James Baldwin remembers the Civil Rights movement; “I Feel Love” on piano; U.S. v. Dege (364 US 51,1960.)

I’m All Lost In … three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#22

Nearly half a year into writing these weekly posts, I suddenly realize that while some of the entries have legitimately been about bona fide (tho perhaps, minor) obsessions—William Wordsworth in January, for example, or Week #1’s account of practicing Smokey Robinson’s You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me on piano—I’m more often actually writing about exciting finds such as last week’s item on John McPhee’s Arthur Ashe book, Week 13’s Solely’s Green Banana Black Fusilli Pasta, or Week 10’s bed of nails acupuncture mat.

This week’s list includes one minor obsession and two excellent finds, though not necessarily in that order.

1) I saw an obscure, quiet, and remarkable film on Friday night: 1980’s I Heard it Through the Grapevine directed by experimental British filmmaker Dick Fontaine and his wife, African-American filmmaker and actor Pat Hartley.

Limited to a brief run at NYC’s Film Forum at the time and a PBS broadcast, this patiently and beautifully shot film tags along novelist, Civil Rights leader, intellectual, and default spokesperson for the human race, serene genius, James Baldwin.

Here’s what I texted my friend Tom about the movie:

It was basically the mischievously reserved and twinkling James Baldwin traveling through the South, revisiting Civil Rights movement sites (Birmingham, Selma) interspersed with the 1960s footage (fire hoses, dogs, electric stun batons, Bull Connor, MLK, Malcolm X, plus Birmingham ‘63 leader Fred Shuttlesworth and Freedom Summer ‘64 organizer Dave Dennis.) Those last two figures also appear here as talking heads, 20 years on. Additionally, there’s footage of Baldwin chatting with lesser known ‘60s activists and leaders (mostly women), still very much active in 1980, at contemporary conferences, churches, picnics, and community centers. There’s also footage of Baldwin trading theories with poets and friends in his apartment. Towards the end of the movie, Baldwin drives around the ruins of Newark, juxtaposed against chilling footage of the 1967 riots, with Amiri Baraka. Funny, when he first greets Baraka at a literary conference, cameras rolling at a backstage klatsch, Baldwin announces, “This is LeRoi Jones, who now goes by Amiri Baraka,” which seemed—because Baldwin appears to idle in convivially suspicious judgement of his colleagues—as a slight dig. For the grand finale, Baldwin strolls with Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, visiting the former slave market in Augustine, Florida noting, and far removed from any snark as he’s clearly awed by Achebe: “This is where you and I meet.” Towards the end of the movie, there’s a shot of President-Elect Reagan on a TV in the background, putting a heavy stamp on the dispirited thesis of the film: the Civil Rights movement is dead and voting is useless.

This searching, early 1980s leftist narrative (and the pot-luck community centers) are very familiar to me. So while Baldwin was reconnecting with the hopes and strife of the ‘60s, I was reconnecting with the lost-at-sea, Reagan-era activism of my youth.

The Harvard Film Archive, which helped restore and re-release the movie, writes:

Whereas in the 1980s the film represented a revisitation and reassessment of the civil rights movement, today audiences look back at the longer, more convoluted arc of the movement’s ongoing path, which has changed but never ended.

The last shot of the movie shows Baldwin and Achebe standing on the beach in front of a stormy Atlantic ocean—a visualization of Baldwin’s earlier observation about slave trade history and about the foreboding currents ahead.

I saw this gem at the new(ish) and well-run, art house theater in Columbia City, Beacon Cinema, which kind of counts as find in itself. It struck me as a happy place for bohemians, oddballs, leftists, and independent cinema intellectuals.

And a follow-up text to Tom: Bonus. The camera work capturing a lot of the live music (bar and/or church bands) was crisp and intimate in a way I’d never seen before: Accessible close ups of guitar fret boards and piano keyboards as the musicians’ fingers did the singing.

2) Two weeks ago, when I wrote about what has since become my main source of music—internet station thelotradio.com—I noted that during one of the DJ sets:

the beat sequence from the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte/Donna Summer EDM earthquake I Feel Love is still reverberating 47 years later; I learned this android diva masterpiece on piano in 2022 and, swaying to this week’s jams from Brooklyn, I quickly put the Moroder sheet music back on my keyboard stand.

This week, I’m in the throes of re-learning this landmark piece of 1977 electronic pop.

Certainly, the piano is no match for the dance club rhythm track nor, more to the point, the synthesized drone of the original (though, even as a lone piano note, that magical e flat still swims through your body like mulled wine.)

So, I’m fixed on re-fabbing Morodor’s electronic mechanics and Summer’s melody into a ballad. It helps that the the chorus is already a slow burn.

Mom & Dad on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court after one of his later arguments on 3/26/84, his 54th birthday, coincidentally; teenage me took the photo.

3) My dad, the Great Jerry Feit, died this week, 16 days shy of his 94th birthday.

Research for his obituary (with an assist from my federal lawyer pal Annie) turned up not only an early women’s rights case he argued and won in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Dege (1960), but also audio of the oral arguments.

My dad was 29 at the time, three years into his new job as an attorney for the Department of Justice. Over the course of his long career as a government attorney, he would argue 13 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

In Dege, he argued that a wife could be party to a conspiracy with her husband, shooting down the idea—promulgated by the defendant and upheld by the lower courts—that in marriage, a woman is subsumed by her husband and therefore cannot be charged with conspiracy because a conspiracy takes two people. (Fun fact, the conspiracy here was an exotic bird smuggling scheme.)

Here’s my dad addressing the Warren Court:

The court below relying upon the ancient notion of marital unity found that husband and wife were not two persons but one and on this basis, dismissed the indictment.

We think that ruling was incorrect.

In present day terms it is clear, we think, that husband and wife are legally separate individuals.

As my lawyer friend said: “Bad for criminal defense, good for feminism.”

So good for feminism, in fact, that a 38-year-old attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Dege in Reed vs. Reed, her landmark 1971 Supreme Court victory—the first time the Court used the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to rule that a law discriminating against women was unconstitutional.

In the Reed brief, which specifically found that “Discrimination based on gender is not constitutional when naming the administrator of an estate,” Ginsberg and her legal colleagues (including NOW co-founder Pauli Murray) cite Dege repeatedly:

Fortunately, the Court already has acknowledged a new direction, see United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), and the case at bar provides the opportunity clearly and affirmatively to inaugurate judicial recognition of the constitutionally imperative claim made by women for the equal rights before the law guaranteed to all persons. …

in 1960, he [Justice Frankfurter] refused to rely on "ancient doctrine" concerning the status of women. In United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960), he buried the historic common law notion that husband and wife are legally one person. …

it harks back to the stereotyped view of women rejected in United States v. Dege, 364 U.S. 51 (1960)

It’s no wonder that when my dad won the prestigious Tom C. Clark award for best federal attorney in 1983, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a United States Court of Appeals Judge for the District of Columbia, was chair of the selection panel.