Central High grad, WSU alum, and national film critic Armond White is the subject of a New York Magazine piece.
Excerpt:
The youngest of seven children, and hailing from northwest Detroit,
where his family “busted the block” as the first African-Americans to
move into what had been primarily a Jewish neighborhood, White grew up
in the era of white flight, the civil-rights movement, and Motown. His
father played piano and worked for Ford after trying his hand at owning
a gas station and a pool hall, neither of which lasted. “He taught us
about the rights of the working man, and also that if you didn’t have
anything to say, you should keep your mouth shut. But if you did have
something on your mind, you should talk up, don’t keep it to yourself,”
White recalls.
“We always went to the movies, every Saturday at least,” White says. “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies
so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I
wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope. Paul Newman and
Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful people ever, on that giant image:
It filled my head … Detroit was a great movie town then. We got
Canadian TV, so I got to see stuff like La Dolce Vita, Jacques Demy’s Lola, 8½, all of them dubbed. Boccaccio ’70—these shorts by Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti—I must have seen that one twenty times.
Read the entire article
here.
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