Day: November 21, 2022

In my limited white-guy mind rap and hip-hop didn’t really ignite until the late ’80s, mainly when NWA became popular in ’87. Musical scholars will also tell you that rap & hip-hop are generally understood to have originated in New York City in the 1970s.

And yet the very first time I associated the word “rap” with musical punch and propulsion was when I heard “The Rapper,” a lame flash-in-the-pan single from The Jaggerz. “The Rapper” was released in January 1970, or nearly 53 years ago.

“The Rapper” was also the first male-composed pop song that could be interpreted as sympathetic to women in a political sense, and even supportive of the nascent women’s liberation movement. It’s basically a “women beware” song that warns of insincere assholes who will turn on the charm spigot in order to get laid any way they can.

It’s my suspicion that the song’s author, Donnie Iris, wrote “The Rapper” out of resentment and jealousy. Iris probably saw himself as the soulful, sensitive type, and he probably became infuriated when he noticed that full-of-shit types were having better luck with women than he was — that hot women were falling for the puerile.

Iris to women of the late ’60s: “Don’t you girls understand that you’re making a mistake by blowing off sensitive soul men like myself in favor of Shallow Hals who have nothing on their minds except dipping their wicks? My song is telling the truth — these seducers are empty vessels, and they have nothing to offer. Please think it over and consider what you’re missing. I’m the kind of Frye-boots-wearing guy you want to go home with, and not those insincere jackals in their polyester shirts.”

HE to Feinberg and especially the wokesters who beat him with the same stick that the Turks beat Peter O’Toole with in Lawrence to Arabia: It’s perfectly allowable to simultaneously walk and chew gum while discussing Harvey Weinstein. Pre-#MeToo and in private suites Harvey was a brutal, beastly rapist (proven, no question) but he was also a canny distributor with brilliant, go-getter instincts. If he wasn’t a deranged criminal and not behind bars and running Miramax and the Weinstein Co. like he did between the mid ’90s and mid teens, Harvey might have managed a very respectable sell of She Said.

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Attorney Friend to HE: “Do you spend time with your family?”
HE to attorney friend: “Sure, I do.”
Attorney Friend to HE: “Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

Jett and Sutton Wells, snapped early Sunday afternoon at Trader Joe’s in Millburn, New Jersey.

I’ll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Billy Wilder‘s Kiss Me Stupid. I tried to re-watch it last night (again), and I couldn’t do it, man. I just couldn’t.

(Oh, and I watched two full episodes of grubby, grimy, endlessly talky Andor on Saturday night, but more on that later.)

It’s not so much the overbearing lead performance by Ray Walston, who was hired at the last-minute when Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack, and Kim Novak is…well, not too bad even though Polly the Pistol is a pathetic character. It’s Dean Martin I can’t stand. He’s playing himself here — a rich, big-name Italian crooner who’s so smug and lazy he can barely say his lines without putting himself to sleep…thinks he’s the center of the universe but in fact is completely out of swing with mid ’60s culture and doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, and who has no funny lines…just a smug, oily-haired lech trying to bang Novak while getting half-bombed.

Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on (a) a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and (b) on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and (c) poor, treated-like-dirt Novak. Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow…good God.

(l. to r.) Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Dean Martin in a rare color snap from the set of Kiss Me Stupid.

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Sasha Stone on the theatrical death of She Said, a first-rate, totally approvable journalism drama: “Journalism changed completely in 2016, just like Hollywood did. The New York Times joined “the resistance” and lost its objectivity. Ditto high-minded Oscar fare. She Said tells the story as Hollywood always does, as though there is only one perspective on any of it. They just assume all of America agrees, or should because their word is the right one.

“Oscar movies aren’t bombing because they’re ‘woke,’ and many of them aren’t. The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t. It’s that Joe and Jane have been “’woked’ too many times, and so when a film comes along, they think ‘I’ll catch it on streaming.’ The last remaining group, to repeat, is likely staying home due to ongoing COVID fear. That isn’t everyone, but it’s enough to make a dent in the box office.

“I just got woked watching a movie recently that was kind of good overall. But its ultimate message was meant to make me, the viewer, feel bad about myself and my world because that is what they want you to feel. They want you to feel guilty and bad because they, the filmmakers, are noble and holy and are on the other side of it.

“I know lots of white people like this — or I used to, I should say. People who go around carping about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white privilege’ as white people. That puts them on the other side and makes them seem “good” and “woke.” It gives them a sense of higher purpose.

“But the end result of this is always the same story. It’s like Christian Rock — no matter how good it is at the end of the day, it is always going to be about just that one thing. This movie I was watching, like almost every movie or advertising you see, was reminding me yet again of the hierarchy of race. White people are bad; everyone else is good.

“How can you ever expect actors of color — Black, Hispanic, Asian — to have any sort of chance to tell great stories if they’re trapped in the cocoon of white guilt and must always be portrayed as noble saints compared to the white heathens? Meanwhile, White people get all of the good parts because they are allowed to be imperfect, flawed, and corrupt. And ONLY THEM.

“I think personally that it betrays one’s sense of superiority ultimately, as does equity in Hollywood and the Oscars. They’re saying women and people of color can never be as good as white males, so they have to be ‘helped’ to win. But that robs them of their worth in the end because all it does is reward the whites who are giving it to them in the first place. See how good we are? See how ‘woke’ we are?

“Most people are sick of it, though hardly anyone will write about it because they will be slammed online.”

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