Comments on the Washington Post article:
* “My parents were the kind of polite conservatives who would have been appalled by this year’s Republican presidential campaign. They belonged to that stuffy but understated class of Eastern WASPs who were gently mocked by the late satirist William Hamilton in the New Yorker.”
That’s complete BS. She can’t even write a piece about good, old-time values without taking shots at what she sees as the enemy. She ditched her parents’ values. Her enemy would have wanted her to keep them. If her parents where polite conservative WASPs who would have been appalled by this year’s GOP, they would have had heart attacks if they witnessed the democrats tranny-rights express. The whole country is messed up and it is boomers like this author who rejected her parents’ values that hold a disproportionate share of the blame. Passing it off on Trump and the people who want to restore some semblance of normalcy is disingenuous.
* Just read an article on Trump I found very illuminating, even though the author mostly does his damnedest to make Trump look ridiculous.
It gives you a good sense of the sorts of ill treatments that might have fueled Trump’s ambitions, financial, social, and political, across his life. One really has to say: the elites dismissed him with the same contemptuous ridicule and snobbery they accord to the rednecks they so obviously despise. This certainly explains much about the ease with which Trump has won over the sympathies of working class whites.
If Trump were, say, Jewish, and fighting his way into the snooty establishment, he’d be lionized by the media for his chutzpah. He’d be the hero Matthew Weiner might only dream about.
But what he is, you see, is a Vulgarian. A real, unabashed, honest to God, Vulgarian! Ugh! Yuck! Sniff!
The author is of course too deep into his cocoon to see the positive in his own portrayal, and to grasp the other angles from which the same events and character traits might be perceived.
* I went to the Django SAG screening. Most of the actors from the movie were there, to answer questions afterwards. My friend had asked me if I wanted to go to a movie at the last minute, and I said “sure,” and didn’t inquire about anything but the title, which meant nothing to me.
When the opening credits rolled, and I saw “Quintin Tarantino,” I turned to my friend and said, “you fucking asshole!” He whispers, “what’s the problem?” I whisper, “you didn’t tell me this was a Tarantino movie. Now I have to watch some stupid, crazy bullshit for at least the next two HOURS!”
As the movie progressed, I whispered to my friend, “why would you invite me to a movie in which a white person is executed about every two fucking minutes? what am I to glean from this? what am I rooting for, here?” My friend says, “just think of them as ‘the bad guys.’”
Then I noticed a white millennial, sitting by himself in front of us. I noticed that quite often, when a white person was executed, he clapped, and cheered. When the white southern belle of Candy Land was executed in such a way as she left her feet, he bounced up and down in his seat, laughing and cheering.
I said to my friend, “what do you make of a white kid cheering every time a white guy is killed? Not a particular white guy. Any white guy?” My liberal friend said, “he’s just enjoying the movie.”
So the ending credits roll, my friend jokingly asks, “so how’d you like the movie?” I say, “It’s going to get a lot of black people killed.” My liberal friend is incredulous. “What the hell are you talking about?!” I say, “this movie will empower the dumbest of the black folks. They’ll be watching it on their flat-screens at home, over and over. Their kids with no dads will be watching it all day, because their mom’s don’t give a shit, so we’ll have a bunch of indoctrinated black asshats, wandering the streets, using every police encounter as their personal, as-yet-unwritten-scene from Django.” My friend says, “you’r crazy.”
So then the actors come out, and the question-answer session begins. All the audience members who volunteered questions agreed that Django was Tarantino’s best movie since Pulp Fiction. The actors carry on about how Quintin Tarantino’s words are sacrosanct, like “reading words from the bible,” according to one.
Then the lead actress went on about her rape scene, and how it was hard for her to do, and she finally acquiesced because she felt she was doing a service to black people to “show it like it was.”
At this I stifled an unintentional laugh. Nothing anyone would notice–except James Remar. He looked over at me from the stage, and began glaring with intent. I broke eye contact with him, figuring it was a coincidence that he was looking my way with a concentrated furrowed brow. I looked back to him about 10 seconds later, and he was still glaring directly at me. I glared back directly at him.
His glare clearly implied, “I’d like to beat your ass.” My glare, I hoped he inferred, communicated, “I’d love to beat the shit out of YOU, ya chicken-shit ex-junkie.” As I was doing this, I was vividly imagining punching him square in the jaw. To this day, whenever I’m feeling low, I imagine punching James Remar in the face at the Django Question and Answer Session, and it always seems to lighten my load a bit. Because he’s a chicken-shit ex-junkie, who needs it.
This glare contest went on for at least half a minute. Very strange, but it happened. Any other time, I just go to SAG screenings, watch the movie, and leave.
Django was special to me, because I was sure it was going to get a lot of people shot, black and white. I didn’t want it to happen to either side. But I felt it was inevitable. I was the only one in the theater, apparently, who believed this. Everyone else was in victory mode.
I’m not happy to see exactly what I said would happen transpire exactly as I said it would. It just makes the world a little more shitty, and boring to me. I prefer pleasant surprises.
I guess I should have stood up during the Q&A, and asked a question. I had plenty I could have asked. I just wasn’t interested in casting myself as the focal point of an angry, aimless shitshow, as if I mattered in that context.
* Here’s what his childhood was:
In a recent interview promoting his new film “Django Unchained,” Tarantino revealed that his mom dated the NBA great and let it slip that she was one of the many notches on the Big Dipper’s bedpost.
“It was the ’70s and I was living with these three hip single ladies, all always going out on dates all the time, dating football players and basketball players,” Tarantino told Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air.”
“Professional ones,” Gross asked.
“Oh yeah, my mom, she dated Wilt Chamberlain. She was one of the 1,000,” Tarantino quipped about his mom, who split with his dad, Tony Tarantino, before he was born.
The filmmaker, of course, short-changed Chamberlain, whose self-proclaimed conquests in the bedroom are the stuff of legend.
He’s proud that his mother was batting practice for assorted jocks. This guy is f’ed up
* It has been 22 years, and (after multiple viewings) I still have no idea why anyone likes Pulp Fiction. It is ugly on so many levels.
I found myself sitting though it several times because it was popular with my coevals. More depressing to me than the movie was the enthusiasm that people had for it.
The first time I saw it was at a late-night showing in Richmond, California. Parents had brought their children to see it. I felt sorry for the children. The adults thought it was hilarious.
