Posted May 19th 2013

 (PETER SALAFF CHAIRMAN STRING AND PIANO CHAMBER MUSIC CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART)

CLEVELAND, OHIO – The Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) is proud to announce that the OMER STRING QUARTET has won the coveted 2013 Fischoff National Chamber Competition’s Grand Prize and Gold Medal in the Senior String Division. Over the course of three days, 48 ensembles representing more than two dozen countries competed. Quartet members violinists Mason Yu (student of Joel Smirnoff and Ivan Zenaty) and Erica Tursi (student of William Preucil), Joseph Locicero (viola student of Lynne Ramsey) and Alexander Cox (cello student of Melissa Kraut) will participate in a Winner’s Tour of the Midwestern United States this fall.

The quartet is coached  jointly by members of the Cavani Quartet, in residence at CIM, and Peter Salaff, CIM’s chairman of string and piano chamber music. The Omer Quartet was appointed Apprentice Quartet  for 2012-2013 season and serves as the Outreach Quartet for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, under the mentorship of Annie Fullard , first violinist of the Cavani Quartet. The Omer follows in the footsteps of CIM alumni award-winning quartets including the Linden, Miro , Biava, Maia and Aeolus quartets.

“We are very honored and excited to have been chosen as the Grand Prize Award winners at the prestigious Fischoff Competition,” said cellist Alexander Cox.  “It was an exhilarating experience to be surrounded by such a high level of ensemble artistry. We are proud to represent CIM  and very grateful for the support of our  coaches, teachers and friends.”

“On behalf of my colleagues in the Cavani Quartet and Peter Salaff, we are elated that the wonderful performances  and tremendous work of the Omer Quartet this past weekend earned them such fantastic honors,” said Annie Fullard. “The Fischoff Competition is very special , and these awards will offer the Omer Quartet amazing opportunities to continue sharing their beautiful musical spirit with the world.”

Now in its fortieth year, The Fischoff Competition is the largest chamber music competition in the world and attracts the finest young instrumentalists from across the country and around the globe to the campus of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.

By Phil Trexler, Beacon Journal Staff Writer

Posted May 19th 2013

Her daughter has yet to come home.

Carmilla Robinson wants no one to forget that.

Two weeks have passed. Mother’s Day has come and gone, and yet 19-year-old Taylor Robinson remains missing.

On Saturday, a crowd nearing 200 or more joined the Akron mother and her family at the Summit Lake Community Center to rally for the return of Taylor Robinson, who was last seen by her mother May 3.

A tearful Carmilla Robinson addressed the crowd, as did Taylor’s stepfather, Jeff Rucker. Joining the family at the podium during the hour-long event were several local ministers, Akron police Det. Dalvin Horton, Mayor Don Plusquellic and Councilman Ken Jones.

“You all are my hopes,” Carmilla Robinson said, her face awash in tears.

“You all are just the light. I know she’s going to come home. I’m just asking for you all, please don’t forget, in a month, if she don’t make it tomorrow … I’m not asking you all to spend every waking moment. I’m just asking you, please, don’t forget she’s not at home with us.”

Taylor Robinson’s family has been looking for her for 16 days, ever since Carmilla Robinson returned to a Kipling Street home where she had left her daughter the night before to work as a health care aide.

That morning, when Carmilla Robinson drove up, Taylor was gone from her patient’s house. Ominously, her coat and shoes were left behind. Her cellphone was shut down that same morning and has not rebooted since.

Akron police detectives have pledged to make the case a top priority. Just last week, 38 officers and detectives searched a series of vacant houses and garages near the Kipling Street neighborhood. The FBI has joined the investigation, providing at least four agents to the case.

Rucker, Taylor’s stepfather, said he has spent most every day walking the city streets, handing out fliers to anyone he may have missed the days before. Rucker reminded everyone that — but for the grace of God — they could be standing at the podium and not him.

Family members say Taylor is an aspiring nurse, who works two jobs while attending classes at Kent State University’s Stark campus. She has never been in trouble, never run away, shirked her school or work responsibilities or dismissed her family.

“We never thought this would happen in our household,” Rucker told the gathering. “But this could happen to anybody, you just never know. No matter how much you pray for it, no matter how much you talk to your kids, anything can happen.

“[But] I need you all’s help. We need all your help. I know there’s a lot of people out there working, but sometimes I feel so alone … Please, somebody tell us something.”

Minister Michael Starks implored the crowd to help Taylor Robinson’s family. He said her disappearance is a community dilemma, not a single family problem. Someone somewhere knows something, he said.

“We need to be responsible and accountable for what’s happening in our community. It’s on us,” Starks said.

“We have a family here that’s in disarray and they’re grieving … But they need more than our prayers. They need our action.”

Rev. Sharon Wilson, Taylor Robinson’s cousin, said she believes the college student is being held captive somewhere by someone. And she forgives the abductor.

But now, she said, it’s time for her cousin to be set free so she may rejoin her family and bring “victory in Akron for Taylor Robinson.”

“God is a forgiving God and we have to be forgiving people,” Wilson said. “And we are sending out a message to them today to let them know: We forgive them. Even though they haven’t released her yet.

“The forgiving has to start today with us. So we forgive them. But there’s one thing I do know, they’ve got to release her and let her go.”

Plusquellic assured the Robinson family and the community that detectives and the FBI are working the case every day, fielding tips and talking to friends and family of the missing woman.

Carmilla Robinson, he said, could symbolize any mother, at any time, in any neighborhood. But the mayor, as the ministers preached before him, said the police are only as good as the support it receives from members of the community.

He said this case needs a Charles Ramsey-like moment, an instance when someone in the community sees something and takes action, just as the Cleveland man and his neighbors did May 6 in helping free three Cleveland women held captive in a house for 10 years.

“[Taylor] is our daughter, in a way,” the mayor said. “And specifically for her mother, we all hope we can make this turn out to be a great news story when we welcome back Miss Robinson.”

Crimestoppers has offered a reward for helping locate Taylor Robinson.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Akron police at 330-375-2490. Anonymous tips may be left at http://ci.akron.oh.us/ASP/tip.html.

Information may also be provided anonymously by calling Summit County Crimestoppers at 330-434-COPS(2677).

Phil Trexler can be reached at 330-996-3717 or ptrexler@thebeaconjournal.com. He can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PhilTrexler

By Yvette Carnell

Posted May 19th 2013

Charles Ramsey rescued three women from their captor. I don’t know what activity Ramsey had been engaged in three weeks ago, or three years ago for that matter,  but on that day, he was a hero.

Among black folk, you’d think he’d have been greeted with a hero’s applause, but Ramsey was instead met with a series of memes deriding him as doppelganger for the grinning barber in the movie Coming to America.

Elite bourgeois Negroes all over the web began hand wringing and wondering how Ramsey’s bad teeth and unkept ‘fro would make them look to white people. In less than a week a Black hero was torn apart and ripped to shreds by his own community.

In The Root Helena Andrews acknowledges the bravery of internet sensations Sweet Brown, Antoine Dodson, and Charles Ramsey, but then ends here:

Ramsey undoubtedly knows the trajectory of the viral star. I’m sure that Ramsey, in between eating ribs and listening to salsa music with alleged kidnapper Ariel Castro, had time to click on a YouTube video or two. Whether he’d seen Sweet Brown’s dental commercial or the one for Dodson’s “S*x Offender Tracker” smartphone app, Ramsey, like the rest of us, probably knows a thing or two about the rewards (and price) of fame. None of that undercuts his heroism — nor should it — but it could explain the ensuing high jinks.

But Ramsey, Dodson and Sweet Brown were all speaking off the cuff and in the moment during their interactions with reporters. How can Andrews, or anyone else, assume that Ramsey was thinking of the “trajectory” of the “viral star”? We’re to assume that a man who asked that the reward money he is rightfully owed be given to the women who’d been held hostage for over a decade is thinking in terms of trajectory? Because isn’t that what poor blacks are always doing, waiting for freebies and welfare checks?

On my own personal Facebook page, Ramsey was called a “toothless fool” and an “Amos and Andy” walking minstrel show.

Is Ramsey a caricature? No. Has he been refashioned into one on the web? Yes.

The message here is clear: Poor Blacks embarrass bourgeoisie Blacks. The evocation here is…Please, per Vice President Biden, only put the clean and perfectly coiffed Blacks on TV.

If the man who rescued these women had resembled Denzel Washington or Will Smith, all of Ramsey’s critics would be bursting with race pride. But bourgeois  black folk don’t abide the unwashed horde of poor black folk, and that’s actually nothing new.

The Black Elite view mocking regular black folk as part of their job. That’s how they maintain their status within the American hierarchy. As Dr. Adolph Reed wrote in Class Notes, even Booker T. Washington “constructed a program and rhetoric that promised group progress through acquiescence to white supremacy.” Since then, Elite Blacks have continued Washington’s Politics of Respectability, determining standards for Black folk, especially the Black poor, based upon white expectations and arbitrary standards of decency.

I fear that the time for the Black poor to break away from the Black Elite is long overdue. If you do a good deed and you’re rewarded by your perceived betters with snark and condescension, what are you in it for? Where is the cultural kinship in that? Or, to put it more aptly, why does that kinship  flow in only one direction?

Whenever the Black Elite show up in the pages of Ebony or Essence or Black Enterprise to laud their own achievements, Black poor folk cheer them on. But when someone like Ramsey does well for himself, all he gets is an offhanded dismissal. Maybe this is a wake-up call. If the Ramsey sensation causes a break away moment, then that’s a good thing.

For what it’s worth, I view Ramsey’s action on that day and in that moment as an act of heroism. I don’t know what I would’ve done or how I would’ve reacted to seeing a random woman clawing at a door. I can only hope that I would’ve reacted as Ramsey did. Too bad he didn’t look like Denzel while doing it.

Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Your Black World and Founder of BreakingBrown. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

By Asa Lovechild

Posted May 19th 2013

Comedian and daytime host,Whoopi Goldberg has bigger fish to fry. She has no time to worry about who is staying and leaving on The View. The projects that she has cooking are far more important to the African American community as a whole. According to Shadow and Act, it has been announced that Goldberg is planning to do a ten series documentary on the history of blacks in entertainment.

After the viewing of her documentary on Moms Mabley entitled, “I Got Somethin’ To Tell You”, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Goldberg announced that she would be taking on the gigantic task. According to RealScreen.com, Goldberg’s perspective documentary will chronicle the history of blacks in entertainment as far back as the 1800s. Goldberg was noted as saying that her inspiration for the project was inspired by “I Got Somethin’ To Tell You”.

Goldberg used Kickstarter to fund her current documentary but is said to be looking for heavier financing for the new venture. Goldberg, realizing how much money it takes to complete a successful documentary, like her Moms Mabley piece, is not taking any chances with this next project.

She said,“I’m going to go to American Express and several other places to see if they’ll give me the money to make a 10-part documentary about black entertainment from the 1800s ’til now.”  She added, “I salute documentary filmmakers… I was lucky I had Kickstarter.” “I know it seems weird [that I struggled to raise money]… A lot of people, they said, ‘Pssh, you’re Whoopi Goldberg.’ I said, ‘Really? Why do you think I work so much? I’ve got family, and there’s only one pay check.” Goldberg is no stranger to producing, as she was very intricate in getting “Sister Act” to Broadway. Although putting together the manpower to do a Broadway show can be taxing, taking on a documentary, as the director and the producer can prove to be a bit more involved.

Asa Lovechild is an accomplished actress and singer out of New York City and a supporter of  One Billion Rising

Follow @asalovechild

www.facebook.com/asaentertainmentgroup

www.asalovechildworld.com

By Amanda Terkel

Posted May 17th 2013

WASHINGTON — As Republicans are increasingly calling the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks a cover-up worse than Watergate and even floating impeachment, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) urged a note of caution on Sunday, saying he wasn’t yet willing to go that far.

“With all due respect, I think this is a serious issue,” said McCain on ABC’s “This Week.” “I will even give the president the benefit of the doubt on some of these things. We need a select committee.”

On Thursday, Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) accused President Barack Obama of overseeing “the most egregious cover-up in American history.” He added that “people may be starting to use the ‘I word’” before long.

Former Arksansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) also said on his radio show this week, “I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term. As bad as Watergate was because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die. And President Obama has yet to explain why did they die.”

McCain also defended Obama against impeachment during a late February town hall, saying, “I do not believe that the president has committed impeachable offenses — that’s high crimes.”

Still, the senator did tell ABC’s Martha Raddatz on Sunday that he does believe the Obama administration’s response to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, constituted a “cover-up” because “there was willful removal of information, which was obvious.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was similarly reluctant to back impeachment talk during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“I don’t at this point, I will say,” she said when asked if she supported it. “But that doesn’t mean that these allegations aren’t serious.”

The Benghazi issue was reignited last week after House Republicans held a hearing on the attacks and ABC News published a story showing that administration talking points offered immediately after the attacks went through several rounds of editing by officials, including in the State Department.

While many Republicans have charged political interference, others — including longtime State Department reporter Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post — have noted that it seems more like a case of bureaucratic in-fighting.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have used the Benghazi affair to argue that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now unfit to be president — should she ever decide to run. McCain, however, was less willing to come to the same conclusion on Sunday.

“She had to have been in the loop some way, but we don’t know for sure,” he said, adding that he would like to see Clinton back on Capitol Hill to testify again.

“We need a select committee that interviews everybody,” he said. “I don’t know what level of scandal, unquote, this rises to, but I know it rises to the level where it requires a full and complete ventilation of these facts.”

By James

Posted May 17th 2013

The family of Malcolm Shabazz has been relatively mum about the circumstances surrounding the 29-year old’s death.  The family issued a statement on the matter, not giving many details about the situation.

Shabazz didn’t die in Tijuana, as originally reported.  Actually, authorities are claiming that he died in Mexico city from what appears to be a beating.   Police are looking into the incident as a homicide.   They were called to the scene at 3:30 am, after receiving reports about an injured man.   Police say that Malcolm was beaten, but there is no evidence of weapons being used.

Police are also saying that Malcolm was out that night and allegedly had a few beers before he died.

“To all who knew him, he offered kindness, encouragement and hope for a better tomorrow,” the Shabazz family said in a statement Friday. “Although his bright light and boundless potential are gone from this life, we are grateful that he now rests in peace in the arms of his grandparents and the safety of God.”

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney said that the death surprised and stunned her.   She’d traveled with Shabazz to Libya and served as his mentor.

“I was saddened, stunned, shocked, to read about the murder of young Malcolm,” former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney said.

“Many of my closest associates have personal memories of their time with him and of his efforts to reach out to them for help,” McKinney said. “He was writing a book.”

By Tina Kaufmann

Posted May 17th 2013

(GLORIA AND YVONNE POINTER)

CLEVELAND – Cleveland police announced charges Wednesday against the man they arrested a day earlier for the 1984 murder of 14-year-old Gloria Pointer.

Hernandez Warren, 58, was charged with aggravated murder. His case will now be handed over to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.

On Dec. 6, 1984, Pointer called a classmate to walk with her to Harry E. Davis School. But at 7:30 a.m., the friend said Pointer never came and notified the principal when she got to school.

Witnesses said they saw the victim walking on Orville Avenue toward her school with a man following behind her. Then, the two disappeared near 10515 Orville Ave. Pointer’s body was found around 10:30 a.m. at the bottom of a fire escape stairwell by an apartment building custodian.

At a news conference, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty said they got a break in the case in April through cold case tips, re-examined evidence and the medical examiner pointing them to him.

“Warren had some connection to the Pointer family,” but McGinty wouldn’t provide further details.

Gloria’s mother, Yvonne, said she has spent half of her life fighting for justice for her daughter.
“To all people out there with missing persons and unsolved homicides, never give up. Keep the hope alive. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Gloria’s murder was the 157th homicide of 1984 in Cleveland. The department said they will investigate “all cold cases, all homicides, until arrests are made.”

A look back at Warren’s past in Cuyahoga County shows he’s no stranger to the court system. Records note he served time in prison from 1985-2000 for rape, kidnapping and assault.

Warren was taken into police custody on Tuesday after a positive DNA match linked him to the nearly 30 year old crime.

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By Maria Lloyd

Posted May 16th 2013

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS MOVIE TRAILER

(ZOE SALDANA PLAYS UHURA IN ‘STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS’ IN THEATERS MAY 17TH 2013)

Beautiful and talented actress Zöe Saldaña revealed her thoughts about love and relationships in a recent interview with Latina. The African-Latin beauty who was born to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother, shared her viewpoint on love and heartbreak. In June 2010, she and her long-time, on-again off-again boyfriend Keith Britton announced their engagement. Sadly, the following year the two decided to amicably split after 11 years of dating. The actress then dated actor Bradley Cooper, only for her to end the relationship with him in the latter part of 2012.

As one can only imagine, Zöe has experienced immense heartbreak since ending her two public relationships, but she was able to pull herself together quickly.

Read excerpts from her interview with Latina below:

On heartache and losing Bradley :

I feel it [heartache], I allow myself to feel it. Of course everyone around me will notice how it made me feel, but I tend to recover very easily.

On recovering from heartbreak:

When I lose, when my heart is broken, when I lose a competition, when I don’t get something, when something doesn’t go my way or I have a heartbreak or whatever… maybe I haven’t really fallen in love yet, had that crash boom bam in my life yet, but I tend to recover… healthy and smoothly. And I’ve been that way up until now. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

On wanting a man vs. needing a man:

I need water, you know what I’m saying? I need to exercise, I need to eat. To be with a man, should be a want. I don’t need anybody.

By Nikki Ferrell

Posted May 16th 2013