Viraldice

I suffer from a wee bit of thalassophobia. Fear of the sea. Or, more specifically in my case, fear of the deceptive emptiness of the open ocean. Vast stretches of water that look from a distance as if they contain nothing but which are actually teeming with life (for now). An alien world that we as a species fled a long, long time ago, which warns against treating it with anything other than the utmost fearful respect with that forbidding, blank countenance. The ultimate poker face. Despite this fear of the ocean, I always want to swim far out into it whenever I get the opportunity. Maybe it's a bit like what the French call l'appel du vide--or 'the call of the void': That tiny voice that tells you to leap when you find yourself gazing from a great height. Maybe it's not and it's just that I'll take any opportunity to reference that phrase because it's just so damn cool. Whatever the case, if I'm on a beach, I'm swimming to the buoys on the horizon. It's just gotta happen. If anyone else with me is up for it, fine, but if not, no worries, I'm going alone. I'll be turning a paler shade of terror-white with each stroke on the way out, and going back will feel like the mad run up the stairs from the basement you did as a kid after turning off the light to prevent the monsters from getting you, but dammit it's gotta be done. I won't wear goggles and I don't want to know what's manifesting underneath my flapping feet, the potential for horror multiplying as I take myself further away from shore, but I just have to make the journey. One time a friend swam with me. He wore goggles and he took a great amount of joy from seeing the look on my face each time he pointed out the sheer amount of wildlife ballooning in abundance beneath our feet as we progressed. 'Knava, it's amazing, I've never seen this many fish in my life!' Sadistic sonofabi**h. I hope he lives this clip vividly in his dreams for the next, oh, two or three nights? (Click through to get the full pants-filling experience.)

This is why I stay away from the water... from r/TheDepthsBelow

America has been swept by a newfound passion for social justice, with monuments to slaveowners being torn down by the dozen as sitcom episodes featuring blackface vanish from streaming services. The rising tide of racial equality has lifted many boats, including that of Ava DuVernay, who announced today that she’ll soon begin work on a project about one of this movement’s central figures.

Netflix has issued a press release stating that DuVernay will collaborate with Colin Kaepernick on a new miniseries titled Colin in Black & White, chronicling the younger years of the football star turned Black Lives Matter activist. DuVernay will produce the series alongside writer Michael Starrbury, the pair having last worked together on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us.

Colin in Black & White will take audiences through a formative period in Kaep’s life, when he was just a Black teenager with white adoptive parents, figuring out how to navigate high school and honing his football skills as a quarterback. The challenges he faces – no small measure of discrimination, undoubtedly – and how he responds to them will foreshadow his future feats in sport and humanitarianism.

Kaepernick himself will narrate the scripted series’ six episodes, but will not appear onscreen, played instead by a younger actor still to be cast. The tone the series will take is difficult to surmise; DuVernay intends to tackle difficult matters of iniquity and prejudice, as the story demands, and yet the high school milieu and the inspirational bent of Kaepernick’s success suggest a need for lightness.

This isn’t the first time Netflix has mythologized the origin story of a Black icon, having previously imagined the college days of Barack Obama with the feature film Barry in 2016. Like that film, DuVernay and Kaepernick’s series will have to execute a difficult balancing act between awareness of the great future that awaits its subject without lapsing into Dewey Cox-style biopic hackery.

The post Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick are working on a series about his younger years appeared first on Little White Lies.