FAYE'S (unedited) COMMENT AT AN ANGRY PATRIOTIC VET'S SITE
So the VA doesn't have the money to pay for all the expensive medications the big drug corporations are making a fortune from?
But the VA... isn't that, like, THE GOVERNMENT??
Maybe next time you won't vote for the candidate who:
1) lets big drug companies sell the same medicine for three times as much in America as they do in foreign countries,
2) passes a law against buying your medicine from Canada (which the police wisely do not enforce)
3) cuts taxes so "big gummint" won't have enough money to pay the VA for the overpriced miracle drugs which would cure you.
Instead, you get mad when the other candidate wins and tries to extend medicaid to everyone so you could get your medicine. They have their mouthpieces call it "communism".
No, "communism" is where everyone lives in squalor under a military dictatorship. "Communism" is red china and north korea. What they call "communism" is the medical system which every other civilized country has.
Everyone (even conservatives) agrees that this would cut health care cost in half. That's why they shout "communism" instead of saying "it would cost more": because it costs LESS.
Think it costs less because it provides less care?
Nope. It provides MORE, and everyone agrees with that too. That's why you hear lies about "death panels" instead of "you'll get less medical care if this "communism" is passed".
Your medicine costs twice as much because the drug and insurance company execs pocket your insurance premium to by another Lexus. They DO give some of it to their "in network" doctors--including paying yours a BONUS for denying you medical care. (Part of their pay is called a "bonus", and it gets smaller with every prescription they write and procedure they authorize).
Yeah, your taxes would go up, but only by half as much as your medical insurance costs you now. But you wouldn't have to buy medical insurance anymore.
Too good to be true? Ask your friend in Canada. They ALL think Americans are crazy for paying twice as much for WAAAY crappier medical care.
See, the rich people fooled y'all. "Rich people" means the large corporations and their mouthpieces like Fox news, who calls medicine for your kids "communism" and lied to you about "death panels". Beck and Limbaugh are both MULTI MILLIONAIRES.
The CEO of your company doesn't work as hard as you and your friends. In fact, he doesn't really "work" at all. He DOES take two-hour drink-lunches, plays golf during work hours, and hires his incompetent, stupid son-in-law as your boss.
Oh, and he also has much, MUCH better medical coverage than you. Ask HR.
This "gummint takeover of health care" you're told to be afraid of is nothing more than giving both the CEO and you the same medical insurance. For him, it means he doesn't get a private hospital room and restaurant food (though he can still buy it if he wants to pay for it).
But for you, your family, and the guys you work with, it means your daughter gets a flu shot like the CEO's daughter does, and that your son gets the knee surgery your health insurance won't pay for now
...IF YOU HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE AT ALL. None of the homeless do, and most of the male ones are vets. I'm a female one, and I'm going to die of Hep C at 34 because the cure, which is sitting on a shelf patiently waiting for its expiration date, costs $2,500 even though it costs the same to make as aspirin.
The CEO's wife, however, can get cured of that and many other diseases which YOUR wife can't. And unless grandpa was a CEO too, forget about high-quality medical care for grandma!
The real "death panels" are the conference rooms at the top floor of State Farm and Allstate.
Every time they get another tax cut giving you $80 and THEM literally millions of dollars each, they laugh at what a sucker you are and light their $40 cee-gar with a $10 bill.
Wanderingvet, THAT'S the $50 which should have paid for your VA medicine, and the medicine for all the other noble guys I know who willingly risked the ultimate sacrifice for a country run BY the wealthy, FOR the wealthy. Kerry was in 'Nam fighting REAL communism. Bush and Cheney were both DRAFT DODGERS.
They fooled you. See it now.
Only smart people ever change their mind and WISE UP ween they're being ripped off. Stupid people send their money to Nigerian bankers, wonder how they got swindled, and believe whatever they're told by their tee-vee set.
IN 2012, IF YOU'RE STUPID, WHICH THEY COUNT ON, YOU'RE GOING TO VOTE THEM BACK INTO POWER **AGAIN**.
You think that the saying "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" is a joke? Tell it to the brave, proud vets I know from the homeless shelter who need that help, and see if they think it's funny. The stories they tell of how they "used to be proud but you can't be proud when you're sick" made me want to cry.
And tell it to your mom while she "spends down" your inheritance at $5,000 a month, until she's in abject poverty and "the gummint" is allowed to pay for her nursing home.
And tell it to me in an angry reply to this
...while my guitar gently weeps.
Faye Kane
Homeless Bumstress
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
SWEET AND LOWDOWN, 1999
Written and directed by Woody Allen, this film tells the story of a fictional arrogant, obnoxious, alcoholic jazz guitarist named Emmett Ray (played by Sean Penn) who regards himself as perhaps the best guitarist in the world, or second best, after his idol, Django Reinhardt.
Penn as Emmett carries the film in an Oscar-nomination performance. The lead female role seems secondary to me, although young Samantha Morton as Hattie also won an Oscar nomination.
Emmett is a victim of poor parenting, a complex and tragic character, with whom I identify. Separated early from both parents, and spending three years in a bordello under the guardianship of the madam, a friend of his mother, he grows up cynical and unable to commit to women.
Cruising the boardwalk with a pal to pick up women, he encounters Hattie, a mute, who turns out as faithful and loving as a dog. When she makes him a birthday card in which she declares her love, he skips out in the wee small hours without telling her.
His drinking and smoking are very pointed. That and gambling (he claims to be one of the six best pool players in the country), plus shooting rats at the dump, watching trains go by, and keeping lowlife company, all condition his fate. He’s trapped.
In a wonderful play of the imagination Woody, Nat Hentoff and others appear as themselves. In cameo performances, they set up the narrative as if it were a documentary about a real person.
A performance in which Emmett plans to descend onto a stage on a large, gilded crescent moon is a metaphor for the mess of his life. It doesn't work. Drunk as a skunk, his climb onto it is a bizarre struggle. It descends in odd jerks, as if it too were drunk. Near the ground he falls off his perch. The moon starts to rise, then comes crashing down in pieces behind him.
The film is personal. I think of the Hatties in my life, and I can understand the need and the repulsion that war within him. And the eternal nagging pathos of her fate. I also relate to his great, unrealized talent and lost opportunities due to his character flaws.
Penn as Emmett carries the film in an Oscar-nomination performance. The lead female role seems secondary to me, although young Samantha Morton as Hattie also won an Oscar nomination.
Emmett is a victim of poor parenting, a complex and tragic character, with whom I identify. Separated early from both parents, and spending three years in a bordello under the guardianship of the madam, a friend of his mother, he grows up cynical and unable to commit to women.
Cruising the boardwalk with a pal to pick up women, he encounters Hattie, a mute, who turns out as faithful and loving as a dog. When she makes him a birthday card in which she declares her love, he skips out in the wee small hours without telling her.
His drinking and smoking are very pointed. That and gambling (he claims to be one of the six best pool players in the country), plus shooting rats at the dump, watching trains go by, and keeping lowlife company, all condition his fate. He’s trapped.
In a wonderful play of the imagination Woody, Nat Hentoff and others appear as themselves. In cameo performances, they set up the narrative as if it were a documentary about a real person.
A performance in which Emmett plans to descend onto a stage on a large, gilded crescent moon is a metaphor for the mess of his life. It doesn't work. Drunk as a skunk, his climb onto it is a bizarre struggle. It descends in odd jerks, as if it too were drunk. Near the ground he falls off his perch. The moon starts to rise, then comes crashing down in pieces behind him.
The film is personal. I think of the Hatties in my life, and I can understand the need and the repulsion that war within him. And the eternal nagging pathos of her fate. I also relate to his great, unrealized talent and lost opportunities due to his character flaws.
Monday, July 19, 2010
THE WIND AND THE LION 1975
Sean Connery, five years after his last Bond role, is the star. Loosely based on a true story, he is a desert leader (Raisuli) fighting for his people’s honor. Set in c.1905, as Teddy Roosevelt ascends to the presidency, the movie was written and directed by John Milius.
At first, and for the most part, the movies seems like a disparaging reflection on the West, which is portrayed as predatory, cold and mechanical as opposed to the soulful Muslims they are up against, and who trust only in Allah. Raisuli kidnaps an American family of three to embarrass his corrupt brother, whose equally corrupt nephew is the sultan of Morocco.
Slowly, the spirited woman, Eden (played by Candace Bergen), and her children grow to like and admire Connery. While he deals harshly with his enemies, he does not kill women and children. When they try to run away, he follows them and single-handedly saves them from slimy desert bandits. He’s alone when we need to see his bravery and nobility. He’s with a band of thousands when we need to see his power as a leader of men. We never see his wives, who are only mentioned when, bemused at having to take counsel from Eden, he complains that she isn’t even one of his wives.
Roosevelt sends in the marines to rescue the Americans, and Connery delivers them at great risk to himself. He is betrayed into the custody of contending European forces and is, in return, rescued by the American family, aided by the marines and the remnants of his band, in a situation that inevitably brings tears to one’s eyes.
At first, and for the most part, the movies seems like a disparaging reflection on the West, which is portrayed as predatory, cold and mechanical as opposed to the soulful Muslims they are up against, and who trust only in Allah. Raisuli kidnaps an American family of three to embarrass his corrupt brother, whose equally corrupt nephew is the sultan of Morocco.
Slowly, the spirited woman, Eden (played by Candace Bergen), and her children grow to like and admire Connery. While he deals harshly with his enemies, he does not kill women and children. When they try to run away, he follows them and single-handedly saves them from slimy desert bandits. He’s alone when we need to see his bravery and nobility. He’s with a band of thousands when we need to see his power as a leader of men. We never see his wives, who are only mentioned when, bemused at having to take counsel from Eden, he complains that she isn’t even one of his wives.
Roosevelt sends in the marines to rescue the Americans, and Connery delivers them at great risk to himself. He is betrayed into the custody of contending European forces and is, in return, rescued by the American family, aided by the marines and the remnants of his band, in a situation that inevitably brings tears to one’s eyes.
MY FAVORITE WIFE, 1940
MY FAVORITE WIFE, 1940
Directed by Garson Kanin, the film stars Irene Dunn and Cary Grant as Ellen and Nick Arden , Gail Patrick as Bianca Bates, and Randolph Scott as Stephen Burkett.
The core of this movie for me is the unjust treatment of a woman in the name of monogamy. It is a comedy of sex with a serious underbelly that no one was intended to consider.
Dunn and Scott are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for seven years. Although the plot is less specific about what transpired there than in the movie remake with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, we are told that the answer is ”nothing.”
Meanwhile, husband Cary Grant, who has brought up their two children, marries anew on the very day that his supposedly dead wife resurfaces.
In keeping with the cultural norms of the period, and even today, one of these “wives” must go. We needn’t guess who. The answer is clear, although the resolution of the dilemma comes nearly at the end, after a highly comedic courtroom skit to legally resolve the case.
My beef with the movie and with our culture is in how new wife, Patrick, must suffer rejection although she has done nothing wrong. As Grant gives all manner of excuses not to consummate their marriage while she waits crying and wondering what about her repels him, I keep saying out loud, “This is wrong!”
Our moral ideas haven’t changed much in the 70 years since that movie, but we can at least now ask: why monogamy? And I’m not just being a male chauvinist either, wishing that Grant had kept both wives (which I do), I have contempt for the story of Dunn’s chastity during seven years on the island with a handsome jock (Scott), thinking only of returning to her husband.
I’m upset that we are supposed to leave the film smiling and content (yes, I know, it was only a comedy), with not a thought for the expendable wife (not the favorite). True, she didn’t have the understanding and rapport with the kids that Dunn had, but she didn’t deserve to be discarded like a piece of trash either.
Directed by Garson Kanin, the film stars Irene Dunn and Cary Grant as Ellen and Nick Arden , Gail Patrick as Bianca Bates, and Randolph Scott as Stephen Burkett.
The core of this movie for me is the unjust treatment of a woman in the name of monogamy. It is a comedy of sex with a serious underbelly that no one was intended to consider.
Dunn and Scott are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for seven years. Although the plot is less specific about what transpired there than in the movie remake with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, we are told that the answer is ”nothing.”
Meanwhile, husband Cary Grant, who has brought up their two children, marries anew on the very day that his supposedly dead wife resurfaces.
In keeping with the cultural norms of the period, and even today, one of these “wives” must go. We needn’t guess who. The answer is clear, although the resolution of the dilemma comes nearly at the end, after a highly comedic courtroom skit to legally resolve the case.
My beef with the movie and with our culture is in how new wife, Patrick, must suffer rejection although she has done nothing wrong. As Grant gives all manner of excuses not to consummate their marriage while she waits crying and wondering what about her repels him, I keep saying out loud, “This is wrong!”
Our moral ideas haven’t changed much in the 70 years since that movie, but we can at least now ask: why monogamy? And I’m not just being a male chauvinist either, wishing that Grant had kept both wives (which I do), I have contempt for the story of Dunn’s chastity during seven years on the island with a handsome jock (Scott), thinking only of returning to her husband.
I’m upset that we are supposed to leave the film smiling and content (yes, I know, it was only a comedy), with not a thought for the expendable wife (not the favorite). True, she didn’t have the understanding and rapport with the kids that Dunn had, but she didn’t deserve to be discarded like a piece of trash either.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Strip, 1951
The Strip, 1951, is a black and white sausage incorporating popular themes of the time. There is crime, entertainment, echoes of military service, and of course the girl. It is a typical vehicle for Mickey Rooney of c. 1950.
Apart from Rooney, (who had been in a war, plays drums, and gets mixed up with a mobster), Louis Armstrong, and, vaguely, Jack Teagarden, I was not familiar with the cast.
Louis Armstrong was the highest paid black star of the time and featured in 11 movies during the 50s. In The Strip, as in other movies, his performance exemplifies bliss.
Armstrong plays himself, and as with his other movie performances, he is used to lift the movie but not to be a featured actor. There is an interesting hinging together of the main story, which is “noir,” and the feel-good appearances of the musicians.
Armstrong was a major force for breaking down racial barriers in the movies and elsewhere. He was the first black musician to feature in films. His personality and fame allowed him to soften the racial divide. I didn’t have to wince through his performance, as I regularly did through black performances of the period.
Sally Forrest sang and danced, often doing the same numbers as Armstrong. “Give Me A Kiss To Build A Dream On,” a popular hit from my youth, was the most played.
Mickey Rooney as jazz drummer Sam Maxton sometimes plays with Armstrong’s band. How well he plays was an enormous surprise to me.
Apart from Rooney, (who had been in a war, plays drums, and gets mixed up with a mobster), Louis Armstrong, and, vaguely, Jack Teagarden, I was not familiar with the cast.
Louis Armstrong was the highest paid black star of the time and featured in 11 movies during the 50s. In The Strip, as in other movies, his performance exemplifies bliss.
Armstrong plays himself, and as with his other movie performances, he is used to lift the movie but not to be a featured actor. There is an interesting hinging together of the main story, which is “noir,” and the feel-good appearances of the musicians.
Armstrong was a major force for breaking down racial barriers in the movies and elsewhere. He was the first black musician to feature in films. His personality and fame allowed him to soften the racial divide. I didn’t have to wince through his performance, as I regularly did through black performances of the period.
Sally Forrest sang and danced, often doing the same numbers as Armstrong. “Give Me A Kiss To Build A Dream On,” a popular hit from my youth, was the most played.
Mickey Rooney as jazz drummer Sam Maxton sometimes plays with Armstrong’s band. How well he plays was an enormous surprise to me.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Exhibition Notes
FROM TURNER TO CEZANNE (The Albuquerque Museum)
The paintings displayed were selected from the collection amassed by sisters Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, now the property of the National Museum of Wales, which organized the exhibition in concert with the American Federation of Arts.
Romanticism tinges the earlier works, while stylistic formalism creeps in after Cezanne. Painterliness becomes a theme. Vlamink copies Cezanne’s brushstrokes without regard to his capture of nature’s essence. Van Gogh, before that, turns painterly brushstrokes into hieroglyphics.
Joseph Mallord William Turner: Only the watercolors make you see how delicate and precise a draftsman Turner was. Living in big-sky country, I appreciate more than ever the huge, turbulent skies of Turner . In his watercolors, he uses blotting and scratching-out to help attain his effects.
Daumier was a decent painter as well as a master illustrator. I observed beautiful, consciously formed negative spaces in one of his paintings. Millet was even better. In a storm scene, a tree is at the point of being uprooted. Water gurgles in the foreground. Everything is bent by the wind.
Manet snow scene: The roof of the church is missing, not because it isn’t there, but because, it being covered with snow, he does nothing to distinguish it from the white scene behind. It is startling even today for the looseness and minimalism of the rendering. Monet’s painting of Charing Cross Bridge at morning—one of many he did--evoked the sounds, the grind of wheels, the bells, the smells, the cries of London as the sun is rising through a reddish haze. Berthe Morisot spins a fine web of light as a woman and child sit among tall grasses.
A Cezanne from the 1870s was hard even to glance at, whereas I went, “Wow!” on seeing his Provencal Landscape from 10 years later. It hit me in the gut. There was no symbolism of nature, no leaves, no bark, no grass. It was a parallel universe, a gestalt of nature, made entirely out of paint; its placement and optical qualities.
If there is one image I take away from the rest of the museum’s permanent collection (a very impressive one, by the way), it is the Model T Speedster of 1912 in the museum’s history section. It is red. It is modern. Crank-started, a free-standing circle of glass for a windscreen, it is an example of form which follows function.
The paintings displayed were selected from the collection amassed by sisters Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, now the property of the National Museum of Wales, which organized the exhibition in concert with the American Federation of Arts.
Romanticism tinges the earlier works, while stylistic formalism creeps in after Cezanne. Painterliness becomes a theme. Vlamink copies Cezanne’s brushstrokes without regard to his capture of nature’s essence. Van Gogh, before that, turns painterly brushstrokes into hieroglyphics.
Joseph Mallord William Turner: Only the watercolors make you see how delicate and precise a draftsman Turner was. Living in big-sky country, I appreciate more than ever the huge, turbulent skies of Turner . In his watercolors, he uses blotting and scratching-out to help attain his effects.
Daumier was a decent painter as well as a master illustrator. I observed beautiful, consciously formed negative spaces in one of his paintings. Millet was even better. In a storm scene, a tree is at the point of being uprooted. Water gurgles in the foreground. Everything is bent by the wind.
Manet snow scene: The roof of the church is missing, not because it isn’t there, but because, it being covered with snow, he does nothing to distinguish it from the white scene behind. It is startling even today for the looseness and minimalism of the rendering. Monet’s painting of Charing Cross Bridge at morning—one of many he did--evoked the sounds, the grind of wheels, the bells, the smells, the cries of London as the sun is rising through a reddish haze. Berthe Morisot spins a fine web of light as a woman and child sit among tall grasses.
A Cezanne from the 1870s was hard even to glance at, whereas I went, “Wow!” on seeing his Provencal Landscape from 10 years later. It hit me in the gut. There was no symbolism of nature, no leaves, no bark, no grass. It was a parallel universe, a gestalt of nature, made entirely out of paint; its placement and optical qualities.
If there is one image I take away from the rest of the museum’s permanent collection (a very impressive one, by the way), it is the Model T Speedster of 1912 in the museum’s history section. It is red. It is modern. Crank-started, a free-standing circle of glass for a windscreen, it is an example of form which follows function.
Movie Notes
ACROSS THE PACIFIC, 1942, directed by John Huston and Vincent Sherman.
Set at the eve of Pearl Harbor, Across the Pacific is a spy film starring: Humphrey Bogart as Richard (Rick) Leland, a disgraced navy captain turned patriot; Mary Astor as Alberta Marlow; and Sydney Greenstreet as Dr. Lorenz, a sociology professor loyal to the Japanese. Each with a different agenda, Marlow, Lorenz and Rick board a Japanese ship from Canada en route to China via the Panama Canal. The ship stops in New York, where Rick gives a military intelligence officer information about Lorenz. It is subsequently detained in Panama.
I preferred the sub-plots to the largely incomprehensible main plot, however.
Nefarious, oily and seemingly invincible, Greenstreet reprises his Maltese Falcon role. Likewise for Bogart who is again stoic, hard-working, and hard-talking. He exemplifies gritty humor when, sickened after too many drinks, he tells Astor, “Close the door when you leave.” “I want to die alone without a friend.” He is a philosopher for the little guy.
The film is sexy. Bogart and Astor waste no time in getting chummy. He often remarks on her scanty attire. When Greenstreet walks in on him searching Astor's belongings Bogart brushes it off by saying, “You’d be surprised how little girls wear these days.” Afterwards, Astor, suffering sunburn, has removed the shoulder straps of her swimsuit and covers her breasts only by clutching the garment over them. When she and Bogart kiss and the scene changes to a later time, the stark dichotomy is revealed between the explicitness of modern films and the understatement of classic ones like this.
The outstanding art direction makes me forget that the filming happens in a single Hollywood studio. When Bogart and Astor disembark in New York, black-coated people move at a New York pace. The pier is cold, hard and straight-edged, exemplified by the diagonally aligned magazines of a news kiosk. In one scene, light shining through venetian blinds falls diagonally on a wall as in an Edward Hopper interior.
Later, the Pan American Hotel in Panama has high ceilings, shaded interiors and arched doorways. As ice cubes tinkle, the shadows of swirling fans are seen on the walls.
When sinister goons come after Bogart, poetry takes precedence over realism as a pure ballet of action unfolds. Men in white suits and white hats shoot guns and throw knives against a backdrop of strongly contrasting light and shadow. Bogart (or his stunt man) pirouettes from rooftops like Jackie Chan, escaping attack while taking down the bad guys, all as if in a dance.
Set at the eve of Pearl Harbor, Across the Pacific is a spy film starring: Humphrey Bogart as Richard (Rick) Leland, a disgraced navy captain turned patriot; Mary Astor as Alberta Marlow; and Sydney Greenstreet as Dr. Lorenz, a sociology professor loyal to the Japanese. Each with a different agenda, Marlow, Lorenz and Rick board a Japanese ship from Canada en route to China via the Panama Canal. The ship stops in New York, where Rick gives a military intelligence officer information about Lorenz. It is subsequently detained in Panama.
I preferred the sub-plots to the largely incomprehensible main plot, however.
Nefarious, oily and seemingly invincible, Greenstreet reprises his Maltese Falcon role. Likewise for Bogart who is again stoic, hard-working, and hard-talking. He exemplifies gritty humor when, sickened after too many drinks, he tells Astor, “Close the door when you leave.” “I want to die alone without a friend.” He is a philosopher for the little guy.
The film is sexy. Bogart and Astor waste no time in getting chummy. He often remarks on her scanty attire. When Greenstreet walks in on him searching Astor's belongings Bogart brushes it off by saying, “You’d be surprised how little girls wear these days.” Afterwards, Astor, suffering sunburn, has removed the shoulder straps of her swimsuit and covers her breasts only by clutching the garment over them. When she and Bogart kiss and the scene changes to a later time, the stark dichotomy is revealed between the explicitness of modern films and the understatement of classic ones like this.
The outstanding art direction makes me forget that the filming happens in a single Hollywood studio. When Bogart and Astor disembark in New York, black-coated people move at a New York pace. The pier is cold, hard and straight-edged, exemplified by the diagonally aligned magazines of a news kiosk. In one scene, light shining through venetian blinds falls diagonally on a wall as in an Edward Hopper interior.
Later, the Pan American Hotel in Panama has high ceilings, shaded interiors and arched doorways. As ice cubes tinkle, the shadows of swirling fans are seen on the walls.
When sinister goons come after Bogart, poetry takes precedence over realism as a pure ballet of action unfolds. Men in white suits and white hats shoot guns and throw knives against a backdrop of strongly contrasting light and shadow. Bogart (or his stunt man) pirouettes from rooftops like Jackie Chan, escaping attack while taking down the bad guys, all as if in a dance.
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