Robert F. Funke

Regarding #FitchTheHomeless

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:09:00 -0700

So the last thing on my tumblr was in reference to my friend Greg’s attempts to take me being a dick on facebook and turn it into a charity.

That’s a pretty amazing thing for a person to specialize in: the impulse to turn online dickery into social good.

I’ve had a few friends post the recent Relevant Magazine article (which, I’d like to point out, denies homeless individuals the dignity [and journalistic accountability] of quote attribution) on #FitchTheHomeless, and I wrote Greg an email, then decided that maybe I’d publish it on the internet, because the conversation is important, and also, what the hell.

Hey Greg,

I saw the #fitchthehomeless backlash has found it’s banner with the Relevant Magazine article, and wanted to give a quick bit of perspective.

http://news.streetroots.org/2010/03/11/unreality-urban-plunges

I wrote that after doing an “urban plunge” thing, in which I pretended to be homeless for a week to bring “awareness,” or whatever, to homelessness.

In the end, the best I could write was an exploration of how ill-equipped I was to say jack shit on the topic. To be frank, you’re no better equipped, which I think is where the backlash is coming from.

But my article was just a thought piece. “Quit pretending you can understand shit you can’t understand.”

Your hashtag is a call to action. “Show this guy he’s an asshole, and simultaneously get involved with your local homeless ministry.” Even if people only take half of that message, regardless of which half, the world is better for it.

Do I think there are parts of the video/movement that are problematic? Sure. But I think your intentions, and your execution, are not only good for those who wouldn’t otherwise see A&F branding for the evil it is, but also for those who, without the internet telling them, wouldn’t know that donating clothes to their local shelter was even an option.

Take heart. Don’t publicly masturbate. You’ve done a good thing.

-Funke

I remember after the #KONY2012 backlash (or maybe backlash to the backlash to the backlash) I saw a comedian tweet (ironically) something like, “I guess the lesson in all of this is: never do anything.” Let’s not have that be the lesson here.

Money Over Mouth

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:47:48 -0800

Money Over Mouth:

A genius idea I inspired by being kind of a dick.

on guns, fighting on facebook, and the power (and lack thereof) of words

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:44:00 -0800

I was, like so many, at work on Friday when I heard about Newtown. And I reacted, like so many, with some quick, aimless, angry tweets and a facebook post or two, about the sorry state of guns in this country.

More than anything, I wanted a dialogue about guns in this country. And I found, when gun-loving conservative friends responded to my angry comments, that I wanted to simply ignore them, thus preventing a dialogue. So I decided, for the day, while I should have been working, to engage them.

It was, for the most part, dumb. You have facebook. You know. It’s dumb.

But then I saw a reply to a post on the wall of my friend, the talented comedian Greg Karber, that froze me. It struck me as so callous, so incredibly one-dementional, that the person who wrote it must be an ignorant redneck asshole who cares more about taunting liberals with his guns than reacting to a horrific tragedy with any sympathy or sadness.

So I engaged.

And it got dumb quick.

And then I realized that I was under this guy’s skin (hi, I’m Robert, and I’m a pain in the ass), and I realized I could do something with that. What follows is the conversation, with others’ remarks mostly redacted for the sake of privacy and space.

Joey and I had a decent back-and-forth privately over facebook messages, and, as it so often does in one-on-one contexts, it ended quite civilly and quietly. Joey isn’t a heartless redneck (though I included his final speech because it is my everything), but a guy who’s been raised with a set of beliefs and taught to guard them with vigilance. At the end of the day, he, like all of us, wants to help. So he did.

I post the conversation not to be self-congratulatory (THOUGH THAT’S PART OF IT), but because Greg, the author of the original post, got a crazy idea.

What if every smug liberal idiot (like me) and every mouth-breathing, gun-flashing idiot (like Joey) had these kinds of fights? Where we affirm our humanity by focusing not on our own positions or the rightness thereof, but on those who could actually use some energy expended in their direction?

So Greg created Money Over Mouth, a competitive donation site. Take a look, take a position, and enjoy watching the people who agree with you be much more generous than the people who don’t.

http://moneyovermouth.com

Go. Donate.

bindersfullofwomen: binders + Lucile & Mitt redux.

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:55:41 -0700

bindersfullofwomen:

binders + Lucile & Mitt redux.

Post-VP debate Politico reporting

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 02:28:41 -0700

It is clear that Biden’s substantive high points—and there were several places where he took clear command of the debate on issues ranging from entitlements to taxes—will be partly shadowed by his nonstop succession of incredulous smiles, sneers, taunts and guffaws that were apparently intended to show self-confidence and fighting spirit but struck many viewers as undignified and rude.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82327.html#ixzz294fMqmIP

This rather encapsulates what I hate about political journalism. We don’t need Columbia- and Missouri- and Medill-educated journalists reporting on what they assume people watching on TVprobably thought about the style and presentation of a debate participant, when in doing so, they are willfully yielding their objectivity to the spun narratives of both campaigns. Run a paragraph about Biden’s command on the issues, then run a paragraph about his antagonistic debate style (if you think both are worth reporting), but don’t make them into a single sentence that deprives the audience of an opportunity to synthesize information for itself and unnecessarily, imprudently, and irresponsibly declares an impressively substantive debate to have been a draw. Report on the contrasts, not just whether or not there was an obvious “winner,” you lazy bloodsuckers.

The least authoritative thoughts on the ACA you'll hear today

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:48:00 -0700

I’m dumb and nothing resembling a lawyer. If you’re reading this, you’re either a fan of my twitter penis jokes, or my mother. AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET. Just to get that out of the way. I’m writing this mostly out of compulsion.
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It seems like the ACA could have broken either way depending on who the judges were and how they viewed the constitution which, I mean holy shit people, is obviously fluid and subjective. (“It’s fluid subjective for the other guys.” -idiots). The ACA is no more constitutional today than it was yesterday.

Here’s why I’m happy:

Before ObamaCare (“CongressCare,” “SCOTUScare,” “LobbyistCare,” etc.), we had a health insurance system that was incentivized towards profit alone, and not towards insuring sick people. Providing coverage to sick (or weak/fat/retarded/whatever) people was (and is!) bad business. Drops and exclusions keep rates down and profits high, and actually paying out on insurance plans is something companies are wise to avoid and are rewarded for.

We had (and still have!) a system of private health insurers who are today more regulated to ensure that sick people in need of insurance can find coverage. Costs are still too high; provisions to keep them down were written out early. Insurance companies are still well-oiled, finely-tuned profit machines, rather than health insurance coverage machines. Insurance and drug companies have their hands DEEP in the ACA, and by the end of its run in congress, were lobbying HARD for its passage. It’s a dirty, complicated, confusing bill that the country at large won’t understand until it’s been put in place. But the arbiter of who receives and doesn’t receive coverage is no longer JUST a person who needs, desperately, to make money for his company.

But hopefully, eventually, we’ll look at keeping people healthy as the American healthcare system’s first priority, which is something that compassionate people should support, rather than the vilification/marginalization of the sick (lazy/fat/whatever) in favor of ideological consistency. The ACA is a step in that direction.

I think the next step is education. If there’s anything we’ve seen about the ACA it’s that it’s much easier to spin than it is to explain, and now the earth is so scorched, it’s hard to believe the public at large will ever understand the provisions of the bill (and the intentions behind them).

And now: back to the penis jokes.

Flannery O’Connor reading A Good Man Is Hard To Find at...

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:30:00 -0700

Flannery O’Connor reading A Good Man Is Hard To Find at Vanderbilt University in 1959.

Highlight of my mother's hotel-lobby meeting of Three-6 Mafia's DJ Paul, as told to me by my mother:

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:32:07 -0700

My mother: You're from Memphis!
DJ Paul: Yeah, are you from Memphis?
My mother: No, I'm from Lebanon.
DJ Paul: I got backup dancers with booties bigger than Lebanon!
(Laughter, clinking of drinks)

My band singing “Lightning Crashes.”

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:04:00 -0800

My band singing “Lightning Crashes.”

YES

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:37:12 -0800

YES

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:36:22 -0800

YES

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:35:46 -0800

YES

The hard numbers.

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:55:14 -0800

The hard numbers.

The best movie poster.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:28:07 -0800

The best movie poster.

Big pewps.

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:50:56 -0800

Big pewps.

This guy and my grandfather were friends in Lebanon. My...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:07:00 -0800

This guy and my grandfather were friends in Lebanon. My grandfather is famous for turning down the opportunity to go into business with Mr. Evans with the line, “Danny, I just don’t think folks will pay money for soup beans and cornbread.” God I love me some Cracky B’s.

thedailywhat:

RIP: Dan “Danny” Evins, founder of the popular (and occasionally controversial) national restaurant/gift shop chain Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, passed away today of an undisclosed cause. He was 76.

The first Cracker Barrel opened its doors in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee. Evins drew inspiration for his restaurant from the country stores he frequented as a kid growing up in the Volunteer State.

Cracker Barrel took its name from the empty cracker barrels country store patrons would use to place their checkerboards on while they played and gossipped about local scuttlebutt.

With its headquarters situated near its flagship store, the chain quickly expanded, eventually surpassing 600 locations across 42 states. Evins served as the company’s CEO — and, later, chairman — for over 30 years. He retired in 2004.

“Danny was the keeper of this special brand for so many, many years, and he left us with a strong culture that values quality and honesty,” said Michael Woodhouse, who succeed Evins as Executive Chairman. “He will be missed deeply.”

[ap via usatoday.]

5 things I thought re: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:02:22 -0800

Man.

I really liked the book. I did. And I knew it would be a challenge to adapt. But. Jesus. I wanted to give this movie the benefit of the doubt, and I tried my darnedest.

I’m gonna give these in the order that I thought them.

1. The Lucky One trailer was the porniest thing I’ve ever seen in a theatre.

Major LOL at 1:10. Also, this does not bode well for EL&IC.

2. I’m gonna have some real problems with this kid.

People really liked Thomas Horn in this movie, and for the life of me, I don’t know why. I blame the director, Stephen Daldry, for most of the problems herein, but his use of Horn was, to me, the worst and most distracting. More power to the kid, I’m sure he’ll continue to make bank in Hollywood as all well-adjusted young gentlemen do, but let’s get one thing straight: he hurt this movie more than he helped it.

His character, Oskar Schell, is the son of a 9/11 victim, and he is borderline autistic. Jonathan Safran Foer drew an autistic child quite nicely in the book, struggling to connect with human emotions, constantly coming up with savant-ish whimsical inventions in his head. The movie, because it’s a movie and not a book, could have found ways to do this. But instead, they just lifted portions of the book (the opening voiceover which, hoo boy, was one of many voiceover issues), which took what was, in my mind, one of the nicest opening sentences to a contemporary novel, “What about a tea kettle?” and replaced it with some very in-your-face talk about burying people in underground skyscrapers because THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT TO BE ABOUT NINE ELEVEN SO GET YOUR TEARS READY.

Autistic boys do not whisperingly inflect monologues perfectly and dramatically. Autistic boys do not look EVERYONE THEY SEE in the eye, and very clearly articulate how they feel about being autistic. Child actors do that, and it’s why they’re creepy.

3. This movie was not made as a movie.

Somebody took the plot of the book, a book that, I might add, was not about plot, and traced a script over it. The narration of the book was good, we’ll just lay it on as voiceover. The imagery of the book was good, we’ll find ways to work it in, even if it’s not set up nicely.

4. If this movie tries to make me cry about 9/11 one more time, I’m going to sue it for sexual harassment.

I remember in high school when teachers were trying to explain to us what sexual harassment was, and there was a tricky grey area regarding asking a girl several times in a row, without ever getting a “yes.”

This movie manages to work like fourteen different scenes of people staring at the burning World Trade Center, with a sappy score overtop, PRAYING that one of them will have the audience in tears. I have a problem with this. First of all, at no point in the book is there a reenactment of 9/11. At no point are people staring out of their windows, with Foer rubbing his hands together at his typewriter, thinking, “THIS’LL GET EM.” And yet that’s the feeling you get with this movie. Where there’s a failure to get emotional heft out of the script, we get these long, hesitating sighs, combined with shots of the towers.

David Foster Wallace, I believe in an essay about David Lynch, talked about how refreshing Lynch movies were, because they didn’t “fumble for your emotions like teens to a bra strap.” This movie did so, and they didn’t get it on the third or fourth try, and I was really out of the mood.

5. CGI plummeting Tom Hanks = ballgame.

The climax of the movie is sort of an anticlimax. That which Oscar has been looking for is, we all know, trivial. But the script needs something BIG to happen. So there’s a shot of Oscar, a LITTLE BOY, sleeping alone on a subway train (“someone is going to rape that boy.” -everyone in the theater), and he has a dream that’s like a 2 second shot of a CGI’d TOM HANKS FALLING TO HIS DEATH AS HE’S PRESUMABLY JUMPED FROM THE HUNDREDTH FLOOR OF THE TWIN TOWERS. HE’S YELLING AND YOU SEE HIS FACE JUST BEFORE HE’S SMASHED INTO THE PAVEMENT. The movie lost all benefits of the doubt and became a tacky, tasteless, exploitative piece of camp, and I was ready to leave.

I didn’t want to hate this movie. But it was unsubtle and uncreative, for a book that was endlessly nuanced and creative. Some things just don’t need to be made into movies. And some, when they are, need to be done by someone who can match the original author’s creativity, not merely try to approximate it.

I just realized you can OWN a book for the price of SEEING a movie.

Highlights: Sean falling down, “What’s grindr?...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:35:53 -0800

Highlights: Sean falling down, “What’s grindr? what’s grindr?”

5 things I thought re: Young Adult

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:36:32 -0800

I saw Young Adult. Great movie. Not perfect—it lost me with about 30 minutes to go—but very good. Here are some things I thought.

1. Diablo Cody should let the haters hate.

People like to hate on Diablo Cody because she is, among other things, a strong female figure who speaks confidently and throws her opinions around, whether in interviews or in her work, with little hesitation, as are her characters. The things that people complained about with Juno—the kitschy dialogue, the occasional on-the-noseness—got better and worse, respectively, with Young Adult.

But there just aren’t that many writers and filmmakers out there whose personal, original work is guaranteed to make you think about humans. My favorite thing about Juno was that there are five or six principal characters, and there are exactly ten clearly drawn relationships, one between each of those characters independently of the main character. The same goes for Young Adult, albeit to a slightly lesser degree.

That said, the third act—everything from the climax/exposition/reveal moment at the baby’s christening (or whatever) on—got VERY Diablo Cody-ish. You could see her working out personal things, you could feel her making conscious character decisions, and you suddenly left the world of the story and entered a place where you’re sitting at a movie debating the merits and demerits of Diablo Cody’s writing style. Could have used another rewrite.

2. Charlize Theron looks terrible.

Shoutout to Charlize and director Jason Reitman for effectively making her into a beautiful blonde girl in great shape with amazing features and sexy makeup and costume—and making her utterly repulsive. I would look at her onscreen, and because of the nature of her character, but also the incredible scenes of makeup application and pasty-removal that showed the ladysausage being made, I found myself utterly sans boner. Charlize was boner inducing in The fucking Road, a movie about Viggo Mortensen trying not to let a little boy get R’d in a bleak apocalyptic landscape. “I’d hit that” -one thought I had seeing The Road. “Jesus I hope the basement meatslaves don’t R that little boy” -another.

And yet gorgeous Charlize managed to achieve a repulsive physiognomy despite being objectively fine as hell. I get the same feeling whenever I see Megyn Kelly.

3. Patton Oswalt could be Will Smith’s negative image.

The guy is an amazing actor who deserves the chance to build his stature in the acting world for a long time, with many roles, until he’s one of the big names. Did you see Big Fan? Really good. Patton Oswalt is an amazing actor.

My one request: He not pull an inverted Will Smith, and allow himself to be only cast as down-on-his-luck, dumpy schlub. Find this guy a John Adams role, Giamatti style.

4. “Remember the tiramisu?” - brilliant line.

I’ve heard people say Young Adult isn’t a comedy. It is. Precious is a straightforward drama. Young Adult is a comedy. It’s as dark as Precious (pre-photoshop), but it’s a comedy.

When Mavis complains that her mother has a photo up commemorating her failed marriage, her mother responds that the wedding wasn’t a failure, “remember the tiramisu?” Brilliant. Funny.

And Matt, Patton Oswalt’s character, bitterly explaining that people stopped caring about his brutally tragic beating when they learned that he was not gay, but just seemed gay, and therefore was not a hate crime victim? I daresay I let a horribly depressed guffaw.

But Cody slips a couple other brilliant one-liners in there, the one that resonated the hardest in my memory being “Guys like me were born loving women like you.” Said by Matt to Mavis, it answered the question of “What does he see in her?” with a jolt of brutal honesty that might have gone past several viewers. But it gave me chills.

5. Movies about women, when made honestly, are always pro-woman.

My biggest gripe with the movie was the clumsy way exposition is shoehorned into the climactic scene in the front yard. The (SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ STARTING NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE BUT MIGHT WANT TO SEE IT) miscarriage plot point is a deeply moving one, deserving of a more graceful (in terms of the writing, not the character) reveal. As it is, it’s tacked onto a looong, totally uncomfortable blowup that is only barely redeemed by a garage door and a drum kit. She says it long after any real drunk person would have been escorted away by caring acquaintances and/or her mother, who was present for the scene.

That said, it shocked me how little I saw it coming, and how quickly I filed the information into the “things I must be compassionate about despite not really understanding at all” part of my brain. Kudos to Cody for bringing an honest, ugly portrayal of the emotional toll miscarriage into the cultural zeitgeist, as she did with pregnancy and birth in Juno. Cody is a hell of a writer and a beast, and deserves a long career in film and television for her bravery with such things.

ALL IN ALL I GIVE YOUNG ADULT A “It’s good. See it if you want to see it.”

If you had an eraser that could erase any one thing off of any other one thing (e.g. pencil chin strap off of a guido's face), what would you want to erase and off of what.

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:47:30 -0800

First of all, Chris, thanks for asking.

Second, I apologizing for not really understanding how the “ask questions” feature works until now. But rest assured it’s a mistake I won’t repeat, and I’ll get to your other questions in time.

If I had an eraser with which I could erase any one thing off of any other thing, I would probably erase human rights abuses worldwide in places like Syria and North Korea. Or the word “hipster” from the rest of my life. Ditto “irony.” Really, “irony” as a concept in its current vernacular iteration can go, and we’ll all be better for it. And the word “adorkable,” but I think that goes without saying. Yeah, scratch genocide; I’m gonna go with one of the white people internety things that followed it. I have to put up with that shit more regularly.

I also really hate cotton candy-flavored things that aren’t cotton candy.

Thanks for playing!