You Draw The Wrong Lesson From the Mockery of a Teen Lady Gaga

Posted on February 26th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

I just found out a few minutes ago that when Stefani Germanotti was in college, and already performing at places like piano bars, a very small group of classmates created a Facebook page dedicated to the title proposition, “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.”

Screen captures exist, but I am not going to share them.

The group never had more than twelve members, but while it was up the postings included snaps of her in performance with a disbelieving, “Who the hell does she think she is?”, and memorably, a proud photo of one of her distributed fliers, defaced with bootprints and then placed back on the bulletin board it had come from.

Stefani Germanotta would come to be known as Lady Gaga.

And here’s the goddamned thing that’s most fucked-up about this.

No matter how commendable a human being you are, you just thought some variation of, “Wow! They messed with the wrong person!”

The wrong person.

As if this would have been better had retrospect revealed her to have been a mildly talented singer who never would catch all the breaks, destined to give up on trying to make a go of it, and ultimately found working as dental hygienist.

Folks, I do not occupy the tier in fiction that Lady Gaga does in music.(Maybe two people at a time do.) But I also had people who delighted in predicting failure, and not because I was an unpolished, uneven talent whose approach to some pretty glaring limitations was to defy them. Indeed, those voices were pretty much split down the middle between people who had read my work in class or elsewhere and had the raw data on hand, and those who knew I wanted to write and thought it hilarious to throw mud on my ambitions. I heard it, over the years, from any number of people who came across that information who would only be seen in close proximity with a book if one bloody fell on them.

It’s a sick human thing, to predict failure and to do it with relish. And in the years that follow, the cruel idiocy of that behavior is only remembered when the target becomes a J.K. Rowling or a Lady Gaga; not when one goes on to a less grandiose destiny like selling a few short stories to small press magazines, or sighing with fondness at the memory of the days when you used to sing for tips, in smoky clubs.

I promise you, the mockers are ahead on points. Most teen girls who wanna be singers, and are mocked by peers who snot, “Who the hell does she think he is?” don’t become Lady Gaga. Most people who write in coffee shops do not become J.K. Rowling. That kind of thing cannot happen to many people.

“They messed with the wrong person” is absolutely the wrong lesson, here.

The lesson should be that if you find out somebody you know has anything at all special going on, you’re a piece of crap if your response is anything but, “Wow! Good for her!”

Tags: Assholes, J.K. Rowling, Lady Gaga, Life Wisdom | Category Life Wisdom

That Racist Old John Wayne Interview Is No Fresh Discovery

Posted on February 20th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

The most ludicrous thing about all the social media outrage at the recently rediscovered John Wayne interview is the assumption promoted by rhetoric that this is some buried obscurity that only recently came to light.

Folks, that interview was notorious THEN.

The Playboy Interviews had a huge footprint in general. They didn’t just profile show-business celebrities but also world leaders, activists, politicians on both sides of the aisle; they could make or break people. I have two volumes on my shelves, and by God, they are fine documents of the cultural landscape of mid-century. Martin Luther King was one of them. So were multiple Presidential candidates.

And one of the most transformative was John Wayne’s. At the time of the interview, he was a declining old Hollywood lion enjoying the last of his successes while the kind of movies he’d made all his life were on their way out. Politically, he was a dinosaur, and in the last few years of his life, people pointed at that interview, at the things he said then, and said, look, he’s a racist, he’s a sexist, he’s so stupid he doesn’t understand the plots of his own movies, he’s so out of touch you can almost feel sorry for him then. His PLAYBOY interview was trotted out as reason to throw his collected work on the trash heap then.

Hell, you didn’t have to go far in the same collected volumes to find other celebrated people talking about what a problem he was. I recall Ed Asner talking about what an anti-Semitic prick he found Wayne to be, Kirk Douglas rolling his eyes at an anecdote about Wayne contacting him after he made the Van Gogh biopic LUST FOR LIFE, to advise him that he was a he-man movie star and should not be making sensitive portraits of “some fag.”

John Wayne was *understood* to be a bigoted old embarrassment, at about that time. I remember John Wayne the man as the painfully thin, visibly exhausted and confused old codger trotted out at the Oscars to read a list of current nominees from a Hollywood he no longer understood. I remember him puzzling out names he’d never heard of, at one point naming “Warner Beatty.” He was dead in months.

It was profoundly out of touch to say you liked John Wayne movies, for a while. It was by the time the leftist folksinger Phil Ochs stood on stage and declared his love for them even while averring in the next breath that the man had not been all that bright.

Don’t even get me started on the man’s range as actor, which was effective enough only within the very narrow category of roles he could be plugged into. This, too, people knew then. None of this was a secret.

If you want to know why all this blew over and why his movies remain a part of our shared cultural landscape, it is because he was so big that the biggest talents wanted to work with him, and because their skills went to crafting stories that could make him look good. When you have John Ford and Howard Hawks on your side, hiring people like Leigh Brackett, and casting co-stars like Henry Fonda and James Stewart, the *work* lasts even if you’re the most objectionable part of it.

Tags: Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Race | Category Movies

On Being the Smartest, Most Talented Genius Ever

Posted on February 11th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Donald Trump is a man who only speaks of himself, and his circumstances, in superlatives.

Nobody knows more about deal-making that him. Nobody knows more about American history than him. Nobody understands military strategy better than him. The economy has never been as good as under him. No President has ever been more on top of things than him. He is less racist than any President, ever. Relations between the races are better under him than under him. Nobody had an inauguration crowd bigger than his. He is being harassed by Congress, more than any President, ever.

It is always “the most, the biggest, the best, the worst,” depending on what self-flatters.

This is, I learned before him, the standard behavior of people who know precisely nothing. For them, things are always more like they are now than they have ever been now, and this is honestly impervious to subsequent provision of facts. They will tell you that New York City currently has the highest murder rate ever, and you can tell them that, actually, it peaked in the early 1980s and that the numbers have been heading downward ever since, and they will simply go to the response preferred by the ignorant, the “All I Know.” “All I Know is, it’s never been as bad as it is now.” A simple restatement of the thesis, documenting that data bounced off the force fields and refused to enter.

Donald Trump is the President of the people with force fields protecting them from data.

And I am thinking of this in particular because of his current statement that he works longer hours than any President, ever; a claim that I am sure he makes without any consultation of a history textbook.

Richard Nixon was so proud of the hours worked that, even as the wolves started circling, he defensively invoked him in his speech. “I work 12 to 14 hours a day for the American People!” he protested, and the thing is, this was wholly believable; this was a guy who, urged to take a photo op on the beach, didn’t change out of his suit or find some appropriate shoes. Carter was just as inexhaustible, and was such a detail man that he ludicrously took out some time from his Presidency to draw up a schedule in a grid, that his staffers could use for reservations on the White House tennis courts. In neither case is this the same thing as being able to use what time they had, always, to make good decisions — and you can count FDR among those who almost always knocked off in time for happy hour — but at bare minimum, they showed up for the job.

Trump, who works a couple of hours a day carving up the nation and spends the rest of his time feeding his rage with Fox News and Twitter, honestly does think, and thinks only because he prefers to think, that he works longer hours than any President ever. He knows it because he wants to think it, and that is the source of all his knowledge, his gut.

But then he also thinks he’s not a racist, that he’s a self-made man, and that he’s a genius.

Tags: Assholes, Donald Trump, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Politics, Richard Nixon | Category Politics