Foster Dickson's Blog, page 30
February 4, 2020
Black History Month: The Whitehurst Case
The most common reaction that I’ve encountered to Bernard Whitehurst, Jr.’s story is disbelief. I’ll admit that I experienced a fair bit of it myself in researching and writing the story of a black man who was shot dead by a white police officer in 1975. Questions that have been asked of me, since the publication of Closed Ranks, are ones that I also asked repeatedly during my process: did that really happen? how could that happen? was nothing done about that? During book talks and other presentations, audiences have asked me about procedures that should have been followed or about decisions that were made by public officials. Given the complexity of what became known as The Whitehurst Case, those questions were hard, or impossible, to answer. However, the few times that someone has asked whether there were public protests or marches in the aftermath of Whitehurst’s death, that question was easy to answer: No. And now, nearly forty-five years later, as his family continues to seek avenues for latter-day justice, Bernard Whitehurst, Jr.’s name and his case are still not well-known.
This Black History Month, we will once again celebrate the lives of people whose lives were extraordinary, many who were leaders in the movement for justice, some whose accomplishments have been neglected in surveys of history, a few who were martyrs to racial injustice. Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. falls into the last category. Whitehurst was no more an activist than Emmett Till, but his death necessitated a reckoning in the same way that Till’s did. There was no good reason for Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. to die on the day he did, in the way he did. Police were searching the area for an armed robber, and Whitehurst, who was walking nearby, was not the man they were looking for. Some versions of events claim that police knew that on the spot, other accounts say that it was discovered later. Either way, the realization that he had not pointed a gun at a store owner and taken some cash could not bring him back to life.
Montgomery, Alabama was changed forever by Bernard Whitehurst, Jr.’s death and the consequences that followed. At the time, The Washington Post called the Whitehurst Case “Alabama’s Watergate.” However, even in our current age of uncovering lost stories and celebrating neglected figures, Whitehurst’s name has still not entered the American lexicon. But it should, and it’s long overdue that it did.
If you’re interested to know more about Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. and the Whitehurst Case, the publisher’s description of Closed Ranks is below.
On a chilly December afternoon in 1975, Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 33-year-old father of four, was mistaken for a robbery suspect by Montgomery, Alabama, police officers. A brief foot chase ensued, and it ended with one of the pursuing officers shooting and killing Whitehurst in the backyard of an abandoned house. The officer claimed the fleeing man had fired at him; police produced a gun they said had been found near the body. In the months that followed, new information showed that Whitehurst, who was black, was not only the wrong man but had been unarmed, a direct contradiction of the white officer’s statement. What became known as the Whitehurst Case erupted when the local district attorney and the family’s attorney each began to uncover facts that pointed to wrongdoing by the police, igniting a year-long controversy that resulted in the resignation or firing of police officers, the police chief, and the city’s popular New South mayor. However, no one was ever convicted in Whitehurst’s death, and his family’s civil lawsuit against the City of Montgomery failed. Now, more than four decades later, Whitehurst’s widow and children are waging a 21st-century effort to gain justice for the husband and father they lost. The question that remains is: who decides what justice looks like?
In this latter-day exploration of the Whitehurst Case, author Foster Dickson reviews one of Montgomery’s never-before-told stories, one which is riddled with incompatible narratives. Closed Ranks brings together interviews, police reports, news stories, and other records to carry the reader through the fraught post-civil rights movement period when the “unnecessary” shooting of Bernard Whitehurst Jr. occurred.
In our current time, as police shootings regularly dominate news cycles, this book shows how essential it is to find and face the truth in such deeply troubling matters.
Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery was published by NewSouth Books in November 2018. Copies can be purchased from major retailers like Amazon and ordered through local retailers.
February 1, 2020
A new article on “It’s A Southern Thing”
[image error]I’m pleased to have a new article about the Lillian E. Smith Center in Clayton, Georgia published on It’s A Southern Thing. The article centers on how Smith’s writing and the Laurel Falls Camp became the modern-day center that has the old camp, under nonprofit leadership, hosting socially conscious writers and artists. I’ve had residencies at the Lillian E. Smith Center twice now, and it’s a wonderful place to get some work done away from ordinary daily pressures.
January 28, 2020
Southern Movie 45: “Macon County Line” (1974)
Written, produced by, and starring Max Baer, Jr. – well-known as Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies – 1974’s Macon County Line made claims that it was based on a true story. Directed by Richard Compton, who later in the ’80s would direct action TV shows like Hill Street Blues and TJ Hooker, the movie might be about the two young rabble-rousers who we meet in the beginning, but it might be about the sheriff in Macon County, who we meet near the middle. The main problem is: Macon County Line can’t figure out who its main character is, who we’re following in the story, where we are, or why. But that didn’t stop it from becoming, according to some sources, the top-grossing movie of 1974. Its tagline says, “A vengeful Southern sheriff is out for blood after his wife is brutally killed by a pair of drifters,” but that’s not what the first eighty percent of the movie is about. Its slow-paced story is mostly a directionless ramble into dumb luck that leads to dire consequences.
Macon County Line opens by letting us know that we’re in Louisiana in 1954, and that we’re watching a drama based on real events. A couple leaves a late-night bar on a quiet street, and they drive away in a roadster. Then our attention is shifted to a second-floor window where a red light bulb is hanging. Once we’re let inside, we see a tiny room, where one young man is getting dressed, presumably after getting finished with the girl that his buddy is now on top of. Looking out the window, though, he sees three men lighting cigarettes under a street lamp and advises his friend to hurry up and get finished. It appears that her man is coming home. (How he knows that’s who they are, we have no idea.) Of course, he’s right, and the men come up the narrow stairs and burst into the bedroom as the our two anti-heroes go out the window, one naked and carrying his clothes. They scramble across the rooftops and jump into the street, running like crazy from two of the guys who chase them a few blocks before turning the wrong way. The naked one manages to get his clothes on, but there’s another problem: they find that they’ve parked their car in a tow-away zone, and it’s gone.
As the credits roll, the two – Chris and Wayne Dixon, who are brothers – walk in the early morning sunlight down a rural two-lane road. A black female gospel-style singer belts out a tune as they walk. We don’t know where they’re going, or even where they are, since the last time we saw them they were in what looked like New Orleans. (The film is called Macon County Line, but we don’t know whether that means Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, or maybe Texas.) The song goes on for longer than it should, but by the twelve-minute mark in the film, they’ve arrived at the yard where their towed car is being stored. An older man flippantly explains the twenty-seven dollars in taxes and fees to get it out, and though the two dispute the amount and the reason, they fork over the money and drive away in their wood-paneled yellow convertible.
Soon, the pair are in a diner, eating breakfast at the counter, while a single waitress tries to tend to all of the men gathered there. Two lawmen then arrive to eat and joke, and Wayne breaks for the bathroom and goes out the slatted window while an old-timer taking a dump watches him passively. Back at the counter, Chris sets up the dine-and-dash, and when the waitress raises cain about being stiffed for the check, the two fat lawmen get up to go after them. However, Wayne has hooked a tow chain from the back of the first car to the front of the second, and when the first officer takes off, the whole front end of the police car is ripped off. As the lawmen survey the damage, the two laughing tricksters go off down the road.
Despite the silly antics of the movie’s two main characters so far, we still have no idea what we’re watching or why. No plot line has emerged, and so far Macon County Line is all characterization. However, there’s a plot point coming up.
As the two now-shirtless young men ride and talk, they see a pretty, young blonde sitting alone by the roadside with her suitcase. Of course, they have to stop and pick her up. At first, Jenny Scott is resistant but changes her mind and gets in the back seat of the convertible, and as the car rolls down a two-lane back road, Chris begins to tell a tale about a judge sentencing him to military service for a crime he won’t name or describe. Meanwhile, Wayne is adding his own embellishments, both confusing and amusing the young woman, who is enjoying the thing, smiling and laughing. Of course, we don’t know whether any of this is true . . .
Next, the story shifts to the Southern sheriff Reed Morgan (Max Baer), who we’ve read about in the tagline of the film. Reed is a big man but is also friendly and smiles a lot. He is in a shop examining a shotgun that he wants to buy for his ten-year-old son Luke. The shopkeeper is trying to talk him into something smaller for the boy, but Reed says that he is ready for the bigger gun. The two men kid each other a bit, then agree to a price, which Reeds puts off paying in full.
Meanwhile, the two brothers and their pretty hitchhiker are limping down the road in the convertible, which is knocking now. They acknowledge that they’re having car trouble and pull into a small garage, where an awkward mechanic named Hamp, played by Clint Eastwood mainstay Geoffrey Lewis, is dickering with a customer in a truck over a mare he wants to buy. The odd man and his wife, who is inside the shop, yell back and forth at each other while the young people wait. Chris declares, “If the Lord was going to give the world an enema, right here is where he’d stick the hose.” Jenny laughs, as Wayne stands by. Soon, Hamp comes over to their car, looks at the fuel pump, and declares that a catch is broken. They’ll need a new pump if they want the car to go anywhere.
Our focus is then shifted back to Reed again, as he pulls up to his house. He has gone home to wash up and change his shirt, but we get a look at the informal nature of his work. He has already been shopping for his son, in uniform and during his work day, and now he’s at home asking his wife to bring him a beer. She asks about the gun, and he explains it, then she plops down on the bed, giving him the lovey-dovey eyes, but Reed just smiles and leaves her hanging.
Back at the garage, Hamp gives the young people a hard time about paying, first saying that he doesn’t take credit cards, then refusing to let them charge the repairs after saying that he takes “cash or charge.” They ask the price, and when Hamp goes inside to figure that out, they count their cash. The guys have seven dollars between them, and Jenny offers a bit more, but Hamp’s price is twenty-seven. Chris tells Wayne, “Go get the gun.”
“What gun?” Jenny asks, but without answering, Wayne gets a small .22 rifle out of the trunk. He looks stern and serious and walks toward Chris and Hamp. When Hamp sees the gun, he is startled and worried, but then Chris offers him a trade: the gun for the fuel pump. Hamp is deeply relieved but tells them that he doesn’t need a .22 rifle. He’ll take a shotgun if they have one, but not a .22. They sweeten the deal by offering him the rifle and eight dollars, but he still says no, then offers to fix only the catch for five dollars. It will only take them about twenty miles, he says, but they have no choice.
During this interplay, Hamp makes a reference to nearby towns named Thornton and Macon, where the gas station might take their credit card. Once again, this is no help in placing the scene, since there are no towns named Thornton in Georgia or Tennessee. There is a Thornton, Alabama, but it is in Tallapoosa County, north of Macon County. Moreover, the city of Macon, Georgia is not in Macon County; it is in Bibb County. The opening of the film says that names were changed, but the lack of a solid locale is still disconcerting.
Since they’ve come an agreement about fixing the car, Chris, Wayne, and Jenny all head to the bathrooms since they’ll be there a while. First, we see the brothers talking and joking, wondering out loud about the girl. Jenny is changing clothes in the women’s bathroom. Then Reed arrives at the little gas station and startles Hamp’s wife, who is reading inside. They talk a joke a bit too, and Reed starts working on another beer. Through these sequences, nothing meaningful happens, and the plot isn’t moved forward at all.
Next, our attention is drawn to two men who pull up in a blue car to get gas. While Reed and Hamp’s wife talk about the three young people in the convertible, we see that the greasy passenger in the blue car doesn’t like seeing a lawman inside. He points Reed out to the messy-haired driver, who tells Hamp to hurry up pumping the gas. The driver then slaps some money into Hamp’s hand and they rush off, commenting to each other about the cop back there.
But Reed’s focus is on Chris, Wayne, and Jenny. He goes into the garage to ask Hamp what is going on. On the way in, he notes the Illinois tag on the car, then laughs at the awkward mechanic for getting the make of the car wrong. Outside the bay, Chris and Wayne are cautiously eyeing Reed. They are penniless and have committed a series of misdemeanors and felonies, and we feel sure that they’re wondering whether those two fat cops at the diner have put out a call to look out for them.
When Reed swaggers out of the dark garage, he has a few questions for the trio. He wants to know what they’re doing – passing through, they tell him – and then he wants to see identification. After that checks out, he apprises the three that there is vagrancy law requiring them to have ten dollars a piece and asks to see it. Chris openly refuses, and the other two stand there. This threat is enough to sober the scene, and Reed tells Hamp to hurry up with the car, then follows with a last remark that he wouldn’t like it if they stuck around for long. As the sun is going down, Reed drives off. In the car, he calls in to the station to run their license plates.
In the dark, the relatively harmless trio of miscreants waits on the car, but the two seedy guys in the car are scoping out houses. And while Reed is gone to get his son from military school, they choose his house— where his wife is home alone.
At the boarding school, Reed walks down a silent hall to a room where a small group of uniformed boys are in a study hall. He finds Luke there, and they get his bags to leave. Walking down the hall, Reed compliments Luke on his promotion to lieutenant then asks him to go hunting. Luke doesn’t want to go, since he promised some boys that he’d play on their baseball team. Reed asks him to reconsider but Luke is emphatic, so Reed yields, saying they can go another time. Outside of the school, in the dark, a group of black boys play basketball on the school’s outdoor court, and Luke speaks to two of them, who are his friends. Reed sees this, but doesn’t say anything.
Back at the Morgans’ home, Reed’s wife is watching the news about McCarthy hearings when the two seedy guys from the car sneak in and accost her. She begins to scream but they subdue her. For the next few minutes, there is a bizarre sequence of imagistic scenes that imply a rape. These scenes are disturbing and are stylistically out of sorts in the film, which has been pretty straightforward so far.
Next we see, the young threesome In the car are moving down the road but their car is petering out. When it finally craps out, they pull over and have a brief tense back and forth about how to get the car fixed. However, agreeing that it’s dark and that they have no tools, they opt for getting some sleep. Wayne, Chris, and Jenny seek out a barn nearby, but Wayne decides to go sleep in the car. Meanwhile, having raped Reed’s wife and robbed the house, the two seedy guys crank up their car and leave, and when they do, we see that Chris, Wayne, and Jenny have stopped right outside Reed’s house— we know that they will be regarded as the culprits who committed this terrible crime!
On the ride home from military school, Reed, who knows nothing of this whole situation at home, is having a heart-to-heart with Luke. The boy explains that he knows the black boys from pickup basketball games on free days, but that the school personnel typically run them off and don’t seem to want them there. Reed tries to explain the rationale of segregation by saying that it “make things easier,” and that he and his wife agree with it. The boy just wants to know, “Does that mean I can’t play basketball with them anymore?” and Reed replies coldly, “I wish you wouldn’t.” Luke doesn’t like but says okay.
What follows make Macon County Line even more awkward. Back in the barn, Jenny undresses, and she and Chris have their sex scene, complete with cheesy, sentimental music. Considering that we’ve just watched a brutal home invasion and rape followed by an assertion that Southern racism is for the best, most moviegoers wouldn’t be feeling sexy at this point.
Out on the highway again, two policeman pull up behind the car of the robber-rapists because their taillights are out. The officers decide to pull the car over, but the men in it debate on whether to comply. When they do pull over, the first officer goes to their window and casually tells them to get the lights fixed, but his older partner sees the signs of the sketchiness in the back seat and orders them out of the car. But it’s not going to happen. The greasy one who committed the rape has a pistol trained on the cop and shoots him twice. They take off! The cops chase them. The driver is sniveling and crying, while they greaser passenger berates him for “driving like a woman.” Soon, though, a truck pulls out in front of them, and they crash.
As the unwitting people’s fates converge, we’re focused again on Reed and Luke. The boy is asleep on his dad’s shoulder and has a dream about them hunting together. Some birds fly up out of the tall grass, and Reed has to shoot them since his son is too weak and slow to shoot. Reed is disappointed, and Luke is embarrassed.
Then we’re back to the seedy robber-rapist-cop-killers, who are in the police station. They are being interrogated and denied a lawyer by the older officer whose partner was killed. They’re being told to sign a confession before they can see a lawyer. Both men refuse, and the officer gets angrier. As the wimpy driver cries, the greasy one is told to put his hands on the table. The officer pulls out his gun and threatens to blow his hand off if he doesn’t sign. As the tension rises, the camera shows us the lawyer outside the room, and we hear the gunshot and a man scream.
By this time, Reed and Luke are pulling in their driveway, and Reed notices the convertible driven by the three hooligans from Illinois. Wayne is asleep in the car. Reed then walks casually into his house, but rushes back out before Luke reaches the porch. He tells the boy to stay outside, but he doesn’t. As Reed goes toward the car where Wayne is sleeping, Luke lets out terrified screams, “Father! Father!” Wayne is awakened and gets out of the car, then runs when he sees Reed, who fires a couple of shots at him with a pistol.
In the house, Luke is laying on top of his mother, who blood-spattered and dead. Reed grabs him up, takes him outside, and slaps hell out of him a few times yelling, “Shut up! Shut Up!” before yanking the boy’s arm to go. Here again, Reed’s focus on revenge rather than on his murdered wife is awkward.
Now, the chase is on! Wayne finds his friends in the barn and says they’ve got to go, that the sheriff is shooting at him. Of course, we know that they didn’t do this to Reed’s wife, but Reed doesn’t. And Wayne doesn’t know why the sheriff is shooting. Now, Reed is in his car, tearing out of the driveway to look for them. Back at the station, the lady clerk tells the angry interrogator-officer that Reed called and wanted an ambulance sent to his house, then turned off his radio. She doesn’t know why or what is going on.
The last ten or fifteen minutes of Macon County Line consist of a chase through the woods at night. Reed is pulling an exhausted Luke and running after the three young people, stopping periodically to fire at them with his shotgun. Back at his house, the angry older cop has come, and he finds Reed’s dead wife and the car with Illinois plates. Shortly after the chase begins, Wayne begins to return fire at Reed with his .22 rifle, but Jenny gets shot as they run down a dock. They retrieve her and take cover in a boat, but Reed has gone silent. The tension rises as the trio huddles down. Chris then decides to swim and get to a another boat for them to escape in, but before he can return and complete his plan, a shower of gunfire (from a person we don’t see) kills Wayne and Jenny. Right after that scene, the older cop who was interrogating the real criminals makes his way through the woods and finds Reed dead on the ground. Next, we see the shocking truth: it was young Luke who killed Wayne and Jenny so mercilessly. He is standing over their bodies trying over and over to pump another shell into the chamber of his shotgun.
In the light of day, Chris Dixon is sitting alone in his car as Hamp repairs it so he can move along. A whole slew of people stand, silent and stoic, watching the scene with blank faces. Then Chris closes the car door and drives away as three separate text blocks fill the screen. The first explains that the two rapist-cop-killers were convicted and electrocuted in 1961. The second says that Luke Morgan turned 29 years in 1973 in the mental institution. And finally, that Chris Dixon was in the Air Force and lived in Hawaii. As Chris drives away, that is all.
Not only is the film itself confusing, the story of making Macon County Line is a twisting mass of uncertainty. The website of AFI relays an unclear narrative about a series of events regarding Max Baer, Jr’s involvement in the film, and the website Images had this to say:
During the movie’s opening credits, the movie is labeled with the following text: “This story is true. Only the names and places have been changed.” However, during the videotaped interviews also contained on this [re-release] DVD, Max Baer reveals this claim is bogus. During test screenings, audiences complained about the movie’s contrivances. So Baer and Compton used the “true” story claim as a way of justifying the coincidences that propel the action forward. And once the movie was labeled as based upon a real-life event, these complaints disappeared entirely. Even today, critics dutifully report that the movie is “based on fact” (Leonard Maltin, Movie & Video Guide).
Notwithstanding the movie’s flaws, the portrayals in Macon County Line smack of Southern-ness but the story doesn’t build itself around them. Reed Morgan is a stereotypical Southern sheriff: friendly to locals, unfriendly to strangers, interested in guns and beer, supportive of segregation, and of course, and sporting a Confederate flag on the sleeve of his uniform. Beyond that, the sleepy slowness of other characters’ behavior also belies a Southern-ness.
But the problem in assessing this movie is that it isn’t really clear what it is about. Chris is only character we meet in the beginning who is alive at the end, but the movie isn’t really about him. The ending is about Luke, who we don’t meet until two-thirds of the way through the movie, and though Reed is a main character, his death is undeveloped and shrouded by darkness . . . If you ask me, Macon County Line may have been a popular when it was released, but it’s also clear by it faded into obscurity.
January 21, 2020
Goodreads: “Frankenstein”
[image error]Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve read this novel a few times – in part because copies with my underlinings, which I teach from, seem to disappear – and it gets better every time I read it. Some readers regard “Frankenstein” as overrated or have other complaints about it, but I both enjoy it and teach it for several reasons. First, it gives students a chance to see how media representations and film remakes distort an author’s original work. (It’s a good example of why we should read the book, not just watch the movie.) Second, its style is definitely 19th-century Romantic but not so dense as to be unattainable to high-school students. Third, the story asks common human questions about identity and meaning while presenting quandaries about the uses and misuses of science and technology, and also offering an (extreme) example of the mistakes that unrestrained youthful vigor can lead to. I’ve found that students are typically impressed by how the novel is not what they expected it to be.
January 18, 2020
Goodreads: “A Letter Concerning Toleration”
[image error]A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I chose to add this work to my English 12 syllabus this year since our new textbook is thematic, not chronological, and the fourth unit is called “Seeing Things New.” By the time Locke was writing this in the late 1600s, Europe undergone more than a century of the Protestant/Catholic back-and-forth, and it probably seemed like time for a new, more rational approach to prevail. I had read the letter several years ago on my own and felt like it laid a solid groundwork for WHY we have a separation of church and state in America. On the one hand, reading this letter is a slog. The diction and syntax are indicative of heavy, Enlightenment-era philosophical prose, some of the spellings are unorthodox— and there are lots of semicolons! But for readers who put forth the effort to dig in, take the time, and get through it, the intellectual rewards are there. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Locke writes here, but his examination of the differences between civil authorities’ raison d’etre and the meaning of religious experience is thought-provoking.
January 13, 2020
The Arising Arts Expo @ MMFA, January 14
Tomorrow evening, from 5:30 ’til 7:30 PM, teachers and students from BTW Magnet, Baldwin Arts, and Carver Elementary will be at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts showcasing the programs offered at Montgomery’s three arts magnet schools. If you or someone you know is interested, come see us and we can talk about the programs and answer questions.
January 7, 2020
In 2020: Re-Arranging the (Mental) Furniture
When blogging and other new media, like YouTube, began to emerge amid cuts to newsrooms and declines in book sales, I jumped at the chance, first on Blogger and later on WordPress. Within the twenty-first century’s paradigm shift, as people have moved away from print media and appointment television and toward online (and now mobile) browsing and streaming, this relatively new and distinctly democratic platform has been a God-send for writers like me. And, for nearly ten years, Welcome to Eclectic has given me a platform for publishing anything I saw fit: short essays, poems, a column.
[image error]However, there are also downsides to writing a blog. Coming up with ideas and writing posts requires constant attention, and it also urges a writer forward with the idea, why seek out other venues for my work when I’ve got my own? This idea became especially prominent as the number of visitors increased over the years from hundreds to thousands. Yet, these factors added up, for me at least, to mean that I’ve spent little time seeking opportunities in mainstream publications, submitting poems to literary magazines, or revising works that I completed then set aside. So, I made the decision in 2019 to shift back to a more traditional approach toward writing and publishing that includes a blog but doesn’t have a blog at the center of it.
Thankfully, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. I’ve begun work on a book about our local Catholic school, which was founded in 1873 by the Sisters of Loretto. The school’s 150th anniversary is coming up in 2023, and the book will be both historical and commemorative. The goal is to produce a stand-alone work that offers a substantial but accessible narrative about the school and its evolution over a century and a half. Right now, I’m only researching, mostly reading, but the writing should begin in earnest later this year.
In addition to that new project, there is the Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest. We got more than four times as many submissions this second year as we did the inaugural year, so I’ve been pleased to see that the word is getting out. Both years, submissions have come in from all over the US, even a few from overseas. The deadline for students to submit passed on December 31, and the judging is now underway. Over the next two months, we’ll have the judges – poet Kwoya Maples Fagin and novelist Joe Taylor – reading them to determine our winners, which will be announced in March. Then, we’ll open the contest up for submissions again in September and start all over!
[image error]Of course, I’ve also shifted some of my time and attention to leading the sustainability efforts at my school and to participating in the Old Cloverdale Community Garden in my neighborhood. I recently went to both the Camp McDowell Farm School and the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network’s Food and Farm Forum, and my goal is to apply some of that new knowledge here at home. The nice side of this new work is that it doesn’t really feel like work. The more I tinker and grow and build and learn, the more I enjoy it, and considering how much time I spend at a desk, writing or grading papers, it has been nice to get outside and move around more often.
Finally, last fall I joined the board of the Alabama Campaign for Adolescent Sexual Health, an organization whose mission is to help young people make “evidence-informed” decisions in these deeply personal matters, decisions that can have long-lasting effects on their lives. While this subject matter is outside of my wheelhouse, as a high school teacher, it concerns me that my students live in the “most sexually diseased city in the nation.” The Campaign provides training, resources, and advocacy with the goal of having teens and young adults to make choices based on facts, not guesses, myths, or rumors, though my role on the board is mainly in providing the perspective of a classroom teacher who works with teenagers in a public school.
For me, 2020 is going to look different from previous years. Notwithstanding the normal propensity for using the new year as an opportunity to change one’s life, I can feel that the time has come for significant change in mine. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been productive, but they’ve also flown by, dominated by a work regimen that I built in my late twenties. Now, in my mid-forties, I’ve been working and living that way for more than fifteen years, with varying degrees of success, and it seems, at least, like the time to rearrange the (mental) furniture.
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. ~ Ross Perot
— Zen Moments (@Zen_Moments) December 5, 2019
December 31, 2019
Dirty Boots: “Twenty Years since Y2K”
We all just knew something awful was going to happen, but that was also kind of cool. We were told that all of the computers were going to freak out and crash, including the ones in our cars, including the ones at the banks, when the double-digit year “99” tried unsuccessfully to flip over to “00.” The computers wouldn’t know what to do, and it was going to be apocalyptic. After midnight on January 1, 2000, we weren’t going to be able to buy groceries or turn on the heat. Everything that involved electricity or telecommunications would go haywire. Y2K was going to ruin everything.
[image error]It seemed like a fitting end for Generation X. To go out for New Year’s Eve and come home to oblivion. Our generation’s distinguishing challenges had been skyrocketing divorce rates and growing up largely unsupervised, and now the Boomers, our parents’ generation who built a world in which computers are ubiquitous, would be bringing it all down on our heads right as we came of age.
What was even more fitting for Generation X was that it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. The lights didn’t even flutter. Even Y2K turned out to be a let-down. I was in Charleston, South Carolina that night, in a park downtown, as the crowd counted down, ” Three . . . two . . . one . . .” One huge collective gasp occurred, as hundreds of people around us sucked in a hard breath from the cold night air . . . then used that breath to let out one huge collective cheer when Y2K didn’t cancel out the world as we knew it. The first moment of the year 2000 was the ultimate anticlimax for our generation. What was amazing about us, though, was that we believed it would happen and went out partying anyway. “It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine . . .”
Y2K marked the end of my youth. I spent that night with this pretty girl with big blue eyes and asked her to marry me less than a year later. In 2000, I worked the last of my after-college dead-end jobs and got a job in book publishing in early 2001. After that, the dominoes fell as they do for most people: buy a house, have some children, work a lot, look up and realize you’re middle-aged. Tonight will be twenty years since we drew that collective breath in Charleston on the night we thought civilization would come crashing down. It didn’t, though, and now I guess it’s time to stop talking about it and move on.
This will be the last of “Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon that offered a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.
December 30, 2019
The deadline is tomorrow.
December 28, 2019
10 More GenX Movies You’ve Probably Forgotten (Or Never Seen)
When the subject of Generation-X films comes up, everybody remembers the John Hughes classics The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything and Singles, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Chasing Amy. A more attentive movie buff might also remember Repo Man or Kids or Blue Velvet, or there’s even the possibility that a few of you wandered naively into The Crying Game or Paris is Burning and never have been able to forget what you saw. Or maybe you went out on a limb once or twice back in the ’80s and ’90s and tried to watch those cool new movies people were talking about, like Slacker or Wild At Heart. But there’s much more, so . . . in addition to the first ten I already offered, here are ten more that you might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Went to Coney Island on Mission from God . . . Be Back by Five . . . (1998)
If you think of Jon Cryer as either teenage loverboy Ducky from Pretty in Pink or as the flunky chiropractor Allen in Two and a Half Men, you probably didn’t pay much attention to him in the years between. This late-’90s indie film, which followed the minor high-school comedy Hiding Out, had Cryer playing a young man who goes with his alcoholic best friend on a day-long quest to find a childhood friend who disappeared. This movie captures and uses the Generation X penchant for randomness and pseudo-intellectualism pretty well. The movie only gets a 5.8/10 rating on IMDb, but it’s a better movie than that.
Paris, Texas (1984)
Directed by Wim Wenders and with a storyline from Sam Shepard, this European movie features indie mainstay Harry Dean Stanton playing Travis Henderson, a man who remerges in his small town after he wandered off four years earlier. His young wife, played by model Natassja Kinski, has left, and his young son has been raised by his brother during that time. Travis wants to reunite his family, so his brother helps him, and it becomes a road movie. Some people say that the end of this film is the greatest movie ending ever.
Arizona Dream (1993)
After Edward Scissorhands and before Benny & Joon and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Johnny Depp starred in this film about a young man who goes to Arizona for his uncle’s wedding— but it won’t be that simple. This movie has a stellar cast: comedian Jerry Lewis, beauties Faye Dunaway and Paulina Porizkova, indie actors Lili Taylor and Vincent Gallo, and character actor Michael J. Pollard. If it’s possible to combine Gen-X floundering, unlikely romance, and the complexities of coming-of-age with halibut in the desert Southwest, this film does it.
Night on Earth (1991)
This movie is centered around taxi cab rides in five major cities around the world, and it tells its story in five vignettes about an array of characters. Back when Bravo! was an arts channel, they used to show movies like this one at random times, between Cirque de Soleil reruns and that documentary about Paganini. This was the first time I remember seeing Roberto Benigni, who seemed so wacky, and with her baseball cap on backwards, Winona Ryder was playing a distinctly different kind of role here. (This film came out in the year between Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.) The movie is short on action, but it’s the conversations that carry it forward.
Stranger than Paradise (1984)
[image error]Set in New York City and starring musician John Lurie, who you’d recognize from Wild at Heart or Desperately Seeking Susan, and Richard Edson, who you’d recognize as the garage employee who joy-rides the Ferrari in Ferris Bueller, this is another distinctly Generation X road movie, as two Hungarian cousins leave New York City to visit their aunt in Cleveland. Of course, it goes further than that.
Living in Oblivion (1995)
Self-described as a “film about filmmaking,” this movie is a farce about the making of a low-budget movie. I remember reading about this in Village Voice when I subscribed in the mid-’90s but not actually seeing the movie until later. Of course, the cast is pure ’90s indie: Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, James LeGros . . . and even has Peter Dinklage who later became famous in Game of Thrones. If you find chaos funny, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t, you probably won’t.
Where the Day Takes You (1992)
Another one I saw back when Bravo! showed good movies, Where the Day Takes You tells the story of a group of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles led by a cool dude named King, played by Dermot Mulroney. The movie intersperses its main story with videotaped segments of King talking to a counselor about how he’d like to get off the street. Lara Flynn Boyle plays a new arrival on the scene who, of course, falls in love with King. It’s a pretty bleak movie, but not as bad as some on this list.
Near Dark (1987)
Like The Addiction, this is one of the lesser-known Generation X vampire movies. It is alternately slow-paced creepy and wildly violent. It lacks the Hollywood feel of Lost Boys, which came out the following year, but it’s better than a movie like 1985’s Fright Night, which was pretty hokey. This one has a small-town boy to fall in love with a sultry girl, played by Jenny Wright from The World According to Garp. But she turns out to be a vampire, and her homeless-punk-Winnebago family doesn’t like this new boy hanging around. Her father is played by Lance Henriksen, of Pumpkinhead fame, and her brother by Bill Paxton from Weird Science. The movie gets a little stupid and gory as it goes along, but hey, it’s a 1980s horror movie.
At Close Range (1986)
Set in the late ’70s in rural Pennsylvania, this film has Sean Penn playing Christopher Walken’s son in a crime thriller that is based on a true story. This was also a film that paired Penn on screen with Madonna, who did the movie’s main song, “Live to Tell.” At Close Range is gritty and tough in its portrayal of cold-blooded killers in a crime family that specializes in the theft of farm equipment, but Penn’s character Brad Whitewood, Jr. finds out that he’s in over his head when he and his friends try to get in the same racket.
Less Than Zero (1987)
I don’t know how I made my first list of ten Gen-X movies without mentioning this one, based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel. I remember seeing Less Than Zero when I was a teenager and thinking that LA looked so cool— until Robert Downey, Jr.’s character had to become a gay prostitute to work off his drug debt. Less Than Zero had Jami Gertz the year before she starred in Lost Boys and Andrew McCarthy the year after Pretty in Pink. It also has a killer soundtrack, wacky ’80s fashion, stacked TV sets, and a red 1959 Corvette convertible. It’s probably the most Hollywood of the movies I’ve listed, but because it’s also dark and dated, it doesn’t get as much play these days.
