Archive for December 4th, 2009
How well will Princess & the Frog do, and how much will shouts of RAAACISM! be issued if it does poorly?
Here’s something to think about this weekend — we’d love parents, especially, to weigh in on this: How well will Princess & the Frog do when it’s released next Friday?
We typically love Disney cartoons around here, but won’t be paying to see this movie because it has Oprah in it. We will never, not once in our lives, give money to anything the Charybdis of Lake Michigan is involved in. We didn’t like her before 2008, but her role in foisting Dr. Utopia on the world won’t be forgotten by us.
If we see Princess & the Frog, we’ll be paying to see another movie (like Blind Spot, with Sandra Bullock, which is AWESOME…and Sandy’s best role ever) and then walk into Princess instead, so we’re not contributing to Princess’ take at the box office. We really don’t want Oprah to have any more bragging rights by being part of a movie that’s a huge financial hit.
We’re really torn on this movie. The character of Tiana looks like someone we’d instantly want to befriend: she appears a lot like Belle from Beauty in the Beast, as she has a passion and wants to do something special with her life, and isn’t mooning over some guy (Tiana, from what we read, wants to open a restaurant and works hard to save up to do that — never blaming anyone else because a restaurant was not handed to her).
We don’t, however, instantly like that Disney made the Prince in this story vaguely Moroccan, when a black prince could (and we think should) have been used. Our idea would have been to make the Prince like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, from an idealized African kingdom like Zamunda…remember this?
We still can’t get over how beautiful that palace was in the Eddie Murphy movie…and maybe James Earl Jones could have played the King of Zamunda in the cartoon, as a cameo, which would have been a neat nod to Lion King.
Who knows, maybe when we see the movie, we’ll feel differently, but that’s how we’re feeling about the Prince right now.
The story of turning into frogs doesn’t appeal to us.
New Orleans as a setting is complicated for us emotionally. The lot of us used to go to New Orleans once a year for Halloween, where one of us always landed a freelance gig party planning. It was the most fun we’ve ever had in this life — and we love New Orleans more than Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or any of our actual home towns. But, we haven’t been back since Katrina. We were emotionally wrecked seeing how much the city was destroyed, and how things have not bounced back — and the rebuilding of the city does not seem to even occur to the current administration. So, we don’t know if sitting there looking at an idealized New Orleans for a few hours in a Disney cartoon will affect us in a negative way.
New Orleans, the way it was before Katrina, is kind of a modern Atlantis. The Lost City. The City of Myth. Putting it into a cartoon, removing all the rough edges, idealizing it…all that serves to further distance this great American original further from reality. That’s almost as tragic as Katrina itself.
We DO want to hear the music…especially if there’s a lot of zydecko, jazz, and cool Cajun beats throughout. Love us some Cajuns.
We really wish Disney had used Monique, Queen Latifa, or in an ideal world, Maya Angelou in this instead of Oprah. Charybdis is really dampening our desire to venture out into the cold and go all the way downtown to the AMC 21 River East to check it out.
In Boystown, absolutely no one is talking about Princess & the Frog. There’s zero excitement — and Disney very stupidly hasn’t done any marketing in Chicago that we’ve seen. There’s the usual TV spots and posters in theaters, but no guerrilla marketing like with other movies. If they were smart, they would have promoted Princess in gay bars…getting special martinis on the menus with green themes. Maybe they are doing this elsewhere, but here in Chicago Princess is nowhere to be found. At the very least, Disney could have gotten window displays up in various stores, really creative things like that, if they didn’t want to do giveaways or other tie-ins.
Because even if it’s a children’s movie, the gay community should be a go-to with cartoon characters. If you want this movie to become part of pop culture, the House of Mouse needs drag queens on their side. Who do you think would be wearing Princess & the Frog costumes at Halloween, besides five year old girls? Well, gay 30-somethings in drag, of course.
We wonder if this movie underperforms if the Race Industry will scream and yell RAAACISM! at the top of their lungs, claiming people are RAACIST for not making this the most successful Disney cartoon EVER.
We think it will do better than middling Disney fare like Treasure Planet or Atlantis, but not anywhere near as well as Beauty & the Beast, Little Mermaid, or Lion King.
Next year, Rapunzel comes out, which will be a HUGE success. We’ve personally been waiting for Rapunzel since we were kids. She’s the last of the “Princess” characters from fairytales that we’ve been waiting to see made into a cartoon. We sure hope Disney does her justice.
We also think we should start agitating for Disney to make a gay prince. King Ludwig II of Bavaria has an interesting life story that could be made into a cartoon…complete with castle Neuschwanstein that was used by Disney himself as the basis for Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneylorld and Cinderella’s castle in Disney World.
Gay is the new black.
And just imagine the aneurysms a gay prince would cause.
Have you heard of the latest rage in Boystown? Recession Parties
So, a few days ago we were all caught up in the Mystery of the Digging of Graves by Roscoe’s, a comedy of errors involving what our friend Panda insisted were six, perfectly spaced, deep, coffin-shaped graves dug by Mexicans at eight in the morning, in broad daylight, in the vacant lot across from Sidetracks on Halsted.
“Those are graves, look at how upset those six guys got when we were watching them dig! They wanted to kill us!,” Panda insisted.
“Actually, they were six straight Mexican men working in Boystown while guys were still stumbling drunk down the street on walks of shame, so they were probably just being homophobic, and you were wearing your pink Hello Kitty winter hat with imitation cat fur, ears, and powder-pink bouncy balls dangling around your chin,” Sebastian corrected. “We’re all straight-guy kryptonite on a good day, but man, Panda, you’re RAINBOW kryptonite in that kitty hat.”
“This is my favorite hat and it’s warm and you just don’t like it ’cause you’re a hater. And your skin tone can’t pull it off, Basty. Mexicans love me. And I love Mexicans.”
“You love enchiladas, that’s for sure about things Mexican. The rest of it is all true, too, and those guys WERE acting strange when we walked by, that’s for sure too,” Robby noted.
We were talking about how odd this all was at Sidetracks during Comedy Night (with clips of Golden Girls dancing over head) when another friend of ours, who was eavesdropping (which is totally what you do at Sidetracks), and had his little Iphone out, jumped in. He asked us what we were talking about, and we told him Panda thought someone had a bunch of fresh graves dug in the vacant lot next to the abandoned building by Roscoe’s bar on Halsted.
“They’re probably just putting in the pipes for the kitchen they’re building for the new restaurant MiniBar is opening in that space. It used to be a gift shop, but it’s been vacant for years, and the d-bags at MiniBar think other d-bags in the neighborhood need a new, extra pretentitous spot for brunch, so there you go,” our friend said.
“Yah, I saw Cyndi Lauper in that old gift shop once, buying a purse with little airline safety information colorforms all over it,” Panda said, “And I totally think they were digging graves and everyone thinks I’m crazy, but if they were supposed to be digging pipes or laying holes or whatever, they wouldn’t have been so weird to me. And they totally liked my hat, as everyone else does, no matter what these other guys say.”
Panda sees Cyndi Lauper, or small, thin women with short hair he accuses of being Cyndi Lauper, everywhere. We have no idea what “airline safety information colorforms are”, but kind of want some now.
Our friend, meanwhile, was emailing someone, who it turned out was a Chicago cop. After a few minutes, we found out no valid permits seemed to exist for construction on that lot, so more likely than not THAT’S the reason the Mexicans looked terrified we watched them digging: they were probably illegals working the site without green cards, employed by a contractor that didn’t bother to file the right permits and get the right permission to be digging in the first place, let alone hiring the laborers without valid employment papers.
Panda was beyond disappointed this particular mystery ended in missing or misfiled paperwork and undocumented workers, and not an appearance by Christopher Meloni and Maristka Hargerty.
“I still think those are graves, and that was totally Cyndi Lauper sitting RIGHT THERE on Thanksgiving Eve, because she was in the Macy’s parade the next day and I waved to her and I think she recognized me from here the night before.”
“That, or she remembers you from the restraining order,” Sebastian said.
Somehow, talking about Thanksgiving Eve in Boystown (and grave digging), got other people around us in Sidetracks on the subject of Recession Parties, which was used to explain why many of the bars seemed so deserted lately.
It seems “Recession Parties” are all the rage these days, most especially in Los Angeles (where we’ve been told by our friend Wes that REAL unemployment is at least 25% there, 50% for black males).
It appears to be a way the LGBTQ community is coping with unprecedented unemployment and a decided dearth of fabulous.
“Oh, I read all about those Recession Parties,” Panda chimed in, “Cyndi Lauper was at one that someone I know was also at and she totally remembered me.”
Oh, Panda.
At Recession Parties, you are supposed to come dressed in old suits or other business wear, covered in patches, safety pins, duct tape, and other additions that make it look like you’ve been down on your luck for some time, unable to get a new suit. All the liquor is bargain basement. You bring a Yankee Swap gag gift that you wrap in newspaper: something cheap and ridiculous, spending less than $10. The more obscene the bigger the laughs the better the gift. Coupon books to McDonald’s or cheap 80s porn have been very popular “Recession Party” gifts.
Serving bottles of beer in paper bags, wino style is also a hit.
The apartments are decorated with the Want Ads and Help Wanted signs, to underscore the fact everyone’s looking for jobs.
This way, people can be social, drink like they used to, have somewhere to go during the week, have fun, and address the elephant in the room that is everyone’s sudden and difficult loss of discretionary funds.
We’ve heard of a few of these here in Chicago, but as we noted, apparently they are HUGE in Los Angeles, which means they’ll hit Chicago in a big way in 2010. Typically, whatever’s hot in Los Angeles becomes big here in three months. Whatever the new thing in New York is hits us about six months later. And whatever’s big in Chicago today will be the popular thing in Cleveland in 2013.
Are people having Recession Parties near you?
Ever stumble upon any graves being dug by illegal aliens in your neighborhood?
How are you and your friends coping with unemployment — in the sense of keeping your social lives going, staying in contact with friends, and having fun while addressing the fact that few can afford dinner and drinks the way we used to?
The disaster that is Dubai: if you build it, they still won't come
UPDATE: Read this piece first, from the Times Online, for an on-the-ground report on how bad things are getting in Dubai. They call it “like watching the fall of Rome”. There’s a story in there about a 30-something British man who’s essentially become a slave in Dubai. He bought property there as a speculator, and thought he would rent it out and make a profit, only the property is three years overdue, not built yet, and he still owes money for it. He is not allowed to leave Dubai, and if he does not repay the money, he will go to jail and be forced to work it off.
White slavery in a Muslim country, people. It’s happening. It’s the way things work in Dubai. Welcome to the “religion of peace” in the “civilized seaside paradise of Dubai”.
******
Drudge ran this article about Dubai gearing up to open the tallest building in the world, which is admittedly STUNNING. We love this building, and we wish it had been built on the site of the World Trade Center towers, as America should have stuck Islam right in its Sauron’s eye by replacing lost towers with something this gorgeous. It is much, much too beautiful to sit in the kingdom of repression and ugliness that is Dubai.
The article reminds us of various ornate and opulent buildings built here in Chicago that opened on the eve of the Great Depression, just as all the champagne was running out.
Most especially, in that sense, it reminds us of the Carbide & Carbon building (which is now Chicago’s Hard Rock Hotel). This building was built in 1929 by a pair of brothers upset with Prohibition, so they had Daniel Burhnham’s son design a giant green champagne bottle with gold foil cap for the middle of Chicago as a giant F-U to the government (as local legend goes).
Not long after the building opened, the whole world went to Hell.
Dubai is a great example of Liberals being idiots.
In New York, our friend Robby’s sister, Ann-Louise, lives like a princess off other people’s money. She’s a screaming Liberal and Obot (whose mother, our friend Patricia, calls “my daughter, the cautionary tale”). Ann-Louise goes on and on and on about Dubai, and how much she wants to live there, ostensibly so she “can be at the beach and in air conditioning all day” (which she could actually do right here in Chicago, since we have beaches and air conditioning too, though admittedly neither of them are being used much today).
Ann-Louise loved talking about the Burj Dubai and how tall it was going to be, and how fabulous all the various things under construction in Dubai were going to be, and how she couldn’t wait to go there. But, she had no concept whatsoever of how men in Dubai treat women, or how Duabi itself treats foreigners. “You can’t carry champagne around in your purse in Dubai,” Robby would tell his sister. “But, I’ll just use my flask, the one I take to the library when I go there to steal magazines, and if anyone stops me I say it’s just diabetes medicine.” “That won’t work in Dubai,” Robby admonishes. “And stop stealing magazines. If you can trick men into paying for that condo of yours, you can trick them into getting you Vogue subscriptions”.
Ann-Louise has always been fascinated by the Middle East, which she often calls “Middle Earth” the way she says “The Netherlands” is “The Netherworld”. It’s unclear, to this day, whether this NYU graduate is joking or not. But, whenever she goes there, she comes back railing about what pigs the men all are, and how many times she was almost raped after staying out too late. “They chased me all the way back to the hotel and no one would help me, they’d just start chasing me too!” We really wish she was joking about that, but it’s all true. THANKFULLY, nothing more serious than a few muggings has ever happened to her, and she was only warned once in Jordan for being inappropriately dressed, but one of these trips she takes to “Middle Earth” will, we fear, be her last.
Because when she goes to Middle Earth, she behaves the way she would in Aruba, St. Barts, Maui, or Paradise Island. She thinks because the weather is warm there, that it’s a vacation destination. She loves going there, too, because she’s blonde and gets an enormous amount of male attention without very much female competition when in Middle Earth.
But, Ann-Louise is not the norm.
Yes, we’ve always been impressed by the grandiose plans of Dubai. And Burj Dubai is gorgeous. But, it was built with slave labor shipped in from Pakistan and China…men who labored day and night to raise that tower in the desert, who were paid little to no wages to do it, and forbidden to return home until it was finished. How safe the tower ends up being is anyone’s guess. There’s part of us that wonders how Tower of Babel the thing ends up being. Apparently, Dubai cut a lot of corners in its construction on top of employing workers who were forced to build it against their will. Who knows how many rivets the slaves left unwelded, on purpose. If the taskmasters weren’t as sharp-eyed and detail-oriented as those working the pyramids, the last true wonders Middle Earth ever produced, we wonder how long-lasting the products of slave labor will be in Dubai.
And that’s the thing with this whole building spree: it’s a collection of gorgeous things built in a culture of ugliness. How women are treated, how workers are treated, how Westerners are treated…this all matters as much to these projects as the kind of steel, glass, crystal, and marble used in these monuments.
Because Dubai can build these things, but people still won’t flock to “Middle Earth”, aside from Ann-Louise, if all the negatives we’ve mentioned are there.
The article from Drudge talks about dozens of even more grandiose projects mothballed because investors realize few Westerners want to travel to Middle Earth. Fewer still want to move there, so real estate is crashing. There are no jobs there, because Dubai doesn’t actually pay its workers. Unless you like working long hours for free in the hot sun, forever terrified of somehow offending Islam and warranting government harassment as a result, Dubai is not an ideal place to live.
But, we’ve heard from Liberals for years and years about what a wonder this place was…about all the amazing things they were building…how Dubai and Middle Earth in general is the future.
That’s nonsense.
As reality is now proving.
Sue Lowden is spanking Harry Reid nine ways to Christmas
Republican Sue Lowden is spanking Harry Reid nine ways to Christmas in the latest Nevada Senate poll: she’s leading by 10 points, despite Reid spending millions on advertising already.
Here’s an insight by way of Ace of Spades that makes us even more enamored of Sue Lowden: she’s smart enough to hit Reid with an inescapable trap.
(1) Lowden hits Reid for his liberal tax and spend ways, making him the poster boy for reckless government spending. But, she doesn’t stop there, since going after him for reckless spending only makes the conservatives hate Reid more than they already do.
(2) Lowden brilliantly hits Reid with the second punch of “while he’s spending the nation’s money as Majority Leader, Reid’s failing to bring any of that pork home to Nevada”.
So, people who might not have a problem with the current Congress dumping our tax dollars down pork barrel septic tanks have a REAL problem with none of that money coming to Nevada itself.
Lowden, quite brilliantly, is attacking Reid with the same issue on two different fronts.
If she can find a way to hit him on a THIRD front too, one that would keep Liberals home instead of voting for Reid, she can depress his Democrat turnout while increasing the moderate and conservative turnout for herself. This one is tough, because Liberals are so nuts; she certainly can’t say Reid isn’t Liberal enough, because then moderates and conservatives would back away from her. Perhaps she could just focus on Reid’s ineptitude. But, Liberals don’t have a real problem with that, either.
Maybe tying Reid to ACORN, the SEIU, and other Democrat thug operations could keep some Liberals home on election day. While they might have no problem with the criminal enterprise that is ACORN, people realize it’s toxic, and don’t want to be seen as an ACORN supporter with ACORN getting so much bad press. Tie Reid to ACORN, make him a toxic asset too, and watch the DNC distance itself from him and let him go down in flames.
The more we see Sue Lowden in action, the more we like her.
Nevadans, what think you?
BREAKING: Obama cancels Copenhagen speech, possibly at advice of ManBearPig
Word’s coming in that Dr. Utopia will now not be speaking in Copenhagen, as the White House prepares to accept the reality that the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax is out of the bag.
Hollywood is also now considering taking back Al Gore’s Oscar for an Inconvenient Truth.
Most likely by next Monday or Tuesday, regular Americans will be clued into the fraud perpetrated by climatologists. It feels like the tide is indeed turning on all this garbage.
"Nationality Expertism" rears its head again in Boystown
If you have been reading us for a while, you know how we feel about “Nationality Experts”: these are amateur genealogists, ethnologists, anthropologists, racists, whatever you want to call them who live in Chicago and think “What’s your nationality?” is an acceptable question to ask a stranger in a bar.
Our nationality is American. None of us here are the children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren of immigrants. All of our grandparents were born in this country. All of our great-grandparents were born in this country. We have no emotional connection to any country other than the United States. We have relatives and friends in many different European countries, but when you ask where our families are “from”, the answer is “Ohio”, “Pennsylvania”, “Texas”, etc.
But, for some reason, in Chicago there’s an obsession with white and Hispanic men to know your “nationality” before they decide whether they want to ask you out or not. There are literally millions of things you can ask a stranger upon first meeting him. There are also about five things someone can say to one of us that immediately makes us shut down and not want have anything whatsoever to do with that person. This “nationality” garbage is the primo date-quasher in our books.
This nonsense happened again last night, with a guy one of us actually really liked. His name is Jim, a French teacher in Chicago Public Schools. He is smart, funny, had the dark hair and eyes one of us goes for, held an interesting conversation about both France and how well Ron Huberman was doing as Chief of the school system (Huberman is the first openly gay man to run the city’s schools, and is also Mayor Daley’s chosen successor for when Daley retires).
But, then he had to do the “What’s your nationality?” thing. We answered, “American”, like we always do. Then he did the thing that really vexes us and pushed it, saying, “No, where is your family from?”, and we did the “America. My family is from America” thing we do. The frustration bubbled up in us and we ended the conversation, told Jim it was nice meeting him, and wished him a happy birthday (as he told us it was next Tuesday). We started to walk away and he realized he did something wrong — but didn’t know exactly what — so he said, “It’s just that I’m really interesting in people’s nationalities…”
Honestly, cute as he was, there’s no way in Hell we are wasting any more of our lives talking to these racists.
What does it matter where relatives of yours lived 300 or 3,000 or even 30 years ago? If you were born in this country, you are an American. If you studied hard, worked your fingers to the bone, and passed your citizenship test, you are an American. If you have no loyalty to any other country and would happily lay down your life for the United States if this great nation ever needed you, then you are an American.
No public school French teacher has the right to define you as anything else if that’s how you define yourself.
In days past, we used to get into it with these clowns about how stupid it was to ask that nationality stuff. We’d go on about how they should ask questions about who a person is, what they like to do, what they think about the news, what books they read, etc. instead of asking where dead relatives of theirs are buried overseas. But, life is too, too short to spend any of it on these liberal fools.
One thing we did realize last night — and this realization is the only reason we bring this stuff up again here — is that it is STRICTLY a Chicago phenomenon. After the business with Jim happened, we all decamped to another part of Sidetracks and talked about it, mentally going through a list of all the guys who have asked one of us “The Nationality Question” over the five years we’ve lived in this city. Here’s what we found:
* Only white males and Hispanic men have asked “The Nationality Question”
* No black person has ever tried to define us this way, no Asian either
* Only white men who were raised in Chicago or its suburbs ask this
* For Hispanics, it’s mainly Mexicans who ask this; people from Puerto Rico, Argentina, Guatemala, etc. don’t ask it
* Guys who grew up poor or working class are more likely to ask this than guys who grew up with professional, well-off parents
* Liberals ask this sort of thing, but conservatives don’t; Democrats ask it, Republicans don’t
It’s a total class thing unique to Chicago. What it feels like is that these guys grew up in families where the “Italians” wouldn’t let their kids play with the “Irish” or the “Puerto Ricans” or whatever, so they were constantly asking kids what nationality they were to see if they could be friends on the playground. If you answer wrong, you can’t be my friend. As adults, these guys now keep the nationality question alive in the first three things they say to a stranger…now using it to determine if the person is dateable instead of just friendable.
As we’ve said before, we’ve never encountered this in any other city we’ve lived in. Just Chicago. And, it seems, just from guys who grew up in Chicago.
The one caveat is that we did get this from an obnoxious, random woman in Ft. Meyers, Florida once. She was the receptionist at an art gallery one of us worked a charity benefit at. Right in the middle of an unrelated conversation, she just blurted out, “What’s your nationality?” and didn’t settle for the American answer there either. Turns out she, too, was originally from the midwest but we don’t think it was Chicagoland.
She, so far, is the only female to have ever pulled this.
Question of the Day: Would you get off a plane if you saw a group of Muslims on board acting suspicious?
Here’s a question some people asked us after we noted the November 17th Air Tran Flight 297 incident, where 11 Muslims in traditional martyr dress disrupted a flight during takeoff, terrifying the passengers on board with all the behavior of a hijacking.
Would you get off a flight, or refuse to board a flight, if Muslims were on board doing this?
We can answer this from experience, because two of us have actually done this.
Once we were waiting in the boarding area and five Muslim men were there, dressed in the white pajama outfits, talking in Arabic and acting “strange”. It’s so hard to articulate what strange is, but it didn’t fit the behavior of everyone around them. Something wasn’t right about those guys, so we went up to the ticket counter and asked the gate agent to bump us to the next flight to Chicago (from LaGuardia). We told her why, she looked over the men, and didn’t give us a hard time at all.
Another time, it was an outgoing Chicago flight from O’Hare to Atlanta, and something similar happened. As the plane was boarding, there were about a half dozen really creepy looking Muslim guys that just appeared out of nowhere to board the plane. We didn’t see them in the boarding area, so it was like they had been hiding in the bathroom until the last possible moment to get on. Once again, they weren’t shouting Allah Akbar! or anything, but something didn’t seem right about those guys, and at that moment our stomach turned and twisted and as we were in line to board the plane we suddenly had to go to the bathroom — BAD — so we took that as a sign and went in there and missed the flight. After we waited long enough for the plane to depart, we went to the ticket counter, told the agent what happened, and got on the next flight. No penalties or an¥thing.
We think it’s important to ALWAYS trust your instincts.
It reminds us of the actor James Woods on 9/11. He went on the Tonight Show and Larry King and talked about how his father lives in Boston and is sick, so Woods has been flying back and forth between LA and home for a while. He actually flew the same flights as the Muslims who planned 9/11. Woods said he saw those guys on several flights, making test runs. They acted suspiciously, and he told the flight crews and the airlines about them. He told the authorities. But, nobody did anything — we bet because the PC police have tied so many hands in terms of “profiling” Muslims. Everyone was so afraid of lawsuits that the Muslims got away with 9/11 when they could have been stopped.
Woods — if we remember this correctly – eventually switched flights or airlines to avoid those guys.
We would have done the same, and have done the same in similiar situations.
What about you?
