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Arts & Entertainment

Reason 1 to vote against Mitt: This mutha’ f##&r plagiarised “Clear Eyes. Full Heart. Can’t Lose.” from Coach Taylor

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This cuts across all humanity as it concerns awful phrase stealin’ Mitt Romney and one of my favorite TV Shows of all time: Friday Night Lights. Well at least filmmaker Peter Berg , the cousin of former Democrat Buzz Bissinger, knows Mitt Romney is a snake!

In a letter to the Romney campaign sent Friday and obtained exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter, Berg calls the use of “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” an act of stealing. “Your politics and campaign are clearly not aligned with the themes we portrayed in our series,” Berg writes in the letter. “The only relevant comparison that I see between your campaign and Friday Night Lights is in the character of Buddy Garrity — who turned his back on American car manufacturers selling imported cars from Japan.”

BOOM! Vice President Joe Biden ain’t the only one gettin’ loose on Romney/Ryan!

Mitt Romney is the guy who sent coach Taylor to the East Dillon Lions and then took his spoiled kid and left the minute East Dillon started kicking Dillon Panther ass.

I can hear a tumblr about this right now, but I can’t wait for this meme to materialize. Instead, after listening to Coach Taylor, I’m going to cure a disease, or save people in a fire or a cat in a tree or go pick up my laundry and go out and get lit. Probably the last thing, but if I had to anything on that list, I could do it…you know why? “Cle…” …never mind.

Laundered History

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It may be that expect better of him or that I may be being sucked in by a (hopefully tongue in cheek) troll article, but whatever… Marc Lamont Hill’s 15 most overrated white people is supposed to be some sort of rebuttal to the unquestioningly awful elevation of a murderous, self aggrandized charaltan, European explorer, slave trader, colonizer and royal private contracter Christopher Columbus, who has been refashioned into an American icon. Columbus Day is a holiday based on a staggering array of myths about an actual human being, but it’s a fraud used to manufacture the romantic archetype of the virtuous colonizer in the brutal times that led to the founding of European colonies in America. I don’t see how making a list of “overrated white people” serves the purpose of establishing a more accurate historical perspective of Christopher Columbus or establishing a better perspective on the other 15 white people Hill talks about.

Michael Clarke Duncan (b. 1957 – d. 2012)

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dead of a heart attack at 54.

Born in Chicago in 1957, Duncan was raised by a single mother whose resistance to his playing football led to his deciding he wanted to become an actor. But when his mother became ill, he dropped out of college, Alcorn State University, and worked as a ditch digger and bouncer to support her. By his mid-20s, he was in Los Angeles, where he looked for acting parts and became a bodyguard for Will Smith, Jamie Foxx and other stars. The murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G., for whom Duncan had been hired to protect before switching assignments, led him to quit his job and pursue acting full-time.

source: Actor Michael Clarke Duncan Dies at 54 – NYTimes.com.

Kind of a dude you always rooted for.

Made In America: Public Money, Private profits

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Concerts are cool and all, and the Ben Franklin Parkway here in Philadelphia is fantastic place for all types of events. But I don’t like that we can’t even be given a ballpark for the cost of the Made In America Music Festival:

This week at a City Hall news conference, Mayor Nutter declined to say how much the festival would cost. He said that the promoters would bear most of the costs and that the overall benefits to the city would be great.

It shouldn’t take an exorbitant amount of public money to allow Jay-Z to host a personally curated music festival sponsored by Budweiser and promoted by Live Nation:

In justifying the public investment, the mayor alluded to the “goodwill” that the city will get, as well as the bump in ancillary businesses and revenue from 50,000 concert-goers coming into the city.
[…] Also, we’d like to remind the mayor that just two short years ago, he was battling with City Council members, including Maria Quinones Sanchez, over whether the city should pick up the security and crowd-control costs for community festivals and ethnic parades. At that time, Nutter said the city couldn’t underwrite privately run events when it was cutting services. That’s why he vetoed the bill, which Council then overrode.

It shouldn’t cost tax payers money to throw a concert that most can’t afford to attend. In the aftermath, I’m not worried about tallying negative effects to “safety” in the surrounding neighborhood, the high attendance price (75 for one day, 125 for two days) combined with the gated layout and “no re entry” policy reduced safety issues for the surrounding neighborhood. Not saying there isn’t some public cost, but broadcast rights or some other profits attached to scale should be negotiated to offset cost. Maybe they are. Just saying.

Sherman Hemsley (b. 1938 – d. 2012)

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When I heard that Philadelphia native, Air Force Veteran and famous Emmy award nominated TV Actor Sherman Hemsley died, I thought of one of my favorite episodes of the Jeffersons “Change of a Dollar” (1983) . Its a narrated episode (a la Twin Peaks or Desperate Housewives) except the narrator is a dead president: Jefferson’s Cleaners first dollar of revenue. It fits this description of the Jefferson’s from The Onion AV Club:

But while the show focused plenty on satirically exploring whatever social malady was being tossed around in the writers’ room that week, over time the sharp comedic interplay between the actors—particularly the darts lobbed between Hemsley and Marla Gibbs’ withering maid Florence—shaped the show into a more farcical and character-driven affair, with Hemsley seamlessly shifting from jerk to underdog to sympathetic, loving family man, often within the same episode.

source: R.I.P. Sherman Hemsley | TV | Newswire | The A.V. Club.

The episode starts with the Jeffersons and the Willises celebrating an award ceremony where Tom Willis will be mentioned for helping to discover a now successful writer who’s won an award named “the shaft”. George tears down his effete neighbor Tom on the night of his big award on the way out while promising to make the award ceremony on time and then rushes all the way from the east side to his original Queens store to “check out everything”.
Then the episode flashes back to the opening day of the store. While setting up wine and American Cheese wrapped singles for their opening day, George links his hopes and dreams for his family to his new business:
George: “I wanna do it for Lionel, I wanna send Lionel to college so he don’t have to scrape like we do! and you know what I’m gonna do for you Weezie? I’ma buy furs, i’ma buy diamonds, I’m a buy you expensive cars…”
Weezie: “oh george, you don’t have to do that!”
George: “Okay, but remember I offered!”
George actually does go on to promise Weezie a maid and a “deluxe apartment in the sky” and then he makes his wife half owner of his business. George wants to suceed so his family can do better than him and better in the future. Lionel in college, Weezie being served instead of serving others. We see why George makes Weezie part owner: whenever he is discouraged by their slow start, he is shored up by Weezie telling him that he will succeed. He knows he is there with her and she’s been there through and through, his word and dedication being enough.
After pitching Jefferson Cleaners to anyone who listens, the first customer Mrs. Colby arrives.
She is intent on giving new businesses a shot.
Mrs. Colby: “Light on the starch, blouse in a box. You do a good job for me and I’ll tell all my friends about you”
George: “Well Mrs. Colby, I hope your very popular.”
Really Mrs. Colby is recognizing the honest effort of another human being. She’s rewarding effort and risk whereas everyone else who has walked by Jefferson’s cleaner was to busy to consider them.
15 years later, Mrs. Colby returns as she has every Thursday since she gave Jefferson’s Cleaners a chance, but instead of bright and early, she comes under the cover of night, after close, obviously indigent. Jefferson welcomes Mrs. Colby into the store and has her clothes ready for her to pick up and treats her like the same Mrs. Colby for a moment every Thursday. He reciprocates Mrs. Colby’s dignity just like, years early, she afforded a hungry new businessman the same when everyone else pretended they didn’t exist.

Above all we well remember that walk: a bouncing, shoulders-back, cuffs-shooting, South Philadelphia strut: “We used to practice these walks when I was growing up,” he recalled. It was a kind of armor and an expression of attitude, he said, as if to say, “Yeah, it’s me.”

Hemsley and Isabel Sanford (Weezie) made the Jeffersons iconic characters who were culturally black as ever but stronger characters every episode so that even a heavy handed episode like this one was worth more than the story it told. But some of the best George Jefferson appearances were from “All in the Family” where Bunker and Jefferson’s shared love of bigotry and insults left them living relics of the way things used to be. The best example of Bunker and Jefferson’s prejudice is “Lionel’s engagement Party (1974)”:

George: Bunker, what is this world coming to?
Archie: Beats me Jefferson. All I got to say is: here’s to yesterday.