What Happened, Miss Simone?

I watched the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone over the weekend about the life of singer Nina Simone and it was fascinating. I didn't really know much about Nina Simone and her heyday was before my time, but that didn't make the documentary any less interesting. She was, like many performers, someone who just got on the hamster wheel and couldn't get off. Once she started making some money and gaining a following, people were dependent on her to continue and build on her success. Her personal health (mainly her mental health) was suffering as she was pushed to get out on stage and perform. Then you add the Civil Rights movement into the mix and Simone just started to unravel. I wonder if the Zoe Saldana Nina Simone movie will ever see the light of day given all of the negative publicity surrounding it. The studio may just quietly release it to video/streaming/On Demand and be done with it. It amazes me that in this day and age someone had the bright idea to cast a fairly light-skinned black Latina to play Simone. A lot of the struggles Nina Simone sang and talked about had to do with her blackness. She was not a light-skinned woman and she did not have white features, as Saldana does. What's even worse is that someone felt the need to blacken Saldana's face and put a prosthetic nose on her to make her look more like Nina Simone for that film version. Why not just let her play Simone without the cosmetic changes?

Hooray!

Finally, some good news to do a blog post about. The Supreme Court's ruling to allow same sex marriage in all of the United States is good news indeed. Hooray and it's about time. I wasn't sure how the ruling would come down, but with more states allowing same sex marriages, it was going to be hard for the SCOTUS to justify ruling against it. Allowing the states to set their own course for same sex marriage just seemed like a recipe for disaster because some states (cough, Mississippi) you know were never going to allow it. So what happens to a couple who is legally married in Illinois but then moves to Michigan where same sex marriage isn't legal? Is that couple deemed no longer married once they cross the state line into Michigan or Indiana? What kills me is that someone like Clarence Thomas ruled against same sex marriage when he knows damn well that his own interracial marriage would not have been allowed under the law had it not been for the Court's intervention.

Broken

I broke my Kindle today and I could kick myself for being so careless with it. It's old and I've had it for a while, but it still worked fine until today. I left it on the roof of my car and drove off. By the time I remembered it, the damage had been done. I found my broken Kindle on the ground and the screen is jacked. I'm very glad I actually found it, but it can't be saved.

Ugh

The recent tragedy in Charleston has renewed the debate of whether the Confederate flag should be removed from the South Carolina capitol building. When I was in graduate school at the University of South Carolina (before I got the hell out of there and transferred to another school), there was a huge Confederate flag hanging right in the lobby of the dorm where I lived. Every freaking day I had to see that flag coming and going. Ugh. In addition, one of the women on my floor had a huge flag hanging over her bed and her room was right beside the floor's communal kitchen, so if I went to cook something and she was home with her door open, I got a great view of the flag yet again. I complained to the school about the flag in the lobby and was given the usual BS responses: it's tradition, heritage not hate, we understand you're not from here, blah, blah, blah. The sad thing was the woman who ran the dorm who was sent to placate me was black! Clearly, she'd been brainwashed by the USC herself. I know that flag isn't responsible for what happened in Charleston, but it's a symbol of hate and it needs to come down.

My second "ugh" of the day is the announcement that Brian Williams is coming back to TV news. Really?? NBC should have just tossed him aside for good. Watch your back, Lester! I have a feeling Lyin' Brian will sit and wait for the chance to pounce and get his old Nightly News job back. And, sadly, he's probably get it! Ugh. 

What Can I Say?

What can I say about the church shooting in Charleston, SC? Nothing that probably already hasn't been said. It's a tragedy, it's a shame, it's senseless, it's terrible. I hope the survivors and the loved ones of the victims can recover and move forward after this. As I've said in the past, I am no fan of South Carolina after spending (wasting really) nine months of my life in Columbia many years ago, but the one bright spot from that experience was a trip to Charleston. It's a lovely city and I hope it is able to heal and get past the ugliness of last night.

Sweet Tea

I've been meaning to post a blog entry about the play Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South for a week. I saw the one man show last Sunday, but my mind was occupied with other things during the week so I'm finally getting around to it. The play is based on a book of the same name and presents the stories of different black gay men who present brief stories of their lives in the South. I enjoyed the play and the writer and performer, E. Patrick Johnson, was really great. Some of the stories felt a little preachy and there's a lot of religiosity thrown into the mix, but that was expected because you can't really discuss black Southerners without discussing religion. I wish I had stayed after the performance for the Q&A session with Johnson, but I didn't. I thought more black men would be at the show also but the audience was primarily women, black and white (with a few Asian women thrown in), at least during the Sunday performance I attended.

One of the things I really appreciated about the show was the honesty Johnson expressed through the characters who were dealing with racism, homophobia, self-hatred, acceptance, and a whole host of other issues as they just tried to live their lives.

 

Not Black Like Me

The whole story of black impostor Rachel Dolezal is bizarre and crazy and ridiculous all at the same time. I see a book deal and possibly a Lifetime movie coming out of this whole ordeal. (Cash in while you can, girl!) While I can understand Rachel Dolezal's fascination with and admiration of black people, I can't understand why she'd lie about being black herself. The late great singer Teena Marie often said she felt like a black woman trapped in a white woman's body, but she never denied the fact that she was white and black people loved her and her music. I remember watching an episode of Wife Swap years ago (don't judge me) and a black couple and white couple swapped wives. At one point, the black husband got frustrated with his swapped white wife and told her something like, "If you had to be black for one day, you'd kill yourself!" If that guy's still around, I wonder what he thinks of Ms. Dolezal. She's been black for, what, ten years now and she seemed to be going strong until her white parents outed her. Some people just can't seem to love themselves.

!Spanish Now!

I'm taking a Spanish class (again) because I'd like to travel to Nicaragua sometime in the near future. I'll never speak Spanish well and I realize that, but I'd just like to be able to speak well enough to get by and understand the language enough to know what someone is saying to me and comprehend the language in writing. 

When I took a Spanish class many years ago while I was in college, my teacher was Cuban and he'd call the students in one by one and yell questions such as "what is the date?" or "what is the time?" at us in order to quiz us. This was not particularly helpful for me. Hopefully I'll have a better experience the second time around.

Prison Break!

I'm officially obsessed with the NY prison break story. How did those guys get power tools? Who helped them? Where did they go after they broke out? Is it time for a sequel to The Shawshank Redemption? I remember when some guys broke out of a prison in Elizabeth, New Jersey and dug their way out Shawshank style. I was living in central New Jersey when that happened and I'd ride past that prison every day on the way to work on the train. Now here we go again with another Shawshank-esque prison break. Crazy! Even crazier is that Shawshank is on TV right now as I'm typing this message. It's on AMC. Coincidence or something more???

Back to the 70s

So Presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee wants to bring the metric system to the United States so our primary system of measurement will be the same as most of the rest of the world. Didn't Carter and Reagan try that in the 70s and 80s? And how'd that work out for them? I remember being in school in the 1970s and 80s and having the whose Eurasia thing pushed on us. Europe and Asia were going to become one continent called Eurasia. Yeah. Okay. That didn't happen either, did it? I saw Jon Stewart talking about the Chafee/metric system idea on The Daily Show last week and he pretty much summed it up by saying that Chafee wouldn't be President because he didn't understand the basic premise that Americans don't care what other countries are doing. So what if Europe, Asia, Australia, etc. are all using the metric system. We do want over here in the USA. The rest of the world refers to soccer as football too, but does that mean we should change also just so we fit in? Ha! I don't see that happening, at least not in my lifetime. Football for us will always be the Lions, Bears, Cowboys, etc. not Manchester United.

Enough Already

Can I turn on the television or get on the Internet this week without having to see anything about people whose last names are Jenner or Duggar? Enough already. The media on these folks has reached its saturation point. I had to placate myself by watching pygmy goat videos on You Tube just to drown out that noise.

In other news, so EL James is pumping out another book for her 50 Shades series. I know I read some time ago that she was working on something new that wasn't related at all to the series, but I guess she scrapped that so she could keep milking the Christian Grey cash cow. I can understand wanting to squeeze another book out since the others were so popular, but why basically rewrite the first book from a different point of view? Why not pick up where the last book left off or write a prequel?

No Night Is Too Long

I'm reading Barbara Vine's mystery No Night Is Too Long after watching the movie version a few weeks ago. It's the story of a college student, Tim, who gets involved with a professor, Ivo, and then the student kills the professor (or does he?). The book is quite good. The movie was good also, but I felt the main characters were miscast. I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but I really like the way Vine deals with the relationship (sexual and otherwise) between Tim and Ivo. These guys are a hot mess and I love it. I saw the made-for-TV miniseries of Vine's A Dark Adapted Eye some time ago and I'd like to see it again (and read the book) because I remember the miniseries being quite good. I've been reading a lot of mysteries lately with gay characters and many of them have been really good. I'm not usually a mystery reader, but that may change.