"I made the list of top 5 Hitlers of all time - real Hitler's not even on the list!"

As much as I find this new season of UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT overly broad, the bit where Titus earns the wrath of a bunch of bloggers has really rung true as of late.

First, io9 issued the breathless "Reminder: Rudyard Kipling was a racist f*** and the JUNGLE BOOK is Imperialist Garbage", written with the zeal and incompetence of a fourteen year old who just discovered Howard Zinn. I'm not really interested in arguing with this piece, other than to point out that any halfway decent point gestured at in the article was already made, in a more coherent and readable manner, by George Orwell, a man whose leftist bonafides and direct knowledge of the workings of imperialism are unimpeachable. At the very least, it is hilarious to read Bombast McGawker going into hysterics over "lesser breeds without the Law" as coded to represent the White Man's Burden over other continents, where Orwell points out that it was probably a dig at the Germans.

But let it not be said that Slate, with its delusions of grandeur evidenced by a paywall, is afraid to sally forth into the fray that Gawker Media has started with a mostly unmourned dead author in the public domain. "Not only was Kipling racist," Katy Waldman must argue, "but so was Walt Disney!" Which is probably true, but Waldman then picks the hill she wishes to die on.

But as far as pure and explicit racism goes, Kipling’s novel scores lower than Disney’s 1967 movie, which introduced a great ape called King Louie (after Louie Armstrong) who sang minstrel songs about his desire to get civilized.

*crickets sound*

I might have only been born in the mid-80s, but I do still remember a time when writers, before turning in an article, had to actually do some research. Waldman, who is apparently Slate's "words" correspondent, whatever that even means, has probably watched the 1967 animated Jungle Book at some point, but that appears to be where her knowledge and research ended.

Now, Disney and his studio certainly deserve criticism. But if you are going to attack Disney on racism, at least pick a time when he and the studio were intentionally racist. Because Waldman didn't bother to do any research.

King Louie in Disney's 1967 Jungle Book is voiced by Louis Prima. Louis Prima was an Italian-American band leader and singer who grew up in New Orleans. He is the one who sings "I Wanna Be Like You", which is not a minstrel song, but a swing/jazz song. Which is the type of music Louis Prima played.


A quick visit to Wikipedia's entry on The Jungle Book shows that Prima was suggested for the part early on. And the book the Wikipedia entry cites (accessible here) mentions that Prima brought down his entire band for his audition, and performed their regular Vegas act. Key point: "Some of the antics of Prima and his crew also found their way into the film".

So the 1967 King Louie was not meant to be a caricature of African-Americans. His image, attitude and mannerisms were inspired by the man who voiced him, a pop-culture icon, who was an Italian-American (!). If this can somehow be construed as racist, then the word has lost all meaning. Instead, this is an example of lazy research. A high school freshman writing an article on Disney's The Jungle Book using Wikipedia would have turned in a more accurate paper with better sources than Slate's own 'words" correspondent.

I e-mailed Ms. Waldman about this error yesterday, and the article has yet to be corrected. Slate, a site that posts clickbait about how Hamilton, a musical where the Founding Fathers engage in rap battles has *gasp* indulged in artistic license, apparently has lower standards for its own content than a Broadway rap musical. Why anyone would even pay for this elephant dung Slate calls journalism is beyond me.

Self-promotion time: Sketch comedy!

So some friends of mine (the amazingly talented Katie Hall & her fiancee Travis Goodman) shot a sketch I wrote for them. I've worked with Katie before through my college's alumni association, and she & Travis did a good job bringing this to life.


Check it out on Youtube!

Oh, and stay tuned after the credits for some hilarious out-takes.

What I learned from... watching END OF WATCH

So, in the interest of actually putting things on my blog, despite the fact that I'm not really in the place for major thoughtpieces right now, I'm going to try a new thing.

I've got mixed feelings about the screenwriting site Scriptshadow on various levels, ranging from the aesthetic to the ethical. But one thing I have found interesting is the occasion feature the site does where they list 10 things they learned from a certain film from a writing perspective. So I'm going to go through a couple of movies I saw recently and talk about what I learned from them. Not going to be 10 things, not even going to review the movie. Just think of it as a series of quick thoughts on what techniques worked and which ones didn't.

END OF WATCH (2012, David Ayers)

Tip 1: Supporting characters need to have a reason to exist.

Jake Gyllenhaal & Michael Pena's significant others barely get any screentime and they don't have a character arc of their own. But yet they occupy a lot of time and space in the movie relative to their function. What do they establish that Gyllenhaal & Pena's conversations & squad-car time do not already establish?

Tip 2: For big emotional moments, less is more.

At the end of the movie (SPOILERS), a main character gets up at someone's funeral to give the eulogy. Normally, you'd think a writer would go for broke on this. But Ayers just has the character choke out, "he was my brother" and then break down. It's a very strong choice because the character has been established as macho & intelligent & talkative. So this gives us an idea of how much the character has been hurt by this death.

Tip 3: Know when to end.

Unfortunately, Ayers decided to end the movie with a flashback to a typical "day in the life" moment. It doesn't give us anything new, emotionally or information-wise. In fact, by cutting back, it undermines the genuine emotion the previous scene had brought up.

Self-Promotion: WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN

So, some of you devoted readers (all...2 of you) might remember me nattering on about a short film I wrote and co-produced a while back called WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN.

Well, now that the festival submissions are all over, it's finally available on the internet for everyone to see!

It's a satire on male privilege, self-obsessed male writers, and the "bro-mance". 

Check it out here on Vimeo!

Department of new ventures....

So I've started a tumblr blog as an offshoot to the Mr. K enterprise.

The tumblr blog will be more of a place for flash fiction and occasionally snarky images, whereas this site will remain devoted mostly to criticism, thought pieces and reviews.

Check out the tumblr now for the beginning of a continuing series called "A Tomb for Hugo Gernsback."

A little hint to you blog-fans: this first series of short flash fiction is inspired by Borges, Bolano and Danilo Kis.

WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN: Rare self-promotion post...

Most of you might know me as that nerdy guy who posts snarky things about science fiction or old movies. But I also write other things that I don't post on the blog.

One such thing is a script for a short film called Women and Men and Women.

It started life as a satire on all those infuriating plays about how white male artists have such a hard time finding a girl who understands how hard they have it, man. It was performed as a staged-reading at Stage Left in Chicago and when I got out to LA, some friends suggested I try to turn it into a screenplay.

Well, now, a mix of friends from college and new friends are trying to turn it into a self-produced short film. And we're trying to raise a small amount of money to help us put it together. 

A short promo video (showcasing other people saying my words) and some information about what your donation is going to can be found here.

Even if you don't actually want to donate any money, I'd appreciate it if you'd just view the video. I think  it's pretty funny, and some pretty funny people are working on it.

But we're not looking to get paid, we're just looking for some help with some of the very real production costs you face even when you make a very simple and small film.

Thanks for your attention and I promise that I won't turn this all into all self-promotion, all the time.

Words for writers to live by...

Danilo Kis' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a sad and moving short story collection that recounts various Soviet-era apparatchiks, traitors, criminals and dissidents, ends with the tongue-in-cheek "The Short Biography of A.A. Darmolatov". The true meaning of this piece, about a minor poet who survives years of Soviet rule without getting sent to a work camp or put on trial, only emerges at the end with this postscript:

He remains a medical phenomenon in Russian literature: Darmolatov's case was entered in all the latest pathology textbooks. A photograph of his scrotum, the size of the biggest collective farm pumpkin, is also reprinted in foreign medical books, wherever elephantiasis (elephantiasis nostras) is mentioned, and as a moral for writers that to write one must have more than big balls.

I couldn't agree more...

From page 24 of Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

... Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on something. Every time I got to Chicago I come away with scars.

I'm doing well these days, but that sums up a lot of how I feel about my time in Chicago. And that's why I'm moving elsewhere at the end of the summer.

Cleaning out backlog of articles to read...

"We often have a way that we think we’re going to correct ourselves in the work that leads us to deny the talent we’re assigned or the subjects we’re assigned or the style we’re assigned. That’s certainly been true for me and I often see it with young writers"

from an interview with Mary Karr.

Earlier in the interview, she talks about how George Saunders initially was trying to be Raymond Carver, until his friends convinced him that the weird stuff was what he should be writing.

Quote of the week

"She was silent and I felt for the first time that she was unhappy. This was a revelation to me. I knew that grown-up people were unhappy - when a relation died, for instance, or went bankrupt. At such times they were sure to be unhappy: they had no option: it was the rule, like mourning after a death, like a black margin round the writing paper. (My mother still used it for my father.) They were unhappy to order. But that they should be unhappy in the way that I was, sometimes, because something in my private life, to which perhaps I couldn't give a name, had gone wrong - that hadn't occurred to me." The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley