What was the first concert you ever attended?
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to First Draft
Post away.
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Some friends recently went on a cable-access show and demonstrated how they taught their ferrets to roll over on command for treats. I haven't gotten there with Bucky yet, but he does sit up and beg pretty well:
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I am a shitty photographer. I can't hold a camera still to save my life but I can point and shoot with the iPhone. This shot was taken before the knitting shop opened so there's a grate on the window impeding the view of this guest kitty. When the the grate is off the window, the shop cats are nowhere to be seen. Talk about ingrates...
We enacted these tax cuts, there was no job creation, debt exploded, and only the wealthiest of the wealthy profited. So tell me, Mr. Fiscal Conservative Kent Conrad, why should we not let the tax cuts for the rich expire?
Allow me to speak for Kent here:
It's actually pretty simple. What's going to happen is we'll just cut the Department of Education, probably eliminate Social Security or raise the retirement age to 79 or so (since I once knew somebody who lived to be 97 and was perfectly healthy), and we'll make a 1600 SAT score mandatory for receiving food stamps.
We'll make sure nobody wounded in one of our AWESOME wars can get an aspirin without paying $700 for it, our cops and firefighters can use equipment from 50 years ago (they built things to last back then!) so long as it doesn't actively electrocute them, and the water mains around here should be good for another 120 years or so.
There are private corporate foundations to provide support for the arts, and really, who DOESN'T want to enjoy the kind of productions Pfizer would put on? Our universities can continue servicing Unilever in the academic equivalent of the tavern alley, because we certainly can't afford all that nonsense about higher education. Libraries? Please, I have the Internet, so you don't need books.
The widows and the orphans? They should have been more careful with their spouses and their parents, so as not to lose them so easily. Besides, we're a Christian nation, let the churches take care of them. BP's gonna take care of the Gulf cleanup. You say we're still hosed from Hurricane Katrina, but those people should have evacuated anyway, so we don't owe them.
There will be plenty of "offsets" found by systematically fucking over this country with a rusty chainsaw, and if you think it's going to be any more complicated than that, I have a new well-capping procedure with a made-for-TV theme song name I'd like to sell you.
One of these days I want to be wrong about some of this shit, I really do.
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To Kill A Mockingbird was my lifeline. It changed my life when I read it. It completely changed the way I thought about my community. It changed my life every time I re-read it.
The reason I remember exactly how old I was when I got that book, and exactly when I got that book, is because the act of my mother giving me that book was the only honest conversation I ever had about racism. It was the only time I was ever allowed to acknowledge that the things I saw happening around me every day were wrong, that they were horrible, that there was something deeply troubling about the community I lived in. Because you did not talk about it. You did not talk about it. You did not talk about it.
But there was this book, this book, and in 1989, it was talking about racism when nothing else in my life was. And yes, in 1989, that was so, so important. It's still that important.
TKAM is a flawed book, and it is directed very clearly at white people. It has outdated ideas about race and deeply problematic images of black people. It has troubling tropes. It is a problem that it's considered to be the ultimate statement on racism, and there's no denying that TKAM's huge popularity is primarily due to it coming from a white mouthpiece and being directed primarily at a white community of readers. And I realize that this post is proving one of the strongest points you can make about the general public opinion of TKAM: that white people read it and then glorify it because they think it is the only book about racism they will ever need to read.
It's possible that if any other book about racism had been handed to me at that age, that book would have been the one that changed my life. But because To Kill a Mockingbird was and is the accepted manifesto on white people and racism, it was the one that wound up in my Easter basket. It was the one that was deemed an acceptable introduction for me as a young white girl--not Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, for example. Was it the right choice? No. The right choice would have been to have systematic representation of black literature in my schools and out of them, across the board. The right choice would have been To Kill A Mockingbird and any number of other wonderful books about racism.
Those things deserved to be talked about when we celebrate TKAM's 50th anniversary. And when we don't.
For Scout:
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via Daily Art Fixx, the paper sculpture of Nick Geogiou:
Georgiou’s work is inspired by “the death of the printed word/world, economic collapse, political and environmental uncertainty.
Georgiou states: “Books and newspapers are becoming artifacts of the 21st century. Whatever we used to read off paper, we’re now reading off digital screens. Our way of interacting with text is changing. My work is not only about the decline of the printed word in today’s society but its rebirth as art.”
