movie mythology

I was a big fan of Northern Exposure It was really something different and thoughtful for tv when it came out.  Probably too thoughtful for TV.  I thought you meant the novelist Graham Greene, but I guess there was an actor by that name.  There was some actor, kind of a big guy who played the rich guy in town and was kind of a bully.  He went on to be in other shows, but the rest of them that was the high point of their careers.  Strange how that happens.

People are already looking back at the movies of the past and trying to figure out what they say about the viewers.  The trouble is that movies not only reflect society, but they also influence society, like those gangsters who started acting the way they were portrayed in movies, and even my own people, the hippies, some of them acted the way they were portrayed in the media.  Somehow the media portrayal begins to seem more right than what actually happens.

The thing about movies and tv is they cost a lot of money to make so the money people have their finger in the pie and they want to be sure nobody is offended so they follow the formula of good guy wins and bad guy loses and the good guy is good through and through and the bad guy is bad through and through.  Whereas some guy just telling a story on a log he can say whatever he thinks will make it a better story.

That's why you have something like the Grimm fairy tales which were originally pretty grim, but then they were prettified for us, and then Disney came along and prettified them even more to make his blockbuster cartoons.

Let me say this about the piss Christ.  I do not like conceptual art, and there are some who think that all art should be shocking, and i am not in their crew.  I personally didn't like the piss Christ at all.  But those who love conceptual, shocking, art loved it.  The National Endowment for the arts had tons of money at the time.  Most of that went for things like folk art and cornball art, stuff that most people love.  We all pay taxes even folks who would like something like the piss Christ, so I guess we can spend a little of their tax money to give them what they want.  If you don't like it, don't look at it.

I can sympathize with not wanting the government to  control the arts by funding them, but on the other hand if it didn't we would have less art, and I like art.

I heard that Mad King Ludwig bankrupted his country by building all those damn castles.  But the people that were there are all dead and gone, but those castles remain, and I'll wager they bring in a pretty tourist penny.

When I was speaking of the Iranis being afraid of us, I was speaking of the middle class.  The peasants are generally for killing all their enemies, and sometimes so is the gov, especially when that guy whose name we won't have to pronounce anymore was top gun, and the nice middle class people felt caught between them and the drunk uncle with the gun collection.  We thoughty people of the great satan have that same problem with guys like Trump and his minions wanting war with Iran, but although Iran is a drunk uncle he has a much smaller gun collection so we really don't need to fear him as much.

Of course I favor cosmopolitan, because among other things it makes for much better restaurants, but I am out of time to discuss anything deeper at this moment.

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