Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. I don’t know anything much about Joan Rivers. I wasn’t even aware she was still alive to die. I recall seeing her on television maybe 30-40 years ago. But the orgies of synthetic grief and posturing admiration every time some celebrity croaks have never seemed to me to be a healthy thing. In this brave new century maybe this other alternative is the healthy one.
At least it’s different. Old Jules
Still Dead So Far
Did the God of Abraham Kill Joan Rivers?
If Only We Could Be Sure… By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Infowars, Alex Jones and the fiendish monstrosities of the “entertainment industry” mourn the death of that evil bitch, Joan Rivers. Before slipping into a coma, a life lived far too long, she advocated the slaughter of Palestinian children, claimed the first lady of the United States was a transsexual and accused President Obama of being as gay as his predecessor.
Rivers was a monster, our biggest concern at this time is to make sure she is still dead.
Her talent, for those who have seen her stage performance in Las Vegas is smut and fart jokes. At her best, she was boorish, tasteless and vile.
She got worse. She became a hate ridden monster, a freakish Zionist advocate of mass murder, a purveyor of continual lies, smears, filth and depravity. Everything wrong about Hollywood or being Jewish is what Rivers represents.
I am ashamed she was an American. I am ashamed of those who failed to stand against her and the powerful lobby that supported her.
So many decent people die all the time. So many of them were Jewish including Robin Williams, subject to continual smears. He was worth a thousand “Joan Rivers.” Robin Williams was a flawed human being, an American, an addict, hilarious, a man who cared about people, a Jew sometimes, a human being all the time.
Alex Jones says President Obama had Rivers assassinated. If only it were true.
What Robin Williams wasn’t is whatever Joan Rivers was, who will be mourned, cried over and lied about. Burn in hell Joan.
Hi readers. Who’d think a movie about a Chinese food joint in a US big city would be worth watching? Well friends, it’s streaming on Netflix.
Take Out 2004 NR 88 minutes An illegal immigrant gets behind on his debt to the crooks who smuggled him into the country, and has one day to find the money to make a payment. More Info Starring: Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu Directors: Sean Baker, Shih-Ching Tsou
The Chinese gangsters who fronted him the money to get here use a ball-peen hammer on his ribs when he sends some bucks back to his family in China and gets behind on payments at 30% interest. So he delivers Chinese food all over trying to bicycle into enough tip money to keep them from coming back tonight.
Then he gets himself mugged out of it by some black guys in an elevator. Late in the day. He’s looking at a bad evening and he doesn’t even have to worry about multi-national banks, US Immigration Service, whatever. All he’s got to worry about is which gangsters will rob him next.
But if he lives he dreams of bringing over his wife and son he’s never seen once his debt to the loan sharks is paid off in four, five years.
Different enough and interesting enough to cause me to give it a five star rating.
Hi readers. Jeanne doesn’t watch movies much but someone told her I might enjoy some made-for-Netflix movie about women in a prison facility. Which I figured what the hell, might as well try it. Which I did. I’ve been known to watch and enjoy a chick flick and if the chicks are all in prison it might still be interesting.
Orange Is the New Black
2013-2014TV-MASeason 2 Now Available A dozen Emmy Award nominations went to this acclaimed comedy drama series including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Lead Actress for star Taylor Schilling. A crime she committed in her youthful past sends Piper Chapman (Schilling) to a women’s prison, where she trades her comfortable New York life for one of unexpected camaraderie and conflict in an eccentric group of fellow inmates.
Fact is when I worked in Santa Fe with the Emergency Management Bureau we had some female prisoners working in our offices for a while, cleaning up and polishing our non body parts. But they started stealing so much when nobody was looking it became too much a pain in the ass to have them around.
Then, in Grants, when I was working for the motel. We had some female prisoners cleaning the rooms for a while. But they began selling sexual favors to anyone who’d pay, began screwing the motel manager until he was too exhausted to allow them around anymore. The regular female employees who usually filled his sexual needs began feeling neglected. So Orange whatchallit got my attention briefly.
I skipped over all the lingering chickflickisms, the slow motion leading-up-to-sex scenes, the flashbacks of flashbacks of flashbacks. The titillating leading-up-to lesbian stuff I also found I could skip past.
Which left approximately 10 minutes of viewing pleasure for this episode of Orange is somethingorother.
But Netflix, because I’d watched it, recommended Gun Hill Road.
Gun Hill Road 2011 R 86 minutes Enrique returns home from three years in prison to find his wife is a virtual stranger and his son is in the throes of a sexual identity crisis. More Info Starring: Esai Morales, Judy Reyes Director: Rashaad Ernesto Green
A decent sort of guy gets out of the slammer and finds his wife is on the rebound from an affair. Handles it fairly well. Gets a job. Handles it less well when he discovers his eldest son is one of those other kinds of guys. Wears sexy female attire and whatnot.
At that point I debated whether I wanted to watch any more of it, but while I was pondering the question the son began smooching with another character in the movie and feeling around, unzipping his trousers.
Soooooo. I’m not anti-Semitic about that sort of thing. Don’t even care if my brother marries one. Or my sister, for that matter.
But that isn’t the same as saying I want to see a lot of details of what they do to one another working up to the other stuff they do to one another.
Hi readers. I’d just about decided my memory played tricks. Two years in a row I remember the carnival at the Roosevelt County Fair having a flea circus a kid could see for a dime. Vivid memory because I somehow accidently went into the tent next door where a woman in a bathing suit who had no arms was typing on a typewriter with her toes.
But I’ve told a lot of people who grew up in Portales at that time about the flea circus and none remember it. Most think I just dreamed it up, or remembered wrongly, which can happen.
Only the reason they thought so, and the reason I’d begun to thnk so, was that I came to believe no such thing as a flea circus ever existed outside imaginations.
The magic of YouTube doesn’t prove a flea market came to town with the carnival in Portales, New Mexico circa 1956, but it proves beyond doubt it might have.
Secrets of the Flea Circus
Secrets of the Real Flea Circus Revealed! National Geographic (Professor Oddnaught)
Genuine Flea Circus
No shortage of flea circuses were making the rounds those days.
So all you people who went to school beside me and don’t remember attending the flea circus I, think there wasn’t one, I say, “Horsefeathers!” If you hadn’t been spending all your money on the steam shovels and cotton candy you’d have seen it too. Playing bingo with pieces of corn on a checkerboard never got anyone into a tent where a woman with no arms in a bathing suit typed with her toes.
I’m not a person who toadies to celebrities. I couldn’t care less what they say or think about anything, what they do with their genitalia, what they eat, drink, or snort. If I like something they do on stage, on audio, on screen, that’s what gets my attention. I mostly don’t read biographies, autobiographies, mostly don’t watch interviews.
With rare exceptions. Leonard Cohen interests me. Louden Wainwright III interests me, Guy Clark interests me, and Tom Russell interests me. But Guy Clark and Leonard Cohen are the only ones I’d ever seen interviewed until now.
But I got to wondering whether Bob Dylan is still alive. I first was introduced to his music at a place on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village during the summer of 1964. McDougal’s might have been the name of the place. And same as everyone else at that time and place, I was blown away.
So I went to the miracle of YouTube and started searching, thinking at least to hear some good music. And there they were, interviews with Bob Dylan, interviews with other people talking about Bob Dylan. Dozens of them scattered over half-century. So I picked a few, beginning with back when he was my age, 70 times around the sun.
Bob Dylan Interview and a very revealing one at that
For Bob Dylan it is Always the Same Interview 42 Years in 24 Minutes
Bob Dylan.Funny Interview.
I don’t care what the Beetles think, or thought about Bob Dylan, nor about anything else for that matter. But they did have a few good songs, and maybe what they say about Dylan will interest someone.
The Beatles talk about Bob Dylan
John Lennon and Bob Dylan Conversation
Bob Dylan and John Lennon on God and Religion
Bob Dylan: San Francisco Press Conference (Dec. 1965) 1/6
Bob Dylan – After The Crash – 1966-1978 (Part 1 of 12).mp4
I never knew Dylan got religion, or whatever it was he got, but I’m glad for him, though I don’t care whether he did or not from the perspective of knowing about it.
Bob Dylan – The Gospel Interview
Bob Dylan 1966 Interview, WBAI
Bob Dylan – Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award – 1991 Grammy Awards
Dylan and I didn’t know it because we never got around to discussing the matter, but we shared a lot of respect for Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, I suppose, might qualify as another person I’d have possibly cared what he thought about some things. If I’d ever met Dylan we could have regaled one another with Johnny Cash respect, I suppose.
Bob Dylan on Johnny Cash. NDH outtake
I’ve mentioned Loudon Wainwright III is one of the people I’m mildly interested in what they might say about something outside the context of a song. Well, in this instance I didn’t have to look outside Loudon Wainwright’s music. He wrote this song to Dylan on Dylan’s 50th birthday.
Loudon Wainwright III – Talking New Bob Dylan.wmv
The Simon and Garfunkel thing about Dylan has always seemed to me to be a cheap shot. Dylan wrote the song that launched Simon and Garfunkel into fame. Sound of Silence. But when Dylan left ‘folk’ behind to invent ‘folk rock’ Simon and Garfunkel got offended enough to personally attack him in song: Bastards, both of them. Screw them, though they did one-hell-of-a-lot of great songs. If they’d kept their nasty little comments off their albums I’d never have known. Pricks.
Simon & Garfunkel – A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)
The Sound of Silence (Original Version from 1964)
Peter, Paul and Mary got pretty pissed when Dylan drifted to folk rock, too. I saw an interview with one of the guys several years later in which he said it was the only really nasty attack song they ever recorded, and that they all regretted it. Something about what he said made me thing it was directed at Dylan. Listen to the words carefully to hear the sarcasm “between the lines”. But at least they did it with some class. They made a lot of money and miles off Bob Dylan creations.
I dig rock n roll music
So I think I’ll just toadie to Loudon Wainwright’s birthday tribute to Bobby Dylan and make a wish when I think he’s blowing out the candles in the wind: “Here’s hoping you outlive me Bobby Dylan. I’d like an excuse to begin my next lifetime in time to hear what you do after I exit the vehicle.”
Hi readers. Hells bells. Hugh Hefner started the sexual revolution back in the 1950s because he thought we were holding back, stuffing things back down inside. Psychologically repressing ourselves and generally, because sex could make Hugh Hefner a pile of money.
Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism 2009 NR91 minutes This documentary maps the evolution of the “post-porn” movement, featuring interviews with pioneers like Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen and Lydia Lunch. More Info Starring: Norma Jean Almodovar, Maria Beatty Director: Virginie Despentes Flowing on Netflix.
But if Hefner had seen this stuff coming down the pike I believe he’d have been shocked, maybe he’d have to ask himself if what he began was an unmitigated blessing.
Also streaming on Netflix:
Fuck for Forest
(Fuck for Forest) 2012 NR 1hr This documentary lays bare an unusual Berlin-based NGO that uses proceeds from homemade adult films to fund the restoration of Amazonian rain forests.
I’m sure it’s just me, but saving the planet by screwing just doesn’t make a lot of sense as a motivation.
Also streaming on Netflix:
Danland 2012 NR 88 minutes This documentary examines the psychology of amateur porn-film creator Dan Lear and what prompted him to choose such an unorthodox profession. More Info Starring: Dan Lear Director: Alexandra Berger
Orgasm Inc. 2009 NR 79 minutes Orgasm Inc. is a funny and sobering look inside “big pharma” and the marketing campaigns associated with a pill for female sexual dysfunction. More Info Starring: Elizabeth Canner, Kim Airs Director: Elizabeth Canner
Then there’s what’s happening in the courtesan industry. Streaming on Netflix.
American Courtesans 2013NR 86 minutes Follow 11 sex workers through massage parlors, brothels, strip clubs and New York high-rises in this documentary about their choices and fears. More Info
Sheeze man. I don’t object to any of this, but I’d pay good money to avoid being a part of a fair amount of it. And not only because it would likely bring on the big one.
I was watching a movie on Netflix last night about Puerto Ricans living in Chicago, a considerable enclave of them. At one point a 15 year old girl was asking her sister how old she’d been when she first had sex with a man.
“Ohhh. Mom hasn’t talked to you yet? We’ve got to get you a dildo!”
“I don’t want a dildo.”
“No, what you don’t want is a kid before you finish school. A dildo is what you want.”
Earthy, practical. Unexpected.
Streaming on Netflix. Generally a fairly lame movie, other than the thing about the dildo.
Chicago Boricua
(Boricua) 2004R1hr 47m In this edgy character study set in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, a group of young Puerto Ricans grapple with issues of identity.
On the other hand, All Night Bodega 2002R90 minutes was okay as such things go:
Seeking a better life for herself, 15-year-old Venus breaks away from her rough neighborhood and gets caught up in a world of violence and crime. More Info
An Israeli intelligence service cop cultivates a relationship with a kid living near one of the Israeli settlements and nurtures it. Reason being to create an informant to betray the people who live around him.
The cop might actually kid himself it’s about friendship, that he cares what happens to the kid. He seems to at times. But when discussing it with his bosses in cophood he has to deny it, has to claim it’s about using the kid.
And use him he does. The kid’s brother is a serious player in trying to discourage Israel’s expansion outside its boundaries. He’s killing people in East Jerusalem. The Israeli cops want him badly and eventually the cop uses information provided by the kid to trap the brother inside a building and execute him.
Bethlehem 2013 NR99 minutes An informant for Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service, Palestinian Sanfur is torn when his brother becomes an agency target. More Info Starring: Tsahi Halevi, Shadi Mar’i Director: Yuval Adler
Unsurprisingly the kid gets pissed, but his involvement with the cop gets him on a hit list among the Arabs for collaborating. He’s offered a possible pardon if he kills the cop.
Your average, “Eek, there’s a nigger in the White House!” patriot never has to ask himself any moral questions, any ethical questions. All he’s got to do is run around in increasingly smaller circles squealing and waving the flag anytime someone points at a war somewhere. “Support the troops!” is about as complicated as it gets. “Stand with Israel,” doesn’t even need saying. Bought and paid for politicians have already taken care of Israel.
But you’ve got to admit those Israeli human beings and those Palestine human beings should be finding themselves with serious questions about what they are doing. Which they probably aren’t.
If you’re a non-Jew living next door to Israel in Palestine you can watch Israel stealing it, piece-by-piece, house-by-house. They’ll come right out and tell you God gave it to them. Some people will inevitably fight back. And those will be labelled terrorists.
If you’re an Israeli and you believe God gave you the keys to the land outside the boundaries set by International Law and the United Nations, anything goes. Duplicity, manipulation, torture, force, bullying, lies. Because you are motivated by the higher good. By the fact that trumps all the others: God gave you anything you want in Israel and Palestine. All you’re doing is taking what’s rightfully yours.
Hi readers. She snuck out of the nursing home they put her in after they snagged her car and sold her house. When a movie begins with that there’s nothing much can be done to spoil the ending. I’d put it up beside Harry and Tonto, generally.
Redwood Highway, 2013PG-131hr 30m, You rated this movie: 5 , Itching to get out of her retirement community but estranged from her family, Marie uses her granddaughter’s wedding as an excuse to go on a walk.
Woman my age dons a backpack and hikes roughly 100 miles up the California coast dodging search and rescue, refusing rides and shooting molesters in the face with bear spray.
Based on the acclaimed novel by Judy Blume. Following her father’s murder, a teenager goes to stay with relatives in New Mexico and falls in love. Takes place mostly around Los Alamos and Santa Fe. More just a story of adapting to pain and loss. Of growing old enough to learn that most of the adventure hurts somewhere.
Reminded me a lot of the years I lived in Santa Fe, and the scene on the Rez was strikingly similar to a Christmas celebration my lady friend of the time, Amy Nevitt took me to at Jemez Pueblo in the home of friends.
If I didn’t miss New Mexico so much I think I’d have hated it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Fairly lousy movie except for the scenery.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 