The Aliens Hate Us Because We Killed Jesus

I stumbled upon this interpretation of Prometheus.

I have no words.

Well, I have words. They go like this. I get that, for a lot of people, “the unknown” all live down the same hall in their head. If not Zeus, why not aliens? But I actually find aliens kind of boring. I assume they exist. I assume they’re probably not interacting with us. If they are, it’s weird and cool, but it wouldn’t fuck me up.

But, for me, there’s a continuum with things I know don’t exist–like vampires–on one end–and things I’m not sure exist–like gods–at the other that I know, with my whole being, are ways we have of trying to make sense of the inexplicable. (Imagine it like this. You know you live in a house with windows. You don’t know for sure what’s outside your house, only that you both can see there’s stuff out there and you have a strong sense that what you see through your windows is not the full totality of what’s outside your house. Now, imagine that you start to see things out there and you want to somehow capture an image of them to show your friends, so you can all talk about what you see out there, beyond the house. Now, say that you, for some reason, decide to draw on the window in butter what you’re seeing. So, there’s the trick of remembering that you’re rendering in two dimensions what you’re seeing in three. And remembering that your finger in butter isn’t a great medium. And, when the sun warms the glass, things are going to slip and slid. And you might not be that great an artist in the first place. etc. And then it’s not you who’s going to look at your window paintings–it’s your kids and grand kids and great grandkids. So, clearly, you saw something out the window. I’m chalking vampires up to mostly butter-smear. I think your blond-haired blue-eyed Jesus is not quite right, but I’m sure you saw something human-like that moved you. We’re all grasping to try to find a language to explain what we’re seeing out there.) And I find the hallway down which that continuum lives to be extraordinarily interesting.

In my own psychic landscape, though, aliens don’t live down that hall. And I really hate when that’s the explanation behind things. I mean, I find the Bermuda Triangle a lot more compelling than Area 51, because Area 51 involves a certain truth that’s being kept from us by a conspiracy and the Bermuda Triangle… well, who can even say if that’s a real thing? I prefer mysterious and unclear to grand conspiracies. I guess in part because I don’t believe that people are good at keeping secrets.

Anyway, so I strongly dislike the Alien Jesus theory, no matter how much Ridley Scott thinks it’s too on the nose. To me, it’s too halls that go different places being forced into one.

Now It’s the Dog’s Turn to Look at My Butt, I Guess

So, even though the dog enjoys walking at the park, which is a much more challenging walk than our morning walks, she has started being a big baby about walking in the morning. She walks behind me like a recalcitrant schoolgirl, who’s not that anxious to get to class. But then, when we turn around, she still walks behind me like she regrets having to make the effort to get home. And then, when we get back to the yard, where she can run free, she still walks behind me like that’s just where she wants to be, creeping up on me.

And today, guess who hit her?

No. Not New Kitty. The orange cat. Who also waited yesterday for the Butcher to put down his glass of milk so that he could stick his whole face right in the cup.

No more Jason Statham movies for that cat. He just starts strutting around the house like he might fight any one of us at any minute.

Speaking of Jason Statham movies, we watched another movie where he kidnaps/rescues an Asian chick!

It’s gotten so noticeable now that the Butcher was all “He’s our generation’s Jessica Fletcher, isn’t he?”

And our friend, T. was all, “What do you mean?”

And the Butcher said, “Where you start to think maybe he just fakes solving the crime he’s busy committing.”

I’m just saying, if you’re an Asian woman and you find yourself in a Jason Statham movie, just go ahead and get in his car. You’re going to end up there anyway, so you might as well save yourself the effort of trying to escape your fate. Hell, maybe if you get in his car before the gun fight starts, he’ll have time to run you through the drive-through at McDonald’s before the bullets start flying.

In all seriousness, I would love to read someone’s commentary on this. It’s apparently a pretty appealing fantasy to Statham’s audience, seeing as it’s featured so often. But I’d like to read someone smart’s thoughts on why.

I had NO idea this had happened to Charlaine Harris. This sounds like a nightmare. I can’t even begin to imagine.

Kansas City

One of the things I love about Janelle Monae, aside from my suspicion that we’re watching some singular vision execute itself in this really extraordinary way, is that she situates herself in music in ways I find really thought provoking. There’s a lot to talk about with “Q.U.E.E.N.” and we could spend all afternoon just talking about the end, which certainly must be the first song to go from Philip K. Dick to Jimmie Hendrix in two lines.

But I want to focus, for a second, on the part right before that:

I asked a question like this
“Are we a lost generation of our people?
Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal.
She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel.
So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal?
They keep us underground working hard for the greedy,
But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy.
My crown too heavy like the Queen Nefertiti
Gimme back my pyramid, I’m trying to free Kansas City.

I quote the whole thing, because I think she’s juggling Black nationalism and Ginsberg and I find that amazing. And because I think the part that I want to really look at depends on what comes before it–this questioning of who creates things and who owns them and who controls them. But this part, “I’m trying to free Kansas City.”

Now, if we consult our roadmap to important places in the psyche of American music, we discover that Kansas City is on that map:

Which makes sense, because we’ve all heard the song:

But hold my hand and let’s go down the rabbit hole. Doesn’t that sound like this tune?

Which is, of course, the same song as Bob’s:

Which is a very similar song to this one:

And yes, that last verse is:

Lord, I woke up this mornin’ with my pork grindin’ business in my hand.
Says I woke up this morning with my pork grindin’ business in my hand.
Lord, if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man.

Which I think brings us back full circle. We start with a man praying to the Lord for someone, anyone, to get him off. That leads us to “Kansas City,” the city that Janelle Monae is trying to free by asking church going folks, “Hey brother can you save my soul from the devil?/Say is it weird to like the way she wear her tights?” Then she promises, “Even if it makes other uncomfortable/ I will love who I am.” It’s a big promise, but there’s something about her that make me think that it’s a promise larger than it appears on the surface. I think she’s promising to love unabashedly everyone she loves, and not just them, but their whole history with them.

***

Also, though it doesn’t fit into the particular hole I was going down, it should be noted that Big Joe Turner was born in Kansas City. This is his song:

Which gave us rock and roll:

Which gave us Elvis:

Whew, you can see why we need Bob Dylan to map all this shit out for us. It’s a vast landscape, and all the roads wind.

It is Every Bit as Awesome as You Thought It Would Be

So Long, George

George Jones has died, which is a total bummer. It’s a major loss of a great talent. But if you can get on Twitter and search for George Jones, you’ll see plenty of fans with old disappointments and old country singers with unforgotten grievances. I don’t quite know what to make of it. But, in a way, it’s nice to see.

Which, I know, I think on other days, I’d find it appalling, but today it strikes me as an important corrective to the hagiography.

You simply cannot overstate Jones’s importance to country music. But that didn’t make him an unproblematic guy.

I think letting him be complicated and disappointing and a genius does actually honor his memory more than white-washing him in death would do.

Ohio

Lord almighty, this song will rip your heart out.

Paranorman, Spoilers Only

What the ever loving fuck? Is this what it’s like to get three-quarters of the way through a burger only to find half a pube in it?

Someone explain this bullshit to me.

There’s a little girl. A genuine little girl, not some Judy-Garland-playing-pretend situation. And the town accuses her, tries her, and executes her for witchcraft. Which, you know, is a pretty fucking terrible thing to do. So, she curses them, which is the only fucking thing she can do in the situation.

And she’s the motherfucking bad guy? None of those assholes who fucking murdered her even have to, oh, you know, face her and apologize?!

The movie even calls her a bully. They fucking murdered her and she’s the bully because she’s hurt and scared and angry?

What lesson, exactly, are kids supposed to take from this piece of shit? That adults can do whatever they want to you and as long as they have a good excuse, you just need to get the fuck over it?

Fuck that shit.

If a children’s movie can’t have compassion for the little murdered girl at its heart… I just don’t even know.

I wish I’d never seen that.

More on Hemlock Grove

Since you already read me here, you already read this in less put-together-form. But here it is!

Ha ha ha.

I’m kind of in love with the idea that you are the folks who get to see my writing in its… shall we say… foundation garments.

Hemlock Grove, Finally

It isn’t consistently great. It is consistently good. This is more than you can say for True Blood or Twilight, who it clearly envisions as its competition. Famke Jannsen’s character finally did get sufficiently evil at the end, but I could have used some more of that all along.

I wish they’d have let Peter and Shelly fall in love. I mean, I know the hot dude is supposed to get the hot chick, and I totally saw why the hot chick dug him. I just thought he had more chemistry with Shelly.

I don’t know what to make of the obvious fact that both Peter and Roman watch “The Wire.” Maybe it’s not obvious. I felt like it was pretty obvious.

And I was surprised by how much I liked Dr. Price, who seemed somewhat flat in the book, but in the show–I think it’s somehow the actor–he feels less like a psychopath (a little) and more like a single-minded fool whose majorly losing his way.

It’s also shockingly less gruesome over all than the most gruesome parts would lead you to imagine. I don’t know if it was a nod to their budget or what, but there were quite a few times when I thought, oh, this is going to be gross and we never saw it–they cut away.

So, I think, if you like True Blood but wish it were a little better, you’ll like Hemlock Grove. I enjoyed it, a lot, but I don’t know that I’ll be telling The Butcher that he has to see it. If it’s your thing, it’s really going to be your thing. Otherwise, probably not.

Hemlock Grove Thus Far

I’m about six episodes in and I have thoughts. It is gory and the problems with Famke Jannsen’s character in the book are kind of more apparent in the tv show in a way that’s somewhat hard to overlook–the main being that, for a woman everyone describes as evil, so far she’s doing a lot of fucking and moping and crying. If this is evil, the bar is very low. Annoying, weird, and difficult? Yes. But not yet evil.

And, I’m uncertain about the portrayal of the “Gypsies.” On the one hand I get that, if you’re going to have a television show that takes horror tropes–including movies–it would be weird to not have “Gypsies” and that the “Gypsies” like “Gypsies” in all horror movies are a kind of catch-all fake minority of people who will be able to procure items “regular” people cannot and who have knowledge “regular” people cannot and who do the woo-woo shit “regular” people wouldn’t even begin to know how to do. And I get that a lot of horror stories just don’t work without that trope and the expectation that viewers will know that trope and the mythology surrounding it. And, as far as “Gypsies” go, Peter and his family get a complex, sympathetic portrayal. But that trope is so easy to call on and the reason there’s an expectation that viewers of horror movies will know it is because there’s a real group of people called that name and attributed those stereotypes and persecuted and killed throughout history because of it.

So, there you go. It’s not unproblematic. And my discomfort with it never entirely went away. But it wasn’t strong enough to make me stop watching.

Other than that, it’s delicious. Peter is beautiful. He’s got these beautiful blue eyes and this very charming way of, whenever he’s confronted with something weird, looking behind him like, “Are you all kidding me?” Though, of course, there’s no one back there.

Roman (Bill Skarsgard’s character) is strange and fun. Skarsgard himself seems built like a child’s stick figure, with legs that come right out of shoulders and he has a way of moving that is both awkward and graceful at the same time. He’s not very good looking, but it’s very hard to take your eyes off him.

The greenscreen driving around is hilarious and awesome. Moreso than anything they do to throw back to old Hollywood horror, that invokes it for me, people sitting in an obviously stationary car while a background goes by.

Christina look to me so much how I imagine Rachel Joiner from the band The Joiners looked as a young teenager. Live, Christine and go on to be in a band in Birmingham!

As I predicted, the cat was not Fetchit, as it is in the book. They went with Casper.

And the story is a hoot, but I already knew that from reading the book. Which brings us to the most interesting part of the show–McGreevy wrote both the book and the show. So, since he’s got thirteen episodes to fill, you get much more fleshed-out backstories. That’s nice. But the best part is watching him revise his original story, smooth things over that were kind of wrinkled in the book, change things that seemed to not make sense, draw connections more obviously. It’s really interesting to watch his mind work. I really liked the book, but my experience as a viewer of both is that there’s something really generous in watching a writer revise his “text” to be more true to his story. After all, he had a perfectly fine book. He could have stuck with it very, very closely.

Maybe this is the advantage over True Blood. I think people liked McGreevy’s book just fine, but I don’t get a sense there’s a rabid fan base who needs to see x happen or it just won’t be right. He really can make good choices about where to differ from the book.

But the coolest thing I wanted to point out requires some very minor spoilers. Here we go. There is a LOT of dragon imagery in the show. A couple of characters make reference to seeing the dragon. A couple of boys are kind of pretending they belong to an order of the Dragon. A character straight-up does belong to the Order of the Dragon. So, at one point, we learn that a company called Lod, LLC wants to buy part of Godfrey Enterprises from the living Godfrey brother. Living Godfrey brother is deeply suspicious so he looks up “Lod” online. They show him going to the Wikipedia page for the city of Lod, in Israel. He scrolls down as far as the Arab section, but on screen we see nothing of interest. He also apparently sees nothing of interest.

But they spend so long showing it that it was hard for me to resist not calling it right up on my iPhone and blah blah blah, nothing of interested until you get to the end of the Arab section,

The city was visited by the local Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi in 985, during the Abbasid Caliphate and was noted for its Great Mosque which served the residents of al-Ludd, Ramla and the nearby villages. He also wrote of the city’s “wonderful church (of St. George) at the gate of which Christ will slay the Antichrist.”

St. George being most well-known for slaying a dragon. St. George being also born in Lod. Nothing about St. George is said in the show (that I’ve noticed so far), but the writer and/or director of that episode managed to stick him in there by planting clues about the dragon and then leading people to look at the Wikipedia page the character was looking at.

It’s so nicely done. It’s hard to explain what a nice treat that was, and felt like a good acknowledgement of how people watch TV, often with a second screen to distract them.

Anyway, I’m really liking it.

Metal Song. Metal Man.

My Iron Man post is up. It’s not as good as the other posts in the round-table, but, in my defense, I thought people would be writing about “Alley Oop” and “Sunshine Superman.”

In Addition to All That…

My parents are in Michigan at the funeral of the husband of one of my dad’s favorite cousins. I want to call them every five minutes and check on them. But I don’t, because I know they’re fine and there’s nothing I can do to comfort them anyway.

We were watching the Justice League last night and, in the episodes we’re in, Luthor is a quasi-good guy. He’s got to wear this vest which prevents him from dying of green Kryptonite cancer, I guess because why not rip off Iron Man? Anyway, he admits last night to a somewhat evil robot that he’s having to come to terms with the fact that, in a couple of generations, no one will know him.

Which is true for most ordinary people.

But it’s not true for Lex Luthor, who has managed to remain known. It makes me wonder if that’s not part of the importance of myths. Something that can be remembered for multiple generations.

You Can Kickstart Buffalo Clover!

So, you know that The Butcher is friends with the one chick from this band, Buffalo Clover, which put out one of my favorite albums of recent years. Well, they’re doing a Kickstarter to pay for their next album and for twenty bucks, you can get the new album and the last album. Hell, for two thousand bucks, they’ll write a song about you.

You and your ill-fated affair with John Rich.

Yeah, you were all “Who would give two thousand… oh, they could do a love song about me and a star-crossed romance with John Rich? I get it.”

Or, I guess it doesn’t have to be John Rich, but it’s hard to understand why you wouldn’t go for it.

Anyway, I don’t know them. The Butcher is, after all, quite a bit younger than me, so, if he knew them in high school, I was already in college. So, they could secretly suck. Or be made entirely of boogers. I don’t know.

But I did love their first album and hope to get to hear this one.

I’m Just Going to Go Ahead and Be a Sucker for This

Let’s talk about this.

I like it.

Darius Rucker has a beautiful voice. He does a fine rendition of the song that is both true to the original and sounds like something he’d sing. I feel like his love for the song comes across (and you know I’m a sucker for that). And the video features my favorite clan of duck call makers.

I only wish that it had been Robbie Fulks instead of Charles Kelly of Lady Antebellum in there. Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re aiming for a Lady Antebellum audience and I know that Lady Antebellum’s name has hurt them among listeners who would otherwise like them and that the record industry really wants to demonstrate that “antebellum” is just a word and you can safely just ignore it and go ahead and put them on your iPod, because, look, they like black people.

But Robbie Fulks would have been a complete mind-fuck. I’m not sure what it would have meant or how I would have read it. But it would have been delicious–the man who twenty years ago so famously decried this kind of music now wink-and-nodding at it? That would have been awesome.

Accidental Racist

In part, I agree with Alan Scherstuhl, over at The Village Voice, that, “Today’s country stars are in the reassurance business” and that Brad Paisley is, indeed, attempting to challenge his audience. And that, as far as that goes, the song is commendable. Which I think is kind of the point that Peter Cooper is trying to make. (Though I find his contention that anyone’s saying, “that racial consciousness and American history are too complicated to be handled in a contemporary song” to be so disingenuous as to be jaw-dropping. People are saying that it’s too important to get wrong in a shitty song, but who, exactly, is saying is shouldn’t be done?)

I think the song suffers from a racist trope, though, which both Scherstuhl and Cooper refuse to acknowledge: The Confederate Flag, as a symbol, isn’t some kind of misunderstanding of meaning between black people and white people that can be resolved by everyone just coming to understand each other. The Confederate Flag is a symbol of white supremacy, the unifying symbol of a country devoted to white supremacy. And even since the fall of that country, it has been used and continues to be used by white supremacist groups as a unifying symbol of white supremacy. (And here’s the important part.) The fantasy in which a black person comes to understand that the Confederate Flag is not (just) a symbol of white supremacy, but is something that is so important for white people (for some other, vaguely articulated reasons) to hold on to, and in which the black person comes to believe that it’s kind of okay for white people to wear or fly the Confederate flag is a white supremacist fantasy.

It doesn’t make you a bad person to have this fantasy or to respond strongly to this fantasy. I don’t think Brad Paisley is wrong or evil for sharing this fantasy. It’s very hard to stare directly at the ways that white supremacy has been ingrained into our culture, they ways in which it is the default, easy-to-support position. You can, indeed, be an “accidental racist” just by going along with “the way we’ve always done things” because the way we’ve always done things as a country is racist as fuck.

But wanting black people to set aside the systemic oppression and dehumanization of their ancestors, to pretend like the state-sanctioned oppression of Jim Crow, and the violent opposition to the Civil Rights movement (which took place under the re-popularized Confederate Flag), and the ongoing violence they face at the hands of racists who identify with that Flag is somehow not that important, less important than white people’s feelings is wanting black people to set aside their own history and to ignore a useful literal red flag of someone who intends violence against them in order to not make white people uncomfortable. Wanting that–for black people’s lived history to count less to them than the feelings of white people–is white supremacy: our feelings should be superior to your history.

That’s why I’d have far less problems with the song (though I’d still think it kind of sucks) if LL Cool J weren’t on it. I do think it’s imperative for white people to talk amongst ourselves about white supremacy and not continue to put the onus on non-white people to fix our racist problem. Even if we do so awkwardly and sometimes fuck up.

But, under the guise of arguing against white supremacy, the song enacts a fantasy of it.

(And also all this good stuff.)

In Which I Subject You to Werewolf/Skarsgard Jokes in Another Place

My other Think Progress post is up!

TRUEBLOOD for Boys

I finished the book Hemlock Grove yesterday. It is awesome. The writing is extraordinary and you can tell this is a genre the author loves the shit out of (There’s a nod to Lovecraft that I’m not sure works, but I admired his audacity in doing it–in other words, I’m not sure that acknowledging something in-story is really racist but trusting your readers to know it’s a nod to something really, really racist, somehow makes it non-problematic. Not that I expect a big, complicated discussion of race, but in a book that otherwise has no such discussion, I didn’t know if I was just supposed to like the main character but understand he carries on this racist tradition in honor of his beloved grandfather PERIOD or if that was also supposed to tell me something about how he might be stupidly bound to tradition in some ways. I hope for the latter, but think it’s the former.).

But, in the end, I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s True Blood for boys. Every place Sookie might be talking about (in the books) or noticing (in the show) a nice body and a hard dick, here it’s all fine tits and wet, glistening crotches. But it’s not just that. It’s how, in Sookie’s world, she has a home she’s firmly rooted to, given to her by her beloved dead grandmother and Peter has a wanderlust–a deliberate lack of home–instilled in him by his beloved dead grandfather.

And I kind of suspect Netflix wants you to draw the comparison as well. Otherwise, why stick a Skarsgard in exactly the position they did?

Which isn’t to say that I’m not hugely excited, still. I am. Here’s the problem I have, though. I think this book is better than the Sookie Stackhouse books. I think the show is going to be better than True Blood. I moreso also think that this is specifically intended as a corrective to the weaknesses in both and, I am 80% fine with that and excited to see it, because I can’t take another season of vampires in board rooms.

I am 20% sad that the “corrective” to the problems of the Stackhouse universe include sticking a dude at the center of it.

Hemlock Grove

1. I’m more excited for this show than it deserves. Even if it deserved a lot of excitement, I’m more excited than it deserves.

2. Yes, that’s Vampire Eric’s brother, glaring at a werewolf!

3. Which brings up an important question–Do Scandinavians possess werewolf-glaring skills that Americans lack? Is that why we have to import Scandinavians to glower at our werewolves? Is this a skill all Scandinavians have or just the Skarsgards? I’m 1/8th Swedish. Does that give me the ability to effectively side-eye 1/8th of a werewolf? And which 1/8th? Or are my dirty looks only 1/8th as effective as someone fresh from Scandinavian soil? Is this why there are no shows about werewolves set in Minnesota? How can we safely test this theory? Can we hire Joe Manganiello to stand in front of us and judge which one of our stoic looks of mild interest he finds the most disturbing?

3.5 How does that even go? A boy and his mom are sitting at the breakfast table and he’s all, “Well, I’m off to seek my fortune in America, being a werewolf-glarer. I’ll write as soon as I find work.” “You come from a long line of werewolf-glarers, son. Your uncle Ollie once stared down three werewolves at once. Your grandfather saved Stockholm from the Great Werewolf Infestation of ’68 by withering looks alone. Go, and make me proud.”

4. I could laugh about this all day. And Alyssa is going to let me write about it for Think Progress next week.

5. I never thought my “Scandinavia” category would get so much use. But here we are.

Snow White and the Huntsman

I caught the Butcher and the Red-Headed Kid watching Snow White and the Huntsman and I sat down and watched them watch it, because, it quickly became apparent they were watching it more like a sport than a movie. They cheered when someone managed some good acting. They cringed when the acting was particularly bad. They did a lot of cringing.

I haven’t watched any of the Twilight movies but I was struck in this one with Kristen Stewart’s amazing blankness. It’s not about her acting. I mean, there are other terrible actors in the world. And, who knows? She might be a fine actor. This just wasn’t the movie for displaying it. She just has this quality of being… I don’t know quite how to explain it. But there’s something about her presence on-screen that encourages you to imagine yourself in her spot. She becomes, somehow, almost not there. There’s just a girl-sized hole where she should be into which the viewer is invited to pour herself.

It’s the damndest thing. And not that I want to watch any of the Twilight movies, but seeing her in this made it easier for me to understand their popularity.

It also made it easier for me to sympathize with her weird relationship with the public in general. I can’t think of another star in my lifetime (or ever, but I’m curious if there’s been another) whose appeal is that she’s like a video game avatar for her public.

I don’t know if I’m quite getting at what I noticed about her. Because it occurs to me that of course a lot of stars are just the public image their fans want and of course a lot of stars are just the fantasies their publicists sell the public. But this is something, it seems to me, beyond that. This isn’t “Imagine if you were Kristen Stewart.” This is her ability (is it an ability? I’m not sure.) to disappear while right in front of you leaving room for you to imagine yourself in her spot–”Imagine if Kristen Stewart were you.”

We treat a lot of our stars like they are characters in movies–or that they are the characters they play in movies. But I do think that Stewart might be the first start so blatantly treated like a video game avatar, as a stand-in for the people who are imagining themselves through her.

The Curse of the Red River Valley Earworm

The tune is beautiful, as we’ve established by the number of people who have used in in their songs.

But the song is so sad! The cowboy’s great love is leaving the valley. And she loves him, obviously, because she came and sat by his side and listened to him sing to her all about how much he will miss her.

Why couldn’t they make it work?

And now it’s stuck in my head.

And worse is the worry that it’s her leaving that causes him to become depressed and look around for barns to sleep in and, eventually, for other women to comfort him because he never understands why the one he loves left him.

The Words

I’m fascinated/confused by this idea that people listen to music without giving a fuck what the words are. It came up at the Hooded Utilitarian and it still blows my mind. What, then, do people sing in the shower, if they don’t know the words to songs?

This morning I sang in the shower “Can I Sleep in Your Arms Tonight, Lady?”

And I thought about how our parents would always put on “The Red-Headed Stranger” in the trailer while we were camping so that we would fall asleep while they were out talking or playing cards.

And then I was kind of bummed that I didn’t know the words to “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?”

Because I would have sung that. Ha, you know, it’s kind of beside the point I’m trying to make (which is a meandering point anyway), but you know that Charles Wolfe would have known who the fiddler on this recording was, either just because he knew who Charlie Poole’s fiddler was, or because he’d listen to it and be able to make a guess just by sound (Wikipedia suggests it’s Posey Rorer). I really like Poole’s version because I feel like we’re listening to something that is recognizable as proto-bluegrass–the heavy fiddle, the plinky, show-off-y banjo, the nasal singing.

But I would not have sung “Red River Valley,” because it’s so sad.

Anyway, if you don’t know the words, aren’t those the same song?

Have They Returned to Letting Captain Morgan Seduce Everyone With His Eyes?

I’m accepting that the days of Captain Morgan just being sexy as hell are over. Now we have to have stories and adventures. I don’t like it, but the latest Captain Morgan ad at least appears to return to some of the things I liked about the “Captain Morgan instigates an orgy” era ads–Captain Morgan’s face is clearly shown. He uses said face to shoot bemused and somewhat lusty looks at people. And there’s a bit at the end that seems too-self-aware of the homoeroticism of the ads to be an accident. (Though it’s interesting how so many things in the Captain Morgan’s ads that would, in real life, be nightmares–servitude at the time, what really happens when pirates bend you across something and tie you down–are just frosted over into fantasy. I mean, yes, it’s all a fantasy. Those are just the moments when how far the fantasy is from reality is hardest for me to ignore. I do think it’s funny that the rescued guy kind of gives a look of “Oh, you just rescued me for my map.”)

Yes, he’s still running away with someone and from someone. But they’ve at least moved the girl off his lap.

Ain’t No Haint Gonna Run Me Off

A week or so ago, I went to see Mark Robinson at his album launch party. It was all good and wonderful, but the best part of the evening was when he and Davis Raines did their own version of this song from above–Gene Simmons’ “Haunted House.” It is not on the new record. So, I’m starting an internet drive to get them to record it so that I can dance around my house in an embarrassing manner while singing along to it. Simmons’ version is fine, but it lacks the joy Robinson and Raines bring to it.

Anyway, the new album is fantastic.

Love and Theft Ruins Mickey Mouse for Me

Oh, y’all, it’s so good, Love and Theft, if a little too much a product of its time in ways that are regretful. But my mind, she is blown. Anyway, I’m still hung up on how minstrelsy became… I guess I want to say…. repressed in our cultural imagination. So, I was looking on YouTube for minstrel performances to see if I could see what I was trying to understand. It lead me to racist cartoons.

Now, I’d like to show you two of them. Let me reiterate that they are racist. I mean, just motherfucking racist, no denying, no equivocating. Just as racist as they come.

This is the first one I saw that started to give me an uneasy feeling of “Wait, I’ve never seen this, but this is familiar.”

Something about the shapes of the people’s heads, the way their jaws and mouths are rendered just reminded me of Disney characters. This is from Universal, directed by Walter Lantz, best known for Woody Woodpecker. And it’s in color. So, wrong studio and too late to be an influence on Mickey Mouse. But it still gave me the WTF?s.

Then there’s this one:

And there’s a mouse looking for all the world like Mickey. That film, “Dixie Days,” was made in 1930, so it’s younger than “Steamboat Willie.” But it’s hard to watch “Steamboat Willie” after seeing these and not wonder if something that would have been readily apparent to Mickey’s audience in 1928.

So, down the rabbit hole I went (speaking of rabbits, let’s not even talk about Bugs Bunny) and here’s what I found. According to Wikipedia, Walt Disney got the idea for “Steamboat Willie” after watching The Jazz Singer. If you want a good appreciation for how woozy Love and Theft can make you, just follow that thread. Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jewish guy who both performed in blackface and was an ardent advocate for desegregating the Broadway stage performed in Champaign, Illinois, where Samson Raphaelson saw him. Raphaelson goes on to write the play “The Jazz Singer” which is later adapted into a movie. In which Jolson stars. Since the movie is a loose adaptation of Jolson’s life, the movie is about a blackface performer. Walt Disney sees the movie and it inspires him to go home and create “Steamboat Willie.” And two years later, there’s “Dixie Days,” in which a mouse that is, for all practical purposes Mickey is also a black stereotype (Mickey will go in blackface three years after that, in a short also having to do with Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

So, the question I have is this: If Mickey was inspired by blackface and if he inspires what we might consider cartoon blackface (white cartoonists presenting black stereotypes to us for our amusement) and he participates in literal blackface in the 30s, would it have been obvious to viewers of “Steamboat Willie” that Mickey Mouse was coded “black”? Even in the absence of stereotypes we now recognize?

Does this question make sense? I just wonder, after spending an evening watching these old cartoons if it doesn’t ping us as invoking the same kind of performative “blackness” as minstrelsy until there are lazy people and Mammies and someone’s eating a watermelon and “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River” is playing in the background as a riverboat gently paddles by, but all an audience in 1928 would have needed to see to know that was what was being invoked was a black body (or more) and a riverboat and a rural setting.

If so, I’m going to have to revise my belief that minstrelsy is being repressed out of some embarrassment about corniness and instead wonder whether what happened is that there used to be a whole wide vocabulary–visual and aural (both musically and just how people were supposed to sound)–that evoked minstrelsy and, even as people clamped down on the stuff that was undeniably racist and objected to it, the stuff that was deniably racist just got uncoupled from it and kept.

We pretend to have forgotten about minstrelsy in this scenario not out of embarrassment, but because then we can keep what we love that has roots in that ground without controversy.

The Mouse is just The Mouse.