Eiayay On The Reel

The Pandemic seems to lend itself to a sense of Nostalgia and also a lot of procrastination. I am back with my Reel of the Week. This weeks reel is off my favorites list. It's 1967's TO SIR WITH LOVE".  It's the 60's and Mark Thackery ( Sidney Poitier ) is a Black man, trying to get along ,and get a job in the field of engineering. Again and again ,  the Color wall   rears it's ugly head. So when he is offered a job teaching troubled High School students in a poor neighborhood, he jumps at the chance of employment. His first day of school he is confronted with a classroom full of surly, brash, irrepressible teens, who in a years time be unleashed into the World with no grasp of what awaits them. Thakery feels in over his head and the students mask their uncertainty at his presence, with bravado and an   escalation of unruly behavior, hoping to scare him off like previous teachers. Thackery has experienced worse in his day to day life as a Black man   so steels...

  I finally decided to see what all the buzz was about, so my Reel of the Week is 2013's GRAVITY. Well I've hopped on the bandwagon and am still scratching my head or my brain...& looking for a way to hop off. With that much Award hoopla, I was expecting much more. The star of GRAVITY is most definitely the cinematography, it was spectacular, but the movie itself was very small.  Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a medical engineer who accompanies  Astronaut (George Clooney) into space. While repairing their shuttle, a disaster leaves the pair hopelessly adrift in orbit. GRAVITY was as formulaic as a movie can get, you know: Everything is fine, then everything is not fine, solution, mini disaster, inner or outer pep talk,then success. I'm not really sure what made it Oscar worthy.  Sandra Bullock   was adequate. She did her thing & it was okay.  George Clooney   was a clone of a lot of characters he's played over & over. Snarky, emotional...

  I originally joined Facebook & Twitter to keep in touch with friends & family, but as the years have gone by I find navigating Social Media as a Person Of Color   an exhausting & disturbing tight rope walk. People participate on Facebook & Twitter to share a little bit of who they are and tidbits of their lives. As as POC I have to deal with racism in my everyday life, so, yeah, it's going to show up in my timeline.   I expect to see racism when I am casually surfing the web, but what I find disheartening is the passive & sometimes blatant racism that I find myself exposed to on my own timeline, from FB & Twitter friends & their friends. I see racist posts & my friends comments and Likes. I get to see racist memes that get shared, LoL'd and "liked". I see conversations with friends & their friends speaking in what they perceive as "Black Vernacular" as if the height of humor is speaking like what they think of as "g...

                                     "Foolish Child" Art by DICKENS                                                                  https://www.autostraddle.com/tag/foolish-child/ I remember my very first experience with racism at the hands of my 5th grade teacher,Ruth Hawes (I debated using her name, but I'm done holding it back, also...she dead). I knew racism existed, but it was abstract. The stories my older siblings told of being teased or followed home. Listening to my father's stories from his years in the military, how his fellow soldiers would tell the French that Black People had tails, or his belt buckles or shoes would go missing .  My mother's stories about living in Georgia in the Jim Crow era. Her fear o...

My first post of the new year was supposed to be a Reel of the week. But I find myself once again giving voice to these EXTRA trying times for Black & NBPOC. My next post will be a movie review...I hope... I try my hardest to attend and support events featuring Black People & NBPOC, including, Concerts, lectures, Art exhibits, book discussions , movies etc. When these events take place in white spaces, they take on the burden of trying to navigate these spaces with a minimum of stress and code-switching. Inevitably white people who attend these events consider themselves to be allies, "woke" and liberal in their feelings for POC. So, they spend a lot of time burdening POC with "proof" of their tolerance. Leaving POC feeling stressed, uncomfortable and unable to fully be themselves and enjoy the feeling of seeing ourselves in Art & Culture. By white spaces, I mean places that are predominantly run by white people or spaces that are for everyone,...

When dealing with the almost daily effects of white supremacy and cultural appropriation, you eventually reach a saturation point. That point is usually what drives my writing. Saturation point was met on a Sunday morning while I was watching CBS Sunday Morning. There was a story about self-taught African American Folk artist, Bill Traylor. He'd been born a slave and lived through the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation and the great migration. The Smithsonian was featuring his art. The morning show interviewed Leslie Umberger, curator and self-taught Folk art expert.She proceeded to interpret what certain images Bill had used in his drawings, symbolized.  I remember thinking: Everything she is saying, is filtered through the white gaze. She was interpreting the meaning behind the images with no frame of reference, no history or intergenerational legacy to draw from. I guess what I really wanted to see, was a Black expert on African American Folk art.  An effort could hav...