by Amy Monaghan

The clear, steady gaze of Mildred Jeter Loving looks right at you from the photographs. Then there’s the shy, smitten glance of her husband Richard at the skinny woman he called “Bean.” In never-before-seen archival footage, their daughter, Peggy, faces down the camera as her mother pulls knee socks onto her legs, her brothers playing in the background. We’re getting a privileged glimpse into a loving family. The Loving family, who lent their name to the Loving v. Virginia decision, delivered on June 12, 1967, by the unanimous Warren Court, which invalidated anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia and 15 other Southern states.

The Loving Story is director Nancy Buirski’s first film, but she founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC, and ran it for a decade, so it’s safe to say Buirski knows her way around nonfiction. At a screening of the film in Durham, she said, “I had not come across this story in documentary form. I was pretty sure it had not been told.” Buirski also knows people like the great and powerful Oz of HBO’s doc division, Sheila Nevins, so it should come as no surprise that The Loving Story will follow its festival circuit run with a premium cable debut later this year.

A trove of previously unseen photographs (many of them taken by Life’s Grey Villet) and 16mm film (the latter shot by Hope Ryden in 1965 while the publicity-adverse defendants were living secretly in Virginia) turns the abstract but aptly named “Loving” of Loving v. Virginia back into a family fighting a terrible injustice. The film’s most powerful moments come from two marriages, actually: the Lovings’ and the marriage — a film term never more appropriate — of audio recordings of the Supreme Court testimonies with these photographs and silent footage of Mildred, Richard and their three children doing homely, ordinary things.

Loving is workmanlike, not flashy, something that could also be said of its subjects. Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Perry Loving grew up in the same poor, rural community in Caroline County, Virginia. He’d drag race alongside her brothers on Saturdays, even though during the week they were governed by the color line. They married in 1958, before she was 20.

Then the sheriffs came into their bedroom at 2 a.m., rousing them with bright flashlights, and hauling them off to jail for the crime of interracial marriage. Mildred was part-black, part-Rappahannock/Cherokee. Richard was white. The couple had married in the District of Columbia, but mixed-race marriages performed anywhere were not recognized by Virginia. The original 1959 court decision suspended their sentences for 25 years but prohibited the young couple from living in the state. They couldn’t return — together — without risking re-arrest, even for a visit with family and friends.

Their exile in Washington, D.C., coincided with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. City life did not agree with the Lovings and so, emboldened by the advances being made, Mildred wrote to then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy to ask whether the new law would make it legal for the Lovings to return to Virginia as man and wife. It wouldn’t. Kennedy recommended that they take their case to the ACLU. The rest really is history.

So why should you schlep to a theatre to catch The Loving Story during the Tribeca Film Festival rather than setting your DVR in a few months? Because sobbing in a screening room in the company of fellow snifflers is much more purgative than weeping at home. Because you can get into terrific, wide-ranging, and booze-fueled related conversations afterward — about how adorable those pictures of the young Stanley Ann Dunham are! Or King and Spalding’s decision this week to withdraw from defending the Defense of Marriage Act! Or when The Gays will finally be able to put KitchenAid standing mixers on their registries — with the pals you dragged with you. Or with strangers you talked with in line. Or that person in your row who wisely brought and shared tissues.

Also! You’ll cheer at verité footage of the young and menschy ACLU lawyers Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, barely out of law school long enough to be admitted to argue before the Supreme Court. You’ll chuckle at their older selves recalling their first impression of taciturn Richard Loving as a redneck. (He kinda was.) You’ll find yourself wondering in amazement again and again at Mildred’s quiet country manners and her determination to make things better for her family and for other families like hers. And you’ll hiss at the lower court judge whose opinion stated, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Then, you’ll sigh when the lawyers repeat what Richard said when they asked if he wanted them to tell the Court anything: “Tell the Court, I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

I know, right? Take a minute for yourself. Deep breaths. You want a glass of water or something?

Oh, yeah, and then there’s the opportunity to catch the post-screening discussion with Buirski, Hirschkop, and others as they discuss this landmark case and current issues surrounding race and marriage equality. So go already. Mildred would approve. According to the last line of her New York Times obituary, Loving issued a statement on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in her favor, “urging that gay men and lesbians be allowed to marry.”

Under her own name and as the Cinetrix, Amy Monaghan has been writing on the Internets since 2003. A lecturer in film studies and literature, she probably should be grading papers right now.

Photo by Grey Villet.

Martin Amis, whose impending arrival in Brooklyn will change the face of Cobble Hill forever, wrote a long thing about his friend Christopher Hitchens in this past Sunday’s Observer. Hitchens has a piece on Philip Larkin — godfather to Amis’ brother — in the current Atlantic. Wheels within wheels.

So, basically, this video is Sartre Wars.

You know those nasty-ass pictures of rotting teeth and decaying lungs that the city made all the shops put up as another front in its war against smoking? Four months after a federal judge blocked the rule, many of them still have the signs up, even though they totally don’t have to. Do me a favor and print out this Journal article so you can bring it to your local cigarette purveyor to let him or her know that they can take those things down. Even if you don’t smoke — or are some kind of coward who is thinking of giving it up — these are not something you want to see. It is stressful enough knowing I’m dropping $13 on a pack of smokes; I don’t need the added pressure of staring at my grisly future while I’m doing it.

Photo by Francois Karm, from Flickr.

Supposedly tomorrow Leon Panetta, the CIA Director, is going to become our Secretary of Defense! And General David Petraeus, who ran our “situation” in Afghanistan, is going to become the head of the CIA! (He will now report to James Clapper, who has had so far quite a successful career, despite running into trouble over signing on to the existence of WMDs in Iraq and more recently for suggesting that Gaddafi would win in the Libyan uprising.) Marine General John Allen is supposedly going to take Petraeus’ job in Afghanistan! Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon will become our ambassador to Afghanistan, replacing retired Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who did not fare well in the Wikileaks cables outing for being honest about Afghani corruption. Also, some Joint Chiefs of Staff posts are expected to change this summer. Has the intertwining of military, ambassadorial and intelligence operations ever been so thorough? (Oh, yes, also: Large Number of White Men Get Promotions.) I suppose now would be a good time to slowly read Ryan Lizza’s thorough take on the Obama-Clinton foreign policy outlook.

Barack Hussein Obama II has finally released his birth certificate (PDF), in order to quiet demands for his official birth time from the nation’s well-funded lobby of astrologers. “It’s about time,” said the victorious president of the American Federation of Astrologers. “Now we as a country can move on, secure in the knowledge of the innermost workings of our leader.”

“What’s the time difference to Hawaii again for 1961?” said astrologer Rob Brezsny. “Ugh, math!”

The president, a Leo, had proved confounding to astrologers due to inability to confirm his birth time, arousing great suspicion. None could be reached for thorough comment on the meaning of his birth time. “I don’t have time to talk, I am frantically redoing charts!” said Susan Miller, of Astrology Zone. “Oh God, look at his cadent houses. Uh oh.”

Five years ago, according to the editor of the Quincy Valley Post Register, the town went a bit crazy in a near-shoring boom. Microsoft and Yahoo! both were building data centers in town (hey, eastern California is much closer than Utah, America’s favorite near-shoring zone (Mormons are so honest and industrious!)) and property values went up and everyone got a little nuts: “We all know what happened. The construction workers eventually left town, the data centers didn’t bring thousands of new people to live in Quincy and we’re still waiting for a movie theater,” he writes. “And sadly, I know of several people who were busted when the boom was over.” Now Dell and Sabey are building data centers there too. Here we go again! Meanwhile, up the road a piece in Greenville, you can buy a “3200sf, historic building on Main Street” for $99,000. Be right back, I’m off to start over in Plumas County!

by Interchangeable Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Writer

From time to time The Awl offers its editorial space to those whose usual forums may be too crowded with similar material. Opinions are the writer’s own; the Awl does not endorse these opinions.

This week, an antiquated collective has returned to revisit the popular, long-held contention that we, as Americans, have a constitutional guarantee to party without fear of regulation. This attempt to hijack the national conversation is the work of aging agitators making a last-gasp effort to sow confusion and increase the potential for chaos on a national level. Once again, America is faced with a grim declaration from an interest group determined to “fight” for its right to party.

But this time, Americans are not lying down for this liberal absurdity. Instead, it is the quiet majority, newly invigorated by Tea Party calls for a nation of true constitutionality, that has called for a “fight.”

In 1986, when the penumbra emanated that partying was a right, strict consructionalists were forced to decide between expending efforts on what was essentially a domestic disturbance, or to put all political ammunition behind President Reagan’s increasingly successful crusade to destroy Communism. Three years later the Berlin Wall was torn down, just as Reagan had commanded.

While popular in the immediate years after its inception, the concept that every American has a “right” to party, and that they should take up arms in furtherance of that right, is an idea whose time has passed.

To be sure, there were kernels of sound policy despite the movement as a whole. For instance, an increasing number of teachers, unbound by the sensible accountabilities of the private sector, see themselves as “preachers” and children who do not buy in to their narrow worldviews as “jerks.” Is it any wonder then that American children “don’t wanna” go to school? Perhaps more alarmingly, their parents have little choice but to send them anyway. As the Alliance for School Choice stated, “We could not agree more that a fight is needed to empower parents, particularly those in low-income, urban families like the Boys’, to choose the education they determine is best for their children.” It seems in this regard, even the Boys can see that education reform, including parents’ right to choose, cannot wait.

That right-to-party supporters would immediately assume the posture of a “fight” is no surprise. Strong-arm tactics have never been feared by this group, as evidenced a mere three years later by a similar group of agitators, also from New York, who promoted a fight against “the power.” Knowing no bounds, even Saturday night has at times been deemed acceptable for such thuggery.

While the party rights’ partisans claim to be on the side of inclusion, their hypocrisy is laid bare by the very umbrella they have chosen to represent themselves: “Boys.” There will be no “girls” allowed to have these so-called “rights.” No Palins. No Bachmanns. No Haleys. For these great female American leaders, these “Boys” offer only roles in porno mags. That this group of freeloaders would counter with an assertion of the porno mags’ superior qualities does not in any way validate their argument.

Also, it should come as no surprise that, despite all the talk of “hypocrisy” about smoking, the “Boys” tacit endorsement of a certain illegal substance reputed for its ability to turn otherwise-virtuous women sexually compliant is doubly repugnant for its endorsement of a looser national border to the south.

In this time of renewed reverence to our nation’s most important document, no more leeway should be afforded citizens unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, to the cost of others.

It is telling that our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, did not see fit to grant Americans a right to party. This was not because they were party poopers. No, the Founding Fathers were indeed quite festive. But they also understood that the freedom to smash a pie in a neighbor’s face also includes the liberty from having a pie smashed in one’s own face by a neighbor. Is it any surprise that the nation’s face-pie smashees would eventually tire of the free ride given the face-pie smashers?

As a matter of fact, our Founding Fathers guaranteed only our right to assemble “peaceably.” Never in American history has the destruction of private property been a right. Instead, far from granting any “right” to party, Article I, Section III of the Constitution states clearly, “The party… shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

Polls support this changed sentiment as well. Data amassed by the nonpartisan Institute for American Festivity show a full 62 percent of respondents believe partying should not be a right. This number jumps to 71 percent when polling for those “living at home.”

But as they dig their heels in to bitterly fight any significant reforms to, or even negotiations about, the “privilege” the rest of America affords these partygoers, it’s clear that this group of has-beens only understands when the volume is loud. The American public is responding, at the top of its voice: there is no license to ill.

Interchangeable Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Writer can knock out 800 words of typical right-wing propaganda dressed up with seemingly reasonable data in an hour, two hours tops.

“Narcissism, research shows, is on the rise…. Nathan DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, has come to the same conclusion based on quite a different avenue of research. DeWall and his colleagues analyzed the lyrics of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart from 1980 to 2007. They found a statistically significant trend toward narcissism in the music, with the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ gradually replacing ‘we’ and ‘us.’ Recent examples of narcissism in popular songs include Justin Timberlake’s 2006 proclamation, ‘I’m bringing sexy back,’ and Beyoncé’s 2005 line, ‘It’s blazin’, you watch me in amazement.’”