Some fun conversations on Twitter after some folks read my Sunday diary entry.
@rossgrady you’d be surprised at amount of black folks who won’t do certain things or go places cause they think that it’s “not for them.”
— Eric Tullis (@erictullis) October 21, 2014
This is such an interesting observation. I’m sure Durham has its share of racist white people, but I can only assume that there are also a ton of white people who are, to greater or lesser degrees, feeling partially paralyzed by guilt, self-consciousness, reflexive discomfort, whatever. So much easier to just cling to 9th St. and the “DIY District.”
Dear White People [god I can’t wait until that movie opens around here – I hope it plays the Northgate & not the Carolina]: there are black folk who feel the same way. Let’s all try harder to just say hi to each other on the street & whatnot. The little things add up, y’all.
[Side note: Seeing Django Unchained at the Northgate with a predominantly black audience totally fucking ruled.]
Circumstances conspired to keep us from going to a screening of Kiss Me Deadly at Duke tonight. I met Mickey Spillane once, in high school, during the summer when I was at the SC Governor’s School for the Arts. (for all you fact-checkers: It’s a residential program now, but was a summer program at Furman University when I was a kid)
Spillane lived in Murrell’s Inlet, SC, and had for years & years – which is, I assume, the only reason they invited him to the GSA to talk to students. Noir was making a comeback – Black Lizard had just debuted the year before – but it was all Thompson & Goodis, and critical reevaluations of Raymond Chandler. Serious attention hadn’t trickled down to Spillane. Has it ever?
Anyway. Like any good thrift-store haunting freak weirdo high school student in the mid-late 80s, I had a fedora, so of course I took it with me to class & had Mickey Spillane sign it. “Some Mike Hammer,” he wrote. Later in life I guess my value system got skewed way out of whack, because I no longer have the damn hat.