“I’ve been to a lot of conventions, but this [one] has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult with Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru. ‘What is that feeling in the air?’ I asked him. ‘Submerged hate,’ he promptly replied. Ah, yes…now I recognize that sulfurous aroma.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 8.27 N.Y. Times column, “High Anxiety in the Mile-High City.”

Okay, I may have given in to excessive rancor and bitterness earlier today. Hillary Clinton‘s speech tonight was much better than I thought it might be — classy, tough, passionate, persuasive. When she asked Hillary supporters if their work during the primaries was (a) about her or (b) about the values she and they believed in….that was a closer. She did what she had to do, but she also delivered a great speech. Hats off.

Erica Gibson‘s Woodchipper, acrylic on panel, 17 x 13 inches, framed — $450.00. Interested parties can forget it because it’s been sold. The generally interested should e-mail the Crazy 4 2 Artwork guys at gallery1988@aol.com.

It is axiomatic that a major dramatic film about any ethnic group is going to draw the ire of some p.c. group claiming to defend the cultural-political interests of said group, blah blah, because of a perceived tribal slur, blah blah. Not interesting! I can feel the slumber instinct building inside as I write this. Fight it! Fight it!

So it really means nothing that the Council on American-Islamic Relations recently complained that Alan Ball‘s Towelhead (which I saw and reviewed at last year’s Toronto Film Festival) is using a “racial and religious slur [that is] commonly used in a derogatory manner against people of the Muslim faith or Arab origin,” blah blah.
The movie is a good sit, though. Intriguing, different, a head-turner. Based on Alicia Eran‘s period novel of the same name, Towelhead (Warner Independent, 9.12 in New York and LA) is “a sturdy, complex character drama that’s 100% deserving of respect,” I wrote last year when it was called Nothing Is Private. “It’s obviously one of the most original, daring films about adolescent sexuality ever delivered by a quasi-mainstreamer. It’s also a sharp look at racism (and not just the American-bred kind) and a sobering portrait of the rifts and tensions between American and Middle-Eastern mindsets.
“And all of this out of a fairly simple period drama, set in a Houston suburb around the time of the Gulf War, about a 13 year-old half-Lebanese, half-Irish girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil), and what happens as she gradually decides, under the fiercely oppressive watch of her Lebanese dad (Peter Macdissi), to explore/ indulge her budding sexuality with two older guys — a randy but nice-enough African-American high schooler in his mid teens (Eugene Jones) and a sleazy neighborhood dad in his early 40s (Aaron Eckhart).

Towelhead “is not exploitation…not even a little bit. It’s a smartly written thing with all kinds of intrigues and counterweights built into each character, and an earnest residue of humanity seeping through at the finish.
“Even Eckhart’s character, scumbag that he is, has tics and shadings that make him more than just a thoughtless statutory rapist. Even Jasira’s dad, a dictatorial racist thug of the first order, comes off as somewhat sympathetic at times. And each one is his own way cares for Jasira. And despite the dark sexual currents (and as odd as this sound), it’s also a fairly amusing film. Really. It’s really boils down to being a ‘neighborhood folks and their quirks’ movie that…okay, is a little bit icky in two or three scenes but isn’t nearly as icky in a general sense as you might expect.”

Speaking to Politico‘s John F. Harris about the rah-rah-Obama speeches being given by Bill and Hillary Clinton tonight and Wednesday night, a veteran of the Clinton White House who remains close to both of them said “they are both going to do what they have to do…that does not mean they will enjoy it.”
In other words, the words in their speeches aren’t in question; it’s the tone and the pizazz that Billary will put into the delivery that people will be examining tonight (and tomorrow night) with a fine tooth comb.
If Hillary feels she can deliver tonight’s speech with 80% passion levels without anyone accusing her of being a wee bit half-hearted, she’ll give it 80%. And if she senses on the podium tonight that she can give it 70% without anyone saying she’s half-hearted, she’ll give it 70%. But there’s no way in hell she’ll give it 100% or even 90% — no way. Because she’d be very much at peace with saying “I told you so” on 11.5.08 if and when Obama loses. She’d love to run again in 2012. All she has to do is play the Obama game in subtle cutthroat fashion. Put on the show and do just enough so people can’t accuse her (or her husband) of undermining, blah, blah. Make no mistake — she’s The Beast and always will be.

Jay Leno asked John McCain the other night about how many houses he owns, and McCain — boldly, absurdly — went into the prison-cell routine again. Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that McCain’s Hanoi Hilton answers are hereby over, invalid, spent. McCain’s honorable history hasn’t been used up — it’s been vandalized.

Joseph Costigan, a political director for a union based in Dearborn, Michigan, called Unite Here, has told N.Y. Times columnist Bob Herbert that “we’ve been talking with staff in different parts of the Midwest, and we’re all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Barack Obama because of his color. There’s no question about it. It’s a very powerful thing to get over for some folks.”

We’ve all wondered and worried about the Undercurrent of Ugliness that lives in the hearts of lunchbucket Americans out there when it comes to race, and Tuesday, November 4th — Election Day — may, I fear, show statistically just how ugly this country really and truly is.
Think of that episode on Boris Karloff‘s Thriller called “The Cheaters” — a pair of magic glasses that shows what people are really thinking and feeling inside — and how it ended with the lead actor putting them on and then looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and screaming and clawing his face over what he saw. His screams, I fear, will be America’s screams on the evening of Tuesday, 11.4.
The right wing talk-backers on HE can spew their usual diseased crap, but when people say they prefer this or that candidate because of any number of factors, fine. Voting records, loyalties, character issues, intellectual capacity, whatever. But when it all boils down to one thing — when they say “I won’t vote for candidate A because of the tint of his skin and the shape of his nose and the suspected allegiances that we associate with people of his sort”…that’s simply evil.
As Chris Matthews said last night, Barack and Michelle worked hard and played by the rules and built their lives into a kind of American Dream, and for people out there to just wave it away and say “naaah, he’s a Muslim and not one of us so I’m not voting for him” — that is just flat-out sickening.
Costigan’s statement points again to the increasing likelihood that the 11.4 vote will be a squeaker, and that Obama has a decent chance of losing if the Generation of Shame (i.e., the under 25s) doesn’t vote for the Illinois Senator in sufficient numbers to counter-balance the 55-and-over racists.
Aaah, but will they? The youth vote is supposed to be energized this year like never before, with a good 75% or 80% favoring Obama….something like that. But we all know what happens when you place your bets on the youth vote, right? We certainly found out what the youth vote is worth in ’04. That’s why we call them the Generation of Shame ’round these parts.
“Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate. When Jack Davis‘s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied, “My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”
“Costigan believes — hopes — that the number of people holding [racially negative] views is relatively small, and that Mr. Obama, now with the help of Senator Biden, can surmount that obstacle.
“Surmounting it will be tough. Not only do the polls show this to be a close race, but the polls, when it comes to Senator Obama, cannot be trusted. It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.
“After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year’s Democratic primary race, I’ve developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:
“Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama’s poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote. Using that formula, Barack Obama is behind in the national election right now.”

It is probably inevitable that Sally Hawkins, the cheerful and indefatigable Poppy in Mike Leigh‘s Happy-Go-Lucky (Miramax, 10.10), will be talked up as a Best Actress nominee once the film starts showing around. (It opened in England last April and came out last week on DVD over there.) An elementary-school teacher who happy-vibes just about everything and everyone, Polly is an unstoppable alpha dispenser — spirited, effervescent — and Hawkins certainly inhabits her whole-hog.

She carries Happy-Go-Lucky, she carries its spirit, and she does handle herself well in the sad-shock scenes at the end of the film with Eddie Marsan, the driving instructor with the correct manner and ferociously uptight, anti-immigrant attitude. In fact, the last 15 to 20 minutes contain the best stuff in the film, and I throughly respect Hawkins for her performance in this section. She handles her scenes with quiet maturity and resigned grace.
But her Poppy character epitomizes a sort of person I’ve never been able to tolerate — the emotional fascist who’s relentless about being happy, smiling and sparkly, but who also insists — here’s the problem — on forcing her bubbliness upon others (acquaintances, strangers, anyone) with the ultimate idea of converting them to their way of looking at life, or at least giving them a contact high to take home.
What’s especially oppressive and dictatorial about smiley-faced brownshirts like Poppy is their determination to gently bully you into submission. If you don’t get on board with the mutual-alpha, they’ll interrogate you like Laurence Olivier‘s Zell (the Nazi character in Marathon Man), looking at you with a quizzical grin and asking, “Are you happy?” or “Having a bad day?” Speaking from experience, I can advise that the best response is “I was feeling pretty good, actually, until you asked me that.”

Imagine if Poppy was a born-again Christian asking total strangers, “So have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” and “Would you like to be saved?” The police would be called, she’d be cuffed and thrown into a van and taken down to the station. But there’s no recourse with the happy-happies.
I hate people who ask me if I’m happy because, of course, they’re not really asking me that. They’re saying they’ve observed my behavior, examined my vibe and decided that I just don’t have the right peppy-happy attitude, and that I need to adjust it right away so that it pleases them. I do meet these people from time to time. They’re like Moonies or Hara Krishna devotees — they’ve got the beautiful inner force inside them, and they know they’ve got that wondrous glow in their faces, and they’re determined to beat you over the head with it until you’re on your knees, bloody and begging them to stop.
Poppy feels like a kind of symbol of the whole happy-face movement of the ’70s, which for me represented a kind of alpha-vibe fascism that you could sense every so often in certain liberal-minded circles. Get with the positive attitudes or else! The late George Carlin once said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley.”

The French poster for Leigh’s film, called Be Happy over there, has a slogan at the bottom: “Adoptez la Poppy attitude!”
The term “emotional fascism” was first coined by Elvis Costello in the ’70s, and it’s real, you bet. There’s a scene when Poppy’s friend Zoe says, “You can’t make everyone happy” and Poppy replies, “There’s no harm in trying that Zoe, is there?” I am here to stand up and say that yes, there is harm in it, and would all the Poppy girls of the world please refrain from ever doing so again in my presence? It’s like being beaten with Mao’s little happy-face book during the Great Cultural Revolution.
There are many of us, I’m presuming, who look upon cheery, cock-eyed optimists as people you sometimes have to speak to at parties — sometimes it’s better just to suffer quickly and get it over with so you can move on — but if you see them coming down the street do cross over to the other side and duck into a book store or something, and then stay there for a good 15 minutes, just to be safe.

Cut together by the intrepid souls at 23/6…hats off.