Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 834

“Smile. You just had a big night”: Joe Scarborough responds to Hillary Clinton’s victorious election night in the most annoying way possible

https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/709... I only described MSNBC host Joe Scarborough's subtweet of Hillary Clinton as annoying to keep the trolls out. But let's be honest, it's subversively sexist. Call it casual sexism, call it ever day sexism, call whatever you'd like, but it's flippant, cavalier and annoying at best and sexist in all likelihood. Of course, if anyone were to call out the "Morning Joe" host for his reaction to Clinton's big wins in Ohio and Florida on Tuesday (and he was certainly reacting to Clinton's election night) he'd deny any charges of the sort, so if he needs a fellow cable news male pundit to throw under the bus in order to deflect some of the blowback surely coming his way, Fox News' Brit Hume offered an even more superficial election night commentary via Twitter Tuesday night: https://twitter.com/brithume/status/7... There was also Fox News' media critic, Howard Kurtz: https://twitter.com/HowardKurtz/statu... And to buffer from instantaneous shouts of outrage (like mine) Fox News' Dana Perino offered a female take down of Clinton's victory speech: https://twitter.com/DanaPerino/status... After Clinton's massive wins in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio on Tuesday, we likely only have the next eight months to debate whether the term shrill is sexist or not. Hooray. https://twitter.com/BklynMiddleton/st...

Continue Reading...

Twitter reacts to Marco Rubio’s official relegation from “presidential contender” to “just another Florida Man about to snap”

To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat... To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was forced to suspend his campaign tonight after Donald Trump won a resounding victory in his home state -- and Twitter reacted as it's wont to react: https://twitter.com/PatrickHowleyDC/s... https://twitter.com/DavidDeeble/statu... https://twitter.com/briangaar/status/... At least the once-and-future "Cuban-American Barack Obama" still has career alternatives: https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/70... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... It's not entirely clear whether everyone is sincerely upset: https://twitter.com/RepubGrlProbs/sta... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/709... Not that we won't remember him fondly: https://twitter.com/FrankConniff/stat... And in case you need to update your bracket: https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... File this under "We Can Only Hope": https://twitter.com/BigDave74Tex/stat...

Continue Reading...

Marco Rubio suspending campaign after resounding defeat in Florida

The man who was once referred to as the Cuban-American Barack Obama announced tonight that he is suspending his campaign. He lost his home state of Florida Tuesday night to GOP front-runner and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, and it wasn't even close. "While we are on the right side this year," he told supporters, but "we are not on the winning side." Rubio is projected to come in second in Florida tonight, but a distant one, coming in almost 20 points behind Trump. Watch a video of his announcement below via NBC News.The man who was once referred to as the Cuban-American Barack Obama announced tonight that he is suspending his campaign. He lost his home state of Florida Tuesday night to GOP front-runner and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, and it wasn't even close. "While we are on the right side this year," he told supporters, but "we are not on the winning side." Rubio is projected to come in second in Florida tonight, but a distant one, coming in almost 20 points behind Trump. Watch a video of his announcement below via NBC News.The man who was once referred to as the Cuban-American Barack Obama announced tonight that he is suspending his campaign. He lost his home state of Florida Tuesday night to GOP front-runner and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, and it wasn't even close. "While we are on the right side this year," he told supporters, but "we are not on the winning side." Rubio is projected to come in second in Florida tonight, but a distant one, coming in almost 20 points behind Trump. Watch a video of his announcement below via NBC News.

Continue Reading...

Trump quashes Marcomentum: Rubio drops out after suffering a stinging defeat in his home state of Florida

Florida's sitting freshman senator was delivered a stunning rebuke by his own constituents Tuesday night, losing his home state's presidential primary by massive margins to frontrunner Donald Trump. Marco Rubio had to ask supporters who squeezed into a small atrium at Florida International University in Miami to stop booing as he congratulated Trump on his resounding win -- only to be interrupted by a heckler moments later. "Don't worry, you won't get beat up at our event," Rubio quipped to distract from the vocal detractor. He continued on to announce he was suspending his campaign. “America needs a vibrant conservative movement built on principles and ideas, not one built on fear and anger," Rubio said, mourning his failed endeavor to lead conservatives. With 83 percent of precincts reporting, Trump has more than 357,731 more votes than Rubio for a 45.5 percent to 27.4 percent lead. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is in third with 16.8 percent followed by Ohio Governor John Kasich at 6.6 percent. Floridia's winner-take-all delegate allocation hands Trump another 99 delegates to pad his lead. The Associated Press has also called the Republican primary in North Carolina for Trump, which rewards another 72 delegates proportionally, and Illinois for Trump. With Kasich winning the Ohio Republican primary on Tuesday, Rubio was the only candidate to lose his home state this cycle. "It is not God’s plan that I will be president in 2016," the Tea Party senator told the crowd, ending his campaign for the White House. Still, suspending his dreams to run the nation and apparently freeing up the few delegates he has amassed thus far to join the Trump bandwagon just wasn't enough for some of the most ardent anti-Rubio forces in the Republican base. Watch one Trump heckler interrupt Rubio as he announces the end of his presidential run: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... sitting freshman senator was delivered a stunning rebuke by his own constituents Tuesday night, losing his home state's presidential primary by massive margins to frontrunner Donald Trump. Marco Rubio had to ask supporters who squeezed into a small atrium at Florida International University in Miami to stop booing as he congratulated Trump on his resounding win -- only to be interrupted by a heckler moments later. "Don't worry, you won't get beat up at our event," Rubio quipped to distract from the vocal detractor. He continued on to announce he was suspending his campaign. “America needs a vibrant conservative movement built on principles and ideas, not one built on fear and anger," Rubio said, mourning his failed endeavor to lead conservatives. With 83 percent of precincts reporting, Trump has more than 357,731 more votes than Rubio for a 45.5 percent to 27.4 percent lead. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is in third with 16.8 percent followed by Ohio Governor John Kasich at 6.6 percent. Floridia's winner-take-all delegate allocation hands Trump another 99 delegates to pad his lead. The Associated Press has also called the Republican primary in North Carolina for Trump, which rewards another 72 delegates proportionally, and Illinois for Trump. With Kasich winning the Ohio Republican primary on Tuesday, Rubio was the only candidate to lose his home state this cycle. "It is not God’s plan that I will be president in 2016," the Tea Party senator told the crowd, ending his campaign for the White House. Still, suspending his dreams to run the nation and apparently freeing up the few delegates he has amassed thus far to join the Trump bandwagon just wasn't enough for some of the most ardent anti-Rubio forces in the Republican base. Watch one Trump heckler interrupt Rubio as he announces the end of his presidential run: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s...

Continue Reading...

“I think it’s terror”: Comedian Josh Gondelman on how Donald Trump’s rise sobered up this election year

Josh Gondelman is an unlikely kind of hybrid. By day, he writes political humor for “Last Week Tonight.” Many nights, he’s on the stand-up circuit, where his comedy tends to be personal and observational. (He’s also one of the creators of the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account.) Gondelman's stand-up is captured on a very funny new comedy album, “Physical Whisper,” with bits ranging from the difference between subway signs in London and New York to his magazine assignment to try a penis-numbing spray aimed at premature ejaculators. (His riff on gay people and parades is one of the few that gets close to a directly political subject.) With his nasally voice and friendly delivery, he steers just clear of nebbish-land. We spoke to Gondelman, who also co-authored the book “You Blew It,” from New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. I’m wondering: Everything I see and hear about you, you’re called “the nice guy,” or “the humble guy” – and that’s your persona on your stand-up album as well. Are you really that nice, or are you secretly really edgy and cruel when you’re not onstage? [Laughs.] No – I’m actually as unhip as I seem when I’m onstage. It’s a very lovely reputation to have – being a kind person. I try to live up to the fact that people think that about me. Certainly, it’s a very warm compliment and I appreciate that you say it. So many male comedians, going back decades and decades, are macho or edgy or rude … Did you make an effort to do something else, or is that just not your thing? Yeah, I definitely don’t come off well when I’m consciously abrasive. There are bits I’ve written that I have to make sure to do with a gentle touch, because in general my personality is laid-back and friendly. If I break from that onstage – if it’s something I’m speaking against -- I have to make sure I’m not, “Hey, it’s really nice to meet you, here’s a story about how much I like my girlfriend, and now, FUCK CHEESE-ITS!” I don’t express myself that way most of the time, so even when I have the opportunity to be a little more aggressive, it doesn’t make sense. Especially when I’m heckled, that’s a sticky situation, because I don’t defuse it… I really envy guys who have a grittier onstage presence and can really go after someone. I used to teach preschool ... I’ll say, “I know you’re having a really good time, and you don’t mean to be disruptive. I used to teach preschool so I’ll say, ‘One-two-three, all eyes on me… That means, Shut up! It’s my turn to talk.’" Even if my intention isn’t to be super-aggressive. You don’t even get the urge to go on a really intense rant or something? No, it’s just not how I talk and not how I write … It just wouldn’t make sense for me to all of a sudden get serious about something. What about politics? You write for one of the most political shows on television, but your stand-up isn’t political in any clear way. What seems like the right kind of balance for you? It’s very easy for me to draw lines: Any jokes about politics and news are things I save to try to work on at work. The stuff on the album is generally either personal, or elliptically about social issues … broader social points. I guess I did have a bit about the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston. So there are jokes you feel you can pull off and jokes you’re not sure you can. At this point it very rarely occurs to me to write a joke that I wouldn’t be able to pull off. It would not occur to me to write a joke like, “This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.” It’s not the voice I write in – which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in. Which comedians did you grow up loving? Who made you want to do this? Oh man, as a kid I always loved Mel Brooks’ stuff –- “The 2,000 Year Old Man” record was something my dad put me onto. And Monty Python. That’s kind of the classic easy answer … Like saying, “The Beatles is a band I like.” But I also had an Ellen DeGeneres stand-up cassette I really love… “Comedy Central Presents” was something I watched numerous times, and Chris Rock’s “Bring the Pain” special and the “Roll With the New” album …Those were some formative ones when I was a teenager. If I can go to your day job for a minute: There was a hilarious bit on John Oliver Sunday night on encryption. Did you have anything to do with that one? We all kind of contribute jokes and stuff to all the pieces. I ended up writing a couple of the jokes. But I didn’t work on that long-term. How do you guys balance funny and serious on the show? You pretty much always get it right, but I just wonder how it works. Are you always conscious of the fact that it can become too dry and factual if you’re not careful? Oh sure, the idea is to be a funny show about serious things, I think. I was hired to write comedy … That’s the directive we’ve been given. It sometimes seems like there’s a dare going on. You pick the most fruitless-seeming topic for comedy – North Dakota! Tobacco companies! Encryption! – something that seems like it just can’t be funny. Like you’re trying to make things hard on yourself. Oh, I hope that it comes off as funny ... Oh, they always do … There’s this degree of difficulty to making a funny 20 minutes on iPhone encryption. Everyone there is just super-funny and super-talented… When someone pitches a story, I’m always confident we can make it funny. What’s the funniest thing about American politics, or the presidential race, right now? Is it funny, sad, a mix of both? I think it’s terror. I think specifically that Trump’s candidacy is like when you and your friends are hanging out, and somebody proposes something horrible, and everyone laughs. And then everyone realizes that guy was serious, and then it’s too late: You have to put the brakes on. “No, no, no, no no. We can’t just strangle someone down by the train tracks, dude! We thought you were doing a bit, but, Oh dear, this is very frightening.” It does seem to have gone from comedy to reality very quickly. It got real.Josh Gondelman is an unlikely kind of hybrid. By day, he writes political humor for “Last Week Tonight.” Many nights, he’s on the stand-up circuit, where his comedy tends to be personal and observational. (He’s also one of the creators of the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account.) Gondelman's stand-up is captured on a very funny new comedy album, “Physical Whisper,” with bits ranging from the difference between subway signs in London and New York to his magazine assignment to try a penis-numbing spray aimed at premature ejaculators. (His riff on gay people and parades is one of the few that gets close to a directly political subject.) With his nasally voice and friendly delivery, he steers just clear of nebbish-land. We spoke to Gondelman, who also co-authored the book “You Blew It,” from New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. I’m wondering: Everything I see and hear about you, you’re called “the nice guy,” or “the humble guy” – and that’s your persona on your stand-up album as well. Are you really that nice, or are you secretly really edgy and cruel when you’re not onstage? [Laughs.] No – I’m actually as unhip as I seem when I’m onstage. It’s a very lovely reputation to have – being a kind person. I try to live up to the fact that people think that about me. Certainly, it’s a very warm compliment and I appreciate that you say it. So many male comedians, going back decades and decades, are macho or edgy or rude … Did you make an effort to do something else, or is that just not your thing? Yeah, I definitely don’t come off well when I’m consciously abrasive. There are bits I’ve written that I have to make sure to do with a gentle touch, because in general my personality is laid-back and friendly. If I break from that onstage – if it’s something I’m speaking against -- I have to make sure I’m not, “Hey, it’s really nice to meet you, here’s a story about how much I like my girlfriend, and now, FUCK CHEESE-ITS!” I don’t express myself that way most of the time, so even when I have the opportunity to be a little more aggressive, it doesn’t make sense. Especially when I’m heckled, that’s a sticky situation, because I don’t defuse it… I really envy guys who have a grittier onstage presence and can really go after someone. I used to teach preschool ... I’ll say, “I know you’re having a really good time, and you don’t mean to be disruptive. I used to teach preschool so I’ll say, ‘One-two-three, all eyes on me… That means, Shut up! It’s my turn to talk.’" Even if my intention isn’t to be super-aggressive. You don’t even get the urge to go on a really intense rant or something? No, it’s just not how I talk and not how I write … It just wouldn’t make sense for me to all of a sudden get serious about something. What about politics? You write for one of the most political shows on television, but your stand-up isn’t political in any clear way. What seems like the right kind of balance for you? It’s very easy for me to draw lines: Any jokes about politics and news are things I save to try to work on at work. The stuff on the album is generally either personal, or elliptically about social issues … broader social points. I guess I did have a bit about the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston. So there are jokes you feel you can pull off and jokes you’re not sure you can. At this point it very rarely occurs to me to write a joke that I wouldn’t be able to pull off. It would not occur to me to write a joke like, “This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.” It’s not the voice I write in – which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in. Which comedians did you grow up loving? Who made you want to do this? Oh man, as a kid I always loved Mel Brooks’ stuff –- “The 2,000 Year Old Man” record was something my dad put me onto. And Monty Python. That’s kind of the classic easy answer … Like saying, “The Beatles is a band I like.” But I also had an Ellen DeGeneres stand-up cassette I really love… “Comedy Central Presents” was something I watched numerous times, and Chris Rock’s “Bring the Pain” special and the “Roll With the New” album …Those were some formative ones when I was a teenager. If I can go to your day job for a minute: There was a hilarious bit on John Oliver Sunday night on encryption. Did you have anything to do with that one? We all kind of contribute jokes and stuff to all the pieces. I ended up writing a couple of the jokes. But I didn’t work on that long-term. How do you guys balance funny and serious on the show? You pretty much always get it right, but I just wonder how it works. Are you always conscious of the fact that it can become too dry and factual if you’re not careful? Oh sure, the idea is to be a funny show about serious things, I think. I was hired to write comedy … That’s the directive we’ve been given. It sometimes seems like there’s a dare going on. You pick the most fruitless-seeming topic for comedy – North Dakota! Tobacco companies! Encryption! – something that seems like it just can’t be funny. Like you’re trying to make things hard on yourself. Oh, I hope that it comes off as funny ... Oh, they always do … There’s this degree of difficulty to making a funny 20 minutes on iPhone encryption. Everyone there is just super-funny and super-talented… When someone pitches a story, I’m always confident we can make it funny. What’s the funniest thing about American politics, or the presidential race, right now? Is it funny, sad, a mix of both? I think it’s terror. I think specifically that Trump’s candidacy is like when you and your friends are hanging out, and somebody proposes something horrible, and everyone laughs. And then everyone realizes that guy was serious, and then it’s too late: You have to put the brakes on. “No, no, no, no no. We can’t just strangle someone down by the train tracks, dude! We thought you were doing a bit, but, Oh dear, this is very frightening.” It does seem to have gone from comedy to reality very quickly. It got real.Josh Gondelman is an unlikely kind of hybrid. By day, he writes political humor for “Last Week Tonight.” Many nights, he’s on the stand-up circuit, where his comedy tends to be personal and observational. (He’s also one of the creators of the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account.) Gondelman's stand-up is captured on a very funny new comedy album, “Physical Whisper,” with bits ranging from the difference between subway signs in London and New York to his magazine assignment to try a penis-numbing spray aimed at premature ejaculators. (His riff on gay people and parades is one of the few that gets close to a directly political subject.) With his nasally voice and friendly delivery, he steers just clear of nebbish-land. We spoke to Gondelman, who also co-authored the book “You Blew It,” from New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. I’m wondering: Everything I see and hear about you, you’re called “the nice guy,” or “the humble guy” – and that’s your persona on your stand-up album as well. Are you really that nice, or are you secretly really edgy and cruel when you’re not onstage? [Laughs.] No – I’m actually as unhip as I seem when I’m onstage. It’s a very lovely reputation to have – being a kind person. I try to live up to the fact that people think that about me. Certainly, it’s a very warm compliment and I appreciate that you say it. So many male comedians, going back decades and decades, are macho or edgy or rude … Did you make an effort to do something else, or is that just not your thing? Yeah, I definitely don’t come off well when I’m consciously abrasive. There are bits I’ve written that I have to make sure to do with a gentle touch, because in general my personality is laid-back and friendly. If I break from that onstage – if it’s something I’m speaking against -- I have to make sure I’m not, “Hey, it’s really nice to meet you, here’s a story about how much I like my girlfriend, and now, FUCK CHEESE-ITS!” I don’t express myself that way most of the time, so even when I have the opportunity to be a little more aggressive, it doesn’t make sense. Especially when I’m heckled, that’s a sticky situation, because I don’t defuse it… I really envy guys who have a grittier onstage presence and can really go after someone. I used to teach preschool ... I’ll say, “I know you’re having a really good time, and you don’t mean to be disruptive. I used to teach preschool so I’ll say, ‘One-two-three, all eyes on me… That means, Shut up! It’s my turn to talk.’" Even if my intention isn’t to be super-aggressive. You don’t even get the urge to go on a really intense rant or something? No, it’s just not how I talk and not how I write … It just wouldn’t make sense for me to all of a sudden get serious about something. What about politics? You write for one of the most political shows on television, but your stand-up isn’t political in any clear way. What seems like the right kind of balance for you? It’s very easy for me to draw lines: Any jokes about politics and news are things I save to try to work on at work. The stuff on the album is generally either personal, or elliptically about social issues … broader social points. I guess I did have a bit about the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston. So there are jokes you feel you can pull off and jokes you’re not sure you can. At this point it very rarely occurs to me to write a joke that I wouldn’t be able to pull off. It would not occur to me to write a joke like, “This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.” It’s not the voice I write in – which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in. Which comedians did you grow up loving? Who made you want to do this? Oh man, as a kid I always loved Mel Brooks’ stuff –- “The 2,000 Year Old Man” record was something my dad put me onto. And Monty Python. That’s kind of the classic easy answer … Like saying, “The Beatles is a band I like.” But I also had an Ellen DeGeneres stand-up cassette I really love… “Comedy Central Presents” was something I watched numerous times, and Chris Rock’s “Bring the Pain” special and the “Roll With the New” album …Those were some formative ones when I was a teenager. If I can go to your day job for a minute: There was a hilarious bit on John Oliver Sunday night on encryption. Did you have anything to do with that one? We all kind of contribute jokes and stuff to all the pieces. I ended up writing a couple of the jokes. But I didn’t work on that long-term. How do you guys balance funny and serious on the show? You pretty much always get it right, but I just wonder how it works. Are you always conscious of the fact that it can become too dry and factual if you’re not careful? Oh sure, the idea is to be a funny show about serious things, I think. I was hired to write comedy … That’s the directive we’ve been given. It sometimes seems like there’s a dare going on. You pick the most fruitless-seeming topic for comedy – North Dakota! Tobacco companies! Encryption! – something that seems like it just can’t be funny. Like you’re trying to make things hard on yourself. Oh, I hope that it comes off as funny ... Oh, they always do … There’s this degree of difficulty to making a funny 20 minutes on iPhone encryption. Everyone there is just super-funny and super-talented… When someone pitches a story, I’m always confident we can make it funny. What’s the funniest thing about American politics, or the presidential race, right now? Is it funny, sad, a mix of both? I think it’s terror. I think specifically that Trump’s candidacy is like when you and your friends are hanging out, and somebody proposes something horrible, and everyone laughs. And then everyone realizes that guy was serious, and then it’s too late: You have to put the brakes on. “No, no, no, no no. We can’t just strangle someone down by the train tracks, dude! We thought you were doing a bit, but, Oh dear, this is very frightening.” It does seem to have gone from comedy to reality very quickly. It got real.Josh Gondelman is an unlikely kind of hybrid. By day, he writes political humor for “Last Week Tonight.” Many nights, he’s on the stand-up circuit, where his comedy tends to be personal and observational. (He’s also one of the creators of the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account.) Gondelman's stand-up is captured on a very funny new comedy album, “Physical Whisper,” with bits ranging from the difference between subway signs in London and New York to his magazine assignment to try a penis-numbing spray aimed at premature ejaculators. (His riff on gay people and parades is one of the few that gets close to a directly political subject.) With his nasally voice and friendly delivery, he steers just clear of nebbish-land. We spoke to Gondelman, who also co-authored the book “You Blew It,” from New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. I’m wondering: Everything I see and hear about you, you’re called “the nice guy,” or “the humble guy” – and that’s your persona on your stand-up album as well. Are you really that nice, or are you secretly really edgy and cruel when you’re not onstage? [Laughs.] No – I’m actually as unhip as I seem when I’m onstage. It’s a very lovely reputation to have – being a kind person. I try to live up to the fact that people think that about me. Certainly, it’s a very warm compliment and I appreciate that you say it. So many male comedians, going back decades and decades, are macho or edgy or rude … Did you make an effort to do something else, or is that just not your thing? Yeah, I definitely don’t come off well when I’m consciously abrasive. There are bits I’ve written that I have to make sure to do with a gentle touch, because in general my personality is laid-back and friendly. If I break from that onstage – if it’s something I’m speaking against -- I have to make sure I’m not, “Hey, it’s really nice to meet you, here’s a story about how much I like my girlfriend, and now, FUCK CHEESE-ITS!” I don’t express myself that way most of the time, so even when I have the opportunity to be a little more aggressive, it doesn’t make sense. Especially when I’m heckled, that’s a sticky situation, because I don’t defuse it… I really envy guys who have a grittier onstage presence and can really go after someone. I used to teach preschool ... I’ll say, “I know you’re having a really good time, and you don’t mean to be disruptive. I used to teach preschool so I’ll say, ‘One-two-three, all eyes on me… That means, Shut up! It’s my turn to talk.’" Even if my intention isn’t to be super-aggressive. You don’t even get the urge to go on a really intense rant or something? No, it’s just not how I talk and not how I write … It just wouldn’t make sense for me to all of a sudden get serious about something. What about politics? You write for one of the most political shows on television, but your stand-up isn’t political in any clear way. What seems like the right kind of balance for you? It’s very easy for me to draw lines: Any jokes about politics and news are things I save to try to work on at work. The stuff on the album is generally either personal, or elliptically about social issues … broader social points. I guess I did have a bit about the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston. So there are jokes you feel you can pull off and jokes you’re not sure you can. At this point it very rarely occurs to me to write a joke that I wouldn’t be able to pull off. It would not occur to me to write a joke like, “This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.” It’s not the voice I write in – which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in. Which comedians did you grow up loving? Who made you want to do this? Oh man, as a kid I always loved Mel Brooks’ stuff –- “The 2,000 Year Old Man” record was something my dad put me onto. And Monty Python. That’s kind of the classic easy answer … Like saying, “The Beatles is a band I like.” But I also had an Ellen DeGeneres stand-up cassette I really love… “Comedy Central Presents” was something I watched numerous times, and Chris Rock’s “Bring the Pain” special and the “Roll With the New” album …Those were some formative ones when I was a teenager. If I can go to your day job for a minute: There was a hilarious bit on John Oliver Sunday night on encryption. Did you have anything to do with that one? We all kind of contribute jokes and stuff to all the pieces. I ended up writing a couple of the jokes. But I didn’t work on that long-term. How do you guys balance funny and serious on the show? You pretty much always get it right, but I just wonder how it works. Are you always conscious of the fact that it can become too dry and factual if you’re not careful? Oh sure, the idea is to be a funny show about serious things, I think. I was hired to write comedy … That’s the directive we’ve been given. It sometimes seems like there’s a dare going on. You pick the most fruitless-seeming topic for comedy – North Dakota! Tobacco companies! Encryption! – something that seems like it just can’t be funny. Like you’re trying to make things hard on yourself. Oh, I hope that it comes off as funny ... Oh, they always do … There’s this degree of difficulty to making a funny 20 minutes on iPhone encryption. Everyone there is just super-funny and super-talented… When someone pitches a story, I’m always confident we can make it funny. What’s the funniest thing about American politics, or the presidential race, right now? Is it funny, sad, a mix of both? I think it’s terror. I think specifically that Trump’s candidacy is like when you and your friends are hanging out, and somebody proposes something horrible, and everyone laughs. And then everyone realizes that guy was serious, and then it’s too late: You have to put the brakes on. “No, no, no, no no. We can’t just strangle someone down by the train tracks, dude! We thought you were doing a bit, but, Oh dear, this is very frightening.” It does seem to have gone from comedy to reality very quickly. It got real.

Continue Reading...

I’m stranded in Trumplandia: Life on the edge of America’s abandoned middle class

No doubt the powerful interests that want to protect their ever-growing share of the national wealth heaved a sigh of relief when they saw the recent images of Trump rally attendees beating up on progressive protesters, taking aim at Trump From the oligarchs' point of view, there is nothing better than having the victims of predator multinational capitalism all go after each other over issues like race and national origin. What you don't want is a peaceful convergence of left and right. Better to have everybody fractionalized and alienated, scrambling for a share of the scraps. Both of the major parties have long been co-opted at the top by these corporate interests, puppet masters pulling strings behind the scenes to become the secretary of the Treasury or appointed as ambassadors wherever they want. It's all pay-to-play. Right now, on the Democratic side, the presence of the superdelegates insulates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a bit from the vagaries of the ballot box. And as brilliantly as Sen. Bernie Sanders has executed his insurgent campaign, he has to continue to try to offer praise for President Obama, whose two terms have seen America's income and wealth disparities only widen, with middle-income and poor Americans continuing to lose ground. The big banks have gotten bigger, the war on terror has widened, and the clamp-down on government whistle-blowers has only escalated. Last month, in South Carolina, a state where active duty and retired military are a big part of the GOP base, it became clear that the RNC had lost the troops, as Donald Trump won the state's 50 delegates despite having called out President George W. Bush for waging an unnecessary war on Iraq under false pretenses. The bipartisan overuse and abuse of America's volunteer military has left many of these patriotic families fractured by suicide, addiction, long-term disability and divorce. They, like the residents of Iraq and Afghanistan, know the real price of these conflicts without end. When both Trump and Sanders carried Michigan, it became clear that the rising anger within the electorate was about an America that no longer works for American workers. What we have on our hands now is a political predator class that has been ignoring the social and economic circumstances of the people for a long time, and profited by doing so. They have kept themselves in power by serving the richest of the rich, cynically playing regions of the country, and segments of the population, against one another. American multinationals avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes every year, transferring the tax burden to small business and working people. We are misdirected to suspect the undocumented among us are the real drag on our national treasury. Yet these folks, one in three of whom own homes here in the U.S., pay billions of dollars in taxes each year. Likewise, when unions were chased out of the private sector, but made inroads in the public sector, big money interests proceeded to demonize public unions for getting the type of pay and benefits that the rest of us were denied, because the new global trade imperative would not permit it. We were all supposed to become lean and mean, like a vast team of Borax mules, pulling the billionaires’ dreams of global domination over the finish line. And for this great favor and opportunity, to work for ever-shrinking wages, higher taxes and less security, we are to deify the billionaires as paragons of philanthropy, elevated on golden media thrones of their own design. Now it is time to smash some idols. Sanders and Trump's Michigan moments were about a working-class America chained, headed up a downward running escalator. We can’t ascend those stairs no matter how many hours we work, or how many coupons we clip. And sad to say, our kids, who went to college just like we demanded, are chained a few treads below us, by their own debt shackles, as we all trudge in place on that same grand conveyor belt to nowhere. As the latest Department of Labor data indicates, the average work week is shrinking and is now down to 34.5 hours a week, which is below full-time. Wages are down as well. Welcome to part-time America.

* * *

For me, at 60 years of age, this is no abstraction. My three 20-something daughters are all college-educated, working and living independently, but have massive amounts of college debt we are all trying to pay off. My wife is self-employed and I have been working as a reporter/ broadcaster for decades. Over the years the deflation in writer’s fees has been dramatic. Stories that used to fetch $1 a word now get a fraction of that. The goal-line stance of almost every going media concern is to avoid actually employing anyone, so you are reduced to the realm of the so-called independent contractor, but always happy to have the work. Despite working with several different outlets, I had to start working overnight at the local supermarket on the night crew, for $9.13 an hour. The three other guys I work with are a bit younger than I am, but represent several decades of experience stocking shelves overnight, checking freshness dates and really caring about what they put on the shelves for people they rarely see. I have thought what a good piece of time-lapse video it would make to see how 1,000 cartons on 10 pallets, 10 feet high, gets broken down, spotted on the aisles, and put on the shelves. It isn’t all that pretty. I have to admit to stumbling a bit trying to move those massive bags of dog food that at 3 a.m. can feel like you're trying to toss a waterbed alone or steer a really drunk dance partner to a graceful ending. And who knew the vast choices available for kitty litter? That’s 21st century America, infinite choices for all the shit that doesn’t really matter. We are a union shop, and my colleagues make a decent wage, have healthcare and weeks of paid vacation. I have none of that, and my big consolation prize was outperforming the 29-year-old who started the same week I did, whom they subsequently let go. I don’t begrudge my union mates the wage and benefits they earned over a lifetime of service. I just want to know why the union to which I pay dues seemed to stop trying for the new hires like me? I have been writing about income inequality for years, but it really didn’t hit me until that first paycheck a few weeks back, when I hit 35 hours and saw that my take home pay was $270. I handle olive oil that costs twice my hourly wage. Over the years I have tried to stay in shape but after a few weeks of moving around massive quantities of bottled water, flour and sugar I realized I was using muscles I hadn’t used for decades. Ironically, it was in my young adulthood, when I worked at a Shop-Rite in Ramsey, New Jersey, also stocking shelves in what was also a union shop. Back then I was making enough money, above the minimum wage, that I could live on my own, and pay the less than $400 a semester it cost me to go to Ramapo College, a state school. I want that America back.No doubt the powerful interests that want to protect their ever-growing share of the national wealth heaved a sigh of relief when they saw the recent images of Trump rally attendees beating up on progressive protesters, taking aim at Trump From the oligarchs' point of view, there is nothing better than having the victims of predator multinational capitalism all go after each other over issues like race and national origin. What you don't want is a peaceful convergence of left and right. Better to have everybody fractionalized and alienated, scrambling for a share of the scraps. Both of the major parties have long been co-opted at the top by these corporate interests, puppet masters pulling strings behind the scenes to become the secretary of the Treasury or appointed as ambassadors wherever they want. It's all pay-to-play. Right now, on the Democratic side, the presence of the superdelegates insulates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a bit from the vagaries of the ballot box. And as brilliantly as Sen. Bernie Sanders has executed his insurgent campaign, he has to continue to try to offer praise for President Obama, whose two terms have seen America's income and wealth disparities only widen, with middle-income and poor Americans continuing to lose ground. The big banks have gotten bigger, the war on terror has widened, and the clamp-down on government whistle-blowers has only escalated. Last month, in South Carolina, a state where active duty and retired military are a big part of the GOP base, it became clear that the RNC had lost the troops, as Donald Trump won the state's 50 delegates despite having called out President George W. Bush for waging an unnecessary war on Iraq under false pretenses. The bipartisan overuse and abuse of America's volunteer military has left many of these patriotic families fractured by suicide, addiction, long-term disability and divorce. They, like the residents of Iraq and Afghanistan, know the real price of these conflicts without end. When both Trump and Sanders carried Michigan, it became clear that the rising anger within the electorate was about an America that no longer works for American workers. What we have on our hands now is a political predator class that has been ignoring the social and economic circumstances of the people for a long time, and profited by doing so. They have kept themselves in power by serving the richest of the rich, cynically playing regions of the country, and segments of the population, against one another. American multinationals avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes every year, transferring the tax burden to small business and working people. We are misdirected to suspect the undocumented among us are the real drag on our national treasury. Yet these folks, one in three of whom own homes here in the U.S., pay billions of dollars in taxes each year. Likewise, when unions were chased out of the private sector, but made inroads in the public sector, big money interests proceeded to demonize public unions for getting the type of pay and benefits that the rest of us were denied, because the new global trade imperative would not permit it. We were all supposed to become lean and mean, like a vast team of Borax mules, pulling the billionaires’ dreams of global domination over the finish line. And for this great favor and opportunity, to work for ever-shrinking wages, higher taxes and less security, we are to deify the billionaires as paragons of philanthropy, elevated on golden media thrones of their own design. Now it is time to smash some idols. Sanders and Trump's Michigan moments were about a working-class America chained, headed up a downward running escalator. We can’t ascend those stairs no matter how many hours we work, or how many coupons we clip. And sad to say, our kids, who went to college just like we demanded, are chained a few treads below us, by their own debt shackles, as we all trudge in place on that same grand conveyor belt to nowhere. As the latest Department of Labor data indicates, the average work week is shrinking and is now down to 34.5 hours a week, which is below full-time. Wages are down as well. Welcome to part-time America.

* * *

For me, at 60 years of age, this is no abstraction. My three 20-something daughters are all college-educated, working and living independently, but have massive amounts of college debt we are all trying to pay off. My wife is self-employed and I have been working as a reporter/ broadcaster for decades. Over the years the deflation in writer’s fees has been dramatic. Stories that used to fetch $1 a word now get a fraction of that. The goal-line stance of almost every going media concern is to avoid actually employing anyone, so you are reduced to the realm of the so-called independent contractor, but always happy to have the work. Despite working with several different outlets, I had to start working overnight at the local supermarket on the night crew, for $9.13 an hour. The three other guys I work with are a bit younger than I am, but represent several decades of experience stocking shelves overnight, checking freshness dates and really caring about what they put on the shelves for people they rarely see. I have thought what a good piece of time-lapse video it would make to see how 1,000 cartons on 10 pallets, 10 feet high, gets broken down, spotted on the aisles, and put on the shelves. It isn’t all that pretty. I have to admit to stumbling a bit trying to move those massive bags of dog food that at 3 a.m. can feel like you're trying to toss a waterbed alone or steer a really drunk dance partner to a graceful ending. And who knew the vast choices available for kitty litter? That’s 21st century America, infinite choices for all the shit that doesn’t really matter. We are a union shop, and my colleagues make a decent wage, have healthcare and weeks of paid vacation. I have none of that, and my big consolation prize was outperforming the 29-year-old who started the same week I did, whom they subsequently let go. I don’t begrudge my union mates the wage and benefits they earned over a lifetime of service. I just want to know why the union to which I pay dues seemed to stop trying for the new hires like me? I have been writing about income inequality for years, but it really didn’t hit me until that first paycheck a few weeks back, when I hit 35 hours and saw that my take home pay was $270. I handle olive oil that costs twice my hourly wage. Over the years I have tried to stay in shape but after a few weeks of moving around massive quantities of bottled water, flour and sugar I realized I was using muscles I hadn’t used for decades. Ironically, it was in my young adulthood, when I worked at a Shop-Rite in Ramsey, New Jersey, also stocking shelves in what was also a union shop. Back then I was making enough money, above the minimum wage, that I could live on my own, and pay the less than $400 a semester it cost me to go to Ramapo College, a state school. I want that America back.

Continue Reading...

“The Bachelor” is still for white people: A sour fairy tale, fed to millions, that keeps prizing whiteness above all

Buried in the manufactured drama around last night’s finale of “The Bachelor”—in which Bachelor Ben Higgins ended up proposing to Lauren Bushnell, after an agonizing period in Jamaica where he claimed to be in love with two different women—was a far more significant and broad-reaching story: that of which Americans are allowed to become America’s sweethearts. It’s both a superficial question and a profound one. After all, we are talking about ABC’s extremely hetero- and gendernormative reality television franchise—which includes “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise”—which codifies and reinforces a pretty terrible view of sex, dating and relationships. But we are also talking about a massively popular program, one that functions as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of viewers every year. If “The Bachelor” is our modern-day fairy tale, then who becomes its princes and princesses does matter. Last night, the new bachelorette was announced to be “Southern sweetheart” JoJo Fletcher, who was dumped in the last half-hour of the finale after tremulously confiding to the camera that her fairy-tale love story was about to become real. This wouldn’t be news if it weren’t for the fact that the franchise had already been prepping its first woman of color bachelorette, Caila Quinn, only to change the lineup in the 11th hour. (Quinn is half-white, half-Asian; her mother is Filipina.) Just this January, ABC chief Paul Lee—who helmed one of the most diverse programming slates in history in his years at the network—said, “I’d be very surprised if [the bachelorette] in the summer isn’t diverse. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but I think that’s likely to happen.” But last month, Paul Lee was ousted at ABC, in a behind-the-scenes network power play that will likely have many lasting ramifications. Promises made from him a few months ago don’t have the same stickiness. And in the last few episodes of this season’s “The Bachelor,” Higgins violated one of the show’s unwritten rules by first declaring an “I love you” before the final rose and second by telling two women he loved them, setting up one for public heartbreak. The unlucky other woman might have gotten her heart broken on national TV, but Ben’s breakup with her ensures her the pay for another season of television, at least: JoJo garnered so much sympathy from the ordeal that it likely influenced the producers’ decision to make her the next bachelorette. Caila gets a raw deal, but there isn’t a contestant on “The Bachelor” that doesn’t. And though Caila would have been the first bachelorette of color, JoJo is in fact half-white and half-Persian, a fact found in her bio on the show’s website but elided from the official press release announcing her. And this leads to a whole new set of complicated questions about representation on “The Bachelorette” and its related shows. Because it is unlikely “The Bachelorette” is going to have a frank discussion about whether or not people with Persian descent experience either white privilege or ethnic stigma; it is unlikely that JoJo’s ethnicity will be given any screentime at all. Because while racial diversity does, at times, have a place on “The Bachelor” et al., the types and kinds of racial diversity are often white-passing or stereotypical. To quote Reality Blurred’s Andy Dehnart: “Diversity is more than just casting a person. It’s about how that person is portrayed to the audience—what the editing includes and highlights, and what stereotypes it reinforces.” Let’s look at some of those tools, and how “The Bachelor” uses them. Viewers of the show will know that contestants like JoJo and Caila would only be called by their first names for the majority of the show—which, like kindergarten, drops the confusing and often ethnicity-indicating last name. This is probably the most relevant for a contestant like Mary Delgado (who “won” her season in 2004) whose given name is Maribel. The nickname and the lost last name ethnically sanitize her; if she looks physically darker-skinned than the other contestants, it could be plausibly chalked up to an overuse of self-tanning lotion. Conversely, the only “ethnic” bachelor, Juan Pablo Galavis, is “diverse” according to Paul Lee’s stated standards because he grew up in Venezuela. But Galavis is also a white man, and labeling someone from Latin America as simply “Latino” or “Hispanic” is a quick way for Americans to compress what is an extraordinarily complex question of racial identity. He is Latino, but he does not solve the problem of an entirely white slate of bachelors. And without Galavis, every single bachelor and bachelorette is a white person, and nearly every winner is, too. Casting includes a token number of minority contestants each season, but those contestants tend to be eliminated quickly. Of the combined 31 seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” only four winners can claim any nonwhite ancestry. And on “The Bachelor,” every woman who has snuck into the winners’ circle has done so through the dint of Anglicized names and light-enough skin. There is a particular ethnicity that “The Bachelor” favors: Like near-bachelorette Caila Quinn, past winners Tessa Horst and Catherine Giuidici are biracial Asian-white. With Quinn looking ascendant to the title of bachelorette just a few days ago, NPR’s Akemi Johnson, in this extraordinary piece for “All Things Considered,” offers up a hypothesis for why this particular ethnic identity of biracial Asian-white might be so enticing to “The Bachelor’s" producers:

Mixed-race Asian-white women become the perfect vehicles for diversity on this show because they are "white enough to present to the family," as [NYU Professor of Sociology Ann] Morning said, while still being exotic enough to fill a quota. Morning suggested they also get a boost from the model minority myth and the recent idea that being multiracial is "cool."

Johnson also quotes another academic, Rachel Dubrofsky, who observes that every nonwhite contestant who made it to the final weeks or ended up winning in her season explicitly downplays her racial background and ethnicity. Horst’s Chinese-American mother is even backgrounded during the hometown visit in her season, in 2007. And though this is pretty terrible, it might be preferable to what happened this season, when, as Johnson observes, bachelor Ben and Caila Quinn’s white father traded some uncomfortable Asian-wife stereotypes—one that Caila herself grimaced at—as a way, possibly, to make Caila Quinn seem like a more desirable contestant (and future bride). This is a long way of saying that while, on one hand, there is something frustrating and suspicious about “The Bachelor’s" sudden decision to make JoJo the bachelorette, after Caila seemed to have it locked down, the grander injustice here is something more diffuse and pernicious. “The Bachelor” is devoted to whiteness, for its own probably ratings-shy reasons. (Conventional wisdom suggests that white American audiences will struggle to identify with obviously nonwhite leads, and therefore, ratings will suffer. Actual wisdom, which notes the massive success of shows like “Empire,” suggests that has limited basis in reality.) The show might be expanding its umbrella to include a half-white, half-Persian or half-white, half-Filipina bachelorette in the near future, but the strictures for being the bachelorette are still the same—to be as white-passing as possible until the appropriate moment for stereotypes emerges. The show’s forays into other ethnic identities cleaves so closely to the accepted racial norm that it reads less like opening up “The Bachelor” to other races and more like expanding, ever so slightly, the bounds of acceptable telegenic whiteness. It’s not much of a fairy tale.

Continue Reading...

An 8-year-old takes down the NSA in the creepily on-message thriller “Midnight Special”

I honestly don’t know whether it’s healthy to see a movie and have the immediate reaction that it would make a terrific cable TV series. Such was my response to “Midnight Special,” the engrossing new supernatural thriller from writer-director Jeff Nichols that plunges us into the middle of a world both familiar and strange. If the relationship between movies and television has long been contested it is especially confusing right now, and the boundary has become increasingly porous. Turning “Fargo” into a TV show sounded at first (to me) like an idea that could only demean the legacy of the Coen brothers’ film or produce a knockoff riddled with lame gags; whether or not you like that series, it has done neither of those things. Only those with short cultural memories would claim this is some new problem, given that an antiwar film made by Robert Altman in 1970 became the basis for the longest-running comedy series in TV history. If you haven’t caught up to Nichols yet after “Mud,” his Tom Sawyer-gone-dark rural adventure with Matthew McConaughey, or “Take Shelter,” his apocalyptic fable with Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, you need to. Everything he makes is worth watching, and he’s one of the storytellers who is both shaping and chronicling the anxieties of our young century. “Midnight Special” might be Nichols’ Bob Dylan-goes-electric moment, in that it clearly tries to push toward the interests and appetites of a much larger audience, while still embodying his obsessions with backwoods Americana and the hidden or mysterious superstrata of human existence. I suspect this movie will sharply divide Nichols’ existing fan base for reasons I can only allude to vaguely in a review; I loved it, or almost all of it, but I can understand the uncertainty. In suggesting that “Midnight Special” might have a TV destiny, I’m not seeking to diminish it as a film. None of Nichols’ films, going back to his 2007 debut feature “Shotgun Stories,” is big on conventional plot, but “Midnight Special” has a combination of narrative density and political or social allegory that has become commonplace in cable drama, from “Homeland” to “The Americans” to “Mr. Robot.” We get very little exposition about why Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), the 8-year-old boy at the center of the story, is seen as so extraordinary, or why the federal government, members of a fundamentalist Mormon-style sect and possibly unknown others are so eager to find him. What we know is that Alton is traveling across east Texas, northern Louisiana and other parts of the rural South with two adult men in a primer-gray ’72 Chevy hot rod. One of those men, Roy — played by the reliably terrific Shannon, a Nichols regular at this point — is getting his picture splashed all over TV news broadcasts, along with the license number of the Chevy. Most of the darker possibilities behind this scenario lift right away, as it becomes clear that Alton is not just a willing companion but is in some sense directing the journey, and also that Roy is his birth father. (An extremely minor spoiler, I promise you.) So this isn’t an abduction, at least not in the classic sense, whatever Nancy Grace is saying about it on TV. As for what’s really going on, there is never a scene when Nichols has some authority figure sit heavily in a chair and explain it all, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Yes, it will eventually become clear why Alton almost always wears tinted swim goggles and never goes outside by daylight. (No, he’s not a vampire, thank Christ.) We will learn, more or less, why Alton became central to the life of the isolated religious community led by Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), and why the government became so interested in Meyer’s sermons that a nerdy young NSA analyst named Paul Sevier who appears not to own a tie (played by Adam Driver, without a light saber) has started tagging along with the FBI. Nichols uses the compressed time of cinema with tremendous verve, flinging us headlong into a story whose forward momentum is captured perfectly by that midnight-running Chevy. (Sadly, it becomes necessary to ditch that particular vehicle on the group’s journey toward an ambiguous rendezvous in the Florida panhandle.) What a TV series could presumably do is explore all these people’s stories in more detail, and answer some of the questions for which the screenplay of “Midnight Special” simply doesn’t have time. Exactly how and why did Roy lure his old friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a Texas state trooper by day, into his blatantly illegal act of resistance? As Nichols did with “Take Shelter,” which both was and was not a movie about global climate change and its consequences, he has employed blatantly fanciful elements here to depict the world that produced the competing insurrections of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, a world where state authority is seen as inherently untrustworthy and information has become a tool of oppression. Driver’s character, the NSA info-geek named Paul who knows only that Alton possesses an unimagined ability to conquer or outwit all the codes, ciphers and secrets his agency can invent, is in many ways the key to the story. When he finally comes face to face with Alton, Paul tells him, “I think you’re a weapon,” in hushed tones of mingled admiration and threat. Of course we’re expected to conclude that isn’t the right answer, but what is? Meyer, laconic leader of the fundamentalist commune, sees Alton as a prophet who receives visions straight from the deity. Nichols is totally unafraid of the big questions; some of those that come into play here include whether “prophet” and “weapon” are two ways of saying the same thing, and what unknown or poorly understood aspects of reality might lie behind our species-wide preoccupation with supernatural phenomena. In the compressed universe of “Midnight Special,” Paul is required to flip almost instantaneously from one state to the other, as if from a 0 to a 1 (a joke he would no doubt appreciate), on the way toward an extraordinary revelation of Alton’s destiny that is perhaps too sudden and hurried to be fully satisfactory. I’m eager to debate the ending of “Midnight Special” with all comers — but let’s not do that right now, OK? In the TV version of this story (which for all I know is not remotely contemplated and will never happen) all sorts of things could be explored in more detail. We could learn more about the conversion of Paul and why it happened — yeah, his name would seem not to be accidental! — not to mention more about Alton’s relationship to the human race and the differences between a prophet and a weapon. I suppose we could try to figure those things out for ourselves, but TV is always easier.

Continue Reading...

What ever happened to the mighty Atlantic salmon?

Atlantic salmon, the native salmon that used to inhabit the northern Atlantic Ocean, rivers and seas, is a species now represented by an impostor: farmed salmon. Also known as cultured salmon, farmed salmon comes from hatchery genetic stock and unlike its native ancestors, lacks wild genetic variation. The wild fish our ancestors ate is gone. What appears on our dinner plates is a substitute copy, a genetic dilution of a once mighty fish, the adaptive king of the sea, and a significant food for coastal humans since prehistoric times. The change in genetic stock has been happening for decades, as farmed salmon are released into native waters via restocking programs (in an attempt to reduce the negative impacts of overfishing of wild salmon) and also unintentionally as a consequence of faulty containment in sea net-cages. The resulting “swamping out” effect — farmed in, wild out — along with several other insidious factors, has driven native salmon to effective extinction. Genetic erosion When I began to research the scientific literature on native Atlantic salmon, I was stunned to discover that this species (Salmo salar L.) is essentially extinct. How can this be possible? Is the fish before our eyes and on our platters not real? Yes, indeed it is, but the verified statistic is that 99.5 percent of all Atlantic salmon living today, whether farmed or fished from open ocean or rivers, is not what biologists call “wild type” and does not faithfully represent, in a genetic sense, the native fish that once broadly populated waters of our planet’s Holarctic zone, the ecological region that encompasses the majority of habitats found across the Earth’s northern continents. The fish we eat today is not the fish that fed our ancestors, or even the fish that fed our forebears of a century ago. Today’s salmon, because of the effects of a force called genetic erosion, is the diluted copy of a fish that once thrived on a wild genome, that tried and true set of original genes which, in the case of salmon, generated a fish capable of magnetic field navigation, survival in fresh and salt water and geochemical detection of spawning micro-habitats. Sockeye salmon preparing to spawn near outlet of Lake Brooks. Each of these salmon may represent as many as 1,000 other salmon that died in the attempt to return and spawn. Salmon face death throughout every phase of their life. (Text and image: National Park Service) Genetic erosion, simply defined as the loss of genetic diversity over time, eliminates the potential of a species to adapt to new environments and leads to extinction. The swamping-out effect by farmed salmon has been one eroding genetic force working against wild salmon. We human predators have overfished, toxically farmed, illiterately stocked, dammed and blindly released, by millions, farmed and unfit Atlantic salmon fishes into the wild. The hatchery stock has bred with and overrun the native species, one that had been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years, and which is now genetically eliminated, all in the quick human feeding frenzy of the last century. In visual terms, the force of this steep genetic erosion has clear cut to an industrial hedge, and burned to the biological bones, a body of irreplaceable, adaptive genetic material equivalent to a massive, old-growth forest, one which had stood for millennia over the entire Holarctic region of Earth and which is frankly not restorable. One could say that the old-growth forest of Atlantic salmon is dead. This is not an easy tale to tell. The salmon, however, is an able storyteller, being a familiar and marvelous fish. Salmon is anadromous, a migrant from fresh water to salty sea, a fish who returns to its birth river to spawn in the family niche for the next generation, for the continuation of each clan, the many clans for each population, and the many populations for each species. Technically, the only way to explain why the salmon you think you are eating is extinct is through the lens of population and molecular genetics. Yet, the salmon is truly a salmon of knowledge and can tell its story in many ways, being a once highly diverse and differentiated, smartly pedigreed family of kin and clan. If you can follow maps and glaciations, rivers and open seas, then you can follow the clans of salmon and their ancestral family trees, and the recent loss of their protective, genetic canopy. Salmonid evolution The earliest salmon came from a diverse group of ocean vertebrates known as the ray-finned fishes and was part of a broad divergence of ocean fishes that adapted over eons to the cold, northern waters of the upper Northern Hemisphere, around the Arctic Circle. Early Atlantic and Pacific salmonid ancestors branched into separate ocean groups of early species types about 600,000 years ago. Well before the coming of its most evolved predator, Homo sapiens sapiens, before the industrial degradation of the earth’s ecosystems, before and after the last retreat of the Last Glacial Maximum, salmon prospered, undisturbed and free to navigate the seas and inland rivers. The females raked their redds (spawning nests), the males attended, their black-eyed eggs developed. They grew into spotted fry, then young parr (juveniles) camouflaged in lines matured to silver-scaled adults, who when ready put out to sea to amass body weight as they navigated the ocean using the Earth’s magnetic fields to guide them. image: BPA.gov Consistently, the salmon returned upriver to breed again, homing back to their place of ancestry, their birth location, not only to pass down the best surviving, evolutionary genetic lines, but the unique adaptive differences of their clan, which allowed them to detect, recall and locate that singular family place as being their own. Innumerable salmon clans eventually earmarked to all of the available niches within the species’ final broad biogeographical distribution. On their way, during their travels, over time and in prehistory, salmon differentiated. Individuals of each clan began to accumulate small genetic differences by random chance, breeding and keeping those differences unto themselves and their families. Salmon clans became unique within their family’s geographic niche because they spawned among their own. The clans grew and multiplied, each clan at its own location, spreading and creating more clans, larger and more diverse populations, accumulating more of those familial differences. Clan-genetic differentiation can now be measured by DNA fingerprinting, has been shown to correlate to geographical breeding location and, most importantly, became locally adaptive. Salmon evolved to cull the identity by smell of their home waters in the elegant genetic processes of gene co-adaptation, and where the salmon bred was where the salmon was most fit. Dynasties of ecological fitness, each clan best suited to its own specific breeding location, certainly emerged. Surviving a frozen world We know that the ancient, wild Atlantic salmon faced and survived Holarctic glaciation, for their genes also left a fingerprint of their biological survival gear in their molecular patterns. Well studied in northern Europe, there likely existed one or more refugia under the Weichlesian glacial plates, bodies of fresh water in which the prehistoric salmon survived as the rest of its world froze over, unable to migrate to sea. Isolated in its clans, separated by distance and geological formations, in different rivers, breeding with no outsiders and accumulating differences, the ever-adaptable wild salmon colonies were yet diverse enough to self-populate over long periods of time, being naturally fit and self-sustaining. Meanwhile, saltwater clans were successfully breeding in the ocean. As the glaciers remained, the separated salmon clans accumulated and passed on those unique fitness differences for best survival in their different environments. Then the glacial ice retreated upon the warming Holocene, about 12,000 years ago. The oceans rose and fingered inland into fjords and rivers as glaciers melted, and individuals from refuge salmon clans began to spread into fresh territory. Some pioneered the newly opened, post-glacial rivers, challenging distance and falls, spawning further upstream again and again, as the case may be, until all of the available rivers of the north Atlantic islands, eastern Russia, the Baltic Sea and their appurtenant inland flows were filled with unique, wild salmon, a literal natural spectrum of glorious natural diversity. In the lands abutting the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, this distribution and range included every river in and out of the sea coasts from the north of Spain to the Arctic latitudes, and in North America from the Connecticut River northward. Here lived and bred the “wild type” Atlantic salmon, adaptive king of the sea and the “leaper,” the muscled fish of power, grace and fortitude. Meanwhile, our own species experienced an upturn during the advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, and spread around the globe. As far as the wild salmon was concerned, all was kept in checks and balances until our epoch of genetic erosion, the superseding Anthropocene, which began c. 1950. Ours is an historic epoch physically characterized by the plastic geological layer now forming as a permanent record in the crust of human industrial ways. Today’s salmon The salmon has taken a fatal series of genetic blows. Its “old growth forest” was set on fire by a human feeding frenzy that began with overfishing and was fed by industrial aquaculture. The genetic erosion is shocking and steep. Today, 99.5 percent of all native Atlantic salmon has disappeared from the wild. In Europe, Scandinavia and around the Baltic Sea, native indigenous salmon has vanished from the Russian rivers Neva and Narva, the Luleälven and Umeälven of Sweden, from the Odra and Wisla in Poland, and the Vilia of Belarus. In fact, only 10 of the many rivers which empty into the Baltic arm of the northern Atlantic Ocean sustain wild salmon populations any longer, and the wild Baltic salmon genome is the only one with natural resistance to the destructive Gyrodactulus salaris parasite. Around the British Isles, in Ireland and across the pond to North America, wild salmon populations are extinct or endangered or threatened. The Kola Peninsula of Russia is known to be a current refuge for wild type Atlantic salmon, yet is also known to harbor military and radioactive waste at ecologically harmful levels. The grand Torneälven of Sweden, called Tornionjoki where it traverses Finland, is one of the last rivers to host wild Atlantic salmon in the world. (For more on the status of Atlantic salmon, see the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List map [5]. Researchers at the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management have produced a report [6] on the Baltic extinctions. Anna Tonteri, a conservation geneticist at the University of Turku in Finland has written an excellent doctoral thesis [7] about the population genetics of north European Atlantic salmon.) image: IUCN The Baltic salmon extinctions were largely enabled by human destruction of migration routes for spawning, upon the building and operation of hydroelectric dams. Further molecular DNA studies of the hatchery stock salmon from this exemplary sea have demonstrated a genetic “homogenization.” Stock salmon populations constitute more of a weak puree than a chunky soup, in terms of “population genetic structure,” another statistical measure of diversity. This is why — although the map above may demonstrate a wide range and lesser areas of extinction — the actual number of wild salmon living within the extant areas is quite small at around 0.5 percent. In other words, the orange areas showing extant salmon are overall 99.5 percent inhabited by farmed stock salmon. We have learned to overlay DNA diversity upon geography and geologic history, in a relatively new field called landscape genomics. The important data is not just in the map or the numbers of fish, but in the genetic quality and the relationships of the individual salmon that comprise the families, clans and populations. An apparent abundance by numbers does not mean a population is healthy, self-sustaining and diverse. In Ireland, the release of farmed salmon has not only caused genetic erosion, but has disrupted the capacity of wild populations to adapt to warmer waters. This is a problem for salmon across its geographical range for the obvious reason of climate change. Strong and well founded recommendations for saving the remaining wild salmon include cessation of stock salmon releases and re-establishment of native spawning grounds. The future effects of warming waters, however, are unknown and not hopeful. I can tell you a similar story about the Pacific salmon, the Oncorhynchus species — the chum, coho, sockeye and Chinook salmon — which are also extinct or endangered or threatened, and which are also genetically eroded. The destruction of the 10-million-a-year run of wild salmon on the Columbia River is unfortunately historic. The Pacific salmon had populated its portion of the Holarctic range simultaneously with the Atlantic salmon. Recent research has verified that Pacific hatchery stock salmon differs genetically from wild salmon and does so from the first generation of breeding. Over 700 genes, according to the data, were associated with “wound healing, immunity and metabolism.” (Scientists at Oregon State University recently conducted a study published in the journal Nature that shows there is DNA evidence that salmon hatcheries cause significant and rapid genetic changes.) The fish are raised in overcrowded, concrete tanks, eat an artificial, supplemented diet and live in polluted water that is released into the environment whether farmed inland or off coast. Genetic variation is the key to survival. With variation, if the environment changes, those individuals with the right variation in their genes will be most able to survive, to adapt and to regenerate a population. That is why it is important to sustain a lot of different, varied individuals in the population, in the clan, in the tribe. Genetic diversity for living organisms is the biological foundation for long term survival, for adaptation to environmental changes, and is essential to species for sustaining fit populations for future generations. Genetic diversity is essential for all life on earth to survive climate changes. The old-growth forest of Atlantic salmon was the entire set of all native salmon genes required for response and adaptation to new environments, the genetic set encompassing all salmon diversity, before the beginning of overfishing and the industrial era of H. sapiens sapiens. This forest of genetic diversity stood, so to speak, in wild swimming, individual, native salmon genomes (not laboratories!) and was acquired over millennia of biological and environmental changes by natural selection. The old-growth forest contained the wild genes of each fish, a reliable molecular network, co-adapted, set like jewels in a biological filigree, fitness genes in a pedigree of clans that salmon had naturally conserved among themselves, to sustain themselves, and to protect their own kind from and for environmental changes, and to adapt, to diverge and to explore new places in their niches of the living ecosystem of our planet. The old-growth forest was everything genetically needed for wild salmon survival. Stock salmon cannot survive without human intervention. The overcrowded hatchery conditions in which it grows cause numerous fish body abnormalities and require nutritional supplementation to cover for shortfalls in bone development and other physiological problems. Protect whatever remains Human cultures rose around the salmon, which has fed and continues to feed a lot of people. In the wild, its orange flesh color comes from its consumption of shrimp and krill and the absorption of these carotenoids into its tissues. These natural pigments may actually have a protective effect for the salmon, as well as nutritional value for its consumers, humans and bears alike. Pellet-fed, farmed salmon must be supplemented to obtain its pink color. Native, indigenous, wild Atlantic salmon, its distinguished clans and tribes, did not need human help to survive, and yet we have lost the salmon to our anthropogenic ways, to overfishing, fish farming, dam construction, inbreeding, poor stock management and environmental degradation. And from these genetically eroded hills has been created a hatchery-dependent, diluted salmon, an inflexible, non-diverse and certainly not wild, genetic copy of salmon that we fish, farm, release and eat, and even feed to our pets every day. Spring Chinook salmon (image: Michael Humling, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service) More than 99 percent of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., live only as genetically eroded, hatchery stock fish today. That is a most sobering statistic considering the engineering of the Pacific Chinook salmon growth hormone into the Atlantic salmon genome (see my earlier article here). Whatever remnants still exist of our wild salmon populations must be protected without exception, especially given the potential introduction of a new, genetically engineered salmon to our frankly fragile food web. Moreover, the pollution and operation of inland fish tanks is costly. At this point in the Anthropocene, conservation interests may want to rise up another step against the introduction of industrialized, non-native food species (call them what you will) into the only biosphere we have in which to live, until we are able to halt any further species genetic erosion. Salmon has been swimming upstream against the depleting force of “genetic erosion” for at least a century, a force that has claimed its wild genome, its clans and its tribes, its genetic diversity, and which has nearly eliminated a once self-sustaining, powerful ocean species. Now, salmon cannot live without us. Atlantic salmon is essentially extinct because we have demanded too much of this natural resource through over-consumption and environmental exploitation. The wild gene forest that once lived, the old trees, the towering antiquarians of genetic variation, are gone, lost in the fire of a rapid, wholesale, industrial Homo sapiens sapiens taking, consumed in an anthropocentric fire we could even see burning, when one looks at the timeline of scientific data. Kathleen McKeoghain is a scientist, scholar and writer who specializes in genetics, agriculture, biodiversity and conservatio.

Continue Reading...

David O. Russell made Amy Adams’ life a living hell: 5 sadistic male directors who treat their actors like garbage

If you weren’t already aware, David O. Russell is a walking pile of garbage. During the infamous Sony hacks, it was revealed that the famously tyrannical director made Amy Adams’ life a living hell on the set of “American Hustle,” so much so that Christian Bale (aka the guy who chewed out a PA for getting in his eye line) was forced to intervene. In an email to Sony chief Michael Lynton, journalist Jonathan Alter wrote: “He grabbed one guy by the collar, cursed out people repeatedly in front of others and so abused Amy Adams that Christian Bale got in his face and told him to stop acting like an asshole.” In an interview with British GQ, Adams spoke out against Russell’s behavior. “I was really just devastated on set,” she told the mag. “I mean, not every day, but most. Jennifer [Lawrence] doesn’t take any of it on. She’s Teflon. And I am not Teflon. But I also don’t like to see other people treated badly. It’s not OK with me. Life to me is more important than movies.” This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone even passingly familiar with Russell’s history; after all, the director once groped his transgender niece. But the incident raises the question: Why do studios continue to hire him? There’s a simple answer: While female directors are branded as being difficult and denied future work (see: Catherine Hardwicke) for all manner of inane reasons, being unprofessional, abusive and borderline sociopathic is seen as a quirk of a male director’s genius. In 2014, a BBC piece from Nicholas Barber on legendarily difficult auteurs—like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, who compared actors to cattle—openly wondered if the best directors are tyrants. “In short, the ends justify the means,” he wrote. That kind of thinking rationalizes behavior that would get one fired in any other industry (especially if one were female), and Russell is only the latest example in a long line of filmmakers who are horrible to work for. Here are five working directors who just keep getting their projects bankrolled, no matter how awful they are. 1. David O. Russell As previously mentioned, this is just the “Joy” director’s latest on-set mutiny. While working on “Three Kings”—his breakout film—David O. Russell treated his crew so abominably that George Clooney tried to kill him. Throughout the shoot, Russell would humiliate and scream at his subordinates—making the script supervisor burst into tears. One day, the director requested that one of the extras throw Clooney to the ground to film a scene, and Clooney recalled that the “nervous” actor balked at the direction. David O. Russell responded by kicking him and yelling: “Do you want to be in this fucking movie? Then throw him to the fucking ground!” When an assistant director tried to intervene, Russell snatched his walkie-talkie and chucked it. George Clooney, too, attempted to step in, and Russell challenged him to a fight. “You're being a dick,” he said. “You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.” The director then began to choke him and Clooney recalls that he “went nuts.” He said, “I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.” If you need any indication of what David O. Russell is like to work for, check out the footage of Russell calling Lily Tomlin a “bitch” on the set of “I Heart Huckabees.” During a set meltdown, Russell yelled, “I worked on this thing for three years not to have some cunt yell at me in front of the fucking crew!” 2. David Fincher The “Seven” and “Gone Girl” director comes from the Stanley Kubrick school of mind-numbing perfectionism, in which actors are forced to repeatedly redo the same take well past their breaking point. Kubrick’s shoot for “Eyes Wide Shut” was a marathon effort that lasted for a Guinness-shattering 400 days, two of which consisted of reshooting the same sequence of the late director Sydney Pollack entering a room. On “The Shining,” Kubrick famously forced Scatman Crothers to redo the same take more than 100 times. Fincher’s own take on this method is called “70 Takes and Up,” one most infamously employed on the set for “Zodiac,” when the exacting auteur clashed with stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal. Downey compared the experience of working with Fincher to a “gulag,” leaving mason jars filled with urine scattered around the set in protest of the director’s no bathroom breaks policy. Gyllenhaal had it particularly hard. Throughout the shoot, the director attempted to wear the doe-eyed actor down, as Fincher would later comment that he “[hates] earnestness in a performance.” After forcing the 35-year-old to repeat the same scene again and again, the director would delete all of Jake Gyllenhaal’s previous takes, just to make the actor cry. Gyllenhaal would never work with the director again, saying that Fincher “paints with people … it’s tough to be a color.” If Nicholas Barber wrote that David Fincher “walks the line between director and dictator,” that fascistic-style approach also showed on the set of “Fight Club.” In order to get a single shot of the movie’s iconic bars of soap, he forced his crew to retake the footage until the wee hours of the morning. Can you imagine filming soap 41 times? 3. Lars von Trier There’s a famous—if sadly apocryphal—story that noted Danish madman Lars von Trier treated Björk so poorly while filming “Dancer in the Dark” that she ate her sweater. Here’s the truthier version: When she would show up for work every morning she would spit at Von Trier and yell, “I hate you, Mr. Von Trier. I hate you!” Things got so bad between the two that Björk declined to appear on the set for days on end. According to an NPR report, she even tried to “escape the set.” “[Trier] needs a female to provide his work soul,” she would later claim. “And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence.” When Nicole Kidman signed on to “Dogville,” the singer personally penned her a letter warning that Von Trier would “eat her soul.” The director—who once joked that he is a Nazi at a press interview at the Cannes Film Festival—wasn’t any kinder to his “Dogville” actors. He and Kidman often screamed at each other, while Paul Bettany (best known to audiences as the imaginary best friend from “A Beautiful Mind”) called making the film “a hideous experience.” The volatile auteur, however, has few regrets. The one thing he would do differently? He would be “meaner” to Björk. 4. Oliver Stone It seems nearly everyone has something to say about working with Oliver Stone. Richard Dreyfuss, who played Dick Cheney in Stone’s George W. Bush biopic “W.,” called him a “fascist,” while Sean Penn—who is no walk in the park himself—said that working with Oliver Stone was like “talking to a pig.” After wrapping 2012’s “Savages,” Blake Lively made the crew T-shirts as a goodwill gesture—because they “needed something nice after working with him for that long.” The shirts read: “I survived working with Oliver Stone.” For his part, Oliver Stone tends to blame his actors for the animosity. He called Dreyfuss “the single worst experience I've ever had with an actor in my life.” After James Woods walked off the set of “Salvador,” Stone nearly killed him when he came back. While filming the football drama “Any Given Sunday,” Stone would confront Jamie Foxx during a scene. “You’re just not good at all, are you?” he asked. Foxx would later win an Academy Award for his performance in “Ray,” whereas Oliver Stone hasn’t made a good movie in over a decade. 5. James Cameron Blake Lively isn’t the only one handing out shirts to commemorate their experience working with a sadistic director. James Cameron’s crew members are known to sport tees that read: “You Can’t Scare Me. I Work For James Cameron.” Cameron notoriously hates cellphones when filming, so much so he has a nail gun stashed away on set; if one happens to ring, the device will become wall art. The director isn’t any kinder to the actors who work with him and has a reputation for nearly drowning them. A fan site for “Titanic” details Kate Winslet’s many labors while filming the box office smash: “influenza, extreme chill from being exposed to cold water, a chipped bone, deep bruises, and a near death experience.” In 2012, the New York Times asked Cameron about this—as well as Winslet’s stated wish to “please let me die” during the shoot—and he was unrepentant. “Man up,” he responded. “Or woman up.” Ed Harris had a similar experience filming “The Abyss”: After nearly drowning during one of the film’s many underwater sequences, the veteran actor was reduced to tears, sobbing after he left the set. His co-star, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, was forced to piss her pants when Cameron informed her that they wouldn’t be stopping the scene for a bathroom break. (On the plus side, at least she was wearing a wetsuit.) If it’s any consolation to the people who work for James Cameron, it doesn’t sound like it’s any more fun to be married to him. He’s been divorced four times, and actress Linda Hamilton recalled that their relationship was “terrible on every level.” That one’s going on his tombstone. Honorable mentions: Francis Ford Coppola, who caused Martin Sheen to have a heart attack while filming “Apocalypse Now”; Michael Bay, whom Megan Fox compared to Hitler; and Werner Herzog, who forced his film crew to drag a boat up a mountain on “Fitzcarraldo” If you weren’t already aware, David O. Russell is a walking pile of garbage. During the infamous Sony hacks, it was revealed that the famously tyrannical director made Amy Adams’ life a living hell on the set of “American Hustle,” so much so that Christian Bale (aka the guy who chewed out a PA for getting in his eye line) was forced to intervene. In an email to Sony chief Michael Lynton, journalist Jonathan Alter wrote: “He grabbed one guy by the collar, cursed out people repeatedly in front of others and so abused Amy Adams that Christian Bale got in his face and told him to stop acting like an asshole.” In an interview with British GQ, Adams spoke out against Russell’s behavior. “I was really just devastated on set,” she told the mag. “I mean, not every day, but most. Jennifer [Lawrence] doesn’t take any of it on. She’s Teflon. And I am not Teflon. But I also don’t like to see other people treated badly. It’s not OK with me. Life to me is more important than movies.” This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone even passingly familiar with Russell’s history; after all, the director once groped his transgender niece. But the incident raises the question: Why do studios continue to hire him? There’s a simple answer: While female directors are branded as being difficult and denied future work (see: Catherine Hardwicke) for all manner of inane reasons, being unprofessional, abusive and borderline sociopathic is seen as a quirk of a male director’s genius. In 2014, a BBC piece from Nicholas Barber on legendarily difficult auteurs—like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, who compared actors to cattle—openly wondered if the best directors are tyrants. “In short, the ends justify the means,” he wrote. That kind of thinking rationalizes behavior that would get one fired in any other industry (especially if one were female), and Russell is only the latest example in a long line of filmmakers who are horrible to work for. Here are five working directors who just keep getting their projects bankrolled, no matter how awful they are. 1. David O. Russell As previously mentioned, this is just the “Joy” director’s latest on-set mutiny. While working on “Three Kings”—his breakout film—David O. Russell treated his crew so abominably that George Clooney tried to kill him. Throughout the shoot, Russell would humiliate and scream at his subordinates—making the script supervisor burst into tears. One day, the director requested that one of the extras throw Clooney to the ground to film a scene, and Clooney recalled that the “nervous” actor balked at the direction. David O. Russell responded by kicking him and yelling: “Do you want to be in this fucking movie? Then throw him to the fucking ground!” When an assistant director tried to intervene, Russell snatched his walkie-talkie and chucked it. George Clooney, too, attempted to step in, and Russell challenged him to a fight. “You're being a dick,” he said. “You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.” The director then began to choke him and Clooney recalls that he “went nuts.” He said, “I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.” If you need any indication of what David O. Russell is like to work for, check out the footage of Russell calling Lily Tomlin a “bitch” on the set of “I Heart Huckabees.” During a set meltdown, Russell yelled, “I worked on this thing for three years not to have some cunt yell at me in front of the fucking crew!” 2. David Fincher The “Seven” and “Gone Girl” director comes from the Stanley Kubrick school of mind-numbing perfectionism, in which actors are forced to repeatedly redo the same take well past their breaking point. Kubrick’s shoot for “Eyes Wide Shut” was a marathon effort that lasted for a Guinness-shattering 400 days, two of which consisted of reshooting the same sequence of the late director Sydney Pollack entering a room. On “The Shining,” Kubrick famously forced Scatman Crothers to redo the same take more than 100 times. Fincher’s own take on this method is called “70 Takes and Up,” one most infamously employed on the set for “Zodiac,” when the exacting auteur clashed with stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal. Downey compared the experience of working with Fincher to a “gulag,” leaving mason jars filled with urine scattered around the set in protest of the director’s no bathroom breaks policy. Gyllenhaal had it particularly hard. Throughout the shoot, the director attempted to wear the doe-eyed actor down, as Fincher would later comment that he “[hates] earnestness in a performance.” After forcing the 35-year-old to repeat the same scene again and again, the director would delete all of Jake Gyllenhaal’s previous takes, just to make the actor cry. Gyllenhaal would never work with the director again, saying that Fincher “paints with people … it’s tough to be a color.” If Nicholas Barber wrote that David Fincher “walks the line between director and dictator,” that fascistic-style approach also showed on the set of “Fight Club.” In order to get a single shot of the movie’s iconic bars of soap, he forced his crew to retake the footage until the wee hours of the morning. Can you imagine filming soap 41 times? 3. Lars von Trier There’s a famous—if sadly apocryphal—story that noted Danish madman Lars von Trier treated Björk so poorly while filming “Dancer in the Dark” that she ate her sweater. Here’s the truthier version: When she would show up for work every morning she would spit at Von Trier and yell, “I hate you, Mr. Von Trier. I hate you!” Things got so bad between the two that Björk declined to appear on the set for days on end. According to an NPR report, she even tried to “escape the set.” “[Trier] needs a female to provide his work soul,” she would later claim. “And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence.” When Nicole Kidman signed on to “Dogville,” the singer personally penned her a letter warning that Von Trier would “eat her soul.” The director—who once joked that he is a Nazi at a press interview at the Cannes Film Festival—wasn’t any kinder to his “Dogville” actors. He and Kidman often screamed at each other, while Paul Bettany (best known to audiences as the imaginary best friend from “A Beautiful Mind”) called making the film “a hideous experience.” The volatile auteur, however, has few regrets. The one thing he would do differently? He would be “meaner” to Björk. 4. Oliver Stone It seems nearly everyone has something to say about working with Oliver Stone. Richard Dreyfuss, who played Dick Cheney in Stone’s George W. Bush biopic “W.,” called him a “fascist,” while Sean Penn—who is no walk in the park himself—said that working with Oliver Stone was like “talking to a pig.” After wrapping 2012’s “Savages,” Blake Lively made the crew T-shirts as a goodwill gesture—because they “needed something nice after working with him for that long.” The shirts read: “I survived working with Oliver Stone.” For his part, Oliver Stone tends to blame his actors for the animosity. He called Dreyfuss “the single worst experience I've ever had with an actor in my life.” After James Woods walked off the set of “Salvador,” Stone nearly killed him when he came back. While filming the football drama “Any Given Sunday,” Stone would confront Jamie Foxx during a scene. “You’re just not good at all, are you?” he asked. Foxx would later win an Academy Award for his performance in “Ray,” whereas Oliver Stone hasn’t made a good movie in over a decade. 5. James Cameron Blake Lively isn’t the only one handing out shirts to commemorate their experience working with a sadistic director. James Cameron’s crew members are known to sport tees that read: “You Can’t Scare Me. I Work For James Cameron.” Cameron notoriously hates cellphones when filming, so much so he has a nail gun stashed away on set; if one happens to ring, the device will become wall art. The director isn’t any kinder to the actors who work with him and has a reputation for nearly drowning them. A fan site for “Titanic” details Kate Winslet’s many labors while filming the box office smash: “influenza, extreme chill from being exposed to cold water, a chipped bone, deep bruises, and a near death experience.” In 2012, the New York Times asked Cameron about this—as well as Winslet’s stated wish to “please let me die” during the shoot—and he was unrepentant. “Man up,” he responded. “Or woman up.” Ed Harris had a similar experience filming “The Abyss”: After nearly drowning during one of the film’s many underwater sequences, the veteran actor was reduced to tears, sobbing after he left the set. His co-star, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, was forced to piss her pants when Cameron informed her that they wouldn’t be stopping the scene for a bathroom break. (On the plus side, at least she was wearing a wetsuit.) If it’s any consolation to the people who work for James Cameron, it doesn’t sound like it’s any more fun to be married to him. He’s been divorced four times, and actress Linda Hamilton recalled that their relationship was “terrible on every level.” That one’s going on his tombstone. Honorable mentions: Francis Ford Coppola, who caused Martin Sheen to have a heart attack while filming “Apocalypse Now”; Michael Bay, whom Megan Fox compared to Hitler; and Werner Herzog, who forced his film crew to drag a boat up a mountain on “Fitzcarraldo”

Continue Reading...