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      Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris

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      In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More

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      Jessie Maple, Pathbreaking Filmmaker, Is Dead at 86

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      She was believed to be the first Black woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. She also broke ground as a union cinematographer.Jessie Maple, who built careers as a camerawoman and an independent filmmaker when Black women were almost nonexistent in those fields, and who then left meticulous instructions for later generations to follow in her footsteps, died on May 30 at her home in Atlanta. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by E. Danielle Butler, her longtime assistant and the co-author of her self-published 2019 memoir, “The Maple Crew.”Director and camerawoman were just two of Ms. Maple’s many jobs. She also worked as a bacteriologist; wrote a newspaper column; owned coffee shops; baked vegan cookies; and ran a 50-seat theater in the basement of her Harlem brownstone.Ms. Maple had been writing a column called Jessie’s Grapevine for The New York Courier, a Harlem newspaper, when she moved to broadcast journalism from print in the early 1970s because she wanted to reach more people.After studying film editing in programs at WNET, New York’s public television station, and Third World Cinema, the actor Ossie Davis’s film company, and working as an apprentice editor on the Gordon Parks films “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972) and “The Super Cops” (1974), Ms. Maple realized that she yearned to be behind the camera.In 1975 she became the first African American woman to join New York’s cinematographers union (now called the International Cinematographers Guild), according to Indiana University’s Black Film Center and Archive, which holds a collection of her papers and films. But, she said, the union banned her after she fought to change rules that required her to complete a lengthy apprenticeship.“If I had waited, I never would have become a cameraperson,” Ms. Maple told The New York Times for a 2016 article about women who broke barriers to work on film crews. “So I took ’em to court.”Ms. Maple with cast members on the set of her second feature film, “Twice as Nice,” the story of twin sisters who are college basketball stars.Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonShe sued several New York television stations for gender and racial discrimination in the mid-1970s, and she won a lawsuit against WCBS in 1977 that earned her a trial period with the station. That blossomed into a freelance career there and at the local ABC and NBC stations.Ms. Maple wrote that she faced crew members who did not want to work with her and nasty whispers, sometimes quite audible, behind her back. But she persevered, even when she got assignments that felt especially difficult — for example, flying in a helicopter to get aerial footage on a near-daily basis even though she had motion sickness.In 1977 Ms. Maple wrote about her experiences in “How to Become a Union Camerawoman,” a detailed guide to succeeding in a forbidding industry.But as TV news moved from film to video, Ms. Maple decided that she would rather become an independent filmmaker, with complete control of her work. She made short documentaries with Leroy Patton, her husband, including “Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit?,” before turning to features.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films about issues that were important to her community.“I want to tell the stories about things that bother me which may not otherwise be told,” she wrote in her memoir. “I strive to use the resources that are around me. Most importantly, I work to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”According to the Black Film Center and Archive, Ms. Maple was the first known African American woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. That film, “Will” (1981), followed a former college basketball player struggling with addiction (played by Obaka Adedunyo) who takes in a 12-year-old boy to prevent him from developing a habit of his own. Loretta Devine, in her first film role, played Will’s significant other.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films in her community about issues that were important to it. “I work, she said, “to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonMs. Maple’s second feature, “Twice as Nice” (1989), was the story of twin sisters, both college basketball standouts, who are preparing to take part in a professional draft. The movie starred Pamela and Paula McGee, twins who won back-to-back N.C.A.A. basketball championships at the University of Southern California but were not professional actors.In 1982 Ms. Maple and Mr. Patton opened a theater to show “Will” and other independent films in the basement of their brownstone on 120th Street in Harlem. They called it 20 West, billed it as “the home of Black cinema” and featured movies by up-and-comers like Spike Lee. They closed it about a decade later — because, she said, she wanted to focus more on her own films.Ms. Maple’s films have achieved greater recognition in recent years than they did when they were released. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art screened “Will”; that same year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (now Film at Lincoln Center) showed both her features as part of a series called “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986.”Ms. Maple in 2016. A year earlier, her films had been shown at both the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMs. Maple was born on Feb. 14, 1937, in McComb, Miss., about 80 miles south of Jackson, the second oldest of 12 children. Her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher and dietitian.Her father died when she was 13, and her mother sent her and many of her siblings to the Northeast, where she went to high school.After high school she studied medical technology and then started working in bacteriology. She eventually ran a lab at the Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medical Center (now part of New York University’s hospital system) in Manhattan while the hospital administration searched for a permanent replacement because, she wrote, she did not have a Ph.D. She was credited with leading the preliminary identification of a new strain of bacteria; on her lunch breaks, she joined other, lower-paid workers who were trying to organize.It was a steady, well-paying job, but Ms. Maple, who was married and had a young daughter, tired of the work and left bacteriology in 1968 to pursue journalism. She was on assignment for a magazine in Texas when she met Mr. Patton, a photographer for Jet and Ebony magazines who lived in Los Angeles, and they developed a bicoastal relationship.Ms. Maple had separated from her husband; Mr. Patton was still living with his wife. In time they divorced their spouses and married, and Mr. Patton moved to Manhattan. (Ms. Maple was sometimes billed as Jessie Maple Patton in her film work.)Ms. Maple is survived by her husband; her daughter, Audrey Snipes; five sisters, Lorrain Crosby, Peggy Lincoln, Debbie Reed, Camilla Clarke Doremus and Stephanie Robinson; and a grandson.Ms. Maple worked relentlessly to accomplish her dreams. She supplemented her income through ventures including two Harlem coffee shops she ran with Mr. Patton and a line of vegan cookies she made in the 1990s, which were eventually available at retailers on the East Coast.“I was too busy doing the work to slow down,” she wrote in her memoir. “I’d like to believe that my efforts have paved the way for the people behind me to work just as hard but struggle a little less.” More

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      Cisco Swank Puts His Spin on Jazz-Rap on ‘More Better’

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      The 23-year-old pianist, drummer and rapper puts a pandemic-era spin on jazz-rap on his debut, “More Better,” and he always keeps the faith.At a recent Sunday afternoon performance in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, the pianist Francisco Haye sat behind a piano at Emmanuel Baptist Church, leading his quintet through a number of recognizable jazz standards. Yet they weren’t straight-ahead: Songs like “All the Things You Are,” “Little Sunflower” and “My Favorite Things” each had wrinkles — a bouncy backbeat or a near-frenetic breakdown — that made them feel fresh.It was the kind of set that might rankle those who prefer to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Hubbard and John Coltrane without frills, yet these listeners — made up of elders who have known Haye since he was a child growing up in the congregation there — seemed to embrace what he was trying to do.The goal, he told them, was to take “cliché jazz tunes and not make them boring.”Haye’s artistry is informed by artists like Robert Glasper and Roy Hargrove, both classically trained jazz musicians who have blended the genre with hip-hop, R&B and rock, aligning the music with alternative rap and the neo-soul movement that emerged in the late 1990s. Haye, performing under the name Cisco Swank, plays melodic piano chords over lush soul and trap-inspired drums and raps in a manner that recalls the weary lethargy of Mike and Earl Sweatshirt, but with the polish of a Village Vanguard headliner.Jazz-rap hybrids aren’t new, of course, but Haye, 23, without pandering to any audience, is tapping into a subset who dig lo-fi underground rap.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Lindsay Perryman for The New York Times“He’s sitting right in the center of a lot of points,” said the noted trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in a telephone interview. “And it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to. It’s just who he is. He is Black music. All of it. It’s in every note.”Haye runs through the tapestry of jazz, R&B and rap on his recently released debut album, “More Better,” which at times ruminates on the pandemic but without wallowing in despair.“Teary-eyed still thinkin’ ’bout 2020/Quarantined, bro, the streets eerie,” he raps on “If You’re Out There.” “City full of dreams, concrete, but I see it when I look in the sky.” On “What Came From Above,” over a melancholic piano loop and stuttering electronic drums, Haye admits he is “renewed” back at home with his family. (He returned to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from the Berklee College of Music, where he studied piano performance and contemporary writing and production when the pandemic took hold.) On “Over Now,” he laments the end of a romantic relationship with keen self-awareness. “I try to smile through it,” Haye raps with an exhausted tone. “I don’t really like fast moving/I try not to commit, bro, I’m last to it.” Even the LP’s title — thought of randomly during a rehearsal — is meant to convey perseverance in dark times.Haye, tall and skinny with long dreads and a boyish charm, peppers his conversation with affirmations like “facts” and “fire,” and speaks easily and expertly about a wide range of musicians — Beethoven and Bach, Kirk Franklin and Richard Smallwood. While growing up in Flatbush, he was exposed to all of this music by his mother, Adriane, who directed the youth choir at Emmanuel, and his father, Frank, who was the director of music there.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Seeing his father in action in front of large congregations sparked a real interest in music. “I feel like it played an important role in how I see people present music and how you interact with people,” he said during a lunch interview. “The whole idea of just music being more than just notes and harmony. It’s serving a bigger purpose, whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Music can serve “a bigger purpose,” Haye said, “whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Lindsay Perryman for The New York TimesAt home, he said, there were “mad musical instruments everywhere,” which made being an artist seem like the coolest job ever. He absorbed Baroque music, Stevie Wonder and other Motown soul, as well as old-school rap. (His mother grew up in the Bronx at the beginning of hip-hop culture and used to rhyme under the name Micki Dee.)Haye started thinking about blending genres during his freshman year at LaGuardia High School: His favorite rapper, Kendrick Lamar, merged rap and psychedelic jazz on his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and Glasper’s song “Portrait of an Angel” doubled as his alarm clock. “That really was the point where I was like, ‘I’m trying to do something very much like this,’” Haye said.He formed a jazz fusion band and started playing around the city. He began rapping as a student at Berklee, tinkering with the conversational cadences heard on “More Better” while releasing music on SoundCloud. “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should just play this song with the band but put a trap groove over it,’” Haye recalled. “Slowly, it just started merging into what it is today.”He met the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Luke Titus over social media at the start of lockdown in 2020 and started sharing audio files with him, which led to the collaborative album “Some Things Take Time,” released two years later. “The narrative was definitely about being patient during a time with so much uncertainty,” Titus said over the phone. “It was about not forcing things and allowing things to come when they come.” Those themes are also relayed on “More Better” in Haye’s singular voice.“He draws from so much influence of being from New York,” Titus added, pointing to the city’s renowned jazz and rap scenes. “He might have all these jazz chops, but he’ll pick the simple melody and play what needs to be there in a very lyrical way.” He added, “He’s one of those rare guys who doesn’t overthink things too much.”Haye noted that while his album was born of the pandemic, it’s rooted in a sense of uplift rather than resignation. “It’s just like seeing the clouds in the distance, like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “It’s being able to say, ‘Oh, I can make it as long as I have faith.’ Even if it’s not a spiritual faith, if it’s just faith that things will get better, it will work out.” More

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      in Theater

      Michelle Ebanks Named President and CEO of the Apollo

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      Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, will assume the role in July.Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, the global media and communications company dedicated to Black women, will be the next president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the organization announced on Tuesday.“I have a deep understanding of the value of cultural institutions and their profound impact on individual lives and society, and the Apollo Theater as one of the nation’s greatest cultural institutions,” Ebanks said in an interview on Monday.Ebanks, 61, replaces the theater’s longtime leader, Jonelle Procope, who announced last year that she planned to step down this summer after nearly 20 years steering the Harlem organization, which she transformed from a struggling nonprofit to the largest African American performing arts presenting organization in the country.The appointment comes at a critical time for the theater, which is wrapping up an $80 million capital fund-raising campaign to fully renovate its 109-year-old building, with construction set to begin next year and the first cultural programs in the new space planned for spring 2025. Along with a new lobby cafe and bar that will be open to the public, plans include added and upgraded seating, new lighting and audio systems and updates to the building’s exterior. The main theater will be closed during at least part of the renovation, but programming will be presented at the Victoria theaters, and will also continue at the Apollo.Ebanks, who holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Florida, led Essence Communications for 18 years and helped grow the company into a global franchise that now includes Essence, the life-style magazine for Black women; Essence.com; and the Essence Festival, the brand’s annual live music event that draws hundreds of thousands of people to New Orleans each year.It was her experience with the Essence Festival specifically that was one of the primary draws for the Apollo, said Charles E. Phillips, chairman of the theater’s board.“She understood really well the kind of artistic content that people would respond to with the Essence Festival,” he said in a phone interview on Monday. “At the same time, she has business experience as well.”Her focus, she said, will be on continuing the existing partnerships the Apollo has with early-career creators and organizations in Harlem and the nation, and expanding them.“I want to reach as many different audiences as possible,” she said. “The impact of arts and music on society is immeasurable, and we need as many stories told from those emerging artists as possible.”Ebanks will assume her new position in July. More

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      Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

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      He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

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      in Theater

      James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80

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      His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan, with a cast that included Frances Foster, a leading actress of the day.“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman in the American Place Theater production of “Do Lord Remember Me” in 1982.Bert Andrews, via The New Federal TheaterA revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown, with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. In a fresh review, Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination.” He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.” More

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      Jim Brown, Football Great and Civil Rights Champion, Dies at 87

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      After a Hall of Fame career in the N.F.L., he pursued social activism and Hollywood stardom, but his image was stained by accusations of abuse toward women.Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns fullback who was acclaimed as one of the greatest players in pro football history, and who remained in the public eye as a Hollywood action hero and a civil rights activist, though his name was later tarnished by accusations of violent conduct against women, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.His family announced his death on Friday on Instagram.Playing for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.In any game, he dragged defenders when he wasn’t running over them or flattening them with a stiff arm. He eluded them with his footwork when he wasn’t sweeping around ends and outrunning them. He never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.“All you can do is grab, hold, hang on and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and the Washington team now known as the Commanders, once told Time magazine.Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him No. 2 all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.Brown in action against the Giants in Cleveland in 1968.Associated PressBrown was still in top form and only 30 years old when he stunned the football world in the summer of 1966 by retiring to pursue an acting career.He had appeared in the 1964 western “Rio Conchos” and was involved in the shooting of the World War II film “The Dirty Dozen” in England, with plans to attend the Browns’ training camp afterward. But wet weather delayed completion of the filming. When he notified Art Modell, the Browns’ owner, that he would be reporting late, Modell said he would fine him for every day he missed camp. Affronted by the threat, Brown called a news conference to announce that he was done with pro football.When the modern civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, few elite athletes spoke out on racial issues. But Brown had no hesitation.Working to promote economic development in Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods while playing for the Browns, he founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (later known as the Black Economic Union) as a vehicle to create jobs. It facilitated loans to Black businessmen in poor areas — what he called Green Power — reflecting his long-held belief that economic self-sufficiency held more promise than mass protests.Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), seated from left, were among the leading Black athletes who met in 1967 to publicly voice their support for Ali.Tony Tomsic/Associated PressIn June 1967, Brown invited other leading Black athletes, most notably Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), to the office of his Economic Union to hear Muhammad Ali after Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced imprisonment for refusing to be drafted in protest over the Vietnam War.In what came to be called the Ali Summit, viewed as a watershed for the development of racial awareness among athletes, Brown and the others at the session publicly voiced their support for Ali.By the early 1970s, Brown’s Economic Union had largely faded. But in the late 1980s he founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and prisoners, mainly in California, and steer them away from violence. The foundation expanded nationally and remains active.Handsome with a magnificent physique — he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds — Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes cited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.“Although the range of emotion Brown displayed onscreen was no wider than a mail slot, he never embarrassed himself, never played to a demeaning stereotype of the comic patsy,” James Wolcott wrote in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography, “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a rugged chassis for a more self-assertive figure, the Black uberman.”One of Brown’s best-remembered roles was in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played one of 12 convicts assembled by the Army for a near-suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a French chateau in advance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He next played a Marine captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).Brown, left, in a scene from the 1967 movie “The Dirty Dozen.” Donald Sutherland is at right.MGMIn 1969, his character was shown having sex with Raquel Welch’s character in the western “100 Rifles,” the first major Hollywood film depicting a Black man making love to a white woman.Brown was “becoming a Black John Wayne; or maybe John Wayne with just a hint of Malcolm X thrown in,” Gloria Steinem wrote in New York magazine in 1968. She quoted him as saying: “I don’t want to play Negro parts. Just cool, tough modern men who are also Negroes. And not good guys all the time.”But Brown had a problematic personal life.He was arrested more than a half-dozen times, in most cases when women accused him of violent behavior, at a time when prominent men like athletes, actors and political figures were generally not held accountable for purported transgressions against women.Brown was never convicted of a major crime. In some instances the accusers refused to testify, and in others he was exonerated by juries.The first accusation against Brown was lodged in 1965, when an 18-year-old woman testified that he had assaulted her at a Cleveland motel. Brown denied the allegation and was found not guilty in a jury trial. A year later, the woman filed a civil paternity suit claiming that Brown had fathered her baby daughter. The jury found in his favor.In June 1968, the police, arriving at Brown’s Hollywood home after a neighbor phoned to report a disturbance, found his 22-year-old girlfriend, Eva Bohn-Chin, a model, lying bloodied and badly injured on his patio. They suspected that Brown had thrown her off his second-story balcony. He said she had fallen. Ms. Bohn-Chin refused to testify, which resulted in the dismissal of an assault charge. Brown paid a $300 fine for interfering with a police officer who had been seeking entrance to his home.Brown’s wife, Sue Brown, with whom he had three children, obtained a divorce in 1972.Brown with Spike Lee, the director of the documentary “Jim Brown: All American,” in 2002.David Lee/HBOWhen Spike Lee released his documentary “Jim Brown: All American” in 2002, Brown was in jail in the Los Angeles area, having lost an appeal over a misdemeanor vandalism conviction in 1999. Brown’s wife at that time, Monique Brown, had called the police to report that he smashed the windows of her car with a shovel after an argument.Brown had been offered community service and anger management counseling, but he refused to accept that and was jailed for nearly four months. But the marriage endured.“I can definitely get angry, and I have taken that anger out inappropriately in the past,” Brown told Sports Illustrated in an interview at the jail. “But I have done so with both men and women.”In 1978, Brown was sentenced to a day in jail and fined $500 for beating and choking a male friend during their golf match in Inglewood, Calif., evidently after an argument over the spot where his friend had placed his ball on the ninth green.“So do I have a problem with women?” Brown added in the interview. “No. I have had anger, and I’ll probably continue to have anger. I just have to not strike out at anyone ever again.”Brown maintained over the years that he been victimized because of his race or his celebrity status. In an interview with Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times in April 1969, in which he spoke about the balcony incident, he said, “The cops were after me because I’m free and Black and I’m supposed to be arrogant and supposed to be militant and I swing free and loose and have been outspoken on racial matters and I don’t preach against Black militant groups and I’m not humble.”Rural BeginningsJames Nathaniel Brown was born on Feb. 17, 1936, on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast, a rural area where the Black populace lived off the land. When he was a few weeks old, his father, Swinton Brown, who had a reputation as a gambler and womanizer, abandoned him and Jim’s teenage mother, Theresa Brown. When he was 2, she took a job as a domestic in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, an overwhelmingly white but politically liberal community, leaving him in Georgia in the care of a great-grandmother, a grandmother and an aunt.She sent for him when he was 8, and they lived together for a while, she continued to work as a housekeeper. By his account he felt that she was more interested in her boyfriends than in attending to his needs; he eventually moved in with the family of his girlfriend in nearby Manhasset.At Manhasset High School, he became a brilliant running back and lacrosse player, and also competed in basketball and baseball and ran track.The second Black player in the history of Syracuse football, Brown became an all-American in football and lacrosse. In his final regular-season football game, a 61-7 victory over Colgate, he scored six touchdowns, kicked seven extra points and ran for 197 yards. Syracuse went to the 1957 Cotton Bowl, where Brown scored three touchdowns and kicked three extra points in a 28-27 loss to Texas Christian.Brown in 1957, when he was a halfback at Syracuse University. He earned all-American honors there in football and lacrosse.Associated PressCleveland selected Brown as the No. 6 pick of the 1957 N.F.L. draft. He won the first of his three Most Valuable Player Awards, as selected by The Associated Press, when he ran for a league-leading 942 yards as a rookie.After the 1962 season, Brown led a group of players who complained to Modell, the team owner, that Paul Brown, the franchise’s founder and head coach, was too rigid in continuing with conservative offensive schemes that were being bypassed by other N.F.L. teams using wide-open offenses.Blanton Collier was named coach in 1963, and Brown had his greatest season, running for an N.F.L. record 1,863 yards. The Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts for the N.F.L. championship in 1964. Brown won his third M.V.P. award in 1965, when the Browns again played for the league championship, this time losing to the Green Bay Packers.Brown led the N.F.L. in rushing in eight of his nine seasons. He also set N.F.L. records for career yardage (12,312), total touchdowns (126), touchdowns by running (106), and average yards rushing per game (104) and per carry (5.22). He ran for more than 1,000 yards seven times when teams played only 12 and then 14 games a season (they now play 17), and at a time when the rule book favored the passing game over running plays. He caught 20 touchdown passes, and he returned kickoffs.Brown credited his offensive linemen with springing him into the secondary, and then, as he told Alex Haley in a 1968 interview with Playboy, “I was on my own.”“Then I had a man-to-man situation going me against them; that’s when I’d go into my bag of stuff,” he said. “They’re in trouble now; I’m in their territory; 55 things are happening at once; I’m moving, evaluating their possible moves, trying to outthink and outmaneuver them, using my speed, quickness and balance.”Brown in the Browns’ dressing room at Yankee Stadium on Dec. 12, 1964, after Cleveland beat the Giants to win the Eastern Conference title for the first time since 1957.Associated Press“But sometimes it got down to out-and-out strength and brute force,” Brown said. “Some guys, if they were small enough, I’d just run over them.”Brown seemed perpetually battered, getting up slowly after running plays, but he said that was a psychological tactic. As he put it in his 1989 memoir “Out of Bounds,” written with Steve Delsohn, “By getting up with leisure every play, every game, every season, they never knew if I was hurt or if I wasn’t.”Most of Brown’s especially significant records have been eclipsed. But he was accorded tributes long after his football career ended.In 1994, he was named to the N.F.L.’s 75th anniversary all-time team. In 2015, Syracuse University unveiled statues of Brown and the star running backs who succeeded him, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little, all of whom wore No. 44, on a patio called Plaza 44. The second Browns franchise dedicated a statue of Brown outside its FirstEnergy Stadium in 2016.Seeking support for his Amer-I-Can Foundation’s efforts to curb gang violence, Brown and the former star N.F.L. linebacker Ray Lewis met with president-elect Donald J. Trump at his Trump Tower office in Manhattan in December 2016. Brown and the musician Kanye West had lunch with Mr. Trump at the White House in October 2018.“This is the president of the United States,” Brown said after the White House meeting. “He allowed me to be invited to his territory, he treated us beautifully, and he shared some thoughts, and he will be open to talking when I get back to him.”In 2013, Brown returned to Manhasset High School, on Long Island, where a plaque in his honor was unveiled.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesHe married Monique Gunthrop in 1997, and she survives him. Brown is also survived by their son, Aris, and their daughter, Morgan; a daughter, Kim, and a son, Kevin, who were twins, and another son, James Jr., from his marriage to Sue (Jones) Brown.At least one defensive player looked at the bright side in describing an encounter with Brown. Remembering the first time he faced him, the Dallas Cowboys’ Pro Bowl linebacker Chuck Howley told Life magazine: “I had one of my best days. I made almost as much yardage as he did — riding on his back.” More

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      Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

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      A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More