Here’s a snippet from my Thesis where I mention Mary Amato’s book “Guitar Notes.” Good stuff!
Maybe with Mary Amato’s permission, excerpts from her Young Adult book Guitar Notes could weave through chapters five through 10 or so giving students a flavor of the very lore of musicianship and musicality from perspectives of a young dreamer or two. She even portrays young adults writing songs throughout the story and occasionally includes verses notated so someone could easily sing and play the melody on a guitar or piano. Once in a while she also includes a guitar chord diagram along with a suggestion such as, “try a Hendrix chord in place of the E7 when you get to the beating part. I think it would sound cool. Here’s the diagram for the chord, which is named after Jimi Hendrix, of course. God of guitar. I’m going to make you some guitar-playing videos and send you the links†(Amato, 2012, p. 139). With all that in mind, doesn’t this book take on a somewhat mixed-media or multimedia art form? Or perhaps a found art of sorts.
Amato, M. (2012). Guitar notes. New York: Egmont USA.
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It was the weekend before Thanksgiving I remember that. I was on a bus returning from Phenix City Alabama to Green Bay Wisconsin and a friend of mine, John Heckenlively counted 22 Wafflehouses that we drove by. That was only the ones where you can see their signs from the road or they have a listing in one of the roadsigns along the highway! I’m sure there were many more.
So in between counting we crafted this parody of Arlo Guthrie’s classic hit, “Alice’s Restaurant.” John also called a friend of his at Z Studios in Milwaukee and purchased studio time on a 2 inch master. We did this on almost no sleep the minute we got there. I already had a guitar along for the trip so we walked right in there and recorded it. I’d say unrehearsed but we probably went over this song several dozen times on the bus instead of trying to sleep!
The last big memory I have of that session was that the song was almost exactly the time length of a 2 inch master tape. The engineer said afterwards he was stressed out at the very end because he was thinking any second now he would have to stop us and back up a tiny bit, then continue on trying to punch that in without too many noises between takes. He figured he’d just let us finish to not ruin our momentum and then just ask us to do the last part one more time. You see a traditional reel or spool is set for just a little bit more than 16 minutes. And this song came in at 16 mins and 40 some odd seconds. Back in the analog days they gave you 30 seconds or so of extra tape just to be safe but you shouldn’t count on it.
I held the last GÂ chord out for a sustain and natural fade, and just then tape machine started slapping that last piece of leader tape around and around at the first part of complete silence.
Perfect timing.
sincerely,
marco
ps:
Here’s the whole audio as an mp3 if you’d like that:
Happy Valentine’s Day, err’budd… I mean Groundhog day, ummm, I mean Polar Plunge day, or Solar Flare? Bipolar Hair day. Fred Astaire; Stroller Chair, everywhere. Yes, I mean that from the depths of my heart, top and bottom. So here’s a recap of my year. Much more in depth than the algorithm Facebook decided to share, although I did like the pictures they chose. But it definitely did not tell a complete “story.”
Another circle around the sun. Beauty before me, beauty behind me. Beauty under my feet, so I walk lightly, deliberately and with great care.
Winter NAMM. I didn’t go this year. Enough said. I’ll miss the new technology; I’m kind of take-it-or-leave-it with being surrounded by so many petentious snobs and so few peers and mentors who truly are the real deal…
The year mostly begins with my song “Frybread” getting picked up to be the theme song of a TV pilot. I got paid a little bit of money and if the show ends up seeing light of day (the percentages on these things are rather daunting…) I’ll see a bunch more and be able to say “you knew me when,” or something. Or something.
Anniversary of Ant Hamlin getting murdered in cold blood in front of New York Amtrak and then his body was dumped near Shewville Road out in North Stoningtonish, Prestonish, Grotonish. Yuck. I’m friends with his ex and many other friends of his and this hurt my feelings a lot. Facebook got this one right and collected up 4 pix of the ceremonies including a rose I kept on my dashboard until early summer and brought over to bury about where his body had been found.
27jan Pete Seeger died. I don’t even know where to start writing about that. I’ll wait for clearer words and a different venue to write that. I could go long! One of the best tributes was written by his friend David Amram who was with him the moment he died.
He wrote this just a day and a half ago, but almost a full year after Pete’s passing. Profound!
What else can I say about “Desiree Bassett sits in with Foghat at the Wolf Den,” but wow, just wow.
Bob Dylan did a car ad for the Superbowl and everyone gave him a hard time but me it seems. I must say it was a great ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn8Isv-3M
Bob Dylan is a master creative, a creative genius and a genius musician, what more can I say. Does anyone out there feel just a little less venomous toward Mr. Dylan a full year out now? I sure do appreciate the guy.
4april can be summed up academically this way. So this week I watched Frozen three times and DrumLine four times. Yay!
In fact I’ll give you two perspectives of the same day back to back. Two different substitute teachers co-teaching the same students.
“I watched Frozen 3X & DrumLine 4X. 2day I’ll teach Quantum Theory & Linear Equations 2 Theater majors. Neat!” — Marco Frucht
“Any day can turn around: I am now getting paid to watch Drumline, speak Spanish, and have my hair braided by middle schoolers #love” — Carolyn Luby
I released a fully remastered and engineered cut of my EP “Poems For Roberta Blackgoat” in April too. You’ll remember it as the one I printed 150 copies of to give away at my Indian Summer Music Festival performance in Milwaukee last year. I had so much fun giving it away to not just radio stations and industry bigwigs but anyone I met who was considering whether they could afford the asking price on my commercial CD. “Here, have this free even if you can’t get my commercial CD,” I’d say, maybe you’ll get it some other day at iTunes or Amazon, right? I think I sold a total of 5 rekkids and gave away more than a hundred. Yay! Sometimes cash flow is not only less important than what else is going on, but not important at all.
No matter what else happens every April 12, this day will always be the time I was was beaten to within a 3-minute blackout of my life in Washington DC back in 2003. I was telling someone just the other day that one of the last big purchase items I got for myself from my out-of-court settlement was a $1500 memory foam bed. I have no regrets with that, and I joke that I’m actually thankful I was a victim of police brutality since I can sleep so well now.
2may the late Link Wray’s birthday.
Stevie Wonder got my friend Dylan Jenet Collins signed. That was my high point for the month of March I think. Just rooting for that young Native American rockstar!
10 may New London Konetiuk’s 4th annual Youth Talent Show. I’m their instrumental talent coach. Some amazing moments that day. No, many amazing moments that day!
7june or so? Whalie Awards. Nominated for 2 or 3, win nothing. I will never win an award in New London because of people like, well I won’t name them there are 5 or 6 of them and they are very corrupt, very small minded and very self-centered not to mention big fishes in the littlest pond ever. Oh well, who cares. I don’t do this stuff for awards — nominations just tell me someone was thinking about me and makes my nose itch so I’m happy about that!
16june or so. I go to Hank’s Dairy Bar to see Noelle Smith. An amazing singer/songwriter who moved to North Carolina. Connecticut’s loss and America’s gain for sure.
21june I sing some of my zaniest renditions of my even crazier songs at the bonfire of a guy named Andrew and his wonderful family. Soooooo fun. I hope we do that again 3 or 400 more times next summer!
23june I get accepted to Sacred Heart on a full ride scholarship from the VocRehab section of the Veterans Administration. I should probably say that in allcaps. I GOT ACCEPTED TO SACRED HEART FOR GRAD SCHOOL! Wait, I should type it in allcaps but spaced out old gutenberg style, I’m just THAT excited about it.
I G O T A C C E P T E D T O S A C R E D H E A R T F O R G R A D S C H O O L !
Yeah, that was a highpoint in my year, perhaps my decade. I got rejected by UNH because they didn’t like my essay, and was feeling pretty terrible about that when the letter from SHU came in and patched it all up and made it better than better. Heck, I’ll say it, UNH is a horrible school anyhow. Their loss 😛
22junish Gabriel Ayala plays the National Anthem on a classical guitar at an Arizona Diamondbacks game. You could hear a pin drop! Wow.
26jun or so I drop off a single flower at the site where the murdered Ant Hamlin’s body had been dumped after someone killed him outside of Amtrak in downtown New London. His murder just like Mr. Spicer’s up the road from me here in groton remain unsolved from so long ago. Not among New London, Groton, Waterford submarine-capitol-of-the-world’s proudest moments, to be sure.
4th of July I publish Marc Frucht’s American Songbag. 🙂
12july my first A as a grad student. My bachelors degree did not even closely resemble these grades.
Jana’s movie starring alongside Lorenzo Lamas hits Walmart stores around the country. About the same time last year or so she managed to get onto Sony RED which my friend Tony helped start back in the day, and they agreed to some kind of distribution for her newest CD but when you walked into Walmart and BestBuy you had the clerk telling you it wasn’t present but you can order it. This time around I was able to walk right in the store and actual buy a copy of the DVD right on premises. Sooooo happy for Jana to be getting her artwork out there like that. She’s been working so hard in these industries!
Pauline Whitesinger dies. She was Roberta Blackgoats next door neighbor. (and by next door I mean half a mile down a fairly well graded dirt road) In the early 90’s I walked back and forth between those two house at least 5 dozen times. A couple times pickup trucks have pulled up and given me a ride half way there because a snowstorm had just begun that might have killed me before I got there. One time it was Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) cops that saved my life.
18aug – I sort of “ambush” the Governor GuerillaJournalist-Style at one of his openhouse town meeting forums in a coffeeshop to request that he bring gas prices down in southeastern CT since wages are so much lower in the parts of CT where gas prices are artifically low but wages are so much higher. I’ll never know if he brought the prices down two weeks later or if they did that on their own but it sure made some good press.
26aug my Making Wampum video gets to the 6000 hits mark which I’m happy about but I get a little suspicious. It seemed to climb really fast a couple days in a row. Looking for why the spike hit I discover that for one year this video had been included in an eBook by one of the CommonCore corporations outfitting schools with material they claim is better than what the schools are already using. Sort of a backhanded curriculum change without any reflection or deliberation on the school district’s part. Anyhew, state of New York school systems were using my homemade music Video as supplemental material to teach grade schoolers about NDN crafts in centuries past. I’m flattered and aggravated at the same time, to say the least.
9sep I find out that the makers of Duke Nukem video game have been using the .MID file of my song “Hey Mon” for years in their video games. They acquired it in a very “pirate” way from their own developers so I’ll never see a single penny from it, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to be able to say you can hear a melody that I wrote in some of the most popular singlepersonshooter games to ever hit computers prior to Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Combat and stuff, right? Ah, there’s a claim to fame I might not even tell too many people about, certainly not anyone under age 11 or so, yikes.
My coversong of the Violent Femmes’ coversong of Marc Bolan’s “Children Of The Revolution” gets shown for an entire month at a listening station in an art gallery as part of an installation at a national gallery in Sharjah, UAE. You get to hear my song in between ones by Joey Ramone and Aldous Huxley! I use an exclamation point there because this is way more exciting than it sounds.
30oct 4 years ago this day 6 teenagers killed my friend Matt Chew. That’s why I became a substitute teacher and that’s why I became an instrumental talent coach, to show young people all over my county that they can write a song, or sing along, or dance and shout or let it all hang out, instead of pulling a drive by or a beat down, right? Yupper and this led to the annual youth talent show that brings so much beauty out of and into New London!
9november I discover someone’s selling a used copy of my SOFFTY FASNFFTOF CD for almost 60 dollars online. I don’t know for sure yet but I think it’s a drop-shipper who hasn’t even purchased it yet but knows s/he can get it off of CDBaby anytime he needs to. If I ever see a penny from that transaction it will only be something like four-dollars-and-fifty-cents and there’s almost nothing I can do about it. This “recording industry” is dying a slow torturous twisted and sordid death and it’s killing off so many souls in the process. I refuse to care. I’m just flattered someone thought enough of my musical work to include it in his/her diabolical plans to take over his or her tiniest part of his world.
Janice Marie Johnson closes out the Nammys this year. I wasn’t able to go this year but was able to see the thing livestreamed on the web. Great stuff. My friends Clayson and Jeneda performed and got an award, so did the Plateros. Very happy for them. They get to tour as the Plateros now and also as part of the band Indigenous.
8oct. Educator Diane Ravitch speaks at Quinipiac college. That was major!
——————————————
HIGH POINT OF MY YEAR:
And sometime in early November I was the sole witness to a Kindergartner speaking for the first time. I won’t write much about it, but he was labelled with a nonverbal learning disability and was on watch for either Selective Mutism or full Mutism and I was supposed to lead in structured play and readalongs and make notes if I see him do even so much as a grunt or a snortle. Well since I’m not like your usual average “garden variety” substitute teacher I brought a guitar and played him some flamenco music three days in a row and sang to him a capella occasionally in between all the structured play. He had a favorite book called “Five Little Monkeys,” that I could read to him and point at pictures. I impovised my own little ditty to sing to him as the introduction of this book and then I’d ask if he wants to read it with me. The third day I did this he pointed at it and said, “Monk.” I nearly jumped out of my skin! “Did you just say “monkeys?” I asked him. He just puffed out his chest and grinned and said nothing else. So I read it to him and that’s all I’m going to say about that. It really was one of the “most high” moments I’ve experienced in 5 or 6 years, not just this past year!
——————————————
13ish November my friend Frank Waln makes it onto MTV with a major project he’d been working diligently on. I’m amazed that MTV allowed such monumental ideas to be shared in one movie short. Not since Little Steven led the Sun City campaign, or maybe with “We Are The World” did that much “movement” happen!
Please close the School of Americas no matter what name they’re giving WesternHemisphereInstituteForSecurityCooperation it’s still the School of Assassins. I’m embarrassed to be a patriotic American citizen having served in the US army signal corps with each new day that our tax dollars pay for us training paramilitary death squads like that. Look it up.
F I N A L E X A M S 🙁
(Translated from the Greco Roman to the English that means, “stress.”
2dec starts off the month AND THE FOLLOWING YEAR with auditions for the 5th annual New London Youth Talent Show coming up 13march (pi day by the way)
13dec Franc Gramz releases a CD to a fully sold out show at Hanafins Pub. I saw Dio Hanafin and his wife at a local Homegoods/Hardware store a few days later and he told me it was one of the best shows of his entire year, with his wife nodding in agreement the whole time.
Sometime between Thanksgiving and NewYears I found out online thanks to BlackBoard educational webapp that I managed to get 3 gradschool As and a B- at America’s most unaffordable college. My masters degree candidacy is more difficult, more stressful and rigorous all the while more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined it to be.
26dec My friend Tanya Tagac gets declared Canada’s best artist for 2014. Wow.
31dec – Noon. Save for eating dinner and other NYE stuff the very last thing I did this year was pretty neat. Late morning I get a call from DJ Dot who is the “Gramma” in Gramma’s attic. She’s had a last minute cancellation on her weekly TV show and can I come on and entertain TVland in one of those “Taped-Live” settings. Sure, when? Oh, a couple hours. I literally went home, got three guitars, tuned them up once quickly and scoured my room for several set-lists and cheat sheets because I knew I wouldn’t even have time to rehearse at all. I’ll stick to songs I know well. Yeah right. How did that work out for you? I had to cover for so many mistakes with humor that this show went from loose to fun to downright zany in less than 35 seconds. I hope that translates well to the upcoming show and isn’t too embarrassing for you. Or me!
Consequently, I had more fun entertaining on this show than I’ve had in any venue for years! The show airs in a few weeks and then I can start sharing movie shorts from it on vimeo or liveleak or something. Yay!
Happy GNU Year!
Sincerely,
marco frucht
aka Marco Capelli
e&p atizine since 1988
Singer/Songwriter since well, since I’ve been singering and songwritering.
PS: THIS JUST IN!! 2015 begins with my dear friend Eric Lichter nominated for a New England Music Award as Producer Of The Year. Eric owns and operates Dirt Floor Recording Studio which is almost entirely an analog environment. If you want an easy comparison of just how wonderful analog equipment can sound with the right producer placing mics and engineering you, you can listen to his three productions on my commercial CD and then contrast them against most of the others.
A very headhitting funny story I can tell you about Sam Drywater is this. A newage wannabe lady came to this potluck supper we were having and she found out that Sam was a bona fide certified wool-in-the-dyed medicine type elder dude. So she offered him a pack of cigarettes and asked his advice about a profound moment she had just had. She was driving to that pot luck just hours ago and drove by a large hawk that had been hit by a car. She stopped a while and sat and prayed near it and asked Creator for guidance and was just certain Creator sent him to her, in the form of sending him to that Potluck that she was going to. Well Sam asked for a small room he could darken completely and some blankets and clothespins to do it. He sat in that room for at 20 minutes, and I swear this lady sat in a chair facing that door the entire time waiting for him to come out just like my family dog used to do when you pushed down the electric canopener.
Well he eventually came out that door while most of us were eating potluck stuff and mingling and he went right to her. Well he couldn’t go anywhere else without going right to her first because she was about 9 feet away directly in front of that door facing him. She got up like he was 9 men on a jury about to give the verdict and she was the defendant.
Well?
She stared deeply into his eyes, and he stared back. Neither of them blinked for a long time.
I just knew she wasn’t going to do a thing until he said something. It was almost painful to watch. Finally he pursed his lips and stiffened his chin and here’s what came out.
“Did you call the DEP or at least the DOT?”
She left that potluck with a mission, pronto. Many of us giggled a little. Even before Sam Drywater told Eagle, Eagle’s wife, his wife, me and Sam and a guy everyone calls Fumby, we laughed again as he told us he figured out in that room that it had to be the same roadkill wild turkey he’d driven by a few hours to get to the same potluck supper.
Well that’s what I remember, there’s probably more. So long ago.
Story about Sam Drywater while I’m remembering Sam Houston Kingfisher, sort of his nephew, who died a couple years ago. I just found out this morning. RIP.
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Cappuccino.
Monkey and Bull make meal of
Pomegranite, potatoes, pineapple & peppers.
LL Zamenhof worked Pepsi's graveyard
Shift til the day he died. Poetic.
Death not for lack of irony.
For growing calamity, asks Esperanza,
Does one need fertilizer?
Removes tongue from cheek.
1477. Chris visits Iceland inquiring
As a wannabe Portugese picking up
Waterfront gossip of "the NewFound Lands."
Looks like Lawnmower Man on valium.
Vacation - Grape Cod. Dwelling on payola,
Punkrock, and plasma in Adobe Abode.
Hystorically, a bladder bag full of bull.
Mother Earth, you are beaux, bela, belle,
Beautiful - Where's Dr. Esperanto
When you NEED him??
Peabody Coal purchases CavenhamForest for a copper penny.
Mrs. Farthing leaves a pie on her porch for
The plutonium miners. Make mine a strip so
Rare IT'S STILL IN THE GROUND.
Spineless as a Portugese Man O'War, now if
That ain't the scumm calling the scummsucker scummy.
Sage tea makes sore throat to merely a wet
Groggy flemmy thing; yet Dire Wolf offers
12-page thesis on Yak semen.
Can God hear you in a Hindu Ashram?
"Yes," yells Yayo. She's 12 and SMARTER than you.
Fiesta. Laguna March 19, 1992
They say you'll be led by children.
Haiku: Zuni Moisture Dance
Mudhead Kachinas - Laura,
Yayo, HasKey Tso.
Sweatlodge. Madrid, NM
2 FAS children flying a kite.
Filthy fake fony false hair follicles
Now fact thanks to Rogaine.
Or was that Reagan??
Nancy's war-on-drugs:
Rhymes with moron thugs.
Open Mike is playing at the Chez What Cafe.
Who IS this Open Mike?
Just some honest Joe?
Stench fries and fillet of potatoes at
The Full Spoon Cafe.
And Bo Diddley's cook wears wine-red
Dingos pouring sherry in Mrs. Farthing's Chowder.
Pampa, TX. Letting go of Police Brutality -
Release, relax, relief.
2:30 a.m. Katy reads poetry for tips at the
Omaha Greyhound.
Makes 2-bucks on "Bernalilo Blues."
Mytho-philosophical street poems.
How do they make coffee in Nowata?
Strong - same as Coffeeville.
Trivia question: who's face on $5
Foodstamp??
Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Cash?
Movado watch with moon minute hand,
I straddle the corner of Florence
& Normandy contemplating cops.
A house full of cat-tails never falls;
And Medina pours Mecca a 20 oz. cup of
Mocha java.
Previously published in a $5 Chapbook entitled "I Slurp My Coffee."
Currently released as an album at:
http://www.reverbnation.com/marcfruchtpoet
And you can get the whole album as a printable .zip file at:
http://www.frucht.org/Poems4RobertaBlackgoat.zip
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I saw two minutes of an infomercial back in the day about installing copper tubing or plastic tubing for your automatic ice maker.
“If you don’t like that skunky taste your ice cubes might give off you can buy one of our in-line filters…”
My response is if you really don’t like the skunky ice cubes you can finish off all the meats in your freezer and stop buying more meat than you can eat in 2 or  3 meals!
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My dear Telemachus,
The Trojan War
is over now; I don’t recall who won it.
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.
But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don’t know where I am or what this place
can be. It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, clintons, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son!
To a wanderer the faces of all islands
resemble one another. And the mind
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.
I can’t remember how the war came out;
even how old you are–I can’t remember.
Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.
Only the gods know if we’ll see each other
again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.
Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick
we two would still be living in one household.
But maybe grampa was right; away from me
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.
– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15205#sthash.gvPZxcV2.dpuf
ANNOTATION:
Laertes is Richard Milhous Nixxon and through Odysseus he sends this message to Telemachus who is Barack Obama.
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Who remembers that kick I was on to use less than-a-dollar  reinventing overpriced things such as the 29.99  ipod/cellfone charger wallsocket holder out of a piece of cereal box cardboard?
Or the 16$ iPod sock made out of an actual used sock from just needle, thread and scissors!
Well it’s refreshing to know someone else out there who I’ve never even met is thinking along the same lines.
Â
🙂
Â
I usually just link to an image someone else took so much trouble to make but I can only find it on facebook so I’ll download/upload here and give link back to THEIR facebook. I think you want to click /like/ on theirs for sure and see what ideas they come up with next, the really have it going on.
These are raw notes and I’m not going to bother editing. You get me thinking out loud on many levels from the straight up, straight forward, straight and true, to the anthropological, mythophilosophical and metaforical too. Enjoy!
Carrucan Plantation. My mind wanders to Caracas pretty quickly.
I believe “Field N____” on page 8 of the script is the first use of the ‘N’ word. Spike Lee and others are bothered by what they’re calling overuse of this word but of course the entire movie is about plantation life in the early moments before and after Lincoln’s ever so famous “Emancipation Proclamation.”
It was never clear to me that it was a $20 gold piece to purchase the horse, just a large looking coin. Too easy in today’s society to think maybe it was a Quarter or a Silver Dollar maybe.
Pg 10: King Shultz insists Django name his acquired horse. He has great difficulty agreeing to accept ownership. I wish they would have kept that in the movie. Could have been a great treatment of Indigenous thought versus anglo philosophy.
17: Love the smalll derringer extended from a handshake. Early foreshadowing maybe, of the Three Musketeers references to come.
Umm, afraid to say this out loud but I noticed Quentin Tarantino is not good at a/an with words starting in vowels. “a onion,” “a honest person,” etc. hehehehe
I tend to overthink things now and then, but Town of Daughtry makes the word Husbandry come to mind, like marriage but also animal husbandry, like chattel slavery as well.
THINGS WE MISS in movies that stay in a script:
20: “don’t make any quick movements and let me do the talking,” Django looks at him like, “as if…”
The movie’s signage specified Servant Uniforms I think but I don’t remember seeing “House Negruh,” or “House N___” whereas the script calls for it.
27: A little bit of cognitive dissonance for me in both the movie and the script. Jerry the boy who works with glass. His mama works at the lumber yard. I can’t tell if he’s a white or mixed indentured servant or a kid of a freed slave or what.
Oh Betina ribs Django for wanting to dress in blue Flauntleroy. In the movie he picked it. In the script Shultz made him wear it.
Spyglass the type a Sea Captain might use. Shades of Frederick Douglass maybe.
So “I’m sure he dead,” was an ad lib? Go Jamie Foxx!”
47: “Frankly I’ve never given anybody their freedom before. And now that I have, I feel vaguely responsible for you.”    Wow. I ponder that when looking back at my marriage and divorce. I’ll say no more about that, just that I truly feel like I freed someone who just couldn’t consider herself free and stay married.
54: Django finds Broomhilda, I think in the movie Shultz found out from rumormill or word on the street.
Not sure why the auction complete with bidding was cut out of the film, maybe time constraints?
“A seventy-five year old Indian on a mule makes a bid.” I would’ve wanted Tarantino, someone part Cherokee to expound on that one, that’s for sure.
57: “She climbs into the driver’s seat in more ways than one.” If it can be done, without being too preachy, I would have loved more documentary stuff about free/slave sexuality and also the dynamics and power differentials exploited using ones’ body or someone elses’ body, etc. Is “pony” legit from history? I never read about that before. That’s new to me for sure.
70: “You want me to play a black slaver?? There ain’t nothing lower than a black slaver. Black slavers are even lower than head house N___’s, and buddy that’s pretty F___ing low.”
Mandingo fighting pretty much lines up script and movie both. Even, “He’s just being cheeky…”
Confirmation of Broomhilda’s presence is about the same too.
“Candie gives Django a creepy smile.” Â I don’t remember seeing that in the film.
86: “I pay 500 dollars I want 500 fights. So what about my 500 dollars? You gonna reimburse me?”       The whites (except for Schultz) laugh. He’s comfortable with the wider economy of the deep south in Chattel Slavery but not supportive of it ethically or morally. The script shows that well. I’m not sure the movie does. Only mention I remember is in the saloon while asking Django to hire on as his sidekick.
I didn’t catch in the movie that getting emotional and wanting to pay the 500 was a break in character. In the script I see that.
That Django has seen worse doesn’t come to me in the movie either. I think Tarantino expected both Schultz’s and Django’s characters to be more developed at this point than they already are. Time probably didn’t permit but maybe more could’ve been done in the soundtrack or with visuals maybe.
Calvin blinks. Django wins a staring contest I didn’t notice. I’ll want to see the movie again just to see if it happened and I just didn’t see it.
I think a lot about the fact that all this was just 120 years ago or so. Someone alive today could have a grandparent or four who would be children of recently freed slaves. This is not ancient history, and I feel that many of the attacks on Tarantino’s use of the N word or the very mention of slavery in a comprehensive way for that matter, might be misplacing a defensiveness over their own family name. Or guilt by neutrality maybe.
Similar to issues over Native American genocide if you ask me.
I wonder if Tarantino’s treatment of Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) comes along from a desire to get the subject of “house N____” back on the table for discussion; it’s been hushed since whatever year Harry Belafonte called Colin Powell one for his “step n fetchit” obedience to Bush’s Iraq war.
Hahahaha. Stephen only misses Calvin Candie like a rock in his shoe in the script. All the other descriptives must be Samuel L. Jackson ad libbing. Script characters that didn’t make it to the movie, but I won’t belabor those details.
The cruelty to mandingos in the script wasn’t something I particularly missed in the film. Good choice not overdoing that I think.
The interaction between Stephen and Django in the Big House might have been illuminating. Freedmen treating a House N___ as if he’s his owner. Shows a lot of deep south dynamics including contemporary emotional issues I bet. Which brings me back to Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell jousting again.
114: The two weeks in boston joke worked much better in the movie than in the script for me. The southern accent probably did it.
Stephen calling Candie’s Boston joke unfunny shows a closeness between the two of them that’s only shown a little bit in the moive. That could’ve helped develop that relationship I think.
Ace Woody telling Django that with Calvin dead Lara probably won’t care much about Mandingo fighting could get into some dynamics too but was probably superfluous to the film. Quite a bit more torture in the script than the movie. Maybe discussed in group was how to imply it without showing everything. Or even just showing a little and not having to belabor the point.
“Seemed like folks never had a bright idea in their life,” says the script but I’m pretty sure Stephen says “white folks” in the film.
146: “Django is damn convincing.”
Damned straight this inner piece of Tarantino writing is a Tall Tale within a Tall Tale that would make Mark Twain proud.
“Instead of [Gambling] chips they play with “N____ ears,” yes the ears of slaves.” Where on earth did you find this?
162 Closeup of Broomhilda as she watches this.
I would’ve liked this kept in the film. Don’t want to give any spoilers but I’ve wanted four characters developed from beginning to end. Django, Hilda, Stephen, and King Schultz.
A lot can be done with eyes and hands.
Last comment for now. I would’ve wanted the song “Follow The Drinking Gourd.” Maybe Richie Havens’ version, maybe mine, hint, hint…
In two places in this movie, maybe a few other places.
of them, most are talking about my “Song Song,” lately. So I guess I should paste up lyrics.
