Foster Dickson's Blog, page 31

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “10 Gen-X 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. But there’s so much more . . . and these ten are ones you might have overlooked, or if you didn’t overlook them, you might have wished you had.

Bad Boys (1983)

This movie about life in a juvenile prison for boys is both dark and brutal. Sean Penn has the lead role, playing Mick O’Brien, who is incarcerated for killing his street rival’s brother. In prison, actors Esai Morales and Clancy Brown play two really scary teenagers who target Mick. Any male Gen-Xer who watched this one on cable TV from the comfort of his living room couch had only one thought, I don’t ever want to end up in prison.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Old Agrarian-ness of a New Ethos”

[image error]In “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision,” originally published in 1980 in Virginia Quarterly Review and re-published online in 2003, the critic Lucinda H. Mackethan writes about “a group of Southern Americans profoundly disturbed by the lack of humane values operating in their world.” She was referring to the contributing authors in the Southern classic I’ll Take My Stand, a small group of perhaps overly nostalgic academics, poets, and critics who looked on a Northern-dominated, heavily industrial country with disdain. But in that phrase, she could have been writing about a lot of modern Southerners, from gun-loving ultra-conservative neophobes to the Gen-Xers who’ve started organic CSAs, letterpress shops, and microbreweries.

Though I had known about I’ll Take My Stand as one of the classics of Southern studies, I hadn’t taken the time to read it until recent years. A weathered copy of a 1977 edition with a preface by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. fell into my hands, and I admittedly let it sit a while before I took it on. This collection of Southern “agrarian” essays has been regarded by some readers as the quaint visions of some hopeless romantics and by other readers as a group of diatribes that are basically racist and elitist in their Depression-era conservatism. By picking and choosing passages, a critical reader could justify either those perspectives.

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Dirty Boots: “Where there is no love, put love” no

[image error]Among the most popular posts on this blog, two that get read quite often are a pair from 2013 about reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness. Not long ago, I re-read those posts myself and was reminded of a passage that I quoted there, one I hadn’t thought of in some time: “where there is no love, put love and you will find love.”

When I read or hear sayings like that, I wonder why doing something so simple can be so difficult. I think that it’s because other responses, rooted in self-preservation, come more naturally when we find ourselves in situations where there is no love: walking away, pretending not to notice, blaming someone, acting ugly back, complaining later. I used to work for an old veterinarian who would say, “Foster, it’s easy to be nice to nice people.” But it’s hard to be nice to unfriendly, unpleasant, or problematic people, and before we can interject something positive — call it love, if you want — into a negative situation, we often consider our own feelings, our own fears, our own well-being first. Then, if those personal concerns seem satisfactory, we may allow ourselves to be a small light in the otherwise-darkness.

Here at Christmas, we have reminders about the power of light in the otherwise-darkness, about how we should put love where there is no love. We top our Christmas trees with a star to remind us of the star that the wise men followed to find Jesus, and we sing about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer making Santa’s delivery possible during a dark, winter storm. In both cases, there was darkness to be traversed on the way something worthwhile, something greater than the self.

[image error]I know that this is a hard thing to do, because I struggle with it, too. I think we all do. It’s easier to go about our business, worry about ourselves, be nice to nice people, and avoid the not-nice people. It’s hard to abide by Dorothy Day’s simple advice . . . But Day was a true Christian, a woman who turned away from a selfish life to create and lead a movement for Christian charity. Day provided light with her life and with her writings. She put love where there was no love. Notwithstanding her deep personal sacrifices, which few of us are willing to make, that, at least, seems worthy of emulation.

I hope that everyone has a Merry Christmas.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Teach.”

On the evening that my students and I met the traveling students from Phillips Exeter Academy for the first time, their teacher Olutoyin Augustus-Ikwuakor had a sheet full of activities planned for our two-hour preliminary session. Mrs. Augustus-Ikwuakor and I had corresponded in the spring about their trip from New Hampshire to Alabama, where they would spend four days in late November learning about social justice and Civil Rights issues, and she wanted her students to meet and collaborate with some local students. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, we were gathered in their hotel’s conference room to eat dinner together, to get to know each other, and to do some educational groundwork. As we looked over her list of activities, I asked if I could have a few minutes to talk with them about Southern history, and she replied, a little surprised, “Oh, you want to teach?”

I did want to teach. The history of the Deep South, with respect to social justice issues, cannot be approached casually, for that can easily lead to something like shell-shock. The brutality of this history is evident immediately to anyone who comes to survey a broad spectrum of museum exhibits that include graphic images of the burnt and battered bodies of lynching victims and scenes of police-led mob violence. This would be a lot to digest for a group of teenagers from New England who had given up the latter half of their two-week Thanksgiving break, and for my students, some of whom had only encountered the sanitized overviews in social studies textbooks and school-lunchroom pow-wows that celebrate Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. No, this was the real stuff. What these 27 students would see and hear constitutes the reasons that the Civil Rights movement had to happen, and needs to continue.

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Saturday Morning Reruns: “Field Trips to Nowhere”

[image error]As our bus rolled down rural Highway 14, which sprawls loosely between Selma, Alabama and the iconic Sprott Post Office, we passed the sign for Hamburg, the tiny farming community where Mary Ward Brown wrote her brilliant stories and memoir, and I tried to apprise the busload of students of it. The few who heard me over the roar of the charter bus turned their heads vaguely as we passed the inauspicious left turn. A few then looked back at me, waiting for more, while others told their classmates who hadn’t heard me what I’d just said. It was hard to teach in such a setting, but I tried anyway.

We had just visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where I had my students start on the downtown Selma side and walk the arc of the bridge so they could get a physical sense how the marchers in 1965 could not see the small army of state troopers on the other side until it was too late to turn back. After a brief stop in the visitors center, they also got to browse the low-slung lobby of the supposedly haunted St. James Hotel and peer into the lush, dark courtyard at the center of that pre-Civil War structure. Now, we were rolling down a two-lane back road, moving further northwest into Alabama’s Black Belt.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Where did twenty years go?”

[image error]I graduated from college twenty years ago this month. I’d like to say that, back then, I was fresh-faced and optimistic, ready to take on the world, but that’s not true. I was twenty-two, heavy-bearded, skinny, generally pale, and still lived with my mother. I had a dead-end job at a veterinarian’s office and drove a 1983 Toyota Celica hatchback, which my insurance company regarded as a “sports car,” even though it had slung a rod during the only road trip I ever tried to take it on. (The seal on the large back window had also rotted, and the rain that collected in the spare-tire well sloshed around every time I turned.) Let’s just say that the world was not my oyster— and I knew it.

After walking across the stage in AUM’s gymnasium in December 1996, my three realities didn’t really mesh well together: a degree in English, which many people in the Deep South regard as a prime example of useless erudition; five or six years of work experience doing menial labor in a variety of settings; and an unrepentantly surly attitude about how my life had gone so far. So I took those skills into the one field where they would be appreciated: the bar business.

My first job after college was working the door at an all-night jazz-and-blues bar called 1048. A friend worked there as a bartender, and she called the week I graduated to ask if I wanted a job. Somebody had just quit, and December was always busy with college students coming home for the break. They needed somebody right now. So, in addition to my vet’s office job,  I started spending every Friday and Saturday night from 9 PM until 2 AM standing in the cold, taking up five-dollar bills, and arguing with people whose friends had gotten in before the bar reached capacity. For my trouble, I earned $35 and two free drinks. It felt like Heaven.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “How Cool It Was— Back Then”

There’s been a lot of heavy stuff to write about lately in the Deep South . . . race in politics, controversial legislation, and the death of a talented writer. Here it is, the heart of the winter, nearly a full month into the dead season with more than two months still to go until spring, and I’m looking for something good to talk about.

[image error]So, what better way to take my mind off the mean ol’ present by waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ past. I’m about a half a year late writing about this one, but not too long ago I read that last May marked the 35th anniversary of the release of the classically zany film depiction of the Deep South in the late ’70s, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed and Jackie Gleason. If you’ve never seen this movie, shame on you! And frankly, the only thing I respect less than a Southerner who has never seen this movie is a Southerner who has only seen the censored TBS version that used to air on lazy Saturday afternoons, the version where Sheriff Buford T. Justice keeps using the overdubbed, heavily censored epithet “scum bum” (in the place of “sumbitch”).

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Panic On!”

[image error]Can you believe it has been ten years since Mike Houser died? What began thirty years ago as a pair of guys who liked to play music together – John Bell and Mike Houser – has grown exponentially into one of modern Southern culture’s musical mainstays. Sadly, Houser succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2002, but he’s still with us in a lot of ways— from his brilliant playing on Widespread Panic’s albums and in concerts to those stickers with his sitting-down-to-play silhouette that I see on the back of a car every now and then.

I first saw Widespread Panic live back in the early 1990s at an outdoor venue in southern Montgomery County called Sandy Creek, which was basically an open field down a one-lane dirt road, and at the time I had no idea who they were. I had seen this bright orange poster on a phone pole for a band that was playing out there and decided to go. Shows at Sandy Creek always made for a good time. Bringing your own cooler was easy enough, and the crowds contained an unpredictably eclectic mix of rednecks, stoners, college students, bikers, undercover cops and other sundry characters. But Sandy Creek is closed now, and I don’t remember much about that show at all . . .

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Dirty Boots: “Thirty Years from Now”

[image error]In the year 2050, my children will be in their early to mid-40s— the age I am now. I supposed that they’ll have families and children of their own by then, and if I’m still vertical, I’ll probably be a grandpa. Given the rise of technology in the last thirty years, since 1989, I can’t even begin to imagine what life will be like in 2050, what kind of a world my children will raise their children in. But I have to be honest that I’m worried.

Last September, the United Nations issued a report telling us that we’ve basically got to change our ways now, or by 2050, the effects of climate change will be severe, obvious, and irreparable. UN scientists estimate that the global population will be 9.8 billion by then, and it’s likely the world’s natural resources won’t be able to support that, especially not with our current eating habits. While others may have political reasons for their contempt or dismay about climate change, I believe the scientists. Science is a discipline that bases conclusions and predictions on verifiable facts, measurements, and observations, and what data is available now tells us that our “throwaway culture,” as Pope Francis calls it, is unsustainable. I know that there are also political connotations to that word now, but politics can’t change its true meaning: “not able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.”

And one major part of that is plastic. Another report from 2016 predicted that by 2050 our oceans will hold more plastic than fish. I don’t remember much from my science classes in school, but I do remember that plant and animal life in the oceans form the basis of the planet’s food chains and ecosystems. If there are going to be nearly ten billion of us walking around, breathing, and eating, I think we might need our planet’s food chains and ecosystems to function.

The year 2020 will start in two weeks. We have time to change our ways before these predictions about life thirty years from now, in 2050, come true. I know that throwing all trash away in one can is easier than separating and recycling. I know that grabbing a plastic water bottle is easier than toting a refillable bottle. I know that grabbing take-out food then discarding the packaging is easier than shopping, cooking, and washing dishes. But when I think about my children and grandchildren living in an overcrowded, overheated world without enough food to eat or air to breathe, it urges me toward a willingness to change my life now. In the South, being “pro-life” is a prevalent sentiment, as is the notion that we care about the rights of the unborn. If we’re going to shout it, we ought to live it too, and leave the planet in some kind of shape for future generations to lead decent lives.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “My little Echo at 13”

[image error]Almost thirteen years ago, I bought a little white two-door car called an Echo, which was made by Toyota for a very short time. I got one of them in the first model years. The Echo was basically the all-gas version of the then-new Prius hybrid. What sold me on the Echo over the Prius was that there was only 10-MPG difference between the two cars, yet the price difference was $14,000; the Echo retailed for around $11,000, and the Prius was just under $25,000. Back in 2000, when gas only $1.00 per gallon, there was no way I would make up that $14,000 in gas savings on that MPG difference.

Yet, even though the sticker on the Echo’s window said that it got 41 MPG, the car’s gas mileage has been even better than that. For example, when some friends of ours used to live in Charleston, South Carolina, we would drive over from Montgomery to visit them. Google Maps said that the distance was 497 miles driveway to driveway, and I could almost get there on a 10-gallon tank. We usually had to stop in Charleston when the idiot-light came on. That would mean the car was getting closer to about 48 – 49 MPG when a trip was all highway.

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