TRUMP FAMILY INSIDER SPILLS THE BEANS ON DONALD

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted July 25, 2020)

Having booked my copy of ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ the moment I got wind that Donald Trump’s niece was writing it, I knew the wait would be well worth it.

Mary Trump has her Ph.D in Psychology and is the first Trump family insider to write an expose on her late father’s brother, Donald. So I knew her book would not be an incidental work of non-fiction. I foresaw it being the most consequential of all the books written thus far about the current US president. More significant than the ones by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton or his former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis or even his 2016 presidential contender, Hillary Clinton.

I wasn’t wrong. Trump is an excellent writer who sticks to writing about what she knows from first-hand experience. Granted she editorializes and surmises a great deal about the psychology of all the members of the Trump family. But having a Master’s degree in comparative literature and doctorate in psychology, she is able to be articulate as well as self-reflective about not only her Uncle Donald and his father Fred, who was the real real-estate tycoon (not his boastful second son), about but all the family members who frequented the House (and empire) the Fred Senior built.

She doesn’t hide the way she and her brother Fritz were literally short-changed (in millions) by her aunts and uncles (spearheaded by Donald). Nor does she deny that she grew up believing her late father was a total failure, having died an alcoholic at aged 42. She was young when he passed on and thus, she hadn’t known the full story of her father’s struggle inside the Trump household until many years after his death.

Dr. Trump has been accused of writing a mean-spirited book simply because she was cut out of her grandfather’s will, given that Fred Senior had disinherited her dad soon after he died. But the story she tells should disabuse critics of what might seem to be spiteful motives for her writing such a revealing and damning book which reflects especially harshly on her Uncle Donald.

 Granted Mary and Fritz were grandchildren, not children of the late multi-millionaire. But they reasoned that their late father Fred Junior had been first-born of Fred’s siblings so they should have inherited at least a portion of their grandfather’s estate (especially as it amounted to almost $US1 billion).

The story is complicated and messy. But Mary Trump spells the circumstances out in simple, straight-forward language that I found compelling.

One of the most fascinating aspect of the book is the revelation of Mary’s role in the 2018 New York Times expose that unveiled the degree of tax fraud, theft and deceit involved in both Donald’s and his father’s money-making ventures. Somehow the brilliant investigative journalism of the NYT reporters did not dent Trump’s presidency. But Mary Trump’s book probably will, especially as the 2020 US Presidential elections is almost here.

IMMORTAL SUPERHEROES LED BY AN AMAZON CHARLIZE

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted July 18, 2020

Comic books have been the fertile fodder for television and subsequently cinema for more than half a century. Ever since Superman came on black and white TV, superheroes have excited viewing audiences and inspired them to ‘look, up in the sky [and see] it’s a bird; no it’s a plane; no it’s Superman!’ as the refrain from the weekly TV show used to chime.

For the latest generation of local superhero fans, it’s mainly DC and Marvel comics that have provided them with a slew of exciting superheroes, from Batman and Iron Man to Thor, Hulk, Wonder Woman and so many more.

But ever since 2017, ‘The Old Guard’ has been out, first, in comic book form, courtesy of its creator Greg Rucha who used to write for DC but subsequently started his own Image Comics. Then early this month (July), the elite team of nomadic immortals who make up ‘the old guard’ came out as the newest set of action-adventurers on Netflix, Rucha having also written the screenplay for the film.

Starring Charlize Theron as the ‘kickass’ leader of this rogue band of death-defying warriors who have literally been around for centuries (and in Andy’s case, for millennia), fighting against evil doers, and for the proverbial underdogs. Theron also coproduced The Old Guard which has been the most-viewed new film on Netflix charts since it came out.

It isn’t often that we see women warriors leading an ‘army’ as Andy (Theron) describes her immortal band of ancients to her young initiate, the African American female marine, Nile Freeman (Kiki Layne). She’s just ‘kidnapped’ Nile from her base camp in Afghanistan shortly after it’s been discovered that there’s something very strange about the young Black woman.

There were witnesses who saw Nile’s throat slit in combat. Yet they also saw her a few hours later, up and ready to get back into combat.

It’s a dilemma the Old Guard understand well, especially now as they are being stalked by mercenaries sent by a big Pharma tycoon who wants to market their immortal DNA. But first, they must be caught which is why the tycoon enlisted mercenaries headed by former CIA agent Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to snag the Guard.

Having fought in and survived wars going back long before the Crusades, their Amazon-like leader Theron plays the millennial freedom fighter whose name, Andy is short for Andromache, named after the mythic Greek princess and wife of Hector whose brother Paris started the Trojan war.

Theron revisits the tough-girl character that she’s played previously in films like ‘Atomic Blond’ and ‘Mad Max Fury Road’. But under the direction of African American female director, Gina Prince-Bythewood she stars as a woman leader who has the miraculous capacity to not just kill and be killed; she’s got the power to resurrect to fight another day.

It’s a power embedded in the story as well since a sequel is already under discussion between Rucha and Netflix.

MARY COLLIS’ LOCKDOWN DAILY EXHIBITION

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (June 2020)

Kenyan artist Mary Collis had the foresight at the outset of the COVID-19 lockdown to consider how some folks could go stir-crazy without the opportunity to have a bit of rare beauty in their daily life and possibly even see a beautiful painting or two or three.

Or at least they could have a chance to see dazzling colors blended in bouquets and virtual explosions on Facebook to fill their hearts with sweet ideas rather than the dreaded notions of testing positive and then where would that lead?

So Mary decided to design a timely online exhibition of artworks that she has created over the past 30 odd years. Her only desire in so doing, she wrote in late May, was to ‘uplift everyone’s day during their house arrest.’

Currently she’s about to post her 80^th artwork on Facebook. Posting one almost every day, Mary might not have known she would be running her one-day, one-work exhibition for so long. But that is no problem for this prolific expressionist painter whose versatility, vitality and sheer love of visual art has kept her vision fresh and ever-alive to the infinite array of beautiful images to be found all over the country.

Her online exhibition requires patience however since she never offers more than one image a day. But for that one, she invariably annotates it, giving a brief caption including the title, size and medium used, be it oil or acrylic paints or watercolors.

She often explains the artwork’s source of inspiration and often shares a brief anecdotal story to offer context and location of the art. She occasionally will tell who bought the painting, when and where it currently resides, be it in Mumbai, Zurich, London or the south of France.

Occasionally, she will quote either another painter as her source of inspiration, be it Gustav Klimt, Pierre Bonnard or even the Scottish artist Dame Elizabeth Blackadder.

She can also refer to poets like Sylvia Plath, novelists like George Sand and of course, photographers like her award-winning daughter Mia whose childhood sketch that Mary painted and is Number 64 in her online collection.

Very much a ‘plein air’ (or outdoor) painter, most of Mary’s artworks were created on site in the open air. Her most memorable canvases are probably her series of gardens that she’s painted over the years, many of which can be found in and around Nairobi.

She spent many hours painting the vast and multicolored garden of the late Erica Boswell in Tigoni. The fashion designer who owned Jax Boutique on Kimathi Street (across from the Stanley Hotel) for many years had given Mary free access to come and recreate the riotous color schemes that Nature (with assistance from Erica and her gardener) had designed in the Boswell garden.

But Mary has covered an array of other topics in her exhibition. For instance, her ‘Red Rain’ is an expressionist work that she admits she wishes she still owned since it has sentimental as well as aesthetic value. It served as a cover for one issue of ‘Msani’, the short-lived art magazine that she and Carol Lees, as co-founders of the late RaMoMa Gallery, created in the early 2000s.

She also spends some time periodically in Cape Town where she creates Monet-like studies of the sea and the skies. Painting them at various hours of the day and month, she has clearly found both the waters of False Bay and the skies at the Cape infinitely fascinating. Depending on how much longer we will be living in lockdown mode, we may have a chance to see many more of those subtle yet colorful studies of Nature’s unfettered beauty.

Having been trained as an interior designer, Mary ranks among the so-called ‘self-taught’

artists who has learned from the Masters, only via books (which preceded YouTube videos as effective learning tools!).

One valuable lesson that Mary’s ‘Lockdown’ Exhibition has to offer, especially to fellow artists, is the value of carefully and conscientiously documenting your artworks. For Mary may no longer own most of the paintings she has exhibited in her daily show; but since she has taken care to keep high-resolution photos of all her work, including relevant details, she is able to re-introduce herself to us as one of Kenya’s most important expressionist painters. Hopefully, she will soon transform her show into a book, YouTube video or documentary film to introduce an even wider audience to her artistry.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

JUST MERCY: A FILM REVIEW

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (July 1st 2020)

The systemic racism and flagrant discrimination against people of color that still exists, especially in the southern parts of the US, could not be more artfully portrayed than in the new Outlier Society -- Warner Bros feature film, ‘Just Mercy’. It stars Jamie Fox as Walter McMillian, a black man sitting on death row, convicted for a murder of a white woman that he did not commit and Michael B Jordan, who played the ‘bad brother’ Killmonger who came to Wakanda to seize the throne from his half-brother in ‘Black Panther’. As Bryan Stevenson, Jordon plays the Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer who’s made it his life mission to liberate innocent black men from the shackles of post-modern slavery that finds them incarcerated and inexorably lined up on death row in the USA.

‘Just Mercy’ is a film that’s sure to debunk any illusion that one might still hold that America is the ‘home of the free’. It’s a film that’s right on time as the world (including many Americans) wake up to what’s been described as America’s ‘original sin’, that is the enslavement of African people starting as far back as 1619 when the first Africans were brought in bondage to Richmond, Virginia.

The ‘I can’t breathe’ murder of George Floyd effectively illustrated the ongoing nature of systemic racism and the life-threatening nature of black people’s everyday lives. It’s also amplified the role of the Black Lives Matter social movement in further raising national and international awareness of the need to finally challenge the systems that have historically oppressed people of color in order that they finally may be free.

Based on Bryan Stevenson’s award-winning memoir, ‘Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption’, the film is unabashed in its portrait of racism and the mean-spirited extent to which white people will go to keep black people enslaved in one way or other. But the film also presents the power of hope and the value of persistence and perseverance, qualities that Stevenson has in abundance. Against all odds, he defiantly outwits the entire racist system by ultimately trusting the rule of law as well as a higher power.

Racists largely stole the rule of law in Alabama where the story is set, with Stevenson meeting roadblock after roadblock with inexhaustible energy and indefatigable ingenuity. Everyone in town has been corrupted by racism (which is why it’s seen as systemic). From the local sheriff to the judge hearing the solid evidence that Stevenson unearths to prove Walter’s innocence, the system is rigged, entrenched to ensure Walter and Stevenson won’t win. But the lawyer perseveres and ultimately, ‘Just Mercy’ is about the triumphant power of hope and grace.

The acting of both Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx was deeply affecting. Just watching the film’s trailer is weep-able. The injustice of centuries is finally being exposed even as the film proves the transformative power of art to illustrate powerful stories that are highly instructive and inspirational as well.  

HAMILTON: HISTORIC HIP HOP MUSICAL STREAMING ONLINE

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted July 8 2020 for Business Daily)

Alexander Hamilton would have remained a name easily forgotten in history but for one man, the Puerto Rican-American composer Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote and starred in the award-winning Broadway musical, ‘Hamilton’ which is now available to watch online as of last Friday, July 3^rd.  

With his ingeniously-crafted (and brilliantly choreographed) hip hop musical, Miranda has immortalized the one American founding father whose face appears on a US bank note but was never a US president. However, Hamilton was the country’s first Treasury Secretary as well as the man who actually established America’s first national bank back at the end of the 18^th century, soon after his country won its revolutionary war and declaring its Independence from British colonial rule.

Thanks to Miranda’s foresight and desire to democratize Broadway musicals, he also chose to independently fund the filming of Hamilton back in 2016 when its first cast included Miranda himself playing the title role. His aim had been to make his musical more accessible to people unacquainted with the joy and genius of the musical art form. It was also to reach out to especially Latino youth who could ill-afford the price of a Broadway ticket which is at minimum USD100 (KSh10,300) a shot.

It’s the product of that three-day semi-professional filming that resulted in the video that is now streaming online. And in spite of the viewer not having been at the live performance in New York where the film was shot, the video captures the dazzling dynamism of Hamilton’s amazing life story: his rise from rags to riches, from obscurity to world renown, and finally from his super-status as George Washington’s ‘right hand man’ to his sudden and tragic demise in a dual with his former law partner, Aaron Burr.

One might ask, who would care to see the story of a dead American who lived almost 300 years ago? It’s a fair question, especially when most musicals are about white people whose lives are rarely relevant to our everyday experience. But as a Latino (not considered ‘white’ in America) who fell in love with musical theatre in an early age, Miranda realized he’d rarely get great roles to play unless he created them himself. So he started by writing ‘In the Heights’, a musical based on life in his Puerto Rican neighborhood, Washington Heights.

Then he read Ron Chernow’s definitive biography on Alexander Hamilton who was the only immigrant (said to also have a drop or two of African blood) among all the founding fathers. He got to work on his own musical interpretation of Hamilton after that.

What makes this show especially significant is that Miranda consciously cast the whole production with brilliant actors, singers and dancers of color. Additionally, Hamilton’s story is all told in rap and hip-hop, making it particularly appealing to youth.

But personally, I am still humming many Hamilton songs since the story, lyrics, music and choreography combine to make it one of the most memorable musical productions that I have ever seen.

Hamilton: An American Musical FULL SOUNDTRACK