December 1, 2004

• WEDNESDAY MOVIES
  

  Watched a couple of really interesting DVDs this week. Baadasssss! is really a son’s tribute to his groundbreaking father. Mario Van Peebles tells the story of the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the original independent black cinema film put together with blood, sweat, and tears (and the band Earth, Wind and Fire) in 1971 by his father, Melvin Van Peebles who was turned down by every major studio and had to be snuck in by masquerading as a black porno film. A fascinating story of achievement under great odds. City of God is set in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, in a housing project built in the 1960′s that in the early ’80′s became one of the most dangerous places to live. The narrator is a young black man growing up in poverty who manages to stay on the fringes of the violence around him and eventually finds his way to becoming a photographer. The environment he photographs and lives in is like a war zone – children of grade school age learn to rob, steal, and kill in gangs, growing into young men capable of ruling the slums they live in. It is a foreign film, the language being beautiful Brazilian Portuguese, but so worth dealing with subtitles.
  

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  Deep Thought: “It was really sad when I went to visit my friend Jim at the state mental institution. He was convinced he was on a tropical island with no cares and no worries. It took me a long time to convince him that no, he was in a room with bare walls and a bare bed and he was wearing a straitjacket.”
  Today I am grateful for: Consistency
  Guess the Movie: “I’m only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t swim here, they’ll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island..” Answer: Jaws, 1975. Winner: Accolade.
  Only the Grassroots Can Save The Democratic Party
  by Joe Trippi
  The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren’t obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party’s trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger defeat. And the true magnitude of the Democrats’ abject failure at the polls in 2004 would have been more clearly revealed. (Rest of article here.)
  End of Day: 8:51 pm
  + = Supposed to be getting a tiny cost-of-living raise this month.
  - = The state funding for the university where I work just got cut by 40% which will make everybody paranoid as hell including me.

  • 8:47 am
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