MATEWAN By John Sayles – A masterpiece made in 1987 that is absolutely relevant in 2020

 

‘You think this man is the enemy? Huh? This is a worker! Any union keeps this man out ain’t a union, it’s a goddam club! They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world – them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy.’

-MATEWAN [2 syllables, pronounced MATE(as in your spouse)- WAN (as in WAND)]

 

Click on the above image to purchase.

 

People use words like masterpiece and great, and sometimes the true weight of what you may be getting across may be lost.

Let me therefore explain MATEWAN to you thusly, I just finished watching the film yesterday. And I’m watching and listening to the, newly cut 2019 Criterion interviews today. (quick aside, i really appreciate that criterion went to the expense of doing new interviews and features for this film, which is something i am critical of them not doing, in other films. These 2019 featurettes are really— stunning, and on top of the greatness of the film, make the blu-ray a must own purchase.)

 

This morning I watched the news of Resident Trump dressing up essentially unidentified strike breakers and thugs, and letting them loose in Portland Oregon, and calling it the law.

 

“If you have vacation benefits, if you have unemployment benefits, worker’s compensation— these things weren’t given to you; they were fought for by people throughout this country. And i’m passionate about the fact that people have actually made an effort to fight for other people’s rights.”

—Karen VuRanch, THEM THAT WORK (2004) Documentary/featurette on the Matewan Massacre

 

Watching MATEWAN, a stunningly beautiful film, referencing a caustic bit of American history,  from exactly 100 years ago, gives me, and I think it will give you, one of the greatest gifts art can can give— perspective. Perspective on the mistakes we have made, and the tyranny we have allowed.

And perspective helps us deal with the present, without ignorance, and if not without fear, without hopelessness. Because we can see others have seen these days of Gethsemane, and endured it, triumphed over it.

You can go many days of your life without gaining that type of perspective, that barest hint of —- grace. Looking at the world, many people go their whole life without finding the type of perspective, that glimpse of grace— that MATEWAN hints at.

For $30 to $40, Criterion’s MATEWAN blu-ray is one of the best purchases you can make. And ultimately, what it has left me with, like the best of true art, is priceless.

 

 

 

” The way she poured herself into her song— it can make a doubting man religious.”

—James Earl Jones on Hazel Dickens’ song in the film

New Zealand Attack/Tragedy

First my thoughts and hopes go out to the victims of this cowardly, reprehensible action.

To those who committed it, to those who enabled it, to those like our Resident in Chief who are making excuses for it… you are as guilty as the ones who pulled the trigger.

See, this blind yet supportive eye our resident in chief (and too many who voted for him) would turn toward intolerance, and step to power on the backs of stupidity, ignorance, greed and hate… this is the outcome of such a policy of hate. This is your ‘wall’ made manifest.

And in an increasingly connected global economy and global thought space, stupidity spreads. Especially when supported by fools in power.

America, has shown the world how to do mass murders of its own citizens by its own citizens, a genocidal and suicidal nation, that is infecting the rest of the world. The lack of laws to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of the deranged, and the addled, and the damned. A lack of laws to hold the firearm manufacturers and the estate of the culprit fiscally responsible for the lives and bodies destroyed, by a wanton act of cowardice.

America, steered by madmen, shows the rest of the world how to go mad.

The answer?

The answer to blood?

The answer to horror?

The answer to deranged madmen calling for insane walls rather than real gun control?

The answer to too many of you who actually voted for such lunacy?

The answer is simple.

The answer is to admit you have been wrong.

Wrong as an American, or a Brit, or a New Zealander or a South African.

Wrong as a Democrat.

Wrong as a Republican.

Wrong as someone who believes in hate.

Wrong as someone who believes in love.

Wrong as a Christian.

Wrong as a Muslim.

Wrong as a Jew.

Wrong as a Buddhist.

Wrong as a Nazi.

You have to question everything you believe is right, and everything you believe is wrong, and only then can you see clearly.

Because a fool and a zealot do not question.

And we live in a world of fools and zealots, who do not challenge the absolute good and the absolute evil they have mistaken for the world.

Monologues, Alan Moore said.

Monologues we have mistaken for the world.

A man walked into a holy place, and destroyed lives, for a monologue he had mistaken for the world.

For a fiction, a fabrication, that with but a moments thought to question, the absolutes of his insane plan, people dead would now be alive, and families broken would be whole.

We all want to be on the side of the angels.

Whatever angels we bend our knee to.

But the magic of the world, is it is constantly changing. And every day, every single day, we have to get up, and ask ourselves, are we good men, or bad ones. And every single day, the answer to that question, should be in doubt.

We should never wake up assuming we are on the side of the angels. Because that is the quickest way… to do the devils work.

The man who walked into that Mosque in New Zealand was absolute in his conviction, and that is what damned him. And that is what will damn us all.

Absolutes whether the quest for a wall, or the quest for lives, absolutes… fail. They fail, especially when the price is paid not by you, but by some one else.

I end where I begin.

My thoughts go out to the victims of the latest man, the latest system, of absolutes. You want to really make a difference, really stop these massacres? This is what you do.

If you are a staunch supporter of NRA, question it. If you are a staunch opponent of NRA, question it. Question your absolutes, honestly, because I believe reason, all effing evidence to the contrary, I believe reason ultimately wins.

I believe a man on a path of hate or a man on a path of love, can be the same horrible man, for lack of questioning.

The humility of doubt can save their souls. Can define their souls. Accepting nothing as absolute.

Wake up every morning asking yourself if you are a good person or a bad one, and answering it honestly. And that is how you stay out of… true evil. Avoiding Absolutism.

I’m not preaching anything to you, that I don’t do myself.

Everyday I wake up, I ask myself if I am a good man or a bad one, and the act of questioning, and the striving to be a better man, is a great way to stop from, gleefully, being… the worst of men.

That’s all I have right now.

Be well.

Colorado and the News and Monsters

“The Quest is the Quest.”
DR. WHO: UNDERWORLD

Colorado.

I’ll be brief, as the media has flapped their lips much, and as always said little. Nothing of use. And I have spoken before on Americans massacring Americans. The unchecked carnage and irrationality, of a population that cheers the death of people and nations it does not know, coming home to roost.

Machine men
with Machine minds
Killing in these Machine times

I was traveling when the news of Colorado intruded.

That’s the only word for it.

The 24 hour news machine/propaganda agenda… lives nowhere as well, as in places we go to… travel away. Lives nowhere as completely as plane, train and bus stations. Almost like an oft repeated mantra of programming to blunt any true travel, a mantra of… ‘this be the world… forever…there is no escape’.

Something oppressive about the 24 hour news cycle, I have always found.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be informed of tragedies such as Colorado (What a beset state), and immediately informed.

What I am saying is the media seems to want to inform us of nothing else. In a day when pilots averted plane crashes, and good Samaritans saved hikers, and countries at war found moments of peace, none of that good news rated even a footnote.

I’m saying the news is not the world, it is selective showcasing of the world, and perhaps if that selection sought to gleefully make stars of something beyond tragedy and mass murder, there would be less sad, pathetic young men, seeking to make their mark with the media… by giving it what it wants.

Murder.

I’m saying I listened to reporters almost salivating over every detail of a dozen dead and dozens more maimed and scarred and changed for life.

And I did not hear the victims in all that endless parade of lipsticked Fox whores and well quaffed CNN pimps, putting on their sincere faces as they sought to poke wounds for blood and wring eyes to elicit tears. I did not hear the victims at all. I heard ghouls, almost vibrating with the joy of a juicy, salacious story.

Vibrating with the joy of a new boogie man and court case to make their names with. Perhaps book deals and made for TV movies for all involved.

I am saying one man chose to change many lives, do not let him change any more. Do not give him… the stage. And reasons? I do not care of reasons. Reasons do not raise the dead, or replace eyes or limbs or livers. I do not care the reason people cross the line, it is enough that they cross the line.

And that they must answer for it, in such a manner as to make the next man see naught but misery in the repetition.

And the talk of insanity is and has always been an invalid one. All crime is insanity, so it is never a case of innocent by reason of insanity, it should always be a case of guilty by reason of insanity.

And in no way should monsters profit from their crime.

No book deals, no interviews, no made for tv offers. Make it illegal to profit from a massacre, whether you are the perpetrator, or a tv station, or a movie studio.

Sure you can write or create a documentary etc, but any profits go into a fund for the victims and their families. NO one profits from a massacre, least of all the perpetrator, becomes the new law of the land.

His name is removed, is vilified, is lessened, his likeness done away with, and everything he was reduced to a bland label such as: ‘”pathetic impotent eunuch BH” stands trial for his crimes.’

And throughout history, that is the name and the manner of man that shall be remembered.

Do that, and then see how many will seek that path for glory!

We must stop glamourizing mass murderers, those who take the easy road to their media promised minutes of fame and infamy. Because to continue to glorify and profit from such massacres is to be complicit in the crime, and worse to be complicit in future crimes, by continuing to romanticize a society of monsters.

All that went through my head in the 15 minutes total, over the course of a weekend that I could stomach to listen to the news whores and pimps, in their glory. And to my horror I found them, all the reporters, far more sickening than the man who walked into a theater… to get their attention.

America will not have ground to stand on with any other country, in judging their atrocities, till this country first owns up and manages our own boiling over evils.

I wish for those affected, an end to the monster that caused their pain, but more than that, I wish an end to the monster-makers… which our news media is no little part of.

Here endeth the Lesson.

MOVIE TRAILER OF THE DAY: GHOUL MASSACRE

Just saw the trailer for something called ZOMBIE MASSACRE.

I don’t like Ghoul movies (If they eat people, and they are rotting they are not EFFING ZOMBIES! THEY ARE GHOULS!!! Get it right!! Pet Peeve. Sorry.)

And I don’t care for any of the extreme films I’ve heard of from Uwe Boll (woman tied to a chair and hit in the face with a hammer on camera. Using real life Ugandan atrocities to sell as entertainment, etc. He’s too close to a snuff film director for my liking. I like my horror less gory, less irresponsible).

However the actual director-writer team on this film is not Uwe Boll, but an Italian writing/directing team of Luca Boni, Marco Ristori. A neophyte team they have only one film to their credit, something called EATERS, another ghoul pic, that has lukewarm to poor reviews.

So all that, does not endear me to see this latest flick. And it’s a Ghoul flick, so even good Ghoul flicks are not my thing.

That said I think the trailer is tremendous. Sight unseen I’m willing to go on the line, and say the best thing about the film will probably be this brief trailer. Especially for me, that has only about 2 minutes worth of patience for the premise of any ghoul flick, which generally has nothing creative to say outside of 2 minutes.

So no intention of seeing this flick, but the trailer… worth a look here!