Tag Archives: all of them witches

01.13.19
by

Plot Holes

I don’t take things at face value.  Never have.  One could say that makes me a cynic.   But I’d say a realist.    So let’s split the difference and settle on a little bit of both.

Hell of a time to be living in for us cynical realists.

There is nothing wrong with watching what’s going on in Washington, D.C. these days and feeling like a skeptic who is positive some dry ice machine hidden just beyond our collective eye-lines is creating that incessant shroud of dense black fog we all continually find ourselves trapped in.

MUELLER WHERE ARE YOU

The FBI is investigating the president, OUR U.S PRESIDENT for being a Russian spy, a willing Russian stooge, or a blackmailed stooge being made to spy on HIS OWN COUNTRY by…..RUSSIA???

Why, it’s like some bad John LeCarre novel that you always felt you should read but decided not to when you saw how thick it was and considered that much time might be better spent at least attempting to read Proust.  Or your latest bank statement.

Just one of the many seemingly absurd Hollywood movies that seem more relevant now #KevinCostnerwasHOT #wow

Of course, there is nothing wrong with escape.  Us cynical realists do it all the time.  I, for one, am a sucker for cheap thrills in mindless entertainment.  But cheap doesn’t mean vague and unexplained and even mindless needs to feel reasonable.  Or, well, follow-able within the unreality that is being created.

Beware — minor spoilers lay ahead.

So will someone tell me: WHAT THE HELL WAS EVERYONE LOOKING AWAY FROM IN Bird Box????  And why??  Why??  Why?????  Why did it make so many of them suicidal and yet others of them spiritually reborn or evil or just clever?  Why Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich??? Why do you need a new kitchen or house or small plane that badly?????

And while we’re on this subject, or genre:  If John Krasinski’s character cared so much about his family you’d think he’d have removed that foot long nail sticking out of the floor in A Quiet Place the first 500 times he saw it.  Or at least after it almost pulverized his beloved wife the first time.  Why???  Why????  Why doesn’t this bother anybody else?????

uh yeah Jim, that’s what we want to know!

But that all begs the question of how an earnest film like Boy Erased, a movie all about a gay teenager’s coming of age, can show us an early scene of him being raped and then NEVER address it again in a story that deals primarily with sexual identity and psychological well-being?  Why???  Why???  Why is it okay to just IGNORE the ELEPHANT YOU PLACED IN THE GOSH DARNED NARRATIVE ROOM?????? WHY??????????????

No wonder I often spend my days feeling like Rosemary Woodhouse AFTER she’s pieced together the truth on her living room floor with Scrabble tiles while everyone else tells her that the truth really doesn’t matter at all and to simply stay in her room, turn up the air conditioning and be quiet.

How many points for COLLUSION?

Yes, there are a few spoilers here but does it seriously even matter anymore if we’ve forgiven everything else?  Or at least you have?

As a writer, I don’t believe you can write (nee create) an important character and not understand their childhood, their family or their love life.  And, if they’re really important, I even need to know their favorite food, color and sexual proclivities.

Call me crazy, but you can’t really get a person unless you understand whether or not they were raised by wolves (Note: Literally and/or figuratively), what they like to eat and who they choose to… well, you know… or if they simply choose NOT to with anyone.

Let’s get personal

No judgments here.  Ask my writing students.  In fact, I get a perverse pleasure out of watching morally questionable behavior unfold as long as it’s earned.   But that’s just a start.  If you’ve made this stuff up by the numbers, or use it lazily to create ridiculous choices and/or inactions, it’s no better.  Either a lack of data and/or vigor means at the end of the day we (Note: Okay, I) won’t be able to feel it.  All you will be giving me is incomplete or hackneyed information neatly arranged into a bunch of consecutive index cards or visual PowerPoint presentations.

This, more than anything else, is my problem with most Robert Zemeckis films.  Not that anyone asked. #ForrestGump goes #BacktotheFuture3X.  And #WelcometoMarwen.

Janelle, you are way too cool for Welcome to Marwen #JUSTICEforJANELLE

This could all account for why I’ve been grossly riveted to cable news and the horrific events of our current Electoral College POTUS these last few days.

Childhood: Raised in my hometown of Queens. Beat the crap out of other kids his age and younger in his youth.  Expelled from high school and sent to military school.  Used Dad’s $$$ to get him out of the REAL military and into IVY league higher education, during which time he was known to have never picked up a book.

What? I’m tired!

Family:  Raised in my hometown of Queens (Note: Still) by extremely rich parents  who marketed in racism, corruption and various other dirty deeds in order to build and keep their massive empire afloat.

Love Life:  Married three times, during which there were countless affairs, various incidents of rage, violence and at least one case of alleged rape with his first wife.  More incidences of sexual harassment and inappropriate manhandling of women in airplanes, parties, movie premieres and television sets than anyone can count.  Or would want to.

Is it working?

Favorite Food: Well-done steak, french fries, ice cream, anything McDonalds and an estimated one DOZEN cans of Diet Cokes per day.

Favorite Color:  Gold. (Duh).

Sexual Proclivities:  I can’t even….   Stormy Daniels knows all.  Though let’s give equal credence to the mysterious #PeeTape once it surfaces.  Which it inevitably will.

If you say Pee Pee Tape three times, Stephen Colbert appears.

The consistent, salient details of DJT has, if nothing else, made me BELIEVE his most unlikely of stories.   That is because if you simply pay attention nothing is shrouded in fog.  The data continues to unfold in a consistent pattern and with the rigor of the best Shakespearean tragedies.  That is where, in the final act, the main character meets his inevitable demise because of every action he took in each scene of his play.

It doesn’t take much to see it’s all very Aristotle’s Poetics.

Both storytellers and audiences should take note for future reference.

The All-American Rejects – “Dirty Little Secret”

08.13.17
by

A Tribe Called…

A 2010 gray Dodge Challenger registered to and driven by a 20 year-old Ohio white man at a white supremacist/Neo Nazi rally on Saturday barreled into a crowd and mowed down more than 20 people, killing at least one.

Those white supremacists and Neo-Nazis demonstrated the night before in front of a black church in Charlottesville, Virginia – yelling out the phrases “blood and soil.” This was a Nazi chant – about purity of blood and an ownership of land in the country one was born into.

Torch bearing white supremacists. This is 2017.

The problem is America is a nation of immigrants and no one other than Native Americans were born here. This country is not by birth or ownership inherently white. It is, as Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe stated on Saturday afternoon, an ever-evolving “mosaic.”

A few hours after the violence on Saturday, Electoral College POTUS Trump said it was time to heal and that for a long time there has been “hatred, bigotry and violence — on many sides.”

Say whaaaaaat? #twilightzone #TrumpAmerica

Well, actually, not in this case.

These demonstrators, with helmets, sticks, bats and loaded rifles, weren’t doing civil disobedience. They were doing intimidation. And at least one or more did domestic terrorism by getting into a car and using it as a lethal weapon.

All of this because the local city council voted to take down a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee – the Civil War military man who led the Confederacy fight to, among other things, preserve slavery.   Yup, more than 150 years after the defeat of the South and General Lee, a group of American representatives decided that it was finally time to take away the very public honorarium to a man warring in order to preserve the rights of wealthy white landowners to own and beat (and if they wanted to, kill) brown African humans at will.

Bet they are real proud of themselves #toolittle #toolate

What is this world coming to?

Let’s stop pretending that Trump’s qualifiers like on many sides aren’t in the same family as his racist dog whistles of bad hombres and people who come here who don’t speak English and that all of them aren’t a strategy to anything more than this:

A re-whitening of America through government mandated exclusion based on race.

Let’s also refrain from the make believe that his proposed mandate to ban transgender people from the military is anything more than homophobic hate support to mollify those who believe LGBT people don’t have the same rights to their country that they do.

And while we’re at it, let’s additionally not naively believe that because Trump has a Jewish son-in-law and a daughter who converted to Judaism – or a few Black people in his cabinet – that he won’t specifically malign and attack Blacks, Jews or any other race or religion as a whole if a particular member of that group publicly speaks out against him or disobeys a particular type of behavior (nee proposed edict) he wants normalized.

The garden is blooming

To qualify or allow for racism and hate is to lie down with it. To whit – the night before the guy in Charlottesville used the car to plow into the crowd – several hundred other white supremacists and neo-Nazis also assembled on a nearby University of Virginia quadrangle, shouting:

You will not replace us, Jew will not replace us.

When your chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is a man who ran a vast media platform admittedly for the alt right – an invented polite word for white supremacists and Neo-Nazis – and your deputy assistant in the White House is Sebastian Gorka – a man who openly wears a medal from a Nazi-linked Hungarian group to your inauguration – there’s not much left to be said. This is because you’ve already said it by NOT SAYING anything about whom you’re associating yourself with and what you’re enabling.

This reference never gets old.

Tribalism is not pretty but to some extent we’re all guilty of it. Meaning – we are all a part of something even if we don’t want to be or forever, to the nth degree, choose to be. This starts with family and continues or discontinues up or down depending on your point of view.

This week I found myself binge-watching all three seasons of Amazon’s acclaimed series Transparent. Yeah, you’d think I’d have seen it already and been a big fan.

I mean, I’m a gay Jewish guy from a family with more than its share of scandals and the fictional Pfeffermans in Transparent are a scandal-ridden Jewish family with not only a transgender patriarch but two lesbian sisters (well, maybe bi but one leaning far towards lesbian).

the real “modern family”

Still – full confession – after watching the pilot when it first appeared three years ago – there was something about this family that I SO DID NOT want to be a part of. I mean, they were too selfish, too neurotic and way too privileged for my taste. I mean, I grew up middle to lower-middle class and knew exactly who these people were despite the gay and the Jewish parts of them. They were the very people that, all through my life, annoyed the hell out of me. And looked down on me. I mean, I couldn’t..can’t…bear people like them.

Well, suffice it to say I was WRONG.

Because to some extent, yeah — they are me – or parts of me – no matter how much I may have wanted to run away from it.

Pretty much.

There is something about their cultural Jewishness – even with them being from affluent Pacific Palisades and me from middlebrow Flushing, Queens – that was undeniable in the bagels and shmeers and overwrought over-intellectualizing.   My family may have been far less outrageous sexually (well, that I know of) but we made up for it with other outrages of taboo behavior that I will save for another time.

As for neurosis, privilege and sheer self-involvement, they slowly became only a mere artistic exaggeration of behavior I had always known, too often exhibited and too often chose to forget, the more I watched. This was my reality, no matter how much I didn’t ever want it to be. And I sort of loved them for it, and in spite of it.

Now I’m not saying Trump or anyone in his White House should take a hard look at Saturday’s alt right (ahem) Neo Nazi demonstration of death and embrace that part of them the way I’ve done with the Pfeffermans. First of all, that analogy wouldn’t be fair to the Pfeffermans, even though I’m sure at least one of them would think nothing of pushing the same metaphor, and even worse, on you about me if they were real and I was fictional.

ahem…. Ali

What I am proclaiming is that each and every one of us – from every possible family and ethnic group there is – every last one of us – do that work for each and every last one of them. Make the analogy, claim the metaphor and push daily the very truth we see before our eyes in the White House and its association with the alt right/white supremacist/Neo-Nazi groupthink.

Trump rose to power and is now the president of American racism and Neo-Nazi/white supremacist behavior. So it behooves us all – every last one of us – who do not want this to continue to be our familial reality – to speak out against IT. Every day. Maybe even more than once a day. Before we no longer have the chance to safely do so.

Cher – “Half Breed”