They Blazed the Trail

 "Several times I have persuaded the directors to omit dialect from modern pictures. They readily agreed to the suggestion. I have been told that I have kept alive the stereotype of the Negro servant in the minds of theatre-goers. I believe my critics think the public more naïve than it actually is. As I pointed out to Fredi Washington, 'Arthur Treacher is indelibly stamped as a Hollywood butler, but I am sure no one would go to his home and expect him to meet them at the door with a napkin across his arm.'

-- Hattie McDaniel

Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry a/k/a Stepin Fetchit

Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen

Mantan Moreland

Luther "Bill" Robinson

Louise Beavers

Knowing Your Triggers XIII

 

Food courts in struggling malls speak to me. 

They seem to be sustained by people who, themselves, might be struggling with abandonment.

Women sporting 40-inch Brazilian weaves and Megan Thee Stallion talons order the #4 from the Mandarin Kitchen menu.

Men with spikey, banded henna-tinted dreads stand in line at Roscoe's in sagging jeans and Yeezys waiting for the pork chop sandwich with hot sauce and seasoned fries.

Pre-teens in Nike gear swing Jimmy Jazz shopping bags, while scrolling through Insta and Tik-Tok on phones with cracked screens.

No music is piped in. 

The only sounds come from blaring TVs in sports stores and the whirr of a siren from the kiddie park fire truck at center court.

A mall security guard steps through on the way out for a smoke break. 

And a sheriff's deputy's vehicle idles just outside the door. 

Emerson Burkhart, American painter (1905-1969)

 Emerson Burkhart, American painter (1905-1969)

"You can't get out of here alive. No way. And who wants to? They can flush me down the commode when I leave, it makes no difference to me. I'd get back to Big Walnut Creek that way, and that's life, and it's life that's everything."

Knowing Your Triggers XII

 

At several points during Netflix's documentary The Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, the survivors of a fatal boat crash attributed to Paul Murdaugh, who would later be shot to death along with his mother, talked about their partying practices and under-aged drinking. Sometimes they did it with the permission of Paul's parents, Alex and Maggie, the other shooting victim. 

According to the documentary, the night of the fatal boating accident, Paul used his older brother's driver's license to purchase copious amounts of alcohol that the six friends drank on the boat that Paul piloted to an oyster roast. After the oyster roast, Paul and one of his friends went for more drinks at a bar before heading back home. The other five objected to Paul driving the boat, since he was highly intoxicated. But he prevailed and subsequently crashed the boat into a bridge. One of the friends, Mallory Beach, was thrown from the boat and lost.

Over the course of the seven days during which divers searched for the young woman's body, the survivors and their family members who were interviewed said they prayed to God. They never said what kind of intervention they were seeking for but the whole matter of praying for help out of a tragic situation that they created seems pretty arrogant and presumptuous and is likely why many people have so little respect for such Christian virtue signaling. 

Not once did one of the four survivors of the crash express remorse for behavior that they recorded on their phones and that were included in the documentary, apparently without embarrassment or regret. They poured their disdain on Paul Murdaugh even though they were active participants in the very behavior that led to the tragic death.

Miles Davis Gallery

Black History Month gallery of Miles Davis (1926-1991)

"If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!"

with actress Jeanne Moreau

with wife Cicely Tyson

with Stevie Wonder 

Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

 

Netflix's three-episode documentary on the Murdaugh Murders is subtitled "A Southern Scandal," but it doesn't explore -- directly -- what makes the self-dealing, manipulation, nepotism and violence that is the backdrop for this truly peculiar case "Southern." Without using the most egregious of stereotypes, that is.

I'm not arguing that the guardedness and paranoia voiced -- in the deepest of Dixie drawls, by the way -- is not rooted in fearsome patriarchy that started before Cotton was King and continues to this day. It simply is not laid out clearly for the viewer to understand how this regional history helped shape these events.

Scenes of nattily dressed white folks posed before white columns and speeding along waterways in motorboats are not enough. The "power," a word that one person interviewed seemed hesitant to use, is directly related to racial and economic disparities in the South, in general, and Hampton County, in particular. Black and poor white labor sustain the economy that affords the propertied class tons of leisure time and opportunity, apparently, to scheme and finagle.

Even though Hampton is majority Black and working poor, all that is delivered to the viewers is the lifestyle of rich white folks. Not a single Black person is interviewed and if it wasn't for one or two newspeople and Judge Clifton Newman, there would be none in this story.

It might be Black folks refused to take part. If that is the case, that's a story in itself.

From where I sat, fuming at the privilege and virtue signaling, I was nagged by the marginalization (erasure) of Black folks? Yeah, that's pretty Southern.

Women Talking

 

Writer / director Sarah Polley's Women Talking is a horror story of the most searing variety because the monsters are within us. 

The movie features powerful performances by eight actresses and one actor in a story set in a Mennonite community where men and boys have routinely raped and assaulted the women with impunity.

When one of the men is identified and he implicates others, the men leave to tend to bail, and the women in the colony hold a plebiscite to decide if they should stay and forgive the men and thus safeguard their eternal reward, stay and fight the men, or leave. 

A dozen women are chosen to represent the others in the colony in the deliberations. Marische (an explosive Jessie Buckley) is determined to stay despite the sadistic treatment by her husband, Ona (a beatific Rooney Mara) is pregnant from her attacker, a young mother Salome (Claire Foy) who has discovered violent hatred in the wake of serial abuse, two wise grandmothers Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey), and a spirited young woman suffering from trauma-induced seizures, Mejal (Michelle McLeod) are among those gathered in the colony's barn to talk through, for the first time, the hell that has been their lives.

It's a riveting conversation that is transcribed by a once-excommunicated young man, August (Ben Whishaw), who has returned to the colony to teach the boys and perhaps marry Ona. Girls are prohibited from going to school, so none of the women can read or write.  Polley intersperses in the women's conversation scenes of children playing in sun-dappled fields -- none of the other men in the colony makes an on-camera appearance, even though their presence is always tangible. 

Uncertainty hangs thick in the air during this remarkable film, as the day wears on and night descends. It is agonizing viewing because the women's resolution to not be enslaved by fear or faith is not presented as sure relief from their torture. That seems to be out of their hands. The best they can do is, well, to do the best they can -- and, perhaps, pray.

Maya Angelou Gallery (1928-2014)

 Black History Month gallery of Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

with Langston Hughes 

with James Baldwin

with Malcolm X

James Baldwin Gallery

 

A Black History Month gallery of photographs of James Baldwin (1924-1987), who undoubtedly continues to inspire and endear, fascinate and infuriate nearly 40 years after his death.

Knowing Your Triggers XI

 

I wonder if people who post reels of their fat cats and roly-poly raccoons on Instagram are trying to draw fire from scolds who scroll through sites looking for targets to shame about their lazy pet care.

Some postings get thousands of comments from people exclaiming "put him on a diet, you hateful thing!"

Maybe it's actually a giant web of co-dependency. Folks overfeed their pets, then parade them around, make them jump (or attempt to jump) from floor to bed or to retrieve something from the kitchen counter. They record every "hilarious" second of this misery for posting and wait for the trolls to attack, which they do -- eagerly and swiftly.

Everybody gets their jollies in this internet wreck of enabling behavior, except Garfield and Rocky, whose lives are being cut short by their owners' vanity -- and pasta.

Knowing Your Triggers X

 

I asked a friend while at lunch yesterday if he could imagine the world where it was equally as likely for a friend or associate, workmate or perfect stranger to lie as tell the truth, without cause or reason. 

"What would the world be like?"

"Total chaos," he said.

I agreed. 

If we were all just as likely to be false faces as truth tellers, then little of importance would get done.

The pricing of commodities in the market might be total fiction, the same with airline schedules and the ingredients in cans of soup. It would be a crap shoot and exchanges would grind to a halt.

Doubt would be the default. There would be no incentive to keep a promise, show up on time or finish tasks one was assigned.

Children would ignore their parents' instruction, claiming not to have heard or to have forgotten. (That actually may be happening now.)

I feel we're getting closer to the precipice of utter disregard for honesty and not just among congressional delegates and corporate moguls. When legislators want to remove from some professions the licensure that says this person is whom they say they are, qualified to do what they claim, then we're staring down the maw of disaster.

Will we soon see regular folk, tempted by money and inured to manipulation, parading like public officials who strut their perfidy peacock-style for the cameras, shrugging and saying, "It's all in the game, right?"

Knowing Your Triggers IX

 

I think the idea of keeping legitimate literature from children is repugnant. Full stop. 

I reviewed lists of books being banned from Florida school libraries to see what they contain. 

Legislators appear to have a drawn a bead on the novels of Toni Morrison especially, the works of race scholar Ibrahim Kendi and writings on the subjects of sexuality and gender identity. One list included Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Perhaps because Lenny is mentally challenged or because George shoots him in the head to keep him from being lynched. I don't have any idea. 

I failed to find mentioned Ernest Hemingway's classic short story from the 1920s The Killers (which has been adapted into a motion picture multiple times) or any of the other potentially racially problematic (as least from Black folks' standpoint) works. 

I think The Killers is a masterpiece, as do most people whose opinion I respect, despite the story containing this and similar passages between the two eponymous assassins and the workers in a diner where the killers are waiting to do a job:

 “Who’s out in the kitchen?” 

“The nigger.” 

“What do you mean the nigger?” 

“The nigger that cooks.” 

“Tell him to come in.” 

“What’s the idea?” 

“Tell him to come in.” 

“Where do you think you are?” 

“We know damn well where we are,” the man called Max said. 

“Do we look silly?” 

“You talk silly,” A1 said to him. 

“What the hell do you argue with this kid for? Listen,” he said to George, “tell the nigger to come out here.” 

“What are you going to do to him?” 

“Nothing. Use your head, bright boy. What would we do to a nigger?”

The last remark tolls like a bell, of course, but does not foretell any violence toward Sam the cook, who, as is often the case in such stories, has more sense than anybody else in the room.

I doubt if the reactionary legislators in Florida debated the inclusion of works by Hemingway or other great writers who used charged language or depicted violence against people of color or other marginalized groups. I doubt if law makers considered including works that reflected this marginalization, even if they did not perpetuate it, because they might be harmful to young people who read them.

And yet, Beloved, an indictment of the horrors of institutionalized slavery and a challenge to historical marginalization is on many lists.

What a world.

Summer of '42

 

My high school library had a copy of Raucher's Summer of '42 and kept it behind the desk. If you wanted to check it out, you had to ask one of the librarians for it.

I'm not sure if they were restricting access to the book to students they thought could handle the material or if they just didn't want anyone to steal it.

Whatever the case, we had it. And I read it.

How distant those times feel today.

Ilya Bolotowsky, Russian-American abstractionist (1907-1981)

 Ilya Bolotowsky, Russian-American abstractionist (1907-1981)

"Abstract art ... searches for new ways to achieve harmony and equilibrium."

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

 

Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a goofy, psychedelic trip of a picture with an incomprehensible storyline about characters that originated on the lower tier of the Marvel cinematic universe affiliated with the highly lucrative Avengers series. 

Reed directed the first two Ant-Man pictures, both of which starred Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a convicted thief and unlikely contender for superhero status until he bumbles into a shrinking suit designed by scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and begins life anew as a crime fighter with the ability to grow to gigantic and shrink to subatomic dimensions. 

He is partnered both romantically and heroically with The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). Not unlike the other "man" franchises -- Iron and Spider -- Ant-Man does feature some intriguing insights about technology, science envy and corporate espionage. There's also familial intrigue as all of the main characters are related to one another, including Cassie, Lang's daughter (Kathryn Newton) who is following in daddy's shrinking footsteps.

It's when things get small -- really, really small -- that the story opens up to Rudd's strongest feature -- his comedic delivery and timing -- and the picture takes on a stoner jokiness that is a welcome alternative to the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo spouted by Douglas and others. I love the weirdness of the tiny denizens of the subatomic universe, and imagine they are intended to parallel the real world's disaffected and disenfranchised, itching to get back at the man.

And who is the man? Who carries the weightiness of existential threat? That's given to the ubiquitous Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, a mysterious humanoid living and ruling in the quantum realm as master of the infinite multiverses. His nemesis is Janet Van Dyne, the original shrinking woman, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. It's their history that propels this third story along.

Yes, like so much of the later Marvel movies, Quantumania's narrative is a mess and, based on the mid-credits teaser, it is going to get even messier as the studio pushes even further into this narrative of infinite worlds and infinite threats and infinite feature possibilities.

Ka-ching the Conqueror.

Danger! Danger!

 

One morning when I was 11 or 12 and riding the school bus with a classmate, I turned to him and asked, apropos of nothing, which of his parents he liked more -- his mother or father?

He stuttered for a second and then shrugged. 

Sitting in front of us was one of the school teachers -- a nun probably in her 50s. She snapped her head around and scolded me.

"Shame on you," she said. "I hope he loves them equally. What a question to ask!" 

Properly chastened, I started to explain but then decided it was better to leave it alone. 

We rode the rest of the way to school in silence. Until then I did not know how obnoxious the question was.

I came to my bold inquiry honestly, though, having only the night before read an exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt in which she asked the very same question and when CB stammered to reply she hit him with her classic "wishy-washy!!"  

I imagined real life would go the same way as the comics, where characters said and did the most outrageous things to one another for laughs, no hard feelings or scolding from eavesdroppers. 

That I thought that's how the world worked was no fault of Charles Schulz, the creator of Lucy and Charlie Brown, the editor or the publisher of the volumes of strips I devoured nightly or anyone else. It was my wrong thinking that was corrected -- in typically "sisterly" fashion -- and I did not do it again. 

I suppose today there might be some anxious someone (maybe in Florida) waiting to pull Peanuts from library shelves for corrupting gullible children, making them treat their classmates badly and sowing seeds of division and resentment in families.

Nah! That kind of thing only happens in books.

Lyonel Feininger, German-American Abstract Expressionist (1871-1956)

Lyonel Feininger, German-American Abstract Expressionist (1871-1956)

"Each individual work serves as an expression of our most personal state of mind at that particular moment and of the inescapable, imperative need for release by means of an appropriate act of creation: in the rhythm, form, colour and mood of a picture." -- Lyonel Feininger