At the Late Night Picture Show...

I want to go there ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Caveat: I’m doped up on allergy meds and cannot be held totally accountable for how the nouns and verbs play out below. I’m having the worst allergy attack in recent memory and have had to quell it with a combination of Allegra D and Wal-Phed.

This week, I watched several great old movies via my new service, Netflix. I’ve resisted Netflix for years, because I didn’t like the DVD mail order business model. I want my movies now, not next week. In the last year or so, they’ve added Netflix streaming service (which works with Roku, Xbox, Samsung blu-ray and several other devices). I can pick out my pix online, and for $8.99/month I can watch unlimited movies and TV shows. The one snag is that streaming video gives you older fare and a lot of “B” movies. Nonetheless, I like a lot of what they have and can probably get my nine bucks worth for a least a couple of years to come. Netflix rules -- for now anyway.

LAST PICTURE SHOW

One of my Netflix pics was The Last Picture Show, a gritty, beautifully rendered coming-of-age movie made in 1971. That year, I was 14 and having the same feelings and insecurities as the movie’s adolescent characters. This movie, set in Anarene, Texas 1952 was a perfect reflection of my 1971 angst, despite the distance of 19 years between me and its fictional characters. Last Picture Show was filmed in black and white and it captures the simple, small-town atmosphere of the West Texas town (now a ghost town near Wichita Falls). This movie was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, a 31 year old new-wave wunderkind at the time and based on a 1966 novel by Larry McMurtry (best known for 1985‘s best-seller Lonesome Dove).

Last Picture Show is a perfect storm of writer, director and actors of enormous talent converging on to one project. Several seasoned character actors (Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson) rounded out a cast of stellar new faces (Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd) and gave us some of the finest performances ever in cinema history. The movie might be described as darkly comic, although it has tragic human implications and consequences as the characters grope their ways through a veritable Texas dust storm of restlessness, loneliness and yes -- horniness. There is some graphic activity, enough that the Church Lady might label the film as soft-core pornography. Fortunately, the Motion Picture Academy saw things differently and gave the movie 8 Academy nominations -- which it won, for best supporting actor (Johnson) and best supporting actress (Leachman).

I love attentiveness to detail. It always bothered me that on TV shows like Happy Days, set in the 50’s, the characters have 70’s hairstyles and for the most part 70’s fashions. Last Picture Show painstakingly gives us the early 1950’s with appropriate fashions, Zenith TV sets, 1951 Mercuries, and Hank Williams tunes coming out of the juke box. I had to purchase Hank Williams’ Honky Tonkin’ from iTunes after watching the movie -- the moment must live on! The windswept little town of Anarene seems sad and dusty yet all at the same time weirdly inviting, like a cold Dr. Pepper in a vintage bottle.

This movie is actually two trips in the Wayback Machine. It gives us 1952 Texas, but it also shows us what Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges looked like at the start of their careers in the early 70’s. If you love nostalgia as I do, you’ll love this whole package. The National Film Institute rates Last Picture Show as #95 on the top 100 American films ever made. I would rank it higher myself; if you haven’t seen it yet, sign up for Netflix and grab yourself a copy.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Legacy of Hate

Murrah Building, 1995 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was William Luther Pierce III? If not for a racist diatribe written under his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald, he would be a crackpot white separatist who faded into oblivion along with his insane organization, “National Alliance”. Pierce was born in Atlanta in 1933, the son of Old South aristocracy – clearly a clan that hadn’t fully accepted the terms of Appomattox in 1865.

Pierce was bright in his schoolwork; he liked model rockets and skipped a grade in school. His first avocation was physics – he completed an undergraduate degree at Rice in 1955 and a physics PhD. from Boulder in 1962. He worked as a physics Associate Instructor until 1965, when his inner demons took hold, and he devoted the balance of his life to such diverse causes as the Nazi party, white supremacy and “Cosmotheism”. His family’s wealth probably afforded him the luxury of quitting an 8-to-5 job and redoubling his racist efforts.

Pierce was a white supremacist who was deeply concerned about interracial marriages and “racial apologists”. He dabbled with both the John Birch Society and the American Nazi party – he even became a leader in the Nazi organization for a brief time. Neither group devoted enough energy to the concept of racial cleansing in Pierce’s view – this prompted him to found his National Alliance (circa 1974), where he could give racial cleansing its “due”. In fact, Pierce was enough of an organizer that he created a mini-media empire; his deep pockets didn’t hurt either. He started a book publishing company, a radio program, American Dissident, and even a church to proselytize his poisonous ideas.

Pierce tried to get tax exempt status for his “Cosmotheist” church but was denied that by the IRS. His Cosmotheism was a sort of pantheism that featured a universal spirit which favored the white race. Neither his religion nor his radio show ever really caught fire. Pierce spent the final years of his life (he died in 2002 at age 68) overseeing his various productions and giving occasional speeches. His death would have been unremarkable in any way if not for the “seed” planted by his toxic tomes – The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1984).

Turner Diaries is a near-future sci-fi book which predicts race war and describes in detail the terrorist acts that “The Organization” (his fantasized group of white supremacists) perform to battle the Federal government. Hunter is a similar book describing a type of bounty killer that hunts mixed race couples. Both of these books were seized upon by radical right militia groups to give inspiration and even instructions to their members. At least two groups, Silent Brotherhood and The Order, used Turner Diaries as a guide. These groups were convicted of robbery and counterfeiting – acts that fall short of mass murder though reprehensible nevertheless.

When Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people bombing the OKC Murrah Building in 1995, he was found to be a fan of Pierce’s book. McVeigh’s self-defense was a garbled mix of patriotism and religious freedom (he hated the Fed’s handling of Branch Davidians a year or two earlier). Such a confused mind – why would McVeigh use this horrific, demented scrawl of race-ranting as his justification? Why would he even mention it to anyone? It had nothing to do with country love or religious freedom. Probably at the point where he was given a national audience, McVeigh had to change his narrative in hopes of gaining sympathy from the general public.

The irony isn't lost on me – I’m giving exposure to the author and his work with this very blog. It’s in the spirit of remembering the past to avoid reliving it. I give credit to my readers – we can say who, what and where without giving endorsements or “props” as they say now. Pierce was a disturbed man and his ideas were lunatic in nature; his Deep-South deep pockets enabled him to promulgate his lunacies to vulnerable, confused, self-loathing people all over America. Let us hope that if his writings endure at all, they endure as negative examples of racial paranoia gone wildly out of bounds.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Reverend Jim's Traveling Salvation Show

The final rite in Guyana -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I must confess to a certain prejudice. When I think of cults or collective insanity, I usually think of right-wing ideologues or crazed Christians-- Nazis, KKK and Heaven’s Gate. I must pause to reflect and mention that sometimes the craziness has a leftward tilt as it did in November 1978. That’s when Reverend Jim Jones, of the Peoples’ Temple bade his 900 member commune to drink cyanide laced grape punch in an act of “revolutionary suicide”. What weird life trajectory would've brought Jones and his followers to this terrible point?

Looking back, the young Jim Warren Jones had an unremarkable middle class childhood in Indiana. He is said to have been an odd child, musing about death and holding funerals for animals. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. He attended Indiana and Butler Universities where he earned a degree in secondary education; his desire was to be a student pastor. Jones chose the Methodist ministry as his first career move, since they were accepting of people with socialist leanings (like Jones) in the McCarthy era. Alas, his dalliance with Methodism was short-lived because at the time they weren’t racially integrated and Jones was pro-integration.

In what was evidence of a dynamic presence, Jones founded his very own church, the People’s Temple Christian Church Full Gospel at the tender age of 22 in the early 1950‘s. Jones was also made director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission and presented a strong voice for the NAACP as well as the up-and-coming civil rights movement. His outspokenness brought harassment and vandalism to his Indiana church. In the mid 1960’s, Jones had a “vision” that nuclear holocaust was coming to America in 1967 and the only safe haven would be Redwood, California. He decided to move his church to California where, coincidentally, the liberal California culture would be more accepting of his socialist, mixed-race church.

Jones' church moved briefly to Redwood and then to San Francisco. Upon the move to San Francisco, Jones became a local political celebrity. He continued to raise funds for NAACP and was appointed the head of the San Francisco Housing Authority by Mayor Moscone. During the mid-70’s, Jones hobnobbed with the crème de la crème of liberal society -- Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown and even Governor Jerry Brown. Dinners were hosted in Jones’ honor and he was a special guest speaker at a DNC Headquarters grand opening.

After several years of good California vibes, a cloud moved across Jones’ sunny sky -- a cloud that even his dynamic, jovial personality couldn’t disperse. Marshall Kilduff, an “alternative” journalist caught wind of bad things happening in Jones’ church -- physical, emotional and sexual abuse. He was about to publish a large exposé when Jones abruptly decided to move his church to Jonestown, Guyana. There, Jones believed he could at last establish his socialist, multiracial utopia away from the establishment’s prying eyes.

Unfortunately for Jones, the establishment couldn’t be shaken off so easily. A “Concerned Relatives” group wanted to resolve issues of kidnapping and abuse even if it was thousands of miles away in Guyana. A fact-finding mission was dispatched, led by Congressman Leo Ryan in November of 1978. Ryan’s entourage came down for a 3-day junket, which was cut short when they encountered overt hostility. They decided to return and @ 15 Temple refugees came with them. Jones’ “Red Brigade” opened fire on the group has they boarded their planes, killing 5 people including Congressman Ryan.

In quick succession following the air strip shootings, 909 people in the People’s Temple were bade to drink grape Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide. Jones exhorted them to participate in family units, as an act of “revolution”. Jones himself was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was no film recording, but an audiotape of the proceedings (over loudspeaker). The mass suicide is the greatest loss of American civilian life outside of natural disasters or 9/11.

What compelled this paranoid, egomaniacal madman to destroy his whole world? The worst possible outcome of Ryan’s investigation would have paled next to the horrific poisonings that happened in his humid, isolated dystopia. What do you believe and why do you believe it? Are we so fragile of mind that we’ll follow any pied piper that promises a happier reality -- a reality based on thin strands of psychobabble and religious distortions? There are no ready answers -- and there are myriad religions and groups now that exist on the mere edge of sanity. All that recommends them is that as yet, they haven't asked you to drink the Kool-Aid.

© 2010 blogSpotter

Of Idiocracies and Tea Parties

Don't say how would it be -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Today, I very belatedly watched Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s hilarious speculation about a future in 2505 where humans have devolved somewhat into gross, belching, rutting, fast-food noshing, low-IQ pigs. The world of this future is overrun with mountains of garbage, technology is on the blink and rampant commercialism has taken over. A hick mentality prevails and people who use big words are accused of “talking faggy”.

This blog doesn’t have that many readers, so maybe it’s not such a risk here … If you’re from a suburb of Dallas, quit reading now -- you will surely be offended. That is because Idiocracy is NOW -- it’s evident in the ‘burbs of Mesquite, Garland and Irving. It’s not a speculative (note faggy word) future, it’s the corpulent, lard-choked, material-lusting world that we already have in most of Texas. Of course, Idiocracy pushed things a tad further for satire, but not much.

We don’t water our crops with Brawndo sports drink (yet!). We do mishandle our water resources and subject our future agriculture to the vagaries of feudal Texas-style politics. We don’t routinely drive off of uncompleted freeways or occupy condemned buildings but nothing pointed out seems very far off the now-or-future mark. The blinders-mentality of the idiot future also called to mind the Tea Party of the present.


Our own slice of idiocracy -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

The “Tea Party Movement” began in 2009 as a populist, ant-tax, anti Big Government protest movement. It quickly was hijacked by the likes of Dick Army and the John Birch Society. Then as if peanuts weren’t enough, some cashews, pecans and filberts were added to the nut mix: 9/11 deniers, militia men and birthers (who refuse to believe that Obama was born in Hawaii) all strutted their nut stuff at various tea party events. When Health Care reform came to a vote, these throwbacks were yelling the N- and F- words to members of Congress as they walked to Capitol Hill.

What would it be like if people of low IQ out-reproduced smart people and took over the show? We don’t have to use conditional phrasing, it already happened in much of the world. As the human race stumbles into the future, we occasionally take a step forward thank God. Who knows how the final mix will (or should) look. If we can learn to quit killing each other over religion and money, and if we can emphasize the collective good over individual aggrandizement -- we might have a shot at a non-idiocracy. It all remains to be seen.

© 2010 blogSpotter