For whatever reason, I'm all about laughing at message boards. The Comicon gutters represent culture in its lowest form, suggesting that if language is a virus, it can sometimes, and may be evolutionarilty destined to, manifest in violent or even flesh eating forms. These are the thread titles on the front page at 8:08 Pacific Standard Time on Monday October 20, 2003 (and forgive my shoddy HTML cut and paste):
Red Skull's cigarette holder is just not that impressive
***The OFFICIAL 2003-2004 NFL Thread***
REALLY fucked up Gutters/comics related dream I had
Never try to whip a donut in a parking lot in four-wheel drive
Have you ever noticed
Hey Black people on Comicon...
CAPTION CONTEST
I Miss Y'All
chris & danny quarantine thread
Lamest sockpuppet EVER!!
Everyone says I draw like Dan DeCarlo anyway
Speaker's Corner
Freedom
We've never seen danny and Otto together, have we?
The Cubs aren't in the World Series
It's been a year.
what kind of music does ronan like?
How can you NOT love it?
Cub Fans sucks today
The Haiku of ScooterDoom
I fell into a burning ring of fire
Peter MacDonald!
UP TOP!
anyone else notice how complicated jim treacher lore has gotten lately?
cahleeforrnians
What's up with Half-Penis Anyway?
English paper on Ruth Hall
O danny boy, this is not a pipe calling
He looks just like his father
Hey ScootiePie
Survivor: Comicon
Why won't ScooterDoom tell us where he works?
Battlefield 1942 - Anyone here play?
The final fate of Danny Hellman and Ted Rall.
9-11, We had it coming
move over, serapion
Thread sent to Gutters and I want it closed.
Sam Catalino is "The Big C" at the ORCA Boards.
Ummm.....Frank?
AESTUS, DEFEND YOURSELF
GOD and Religion suck Hitler was righteous
How To Make The Perfect Cup Of Coffee
someone should show this to groth
Why i hate people who hate_ Bush, Harrison, Clinton, and Taft.
Hello
Horoscope and puzzles
Arnold orders off the menu
SEASONAL
ANNOUNCEMENT
Why I hate Danny Hellman
What the hell happened?
If a teenager was caught spraypainting any one of these slogans on the side of a school, he'd probably be suspected of plotting a shooting, and rightfully so. On the internet, its just part of communication. Any one is a short poem of loneliness, misery, despair; adrifting and lost, they mournfully prefigure an epitaph for our entire times and culture.
Monday, October 20, 2003
Wonderful comedy is afoot at the John Byrne message board. It opens with Byrne, a veteran superhero comic creator, devoting a statement to the use of a comic book characters' full name: "What's with the cutesy abbreviations of the character names, people? "Supes"? "Bats"? Do you really feel right using those? Does it really resonate correctly for you when you refer to a super powerful mass murderer as "Mags"? Or a homicidal maniac who would gut you as soon as look at you as "Wolvie"?"
There's plenty more ("Seriously -- would you call Batman "Bats" to his face? Even Superman, who is a much more "approachable" kind of guy -- if he were real, would you actually feel comfortable addressing him as "Supes"?"), the gist of which is that Byrne is absolutely not kidding, documenting a persolality that is chillingly unsettling even by the standards of posters to a comic book message board. If I were an FBI agent interviewing a serial killer for a profile case, and he delivered a monlogue like that, I would leave the meeting sweating and pale, and spend the rest of the week in bed, doubting God and contemplating a career change. Would you trust this man a gun?
Alomst as unsettling is the ensuing debate, with partisans taking the argument seriously on every side imaginable. From "I would consider it the highest compliment if I created a character and the fans started refering to him with a nickname, as long as it was intended as affection and not done with malice" to "That you think calling Batman "Bats" is a term of affection means not one whit to the conversation. I, personally, don't think it's an affectionate term at all. Nor do I think that it's a "fun" term either. Am I taking it too seriously? No. If you think so, more's the poorer for you."
I wonder if social debate was like this before the middle ages, or is speculating that the Earth has two sides and acceptable heresy?
There's plenty more ("Seriously -- would you call Batman "Bats" to his face? Even Superman, who is a much more "approachable" kind of guy -- if he were real, would you actually feel comfortable addressing him as "Supes"?"), the gist of which is that Byrne is absolutely not kidding, documenting a persolality that is chillingly unsettling even by the standards of posters to a comic book message board. If I were an FBI agent interviewing a serial killer for a profile case, and he delivered a monlogue like that, I would leave the meeting sweating and pale, and spend the rest of the week in bed, doubting God and contemplating a career change. Would you trust this man a gun?
Alomst as unsettling is the ensuing debate, with partisans taking the argument seriously on every side imaginable. From "I would consider it the highest compliment if I created a character and the fans started refering to him with a nickname, as long as it was intended as affection and not done with malice" to "That you think calling Batman "Bats" is a term of affection means not one whit to the conversation. I, personally, don't think it's an affectionate term at all. Nor do I think that it's a "fun" term either. Am I taking it too seriously? No. If you think so, more's the poorer for you."
I wonder if social debate was like this before the middle ages, or is speculating that the Earth has two sides and acceptable heresy?
If you're in the Seattle area, I highly recommend heading to Consolidated Works to check out Dazzle Camouflage, a new installation by Jason Puccinelli. He received funding for it from Artist Trust, which is how I first heard of. And Jason is joining us for a fundraising reception at the site, so I've gotten to talk to him a bit while setting that up.
The basic idea is that he's constructed museum dioramas, like you would see representing Stone Age culture or something like that, and combined them with a fashion shoot. In this case, the dioramas are representations of some questionable things, such as in the image up top. Other scenes are a slaughterhouse, a missile silo and a stock exchange. Opening night, he had fashion models pose and cavort in the scenes, covered in blodd, stabbing pig carcasses, and also audience members were selected to pose as well. I thought the fashion models weakened the effect, actually, because the exhibit works better as audience participation, the better to implicate the audience as they interact in the settings. The performed fashion shoots distanced the audience. It wasn't them.
There won't be the full on fashion shoot spectacle in the regular exibit, but a photographer will be on duty Thursdays thru Sundays 7:00pm – 8:00pm to take pictures of visitors to the installation. Which means you get a photo as a souvenier. It's supposed to be fun, and kind of disturbing that it is fun.
It's also the cover of last week's Stranger:
Thursday, October 16, 2003
I have returned from vacation. I was considering retirement, but I found something out today that demanded my attention -- and the world's.
Jimmie Walker writes a column for Jewish World Review.
Today he writes about Rush Limbaugh.
That is all.
Jimmie Walker writes a column for Jewish World Review.
Today he writes about Rush Limbaugh.
That is all.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Friday, September 12, 2003
In a world gone mad with grief and ecstacy, there is at least some good news. In April 2004 Fantagraphics Books will publish the first of 25 volumes of the Complete Peanuts. All fifty years. All fifty years.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Riefenstahl dies at 101; tainted by link to Hitler
September 10, 2003
BY ROGER EBERT Sun-Times Movie Critic
Leni Riefenstahl, who did more than any other artist to shape the image of the Third Reich, died in her sleep Monday night in Berlin. She was 101. Although her 1934 documentary "Triumph of the Will" was the most dramatic and influential visual treatment of Nazism and the cult of Adolf Hitler, she maintained until the end that she was not a Nazi.
Not everyone agreed. She was declared to be a Nazi sympathizer by an Allied tribunal after World War II and essentially disappeared from public view for 20 years. Then she attempted to rehabilitate her image through interviews, film festival appearances, a 1973 book of photographs about a threatened African tribe, a 1992 autobiography, and her appearance in an extraordinary 1993 documentary by Ray Muller named "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."
I wrote in my review of that film: "If Leni Riefenstahl had done nothing notable before the age of 60, what a wonderful life we would say she had lived since then." At that time in her early 90s, she was the world's oldest active scuba diver, and in the documentary, at the end of a day of diving, we see her walk down a pier with two men -- the captain, and Horst, her younger companion and cinematographer -- and "the body language says everything. The two men walk ahead, carrying gear, engaged in conversation. She walks behind them, alone, carrying her own gear and oxygen tank. They don't lend her a hand, or offer to carry the tank for her, and what this says is that, at 91, they do not think she needs special consideration. She's one of the guys."
But being in great shape at a very old age, while admirable, does not erase the stain of her association with the Nazi movement. As Hitler began his rise to power, Miss Riefenstahl was already a famous German actress, best known for a group of "mountain films" in which idealized Nordic characters posed heroically against the sky. In "The Blue Light" (1932), which I once saw at the Telluride Film Festival, she is accused of being a witch, but finds truth and deliverance in the secret of a blue light which shines from a cave high on a mountainside.
By 1934, she was a favorite of the Nazis, and was chosen by Goebbels, the propaganda minister, to film the party's rally at Nuremberg. Given many cameras and unlimited film, she also benefitted because much of the rally was deliberately staged with the film in mind. The result, "Triumph of the Will," is one of the most important documentaries ever made, and by general consent one of the best: important at the time for the way it painted Hitler and his followers as idealized supermen, important now because it helps explain how Nazism was not only a political movement but an exercise in mass hypnotism drawing on fetishistic imagery.
Miss Riefenstahl's other important documentary was "Olympia" (1938), a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which took place on the eve of Hitler's war.
Again she had unlimited resources at her disposal to create heroic images of muscular athletes conquering space and time. The buried message praised the cult of the body, particularly the Nordic body, and it was a considerable embarrassment for Hitler that the African-American runner Jesse Owens won four gold medals and set three Olympic records at the Berlin Games.
There was one other important film directed by Miss Riefenstahl, the little-known "Lowlands," partly filmed in Spain in 1944 and using gypsies in a parable that she said was intended as a criticism of Nazism. Post-production was interrupted by the end of the war, and the movie was not finished until 1954. Only last year Miss Riefenstahl was sued by gypsy death camp survivors who said she used them as slave labor; they objected to her statement that none of her gypsy extras died, since some did, in Auschwitz.
After her public reappearance in the 1960s, Miss Riefenstahl often defended herself against charges that she was a Nazi. She was an artist, she said, interested in film, not politics. In the 1993 documentary, she is questioned strenuously about her association with the party, and we see that she has rehearsed over the years an elaborate explanation and justification for her behavior. There is no anti-Semitism in her films, she points out. She did not know until after the war about the Holocaust. She was naive, unsophisticated, detached from Nazi party officials with the exception of Hitler, her friend -- but not a close friend, she insists.
But the very absence of anti-Semitism in "Triumph of the Will" looks like a calculation; excluding a central motif of Hitler's speeches must have been deliberate, to make the film go down more easily as propaganda. Nor could a film professional working in Berlin have been unaware of the disappearance of all of the Jews in the movie industry.
In the 1993 film, Miss Riefenstahl is seen visiting the site of the 1936 Olympiad with the surviving members of her film crew. They talk about some of their famous shots -- from aerial techniques to the idea of digging a hole for the camera, so that athletes could loom over the audience. We sense Miss Riefenstahl's true passion for filmmaking. But there are candid moments, when she is not aware of the camera, when she shares quiet little asides with her old comrades, which, while not damning, subtly suggest a dimension she is not willing to have seen.
The impression remains that if Hitler had won, Leni Riefenstahl would not have been so quick to distance herself from him. Her postwar moral defense is based on technicalities. Understandably, she was not eager to face conviction or punishment as a war criminal. But ironically, if she had confessed and renounced her earlier ideas, she might have had a more active career. It was her unconvincing, elusive self-defense that continued to damn her.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
September 10, 2003
BY ROGER EBERT Sun-Times Movie Critic
Leni Riefenstahl, who did more than any other artist to shape the image of the Third Reich, died in her sleep Monday night in Berlin. She was 101. Although her 1934 documentary "Triumph of the Will" was the most dramatic and influential visual treatment of Nazism and the cult of Adolf Hitler, she maintained until the end that she was not a Nazi.
Not everyone agreed. She was declared to be a Nazi sympathizer by an Allied tribunal after World War II and essentially disappeared from public view for 20 years. Then she attempted to rehabilitate her image through interviews, film festival appearances, a 1973 book of photographs about a threatened African tribe, a 1992 autobiography, and her appearance in an extraordinary 1993 documentary by Ray Muller named "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."
I wrote in my review of that film: "If Leni Riefenstahl had done nothing notable before the age of 60, what a wonderful life we would say she had lived since then." At that time in her early 90s, she was the world's oldest active scuba diver, and in the documentary, at the end of a day of diving, we see her walk down a pier with two men -- the captain, and Horst, her younger companion and cinematographer -- and "the body language says everything. The two men walk ahead, carrying gear, engaged in conversation. She walks behind them, alone, carrying her own gear and oxygen tank. They don't lend her a hand, or offer to carry the tank for her, and what this says is that, at 91, they do not think she needs special consideration. She's one of the guys."
But being in great shape at a very old age, while admirable, does not erase the stain of her association with the Nazi movement. As Hitler began his rise to power, Miss Riefenstahl was already a famous German actress, best known for a group of "mountain films" in which idealized Nordic characters posed heroically against the sky. In "The Blue Light" (1932), which I once saw at the Telluride Film Festival, she is accused of being a witch, but finds truth and deliverance in the secret of a blue light which shines from a cave high on a mountainside.
By 1934, she was a favorite of the Nazis, and was chosen by Goebbels, the propaganda minister, to film the party's rally at Nuremberg. Given many cameras and unlimited film, she also benefitted because much of the rally was deliberately staged with the film in mind. The result, "Triumph of the Will," is one of the most important documentaries ever made, and by general consent one of the best: important at the time for the way it painted Hitler and his followers as idealized supermen, important now because it helps explain how Nazism was not only a political movement but an exercise in mass hypnotism drawing on fetishistic imagery.
Miss Riefenstahl's other important documentary was "Olympia" (1938), a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which took place on the eve of Hitler's war.
Again she had unlimited resources at her disposal to create heroic images of muscular athletes conquering space and time. The buried message praised the cult of the body, particularly the Nordic body, and it was a considerable embarrassment for Hitler that the African-American runner Jesse Owens won four gold medals and set three Olympic records at the Berlin Games.
There was one other important film directed by Miss Riefenstahl, the little-known "Lowlands," partly filmed in Spain in 1944 and using gypsies in a parable that she said was intended as a criticism of Nazism. Post-production was interrupted by the end of the war, and the movie was not finished until 1954. Only last year Miss Riefenstahl was sued by gypsy death camp survivors who said she used them as slave labor; they objected to her statement that none of her gypsy extras died, since some did, in Auschwitz.
After her public reappearance in the 1960s, Miss Riefenstahl often defended herself against charges that she was a Nazi. She was an artist, she said, interested in film, not politics. In the 1993 documentary, she is questioned strenuously about her association with the party, and we see that she has rehearsed over the years an elaborate explanation and justification for her behavior. There is no anti-Semitism in her films, she points out. She did not know until after the war about the Holocaust. She was naive, unsophisticated, detached from Nazi party officials with the exception of Hitler, her friend -- but not a close friend, she insists.
But the very absence of anti-Semitism in "Triumph of the Will" looks like a calculation; excluding a central motif of Hitler's speeches must have been deliberate, to make the film go down more easily as propaganda. Nor could a film professional working in Berlin have been unaware of the disappearance of all of the Jews in the movie industry.
In the 1993 film, Miss Riefenstahl is seen visiting the site of the 1936 Olympiad with the surviving members of her film crew. They talk about some of their famous shots -- from aerial techniques to the idea of digging a hole for the camera, so that athletes could loom over the audience. We sense Miss Riefenstahl's true passion for filmmaking. But there are candid moments, when she is not aware of the camera, when she shares quiet little asides with her old comrades, which, while not damning, subtly suggest a dimension she is not willing to have seen.
The impression remains that if Hitler had won, Leni Riefenstahl would not have been so quick to distance herself from him. Her postwar moral defense is based on technicalities. Understandably, she was not eager to face conviction or punishment as a war criminal. But ironically, if she had confessed and renounced her earlier ideas, she might have had a more active career. It was her unconvincing, elusive self-defense that continued to damn her.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Leni Riefenstahl was an amazing woman. I'm amazed she died. I figured she would outlive me. Her autobiography is an amazing document. In it, she describes Josef Goebbels crawling on his hands and knees in her living room, begging her to sleep with him. Amazing stuff.
German Film Director, Leni Riefenstahl, Dies at 101
By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; 1:40 PM
Leni Riefenstahl, 101, the German film director and protege of Adolph Hitler whose historic documentaries about the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 set benchmark standards for cinematic imagery and political propaganda that endured through the 20th century, died Sept. 8 at her home in Pöcking, near Munich. No cause of death was reported.
Ms. Riefenstahl was a personal favorite of Hitler's, and one of the few remaining friends of the Nazi dictator still alive. Under his sponsorship, she had wide authority and unlimited access in her work, and her career flourished. But it collapsed with the fall of the Third Reich and the carnage of World War II, and Ms. Riefenstahl never rid herself of the Nazi stigma.
As a filmmaker and artist, she had an eye for detail and a talent for editing that evoked the hypnotic spectacle of the massed Nazi legions, the raw charisma of the German fuhrer and the mesmerizing drama and majesty of Olympic competition with a force and power not seen before in the film medium.
During the 1930s, Ms. Riefenstahl was widely rumored at the highest levels of the Nazi party and throughout Germany to have been Hitler's mistress. In the United States, the Saturday Evening Post described her as a "Nazi pinup girl," and the Detroit News, in a 1937 story, called her "the woman behind Hitler."
Ms. Riefenstahl always insisted the rumors were baseless, and investigators for the Allied Powers after the war found no evidence to suggest she may have had a romantic or sexual liaison with the fuhrer.
Taken into custody by military authorities following the Nazi surrender in 1945, Ms. Riefenstahl was eventually released without charges. But it was years later before she obtained a work permit, and the films she made under Hitler would become a permanent reminder that she had served a regime that produced concentration camps, gas chambers, the Gestapo and genocide of European Jews. She never regained her pre-war professional standing as a director and actress.
Late in her life, Ms. Riefenstahl would downplay her relationship with the fuhrer. "Hitler did not play such an important role in my life," she said.
But she did admit being "dazzled" by him. "I had never met anyone with such power of persuasion," she said, "able to influence other minds so effectively."
Ms. Riefenstahl had been a glamorous actress and film director who starred in her own adventure movies before Hitler selected her to make the film of the 1934 Nazi congress. As one of Germany's leading movie stars, she caught the fuhrer's eye with her performance in "Blue Light" (1932), which she co-directed, about a courageous village girl who scales a treacherous mountain.
"Your 'Blue Light' proved that you can do it," Hitler told her when she voiced doubts over her ability to produce the documentary he wanted about the Nazi congress. He would later describe the finished product, which came to be known as "Triumph of the Will," as "a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement."
For the filming of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Ms. Riefenstahl was officially working for the International Olympic Committee, but her efforts were surreptitiously financed and later exploited by the Nazi regime. She would produce an epic three-hour documentary entitled "Olympia," that became a prototype for much of sports television decades later.
In that picture she pioneered such techniques as aerial photography, underwater pictures of swimming and diving events and the placing of cameras on tracks to move with runners in a race.
She perfected the technique of dramatizing athletic contests by personalizing the athletes. With such details as a close up of the vein throbbing in American sprinter Jesse Owens' forehead and the glint of confidence on his face as he prepared for the final in the 100-meter dash, Ms. Riefenstahl made the Games come alive.
It took her 18 months to edit the 250 miles of film footage into a single documentary, which had its premiere showing in Berlin on April 20, 1938, Hitler's birthday. To no one's surprise, "Olympia" won Germany's State Prize as the best film of 1938, but it also won prestigious awards in France, Sweden and at the Venice Film Festival. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sent a congratulatory note praising the film.
In its May 1938 issue, the German Film magazine declared "Olympia," to be "one of the greatest works of art that the German film has produced up to now -- filled with the spirit that we sense not only as the spirit of the Games but also the spirit of the German reality of today. . . . It is a result of National Socialism, which is penetrating the total life of the nation. Only in the ideological structure of National Socialism could this great documentary film have come into being as an artistic achievement."
Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, where her father was a prosperous manufacturer of plumbing and heating equipment. As a child she aspired to be a dancer, but a knee injury cut this career short and she turned to acting.
Dark haired, brown eyed, and athletic, she radiated confidence and a cool Teutonic sensuality. In seven films during the 1920s and early 1930s, she displayed a lively and spirited alpine glamour as she climbed mountains barefoot, survived avalanches and traversed treacherous crevasses on the flimsiest of ladders, often in films by her protege, director Arnold Fanck.
In May 1932, after having attended a Nazi party rally where Hitler spoke at the Berlin Sports Palace, Ms. Riefenstahl sent the fuhrer a letter. "I was so impressed by you and the enthusiasm of the spectators that I would like to meet you personally," she wrote.
A few days later she received a telephone call from one of Hitler's aides inviting her to meet the Nazi leader at Horumersiel, a small fishing village on Germany's North Sea coast. She accepted, and the following day she spent several hours with Hitler, walking along the seashore and conversing on subjects ranging from art and architecture to Hitler's politics. "I feel that I have been called to save Germany -- I cannot and must not refuse this calling," she recalled him as saying.
At one point, she recalled in her 1987 autobiography, "Leni Riefenstahl: a Memoir," Hitler "halted, looked at me, slowly put his arms around me and drew me to him, . . . but when he noticed my lack of response he instantly let me go and turned away. Then I saw him raise his hands beseechingly: 'How can I love a woman until I have completed my task?' "
They met periodically over the next several years. At one point Hitler offered to place her in charge of all German cinema, which she declined. But she agreed to his request to film the 1934 Nazi congress. Preparations for filming this spectacle began months before the rally itself, which took place from Sept. 4 to 10, 1934, and they involved elaborate, stage-managed coordination between party organizers and the 36-member film crew.
The result of these efforts was an amalgam of exquisitely interwoven and highly emotional images building up to a crescendo of frenzied German nationalism and mass hero worship for the fuhrer. Time magazine later called it "newsreel raised to romantic myth."
Especially powerful was a sequence in which Hitler walked down an enormous corridor of massed party members to lay a commemorative wreath at the grave of a Nazi martyr.
The American film director Frank Capra found the fanaticism of "Triumph of the Will," so compelling that he used copious footage from the documentary to illustrate the nature of the enemy in "Why We Fight," the inspirational films he made for the U.S. armed forces.
To film the Berlin Games, Ms. Riefenstahl directed dozens of camera crews -- 60 were assigned to the opening ceremonies alone -- and pictures were taken from helium balloons and the saddles of horseback riders.
In editing the films, she perfected such artistic techniques -- copied later by U.S. film directors -- as superimposing the image of the Olympic Stadium getting nearer over the running feet of a marathon racer and the cinematic silhouettes of the Olympic divers soaring and tumbling as if in defiance of the laws of gravity.
Late in 1938, Ms. Riefenstahl toured the United States with the film, which drew grudging admiration. She herself received a cold shoulder from the media and the Hollywood film industry. At the outset of World War II, she followed the Wehrmacht into Poland, but she soon decided against making war films.
She did some desultory work during the war on a film version of the Eugen d'Albert opera "Tiefland," but the picture was not finished until the early 1950s and it was withdrawn from circulation after unsuccessful openings in Germany and Austria. Several other film projects during the 1950s never materialized. For the Munich Olympics of 1972 she was a photographic adviser.
For most of the half century since the end of the war, she attracted little notice from the media, although she did return to the public spotlight with the publication of her memoirs and the U.S. release of a documentary film about her, Ray Muller's "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" (1993).
She also learned to scuba dive at age 71 to take photographs for her book "Coral Gardens," which was hailed for its stunning beauty.
She continued diving well into her 90s. In 2002, she released in conjunction with her 100th birthday a 45-minute documentary, "Underwater Impressions," about her 30 years of exploring the coast of Indonesia.
Hilmar Hofmann, director of the Goethe Institute, was quoted as saying, "It exceeds even the talents of the veteran French underwater film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau."
She was married once, in 1944 to Peter Jacob, an officer in the Wehrmacht. They were divorced in 1946.
German Film Director, Leni Riefenstahl, Dies at 101
By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; 1:40 PM
Leni Riefenstahl, 101, the German film director and protege of Adolph Hitler whose historic documentaries about the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 set benchmark standards for cinematic imagery and political propaganda that endured through the 20th century, died Sept. 8 at her home in Pöcking, near Munich. No cause of death was reported.
Ms. Riefenstahl was a personal favorite of Hitler's, and one of the few remaining friends of the Nazi dictator still alive. Under his sponsorship, she had wide authority and unlimited access in her work, and her career flourished. But it collapsed with the fall of the Third Reich and the carnage of World War II, and Ms. Riefenstahl never rid herself of the Nazi stigma.
As a filmmaker and artist, she had an eye for detail and a talent for editing that evoked the hypnotic spectacle of the massed Nazi legions, the raw charisma of the German fuhrer and the mesmerizing drama and majesty of Olympic competition with a force and power not seen before in the film medium.
During the 1930s, Ms. Riefenstahl was widely rumored at the highest levels of the Nazi party and throughout Germany to have been Hitler's mistress. In the United States, the Saturday Evening Post described her as a "Nazi pinup girl," and the Detroit News, in a 1937 story, called her "the woman behind Hitler."
Ms. Riefenstahl always insisted the rumors were baseless, and investigators for the Allied Powers after the war found no evidence to suggest she may have had a romantic or sexual liaison with the fuhrer.
Taken into custody by military authorities following the Nazi surrender in 1945, Ms. Riefenstahl was eventually released without charges. But it was years later before she obtained a work permit, and the films she made under Hitler would become a permanent reminder that she had served a regime that produced concentration camps, gas chambers, the Gestapo and genocide of European Jews. She never regained her pre-war professional standing as a director and actress.
Late in her life, Ms. Riefenstahl would downplay her relationship with the fuhrer. "Hitler did not play such an important role in my life," she said.
But she did admit being "dazzled" by him. "I had never met anyone with such power of persuasion," she said, "able to influence other minds so effectively."
Ms. Riefenstahl had been a glamorous actress and film director who starred in her own adventure movies before Hitler selected her to make the film of the 1934 Nazi congress. As one of Germany's leading movie stars, she caught the fuhrer's eye with her performance in "Blue Light" (1932), which she co-directed, about a courageous village girl who scales a treacherous mountain.
"Your 'Blue Light' proved that you can do it," Hitler told her when she voiced doubts over her ability to produce the documentary he wanted about the Nazi congress. He would later describe the finished product, which came to be known as "Triumph of the Will," as "a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement."
For the filming of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Ms. Riefenstahl was officially working for the International Olympic Committee, but her efforts were surreptitiously financed and later exploited by the Nazi regime. She would produce an epic three-hour documentary entitled "Olympia," that became a prototype for much of sports television decades later.
In that picture she pioneered such techniques as aerial photography, underwater pictures of swimming and diving events and the placing of cameras on tracks to move with runners in a race.
She perfected the technique of dramatizing athletic contests by personalizing the athletes. With such details as a close up of the vein throbbing in American sprinter Jesse Owens' forehead and the glint of confidence on his face as he prepared for the final in the 100-meter dash, Ms. Riefenstahl made the Games come alive.
It took her 18 months to edit the 250 miles of film footage into a single documentary, which had its premiere showing in Berlin on April 20, 1938, Hitler's birthday. To no one's surprise, "Olympia" won Germany's State Prize as the best film of 1938, but it also won prestigious awards in France, Sweden and at the Venice Film Festival. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sent a congratulatory note praising the film.
In its May 1938 issue, the German Film magazine declared "Olympia," to be "one of the greatest works of art that the German film has produced up to now -- filled with the spirit that we sense not only as the spirit of the Games but also the spirit of the German reality of today. . . . It is a result of National Socialism, which is penetrating the total life of the nation. Only in the ideological structure of National Socialism could this great documentary film have come into being as an artistic achievement."
Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, where her father was a prosperous manufacturer of plumbing and heating equipment. As a child she aspired to be a dancer, but a knee injury cut this career short and she turned to acting.
Dark haired, brown eyed, and athletic, she radiated confidence and a cool Teutonic sensuality. In seven films during the 1920s and early 1930s, she displayed a lively and spirited alpine glamour as she climbed mountains barefoot, survived avalanches and traversed treacherous crevasses on the flimsiest of ladders, often in films by her protege, director Arnold Fanck.
In May 1932, after having attended a Nazi party rally where Hitler spoke at the Berlin Sports Palace, Ms. Riefenstahl sent the fuhrer a letter. "I was so impressed by you and the enthusiasm of the spectators that I would like to meet you personally," she wrote.
A few days later she received a telephone call from one of Hitler's aides inviting her to meet the Nazi leader at Horumersiel, a small fishing village on Germany's North Sea coast. She accepted, and the following day she spent several hours with Hitler, walking along the seashore and conversing on subjects ranging from art and architecture to Hitler's politics. "I feel that I have been called to save Germany -- I cannot and must not refuse this calling," she recalled him as saying.
At one point, she recalled in her 1987 autobiography, "Leni Riefenstahl: a Memoir," Hitler "halted, looked at me, slowly put his arms around me and drew me to him, . . . but when he noticed my lack of response he instantly let me go and turned away. Then I saw him raise his hands beseechingly: 'How can I love a woman until I have completed my task?' "
They met periodically over the next several years. At one point Hitler offered to place her in charge of all German cinema, which she declined. But she agreed to his request to film the 1934 Nazi congress. Preparations for filming this spectacle began months before the rally itself, which took place from Sept. 4 to 10, 1934, and they involved elaborate, stage-managed coordination between party organizers and the 36-member film crew.
The result of these efforts was an amalgam of exquisitely interwoven and highly emotional images building up to a crescendo of frenzied German nationalism and mass hero worship for the fuhrer. Time magazine later called it "newsreel raised to romantic myth."
Especially powerful was a sequence in which Hitler walked down an enormous corridor of massed party members to lay a commemorative wreath at the grave of a Nazi martyr.
The American film director Frank Capra found the fanaticism of "Triumph of the Will," so compelling that he used copious footage from the documentary to illustrate the nature of the enemy in "Why We Fight," the inspirational films he made for the U.S. armed forces.
To film the Berlin Games, Ms. Riefenstahl directed dozens of camera crews -- 60 were assigned to the opening ceremonies alone -- and pictures were taken from helium balloons and the saddles of horseback riders.
In editing the films, she perfected such artistic techniques -- copied later by U.S. film directors -- as superimposing the image of the Olympic Stadium getting nearer over the running feet of a marathon racer and the cinematic silhouettes of the Olympic divers soaring and tumbling as if in defiance of the laws of gravity.
Late in 1938, Ms. Riefenstahl toured the United States with the film, which drew grudging admiration. She herself received a cold shoulder from the media and the Hollywood film industry. At the outset of World War II, she followed the Wehrmacht into Poland, but she soon decided against making war films.
She did some desultory work during the war on a film version of the Eugen d'Albert opera "Tiefland," but the picture was not finished until the early 1950s and it was withdrawn from circulation after unsuccessful openings in Germany and Austria. Several other film projects during the 1950s never materialized. For the Munich Olympics of 1972 she was a photographic adviser.
For most of the half century since the end of the war, she attracted little notice from the media, although she did return to the public spotlight with the publication of her memoirs and the U.S. release of a documentary film about her, Ray Muller's "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" (1993).
She also learned to scuba dive at age 71 to take photographs for her book "Coral Gardens," which was hailed for its stunning beauty.
She continued diving well into her 90s. In 2002, she released in conjunction with her 100th birthday a 45-minute documentary, "Underwater Impressions," about her 30 years of exploring the coast of Indonesia.
Hilmar Hofmann, director of the Goethe Institute, was quoted as saying, "It exceeds even the talents of the veteran French underwater film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau."
She was married once, in 1944 to Peter Jacob, an officer in the Wehrmacht. They were divorced in 1946.
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Thursday, August 28, 2003
For no reason whatsover, I did a Google search for "Unrequited love." The first hit was "Unrequited Love: Agony and Rapture", which seems to originate from the Physics department of Ohio State University, which doesn't surprise me for some reason.
Where was I going with this?
Oh, yeah. One of the funny "tips" is during the page on Communication, where they suggest memorizing every personal detail possible, even while not trying to avoid obvious pitfalss: "As you sit with them listening to that smooth, calming voice, you are likely to become entranced by the movement of their sweet, beckoning lips, the subtle variations in the color of their hair, and the texture of the skin on their hands." So pay attention. That's the lesson.
It seems to be a guide for making unrequited love the absolute apotheosis of the concept. Again, no idea why I'd be looking that up in the first place.
Where was I going with this?
Oh, yeah. One of the funny "tips" is during the page on Communication, where they suggest memorizing every personal detail possible, even while not trying to avoid obvious pitfalss: "As you sit with them listening to that smooth, calming voice, you are likely to become entranced by the movement of their sweet, beckoning lips, the subtle variations in the color of their hair, and the texture of the skin on their hands." So pay attention. That's the lesson.
It seems to be a guide for making unrequited love the absolute apotheosis of the concept. Again, no idea why I'd be looking that up in the first place.
Friday, August 22, 2003
Narrowly beating out Hollywood is Calling, the most depressing site I've seen this week has to be Star Search Casting. For $9.95 a month, or $99.95 a year, aspirants, wannabes and never-will-bes can post a talent profile to be viewed by Casting Directors and Agents. It's heartbreaking to see these amateur photo galleries, wishful age ranges and deluded weight estimates posted in the hopes of "being discovered." If you want to go and laugh, spare yourself the biographies, which read like something out of Robert Altman's Nashville. I felt really bad for the girl who said she'd been living in California for two weeks, having just arrived from Indiana, and really, really looked forward to being a star. At least, I felt bad for clicking on her attractive picture to laughs at her dreams. She should start by saving her money.
***
UPDATE: Well, I've sinced browsed even more of the site, and noticed that in addition to the aformentioned aspirants, there also seems to be a handful of models who have appeared in the likes of PLAYBOY and TRUCK DRIVER MAGAZINE. I wonder if that's even more depressing, that even with a "big break" like Playboy behind them, they still have to resort to a website like this.
***
UPDATE: Well, I've sinced browsed even more of the site, and noticed that in addition to the aformentioned aspirants, there also seems to be a handful of models who have appeared in the likes of PLAYBOY and TRUCK DRIVER MAGAZINE. I wonder if that's even more depressing, that even with a "big break" like Playboy behind them, they still have to resort to a website like this.
With the death of Wesley Willis, the world is now poorer one intimidating psychopath. I first heard that madman's music when I worked at Fantagraphics Books in 1996. One of my co-workers, a demure young woman, had an inexplicable and possibly satanic love for Willis' ouvre. This song in particular stands out in my mind:
I Wupped Batman's Ass (Rock Power, Rush Hour and Greatest Hits)
Batman got on my nerves
He was running me amok
He ridiculed me calling me a bum
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Batman thought he was bad
He was a fucking asshole in the first place
He got knocked to the floor
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Batman beat the hell out of me and knocked me to the floor
I got back up and knocked him to the floor
He was being such a jackoff
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Wheaties, breakfast of champions
I Wupped Batman's Ass (Rock Power, Rush Hour and Greatest Hits)
Batman got on my nerves
He was running me amok
He ridiculed me calling me a bum
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Batman thought he was bad
He was a fucking asshole in the first place
He got knocked to the floor
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Batman beat the hell out of me and knocked me to the floor
I got back up and knocked him to the floor
He was being such a jackoff
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
I wupped Batman's ass
Wheaties, breakfast of champions
Thursday, August 21, 2003
My favorites are cave bitch, ice mutant, and of course, White Devil.
List of ethnic slurs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The following is a list of ethnic slurs that are, or have been, used to refer to members of a given ethnicity (or, in some cases, nationality or religion) in a derogatory or pejorative manner. The term is listed, followed by its primary user(s) and a definition.
Not all terms on the list are considered equally offensive. Many of these terms are used more widely than would be imagined based on their "definition", for example, Chink can be used to refer to any Asian person. The key here is that the person using the slur cares so little about the target, that the person's actual background is irrelevant. The motivation for using an ethnic slur is often racism.
See also: Term of disparagement
Ab-bo - Australia, Australian aboriginal
A-rab - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent (from Arab)
barbarian - Ancient Roman, a non-Roman European (especially the Germanic tribes)
boat niggers - U.S., Cuban people
bolillo - Mexico, white people (bolillo is a white bread roll).
boong - Australia, Australian aboriginal
boy - Southern U.S. whites, a black man
beaner / bean-eater - Western U.S., someone of Mexican descent
camel jockey - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
Canuck - U.S., a Canadian national
caphead - Australia, a Jewish man
Carlton - U.S., refers to Carlton Banks: a black sitcom character that "acted white".
cave bitch - U.S., from an Ice Cube song about white women
charlie - U.S., a Vietnamese person (shortened from radio code for the Vietcong (V.C.): "Victor Charlie")
ching chong - Australia, someone of Chinese descent
Chink - U.S./U.K., someone of Chinese descent
chocolate drop - U.K., a black person
chogee - Australia, someone of Asian descent
chongo/chango - (also "mono") U.S. hispanics, a black person ("chongo/chango" is Spanish for "monkey")
Christ-killer - used in some Christian cultures, a Jewish person
clog - used in some cultures, a Dutch person (from their supposed wearing of clogs)
Cochise - U.S., a Native American
coon - U.S./U.K./Australia, a black person
cockroach - U.S., a Mexican immigrant
cracker - U.S., a white person from the Southern U.S.
dago - U.S., someone of Italian descent (originally applied to Spanish, Portuguese or Italian sailors)
darkie - various, someone with dark-colored skin (not used for Hispanics or Asians)
Dot-head - U.S., someone of southeast Asian descent (from the Hindu practice of wearing bindis)
double Dutch / Dutch courage - U.S./U.K., inferior attributes for Dutch people
eggplant - North-eastern U.S., a black person
esse - U.S., someone of Hispanic descent
Eurotrash - U.S./U.K., a continental European national
Eyetie / Eye-talian - U.S., someone of Italian descent
fob - U.S., a recent Asian immigrant (from Fresh Off the Boat)
flip - U.S., someone of Filipino descent
frog - U.S./U.K., a French national
gaijin - Japan, any non-Japanese person
gavacho - Mexico, a white person
ghost - China (Qing Dynasty), a foreigner, esp. a Japanese person (white people were "ghosts from the seas")
gin - Australia - an Aboriginal woman
goat roper - U.S. southwest, white people (mostly hicks and/or suburban cowboys)
gook - U.S. since Vietnam War, a Vietnamese person
goomba - various groups, An Italian person
goy - Hebrew speakers, a non-Jewish person
gringo - Latin America and Spain: U.S. national. For brazilians, any foreigner.
gubba - australia - Aboriginal term for white people.
guinea - U.S., someone of Italian descent
habib - U.S., someone of Southeast Asian descent
haole - native Hawaiians, a non-native white person
heeb - U.S., a Jewish person (Short for Hebrew)
hillbilly - U.S., a rural white person, esp. one from Appalachia
honger - North America, a person from Hong Kong
honky - U.S. blacks, a white person
Hymie - U.S. blacks, a Jewish person, especially from New York City ("Hymietown")
hun - Allies in WWI, a German soldier; also Irish nationalists, a British nationalist
ice mutant - black supremacists, a white person
Jap - U.S./U.K., someone of Japanese descent
JAP - U.S., Jewish women (Jewish American Princess)
Jerry - U.S., a German national
jungle bunny - U.S. whites, a black person
kaffir - South African whites, a black person
kaffir - Arabic word used in the Islamic world, a non-believer, atheist, or pagan. Jews and Christians would not be considered a kaffir. The word does not count as a slur, it has the same negative connotations as a non believer
kike - U.S., a Jewish person
Kraut - U.S./U.K., a German national
limey - U.S., a British national - British sailors ate limes to prevent scurvy
long nose - China, a person of European descent
mayate - U.S. hispanics, Spanish equivalent of nigger
mick - U.S., a person of Irish descent (from the common surname form McXxxx)
moon cricket - U.S., a black person
mud person - U.S. white supremacists, a non-white person (usually seen in the plural form as mud people)
Nazi - North America, Europe, etc, a German person
Newfy - Canada, a person from Newfoundland
nigger - U.S./U.K., a black person (also "niggra", southern U.S. pronunciation)
night fighter - U.S., a black person
nig-nog - U.K., a black person
Nip - U.S., someone of Japanese descent (from Nippon, an Anglicization of the Japanese name for Japan)
oreo - U.S., someone of black and white descent (or a black person who "acts white" - see Carlton)
oven dodger - Australia, a Jewish person
Papist - Protestants, a Roman Catholic person
Pakeha - (Maori) A new Zealander of European descent
Paki - U.K., a Pakistani (or other South Asian)
Polack - U.S., a person of Polish descent
pom - Australia/New Zealand/South Africa, a British national
porch monkey - U.S., a black person
prairie nigger - U.S., a Native American
raghead - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
raton - France, a North African Muslim
redneck - U.S., a rural white person
roast beef - France, a British person
rock spider - English-speaking South Africans, an Afrikaner (although in Australia, rock spider means child molester)
Round eye - Asia, a white person
Round hair - U.S., a black person
Russki - U.S., a Russian national
sambo - U.K., a black person
sand Nazi - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
sand nigger - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
sheister/shyster - U.S., a Jew
shit-kicker - U.S., a white person from the southwest (ex: Oklahoma)
Skunk - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
Skip - Australian - a white Australian of British descent - from "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo"
slant-eye - U.S., a person of Asian descent
slapface - Australia, a person of Asian descent
slope - a person of Asian descent
spic - U.S., a person of Hispanic descent
spook - U.S. whites, a black person
spear-chucker - U.S. whites, a black person
surrender monkeys - U.S., a French person
swamp honky - U.S. southwest, similar to white trash - white residents around the Louisiana/Texas border (also "swamp trash")
terrier - U.S., an Irish laborer
Tonto - U.S., a Native American (refers to the sidekick on "The Lone Ranger")
towelhead - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
trailer trash - U.S., a rural white person living in a trailer park; cf. white trash
Uncle Tom - U.S. blacks, term for someone who kisses up to white people; a "sellout" (taken from Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin")
wetback - U.S., an illegal Mexican immigrant
White Devil - U.S., (originated with Nation of Islam) a white person
whitey - U.S., a white person
white trash, also poor white trash - U.S., a rural white person
wog - U.K., a dark-skinned national of a Colonial British colony; also Australia, a Southern-European person (or any foreigner)
wop - U.S., an Italian immigrant (folk etymology gives the origin as: WithOut Passport)
Yank/Yankee - Southern U.S., a person from the North-Eastern USA; also non-USA, an American national
List of ethnic slurs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The following is a list of ethnic slurs that are, or have been, used to refer to members of a given ethnicity (or, in some cases, nationality or religion) in a derogatory or pejorative manner. The term is listed, followed by its primary user(s) and a definition.
Not all terms on the list are considered equally offensive. Many of these terms are used more widely than would be imagined based on their "definition", for example, Chink can be used to refer to any Asian person. The key here is that the person using the slur cares so little about the target, that the person's actual background is irrelevant. The motivation for using an ethnic slur is often racism.
See also: Term of disparagement
Ab-bo - Australia, Australian aboriginal
A-rab - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent (from Arab)
barbarian - Ancient Roman, a non-Roman European (especially the Germanic tribes)
boat niggers - U.S., Cuban people
bolillo - Mexico, white people (bolillo is a white bread roll).
boong - Australia, Australian aboriginal
boy - Southern U.S. whites, a black man
beaner / bean-eater - Western U.S., someone of Mexican descent
camel jockey - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
Canuck - U.S., a Canadian national
caphead - Australia, a Jewish man
Carlton - U.S., refers to Carlton Banks: a black sitcom character that "acted white".
cave bitch - U.S., from an Ice Cube song about white women
charlie - U.S., a Vietnamese person (shortened from radio code for the Vietcong (V.C.): "Victor Charlie")
ching chong - Australia, someone of Chinese descent
Chink - U.S./U.K., someone of Chinese descent
chocolate drop - U.K., a black person
chogee - Australia, someone of Asian descent
chongo/chango - (also "mono") U.S. hispanics, a black person ("chongo/chango" is Spanish for "monkey")
Christ-killer - used in some Christian cultures, a Jewish person
clog - used in some cultures, a Dutch person (from their supposed wearing of clogs)
Cochise - U.S., a Native American
coon - U.S./U.K./Australia, a black person
cockroach - U.S., a Mexican immigrant
cracker - U.S., a white person from the Southern U.S.
dago - U.S., someone of Italian descent (originally applied to Spanish, Portuguese or Italian sailors)
darkie - various, someone with dark-colored skin (not used for Hispanics or Asians)
Dot-head - U.S., someone of southeast Asian descent (from the Hindu practice of wearing bindis)
double Dutch / Dutch courage - U.S./U.K., inferior attributes for Dutch people
eggplant - North-eastern U.S., a black person
esse - U.S., someone of Hispanic descent
Eurotrash - U.S./U.K., a continental European national
Eyetie / Eye-talian - U.S., someone of Italian descent
fob - U.S., a recent Asian immigrant (from Fresh Off the Boat)
flip - U.S., someone of Filipino descent
frog - U.S./U.K., a French national
gaijin - Japan, any non-Japanese person
gavacho - Mexico, a white person
ghost - China (Qing Dynasty), a foreigner, esp. a Japanese person (white people were "ghosts from the seas")
gin - Australia - an Aboriginal woman
goat roper - U.S. southwest, white people (mostly hicks and/or suburban cowboys)
gook - U.S. since Vietnam War, a Vietnamese person
goomba - various groups, An Italian person
goy - Hebrew speakers, a non-Jewish person
gringo - Latin America and Spain: U.S. national. For brazilians, any foreigner.
gubba - australia - Aboriginal term for white people.
guinea - U.S., someone of Italian descent
habib - U.S., someone of Southeast Asian descent
haole - native Hawaiians, a non-native white person
heeb - U.S., a Jewish person (Short for Hebrew)
hillbilly - U.S., a rural white person, esp. one from Appalachia
honger - North America, a person from Hong Kong
honky - U.S. blacks, a white person
Hymie - U.S. blacks, a Jewish person, especially from New York City ("Hymietown")
hun - Allies in WWI, a German soldier; also Irish nationalists, a British nationalist
ice mutant - black supremacists, a white person
Jap - U.S./U.K., someone of Japanese descent
JAP - U.S., Jewish women (Jewish American Princess)
Jerry - U.S., a German national
jungle bunny - U.S. whites, a black person
kaffir - South African whites, a black person
kaffir - Arabic word used in the Islamic world, a non-believer, atheist, or pagan. Jews and Christians would not be considered a kaffir. The word does not count as a slur, it has the same negative connotations as a non believer
kike - U.S., a Jewish person
Kraut - U.S./U.K., a German national
limey - U.S., a British national - British sailors ate limes to prevent scurvy
long nose - China, a person of European descent
mayate - U.S. hispanics, Spanish equivalent of nigger
mick - U.S., a person of Irish descent (from the common surname form McXxxx)
moon cricket - U.S., a black person
mud person - U.S. white supremacists, a non-white person (usually seen in the plural form as mud people)
Nazi - North America, Europe, etc, a German person
Newfy - Canada, a person from Newfoundland
nigger - U.S./U.K., a black person (also "niggra", southern U.S. pronunciation)
night fighter - U.S., a black person
nig-nog - U.K., a black person
Nip - U.S., someone of Japanese descent (from Nippon, an Anglicization of the Japanese name for Japan)
oreo - U.S., someone of black and white descent (or a black person who "acts white" - see Carlton)
oven dodger - Australia, a Jewish person
Papist - Protestants, a Roman Catholic person
Pakeha - (Maori) A new Zealander of European descent
Paki - U.K., a Pakistani (or other South Asian)
Polack - U.S., a person of Polish descent
pom - Australia/New Zealand/South Africa, a British national
porch monkey - U.S., a black person
prairie nigger - U.S., a Native American
raghead - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
raton - France, a North African Muslim
redneck - U.S., a rural white person
roast beef - France, a British person
rock spider - English-speaking South Africans, an Afrikaner (although in Australia, rock spider means child molester)
Round eye - Asia, a white person
Round hair - U.S., a black person
Russki - U.S., a Russian national
sambo - U.K., a black person
sand Nazi - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
sand nigger - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
sheister/shyster - U.S., a Jew
shit-kicker - U.S., a white person from the southwest (ex: Oklahoma)
Skunk - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
Skip - Australian - a white Australian of British descent - from "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo"
slant-eye - U.S., a person of Asian descent
slapface - Australia, a person of Asian descent
slope - a person of Asian descent
spic - U.S., a person of Hispanic descent
spook - U.S. whites, a black person
spear-chucker - U.S. whites, a black person
surrender monkeys - U.S., a French person
swamp honky - U.S. southwest, similar to white trash - white residents around the Louisiana/Texas border (also "swamp trash")
terrier - U.S., an Irish laborer
Tonto - U.S., a Native American (refers to the sidekick on "The Lone Ranger")
towelhead - U.S., someone of Middle-eastern descent
trailer trash - U.S., a rural white person living in a trailer park; cf. white trash
Uncle Tom - U.S. blacks, term for someone who kisses up to white people; a "sellout" (taken from Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin")
wetback - U.S., an illegal Mexican immigrant
White Devil - U.S., (originated with Nation of Islam) a white person
whitey - U.S., a white person
white trash, also poor white trash - U.S., a rural white person
wog - U.K., a dark-skinned national of a Colonial British colony; also Australia, a Southern-European person (or any foreigner)
wop - U.S., an Italian immigrant (folk etymology gives the origin as: WithOut Passport)
Yank/Yankee - Southern U.S., a person from the North-Eastern USA; also non-USA, an American national
Now that I'm starting to pay attention to the California side-show, it's really entertaining. LA Times has pictures and bios of all 200 candidates, as well as links to their web sites.
I'm torn who to support.
Democrat Georgy Russell, is so cute and idealistic. And actually seems to have a brain. She'll go far, although with her current visibility, I'll have to stand in line for a date until her notoriety dies down.
Porn actress Mary Carey, running as an independent, has an innovative "porn for pistols" program and promises live web cams in the governors mansion, which are just the kind of forward-thinking public policy citizens of all states need. She's also offering "dates" in exchange for a $5,000 campaign contribution. Out of curiosity, just how many porn actresses are there, anyway?
Oh, here's Gary Coleman's official campaign photo:
I'm torn who to support.
Democrat Georgy Russell, is so cute and idealistic. And actually seems to have a brain. She'll go far, although with her current visibility, I'll have to stand in line for a date until her notoriety dies down.
Porn actress Mary Carey, running as an independent, has an innovative "porn for pistols" program and promises live web cams in the governors mansion, which are just the kind of forward-thinking public policy citizens of all states need. She's also offering "dates" in exchange for a $5,000 campaign contribution. Out of curiosity, just how many porn actresses are there, anyway?
Oh, here's Gary Coleman's official campaign photo:
Saturday, August 16, 2003
Friday, August 15, 2003
And meanwhile in Seattle, civic leaders wonder why the Northwest hasn't experienced a blackout, seeing as how we're a major city with a port and three pro sports teams. They don't understand that if aliens invade, they'd probably ignore Washington. I can see it now: "After seven years, Western Washington residents continue to hold their breaths in fear, waiting for our extraterrestrial overlords to attack this major metropolitan area with their death rays and killer robots."
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Friday, August 01, 2003
Holy shit, Christopher Hitchens has just set a new standard for attack obituaries. His commentary on Bob Hope is just plain mean. Beginning with the obvious and accurate premise that Bob Hope wasn't funny, he engages in the sort of thrilling desecration I thought he only reserved for the unsavnory likes of Mother Theresa or Princess Di. Every word is dead accurate, and he even mentioned something I didn't even realize I was thinking: "I have met more than one veteran who says that those USO concerts were the last straw." Jesus, the one ray of er, hope was those USO tours. If the soldiers hated it, then the man's life was worthless, wasn't it? I guess I should have realized: the man was no Playboy bunny.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
As a comic book nerd, a former pro and a current critic, naturally I paid attention to reports of a new Batman short that premiered at the San Diego Comicon. The short has been getting props from all over the place, as an example of how a Batman movie ought to be.
Personally, I thought the thing was retarded. The acting is of short film quality, which is to say, it is very bad. Starting out at a pretentious fanboy jerk-off, with fetishized shots of Batman fastening is boots (with Velcro, no less) and chasing the Joker, it gets even worse with the introduction of that fucked up alien from Alien and a bunch of those fucked-up aliens from Predator. This is all at the service of some weird fascination genre fans have with crossovers. It is inept and pretentious at the same time, and manages to not have a single original idea. And it was shot on 35 mm film, which means someone like Wes Anderson could have made an amazing feature with the same budget.
To its credit, the film's production values are first rate (those look like real Alien and Predator costumes), albeit at the service of something just plain awful.
So why is everyone (well, all 100,000 comic book fans) so excited? Apparently, for comics fans the previous Batman films have acquired the sting of a childhood memory of being molested by an ugly relative, just like the television show (I stole this simile from The Comics Journal). Comic fans believe Batman deserves better than the admittedly terrible Batman and Robin, or even the previous Tim Burton "efforts," to use the term loosely.
Honestly, who cares? Okay, admittedly I'm writing about it, but we're talking about a man who responds to the murder of his parents by dressing up as a winged possum in vinyl and beating up people. A banal and primitive concept, meant to appeal to undeveloped minds, something the character has excelled at for sixty years. Batman is an idiotic character, and every appearance, every film, every television show and cartoon produces a net deficit in the free marketplace of ideas. Batman doesn't deserve better, because the mediocre doesn't deserve better.
Anyway, you can download the thing here. Be prepared to be blown away. If you're a complete fucking geek. Fuck you and your family.
Personally, I thought the thing was retarded. The acting is of short film quality, which is to say, it is very bad. Starting out at a pretentious fanboy jerk-off, with fetishized shots of Batman fastening is boots (with Velcro, no less) and chasing the Joker, it gets even worse with the introduction of that fucked up alien from Alien and a bunch of those fucked-up aliens from Predator. This is all at the service of some weird fascination genre fans have with crossovers. It is inept and pretentious at the same time, and manages to not have a single original idea. And it was shot on 35 mm film, which means someone like Wes Anderson could have made an amazing feature with the same budget.
To its credit, the film's production values are first rate (those look like real Alien and Predator costumes), albeit at the service of something just plain awful.
So why is everyone (well, all 100,000 comic book fans) so excited? Apparently, for comics fans the previous Batman films have acquired the sting of a childhood memory of being molested by an ugly relative, just like the television show (I stole this simile from The Comics Journal). Comic fans believe Batman deserves better than the admittedly terrible Batman and Robin, or even the previous Tim Burton "efforts," to use the term loosely.
Honestly, who cares? Okay, admittedly I'm writing about it, but we're talking about a man who responds to the murder of his parents by dressing up as a winged possum in vinyl and beating up people. A banal and primitive concept, meant to appeal to undeveloped minds, something the character has excelled at for sixty years. Batman is an idiotic character, and every appearance, every film, every television show and cartoon produces a net deficit in the free marketplace of ideas. Batman doesn't deserve better, because the mediocre doesn't deserve better.
Anyway, you can download the thing here. Be prepared to be blown away. If you're a complete fucking geek. Fuck you and your family.
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