"Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This is not a review; rather, it's a freewheeling, tangential discussion of art, alternative ideas, and popular culture."
This time around, it's a conversation with Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder, about Star Wars, Episode 2. II. Something with clones in the title. Haven't read the article, as I suppose I should see the movie first. But the rest of you go on ahead. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.
As some of you weren't paying attention the first few times:
'Black Hawk Down' Video Game Planned for Holidays
"Beer (oddly unidentified other than by last name in the version I read - A.) said the last mission of the game is the one depicted in `Black Hawk Down,' though he said it will steer away from the actual fate of that mission so as not to offend anyone, and will exclude scenes of bodies being dragged through streets."
Satire is not only really dead, it's really most sincerely dead.
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How the. . . fuck do you manage to graduate from a major American university (regardless of which department you're in) without knowing who bell hooks is? Seeing as they're all hotbeds of political correctness run amuck and all?
Professor hooks, Brown (heh) Visiting Scholar of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University, is quoted as saying during her commencement address:
"The radical, dissident voices among you have learned here at Southwestern how to form communities of resistance that have helped you find your way in the midst of life-threatening conservatism, loneliness, and the powerful forces of everyday fascism which use the politics of exclusion and ostracism to maintain the status quo. Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits."
Not seeing the problem here. Then again, I got Hillary at my commencement, telling us about universal health care, and we all know how that ended. . .
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I'm not taking any bombastic rhetoric about "P.C. thought police", "gestapo tactics" or "political correctness run amuck" seriously until a group of suburban, het, white, male frat rats are found bound, gagged and shot execution-style in their fraternity house at a midwestern university.
Actually, first I'm going to laugh my ass off, but then I'm going to start listening to complaints.
Ok, laugh my ass off, then dismiss the event as a troubling, but isolated incident, but if it happens two or three times over the course of a few weeks, then I'll recognize that there's a problem, call for a blue-ribbon commission to study it and shitcan their report when it finally comes out a few years later.
What?
Elvis Mitchell's weekly show on KCRW, "The Treatment", features interviews with, among others, writer/actor/director Kevin Smith, comics/screenwriter and artist Frank Miller, director Sam Raimi and (ugh) Harry Knowles.
Mr. Mitchell also has a segment on Weekend Edition Saturday, discussing comedians in films, and reviews the new Jerry Bruckheimer release, Bad Company, in Friday's New York Times.
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From the, apparently, childless, melanin-impaired Christopher Caldwell at The Weekly Standard:
"UH-OH! R. Kelly is in big trouble. He's been arrested for having made a dirty video with a 14-year-old girl. From the time I first heard the news on a drive-time talk show until yesterday morning, when I read about it in detail on page 1 of the New York Post, I've been unable to shake the same nagging question:
"Who in the hell is R. Kelly?"
(Link swiped from Tapped)
To quote Jessica Skolnik: "I wish I didn't understand the overwhelming popularity of being Loud and Crass and Stupid. I'd be a lot more hospitable towards human beans if I didn't."
To paraphrase Maggie Estep: "No, I don't got a problem with white people. Just stupid white people."
R. Kelly performed "I Believe I Can Fly" on the Space Jam soundtrack. A film featuring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan is about as mainstream as you can get. Caldwell also pleads ignorance about Aaliyah and Selena, which is fine, but goes on to ask, "why do these people get dragged out of their narrow marketing niches and cast as society-wide VIPs in whom we are all assumed to have taken an interest?"
"these people"
Christ, I haven't even sent out Raymond's award yet. . .
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Cultural ignorance cuts both ways, of course.
Play two brief pieces from symphonies, and I couldn't tell you which was Hector Berlioz and which was Peter Schickele.
(Ok, I probably could, but I'd convincingly pretend I couldn't. I'm keeping it real. Or something.)
(Does the gag work better if it uses the P.D.Q. Bach moniker instead of his real name?)
There's an apocryphal story about a classical music announcer (DJ's are for the vulgar) ascribing a work to "George Gershwin, and his lovely wife Ira." I use that line pretty much the same way I sometimes wear a Smith College t-shirt; to see who's paying attention.
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Anita Hill writes, of the FBI's Coleen Rowley and Enron's Sherron Watkins:
"Though each woman had attained respected insider status, I can't help but wonder whether, given their gender and the nature of the institutions, the feeling of being inside was complete. This uncertainty may have caused them to consider whether their gender would be used as the basis for ignoring their complaints or attacking them as malcontents in retaliation for their criticisms."
Please demonstrate passing familiarity with at least some of the essays in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power : Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, Toni Morrison, Editor, before commenting on Anita Hill. You can snag a copy for a buck and quarter plus shipping if your local library doesn't have a copy.
"As usual, few complained about the facts of the story detailing racial tension and class separation among black and white gays and lesbians. They were angry that somebody told it."
I am not Your Negro Tour Guide.
Ok, so I'm a sucker for Br'er Rabbit Jokes. Sue me. Also, ignore this line after Friday the 7th, since the strip gets updated daily, and the archives require filthy lucre.
"Oh look, the Maasai just found out about September 11, and gave us some cattle. Aren't they cute?"
"Actually, that does put the lie to the notion that the entire world was united by the even---"
"And Senegal beat France in the World Cup. Good. Hate the French."
"Well, y'know, France did provide a haven for black American artists like James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, but the Senegalese probably did enjoy beating their old colonial masters."
Beat.
"France never had colonies in Africa."
Beat.
"Um, Algeria. . .?"
"Oh, North Africa isn't really part of Africa."
". . ."
"Not like sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, North Africa had writing and cities and. . . what are you doing with that letter opener?"
"It's shiny. I like things that are shiny. Pray, continue."
I give up.
Meryl Yourish visits Times Square, and notes: "I heard African from a family dressed in bright colors, pointing at landmarks."
Because, you know, there's a country, Africa. And the people there speak a language, African.
(Not like I can immediately tell, say, Spanish from Portuguese, or Welsh from line noise, but geez.)
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Yes, it's hypocritical to complain about the portrayal of blacks in the media while enjoying the old Jack Benny Program. I can give you some bullshit excuses about placing the show in historical context, if it you want.
It helps that, unlike the folks on WB and UPN these days, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson was actually funny.
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The guard who picked up the phone and said that drawn-out "Ye-e-e-s?" in the Simpson's episode where Homer (doesn't) almost get executed was yet another Frank Nelson type.
If I can't purge the pop culture trivia, I'm going to inflict it on others instead.
If, like me, you're a moron, and use "previous" instead of the shorter, compliant "prev" in your rel links, remember:
perl -i -wpe 's/\"previous\"/\"prev\"/g' *.html
Perl is your friend. Perla is a character in Love & Rockets. Bauhaus is not Love & Rockets.
Terry Moore will only be doing three issues of DC's Birds of Prey, instead focusing on his own series, Strangers in Paradise. Gilbert Hernandez takes over as writer with #50. Gilbert did not do the stories featuring Perla; that was his brother Jamie. Try to keep up with me here.
In commemoration of the release of Mozilla 1.0, the site now uses a feature . . . which was not included in Mozilla 1.0. Bugs involving tabbed browsing, long story, doubt you're interested.
Seems to be working in Galeon and lynx, though. And looks effin' hideous in links, but does anybody use that?
For the majority of visitors, who are using one version or another of Internet Explorer: scum. Although I do wonder how the good people at University of Minnesota feel about "outdated format" line. . .
Remember, Illinois = Mosaic = World Wide Web (shut up, CERN-guy). Minnesota = gopher = "fucking pathetic".
Went to listen to Miles' cover of Human Nature, and my copy of You're Under Arrest seems to have gone missing. If the wormhole drops if off near you, the track is lovely, if not particularly representative of the man's work. Come to think of it, no one tune is particularly representative of his work. That's one of the things that made him so damn charming. Well, if you ignore the stuff about Cicely, anyway, but luckily American society has a quite accecpting attitude towards domestic violence. Yay us.
I also liked the other guy's live version of the song, so you maybe wanna ignore my music recommendations. . .
Lileks delivers unto us an ode to Minneapolis today. Although it's hard to be sure from the text itself; he never actually mentions the name of the place, saying only that he lives in "a major city". So I'm not positive this is the place he means. After all, what the hell is Minneapolis known for?
(looks up)
Ok, other than The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As and associated groups.
(found some of the tracks The Purple One did with Miles Davis on isn't-it-dead-yet? Napster, or maybe with one of the gnutella programs. Still half-heartedly searching for Madhouse's albums on that vinyl stuff, since I don't think they were ever re-released on cd. Think they -- along with George Clinton -- got majorly screwed during TAFKAP's little tiff with Warner Bros.)
After reading Lileks's rantings, I've decided that smokers/fat people/straight people/corporate executives have it wrong, and defense attorneys are the only group it's still ok to discriminate against in horribly P.C. America.
I mean, think about it. Your typical episode of Law & Order has the detectives pick up some young person of color totally unrelated to the crime they're investigating, who they grill over the objections of sleazy defense attorney(tm), and later it looks like the D.A.'s might lose the case due to evil strategems employed by the actual perpetrator's sleazy defense attorney(tm).
This is why I prefer Columbo. None of that courtroom stuff, just Peter Falk annoying the hell out of everyone until somebody confesses just to shut him up.
I think I shall run for office as a black Republican, on a platform of increasing funding to public defender's offices and completely abolishing the Marital Rape Exemption. As we all know from Colin Powell's speeches before the Republican conventions, they don't listen to a single word you say, no matter how much it goes against their platform, because the symbolic power of someone with dark skin joining their club clouds their minds.
Just as a heads-up: when Cynthia McKinney said the Bush administration had no interest in the opinions of black people, she wasn't referring to the two (unelected) high-profile people working in the White House, but rather to the 90+% of us who didn't vote for Dubya's dumb ass. Thought that was an obvious point, but there seem to be some very slow children out there. And they all have blogs.
There's talk of making Rudy Giuliani the vice presidential nominee when Bush runs again in 2004. Guess they really don't want the black vote. . .
Saw a video installation a few years back at Krannert Art Museum in Shampoo-Banana, showing work from the guy responsible for, among other things, the opening minutes of the first Superman movie (kid reading a comic) , the credits sequence from Lethal Weapon 3 (ice skater drawing lines of flame) and a trailer for Blade Runner (zooming in on a bar code and "Tyrell Corporation" logo on a woman's neck).
I have, of course, forgotten the artist's name. Anyone?
Negro what? Negro where? Negro when? Negro today.
Son, wipe
your feet.
