I was just typing a huge post when firefox crashed! ah fuck it. I'll try to remember what I was talking about...
First It was about "Robbie McCauley" I was looking her up because I watched a documentary tonight that included part of her play "Sally's Rape" . I looked up McCauley on wiki but no info. Then I became distracted by one of wiki's features on Dixie, the song and it's history . This article lead me to Foghorn Leghorn and that lead me to a search for "southern dialect cartoon characters." I was also looking up VHS tapes on amazon that I could use for some audio appropriation.
This search lead me to a banned tape called "cartoon scandals" but that was kind of a dead end as that tape is to expensive for me to purchase for audio clippings.
Then I found this article and that lead me to looking up "Song of the South" they say the movie is banned but I remember seeing it in the theater. It was my second movie. Little Shop of Horrors with Rick Moranis
was my first but enough of that scarring. A few months later I must have seen Song of the South. I remember when the little boy gets hurt by the bull because Uncle Remus was leaving him just like his daddy did. Shit. It was heart wrenching. I think this movie was special for my parents and that is why they took me to the theater. It came out when they were children. It's controversial because it paints a happy picture of race relations in the south right around the time when share- cropping had started. As a child I was happily oblivious to the social connotations and completely immersed in the drama of the poor little rich white boys life.
Although this movie hasn't has a legal release (in the USA) since 1986 I read in it's wiki article that it will resurface in a special DVD edition for it's 60th anniversary in November.
My little niece, Kiah is 5 this year, the same age I was when I saw this movie. I would love to video tape her watching this movie and then ask her opinion on the social political situation of the reunited union.



and one last thing,
the folk tales uncle Remus (fictinal character by the way) tells in this movie are a significant part of southern heritage. The question for me is who do they belong to? Jim Crow laws really fucked the progress of the south but at the same time maybe a certain time for autonomy was good to help with the shifting from slave economy to industrial economy. I say that not for the white people though, the whites were the villains and the blacks the victims of that situation. How does one go from being an oppressor to being a friend and how does one go from being the oppressed to being a friend, and just hanging out, you know? Exactly what happened and why is still puzzling 150 years later. I wonder if time helps or does it make things more confusing? If it helps then why is there still these statistical economic inequalities among races? Why is their still a concept of race?
... but what i think about the tales is they belong to anyone who has an interest and just like the mythologies of the bible or the koran are worthwhile so are these moral oral tales. The whole oral tradition thing is slowly going down the toilet since literacy came along. I like telling stories but it's difficult to get a listener and also difficult to learn how to tell a good story. I wonder if my life would be more or less difficult it I were illiterate? I imagine I would have to be more physically active. I'd be even more poor but probably less in debt.
back to Uncle Remus, these tales were recorded in a hard dialect. I can't read them unless I speak them aloud in my head. Here is a link where you can find some info on this archiver that used the Remus character