Jervey Tervalon

law logo2x b

Perry Bennett

Jervey Tervalon
Hungry jazz heads owe a debt of gratitude to Perry Bennett, who rocks straight-ahead jazz while serving hot-fudge sundaes at his Pasadena coffee, ice cream and sandwich shop, Perry’s Joint, a cultural oasis that happens to sell really big sour pickles. The sandwiches have jazz-inspired names like “Birth of the......
Credit: Courtesy Barackobama.com

Barack Obama and the Company We Keep

Jervey Tervalon
It seems as though we are waiting for another shoe to fall in Barack Obama’s quest for the White House, something that will expose him as being potentially unsuitable for the presidency. It might never happen, but then again, he’s a man of the world with varied experiences — which,......

The Slow Death of a Chocolate City

Jervey Tervalon
Lacking a strong economic link to their community, many upwardly mobile African-Americans — as many as 75,000 by some estimates — deserted the community for the suburbs. —Joel Kotkin and David Friedman, The Los Angeles Riots: Causes, Myths, and Solutions ONE MORNING BACK IN THE ’80S, when I was teaching......
article placeholder

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jervey Tervalon
When I taught “Introduction to Literature” at Cal State Los Angeles, a campus where everyone, seemingly at least, is bilingual, I regularly taught Junot Diaz’s story collection Drown. I was impressed with all of the stories, but “Aguantando” stunned me. I would ask my students to read from it out......
(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Cecilia Peck

Jervey Tervalon
who was the filmmaker who had the courage to get close to the radioactive Dixie Chicks when everyone else had fled like chicken-hearted pootbutts? That would be director and actress Cecilia Peck, who hooked up with her longtime collaborator, Academy Award–winning director Barbara Kopple, to make Shut Up & Sing,......
(function(r, d, u) { var s = d.createElement(r); s.async = true; s.setAttribute('data-cfasync', false); u += '&cb=' + Date.now() + Math.random(); s.src = u; var n = d.getElementsByTagName(r)[0]; n.parentNode.insertBefore(s, n); })('script', document, '//engine.laweekly.com/?221982862');
(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Dennis Haysbert

Jervey Tervalon
As the election season explodes upon us, it’s fascinating to see a television character drive real events. But there it is, a fictional black president, now departed from a series, who paves the way for a real one. I’m not sure if presidential candidate Barack Obama is a fan of......
(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Roger Guenveur Smith

Jervey Tervalon
{mosimage}Long a fan of the extensive and impressive body of work of Roger Guenveur Smith, I decided that he was a genius when I saw him breathe through a cigarette while doing one-armed pushups in the Spike Lee–directed A Huey P. Newton Story, the film version of Smith’s Obie Award–winning......

UCLA's Black Shadow

Jervey Tervalon
Graduation day at UCLA and, as usual, I’ve managed to get myself lost on this beautiful and gigantic campus, which today is festooned in blue-and-yellow balloons and populated with countless grads in caps and gowns as far as I can see. But I can tell at a glance that these......

The Creole Connection

Jervey Tervalon
I met Dean Baquet, who was then the first African-American managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, at a dinner party when he was still new to town. I was puzzled by his appearance — he looked European to me, or maybe Middle Eastern — and I had a vague......