Showing posts with label Reputation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reputation. Show all posts

Saturday 15 October 2022

Rasputin

 






UC Sunnydale classroom

Buffy is sitting among The Students, 
yawning while The Professor lectures. 

PROFESSOR: 
Now, Rasputin was associated 
with a certain obscure religious sect. 

(Buffy taps her pencil on her desk. 
The girl next to her glares
Buffy sees her and stops tapping the pencil 
but continues fidgeting

PROFESSOR:
They held the tenet that 
in order to be forgiven
one first had to sin

Rasputin embraced this doctrine 
and proceeded to sin impressively 
and repeatedly.
 
The notion that he was in fact evil 
gained strength years later, 
(Buffy fiddles with her pencil, drops it, 
shrugs and doesn't pick it up
when The Conspirators who set out to Kill Him 
found it nearly impossible to do so. 

BUFFY: (to herself) 
Nearly impossible

PROFESSOR
I'm sorry, there's A Question?
 
The Students look at Buffy. 

PROFESSOR: (sighing
Miss Summers, of course

Buffy makes a pained face, stands up as The Professor gives her a disapproving look. 

BUFFY: 
I, uh, about, you know, 
killing him ... 

You know, they, they poisoned him and, 
and they beat him and they shot him
and he didn't die. 

PROFESSOR
.....until They rolled 
His Body in a carpet and 
drowned him in a canal. 

BUFFY
But there are reported sightings of him as
 late as the 1930s, aren't there? 

PROFESSOR: 
I can assure you there is near-consensus in 
the academic community regarding 
The Death of Rasputin. 

BUFFY: 
There was also near-consensus 
about Columbus, you know, until someone 
asked The Vikings what they were up to in 
the 1400s, and they're like, "Discovering this America-shaped continent.

(Professor looks annoyed

I just ... I'm only saying, you know, 
it might be interesting, 
if we ... came at it from,
 you know, a different perspective, that's all. 

PROFESSOR: 
Well, I'm sorry if you 
find these facts 
so boring, Miss Summers. 

Maybe you'd prefer I step aside, 
so that you can teach 
Your Own Course : 
Speculation 101 perhaps? 
(The other students laugh
Intro to Flights of Fancy? 
(The students laugh more

BUFFY: 
I only meant

PROFESSOR: 
What was it you were going on about last week? The Mysterious Sleeping Patterns 
of The Prussian generals? 

(Buffy looks annoyed)
 
Now, some of Us 
are here to learn. 
Believe it or Not, 
We're interested in finding out 
What Actually Happened. 

It's called 'Studying History'.
 
You can sit down now. 
Unless you have something else 
to add, Professor? 

Buffy scowls, sits. 

Thursday 10 September 2020

Still Unforgiven : The Four Whores of The Apocalypse




She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. 

Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. 

When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have suspected, but of smallpox. 

That was 1878.



SKINNY
Alice, shut up! 
Little Bill, a whipping ain't going to settle this.
This here is a lawful contract between me and Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut whore. 
I brought her clear from Boston, I paid her expenses and all, and I've got a contract here that represents an investment of Capital.

LITTLE BILL
Property.

SKINNY
Damaged Property. Like if I was to hamstring one of their cow ponies.

LITTLE BILL
So you figure nobody will want to fuck her now, right?

SKINNY
Hell no, least ways they won't pay to do it. 
Maybe she can clean up the place or something, but nobody's going to pay good money for a cut up whore.



In April 1888, Joseph Gorman continues, Queen Victoria and the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury discovered Albert Victor's secret. 

Gorman accuses Salisbury of ordering a raid on the apartment because he was afraid that public knowledge of a potential Catholic heir to the throne would result in a revolution. 

Gorman claims that Albert Victor was placed in the custody of his family, while Annie was placed in the custody of Sir William Gull, who certified her insane; she spent the next 30 years drifting in and out of institutions before dying in 1920.


Meanwhile, Gorman alleges, Kelly was looking after the daughter, Alice, both during and after the raid. Gorman asserts that at first Kelly was content to hide the child, but then she, along with her friends Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, decided to blackmail the government. Gorman accuses Salisbury of conspiring with his fellow freemasons, including senior policemen in the London Metropolitan Police, to stop the scandal by staging the murders of the women. Gorman says Salisbury assigned the task to Gull, who lured the four women into a carriage individually where Gull murdered them with the assistance of coachman John Netley and Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. Gorman claims a fifth victim, Catherine Eddowes, was killed accidentally in a case of mistaken identity because she used the alias Mary Ann Kelly and was confused with Mary Jane Kelly. Gorman alleges that Netley tried to kill the young Alice twice but after the second unsuccessful attempt several witnesses chased Netley, who threw himself into the Thames and drowned. Gorman completes the story by saying that Alice lived well into old age, later becoming Walter Sickert's mistress, and that Alice and Walter Sickert are his parents



“I think the answer to why Obama doesn’t pardon [Former Heavyweight Champion of The World Jack] Johnson lies in the furor over sex trafficking which began with Bush and then Obama’s State Department. 

What does this have to do with Jack Johnson?

He is the black pimp, now called Gorilla Pimp in the anti-trafficking scenario. He was an enticer and certainly whatever his motives he can’t be a hero.”

Mary Frances Berry,
Professor of History, 
University of Pennsylvania, Former Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 
(She left the commission years before its vote on Johnson.)


ROSE: 
Can you imagine yourself writing a screenplay? 
Have you tried?

DFW: 
No, I haven't tried. I've talked a couple times -- 
My Best Friend writes mysteries and he and I have talked about doing a screenplay.

I think -- I think I would have a very difficult time writing something that's a product that other people would mess with. 
And the amount of money that's at stake in movies and the amount of -- the dispersal of responsibility for the thing -- I mean, the director, the actors, the producer -- in order to do -- writing is very difficult for me and it takes a lot of time and energy. 

And once I've done it, it's my thing. 
I can't imagine putting in the time and energy to do a good screenplay -- 
I mean, something like what David Webb Peoples can do. 
He's a screenwriter I think is really, really superb.

ROSE: 
What's he written?

DFW: 
He's written "Blade Runner" and he wrote "Unforgiven," the Clint Eastwood Western which --

ROSE: 
Did you like it?

DFW: 
I thought -- "Unforgiven"?

ROSE: 
Yeah.

David Foster Wallace : 
I thought "Unforgiven" is the first really smart Western since, I don't know, early Peckinpah.

Charlie Rose : 
I do, too. I loved it.

Foster : 
What's interesting is I don't know a single female who likes the film. 
It's very odd. I talk to all these people --

Charlie Rose :  
It's interesting you say that.

Foster :
-- about "Unforgiven" --

Charlie Rose :  
It's interesting you say that because --

Foster :
-- and females think, "Western? It stinks." 
And if you can get them to watch it, it's not a Western at all. 
I mean, it's a moral drama. 
It's -- you know, it's Henry James, basically. But it's very odd.

ROSE: 
My girlfriend and I -- Amanda hates the film and it's the one film that I just have a wider difference with her than any other film that we've seen together.

DFW: 
Yeah. If I were going to try to do something, I'd want to do something like that. 

But that was also an enormous success story -- luck story. 
David Webb Peoples -- reclusive, weird screenwriter -- I don't know much about him. 

This script had been shopped around for years and finally Clint Eastwood bought it 
and Clint Eastwood's got enough juice to go, 
"Okay, I'll star in it so they'll make it." 
This was a weird Western. This is very cerebral for a Western and I think the only way that it could have got made was if a, you know, star director, you know, was willing to do it. 
And the thing about it is, I think for every script like that that gets made, there've got to be, you know, hundreds of these really intelligent, cool scripts --

ROSE: 
Absolutely, that there's not somebody that comes along who has the power to get it made.

DFW: 
Right. Or else it gets worked on by the rewrite guys, you know, 
and John Gregory Dunne's got that whole book, "Monster" --

ROSE: 
"Monster," yeah.

DFW: 
-- about, you know, their working on the Jessica Savitch story, which became, you know, what was it --

ROSE: "
Up Close and" something --

DFW: 
-- "Up Close and Personal," which was --

ROSE: 
Michele Pfeiffer.

DFW: 
-- a film so bad it doesn't even have charm. 
You know, some things are so bad that they're enjoyable. 
This was worse than that.

ROSE: 
I know. It was. It was.

Wednesday 11 April 2018

Infamia


Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? 

He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words 
"Civis Romanvs Svm" 

"I am a Citizen of Rome."

So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens. 

In other words :

" DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY...! "

[ SPEAR-THRU-CHEST ]


" ....has just been revoked..! "


Before Hagen and Jack Woltz start talking, Woltz holds a birthday party for a young actress named Janie, and presents her with a pony as a gift. 

Present at the gathering are the girl's mother and several others involved with her current film. 

After Woltz kicks Tom out after dinner, he walks to the exit, looks up, and sees Janie, crying at the top of the staircase, being retrieved by her mother; the implication is that Woltz raped her. 

There is an additional scene of Tom Hagen, Sonny and Vito Corleone discussing the Woltz situation with his vendetta of blocking and blacklisting Johnny Fontane for seducing, stealing and "ruining" one of his studio's most promising Starlets-in-Groiming -"The Best Piece of Ass I've Ever had, and I've had it all over The World."

Vito asks if Woltz is "so tough," to which Tom responds, "You mean is he a Sicilian? Forget about it." 

Don Vito then asks if the story between Woltz and Janie is true, and upon hearing that it is, declares Woltz and his personal behaviour to be "infamia." 

Vito tells Tom to summon Luca Brasi to "see if we can find a way to reason with this Mr. Jack Woltz." 


In ancient Roman culture, infamia (in-, “not,” and fama, “reputation”) was a loss of legal or social standing. As a technical term of Roman law, infamia was an official exclusion from the legal protections enjoyed by a Roman citizen, as imposed by a censor or praetor. 

More generally, especially during the Republic and Principate, infamia was informal damage to one’s esteem or reputation. A person who suffered infamia was an infamis (plural infames).


Infamia was an “inescapable consequence” for certain professionals, including prostitutes and pimps, entertainers such as actors and dancers, and gladiators

Infames could not, for instance, provide testimony in a court of law. 

Stripped formally of your reputation, and unable to invoke your family name, noble household or blood lineage, you were rendered to be totally untrustworthy and not held to be reliable - irrespective of how much wealth or ready cash (in the form of Gold) you had to hand.

They were liable to corporal punishment, which was usually reserved for slaves.

You couldn't beat a Roman, even if you were a Roman yourself, and he was one of your peers and social equals/ 

The infamia of entertainers did not exclude them from socializing among the Roman elite, and entertainers who were “stars”, both men and women, sometimes became the lovers of such high-profile figures as the dictator Sulla and Mark Antony.

A passive homosexual who was “outed” might also be subject to social infamia, though if he was a citizen he might retain his legal standing - exactly as happened with Julius Ceasar when Rome was scandalised with the rumour that he had consented to play Bottom-Sub to the appetites of King Mithradates' Top-Dom in the bedroom

The modern Roman Catholic Church has a similar concept of infamy. 

Infamy - They've all got it in