‘Death always feels imminent’: a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness

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In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him. In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest...
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‘You think God didn’t make gay men?’ Comedian Leslie Jones on religion, grief and getting famous at 47

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She was Saturday Night Live’s oldest hire, then faced a torrent of abuse after her role in the Ghostbusters reboot. She talks about the deaths of her mum, dad and brother – and why she’s given up dating men

It’s early evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. “Make me look skinny,” she says to the photographer’s departing back.

“I’m 6ft tall – I can’t cut my feet off,” she says, later. “I can’t stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – let me work with who I am.” Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she’s doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it’s alive, or telling her assistant to read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you find yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is low because men spend too much time in hot tubs, and their sperm has become lazy and complacent? “It’s funny, but it’s true. Go look that shit up – I’m not saying something that’s not factual. I hope.”)

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