Tag: Entertainment

WHM III

History

When the history of the world is explored at some time far into the future, historians will scratch their heads at the collapse of an entire culture and civilization, and wonder how a society so successful, so prosperous and so advanced could have fallen into disrepair and decay, this little footnote may shed some light on the topic.

Now as we all know, today’s grannies are generally not the same as grannies of yore.  Here’s yore:

…and here’s today:

   

Sadly, however, this modern-day ageless sexiness seems to have washed away the modesty and reserve for which grannies were once renowned, and one arrives at this sad conclusion (warning: link contains extreme nausea risk):

A grandmother and self-proclaimed ‘prolific cougar’ who has dated hundreds of toy boys believes bedding men under 30 is the key to keeping young.
Gaynor Evans, 57, from Enfield, North London, has dated more than 200 younger men since she had a fling with a 23-year-old after divorcing her second husband in 2010.
The author, agony aunt and businesswoman never dates exclusively and said she has no intention of her love life slowing down – despite being a grandmother of four.

…and there you have it.  “Agony aunt” indeed.

Vulnerable

Business, Music, Two-Minute Hate

One of the many wise things my brother-in-law (Uncle Mike) said to me was this:

“The ideas people always end up getting fucked by the money people.”

The occasion of his utterance was many years ago, when the vulture venture capitalists were giving me the runaround with funding — in essence, they thought my business plan was great, as long as I changed the product, its marketing and its target market — and when I refused to change anything, they promised to release the funds… after six months’ further study.  Result (as Longtime Readers may remember):  a third of a million dollars’ savings lost, staff laid off, followed by ruin and bankruptcy.

The same is true not just of venture capital gnomes, though.  It is a fact of life in the music business, where creative people are happy just to get an opportunity to create music, make albums and perform at concerts for their fans;  while in the background the loathsome accountants and managers collect the money, demand more and more “product” from the artists, and try to justify their greed and rapacity by pleading that they “invest” in the artists and are therefore entitled to a return on their investment.

I recently watched the biopic of the late Amy Winehouse, the British jazz singer and ultimate Train Smash Woman, on Netflix.  I would urge everyone to watch it — if you can stomach it all the way through — to see exactly what I’m talking about in the previous paragraph.  All Amy had was boundless talent;  all she lacked  was maturity, commonsense, guidance, protection and security, and nobody ever helped her by giving her any of it.  Instead, her life was one long catalog of exploitation, enabling and vampire-like sucking of everything she had, with the predictable outcome. And she didn’t deserve any of it.  To say Amy was vulnerable would be guilty of gross understatement, and her world treated her like a sadist would kick a newborn puppy, just because the squeals sounded good.

Here’s my comment on the tragedy of Amy Winehouse:

Every single person involved in this vulnerable young woman’s sad life:  her “friends”, her producers, her record company’s executives, her “bodyguards”, the press reporters and paparazzi who hounded her every move, her husband, and most especially her father — every single one of them deserves to be  put into the stocks and beaten with heavy chains.  For hours.

Unknown At This Address

Music

PJMedia published a list of songs that turned 20 this year…

…and I can proudly announce that I’ve never heard of any but one, that being the Britney Spears thing (and even for that one, I sort of remember the video — Brit in a schoolgirl uniform! — but not the song).

The rest?  Wouldn’t recognize the songs (or their performers) if I tripped over them in the street.  To paraphrase the late great John Barrymore:  my memory is filled with beauty, wonder and loveliness — and you expect me to clutter it up with this shit?

Snowflake Warnings

Culture, Entertainment

One of my most treasured memories is watching the late Frank Zappa tearing into that foul scold Tipper Gore during Congressional hearings.  Gore, you may remember, thought that rock music lyrics were eeeevil and caused kids to become mass murderers or Satanists or something, and Zappa just took her precious little thesis and trashed it with a wonderful mixture of scorn, opprobrium and educated analysis of her silly, nonsensical fears and creeping Puritanism.

I was taken back to those good times when reading this piece of utter bullshit:

Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire?

They exist throughout society’s pop-culture canon, from movies to TV to music and beyond:  pieces of work that have withstood time’s passage but that contain actions, words and depictions about race, gender and sexual orientation that we now find questionable at best.
Whether it’s blackface minstrel routines from Bing Crosby’s “Holiday Inn,” Apu’s accent in “The Simpsons,” bullying scenes in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the arguably rapey coercion of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Sixteen Candles” or the simplistically clunky gender interactions of “Mr. Mom,” Americans have amassed a catalog of entertainment across the decades that now raises a series of contentious but never-more-relevant questions:
What, exactly, do we do with this stuff today? Do we simply discard it? Give it a free pass as the product of a less-enlightened age? Or is there some way to both acknowledge its value yet still view it with a more critical eye?

I have a better idea.  Treat it all as entertainment.  And in the manner of Tipper Gore and her ilk, feel free to pepper the covers with all sorts of “parental advisories” or better still, my favorite all-purpose warning that one’s childish sensibilities may be offended by the contents thereof (number to increase with the frightfulness of the content):

  

At least a “10-” warning will announce that I’m about to really enjoy myself.

But for the love of Jupiter’s throbbing headache, leave the classics alone for us grownups to enjoy for the fabulous bits of entertainment they are.   Frankly, there’s absolutely fuck-all about the classics which should frighten anyone, whether it’s Mark Twain using the word “nigger” so freely in Huckleberry Finn  (which novel, lest we forget, did more to change attitudes about race than a dozen Jesse Jacksons) or Gary Cooper taking Claudette Colbert in hand in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938):

At the end of the brilliant movie Thank You For Smoking (2006), there’s a scene where the foul Senator protagonist talks about going back into all the classic movies and digitally removing all traces of smoking, thereby “improving” them.  The man’s unctuous smugness coupled with his utter conviction is so creepy it makes your skin crawl.

And that’s what these pricks are talking about now.  And make no mistake, there’s absolutely no end to it.  If a treasured classic like Baby, It’s Cold Outside can be interpreted to containing “rapey coercion”, then let me assure you all of one thing: nothing is safe.

I have a simple solution to this nonsense:  every time some asshole indulges in some censorship dream like the above, the nearest person should horsewhip them.  Literally.  They get “triggered” by the suggestion of stalking in The Police’s Every Breath You Take ?  Well, I get triggered by their wanting to change the whole fucking world to accommodate their tender sensibilities.

Just remember:  this wonderful, sexy scene in Tom Jones is one day going to disappear forever because some fucking vegan got triggered.

I am getting so sick of people trying to tell me what I should or should not do, or what I may or may not eat, or what entertainment I may or may not enjoy, that there may well come a time when you’ll read about some snowflake getting flogged for trying to bowdlerize the lyrics of Run For Your Life.

And the flogger’s name will be mine.  Which reminds me:  I need to oil the old sjambok, just in case.