MCN Curated Headlines Archive for March, 2018

“Continuing down this path guarantees you will lose respect, readership, and ultimately your jobs. I am a journalist. I want you to thrive, I want you to survive. But I cannot allow you to survive by standing on my back.”
“White Critics: Please Stop Using [That] Word,” Encourages Regina Victor

“This new ‘Roseanne’ is a dream machine for someone like Steve Bannon, who worked so hard to convince potential voters that supporting Donald Trump didn’t mean they were prejudiced. It reinforces Trump voters’ defense against cognitive dissonance and gives them an idealized version of themselves that allows them to dismiss any fear that they might be intolerant. In essence, the reboot of ‘Roseanne’ has already added to the faux-populism that is Trump’s political ideology, and has given viewers a platform to further their own misconceptions of themselves.”
Jared Yates Sexton

“Thugs, buffoons, secret policemen who were attacking me as an artist, as an educational professional, as a programmer, but mainly as an artist.”
Longtime Professor Saul Levine Claims He Was Pushed out of Massachusetts College of Art and Design By Administrators Who Accuse Him of “Harming Students”

indie wire

“Despite everything, I think that Europeans have lost a lot with the loss of Harvey Weinstein. You have to remember that there are French producers who we haven’t denounced — I won’t mention them; I won’t mention names, although I know three who are extremely respected — I don’t know why they weren’t denounced as well. They absolutely had their place. Long before the Me Too movement started, I was very upset when Jessica Chastain made statements against Last Tango in Paris. If you listen to her, that film should never have been made. To listen to her, Maria Schneider was raped. But Jessica Chastain wasn’t there, and it’s not true — I was on set. The scene was fiction.”
Asia Argento Addresses Catherine Breillat, With Text Transcribed From Now-Deleted Podcast

NY Times

“Where once she was edgy and provocative, she is now absurd and offensive. Her views are muddled and incoherent. She is more invested in banal and shallow provocation than engaging with sociopolitical issues in a thoughtful manner. No amount of mental gymnastics can make what Roseanne Barr has said and done in recent years palatable… This fictional family, and the show’s very real creator, are further normalizing Trump and his warped, harmful political ideologies. There are times when we can consume problematic pop culture, but this is not one of those times.”
Roxane Gay On Roseanne

“Maybe he’s a scumbag, but nobody went to the police and said ‘Weinstein raped me.’ No, they wanted to earn $10 million. What do you call a woman who sleeps with a man for $10 million? Maybe I’m being crude, but she’s called a prostitute.”
Putin Spokesman Dubs Harvey Weinstein Accusers “Prostitutes”

“There’s a part of me that’s going: ‘I haven’t touched it yet.’ I haven’t touched that exquisite thing, a really great performance. I don’t think I’ve done it, yet. What I’m looking for is that bit when it transcends acting. Where you feel like you’re literally looking through a window at someone else’s life.”
Paddy Considine

“The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.”
Laurie Penny On Her Decade Past

“Whilst Arulpragasam says she’s completely over the whole incident, the film has clearly refreshed the frustrations she felt. “A middle finger, it’s like get a fucking grip. People were like, ‘oh you’re lucky you’re not in jail, give up all your profit, be this slave for the rest of your life’,” she stops herself before saying: “Oh god, I hope the NFL doesn’t sue me again for talking about it.” A voice comes from the nearby kitchen to suggest that this is a topic that shouldn’t be discussed. “Oh, I’m not supposed to talk about it, I’m going to eat crisps,” she says, diving into the bag.”
Maya Arulpragasam On MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A

“I think this 40 year old man is hitting on me,” she wrote. Rice, then 14, continued in her diary, “But he’s never perverted. He is also very nice. He gives me a lot of drawing tips.”
“The 1990s were a time of mental and emotional fragility for Mr. Kricfalusi, especially after losing ‘Ren and Stimpy,’ his most prized creation. For a brief time, 25 years ago, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend. Over the years John struggled with what were eventually diagnosed mental illnesses.”
Creator Of “Ren & Stimpy” Has History Of Underage Sexual Abuse

“It’s hard to call it offensive, exactly, and yet, it’s not devoid of a kind of opportunism. It’s not a crime, but it’s certainly something to unpack… The film’s use of Japanese language felt bizarre to me, even as a nonfluent (seriously, the opposite of fluent) Japanese speaker. Human characters speak Japanese throughout the film, but it is almost never subtitled,”
“What It’s Like to Watch Isle of Dogs As a Japanese Speaker,” By Emily Yoshida

“I love producing. But producing in Europe is different than producing in Syria. I’ve been producing in Europe for the last four or five years and so much that surrounds it today is bureaucratic and technical. Producing in a place like Syria was a revolutionary act, energizing, full of motivation and dreams. I think in Europe, a place like IDFA offers this. IDFA is about public benefit, the audience and the industry, dream-filled filmmakers, and curious viewers. After all, why do we make documentary films within such a complex web of challenges, if not for the dream?”
A Conversation With IDFA’s New Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia

“Her style and poise was a legacy from the fashion school days. She always knew exactly which Levis were correct. She could make a trench coat look edgy. She could make huge hoop earrings look like the crown jewels.”
Tracey Thorn On The Return Of Sade

“The fundamental imbalance here is that studios have to play by basic rules of economics, physics and acceptable cultural norms, while the tech giants can create havens for Nazi propaganda and teen-suicide boosterism; run ads around jokes about beating up Rhianna; blow tens of billions on unwatched misfires and call it all data collection. Not to mention compromise the American electoral system, put tens of millions out of work. And as punishment for that? Get handed zillions more from Wall Street. While Hw’d is subject to taxes, regulation and antitrust regulation, Silicon Valley is given a giant hall pass on all of that and told, hey – if you break anything, just leave a note so we can clean it up for you. That’s a tough fight to win.”
Richard Rushfield

MCN Curated Headlines

“I don’t think it’s cruel to say this, because John himself would undoubtedly have turned it into a gleeful anecdote: When he had the stroke that killed him, he was at a local dinner theater. Hell of a review.”

“I am inclined to aver that every activity needs its critics, from narcissists bloviating in Washington to exhibitors of knee holes in their blue jeans by way of following a fad. So, too, tennis players and others wearing their caps backward. There is, to be sure, only fairly innocuous folly in puncturing pants or reversing caps, but for political or artistic or religious twisting of thought or harboring holes in the head there is rather less excuse. I have always inveighed against the bleary journalism practiced by newspaper reviewers, as opposed to the real criticism performed by, well, critics.”

“I often felt a twinge of grief at the idea that John Simon had devoted his life to a method of work that could only make him increasingly unhappy. Here was a man, elegant, articulate, and vastly knowledgeable, fluent in at least half a dozen languages, whose gifts of mind gave nothing back to the arts he wrote about except a few unkind remarks that made fun of someone’s performance, ethnicity, physical attributes, or, with a pun, on his target’s name. (“If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon folly.”) Other theatre critics keep such darts in their rucksacks for occasional use; John lived by them.”

“One person’s critic is another person’s crackpot. That they are not united in their opinions is ascribable to the Latin saying: quot homines, tot sententiae. I myself prefer being considered a creep, but that is what you get for having what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘Strong Opinions.’ It is odd that in a country so wallowing in negativity, starting with mass shootings and climaxing with Trump, such an unimportant matter as theater criticism should generate so much hostility. The only target patently more important is lead in the drinking water.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon