On Quentin Tarantino's early introductions to African-American culture: "[My mother's] boyfriends would come over, and they'd ... take me to blaxploitation movies, trying to, you know, get me to like them and buy me footballs and stuff, and ... my mom and her friends would take me to cool bars and stuff, where they'd be playing cool, live rhythm-and-blues music ... and I'd be drinking ... Shirley Temples — I think I called them James Bond because I didn't like the name Shirley Temples — and eat Mexican food ... while Jimmy Soul and a cool band would be, you know, playing in some lava lounge-y kind of '70s cocktail lounge. It was really cool. It made me grow up in a real big way. When I would hang around with kids I'd think they were really childish. I used to hang around with really groovy adults."
full: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/02/168200139/quentin-tarantino-unchained-and-unruly --- Norman Mailer: "The White Negro": But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self- esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute. Add to this, the cunning of their language, the abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppression they learned to speak (“Well. now, man, like I’m looking for a cat to turn me on ..“), add even more the profound sensitivity of the Negro jazzman who was the cultural mentor of a people, and it is not too difficult to believe that the language of Hip which evolved was an artful language, tested and shaped by an intense experience and therefore different in kind from white slang, as different as the special obscenity of the soldier which in its emphasis upon “ass” as the soul and “shit” as circumstance, was able to express the existential states of the enlisted man. full: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
