Gina Harris's Blog, page 62

Hang in there

As I write this at 5:05 PM, Pacific Standard Time, Biden has 253 electoral votes, and Trump has 213. Of the remaining states, Trump is likely to get Alaska and maybe North Carolina, but he does not appear to have a path to victory.

In addition, there are currently 48 Democrats and 47 Republicans in the Senate. I don't know what is happening with the other 5, but it is a nice thought to think of McConnell no longer being able to obstruct so easily.

Democrats currently retain control of the House.

Trump will continue to stew and try his best to cheat. That's who he is. The court stacking that has happened on all levels - not just Supreme - will matter, but this is still good. It is still a step forward, out of many needed steps. 

Well, it depends on your goals, but mine are based in equality; I have been very clear about that.

So, take a breath. Smile. Drink some water, eat something, nap... as there are many steps to be taken, you want to be in good walking condition. That requires taking care of your health and energy.

It also requires looking out for your safety. There are people threatening shootings - more in the places where counts are still going on - but wherever there are angry people with guns and alcohol, the risks are real. They are also bullies who are more likely to target marginalized people. Homeless people are really vulnerable, and people of color, and in some cases it may just be people with Biden or Black Lives Matter signs. Keep an eye out for them, listen to your instincts, but still, take that breath and enjoy the step forward.

There are a lot of naysayers, and I don't see most of them accomplishing a lot of good. I would rather do something good. 

(Though I can be scathing when I want. Ask around.)

Have a good weekend, one day at a time.

Black History Month 2019 - Black directors

 I guess I ought to do a summary, now that I have actually watched all of the films.

As is common, things took much longer than I anticipated. A lot of that was mission creep, but I don't regret it. It was a richer experience for watching more movies.

It also took longer because I went through periods when I was too busy with my mother to watch anything that would not hold her attention. I am not going to regret anything there either. I did what I could, with appropriate priorities. I tried.

My initial plan was to watch something every day until I was done. That didn't happen at all, but it is why I watched many of these documentaries toward the beginning, just so I could get something in. Those were good. I am glad I did it. However, since being a daily thing wasn't sustainable, I have removed the days where I was watching episodes of Queen Sugar and black~ish. 

I was able to catch up on black~ish, which I appreciated. I started watching during Season 3. I was able to watch Season 1 on DVD from the library, but I missed one episode (where Bo's night shifts coincide with Diane's difficulty sleeping without a light), and I saw the Season 3 episodes in re-runs, but somehow I missed "I'm A Survivor" (where Dre freaks out about mortality and disrupts his grandmother's life by moving her in and starts micromanaging his friends). I hadn't seen any of Season 2. 

I was able to catch everything on BET, which I discovered accidentally looking for movies by Black directors.

The timeline is below, but also, here are some notes. 

There are a few extra movies that I thought about, some of which did not have Black directors. They are listed because I still might have things to say about them that relate. There are also things that I watched during that time period that are not listed.

I don't know if horror films would have held Mom's attention, but I didn't want to risk putting any scary images in her head. That meant watching Jordan Peele's movies after everyone else was in bed, with lights and sounds down low. Exactly the best way to watch them.

I don't seem to have marked down when I watched Moonlight.  I have watching 2 Fast 2 Furious in a separate place from finishing it, because when I was almost done the DVD started to malfunction. I was able to record the movie off of television to catch the end. Paul Walker and Tyrese both have really nice smiles, though Paul does not sound smart when he talks.

I liked more than I didn't. I feel a lot of affection for most of the directors, and would watch other work by them. The greatest find was Talk To Me though, because I had at least heard of the other movies that I watched for this. Talk To Me was a complete surprise, and a revelation. 

The most disappointing was Hollywood Shuffle. I really expected it to be funny. Watching the comedians was generally more sad than funny.

I think Cuba Gooding Jr. was the weak link in Boyz N the Hood, but I see some similarities between Lawrence Fishburne as Furious and as Pops, so some sort of mash-up with parenting Trey and Dre could be fun.

But yeah, that was what I started last year and finally finished. All of my desire for knowledge is getting more ambitious while I get busier and more tired, so I am not sure that anything will ever fit neatly into a year again.

I may still try and do annual summaries. Sometimes.

2019

6/22 13th - Ava DuVernay
6/26 The Rosa Parks Story - Julie Dash
6/28 The Clinton 12: The Clinton County Desegregation Crisis (1947 – 1958) - Keith Henry McDaniel
6/29 The Untold Story of Emmett Luis Till, 2005 - Keith Beauchamp
6/30 Brown V. Board - ? (Can't find which one I watched)
7/1 Daughters of the Dust - Julie Dash
7/2 Boyz N the Hood - John Singleton
7/5 Black Nativity - Kasi Lemmons
7/7 Creed - Ryan Coogler
7/8 Belle - Amma Assante
7/9 Desegregating Baltimore Schools - Not credited, but Chris Jolissaint probably comes closest.
7/12 Fences - Denzel Washington
7/15 Fruitvale Station - Ryan Coogler
7/18 and 7/19 Eve's Bayou - Kasi Lemmons
7/30 and 7/31 Rosewood - John Singleton
8/13 Get Out - Jordan Peele
8/15 Us - Jordan Peele
9/11 If Beale Street Could Talk - Barry Jenkins
9/20 Eddie Murphy: Raw - Robert Townsend
9/25 The Five Heartbeats - Robert Townsend
9/27 and 9/30 How Stella Got Her Groove Back
10/12 B.A.P.S. - Robert Townsend
10/14, 15, 16 Shaft - John Singleton
10/25 Little - Tina Gordon
10/29 The Original Kings of Comedy - Spike Lee
11/6 Richard Pryor Here & Now - Richard Pryor

2020

2/4 and 2/5/2020 Talk to Me - Kasi Lemmons
2/6 Hollywood Shuffle - Robert Townsend
2/22 I Am Not Your Negro - Raoul Peck
2/23 Extras for I Am Not Your Negro - Raoul Peck
2/26 The Photograph - Stella Meghie
3/3 The Caveman's Valentine - Kasi Lemmons
3/6 The Great Debaters - Denzel Washington
3/12 Antwone Fisher - Denzel Washington
3/25 and 27 A Way of Life - Amma Assante
7/22 I Will Follow - Ava DuVernay
7/28 Middle of Nowhere - Ava DuVernay
7/30 Higher Learning - John Singleton
8/16 “Remember the Time” (re-watch) - John Singleton
8/17 30 for 30: Marion Jones: Press Pause (2010) - John Singleton
8/18 “My Mic Sounds Nice” (2010) - Ava DuVernay
8/18 Abduction(2011) - John Singleton
8/19 “Give Me One Reason - Julie Dash
8/19 Subway Stories: Tales From the Underground “Sax Cantor Riff” - Julie Dash
8/19 Illusions - Julie Dash
9/3 Queen of Katwe - Mira Nair
9/5 The Fits - Anna Rose Holmer
9/8 2 Fast 2 Furious - John Singleton
9/8 Good Hair - Jeff Stilson
9/10 Four Brothers - John Singleton
9/18 finished 2 Fast 2 Furious - John Singleton
10/2Medicine for Melancholy - Barry Jenkins
10/5 American Crime Story: The Race Card - John Singleton
10/5 Baby Boy - John Singleton
10/9 & 10/13 Poetic Justice - John Singleton
10/14Poetic Justice w/commentary - John Singleton
10/19 Love Song - Julie Dash
10/20 Incognito - Julie Dash
10/21 Funny Valentines - Julie Dash
10/22 When They See Us, pt 1 - Ava DuVernay
10/22 When They See Us, pt 2 - Ava DuVernay
10/23 The Door - Ava DuVernay
10/28 When They See Us, pts 3 and 4 - Ava DuVernay
10/28 Jay Z: Family Feud ft Beyoncé - Ava DuVernay

Waiting to exhale

Well, things still aren't settled, but it is getting closer. If it is not everything that was hoped for, that is not really surprising.

I am not going to write about that right now, at least not exactly.

What I want to say is that it is no surprise Republicans are objecting to vote counts when they tried so hard to keep those votes from being cast. They're consistent, in a way that goes well with foolishness and little minds, but has a core that needs to be examined.

When they talk about the need for election day to become a federal holiday, it's important to think about all of those people who work holidays. It wouldn't really help them, would it? If you get the kids out of school (at least in a normal year), will that make it harder for some people to vote? 

Personally, I love voting by mail; that has worked great for Oregon. I don't have anything against early voting times or expanded voting hours if some states are strongly attached to in-person voting, but the places that try and cut that are the same places that tend to reduce polling locations. For a state the size of Texas to only have one ballot box per county? That is not pro-voting.

So what we need to think about is whom we want to vote. Early colonists often thought that there should be property-holding requirements. That not only required a certain amount of wealth but also a specific type of wealth, that could easily eliminate the merchant class and various tradesman and those military members that were not already property owners. Obviously, forget about women and any man who wasn't white.

This seemed very logical to them. Misogyny and racism were pretty accepted, and obviously you want the right kind of people with the right kind of education voting; superior people, you might say, who also just happened to be the same people making the decisions.

It didn't end up quite that bad, though if you looked at the voting percentages for ratification of the Constitution it can be shocking. Amendments have given us a better situation still. However, look at how hard some people will still work to keep some votes from being cast or counted.

If you are a constitutional originalist, and you truly believe that women have weaker minds (probably because of the presence of the uterus), you are stupid and gross. I don't even have the patience to be polite to you about it. Same deal if you believe in white supremacy, and double if you try and justify it based on cranium size. Seriously, fuck you. 

However, if there is a part of you that is okay with limiting who votes, because these stupid unwashed rabble make such bad decisions and don't even know what's good for them, yes, I am tempted to say the same to you, but I have a question: Would you have been able to vote in 1789? Would everyone have wanted you to? Remember, that means not just being white and male but also owning some property and investments.

I saw a meme about people making $30K per year and panicking at higher taxes on income over $400K per year; I know people for whom that is so true. Sure, they are not rich now, but they just know that someday they will be, and then the government is going to be taking it away from them. It is rather like the panic that the government will take your guns, which has never been true but it sure has been a cash cow for the people who make and sell guns.

I guess what I am asking is that if you can't vote based on wanting equality and good for everyone, can you at least vote to benefit your current situation instead of the fantasy you have been nurturing for so long where you are better than everyone else?

That would be great.

Otherwise, that fight for equality still has a lot of work left.

Harvesting

As you can see there are 11 orange pumpkins of various sizes (not counting the one that I carved), one that almost ripened that is a kind of nice mottled green and yellow, and a few shiny round green gourds.

Given how many issues there were with planting time and germination, it is kind of miraculous. 

The vines and the nightshade filled up the yard debris bin, so currently the sunflower stalks are still  standing, but all of the heads are down on the ground. Frankly, I had been hoping to see more small creatures eating the seeds, but there is still time. Come on, critters!

It was (for me) kind of a miraculous thing to pick a seed out of something I grew, and be like, "That's a sunflower seed, just like the one I planted a few months ago."

I don't really have any plans for eating them myself, but I did save a few, to see how planting them works. I saved some from a regular head, the big head on the mutant sunflower, and some little heads off of the mutant sunflower. I labeled them neatly in envelopes and meant to take a picture, but it appears that Lilly had some feelings about how long I had been outside.

Speaking of little critters and what they eat.

Vicious.

One reason I waited so long to pull up the nightshade was that - besides being pretty - I read that it composts well, and I kind of wanted to compost it here. I am not ready to sort out composting yet.

I still need to take down the sunflower stalks and the tomato plants in the back. The potatoes don't appear to be done yet. Being so deep underground, I guess the frost is less of an issue. 

Otherwise, everything is figuring out next year, and I am having a hard time looking ahead. 

I hope things are clearer tomorrow.

Halloween 2020 recap

 Thursday I pulled up the vines and cut the pumpkin stems, freeing up the patch. 

I had about four that I thought were big enough to carve, but time was an issue. I was going to try stencils for the first time this year, which I should have known would be overly ambitious. 

The first issue is that they all had big mud patches with worms. I scraped some off, but it wasn't effective and I was worried about hurting the worms. If you want good soil, you need them. So Friday I started using the hose and a rag to clean them off. This worked fairly well, except I ended up with a huge amount of mud, on the ground and especially on my shoes. I wouldn't mind being taller, but not that way. I still need to finish getting those scraped off, so that was an issue every time I left the house, trying to find something else to put on my feet. 

Separately, Julie had ordered a Halloween ice cream cake, and we had that for dessert Friday and Saturday night.

It was very cute and the frosting was good. It did not stay looking like this, but massacres are appropriate for Halloween.

Saturday. The big day. Still no pumpkins carved. I was going to do it while my sisters ran errands, but then they had a cancellation and we were off to the store, which took longer than I thought it would, so I needed to start making dinner as soon as we got home. The sun was going down and we still had no jack o' lantern.

There was also a good chance of having no trick-or-treaters. We had candy, masks, and tongs to allow us to distribute candy from a distance, but would children come? I mean, with the briefness of the interactions and it happening mostly outdoors, I think trick-or-treating can be safe, but people are freaked out this year, and who can blame them? One friend had prearranged to bring the child she cares for - who needed to have some trick-or-treating - but that could easily be it.

We did get some, and it was largely due to my procrastination and fixation, but I could not deal with not having a jack o' lantern. 

At 7 I headed out there with a knife. I did not have newspapers to use for the guts, because we only get one on Sundays now, and that one had been taken away by recycling. I did not bring the stencils. I did the fastest, least-dedicated job ever, dumping guts directly into yard debris (full of vines and nightshade) and sometimes balancing the pumpkin on my knee.

However, while I was dumping guts, the neighbor kids started loading into the car.

I grabbed my mask, tongs, and candy bowl. "Want some candy?" And even from the scary old neighbor lady, that is a good offer.

Then, while I was finishing the carving, two people were taking a kid in a wagon up the street. I nearly lunged at them, worried they would not come back, but they did! I was waiting on the sidewalk, and as they were looking at the decorations next door they didn't see me until the last minute and I scared them a little, but still, they took candy! Then while I was tonging out their candy, one more group of kids came. They saw and came, but they were not going to all the doors. If you wanted trick-or-treaters this year, you needed to flag them down. So it was good I spent some time outside, and I did carve a pumpkin.

I know I can do better than this, and I am a little sad that I didn't, but this is the first time I have carved a pumpkin I grew from seed, and it got us twelve of our thirteen trick-or-treaters. (I think that was the number. Probably no significance.)

We also tried building one of those haunted house kits. It looked like it was working out but then it went all Fall of the House of Usher on me. 

That is so 2020.

PS: I know there are more important things I could write about, but I am struggling with not knowing whether I am going to be relieved or furious or suicidal Wednesday, so today is Halloween, tomorrow is the garden, and I don't know what happens after that.

We all do what we can.

Love to watch you go?

I know when terrible public figures die, some people will say mean things and other people will give quotes about refusing to celebrate anyone's death... you know how it goes.

I have been thinking about one death recently that I didn't celebrate, but for which I did feel relief.

It was Dennis Richardson. 

Shocking, I know.

He was a member of my church, though in a different city so I had no personal knowledge of him. He had a beautiful family. I am no fan of people getting cancer. But still, I was relieved that he died.

He was elected at a time when Republicans nationally were targeting Secretary of State elections. They were being prioritized over governors then.

It was smart. People pay less attention to the down ballot. It's not as flashy, but if you want to influence elections, it is a great position to be in. I'm guessing it was inspired by part of the Voting Rights Act being struck down in 2013, but maybe the same people pushing that case were pushing the elections. I'm sure some of the reduced voting hours, eliminated ballot boxes, and voter purges are related.

Even before that, think about Katherine Harris running Florida's election while running W's campaign there. You know, people said it was a Democrat who designed the infamous butterfly ballot, and that is technically true. Theresa LePore registered as a Democrat in 1996 to help win an election, and then switched to Independent a few years after confusing many elderly Jewish people into voting for Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan.

(I do hope some of this is a reminder to pay attention to the down ballot, and also at least some attention to what is happening in other states.)

I know that Richardson promised to be non-partisan, but I had concerns. They became worse when he wanted to start redistricting before the census. I know some people like to complain about how their counties are underrepresented, but that's because of people. If Umatilla County has about 80,000 people and Multnomah County has closer to 800,000, that is more votes. That is fair. Trying to change that would be more unfair. 

It would also be hard to sabotage, but I think Richardson was going to give it a shot, so yes, I was relieved when he died.

I have been thinking about this for two reasons. 

Most recently, I keep getting phone messages encouraging me to vote for Kim Thatcher so she can continue Dennis Richardson's legacy. This makes her the only state candidate I actively hate. No thank you.

But also, as Mitch McConnell's body shows early signs of decay, and Trump apparently overcame Coronavirus via great medical care that included steroids (like he needs that in his system), and Republicans keep showing their determination to hold super-spreader events - including for the incompetent justice they shoved through, but forget relief packages! - I would not mourn their deaths. 

I might not feel much relief, either, because there has already been so much harm done. 

However, I know considerably more harm has been felt by other people, and if anyone dies and the death is celebrated by people have lost ground and suffered and lost relatives to disease that they could not get high-quality medical care for, or who can't find their children to be reunited with them, or who have lost businesses because more relief went to those who are more powerful and better-resourced and can apply faster, I will not shame their celebrations. They can have fireworks and socially distanced parades, and I will wish them joy.

But I will still be stuck regretting that it didn't happen sooner, before so much harm was done.

Director Spotlight: AVA DUVERNAY

Had already seen: Selma (2014), A Wrinkle In Time (2018), two episodes of Queen Sugar

Watched for this: 13th (documentary) (2016), When They See Us (2019), I Will Follow (2010), Middle of Nowhere (2012),My Mic Sounds Nice (TV short documentary) (2010), The Door (short) (2013), Jay Z: Family Feud ft. Beyoncé (video short) (2017)

Have not seen: Saturday Night Life (short) (2006), This Is The Life (documentary) (2008), Compton In C Minor (short) (2009), TV One Night Only: Live From The Essence Music Festival (TV movie documentary) (2010), Essence Presents: Faith in 2010 (TV short) (2010), Scandal (1 episode) (2013), For Justice (TV movie) (2015), August 28th (documentary short) (2016), Nine for IX: Venus Vs (TV documentary series, 1 episode) (2013) 

I find it interesting that so many of her early efforts are music-related. I have only been able to find My Mic Sounds Nice to watch, but I would be interested in the others.

Otherwise I think the main thing I come away with from watching more DuVernay is a sense of vision. I know that she uses good actors and designers and that is a help, but I also see a great sense of imagination and an openness to inspiration.

I am actually at kind of a weird place for writing about her. For past viewing, I have written about A Wrinkle in Time and six(!) posts about Selma. (And so much about Queen Sugar, but that is less her directing and more producing.) I just finished When They See Us, and I think I am going to have a lot to say about that as I process it.

Instead I will focus on two in the middle that are not well known, but the library had them: I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere

I Will Follow has some music focus too, as the main character reflects on her recently deceased aunt - a legendary session drummer - schooling her on the music of U2. Mainly it is about moving on, as after about a year caring for her dying aunt, it is time to clean and finish and theoretically but maybe not possibly return to her old life. 

Middle of Nowhere also has a woman who has put her life on hold for someone else, working night shifts and giving up weekends for long bus rides to visit her jailed husband. 

I am in the middle of so much transition - then when I watched the movies, but still now - that they resonated with me. So many of my choices have been made for other people. Without even being wrong choices, they have still left me in a hard place, with a lot of unknowns.

Both movies end up in the air. The protagonists have gained some understanding or reconciliation, but there are still many things unresolved and messy relationships all over the place. There are people who know what they want and can't seem to get it, and people just stuck, even though it seems like it should be easier.

The most interesting relationships for me were in I Will Follow. There was an aunt and niece, but that aunt was also a mother to a frustrated daughter, who resented her cousin being the caregiver, but who would also not have done well as the caregiver, especially given her anger at her mother's decision to end treatment for her cancer, and go out peacefully. 

That resentment is worse because of its base in a previous rocky relationship, where the aunt and niece could get along and share interests in a way that the mother and daughter could not. It is poked at when the daughter sees that envied cousin bonding with her son. Aunts again.

Clearly everyone needed to accept and embrace people as themselves, but that is more easily said than done. There are lots of different ways of being selfish and jealous and hurt, and it seems like they found all of them. 

Also, perhaps we cannot relate to our parents like everyone else. It may not be fair, and it may not be terrible, but there are pressures there that are hard to ignore. Maybe "embracing" is still the answer.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-wrinkle-in-storytelling.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-emotional-impact.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-choices.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-academy-fails.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-and-lbj.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-not-even-past.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/selma-lessons-for-now.html

 

Garden update - watching a garden die

 Yes, I did review an album by that name in February; this garden wasn't even planted yet.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2020/02/album-review-watching-garden-die-by.html

I took this picture because things are starting to die.

I have been getting a lot of compliments on the sunflowers, but now they are all drooping. A few got so top-heavy they collapsed. 

The pumpkins have not gotten as much attention because the leaves hide them pretty well, especially when they are green. I have about ten that are orange now, though there is no angle from which you can see them all. 

Also, the powdery mildew - which is plentiful in our region and adores squash leaves - has spread a lot. I was going to do some cleanup this week, but temperatures are supposed to be low enough for a frost, at least for Sunday night, and that will make things much easier.

I was also worried about cleanup for the sunflowers, because I want the seeds to finish forming. It looks like detaching the head is an option. I am a bit nervous about it, but I may at least try it on the already fallen ones.

I took the picture as a reminder that a natural life progression includes a period of decline. It is not the most attractive stage. If I want my garden to be a showcase, that is a problem, but if I want it to be something living and growing and embracing life and nature, sometimes it will get messy.

I am eternally grateful there is no HOA here.

I am posting the picture today because today was full of problems, including continuing issues. It's frustrating, and I am not the person I want to be on those days, except in that I continue to get through them. But the messiness is valid and natural. I grow from the bad times, probably more than from the good times.

That one lone flower seed to sprout has really taken off though. That's all one multi-branching plant.

Director Spotlight: JULIE DASH

Had already seen: two episodes of Queen Sugar,

Watched for this: Daughters of the Dust (1991), The Rosa Parks Story (2002),  "Give Me One Reason" (Tracy Chapman video short, 1996), Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground - Sax Cantor Riff (1997), Illusions (short) (1982), Incognito (1999), Love Song (2000), Funny Valentines (1999)

Have not seen: Working Models of Success (1973), Four Women (Short) (1975), Diary of an African Nun (Short) (1977), Praise House (1991), Women: Stories of Passion - Season 2, episode 5 "Grip Till It Hurts" (1997), Brothers of the Borderland (short) (2004), Standing at the Scratch Line (short) (2016), Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (2017)

It is for Julie Dash that I am most glad that I expanded my watch list. 

Initially I only intended to watch Daughters of the Dust and The Rosa Parks Story. I wrote about Daughters of the Dust being gratuitously beautiful, and there were many ways in which it kept coming back to me. It is a classic for a reason.

I did not like The Rosa Parks Story. 

There is an episode of black~ish where the Johnsons go to the movies on Christmas. They were going to watch a new action picture that sounded a lot like Captain Marvel, but conscience struck Dre and he made them go see a movie based on Rosa Parks. Everyone keeps trying to sneak out because they are so bored by this ridiculously slow and overacted but still not fun movie. 

I could not help but wonder if they had The Rosa Parks Story in mind. 

Even finding it boring and disagreeing with how they portrayed Parks (as a very shy and reluctant activist; maybe I'm wrong), I could still appreciate some nice touches to how the scenes were set and the aesthetics of the picture. 

Julie Dash has better movies. And worse ones, though not many.

I was only able to watch the three made-for-television movies because of a Youtube channel, Reelblack:

https://www.youtube.com/user/reelblack 

(If Reelblack can locate and post the movies and shorts I haven't seen, I will watch them all, even though my watching is technically over.)

I thought Incognito got pretty contrived at the climax, but that was based on a book that has a lot of fans, and probably needed to be that way. I had a hard time sticking with Funny Valentines, but a lot of reviewers loved it. Tastes differ, that's okay. I am still really glad that the movies were there, and that I had the chance to see them.

I liked Love Song a lot. That is largely for the music and the hard to resist charms of Christian Kane. In addition, as Camille (played by Monica) goes to reconcile with Billy (Christian Kane's character), there is this excellently shot sequence of her walking to him, picking her way through the normal garage detritus. She is wearing flowing pink crepe-y pants and a really cute pair of ball heeled shoes. It is not your most practical outfit for navigating a greasy garage, but visually it works so well. I have to love the artistry there.

What really sold me on Julie Dash was her use of different kinds of lighting for different projects.

Daughters of the Dust has a lot of light saturation, with powerful sunlight striking characters dressed in white on sand. It is a memorable look on its own, but the other two projects show the range.

"Give Me One Reason", a music video for Tracy Chapman, is set in a club. That is frequently a dark environment, and this seems like one, especially with the royal blue backdrop. And yet, with the use of focused overhead lighting (I assume), there is also a radiance throughout the set. 

Where I really started to appreciate it was on Illusions, a short film from 1982. 

Lonette McKee plays a light-skinned Black woman passing for white and working in the studio system. That is one illusion, but Hollywood is full of them, including having Black singers providing the voices of leading ladies. 

(So, in Singing in the Rain terms, Lana is not really singing, but her understudy looks nothing like Debbie Reynolds.) 

The plot and dialogue is solid anyway, but I was first impressed with how much it looked like it really could have been filmed during World War II. Accurately, those movies did not give any definition to Black features, which you see with a few performers, including the actual singing voice, Esther, played by Rosanne Katon. 

When McKee's character has an extended and important dialogue with Esther, the film used doesn't change, but Dash doesn't leave Esther to be nullified by the darkness either. She shoots them outdoors, with Katon in bright sunlight and McKee partially shaded. Both actresses are seen distinctly, it doesn't change the accuracy of the period representation, and it also works as a metaphor for the openness with which each character can engage with her race and identity.

With John Singleton we talked about how to engage with different levels of quality in terms of scripts and what the studio wants; most directors are probably going to have to work with a few clinkers, just to keep working. 

As wonderful as it is to watch a movie where all of the different parts are working together, sometimes you learn more from the movies that don't work as well. 

I have learned that Julie Dash really knows how to make movies. She films well.

Listening to Black women: pre-requisites

Okay... two more posts, even though yesterday I said it would only take one.

Here's why: with everything I have written about Black women not getting recompensed for their work, and being expected to give free emotional labor, and frequently getting abused, I do not want to add to that. 

What I was going to post today was a starter kit, with a selection of various smart and wonderful Black women, where readers could choose a few and start reading their work and getting a feeling for them. I am still going to do that, but I worry about directing someone exhausting toward people I care about, who are often far too close to exhausted already.

Today's post is going to be about sending you in with the ability to not be a problem. There is no offense intended if you do not think you would be a problem. The people who want to be problems are way ahead of me, but well-intentioned people can really not live up to their intentions.

First, check your ego.

You may have expected me to say "Check your privilege", but if we are doing this right your privilege will get checked. More than once.

We have talked many times about how the racism is structural, so it creeps in without being noticed. Even knowing that on one level, it can still be appalling and hurtful and uncomfortable to find it inside you, and realistically there is going to be some.

Remember those ladies I wrote about yesterday, trying to add diversity and then so angry and offended when they were questioned on something? That they even had the idea to add diversity by inviting in a Black woman was a sign that they were trying. Their reaction was probably a sign that they didn't think it through. They weren't prepared.

It might sound logical that you prepare by self-examination and rooting it out, but you probably can't do that enough. The better preparation is being prepared to sit with the discomfort. When someone says something that seems to imply you are racist, pause and absorb it. Sit with it for a minute, and see what you can learn from it.

This is the same response for if they call you racist outright, but it is often not that. Maybe they rebut a point that you make, or they mention privilege, or it is something really mild, but that defensiveness rises. Stop. Breathe. Listen and learn.

That silently listening is a great response, because I can't tell you how many times I have seen people replying with their agreement to show they are good too, or trying to correct a blanket statement (Excuse me, but not all white women!). That is also in service of your ego, and it doesn't help anyone. It places the burden of your self-esteem on someone who is already too busy. 

Sometimes the request for ego service is an expression of dismay at how awful things are, and how deeply it hurts you. If your pain is at racism because it exists, but not because you are oppressed under it, it should not take a lot of thought to see how throwing that on someone under the oppression is not appropriate. 

And it does hurt. I am appalled and angry and grieving all the time. It is still not the job of non-white people to comfort me.

In the same vein, if you have a question about something, try a few Google searches. Don't add to the work. If someone is asking a question, but not to you specifically, and you don't know the answer, it is not helpful to reply that you don't know.

I say this coming from that place. Eight years ago I had great intentions and I knew some things, but there was still so much I didn't know and understand. I probably did ask unnecessary things, and I know I made stupid flippant comments at least twice. I did learn, and I found a lot of grace. I have even made some friendships. I would still rather not have made the stumbles that I did, and I did them in a much less traumatic time. So, take heed.

If you want to do any good in the world, it will almost certainly require checking your ego anyway.

For more on letting things wash over you:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2020/06/through-overwhelm.html