February 16, 2007

Tonight: A Documentary on Melvin Van Peebles

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How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It) is premiering on The Independent Film Channel at 9 p.m. tonight. It’s a biographical documentary on Melvin Van Peebles, who grandfathered blaxspoitation cinema with Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song in 1971, and has created 11 other films and seven plays in his career.

“I wanted a movie that black people could walk out of standing tall,” Van Peebles explains. “I didn’t see the type of movie I wanted to see so I made it myself.” How he has done so again and again, despite all odds, is what this documentary shows best.

Read the rest of this post on The Riff.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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