Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@Valentine

also I thought it is very strange and also disrespectful to Uma that the interviewer described how looks her body and how she likes on her sofa. she objectified Uma – at same time she interviews her about men who also objectified her.

Thank you, my friend, for putting into words something I only picked up on as a feeling. It was almost novel like in it’s scene setting – and felt damned odd reading it in an interview outside of the first paragraph (Seems to be customary there, for some reason).

Yeah, Maureen Dowd isn’t quite at the level of Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers when it comes to faux feminist writing, but she’s not that far off. I wish someone else had written it. Thurman’s quotes were all valuable and interesting, the writing around it, not so much. It sounded more like a fluff piece for a high end fashion mag like Vogue than a piece on sexual assault. I’m glad she’s told her story though.

I get angry when someone like Tarantino is in this list of ‘great directors” with people like Stanley Kubrick. Tarantino is arrogant and selfish child who makes violence on women and says racist things because he enjoys it and then if anyone makes criticism he just says ‘it’s art! you don’t understand you stupid moron. it is too clever for you’.

Sadly, Kubrick liked to abuse women on set in the name of art too

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/09/22/dont-sympathize-with-shelley-stanley-kubrick-showed-no-mercy-to-shelley-duvall-on-the-the-shining/

wwth

?I didn’t know about that.

@Eddie: Why not both?

I’ve been dealing with a respiratory infection that just will not go away and when I’m hacking up a lung, Dracarys keeps meowing at me. I can’t tell if she’s trying to ask me what’s wrong or telling me to shut the fuck up because I’m a noisy disgusting human. Probably the latter.

Seriously, I hope none of you get this stupid cold or flu or whatever it is. My grandmother had to go to the hospital over it because she’s 92 and already has weak lungs and has to be on oxygen. She’s doing better and fingers crossed coming tomorrow though. I’m not sure if it’s the same bug that’s been killing children or not. I just know it sucks.

@Miss EB47

I’m so sorry to hear that this is happening to you. What a jerk your neighbor is!

I certainly don’t know what the right approach to this problem would be. I can only tell you what I think I’d do:

1. I’d walk with another family member or a friend. If he sees you with your dad, he might back waaaaaaaaaaaaaay off.
2. If that were not possible, I’d take the alternative path.
3. If he spotted me alone and harassed me, I’d wave, smile brightly, and say “Hello!” cheerfully. If he tried to get me to stick around, I’d say, “I have to go.” If he pressed me, I’d just smile and repeat myself: “No, I have to go.” You can use various tones of voice if you have to keep repeating yourself, from patient and amused to impatient and testy. (I can tell you for certain that people loathe this “broken-record” response. Too bad!)

This kind of approach works for me, possibly because it has an element of the unexpected (smiling and waving).

That said, this approach might be all wrong for your personality. If so, try to work out what would make you feel the most safe and the most powerful under these icky circumstances.

All best wishes for a quick end to this neighbor’s revolting behavior.

My domestic violence counselors all seemed to think that psychic abuse was actually worse than physical abuse. I think that might be true for many survivors of violence. But for me, I don’t think that’s true. I’ve always been very, very protective of my body because some harm can be permanent. (Of course, the same could be said of psychic violence as well.)

After I was grown and had moved away, my father (my original abuser) once sent me a letter asking me to pay a visit to him and my mother. He told me to travel by train. The train, however, didn’t stop at my hometown, so he told me to jump off the moving train. He also told me to “be careful” when I did it. In my mind’s eye, I saw my broken body lying near the train tracks.

So my blood ran cold when I read what that monster Quentin Tarantino did to Uma Thurman:

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Even though their marriage was spiraling apart, Hawke immediately left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to fly to his wife’s side.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he told me. He said he told Tarantino, “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/this-is-why-uma-thurman-is-angry.html

Holy mother – been poking around the archives some more and I’ve just met Walter, the penocracy proponent. Strange dude.

@Kat

Abuse is abuse – it is as bad as it is, no matter if it’s mental or physical.
Though I’d call Tarantino’s car thing with Uma Thurman more attempted murder.

@Miss EB47
I think Shadowplay has some great advice.

@Shadowplay

I’d call Tarantino’s car thing with Uma Thurman more attempted murder.

Yeah, I would too.

Which makes no sense, because why try to kill — or traumatize — a person who makes you a lot of money! But abuse is all about ego and as such isn’t rational.

@Kat, Valentin

I’m no artist and wouldn’t know a muse if one slapped me, but don’t most artists hate the person they have decided is their muse as much as need them for inspiration? It’s the impression I got over the years.
Or they pick someone who’s already fragile as hell – poor Edie Sedwick comes straight to mind there, and there’s bound to be others – and apply the pressure.

Sickens me, the excuses that get trotted out for a “visionary artist” behaving like a total shit.

I don’t understand it either, my friend. Can almost see it for a fashion designer, where their muse could be thought of as their perfectly idealised body type, but for anything else? A person seems way too limiting.

Not that I’m against the idea of Muses in the classical sense – ideas come from somewhere, and I’ve had stories appear instantly, fully formed in my mind from nothing.

You don’t really hear about female artists having younger attractive male muses. I’m sure that it’s happened before. But it’s not really a thing.

Let’s face it. The concept of the muse is nothing more than male artists objectifying women and putting a fancy pants artistic spin on the belief that their boners are the center of the universe.

(Mild nudity, violence, it is Oglaf)

My muse really needs to be more like this, she’s efficient: https://www.oglaf.com/blank-page/

Oh and usually “muses” inspiring men tend to fall into “they are my one true image of true womanhood and if you’re not like this, you’re a failure, you woman in a crowd” category, so eff that.