Foster Dickson's Blog, page 9

tidbits, fragments, and ephemera 39: the photography edition

Originally published on level:deepsouth— for Generation X, tidbits, fragments, and ephemera is a sometimes substantial but not making any promises glimpse at information and news related to growing up Generation X in the Deep South.The South in Color: Vicksburg, Mississippi in the 1960s and ’70s

Published by University of North Carolina Press, The South in Color offers one hundred photos taken by William Ferris, most of which show Vicksburg, Mississippi and the surrounding area. A feature story on the book’s release and on the photographer’s career, “For Ferris, each photo tells a story,” was published in The Vicksburg Post on December 13, 2016.

The John Buckley Collection in Florida Memory

With more then five hundred images that span the years 1969 through 1976, this free-to-access photo collection shows scenes ranging from anti-war activists in Miami Beach to community events in Tallahassee. The Florida Memory project is hosted by the State Library and Archives of Florida.

A look back at Atlanta in 1978

This photo essay in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows the city in earlier times, when its population growth and construction boom were happening. The opening image is a great picture of Bob Horner and Dale Murphy, two Braves players that GenXers will certainly remember.

The Good Times Rolled: Black New Orleans, 1978 – 1982   by Bernard Hermann

Published in 2015 by the University of Louisiana Press, this collection of photographs taken over a four-year span provides a look back at African American communities in New Orleans in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Backstage at the Blackfoot Concert in Montgomery County, Alabama, 1981

These images from the website/blog of James Robinson show the rock band Blackfoot at the outdoor venue Sandy Creek, which is in rural Montgomery County. The concert was held in July 1981 and was co-sponsored by local radio station Y-102 (WHHY). Among those people shown in the photos are Ricky Medlock, who later joined Lynyrd Skynyrd.

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Dirty Boots: Shorty Price

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

If you’re going to be a joke, the least you can do is be funny. Shorty Price understood that. I wish more people did. 

Well-known in the state of Alabama, Ralph “Shorty” Price ran unsuccessfully for governor as often as possible in the 1960s and 1970s. They called him the “Clown Prince” of Alabama politics and declared him a “self-appointed cheerleader” for his beloved Crimson Tide. But for all his buffoonish antics, Price was also a country lawyer and a working-class hero, often using wild behavior and outlandish sentiments to draw attention to real problems. Below is a posthumous tribute to Price by local commentator Bob Ingram, which ran on Montgomery’s WSFA-TV in the early 1980s. 

They say that every joke has a grain of truth in it. In the clip above, Price proclaimed that he thought the term for an Alabama governor should be two years, not four. The way he put it: if a man couldn’t steal all he wanted in two years, he wasn’t right for the job. Political pundits in his day presumed that Price just wanted shorter terms so he could run for office more often. Both seem valid. These days, I’d be satisfied if our rolling array of characters in Congress and various state-level offices would limit their time in the spotlight to two years. Or better yet, if, like Price, they only appeared briefly during election season to yuck it up a bit.

I think of Shorty Price when I hear about politicians today who run for public office not to be leaders or problem-solvers, but celebrities or personalities. Unlike today, the voters of yesteryear understood what they saw and rarely voted for Shorty Price. Sadly, many voters today lack that level of discernment. Beyond that, if a candidate is only running for office in order to be a character on TV . . . then for Pete’s sake, be entertaining! As a long-time public school teacher, I can say with certainty that disruption for its own sake is not entertaining. But there is a place for these aspirations. Ever since the invention of screen media, there have been fools wanting to be on it, and if all somebody wants is attention, then do something worthy of attention. For example, a green suit, a funny haircut, and talking puppets worked quite well for Captain Kangaroo. If that idea is too old-school, there are plenty of opportunities for people who lack talent and charisma to achieve fame on reality TV, TikTok, and YouTube. My advice to a wannabe attention-seeker is: if you can’t outdo a man like Shorty Price, then stay in the audience.

Shorty Price died in a car wreck in 1980, and there hasn’t been another one like him. The man had strong opinions and unique ways of sharing them. Once, Price expressed his disdain for the University of Tennessee football team by mooning their band at an Alabama game, and he got arrested for it. After he was sentenced to jail time and was being led away, he purportedly told the judge, “See you next year!” It’s hard to say what Price’s effects on Alabama politics were – did he actually sway public opinion or affect an election outcome? – but that’s not really the point. Somebody has got to say what needs to be said, and often we leave that duty to the clown, because it’s just too hard to take the town crier seriously. 

Dirty Boots: The Third Third

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Later this year, I will hit the half-century mark. Part of me would like to proclaim bravely that aging doesn’t bother me, though another part of me kind of wishes that it did. The simple truth is that I don’t really care. I’m here, and Lord willing, I will be for a bit longer. Yet, the big decisions that a young person looks forward to – where to go to college, who to marry, what career to have, how to raise children – those are behind me now. I made the choices and have seen them through to fruition. Anything that comes along from here on out won’t be anything I’ve sought, and that’s a good feeling. Life after 50 will be like a real-life bonus round.

Half my life ago, I wandered into adulthood at the end of the 1990s and only wanted two things: to marry this one particular girl and have a family with her, and to be a writer. I’ve gotten to do both. Before my landmark birthday arrives, that girl and I will celebrate twenty-three years of marriage, and we will also send one of our two children off to college. Between that anniversary and that departure, we’ll put the younger of our two children into a truck with his brand-new driver’s license. Because my wife and I met on my twenty-fifth birthday, my fiftieth will also mark the point that I have lived with her as long as I did without her. As to the latter goal of being a writer, my seventh published book was released last fall. The first one – a poetry chapbook – came out in 2002, followed by three books in 2009, then another in 2011, one more in 2018, and the most recent one in 2023. Those books, some other projects, quite a few short works, and a teaching career of twenty-plus years— I think I did OK.  So, the question of what I will do with my life has been answered. 

What really fascinates me, at this age, is how many different people we are throughout life. I’ve now lived long enough to look back at my own life from a critical distance, and what I see is how my approach to life has evolved with my circumstances. As a child, I was bright, meek, and agreeable. As a preteen and young teenager whose family was falling apart, I could be a jerk and tended to cause problems. Once I discovered the arts and girls as an older teenager, I was curious and invigorated, but also lost and selfish. Having to live at home and work during college, I was bitter and lonely but had hope nonetheless. Afterward, my mind hog-tied itself with shortsightedness and frustration when I didn’t find success immediately. All before age twenty-five. In the twenty-five years since, I have been changed fundamentally by a cascading tide of marriage then parenthood, teaching in a public school, a writing career, the internet and smartphones, a religious conversion, deaths among family and friends, the recession, and the pandemic. Considering my experiences, I can share that life is humbling and that we seem to do the best we can with what we are capable of at the time. 

My other predominant thought, as I consider how I have gotten older, is: I want people to just say what they have to say. I don’t feel the need to agree with anybody, nor to hear what I want to hear. I wish that people would share their truths in plain, simple terms, without anger or defensiveness, without the need to be indisputably right. During my time teaching creative writing, I used to tell my students to be themselves and remember, “The best writing says the most with the fewest words possible.” These days, in my reading, I tend more and more to prefer shorter works over longer ones. I find myself picking through the Analects of Confucius, Aesop’s fables, Issa’s haiku, or the sayings of the Desert Fathers instead of reaching for a novel or other full-length book. Perhaps, in late middle age, I’m losing some measure of patience, or maybe my writer’s mind has turned its attitude to the literary version of “I don’t buy no green bananas.” More than anything, I think it’s this— I’ve learned that, if you actually want anyone’s attention, you have to say your thing, and quickly.

Somewhat thieving the term from Neal Cassady’s posthumously published 1971 memoir The First Third, I am aware that I either already have or am now entering my Third Third. The growing-up First Third was complete by my mid-20s, and the marriage-working-children Second Third is nearing completion. Clearly beyond my peak, which came in the form of book publications and teaching awards in the 2000s and 2010s, I am approaching my denouement. Some people call our 40s and 50s “middle age,” but I’m not going to live to be 90 or 100. Middle age would really be our 30s to early 40s, though it would be difficult at that stage of life to realize that it’s halfway done. Me, I’m not kidding myself— this is the last of three Thirds. The final act! Which is usually when we find out what all that struggle was for.

More and more these days, I also think about Peter Matthiessen’s reminder in The Snow Leopard to “Expect nothing.” It’s good advice. As is something that the late Thich Nhat Hanh taught: frustration is just the anger we feel over things we can’t control. Living in a thoughtful way reveals that these lessons have many manifestations, including the story of Job, Jesus’s parable of the lilies of the field, and the Serenity Prayer. Each of us has a very limited amount of control over our lives, and we may as well accept that. That said, I’m pretty proud that half my life ago I sought two things, and despite the hardships, I got them both. So now I get to just go with the flow. Yep, everything after 50 will be like a real-life bonus round.

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50 GenX Movies that 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 maybe a few of 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 Buffalo 66 or Slacker or Wild at Heart. But there’s much more, and I keep thinking of movies that I didn’t include in the first ten I offered, nor in the second ten that followed, and not in the supposedly last one after that, nor even in yet another one after that, so here’s a fifth installment. This summative list rounds it out to an even fifty movies, ones that might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Phantasm (1979)

This might be one that you think of as a classic horror film rather than as a GenX film. But it is so GenX.  We’ve got the kid who is alone because his parents died, we’ve got the cool older brother who drives a muscle car, we’ve got gratuitous shots of women’s breasts during a make-out session in a graveyard— c’mon! The movie also has elements of the plot that are totally random: a best friend who is a guitar-playing ice cream man, a blind fortuneteller with a pretty granddaughter who speaks for her, a black maid who comes out of nowhere in one scene, evil midgets in hooded robes who make weird noises, a discovery about the true nature of evil during a random visit to an antique shop. There’s more to this movie than just the Tall Man and that flying glass ball with the blade sticking out. And of course what could be more GenX than a string of sequels: part II in 1988, part III in 1994, part IV in 1998 . . . 

Times Square (1980)

This lesser-known movie takes on a few classic elements to create something GenX out of the them. We’ve got the odd couple who meet under tough circumstances— in this case, two teenage girls (a street kid and a well-to-do kid) who meet in a mental ward. After they escape, they relocate to an abandoned warehouse and dub themselves the Sleez Sisters. The pair go around the Times Square area mixing with the street people, throwing TVs off of buildings, and working in a low-end strip club. The street kid, Nicky, is a guitar player in the vein of punk rock and new wave, and her more-cultured friend helps her understand her talent for poetry, which manifests as the song “I’m A Damn Dog Now.” The movie also features Tim Curry, of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, as a renegade radio DJ who reads fan mail on-air and who likes Times Square the way it is. Three things about this film: the period soundtrack is great, some of the dialogue is very un-PC, and the unrealized young lesbian sexual tension is palpable. More astute movie buffs will also recognize the mayor from Ghostbusters who plays a doctor and Craig’s mom from Friday who plays a social worker. Times Square is puts the classic GenX twist on the coming-of-age story— the cool kid seems fun and interesting until you figure out that she really is mentally unstable.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982)

Here, we stay with the punk rock girls motif. Directed by Lou Adler, who became famous in the 1960s as a music producer for The Mamas and the Papas, this film is about a female punk rocker who goes viral in the 1980s sense of what that would mean. It stars Diane Lane, the GenX beauty who was in Six Pack the same year and in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish the following year. Creating an alter ago after her mother’s death, Lane’s character becomes Third Degree Burns, leader of a band who speaks for angry American women! In some ways, this might be GenX’s version of the 1976 film Network with its unlikely hero who rises to great fame as a spokesperson for fierce dissatisfaction.

Seven Minutes in Heaven (1986)

If you don’t remember this film, it might be because it stars Jennifer Connelly and came out the same year as another far more successful film that she was in called Labyrinth. Seven Minutes in Heaven, named for the youthful sex-dare game where two people agree to be locked in a closet together, is a teenage romantic comedy and a bildungsroman story. Like so many GenX films, its plot occurs because parents are absent— our main character’s dad goes out of town on a business trip and leaves his teenage daughter to stay alone, and her boy-crazy best friend, played by GenX mainstay Maddie Corman, urges her forward into the kinds of behavior parents don’t approve of . . . To me, this movie is charming but is also one step above an after-school special. (If you don’t recognize Corman’s name, you’d know her face: she was in Some Kind of Wonderful, PCU, and Boys.)

Thrashin’ (1986)

Next to breakdancing movies, skateboarding- and BMX-themed movies were also popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Here, the producers explored the rival-gangs storyline with the Romeo-and-Juliet forbidden-love element thrown in, but set in California this time. And for fans of skating in the ’80s, there’s all the things: dangly earrings and denim vests, close-ups of ragged Converse All-Stars, slow-mo shots of drop-ins, posers leaning on walls. Its star Josh Brolin had just been in Goonies, and there’s also Richard Rusler who was one of the two popular jerks (alongside Robert Downey, Jr.) in Weird Science. Sherilynn Fenn, who became famous on Twin Peaks in the 1990s, is also featured. This film got 6.5/10 stars in IMDb, but I’m not sure that it’s that good of a movie . . . 

Vamp (1986)

This heavily stylized vampire movie stars a few of the minor GenX actors: Chris Makepeace who was the lonely kid Rudy in Meatballs, Richard Rusler again, and Gedde Watanabe who was Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, among others. With a very GenX premise – heading to a fabled seedy bar to hire a stripper– the guys run into a completely different kind of problems than the horny Angel Beach boys in Porky’s. Instead of a big fat guy chomping a cigar in the backwater, they find vampires in the urban darkness, one of whom is played by model and art-rock icon Grace Jones. 

The Principal (1987)

Alongside movies like Tuff Turf and Class of 1984, this is one of the more violent and harsh high school movies. Jim Belushi plays a teacher who can’t play by the rules; he is a smart ass and a pain in the neck. So, the school system offers him a job as a principal of an extremely rough high school. This will not go well, also because he has no experience and no training. But in typical upstart fashion, he teams up with the school’s ex-football star-turned-janitor, played by Louis Gossett, Jr. With help from a group of Hispanic guys in the auto shop, they overcome an apathetic faculty, a complete lack of order, and a drug dealer named Victor. Rae Dawn Chong co-stars, playing the teacher who actually cares, but even she gets sexually assaulted by a drug dealer named White Zac. This no Ron Carter story or Lean on Me— this is the Walking Tall of the feel-good education movie subgenre. 

Square Dance (1987)

One of a Winona Rider twofer, this was the first film where the young actress played the main character, whose name is Gemma. The scenario is somewhat familiar to us: country  comes to town. Jason Robards plays her grandfather, who wants to shelter her from the life that her mother would certainly expose her to; the older actor was 1980s mainstay, with films like Max Dugan Returns and Something Wicked This Way Comes earlier in the decade. Rob Lowe also stars opposite Winona Rider, and he was familiar by this time, too, having already played the heartthrob in Class, Oxford Blues, and St. Elmo’s Fire before this one. Though Square Dance isn’t a classic by far, a GenXer will recognize the zeitgeist: dysfunctional family, sexual awakening, etc.

Boys (1996)

The second part of Winona Rider twofer, this one came ten years later— after Beetlejuice, after Heathers, after Roxie Carmichael, after Edward Scissorhands, after Reality Bites, after American Quilt . . . but before she was arrested for shoplifting in 2001. In this movie, she plays a beautiful young woman who some boarding schools boys hide in their room. Of course, there are cops looking for her, and what do GenXers love more than a bunch of teenagers outsmarting the cops? This one also stars Lukas Haas, who played the wide-eyed little Amish boy in 1985’s Witness, and James LeGros, who GenXers will recognize from Drugstore Cowboy and Point Break. 

Foxfire (1996)

This teen drama was Angelina Jolie’s coming-out film. She had been in a few music videos, including Widespread Panic’s “Wonderin’,” and in the movie Hackers the year before, but this one garnered her a fair amount of attention. In the film, a group of teenage girls deal with a teacher who sexually exploits female high school students. Thinking about third-wave feminism in the 1990s, this was a movie that pointed to Generation X’s pre-#metoo politics. The evolution had obviously not been completed since this film’s feminist fight-back message goes alongside Hollywood’s continuing “we’ll need you to show your boobs” ethos. This film shows that we hadn’t yet arrived in the mid-1990s but we were heading toward girl power in a serious way.

The Original 10
Bad Boys (1983)

Not to be confused with the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence movie, this one 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 in the facility. Ally Sheedy, who would later be the shy girl with the weird sandwich in The Breakfast Club, plays Mick’s girlfriend. 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 subgenre, 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. This little gang of four absolutely terrorizes the new teacher, who finds out during the process that the leader of the small group is a musical prodigy. The ending of this film, which I won’t give away here, is particularly brutal and violent, and these scenes go on and on for a while. 

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. If the horror movie It didn’t solidify the clowns-are-creepy motif, then this one did. As for Bobcat Goldthwaite, he was pretty easy to digest in mainstream movies, like One Crazy Summer, 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. But this one is a classic of the ugly honesty that GenX demanded.

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 communal 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. This was one of my favorite films in the 1980s. Great music, no frills, solid story.

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 juxtaposing completely unlike things in wacky ways – in this case: punk rock, road trips, and the American West – while including punk band The Vandals, an Elvis impersonator, a pink Cadillac, a pretty female tow-truck driver, a jailbreak, and a heroic final showdown with the bad guy.

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. Trying to capture the Gen-X penchant for randomness didn’t work this time.

Streets of Fire (1984)

Heavily stylized noir, this action film pits cool-dude Michael Paré against a motorcycle gang led by Willem Defoe’s really creepy character in an effort to rescue his sultry girlfriend played by Diane Lane, who had just been in the movie adaptation of The Outsiders. Alongside Rumble Fish, which shares some stylistic similarities to this one, this movie stands as one of the more unique films of the time, merging a post-World War II sensibility with noir and arthouse elements.

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 feature made by Harmony Korine, who was then in his mid-20s. (Korine had a memorable series of appearances on David Letterman’s show and was featured in the 2008 documentary Beautiful Losers.) Put simply, Gummo is bleak and bizarre and creepy.

The Second 10
Went to Coney Island on Mission from God… Be Back by Five…  (1998)

If you think of Jon Cryer as either teenage lover boy Duckie 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 their 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. Best? I don’t know. But it is heart-wrenchingly sad.

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 plays a distinctly different kind of role here. (This film came out in the year between Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.) These stories are short on action, but like My Dinner with Andre, it’s the conversations that carry it forward. 

Stranger than Paradise (1984)

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. It’s only a half-hour long, and being a Jim Jarmusch film, you’ll notice that director’s distinct style.

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, dealing in drugs and sex, but it’s not as bleak as some on this list.

Near Dark (1987)

Like The Addiction and Vamp, 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 GenX movies without mentioning this one, which was 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.

The Third 10
Turk 182! (1985)

Starring mild-mannered 1980s mainstay Timothy Hutton, best known as Conrad from Ordinary People, this movie is all about sticking it to The Man. The main character’s brother is a New York City firefighter who has been hurt in an accident, but he is denied benefits from the city. In response to the injustice, our hero begins to graffiti messages against the mayor . . . which, of course, causes the mayor to demand that it stop, leading to the inevitable confrontation between our righteous Everyman and the powerful leaders who don’t want to be challenged. 

Three O’Clock High (1987)

I learned what hypoglycemia is from Three O’Clock High, a classically ’80s movie about high school social boundaries and bullying. The story focuses on Jerry, a weakling teacher’s pet who gets assigned to write a school newspaper story about a new student at the school, the leather jacket-wearing badass Buddy Revell. Unfortunately for Jerry, he claps Buddy on the arm while arranging his interview, prompting the tough guy to tell him that they will fight after school. Jerry spends the day dreading what he is sure will be a royal (and very public) ass-kicking. This was Richard Tyson’s movie debut, coming out the year before he played the mysterious love interest in Two Moon Junction and a couple of years before he was the psycho dad in Kindergarten Cop.

Rumble Fish (1983)

In Rumble Fish, director Francis Ford Coppola had some of the same cast of the now-classic The Outsiders, but with its black-and-white surrealism, its bald focus on teenage anger, and its themes of police brutality, Rumble Fish was never going to be as successful or well-known. Where The Outsider kept our attention on the compassion and naiveté of Pony Boy and Johnny, this movie gave Matt Dillon another chance to play a disgruntled young man, this time as the lead who is ambivalently pining away for the return of his brother Motorcycle Boy, played by Mickey Rourke.

The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984)

Back in the ’80s, Mickey Rourke was the cool dude – usurped later by Johnny Deep, when 21 Jump Street came on TV – with his smug arrogance, mumbling cadences, and greasy hair. The year before this, he was Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish, and in the years following, he starred in 9 1/2 Weeks, Barfly, and Angel Heart. This strangely titled movie caught my attention when I was a kid, but I didn’t watch it until later. The Pope of Greenwich Village tells the story of two young friends who screw up royally and end up with both the police and the Mob after them.

Heavy (1995)

Part one of this Liv Tyler twofer, Heavy had her playing a sweet, young waitress named Callie who gets a job in a small café owned by the painfully shy, overweight, middle-aged cook Victor and his mother. The movie is mainly about Victor, who dreams of becoming a chef and has a crush on Callie. Sadly for him, though, Callie’s rude boyfriend, played by Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, stands in the way of Victor and Callie even becoming friends. This is a very good film, which also co-stars a middle-aged Debbie Harry (from Blondie).

Stealing Beauty (1996)

Part two of a Liv Tyler twofer, this movie is visually striking, has a great soundtrack, and a stellar cast. This time, Tyler plays a teenage girl who travels to the Italian countryside in search of answers about her father, and to find those, she stays on a hilltop villa full of eccentric artists. Of course, there’s a love story sub-plot, too. In addition to Liv Tyler, who was the beauty du jour in the mid-’90s, director Bernardo Bertolucci has Jeremy Irons as a dying poet and Donal McCann as a stodgy old artist. This is also just a great film.

My Science Project (1985)

My Science Project is not a bad little 1980s sci-fi/fantasy teenage comedy, but it probably didn’t stand much chance since it came out the same year as another sci-fi/fantasy teenage comedy: Back to the Future. In this one, the main character, a machine-head who lives for auto shop and junkyards, doesn’t team up with a wacky doctor and a flux capacitor; he finds one of those globes like they used to sell in Spencer’s – the ones that attract electricity to your hand – and it brings on all kinds of crazy consequences. Along with his mouthy sidekick and would-be girlfriend, his half-baked effort to avoid a science assignment gets him in over his head.

Time Bandits (1980)

Time Bandits was one of the mainstays of Saturday or Sunday afternoon TV, when random programs and obscure movies got played, probably by hapless interns who manned the controls while the legitimate broadcast professionals were off. This movie is weird and British and smacks of the old Dr. Who. It features a child main character, John Cleese from Monty Python, and of course, steam-punk midgets. Time Bandits is a reasonably good fantasy film for its day, but in retrospect, it’s pretty quirky.

Light of Day (1987)

This movie about a struggling brother-sister rock band came out in the late ’80s and showed Michael J. Fox in a different kind of role than young Republican Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties. The sister is played by Joan Jett, whose 1982 cover of “I Love Rock N’ Roll” gave her mainstream fame (after being in The Runaways). The conflict surrounding the band’s efforts to succeed are complicated by the fact that she is a single mother who leaves her child at home with her own mother. One little known fact about the movie: Bruce Springsteen wrote the title track that the band plays as their signature song.

The Heavenly Kid (1985)

This last one is from the nerd-turns-cool subgenre of 1980s comedies. The story starts with the cool dude from the ’60s who dies in Rebel Without a Cause-style chicky run, but comes back as a guardian angel to help an ’80s teenager find his mojo. The cast includes Richard Mulligan as a Heaven-sent helper a la Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, and the dad is played by Mark Metcalf, who was best-known to our generation as Neidermeyer in Animal House then as the mean dad in Twister Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” video. The Heavenly Kid has all the typical ’80s high school stuff, including the makeover into the totally dated clothes and the blonde popular girl who our loser-hero dreams about, but it also has a twist in its story.

The Fourth 10
Gas Food Lodging (1992)

This film stars Ione Skye in the years after River’s Edge and Say Anything and Fairuza Balk in the years before The Craft, American History X, and The Waterboy. It’s the story of two teenage girls living with their single mother, who manages a gas station and motel in the middle of nowhere. They’re trying to grow up and realize lives that are bigger than the mundane existence they have in the desert. As an aside, J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. also has small role.

Over the Edge (1978)

Matt Dillon became truly famous with the 1983 double-whammy of SE Hinton’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, followed by The Flamingo Kid in 1984. This one was his first feature film. I’d say, back in late 1970s and early 1980s, there were three young actors who played the best teenage tough guys: Sean Penn, who was Mick in Bad Boys; Jackie Earle Haley, who was Kelly Leak in Bad News Bears, and Matt Dillon. All three dudes just had it— bad attitude for no good reason. In this movie, Dillon plays the unruly, dangerous friend of a well-to-do junior high school kid. They live in a wannabe-idyllic suburb, but the problem is that the teenagers and kids in the community are terrible. Then, after Dillon’s character Richie gets killed by the hard-nosed cop who is always hassling them, the teenagers go crazy!

Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Christian Slater could do no wrong the 1980s – The Legend of Billie Jean in 1985, The Name of the Rose in 1986, and Heathers in 1988 – but then there’s this clunker in 1989. (Thankfully for him, he redeemed himself in 1990 with Pump Up the Volume and again in 1993 with True Romance.) Gleaming the Cube was a painfully obvious effort to capitalize on Slater’s indie image by casting him as a skater, but if the studio folks were going to put a cool actor into a cool scenario, the least they could have done was make a cool movie, not some TV action-show cheese. In the movie, Slater’s character is trying to find out who killed his Vietnamese (adopted) brother, and of course, has to confront the bad guys. They did throw Tony Hawk in there to give it some street cred, but still no.

(1978)

It was impossible to grow up in the 1980s and avoid Robby Benson. In this movie, he played a basketball player who has trouble adjusting to life in college. Before that, Benson was Billy Joe McAllister in 1976’s Ode to Billy Joe. Later he was the lead in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and played George Gibbs in a TV movie of Our Town.  Either this guy was versatile as hell or some executive in Hollywood decided that Benson was the teenage/young adult Everyman du jour. About this movie, we’ve got the underdog story of a small town underdog who goes bigtime and is in over his head, but of course, there’s a pretty girl to help him get through. Remember, in the ’80s, it was always a love story . . .

Crossing Delancey  (1988)

This movie about being young and single . . . and pressured to marry might age out of being a GenX film, since those in our generation were between ages 8 and 23 in its release year 1988. Only the oldest GenXers, those born in the mid- to late 1960s, were old enough to get married, but this film’s GenX vibe comes from its ’80s-ness. New York City in the 1970s and ’80s was a mythical place, and lead actress Amy Irving was very recognizable at this time, most notably from 1984’s Micki + Maude. (And of course, we recognize actor Peter Reigert as Otter from 1981’s Animal House.) While not many of us were young, happily single Jewish women working in a New York City bookstore, the vibe of our generation is still there.

Reform School Girls (1986)

I hadn’t thought about this movie in a long time until I was re-watching Lost Boys and saw the poster on Sam’s wall. This is an exploitation film from the girls-behind-bars sub-genre, which is really just a cheesy excuse to make a nudie movie with a few girl-fights in it. The villain here is Miss Edna, an ugly, mean woman with a scratchy voice who runs the juvie dorm for girls as her own private hell. The other villain in the story is ’80s sexy mean girl Wendy O. Williams, who is something of a gang leader.  The acting is bad, the sets are cheap, all the things— but it was the ’80s, so audiences put up with it because they knew two things: there would be gratuitous nudity, and the villain would be defeated in the end.

Pretty Smart (1987)

This movie is probably the most obscure one in this list. Its story has two rival factions of teenage girls in a boarding school on a Greek isle coming together when they realize that the headmaster is secretly videoing them and selling drugs. I added it in part because of the plot line’s general similarity to Reform School Girls. And also because it was one of Patricia Arquette’s first films. Arquette would later become much more well-known in 1990, playing Alabama Wurley in True Romance.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)

I loved the original 1976 Bad News Bears movie. This one came out the following year and ranks up there with the first one. They made one more of these, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, which came out two years later in 1979, but . . . they were basically trying to keep the motif in this movie going. Two were enough. This sequel to the original is a mixture of underdog comedy and road movie, with most of the same characters and actors. This time, though, the story is not about the young pitcher Amanda and the drunkard Buttermaker. This time, the remaining Bears get an opportunity play another team in Houston, even though they have no coach— so they go anyway. Its story is highly unlikely and requires some willing suspension of disbelief, but it’s still charming to watch. Especially the end, when Tanner Boyle gets chased around the outfield in the Astrodome as the crowd cheers, “Let them play! Let them play!”

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Adapted from a Tom Robbins novel, this movie stars Uma Thurman as Sissy Hankshaw, a hitchhiker with incredibly large thumbs. The film’s release date in 1993 settles it right in between her earlier performances in Dangerous Liaisons and Henry & June and her big hits that followed: Pulp Fiction and Beautiful Girls. Its director Gus Van Sant had also just made 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, and a whole bunch of music videos for popular bands. This movie is quirky and odd, to some degree magical realism. It features a has-been model and an all-female dude ranch, and the conflicts in the film are set in motion by a transsexual advertising genius in New York who abhors vaginal odor and thus operates a re-beautification ranch that doubles as a sanctuary for whooping cranes. Other notable actors in the cast are Pat Morita (Mr. Miyagi), Keanu Reeves, Angie Dickinson, and two of my favorites: Crispin Glover and Victoria Williams.

Corvette Summer (1978)

I feel certain that Mark Hamill had no idea how big Star Wars was going to be when he signed on to do this movie, which came out the following year. Corvette Summer is about a high school senior who is the main machine-head in his auto-shop class, and they take a half-wrecked Corvette from the junkyard and rebuild it. When they get done, the thing is ultra-tricked out, and they’ve made it even more unique by putting the driver on the right side (like cars in Europe). Everything is cool until one kid (played by The Partridge Family’s Danny Bonaduce) leaves the keys in it and goes to buy Cokes. Of course, the car gets stolen, and Hamill’s character hits the road to find it. While he’s bumming around Las Vegas, sleeping in a U-Haul trailer and finding ways to stay fed, he meets a pretty young woman (played by Annie Potts) who is trying to start as career as a prostitute. With these kooky characters in place, the two become an unlikely duo with conflicting aims. Yet, our protagonist is singular of purpose: get that car back. Though this is not a very good movie, it is also not typical and formulaic like a lot of high school films from the time. (A bit of trivia: director Matthew Robbins wrote the screenplays for 1974’s Sugarland Express and 1981’s Dragonslayer, then directed The Legend of Billie Jean in 1985.)

And for those who at least scrolled all the way to the bottom, whether you actually read all of it or not, here’s your bonus movie— making it 50 plus 1 to grow on.

Smithereens (1982)

Another punk-rock girl story, this one follows a main character who has no talent but still wants to be famous. Like Times Square and Liquid Sky, this was one of several movies that foreshadowed a mainstream interest in New York City’s artistic young people in the 1980s. The film’s director Susan Seidelman made Desperately Seeking Susan three years later. At this point, though, MTV was brand new, the average American had never heard of Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Madonna was still rolling around on the floor in fishnets. So, Smithereens remained a cult hit.

Dirty Boots: Eerily Prescient but Also Mistaken

Dirty Boots: An Irregular Column of Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Here we go again. 2024 is an election year, and the Iowa Caucus for Republicans will be held in less than a week. Soon, the yard signs will go up, the bumper stickers will be slapped on, and the commercials will go into heavy rotation. Yet, for the first time in many years, Kevin Phillips won’t be among us to witness it. The conservative political writer, thinker, and pundit died in October at age 82.

Few people today know who Kevin Phillips was. Were I not a writer who seeks out lesser-known stories from Southern history, I probably wouldn’t either. Phillips’ work was important but not exactly sexy. In the mid-1960s, he worked as a Republican election strategist and may have been the first to use demographic data to effectively determine likely outcomes. His 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority was a controversial but influential work that foresaw a reactionary post-Civil Rights shift among Midwestern and Southern whites, which would lead those voters to the Republican Party as the Democrats embraced policy positions in favor of diversity.

I’ve been interested in Kevin Phillips’ work because so many people in the Deep South – ones I’m related to, ones I’ve known – have lived out what Phillips predicted so well. This has mattered to my life most significantly because, as a public school teacher in Alabama for nearly twenty years, our everyday work depended on tax revenue and public policy. Twelve of my years in the classroom came after a two-pronged coup de grace: George W. Bush’s Great Recession of 2009 followed by the “Republican Wave” of 2010. That socio-political one-two punch brought immense changes to my work. The new Republican leadership of our state government cut classroom funding, passed anti-union, ethics, and “accountability” legislation, and hiked benefits costs that reduced our take-home pay. I had not seen these these historical shifts coming, but Kevin Phillips did— more than fifty years ago.

It was May 1970 when The New York Times‘ James Boyd wrote about Kevin Phillips’ prediction of “an inevitable cycle of Republican dominance that would begin in the late nineteen-sixties and prosper until the advent of the 21st century.” A look at the piece more than fifty years later reveals a creepy degree of foresight, including some uncomfortable insights about an ongoing modern argument: whether bigotry causes many white voters to lean Republican. Phillips thought it did, especially in the South, a factor that Republicans didn’t like him to articulate so effectively. Boyd wrote, “Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic and cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited.” Furthermore, Phillips was quoted as remarking that black people voting Democratic helped the Republicans:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.

However, an election strategy that only focuses on attracting the most racists won’t go far, and Boyd’s explanation of Phillips’ predictions for an “emerging Republican majority” included more than just racism. Strategists did rely on working-class, nativist whites refusing to ally themselves politically with the party of “colored minorities,” but drawing mainstream conservative voters required coalition-building and messaging that took into account a complex mixture of population shifts, traditions, and values. Phillips was quoted in the Times piece as referencing the “millions of working-class people who are looking for a party that relates to their needs.” His predictions displayed an eerie and unseemly prescience:

In the future, the liberal-conservative division will come on social issues; Middle Americans and the working class are socially conservative.

What makes it unseemly is another of Phillips’ conclusions: American voters seek to have their needs met but lack the sophistication to make good choices. Boyd’s article referred to Phillips’ belief that most Americans “delude themselves” when they think that they make “a free, contemporary judgment on an issue, a man, a record, or a party philosophy.” No, it’s not like that: “the average voter steps into the booth [and] registers the prejudice or the allegiance bred by a mix of geography, history, and ethnic reaction which stems from a past he knows only murkily.” He further cited the idea that “liberalism has turned away from the common people and become institutionalized into an establishment.” This, too, sounds familiar, i.e. “Make America Great Again.”

While we’re mired today in post-Great Recession, Trump-era politics, taking the time to understand our history can hold keys to understanding the present quandaries we currently face (and wish to resolve). In 2016, many white working- and middle-class voters found one more reason to vilify the “liberal elite” when Hillary Clinton alluded to “the basket of deplorables” in their midst: “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” Rather than looking inward to determine why she said that or to whom she was referring, one common reaction was to ramp up the bitterness against Clinton and, for some, to embrace the term “deplorable” as a badge of honor that separated Trump voters (in the best way) from an out-of-touch elite. Instead of being a call to introspection, Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment had a similar effect to “Let them eat cake.”

Yet, this tactic of portraying Democrats and “liberals” as anti-Working Man is not new and should seem familiar. In the mid-1990s, a now-well-known Georgia representative named Newt Gingrich was using the same strategies, a la Kevin Phillips, to say the same things to goad the same audience to get the same result. In her August 1995 dual book review “The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich” about his To Renew America and the co-authored 1945, essayist Joan Didion put it this way:

The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle. The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by “the system,” by “Washington,” by “the liberal elite,” by “the East Coast elite” (not by accident does a mention of Harvard in 1945 provoke the sympathetic President’s antipathy to “East Coast snobbery and intellectual hauteur”), or simply by an unspecified “they.”

Twenty-one years later, in 2016, “the system” had been re-branded as “the swamp,” and “To Renew America” had become “Make America Great Again.”

This negative notion of a liberal intelligentsia seems to be just another incarnation of former Alabama governor George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” from the 1960s, but it also seems to be the flip side of the coin to noblesse oblige, the old notion that well-to-do, well-educated elites had a paternalistic interest in the welfare of those who lacked wealth and knowledge. By contrast, the “liberal elite” or “liberal establishment” of today is assumed to despise and belittle working and poor people, instead preferring to create a “welfare state” that enriches a few team players and cripples everyone else with regulations that hamper basic rights and with taxes that become handouts to freeloaders. The effects of the “liberal agenda” are purported to be negative for everyone involved and are described as having no upside. This rhetoric gets pulled out of the bag of tricks over and over . . . because it works. (For a brief discussion of anti-intellectual remarks made over the last half-century by conservative thinkers, see this 2012 article from The Chronicle for Higher Education.)

By 2014, two decades after Gingrich’s rise to prominence, the party’s strategy had worked well, and there was confidence in this platform and its base. Support in the South and Midwest had become almost unflappable, just as Kevin Phillips had predicted. The party held both houses of Congress as well as many state legislatures. In “The Emerging Republican Supermajority,” John Hood of the conservative National Review wrote, “As it turned out, the Republicans and conservatives appear to have spent more wisely [than the Democrats] while benefiting from a favorable issue environment.” Of course, two years later, the 2016 election of Donald Trump confirmed that comfortable position, and Kevin Phillips’ all-important white working-class voters were a key element in putting a man in the White House who promised that he would “Make America Great Again.”

What is interesting to me about working-class support for Republicans is the party’s lack of enthusiasm for institutions and policies that can enable working-class and poor people to move up, or at least hold steady, in the world: public schools and public libraries. Strong public schools and public libraries have great potential benefits for Americans who lack resources but still want a good education and trustworthy information, which lead to better opportunities. Schools’ and libraries’ main function is to provide the mass of people with knowledge that can yield meaningful betterment, personally if not professionally. For example, a knowledge of history and civics can help people to recognize “fake news” and to comprehend the political system. The skills involved in critical reading can help a person to make good judgments based on factual information. Knowledge about science and mathematics can help a person avoid superstitions about causes and effects in nature.

Yet, the Republican approach to public education has occupied the unfortunate territory between ambivalent and ham-fisted. To lead America’s public schools, perhaps our greatest mechanism for socio-economic advancement, President Trump appointed a controversial, anti-public schools billionaire with no experience in an educational institution. For post-secondary, despite his campaign proposal to provide student-loan debt relief by capping repayment amounts, his boldest move was to revamp relief programs to the detriment of borrowers, most notably affecting some forgiveness programs for teachers. And on the state level, a handful of governors and state legislatures created policies that negatively affected teachers and public schools, some of which led to walkouts and protests.

I see these circumstances in light of the phenomenon that Kevin Phillips predicted. Many – but certainly not all – working-class and middle-class whites in the South regard the Democrats as the party of handouts, especially for “colored minorities.” Public education has become a Democratic Party issue, but the problem with that view is: it neglects the nuances of how public education fits into our society and our economy. The Republican Party’s appeal to working- and middle-class class white voters with promises of good jobs and renewed prosperity comes in a package deal with its ambivalence about public education, which could enable working people to access better opportunities. After all, a jobs-focused local or state government can only recruit new industries for their citizens if those citizens can actually do those jobs— and the best path to better jobs is increased skills and knowledge.

However, the raison d’etre of this anti-public education plank in Republican politics may not be about all that, as revealed in this NBC Left Field video segment featuring former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd.

As the Republican majority has enjoyed its heyday, another re-alignment of voters has occurred: college-educated, suburban voters have been skewing hard toward the Democrats, while non-college-educated white voters, especially in rural areas, have been skewing hard toward Republicans.

For some years now, the most recent incarnation of conservative anti-intellectualism has claimed that colleges are making their students more “liberal.” We’ve also heard that liberal arts degrees are “useless” and that no one can get a job with a degree in English, history, or philosophy. (Both assertions are false.) However, what may be more consequential is: people who undertake these courses of study emerge with strong critical-thinking skills that can dissect political rhetoric and assess it in complex terms. In short, college graduates are more likely to recognize flawed rhetoric when we hear it.

Though my ideas about society and politics are left-leaning, I’m one of those darn independents who makes up his mind each election cycle about who to vote for, the ones that political operatives like Kevin Phillips can’t predict. To do that, I use the skills from my liberal arts education to make good decisions. Instead of party labels and straight-ticket voting, I pay attention to campaign messages and read diligently, both from news sources and in documents like reports and studies. And every election cycle, without fail, I have to wade through the hackneyed claims of the self-proclaimed Lone Rangers who promise to stand up to the mythological host of boogeymen— the ones who want to destroy America, the ones whose mission in life is to take everything from hard-working people!

Kevin Phillips’ New York Times obituary led off by calling him a “conservative mastermind,” but also noted that he “had second thoughts after assessing income inequality under three Republican presidents.” He wrote two books, both published in the 2000s, that criticized presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. He had seen the reality of his early vision. In the late 1960s, Phillips declared that liberal politicians had turned away from ordinary working people, but thirty to forty years later, he had seen what his own people would do with political power. It seems odd than a man could be both right about the path and wrong about the destination, but I guess Kevin Phillips managed it.

tidbits, fragments, and ephemera 38: the reboot

Originally published on level:deepsouth— for Generation X, tidbits, fragments, and ephemera is a sometimes substantial but not making any promises glimpse at information and news related to growing up Generation X in the Deep South.Keep on Smilin’ by Wet Willie, 1974

Released fifty years ago, Keep on Smilin’ was the band Wet Willie’s third album, and its title song became their biggest hit. Led by Jimmy Hall, the group was formed in the late 1960s in Mobile, Alabama and later moved to Macon, Georgia to sign with Capricorn Records. They were well-known as an opening act for the Allman Brothers Band. The album charted as high as number 41, and the single just did break the top-10.

Hustler‘s Larry Flynt is shot in Lawrenceville, Georgia, 1978

Larry Flynt was a controversial figure in the 1970s for publishing the pornographic magazine Hustler, which was generally more explicit in its depictions and imagery. As a result of his work, Flynt was facing criminal charges in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and when he went down to face those charges, he was shot with a .44 caliber rifle in broad daylight. The gunshot did not kill Flynt, nor did it stop him from publishing his magazine, but it did cripple him permanently. Though rumors circulated that there was a government conspiracy to kill Larry Flynt, it was determined that the killer had committed the act because he was angry about an interracial sex layout in Hustler. In 2013, Atlanta Magazine published a look-back piece on the incident, and the true crime book Blood in the Soil came out in 2016.

People magazine discovers the Athens alternative music scene, 1983

an excerpt from page 191 in the 2016 book Party out of Bounds by Rodger Lyle Brown:

South Carolina defeats Notre Dame 36–32, October 1984

Called “A Golden Afternoon” by the website GamecocksScoop.com, this college football victory was notable within a great season for the team that year. South Carolina was ranked number 11, and the game was played at Notre Dame’s stadium. The Fighting Irish were ahead at halftime, then had an even greater lead at the end of the third quarter. But the Gamecocks fought back and came out on top, giving them a 6–0 record at that point in the season. Sports Illustrated remarked in its coverage that it was the best start for a South Carolina team ever, and they also referred to Notre Dame as the “Dying Irish.” Though South Carolina had its best season ever (up to that point), their winning ways were stymied by a late-season loss to Navy followed by a loss in the Gator Bowl. Their season ended with a 10–2 record. South Carolina later joined the Southeastern Conference (SEC), in 1992.

“The murders of 1994: Lessons from New Orleans’ deadliest year” from nola.com, July 2016

In 1994, there were 424 people murdered in New Orleans, which was then the highest number ever recorded. A May 1994 report from The New York Times explained that there had already been almost 200 murders and that there had even been six murders in one day. Modern accounts of the period note that the city’s police force had severe problems with corruption, which may not have caused the problems, but it certainly did not help. Following this violent episode in the city’s history, significant efforts were made to reduce the murder rate and curb corruption.

“The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools” on PBS’s American Experience, September 2023

excerpt: “After the 1954 Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, little more than token efforts were made to desegregate Southern schools. That changed dramatically on Oct. 29, 1969, when the high court ordered Mississippi schools to fully — and immediately — desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old [Doug] Blackmon, entered school in the fall of 1970 as part of the first class of Black and white students who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland, Mississippi.” The small town of Leland is located between Greenville and Indianola, in the western part of the state. The central figure in this documentary, Doug Blackmon, is today a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist.

Read more tidbits, fragments & ephemera

A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2023

2023 was another year of changes for this middle-aged writer, editor, and teacher. In January, I moved from the English department faculty at the college and to  a staff position as the Academic Writing Advisor. Another change was the decision to end level:deepsouth. That was a hard, but it was the right thing to do. One more change, but this one was positive: I revisited the “A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week” series this year . Looking further, into ongoing work, Nobody’s Home has stayed constant and is going strong after its third anniversary in March. That same month, the Fitzgerald Museum’s fifth annual Literary Contest was completed, while the theme and judges for the sixth contest were announced in August. Most importantly, the Montgomery Catholic history book was completed and published in conjunction with the school’s anniversary in October. Now, as 2023 comes to a close, here is a recap of what has been published here (and a few things on Nobody’s Home) this year:

Posts

Dirty Boots: Flag Football (December)

A Quick Tribute to “Redneck Sheriff” Clifton James (December)

Dirty Boots: Mulling over Milligan (November)

Throwback Thursday: Five Years since the Release of Closed Ranks (November)

The Work, as 2023 winds down (October)

The release of Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. (October)

The end of level:deepsouth (September)

a few haiku from recent years (September)

A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: The Death of Mary Crovatt Hambidge, 1973 (August)

A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: The Death of Jerry Clower, 1998 (August)

Another Batch of New Works in Nobody’s Home (August)

The Fitzgerald Museum’s sixth annual Literary Contest and Zelda Award (August)

A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: The Destruction of the Georgia Guidestones, 2022 (July)

Spring 2023 (in images) (June)

The Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home ends today. (June)

Yet Another 10 GenX Movies You’ve Probably Forgotten (or Never Seen) (June)

Alabamiana: Albert Brewer vs. the Drive-Ins, 1969 (May)

Essay: “Southern Roots in Four Plays by August Wilson” (May)

Thirteen Years of Unapologetically Eclectic Pack Mule-ing (April)

Timothy B. Tyson at Huntingdon College, April 13 (April)

Essay: “Am I Supposed to Laugh or Not?” (On the Poetry of Rodney Jones) (April)

An editor’s look back: “Myths are the truths we live by.” (March)

Congratulations to the Winners of the Fitzgerald Museum’s Literary Contest: “Unclassified Masterpieces” (March)

level:deepsouth, because GenXers have stories to tell (February)

A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: Walking Tall, 50 Years Later (February)

A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: The Death of Bear Bryant, 40 Years Later (January)

and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:

A Road Trip, West: Alabama’s Black Belt (October)

Car Trouble and Voodoo: a Rumination on Horror and the South (October)

“the degree of civilization”: A Rumination on Prisons and the Summer Heat (August)

Flipping the Script: A Rumination on the Anti-CRT Movement (July)

A Road Trip, Southwest: The Carolinas in Spring, Part Two (April) 

A Road Trip, Northeast: The Carolinas in Spring, Part One (April)

Reading

The Catholic Teacher by James D. Kyrilo

Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Essential Haiku and Extraordinary Zen Masters by Robert Hass and John Stevens, respectively

and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:

The South of the Mind by Zachary J. Lechner (2018)

South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray (1971)

Biracial Politics by Chandler Davidson (1972)

Watching

The Great Watchlist Purge of 2023: The Finally Final of All Final Reports (July)

The Great Watchlist Purge of 2023: Everything Must Go! (January)

Sad Hill Unearthed (2017) (January)

and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:

The Waterboy turns 25.

“My Louisiana Love” on America ReFramed from PBS

Conrack (1974)

Southern Movies

The Chase (1966)

Nothing But A Man (1964)

Mississippi Masala (1991)

An LGBTQ Sampler

Band of Angels (1957)

Read more from past years:
A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2022
or A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2021 
or A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2020

Dirty Boots: Flag Football

Dirty Boots: An Irregular Column of Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

About two weeks ago, I went to Tuscaloosa for the girls’ flag football state championship game, which was being played in Bryant-Denny Stadium. My daughter played quarterback for her school’s team, and they were one of the two teams there from a division that lumps 1A through 5A schools together. Her school is classified in 4A, and during the regular season, the team went undefeated against teams 5A and lower, with their only losses coming from 7A teams. The championship game was nailbiter, with the two teams trading touchdowns. A 12–12 tie at the end of the fourth quarter took the hard-fought game into overtime, and their opponents scored on a fourth-down play in sudden-death to win. It was a tough loss for us, but finishing the season as state runners-up ain’t too shabby.

What I saw in Bryant-Denny that day was remarkable to me for its celebration of girls by the sports community. The team was given all the amenities, including a police escort from their hotel to the stadium. There was also strong turnout to support them. The cluster of students cheering them on were predominantly boys, whole families showed up in school colors, alumni of the school came, and the band traveled to be there, too. It was a far cry from my experience in high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when hardly any of us – me included – paid much attention to girls’ sports. It was an even farther cry from my mother’s days as a three-sport high school athlete in Montgomery in the mid-1960s, when girls basketball was half-court because no one believed that they were physically capable of running up and down the court for a whole game. Back then, all girls’ games were played right after school, and their uniforms in every sport included a skirt since girls were not allowed to wear pants. When my mother and I discuss my daughter’s participation in sports, as well as my and my wife’s habitual attendance at her games and matches, she usually mentions that her parents never once came to see her play, not even in the years that she and her teammates won city championships. (There were no state championships for girls back then.) My mom was with us at the game in Bryant-Denny, and it must have been a marvel for her to see.

Perhaps I noticed these things at the flag football game because they were already on my mind. Earlier that week, I had been watching my usual evening news on PBS NewsHour and saw a story about how a few elite universities were addressing anti-Semitic acts on their campuses (related to the Israel-Gaza conflict). As the story was being introduced, they showed the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, then the person leading the congressional committee— all women, white, Jewish, and black. I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t surprised, but it did give me pause . . . in a good way. I hit rewind and watched again, thinking: The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT are all women, and they’re testifying before Congress in a committee meeting led by a woman. Going back once again to the 1980s and ’90s, when I was young, girls and young women would have seen their dads watching the news, seen a congressional panel like this, and probably seen only white men, including in the gallery of spectators.  That night, I would have called my wife and my daughter in to see the story, too, but nobody else was home. They were out getting ready to travel for the big game.

Raising two kids who are active two-sport athletes has been odd for me. I tried a few sports as a kid myself – first tee ball and baseball, then tennis, and finally football – but was barely mediocre at any of them. (I found my place later among literature and the arts. That’s another story.) I’m as awkward a sports dad as has ever been, but there is one thing I’m certain of. I’m thankful that my son and my daughter have these opportunities. I’ll admit freely that boys’ football – one of my son’s two sports – dominates the scene and draws the biggest crowds. But other sports, ones played by boys and by girls, are taken seriously by the school’s administration, the athletic staff, the parents, the students, and the local news media. In soccer – my daughter’s other sport – the boys are there for the girls’ games and vice versa. When the school’s volleyball team won the state championship earlier this fall, they were regaled and honored. Their school doesn’t treat the female athletes and teams as second-rate.

This spring, my daughter will finish high school, and her mother and I will send her out into the world for college. She has worked hard and done well, both inside the classroom and outside of it. The world she’ll encounter isn’t fair, and it will sometimes be downright demeaning, which is why her mother and I have tried to show her in a variety of ways that she can face the adversity with dignity. All people face adversity, but girls and women have long been advised to yield to it, to give in, to take the subordinate position. Especially in conservative cultures like the South. That seems to be changing, even down here. We’ve raised our daughter to tolerate no such attitude that she should just smile and be pretty and agreeable. And athletics have been part of that education. She and her team might not have won that very last game, but what she got to experience in Tuscaloosa should augment an expectation that her hard work deserves respect. Frankly, seeing her get that lesson – that affirmation – means more to an awkwardly inadequate sports dad than any championship trophy.

 

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week 218

Life is full of peaks and valleys, triumphs and tribulations. We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle or difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. We resist the truth of difference and diversity. We resist acknowledging that our constants exist within a framework where everything is always changing. We resist change. When we are able to face the reality of highs and lows, embracing both as necessary for our full development and self actualization, we can feel that interior well-being that is the foundation of inner peace. That life of appreciation for difference, for diversity, a life wherein one embraces suffering as central to the experience of joy is mirrored for us in our natural environment.

– from the chapter “Moved by Mountains” in Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks

A Quick Tribute to “Redneck Sheriff” Clifton James

You probably don’t know the actor by name, but if you’ve watched many movies or much TV in the mid- to late twentieth century, you know his face and his voice. For me, his most memorable role was Carl the floorwalker in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, where he yelled “First bell!” and “Last bell!”  Among other Southern movies from the 1960s and ’70s, he was also in Black Like Me, The Chase, The Reivers, tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . , WUSA, and Buster and Billie. However, his most famous Southern character might have been JW Pepper, the “redneck sheriff” in the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die, a role he reprised in The Man with a Golden Gun the following year. In the 1980s, typecasting could be what led James to roles in Southern TV shows like The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas.

I was surprised to learn that Clifton James was not from the South but from Spokane, Washington. Born in May 1920, James was a World War II veteran who served in the Pacific and was awarded several medals. He graduated from the University of Oregon and from the Actor’s Studio, then began his career on Broadway and in TV westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke. I’ve never been a fan of James Bond movies so I was surprised to see so much emphasis on that when I was reading about him. Clifton James’s portly build and thick jowls combined with a killer scowl, an ominous smile, and thoroughly believable cigar-chomping made him a natural for playing the redneck we love to hate. Somehow a decorated war veteran from the Pacific Northwest figured out how to pull that off convincingly.

In 1966’s The Chase, the most recent Southern Movie I wrote about, his character is Lem, a minor character, one of a trio of town assholes. Lem has greasy hair and a mustache, and wears a baby blue suit and loosened tie. He is the initial eavesdropper who hears Sheriff Calder on the phone then shares the news of Bubber’s escape without permission. Later, Lem causes commotion by shooting his pistol indiscriminately during a party, then he and his drunk friends try to lynch a black man named Lester in an alley, before imprisoning the sheriff in his own office and beating him up severely. Clifton James plays this part perfectly. 

Clifton James died in April 2017, at age 96, from “complications of diabetes,” his New York Times obituary reported. The local newspaper from the area where he grew up also published a nice tribute to him at the time of his death, calling him a “hometown hero.”