There warn't no haound! They did give the kids a less culturally distinct dog, but mainly to get Mom to show how resentful she was (and maybe to show how denatured hill folk had become in the age of opioids, that they would countenance a non-coon-hound! Hilariously, the dogs grown JD has are not especially holler-like: https://alicublog.blogspot.com/2017/03/friday-round-horn.html)
Thanks for subjecting yourself to Holler Hell, Roy. I’ve heard the movie is hot garbage.
Just want to add that someone on twitter -- referencing Vance’s elitism and condescension -- referred to the movie as “hillwilliam elegy” and I still haven’t stopped laughing.
live 40 miles northeast of the town that Hillbilly Elegy asshole wrote about. It’s not a great place but not nearly the hellscape dude made it out to be. The Black neighborhoods 30 miles northwest of there in West Dayton and 30 miles due south of there in the Over the Rhine district in Cincinnati are certainly worse when it comes to crime, poverty and lack of opportunity. Nobody writes them any elegies though. Maybe Paul Laurence Dunbar. 120 years ago. I wonder if he had a NY Times bestseller?
So many reasons to find this offensive but, nah, love it anyway.
(Part of the reason for potential guilt is my new old fart theory that having a clue is actually an unaffordable luxury for many if not most people so, you know, mockery of them for their ignorance, stupidity, limitations must be somewhat limited. Or maybe not; still working on this.)
To be clear: My new old fart theory has nothing to do with whether I find something like this funny -- I love making fun of with trash because is there any group with so little on so many levels so filled with pride? -- nor actually guilty for laughing over this. I mean, the piece had me ROTFLMFAO as the kids used to say.
Couldn't have been his years in Mayberry. Maybe some young punk Hollywood liberal producer thought he'd bring special experience to the movie. (Personally, my gut feeling is that Howard's fortes are getting the movie made and fairly good taste in what he chose to do (or maybe that was his partner's doing).)
You know, I grew up poor myself. I was the kid from the trailer park, the guy who went to work after high school instead of off to college. Not sure how I managed to get through it without becoming twisted and selfish (a.k.a. conservative) but I apparently did.
So I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for ol' J.D. here. Sounds like he made his choice. Now he gets to live with it, just like the rest of us. Suck it up, snowflake.
There were glimmers in the movie, here and there, of recognizable poor-gifted-kid trauma -- a condition, as Mr. Spock said, with which I am somewhat familiar. But by itself that's a rareified concern -- you have to reach out to connect it to something other people can relate to, like survivor guilt or cultural alienation. And the salad forks and dessert spoon just don't cut it.
The one thing I'll give him - it IS really hard growing up poor in a rich country. You watch your contemporaries being showered with undeserved riches - cars, trendy clothes, vacations to exotic places, college - and after a while you start thinking, ''Why me, God? What did I do to piss you off?''
About twenty years ago PBS aired a documentary, “People Like Us” (obligatory snark: No they don’t) that included a heartbreaking sequence about rural poverty in Ohio. Watching it at the time, I thought: these kids are doomed, needlessly doomed, their lives blighted because they are being raised in sand rather than soil. Here’s that segment, “Tammy’s Story”:
Yeah... then you get the bright idea that if you start engaging in what I shall call "black market activities" you can make some extra dough and get a shiny car, new clothes, vacations - and fuck the college part.
Heh. That didn't work very well for me. Too much sampling my own wares kept me from getting anywhere but stoned.
Nah, what did it for me was taking advantage of the whole Y2K deal to turn a hobbyist's interest in computers into a new career in IT. In the runup to Y2K, all the experienced people were busy reprogramming everything and anyone who didn't run screaming at the sight of a command prompt could get a job. Wound up making more money than some of my degreed friends.
Still, sometimes I wonder what I might have accomplished if I'd had the option of attending college after graduating high school back in 1970 instead of wasting 25 years in the workforce. I obviously had an aptitude for it.
Hah - yes, not smoking up all your profits was a problem but I dealt with it by dealing in volume. Ahem...
Computers were boring back in the 70's. I wrote my first computer program on a mainframe that we connected to via 300 baud modem back in '71 and like you had an aptitude for them. But couldn't get excited about business machines until the PC revolution and computer games. I worked as a printer for years, which as perfect for my itinerant lifestyle of the time, but then learned x86 assembly language (self-taught) and started writing specialty video graphics support routines for a gaming company and then just got into the business. No degree and nobody has ever cared.
Joining the Marines -- which is to say getting far away from the holler or whatever, was Vance's start for let's say moving on from his roots. Maybe socialism isn't the panacea the comrades claim after all.
This is amazing, Roy. What you have here is why the show/book is offensive. It's the "sons of the soil" glurge that Opie is hellbent on turning into the "sons of the blood and the soil". For a paycheck.
This is the "Triumphen des Willen" of the stupidest version of America...
A friend lent me “Hillbilly Elegy”: I read it quickly, as it was facile, and seemed intent on exonerating the folks with power, the Good folks, like Vance
As actual hillbilly (I don’t say “Mountain William”: if i want to be pretentious I’ll use 1$ words or quote, say, LaRochefocauld), I’ve watched the insular towns of the Southern mountains stagnate as they support governments that are killing them, with conservative policies..The Brightest go elsewhere, the government and businesses are now seen as hereditary, and anyone different must be run out. If you believe the upper crust or “local elites” are moral, observe what sentences the kids of the well off and connected get as opposed to workimg folks. They have conserved their power by making the economic downwards spiral into a dive, where a few thrive..
These folks have chosen to live in a social bubble where conforming to the local group is more important that facts, or any other opinion. Fox/right media, bad religion, and a GOP going deeper into crazy conspiracy world have made the bubble well nigh impenetrable.
The war on drugs and workers, and lying about who actually gets and survives on Government Transfer payments, 40 years of first the POWMIA scam and then the almighty NRA telling them “they’re going to come and take your guns and bibles and give everthing to BLM or Scary Antifa!” has become a literal article of faith.
48 years ago my buddy and I quit high school and left our ridiculously pleasant middle class California town for a long journey by bicycle around the country. Probly the best thing I ever did (almost) entirely of my own volition. Deep in the south (the region I found most beautiful overall) we had some long and deep discussions with lotsa folks. The prospects for kids my age looked pretty bleak – get outta town, via army or other (unknown) route. These were smart kids with an eagerness to hear about the world from me – Person Without a Clue. I felt an obligation to try to spell out things about the world I'd seen as objectively as possible, tho maybe for them my only notable characteristic was not my age or my starting point or my bicycle. More likely it was just my being there – back then it woulda been pretty unusual for a kid from way elsewhere to just show up in a small town in rural Mississippi.
I've never forgotten how gut-wrenching it felt to say goodby to some of those folks...
You dun leff out the haound...
There warn't no haound! They did give the kids a less culturally distinct dog, but mainly to get Mom to show how resentful she was (and maybe to show how denatured hill folk had become in the age of opioids, that they would countenance a non-coon-hound! Hilariously, the dogs grown JD has are not especially holler-like: https://alicublog.blogspot.com/2017/03/friday-round-horn.html)
Thanks for subjecting yourself to Holler Hell, Roy. I’ve heard the movie is hot garbage.
Just want to add that someone on twitter -- referencing Vance’s elitism and condescension -- referred to the movie as “hillwilliam elegy” and I still haven’t stopped laughing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzvS9UQpEg
Extra points for Hoosier Hotshots. See also "Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now".
Not to be pedantic, but I didn't read all 21 of the Aubrey/Maturin novels for nothing. Quite a few English idioms are nautical in origin.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_of_one%27s_jib
P.S. This was a lot of fun.
But it’s “jib,” not “gib.”
L.I.B.! Fixed, thanks.
"Pardon me, sir, but your jib has gotten into my gib..."
"I love the cut of your jib" is something you often hear at mohel conventions. Or so I'm told.
Doesn't matter unless she's yar...
I like the cut of your gibberish
Quinoa fork, very helpful.
live 40 miles northeast of the town that Hillbilly Elegy asshole wrote about. It’s not a great place but not nearly the hellscape dude made it out to be. The Black neighborhoods 30 miles northwest of there in West Dayton and 30 miles due south of there in the Over the Rhine district in Cincinnati are certainly worse when it comes to crime, poverty and lack of opportunity. Nobody writes them any elegies though. Maybe Paul Laurence Dunbar. 120 years ago. I wonder if he had a NY Times bestseller?
White privilege at its best.
So many reasons to find this offensive but, nah, love it anyway.
(Part of the reason for potential guilt is my new old fart theory that having a clue is actually an unaffordable luxury for many if not most people so, you know, mockery of them for their ignorance, stupidity, limitations must be somewhat limited. Or maybe not; still working on this.)
Then what's left to laugh about?
To be clear: My new old fart theory has nothing to do with whether I find something like this funny -- I love making fun of with trash because is there any group with so little on so many levels so filled with pride? -- nor actually guilty for laughing over this. I mean, the piece had me ROTFLMFAO as the kids used to say.
This is hilarious btw - I have been surrounded by these people my whole life. Spot on!
Wonderful, in the best tradition of “You’ve seen the book, now read the movie!”
Oh God. I wish I was there to clutch the sides of your head, Roy.
(But isn't it "KAIN-tuck"?)
Dead on!
Thanks for your send up. I’m wondering if they got Opie to direct as entree to a particular audience? So calculating does it all seem.
FYI—Im from Indiana. A good friend who lives in nearby Bloomington calls them hee-Billys.
Couldn't have been his years in Mayberry. Maybe some young punk Hollywood liberal producer thought he'd bring special experience to the movie. (Personally, my gut feeling is that Howard's fortes are getting the movie made and fairly good taste in what he chose to do (or maybe that was his partner's doing).)
You know, I grew up poor myself. I was the kid from the trailer park, the guy who went to work after high school instead of off to college. Not sure how I managed to get through it without becoming twisted and selfish (a.k.a. conservative) but I apparently did.
So I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for ol' J.D. here. Sounds like he made his choice. Now he gets to live with it, just like the rest of us. Suck it up, snowflake.
There were glimmers in the movie, here and there, of recognizable poor-gifted-kid trauma -- a condition, as Mr. Spock said, with which I am somewhat familiar. But by itself that's a rareified concern -- you have to reach out to connect it to something other people can relate to, like survivor guilt or cultural alienation. And the salad forks and dessert spoon just don't cut it.
The one thing I'll give him - it IS really hard growing up poor in a rich country. You watch your contemporaries being showered with undeserved riches - cars, trendy clothes, vacations to exotic places, college - and after a while you start thinking, ''Why me, God? What did I do to piss you off?''
About twenty years ago PBS aired a documentary, “People Like Us” (obligatory snark: No they don’t) that included a heartbreaking sequence about rural poverty in Ohio. Watching it at the time, I thought: these kids are doomed, needlessly doomed, their lives blighted because they are being raised in sand rather than soil. Here’s that segment, “Tammy’s Story”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37ZpauS5Doo&list=PLC6D871A2A8C3C8EF&index=4
And the followup from years later, as things play out the way you’d expect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqs4_Zs2GvI&list=PLC6D871A2A8C3C8EF&index=11
Yeah... then you get the bright idea that if you start engaging in what I shall call "black market activities" you can make some extra dough and get a shiny car, new clothes, vacations - and fuck the college part.
Heh. That didn't work very well for me. Too much sampling my own wares kept me from getting anywhere but stoned.
Nah, what did it for me was taking advantage of the whole Y2K deal to turn a hobbyist's interest in computers into a new career in IT. In the runup to Y2K, all the experienced people were busy reprogramming everything and anyone who didn't run screaming at the sight of a command prompt could get a job. Wound up making more money than some of my degreed friends.
Still, sometimes I wonder what I might have accomplished if I'd had the option of attending college after graduating high school back in 1970 instead of wasting 25 years in the workforce. I obviously had an aptitude for it.
Hah - yes, not smoking up all your profits was a problem but I dealt with it by dealing in volume. Ahem...
Computers were boring back in the 70's. I wrote my first computer program on a mainframe that we connected to via 300 baud modem back in '71 and like you had an aptitude for them. But couldn't get excited about business machines until the PC revolution and computer games. I worked as a printer for years, which as perfect for my itinerant lifestyle of the time, but then learned x86 assembly language (self-taught) and started writing specialty video graphics support routines for a gaming company and then just got into the business. No degree and nobody has ever cared.
Joining the Marines -- which is to say getting far away from the holler or whatever, was Vance's start for let's say moving on from his roots. Maybe socialism isn't the panacea the comrades claim after all.
I'm so glad I don't ever have to consider seeing this movie now. This is all I need plus the quinoa fork and the fourth-wall bits. We all owe you.
This is amazing, Roy. What you have here is why the show/book is offensive. It's the "sons of the soil" glurge that Opie is hellbent on turning into the "sons of the blood and the soil". For a paycheck.
This is the "Triumphen des Willen" of the stupidest version of America...
Why you gotta go and bring the Funyuns into this? One of my momma's favorite food groups. No kidding. xo
A friend lent me “Hillbilly Elegy”: I read it quickly, as it was facile, and seemed intent on exonerating the folks with power, the Good folks, like Vance
As actual hillbilly (I don’t say “Mountain William”: if i want to be pretentious I’ll use 1$ words or quote, say, LaRochefocauld), I’ve watched the insular towns of the Southern mountains stagnate as they support governments that are killing them, with conservative policies..The Brightest go elsewhere, the government and businesses are now seen as hereditary, and anyone different must be run out. If you believe the upper crust or “local elites” are moral, observe what sentences the kids of the well off and connected get as opposed to workimg folks. They have conserved their power by making the economic downwards spiral into a dive, where a few thrive..
These folks have chosen to live in a social bubble where conforming to the local group is more important that facts, or any other opinion. Fox/right media, bad religion, and a GOP going deeper into crazy conspiracy world have made the bubble well nigh impenetrable.
The war on drugs and workers, and lying about who actually gets and survives on Government Transfer payments, 40 years of first the POWMIA scam and then the almighty NRA telling them “they’re going to come and take your guns and bibles and give everthing to BLM or Scary Antifa!” has become a literal article of faith.
48 years ago my buddy and I quit high school and left our ridiculously pleasant middle class California town for a long journey by bicycle around the country. Probly the best thing I ever did (almost) entirely of my own volition. Deep in the south (the region I found most beautiful overall) we had some long and deep discussions with lotsa folks. The prospects for kids my age looked pretty bleak – get outta town, via army or other (unknown) route. These were smart kids with an eagerness to hear about the world from me – Person Without a Clue. I felt an obligation to try to spell out things about the world I'd seen as objectively as possible, tho maybe for them my only notable characteristic was not my age or my starting point or my bicycle. More likely it was just my being there – back then it woulda been pretty unusual for a kid from way elsewhere to just show up in a small town in rural Mississippi.
I've never forgotten how gut-wrenching it felt to say goodby to some of those folks...
I recommend Joe Bageants Deer Hunting With Jesus and Rainbow Pie. Most of those hillbillies have been bent over and screwed proper for years.
And here we are.
This is the closest I will come to watching that movie. Thanks, again, for taking one for the team.