Wednesday, November 17, 2010

My Cousin James Lloydovich Patterson Get Well

My cousin James Lloydovich Patterson is now very ill residing in Washington D.C. James and I exchanged poetry , letters over the years losing touch a few years ago, Unfortunately our family is like most dysfunctional; I am trying to connect by reaching out in an effort to salvage our family, land, art, foundation of the Hagar family. With my cousin James who is a wonderful poet/writer is unable to maintain his own matters along with his mother Vera Aralova pieces of lost art is a tragedy.. As a family we need to stop all the in house fighting. Time to concentrate on what is important our family. James we need you and love you.


The Biography of my cousin James Lloydovich Patterson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Lloydovich Patterson (Russian: Джемс Ллойдович Паттерсон; born 17 July 1933) is a Russian writer and child actor of African American descent.

1 Biography
2 Selected works
3 References
4 External links

Biography
James Lloydovich Patterson was born in Moscow on July 17, 1933, the eldest of three children born to an African American immigrant to the Soviet Union and his Russian wife. Having arrived in the USSR as an unemployed actor looking for work during the Great Depression in 1932, James Patterson's father Lloyd Patterson, just twenty-two, decided to remain permanently after meeting and falling in love with James' mother, the theater artist Vera Ippolitovna Aralova.
James Patterson appeared in the Soviet cinema as a baby in the 1936 hit Soviet film Circus – where, parallel to his own life, he played the role of the dark-skinned child of an interracial couple being brought up in the manner of the politically egalitarian ideals officially embraced by the Soviet system.
Following Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, James and his mother were evacuated to the east, while his father, who had obtained a position with Soviet radio as a presenter for English-speaking listeners abroad, remained on the job in Moscow. He died during the war after suffering serious wounds in the bombardment of the city in 1942.[1]
James was a member of the Komsomol and graduated from the Riga Nakhimov Naval School, a prestigious military academy for boys of high-school age, in 1951.[1] Lauded as a model cadet, he proceeded to receive further training as a submariner in Leningrad. Commissioned as an officer in the Soviet Navy, Patterson began serving with the Black Sea Fleet in 1955.[1]
By the 1960s, Patterson's professional ambitions had turned to writing. Still serving in the navy, he published his first literary debut, the poetry collection Russia. Africa in 1963. Leaving the Soviet Navy, Patterson graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1964, drawing inspiration from subjects as diverse as the sea, the beginning of the Space Age, and the racial tension around the time of the desegregation efforts of the American civil rights movement. Having authored a number of works by the late 1960s, he was admitted as a member of the USSR Union of Writers in 1967.
The sweeping political and economic changes during the breakdown of the Soviet Union were also accompanied by profound difficulties for the new Russian society; a frequent visitor to his father's homeland, James Patterson and his mother immigrated to the United States from the Russian Federation in the 1990s.


more info about the family...

Lloyd Walton Patterson
Born 1911, Westfield, NJ - Died 1942, Moscow, USSR

In the summer of 1932, 21 African-Americans - including the young Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes - departed for Russia with plans to make a movie, “Black and White,” in which they would realistically depict racial inequalities in America. Their often comic misadventures - caused principally by the Soviets’ glaring lack of knowledge of American race relations - caused the collapse of the program after only a few months.
Hughes and most others departed Russia, but among the few to remain was Lloyd Patterson. A graduate of Hampton Institute, he found in Russia the interior design jobs that he could not get in the U.S. He married a Ukrainian artist, Vera Aralova, and stayed in Moscow. Together, they designed stage sets, and he worked on some of Moscow’s most prominent buildings.


The Patterson family with a census taker in a 1938 photo from the Russian State Archives. Lloyd at center, Jimmy to his right. Vera Aralova standing.

They had three sons, one of whom, Jimmy, was to become famous throughout the Soviet Union for years to come for his role in a spectacular Stalinist film on race called “Circus.” Unlike his father’s failed movie project, the 1936 “Circus” was an extraordinarily popular film and young Jimmy Patterson became a hero of Soviet race relations. In the film, his mother, forced to flee America with her black child, finds comfort and stardom in a Soviet circus. The evil ringmaster tries to take advantage of her but she finds love with another performer. In the climax, the ringmaster reveals her shameful secret, but everyone in the audience embraces the child - literally - and sings to him, fully accepting him. In the film and in real life, Jimmy Patterson became living proof of how a real-life artist fled America to find greater tolerance and professional opportunity in the USSR, and at age four he was a star.


In a still from the movie, Jimmy with Lyubov’ Orlova (Marion Dixon) and her new love.
This more extravagant poster for the movie “Circus” points to the glitzy, blockbuster style movie it was in the 1930’s. Note the stylized version of Jimmy with the ringmaster, center left.

James Patterson eventually joined the Soviet Navy and also became a well-known poet. He lives today in Washington, DC.

Here he is pictured with a mask of the mixed-race poet in a 1992 National Geographic story on Aleksandr Pushkin.

This extraordinary portrait of Lloyd Patterson is a relic not just of a collapsed regime, but also of the largely unknown struggles of African-Americans. Few Americans know of those who immigrated to Russia seeking racial equality, and few left a mark on the Soviet people as much as the Pattersons did.



more information about my cousin James Patterson

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The other James Patterson
There is another James Patterson, a Moscow poet. His father was a member of group that Langston Hughes brought to the Soviet Union. Their purpose was to make a film, but nothing became of it. Instead, the father became a broadcaster in the North American service of Radio Moscow. He died during World War II during what his widow said was a German air raid but I think was a political killing by the secret police.
Here's a bit more about the Russian James Patterson in the middle of BIO Antero Pietila HOME

Monday, November 15, 2010

Jackie Wilson - Lonely teardrops

Sleeping With A Legend

Revealing his worth
rubbing the backside
of her high rise behind
just palms
entertaining journeys quiet snore

soon awaken by legend stepping stairs
coloratura a sweep ear
Wilson's "Danny Boy"
hands actuate down
between their appetite
a turn lovemaking

peaceful cries
kind prodding timidity
riding out together into a crab crawl
clench carriage

barely a respite
sweeten air resting
doff a moment
legend stroking this wanton woman

laid inside his journey
sogginess content
patting ripples of her damp hair

journey lip bumping his cross
tonguing away
hardness cutting a sliver of skin
for man to suck a bit drop of blood

now love ... we are united


© 2010 Lepadah


Comments

Messages in this Discussion




Sleeping With A Legend

From: GuyBlakeKett (GuyBlakeKett)
Last Visit: 5:29 AM
To: lepadahxxx
Unread
Posted: Nov 16 10 05:30 AM
Message:

sinuous & twisting. I like it.



g



From: dreambluestar (dreambluestar)


To: lepadahxxx
Unread
Posted: Nov 17 10 04:20 AM
Message: 



lepadah,

this matches my mind's eye view of you...

 

slm

Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Making Of You

His guitars against the wall
kung fu stickers
drumsticks peeking out pocket
sagging Levi's
braces, afro pick, curly fro
his favorite Yankee baseball cap
the lone saxophone
puberty passing thru

adolescent testosterone
breaking in Plan B
no license to rule this world
spray paint thought on pundit desk
started a little rock band
one day Nirvana

tired of father
squelching sons breath
he's so unpredictable
ascribe constant disapproval
he should understand
contest becoming a man

let stand alone
go on do that !
allow a fail
many a lesson learn
expect the burn

beating blindness out drums
slamming door to private room
doing his thing
swept away by old szhool
young nwa searching ally

lush innocence a sprout
seeking to be the superior being
adrenaline rush sugared frosted flakes
"They're great!"
lacing up sneakers
with different color shoestrings

DC foot atop album crate
prepping to practice
the art of scratch
turning expending tables

no riddled rhyme
neither sublime
speeding wheels rushing time
changing tides
astride your Birdhouse

© 2010 Lepadah

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

My man Obatala just slam this online The Blacktop a poem

The acute insight of a boy at puberty ... yo I LOVE THIS piece so much man. Tapd damn.
Two thumbs up

One Love Lepadah


The Blacktop (oba)

From: trkyounger (trkyounger)

There was a parking lot that led to another lot
which in turn led to Ms. Shimshacks candy store.
And there they stood. For the first time I was no
longer afraid of myself that spring. I was a boy
of thirteen and the city was no longer huge anymore.
Still I knew enough to stay in my part of town. But 'they'
were here. Hanging around the grocery shops, our candy
stores, in the heavy light of good, good noon. They were
our reversed 'po white trash' and they smelled of pig fat,
ashy elbows, and nappy, kinky, hair with a rank that tore
through town. Our gyms, our P.S. # 14 schoolyard, our
backyards, our cleaners. I wanted to go to sleep right
there on the blacktop and think of another city. I was
ashamed of them, of myself for looking so much like them.
'Dreams don't work this way',I kept saying to myself. But
they were finally here. Not Black people but these, these
niggers...

Monday, November 8, 2010

Moving Day

Think how the air stood
still, alone without noise
no pointy toed raccoon feet
crunching fall leaves

a thin silence in troubled air
stirring up emotion
suddenly a strong hold
around your memories

collected, bought, inherited
photographs a span
tender good years
before reality hits
from an ice cold fist
punching at you

alone boxes about the feet
more and more memories
closing in on you
deepening depression
Hitchcock's Vertigo

remember change is a good thing (so said )
lost tears in the shower
unable to let go
so you stayed drunk for days

forgetting there is no time
ignoring last weeks eviction notice
less than 48 hours
final decision to flee

or be thrown into the street
mid morning
amid neighbors rising shades
maintenance men ring of keys

suddenly heart a flee
you must leave
the premises
with everything ...

boxes, furniture old and new
pots and the dirty dishes you forgot to wash
the cat, the dog and all children's toys
a lifetime unless taken
will be discarded in next day trash

permission pickers
pulling for nice remnants
treasure trinkets from another life

do you remember
the heaviness upon chest
the ball chain burden pulling neck
forcing one to heave into a clear moment

enduring the frigidity
reality challenged
conformity that of a castaway

a birth
older, not much wiser
yet still able to dream
a virgin vision of life

© 2010 Lepadah



From: trkyounger (trkyounger)
Last Visit: 1:36 PM

To: lepadahxxx
Unread
Posted: Nov 09 10 01:38 PM
Message:

...this shyt is goooooood

forcing me to go back

wow

Peace

obatala

Monday, November 1, 2010

A Beautiful Halloween Weekend In Baltimore

This past Halloween weekend was spent away from nyc. My son and I traveled to Baltimore, Md to spend some quality time with my daughter and his big sister. The departure was necessary so we packed a small grip bag along with his guitar , my lap top and off we went. A great beautiful weekend just eating good food my daughter and I favorite place. The famous Lexington Market. We enjoyed some freshly shucked clam's from Faidley Raw Bar and venture over to the other side for the world famous All Lump Crabcake , Cream of Crab soup and fried Flounder omg ... deeeelicious . My son opted out at the invitation by Lou to try a raw clam or oyster on the house. (hehe) We teased him about the "muskrat", "Rabbit" and "Racoon" specials. So his big sister treated him to hooter's a young boy paradise of lady art. Later that afternoon we walked around the Harbor shot some pics. The time priceless bonding together. I even finished up some editing, designing cover and other issues with my upcoming book. My children enjoyed Sunday Brunch of scrambled cheese eggs, turkey bacon, apple juice for Khalil and Mimosa for grown folks. I even fried chicken, baked mac and cheese, salad enjoying a lazy Sunday. The one thing I enjoyed was the walk alone to the coffee shop for a serious cup of French Vanilla coffee and listening to the church bells ringing. God so beautiful.