Project Slayer

Recently, I was tasked with reading a YA vampire novel. Needless to say, I did not care for the experience, and I ended up spending a lot of time going to cases I felt dealt with similar material better, some of which I hadn’t read or watched in many a day. You can guess one of those cases pretty easily, I bet.

            It put me in mind for another undertaking, whilst I await Furious 7 on the blu-ray.

“When Will the White Community Address their Culture of Violence?” Isn’t a Joke Anymore

I like jokes. I particularly like jokes that are dark and pointed, and that puncture power structures and the small-minded. As such, jokes about the “White Culture of Violence” were great. It’s a really simply joke—just talk about some predominantly white incident in the same way the Right likes to do with black people, usually leading off with “When will the white community address their culture of violence?” Where are the white leaders condemning this? What of white-on-white violence? It’s all the music they listen to—‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?’ Horrific! And so on. The joke, in this form, is a subversion and reversion of the narrative, meant to highlight the idiocy in the way outlets discuss black people.

            This isn’t much of a joke any more.

You Can Kiss My Ass, Tomorrowland

I’m not seeing the movie Tomorrowland any time soon. The seemingly earnest and gentle movie turned me against it pretty early, with a trailer lauding the great minds of science history. Einstein! Edison! Walt…Disney. This is a Disney production of course, and I’ve always found that company’s self-aggrandizing, disingenuous self-mythologizing really irksome. In theory, that would have been the end of things. Disney’s Disney hagiography is nothing new, but I would have rolled my eyes and moved on. After all, Saving Mr. Banks rewrote history so embittered author P.L. Travers achieves emotional catharsis under the beatific watch of wise and kindly Uncle Walt, instead of being someone who was pissed off and didn’t want dancing penguins in the adaptation of her work, and I didn’t rant too much about that. It’s a movie that should have just passed me by, even if I have much more of an affinity for science fiction than I do for mid-century quasi-historical retcons. But then the movie came out, and the story became clear.

            Then, I got pissed.

In Asphalt, Nitrous, and Rubber: The Token White Guy

Famous person deaths are weird. In all likelihood, you never met them, and yet there is a sort of a loss all the same. And the weirdness is compounded by how we usually learn of famous person deaths these days—we read it on the internet, which just sort of reinforces the remove. And that’s how it’s been for me, and I bet many, many more, with most recent famous person deaths. Leonard Nimoy? Internet. Maya Angelou? Internet. Philip Seymour Hoffman? Internet. Then again, I didn’t know any of them, so shouldn’t that be the way? Yet I recall distinctly hearing about Paul Walker’s death, because someone else read it on the internet. I was at either a book club or a game night, when someone else looked at their phone and flatly said that he had died. It sort of took me a minute. “Man,” I said, “I’m legitimately bummed.” He was, after all, an integral part of something I loved.

In Asphalt, Nitrous, and Rubber: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

“You want to catch wolves, you need wolves. Let’s go hunting.”

In Asphalt, Nitrous, and Rubber: Fast Five (2011)

“The men we’re after are professional runners. They like speed and are guaranteed to go down the hardest possible way, so make sure you got your thunderwear on. We find them, we take them as a team, and we bring them back. And above all else we don’t ever, ever let them into cars.”

In Asphalt, Nitrous, and Rubber: Fast & Furious (2009)

“I’m going to enjoy what happens next.”