I've thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog, which began fourteen years ago this month. It has allowed me the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, in any way that I wanted. And, fortunately, I never had to concern myself about any gatekeepers.
I look forward to writing the blog for a few more years.
I have a bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in my kitchen cupboard. So when I saw an item in Harper's magazine (January 2023 issue) quoting a class-action lawsuit against the product's manufacturer, the T.W. Garner Food Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I became very interested in what the lawsuit was about.
The lawsuit, filed in September, stated that "A hot sauce is labeled 'Texas' if it is made in Texas, using Texas ingredients and flavor profiles. .... Texas hot sauces...must be made in Texas from ingredients sourced from Texas. ....Texas takes great pride in its hot sauce. ....The defendant trades on the reputation of Texas. There is nothing Texas about them."
Nowhere on the label does it say "Texas-style" (whatever that is). There's only a cartoon-drawing of a cowboy wearing a 10-gallon hat, with a whip in his hand, and three red peppers near the logo. The label says the company has been making Texas Pete hot sauce "Since 1929." Which leads one to ask this question, why has it taken 93 years to complain about the product's authenticity?
Frankly, I don't know what makes Texas hot sauce different from any other hot sauce. If there is such a thing as Texas-style hot sauce and the recipe is generic and in the public domain, how is its replication by others injurious to the reputation of Texas? I'm not a lawyer but based on the above quote, this lawsuit sounds frivolous. That could mean it will get thrown out of court.
I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")
The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.
While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.
Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.
Earlier today I re-read the chapter on James Baldwin in Christopher Bram's wonderful book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve/Hachette Book Group), published in 2012. The chapter is an excellent summation of Baldwin's life and literary career.
What prompted me to re-read the chapter was the idea that came to me that Baldwin's life, especially his early life, would make a riveting biopic. Drawing on previous biographies and his essays, the film would trace his evolution as a writer from his impoverished childhood in Harlem to his first few years in Paris where he, as an American expatriate, struggled to survive while completing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
I think this would be the sort of cinematic project that would interest directors like Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay.
Concerning who would portray Baldwin, a good choice would have been the late Chadwick Boseman, who somewhat resembled Baldwin. Unfortunately, since Boseman is no longer available, Don Cheadle, who did a brilliant job of portraying Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), would be another possible choice.
