A Tale of Two Towns

I saw the movie tonight. It was good. I have to say, though, that the question/answer session with the directors was interesting, as well. Sarah, Helen, Rashad (a guy in my Race class) talked about Whitney the White Guy for quite a while. Marco the Black Guy was a little more interesting. Or at least he seemed to have known a little more how to handle public discussions. Whitney, in describing the silent woman at the end of the film, as "dumb." He also defended the Bubba family of Jasper, Texas, and not "tra-- they're middle class." Nice. Another interesting use of words was when he explained how he and Marco stayed on either ends of the town. He referred to their interviews and interactions, etc. as being involved in their respective communities. Very interesting. Isn't the point to find some common ground? If the two New York film guys are operating within their individual communities then there's a little perpetuating of racial structures goin' on. Oh wait. One more thing. On the white side, there was an obvious absence of women. There was one woman -- a Bubba. And she was kind enough at the very beginning to show disgust at the way James Byrd was killed. But she wasn't happy with the way the "community" was portraying him as an upstanding citizen. Because that's relevant when determining the guilt or innocence of his murderers. Anyway, the last question of the evening was about the absence of women. The gist of Whitney's response: they all just happened to men. That sounds familiar. This sentiment echoes the justifications for ignoring the presence of women for centuries. Marco found the women. He knew where to go, too: Uvan's beauty salon. I remember my days at Kinks getting my hair "twisted." After the film, we went uptown to a place called Fred's on 82nd and Amsterdam. It was good. It's nice to be able to talk to a professor on such a level. I hope we keep in contact. We exchange CDs and books, so I think we probably will. I didn't get a whole lot done on my paper today. Ok, I got nothing done on my paper today. I managed to print out my outline and the notes I jotted down from books. And I started reading John Keegan's Face of Battle. I only have to read the bit about the Somme. Also for Tuesday, I have to read Ernst Junger's "Total Mobilization" and something from The Storm of Steel. For Monday I have to write a short response to some Internet chat room excerpts, as well as read a piece from the reader. Maybe I'll take a day off from the slavery paper and just read. You may think that I took the day off today but that's different: I didn't intend to. I just looked at my notes and the screen. Let's hear it for Nancy Pelosi.