Beastly, that's what it is.
W
ill the world's complainers never learn?The Scotsman, July 15, reports on the Tintin in the Congo furore.
DAYS after it was labelled "racist", a Tintin adventure book is flying off the shelves with sales soaring by almost 4,000%.
The Belgian comic strip was condemned by Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) bosses for apparently making black people "look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles".
(link thanks to mr j)
There's something admirable about the British in the way they will help themselves to the thing they were told was forbidden. I'm sure it's not just the British, but I was alarmed watching some folks in a 'dry' borough of Alabama on the tv last night ranting against booze, which they have never tried in the lives apparently. So it's definitely not the Alabamalamians. That was me, I'd be off to give it a few serious licks pronto. I'm reminded of an occasion when I did the very thing. I went in to see a movie for no other reason than that some picketers outside the cinema stopped me to sign a petition against it. I made it clear to them that I was now going to change my plan for the evening and go directly inside to see it entirely because they were telling me not to, and worse than that, trying to enlist me to tell other people likewise. Anyway, it was Borowczyk's La Bete (the Beast, 1975). I can't remember anything about it except a girl being chased through the woods to the strains of a Scarlatti harpsichord sonata. That link is to the Internet Movie Data Base and there's a guy there (EVOL666) remembering it better than me:
"THE BEAST is a film that I find kind of hard to rate. The cinematography itself is quite eye-catching and the sets, costumes and locations are elaborate. The plot is a little convoluted and seems to take it self awfully seriously for what ends up being such an unintentionally hilarious film about a chick boning a rat-bear. A good bit of tits, ass, and hairy 70's French bushes to help make up for the dull first half of the film. I have to honestly say, that if it weren't for the graphic scenes of the BEAST spackling all over the willing maiden, this film would have been a real bore - that is unless you like dull dialog and some graphic horse sex. The plot involves something about a monster in the woods that some French aristocrat chick screwed back in the day. Eventually you see "THE BEAST", which looks like a guy dressed in a giant rat-bear costume with a horse cock attached to it. The scene takes place with the aristocrat woman running around the forest looking for a lost sheep. The sheep ends up dead and the woman gets scared. THE BEAST pops up, rapes the chick and shoots 400 gallons of spunk all over her. Eventually the chick starts to enjoy the beast's "attention" which results in some pretty novel simulated sex scenes, including an unnervingly erotic foot masturbation scene where the woman jerks the beast off with her feet.
Right, I'm off to complain about the obscenities on this blog.
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Gallery hopes Stella Vine's naive portraits and colourful biography will bring in the crowds at first major show. -Maev Kennedy-Guardian-Saturday July 14.
"Jolly good luck to her," David Lee said. "She is a hopeless, hopeless painter - but she's done very well."
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LONDON (Reuters) - Can't remember life before mobiles? Chances are you'll also struggle to recall your home phone number and family birthdays. According to a survey released Friday, the boom in mobiles and portable devices that store reams of personal information has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things
Labels: cranky old bastard.
posted by Eddie Campbell at
00:04
12 Comments:
Actually, now that you're mentioning it, I've had some geckos picketing outside my house to protest about your blog and the unfair light you were trying to shed on their Australian brothers. The protest turned ugly when Chaos (that's one of my cats) pounced on the demonstrators. But he's one of your fans too.
I don't know about being a racist... but that Tintin sure does have a potty mouth.
As they say, viewer discretion is advised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tyCYOjSd8g&mode=related&search=
Here's an article that reacts to the CRE action: Let Tintin the racist speak. I agree with this part:
Tintin in the Congo is a product of its time. It correctly represents attitudes that were prevalent in 1931 (and, in Belgium, well beyond it). Nobody is denying those attitudes were grotesquely offensive, or that literature – and art in general – doesn’t contain an embarrassment of material that causes any brown or black-skinned adult to cringe, or any brown or black-skinned child to feel miserably sad. But that doesn’t mean the sensible thing to do with such material is to wipe it out and pretend it never existed.
Living in a country where a slightest thing that might offend (or reveal the scams of) the government or highly influential people used to be banned (or silenced), I can somehow relate to this Tintin case.
For a great polemic against the "pale white penis people" who want to ban everything that may cause offence, I recommend The Culture of Complaint by that great Australian Robert Hughes.
I've never seen any of Borowczyk's features but Ubuweb has a small collection of his short films which are quite curious and entertaining. Probably more inventive as well since many of these were made before he was given money to make silly porn.
Aaaaaaand I forgot the link...
http://www.ubu.com/film/borowczyk.html
tintin is nothing compared to the frankly bizarre 'nemo in slumberland' by mckay. Here's arguably one of the most beautiful pieces of art available, that now, i should imagine, very rarely reaches the hands of a child.
PS.
the dark inventory is here and i'd love to know what you think of it: http://thedarkinventory.blogspot.com/
your advice was such an encouragement last time.
lewesherriot@hotmail.co.uk
I'm an Alabamian in a wet county, and the dry counties are as exotic to many Birminghamians as they are to Australians. I once read an article about the matter in which a proud dry county resident issued an open (if rhetorical) challenge to explain how alchohol makes one a better person. Speaking as a shy person whose romantic entanglements usually required a little lubrication to help things along, I suspect the speaker wasn't shy.
A friend who had a peculiar small-town Alabama upbringing says that her preacher insisted that when Jesus changed water into wine, it was nonalcoholic wine.
Aaron, You've no doubt already investigated it all you need to, but i keep this handy:
at this link
http://bible.cc/john/2-10.htm
there are twelve parallel translations of the well known passage.
"Every man serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then he serves the poorer wine; "
Doesn't matter how you word it, It lmakes no sense whatsoever unless we're talking about regular alcoholic wine.
some of the commentaries at the bottom of that page are amusing, seeing them trying to wriggle out of it...
"Even adopting the view that it was fermented wine, it was totally unlike the fiery and undiluted drinks sold as wines in saloons, used in many families, offered at hotels and wine parties, and even poured out at communion tables. In the use of the usual wine of Palestine there is not the slightest apology for drinking as a beverage the alcoholic drinks which are the curse of our times."
god bless America.
We Americans are a special breed. Not only do we regularly appropriate Christianity to justify our odd notions, but we do surgery on Christianity to remake it to taste. A deeply Protestant nation, this.
Sacred stories have always been changed, added to, or removed to reflect social and political and moral changes, so that everybody may continue to live with the approval of the gods. Modern faith systems are written down in texts that are held to be absolute and unalterable, making the normal process of adaptation problematic.
I used to book films for a repertory cinema in North London, and we were always very jealous of our main West London counterpart, because every time they showed 'The Last Temptation of Christ' they received a petition against the film from the local branch of the Salvation Army.
By contrast, we showed it loads of times, without so much as a peep of protest, which I thought was rather a shame. In fact, in retrospect, maybe we should have hired fake protesters to picket the cinema?
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