Loving

I rode my bike to see Loving at Embarcadero Cinema -- the discount matinee in one of the smallest screening rooms. I was moved, quietly, and smitten with the faces of the lead actors, which we saw up close quite often. I found Nick Kroll a bit distracting but he didn't stick out as much as I had feared -- he did not appear in many scenes other than the ones that were in the trailer. I happened to sit next to an interracial family -- and afterward, in the women's room, the wife told me that she wasn't sure how realistic some of the everyday scenes were. I didn't ask her exactly what she meant -- I wish I had -- but I am guessing she was referring to the scenes in which blacks and (just a few) whites were socializing. Or maybe that's just me projecting. She said she had just been telling one of her daughters (there were three in the bathroom with her, all adults) that she and her husband had lived in Maryland about a decade after miscegenation laws had been overturned there. She said, "That's American history." I managed to reply, "Not very long ago, I'm sad to say."

kitchen

I'm happy with the kitchen these days -- my design anxiety has ebbed and I like cooking and baking in there. Three McCormicks came over today for lunch, and it was good to see them -- we mostly sat in the dining area eating soup and cookies, talking energetically about this and that, as we always do. I am sitting on the couch watching the sun go down. I'm not sure if I need to make dinner.

On xmas eve I went out to lunch with A and B and Garry and David. That was a lot of fun. Afterward, I spent an hour or so at the Asian Museum before I drove across the bridge. I mostly wanted to visit the snuff bottles. I was dismayed to see that the corner of the park closest to the museum was densely populated by older white homeless men and their stuff. I don't know if I'm just getting old and losing my capacity for empathy, but I hate seeing this sort of thing. Fortunately, the snuff bottles did not disappoint.

I stopped by the Bowl and it was not crowded. I guess a lot of people were out of town. When I got to N+T's there were preparations under way to get T's niece to the airport. I ended up riding along with N, which was nice because I got to chat with the niece on the way there and with Nola on the way back -- we got a little turned around while we were trying to skirt around the post-Raiders-game traffic, but you never really get completely lost in the cell phone era.

Anyway, I had a really nice, fairly low-key xmas eve/day. I got home before 5:00, after I dropped N off at the airport (she was going up to Seattle), and did next to n othing, except make the dough for the cookies, so that it could chill over night. Gene and Barbara were having people over for xmas and that involved a bit of music -- I think that was the first time I've ever heard any coming from their place. It wasn't loud, but I could hear the bass line, and so I thought, once again, about how much it might cost to insulate the shared wall. Then I put in earplugs and went to sleep.

land of the free

Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in 1987, just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference. Washington asked what percentage of Chicago’s white vote he’d received. “And someone said, ‘Well, you got 21 percent. And that’s really good because last time’ ”—in his successful 1983 mayoral campaign—“ ‘you only got 8,’ ” Axelrod recalled. “And he kind of smiled, sadly, and said, ‘You know, I probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods, and I think I’ve been a good mayor for everybody, and I got 21 percent of the white vote and we think it’s good.’ And he just kind of shook his head and said, ‘Ain’t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?’ 

“That was Harold. He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times—and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him.” During his 1983 mayoral campaign, Washington was loudly booed outside a church in northwest Chicago by middle-class Poles, Italians, and Irish, who feared blacks would uproot them. “It was as vicious and ugly as anything you would have seen in the old South,” Axelrod said.

-from Ta-Nahisi Coates, "My President Was Black." 

making stock

Text TK.