Foster Dickson's Blog, page 38
August 25, 2019
What Peter Fonda Meant to Me
Last week, actor died. He was 79 years old. I first encountered Fonda when I was a teenager and watched Easy Rider for the first time. (I’ve seen it many time since.) Though the film was made in the late 1960s, before I was born, and described an experience I’d never had – driving across the country on a motorcycle, going to Mardi Gras – I connected with it immediately, especially with Fonda’s character Wyatt aka Captain America.
[image error]Next to his high-strung and quick-to-judge sidekick Billy (Dennis Hopper), Fonda’s character was a true searcher, cool and collected, appreciative and open. When the two bikers stop to eat lunch with a family of ranchers, Wyatt silently takes in the man’s story about marrying, becoming tied to the land, and living a life he hadn’t anticipated. When they pick up the stranger on the highway who is heading to his hippie commune, Wyatt lets the man ramble about his vaguely idealism instead of showering him with suspicion like Billy does. At the commune, in response to Billy’s discomfited urge to get out of there, Wyatt simply admonishes him: “We’re eatin’ their food.” Wyatt is also quietly attentive as Jack Nicholson’s character, the ACLU lawyer George Hanson, explains the conservative “purify America campaign” and says, “Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.” Hanson was able to give this speech because Wyatt was the force of quiet that allowed it to come. In the midst of violence and chaos, Wyatt is the character who calms everyone around him, allowing the scenes to play out.
But it was Fonda’s display of the American flag on the back of his leather jacket, on the gas tank of his bike, and on his helmet that taught me something I’ve fully embraced: it is patriotic to exercise the freedom we have in America. Despite any and all efforts to co-opt patriotism and the American flag, I learned from Easy Rider, and from Peter Fonda in particular, that freedom is to be lived even in the face of animosity, that freedom that shouldn’t be hidden or hesitant, that freedom that is worth dying over. I learned from Easy Rider that American freedom belongs to everyone, even to the people some Americans say don’t deserve it. The subtitle of the film is: “A man went looking for America, and couldn’t find it anywhere.” The caveat here is: there will always be people who want define America narrowly and push some people out of it— we see those folks in the Midwestern small-town jailers, we see them in the Deep Southern café, we see them in the backroad pickup truck at the end . . .
Some people will watch Easy Rider and see Fonda’s character only as a lawbreaking nihilist, nothing more. To me, that’s a shortsighted view. It’s what happens on the road that matters. Through Wyatt and Billy, we see an America that is diverse and varied, full of people trying to make their way, and we see what happens to two nonconformists as they make their way through it. In some cases, the two bikers are met with kindness and generosity, and in others, intolerance and violence.
Peter Fonda wrote this story with co-star Dennis Hopper and writer Terry Southern, and Easy Rider is just as American as his father’s Grapes of Wrath. They both show what happens to itinerant people who are viewed as problematic or dangerous. The movie came out the same year as Midnight Cowboy and Cactus Flower, the same year as Woodstock, but Easy Rider isn’t simply a hippie artifact. Notwithstanding the stellar soundtrack and the beautiful cinematography, it is an allegory about the reality of our complex nation, and if it is viewed as such, there is a great deal to be recognized and learned.
After that landmark film, Peter Fonda peppered the cinematic and cultural landscape for the next few decades. Fonda played the lead in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry from 1974, made a cameo as the leader of the biker gang in the 1981 comedy Cannonball Run, and starred in the underrated Ulee’s Gold in the late ’90s. He made several other good films (and a few clunkers), but it’s that one that remains my favorite. It will always be Easy Rider that defined Peter Fonda and that taught me early in my life that freedom wouldn’t be easy at all.
*Shown above is the poster of Easy Rider from the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, which hangs right beside my desk.
August 24, 2019
#ICYMI: “Closed Ranks”
– Alabama Writers Forum
From the publisher’s description:
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.
August 23, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Things.”
I’m in my office, scanning a three-rack stack of old cassette tapes. As my finger runs down the middle column of the lower rack, there are Keith Richard’s Main Offender, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, The Best of the Band . . . Like everything in those racks, each tape has its own story. I can remember liking “Wicked As It Seems” after I saw the video on MTV, a black-and-white montage that featured a near-elderly Keith Richards emerging from the darkness to mumble his lyrics. I can remember discovering T. Rex after seeing that iconic image of Marc Bolan, face covered and top hat on, the look that Slash was copying. I can remember buying The Band’s album as a primer to that group I’d heard about, the one that backed up Bob Dylan in the ’60s.
And I don’t want to throw them away.
Some of the hundreds of tapes in those racks don’t even play anymore. Every once in a while, when I’m feeling nostalgic, I’ll pop in various ones of them to find that the spools won’t budge. I try flipping it over, rewinding and fast-forwarding— nothing. I try using a pencil to loosen it up manually— nothing. Then I have to make that decision: Do I throw it away? Maybe . . .
August 22, 2019
A #throwbackthursday Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “In This, the Year of My Birth, 1974”
[image error]In perhaps one of the most important events in modern American political history, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974— a few weeks before the most important event in my history. During that summer when I was born, Burt Reynolds’ prison-football movie The Longest Yard was popular, and apparently John Lennon reported seeing a UFO during that time. Since I’ve long felt out of place in Alabama, reading that latter fact made me wonder if I might have been dropped off here by that UFO. Some people who know me might say yes.
1974 was a wacky year for American culture. Nixon and Watergate dominated the scene, and the January 17, 1974 Rolling Stone cover showed Nixon with his hand up the back of a buxom Lady Liberty’s dress. Ted Bundy was on his killing rampage. Steven King’s debut novel Carrie, about a bullied girl who bloodies up the prom, was published. Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February. Charles Bronson’s revenge film Death Wish and Jack Nicholson’s hard-boiled Chinatown came out that summer, and in the fall, the gruesome original Texas Chainsaw Massacre also premiered. Even though the racist cowboy comedy Blazing Saddles was released that year, blaxploitation films were an established genre by that time, and 1974 brought TNT Jackson, Jive Turkey, and Foxy Brown. On TV, The Flip Wilson Show went off the air, as did The Brady Bunch, but Good Times came on, putting “Dy-no-mite!” into our American lexicon.
August 21, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “When I become president . . .”
[image error]I will run as a moderately liberal conservative who is a strong supporter of the First Amendment and a representative for the best values of the South: individual rights tempered by a love of God and family. My campaign theme song will be Merle Haggard’s “Rainbow Stew.”
My administration will be both pro-choice and pro-life, because the choices that we make in life affect other people’s ability to have lives and choices.
The first thing I will do is: assemble a Cabinet and staff made up entirely of Waffle House waitresses. They get things done fast, and they get them done right. They don’t give special treatment. They don’t care who or what you are. They don’t put up with any shit, but they always call you “sweetie” or “sugar.”
The White House press briefing room will have a house band. I’d like it if it were Galactic, but I understand that leaving New Orleans could be hard for them. If not Galactic, then Crazy Horse.
August 20, 2019
Dirty Boots: “When Reading Meant Everything”
[image error]All of the books pictured here came into my life between ages 14 to 20, during the years 1989 through 1994, while I was in high school or the first two years of college, and each of them changed my life in its own way. It was a bleak time for me; my parents got divorced, my older brother got married and moved out, and my father remarried quickly, all in 1990, and once high school was done in ’92, our inability to afford much in the way of college meant that I would continue to live at home and attend a local school while working full-time. I was tethered to a life I didn’t want to lead in a place I didn’t want to be, and books (and music and movies, too) were my gateway to something greater than what I saw around me.
Though, as a young kid, I was something like the bullied Bastian in The Neverending Story who escaped from the world through books, what I have found in books and magazines (and music and movies) since then is expansion. By high school, I was no longer reading to get away from the world— I was reading to know it better, to see and to know more of it, to glimpse ways of life I hadn’t imagined, even when I couldn’t physically leave where I was.
Beyond the fantasy works of JRR Tolkien, Ursula K LeGuin, and Madeleine L’Engle that I enjoyed when I was young, the first book that truly changed my life was Albert Camus’ The Stranger, a work I never would have chosen for myself but which was assigned by Mrs. Brock in ninth-grade English. In this mid-century French novel, a man named Meursault’s passive refusal to participate in aspects of life that he doesn’t care about causes him to be taken for a sociopath when he stabs and kills a man in an altercation that results from a misunderstanding. At fourteen, what I saw in Meursault was not a heartless murderer who deserved the death penalty, but a man who was utterly exasperated with having a life he didn’t want being crammed down his throat.
That same year, I borrowed another book that I had seen on a friend’s shelf, knowing nothing more about it than its intriguing title: Beyond Good and Evil. This work of philosophy by 19th-century German existentialist Friedrich Nietszche, was way over my head, though I did manage to finish it, urged forward by having people constantly say that I had no business reading such things. They had thrown down the gauntlet, issued a challenge, and I wouldn’t be bested. I’ll admit freely that I only understood parts of what I read, but for me, it was like Rocky’s goal in the first movie: I wanted go the distance. I knew I couldn’t beat Beyond Good and Evil, but I also wouldn’t be able to hold my head up in the neighborhood if I got knocked out by it. Some teenagers wanted a high ACT score or a sports championship, I wanted to read and understand books that no one around me read.
Later in high school, two other vastly dissimilar books moved my understanding of literature and reading forward again: Edgar Lee Master’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology and Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive, a tell-all biography of Jim Morrison. Though I don’t remember when I encountered that latter book, Spoon River came to me through a theatrical adaptation we put on when I was a junior in high school. (The book, published in 1915, contains interconnected monologues spoken from the grave by the town’s dead citizens.) After the show was over, I went out and bought the book to read all of the poems, and this experience led me to two realizations: that people carry things inside themselves that the rest of us never know, and that I loved poetry. Where The Stranger was the first literary work that made me look deeply and critically at the world outside, Spoon River made me look deeply and critically at the world inside. By contrast, that second work – a mass-market paperback about hippie-era Los Angeles – taught me something that neither Camus, nor Nietzsche, nor Masters could: that writing could be cool, and that nonfiction could be, too. Books didn’t have to be dull and droll— they could be about rock stars.
[image error]After high school, reading became a way of life. Working, attending a commuter college, and living at home with my mother severely limited “the college experience” for me, which led me regularly and often into the arms of literature. Reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Dharma Bums, and The Subterraneans one after the other at age eighteen fertilized the seed that was planted by No One Here Gets Out Alive— a life lived on the edge could be a writer’s material. Discovering the Beats then led me then to Henry Miller’s lurid and wild Tropic of Cancer and to Richard Brautigan’s quirky novels Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. My affection for Kerouac also led me to his literary idol Thomas Wolfe, whose florid and sprawling Look Homeward, Angel is heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. Somewhere in there, Walt Whitman came into my purview via Allen Ginsberg, and along the way, possibly via Camus, I found Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer (Le Gran Meaulnes), which is still my favorite coming-of-age novel.
Stranded in pre-internet Alabama, reading meant everything. These were the years between the release of Nirvana’s Bleach and the suicide of Kurt Cobain; during the years that REM put out Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster; in the five-year span that started with Say Anything and ended with Reality Bites . . . And it makes me sad that I don’t see young people reading like I used to, for the reasons I used to. And don’t tell me that anything on the internet is even a remote parallel, and don’t compare the books I just listed to Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. These literary idols of mine didn’t offer readily available screen adaptations or collectible merchandise to garner revenue from my isolated and desperate teenage sense that there absolutely must be something more out there, something more than what was at arm’s length. Back then, there were only the words on the pages, words were so masterfully strung together that nothing else was necessary. Not followers or subscribers, not clicks or likes, not trending or sales ranking, not chat rooms or fan conventions . . . just the words on the page. And, with reading, that’s the way it ought to be.
“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.
August 19, 2019
Emily Blejwas @ The Archives’ Food for Thought, August 20
[image error]Tomorrow from noon ’til 1:00, Emily Blejwas will be the presenter at the Alabama Department of Archives & History’s lunchtime Food for Thought program, talking about her new book Alabama in Fourteen Foods. If you’re interested in this book, there will be copies for sale, and if you’re interested in teaching it or using it in the classroom, the curriculum guide is available here.
August 17, 2019
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.
Class of 1984 (1982)
From the terribly-violent-high-school-you’d-never-want-to-attend genre, this thriller has mainstay Perry King (who would later star in the series Riptide) as a music teacher who refuses to accept the bullying of a small gang of punks who are selling drugs at the school. This story is more than Rebel Without A Cause gone wrong. The gloves are off in this one.
Human Highway (1982)
’60s folk rocker Neil Young and new wave mainstay Devo team up for this extremely poorly acted portrayal of a very poorly crafted story. The movie centers on a diner near a nuclear power plant that leaks toxic waste, but the story veers off into the minds of Young and Devo. There’s a prolonged staccato version of Young’s “Hey Hey My My” in there. If you like things that are so bad they’re funny, you’ll like this. If not, you’ll never get back that hour and a half of your life.
Shakes the Clown (1991)
Oddball comedian Bobcat Goldthwaite stars in this film, which offers a grim perspective on the life of a birthday-party clown, including the attendant alcohol abuse and lechery behind the scenes. Goldthwaite was pretty easy to digest in mainstream movies, with his silly growling speech impediment, but this movie takes the same hard left turn that Adam Sandler took in Punch Drunk Love. Fans of Bobcat’s more well-known work were probably deeply disappointed, and possibly deeply offended.
Suburbia (1983)
Not the big-budget thing from 1996 that tried to capture our generation, but the early ’80s one made by Penelope Spheeris. Another bleak film, this one was cast with mostly no-name actors, the exception being Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The story centers on a makeshift group home for runaway punks in an abandoned housing project where packs of dogs scavenge for food and where a pair of bitter, unemployed blue-collar workers try MAGA-style to show the punks who’s boss.
Dudes (1987)
Once again, director Penelope Spheeris who once again includes Flea in the cast, but this time, she had John Cryer who was fresh off the role of Duckie in Pretty in Pink and Daniel Roebuck who had just played the cold-blooded killer Samson in River’s Edge. This movie has the classic Gen-X feature of juxtapositing completely unlike things, in this case: punk rock, road trips, and the American West.
Liquid Sky (1982)
Something between a sci-fi alien story and a social commentary on androgyny and sexual repression, this slow-paced, awkward movie is set in the early new-wave scene in New York City. In the movie, two blonde models, one male and one female who are played by the same actress, deal with sexual animosity and ambiguity: for the female model, it is having everyone want her, and for the male, it is wanting to be sexless. That would be complicated enough but there’s also a hidden alien space craft that is incinerating people one by one.
Roadside Prophets (1992)
This movie was not good, but it probably should’ve been. It stars John Doe of the punk band X and Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys who ride cross-country on motorcycles. And it also has acid king Timothy Leary, folk singer Arlo Guthrie, and Kung Fu star David Carradine. But quirky and weird crossed over into downright dumb this time.
Streets of Fire (1984)
Heavily stylized noir, this action film pits cool-dude Michael Paré against a motorcycle gang led by a really creepy Willem Defoe in an effort to rescue his sultry girlfriend Diane Lane, who had just been in the movie adaptation of The Outsiders. Alongside Rumble Fish, which shares some similarities to this one, this movie stands as one of the more unique films of the time.
Gummo (1997)
The only viable response to watching this movie is: Man, I’m glad I don’t live like that. This is probably one of the last films that I would say belongs to Generation X, since the age-span of our generation in 1997 would have been 17 to 32. The movie was the first film made by Harmony Korine, who was then in his mid-20s. (Korine is featured in the 2008 documentary Beautiful Losers.) Put simply, Gummo is bleak and bizarre and creepy.
August 15, 2019
Disrupters & Interlopers: Clifford Durr
Clifford Durr was a lawyer perhaps most famous for his defense of Rosa Parks after her December 1, 1955 arrest in Montgomery, Alabama, though his work for social justice reached further than that well-known case. Along with his wife Virginia, Clifford Durr was prominent among the group of white Southern progressives who help to change the social and political landscape of the region.
Clifford Judkins Durr was born in 1899 to a wealthy and prominent family in Montgomery, Alabama, and later attended the University of Alabama and Oxford University. After working as a lawyer in Birmingham, he accepted a job in Washington, DC during the Great Depression working within FDR’s New Deal. He later shifted his employment with the government to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), where, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama,”he fought for advertisement-free public broadcasting and open public access channels for community participation in the newly emerging television industry.”
In the late 1940s, after a disagreement with the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee over the required loyalty oath, Durr left the federal government and went into private practice. His left-leaning work, trying to ensure civil rights and basic well-being for all people, then drew the attention of powerful enemies, including staunch Southern segregationists. That tension was exacerbated by his continued willingness to defend African-Americans in court.
Though he never achieved the widespread name recognition of his most famous client, Clifford Durr laid some of the groundwork for the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s success. Durr was instrumental, alongside attorney Fred Gray, in the legal maneuvering necessary to procure the 1956 Supreme Court victory that signaled the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation.
After continuing his progressive work into 1960s and ’70s, Clifford Durr passed away in 1975. A book about his life, The Conscience of a Lawyer by John A. Salmond, was published the University of Alabama Press in 1990, and Alabama Public Television also has The Durrs of Montgomery in its Alabama Storytellers series.
The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo. To read previous posts, click any of the links below:
Theresa Burroughs • Clement Wood • Charles Gomillion
Myles Horton • James Saxon Childers • Joan Little
Will D. Campbell • Ralph McGill • Juliette Hampton Morgan
August 14, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “On The Edgy Edge of Edginess”
Recently, I was listening to a little cluster of students who huddled around a computer, giggling at what each other didn’t know and at what was too old to care about. One proudly explained that she couldn’t name a single Beatles song, though her friend began to sing the chorus of “Here Comes the Sun.” A third proclaimed loudly that Madonna was overrated and that Beyoncé is so much better. This is the same group who call ’60s and ’70s classic rock “dad rock.”
[image error]As a dad in Wayfarers, I’m not sure how to respond to this half-joking diminution. It’d be nice to be the cool old dude, but one must be careful not to veer too far and end up like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or worse, like Dennis Hopper in River’s Edge. Old-dude cool is dangerous territory, even at this late date in pop culture. While it is acceptable for me, in my 40s, to play Pixies louder than a middle-aged man should, it would not, for example, be okay for me to listen to Lana Del Rey at all. (Who’d want to, when you’ve got Velvet Underground & Nico and Portishead?)
Here’s the catch: the double-standard is real, apparent, and obvious . . . and no young person apologizes for it— even though young people readily plead the case when faced with a double-standard dealt out by an older person. For example, if a teenager has something old, then it’s “vintage,” but if I have something old, then it’s just old. Old-dude cool involves knowing all about that undefined and deeply hypocritical line – the edgy edge of edginess – and it means grasping what Bob Dylan taught generations of us: if you have to ask, then you don’t get it.
