And We Shall March

The Story Of The Giant Black Man Who Wanted To Be A Muppet That Made Me Cry

Being Elmo.

I've seen this documentary. You need to see this documentary. Here's the trailer:

Reading This Reminds Me Of Our Trying to Decide if We Should Institute A "No John Cusack" Rule. Ultimately We Decided No To, For Obvious Reasons..

We called it Talking In Movie, something I've written about around here sometime in the past, but I don't feel like searching my own blog right now. Update! Here it is. Though I don't do TiM anymore, I do miss it. This fab essay reminds me just how glorious this trilogy is.

Say Anything opens with a conversation about love, followed by a high school graduation, while Grosse Pointe Blank concludes with a 10-year high school reunion that ushers Martin into an existential crisis and emotional rebirth. The two films are also linked by two key speeches that serve as character arcs as well as social commentaries. Lloyd’s heartbroken admission on Diane’s answering machine that: “Maybe I didn’t really know you. Maybe you were just a mirage. Maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we’re all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it’s not your fault” returns in Grosse Pointe Blank (when Martin tells Debi’s father what his life has consisted of the past ten years) as: “Six figures. Doing business with lead-pipe cruelty. Mercenary sensibility. Sports. Sex. No real relationships with anybody.” The speeches also articulate the horror Debi feels when she discovers Martin’s true identity, for Martin personifies Lloyd’s elegiac description of late 20th century life.

Let It Be

Because all of life's questions can be answered in pop culture ... even as pop culture lies to you with every single breath. Which means it's up to the individual to make the call.

Right now, with several things going on in life that are not within my ability to control despite all attempts to do so, Let It Be is all I can do.

In a way, this song ties into Del Close's philosophy, maybe? Yes. It does. This is all so complicated.

I don't know if loving this song (in all its iterations) makes me a bad atheist or not. I just know that in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom. Let It Be.

Maybe it's all due to being the atheist child of an Evangelical Baptist and a Vatican I excommunicated Catholic? Or not. I don't know.

I just know I have leaned to this song in times of strife since childhood, and it works for me. It gets me through the roil and to the other side, where rational sanity waits.

An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help from the Association of Black Women Historians

The text below is from the Association of Black Women Historians, who released it either today or yesterday. They released it as a pdf, which, in my opinion, is not the best format to easily disseminate information that needs to be shared Widely and Right Now.

So! I have converted their statement into this linkable format. What I love? A resource list at the end! I have been threatening to put together a similar list as Reality Based Counter-narrative to that regressive, abysmal movie, and now I don't have to!

(I'll come back and do the line-item formatting later.)

Once (and if) the ABWH makes the document available in linkable form, I will edit this post with excerpt and direct link over to the full item on their site.

- End Me -

- Start the Association of Black Women Historians -

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America
to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters
are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.

We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones is National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University. Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross are Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Janice Sumler-Edmond is a Lifetime Member of ABWH and is a Professor
at Huston-Tillotson University.

Suggested Reading:
Fiction:
Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress
The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James
Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley
The Street by Ann Petry
A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction:
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph
To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter
Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by
Jacqueline Jones
Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to:
ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

Competing Tangos (Mostly Musicals Edition)

This one:

This one:

This one:

This one:

Or another one not easily obtained via YouTube?

#Ponder

 

O MY GOD YOU GUYS SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO EXTENDED CLIP WHICH I JUST NOW SAW

Of course I have no idea what anybody is saying in this clip, due to being a Basic American with command of only one language. I'm working on Spanish*** because where I live that's the most useful second language to pick up, but anything beyond that I'm too dumb/busy/exhausted to learn.

So my hope is that when this AWESOME LOOKING live action Star Blazers comes out on dvd (Hollywood is currently whitewashing the Akira adaptation, so I don't have much faith that this live action Starblazers/Space Battleship Yamato sans white people will show up in a theater near Me, and I have been hunting in the Usual Outlets in town for a dvd over the past year or so but with no luck) it will have English subtitles.

While waiting, I'll just sing the theme song at random!

*** I'm getting better with Spanish. Recently I held my own during six-minute conversation at a bus stop with someone(s) I don't know about the weather and the flowers and the schedules and, apparently, elephants. It was great until they couldn't take it anymore, fell out laughing, switched to English and explained to me the bits I got so very wrong. It was awesome!  Embarassing, but also awesome, just like every other time this happens when I try to unleash my Spanish. I'll get there. It'll take a while, but I'll get there. My experiences so far have shown me that I have an entire city to help me get there.

Life Is The Flower For Which Love Is The Honey

Beach! Movies! Picnic! Horsies! Mojitos! Fireworks!

Which was not how yesterday was supposed to be, but that's how it turned out through a series of ridiculously hilarious events. We couldn't have had more fun if we tried!

Also, once it hit me that TDoTM is pretty much an expanded, tweaked version of that G1 episode that pretty much had the same plot? It was even better!

 

 

"Shut Up And Eat Your AWESOME" Is The Name Of My Metallica Tribute Band

I will have more to say about ! Death 40-Feet Tall ! @ the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2011 in a bit. For now! This!

Update! "I'm, like, a true American."

Monkeys!

As you know, Bob, the best entry in the original Planet of the Apes film franchise was Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (even making allowance for the wuss-out ending imposed by the studio at the time). As you also know, Hollywood is remaking that film for some reason. And of course as you further know, that is if you know me in real life, that I have been !!! BITCHING AND COMPLAINING ABOUT THE VERY IDEA OF REMAKING CONQUEST OMG YOU FUCKING HIGHLY-PAID BASTARDS CAN'T YOU JUST COME UP WITH YOUR OWN IDEAS FOR ONCE !!!! since about four nanoseconds after the project was announced.

But. This new trailer? Oooo.

We'll see.

I love gorillas. Gorillas are AWESOME. Gorilla shock troops leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge to take out a helicopter full of cops? EVEN MORE AWESOME.

Great Interview With The Man Responsible For Penguins In Existential Crisis

I love Werner Herzog's  movies, and now I love even more that he gets why why this city is The Greatest!

Los Angeles is just a very exciting city. There’s great excitement, there’s vibrant culture, and there are a lot of things going on here that I wouldn’t relate to filmmaking, but yet they trigger films. For example, I was fascinated by the Galileo space probe, which at the end of an incredible odyssey was sent on a suicide mission into the atmosphere of Jupiter, where it burned into superheated plasma and was gone. Only 30 minutes from where I live there is a mission-control center in Pasadena, and because of this fascination with Galileo I found out that there was a completely unknown NASA archive in downtown Pasadena in a warehouse. I discovered footage of astronauts who filmed on 16-mm celluloid back in 1989, and it is such fantastic footage. In a way it was the backbone of a science-fiction film I made called The Wild Blue Yonder. So you see, the excitements are everywhere, and they don’t have to be connected with Hollywood or production companies.