End of Watch is a big sloppy wet French kiss to the L.A.P.D., tongue swirl and all. Depending on how you feel about the L.A.P.D. and/or how effectively or whether you are able to put those feelings aside for a movie, you may really enjoy this movie as a neo-western or you may be a bit put off by yet another mainstream film in which most of the dying is done by the racialized other. Just once, I would like to see a modern film in which whites sacrifice for non-whites and die doing so. Those films tend to be pretty rare, Django Unchained notwithstanding. Ok, my particular racial hangups aside, what's this film about and how well does it work? Well it's directed by the same fellow who wrote Training Day and S.W.A.T. and directed Street Kings and Harsh Times. So if you liked the plot or characterization in those films, you probably will appreciate the storyline here. It's not all that different. Two L.A.P.D. officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Miguel Zavala (Michael Pena) are close friends and partners who share a rough camaraderie as they patrol the streets. Brian is a former Marine. Nothing is off limits for them. They tease each other a lot in ways that might be considered inappropriate were it not for their tight bond. Brian playfully mimics the singsong patois of Mexican-American women (Zavala is married to his high school sweetheart Gabby (Natalie Martinez) ) while Miguel cheerfully mocks the nasal Caucasian valley girl vocal rhythms of the Anglo girls Brian pumps and dumps. Brian is starting to get serious about one such woman in particular, Janet (Anna Kendrick). Neither Martinez not Kendrick have a lot to do here since their roles are decidedly secondary but they do very well with what they have. Martinez's big moment comes when she gleefully and graphically describes to a young couple exactly how a newly married wife should ensure that her husband doesn't cheat. The movie's hook is that Brian is taking pre-law classes. One course is media studies so he's filming everything he and his co-workers do. For obvious reasons, his fellow officers aren't fond of this and tell him so repeatedly. No one wants to show up on youtube. They (jokingly?) threaten to beat him up while one stick in the mud complains to higher authority. The film's sweetest scene is after Brian and Janet have enjoyed carnal knowledge of each other. Janet tells the sleeping Brian (via his camera) how much she loves him but also takes the opportunity to go through his wallet. She finds names and numbers of other women and throws them out, telling the camera "Oh, you won't be needing these any more". I have heard that women sometimes do such things.
But it's not all just fun and games. The dynamic duo is aggressively looking for bad guys. They don't like writing moving violation citations or handling less dangerous, more routine work, much to their sergeant's (Frank Grillo) dismay. He has ticket quotas that need to be met and he doesn't need cowboys. Miguel and Brian are also constantly warned against being too aggressive by an older, quite bitter cop, Van Hauser (David Harbour) who tells them that he knows from horrible personal experience that the department will not back them up if things go wrong. Van Hauser is the sort of person people generally avoid speaking to as even telling him "Good Morning" is likely to set off a long diatribe about the person who ******d him over back in 1997 and how he's gonna get him back some day and how he doesn't make enough money, and his woman left him and life is one big bowl of s***. I worked with a few people like that and I'm sure you have also. Miguel is insulted and challenged to a fight by a Bloods member Tre (real life former Bloods member Cle Sloan). Miguel beats Tre fair and square and arrests him but doesn't charge him with assault because that would have been a third felony. Tre respects this and later tries to do Miguel a favor. But first Tre survives a driveby from the local Mexican-American gang which is assiduously attempting to drive all blacks out of what it now considers to be a Mexican neighborhood. The drug rivalry and racial hatreds feed into each other. The Mexicans are depicted as very much the worst of the worst here though honestly Black people (especially black mothers) don't come off that much better. You could very easily watch this movie and think to yourself "Who the **** lost LA?". I don't know if that was the film maker's intention or not but that question certainly crossed my mind.
After the driveby murder (they aren't supposed to be investigating it as they are not detectives) Miguel and Brian make a few arrests, shake some people down and stumble upon what they later learn are links between the city's Mexican-American gangs and the Mexican cartels. The cartels have a completely different set of rules regarding murder and who can or can't be killed. The Sinoloa Cartel does not automatically consider police officers to be untouchable. Miguel and Brian unintentionally disrupt an ICE investigation into human trafficking and narcotics importation. They are warned off for jurisdictional issues and concerns about their safety. Of course it wouldn't be much of a movie if they listened to this warning. This movie really looks realistic. I liked the cinematography. Every shot is captured by what looks like handheld cameras, surveillance cameras, dashboard mounted or cop mounted cameras or even night-vision. There's more than a hint of conspiracy or federal cover-up as we see ICE or other agencies gather intelligence on threats to L.A.P.D. officers without sharing it with that department.
Yahira Garcia, aka Flakiss , a Latina rapper with no acting experience, steals most of the scenes she's in as "Lala", a swaggering thugged out racist lesbian gangster. She's Snoop's (from The Wire) evil twin. America Ferrara, Cody Davis, Shrondella Avery, and Kristy Wu also have roles. Obviously this is a violent film. There's gunplay, beatings and dead bodies. I didn't think it was over the top for an action film but YMMV. I'm kind of inured to cinematic mayhem. There are a few scenes which I DID think pushed the limit so take that for what it's worth. The film makes a few sharp changes in tone, which may catch you by surprise. The finality of death, as well as its banality, punches you in the gut. If I were a cop not only would I always have vests and body armor I think I would make sure I'm coming home at end of watch no matter who else gets got. TRAILER
Looper directed by Rian Johnson
There are some movies which almost must be seen a few times just to get all of the little hints and stories within stories that are being told. Looper may well be one such film. I watched it a few weeks back and will probably watch it again this weekend. It was really that good. It could be a new Matrix. Time travel is something that has always fascinated people perhaps because it opens up some unanswerable questions about destiny, free will and causation. While supposedly physics allows for time travel as far as I know no one has ever done it. I'm not sure if special and general relativity also allow for time travel into the future as that would really throw causation into question. It's like the ball being hit before the pitcher throws the ball. I remember reading somewhere that such a thing would also imply faster than light speed which also seems to be a fundamental quality of our universe. I don't know. I'm not a physicist and all of this is FAR beyond me. Maybe someone with physics knowledge can chime in.
Time travel into the past seems to be a bit more conceivable but again you get into that tricky question of destiny and free will. Physics has some theories about different choices (quantum) creating different universes. I am making the choice to type these words right now but perhaps in another universe I didn't and so my life goes down a different path. And maybe every living being makes an infinite number of choices and so there are literally an infinite number of universes. Maybe your mother didn't smile at your father at just the right time and so you never existed. Maybe you don't exist now and are just a figment of my imagination. Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" was an excellent short story that examined the perils that time travel into the past could engender. Looper is an excellent movie that examines all of the decisions that you make and how they impact your life. I know for damn sure I wish I had some decisions back because they turned out to be the wrong decisions. But what if I could send myself back in time a decade or more to talk to myself. Would the younger Shady listen? What if the younger and older Shady not only don't like each other but have violently conflicting interests? Or would this all be pointless because what will be will be? The moving pen writes and having writ moves on and such. Or maybe time is really an illusion. Perhaps past, present and future are all one and it's just that our perception is tragically limited, much like the square in Flatland who is visited by a sphere, whom he perceives as a circle that can randomly and apparently magically change in size.
It's hard to talk too much about this film without giving spoilers but basically in 2044 time travel is not only considered possible it actually takes place. Or to be more precise, it takes place in 2074 but the effects occur in 2044. See by 2074 time travel has been invented but it's not legal. Murder still exists but it's virtually impossible to get rid of a body. So criminal organizations being nothing if not inventive send their victims back in time (with payment attached) to 2044 where hitmen called loopers kill them and dispose of the body. Eventually the looper's future self will be sent back to 2044 where he will be murdered by a younger version of himself. No witnesses, no bodies, no snitches. This is called closing the loop. Left unexplained is exactly why the older looper in 2074 wouldn't have the memories of what he did in the past and what his employers intended to do to him. It seems like such a person, being the resourceful violent thug that he is would take steps to kill people in 2074 or failing that go underground. Anyway as is explained in voiceover the hitter business doesn't attract a lot of deep thinkers. So it's a nice little setup for looper Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a cold blooded man who is also skimming a little bit from the payments he receives. Joe also has a thang going on that is a little more than client/call girl but something less than boyfriend/girlfriend with prostitute/stripper Suzie. (Piper Perabo)
An affably evil hitman from the future Abe (Jeff Daniels) oversees everything to make sure no one gets too far out of line or asks questions they shouldn't. Joe's co-worker and only friend Seth (Paul Dano) shows up at Joe's apartment with a harrowing tale. Seth was on the verge of closing his own loop when his future self told him they were being played and that some unknown man called the Rainmaker was killing all the loopers prematurely. Seth thought twice about killing his future self. Older Seth escaped and now Abe and his crew are looking for both Seths to terminate them. Initially Joe hides Seth but when Abe explains the facts of life Joe sees the light. Eventually Joe terminates his own future self (Bruce Willis). Or does he? Gordon-Levitt not only wears makeup and prosthetics to make himself reasonably look like a younger Bruce Willis, he also does a pretty fair job of mimicking Willis' thin-lipped smirk, vocal cadence and casual one liners. Future Joe has his own plans, which obviously conflict with those of present day Joe.
Words can't explain how good this movie is. Just see it. It combines action, drama, some really deep questions about causation and time, Freudian overtones, and oh yes, the battle for one soul's redemption. And the special effects are not only awesome, they are surprising, which is getting increasingly hard to do. Emily Blunt and child actor Pierce Gagnon have critical roles. I also liked this film because the ending does not explain everything that happened or will happen. You can have different interpretations. It's a pretty smart flick and doesn't spoon feed you things. Looper shows that sci-fi or action films can be just as smart as any talky drama. I'm definitely going to watch this again because even writing this I can think of a few things which I missed or am now thinking about differently. Once you start to think about the paradoxes and loops within loops you might have to sit down for a while. TRAILER
Irreversible directed by Gaspar Noe
I think Monica Bellucci is one of the planet's most beautiful women. Because I recently watched Amelie I thought I'd check out another French language movie. So for those two reasons I sat down and watched Irreversible in its entirety. As the President might say, let me be perfectly clear. This was a mistake!I should not have watched this film. Let me say that again in stronger language. Watching this movie was like going to an expensive exclusive restaurant , sit down to eat a scrumptious looking salad, think the taste is odd and then discover a half-eaten piece of excrement in your salad bowl. So you will gag, attempt to vomit, demand alcohol and mouthwash and spend the next few hours trying to forget what you just did. And when you angrily confront the waiter, chef and management, they smugly point to small print on the menu that reads "There may be small pieces of sh** in salad added for taste.Caveat emptor!!"
To be fair, I had heard that some of this movie's scenes were rough. Bellucci herself had said they were among the toughest things she ever did. I had seen bits and pieces of Irreversible over the years and knew the basic story outline. But I had never watched the film all the way through or seen the infamous scene unedited. So this was a bit of a shock. And I don't shock easy.
Irreversible tells the story in reverse chronological order and jumps around a bit. This can be confusing sometimes but it would have worked here were it not for the underlying ugliness. Two men, Marcus (Vincent Cassel-Bellucci's real life husband) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), are frantically searching for the homosexual pimp who attacked, beat and raped Alex (Monica Bellucci). The rape scene is the ugliest, harshest and bloodiest I've ever seen. It's also seemingly interminable. Unwatchable. There are ways to show that someone is the bad guy without also seeming to enjoy the defilement and degradation of a woman.
Marcus and Alex are an item. Alex and Pierre used to be together but in a bit of strangeness Marcus and Pierre are good friends. The trio hang out together constantly and don't mind sharing intimate details. At a party Marcus is behaving like a bit of a jerk. He's high and fondling other women. Alex gets annoyed and leaves, declining Pierre's offer to escort her home. Homosexuals and transgender people are portrayed as the scum of the earth, who aggressively seek to inflict their "perversions" on other people. The homosexual/S&M underworld is NOT a place you want to visit. Things that were hinted at in Blue Velvet are shown in full frontal here. Cassel does a good job portraying the anguished guilt and insensate rage of a man who will kill the entire world if that's what it takes to get rid of the fact that he failed to protect his woman. His acting is about the only "good" thing in this film. Now where's my mouthwash? TRAILER
Alexandre Dumas is best known today for his swashbuckling adventure/revenge stories such as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Corsican Brothers and several others. What's not widely known is that details of and inspiration for Alexandre Dumas' bestsellers often were drawn from stories and memories of his own father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. Thomas-Alexandre, who generally preferred to be known as Alexandre, was the son of a dissolute French nobleman (who sold his own children into slavery) and a black Haitian slave. He rose to claim aristocratic status and worked his way thru army ranks to become a General (and rival of Napoleon). He died when his son was only four. Once you become familiar with the General's story, his feats of derring-do, his struggles against racism, the intrigues of nefarious aristocrats and bigoted bureaucrats, great battles in the Alps, fortunes won and lost, it becomes very apparent that his son the novelist loved him dearly and put bits and pieces of him in just about everything he wrote. It is amazing how the more things change the more things stay the same. The accounts of police harassment that the elder Alexandre had to deal with in France, especially if he were in the company of a Frenchwoman, as he often was, read like something out of 1930s Mississippi. There were French laws requiring the registering of anyone with African blood and petty apartheid rules were occasionally enforced (No black person could be called "Sir" or "Madame".) On the other hand, like Britain, France had a tradition of not tolerating slavery within its borders, regardless of what it was doing in Haiti or elsewhere, and of rewarding talent regardless of race. It was between these clashing interests that people like General Dumas and Chevalier St. Georges made their way..
I've always loved exploring history. It's like an uncharted hemisphere, and when you look at it closely, it has a tendency to change everything about your own time. I'm also drawn to outsiders, people who have swum against the tide. I often feel like a kind of detective hired to go find people who have been lost to history, and discover why they were lost. Whodunnit?
In this case, I found solid evidence that, of all people, Napoleon did it: he buried the memory of this great man – Gen. Alexandre Dumas, the son of a black slave who led more than 50,000 men at the height of the French Revolution and then stood up to the megalomaniacal Corsican in the deserts of Egypt. (The "famous" Alexandre Dumas is the general's son – the author of The Three Musketeers.) Letters and eyewitness accounts show that Napoleon came to hate Dumas not only for his stubborn defense of principle but for his swagger and stature – over six feet tall and handsome as a matinee idol – and for the fact that he was a black man idolized by the white French army. (I found that Napoleon's destruction of Dumas coincided with his destruction of one of the greatest accomplishments of the French Revolution – racial equality – a legacy he also did his best to bury.)
I first came across Gen. Dumas's life in the memoir of his son Alexandre, the novelist. And what a life! Alex Dumas, as he preferred to be known, was born in Saint Domingue, later Haiti, the son of a black slave and a good-for-nothing French aristocrat who came to the islands to make a quick killing and instead barely survived. In fact, to get back to France in order to claim an inheritance, he actually "pawned" his black son into slavery, but then he bought him out, brought him to Paris, and enrolled him in the royal fencing academy, and then the story begins to get interesting.
What really stuck with me from reading the memoir was the love that shows through from the son, the writer, for his father, the soldier. I could never forget the novelist describing the day his father died. His mother met him on the stairs in their house, lugging his father's gun over his shoulders, and asked him what he was doing. Little Alexandre replied: "I'm going to heaven to kill God – for killing daddy." When he grew up, he took a greater sort of revenge, infusing his father's life and spirit into fictional characters like Edmond Dantes and D'Artagnan, with shades of Porthos, too. But the image of the angry child stuck with me and drove me onward to discover every scrap of evidence I could about his forgotten father.
And recovering the life of the real man behind these stories was the ultimate historical prospecting journey for me: I learned about Maltese knights and Mameluke warriors, the tricks of 18th-century spycraft and glacier warfare, torchlight duels in the trenches and portable guillotines on the front; I got to know about how Commedia del Arte influenced Voodoo and how a Jacobin sultan influenced the Star-Spangled Banner, about chocolate cures for poisoning and the still brisk trade in Napoleonic hair clippings. I discovered the amazing forgotten civil rights movement of the 18th century – and its unraveling ...
As we discussed previously and on multiple occasions the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, sent some conservative whites into paroxysms of rage or valleys of despair. Now obviously not all of this was racially based but a great deal of it was, with the comments and snarks by people like Sununu, Palin, Nugent, and more recently South Carolina GOP Executive Director Todd Kincannon. The main issue that some people seem to have is that despite the fact that overall Romney won a majority of the white vote of both genders (59% overall, 62% of white men and 56% of white women) that simply wasn't enough to give Romney a victory, let alone a decisive one. Some folks just can't wrap their heads around why that happened. The reasons will still be debated and discussed for quite some time but they include at least three salient points:
The country has become more diverse. The white vote in 2012 was just not as large a portion of the electorate as it was in 2004 or in 2008, let alone 1996 or 1992.
The Republican party has become overly identified with a particular form of social conservatism and radical free market theory that remains quite popular in the South but is not easy to sell in the Northeast or to a lesser extent in the Midwest, and is virtually impossible to win with in California.
Recently, The New Republic magazine produced a cover story by New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus (he's also an author) that basically argued that Republicans (since at least the sixties) explicitly became the "party of white people" and have worked that particular mojo for about all it's worth. You can read the whole article here.
"Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?" Kevin Phillips, the prophet of "the emerging Republican majority," asked in 1968, when he was piecing together Richard Nixon's electoral map. The eleven states, he meant, of the Old Confederacy. "Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"
Forty-five years later, the GOP safely has Oklahoma, and Dixie, too. But Phillips's Sunbelt strategy was built for a different time, and a different America. Many have noted Mitt Romney's failure to collect a single vote in 91 precincts in New York City and 59 precincts in Philadelphia. More telling is his defeat in eleven more of the nation's 15 largest cities. Not just Chicago and Columbus, but also Indianapolis, San Diego, Houston, even Dallas—this last a reason the GOP fears that, within a generation Texas will become a swing state. Remove Texas from the vast, lightly populated Republican expanse west of the Mississippi, and the remaining 13 states yield fewer electoral votes than the West Coast triad of California, Oregon, and Washington. If those trends continue, the GOP could find itself unable to count on a single state that has as many as 20 electoral votes.It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide.
Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.
But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.
So what's going to happen with the Republican Party going forward? Are things quite as dire as Tanenhaus would make them seem? Is Tanenhaus doing a little premature spiking of the football and touchdown dance? Well maybe. Look, the Republicans have lost four out of the last six Presidential elections. They would be foolish not to examine why. And the 2012 loss is going to sting them for a while because not only did they lose (again) to a racially different incumbent presiding over a sluggish economy, they did virtually everything but take out signs saying "Don't vote for that (insert racial slur of choice)! "and they still lost decisively. Republican operatives or media personalities attacked President Obama's parents in the nastiest and ugliest of ways but it just didn't get the job done. The electorate is just not what it was in the good old days. Certain tricks just won't work any more. The Republican party needs to do some soul searching and some addition by subtraction. This probably explains the slow thaw on immigration reform. I am sure that over time we shall see similar overtures made on abortion, contraception and gay marriage. There is some evidence that younger voters are less open to the current Republican message. Republicans will need to change that to remain competitive going forward. Hoping that President Obama messes up for the next four years might be gratifying but is not really a political strategy.
On the other hand, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Whites are still the overwhelming majority in this country and will continue to be so for quite some time. Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives and are the majority of governors. So obviously many people think that some Republicans are doing a good job. No one knows what will happen going forward but we do know that President Obama (absent some very unlikely turn of events) will not be on the ballot in 2016. A more charismatic and less ideologically rigid Republican candidate could very easily win in 2016. I have no idea who that person might be. By 2016 there will have been more Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, voting rights, and racial discrimination cases. These decisions could theoretically move more white voters to vote Republican. Or there could be millions more Hispanic voters that might vote Democratic. The Republican Party is stuck between the frying pan and the fire. Does it more explicitly embrace a grievance based white nationalism and try to get its base out? It could do that but then lose almost everyone else. Or it could become Democratic-lite and try to sell a message of limited government, low taxes and free markets (without any ugly racial overtones) to a changing demographic. However so far it hasn't had success doing that with Hispanics, Asians or Blacks. "Limited government" often has racialized meaning to different groups of people. It's very difficult to have a racially neutral discussion about "states rights", "negative rights", "rugged individualism" or several other tropes of Republican belief. What to do, what to do...
Questions
1) Do you think the Republican Party is the party of Whites?
2) If so how can this change? Should it change? What's wrong with looking out for "white interests"?
3) Can Republicans win back the Senate and the Presidency or are they a dying party?
4) Will the Republican party split between the social conservatives and economic conservatives?
As you may know Prince has not exactly been a fan of online music, either for free or for pay. He once sued youtube to force removal of all uploads of his music. His music, his rules. Well that may be changing somewhat as Prince or apparently (hopefully) someone with his permission recently placed numerous uploads of new Prince music online for free and for purchase. Maybe this signals a permanent thaw in the Purple One's often frosty relationship with online music consumers. I was first hipped to this on a different board by a younger friend who is likely the biggest Prince fanatic I've encountered in quite a while. And that's saying something, I think. The rumor is that there is a new album that will be released later this year. I hope that's the case.
Anyway check these out and enjoy. Some of this stuff harkens back to his early 1980's Cars inspired rock-n-roll sound, with straight eighth chank rhythms and synths. Other music not only makes nods to jazz, for all intents and purposes it is jazz. Much would not have sounded out of place on seventies George Benson or Crusaders albums. No one is going to mistake Prince for Joe Pass anytime soon but he still remains one of modern music's most fascinating and eclectic songwriters and performers. I grew up with jazz enthusiasts and was proud and lucky to do so. I don't think they would have automatically rejected some of this music, which in and of itself, would be pretty high praise for someone like Prince, who is not and has not been considered a jazz musician. Some blues musicians and scholars have been known to make the claim that essentially all popular music descends from the blues one way or the other. The drastically reworked song "I could never take the place of your man" which has been turned into a Hendrix/Hazel workout complete with gospel type vocals certainly would seem to support that pov. I could not believe this was the same song. I don't know how long any of this music will be online so go download purchase it now.
The Midwest in general and Ohio in particular was a hotbed of soul and funk in the sixties and seventies. Ohio could boast musicians and groups like Bootsy and Catfish Collins, Slave, The O'Jays, Lakeside, The Dazz Band and of course The Ohio Players. The Ohio Players were led by guitarist and vocalist Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, who just recently passed away. As I've discussed before many people who like to write themselves into history argue that as black audiences lost interest in traditional blues, such music was kept alive by British or White American bands. Well there's something to that but it is also a fact that traditional blues morphed into soul and funk. Sugarfoot Bonner and the Ohio Players certainly are prime examples of that. A tremendous amount of their music has blues roots or is straight up pure blues ("The Reds"). Bonner himself was a hardcore blues guitarist when he first started out. Bonner was a bluesman for his generation. The Ohio Players grew out of the backing band for such greats as Wilson Pickett, Mack Rice and Eddie Floyd, none of whom were known as "blues" singers per se but all of whom had tremendous voices packed with blues feeling. Shortly after lead guitarist Robert Ward left to go on to a solo blues/soul career and almost singlehandedly keep the sound of the Magnatone amplifier alive, Sugarfoot Bonner joined the band, now known as The Ohio Players.
The band signed to Detroit based Westbound records, where like label mates Funkadelic they soon became known as much for their record covers (often softcore S&M) as for their music. Musically The Ohio Players created a potent melange of soul, funk, R&B, blues and jazz. They didn't get quite as far out as some of the Funkadelic or Hendrix stuff. The Ohio Players had an explicitly jazzier sound. I had heard some of their music on the radio or at relatives' homes but because of the record covers I generally wasn't able to get too many of their albums into my home as a kid. So as a result I was much more of a P-Funk fan than an Ohio Players fan growing up. I didn't really get into them seriously until late high school and college when I was more able to do what I wanted to do. The Ohio Players had more commercial hits after they left Westbound and signed with Mercury Records. At Mercury they had a more smoothed out sound and one with slightly more prominent horn breaks. Bonner took over most of the singing and became the band's most identifiable front man. His double neck guitar, outrageous outfits and especially his pleading drawling "awwwwwwwwwwww girl" vocals, were a signature. Bonner wasn't the first singer to use that vocal style (Bobby Bland anyone?) but he was one of the most popular. He influenced people like Lionel Richie and Larry Blackmon. I wasn't a huge fan of the drummer for some reason. I can't quite say why.
Their first big hit (at Westbound) was "Funky Worm", written by keyboardist extraordinaire Junie Morrison, who later joined Funkadelic. "Funky Worm" lived on in just about any rap song recorded between 1990 and 2000. The Ohio Players had hits with "Fire", "I want to be Free", "Sweet Sticky Thing", "Fopp", "Who'd She Coo?", "Far East Mississippi" and several other tunes. I love the bass line on "Pain". I don't know who started it but there was an urban legend that the scream heard on "Love Rollercoaster" was that of the cover model who was murdered during the recording session.Obviously untrue but in the pre-internet days this just added to the band's mystique. "What the Hell" sees Bonner turning up the amp and giving us a very lengthy memorable modern blues solo. Their early cut "You Don't Mean It" has the bass turned up a lot, which is just how I like it. The horn riffs on "Food Stamps" have an ever so slight resemblance to the horn charts on Al Green's "Love and Happiness". I'm sure it's purely accidental...
This is from the HBO's Game of Thrones Season Two Blu-Ray extras. The Blu-Ray and DVD sets will be released on February 19. As in one of the previous extras I posted, Rose Leslie as Ygritte provides a quick explanation of an important element in George R.R. Martin's world. In this case she discusses The Night's Watch, that legion of men who have volunteered or more likely been sentenced or exiled to the far north to keep out the Wildlings (or Free Folk as Ygritte would prefer) and provide early warning/defense against any invasion by less natural creatures.
Chris Kyle, a former US Navy SEAL, was the most dangerous sniper in the history of the US military. He had over 150 confirmed kills and multiple Bronze and Silver Stars. Kyle was wounded in combat. He completed four tours of Iraq and once killed a rocket launcher bearing insurgent from a little over a mile away. In short he was the best at what he did. When he left the military to be with his family he wrote a best selling autobiography, American Sniper, detailing his story. He didn't take any of the royalties from this book but instead donated them to the families of SEALS killed in combat. He also gave away the money he made from appearances or book signings. Kyle started a non-profit foundation, FITCO, to work with veterans suffering from disabilities, whether physical or emotional/mental like PTSD. Kyle did a lot of hands-on volunteer work with veterans. He was pretty dedicated towards raising awareness of the challenges that veterans face reintegrating into society and doing what he could to help veterans meet those challenges. Kyle was supposed to help work security at the Super Bowl but evidently decided to decline that opportunity in order to volunteer with a veteran he didn't know, Eddie Ray Routh, who was suffering from PTSD. The men went to a shooting range. Apparently, at some time on Saturday, Eddie Ray Routh murdered both Chris Kyle as well as a friend of Kyle's, Chad Littlefield. So a man who survived four tours of Iraq and an Iraqi bounty being placed on his head was murdered in the US. Kyle leaves a wife and two small children behind.
Now this isn't the first time this has happened to a combat veteran. And it definitely won't be the last. The news is full of stories where someone survives the war zone abroad only to return home and get murdered. Usually when things like this happen, people murmur words of sympathy and curse the evil person who took the life. But see, Chris Kyle was also something of a conservative who was quite proud of having served his nation in the Armed Forces. He also was not a fan of current gun control proposals or the current Administration. I haven't read his book yet but it's probably a pretty fair bet that Kyle was probably close to if not 180 degrees different from my political beliefs. So evidently that made it okay for some people to snark or joke about his untimely death. Whether it was the Mother Jones editor implying Kyle's death showed we needed more gun control because even SEALS aren't safe, random twitter users calling Kyle a hillbilly liar, saying his death was poetic justice or karma,alternet commenters calling Kyle a "mass murderer","psycho", "serial killer", or Ron Paul saying that "live by the sword die by the sword" there was an unseemly number of people that were eager to denigrate Kyle (and by extension all soldiers) after his death.
I am not a fan of an interventionist foreign policy. I did not and do not support the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But once we're there, we're there. Chris Kyle did not commit war crimes. He killed people in a war zone who were trying to kill him or other Americans. He wasn't sitting in Langley dropping bombs on children and or writing memos claiming the right to kill Americans. He put his life on the line overseas to save soldier's lives. And upon his return he continued to look out for soldiers. He died trying to save a soldier's life. There are American veterans today who are alive because Chris Kyle was watching their backs. You may or may not think that makes him a hero, but there's no way that makes him a bad guy as far as I can see. But even if you do think that Kyle was a bad person for his politics or his attitude, I don't see why someone should crack jokes or make light of his death. Is that where we've come to as a nation? Someone politically opposed to us is murdered and we hurl insults and unfunny jokes? That's disgusting. I have family members who served in Desert Storm. I am very glad they returned safely. Another younger relative is at West Point now. In the unthinkable event of their murder I wouldn't have much nice to say to anyone who implied that their death was somehow karma for their "bad" deeds or politics. Even if you think that our foreign policy is wrong and needs to be radically changed as soon as possible, (and I certainly do) I just don't think you do your argument or yourself any favors by making fun of dead soldiers. Something has gone very wrong in our political culture when someone's death just invites more vitriol. Given time and experience Chris Kyle may have become a modern day Smedley Butler. Or he may not have. He may have stayed most comfortable on the right. Either way he (nor most other human beings) did not deserve to be murdered and then mocked after death. Again, it's not about if you agreed with his politics or not. It's just basic human decency. One of Kyle's last interviews from January 2013.
This was Ferrari's first novel. It's impressive. The book is longer than 600 pages. I don't think that Ferrari needed quite that much room to detail everything that happened. But the story hardly ever drags. The Book of Joby is as you might expect from the title, an epic, humorous and magical retelling of the The Book of Job from The Bible. It also nods to some other popular religious conspiracy books but that doesn't become apparent until later. As usual Lucifer is trying to find a way to destroy all creation. Lucifer remains convinced that man is God's biggest mistake. Due to his pride (he was the Morning Star after all) Lucifer thinks that God is simply too stubborn to admit that Lucifer is right. God remains an engaging being who has seemingly infinite patience for Lucifer's shenanigans. God reminds Lucifer that Lucifer has only won bets with God twice (Adam and Eve and Judas) and that both times Lucifer's victories rebounded to God's and humanity's glory. Eager to prove his creator wrong, Lucifer claims that God cheated in the Jesus situation. God responds that He never said Jesus would stay dead. Lucifer just assumed. The two immortal beings make another bet. Lucifer still insists that given time and resources he can make even the most righteous human despair and curse God. God says he can't. If Lucifer wins the bet, God agrees to wipe creation and start over using Lucifer's ideas, which primarily involve getting rid of that nasty little free will feature that humans have. Free will drives Lucifer crazy. God will pick the human whom Lucifer will get to test for about 30 years. Neither God nor any of His angels will interfere. Lucifer and his hellish subordinates can't kill the human or threaten to kill him but can do anything else.
The chosen child is one Joby Peterson, an unabashedly happy and optimistic nine year old with fantasies of being King Arthur, fighting the devil and doing good. Both God and Lucifer appear in Joby's dreams and obtain veiled permission for his role in what's to come. Starting immediately and ramping up through first puberty and later adulthood, Lucifer and his minions find many ways to attack Joby's self-esteem. They seek out every weak spot and exploit it. Whether it's preventing Joby from finding true love, causing a Joby led protest to go horribly wrong or telling Joby that only perfection may get God's love and entrance into heaven, Lucifer stays busy. The story's funniest parts are Lucifer's interactions with God or discussions (really more rants) with his own sullen subordinates in Hell. At a managerial status meeting, irritated by another devil's incessant table tapping Lucifer calmly tells the hapless employee that if he taps that table onemore time, his fingers will be the least of the appendages which he loses. I had a boss like that once. I still have all my fingers but it was touch and go for a while.
Joby grows into a mediocre sad man beset with self-doubt and riddled with hidden rage. But Joby has something secret which Lucifer didn't see. Joby is drawn to Taubolt, a hidden town that Lucifer and his agents don't know about. And something here hurts, incapacitates and can even kill supernatural evil creatures. This story seamlessly blends a very Western Christian understanding of free will with Arthurian legends and Biblical stories. It's a very enjoyable book. Lucifer constantly accuses God of cheating only to be forced to admit that no their agreement really didn't include the contingency that Lucifer didn't see but which God did. There's a lot here about missed opportunities and sacrificing for your children. Children play an integral role in this book. If you skim over the "silly kid stuff" you may miss some important things. I appreciated the lack of cynicism and anti-heroes. The Book of Joby shows cynicism, despair and pessimism masquerading as honesty to be bad, even demonic things. This book was a much needed break from morally gray stories. This book will touch people (especially religious folks) who enjoy seeing the good in life and like watching the butterflies and eating fresh summer strawberries. The good guys may not win, but they are the good guys. The bad guys don't have redeeming features, unless it's Lucifer's fondness for fine suits and accoutrement. He really is a man of wealth and taste. Lucifer's also incredibly mean, petty and short-tempered. Hell reflects Lucifer's vile nature as rival devils constantly attempt to one-up each other and replace Lucifer as King of Hell. Beyond The Black River by Robert E. Howard
One thing that Robert E. Howard often did in his stories, besides including an idealized version of himself, was to show his amateur yet deep knowledge of history. In one story Conan is tangling with Vikings but in another he's matching wits with barely disguised 16th century Spanish privateers. The effect is very intoxicating, especially as Howard's prose pours from the page and transmits you to a world that never was yet feels so true to life you'll swear you're reading and experiencing historical accounts. Beyond the Black River is one of Howard's best stories. Here Howard draws heavily for inspiration from the history of White/Comanche wars in Texas. He learned some of this from his mother and other female relatives. Howard also traveled extensively around Texas as a child and later as an adult, soaking up history from older ruins and forts. Beyond The Black River also appears to have been very strongly influenced by James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales. You could strip out the minor fantastic elements and this story would work just as well as a colonial America tale or as a Western. Some characters sound like Texans. Even the title hints at "Injun country", that zone in the American mind where the laws of the white man do not apply. Conan is roughly at the age where he's "getting too old for this s***" . Conan is serving as a scout for the Aquilonian military, which is overseeing a settlement expansion beyond the Black River (the previous boundary between Aquilonian hegemony and Pictish controlled lands). Howard's Picts were a fictional creation based on the indigenous Scottish/Welsh inhabitants but here they very much read as Iroquois or Comanche. Aquilonia is the age's superpower, something akin to High Middle Ages France/Britain. Obviously, the Picts aren't very happy about this expansionism and are fighting back in hit and run attacks.
Conan meets up with a slighter more civilized version of himself, a settler named Balthus. They find the body of a merchant who's been killed with sorcery by a Pictish nationalist and wizard named Zogar Sag. Zogar Sag has the power to talk to and even control animals and deadlier things that lurk in the woods and swamps. Zogar Sag could unify all the Pict clans. Conan gets the assignment to take out Zogar Sag. Conan agrees, even though he thinks the Aquilonians are greedy and overconfident about being able to take and hold land so far from home. Being Cimmerian, Conan has an atavistic hatred for Picts but he has a grudging respect for their fight against Aquilonian colonialism. Howard has Conan show a strong class consciousness and speak approvingly of land reform. Conan says, "This colonization business is mad anyway. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them. " Conan himself was part of a successful Cimmerian attack against Aquilonian invaders when he was just fifteen. Conan, Balthus and a few others, including a Pict hating dog named Slasher (its previous owner and family were murdered by Picts) set out to kill Zogar Sag. But they find themselves making a last stand far from home while a Pict army attempts to overrun the Aquilonian fort and settlements and kill all of the settlers. Despite being action packed, this story is also somewhat philosophical as Conan spends some time ruminating on what he sees as the hypocrisies and savageries of "civilized" men. This short story is famous for its final quote, that of a woodsman looking at Conan. The quote pretty much expressed Howard's views as well. "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.
Black Science Fiction by John M. Faucette Jr.
John Faucette was a Harlem born black science fiction writer. He may have been best known for his allegorical novels Warriors of Terra (inspired by Harlem gang wars) and Crown of Infinity (inspired by Black experiences in America). Faucette, however, did not become wealthy from his writing endeavors. He had tremendous experience and frustration with racism in the publishing arena and more specifically with scarce black presence in science fiction. By his own admission he was not at the top of his craft and like many writers regardless of race had to deal with constant rejections. The foreword to this book drips with anger about the rejections. Evidently he took this very personally. I guess I would too after a while. Faucette's insistence on writing black heroes or mildly disguised allegories dealing with racism, slavery and colonialism added to his unmarketable reputation. Other times, publishing houses just weren't selling work by black authors. Period. Black Science Fiction is a self-published collection of short stories that are more or less exactly what they sound like. Often, not always, the protagonists are black. Faucette wrote that "I amno Hopkinson, Delany, Butler, or Barnes. But I try. I will always try. Till the day they bury me". This collection came about in part because of an uptick in interest in some of Faucette's older stories and the ability of the internet to link together like minded people. Faucette discovered people who actually liked his older works as well as younger writers who were self-publishing e-books and the like. So Faucette decided to publish short stories he had written over the years. He's deceased now but this is an interesting group of stories. The collection is highly uneven in quality. Faucette was correct. He wasn't the best writer. But he did have a great talent for "what-if" stories and an insight into the underdog's mind. He also didn't mind putting extremely frank erotica into a story, if he thought it necessary, sort of like Martin or Laymon. So this collection isn't really a group of stories for kids or prudes of any age. However as my brother reminded me it is probably just the sort of thing I may have read myself as a teen and "neglected" to tell anyone about.
Black Science Fiction is a little over 400 pages and contains about 40 short stories of varying length. Standouts include "The Redemption of Robert E. Lee" in which Pickett's Charge succeeds and leads to a southern victory and an attempt by General Lee to outlaw slavery; "Hitman for a Day" where due to overpopulation pressures, citizens can play a lottery and kill someone they hate; "The Outrage", where a security guard must defend aliens accused of rape from a human lynch mob; "The Slave and The Time Machine", where an enslaved African goes to the future and comes back with some little friends for slave owners to say hello to; and "The Promised Land" where a black secret agent who can pass for white discovers that the victorious Confederacy is creating a Final Solution for blacks out west. There are other stories here which I didn't like and a few which I positively hated ("Cinderella 3000") so YMMV. If you like speculative fiction writers with an idiosyncratic and occasionally rather perverse take on things, this book might be worthwhile. If you don't like a particular story, just turn the page. There's probably something better coming up shortly. Overall I'm glad I have it in my library.
One Shot by Lee Child
This is the book which the Tom Cruise movie Jack Reacher was based upon. I'm not enough of a Tom Cruise fan to go run and see his movies in the theaters. But I was intrigued by the howls of fury from Lee Child fans that Tom Cruise was playing the titular role. So when I saw this book on sale a few weeks back I bought it. Now I can understand why book readers would have been disappointed, even upset with Cruise taking the movie role. In the book Jack Reacher is a former Army MP who is a blonde haired, blue eyed giant of a man, standing 6-5 and weighing about 250#. Few people want to tangle with him physically. He consciously and subconsciously uses his size and muscle to subtly intimidate people. I don't think Cruise could have brought that element of the character to life visually. Though Reacher's size is an important part of his overall persona and how he is viewed by others, it's definitely not the most important thing about him. Reacher's primary tool is his brain. He's able to out think just about anyone he's up against. He's sort of a modern day Sherlock Holmes or Doc Savage. Reacher notices and remembers things which other people don't. He has quite the talent for living and moving off the grid. This second is somewhat less believable in a post 9/11 world but then again Reacher is ex-military with skill sets other people lack. He's a ghost. You can't find him. He finds you. The story opens in a small Indiana city with an unnamed man methodically shooting five people from his parking garage perch. He misses one shot and does not retrieve all of his ejected cartridges. All five people that he did shoot are dead. Obviously this is a skilled sniper.
The physical evidence all points to a former Army Sniper, one James Barr. James Barr tells the cops they got the wrong guy and to get Jack Reacher for him. But Reacher, who was engaged in empty sex with a beautiful woman, is already on the way to the city. He saw the news. He and Barr have history. Bad history. The case appears open and shut. The lead police investigator and DA are basically already congratulating each other as the trial appears to be a mere formality. Barr can no longer assist in his defense as shortly after being put in jail he was beaten into a coma. Barr's semi-estranged sister Rosemary doesn't believe her brother did it despite the abundance of evidence. Reacher is nothing if not a straight shooter and after talking to the police and DA he doesn't see much to shake their faith in Barr's guilt. But someone is shadowing Reacher's moves around town. Reacher becomes aware of this not long after the reader does. Someone wants to make sure that Barr is convicted. Eventually Reacher notices a few anomalies, things which other investigators wouldn't have. And he starts pulling a few strings. Hard. Even though Reacher would like to hurt Barr and doesn't always care about the exact letter of the law, his sense of honor, intelligence and quiet morality won't let him leave Barr to the tender mercies of the Indiana courts if Reacher is not convinced that's where Barr should be. Barr's defense attorney, Helen Rodin, is the daughter of the DA prosecuting the case. She, Reacher, Rosemary and a Reacher associate uncover a conspiracy. The shot-callers aren't happy. They play for keeps. They take increasingly deadly steps to take Reacher off the board. This was a very quick fun read. The author walks you through many ways in which people unknowingly leave evidence of who they are and where they've been all through the day.
