Title: Side by Side
Platform: iPad
Cost: Ad-supported: free. No ads (pro version):$1.99
I learned about Side by Side just about a month ago and since that time it’s become one of my go-to apps. The app fills a need for those that use an iPad as a desktop, netbook, or laptop replacement. As a device for getting work done. Side by Side achieves this by making it possible to have up to four pieces of content all visible at the same time on the iPad screen.
I’ve used Side by Side in a few different ways. Here are a couple of examples:
- Each week I favorite Tweets that I think will make good content for the YALSA Blog’s Tweets of the Week. When I’m ready to write the weekly post, using Side by Side on my iPad, I open up my Twitter favorites list at the top of the iPad screen and the YALSA Blog entry screen at the bottom. Quickly I can copy and paste from top to bottom, add content to the blog post as necessary, and write/create the post all on one iPad screen.
- Recently I needed to look at a website, read what some people had written about the site, and then respond via email to the comments on the sites. I did that all on my iPad with Side by Side. On the top of the screen I pasted in the URL of the website I needed to look at and could then view the site on the top of the screen. On the bottom left I had the comments from others on the website open, and on the bottom right I had email open so that I could respond to the comments. It worked perfectly.
Those are just two examples of how I’ve used Side by Side and I’ve come up with ways that it can be used by librarians and teens:
Teens who are working on a project that requires they look at content on the web while taking notes, creating a bibliography, or outlining can use Side by Side to do all of those tasks without having to move back and forth through screens on the iPad.
Librarians who are searching through the library catalog or the web to create curated lists of materials for teens can do that on an iPad without having to move between screens. The catalog or website can be open on one area of the iPad screen and the list can be developed on another side of the screen.
I have to admit that Side by Side isn’t perfect. Even after using it for a few weeks I still get confused by some of the menu items and I sometimes have to use trial and error to get the windows to show in the form of organization that I’m looking for. Also, while I can access files that are available via Dropbox, which is great, in order to edit those files I need to copy the content and paste it into the notes feature of Side by Side.
Even with these imperfections, Side by Side is still a very useful app for both librarians and teens. It does make it possible to get work done on an iPad and saves time in the process. Give it a try and see what you think.
Imitation of Life by Fanny Hurst was published to great success in 1933, made into a film in 1934, and then again in 1959. All three are a fascinating window on race in the USA. Fascinating and deeply depressing.
The movies are kind of an obsession of mine. Particularly the contrast between them. So much changed in those intervening 25 years, and so very little. David Kehr in today’s New York Times describes the films thus:
Douglas Sirk’s 1959 “Imitation of Life” is among the most closely analyzed films in the Hollywood canon, a Lana Turner soap opera 
turned into an exercise in metaphysical formalism by Sirk’s finely textured and densely layered images. Less well known is John M. Stahl’s first film version (1934) of this Fannie Hurst novel about the complex bond between an enterprising white businesswoman (Claudette Colbert) and the black woman (Louise Beavers) who becomes her housekeeper and supplies the secret formula for pancakes that becomes the basis of Colbert’s character’s empire.
That was the year that Hollywood began seriously to enforce what had been the largely toothless Production Code, which, among its many nefarious effects, would result in the near disappearance of socially engaged films for the next two decades. But Stahl’s “Imitation of Life” still benefits from the frankness and skepticism of the early Depression years. Though hardly free from stereotyping, it stands today as perhaps the most powerful Hollywood film about race until the civil rights movement of the 1950s.
Hardly free from stereotyping is right. The black characters are happy with their place in the world. All but the housekeeper’s daughter, Peola, who is so light-skinned she can pass for white. Yet in both films her decision to do so seems inexplicable. The black people are all happy. Why would you want to be pretend to be one of the tormented white people? Look how hard the white man’s burden is!
If you were an alien watching the movies you’d be scratching your head trying to figure out what was so very terrible about being black. In neither film are there any cafes with signs saying “Whites Only.” The black characters never have to sit at the back of the bus. There’s no mention of slavery, lynchings, or the civil rights movement.
There is one horrible scene of racism in the 1959 version, but it plays out as though racism is just that particular person’s problem, not anything systemic. The most you get in the 1935 version is the kids at school looking shocked when they discover that Peola is passing. Their reaction shot lasts less than five seconds.
One of the things that puzzles me most is that in 1934 a black actress was cast in the role of the daughter who passes as white, but in 1959 she was played by a white actress. What’s up with that? Were there truly not any light-skinned actresses of Fredi Washington’s (pictured above) calibre around in the 1950s? Colour me doubtful.1
I find the 1934 version more powerful because it doesn’t lose its focus on racism; the 1959 movie winds up being largely about Lana Turner’s scandal ridden life, specifically her daughter killing her mobster boyfriend. David Kehr’s is spot on about the final scene of both movies:
Like the Douglas Sirk version, Stahl”s “Imitation of Life” climaxes with a lavish funeral procession. But what Sirk turns into a triumph of coolly expressive visual style becomes, in Stahl”s version, a sustained march of silent protest against a system as unjust as it is deeply ingrained. The film seems unable to put a name to the monumental grief it depicts with such devastating force.
That’s a large part of the problem with boths films: they are about systemic racism and injustice, but they cannot name them. Both films are exercises in avoidance, shame, and lame liberal justifications. What fascinates me is their inability to articulate the bleeding obvious: It is unjust that the black woman who makes the white woman’s life of money and privilege gets so little for it. It is unjust that the black woman’s daughter cannot get what she wants unless she pretends to be white and then when she does that she is punished.
Both films are clear that the problem lies with Peola for trying to be something she is not. Her passing is what is at fault, not the system of racial inequality that makes passing as white an attractive path.
But most of all neither of these films are about Peola or her mother: They’re about the white woman. Claudette Colbert in the first film and Lana Turner in the second. I’ve always longed for it to be remade with the focus squarely on the black woman with the miracle pancake mix.2
Happy Super Tuesday to all you USians living in those states. Vote well! I bet Peola would be happy to see a black man in the running, but sad to see how much racial and sexual inequality still exists. But we can change that, right?
