walking with white privilege
Okay well, I have only one bit of socializing from my weekend on which to report: I got a text from Alexia on Friday telling me she had some open time on Saturday and asked if I wanted to take a walk. I sure did! I still needed to return the DVD of Enchanted to the library downtown, so we went down that way. And then, at my request and she happily granted, we walked back via Olive and then Denny, so I could get these pictures of the "Ward House," built in 1882, officially "Seattle's oldest building." I happened to be browsing a website last week about points of interest in Seattle, and it mentioned this old house, which is an official historic landmark. I had no clue such a significant building was so close to where I live—the house is on Denny & Belmont, and my condo is less than three quarters of a mile from there. (0.7 miles, to be exact—the very same distance away as the Central District PCC store, just in the opposite direction.)
Now, I have also discovered that a lot of people love to bring up that the claim of Ward House being the oldest in Seattle is "wrong," except the house in West Seattle that gets cited is not entirely the original structure—which still makes Ward House Seattle's oldest fully intact structure, it could be argued.
What fascinates me most about both buildings is that neither is in its original location. Ward House used to be at Pike & Boren, and was moved to its current location in the eighties. So now what I'm dying to know is what Seattle's oldest building in its original location is. I even emailed the Seattle Public Library to ask, and hope they respond soon.
Anyway, I cross-posted my photos, and accompanying information, to the "History of Puget Sound and Surrounds" Facebook group, and it's proved quite possible there: 239 likes and 11 shares, so far.
Both Alexia and I admired the house, which now houses a ventur capital firm, and then we walked home discussing the insurrectionist events of last week at the nation's capitol. Alexia is an older white woman, so some of this is kind of unsurprising, but she actually seemed kind of taken aback when I mentioned what a blatant display of white privilege the whole thing was. "Why, because only five people died?" she asked. I was struck somewhat speechless by this response, but when I mentioned a mob literally beating a police officer and still not getting shot by any of the police, she somewhat conceded that I had a point. Imagine if that had been a bunch of Black Lives Matter protesters beating the shit out of a cop. They would have absolutely been shot.
That said, I still keep thinking of things I wish I had said immediately. Like: "Yes, actually." BLM protests may have featured fires to a couple of buildings and lots of property damage (both of which Alexia brought up, of course), and never mind the massive difference between them and people literally committing sedition, BLM protests were never a mob of armed protesters. The seige of the Capitol was swarming with armed citizens. So yeah, I would say that "only" five people died, given the clear difference there. I mean, shit, Black people are consistently killed by police when they aren't armed at all. Imagine if they came at police with clearly visible firearms. Jesus Christ.
Alexia also mentioned BLM protesters infiltrating the White House, and I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. I just tried to search reports of this online and can't seem to find any. Either way, I did say to Alexia, "There wasn’t a mob inside the White House," and that she did concede as well. I may ask her about it again if we walk again soon; she is so afraid of unrest this week during or around the inauguration that she's not going anywhere except maybe to walk. She's even afraid it might be too dangerous to walk around here on Wednesday, which seems a little alarmist to me, but who knows? God knows these days anything is possible.
Anyway! I spent Friday evening writing and reviewing the new film One Night in Miami, the third movie I reviewed in as many days. It was excellent. I really thought I would be reviewing the new Tom Hanks movie News of the World to make it four movies in as many days on Saturday, but while I had thought it would be on Netflix, it was actually only available VOD (for now) for $19.99. I won't pay that much for a movie, so that will have to wait until either it's down to $5.99 or it's on Netflix. I see now that I misunderstood what I had read: Netflix only has international streaming rights, and not domestic here in the U.S. Well, damn.
So, instead, I . . . spent way too much time on TikTok. That was really the story of my weekend. There is a stunning amount of talent on there, and I really got sucked into the current sea shanty trend, especially the widely varied duets other users posted with that Irish guy's original posts. They're so awesome! And now my account has pivoted algorythmically to amazing music performers of all sorts, though still with a large percentage of sea shanties. I'm literally losing sleep because of my compulsive watching: I had gone to bed Friday night around 11:30 but looked at TikTok until around 1 a.m. And then I did not get the amount of sleep I needed because Shobhit woke me up first with his constantly throat-clearing and then a second time when he needed me to get out of bed to get him a fresh roll of toilet paper, and in between that I had to get out of bed to feed the cats. What a wild pain in the ass. I then could not get back to sleep, but predictably had to take a nap later in the afternoon.
So, I was decidedly unproductive on Saturday. But! I felt relatively productive yesterday, as I finally now have my entire history of "Year in Ten Minutes" videos on Flickr. Many of the videos were too large in size for Flickr to take them even though they came close to meeting the ten minute limit, so I used iMovie to edit and resize every video for 2013 through 2018. (2019 and 2020 I had already managed to upload there.) I cut brief clips out of video portions to get each of them down to 10:00 even—the most involved one was 2014, which had originally been "2014 in Eleven Minutes"—but it wasn't hard to do, just time-consuming. One thing I really noticed with the older videos is how much I have dramatically improved on the editing process. I can see older videos that seem now like they could have been much shorter; it's also clear that, ironically given how much we had to stay at home, 2020 packed in by far more photos and video clips than any other year. Of course that's also largely because of the trip to Australia, which was only two weeks but covers a full third of the ten-minute video.
Anyway, I now have them all grouped in an album on Flickr. Eight ten-minute videos to date, covering eight years of photos and video clips.
I just barely managed to finish by the time Shobhit was home from work and we watched another three episodes of the final season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I commented on how great that season actually turned out to be, after the first few episodes seemed slightly off compared to what had come before it. Then, ironically, the very next episode we watched was of lesser quality. It featured fantasies among Lou, Ted and Murray wondering what it would be like to be married to Mary. A huge swing for the writers of that show, and kind of a miss—although I have to admit the vision of Lou and Mary as an elderly couple, ultimately featuring both Ted and Murray also in old-age makeup, turned out to be quite funny.
Now there are only three episodes to go before we're done with the whole series. What a great show.
[posted 12:29 pm]