“Everything the Left touches, it destroys” — Dennis Prager
To add a corollary: everything modern, left-infused culture touches, it also destroys.
For a variety of reasons, Cyrano De Bergerac was one of the bits of literature I grew up positively steeped in. I won’t say Dad – a speech, writing and literature teacher – was obsessed, per se, with the De Rostand book and the many theatrical and film versions that’ve appeared over the years (Jose Ferrer’s version was a particular favorite, especially once we got a VHS) being fairly constant fare at the Berg house.
And if you’re not familiar, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. I won’t spoil it; it’s most accessible version to Americans maybe the 1987 Steve Martin version ,Roxanne, which is as 1980’s a Steve Martin comedy as you can think of, but I think is an underrated adaptation…
…that stayed fairly faithful to the concept of the original story.
Last week’s kerfuffle between Spotify (and their contract employee, Joe Rogan) and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Barry Manilow and (reportedly) Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters, may not mark the point where the iconoclasm and “rebellion” of popular music fromthe 1950s through the 2000s finally died.
But it’s certainly a waypoint on populist conservatism’s path to being the real iconoclasts.
The strongest lyric on Kid Rock’s new single “We the People” is 235 years old: “In order to form a more perfect union / Do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”…On the day Kid Rock released his song, rock-music veteran Neil Young publicly threatened Spotify with an ultimatum: Either remove its broadcast of the political commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, or he’d remove his music from its streaming service. It’s enough to make a true rock and roller revolt…In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.
As with most things Kid Rock has done in the past three decades (but by no means all), light leaving “safe for work” right now won’t reach us for centuries. A radio edit bleeping out the profanity would sound like Morse Code.
You’ve been warned. Here goes.
Very NSFW. Probably not for family consumption, either.
The 1980s was the golden age of teensploitation movies; the Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink, Saint Elmo’s Fire, Risky Business, Weird Science, and many, many less memorable ones.
For me, maybe two of them have held up over time; Better Off Dead and Adventures in Babysitting.
I loved the Artemis Fowl books. I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.
Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler. The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.
Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base. But that fan base knows the character and knows the story. They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff. But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?
Joe Doakes
Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.
NOTE: This blog’s editing tool, “Word Press”, just keeps getting worse and worse. It ate the lede, literally, for this piece. We’ll try again.
I’ll cop to a certain amount of Schedenfreud, watching the array of reliably “progressive” and utterly un-funny late-night talk shows sinking beneath Greg Gutfeld.
Four years of Donald Trump made conventional late-night “comedy” indolent and lazy. Writers – many of them not very funny to begin with – seemed to think anything with Trump in the punch line would earn ’em a laugh. The “A-list” “talent” hosting these affairs – dismal talking heads like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, whose careers peaked at parodying “Red” media and watching women jumping on trampolines, respectively – aren’t helping much.
And few stories of of this decline make me happier than Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, which traded the (relative) wit and charm of Jon Stewart for…
…well, Trevor Noah. I’d normally tell a joke at this point at Noah’s expense, but it seems fitting to remain un-funny.
And between a lame host and “writing” that can’t quite find, well, any traction in any way, the Daily Show is sinking fast.
The “Daily Show” host is as reliably progressive as his peers, although he occasionally will smite his own side (at least far more than Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel). Still, his show’s most recent ratings snapshot isn’t bad
Noah has sunk below the unctuous, priggish John Oliver. Below the hapless and abysmal Samantha Bee. Ahead of the pointless, Colbert-produced “Charlemagne Tha God”, and nothing more.
While the New Yorker’s politics just keep getting more blinkered and puerile, their arts and entertainment coverage remains frequently excellent.
With that in mind, I commend to all of you this fascinating piece by Lee Remnick on Paul McCartney, on the near-eve of the release of a Peter Jackson documentary on the last days of the Beatles that is almost enough to make me consider subscribing to Disney+.
And don’t put some moron who cut his/her teeth writing comic book movies on the job of writing the screenplay; the story calls for someone of David Mamet’s stature and talent. Nothing less.
Don’t f*** this one up.
(NARRATOR: “Hollywood will f*** this one up”)
UPDATE: And in case anyone tries to morph some credit over to the civilian and/or military chains of command?
“This Herculean effort couldn’t have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,” Mann said.
Which brings up a troubling question: if one must defy orders to do the right thing, what does that do for unit cohesion and morale? The authority of the chain of command?
Hidden in this one bit of scarce good new is a lot of really awful stuff for the future of this nation’s institutions.
I’ve read a few good reviews – although I’ve tempered my enthusiasm by remembering that, outside classical music, the “critic” class is bastardized beyond salvation.
A lot of people are yukking it up over this story – yep, including me the other day. You recall it – Italian “artist” selling an “invisible sculpture” / block of air / “vacuum full of energy” for $18,000.
“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” Garau said of the statue according to as.com. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
Italy 24 News reported that per Garau’s instructions, the sculpture must be displayed in a private home free from any obstruction, in an area that is about 5 ft. long by 5 ft. wide. Because the piece does not exist, there are no special lighting or climate requirements.
The story was, to say the least, thinly sourced, to the point where the BS meter is howling.
On the other hand? This, along with the “dumpster fire” last week in Uptown Minneapolis, is the ultimate metaphor for society today.
It’s a cube of nothing – that means whatever the viewer can conjure from it.
It’s no different than “woke”-ism. Or “Critical Race Theory” . Or “Whiteness” theory. All of them are conclusions that are left to the viewer to fill in any way they want.
Signore Garau may be a garbage artist, and a con man extraordinare – even if you assume the story isn’t a hoax (and I’m abou 50-50 – mixing wealthy Frenchmen and dubious “art” is never completely implausible.
But the metaphor he is alleged to have constructed may be the best bit of literature, or at least the best bit of (unintentional?) literary symbolism of the year.
An Italian “artist“ just sold an invisible statue – and not for invisible money, either:
an artist has sold an invisible statue for 15,000 euros. His name is Salvatore Garau and he has managed to auction his “work” for an amount that many consider crazy. However, he defends his creation tooth and nail.
The artist explained that “the success of the auction confirms an irrefutable fact: the void is nothing more than a space full of energy, even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that nothing has a weight. It therefore has an energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is to say, into us
My mission is clear. I need to create a better space full of energy.
I’ve never much liked the entire “Seventies Midwestern Arena Rock” genre.
But among the bands in that genre, it’s Styx that’s always gone beneath and below the rest, the one whose impression to me swerves from apathy into active dislike.
It’s not that they couldn’t play. They certainly had live game.
But unlike REO Speedwagon, or Head East or Trooper or April Wine (I know, they’re Canadian, but they fit the genre) or Michael Stanley Band or any of the others that were more or less like them, Styx’s Dennis DeYoung spent most of the late seventies and eighties whining about how awful being a pop star was, how degrading the machinery of the stardom industry was, and what mindless sheeple the fans were.
To which I eventually responded “OK – then go to work in a meat processing plant and quit your whining”.
We’ll come back to that.
———-
This is the Sinead O’Connor I suspect most of us remember:
This is the response I suspect most of us, even us Protestant goyim that found, nevertheless, much that was admirable about JPII, would have loved to have made:
Thirty years and change along, and it turns out it wasn’t (just) rabid anti-Catholicism. Turns out she really, really, really loathed being a pop star, and she also had some serious mother issues:
In the book, she details how her mother physically abused her throughout her childhood. “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well,” she writes…O’Connor was 18 when her mother died, and on that day, she took down the one photograph on her mom’s bedroom wall: the image of the pope. O’Connor carefully saved the photo, waiting for the right moment to destroy it.
“Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis into another,” she said. And when she tried to call attention to child abuse through her fame, she was vilified. “People would say that she’s fragile,” Geldof said. “No, no, no. Many people would have collapsed under the weight of being Sinead O’Connor, had it not been Sinead.”
Of course, being an “artist” (I put the term in scare quotes not because O’Connor isn’t one – she was an exceptional singer – but because the term has been stretched far beyond meaning these days) means being able to pass the abuse on without ever having to adopt any sort of adult coping skills, which is one of the reasons people go into being one in the first place.
The piece is an interesting read, although kind of depressing by the time you get to the end and really digest it.
Oh, yeah – I said I’d come back to Styx and Dennis DeYoung. I have a habit of saying “we’ll come back to that”, and I don’t, always. I should go back through a few years of this blog’s history and finish some of those threads.
Anyway. DeYoung.
Uh…
Actually, for all the whining about the pop star life he had (and still has), and how vocally I dislike most everything he has ever written, in or out of Styx, DeYoung would seem have avoided the most cliched pitfalls of stardom; he’s abstemious and rigorously healthy, as devoutly Catholic as O’Connor is, well, not, and he’s been married to the same woman for 50 years; he used to take his family on the road to avoid, y’know, all the problems that families get when Dad is on the road all the time. And as whiny as most of his music was, in interviews he’s always been one of the funniest, most genial, and seemingly audibly well-adjusted, grateful people in the music business.
“What books made you forget it was a book, and just want to eat at the George and race through the NeverNever on spell-box powered motocycles and play with the band, command that ship, and run with the pack?”
I had that feeling when I was a kid, devouring the Sci Fi section of the local public library. I haven’t had it for a long, long time. Modern literature just doesn’t grab me and suck me in as it once did.
I miss that.
Joe Doakes
Possibility 1: we focused on the generally-acknowledged great books when we were younger. They seemed better because they were, pound for pound, better than the stuff you grabbed off the “New Releases” shelf at Barnes and Noble.
Possilbility 2: the stuff coming out today really does suck.
Background point 1: the Woke Mob in Hollywood has, for the past few years, been twisting itself into a self-righteous tizzy about “Tropic Thunder”, the 2008 satirical action comedy best described as “The Three Amigos go to Vietnam“; three prima donna actors to to Southeast Asia to shoot a Vietnam movie, and end up in the middle of a guerrilla war.
The movie was…not bad for anything involving Ben Stiller after Something About Mary. It also included Jack Black at the peak of his overexposure…
…and Robert Downey Junior, literally in (supposedly, satirically) blackface.
The PC mob, in full “eat its own” mode, has been on the…I can’t say “warpath” anymore, can I? The PC mob has been after the movie for Downey’s “blackface” appearance…
…notwithstanding that the whole point of the role is spoofing the arrogance of Hollywood’s “method actor” crowd, whose real-life methods weren’t a whole lot less absurd at the height of the fad. The “white method actor in blackface” schtick was, in fact, the same point the woke mob would like to make – actors sure can be disconnected, pretentious and arrogant – if they had senses of either humor or proportion.
It’s a point that is in fact, the only memorable part of that movie – which I remember being funny enough and not half bad, but then I only remember that because it’s the movie with Robert Downey in the perfectly absurd makup.
Background point 2: A key tenet of feminism is that women can do literally everything men can – and, more proximate to this post, females can do anything males can. (We’ll leave out the whole “even if they’re trans men and they’re in a weightlifting competition” bit – for purposes of this post, anyway).
OK. On to the post.
I don’t watch a lot of TV. I literally went six years without watching a network TV show – from the finale of The Office til sometime in 2020, I didn’t watch a single network television show (and other than local weather, nothing on their local affiliates).
For that matter, I went from the finale of Breaking Bad until probably a few months into the pandemic without watching much of anything on cable.
And truth be told, my habits haven’t changed much.
Even a show with a brilliant promotional campaign will rarely reel me in – and I say “rarely” out of pure intellectual honesty; it could happen, it might have happened, but I honestly can’t recall if it has happened.
If there was a show whose promos were not, no way, no how, ever going to reel me in, it’s…
In Ben Shapiro’s Sunday interview with Gina Carano that I linked yesterday, there were several passages that resonated.
One in particular:
I would go to a barbecue on the beach in California, and all these people would go [switches to sotto voce] “Hey, I agree with you. Messed up, isn’t it?”.
And I’d be…’This is your house. Why are you whispering?'”
It reminded me of another episode.
I was talking with a couple of reps from a metro media organization – TV, newspaper, it matters not. And when one of the representatives and I had a moment without the others around, that person swiveled their head around to make sure nobody was listening, and whispered to me “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I love [the NARN]. I’m on you guys side. I just have to keep quiet about it”. I felt a little like a reporting working in East Berlin or Warsaw in 1974, getting a furtive, samizdat note from a local that the Stasi or ZOMO wouldn’t be able to trace.
This was over a decade ago.
I think of this because it is now in vogue for lefties to tell people “there is no such thing as cancel culture. There’s just consequences for actions”.
Right. And that “action” is “dissenting from the progressive worldview in public”. No more.
Big Left has been ideologically cleansing academia for decades. They’ve largely consolidating their control of the educational-industrial complex. They’re consolidating Hollywood and Big Tech now. Along with that, they – and a Big Sort – are doing the same with major metro areas.
And conservatives have in many cases obliged by moving on to greener/redder pastures.
But just as Eden Prairie is following Edina into the moldy blue camp as conservatives concede the battlefield, the culture war is coming for you, wherever you are.
At some point, the good guys and gals have to draw their lines in the sand.
We’ll take a break from stanching the flow of blood from Western Civilization to reach across the aisle to admire on of the civilization’s crowning achievements.
The Guthrie Theater had to cancel its entire Spring and Summer run of performances because of the deadliest virus known to mankind. They need help to keep the doors open. Their state grants and corporate sponsors aren’t enough.
Won’t you considering digging deep to support the Arts?
As background: Thursdays are usually my slow day here on SITD. I usually do a little surge of writing over the weekend that tides me through the first half of the week – and the end of the week usually brings its own observations I scramble to get in for Friday.
But late-week fatigue, other commitments, and the like have made Thursdays the red-headed step-day of the Shot In The Dark schedule for years and years, now.
I’m going to fix that. Sort of.
So – the urge to do another book project has overtaken me. And writing Trulbert as a “Dickensian Serial” on this blog six years ago was not only a lot of fun, but short-circuited some of the usual pitfalls of trying to write a book, most particularly the whole “self-discipline” thing.
Indeed, I believe the fact that one of you readers called it exactly that was what sparked an interest to turn an extended series of “comical” posts into a novel. And it was suggestions in the comment section that led to an actual ending.
So I’m gonna do it again. I’m going to earmark Thursdays for the new project.
Or should I say, “new” project.
Thursdays will likely be light on other content, and devoted to a “chapter” of my next project.
I’m not going to say I haven’t enjoyed a few of your movies; “Zack and Miri make a Porno” was worth a watch. And Freaks and Geeks was pretty essential, although that was mostly a Linda Cardellini thing – and you played basically the same role you’ve played in just about every movie since.
Which brings us, with all due respect, to the point; you’ve kind of got a formula – to the extent that once you’ve seen one of your movies, you’ve kind of seen them all.
Which puts us in a bit of a pickle. I can’t “f*** off” and skip your movies, since logically, unless your formula changes, I have already seen all your future, lovable-bumbling-stoner/slacker-fish out of water movies as well
