When I can’t sleep, I’ll navigate cities where I used to live in my head, reassuring myself that like the shitty side streets I’ve lived on still exist. Morning and afternoon rush hours, you will find me barrelling through the Third Ward either on my bike, whilst unashamedly listening to Discharge (this is the only thrill of being an old lady), in my boyfriend’s car, groaning at the Writer’s Almanac, or on the Houston Metropolitan Bus, evesdropping. I’m not saying I have a reciprocal relationship with the neighborhood, but I would at least call it familiar.
On Saturday I was riding my bike to work while the Get Your Money Right Summit was about to happen at TSU. Of course I lost all sense of decorum and wove recklessly through light traffic, gawking and hoping to get a glimpse at Ciara. A lady chastised me from her car, “You can’t ride like that around here. It’s dangerous.” Thus leaving me to vacillate between acting snotty at someone telling me to practice bike safety, or to get meek for being reprimanded for being a stupid white person. Why is are bicycles the ultimate stupid white person accessory? See Gentrifying Asshole Dude in Do the Right Thing for a good example.
On PBS this week, Third Ward, TX, a documentary by the UT film professor who’s also at the head of East Austin Stories. It was mostly Project Row Houses with a little of the Flower Man thrown in, to make the argument of still-standing poverty as outsider art. No acknowledgement that poverty is no joke, no mention of the fact that the neighborhood rotted for decades sitting in the shadows of a self-described “major research university”, whose inventive use of eminent domain continually displaced residents and kept the neighborhood isolated. That the white filmmaker was from Austin gave him a pass from the implications of being a white person in Houston. (Moreso, the cameo from a condo developer probably delivered the point that so few in Houston who have the economic wherewithal would make such a documentary.)
Also seen this week: Frontline (same boring News-as- News series), Shadya, a borderline weepy about an Israeli Arab girl karate champion, Heading South (sex as colonialism), and despite better judgment, a half dozen episodes of Big Love on on-demand. Chloe and M-K Place as mother and daughter crack me up, even though Chloe’s making a point of not even pretending to act; Jeanne Tripplehorn’s ridic sensuality is evident as ever, while the entire thing, I promise, appalls me.
I am ashamed to admit I devoured the entire season of Big Love On Demand over the last two weeks. I think I need to keep watching until I decide which character I hate the most. It’s a tough call.