Prospective/ Retrospective

Printed on the shower curtain in my bathroom is a map of the world. The lines are drawn with a loose hand and the countries are playfully colored. Greenland’s green, Uganda’s peach, its neighbor Tanzania is pink, and the great swath of Russia is a dreamy blue—adding some cheer to the otherwise destitute tiled walls. My bathroom, with its leaky faucet and the closest thing to counter-space the top of the toilet bowl tank, is not the most charming feature of the small Fort Greene apartment, my home of four years.

But so long as I’ve lived in New York, my home has never been more than a place to sleep at night, and I am aware that many people put up with worse.  For beyond the secluded hull of every apartment lies the magnificent cosmos of the city, the broad barreling avenues, the perennial clamor, the daily business with its unremitting bustle. It becomes difficult to see how anything could really be happening anywhere else, and if it is, certainly not so with such s... more

Film and the View from Power

The story is familiar. An old, hardened war veteran, Walt, lives a routine banal existence in a small middle-America town. He has no friends and no joy, and is destined to live out his days thus until something out of the ordinary happens.  New neighbors move in. Not only are they from out of town, but they are Hmong, of southeastern Asian descent. Walt takes an immediate dislike to the “gooks,” refusing their various friendly overtures. But when Thao, the shy teenage boy next door is pressured by a local gang into stealing the old man’s car and is caught, the family and the old man are forced into intimacy. Thao repays his crime by lending Walt his labor and the two develop a “tough love” for each other. Walt increasingly warms up to Thao and his Hmong family, assumes the role of vigilante by avenging the family against the local gang, and peaceably meets his end in martyrdom. ... more