The Truth about Racial Stereotyping..

Is that it aint gonna stop. Not anytime soon. Regardless of the number of African Amercian scholar freinds of the President(Henry Louis Gates Jr.) getting treated to beer at the white house in the company of the cops who pissed off the President for putting his learned freind in handcuffs; regardless of a wise latina supreme court justice who successfully defended herself against accusations of being racist in her confirmation hearings.

You see, its all in the numbers. If 8 out of 10 prison inmates and more than half the bums in New York City or most other places in the US are black, and ALL the help in restaurants and homes are latinos/latinas - racial stereotypes will remain. Racism is a reality in this country. News reports say the President will not reveal details of the beer-talk with Mr. Gates and Mr. Crowley. Good. Why bother? I am not interested in the conversation as much as I am in the Mr. President's reasons to have this conversation at all. Is one conversation going make me less jittery about moping around in the Bronx at midnight (yes, this was attempted with consequences that were not fun)? Its nice of Mr. President to get all worked up about his bud being shackled- but what about this kid ? She was supposedly yanked out of undergraduate studies, from Harvard no less, for allegedly abetting a crime. No proof has been provided to support the assertion of the police. Mr Gates is atleast an established professor/scholar (in African American studies- may have been more interesting if his choice of subject was a tad less predictable, just a tad), this kid's future is potentially in the gutter. Beer pong any one ?

The truth is that until a sizable portion of the colored folk are uplifted in America negative/potentially deterimental stereotyping on the basis of race will persist even in ways that cannot be overlooked. Unfortunately until then, all conversations to address racial stereotyping - with or without beer- are rhetorical too.

"Away we went"

When a movie review in a respectable paper such as the New York Times comes off like its a bit on the fence, you end up feeling like the critics are just trying too hard to do their job.

Atleast, in this case, the review that seems to try too hard to dislike Sam Mendes's latest movie "Away we Go", said enough to convince me to go watch it. Besides, I guess I am something of a Mendesophile. Especially after his star-studded play "The Cherry Orchard" (originally by Anton Chekov, edited by Tom Stoppard) earlier this year.

The set up is simple- a pregnant couple sets out to visit freinds in search of the perfect environment in which to raise their child. Why? Because they are socially conditioned to think that there is such a thing as a perfect setting in which to raise a child. They are shown to run into everything from obscenity mouthing parental horror stories to zen loving, organic-food-eating self absorbed New Age drivelers to those that suffer in the quiet dissapointment of not being parents.

The movie is as unassuming and seeking as its lead characters, if a bit deliberately funny and cloying in some of its frames. You have to love the honest modesty of the characters who wonder if its a cause of worry that they have outgrown the get-a-home-and-a-mortgage stage of their life. I dig the unpretentious indie feel of the movie that among other things encourages idyllic fantasies of a free form life where you first choose the city and the freinds and then the job, and not the other way round - no discussion of this movie is complete without cubicle talk such as this. I know that was part of the movie's plan...

The point is- to me, as the one who pays to see the movie at the theater - this movie reaches its audience. When you tell stories for a living, its all about how well you tell them. So regardless of Mr. Mendes's personal opinion about the perils of living the American suburban dream or about being a New Age driveler, this is a very well made movie. That's all I care about. And the fact that it reaffirms my faith in an imperfect world.

Year 2

Married life Year 2 was celebrated camping by the ocean close to Chesapeake Bay - days were spent under the canopies drinking mimosas and relating stories to lovely freinds and to lots of mosquitoes; fragrant moonlit nights were spent sleeping under the stars listening to the sea and to the shrieks of the fishermen celebrating their crabby victories.......

The slippage of a paean shall be excused ....

A fragrant summer night bathed in the silvery moonlight,
Soft, gentle breeze hummed the Song of the Sea.

Toes entwined and fingers locked,
we sank into the sands of a million shared dreams.