Now what do I write about?

Day 2 of my shiny new blog. Hello out there to all my adoring fans.

Those who have visited our prison - er, home - know that my computer sits just off the main living area, and the big screen attached to it runs a cycling display of my favourite pictures - photos I've taken, I mean. They date back up to 15 years, although I add new ones all the time. It's a kind of revolving memory bank. 

I've decided to favour you with one selection from my memory bank each post, chosen more or less randomly. Here goes...

This is a picture I like for the vividness of the colours, and the woman's poignant expression. I've worked and reworked it over the years to try and get the most out of it. But it is also one that makes me cringe a little. It was taken in Santiago de Cuba in February 2008. 

Karen was desperate to get away that February. Her father had just died, her sister not long before that. I booked a one-week getaway to try and cheer us up. I booked it, I thought, on the fairly posh island of Santa Lucia, near Barbados. I was surprised later when Karen pointed out that we now could look forward to a week in Santa Lucia, Cuba. That would explain why it was so cheap.

The picture was taken on a day tour to Santiago when we were left on our own to wander for a while. I cringe because the woman is obviously very poor and looks quite anxious. Tourism is important to Cuba, and it's an authoritarian state. I'm sure she would never have dared object to a gringo tourist taking her picture unasked - but might she have preferred I didn't? 

In any case, I took it, and have felt qualms ever since. Hmm, and yet I post it here...

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I said I might make unasked-for recommendations of ways to while away the lockdown. Here's one: a possibly overlooked TV miniseries Karen and I rediscovered last night, The Good Lord Bird (Showtime/ Crave). It stars Ethan Hawke as the radical 19th century abolitionist John Brown. Yeah, that guy, the one whose body has been moldering in his grave all these years. But his truth is marching on, right? Or maybe not, given the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the US. 

It's a surprisingly entertaining and original bit of historical story-telling. Hawke plays Brown as a homicidal lunatic, a lunatic of high moral principles and deep religiosity, fighting a just cause, but a lunatic still. The trick is, his lunacy is partly played here for laughs. Hawke is obviously having a grand time, sporting a ZZ Top beard by the end, and blithely pistol-shooting slave owners and traders, or anybody else who gets in his way, while quoting scripture.

Hawke as Brown

There are also interesting passages featuring real-life black abolitionists of the time, including Frederick Douglass, possibly the first black radical in America to sport an afro. (He really did, and he was a pretty interesting dude too.) The blacks revered Brown but were leery of him, exactly because he was a lunatic. They feared he could bring the whole cause into disrepute, and/or reprisals down on them. 

Actor Daveed Diggs as Douglass (l) and the real guy

Douglass in the end refused to support Brown's fateful raid on Harper's Ferry in Virginia. Brown hoped to liberate rifles from a federal armoury there, with which he would arm enslaved and free blacks to foment a larger rebellion. That's the challenge in writing real-life historical dramas, your audience likely knows what's going to happen - certainly American audiences would in this case. 

The raid fails, of course, and Brown and other conspirators hang for murder. The makers of The Good Lord Bird meet this challenge head-on by starting at the end, with the hanging - which they play partly for laughs, stopping just before the neck stretching - and then doubling back to a point a few months before the raid. Great credit then for making it as entertaining as it is, given the dire subject matter and the downer ending we know is coming. 

There is room for criticism for sure. Douglass is portrayed as a vain playboy who has his wife and lover living under the same roof. Some have disputed the accuracy of this - although it was rumoured - and argued that he was a true hero and should have been presented in a more serious light. Indeed, the overall slightly comic treatment could be said to inappropriately make light of a very dark and seminal passage in American history. 

Maybe. We've just been enjoying the quirky story-telling and gonzo acting.

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Oh, what the heck. You can never go wrong with a picture of the cutest toddler in the world to close a blog post. Which picture, though? 

Louis, like his papa is a hat guy, but this one, for whatever reason, he often rejects. He shows up in it all the time in pictures taken by his part-time minder, but if Caitlin wants him to wear it, he turns up his nose. This day, though, he was into the lumberjack look.