Sunday, October 24, 2004

It’s early evening. The Bucs won today, although I won’t dwell on that because, having watched the game, I’m still trying to decide whether or not they actually had any opposition on the field. Griese continued to look sharp. Mike Alstott took what is now reported to be a season-ending injury to his knee, which is a serious blow (the Bucs have been near-ruined this season, as they were last, by injuries) and apparently Michael Pittman took a bad hit to the knee, as well… they don’t seem to know just how serious that one is yet. If he’s out for the season as well, things look pretty dismal for any kind of turn around.

Still, a win, even against a team playing about as badly as professional football has ever been played, is a win.

I just carved my Hallowe’en jack o’lantern. It is now out on the small concrete lip we Florida duplex dwellers laughingly call a porch with a candle inside it, looking pretty good. It being out there, while I am here, in the back bedroom, typing a blog page, probably for the next several hours, is less an act of faith than an active experiment. If it stays unmolested the rest of the evening, well, then, I’ll have high hopes I can put it out every evening leading up to the holiday itself. If it doesn’t… well, then, that’s a self correcting problem.

Although I’ll be annoyed.

There’s a lot going on at work, which, since some people from my job may or may not read this blog page, I can’t go into specifics regarding without undue hazard to my continued employment. Boiling it all down into a nutshell, business is bad… our work volume has been down for over a month now… and a chill wind is blowing through the entire place. Several people in upper management have been axed without warning over the past several weeks, and there’s talk that my own particular supervisor needs to make some changes on our team or maybe start updating her own resume… and all that is mostly surmise drawn from bits and pieces of rumors coming from several different corners, but I’ve worked at a lot of different places (I temped for the entire 90s) and the smell of doom is definitely in the air there. I imagine we have until the New Year before any serious decisions come down, but if volume hasn’t gone up by then, I may be out there looking for dishwashing work again.

Even if things don’t go that drastically, one of the changes my boss may have to make is throwing some people from our team back out into the general population… which no one wants, since the basic job, the one that generates 90% of the billable hours at my place of employment is something most people strenuously strive to transfer away from as soon as possible. Just lately everyone on my team has had to spend a few hours each work day doing that basic job once more, which absolutely no one is happy about… but people will be even less happy if they get tossed back into the grinder full time. And that’s the next step.

Supposedly, if my boss has to make that call, she is going to do it based not on seniority, but on our performance as measured by certain stats that management keeps track of. My stats have generally been good, but, well, I have a hard time believing the final decision will be made on that basis, since my boss clearly has some favorites among the more senior members of the team, and quite a few of those people have really spectacularly shitty stats. If any of them end up getting tossed back into the general labor pool, I will be shocked.

There’s a strangeness in the air…

NEGROES: The Problem That Won’t Go Away

The above title is courtesy of the National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, which came out in the mid-70s, and which was, overall, pretty hysterically funny. I still have a dingy, yellowing copy of it somewhere, packed away in some box, I believe. Along with headlines like that, it also features advertisements for movies like “BLAZING JEWS – Mel Brooks’ hilarious spoof of World War II” and comic strips called “The Amazing Squirrel-Man” and “Cap’n Nip Kicker”.

As a white male, of course, I’m not even treading on thin ice by using that caption; I’m pretty much drowning in ice water. Still, I’m running it because I am outraged and exasperated by something that occurred lately in nearby St. Petersburg… but even I’m not so rash that I’d dare to do it if I thought more than eight people read this thing, and ANY of them were black.

Still, I’m aggravated, and here’s why:

On Tuesday, October 19, 2004, a local rabble rousing black supremacist demagogue named Omali Yeshitela, who frequently promulgates often violent outlawry in the name of ethnic outrage in St. Petersburg, got a call from a high school student. Said high school student, whom I think it is safe to assume is of darkly hued countenance, saw a hanging dummy from her school bus window during her morning commute.

The dummy was a Hallowe’en decoration put up by a family named Watson. They put up a Hallowe’en tableau featuring a similar dummy every year. The dummy’s head is a stuffed rubber Frankenstein mask; its hands are hairy werewolf gloves; it’s body is clothing stuffed with newspaper.

The family calls the dummy “Bob”, and in past years, they have displayed Bob being decapitated by a guillotine, or lying in a casket.

This year, in a tableau that the 15 year old son of the Watson family worked two days on, the family hung Bob from the center of a home made gallows, by his newspaper stuffed neck, presumably until he was dead and God had mercy on his soul.

Alerted to this hideous ethnic affront, Omali Yeshitela, whose name in some African dialect translates roughly as “Dear God Why Didn’t You Let Me Be Born Al Sharpton”, sprang into action. Heading over to the site, the Non-Caped Crusader for all melanin enhanced pinheads everywhere saw, not a macabre Hallowe’en display, but something more ominous – a black man hanging from a noose.

Yet another dusky dimwit in the crowd, one Patty Melnick, is quoted as saying “I think it’s horrendous, it’s a hate crime.”

Ethnic outrage is, of course, a free pass to do whatever is deemed necessary by any exasperated private citizen regardless of minor concerns like, oh, the law. People like Yeshitela are, naturally, on a mission from God… or something. Petty things like private property rights don’t trouble them at all when there is a racial wrong that must be righted. Faced with the clear and present danger posed by a hanging, newspaper stuffed set of clothing, Yeshitela did not hesitate for a moment.

“It’s coming down,” he said, no doubt sounding just like George Patton leading a tank brigade on D-Day… or something. He opened the gate in the chain link fence around the Watsons’ yard, marched over to the home made gallows, and ripped that goddam dangerous dummy down. Supporters of his racial supremacist group Uhura followed him, dismantling the gallows and tearing the dummy apart, leaving the newspaper stuffing strewn about the yard.

As these maliciously destructive vandals streamed back off the property, leaving the evidence of their voilent rampage scattered over a privately owned lawn, a St. Petersburg police officer named Sgt. Glenn Stofer approached them and took their names, but did not arrest anyone.

Yeah, Glenn. You’re definitely the guy I want protecting MY home, family and chattels when I do my holiday decorating.

When I was… hmmm… I’m going to say, about 11 or 12, I guess… my family had just moved into a rented farmhouse outside Holland, NY, way out in the back woods on Whitney Road. We had a big yard with a lot of old oak trees down by the front road, and one Hallowe’en I created a stuffed scarecrow, took it out, and tied it up to one of the trees, with a couple of carved jack o’lanterns on the ground at its non-existent feet. I worked hard most of the afternoon putting it together and setting it up, with no help from anyone, and I thought it looked spiffy. My mom said it looked pretty cool, too.

I came home from school the next day and found the scarecrow strewn across the yard in pieces, and the pumpkins smashed into scattered, pulpy bits.

I felt like I had been personally assaulted. If it’s happened to you, you know what I mean. If it hasn't, well, you’re lucky. Just take my word for it, it’s a deeply unpleasant feeling, to have something you worked hard on, some display of your own creativity you were happy to be sharing with the world, ripped down and torn apart in this fashion by malicious little pricks with no respect whatsoever for anything except their own gratification.

We figured it was some kids who lived down the road, but we couldn’t prove it. If we had been able to, though… say it had been twenty or thirty years later, and someone had gotten the little fuckers on videotape doing it… the cops would have arrested them. Coming on someone else’s property without permission is a crime in and of itself; doing it for the sole purpose of committing wanton destructive vandalism is a fairly serious anti-social offense.

Unless, of course, you are black in St. Petersburg. Then, I guess, it’s okay.

In justification of his egregiously illegal act, Yeshitela, is quoted as saying “There is no history of hanging ghouls in this country but there is a history of hanging African people”.

Personally, I can think of a few I’d like to see, if not hung, then at least, strung up by the ankles and horsewhipped in public, right about now.

The kicker of it is this: Colleen Watson, the mom of the family, told police she did not want to prosecute anyone. On Tuesday, in fact, she called Yeshitela… and apologized.

Yeshitela, no doubt in tones of grave but righteous compassion, accepted.

Whether he told Watson she was a damned fine honkey bitch and obviously knew her place well when he did it is not mentioned in the newspaper account.

I should not have to explain this, and, given the that the limited number of people who read this thing are all pretty bright, I probably don’t. But I’ll be publishing this on the Internet, and you just never know when some dimbulb out there might do a random Google search, stumble across this page, and then hurtle away from their CRT shrieking “Oh my GOD there’s this racist nutball down in Florida who wants to string black people up by the ankles and horse whip them!” That being the case, let me be a little explicit here:

I have no more dislike of any race, or any gender, or any sexual orientation, than I’m going to have as, you know, a 42 year old Caucasian male who was raised in American small towns and cities in New York State in the last half of the 20th Century necessarily has to have, simply as part of his upbringing.

And that inculcated racism is something I view as being toxic, and that I consciously struggle against whenever I feel it manifesting. I do, honestly and sincerely, believe that it is wrong, and very, deeply, profoundly wrong, to judge another human being on the basis of anything except his or her behavior.

It may seem that I am being racist in this blog entry. I do not believe I am. I am responding to the individual actions of certain specific individual persons. However, it is more complex than that, because those individual actions of those individuals were, if you will, colored by their race, and by the race of the people they chose to act against.

In addition, the apparent consequences of these people’s behavior, which I believe should have included arrest and imprisonment, or at least, heavy fines and community service and probation, have been strongly and unfairly influenced by their race, and the race of the people they chose to act against.

I think those people, who went onto someone else’s land and destroyed someone else’s property, for no other reason than that they found that property offensive to their particularly, egregiously ignorant and idiotic and intolerant sensibilities, were criminals. Dangerous criminals, who should be punished, harshly, and in public.

However, I do not think that all people who look like those particular criminals should be punished just for the resemblance.

In other words, I have nothing against black people as a group, or white people as a group, or tan people as a group.

I do, however, have an intense loathing for self aggrandizing vandals and racial supremacists who feel that their ethnicity places them above the law. And make no mistake, these people are indeed racial supremacists. Had a mob of any other ethnicity invaded one of THEIR homes to tear down one of their holiday displays on grounds that members of the mob found that display profoundly offensive, they would be screaming for arrests, and in St. Petersburg, you had better believe arrests would be made, too.

Oddly, though, I come to the end of this entry and find myself agreeing with a statement made by someone I called a dimwit further up.

“I think it’s horrendous, it’s a hate crime.”

Indeed, Ms. Melnick. Indeed.

This is going to sound a little obsessive

Now, from an entry that could incite a mob of thousands against me, let’s move to something absolutely no one will care about in the slightest, but that I’m sure I’ll still end up blathering on for several thousand words about, anyway.

No wonder Elaine Riggs won’t read my blog any more.

I picked up a bunch of DVDs last weekend, as I believe I mentioned. One of them, Mask, is billed as “The Directors Cut”.

You know, overall, I like the general idea of a “Directors’ Cut”. It’s nice that a director maybe has a second chance, when a movie he had a big personal creative stake in is re-released on DVD, to re-edit it, or restore it to the way he originally wanted it presented to the public.

That’s in theory. In practice, I find it rarely works out so well.

See, I’m trying to think when the last time, or, for that matter, the first time, I thought a “Directors’ Cut” was better than the original version I saw in the theater was. And, you know, I’m good and goddamned if I can. Director’s Cuts are nearly always interesting, but, in all of the instances I can immediately think of, I would, at the very LEAST, like to have the opportunity to buy a copy of the original version on DVD, the one that I watched in the theaters and have probably watched again many many times since on videotape, in addition to the “Director’s Cut”.

Blade Runner… well, I won’t argue, I suppose the movie is, in some vague artistic manner, better with the sappy happy ending cut off and the hard boiled narrative over-voice chopped out… but you know, I kind of like happy endings, and I remember enjoying Harrison Ford’s pulp era detective story style narration, as well, the first couple of times I saw the movie in the theater. The Last Of The Mohicans… the Director’s Cut of that so annoyed me by leaving out certain utterly necessary bits of dialogue that I gave the DVD away and kept my videotape.

The Director’s Cut of Mask continues this sad, sorry trend. I’m going to have to keep my videotape copy, which annoys me, because my videotape copy, like most videotapes, is full screen, and I’m one of those really aggravating people who honestly prefers to see movies in the original widescreen format.

What’s annoying about Mask is that the Director’s Cut now has several Bruce Springsteen songs, some from “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”, others from “Born In The U.S.A.”, stuck in to the background, where prior to this, there had been several different Bob Seger songs instead.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking I am some kind of zealous Bob Seger partisan, or, for that matter, a Bruce Springsteen hater. I honestly see very little to choose between the two of them, and if I did have a preference, I would grudgingly give the edge to Springsteen… he’s a marginally better lyricist (albeit both of them tend to obsess on subject matter I couldn’t care less about) and there are probably a few more Springsteen tracks I genuinely enjoy than there are similar Seger tracks, and slightly more Seger tracks I cannot abide than similarly loathed Springsteen tracks.

Still, for the most part, the two are largely interchangeable to me. They’ve each done stuff I like, they’ve each done stuff I would happily blow up a turntable to keep from having to listen to ever again. I am, I suppose, much more likely to someday pick up a boxed set containing most if not all of Springsteen’s material than I am to ever bother with a similar set of Seger’s stuff. If I ever get the chance to burn an audible DVD containing music I will want to throw into a drive and listen to on random at any given moment for the rest of my life, there are definitely some Springstreen tracks I want, somewhere, on that disc… want enough that I’d buy them, in a cheap bin, somewhere. Seger… ehhhh. If someone gives me a few of Seger’s earlier CDs (the ones with “Night Moves” and “Hollywood Nights” on them, which I can’t remember the names of right now), well, I’d probably toss a few Seger tunes onto that hypothetical disc containing The Music Of My Life. But, still, I wouldn’t go out of my way; I’d put more effort into getting a copy of the Kings’ “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ To Glide” than I would anything by ol’ Silver Bullet Bob.

Having said all that, I love Mask and I have watched it many many times, both in the theater when it first came out and since then on videotape, and the substitution of Springsteen’s “Badlands” where Seger’s “Katmandu” belongs in the opening sequences of that movie are a painfully intrusive desecration.

Hey, I told you at the top no one was going to care about this entry but me. You didn’t believe me, that’s on you.

Having just watched and compared both versions of these films, well, what I am really pissed off about is an interview with director Peter Bogdanovich that is included as a Special Feature on the DVD.

Look, despite all appearances on this blog, I am not a completely unreasonable human being. Yes, change sucks, especially what I regard as unnecessary change to something that I greatly enjoy. “Buffalo Gals” is a pretty rotten song in my opinion, but if someone suggested using computer generated digital images and sounds to replace the sequences in It’s A Wonderful Life where Mary and George sing “Buffalo Gals” to… I don’t know… Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”, well, I and several billion other people would be outraged, and if we could somehow pin it on Dubya, he would definitely lose this election.

Nonetheless, sometimes things happen, and I am aware of these things, and however much they suck, you just have to deal with them. What I had assumed had happened, when I first watched this DVD and was horrified and appalled to find Bruce Springsteen mumbling his way through “Badlands” where Bob Seger screaming stridently about goin’ to Katmandu belonged, was that in between the original release of the film, and the release of this DVD, someone had lost the rights to reproduce those Bob Seger songs, so, they had had to be replaced.

This would have sucked, but hey, there really wouldn’t have been anyone or anything to blame, other than our annoyingly litigious copyright system… and since I still dimly and probably in utter futility hope to one day profit from that copyright system, well, I won’t bitch about that too much.

However, Peter Bogdanovich’s interview tells us otherwise.

This interview mostly seems to exist for the sole purpose of (a) letting Peter Bogdanovich tells us that yes, he really did get to nail utter babe and one time Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratton before she died, and isn’t he proud, and (b) to let P.B. relate to us that in fact, he had always intended, from the very start, to use these Bruce Springsteen songs in the movie, and in fact, he had used these Bruce Springsteen songs in his original cut, and Bruce Springsteen had never ever allowed any other director or producer to ever use any of his music in any other film, and he only did it because Springsteen was such a good friend of Bogdanovich's, and Bruce apparently thought Bogdanovich was this utterly brilliant genius.

Oh, Peter also took the time to mention that Cher really hadn’t hated him as much as she later said she hated him, and everybody else said she hated him, so that’s okay.

This means, instead of this simply being a case of somebody didn’t write a contract correctly back in 1984, or some studio secretary somewhere didn’t renew a license, it appears that this is, in fact, a deliberate decision on the part of the director… and we are supposed to be thrilled about this, because this is what the director had always wanted, and, in fact, the film is much, much better this way.

I have a couple of really serious problems with this, and these problems are over and above the simple “you are fucking with something I love that was just fine before, get your hands off it, creep” factor that, I admit, is always present when someone does that sort of thing on me.

First, and this is probably something that, even if anyone out there besides me cared at all about this nonsense, they’d still have to admit probably doesn’t matter very much, but, nonetheless, I care about shit like this: this movie is clearly set in 1979-1980. It says so right at the beginning of the film, when Rocky first shows up at school.

“Born In The U.S.A.” did not come out until 1984.

Now, the movie was made in 1984, but it is set in 1980, and having a character listen to music that will not be recorded for another four years is, to my way of thinking, a mistake.

Again, that’s probably not anything that anyone besides me is going to give a shit about (not, as I keep mentioning, that anyone besides me is going to give a shit that the music in an obscure Cher movie got switched around a little on DVD, anyway).

However, this next thing bugs the shit out of me:

I think Bogdanovich is lying.

I realize that’s stunningly arrogant, even more arrogant than my presuming to say that I believe a particular version of a movie is better than the one that the director himself picks as being the best version of the movie.

Nonetheless, I still think Bogdanovich is lying, and here’s why:

Bogdanovich claims that for the opening sequence of the film, they actually played “Badlands” so that Eric Stoltz could dance around to the tune and sing along and what have you, and it would look authentic. If so, this is rather rare; as a general rule, when you see people on TV or in a film interacting with music, they are doing it without actually hearing the music itself. Music, like dialogue, gets added to the soundtrack later, and synced as precisely as possible with the movements of the actors… and things like this are why ‘acting’ is actually a lot harder than most of us think, and perhaps there is some small justification for the salaries successful actors get.

Now, I believe that they did actually play the song that Eric/Rocky is dancing around his room to and singing along with as he gets dressed at the start of Mask. Eric’s movements are perfectly synchronized to that piece of music. At one point, as he looks into the mirror, there is a particular beat and guitar stroke and the singer yells and Eric, at that exact moment, gives a jerky little nod of his head and makes a kind of bobbing motion that is perfectly in synch with the song. It looks absolutely convincing; you know as you watch this, without even thinking about it, that Rocky is indeed listening to… well, to “Katmandu”, by Bob Seger.

Watch it on the DVD, and it doesn’t look anything like as good, and Rocky’s odd little head-duck and body-jerk simply don’t work.

I’ve watched it a couple of times, and I simply don’t believe that Eric was dancing to “Badlands”. He was dancing to “Katmandu”… and Bogdanovich is trying to sell me a bill of goods.

This is all subjective, of course, and honestly, it makes more sense that I’m wrong, than that a successful Hollywood director bothered to record an interview and put it on a DVD trying to convince people of something that just isn’t true. I mean, why would anyone CARE enough about the substitution of these tracks instead of those tracks to make up this convoluted lie about it? You’re not going to hear the interview until after you buy the DVD. Once they have your money, why would they care how pissed off you are that the original soundtrack has been fucked with?

I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, Mask is better in the original version than it is in the Director’s Cut (in my opinion). I would like to see the original version of Mask put on DVD, in widescreen format, and since it probably won’t ever be, I will have to hang on to my videotape, even though it is in full screen.

And, in my opinion, Peter Bogdanovich is a lying louse… plus, he ain’t all that great a director. I mean, even Ridley Scott has done a few good movies, and he never put They All Laughed on celluloid, either…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.