Lucky 13! Finally got the damn thing up, edited and posted. Boy, it has lived up to it’s number, too. Editing issues, had to attempt the upload three times because our internet’s been all wonky. But it’s here.
Mikki Kendall and I talk about Race Fail 09 and how it inspired her and Jamie Nesbitt Golden to start up Verb Noire. It gets a bit quiet in places, so you’ll want headphones for this. I need better tech.
Also, just so you know, the glitch they talk about in reference to the Verb Noire store is fixed, and their first book River’s Daughter by Tasha Campbell is ready for sale!
Addendum: I’ve not read the Sookie Stackhouse books, so I am going off of what other people have told me about the way the characters of Tara and Lafayette were depicted therein. I suppose I should get off my ass and read those, huh?
Geek Girls Rule!!! 
That sounds interesting! But there’s a technical problem somewhere.
I tried to download the podcast by right-clicking on the “Direct download” link and saving it, but I got something that’s only 369 bytes, which can’t be right. When I tried just clicking the link, I got “500 – Internal Server Error”.
Weird. I just tried it myself, and it downloaded fine.
If you’re using a windows machine, my advice is do a restart and try again.
Also, it’s entirely possible that Libsyn was having an issue.
Hate to say it but I’m also getting the Internal Server Error on my Mac with Firefox…
I don’t know what to tell you.
It worked eventually – yay! Minor point about True Blood vs the books it’s based on in relation to the characters Tara and Lafayette. **SPOILER WARNING**
I’ve re-read the first two books now. Season 1 of True Blood is based on the first book in the series: Dead Until Dark. In that book Lafayette is only mentioned briefly a couple places and by the beginning of the 2nd book the character is killed off – which is really the only time we get much of anything about his background, and it doesn’t amount to much. Having watched the season 1 dvd’s with commentaries I can tell you that they probably aren’t going to follow the books because his co-stars, the producers and the writers all LOVE HIM. He’s also the only actor allowed to ad-lib his lines. Tara, as a character, is not really mentioned in Dead Until Dark and is really only introduced near the end of Living Dead in Dallas (book 2) and while it doesn’t come out and say directly it’s implied that she is white in the books – Katie thinks she remembers her being Italian in the books. I’ll let you know if it says in book 3.
My point here is that the show has taken a certain amount of liberties with the characters and while, yes, there are stereotypes applied – they apply to pretty much all of the cast. I grew up in a suburb that was mostly white and so the people I knew with drunken mothers, who sold drugs, who did petty crime to get by – all white. People I knew who grew up in small towns also all seem to agree that, as teenagers, the only things they really had to do for entertainment were sex and drugs. So, it seems like a small town stereotype has been applied to show in general.
My take on Lafayette and Tara on the show is not only that they are my favorite characters – they are also the most intelligent characters and I’m glad they are getting more air time in the show than they did in the books. They are the only people allowed to take care of Sookie after her grandmother dies because they are the only ones she can depend on to put their shit aside and not let people make her trauma into their own drama. Nelsan Ellis, who plays Lafayette, is also six kinds of HOT!
Tara’s mother gets her shit together by the end of the first season and does what is no doubt the hardest thing she’s ever done when she leaves Tara in jail and kicks her out. She’s afraid her daughter is starting down the path she went down for so many years and had to apply tough love to try to save her even when she KNEW it made her a bit of a hypocrite in her daughters eyes. While I can also sympathize with Tara’s feelings at the time I think the character of Lettie May (not in the books by the way) is a very courageous one.
Just some thoughts I had…