blackwashing hollywood and hypocrites

I'm in a terse mood. Wanna know why? Well, there are very few things that really huffle my puffs and this is a list of them: 1) stupid shit; 2) law school shit; 3) racist shit; and 4) “even though God made my body in his image, men in nightgowns tell me that it’s a gross and evil thing therefor I find my natural human body related urges icky” shit (or puritanical views on sexy time for short). That’s it. You steer clear of those categories and you find a very happy and agrreable man of every hour, drew everyday. But then I go and hear about the “controversy” over the casting of Michael Balthasar Jordan (I assume that’s what the “B” stands for), one of the finest young actors not named Jonah in all of Hollywood, as the human torch in fox’s Fantastic 4 reboot.

seriously, the fat kid from "superbad" just turned 30 and has 2 oscar nods already. he's basically on route to be this generation's robert de niro.

Seriously. People are pissed. Why? Glad you asked, and the reason for the misplaced nerd rage took a hard left right into one of my puff huffler zones, then swerved in time to side swipe anothers bloated gas guzzling minitank of a car. You see, this is a fundamentally different issue then the rage over batfleck or superman murder. Those two internet poo-ricanes (tm) were due to questions over ben affleck’s ability to pull off being batman (he can, but much like Clooney was, is too… too… who he is for the cowl) and for the sheer… just un-supermanlikeness of neck snapping a fellow kryptonian. I mean superman will kill a… giant bug monster from the center of the earth, or rip the head clean off an unkillable cyborg (hell, he banished doomsday to the end of time, so he’s no saint) but straight up bare hands murder of a humanoid form his home planet? No. just no.

no.

NO.

Before I go completely on this sidetrack like another, faster locomotive is heading toward me- hold on a sec…

stop it.

Ok, so before I go off on this sidetrack any further like my engine gave out on lap 63, what makes the Michael Bosworth Jordan human torch outcry different? Well, as this article puts it, and I’m paraphrasing, “because white nerds are racist little pricks”. That’s right. The outrage has nothing to do with Michael Benvolio Jordan’s capability of pulling off the complexities of Johnny Storm (b/c, c’mon, being a hotheaded manchild requires Shakespearean depth and character dev skills) as a character.  It’s just because J-Torch is  a fire elemental and we all know fire elementals are white people. Or at least that’s how they drew him in the comic. But there’s a reason that stormfire johnny is  white in the comic… it was first printed inthe sixties. The first black superhero wasn’t invented until a later issue of the Fantastic 4 series.

you know he's black because it says so in his name. BP's a BA BTW...

So that first piece of rage inducing back lash is the easy one. Hell, it's the type of low hanging fruit that has also seen outrage over Heimdall’s movie casting (a decidedly black Idris Elba) or Nick Fury’s (an even blacker Samuel L. Jackson), both traditionally white characters. And you know what? They crushed it in those roles. Hell, Samuel L. “and the L is Motherfuckin” Jackson was so great as the leader of shield, marvel retconned the character to look like him!

who you callin a ret-con, muthafucka?

The second rage inducing backlash (the one they swerved into earlier, remember?) is the other stupid reasons people shit on these fine actor’s being cast in these roles: the purist reasons. These are stupid. Why? Because they’re excuses for people to be racist without feeling like dickholes. The purist reasons range from “but the character was always white before, so casting a nonwhite person in the role ruins it for me” to the equally annoying (and this is fantastic four specific) “but how can he and sue still be sibs if he’s black and she’s white?”. Those arguments seem reasonable until you hear the third, which pulls the sheet off the alleged unracism and reveals the pointier hooded sheet underneath. The third purist argument is, “but I can’t get invested in the character now, because they were white in my head”

this basically

All of those sentiments are coded. They all imply a level of discomfort with black people akin to that of finding your dog has been replaced with another dog of the same breed, but in a different colorway. It’s like yeah, it’s a chow, but you don’t like it now because it looks different than the chow you knew. Bad analogy aside, this has even been used when the character in question was always black. If a character is being adapted from print to film and is belived, white people will often assume the character is white, even if the source material explicitly describes them a different way.

**ahem**

And to all you contrarians who are loading up your, “but just because SOME people said racist shit doesn’t mean EVERY person who doesn’t like these casting choices is racist” cannons to counterstrike, SHUT UP! There are people who dislike Obama for policy reasons, but that doesn’t excuse the inherent bigotry of the birther crowd and the secret muslim coalition. Not to mention the “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of a black president” contingent.

Now, the worst part about these racists and puri-racists is that they’re hypocrits for shitting on the ‘racelifting’ in Hollywood. Oh, you wonder how? Well then, you, you.. drewninite jerk, for the first time in drewniversal history, join me on page 2 and I’ll prove it…

shut up in my bones

bones are important, man.

stay with me. have you ever really thought about them? beyond them being hard or hurting a lot if they break i mean. have you? bones are why you have a form!! they hold you up and let you walk and stuff. they do other stuff, too. they enable you to eat and start digestion (teeth are bones, too, you know) they hold your muscles in place so you can, like, have mobility. they make stuff taste better (the difference between unctuous and flavorful stock and blah di blah broth? stock is made with the bones of the beastie). even bugs have bones (they call them "exoskeletons" because they wear them on the outside because bugs have no shame). and the most important thing bones do?

star in noir style mysteries?

no, they make blood! thought it was the heart that did that? wrong again Bob! the heart is like the head of person city's blood distribution ring. it moves the product through the veins and what not, but it has a supplier, and the supplier lives in the bones. that would be the marrow. see, if the heart is Frank Lucas, and the blood is blue magic, then the marrow is the vietnamese general that grew the opium it was made of.

And that would make Richie Roberts a heart attack (get it? because he was the arresting officer?!)

the bone marrow is very important. it's what makes bone in food taste good, and it's what gives stock it's oomph. also it's wht gives your body blood, and  more importantly, white blood cells. without white blood cells the body can't fight infection, and if you can;t fight infection, you can't, like, live through stuff. you need to be able to live through stuff. i mean it! how terrible would it be if everytime you got a sniffle you had to fear for your life? that's how important bones are, they give you the ability to live your life and live through the stuff that wants to take your life from the inside. 

and the cool thing is we all have that superpower!

.....

ok, so i lied. most of us have that superpower, but there are those of us who don't. there are people in this world that for one reason or another lose the ability to produce new healthy blood cells to fight off infections that might do us in. and you know what? as superheroes, it is our duty to help those who cannot help themselves. we have to give our powers to those who have lost the ability to use their own. that's what wolverine would do. remember that scene in the first [read: the good] X-men movie? when rogue was latched into Magneto's "turn-all-the-people-into-mutants-but-it'll-kill-the-person-acting-as-the-battery-so-i'll-trap-a-teenager-who-can-steal-powers-into-it-in-my-place-because-the-nazi's-killed-my-mom" machine and died as a result, wolverine went and did the one thing he knew could save her: touched her so she could steal his healing power to come back to life. 

shown: life giving. not shown: what it looks like (fuckin)

that's what we are: a bunch of wolverine's. we all have a healing factor shut up in our bones. and we need to be willing to give our powers to those who have lost the ability to use there's. that's why i encourage everyone who is able to sign up to the National Marrow Donor Program as a bone marrow donor. it costs you nothing but a cheek swab and it could save someone's life, man. you could be somebody's personal wolverine!

not a butt cheek swab, you perv....

look, i know it's a scary proposition. donating a piece of you to somebody else, somebody you've never met no less, doesn't sound appealing. it sounds painful and invasive. i know man. when i signed up i had the same thoughts. but you know what outweighed all of my fears? the idea that just maybe one day there would be a part of me out there saving the next michael jackson, or the next bill gates. somebody might have leukemia and need a marrow transplant and that may be the person that cures AIDS or cancer. somebody might need chemo and require a transplant to repair their immune system afterwards, and that person may go on to invent time travel, or may negotiate peace in the middle east. hell, you may just save somebody's mom or dad, brother or sister, son or daughter, and they may go on to just lead a normal life. and that? that's worth more than any fear i had. that outweighs all of it.

i don't really know how to close this one out, so i'll just leave you with this image that pretty much says it all.

any questions, bub?

the resurrection of the RQOD

pictured: 40-year-old men

With 2 songs in the billboard top 10 at the same time last year (including a #1 song) and a couple of grammys, is it safe to say The Neptunes are the hottest producer in the game right now?

The Hunt for Red October

so the good (no pun intended) people at NIKE finally caved to the incessant ranting and raving by incessant ranter and raver and professional full grown baby Kanye West and made the Air Yeezy II "Red October" available to the public: a sudden and surprising phenomenon which lasted all of about 11 minutes. see, the shoes which yeezy had spent the better part of 2013 shouting about incoherently at radio and tv interviewers had achieved  a status that every product not designed for McDonald's style mass production lusts for: they had become a white whale. an urban legend. a unicorn. a sort of holy grail for every sneakerhead, taste maker, and twitter teenage millionaire to fawn over. they were to the shoe canoodler what, say, "Nintendo World Championships '91" is to the retrogamer, or Action Comics #1 is to the comic collector: a piece of fandomonium trumped up by the real thing i want to talk about here: artificial scarcity.

which makes the Red October worse than action comics #1 as unlike the Yeezy, it was printed in 1938 with ink made from black people and whale infant blubber.

what artificial scarcity does is take something that's is actually common/easy to produce/super inexpensive and by withholding large quantities of it (like OPEC does with oil) or only making a relatively small number of product (like holofoil pokemon cards) drive up the price, or, as is the case with this particular shoe spike peoples desire by making it unavailable for no reason whatsoever. like the McRib. NIKE clearly did this with the red october. let's look at the case a little more closely. 

artists depiction of the red october

NIKE collabs with YEEZY on the air YEEZY. they only make about 3000 pairs and sell them at $225. they make like $800,000 on them (according to kanye) (they couldn't have made more than $675,000 because that's how math works). BIG SUCCESS! YAY! COCAINE SHOWERS FOR EVERYONE! the resale value on the air Yeezy tops $1000. so because of the success and obvious demand demonstrated by the resale value, NIKE commissions the air YEEZY 2 and sells them for $245. however they (strangely) push back the release schedule for the shoe's signature colorway, the "Red October". YEEZY then does what he does best: complain about all the success he isn't having!

that's what he's best known for right? all the not success? right?

he goes on the breakfast club in ny "why they won't release the red octobers?".  he goes on sway in the morning "WHY THEY WON'Y RELEASE THE RED OCTOBERS?! YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWER SWAY!" he goes to england. ENGLAND! "i'm trying to be the next louis vuitton... of shoes, but NIKE won't release the red octobers". this creates a buzz in the fashion world. "why won;t nike release the red octobers? how do they look? where can i buy them? when will they be available?" are all questions you were likely to hear if you perused the sneakerhead sites over the past year. what this does is create a ground swell of deman for a shoe that Nike knew they would not have pressed more than a few thousand of. with millions of people demanding them and only thousands pressed (for pennies, btw) they could charge a factory direct price of $245.  that's a brand new XBOX 360 with kinect and watch_dogs!

i DO have a birthday coming up...

and the final piece to the false scarcity puzzle? have a cool person seen in it. like macklemore at nye!now all the stans are drooling on their eminem cds and hair bleach, b/c the unicorn is real and maybe, just maybe the great unicorn masters will let them stroke it's mane for a few minutes (you don't wanna know what it did with the horn...). then suddenly a tweet announces that they are available, and 11 minutes later artificial scarcity proves it effectiveness again. (hell they were on ebay and hour later and going for upwards of $16,000,000.00!!!!!!!!!!)

above: macklemore just despising all the fame and success rap has brought him.

i guess the greater point i'm trying to make is i heard the rib sandwich was coming back on tuesday!!!!!! sign a bruhva up for that!!!!!!!!!!