If you’re at all confused about where you should stand regarding Confederate monuments, read Caroline Randall Williams’ “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” It’s a searing, blistering indictment of America’s penchant for myth-making. She writes:
“You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.”
Read it here.
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This is one of my favorite photos of Los Angeles. It’s Hollywood when it was Hollywoodland. It’s the Herculean effort it took to create what’s here now. It’s omnipresent and never the same. According to TIME:
“The 50-ft.-tall lettering, which was lit by thousands of flashing light bulbs, was erected as an advertisement not for the movie-making mecca, but for a housing development called Hollywoodland.”
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If you haven't checked out The Rialto Report, do. It's an amazing, unrivaled collection of "Oral history, audio, photo, and documentary archives from the golden age of adult film in New York, and beyond."
Take, for example, "Deep Throat" shooting locations:
The opening scenes were shot at Handsome Harry’s place. Handsome Harry lived in Fort Lauderdale. He was a bachelor, maybe 28 or 29 years old, a nice gent who lived solo in his ranch-style house with a swimming pool. Most of his waking thoughts turned lightly to love in any season… and swings and orgies. Our crew – and our project – could not have been more welcome.
Handsome Harry never could figure out why after a long hard day in front of the cameras we weren’t all chomping at the bit to swing into a wild orgy.
[The Rialto Report]
Currently I'm reading The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil.
Entertainment weekly called it "eloquent and sleazy."
I opened a page at random, and here's what I read:
JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT: But she'd had it all planned out already. The week before she'd threatened me with a knife, but she didn't point it at my dick. She knew exactly what she was doing when she sliced me. Believe me, it was premeditated.
[Amazon]
