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I bought this OLD BOOK at an estate sale...

The Clansman (the book and play upon which The Birth of a Nation is based).

I didn't know what it was about.... but being a 59-yr black woman.. I was simply pulled to explore this antique item! so.... I paid a dollar $$ or so for it....  After I watched Django this weekend.... I read in the ROOT, about Quentin Tarantino's Q&A session.....

And if you ever tried to read The Clansman [the book and play upon which The Birth of a Nation is based], it really can only stand next to Mein Kampf when it comes to just its ugly imagery.

Mein Kampf in English means "My Struggle". It's the title of Hitler's book, which he wrote while he was incarcerated for trying to over throw the German government in 1923.

Learning about Thomas DIxon!

Quinton Tarentino said . . .  THE BIRTH OF A NATION ......it gave rebirth to the Klan and all the blood that that was spilled throughout -- until the early '60s, practically. I think that both Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr. and D.W. Griffith, if they were held by Nuremberg Laws, they would be guilty of war crimes for making that movie because of what they created there.

American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon [Hardcover]

Born:January 11, 1864 in Shelby, North Carolina, USA

Died:April 3, 1946 (age 82) in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

Thomas Dixon has a notorious reputation as the writer of the source material for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and controversial 1915 feature film The Birth of a Nation. Perhaps unfairly, Dixon has been branded an arch-conservative and a racist obsessed with what he viewed as "the Negro problem." As American Racist makes clear, however, Dixon was a complex, multitalented individual who, as well as writing some of the most popular novels of the early twentieth century, was involved in the production of some eighteen films.

Dixon used the motion picture as a propaganda tool for his often outrageous opinions on race, communism, socialism, and feminism. His most spectacular production, The Fall of a Nation (1916), argues for American preparedness in the face of war and boasts a musical score by Victor Herbert, making it the first American feature film to have an original score by a major composer. Like the majority of Dixon's films, The Fall of a Nation has been lost, but had it survived, it might well have taken its place alongside The Birth of a Nation as a masterwork of silent film. Anthony Slide examines each of Dixon's films and discusses the novels from which they were adapted. Slide chronicles Dixon's transformation from a major supporter of the original Ku Klux Klan in his early novels to an ardent critic of the modern Klan in his last film, Nation Aflame. American Racist is the first book to discuss Dixon's work outside of literature and provide a wide overview of the life and career of this highly controversial twentieth-century southern populist.

Talk about learning something new everyday.....

Talk about learning something new everyday.....


The Birth of a Nation(novel "The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan" / novel "The Leopard's Spots" / play "The Clansman")


Django is an opposite extreme of The Birth of a Nation. Did that play a conscious role in your mind? Reversing the depiction of slavery that The Birth of a Nation registered?

Enjoyed WInning/Payback attitude of DJANGO!

One person reviewed the movie as such..... (and I agree with her)

......People, it's a MOVIE. I saw it today and LOVED it.I also saw Lincoln and loved it. I am over 50 years old. There were African-Americans in the theater that loved it as well, two of whom were sitting next to me. It is rated R for a reason. The "n" word was used as it obviously was over 200 years ago in that particular setting I also loved "Inglorious Basterds", and I am Jewish. I didn't mind the derogatory Jewish terms that were used...it was representative of that portion of history. I go to the movies to be entertained...it is my choice

 

OH SO TRUE.... is this review of this move........"There's something here to offend everyone. Revenge fantasies don't leave much room for moral lessons. Django is out for blood. So is Tarantino, but he doesn't sacrifice his humanity or conscience to do it."

 

Critics have described the film as bold and original, but some reviews criticized the film for being ultra-violent, over-the-top and overly long

 

........ "Granted, there's something gleefully satisfying in watching evil people get what they have coming. But 'Django Unchained' is Tarantino at his most puerile and least inventive, the premise offering little more than cold, nasty revenge and barrels of squishing, squirting blood."

 

NEW WORD OF THE DAY is

tit·u·lar

( tíchələr )  adjective 1. existing or being such in title only; nominal; having the title but none of the associated duties, powers, etc.: the titular head of the company

 

..... the film's premise: Foxx's titular Django being freed by a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) who needs Django's help to track some baddies, and in exchange, promises to help Django free his wife from an evil plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) ,,,, the movie has sparked debate about its depiction of slavery and ample use of the n-word .

 

 

ANOTHER WORD OF THE DAY

.....Tarantino injects the weighty material with so many jocular, startling and unexpected touches that it's constantly stimulating."

joc·u·lar

( jókyələr )

fond of joking: with a playful joking disposition

humorous: intended to be funny

 

we've become inured to the suffering and pain of slavery, that we've distanced ourselves enough from it, that people can't experience the terror, the horrible pain, the anxiety, the stress, et cetera, that came with the slave experience. I thought that in Django you really began to reinsert contemporary viewers into that pain, particularly through the scene when the dogs tear Candie's slave D'Artagnan apart

 

in·ure

[ in' your-ed ]

1. harden somebody to something: to make somebody used to something unpleasant over a period of time, so that he or she no longer is bothered or upset by it 
2. transitive verb: to accustom to accept something undesirable

Synonyms: fortify, indurate, harden, season, steel, strengthen, toughen

Antonyms: soften

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: You've targeted Nazis in Inglourious Basterds and slave owners in Django Unchained. What's next on the list of oppressors to off?  

 

BTW === ..original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been f--ked over by the American military and kind of go apes--t. They basically -- the way Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and the Basterds are having an "Apache resistance" -- [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland.

 

Tarintino says) ...Hildy.....you've only seen her as a figment of Django's imagination. So the first time you meet her in the here and now, s--t's even worse than you thought..... ...... ...people in general have so put slavery at an arm's distance that ... just the information is enough for them -- it's just intellectual. They just want to keep it intellectual.    ..... I think America is one of the only countries that has not been forced, sometimes by the rest of the world, to look their own past sins completely in the face. And it's only by looking them in the face that you can possibly work past them. And it's not a case where the Turks don't want to acknowledge the Armenian holocaust, but the Armenians do.

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.

Another 4-19-1995, another 9-11 in America

At both funeral homes, as around the country, people wrestled with what steps could and should be taken to prevent something like the massacre from happening again.
"If people want to go hunting, a single-shot rifle does the job, and that does the job to protect your home, too. If you need more than that, I don't know what to say," Ray DiStephan said outside Noah's funeral.
He added: "I don't want to see my kids go to schools that become maximum-security fortresses. That's not the world I want to live in, and that's not the world I want to raise them in."

Meanwhile, the outlines of a national debate on gun control began to take shape. At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney said curbing gun violence is a complex problem that will require a "comprehensive solution."
Carney did not offer specific proposals or a timeline. He said President Barack Obama will meet with law enforcement officials and mental health professionals in coming weeks.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, flanked by shooting survivors and relatives of victims of gunfire around the country, pressed Obama and Congress to toughen gun laws and tighten enforcement after the Newtown massacre.
"If this doesn't do it," he asked, "what is going to?"

Lanza is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, a civilian version of the military's M-16. It is similar to the weapon used in a recent shopping mall shooting in Oregon and other deadly attacks around the U.S. Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in this country under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the law expired in 2004.
At least one senator, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said Monday that the attack in Newtown has led him to rethink his opposition to the ban on assault weapons.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is an avid hunter and lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, said it's time to move beyond the political rhetoric and begin an honest discussion about reasonable restrictions on guns.
"This is bigger than just about guns," he added. "It's about how we treat people with mental illness, how we intervene, how we get them the care they need, how we protect our schools. It's just so sad."
Authorities say Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home and then took her car and some of her guns to the school, where he broke in and opened fire. A Connecticut official said the mother, a gun enthusiast who practiced at shooting ranges, was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. Lanza was wearing all black, with an olive-drag utility vest with lots of pockets, during the attack.

Investigators have found no letters or diaries that could explain the rampage.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges, and also visited ranges together.
"We do not have any indication at this time that the shooter engaged in shooting activities in the past six months," Seifert told the AP

Person of the Year 2012

Runners-up were Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani women's rights activist who survived after being shot in the head and neck by Taliban; Apple CEO Tim Cook; Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Morsi; and scientist Fabiola Gianotti. In 2011, Time picked "The Protester."

The magazine unveiled its Person of the Year selection on the "Today" show on Wednesday.

The president's reelection in November showed "the Obama effect was not ephemeral anymore, no longer reducible to what had once been mocked as that 'hopey-changey stuff,'" Time's Michael Scherer wrote in the accompanying cover story. "It could be measured in wars stopped and started; industries saved, restructured or reregulated; tax cuts extended; debt levels inflated; terrorists killed; the health-insurance system reimagined; and gay service members who could walk in uniform with their partners. It could be seen in the new faces who waited hours to vote and in the new ways campaigns are run. America debated and decided this year: history would not record Obama’s presidency as a fluke."

The cover features a silver border--just the fourth time in Time's 89-year-history the magazine was published without its trademark red. Time.com also published a slideshow featuring "never-before-seen images of the Obama presidency" from Election Night to Newtown.

“It was easy to think that maybe 2008 was the anomaly," President Obama told Time in an interview. “And I think 2012 was an indication that, no, this is not an anomaly. We’ve gone through a very difficult time. The American people have rightly been frustrated at the pace of change, and the economy is still struggling, and this president we elected is imperfect. And yet despite all that, this is who we want to be. That’s a good thing.”