Why I Waited 9 Months to Watch 12 Years A Slave

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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12 Years A Slave (2013), African American History, Black Heritage, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Father-Son Relationships, Growing Pains, Growing Up, Inhumanity, Late Bloomer, Learning About Race, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael Fassbender, Slavery, Solomon Northrup, Steve McQueen, US History

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave (2013) screen shot, January 17, 2014. (http://blog.sfgate.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — it illustrates subject of piece.

I’m usually late to the game. That’s been a running theme in my life since the early ’80s, when, as a result of my Hebrew-Israelite years, I found myself often years behind on pop culture trends. New books, new music, new dance moves, new colloquialisms, new movies. I might as well declared myself as an adult in April ’81, at least as far as the ’80s were concerned. Yet I did catch up, sometimes taking as long as a decade to get a punchline to a joke that my nemesis and classmate Alex made in seventh grade.

But not following the herd has its benefits, too. For one, I’ve gotten to look at things from a fresh perspective (some would even say as an outsider — that’s accurate as well), without succumbing to hype or groupthink about a piece of culture. Waiting also has meant that I’ve often read reviews of movies but managed to miss content-based details and that I’ve read books without forming an opinion based on its popularity ahead of my read (it’s also true about my path to Christianity). Being forced by circumstance to wait has meant that I am less apt to make sweeping declarations like “I grew up on hip-hop” when I in fact grew up with it, not on it like a drug.

Kunta Kinte being whipped, Roots (1977) screenshot, July 6, 2012. (http://irvine.wikis.gdc.georgetown.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screenshot’s low resolution.

With 12 Years A Slave (2013), though, I wanted to see it even before it came out here in the DC area in August. I’d heard about this film for months even before it was out in “select cities” in the US. Between Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender — two supreme British actors — I knew the film would be good. And depressing. And sad. And anger-inducing. And stomach churning. It would be an emotional roller-coaster-ride akin to my introduction to Roots on ABC in February ’77, when I was only seven years old.

So what stopped me from seeing it? My ten-year-old son. I wanted him to see the film with me. But I also knew that he would have a lot of questions. Outside of family and his visits to watch me teach my American and World History classes, my son has had little exposure to race in popular culture in an obvious sense. Most of his friends in our suburban, middle-class Silver-Spring-world are White, and his other Black friends have even less exposure to race than our deliberate injections (or inoculations) for our son.

I decided not to take him to see 12 Years A Slave because it would’ve been two hours of questions in a crowded theater, with those sitting around us ready to strangle us for ruining their watching experience. But I did queue it via Netflix weeks before it came out on DVD, with the expectation that we would watch it during his Spring Break, Easter Week.

As soon as I told my son that we were watching 12 Years A Slave last week, he became whiny and upset. Whiny because his time away from anime and Disney shows would be interrupted with parenting. Upset because of the movie title and its implications. As my son said to me when he was upset, “You made me watch Roots last year!” Well, we watched three hours of it, enough for him to see the sequence of kidnapping, the Middle Passage, slave auctions, running away, rape, whippings, and Kunta Kinte’s foot cut off. I guess the message of slavery and history really did stick with him!

Noah trying to look cool at The Gap store, Chevy Chase, MD, March 28, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

We finally sat down and watched 12 Years A Slave Thursday evening. And yes, Noah did have a ton of questions, about Solomon Northrup, about free Blacks, kidnapping, mistreatment and the concept of property, about race, sexual attraction and rape, and about the rule of law. But I was more surprised about two things. One, my son sat through most of the two-and-a-quarter hour film, and only got up twice. Two, he paid serious attention in a way that he hadn’t appeared to in watching serious films before.

Still, my son was more than happy to return to his Nintendo 3DS and the land of Disney shows before bedtime that evening. The fact that he fell asleep right after bedtime, though, made it obvious, at least to me, that we’d given him more thought for food about history, race, and his own heritage.

And though I don’t think the movie was as epic as the hype-meisters have presented it to be, it was a great film, with great acting — I’m not sure if todays American actors could’ve pulled off Ejiofor’s, Fassbender’s or Lupita Nyong’o’s roles. 12 Years A Slave is also an important film, at least in terms of interrogating the meaning of race and inhumanity in this world. I just hope that those messages made it into my son’s conscious thinking. Time will tell, but enlightenment is a journey, not a race.

Battlescar Galactica

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"All Along The Watchtower", Battlestar Galactica (2004 series), Cylon Attack, Cylons, Divine Hand, Divine Intervention, Entertainment, Epic Story, Epic Tale, Extinction, Fandom, Human Condition, Humanity, Jimi Hendrix, Late Bloomer, Miniseries, Nuclear Annihilation, Reimagining, Revisioning, Technology, TV Series

Battlestar Galactica artwork, Season 4, October 12, 2008. (Halil Gökdal via Flickr.com/iTunes TV). Battlestar Galactica Prologue (2003)

I’m a sucker for an epic story in any form. A book, a movie, a TV series, even the occasional epic poem. It really doesn’t matter. I’m also a late bloomer, one who discovers the stuff of life late, but probably enjoys the stuff I discover more because it’s on my own time, without necessarily being part of a crowd or trend.

That convergence has hit me once again, at the ripe old age of forty-two, in the form of the revisioned series Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2004-09). I had planned to watch the original miniseries for this drama when it came out in December ’03, but with so many things outside the realm of then newborn baby Noah, writing and work that year, my watching Battlestar Galactica fell to the side.

I already had a lineup of shows to watch — Six Feet Under, Queer As Folk, Law & Order, CSI. I didn’t need a new thing on my screen, especially something that was based on such an old and goofy series from the ’70s with Lorne Greene, Dirk Benedict and Richard Hatch. “What are they gonna do next, redo BJ & The Bear?,” I said to my wife when I first heard about the Battlestar Galactica miniseries in September ’03.

But as with so many events in my life, I stumbled on the miniseries, thanks in no small part to my wife. It was one late Friday night this past Easter weekend. I woke up about a quarter after three, having only been

Cylon Raider Scar screen shot, September 16, 2009. (Skier Dude via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to image’s poor resolution.

asleep about three hours, to my wife dosing off to the TV in our bedroom. I woke up to the sight of Cylon Raiders in flight, to a strange scientist seeing visions of either a skinny angel or his dead Cylon girlfriend, and Edward James Olmos playing the mercurial Commander Adama. I could tell in ten minutes that this series was way different from the Battlestar Galactica series of my ’70s youth.

The miniseries was on BBC America, so I watched it until 5 am, and then discovered that they had skipped two full seasons ahead to a random Battlestar Galactica episode. I was fully awake by then, so I went on Netflix to find the entire Battlestar Galactica series available on streaming video. I watched season one that day, and season two Easter Sunday and that Monday.

In fact, I watched all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica in six days. I found the story engrossing, the acting intense, and the series an in-depth exploration of the worst features of the human condition under the most difficult of stresses and circumstances. It was so unlike the original series that after a few episodes, I didn’t even think about the differences anymore. The story of a flawed, destructive race of humans fighting each other while fighting for their survival against their more destructive yet more rational creations. I couldn’t help but fall in love with the series.

After that week, I finally read and watched the reviews and the comments about the series. They fell into two categories. There were plenty of folks who refused to watch the new Battlestar Galactica on principle. They saw the recasting of Starbuck as a woman an insult, the ability to make Cylons as human-esque machines blasphemy, and the revisioning of these humans as ones with many of our worst features multipled by a factor of ancient Greece, Rome and Persia an abomination. Oh well! I never liked the original series, with its idealized version of humanity, with its archetype good and evil characters, and with its goofy atmosphere in the midst of potential extinction, the ultimate epic crisis (“All Along The Watchtower” notwithstanding).

The other group was just like me. Fascinated by the lengths to which the producers and writers for the show went to present humanity at its most monstrous, between violence, selfishness, lust, greed, avarice and strive. Mesmerized by the cast’s ability to explore our worst and deepest fears, to hold out hope against hope, to take us into the depths of despair again and again.

The battle-scarred Battlestar Galactica finally reaches Earth (orbiting over the horn of Africa, March 21, 2009. (http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu).

I had to watch Battlestar Galactica a second time, this time more slowly and deliberately. So, through the second half of April and first half of May, I watched again, to find something remarkable. Despite their deep flaws, many scars and scabs, and twisted minds, there was something noble and redeemable about these humans, about the Cylons. Even the fact that the Cylons were a human creation didn’t matter. And to top that all off with a divine hand, a guiding force as the prime mover for the 50,000 humans that survived the nuclear annihilation of their twelve planets by the Cylons.

That really is an epic journey. One that heals as much as it scars. The story of my life the past thirty years, not to mention a reference in three of my posts over the past month. A commentary on the state of humanity in the early twenty-first century. What more can a late-bloomer ask for?

Taking the Long Road: Driver’s Delight

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Youth

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Adulthood, Driver's License, Kauffman's Driving School, Late Bloomer, Learning How to Drive, Mount Vernon New York, Perseverance, Pittsburgh, Rite of Passage, University of Pittsburgh

Our 2004 Honda Element, Mount Vernon, NY, November 2006. (Donald Earl Collins)

How I was able to get my driver’s license twenty years ago tomorrow is a shining example of my late bloomer status. I started in the middle of May ’88, a couple of weeks after the end of my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. My main motivation was the fact that the only piece of picture identification I had was a choice between my Pitt ID and my old Mount Vernon High School ID. It also seemed to me that I couldn’t hope to travel or to get a good job without having a driver’s license.

1974 or 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, cropped and colored green, January 23, 2012. (http://http://www.allcollectorcars.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because photo is of low resolution, cropped and altered for purposes of post.

I knew plenty of people with cars, but in my family and immediate circle, only my idiot stepfather Maurice had a license. In the eleven years he’d been in our lives, he had access to his Reliable cab for two years (’77-’79), and had owned a ’70s-era Coupe de Ville for about a year and a half. At least until he burned out his engine on the New Jersey Turnpike earlier in ’88.

Despite all of these disadvantages, I began my journey. At the end of my second week back, I grabbed a manual at the White Plains DMV, leafed through it, and took the exam. I passed with a 70, making the cut by two questions. I scheduled and took my first driving lesson two days later. I was quickly on my way to becoming a licensed driver.

But if I hoped to follow-up on that quick success with a job that could cover the cost of more driving lessons, I was sorely mistaken. I spent the rest of the summer of ’88 unemployed, like nearly seventy percent of Black males my age that summer. This began the off and on again cycle of my quest for one simple symbol of adulthood.

Even in the midst of my fall of homelessness and with $205 to work with between Labor Day and Thanksgiving ’88, I continued plugging away. I’d gone at the end of October to the Pittsburgh DMV center off Washington Boulevard, near the bridge across the Allegheny River into the northern suburbs. I ended up walking from Welsford through Oakland to Forbes, then Fifth Avenue, stayed on Fifth through Shadyside and Point Breeze and Homewood-Brushton until it turned into Washington Blvd, then kept going until I reached the center. It took me an hour to get there and another to get back. In between I scored a 95 on the Learner’s Permit exam, making me eligible to get a driver’s license in two states.

I even got my former CIS (Computer and Information Systems) co-worker Bill to give me a driving lesson in Highland Park Zoo’s parking lots before he left for Virginia that March for a job with AT&T. It was February ’89. I was behind the wheel of Bill’s car, his “babemobile,” his white ’88 Ford Thunderbird. It was an easy lesson until I screwed up. I was going too fast on a left-turn, cut the car too close to an embankment. We ended up going down a short grassy hill that cut off one side of the large parking lot from the other. Bill was terrified and a scary shade of purple for his car. I’d no sooner parked it then he had jumped out to make sure there wasn’t any damage. I knew that this lesson was over.

I continued taking driving lessons off and on in ’89 and ’90, between Kauffman’s Driving School (at $53 an hour), my Pitt friends, and a couple of 616 folks in Mount Vernon. By September ’90, with about twenty-five hours of driving lessons under my belt, I thought I was ready. After three driving test failures, I was obviously mistaken. Then my money ran out again, and then I started grad school the following year. I wondered, sometimes out loud, whether I’d finish my master’s degree before I’d earn my driver’s license.

It all came together at the beginning of January ’92. I decided to spend whatever it would take for me to pass the driver’s test on the Washington Blvd course in Pittsburgh. I took seven hours’ worth of lessons from Kauffman’s in ten days, mostly to practice parallel parking and three-point turns in a ’88 Chevy Cavalier. I

1991 Chevy Cavalier - similar to one I drove on day I got my driver's license, Gaithersburg, Maryland, July 5, 2008. (IFCAR via Wikipedia). In public domain.

practiced turns with my dinner plate in my apartment in between the lessons.

Finally, we scheduled my driver’s test for 9 am on Friday, January 24. That morning, it began to snow. By the time I drove to the test site, six inches of snow had fallen. I was the first person on the course. Between that and the falling snow, I was comfortable. Seven minutes later, I’d done it all, and had barely parked the car after hearing the words “You’ve passed” before literally jumping out of it and into the snow.

It took me three years, eight months and eleven days in all to pass my driver’s test in Pittsburgh. At the time, I was prouder of that than I was of any of my academic achievements or other personal triumphs. A month after my twenty-second birthday, I’d now earned the right to add to humanity’s carbon footprint. As well as a real badge of adulthood.

Crazy

13 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pop Culture, Youth

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"Crazy", Aspirations, Eclectic Music, Expectations, Graduate School, Late Bloomer, Lyrics, Seal, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

Seal, CD Cover (1991), August 13, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a late bloomer. I came to find myself a teenager in a twenty-one year old’s body twenty years ago, just as I’m a thirty-five year-old in a forty-one-and-a-half year-old’s body now. As the summer of ’91 began to wind down, though, I realized that I needed to go into my first year of grad school at Pitt with some inspiration, with a chip on my shoulder, really.

It didn’t take more than a simple thought to find that inspiration and chip, either. Between working for a bunch of folks at my Western Psych job who still thought that hunting down half-and-half was the extent of my work there on the one hand. And professors like Reid Andrews telling me after I’d received my grad school stipend award letter that I wasn’t “graduate school material” on the other hand. Livid is the minimal word I’d use to describe my mood in the three weeks before the start of my five-and-half-year odyssey. One of doing cartwheels at least three times better than my colleagues to prove that I was as good as anyone.

But I’m jumping ahead of the story here. I found some inspiration from music, as usual, in this case, on one of my daily walks home from work in Oakland to my studio apartment in East Liberty. Still searching for more new music for my ’90s collection, I found a radio station playing Seal’s first big hit, “Crazy.” I’d heard parts of the song before, all during that summer, but never from start to finish. As I reached the end of Ellsworth Avenue, where I’d walk up the steps to a bridge on Highland Avenue, one that went over the train tracks and busway into East Liberty, I heard the lyrics, really for the first time.

“In a sky full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy
In a world full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy/Crazy
In a heaven of people there’s only some want to fly/Ain’t that crazy”

Seal, "Crazy" 45 Single Cover (UK), January 8, 2009. (Source/http://cover6.cduniverse.com/MuzeAudioArt/140/141811.jpg). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, as version is of low resolution for reproduction, and is part of larger commentary.

And yes, I wanted to fly. Besides, as far as most people were concerned, I was crazy anyway. For wearing that godforsaken kufi to school for three years. For becoming a newborn and sanctimonious Christian after that. For trying out for football, and later, baseball instead of basketball. For listening to Mr. Mister and Tears for Fears and Sting instead of bopping to Run-D.M.C. For walking way too fast, and talking a little too slow. For going off to college out-of-state, to a no-name school no less. For taking a grad course my junior year at Pitt. For deciding to go to grad school in history instead of law school or Black studies.

The list is as long as an introspective Eminem rap sequence, airing every negative ever tossed my way. I was crazy, and still am. But, as far as my first year of grad school was concerned, I made two deals with myself about the process. One was to not compare myself, my abilities, my limitations, to anyone else in the program. The other was to put aside all of my preconceptions about my professors, or the difficult courses ahead, or whether I would complete the master’s degree and move on to the doctoral portion of the program.

I didn’t want to limit myself to what others may have expected of me, or to what I could’ve possibly expected of myself at the time. I didn’t even like my friends saying that “the sky’s the limit,” because I didn’t want to limit myself to the sky. I simply wanted to be crazy enough, humble yet arrogant enough to know my limits, but push the envelope as hard as I could in order to make graduate school work for me.

Howard Hughes standing in front of his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane, Inglewood, California in the 1940s, May 31, 2005. (Source/Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-63333 - In public domain). One of the craziest, yet great, innovators of the 20th century. Guess it works better when you're a rich White male.

That kind of thinking affords a very single-minded intensity — to the point of a near-psychotic passion — that leads to excellence, miracles and the exceeding of what may have been your craziest expectations. I know it was that way for me. It had to be. If I’d bought into all that my most hateful Humanities classmates, my mother and ex-stepfather, my father Jimme, my fellow Mount Vernonites and some of my teachers and professors thought of me, who’s knows? I’d likely become a sexually confused and frustrated Black male, a college dropout, wandering from one minimum wage job to another, living alone in a boarding room, as miserable as a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’d become a psychopath, not just crazy enough to believe in myself and the miracles of God in my life. I need to do be a little crazy now, even at this stage of my life. We all need to be a little crazy, not in a Tea Party sense, but much more in an Arab Spring kind of way. After all, “we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.”