January 28, 2023

BUSINESS • RepDat TV - JRep Dat TV free-to-air 24hr TV channel Representing Black British Culture through entertainment, news and current affairs from the UK and Worldwide. https://www.repdattv.com/ • Trixy -Looking for an experienced magician with outstanding skills for your next event or party?Well, look no further! Magician Trixy is the perfect choice for any occasion throughout London. Specialising in performing close-up magical illusions, it will be a night that your guests will never forget! https://www.magiciantrixy.co.uk/ • Rock Steady Rum Lounge - With a vibrant evening menu and a brand-new bar serving a heady range of drinks and cocktails, accompanied by a Rock Steady-inspired soundtrack. During the day we’ve added new culinary twists to complement regular day-time favourites. Located at 128 Gipsy Hill, London, SE19 1PL, T: 020 8670 4030 https://www.rocksteadyrumlounge.com/ • The Kickback - We at The Kickback are a fresh events company targeting Black and Mixed Heritage professionals in London. We have a clear vision of what we want to build in this world; we imagine a world where young professional people can be authentic, connect and have fun with new like-minded people at a social event beyond the typical nightclub. Everything we do is helping to build that world, from connecting single Black men and Single Black women to making a space for Black professionals in London and around the world. They specialise in singles, networking and social events. https://www.wearethekickback.com/ EVENTS • John Legend (Royal Albert Hall, 5-6 April) - EGOT holder and multi-platinum artist John Legend returns to the Royal Albert Hall in 2023. Legend has garnered twelve Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and an Emmy Award, making him the first African-American man to earn an EGOT. Legend has starred in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert in 2018 and also joined The Voice in 2019.. As a philanthropist, Legend initiated the #FREEAMERICA campaign in 2015 to change the national conversation surrounding America’s misguided criminal justice policies and to end mass incarceration. https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2023/john-legend/ •I am Not Black (Baron's Court Theatre 31st Jan - 4th Feb) - Temz Thomas has been asked to give a speech at his old school about how his time there shaped him into the man he is today. While searching his old bedroom for his Blackberry from when he was in school Temz goes on a nostalgic trip down memory lane. n this solo performance, writer Akin Wright is asking the question where do you fit in when you're ‘too white for the black kids and too white for the white kids’? 'I am not Black' is a one-man show written and performed by Akin Wright and directed by Joseph Junkere. https://www.baronscourttheatre.com/i-am-not-black • Reggae Brunch (London dates 21/01, 04/02, 11/02,18/02, 04/03/, 11/03, 18/03) -London’s craziest brunch; rum punch & jerk chicken in a secret location!. Put on your lei, blow your whistle and follow the leader all the way to the most unique brunch, featuring a whole hour of bottomless rum punch, 3-course Caribbean meal and the infamous ‘reggae brunch’ show* (one-off events may differ and bingo events excluded) our bottomless rum punch starts from when the doors open, so don’t dare snooze to that alarm because we wait for no one! Once your thirst has been clenched, our reggae girls will be serving up your 3 courses of Caribbean food to you. Meanwhile, our resident dj will be spinning all your favourite reggae, soca, bashment, afro, ska & even commercial hits to hit everyone’s taste and of course to compliment the day – our host with the most, giving you the most banter and hype you’d ever experience. Events in London, Birmingham, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Wolverhampton. http://www.reggaebrunch.uk/ • Man Fi Get Bun (04 February, Hackney Empire) - Man Fi Get Bun is a hilariously funny Jamaican comedy play. Telling the story of one of those nowadays pastors, who we would refer to as a Sunday Ginal, just in the church to make money. Starring Charles Tomlin and Maxwell ‘Bashy’ Grant with co-stars Juliet Shanks, Suezette Barrett Ennis and Lloyd Chat Bout. https://hackneyempire.co.uk/whats-on/man-fi-get-bun/ • When We Were Kings 4th and 11th February - An online program focused on self-determination, accountability and leadership for black men raising and those black raising black boys. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-we-were-kings-tickets-510130994537?aff=ebdssbdestsearch • Gregory Maqoma ǀ Thuthuka Sibisi: Broken Chord (Sadlers's Wells Theatre, 17-18 March) - Broken Chord moves between concert, dance and performance, retelling of the story of the first African choir which performed in Great Britain and the US, in the late 19th century. • LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE FLY IN LEAGUE WITH THE NIGHT (Tate Modern until 26 February)- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people. This exhibition brings together around 70 works from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date. The figures in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are not real people – she creates them from found images and her own imagination. Both familiar and mysterious, they invite viewers to project their own interpretations, and raise important questions of identity and representation. Often painted in spontaneous and instinctive bursts, her figures seem to exist outside of a specific time or place. Her paintings are coupled with poetic titles, such as Tie the Temptress to the Trojan 2016 and To Improvise a Mountain 2018. Writing is central to Yiadom-Boakye’s artistic practice, as she has explained: ‘I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.’ Yiadom-Boakye was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 2018 and was the 2012 recipient of the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/lynette-yiadom-boakye don WC2N 5BY BOOKS • Black Cloud Rising A Novel by David Wright Faladé- (publication date February 1st) - By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild—a one-armed, impassioned Abolitionist—set out from Portsmouth to hunt down the rebel guerillas and extinguish the threat. • Assembly by Natasha Brown - Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going. The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?

4.0 out of 5 Amazon

3.9 out of 5 Goodreads

• Here Again Now -by Okechukwu Nzelu Published: 2 March 2023- Achike Okoro feels like his life is coming together at last. His top-floor flat in Peckham is as close to home as he can imagine and after years of hard work, he's about to get his break as an actor. He's even persuaded his father, Chibuike, to move in with him, grateful to offer the man who raised him as a single parent a home of his own. Between filming trips, Achike is snatching a few days in London with Ekene, his best friend of twenty years, the person who makes him feel whole. Achike can put the terrible things that happened behind him at last; everything is going to be alright. Maybe even better. But after a magical night, when Achike and Ekene come within a hair's breadth of admitting their feelings for each other, a devastating event rips all three men apart. In the aftermath, it is Ekene and Chibuike who must try to rebuild.

PODCASTS • Dane Baptiste Questions Everything - The podcast where comedian Dane Baptiste, producer Howard Cohen and a special guest pose the questions that need to be asked. Our special guests are amazing people from the world of film, TV, media and comedy. Dane Baptiste Questions Everything, this has been an Insanity Podcasts production. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/danebaptistequestionseverything. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

•Black History Bites - Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health (BLAM UK) is proud to offer short, bite sized, and accessible global Black history and cultural podcast episodes to aid you in your Black history learning. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/black-history-bites/id1515225350 RADIO • People Person by Candice Carty-Williams - From Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of Queenie, a funny and frank portrait of a young woman trying to find belonging. Dimple is an aspiring social media influencer, disconnected from her wayward dad and her four half-siblings who are dotted across south London - until one fateful night when she needs to call on them. In this opening episode of a 10-part abridgement for BBC Sounds, a teenage Dimple meets her brothers and sisters for the first time.https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0cdhdsj

FILM/TV •St Omer (in UK cinemas 3rd February) - Saint Omer was the richly deserved winner of the Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival’s runner-up prize. It builds on Diop’s sharply-drawn work as a documentarian – her most recent, Nous (2021), took an empathetic look at Paris’s underclass.And she uses that same documentary nous to full effect in Saint Omer. The story's based on the real-life trial of Fabienne Kabou in 2015, a Senegalese immigrant accused of murdering her 15-month-old baby. Diop attended the trial and took copious notes, with dialogue from the trial making its way into the text of the screenplay. Her fictionalisation of the events contextualise the prosecution within the borders of immigration, motherhood and colonialism. (TIME OUT) •Empire of Light (in UK cinemas now) - Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a troubled front-of-house manager at a seafront picture palace, who forms a romantic bond with a much younger employee (Micheal Ward) • Truth Be Told -Apple TV’s TRUTH BE TOLD starring Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer and Gabrielle Union. Season three of the NAACP Image Award-winning series will debut with the first episode on Friday, January 20, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday. WHO is WHO? • Curtis Holder - Curtis Holder is a London-based artist who draws using graphite and coloured pencils. His work focuses on people and the human form. In 2020 Holder won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, a prestigious portraiture competition televised in the UK. •Sonia Boyce - (born 1962) is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. With an emphasis on collaborative work, Boyce has been working closely with other artists since 1990, often involving improvisation and spontaneous performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK. In February 2020, Boyce was selected by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2022, the first black woman to do so. In April 2022, Boyce won the Venice Biennale's top Golden Lion prize with her work Feeling Her Way. •Nokx Majozi - Nokx Majozi remembers well the very first pie she cooked at the Holborn Dining Room. “It was a grouse, chicken mousse and girolles pithivier,” she says, looking slightly misty-eyed at the memory. That was back in 2014. Today, aged 42, she is number two to executive chef Calum Franklin. She runs the famed Pie Room with its slab marble work surfaces and its shiny copper moulds. The production of the bronzed pastry-clad wonders filled with pork or mutton or cheese and onion and many other things besides is down to her. She also regularly runs service for the whole dining room. “We call her Chief Pie Maker,” Franklin says simply. It’s all a very long way from her beginnings in Durban, South Africa. “My father was the one who cooked when I was kid,” Majozi says. “I started cooking with him because it meant I got to spend time alone with him away from my four siblings.” Not that her parents were delighted when the kitchen became her choice of career. “They wanted me to be a nurse or a doctor.” But she was determined. She finished her training and went to work in hotels first in South Africa, then at Disney World in Florida before coming to London. “It was closest to France, but it was also a place where I spoke the language. (THE TIMES) WHAT I AM PERSONALLY RECOMMENDING? TOP 10 FOR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1. Get tickets for the hottest show in town 'Mandela the Musical'. I saw it last weekend and it was amazing! 2. Go see the Till movie. 3. Book a table at Tatale Restaurant in the Africa Centre. 4. Watch Riches on ITVX (Riches is about the beauty empire built by ruthless businessman Stephen Richards). 5. Book dinner at Parks Edge Bar & Kitchen 6. See the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye exhibition at the Tate Modern 7. See Will Smith's redemption in the well-reviewed movie Emancipation. 8. Book your tickets for John Legend at the Royal Albert Hall in April. 9. Have dinner and drinks at Idris Elba's Kings Cross restaurant Porte Noir (4.7 review on Google) 10. Chicken, Burger N Chips at Brixton House Theatre