The Political Resistance against Donald Trump
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Christopher Snyder Please don’t start giving Scalia — whom I like to call “Fat Tony” — credit as though there’s a relative proportion of merit there. People like Scalia, Cheney, Gingrich, et al., eroded so many values that that’s how we *ended up* here.
Like · Reply · June 29 at 2:06pm
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Bob Vitray There were reports that Scalia was collecting on a bribe offer when he died. The free stay in the hunting lodge was supposed to be the quo for some quid in his decisions.
Like · Reply · 1 · June 29 at 5:03pm
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Christopher Snyder The guy could write bend-over-backwards “it’s not me, really, it’s consistent with caselaw and not my ideological leanings” decisions to an extent and degree that’s just amazing — majority decisions, dissents, or not. Even just rattling off some extemporaneous bit of prose so he could “explain” his “thinking” seems to be beholden to this constant-justification, “doth protest too much” spiral he was submersed in for much, if not most, of his waking life. Good riddance!
“Some people [shouldve] die[d a long time before they did] — that’s just unconscious knowledge!”–Perry Farrell, in Jane’s Addiction’s “Pigs in Zen” (too fitting a song title to cite, for *this* guy, all things considered!)
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[from Diddle Knabb ‘s Facebook clique]
Christopher Snyder ” … and remembering the time his sister tried to fight with me over who [NAME DELETED] loves more, me or her.” Holy shit! Eww. What is it like to even *want* to do that, to “esteem” (as an action verb) in that direction? Some people are so muddied in their frame of reference, in their sense of the “other,” that you can’t even tell what the guises are because they’re not openly spoken of, they’re just informing everything (or, “every major thing”) under the surface, and only manifest when people, all of sudden, out of the clear blue sky, just go ahead and nonchalantly say shit like, “oh yeah, all along I really want you to know that I act based on … ” Yuuuuuuuuuuck!
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Jennifer Robin
21 hrs ·
It is never too late to become new.
Christopher Snyder … tricky to find that commensurate, proportionate, equally-valid fork in the road to turn, though! Let us admit that.
(‘Course, there was no Mission of Burma reuniting, leading the way for Polvo, Man or Astro-man?, Versus, Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr., etc., to find it tenable and o.k. to simply put out new work and keep going before it happened outright in our culture, vanquishing the idea only of the much-dreaded “reuinion tour” and becoming a matter of simply “resuming” as Henry Rollins observed … it IS a different time, now!
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Christopher Snyder
5 mins ·
This is shuffled in w/the second-run’s at the Laurelhurst for $4 (not the first time they’ve done this; it’s how I saw “Ned Rifle” and “The Invitation” as it happens, they didn’t screen anywhere else in Portland, so, kudos for them!).
Surprisingly, it’s getting lower critical-rating-score averages on the Internet thingees than you’d expect, considering how vital, quizzically-strange, and filmically-proficient it appears to be, just from the trailer [not to mention how well-received her last work was]. Why is this?
I can already tell it’s gonna outclass the quite-good-but-with-a-premise-that’s-stretched-too-thin-by-the-very-end “Get Out” and the disappointingly-well-made-but-increasingly-preposterous “It Comes at Night” (he makes a bad decision … AGAIN! and … AGAIN! … and … (It has a misleading title, too — no “It” actually comes, it’s just a vaguely-worse situation at night, ’cause yeah guess what, you’d *figure* that, he just mentions it once in a offhand dinner-table conversation … )).
Why aren’t people stunned by THIS one?
I think people are too used to the “forgiveness” trends that are fashionable these days, such as:
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– the halo around the apparently mentally feeble co-screenwriter of “Superbad” who managed to launch a successful propagandistic attack on another quite real but not-America country INADVERTENTLY; and made alien-phallus shots a “joke,” like you’ve never seen weird art fro H.R. Giger to anything beyond a 12-year-old’s reach so at first you’re confused there’s supposed to be a gong on the soundtrack and you’re supposed to laugh; and misconstruing what Jews do-and-don’t know about Jesus, behavior in public in general, and those damn-popular sweaters with the Star of David right smack dab on the front, as though that obscure figure Adam Sandler for example hadn’t covered this with his “The Chanukah Song”
– another Zombie narrative of any stripe, which is de facto “ambitious” and scratching at profound and timely “cultural commentary” just for existing and by dint of your glancing at it
– torture porn, which is exactly what is sounds like: arcless, repetitively-lingering narrative, w/no layers or motion — it’s not a REAL COMPLEX issue, folks!
and, of course:
– perpetual remakes, as though genre fans are used to the wallowing in the dregs, anyway, and they’ll love Hollywood Studio laziness shoved in their face without blinking …
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THUS: This falls off the cultural radar (almost, but not entirely).
C’mon, people! This radar’s not *broken*, it’s just a little *skewed* — which, in practice, is what “bias” really denotes: “skewed data.”
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Let’s work to fix that damn fucker, shall we?
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[in reponse to a July 17 Lisa Marie Basile post — not unlike things Amanda Sledz has commented on — referring to the obliviousness of people who “quit their job” and “take trips” and “find themselves,” oblivious to the class angle, that makes such “enlightenment” and “exploration” possible … ]
I canvassed with someone who said, “Once you get used to it, canvassing’s like a game.” No it isn’t — 1 in 30 people make staff; there’s a $425 quota a week (you get three nights to attempt to make staff — otherwise, thanks for playing, it’s the Left, we’re broke!) The only thing that would cause this inner/mental insulation would be a trust fund. He also thought it was cute to give me a shit turf (neighborhood of 60 doors or so to canvass that night) when I was new and needing a momentum of confidence and mindset to hang in there — “prove yourself, buddy!” It’s hardly conscious but he went there at a pivotal moment ’cause his mind, in a sense, is going to find itself bored with the usual things. “But hey — it’s my JOB!” dude, and further, everyone else in the office and has to deal with the same shit and can’t not know it, whether or not anyone’s a blazing success about it or crows about it, and YOU’VE got an extra millimeter-when-you-need-it to see further than us, you spoiled rotten brat, fuckin’ go get some work that doesn’t entail you floating over us middle-class, working-class types. Go to goddamn Europe and learn the history of the Art of the West over the past 2 centuries, get an MBA, fuck I know what you should do — go skiing in Switzerland! Sadly, jellyfish aren’t just immune but allergic to engagement with real challenges; it’s a real contra-inclination that has little to do with “conscious” scheming, but is just a matter of what they alight on, like a frog to an attractive lilypad.
Also, some dude who lived across the hall from me when I first moved to Portland couldn’t shut up, take hints, or register facial cues and expressions — pegging him as an inner-fishbowl “Trust Fund resident” behind his eyes. (You have to work around it as though stepping around a physical space — if you *can*, if you *spot it*, if you’re *agile* … ) He lived in a bubble and gave me helpful advice about “deleting” programs from my computer (“uninstall” is what you have to do, I realized later with a moment’s contemplation, without having tackled him at the time and pounded him in the head, since the guts of programs are intertwined with other programs and simply “deleting” them could cause problems — fortunately, I didn’t let his goggly, don’t-we-know-better eyes turn and look down and punch that key *too* many times). The tendency of such individuals to find things “easy to do” — to the point of INSISTING — is the sure tell. From there, who knows.
How do I know this? When I was in college, some homophobe (of the “bisexual but not dating nor hooking up with a guy ever” hovering-around variety) wasted the Formative Years[*] of My Life by seeing every indie movie in the THEATER in Chicago (let alone plenty of those at 7-days-a-week student film society on campus, DOC Films at the University of Chicago, which is an exemplary one, regardless of college programs or ranking) before getting married to his best friend’s girlfriend and having a baby with no job but having garnered a trust fund for himself from his Kool-Aid-founding grandad (Google “Perkins St. Louis Kool-Aid,” as I’ve had to deduce this years later) via a degree with a PHI BETA KAPPA distinction. (To make this clearer, about 10 or 11 people graduated with it that year — at U of C, it’s not so much the point to hit it like that at the 3.8-4.0 GPA level as to simply *encounter* serious thinkers like Foucault, Marx-Engels, or Max Weber at the time, but HE DID ’cause HE NEEDED TO! I’ve known someone else who had a “hoop to jump through,” but, not only was that guy particularly gracious as person, but he was *forthcoming* about it at all, as well!). We made no movies together — short films, experimental Maya-Deren-or-Kenneth-Anger-esque or not — even though his $40-a-years Facets Cinematheque membership got him access to a 16mm, color, sound film camera — all you had to do was put your name on a wait list and check it out when available, after they gave you a preliminary class on how to use it. (“Hal Hartley’s Simple Men, Allison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging, Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud movie … fuck it! I’ll settle down years before reaching 30, at 22 with a dropout who sat around the apartment after giving up on college or doing something else, ’cause all along I was wasting your suburbanite-kid-with-student-loans’s time! Sorry, I thought you might want to ‘switch hit’ or ‘gimme some’ ’cause my eggs got scrambled in an age-inappropriate menage-a-trois when I was in 8th grade with my older brothers’ friend, who ‘had a good time’ … ” Well. Silly me! Join GALA, find a guy, I’m not converting Danielle, Rachel’s not converting Bill Fischer, nobody THINKS THAT BUT THE RIGHT WING, and Tom Kalin’s not scary, no other filmmaker came to campus, why skip it? Oh. Oh of course … ) He’s now insane, packed tight like a bottle full of fizz, teaching under the name of “Ben Rain” in Eugene, Google it. See if you can see a bubble of moneyed entitlement around him — personally, I doubt it. It’s about as visible to the eye as an aura, and seldom will people be equipped to look *for* it.
This shit’s more causal than you think. Pivotal times & places aren’t easy to come by, and they’re as attractive to gadflies as light is to moths. Be warned, and be wary.
[*] “That’s not to say your formative film years can’t be lots of fun. Just don’t expect to have much to show for it for a while. People you went to high school with will be getting out of law school or getting their Ph.D.s, and you’ll be working on a five-minute short that maybe fifty people will end up seeing. I was always a bit envious of my musician friends. They’d start a band, start playing out live, and then be putting out an album in what seemed like no time while I was on a solid five-year plan in building up to that first real film.”—Richard Linklater, in the book for the movie Slacker, published by St. Martin’s Press a year after the film’s release
… unless, of course, you’re a flabby white guy who spreads his ass in a “Sex Ed” tape starring the same piece of meat he marries who didn’t wanna work (or date the guy she hooked up with Orientation Week who socially pressured him into a relationship), and … uh … well, go jerk off thinking ’bout your mom! (“Can’t tell you how many fantasies I’ve had about mom … ” oh, how liberal and, um, “not-conservative!”) “Can’t just get a ‘squirt’? No?” No … no, no more than I’m going to unhook all these bras around campus, life’s just terrible, particularly if you’re set for life with a Trust Fund and your name’s the amount you get each year, starting with college graduation, not the lame hippie name you chose when you’re not a hippie, anyway …
Anybody who talks to him and plans on spending even a half-minute near me better get through all these pictures first (no joke!) and get me all those bras I missed (no exceptions — try making that happen!) or fuck off. And die.
No kidding.
