the groundhog day project

Watching Howl again. Feeling preachy. Feeling political. Tired of so many news stories about refugees, about terrorists, about transgender men and women using the "wrong" bathrooms and scaring all the nice, upstanding, good Christian folk. How dare anyone want to flee a warzone for somewhere safer. How dare anyone lash out at power when they feel impotent. How dare... Actually, those two cover the transgender thing, too. It's all some bullshit war. Christianity being persecuted, of course, because the rest of us (and some of them) don't want them to be allowed to discriminate and hate and hurt and destroy just because "God" says it's okay. And, I'm watching a film. A film about a poem. A poem about a world destroying those who dare to be different, about those who dare to be different trying to destroy the world, or at least to reshape it into something new, something less demanding and restrictive. A film that couldn't exist at the time of i...

I've got this urge to choose movies this month that will get me political angles, topics that will allow for me to fill these spaces with worry and with anger. (For example, yesterday, I had intended to watch Slam a third time, and briefly while still on the planeride home, I started writing what would have been the blog entry for that third viewing-- Meanwhile, I am instead watching Howl tonight and it just moved into its first bit of animation, it's play at being poetry about poetry. --and there was going to be a thing about minstrel shows, and a reference backward again to that final poetry round at the national speech tournament from which I was returned yesterday. But, I found the writing pushing me into a corner almost immediately. This comparison--or, more appropriately, as it would go, contrast--between black performers telling black stories and white performers in blackface inventing black stories was going to take 1) research and 2) a lot of thought and 3) car...