World Premier of "The Whole Gritty City"
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA
October 12, 2013
Fellow Kickstarter supporter and homeboy Phil Woodbury, film director Richard Barber, and pt have a chat before the premier begins in New Orleans. Below are photos, video links, and observations about the film and the Q and A after it.
The documentary-style film begins by identifying three New Orleans marching bands and their band directors. It's hard to keep track of who's who for a while but not hard to feel the power music has on young band members and feel the charisma of the men who lead the bands. Sections of the film where kids bring video cameras into their homes and neighborhoods would have benefited from more captions to capture their commentary. You don't need any help grasping the heart and soul of how music is the lifeblood of New Orleans.
A brass band appears in the auditorium as invitees fill their seats before the premier begins. VIDEO
The Freeport-McMoRan Theater at The Contemporary Arts Center seats 300. Kickstarter contributors at a certain level were invited to attend as part of their donation package. Project supporters from distant cities attended. I drove to New Orleans from Lafayette, LA, where I was attending the Festival Acadiens et Creole. My pal Phil Woodbury, a jack of all trades, drove from Common Ground Relief in the Ninth Ward where he was volunteering with the rebuilding effort.
For many kids, band is the only family they know.The men who teach them know that these kids need to be recognized, noticed, have a guiding hand, and know someone cares about them. They watch them learn the right way and the right life lessons. Like all families, a band has its ups and downs but it is a unit to which these men say members have to be loyal to each other and be connect to something larger than themselves.
Co-directors Richard Barber and Andre Lambertson soon invited Wilbert Rawlins, Jr., Derrick Tabb and Lonnie Johnson to the stage for the Q and A session.
Barber and Lambertson thank the boys and girls and their families for the access to their homes and their lives.
Andre Lambertson talks about how he and Richard Barber gained the trust of the families they filmed."We told them we would not leave anything in the film that the family did not want included," he said, so there's a certain naturalness of kids at home doing their routines and relating to their families. I feel it when Jazz Henry's mother reflects on her daughter still being a kid at age 13, that she never had a childhood like her daughter has. Look at her eyes, listen to her tone. You don't get that sheer honesty unless you have trust.
The bandleaders talk about giving each kid the chance to feel special, be special. When asked about mentoring, Rawlins says, "What we do is a small piece of a bigger picture that needs to be painted. There are kids who want to learn to be carpenters, electricians, plumbers, videographers. There are no mentors, no outreach programs to serve those needs." Andre Lambertson looks at Mayor Mich Landrieu sitting in front, the mayor nods his head.
Easier said than done, I'm thinking. Watching the film, it's clear that these band directors feel they've been called to step up. Indeed, one of the men on stage (I believe it was Bruce Davenport, Jr.) says,"This film has been annointed." There's something vaguely religious in the way the band leaders tend to their flocks."Who looks out for you every day, who makes sure you have something to eat, who makes sure you belong someplace... I do, " band director Lonzie Johnson says. Anyone who works with these kids has to be all-in or it won't work.
"People want love. If they don't find it in the right places, they'll look for it in the wrong places," Illustrator for the project Bruce Davenport says in the film. Being in a band is the right place for these kids to find love.
"People outside form opinions about you. They think you young black kids are thieves, dope sellers, murderers. In the band, you can make choices in ways that don't reinforce that stereotype," Derrick Tabb says in the film.
Wilbert Rawlins, Jr. with a student.
In the Q and A, Mr. Rawlins tells about the Wednesday he told the band,"Put your instruments down." He had a chef from a local restaurant set up a cafeteria like a fancy dining room. The chef shows the band the different utensils, names them, explains how to use them, talks about first course, second course, then has waiters bring out a meal of chicken breasts which they eat using utensils and everything they have learned. Men like Rawlins don't just teach kids how to play music, they teach them how to live.
Rawlins, Tabb and Johnson are father figures, mentors - big-hearted men who are not afraid to tell kids how to act, how to succeed at belonging to a marching band. They're dead serious. In the film, a talented souzaphone player named Kirk gets into a fight with a rival band as his own band boards their bus after a big Mardi Gras parade. The choices you make have consequences, these men say. Band is like life. Kirk is asked to leave the band.
The brass band, all students, rock the house after the film and reception concludes VIDEO
New Orleans is where I witnessed my first big Mardi Gras parade. The humongous floats were so big they barely fit under the giant oaks on Napolean Street. Dozens of high school bands played as afternoon turned into evening.The synchronized movements of the marching band, the sinuous movements of all the dancers, the people cheering on the neutral ground and street sides blend into a rhythmic cosmic soup with serious swagger. When they hit their upper registers, the blaring horns of a New Orleans Marching Band can cause disturbances in the ionisphere.
Spectators like me watching the marching bands at football games and Mardi Gras have no idea the amount of work and pride and competitive drive that's behind the brassy, colorful, proud band performances. During outdoor practice, their mentors hold them by the shoulders, "I want you to step like this, I want all your toes pointed to the ground like this - all of you!"
Just a few months before the two weeks of 50 parades begin before Mardi Gras, you'd never guess that these kids in spiffy uniforms were the same kids in raggedy high top sneakers and scruffy clothes practicing in public parks or on a wide expanse of asphalt.
"In the moments of marching as a group, with precision, intention, and fierce concentration, all your cares disappear..." Wilbert Rawlins, Jr. says at the film's outset.
Andre Lambertson and pt
Lambertson and his crew captured a cinema verité feel that gives the film its grit. (By the way, if you listen closely, you'll hear drum major Skully of the L.E. Rabouin High School Marching Band describe his home town as "the whole gritty city.") Indeed, the sound of police sirens pierce the air in several scenes, reminders that New Orleans can be a dangerous place if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In one section of the film, Lambertson's footage of a band marching in a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans shows a fierce loyalty. For marching bands, the basic rule is that spectators do not cut through the band to get from one side of the street to the other.
I recall standing on Napolean Street to see my first New Orleans Mardi Gras parade that as each marching band approached, a group of adults purposefully strode down each side of the street where the crowd had pushed forward hoping for a better chance to catch beads and trinkets being thrown from the passing floats. Holding yellow rope between them, these "minders" cleared the way for the width of the band to pass unimpeded.
Footage shows grown men and women, minders for the band, grabbing young men trying to cross the street through the band as the band has slowed to a stop. "You can't cut through the band!" they shout. They grab the men and bring them back to the sidewalk. The young men resist, complain, and swear as the minders tell them they can't cut through the band.
Figuratively the minders are saying we're family, we are together, we want nothing to divide us - we are a unit of one. The band members sense this display of unity, of loyalty. They may not have much space of their own anywhere else in the world but in this band at this moment on the street they own this space, it will not be violated by anyone or anything.
The film was presented on CBS' "48 Hours" on February 15, 2014
Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
The Past, The Present, The Future... Sports Illustrated Style
"the PAST the PRESENT the FUTURE"
The sight of a woman’s bare butt will forever command a man’s attention. A biological imperative? A law of Nature? A no-brainer?
Perhaps all the above. If an automaker designed a grill to look like that, men would spend entire weekends washing their cars. I have no idea who came up with the idea that women’s swimsuits was a sporting enterprise on a par with football, baseball, soccer, golf, basketball, and tennis.
Whoever it was, it was brilliant strategy. Men look forward to the swimsuit edition as a sign of spring….or something. The women’s hairstyles, makeup (if you can take your eyes off other assets), and revealing attire might change as fashions wax and wane.
The derriere, however, has been, is now, and shall forever be, what stops men in their tracks, sells magazines, and drives advertising. Whoever wrote the copy for this year’s edition has bared a truism of the first order.
February 26, 2014 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (5)