I sure enjoyed the hell out of watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman act. He seemed like a shy, sensitive fellow, & his co-worker's tweets seemed to bear that out. Jim Carrey tweeted, "For the most sensitive among us the noise can be too much."
So many people I admire, who were artists & musicians, have been dashed on the rocks thanks to the siren song of heroin. I am squeamish when it comes to people poking needles into me; I always make sure I am lying down & looking away when someone takes my blood at the doctor's. As such, heroin addiction was not much of a threat.
Also, I've never know any dealers. Or if I have, I didn't know they were dealers. I am astonished that people get drugs at all. I wouldn't know the first place to find them.
A few friends on the Face-type-Book are wringing their hands about Woody Allen, whose adopted daughter has written an open letter accusing him, as she has for twenty years now, of sexually molesting her when she was seven. This comes after her mother Mia Farrow & half-brother Ronan Farrow tweeted the allegations when Woody Allen won an award at the Golden Globes, & also after documentarian Robert Weide wrote a defense of Allen. After the Dylan Farrow article, Roger Friedman wrote this article which suggests that this is some kind of campaign by Farrow to keep these accusations out there.
I don't think this is as big an issue for many of my friends for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of them don't watch or don't enjoy Woody Allen movies. Two, there's a contingent of them who, whether they like Woody Allen's movies or not, always side with the victim & decided, twenty years ago, he was a pervert on the level of Roman Polanski (who pled guilty to child molestation) or Michael Jackson (who was acquitted of one count but earlier settled out of court to the tune of 25 million dollars for another).
A smaller contingent might be my own: I don't know what to believe. I certainly don't want to find out that someone whose body of work I admire is actually a pedophile, but I don't think there's enough evidence to prove it conclusively. However, I am deeply affected by Dylan Farrow's letter & my heart goes out to her. I just find myself so full of doubt I don't think I can even begin to know what really happened.
I often find you can tell a lot about a person by their initial reactions to such allegations. I do the same thing, have the same sorts of things that I will automatically jump in defense of without thinking it through first. I check myself, however, & try not to jump on the Twitter or whatever & throw out accusations. I wish most of us could install the same sort of filter.
But it's intriguing how experience & loyalty fuck with the filter. I dated for a while a sweet woman who was a feminist, who would automatically take the side of any woman who claimed to be raped or sexually assaulted or sexually harassed. She volunteered at a battered woman's shelter & she had seen first-hand the devastation that violence against women caused.
She also was part of a new-age-y self-help group whose leader was, during the time I was finding out what she was a part of, accused by many female members of the group of raping them during their quasi-religious therapy sessions. The number at the time was growing. When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she automatically dismissed those women's claims outright. She couldn't believe the founder of her therapy-ish religion could do such a thing.
Although if it had been a Christian, she would've sided with the women.
I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night, but I read tweets about it. (I'm so meta.) I understand it was a shut-out, & not enough of a contest to be entertaining. Someone either there or Facebook said something funny, which I paraphrase: I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but as I was flipping channels, every time I came to the game, the Seahawks were scoring.
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