http://toddseavey.com/2007/04/06/grindhouse-good-friday-death-proof/ Conservatism for punks. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:30:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.9 http://toddseavey.com/2007/04/06/grindhouse-good-friday-death-proof/#comment-355 Tue, 08 May 2007 02:22:25 +0000 http://toddseavey.com/2007/04/06/grindhouse-good-friday-death-proof/#comment-355 [...] Even when describing more mundane environments, Janice is unsentimentally frank.  She has the honesty to note that in her high school, as in essentially all high schools, there was a clique of tough, brutal, often sadistic males who had fawning female groupies, Janice among them — while most of the girls scorned the majority of their own suitors.  We also get to see the painfully cyclical nature of Janice’s mom’s attraction to abusive boyfriends who became abusive pseudo-parents to Janice.  And we see Janice escaping some of the worst parts of her existence only to wander unreflectively into some pretty hardcore drug use — an aspect of the book as revealing as the glimpses of homeless shelters, at least for those of us who were lucky enough (as I see it) not to be teens in New York City during the 80s.  (All this street-level rough-and-tumble stuff is something of a welcome break from the usual theoretical-type-stuff I read, by the way, with the grittiest and realest volumes usually still be no scarier than, say, Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping, not to be confused with Grindhouse (which may actually have made less money), about how to use real-life job experience to start your own business.  No stabbings in that book, interesting though it is. [...] […] Even when describing more mundane environments, Janice is unsentimentally frank.  She has the honesty to note that in her high school, as in essentially all high schools, there was a clique of tough, brutal, often sadistic males who had fawning female groupies, Janice among them — while most of the girls scorned the majority of their own suitors.  We also get to see the painfully cyclical nature of Janice’s mom’s attraction to abusive boyfriends who became abusive pseudo-parents to Janice.  And we see Janice escaping some of the worst parts of her existence only to wander unreflectively into some pretty hardcore drug use — an aspect of the book as revealing as the glimpses of homeless shelters, at least for those of us who were lucky enough (as I see it) not to be teens in New York City during the 80s.  (All this street-level rough-and-tumble stuff is something of a welcome break from the usual theoretical-type-stuff I read, by the way, with the grittiest and realest volumes usually still be no scarier than, say, Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping, not to be confused with Grindhouse (which may actually have made less money), about how to use real-life job experience to start your own business.  No stabbings in that book, interesting though it is. […]

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