed Black Hope. He is Jack Jefferson (James Earl Jones), a full-throated paraphrase of Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915. The last five supersaturated years of his reign form the basis for Sackler's fictionalized crisis in black and white...
...Jack Jefferson enrages the country not only because he has wrested the title from an Irish-American but because he has acquired a Caucasian mistress, Eleanor (Jane Alexander). A great copper statue of a man, Jefferson cannot be legitimately toppled. But he can be melted down legally. Arrested on a rigged Mann Act violation, the champ jumps bail and flees to Europe. There the bruiser becomes the bruised. The retreat starts in alcoholism and ends in a Budapest café where with aching symbolism he "lawzy me's" his way through the role of Uncle Tom on a tiny...
Such clanking devices would have even seemed excessive back in 1870, but restraint is a word unknown to Sackler. Jefferson refuses a standing offer to take a dive for a white champ in order to cancel out his previous "crimes." In a final Meaningful Act, he even rejects his beloved Eleanor, whom he suddenly sees as an albatross. In a scene that would shame Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor's drowned body is brought onstage, and the broken Jefferson capitulates...
...scientific method for interpreting history and the economic and social facts of the world. It is not a prescription for making a government. The Chilean Socialist Party has never been attached to any international association. I have read Marx, Engels and Lenin, but I have also read Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington. Kennedy's Inaugural Address was one of the best pieces of oratory I have ever read...