Update--This kind of behavior will not be tolerated

Why is Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke the only reporter covering the story of the CNN camera operator pelted with peanuts? Today the young woman gave her feelings about the incident. You can read the update here.  The CNN employee does not think much has changed in terms of race relations.

 Last night Condoleezza Rice rocked Tampa with her speech about growing up in segregated Birmingham and not being allowed to eat at the local lunch counter. It was a great speech and a bit of a thumbing of the nose at Romney and Ryan and their not-so-subtle cracks appealing to the birther crackpots.
 I couldn't help but think that a Rice/Clinton race would be an epic political event with two extremely smart, extremely shrewd foreign policy experts going head to head.

ThugLit is back

It's actually been back for awhile. There's now a new ThugLit page on Facebook so if you do the FB thing, you should go here and like it.

An Aha moment....Lynn Beisner

Feminine symbol from Loco Roller Derby

We read a lot about urban feminism but not so much about rural feminism. My paternal grandmother was the first woman in her county in Virginia to earn a college degree. She was a farm wife who also worked at the family's general store. Like my maternal grandmother (who was a traveling sales lady), she was ahead of her time.
I was thinking about that when I ran across this entry on the Role/Reboot site. It's the story of the moment feminist writer Lynn Beisner became a feminist. I like her message of "sisters doing it for themselves." Check out the post here.

The word of the day is ... narrative

Have you noticed?  The word "narrative" is all over the coverage of the RNC.  And in the news in general. It looks like it's replaced "calculus" as an expression of how a story is spun. Narrative...

The Next Noir at the Bar Los Angeles

I missed the most recent Noir at the Bar event here in L.A. (featuring Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Denise Hamilton, Christa Faust and Jen Westeman, all writers I admire and have never met, although Hamilton and I  have tweeted about the whole NoHo Noir thing). But I will not be missing the next event, coming in October.
I will not be missing it because I HAVE BEEN INVITED TO PARTICIPATE.
I am so thrilled. I will be in stellar company--Eric Beetner, Johnny Shaw, Greg Bardsley, and Owen Laukkanen.  I cannot wait.
P.S. You can get a copy of that autographed poster from the August event--the link is on the FB page--and the proceeds go to a good cause.

This Kind of Behavior Will Not Be Tolerated...

You may have heard that yesterday there was an incident at the Republican National Convention in which two attendees threw peanuts at a CNN camera operator while whooping it up and yelling, "This is how we feed the animals."
The camera operator is a black woman.
And it's hard not to see that act as sort of symbolic of the party's disdain for African-Americans and Female-Americans, Mia Love's speech notwithstanding. A beautiful black Mormon Republican, daughter of Haitian immigrants, Love is being positioned as the "new face" of the Republican party, and good for her. She's already broken a number of barriers, including becoming the first black woman to be elected mayor of a Utah City. She's only 36; she'll go far. But how proud can she be of party representatives who are still openly racist and sexist?
The RNC responded swiftly to the incident with the CNN camera operator, calling the behavior of the attendees "deplorable." But with racism and sexism being subtexts in so much of the party platform, the protestations sound hollow.
You can read about the incident here on Deadline Hollywood.

Line of Duty, my new addiction

In general I don't watch a lot of television. And when I do, it tends to be in big, season-long chunks on dvd or streamed on Netflix when I'm recuperating from a hard day at the eye clinic and can't see well enough to read. It's not that I'm a culture snob--one of the shows I DO watch is Drop Dead Diva and another is Grimm--but I still haven't figured out how to balance out a freelance career, a pretty demanding writing-on-the-side career, a personal life and the odd night's sleep.  Something had to give and it was television. 
I did check out the BBC's Sherlock and liked it well enough, although honestly, I thought Sherlock's behavior in the second season ws a little ... smug.  I honestly didn't believe he'd go to Buckingham Palace wrapped in a sheet. But Freeman and Cumberbatch are lightning in a bottle together.
I'm still on the fence about Copper. I know a lot about the era. I once spent about six months researching a script called Dead Rabbit, which was basically Gangs of New York but with two brothers at the center. I thought the first episode was dark and dreary and predictable and on the nose. I liked the second episode better.
But then I stumbled across Line of Duty.It's currently streaming on Hulu (although I suspect it's eventually going to be part of their Hulu Plus package) and it's a slice of grit pie.  Martin Compston, playing the lead, a young detective sergeant who refused to take part in a cover-up after a raid leaves an innocent man dead, looks distractingly like a young Mark Dacascos in his Crying Freeman period,  but he's extremely good as the button-down cop. Lennie James, the other lead, is a black cop with a complicated love life and a taste for corruption. He's great too.
Sexism. Racism. Budget cuts. It's all there. Two episodes in, we really don't know that much about Kate Fleming, one of the detectives on James' squad, and I'm hoping that will change.
If you liked Dirty Pretty Things, I think you'll like Line of Duty.