A scene from Hyde Park

It's Valentine’s day in the cold, cold world. Yep. Having a sad day. I am underrating massively, of course. My Sad like having a black train rolling though my spine and crushing all goodness and hope. Im a bit of a depressive, but I’m fighting it and I win most of the time.

After two cups coffee, the first line of defense against depression, I went outside to go to work and immediately felt better. I had expected to be bitch-slapped by the cold, but the seeming mildness of the 30 degrees made me feel pretty manly and butch! I was acclimating! ?Quien es mas macho?

Walking to work and past my neighbors I scored no points. One point is when they look at me when I pass. Two points is a nod or a smile. Three points is an actual word or two. From 47th to 55th, I ran in Love. The tennis kind of love. The zero points kind of love. I have been getting a little bitter about my frequent low scoring , which admittedly, is easy for a man burdened by the black dog of depression. And I can understand why folks would be suspicious about the only white face in the neighborhood. My people have had a shitty past, after all. And if our
places were reversed, if I saw a person walking about looking all singular. . .well shit, actually I couldn’t say.

Where I come from, most of the city is pretty mixed. Even in the most polarized of ‘hoods, there is not the absolute white-out like you find in Chicago, so the concept of one face in a sea of it’s opposites is completely alien. If it did happen to me, I would go out of my way to include that ‘other’. Which is partly motivated by white guilt and also by being an experienced outsider and the child of one. After being walked by and left, it’s hard to just walk by. I can’t stand to see a person be ostracized, until absolutely necessary.

I guess that’s true of all who have felt the ostrakon’s stony sting upon our face and bodies. Playing my own devil’s advocate brings me back to my reality, which is not the reality for any of my neighbors. Of course these folks are suspicious. They should be. I picture the conversation between black women on the bus, after I leave the bus smiling and saying hi to them.

BETTY
Who the hell is that white guy to be walking all around and shit.
BERNICE
Has to be a mistake.
BETTY
That gotts be true. And if he’s here on purpose that’s worse.Why is he here? What’s he wanting from us? Prolly some offay egghead doing some kind of sociological experiment. Well this ain’t no Tuskegee. I ain’t going to give up my DNA or any other letters I can tell you that right now. Just look at him, walking around and smiling all the damn time. Like that’s gonna make me say Oh! Hi! Welcome to the neighborhood! Come into my house and breathe my air and eat my damn food. I work too hard the put bread on my table to just give it all away to some white dude.
BERNICE
MMm Hm. A smile will let the devil in.
BETTY
That’s so true it ought to be tattoo’d on Barack Obama’s face.
BERNICE
Man, he fine.
BETTY
I don’t know what you see in him
BERNICE
If you don’t know I can’t tell you
BETTY
‘side, he’s practically white himself.
BERNICE
Practically still ain’t.
BETTY
Mm hhmm.
BERNICE
I know he is black enough to be sad about Whitney.
BETTY
Oh, girl, don’t, I barely got to stop crying about that this morning.
BERNICE
Well you know white folks don’t get it. I don’t get it how they don’t get it, but they don’t.
BETTY
Oh, girl, Whitney!
BERNICE
How can a person be so damn different like that?
BETTY
She sang like she was just breathing, like it was just leaking out. So beautiful.
BERNICE
I mean I understand not liking Michael Jackson. . .
BETTY
Oh, Michael made it hard to like him.
BERNICE
He did. . .but Whitney? Ain’t no comparison? Makes me mad.
BETTY
Mad?
BERNICE
Yeah, Betty,I said mad. I’m having trouble forgiving white folk about it too.
BETTY
What!?
BERNICE
What?
BETTY
Girl, you work with Buddhists.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
You work with republicans.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
You work with lawyers.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
Girl, you even work with that pale bitch that calls herself a witch.
BERNICE
Oh, Rhiannon just playin’ , she don’t mean it.
BETTY
But I’m sayin’ that all that you got no problems with. Those people got different morals, different politics, different Gods and one of them even got a different color sky I don’t care what you
say about Rhia-whatever, and it’s Whitney that gets your goat?
BERNICE
Yeah. I guess that’ s what I saying.
BETTY
That’s kinda messed up. And I agree with you completely. What up with that.
BERNICE
She real.
BETTY
Mhm?
BERNICE
Whitney was real. All that other shit people like or don’t, politics and what-all, that shit just window dressing; curtains to make the messed up world look a little less messed up.
BETTY
That’s some deep shit.
BERNICE
Is it? Didn’t mean it to be.
BETTY
That’s prolly why it came out right. Whenever people try to be deep it comes out like buullshit.
BERNICE
Well, I don’t know about that, I just don’t mind disagreeing about the little stuff. But Whitney, girl, don’t nobody better dis-remember her.
BETTY
Makes sense to me.
BERNICE
I know it does.
BETTY
I bet that white boy don’t get it.
BERNICE
Girl, I know he don’t.
BETTY
And it would be weird if it did.

The dialogue in my head faded away after that. I hope it’s close to real. That’s all a combo of what I saw with my head and heart, and then squeezed through the funnel of my pen. Let me know how this all plays in the theater of your mind. I did actually hear the phrase ‘a smile lets the devil in’ in a conversation between two so-called African American women on a bus.
I’m gonna keep smiling though, and hope they don’t see my devil in it.

The Green Line

My roommate would be surprised that it does not bother me to be the only white face on the bus. He is a tall black man, a good Christian and a business minded entrepreneur. I need to tell you he is black, because I am white, and I am living in a black Chicago neighborhood.

Is that racist?

It’s the Northern part of Hyde Park, which makes me a Sox fan and a Green Line rider. It has been interesting telling white Chicagoans I ride the green line and watching the eyebrows rise and face sprout the “Oh so do you know. . .”. Yeah, I know. I figured it out. As the Green Line train thundered south, the people on board slowly, stop by stop, grew more and more black. It became clear I was going to a. . . not a ghetto. . .not a hood. . .a black neighborhood. Was I afraid? Yes and no. I am from San Antonio Texas, whose population is heavily Latino. Often, on the bus, in a store, on the street I have been the only white guy. So I ain’t got that automatic drop-kick testicle shrinking fear from being around a lot of Melanin. But, This is a new city for me, and I might be going into a neighborhood . . .where. . . strangers aren’t welcome.

Is that racist?

I walked the whole way from the train stop to the address given. It’s a place of brownstones; lovely three to four story houses like I’ve seen in my dreams. There are some empty fields, some abandoned buildings and a lot of rebuilt and refurbished brownstones gleaming with the freshness of the recent stone work. And the farther I walked, the more frequent the shiny homes became. When I got to the address , it was the best looking apartment I had seen so far and close to several little chop suey shops and a grocery store. I knocked at the appointed hour, and a smiling man answered the door, with whom I felt comfortable with instantly. I wondered how he felt about me being white or if he had guessed. We had met obliquely on Craig’s list, so it could be either way.

I’m not going to ask, of course.

That would be racist.

We got along really well, and seemed to be at similar stages in our lives. Once confirmed we were both heterosexuals, the deal was pretty much set. The place is great, and when Mark showed me the view from the roof and I saw the skyline shrouded in winter’s hands, I would have paid him any amount to live there.

I moved in, and settled in the empty white room, and immediately had to go and get a head shot done. And this began the daily test of the Green Line. There’s a lot of black people at the Green Line. It has been casually hinted that there’s a few less at the Red line. The bus I take to get to the train goes to both, but the Green comes first. It’s a little more convenient, but a lot more black. I think about hanging on to the Red Line. Just about every time.

But. . .racist?

Something happened last night to make it all clear. I went to a Second City Show with a dear friend. A dear friend is a southern term which means it’s a member of another sex whom I have not had sex with nor do I intend to. The show was superb, and I will discuss that in the future, but I noticed and checked frequently that there was only one non-white face in the entire 150 person crowd. I had never seen that before. Ever. Back in San Antonio, ever crowd has at least
a few latino’s. I asked my friend and she confirmed that Comedy Improv seems to be a white thing.

I started to feel bad about it. I didn’t want the art of my love to be segregated. It bothered me the whole night and next day. I fought it, I didn’t want to accept that such a beautiful thing couldn’t appeal to black people. Then it hit me. Black music has a long tradition of improv in hip-hop and rap music. White folks have seen Eminem do it in Eight Mile. That’s big time Improv! Oh! I felt better immediately. It wasn’t that Comedic Improv was inherintly anti-black, it was that dramatic Improv was already a highly cultivated art form within the hip-hop music scene. They already had it covered!

So it’s not racist.

But everyday I’m gonna take the Green line test.

Schadenfreude Review-My Baby is Black

My Baby is Black
1965



My Baby is Black was released in 1965. It was publicized by the Exploitation Movie Distributers of the time as a shocking expose of the race problem in America. Which seems like an odd thing, as the movie is French. Let us be clear, it is not just shot in France, but it is written with French characters, situations, places and themes which never occur in the United States, thereby invalidating any possible accurate reflection of the race problem in America.


However in 1965 America, mixed race couples were rare, considered to be scandalous and even morally wrong by some. Isn’t that weird? The Egghead rationalizers of suffering have a technical term for mixed race mating: miscegenation, and it scared the hell out of a lot of people. But by 1969 the sight of white girl hippies kissing black male hippies would become almost required for any exploitation film released in the US. It’s still a social issue today, but exploitation films inadvertently helped to ease these racial tensions. Exploitation needs to frighten people a little in order to succeed, and by showing how miscegenation was not equal to aliens, mutants, junkies or even VD, a lot of wind got let out of the sails of hate.


But the Schadenfreude news is, even if My Baby is Black ain’t Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, it’s still French. Extremely French. And with the gentle aging of forty plus years, the racial themes have mellowed - with the assistance of ridiculous French film styling. So the sour social grapes of 1965 have become heady and hilarious Vintage of 2011.


The movie’s opening is Option Number 7 from the Official list of “Predictable Opening Scenes that the Director Doesn’t Think is Predictable”. The lead actress is wheeled from an ambulance into a hospital room; it’s the old ‘Show the last scene first” trick! Right away, we know we’re in for an extra special treat when the background music kicks in. It sounds just like the singers from the original Star Trek theme song escaped from Rigel 7, dropped some acid, got a tympani drum and pressed ‘record’on a beat up cassette machine. We receive the second sign of Bad Movie Apocalypse in the form of the head doctor, who is smoking a cigarette while being dressed for surgery. And he keeps on smoking the cigarette during the procedure! The music builds, and AHHHHHHH! It’s a black baby! What? That’s the horror? It’s not even reversely offensive, it’s just silly! And this was tested amongst the multiple races of the Conclave as being genuinely ridiculously funny.


Over and over again we found ourselves saying ‘Wow! This movie is extremely French’; from the pointless stock footage of French slums to close ups on bleached skulls inexplicably strewn about the room. The camera seems to be everywhere except on the people talking. It’s more Cocteau than thou! And when it is not French, it is preachy. And when it is not that. . . well, it’s just those two things. There are montages aplenty about the love of our lead characters, and they such French-y things about their love such as, “In the great feast of love, everything has the color of love.” And a bad translation helps a bad script come off like a First Year French Grammer Book written by Jean-Paul Satre.


A funny aspect of the movie is the character of Daniel, who is perfect, smart, handsome and brave. He has no bad characteristics. All the Anglos in the movie are flawed, often they openly admit their flaws. But Daniel has none it seems. At the Schadenfreude Conclave, we do not judge a movie by what it claims to be, we judge it by what it is. When we strip a film of it’s pretense in this manner, we create a window into the mental viscera of existence: our suffering ethnic antagonist, Daniel, is a perfect person, and many movies who fought for racial justice put forth ethnic characters who had nothing but positive qualities, which made them perfect and therefore stereotypes! The Circle of BullShit, we call it here at the Conclave. Imagine being stuck between the role models of Sydney Poitier and Buckwheat. One is a lie, the other an impossible goal.


Some caution, the N word is uttered several times near the end of the movie. But most of the racial tension has been let out of this tire a long time ago. There is also one side boob shot. But that’s it. We recommend this one with cultural study groups. Or your grandparents. Watch ‘em sweat and relive the days when this stuff mattered.


Some fun stuff particular to this flick are:

The French students, oh so lame.
The theme music. Oh so unique
The shots of the feet. Oh, so sole-y.

Classsic bad movie elements contained in this Flick
The dubbing and bad translation
Montage, montage, montage
French everything or anything

THE DRINKING GAME FOR “My Baby is Black”

TAKE A DRINK WHEN:
You see the skull!
They compare their love to anything.

CHUG A WHOLE BEER WHEN:
You see Daniel’s feet!
The N word is uttered

IF ONE HAS TO WRITE A COLLEGE ESSAY FOR FILM CLASS

When considered the cultural landscape of deGaulle’s France, the Communist Front cannot be understood without first analyzing, “My Baby is Black.” The Socialist themes contained in the overt plot are obvious, but the revisionist economic pleading for a laissez- faire trading platform in Europe are subtly stitched into the subtext and the art laden picture poems of Paris in turmoil. We are all oppressed, as long as the salt tariff is over three percent.


SCHADEN FREUDEN SCORE
Elements: 8(out of 10)
Titillation: 1(out of 5)
Wrongness: 3(out of 5)
Style & Funness: 4(out of five)
Extra points: 3(out of five)

TOTAL: 19( out of 30 )

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