The Piano Lesson: Memory is the Thing
The field of historic preservation in America still tends to prioritizes architectural significance over cultural significance in important places. The West also prioritizes written history over oral history, and oppressor history over those that have been oppressed. What do you do when preserving your culture is a call and response instead of a thesis, when it’s carved into a piano instead of documented on paper?
A Love Letter To JAWS (1975)
Tourism has talons and these talons dig into communities in unflinching ways. Therefore, these places are complicated. Tourism touches most parts of the planet, but certain areas get more heat than others. This leaves locals stuck inside some twisted catch-22. What IS the cost of closing a beach? In the case of JAWS, the cost is four lives and 24 hours of income lost.
American Fiction: Who Gets to Tell What Stories?
Generally, white publishers look for stories of Black trauma. The stories themselves are not a problem; they are valid because they are often rooted in reality. Telling these stories only becomes a problem when they are the only stories being told. American Fiction brings light to the complicated nature of publishing or making art while Black in a late capitalist world.
It’s the freakin’ Catalina Wine Mixer!
Arguably, Stepbrothers, this silly movie many of us know and love completely transformed the reality of Catalina Island and its tourism industry.
Up (2009): Stubborn Developers and Stubborn Old People
We all have a past. We all have ties to places - whether emotionally, financially, or both. There is a reason why preservationists can be stubborn or get angry. It’s not so much because they want to be, and far more because they are trying to protect a place that matters deeply to them.
You Can’t Dodge the Preservation Themes in Dodgeball (2004)
There is always space for enjoying state-of-the-art amenities, but we also need intimate spaces. Intimacy encourages lifelong bonds. When you tear down places like Average Joe’s, you replace intimacy with money, and that’s a big issue we’re dealing with in the US now: late-stage capitalism.