JULY - Summer 2013

Hello People of the World;

Say ‘hey’, it is starting to warm up around here. At this point in the calendar I usually crank up the AC but my AC unit is such an energy-burning dinosaur that I have decided to see if I could hack it until mid-July. (I am writing this at the end of June = Blowing your mind!) Anyways, the AC quadruples my electric bill for the three months of summer. Yeah, that’s true. So, I am thinking of asking my landlord if they can replace it. We will see.

I hope this finds you well and not at all surprised that it is actually HOT during the summer. Most people I talk to always seem surprised by that fact – the Earth turns in space. Oh well. So, here’s a funny story. The plug-in/adapter for the laptop burned out and I was without a working laptop and Internet for close to three weeks! HAhahahaha. Well, I thought it was funny. Then, I finally got back online and find that I must have gone withdrawals from DUMB because I see that absolutely nothing has changed online. But, it was only three weeks.

Anyways, let’s get started shall we?

1:[ First Item of the Month: More Truthfulness

My Useless Self: Filmmaking

I have this idea that if you plug a Native actor into any typical genre that it should not matter if the story is not about Native people. I have been writing a movie about a hitman that happens to be Northern Arapaho since about 1996. One of my short films was a remake of “The Limey” with a Native lead character. If a Native can be cast and there is no mention of the actor’s ethnicity, then it creates a mental backdoor for general audiences to begin accepting Native peoples as contemporary peers.

I hate the self-victimizing that happens in a lot of Native films. The whole “ we were colonized and assimilated, poor us” just turns a general audience off. They want to see robots beating the shit out of each other or teen girls swooning over bloodless vampires. I hate the typical motifs of contemporary Native music. Turn off the chants and drum and flutes and rattles and make some damn music. This self-pity party is why people hate to pay attention.

Get their attention first then tell them our stories. Which is why I am adapting “Hamlet” to have Native actors. It is a reverse cultural appropriation, Natives taking English culture and using it. See? We mastered the English language – Alexie and the Erdrichs have proven that. We mastered sports, we mastered education, we mastered everything they could throw at us to keep us down. Now, we run to our victimhood so easily. We need to master the greatest, most influential media form now available. But Native Cinema might trip before it even begins.

I am writing up an op-ed piece for the film festival website entitled “Native American Cinema is Doomed.” In it, I write about what it takes to make a truly independent movie and why the system, in its current state, will lend to the eventual loss of Native American films altogether. So, keep a look out for that.

Updates from my other Truthfulness Projects:

+ NAMELESS: The Authentic and Magical Ledger Art of EW3

A Treatise on American Indian Art

“All you care about is money. This city deserves a better class of artist. And I’m going to give it to them.”

This past week I was reminded once again of how much money kills Native Art in any regards. That the Native Art World is nothing but a Pay For Play Reservation of Collectable Coffee Mugs and not doing what you say you were going to do is much easier when a payday is waved in your face, which I find fairly typical across the boards.

“Quote the great man, ‘It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message…’.”

+ The Five Six SEVEN Hypocrisies of Native America:

(Because Seven is a sacred number):

So, the Blackhawks won the Super Cup and now everybody on the train is looking at their phones, at pictures of someone’s accomplishment that they HAD NO part in. Shit. It’s just hockey.

I really need to post these and not be so afraid of any reaction. From my experience, no one will read it or they will take credit for the ideals….

+ ONE: A Spoken Word:

I have been working on this poem, done in this reading style that I have been developing about the time Crazy Horse showed up at my door. We went on a road trip, like all good Indians do and we visit the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota and this set off a long, profanity-laden rant by Crazy Horse about modern Native society. I mean, wow, he said a lot of the things I had always wanted to say but I think it would be easier to accept because it is Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse is the only Indian man that Indian men are allowed to be in love with. So, when I finally find a place to read this and you hear it, please excuse the anger but Crazy Horse really said those things….

NEXT MONTH’S TRUTHFULNESS: Ego and _____? Let me know.

2:[ I do not have a CD player anymore. I don’t know. I just can’t afford one. I had an MP3 player but I lost that on the bus on a trip north. So, I decided it was time to break out the cassette player. Yep, I pulled it off the top of the refrigerator (why I kept it there, I cannot tell you.), dusted it off and plugged it in.

I was hankering for some U2 “October” and I have that in my radio-alarm clock-tape player but I hate how it sounds on that. So, I pulled the old gal off the ‘fridge. I have to tell you, it sounds great. I am playing Daniel Lanois’ “Acadie” as I type this and “Where the Hawkwind Kills” sounds great. But it also reminded me of how much great music I have on cassette tape. I will have to break out the old tape carriers and boxes of cassettes that I still have.

I would play them and used to play them on the radio-clock, but it is one of those non-rewinding player and those things tangle and ruin tapes on a regular basis, so too does mine. I lost old mix-tapes and Chris Isaac “Forever Blue” on that contraption.

Cassette tapes and VHS, geez, I am becoming the very thing I hate: a hipster….

3:[ More MOVIE TIME ADVENTURES:

+ My Star Trek Into Darkness & Man of Steel reviews on WOS Reviews: COMING SOON!

+ Redbox Reviews: I was off-line for a good, long while and that made me turn on my TV again, even though I have no digital antennae or any sort of cable or satellite system. So, I hit the Redbox and rented a few things that I missed in theaters or on cable. Here are some short reviews:

Die Hard 5: That’s what I’m calling it. The first one, like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was essentially, lightning in a bottle and every attempt to recapture that has been a dismal failure. The biggest problem with this franchise is twofold – 1) the premise has gone so far away from the very first film: a regular guy caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems like a simple formula but all other movies that try to replicate just cannot match it; 2) Bruce Willis is the biggest thing holding back the franchise as the “Gate keeper” and never allows anything fresh to be interjected into the series.

It is pretty sad that I was coming up with better family-connection moments and was quicker with the quips than the movie itself. Ego is destroying this franchise. Time to let it die. But they make money so I guess it will die hard. (Ouch! See what I did there?)

The Last Ride: This was a very independent film about the last trip of one mister Hank Williams, the renowned country singer. Here, it is presented as a fictionalized tale of a young man who takes the job of driving a Mr. Wells to a job in Ohio. The boy is a drifter in life with no focus and Mr. Wells, a washed-up, drunken, addicted singer trying, to NOT make a comeback, but to simply get back to work to support his habits and families. Along the way they learn things, blah, blah, blah, touch each other’s lives forever and the hot chick from “Big Bang Theory” shows up as a tomboy-ish 50’s gas station attendant to give the drifting boy a focus in life.

This was a pretty cheap movie, you can tell a lot of the driving scenes where too-obvious green screened and they worked hard to angle-out the modernity of the towns and roads they shot. The driver’s story arc is uninteresting and the female lead shows up in the last 10 minutes of the movie but what anchored this and made me forgive all that was the performance of Henry Thomas (Yes, the little kids from E.T.!) as Hank Williams. It was a great performance. While he never sang, he brought a lot of heartache and melancholy to the character of “Mr. Wells” and at times, disappeared into Hank Williams. Check it out if you can.

Spring Breakers: Not as fun or as compelling as it was made out to be. Let’s face it, many watched this to see former Disney stars bouncing around in bikinis and when they were presented with a just-average crime story, were duped into thinking that it was something more than what it was. It’s not. It’s about a gangbanger that seduced some college girls into a life of crime with him and some of them happen to fall in love with him. I really didn’t care for it. There are, however, a lot of bikinis and boobies. If you’re into that thing. Overly-stylized flourishes and “good girls being bad” cannot hide a ho-hum crime story about an upstart challenging his mentor that’s been done a thousand times before, sorry.

I also was able to get out and see a few movies at the theater as well. Here are my Movie Reviews:

World War Z: As a fan of the book, possibly one of the few zombie ephemera that I enjoy, this movie was a great disappointment. Zombies are boring. They are quite possibly the laziest monster creation ever and if you think about them for a minute, they are a pretty stupid concept. But the book was compelling and suspenseful because it looked at the human side of the Great Zombie War. This movie is not the book and shitheads will tell you that it’s okay, but they are fucking stupid.

Brad Pitt plays a super-smart, awesome, cool guy that runs around the world causing trouble and chaos wherever he went. Dude should have just stayed put and the military airstrip would have been able to make a stand, the wall in Israel would have held and the plane would have made it. But no. There was no climax, no “Battle of Yonkers” and the thing that bothered me most was that Pitt’s Awesome Dude never seemed scared. Sure, he was supposed to be a quick-thinker that would see all the angles but having run into something he never would have imagined, you’d think that he would be scared. Nope. Plus, the resolution was just stupid. Don’t waste your time.

Much Ado about Nothing: I wrote a much shorter review in my movie ticket project. I think people will like this simply because it is Joss Whedon. It was okay. You can completely tell what scenes were filmed early one in the shoot by how much the actors adopted that “Im-PORT-tant” syntax, like they know they are reciting Shakespeare and it comes across that way too. “I’m re-CI-TING SHAKES-SPEARE!”

Plus, I have been awakened to how terrible an actor the guy who played Agent Coulsen in “The Avengers” is. Having him mugging sillily is neither good directing nor good acting. A curiosity at most. Watch it if you want. You’ll probably love it.

Despicable Me 2: Probably the funnest movie I have seen this year. I saw it with Bonnie and Charlotte, with whom I saw the first. It is about adopted families and we enjoy stories like that. This time, as Char and I surmised, it was about a girlfriend. But it was cool to see Gru grow and become a single parent. Char and I agree that the next one, probably called “Despicable 3” will be about the baby. Plus, it has one of the most macho of deaths in it that has to be seen to be believed. If you have kids, go see it. This is the movie that knocked Johnny Depp’s dick into the dirt, which gives me another reason to love it.

Pacific Rim: I must have burned out on “BIG DUMB” after “Man of Steel” and “World War Z” and “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “Pain and Gain” and “Life of Pi” and “Jack the Giant Slayer”, so much so that I haven’t even bothered with “Iron Man 3”. Big robots fighting big monsters should have been fun but that was all it was. I was bored with most of the fighting, unconvinced by the love story and the rivalries, annoyed at the annoying scientist guy, amused at the big, important speeches and confused as to why the fuck Ron Perlman was in it at all. It was as advertised. Which some people dig. I guess. I wanted a bit more, like a little more variety in the monsters would have helped. Cooler looking robots too. Once again, a not-so-smart, white guy with muscles and hair saves the day. Plus, there was no real climax of humanity coming together. It was “Hey, let’s do this one thing” and then they went and did it. The end.

It was missing the annoying Japanese kid(s) with the high security/military clearance whose cute-kid antics saves the day after “no one believes us!”

People are going to forgive the movie’s flaws because they like Del Toro. So, go watch it and pump your fists.

+ Redshade Productions Update: We finally roll camera on HAMLET!! After close to three years of planning and a number of false starts and folks dropping in and out of it, I finally turned film on a scene from my adaptation. From the actors, the equipment to the editing and almost everything else (except the food) I have gotten done with no money, No Money, NO MONEY, NO MONEY, NO MONEY! So now there are NO MORE EXCUSES, soon you will be able to see what we have done by pooling our resources, skills, efforts and time. Native Cinema may be doomed thanks to the Pay-for-Play mentality of colonized behaviors, but people coming together to create something from nothing for the sake of this shaky concept called “Art”? We may have found a lifeboat. Once these two scenes are finished I will edit them, package them together with other things I have shot and a couple of trailers and do presentations and hopefully get some Native support behind this film idea of mine, beyond the typical “Yeah, let me know” or “Yeah, I know a guy….”

4:[ DOGS IN THE CITY – PART II

Dogs are pack animals, plain and simple, and cats do not speak English. Sorry. Recently, one of the strangest things I have seen in the news have been stories, lots of stories about people dragging their poor dogs to the funeral of their masters. It is a strange thing to do. They make it all like the dogs are sad for the passing of their master. Which I am sure in some small part, they are. Dogs are pack animals. They are genetically coded to survive in a pack. Which is why they seem happy when you come home from leaving them. To a dog it is no different than being left in the woods or in a field or being abandoned by the pack. Once they find the pack again, of course they are happy. It’s not you. It’s nature.

So, a dog mourning its master? Bull. That’s like a captive mourning its jailors. Then, to drag them to a funeral? How arrogant to think that dogs would not mourn other dogs. You’re not special but we come from this idea that “human’s rock!” I mean, how much more do you need to dominate a domesticated animal? “You better drag Ruff to my funeral to show him I’m still his master.” Please, just let the dog enjoy the sweet, sweet freedom of your death….

5:[ Ah yes, settle in Dear Readers for more of:

Adventures at the Coffee Shop!

+ So, I was in whatever neighborhood the Aragon Ballroom is in buying a doughnut to pass the time waiting for Cuba. I was short a cent with my change on the price and I mentioned this to the cashier. But the Asshole Barista says under her breath, “You also have a dollar” to which I said under my breath, “What an asshole”. But, I guess from her perspective I was simply a cheap bastard that didn’t want to spend a dollar. But I am sure she has never been a poor bastard were every dollar counts….

+ While I was sitting in the coffee shop eating my cheap bastard doughnut, I saw a woman in the streets walking by. Now, I was readying to see a concert that drew hipsters and this lady had on a pair of phony moccasins. Now, they were not those stupid slip-ons with the bead and fringe on the top. No, these were made up to look like Plains Indian moccasins. They were these cheap plastic or canvas shoes with garish triangle designs on them. They looked like someone’s vague idea of a Plains Indian design and because they looked Indian enough, they were sold and bought because garish Indian accoutrement is in style now thanks to hipsters and everyone knows: style is the enemy of creativity.

+ So, I found myself in this coffee shop because I agreed to go with my buddy Cuba to the Him and She (Or She and Him, I guess, I don’t know. Something.) Concert. Getting into the Aragon Ballroom I felt I was deep into Hipster Territory. I did enjoy the opening act “Camera Obsura” but they had a tendency to sound the same nearly every song. I had never heard of them before that night. Or, maybe I had heard of them, but never heard them before that night. So, She and Him, with actress Zooey Deshanel as the lead, or co-lead singer, and with great apologies to my friend and brother Cuba, but that woman can’t sing for shit. A quirky, non-actress is a pretty flimsy premise to hang a musical act on. She sings at one tone at one volume, which are classic-styled songs from the early 60’s or something and people ate that up simply because she is in the band, “look, an actress we like is SINGING” but she had no stage presence. None at all. She would bang out notes on a piano and warble. That’s it. No movement, no grooving, no jamming. Holding a shitty note for ten seconds at the volume of a jet engine is not accomplished singing. No stage presence. Danielle Anderson of Danielle Ate the Sandwich would outshine her on stage any night of the week.

Of course, tortured guitar hero tried his best to have presence but hanging the entire look, feel, presence and sound of the band on this one chick? Sorry. I really did not care for Him and Her. It is a huge clue that you would surround her with seven musicians and some back-up singers who were better than her. Sorry Cuba….

6:[ I love people watching on the train. What I love is how when a train does not pull completely into a station and people move to a door but the train moves up some more, the people always seem to take it so personally, like the driver saw them and decided to fuck with them. It’s the same when a train leaves before the late knucklehead can make the doors. They lift their hands, again, like the driver is screwing around with them. I am sure there is a certain satisfaction to leaving shitheads in the station.

I remember the other day two couples get on with strollers and the driver is telling them that they have to fold them up because it’s going to get crowded because of the local street festivals. They just laugh him off and make comments about “Yeah, we’re real dangerous with our strollers”, “Black people are stabbing each other in the station and they are worried about our strollers” (Yeah, one of the women said that.) or “We are being sooo evil just doing this” and they would chuckle. Privileged Idiots. How sad our society has become when we have to be reminded to be courteous to each other, that our consideration must be announced and dragged from us. So, of course, the train got super crowed and they still would not fold up their huge, monster strollers for people to sit down.

Then, there was the guy next to them who was laughing with them. He pulls out a bottle of wine, opens it and pours it into his aluminum water bottle and just guzzles it down like water. Man, what people feel they are entitled to. Why is it that if a Native does that, drinks in public, he or she is a drunken alcoholic, yet, when yuppies do it, it’s something they are entitled to? Why does the rule apply to me and not you? Almost every white person out there in the city has wine or beer or whiskey in their house and it’s okay. Yet, when a Native has a beer in the house it’s a problem for social services to deal with?

Spring break? Please. I always say we can solve alcoholism on every reservation very easily. Just put a Cubs cap on every Indian in the bar and on the park benches. Then, then, they are simply having fun watching the game like everyone else….

7:[ And now Wisdom of the Sages presents:

“An Ever-growing List of Things That MUST Stop!”

+ The use of the term “Super cute” must stop. “Cute’ is an absolute, more cute becomes cloying. Super Cute means that you are basically being a dick about it….

+ Rudeness must stop. As you are well aware, I was without a home computer for a long time and had to go to the local library to use their computer to keep up with festival and filmmaking business. So, the other day I was coming into the library and heading to the computer. Lately, I had learned that there is a sign for a waiting line if the computers are all being used. I just seen it and this day, I remembered that and headed for the sign as it looked like I would be the first one there. But this dude, who got chased away from another computer because he didn’t know there was a line, comes around to where I am and tries to get in front of me. He tried to tell me that he didn’t realize there was a waiting line and if he could just get in front of me because he was here first, which he wasn’t. He was in the general vicinity of the computer but not in line. I tell him, “line starts here” and goes on “that’s all right, no worries” over and over like I’m supposed to suddenly feel sorry. So, he gets out of line and gets a laptop from the reference desk.

I had walked from home and was over heated from the sunny day and so I get my bus schedule out of my bag and wave it to cool off. Suddenly, a lady gets up and I check to see if the computer is free which it’s not, being reserved. So, I step up to the sign again to wait. But the lady on the computer nearest the sign lets out a huge, exasperated sign and says, “could you not stand there waving your arms, I’m trying to work. Could you go somewhere else for like 10 minutes? I’m trying to do my work and hate being distracted.” To which, I silently point at the sign that states, “Line for computers begins HERE”.

She gets upset and says, “I hate it with you standing there, waving your arms while I’m working. I’m trying to do my work.” I just point at the sign again to which she says angrily. “I CAN READ. I just don’t want YOU to stand over me waving your arms distracting me while I work. I hate that.”

I say, “Look, I cannot control how you react to my standing here but the line starts here.”

Before she can say anything else a computer two seats over opens up and I tell “See? You just needed to be patient. One opened up.”

I go to get on the computer but she would not let it go. “How would you like it if I stood behind you and waved my arms.” I told her, “Go ahead.”

The guy in between us laughed and shook his head. “The nerve of some people” I say to him. Then, after that, she would mutter something about being distracted every time she passed me to get something. Then, when she passed me the last time, she said out loud, “I don’t know why YOU’RE so angry.”

To which I did not reply because she was looking for an argument. She was rude. I did nothing but stand where I was supposed to and someone still got upset….

+ So, this lady at the stoplight waits too long to make a left turn and gets stuck again at a red light, but because of the timing of the lights, the cross-traffic is slow in coming. So, this lady thinks that they are letting her turn and she pulls into the intersection and rolls slowly, her left turn just as the traffic against her starts to move.

She is basically blocking traffic now. So, unsurprisingly, the cars honk at her.

So, what does she do? She honks back like everyone else, who has right-of-way now, because she basically ran a red light are now in HER way and inconveniencing HER! What a dip. That privileged attitude needs to stop.

+ Why do Idiots on the train think that “Express” means “Fast”? When was that change in definition agreed upon and executed? Express means ‘direct’. When delivery companies state express delivery, they do not mean fast, they mean direct to your address, unlike the post office, which delivers in routes.

So, the next time you hear a buffoon on the Purple Line Express to Howard getting mad that “Thought this train was supposed to be express” when they run into slow zones and crews working on the track ahead or for signals, you can tell them “Express means ‘direct’ not ‘fast’.”

+ All this “The Godfather” merchandising and sequel-izing needs to stop. That story has already been told. Now, every one just wants to see Sonny Corleone be a badass. But that story’s been told. Read the book. I hated the video games they made, the books Michael Winegartner wrote because they were trying to turn “The Godfather” into a mafia story, which it’s not. It’s is about an immigrant fighting to achieve the American Dream in a society that closes all doors to him, so he achieves success by the only means available to him, crime. It is about a good man doing evil to protect his wife and children and seeing how corrupting it is on his youngest, most successful son. That’s it. The story is told but people want to turn it into “The Sopranos” with stupid mafia nicknames and double crosses and gun battles and fucking. That is not “The Godfather” and I will not support efforts to turn it into something it is not….

8:[ This is a measure of how much I do not talk to people: I was on my way to a film festival meeting in Pilsen and waiting for a bus connection at Roosevelt Road and this young woman, whom I seen on the train earlier walks up to me and asks me the way to Union station. She apologizes and explains that she has a bad sense of direction. She then began crying like it is all her fault for being lost or that she is at the end of her rope. I told there is nothing wrong and at one point had to calm her down by saying, “It’s going to be all right” in as calm a voice as I could manage. I gave her detailed directions and told her if she finds herself walking towards the lake, she went the wrong way. She did calm down.

She thanked me and went to get back on the train and I hope she made it to the train station. Anyways, my throat was so sore from having to talk that loud for that long….

9:[ From the “This Just In” Department: ZIPCars now offers ZIPVans!

It makes my career as a serial killer that much more accessible! (And untraceable.)

10:[ Last Item of the Month: Finally, A BATMAN/SUPERMAN MOVIE!!! Here’s a video of the announcement. This took me by surprise. I think this is a great compromise for DC in the face of everyone on the planet wanting them to do a bunch of solo films before a Justice League movie. Just so they can say they had influence. But I am really looking forward to 2015, which will bring “Man of Steel 2” and “Star Wars Episode VII”. The kid in me just might come out and take a peak at the world….

That will do it for this month.

I really need to say sorry for being super late with this month’s edition. I was without an adaptor and it took me forever to get one. So, I am back online and feeling okay.

I know about what’s going on in the world believe me. I am just seeing how the rest of the country reacts. Will we ever try to initiate change on our own or for ourselves? We never really know. Sometimes I wonder if people really ever think about what ‘de-colonization” and “sovereignty” TRULY mean? Or are they just trying to beat The Man with their own curveball?

Feel free to comment, correct or contradict anything on “Wisdom of the Sages”. Please, prove me wrong with a well written, though out response. I am pretty sure the dog thing will get on someone’s nerves. Thanks for staying with this so far….

Until Next Time, “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control everything really are.”

2013 Ernest M. Whiteman III