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Friday, March 30, 2012

Palisade Friday


            I went for an interview at Palisade Tribune this morning, and guess what? I now have a third part time job: tax season Liberty Tax preparer, freelance writer for Beacon Senior newsletter, and now (possibly, I have to do one story first, then they will decide if I have the job for sure) a freelance writer for the Palisade Tribune.
Yeah!
            They want someone to cover and write up the Planning Committee meetings on Monday nights, and if I come up with feature stories about colorful Palisade, I can submit those for publication each week. I can do that. Plus, I am thinking up other ideas to put into the paper.
            Immediately after the hour and half interview, I walked through the newly moved and remodeled Palisade library. You know how I love books, reading and library stuff. Their building was lovely, so light and airy and smelled good as well.  I’m going to enjoy slipping over there to read and write about Palisade.
They accept donated books! The main library and Fruita branch do not, so I took in the two volumes of George R.R. Martin’s series The Song of Fire and Ice:  Game of Thrones and Clash of Swords.
            I made sure that they would catalog them and put them out on the shelves. Really, I gushed and told them the background of the first book that has already been made into a tv series, which is on DVD now, and the second book episodes start Sunday night. I don’t have HBO, darn it.
            Next I went looking for where Chalane Coit preaches, but didn’t find her or her church. BUT, I met Rev. Greg Sharp at the Palisade United Methodist Church. He didn’t know her where-abouts, but he gave me a story lead—his church will be celebrating the 115th anniversary, which occurs in April, but they will save the celebration for May. Cool, huh?
            Palisade needs more senior organizations and activities. I went to the Chamber of Commerce; they didn’t know of any, but sent me to Parks and Rec. That organization just has “some senior activities” built into their upcoming summer activities, but not a lot. That gave me an idea.
            I stopped by the Beacon office to talk to Kevin, the publisher/owner. Finally I met my editor Cloie and the graphic artist who does the great layout and design. They showed the mock-up of my cover story and the two inside pages filled with the story of the Titanic survivor whose relatives live here in the Valley.
Kevin liked my idea. Since I am going to be at Palisade Tribune every Monday, I want to make it a Beacon beat. You know, find story leads on the over 50+ adults, and write up their stories for the Beacon. Once a month—I can do that.
So, I am all excited about this new adventure. In fact, I am ready to rent or buy a small house off I-70 to stay in while we rent or sell the McKinley House. I would save on gasoline, and we would be closer to Vega and the Mesa cabin. I would be happy in a newer, smaller house while Byron is up on the mountain, or teaching at the college.
I might even look into an old two story house with necessities on first floor, and use the top floor as storage or rent them. At least have them for when the eight grandkids come to visit with their parents.
YEA!!! 
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Westley's Graduation - One Year later

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The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.