Looking for the muse, just re-watched this movie about a book, not a song…
A Love Song for Bobby Long, a 2004 American drama film written and directed by Shainee Gabel and based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps, was shot on location in New Orleans and Gretna, Louisiana while I lived in the city from 2000-2004. It was released in December, 2004.
The story combines elements of characters and stories from Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. It focuses on 18-year-old Purslane Will, who leaves the Florida trailer park where she lives with her abusive boyfriend to return to her hometown of New Orleans following the drug overdose death of her jazz singer mother Lorraine, a free spirit she hadn’t seen for several years.
The girl is startled to discover one-time Auburn University professor of literature Bobby Long and his protégé and former teaching assistant, struggling writer Lawson Pines, living in her dilapidated childhood home. Both men are heavy drinkers who while away their days smoking numerous cigarettes, quoting Dylan Thomas, Benjamin Franklin, and T.S. Eliot, playing chess, and spending time with the neighbors while Bobby strums a guitar and sings melancholy country-folk songs.
The case included John Travolta as Bobby Long, Scarlett Johansson as Purslane Will, Gabriel Macht as Lawson Pines, Deborah Kara Unger as Georgianna and Clayne Crawford .as Lee.
Here’s an analysis from the BBC on “Why people often vote against their own interests” that should be must reading for Democrats, and everybody else, everywhere.
Summary
Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient health care system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?
Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?
It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called “the paranoid style” of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.
But that would be a mistake.
Drew Westen argues that stories rather than facts convince voters
If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.
They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.
There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.
As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as health care reform a very hard sell.
Read the entire article and listen to the BBC radio show here:
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
