Oxford American . Southern Movie Issue.

the south has lost so much of it's style... there really is no souothern movie anymore, except some skin head epic... a farse.. like smokey and the bandit.. Nothing like Long Hot Summer or any of the dry sexuality felt in Landscape as in Bonnie and Clyde.
People still love this, but no one take the time for love by the close line.

Don't you ever feel like the entier south, Faulkners south, Tennessee Williams south, has actually just gotten worse (depsite all the improvemtns of intergration)since the 1960's... espeacially when it comes to wanting fauder for somthing like Cool Hand Luke or The Yearling...? I always remember the two little black kids in cool hand Luke, who help him escape from the leg iorns and earn his brief, few moths of freedom.... At the time, one hot summer in some vauge southern state, you think, "gosh, poverty...repression, etc" but comparing it to the KFC trailer park missisippii of now, florida full of crystal meth and cops (now equiped with taisers and checking every liscense of ANYONE walking, enjoying the landscape) you think back to O-Brother Where Art though, and Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, and realize that the south at least wavered between two extremes back then... as compared to now, when all doors are closed.. a closed soceity, in essence, no more friendly then orange county california- only more rigid and evasive... the good stuff, sweet long legged coutnry girls, cane pole fishing under bridges, easy offer odd-job labbor and self suffiency... all come to make a far better world then compared to the new south, whcih only wants a suburban house, tinted windows, cold soda, a buz cut/intown goverment job, and a big screen to watch the superbowel... still inviting nieghbors over for what they think is "hospitality..." while calling the police every time someones dog trotts through thier manacured lawn, or a stanger passes by... I think of those little balck kids in Cool Hand Luke and laugh... Hospitality and born-free my ASS! The bad gets worse and the good ran away...

Go fig... gone with the... no, it's not exactly wind, is it?

Well, speaking only for myself.

I really don't want to watch the "superbowel" on a big screen.

Or at all for that matter.

as far as the degradation of the south goes, it has, truly, but it's not all bad. people seem to think that since the south has become "integrated" and civil rights won out, things were supposed to get better, but if you take a good hard look, that was about the time things got worse. i'm not blaming it on that, but i'm not saying it was the cure all of the south everyone thought it would be. the largest reason the south isn't as wonderful as it once was is that the isolationism once cherished by generational southerners has vanished. yeah, we have better jobs and more...stuff...but at what cost. when the south was "cut off" from the rest of america, when we had our textile mills, our good honest farming (tobacco) jobs, and our small towns, things were much better. urban sprawl and subdivisions, along with an ever increasing invasion from EVERYONE (yankees, i'm looking at you, though you look down on southerners, why are so many of you here now?), the south no longer belongs to the southerners, and i fear it never will again.