Elyce Elucidates

Toy Story 3: More Like Horror Story

2010-06-25T15:50:00.000-05:00

A combination of unceasing advertising, nostalgia from watching Toy Story and Toy Story 2 with my son when he was a tot, and needing something to do with said son and his pal for her birthday led me to the megaplex to see Toy Story 3. Skipping the 3D option was probably the only good thing about the afternoon's screening.

SPOILERS HO!

My biggest complaint about the film was the horror. The baby doll was utterly creepy. The monkey was terrifying. The bear was ghastly. And the adventure was one frightening peril after another. There were way too many unhappy under-10 year-olds in the theater, either bored or clinging, and I was amazed that there was so little good feeling throughout.

Repeating the horrors of Sid the bad kid from the first flick and the adventure and hiding under stuff to escape being crushed or captured from the second flick didn't help much either.

Did Ken help? The tiniest bit perhaps.
Did Latin-lover Buzz help? Not me.

And the worst of all for me, I think, was the message that toys don't have adventures so much as hope not to be thrown away, abused by tots at daycares who receive no adult supervision, bullied by other toys, or tossed into attics. Where I actually cried when I watched the scene with Jessie and the song "When She Loved Me," I just felt like there was no hope at all in Toy Story 3. People suffer, but toys suffer more. How much guilt do I need to lose all pleasure in toys' adventures? This movie tested my limits and gave far too little back.

Despoiling Shrek 4

2010-06-05T19:05:00.001-05:00

THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS AND DESPOILING. SO THERE.

You wanna tangle with me, whitebread? Do ya, ogre? Want me to feel sorry because boo-hoo your life is boring while your mindless wife loves the monotonous routine and never complains? So you wish it all away and then you're sorry? It's a Wonderful Life without the excuse of financial woes? The Incredibles with better fart jokes? Well, bring it, Dreamworks, bring it. Oh wait, you did.

I enjoy twisted and fractured fairy tales with the best of them. I like that Fiona's happiest when fat and gassy and living in a swamp (too bad you give her voice to blonder-and-skinnier-than-thou Cameron Diaz, though). There have been some wonderful moments along the way with the Shrek franchise, and I will always have a soft spot for Mike Myers. I even enjoyed this new one…but it should not have had to use a stupid rehashed lame-ass sexist plot about the poor middle-class man with midlife crisis who wishes he was single and a slob while his wife is entirely oblivious.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand he has to figure out that he had it good before and wah wah wah boo hoo hoo it's all about ME ME ME.

What put this over the top, though, compounding the offense, is what happened at the end, after we've gotten to meet the tougher, hotter Fiona who is the leader of the ogre rebellion and rescued her own damn self from the tower (go white girl go white girl go!). She has no memory of that angry but/and amazing alternate self and goes right back to contented clueless housewife. The writing makes that a necessity. Damn, people, I don't object to contentedness, I object to mindlessness, and Fiona has it.

It kills me that this mess would have been so easy to fix! First, use simple misunderstanding instead of malcontentedness: Fiona seems unhappy, Shrek decides he can fix it but oops fixes it by getting suckered and then the same middle of the film. Or let their be trickery when neither Fiona nor Shrek is looking. Then: at the end of the film, the magical "exit clause" can have an exit glitch and Fiona somehow remembers her old self! She decides heck yeah, she'd like to do a little more axe-wielding now and then and less drippy Ye Olde Chuck E. Cheese birthday party nonsense. Is that so hard?!?!?!

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy some of the twists and turns and laughs. But this tired old plot about the tired old Dad who dreams of tired old adventures while the oblivious wife just wants normalcy? I'm over it, like fairy dust.

And don't go telling me Fiona wants normalcy because her childhood was hell. For one, whose wasn't? And for two, this is Shrek, where we turn fairy tales upside down. Let Fiona need wildness now more than ever given her upbringing. She couldn't save herself so she starts a women's self-defense class. Or she has occasional need for friends who aren't her husband's dumbass donkey sidekick and Puss-in-Boots. Ya know, a little sisterhood. I know! Maybe the mom from The Incredibles who prefers laundry to adventures and the wife from UP who never got adventures can team up with Fiona to star in a twisted 3D remake of Xena: Warrior Princess. After all, these CGI women need something, even if it's make-believe.

Two Ads I Would Pay Not to Have Seen

2010-05-31T13:48:00.000-05:00

Am housebound for a few days, and am watching a marathon of Cake Boss on TLC, but this post isn't about that. (Ok, I'll say Buddy and crew are more talented than the Ace of Cakes clan but the production values of the show suck ~ way too much fake scripting. Now on to the ads...)

TLC has a very small number of ads, repeating endlessly. In addition to the summer show promotions for the channel, there are two that are really on my damn nerves, hence, you're reading about it (unless you've had enough with this warning).

1. Shark Nicorette Ad: Dude on a dock is so obsessed with his cig habit that he doesn't notice when a shark leaps from the water to eat his arm. Now there's no blood pouring from his gnawed limb, and I get the joke, but he's flipping out when he finally realizes the shark is eating him and starts screaming and punching it and I hate it. Apparently others don't, hence my ability to provide you the link to the ad on youtube.

2. Pertussis Vaccine Ad: Young, thin, maybe Hispanic mom and her baby in an ad telling moms to get the pertussis vaccine so their babies don't get sick and maybe die. Now if your baby is already vaccinated, I don't get the point in the first place, but also the sound of a hacking, pitiful coughing baby in the background is more than I want to watch. It's just excessive and I loathe that kind of emotional manipulation and scare tactic.

Now back to Cake Boss and the Sesame Street cake! (Mmmmmm, I want cake and not bad ads.)

CATMAN

2010-05-21T17:17:00.000-05:00

I'm totally hooked on CATMAN. Join me! Check him out here at CrunchyRoll. CATMAN comes in little five-minute episode nuggets with hints of Ralph Bakshi or Heavy Metal, some of the BS machismo and sexism of HM, too. But it's less grotesque and oversexualized and goes more for the fxxked-up desire for a kind of aimlessness the CATMAN wants to call "freedom" when it's mostly about being hopelessly lost with no sense of self, meaning, purpose, or concept of love or happiness. CATMAN's a lanky hip-looking 3-fingered cat dude who leaps from building to building, smokes, drinks, bowls, and has primary dialogue consisting of "Whaaaaa?" and "Fxxx" (those letters used in the subtitles from original Japanese, but there's no voiceover for dialogue, so I imagine it's subbed in the original, too. I saw the word "kudaranee" in hiragana translated as "Fxxxd" in the preview for the third "season," and kudaranai is like "fuck up." So the Japanese spell it out it seems, but it's all xxx'd up in the subtitles.] It's compelling viewing, especially in episodes like #1 where he shoots down the sun, or those where he doesn't kill a canary or wakes up on the top of a fast-moving train.

Gordon Ramsay: Orly?

2010-05-17T08:45:00.000-05:00

I'm picky about my reality tv pleasures. In a truly nonsensical, random way. In past, some I have loved for a season (Project Runway) and some I have never watched and, I daresay, never will (Survivor) or perhaps just one episode every few years (American Idol). About three years or so ago, I injured my back, and was flat on it for a few weeks. I watched every single episode of the Danny Bonaduce trainwreck and the one about the guy who played Peter Brady. They passed the time, as did reading two whole Harry Potter novels in a few days each. And I've always been a big fan of reality-like tv in The Dog Whisperer and Mythbusters.

But now, with time on my hands again while off work, I'm sampling tv reality pleasures at all times of day (and in my usual haphazard fashion). In addition to RuPaul's Drag Race, the new favorite around my house is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. It's definitely got the trainwreck element, but I also feel like everyone in the show knows what's going down, who Ramsay is and how he talks to people--even those he respects get peppered with abusive language--so there's a consensual feature I like my reality tv to have. Some of the waitstaff definitely get deer in the headlights from the abuse, but I guess it's one of those job hazards, and there are more than a few chefs, sous chefs, hosts, and managers who deserve every F bomb aimed at them by the never-charming Gordon.

When I get most riled up is when I close the gap between reality tv and reality as such programming seeks to do as a main directive. I get angry with Gordon at liars. I get flabbergasted by the disgusting sight of rotten food or thieving managers. And I get excited when kind people have good things happen. But I can also generally keep a distance, not falling entirely into the pit of reality tv provocations. So even as I want to babble about "Did you see the one where the Italian restaurant in NY has that big son who thinks he's in the mafia?" and cringe that the episode fulfilled every stereotype of NY Italians I can think of, I simultaneously am quite aware of how the structure of the program and Ramsay's tv persona are entirely aimed at provocation and manipulation to get the biggest reaction (good or bad) and make the "best" reality tv. Explosive with happiness or, mostly, conflict, the show is just another blatant example of how to make pseudo-events (see theorists Daniel Boorstin and or Jean Baudrillard's hyper-reality) happen.

So, on I watch, along with my son and sometimes my husband, to learn far more than we wanted to know about how filthy most restaurant kitchens truly are, even when they get good marks on inspections. I wait for idiots to admit their concept for a restaurant sucks or their dining room manager is dringing them into debt. I watch to see the makeovers and the refitted menus and the on-the-street pitches. I see through to how people fill the restaurant only because Ramsay is there, that giving someone advice rarely helps beyond the first week (too easy to go back to old habits), and that Ramsay is a font of foul language in the most childish of ways. All manner of fun stuff.

The only thing so far that truly irked me? His gratuitous bashing of vegetarians as not having a clue in the world. Yeah, go eat some more lamb, asshole, and see if you get into that Heaven I don't believe in.

LOL @ self.

So... About RuPaul's Drag Race...

2010-05-13T22:54:00.001-05:00

The single most interesting fact about the second season of RuPaul's Drag Race was that my son absolutely adored it. My kiddo is mildly gender-bendy because his hair is below his shoulders, but in most other ways, he's very boy. He has been primped, primed, and preened to understand that gender and sexuality are choices and his parents respect more diversity than he can probably imagine. However, though he's vegetarian, athiest, and long-haired, he is also a soccer and videoplaying BOY. Straight up gym shoes and t-shirts with nothing flowery or even androgynous except the occasional elegant dragon on it. He watches Naruto and ignores all female characters unless important for plot and getting to all the evil villains, several of whom -- including his favorite Deidara -- look entirely like girls to me. Anyway, I digress. Maybe.

We watched most of season two, or maybe from about midpoint on, and he was entirely into the cut-throat competition and picking which ones he thought were best and questioning judges and not boggling or baffled after the first episode we watched where it was clear these were men dressing not even as women but in High Drag. He loved every minute of the tension and trials and contests and dishing.

The rest was just another reality show, I suppose, though we all did kinda love Raven (which, I hasten to digress, is my son's nickname for himself). The man is gorgeous and the drag she does is WOW. Wouldn't wanna meet him, but did love looking at her. And in a less reality-TV way, I adored Pandora Boxx. My favorite, hands down. Witty, wild, wonderful. Great costuming and characterization. Talented in ways so many weren't. OMG Tatiana. Buy a brain. Purchase one, please. Then the ending came though, and Tyra won and ok, he gets to have an apartment so his son can stay with him. What more happy ending is there?

Last, let me say that RuPaul is so into his/her own media self I can't watch/listen without cringing. The surgery, make-up, and fuzzy lighting are nothing compared to what seems like delusions of grandeur that I found painful to witness or perhaps just not performed with enough panache. "Don't fuck it up" became just...embarrassing. She is gorgeous. He is talented. He and she have paid more than their dues. But the Big Gay Sketch Show did a spoof where the contestants were fawning insanely and wondering why RuPaul looks blurry all the time when no one else does. And I laughed.

And ok. I'll watch the Drag U show I bet anyway.

Shatner's Raw Nerve: Who Knew?

2010-05-11T11:45:00.000-05:00

I'm baaaaack! Some time off work and in bed means MEDIA OVERLOAD! So it's time to dish. I hope in the coming weeks to vent my spleen and bounce happily over such televisual delights I've been enjoying over the past few months as Doctor Who, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Dragonball Z, and Ru Paul's Drag Race. I might even share my recent affection for Japanese rap group Midicronica, the Coffee Party, and the pleasure of making origami cranes. But first on the slate has to be my morning with William Shatner.

I hadn't heard of or seen Shatner's Raw Nerve until a random channel surf this morning. Forsaking such televisual pleasures as Margaret Rutherford's Miss Marple and Paula Deen grilling oysters with fresh dill (bleah), I tuned in to see Shatner in an S-shaped loveseat type arrangment interviewing Fran Drescher. I admit I entered the fray because I didn't know she had been raped or gone through cancer, but what I discovered as I watched was two people really talking. Their body language of leaning int toward one another was powerful, as was Shatner's amazing ability to draw out information without seeming like a tabloid reporter or pompous ass. He shared a story of his own apparent near-rape, he pressed her for details but did not laugh or poke. He seemed genuinely interested and genuinely insightful and intelligent. I can't say strongly enough that I've never seen this side of William Shatner.

My husband's theory is that he's simply dealt with all his macho nonsense and is enjoying his buffoonery but has more than that inside. He actually seems interested. I was fascinated.

Partly, it's Drescher, who I love (though I hated The Nanny). I loved her in Spinal Tap and for being a loud-mouthed beautiful Jewish woman. Shatner seems to appreciate that too.

Less satisfying was his interview with Tim Allen, but I blame Allen. His body posture in the loveseat was less comfortable, and he kept this distance that Shatner tagged spot on: stand-up comedians keep a wall between them and others, even from acting. Allen talked about his jail time as a teen, his alcoholism, etc., but Shatner was more available than Allen was for any of the interview, I thought.

Jason Alexander was somewhere between the two: genuine and open, but I guess just less interesting to me than Drescher, or perhaps it was because my husband was watching too and we talked more than we watched. Shatner just amazed me with asking great questions and giving powerful prompts without being prurient. Or not seeming to be anyhow.

If anyone is out there reading, I'd be interested in knowing what you think of this Shatner. Not the Priceline guy, not Kirk, but this interviewer with intelligence and poise--at least as I see it.

Adventures in Manga

2008-02-10T08:16:00.000-06:00

My experiences with Japanese anime and manga (comics) have happened in distinct stages. I remember watching Akira with friends (ok, geeky friends into Dungeons and Dragons, but Chad was there too) and enjoying the artwork and bizarre fixation on mutation (perhaps what a culture fixates on when it has faced the atomic bomb – it enters into the cultural un/consciousness, to be sure – just ask Godzilla). I even remember playing a drinking game, where you had to drink anytime someone said “Tetsuo,” the main character’s name. (That was that game that led Chad and I to kiss for the first time! How romantic!)

With a few exceptions along the way, largely based on Chad bringing home the occasional rental tape, Akira stayed a unique experience. I categorized it more with the postmodern/cyberpunk texts I was studying in graduate school than with anime or manga. Though that same group of friends boasted of Ghost in the Shell and Vampire Hunter D and some were reading the manga that had been translated and was available in the States, I wasn’t really into it. Like D&D, I enjoyed that kind of thing for the social aspects, because it brought with it a fun group of pals to keep me connected to the world while I was taking a long break from dating (and heartbreak) and working on my dissertation. And eventually it brought Chad.

A few years ago, another text brought me back to Japanese anime and manga: Inuyasha. I loved the creatively conceived demons (Yura, the hair demon! Naraku, the megademon consolidated from the broken body of one man and thousands of minor demons! Sesshomaru, the dog demon of elfin good looks and icy but engaging demeanor!) and the incredible cuteness of the drawings. The Japanese fascination with schoolgirls in micromini skirts left me cold, but the show as a whole was fun, and Chad liked it too, so we began watching it regularly on Adult Swim, then found ourselves renting and eventually buying whole seasons. We now own the first four seasons in boxed set plus the four feature films, in Japanese editions. We watch the show in Japanese with English subtitles, preferring the Japanese voices. (It’s also led us to begin, on our own, studying basic Japanese over the past few weeks – fun and challenging!)

When I saw the original manga that inspired the television series of Inuyasha, I was daunted by the ridiculous number of ongoing issues there were. Back then, I did not realize the series was practically interminable (I honestly don’t know whether it’s still in production or not, but we’re waiting for the season five box set of the show, which I know will come out sometime soon). Each comic (the shape and thickness of a paperback but a bit larger) was $9.99 at the time, and I scoffed at the ultimate cost of all those books for a show I was enjoying well enough on TV. I looked at other titles, but I did not know the quality or interest level (for me) of one from another, and the whole concept of manga just did not interest me. (I’m not a fan of American comics either, though I have enjoyed a few over time, including a specific year or two of Animal Man – around the Coyote Gospel and deus-ex-machina issues … can’t remember the artist’s name). And I like some (classic) graphic novels very much, such as Maus and Watchmen. Then there was a bout with Gloom Cookie and more recently Death Jr., but those were short-lived and catch-as-catch can experiences, and I like the omnibus or collected issues not single magazines (too short and too expensive and require me to keep up with when they’re published – hate that and lose interest fast).

But now we come to the present day. Though we don’t play D&D anymore and I don’t spend any time at comic book stores, Chad still does (plays Warhammer – little painted men and dice rolling -- at a local comics store). One afternoon, I was hanging out there for a bit (which is all I can handle) and watching the boys play (Chad and Lane and a bunch of happy geeks), and I discovered the store’s sale bins. I rummaged through the “everything for $1” boxes and came across something called From Eroica With Love, a very unusual manga (to me anyway) with a very campy gay man on the cover. I flipped through it briefly, bought it for a buck, and put it on a shelf at home. I did not read it for about a year.

When I did read it, I was astonished. Written by a woman (as is Inuyasha) in the 1970s (though only translated from the Japanese since 2000), it was full of effeminate beautiful men and decadent intrigue. It made me smile and I loved the very-70s art style, with super-slim men and disco fashions. The plots weren’t even bad (after the first story, full of supporting characters that were quickly abandoned), in a spoof of James Bond adventure in the world of art thievery and NATO. I hopped onto Amazon and bought books 2-4. An intense love-hate relationship was building between the main character (Earl Dorian Red, Lord Gloria – aka Eroica the art thief) and his ramrod of a nemesis and adored object of desire (Major Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach, aka Iron Klaus). Of course, Klaus is as pretty as Dorian in the way he’s drawn, if nowhere near as florid, and their relationship is ripe with sexual tension in deliciously camp fashion. I’ve now read 1-8, am waiting for 9-11 to arrive in the mail, and 12 will soon be translated and available for purchase.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that there must be fan fiction on this series. I’m an old fan of slash fiction, in which media fans take characters they love who should have been intimate but never were (especially male-male pairings) and write stories where they have opportunity to consummate the connection (via every thing from amnesia or date drugs to hurt-comfort scenarios like torture or isolation). I was especially a fan of K/S (or Kirk/Spock stories), where I came to find it impossible to watch old Trek episodes without assuming Kirk and Spock were getting it on in supply cabinets and on shore leave. (Slash stories are the most popular kind of fan fiction on Trek there was/is, I might add, and almost exclusively written by white, middle-class, heterosexual women!) Before the internet, these stories came out in plastic spiral bound xerox packets, costing $20 or more, and I have a few of these treasures stored away. Now, the internet is full of fan fiction of all sorts, from the G and PG variety to the NC-17 type, on megasites, such as fanfiction.net, and those specifically geared to individual fandoms, like fried-potatoes.com (an all-Eroica site named for Iron Klaus’ favorite food). What fun to find free access to texts that mean one never has to get over one’s obsession with a specific manga or TV show or film, even though the writing quality may vary and stories aren’t the same as comics or other visual media, with their “a picture paints a thousand words” approach.

The fun I’ve had reading Eroica has since led me to seek new titles I might enjoy. Contemporary artistic standards for manga have definitely come a ways since Eroica (though I do love the stylized 70s excess and do not critique its simplicity vs. other manga I’ve seen more recently – it’s certainly not the only manga to date to put wit and plot and character above high artistic standards). Recently, and from bookstores like Barnes and Noble and a local Hastings (because manga is not just for comic book stores anymore!), Chad and I have bought such titles as Korean-produced Chunchu (a violent tale of warlords, twins, and demonic possession with a goth/cyberpunk aesthetic for its young lanky main characters) and From Far Away (doe-eyed icky bimbo schoolgirl protected by total-babe warrior in another world where her coming will somehow bring forth some sky demon to help one warring tribe to take over the world!). I’m not drawn to the non-fantasy texts, and there are plenty of high school romance titles (thank you Tokyo Pop) and straight action-adventure. But I like the other-world, fantasy feudal era stuff best, especially with a healthy dose of romantic tension.

Did I say best? No, let’s save the best for last! Eroica has characters that are, in the manga world, called “bishonen,” meaning, basically, “pretty boy.” And I absolutely love those lush images in manga, particularly the ones that are very androgynous and of an unearthly beauty. I know everyone has their type, but that David Bowie-style attractiveness has always drawn me. (Several of my boyfriends in college were tall, lanky, and dark-haired, with long bangs and short cuts in the back. Several dumped me, and the others eventually discovered they were gay.) I was surprised to find out, through a bit of internet research, that many characters in “straight” manga are considered bishonen, including some of the less provocative texts, such as Naruto (my son loves it and so do some teen girl family friends of ours). I guess I just prefer adult fiction, and that takes me to the manga genre I’ve just discovered that is blowing me away. Drawn/written mostly by women and very adult (in that NC-17 way), there is a genre called “yaoi” that is gay male erotic manga, and some of the artists are amazingly talented at invoking the god/dess of Desire.

I’ve only read a few of these, and the intimacy they depict is softcore to be sure (though there is also a hardcore genre, I understand, called “hentai” – a dirty word in Japanese but meaning more just hardcore sex manga in English). (You can google this stuff yourself, of course.) I just finished the omnibus edition of Saihôshi, which actually has a solid beginning, middle, and endpoint and simply has the most gorgeous bishonen dudes I’ve ever seen in a tale as lurid as the best romance novel and as creative as the best pulp fantasy. It’s drawn by Kôsen, the penname of two Spanish women (Aurora Garcia and Diana Fernandez) who, for my money, have cornered the market on depicting the irresistibility of beautiful adult male youth. As a woman with whom I went to graduate school once noted (and I regret now that I cannot remember her name!): a beautiful man is more beautiful than any beautiful woman because it is not expected of men and they capitalize culturally on both feminine desirability and male power. Kôsen definitely pounce on this and play it for all it’s worth. I can just imagine them thinking about what outfits to put their creations in, how best to milk every ounce of tension and release out of the plots. I think of them sitting at the drawing table, laughing with each other about what will turn on their largely (hetero, married) female audience—though Chad found Saihôshi in the gay/lesbian literature section of the store! It’s all a fascinating phenomenon, a complex part of what determines desire and desirability in our culture, straight women’s fascination with fantasies of gay men, and youth obsession. My relationship with it is a complex one too: a delicious pastime and subject of critical scrutiny simultaneously. I guess that’s my favorite flavor.

I LOVED Sweeney Todd!

2008-01-16T17:17:00.001-06:00

The mixed reviews I’ve read and heard of Sweeney Todd do not echo my experience. It’s a wonderful film and I loved it. End of story.

Well, ok, not “end of story” or there’d be no blog entry and it wouldn't be me. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve ever written or spent more than a half an hour talking to me KNOWS I am given to critique and I do not praise uncritically.

SPOILER ALERT!
(I hate having to write that. It’s so nerdy. But I know, people want it.)

No, Johnny Depp did not have the power in his voice that one desires from someone playing Sweeney Todd and singing that dark yet witty Sondheim music. Yes, Helena Bonham Carter was too delightfully corseted and costumed to play a character that Sweeney is repelled by because she’s not one of the “pretty women” he and his nemesis and mirror Judge Turpin sing of. And Alan Rickman was arguably wasted here; the role demanded little and gave little back. Ok, the supporting cast (Johanna, Anthony, and especially Toby) outsang all the lead characters. And golly no, I did NOT need to see the heads bounce and smash on the floor over and over when they slid down out of Sweeney’s barber chair of doom nor Mrs. Lovett burning to death in close-up.

But then, the gore was mitigated by the blood looking nothing like real blood and how well it fit into the black-white-red color scheme that Tim Burton uses so well. Helena Bonham Carter’s pretty high notes offered a gorgeous contrast to her grotesque behavior and she had the character of Mrs. Lovett down perfectly. Sacha Baron Cohen is an astonishingly brilliant comedian and his ability to do voices and accents is a wonder to behold (as was his wig and costume). I can watch Alan Rickman do anything, anytime. And Johnny Depp is…well…Johnny Depp. Who could look away for a moment, regardless of how talk-singy or weak rock-operaish his voice was at times. He was still a spectacle unto himself.

I bought the whole package, from gorgeous sets and Burton’s unmistakable style (that turned humans into living stop-animation) to the opportunity to hear the glorious Sondheim music on screen.

Go see it. And enjoy.

Wicked

2007-12-25T13:00:00.000-06:00

We saw Wicked at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood Sunday night as part of our holiday extravaganza. After a first-class flight and stay at a wonderful hotel right on the ocean (with non-stop sea lion "singing" day and night), seeing Wicked was icing on our amazing vacation cake.

I'll talk about the show in a minute, but I want to describe background details first that made the show extra special. First, the Pantages is this amazing theater that was remodeled some few years back to its original art deco splendor. Out in front were some of the celebrity stars that line the Hollywood "Walk of Fame," including my mom's octogenarian hero Carol Channing.

To this coolness was added extra spectacle when we learned that Carol Kane was starring in Wicked as "Madame Morrible"! It was great to see her do her stuff live, and to hear her unmistakable voice and comedic timing.

But an additional star moment was still in store. As I looked across the aisle and up two rows from our eighth row center seats (!), I saw Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen (and son?) out for the evening! His legs were stretched into the aisle (he is incredibly tall) and she looked gorgeous. Most audience members didn't seem to recognize them, though one woman ran up for autographs. I decided not to bother them with another request. (I've always loved Steenburgen since 1979's Time After Time with ex-husband Malcolm McDowell!)

Then, of course, was the show itself. The sets were an ornate and gorgeous spectacle. The giant dragon with his red lighted eyes and movement at crucial powerful moments was amazing, though did not seem to have any relationship to anything going on in the show. I don't think Oz was mentioned as actually having dragons or mythical creatures, really. Just talking, humanlike animals that were being increasingly oppressed and silenced. Hmm.

The costumes throughout were also gorgeous and spectacular. The ensemble had many wonderful changes of character and costume, from the Les Miz-ish street ensemble at the beginning to the Rocky Horrorish Emerald City denizens and their green spectacles. I imagine it was great fun to design all this for the costumer and set designer.

The acting (including leads that had already done the roles on Broadway) was strongest when comedic, but the singing was glorious. The two leads, Eden Espinosa and Megan Hilty, could belt like nobody's business, and I do adore Broadway belters. Kristoffer Cusick as Fiyero was, to me, the weak link, with a weak boyband singing style and cockiness his talents did not merit.

The music itself was a bit less enthralling than the set and ambiance of the show. Stephen Schwartz (of Pippin and Godspell fame) is not one of my favorite composers. You could feel the Pippin-esque quality of several songs, and this didn't move me. "Popular" is incredibly cute, "I'm Not That Girl" is sweet, and "Defying Gravity" has a catchy hook. (Chad liked "No Good Deed," though I cannot remember the melody being strong, just the message of the words. Suffice it to say: the concept of the show (based on a novel) is compellingly theatrical and familiar--yet with the new message that wickedness is about the perspective from which you view it. I definitely see why it is so successful, and even a few memorable tunes is more than many composers can give us. And he wrote "Colors of the Wind," which is cheesy Disney, I know, but I do love the melody. A nice Jewish boy made good (but why a Jew wrote Godspell is something I guess I'll have to research if I really want to know).

I will add that the show definitely felt like it could only have been staged in a post-Harry Potter world, with images, characters, setting, and mood that really felt Potterish (both novels and films). The many echoes (of Potter, Pippin, Rocky Horror, and even Les Miserables) did bother me a bit, left me feeling the show was leaning on too much else too obviously. But it was still a wonderful night and I'm glad I got the chance to see such a strong production.

My favorite Christmas Season Miracle Picture

2007-12-12T09:25:00.000-06:00

Hey Kids!

The Catholic Church (NY Archdiocese)

has released a new coloring book

that will miraculously solve

all the predatory priest problems,

just in time for Christmas!

But is it just me...

or does that priest

look rather perverse?

like he's just done something naughty

with that angel in the doorway

to make her smile extra brightly?*

* Wow, I actually think this image shows the Church's true plan. It's not breaking your priestly vows if you shag an angel! A perfect solution for all, from mentally ill priests to innocent little boys to the hardest hit of all, those embarrassed archbishops and their boss!

Good to Be Understood: Happy Hannukah!

2007-12-03T21:04:00.000-06:00

Enchanted? Not so much.

2007-11-26T16:24:00.000-06:00

Well, what can I say. It’s the kind of movie that triggers lots of superficial conflict and cultural anxieties for me. When I like it, I know I’m slipping down that slope to hegemonic sell-out land. Where it annoys me, I know I’ve made the argument a million times before (to myself and anyone who will listen, take my courses, or read my blog). And I can’t change the world to be more analytical except by one willing, sympathetic soul at a time.

So. Enchanted: This Disneyfied almost-Princess finds herself tossed into NYC 2007 and must survive til she can be rescued by her Prince and return home. She’s entirely ill-equipped, of course, to navigate our world. And so there’s superficial pseudo-post-feminist critique there momentarily. The classic western fairytales all involve ill-equipped lovely maidens being rescued. I prefer Sondheim.

That our heroine manages to get NYC pigeons, rats, and roaches to clean her rescuer's apartment is fascinating, especially as what passes, then, for “clean” is roach/rat/pigeon-cleaned clean. Which I enjoy. All animals are new “friends” to our heroine, and I do love her holding up and singing to a CGI roach at one point.

At the same time, I’m groaning from my absolute knowledge that this film will end “happily ever after,” and the odds are that the soft-spoken NYC hero won’t end up with his careerist “professional” (a.k.a. pseudo-post-feminist) girlfriend.

Along the way, I’m enjoying the song and dance numbers and the absolutely irresistible message that we all need a little magic in our lives. Heaven knows, these sorts of films beg us to acknowledge how dull and painful our lives are. And sometimes in some ways they certainly are. But then they offer us a few minutes in the dark of a fantasy we cannot possibly achieve as our “reward” for our acknowledgment. I say the payoff is woefully inadequate and just leads to further depression or unrealistic expectations of what "happily ever after" is truly about: a lot of luck and a lot of relationship work.

(I’m also NOT enjoying the little girl in the film. Lousy actress and annoying to watch. What producer's kid is this that she got the part?)

Anyhow. Back to the fantasy. I predicted at the beginning that the princess would become the magical catalyst for the main fella, helping him and his girlfriend to live happily ever after. I kept saying, “Well, at least it won’t be him ending up with her! She needs to go back to fairyland with her incredible childlike naïveté that men with midlife crises often want and divorce their wives for then go, ‘Oops, I seem to be married to someone without maturity, self-insight, or adult goals.’ Guess I'll cheat on her now."

Halfway through the flick, though, I look at my son and say, “Yep, they’re going to end up together” as I push away my over-salted popcorn. I also predict at this point that the workaholic girlfriend (who really we don’t see developed at all as a character, resting so fully as she does on stereotypes of “Today’s Woman” that she doesn’t need development) will end up with the clueless Prince, which she does. That she has to go all the way to Disney fairytaleland to achieve happiness is really sad and, I think, a message the writers feel oh-so proud of. Aren't we clever? We acknowledge that careerist women are as unhappy as men! That the writers believe that this woman would truly want to live the rest of her life with a braindead prince, of course, tells me they’re either all men in midlife crisis wanting to excuse their own sexism by pretending women are just the same as men, or they're women who’ve bought into this mythology, too.

But yeah, ok, corporate life does suck mightily, and I understand why the girlfriend wants out. It’s just that presenting these fantasy extremes just doesn’t help us out, either as real solution or as truly pleasant diversion.

The price we pay for each moment of laughter in a film like this does trouble me.

I will say this, though: I noticed the wrinkles around the super-skinny lead actress’s eyes as she played her bimbo-voiced, wide-eyed wonderfantasygirl and fashion designer. And I thought: Susan Sarandon looks better. And I’d rather be the Wicked Queen than the Bimbo Princess, every time. Am sure Sarandon agrees.

Tell me: Are there truly no new stories to tell?

The Quality of Attentiveness

2007-11-22T18:12:00.001-06:00

Part of the pleasure of doing Streetcar was reading scholarship on it. I realize this is not everyone's cup of tea, but it helped me grasp possible ways to play the role and is also just part of my pleasure in reading literature. One early article I discovered online, by George Toles, dealt with studying drama and also doing drama. This isn't an area of scholarship I've investigated much, oddly. I often keep my acting separate from my studies. But reading this Toles article impacted my studies and my portrayal of Blanche and my understanding of A Streetcar Named Desire as a play. One quotation in particular has stuck with me beyond its ramifications for being Blanche, and I've put it in my signature line in my email and thought about it a lot. Here it is:

"Sometimes another person can arrest my sense of absence from life by remembering that I exist, and making that memory tangible through their quality of attentiveness. I come to believe once more (through another's belief) that I am situated, openly, within my life, that I belong to a world that actually contains me. I am sustained by finding myself at home in another's gaze. And once revealed in this other being's sight, where there is room for me to remember myself, I can turn back to my separateness and not be annihilated by it."

Specifically, Toles is discussing the final scene of the play, in which Blanche rises from having been pinned to the bed by a nurse when a doctor holds out his hand, calls her name, and brings her back, arguably, to a sense of herself. There are many ways to play this moment: is the doctor manipulating her to keep her calm and out of the need for a straightjacket or does he truly care? Is Blanche regaining a bit of sanity and personal power or slipping back into her Southern belle role, attempting to flirt with the doctor to earn the privilege of leaving the room in a relatively dignified manner? Toles describes what may be happening to Blanche at this moment of eye contact with the doctor in the quotation above. But I think he's also describing an important interpersonal moment for all of us who seek approval in the gaze of another.

In film theory, the concept of the gaze, particularly as the "male gaze" discusses the way looking can be political, especially when it is the camera or male protagonist looking at a more passive female subject. The hero rescuing the damsel in distress, the teen boy looking through a peephole at the showering co-ed, the femme fatale caught in the sights of the detective's gun, or a million other similar scenarios with male as active and female as passive. The oversimplicity of this model has, of course, been considered. From issues of race and class and how they modify gender to historical specificity in impacting meaning and from the lesbian gaze to parodic use of the gaze, we understand that this formula may not always apply or apply the same way.

This quotation at first troubled me because of its talk about being sustained in the "other's" gaze. The language of woman-as-other, and how many women may seek validation for their existence through male attention, was problematic for me. And so it is for Blanche, who walks off stage -- whether she is proudly walking on the arm of the rescuing doctor or falling prey to a foolish self-delusion (again) that some man is going to rescue her from herself and from death -- still the same woman obsessed with men.

And the actor is also desperate for the gaze, the insecure "look at me" aspect of theater for the performer. And I am definitely an exhibitionist, not a voyeur. I'd rather act than direct, rather sing than be sung to, though I do not consider myself pathological or abnormal here. I also enjoy seeing good theater, listening to good music, watching films, etc. But that's not really the depth of what this quotation does for and to me.

I also seek validation for my insecurities based on other aspects of my life choices and personality. I feel alien and "other" sometimes, based on my political views and worldview (Left, vegetarian, feminist, pacifist, Jewish American, athiest, outspoken, bisexual, etc.). And so yes, sometimes someone just meets my gaze, literally and, more importantly, symbolically, and I feel at ease, at home, and safe -- for at least a moment. It can come in very differing forms, such as a comment to me that lets me know I've truly been heard or reading a perspective I share and need to hear in Mark Morford's SF Gate column or a negative film review of some hideously popular film that I hated but almost everyone else on the planet seems to have loved. It gives me a moment of feeling safe in the "gaze" of the person or the writer or whomever, and, as Toles says, I can safely "remember" myself, be myself wholly and know I'm not alone. And then, fortified by this reflection, I can continue to be my pessimistic idealistic self, my nervous dominant with the heart of gold self, my wild thing meets doting mom self, and many other selves that aren't always met with praise or understanding in this "my way or the highway" culture.

Tennessee Williams and DESIRE

2007-11-12T12:10:00.000-06:00

I’ve gained new (or perhaps renewed) respect for Tennessee Williams of late, as I enmesh myself with his worldview in A Streetcar Named Desire. He is so right on when he argues, through Blanche and really the whole play, that Desire is the opposite of Death. I know for certain that various forms and manifestations of desire motivate much of my life, from the more obvious to the more implicit. Sex, theater, teaching, writing, activism, parenting: so much in life is so much about Desire. And the more Death you see, the more Desire you need to muster to keep feeling alive -- and as safe as a very unsafe existence can allow. The distinction helps me understand a lot about myself, the risks I take – wise and unwise, the multitasking I do, the constant need to fulfill a drive that seems inexhaustible: no amount of publications, no number of shows, no high enough teaching evaluations, no ample enough times of saying or hearing “I love you”… I just need more more more to feel good about myself, to feel safe, to feel alive. So, bravo Tennessee Williams: your words and being Blanche have helped me uncover another layer of myself and this crazy species we are.

Death and Friendship

2007-10-20T11:03:00.000-05:00

For whatever reason – chance, the Fates, karma, bad luck, just life – death of various sorts has been resonating in my life this past year, leaving me hurt, thoughtful, and struggling to accept myself as I am.

The true manifestation of death closest to me is, of course, my Dad, almost a year ago. As my mother put it, life feels unreal after my Dad’s death. Something askew. Which really means that mortality has never felt so real. And who wants to know that. Knowledge of mortality inspires so very much of what human beings do and how we do it. It doesn’t seem to traumatize the elephants, but it does us. In this culture, it motivates everything from youth obsession and conspicuous consumption to poetry and daredevils.

But I’ve also been dealing with rejection-as-death this year, having unintentionally chosen to invest myself in several friendships that ended badly and with complete severance of contact. I am the type to always maintain a friendship at some level, disliking any sort of permanent ending and feeling there is always something positive to come from two people who care for one another, even if there is great distance between them of some kind (physical, emotional, intellectual, etc.). Friendship closeness can just be the knowledge that we care, even if we talk rarely and just think good things about and for each other. Or it can be frequent contact and sharing life narratives and emotional needs. And anything in between. But I don’t sever contact, and I loathe rejection. It’s death. This is not to say I’ve never rejected anyone. But if there’s been emotional closeness shared, I do my best to keep good energy between us always.

This past year, I’ve had friendships wax and wane, and I’ve had several go bad in painful ways. And all with men. Hmm. On the positive side, I remain deeply bonded to my wonderful and loving husband, and plan always to do so. In addition, I have several close male friends who are not freaking out or severing ties. I also have strong and close female friends, from longterm childhood friends to more recent theater pals.

But the rejection from male friends really has me hurting. That ability to compartmentalize that some (many?) men grow into from childhoods in which they’re told to toughen up for the big hard world (or however they come by it) is so alien to me that when I come face to face with it, I feel shocked, astonished, and helpless. I can explain some of this to myself sociologically and psychologically, and that’s fine for the intellectual end of the “dealing with symbolic death” equation. But what about my gut, my heart?

Yes, I invest myself deeply in friendships with men and women, and I know many people do not. They “reserve” deep caring for their partner or family only. But I don’t. If I care about someone, then I just do. And the men I’ve been hurt by this year did care, did show strong signs of valuing my friendship. But they were able to distance themselves, sever ties, and do it absolutely. I just plain don’t get it. Yes, I know one of them is having marital issues and is not very effective in communication, and I do not want to be in the middle of that. One has never had a successful long-term relationship, and I don’t even know if he has any close friends. He’s a loner and I was wrong to think he’d be able to maintain a friendship with me. (Ah, the temptation to link friendship with therapy is strong in me.) And the friend I’d had for 3+ years decided he needed only friends who have no critical thinking skills. At least that’s how I read it from a distance of a year of no contact.

And it’s the no-contact thing that I’m complaining about here. Yes, friendships come and go – just the nature of them. But a need to never talk again? I just loathe feeling forced to remove a cell phone number from my phone and knowing I cannot call to ask a question or share a success. It hits me very deeply, and moreso since my father's death.

All I can do is ask: Why invoke that kind of death when death is all around us already?

Religious Harassment: Can I Get a Witness?

2007-09-30T20:03:00.000-05:00

In completing an online educational “module” related to sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, I began to think about the importance of having sexual harassment addressed, legally and morally, in the workplace and, simultaneously, about how other kinds of harassment in the workplace are left entirely ignored. The major gap I’d like to preach about and decry here is religious harassment.

When Christians preach directly at me in a workplace situation, I consider this a form of harassment. I’ve had students proselytize in my direction, for example, telling me I need to find my way to Jesus, that I’m in danger if I don’t, that they can get me literature to read or a church to attend, etc. One young man kept it up until I finally stopped dead in my tracks as he followed me to my office (for the third time in a row after class), faced him down, and told him, as politely as I could, that I was tired of assuming and reflecting back to him that he meant well. I told him he was not only wasting his time but actively and overtly insulting me, condescending to me, and alienating me – from his beliefs and from him as a person. He seemed thoroughly shocked to hear this, as if it had never in his wildest dreams occurred to him that his behavior could be seen as inappropriate, much less insulting and alienating, or worse, let me hasten to add, harassing.

In the online lesson on sexual harassment, I read this quotation: “An example of third party harassment may include direct (or telephone) conversations about sex in the hearing range of others to whom it is unwelcome. Such behavior must be stopped if others request it or if management becomes aware of the behavior.”

It makes perfect sense in some ways. Listening to someone talk in insulting or objectifying manner about their sexual conquests while I’m trying to work or in order to distract or disturb me could easily become harassment. Yet, the idea that just being overheard talking about sex at all could lead to a harassment suit made me think about our prudishness as a society. Still, in a gracious society where we err on the side of caution, I respect the concern.

That said, I resent that I could say “Please stop talking about sex in front of me and keep your ‘Pornstar’ or ‘Don’t Assume I’m Not Into Cheap, Meaningless Sex’ t-shirt covered” but could not say “Please stop talking about Christianity in front of me and keep your ‘Denial Won’t Help When You Stand Before Christ’ or ‘The Rapture is Coming: Are You Ready?’ t-shirt covered.”

The truth is that we have no “religious harassment in the workplace” protection or training courses anywhere that I know of. And I want some.

Streetcar Named Desire: Being Blanche

2007-09-02T11:40:00.000-05:00

Going against type and what the director was kind enough to praise as my large "toolbox" of acting skills, I have been cast as Blanche in a local theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire (get ongoing show info at the Center for the Arts website). I am honored and thrilled (and no little dose awed by the number of lines to memorize). I also had to wrap my head around how I fit Blanche. It is certainly easiest to cast Blanche as a willowy woman with a shake in her voice, looking like a kitten in the rain. But my director and I share the perspective that Blanche can be most compelling if she begins the show as a woman who has mustered all of her strength for a last shot at convincing others she is not the fallen, broken woman she feels herself to be deep down. Then, the show progresses and shows her fall apart completely. The movement from stronger to entirely broken could be so heartbreaking to watch compared to a more weak woman losing her last shred of hope. And that's how we're going to play it, though the rehearsal process should help us try out many subtleties along the way.

This will be my second lead in a Tennessee Williams show. I did Maxine in Night of the Iguana ten years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. Blanche is a much more challenging part in terms of her volatility. Maxine was confident and comfortable as a sexually predatory lush. And what fun to play. I hope to learn new things about myself, Williams, and acting through this experience. What does not kill us makes us stronger -- and this is going to be a LOT of work!

So far, my best motivator has been the director's confidence in me as well as her husband's, the man who will be playing Stanley. He and I have awesome onstage chemistry, and that should help a great deal to allay any last fears I have. In addition, I saw Ann Margaret's made-for-TV 1984 rendition, and she definitely plays the part similarly to what I will. Here she is:

I won't look like her (ha!) but she played it very strong, low-voiced, and sultry rather than flighty. It should be an interesting ride!

Insomnia Cure

2007-08-12T15:28:00.000-05:00

Like anorexia, obesity, addiction to Warcraft, and fundamentalism, I think insomnia is a product of our culture. Rather than interpreting these various phenomena as "purely" psychological or physiological, a social view of U.S. culture as having certain toxic effects helps one not to blame oneself for various dysfunctions and addictions.

I am somewhat of a light sleeper to begin with, and stress means that if I wake during the night (to pee, because the dog needs to go out, because my son wakes and calls to me, etc.) it can be hard to fall back asleep. When I had Lane, I also had baby-related insomnia in a big way: by the time he slept through the night, I couldn't. A therapist recommended an excellent book, Say Goodnight to Insomnia and I recommend it heartily for the clear, calming, book full of good sense that it is. Really helped me to know I would not die of insomnia and that I could be ok in time. I also took benadryl, which had the lovely effect of giving me a solid 6 hours a night but dried up my milk so I stopped breastfeeding much sooner than I'd planned. (My OB should have warned me, but did not, dang it.) Some folks can't do the Benadryl/Tylenol PM type route because it makes them wonky for too many hours (or days), but at least it's not addictive and doesn't give you short-term amnesia and cause you to crash your car like Ambien! (I have friends who have experienced both!)

But I've found myself a new cure that works best of all: books-on-tape and my iPod. I have a bunch of books of light and frivolous nature (most by P.G. Wodehouse) on my iPod, and I simply turn them on very softly and listen when I wake in the middle of the night. Except for the harsh nightlight that is the iPod screen, it doesn't disturb my spouse beside me, doesn't involve altering my body chemistry, and can be used over and over. Between free downloads from the public library and iTunes, I've got wonderful radio plays and classic literature, silly comedies and mindless mysteries. I have new books that I haven't listened to for when I first lie down to relax me if I need it (instead of TV) and old favorites (especially Wodehouse's Blandings Castle tales) that I know almost by heart.

I find myself wondering if I'm the only one who does this. In any case, it really works for me.

Holocaust Imagery in Recent Films

2007-05-30T21:18:00.000-05:00

There was a huge mound of discarded children's shoes in Pan's Labyrinth and another of peasants' shoes early in Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Mountains made of the shoes of the slaughtered (whether by a horrible Freudian monster or a monstrous government) is an easy invocation of horror and an obvious allusion to the Holocaust (one of the easiest horrors to summon for our twenty-first-century western consciousness).

These two films were so very different in focus and tone, yet both use this stock Holocaust image to magnify/simplify our awareness of Evil in the deaths of "chosen" people: children--the ultimate innocents--in Pan's Labyrinth and those who resist the government in Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

Pan's Labyrinth arguably earns its usage: the Holocaust is part of our consciousness and unconcious fears as viewers, plus the filmmaker wishes to draw connections between the Spanish fascists of the Spanish Civil War era and the Nazis. By comparison. Pirates 3 is all about shortcuts that maximize pathos with the least amount of filmic space (so we can get to the action-adventure scenes, the special effects, and the Johnny Depp scenes).

Yet I am surprised to have found this image in both films. Has anyone noticed similar imagery in other films recently?

Well Fallen, Mr. Falwell

2007-05-19T13:21:00.000-05:00

So, Jerry Falwell is dead. May his legacy of hatred and intolerance join him in the nothingness that I believe meets us all at death. May all the wickedness, cruelty, bigotry, and hypocrisy he spouted vanish into resounding silence for the future and instant forgetfulness smack into the minds of his followers with the same certainness in which his life ended (sans rapture, I might add).

I almost wish I believed in hell at times like this, for that is surely where Falwell would be right now if it existed. In sincerity, though, I simply wish that respect, tolerance, love, peace, kindness, gentleness, honesty, concern, care, and fun would find their way into the hearts of the Religious Right, and especially into their leadership.

Morality does not necessarily come with religious faith and, often, the opposite seems true: the louder the voice from the pulpit or the pew, the more immoral and irrational. Falwell did grievous wrong to his constituency and to all those who lent him even half an ear for half a moment. We can see it in his every word, but I don’t want to reprint them here lest they pollute the internet more than they already do. (But do visit Mark Morford’s Falwell column to read some of the saddest and most evil and know fully whereof I speak.)

When you’re through, you might want to read the wit and wisdom of that bizarre combination of iconoclast and neocon Christopher Hitchens at Slate.com or watch him on CNN, spouting anti-Falwell/anti-religion rhetoric with more persuasive and powerful gusto and sparkling white male Britishness than anyone else on the planet can muster (well, there’s always Richard Dawkins). I am so glad ethical athiests are starting to have some voice in the media!

To conclude, let me add how much I resent Falwell for making me have to write this blog entry. We all have better and more positive things to do with our time than combat the evil he spewed into the world in his power-mongering way...evil that will continue to impact this nation's populace and leadership, sadly, even after his death.

I think today would be a good day to plant a tree in reverent honor of a future without Mr. Falwell in it. And hug your LGBT friends. (Any excuse for a tree or a hug is good, eh?)

Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country

2007-05-01T19:21:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country. It's full of powerful opinions from the Left, wise and well-earned outrage. In fact, I don't think I disagreed with anything he said, though I have my own pessimistically idealistic feeling the species won't die out in the next 100 years, even if we are speeding towards doom at a rate unprecedented or unimagined by previous generations. Each generation has doom-predictors: we're just moving faster because our technology moves faster. And, in this country, because we let the dumbest and greediest lead in every facet of life. The book reads quickly and smoothly and delightfully in a pithy, witty, and often powerful way. From religion and politics to death and the arts, I share his perspectives.

Vonnegut does disappoint me, however. Or no. I could tell where he'd go in ways that I've grown accustomed to yet regret. Old-school white male focus is my frustration. He makes reference to men and women (with only one chapter doing a bit of Venus and Mars, and then only superficially), but all the wisdom he finds -- in literature, politics, arts, sciences, and his personal experiences -- come from the minds, mouths, and pens of white men. Lincoln, Hemingway, Twain -- I could catalog it but I won't. But references to famous wise women are absent, with the single exception of one reference to a few word's from Emma Lazarus. And people of color are praised for maintaining extended families (Navaho, the Ibo) and the Blues (African Americans), but only Martin Luther King is named (in passing).

We are products of our times and places and Vonnegut's more wise here than foolish...though it would have been so nice to write this post without a caveat. Hence, I'll end it elsewise.

Kurt is up in heaven now; and if this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

New Haircut!

2007-03-08T17:54:00.000-06:00

Labyrinths Beat Bridges Every Time

2007-03-03T09:27:00.000-06:00

Have meant to blog about Pan’s Labyrinth for some time, but haven’t gotten to it. Life has kept me away from the blog too long. Have been doing lots of theater (just finished Chekov’s “The Bear” and now am cast as Lois/Bianca in Kiss Me Kate). And work has been hectic, with me having to chair our biennial Women’s Studies Conference. But why blog about that when I can blog about Pan’s Labyrinth and Bridge to Terabithia!

Pan’s Labyrinth is a rich yet broadly scripted film that I did very much enjoy. My enjoyment was qualified by what I considered a very unnecessary amount and type of violence plastered all over the screen in places. We know the commander is an evil bastard from the moment we meet him (or before, when the young female protagonist is told to call him Father and doesn’t want to). But when he crushes her hand upon meeting her, we know he’s a sadist with no conscience and, for this Grimm’s fairytale-like narrative, enough. But no, we get gratuitous (imo) scenes like him punching a man in the face until he’s dead (I turned away, perhaps he punched him elsewhere or did other things, but I couldn’t look and plugged my ears, too). Other scenes were arguably more necessary in their violence, like when he stitches up the gash in his mouth and it has psychoanalytic vaginal overtones. But mostly I think the graphic violence was about director del Toro having been the director of flicks like Mimic and Hellboy.

The plot was arguably also not particularly original: the little girl who escapes the bad world around her through fantasy tainted by that world. There’s no escape is the message. And she dies as a martyr, also wringing the tears from us and evoking Jesus and not wildly original.

The fantasy world and its creatures were damned creepy and intense, though. One monster that eats little children (we see the carnage in Goya-like paintings and in a pile of children’s shoes that is directly evocative of the Holocaust – as are other elements as this is fascist Spain). I think of it as the miscarriage monster and it’s gorgeously hideous and a Freudian field day to analyze.

I also adored the use of sound in the film. Creaking leather was big throughout, as were the creaking building, beds, creatures, and humans. I’d need to see the film again to analyze that element further, but it definitely caught my ear.

By contrast, I have far less of interest to say about Bridge to Terabithia, which used some similar images: fantasy as escape for kids and marred by real life ugliness; martyred little girl. I think my very negative response to the film comes at least in part by how wrongly it was advertised. There’s precious little actual fantasy in the film and the ads make it look like a lovely little escape. I’d never have taken my son to Pan’s Labyrinth because I knew it was adult content with a child actor; I wouldn’t have taken him to Bridge to Terabithia either, if the ads had represented the content accurately.

As another reviewer my husband read (sorry, no citation at the moment) said: the film cannot bridge the gap between the touching fantasy escapism and the grim reality of killing off the seventh grade girl. She is the heart and soul of the film, the savior and martyr, the delight from beginning to end with her individualism and her pain, her enthusiasm and her art.

The plot is contrived, beginning to end. The boy who is ignored by the impoverished and too-full family, desperate for Daddy’s love but Daddy gives it only to his baby girl: not original. Suffering bullies at school, having a crush on a teacher: blah blah blah. And then here is that teacher. Totally hot hippy music teacher (who’d have been fired for singing hippy songs at my son’s school) suddenly gets the brilliant idea to pick up and take ONE YOUNG BOY to the museum ALONE. Can you say Statutory Rape Charges? It’s all “necessary” to show the boy be selfish for one stupid moment so the glorious girl can have an accident when alone and he can feel guilty the rest of his life. Or at least until he reconciles everything by donating his fantasy world to his undeserving little sister. What an ending. Dreadful.

In the end, both films left me conflicted. But Pan’s Labyrinth is ultimately a powerful and compelling film with evocative and rich imagery – a compelling filmic experience. Bridge to Terabithia, by contrast, is an unworthy mess.

Dog Whisperer Fan

2007-01-10T10:59:00.000-06:00

I confess it: I love The Dog Whisperer, on many levels.

First, the dog psychology Cesar Millan uses is absolutely practical, useful, and right on the money. We’ve taken our basically good but nervous dog Josie and helped her be more secure, calm, and obedient in only a few days using Millan’s simple, common-sense method.

It is amazing how repetitive the show gets while remaining entirely watchable. I can now predict exactly what he’ll do or recommend on every episode, with the same sparkling results every damn time. The people always overindulge their dog, let it run the house, and substitute affection for discipline in a way the dog does not understand. The dog thinks that its neurotic behavior (whether aggression or nervous anxiety) is a good thing when the people use love and affection to try to calm it down, and in five minutes Millan takes the dog for a walk and gets it obedient and calm, even if it takes him getting bitten a time or two to do it.

I also enjoy the show because Millan is such an entertaining little macho powerhouse. I don’t think I could stomach him if he were only macho, though. He actually does seem to care about the owners and analyzes and treats them like a good therapist while smirking his “seen it all” smile as they think their situation with their dog is entirely unique and out-of-control while he knows it’s just another typical owner not giving the dog enough exercise or discipline.

Moreover, Millan and his dog pack definitely have a literal and symbolic “animal magnetism” that is engrossing to watch, and I definitely find myself attracted to him and his human-dog worldview.

I really want to see the South Park episode with Millan disciplining Eric Cartman and my Dog Whisperer life will be full! The excerpts I saw on YouTube were hysterical!

Meanwhile, how about a Cat Whisperer to get our fluffy monsters to stop clawing the furniture!

Trying to Talk to a Policeman

2006-12-08T17:09:00.000-06:00

I was driving home after 10 the other night, returning alone from final dress rehearsal of It’s a Wonderful Life, my husband having taken our son in his car just before I left. En route, I decided to call my mother about something or other related to ongoing bits and bouts of depression about my father’s death and the ending of a close friendship only a month apart. She began to tell me of some stressful things that happened during her day and as we talked I lost track of speed limit. About a mile from home a cop pulled me over. I was going 65 in a 55-mph zone.

The usual things happened: he took a long time checking my plates sitting in his car, then walked v e r y s l o w l y over to my door and flashed his flashlight throughout my messy little red Focus with kids’ toys and tissues and empty water bottles everywhere. He acted as if I were dangerous, perhaps because my leather bomber jacket seen from behind makes me look so butch. He demanded my license, registration, and proof of insurance. I was flustered, frustrated, and increasingly depressed as he took his time looking over what I handed him (after rummaging through my equally messy glove compartment). Pretty soon, my eyes were filling with tears, and all I wanted was to go home. He aimed his flashlight at me as I dabbed at them and I looked up into that too-bright light and said, “Look, my father died a few weeks ago, I was having a stressful conversation with my mother though I shouldn’t have been talking on the phone in the car, and all I really want to do is go home. If you need to give me a ticket, that’s fine” or words to that effect, all said deferentially and with as much patience and as few tears as I could muster.

He nodded sagely, then went behind the car and looked at my license plate some more and waited for the report on my driver’s license (don’t they have computers in their cop cars yet?). When he returned, I noted that he had not taken out his pad for writing speeding tickets, which made me happy, as I didn’t particularly want a speeding ticket. But he did pipe up with a fascinating question:

“Do you hate our president?” quoth he.

“Do I what?” said I.

“William Bush: do you hate him?”

“Who?”

“The president.”

“George Bush?” I asked, trying not to sound too condescending as I was asked this entirely inappropriate question. I then remembered the W with red circle-slash on the back of my car. I smiled through soggy eyes. “No,” I said with a little laugh, “I don’t hate anyone. I disagree with many of his policies, but I don’t hate anyone. I’m tired and all I want to do is go home and go to bed.”

He replied, “Sounds like you’re going through some real chaos right now. I’m just going to give you a verbal warning. Remember, this is a 55-mph zone not 65.”

“Thank you,” I said, sincerely. “I really appreciate your not giving me a ticket.”

He added something about getting home safe and we parted company, him doing a dandy super-swift U-turn in the middle of the road that would have landed anyone else with a pricey ticket.

I don’t think I really need to analyze this for my readers, do I? Clearly, he should not have asked me that question about our president, “William” Bush. That he did not know Bush’s name is funny in an absurdist theater way. And that he would have given me a ticket if I said I did hate Mr. Bush is obvious and infuriatingly sad. But that’s how things are when you have to talk to a policeman in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Yee-haw.

DaVinci Code: Take 2

2006-11-29T18:02:00.000-06:00

Life and death intervened to keep me from blogging about finishing The DaVinci Code before now. But here's a bit:

In the end, I really enjoyed the novel. It was escapist when I needed some escape; it challenged Christian religio-cultural supremacy when I needed to bask in such challenge. I stand by my critiques of the novel’s limitations, but once I accepted that this was an action-adventure thriller with some juicy if superficial political critique of the Church (many aspects lifted whole from other texts) rather than Good Literature (a.k.a. beautifully written prose with richly crafted characters, etc.), then I just dove in and enjoyed it for what it was. The reading dovetailed nicely with my readings of Richard Dawkins, which was another factor in its timely favor for me. Dawkins deserves and will get his own blog entry here one of these days. I share many of his perspectives but not all. He is sexist and throws babies out with bathwater too often, but he is also such a reassuring voice admist the excess of religious rhetoric dominating our culture and much of the world today. But I think I may have to blog about Talledega Nights and Nacho Libre next.

Talledega Nights: Over and Over

2006-11-29T16:26:00.000-06:00

I have now seen the film Talledega Nights FOUR times. What does this say about me, about the film, and about the state of the union? Instead of answering those questions, here is an overview of my viewing experiences.

Before the first time: Saw the previews and actually laughed. Saw a making-of and enjoyed knowing the actors had done some behind-the-scenes roleplay at Nascar tracks. Thought the critique of redneck racing fans might do my Yankee heart good.

First time: Saw it with my son at the multiplex. It was the only film out that I thought he and I both might be able to stand. We both laughed aloud, though we found the writing of the kid characters excessive and unfunny.

Second time: Played for $2 on the campus of MTSU so dragged my hubby and my son to it again to see if Chad would enjoy it. He did. Again, we laughed aloud, and I paid particular attention to Sasha Baron Cohen’s character, his accent and facial expressions, especially. Chad and I particularly grooved on the long kiss at the end. And we both think the actress playing the wife is superb in the role.

Third time: Saw it without the sound on the airplane going to California (first trip) in early November. Enjoyed paying half-attention to the now-familiar funny bits and ignoring the rest—like moments of lousy editing (like the whole Susan character, which is fabulous in the bar scene but obviously cut out to make little sense in the rest of the film) and jokes that didn’t quite work (again, the kids and their change of character).

Fourth time: Watched it in the hotel with my brother when on the second California trip after my father died, thinking it would be good escape for me and Reid. Watching it with him made me see how stale some of the jokes were and how fluffy the critique (so interspersed as it is with cheering on the redneck). The knife in the leg scene is still hysterical, but even better in the outtakes. We also saw Anchorman when I was in CA the first time, and I opined then that Talledega Nights is better, more cohesive, more sustained critique…but after seeing it the fourth time I’m less sure. I don’t think Anchorman truly worked; it changed direction in the film several times, particularly re the purpose of the gender battle, but it had some great improv moments. When we finished with Nacho Libre and I thought it wasn’t much worse than either film (though somehow Will Ferrell is growing on me and Jack Black isn’t), well, Reid and I both decided that how funny a film is has much to do with mental state and energy. And when we watched the films, we had little energy and a seriously depressed mental state. Less so when we saw Borat on its opening weekend when things seemed stable with my dad and my brother and I were seeing a film in the theater for the first time in many, many a year. (Not that Borat, too, didn’t have its limitations, but it’s politics were much more upfront—even if rednecks can ignore them and just laugh at the foreigner jokes.)

The Da Vinci Code: Why Didn't Someone Tell Me...

2006-11-11T09:17:00.000-06:00

...this is pulp crap?

I mean I know I should have been paying attention to what people were saying beyond the religious nuttiness, but I didn't. I just did not know that it is chock full of superficiality, predictability, sexism, and mediocre writing skills. Now, I confess entirely that I'm only on page 100, but I just had to pause and put down my thoughts (at least in part because I want something over my pirate pic below because someone told me it makes me look like I'm pumped full of testosterone with my dominant jaw and obvious pumped body! I'd love to look macho when I'm TRYING but I thought I looked hot and more femme than butch in that pic!). Anyhow, back to The Da Vinci Code...

To exemplify my critique, let's begin with Silas's backstory in Chapter 10. I could have guessed the S&M albino thug would have an abusive alcoholic father. I didn't think the novel would bother with his backstory, assuming, as readers likely would, that he'd have some horrid upbringing that led him to zealotry and a willingness to do others' bidding, no matter what was asked. Like Jaws or Oddjob, those over-the-top villain's assistants in the James Bond films, the albino Silas is our generic creepy evil-doer in service of the more evil-doing head villain. So, I didn't need his backstory. When I got it, it was entirely predictable and superficial, down to the butcher knife he used to stab his no-good, spouse- and child-abusing father in the back--and everywhere else, repeatedly. (I'm not arguing, by the way, that alcoholic men don't abuse and even murder their spouses with alarmingly culture-defining frequency; just that it was an easy/cheesy backstory for our albino villain's assistant.)

For sexism, I was truly surprised to see that, with the exception of Silas (who is, let's face it, an emasculated mess), the male characters are referred to by their last names (Langdon, Fache, etc.) while our intrepid cryptologist is always spoken of by her first name (Sophie). She becomes more personalized, less professional, more vulnerable. And I wonder if the author, Dan Brown, did this on purpose or not. I tend to think not.

I could go on, but let me pause here until I finish the novel and just say the whole thing has a kind of cheesy noir feel to it, artificially imposed and leaving me with a smirk on my face the whole time I'm reading it. Nonetheless, the religious symbology stuff is engaging and it is serving its purpose for me: escapism while I care for my very ill father.

What's New and Fabulous, Elyce?

2006-11-01T18:52:00.000-06:00

What's new, Elyce? First and most fabulous, of course, is ME! I've lost almost 25 lbs. now, am bleaching my teeth, and had a fabulous Saturday Hallowe'en pub crawl with friends, dressed as a pirate babe! Men are giving me doubletakes these days and I must say I love it and need it! I'm also taking the motorcycle safety class soon and then, if it goes well, I plan to buy my friend Deb's 1999 Honda Shadow. (Can you say midlife crisis?!)

What are you reading, Elyce? Well, Chad and I are in the middle of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and loving it. He's a cocky fella, but so are most Christians we know, with perhaps less reason! He includes many gorgeous quotations from our country's "founding fathers," such as this gem from John Adams: "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!" Zowie! Or this delight from a later Adams, Douglas (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy): "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" I know, I know: most of my friends reading this are agnostic or lapsed/casual Christians or Jews, but I'm enjoying the possibility of claiming well-deserved respect for atheists--and I'm hoping by the end of the book I can claim the title proudly (I feel sometimes like a cowardly agnostic...I so WANT to believe in reincarnation, but I really don't believe in God, just in being a good, caring person). As Dawkins' says about atheism, "I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an athiest when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further."

What's your next show, Elyce? Just got cast as Mother Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. Too funny, isn't it? (Lane has also been cast, as a newspaper boy who cries out "Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Local boy wins Congressional Medal of Honor!" It will be our first show together!)

And after that, Elyce? After the first of the year, I've been invited to play the young and beautiful widow who scorns, threatens to duel with, then falls for a brusque soldier in Chekov's early one-act play, "The Bear." It's a lovely role and the director will be my longtime MTSU colleague in English (now retired) Ayne Cantrell. How cool is that?

Anything else, Elyce? Heading out to visit my Dad Saturday for nine days. Send healthful thoughts for painless longevity his way.

Frida Kahlo Meets Moses

2006-10-22T10:20:00.000-05:00

Though we didn't win a prize at our theater friends' "Famous Dead Persons" Halloween party, we do think we were the most provocative couple there!

And I'm amazed how much I actually looked like Frida Kahlo!

Career, Cukor, and Me

2006-10-08T17:26:00.000-05:00

How do I feel about my career? Well, it’s important to my sense of self and well-being. I feel needed, wanted, useful, productive, smart, and important enough to avoid debilitating moments of self-doubt. I place value in education and I enjoy teaching and learning. I write well and I like writing. Not sure about cause and effect in all of this. Do I enjoy writing because I do it well or have I developed the ability to do it well because I enjoy it. Probably, the answer is “yes” (or “all of the above,” as my friend Rick would say).

I also love acting. Would I love it as a career? I’m not sure. Certainly, there is the theatrical within teaching: the students as audience to teacher as performer. The best teachers, so I am told, let the students perform. But I also believe that there are times when you just have to lecture, to bring new ideas rather than just asking questions to let students discover things on their own. There are some thoughts that some people just won’t come to without someone pointing out a path to them. In any case, teach is not acting. Students are a far less grateful audience most of the time, nor are they in the classroom to applaud their teachers. Nor should they be. So I also like acting for its own sake. I like performing someone else’s words when well or entertainingly written. I like singing good songs. And I love applause.

I have no desire to be a director. Never a behind-the-scenes type though I admire those who are content or thrive there. I enjoy taking photos, but I’d rather be in them (if well taken and make me look good). I love contemplating bringing something to the stage, but I’d rather bring it there bodily (and enjoy the applause).

All these not-new thoughts have been swirling around my head today as I read Gavin Lambert’s interview book On Cukor. Cukor loved the theater from age 12. Wasn’t great at school. Never wanted to act. Guessed he’d love directing without really understanding it. Saw every show he could in NY whenever he could as a young adult. Did assisting, stage managing, coaching, then directing. Then went to Hollywood and became a dialogue coach in the early days of “talkies.” Eventually went on to direct 80+ films. Privileged child of Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents who wanted him to be a lawyer but let him forge his own path with privileged-class indulgence.

I bring all this up because, for one, I’m trying to figure out why I am writing a book on gender in the films of George Cukor. Well, I love analyzing, I love gender studies, I enjoy film and am getting very good at critical analysis and teaching thereof. Then, Cukor and I are the children (or children’s children in my case) of European Jews who aren’t religious—though he had more class privilege than my folks or my folks’ folks on either side. And he was a closeted gay man who chose the discreet, conservative route most of the time and maybe I have in some ways but mostly not so much. I know I’m getting a great deal of pleasure writing this book. Some ideas come easier than others, some chapters come together easier than others, some films are more enjoyable and fit my schema easier than others. And I love reading all the gender theory and queer studies analyses and film criticism and film history. Maybe there’s no more to say than that it is a happy coincidence that I’m finding a blend of films I like to study, an approach I enjoy that will likely get published, my son is old enough to enable me the mental space I need to write a book, and few people have written on Cukor’s films. He’s kind of this odd combination of highly successful team player and underdog and I can’t always relate to him or his films, but I enjoy him and his films and anyhow it’s just working so there you go.

Though I’ve rambled on for several paragraphs, the specific purpose in beginning this was to cite a few quotations from Lambert’s book about Cukor that I find intriguing. They speak of a way of being and feeling that sometimes really speaks to me and reflects my worldview and other times really does not. Here we go:

“There are artists whose work is basically a release from personal tension, and there are others for whom their work is an extension rather than a tension, a mode of pleasure and a way of expressing curiosity about their world.”

This really makes me think of my mom. As for me, I think work for me is a combination of tension and extension, but in any case I love the words: extension vs. tension. I am very curious but also sometimes very threatened, so work for me is a way of sorting this out, seeking the new while protecting myself from the threatening. This assumes we mean teaching and research as art. If we’re talking acting, then we’re talking release from tension while engaging in pleasure, but in my life that also means not talking about career. Hence, my choice of doing more comedy and musicals than serious drama, which is compelling but not escapist for me usually.

Quoted within Lambert’s book is also this, from a letter by Lesley Blanch (don’t yet know who that is): “I think he has not, or has passed, ambition, in the destructive sense. This makes him utterly free. And being perfectly sure who he is, what he is, he does not envy—is not eaten up by competition.”

Oh, to reach this before I am, as Cukor was when Lambert interviewed him, 70. I think of myself as someone who is not destructive because of my ambition and envy, but I know there are times—at work, at home, with friends—where I am more competitive than I should/need be, more jealous or envious than I wish I were, more “eaten up” than I would like to be. I don’t envision being “utterly free,” nor do I think Cukor ever was. No one is. Cukor was semi-closeted his whole life, never truly loved his looks, lots of things. But as for career, he made his peace with it. I think I have too, for the most part. No desire to be an academic superstar, though not complacent and still with desire to do more, like this book, my first attempt to write a complete scholarly tome—to make the time and mental space for it despite a heavy workload.

If I can get to a space truly beyond destructive ambition, I sometimes feel, I will achieve the humility Cukor does seem to exude. Whether from a self-doubt related to his sexual orientation and ethnic looks amid the thin, white Hollywood ideal or a true inner peace, I love that Cukor could look back on his career and say he had “an almost mystic respect for other people’s talent.” I have moments of this, as when I admired the actor’s portrayal of the Jester in Once Upon a Mattress in the recent production I was in or this same actors work and the skill of the director in the production of The Bald Soprano I saw when I was doing The Hot L Baltimore. It’s not that I’m cocky and think I’m the best actress ever; it’s that I sometimes am too much in my own head (often in my own insecurities) to pause to really and truly respect other people’s talent. Again, not slamming myself here and not idolizing others; indeed, I think I can be more generous and giving than most people I know. Am just expressing a desire to be a little more generous, a little more patient with self and others, a little more listener than speaker. I’m better than I was and not as good as I hope someday to be. And that’ll do for now.

O Leafy Sea Dragon, who can match thy wonderosity?

2006-10-06T21:52:00.000-05:00

Please meet my new favorite animal, the Leafy Sea Dragon. A stunning creature, a seeming blend of plant and animal of a species in which the male does the pregnancy and childbearing. Amid the moon jellies and manta rays and the utterly creepy-cool moray eels, I found you and could barely tear myself from your tank at the Chattanooga Aquarium. All hail the seahorses and their champion, the Leafy Sea Dragon!

Rethinking Country Music

2006-10-02T19:30:00.000-05:00

You know, I have a lot of "re-" posts on this blog. Rethinking, reconsidering... I find this blog a useful place to work through second thoughts, reevaluations, new perspectives, or returns to subjects from fresh angles.

Being in Tennessee, perhaps it's predictable that sooner or later I'd rethink country music. But it's probably not in a predictable manner. I still don't listen to the vast majority of country, though I've always liked Patsy Cline, and who could dislike "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" on the jukebox? I think my friend Kate has always liked "Rocky Top," and though I didn't like it when younger, I've since come to enjoy the knee-slappin' twang of it. (Wasn't it you who'd enjoy it on the Rainbows Bar jukebox? Or do I misremember?)

But I still dislike the majority of country and worse for me is the political conservatism that seems to accompany it and, especially, its fans. I don't groove on white trash anthems or sappy break-up songs or high hair or "boot scoot boogies" or cowboy-hatted bubbas. This is, in part, cultural bias. Or at least cultural difference I can't get past.

Nonetheless, there are some artificial distinctions here that require me to say that, in certain circumstances, I do like country. I like rockabilly. I like bluegrass. I like "Ring of Fire" and "Jolene" and "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" sung with all the fervor singers can muster for a religion I will never understand.

More importantly, dismissing country wholesale means dismissing a folk tradition and a long and compelling history. One I'm proud to say I'm reading in Charles Wolfe's 1977 book about the relationship between country music and Tennessee, called Tennessee Strings.

I saw Walk the Line last night on HBO when flipping channels and found it badly written but engaging enough to watch most of. And it made me thinkg of Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly and Elvis all playing alongside Johnny Cash and the artificiality of country/rock distinctions with their performances and songs. And I really wanted to talk to Charles. But he's gone so I can't. Which is really unfortunate. I'm rethinking and he's unavailable for comment. A colleague replied that perhaps he was up in heaven having a beer with Johnny Cash even now. Great image. And if I believed in an afterlife, it would have been even better.

Another person I know is a book editor and just finished an editing job that should really be called writing a book (but won't because his name won't be on it as author or ghostwriter or assistant - just in the acknowledgements page, I imagine) about Johnny Cash, a guy's memoirs related to touring with Cash. Maybe I'll pick that one up too after I finish some of Charles' work.

Anyhow, I don't imagine becoming a country music fan anytime soon (or probably ever), but the history and study of it is definitely worth my time.

Need a Good Smile, Laugh, or Cry?

2006-09-28T15:51:00.000-05:00

Free Hugs

This video made me sob like a baby. Sad sobbing, happy sobbing. Not even sure how it triggered the downpour. Something about how afraid we all are so much of the time. Distrustful, isolated, cynical.

In particular, we're so afraid to touch. Afraid that people are lechers who'll steal something from us, pickpockets, mentally ill. No question, I sometimes fall prey to this, too. Though I'd absolutely hug someone with a "Free Hugs" sign. As long as they didn't push religious literature on me.

This also reminds me of a documentary I saw years ago about middle-class women who'd been dumped by their husbands for younger women. They talked about wanting to be desired, just longing to be touched. They banded together and hugged each other.

Reconsidering Judy Garland

2006-09-27T08:19:00.000-05:00

For the book I’m writing on gender in the films of George Cukor, I’ve recently spent a lot of time contemplating the film A Star is Born and the career of Judy Garland. I’ve never been a big fan, having generally been annoyed by her girl-next-door persona in the Andy Hardy films with Mickey Rooney, and finding her equally offputting as an adult in sappy flicks like Easter Parade. Despite being a person given to (feminist) critical analysis, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that Garland herself might not have wanted to be this hyper-earnest trifle of an actress. Certainly, the power of her voice exceeds the characters she mostly played at every opportunity. And she looks physically awkward often, like she has neurotic tics, especially in adulthood.

So, reading about Garland in A Star is Born, including the history of the film and how Garland ended up making it, as well as more contemporary critical study (including key works by Richard Dyer on gay men’s relationship with Garland), has led me to rethink the ease with which I dismissed Garland because watching her always made me uncomfortable.

A Star is Born is a film in which Garland’s discomfort is visible in every frame, in part because the film is so (intentionally) autobiographical and because the pressure was on: encouraged by her then-husband, producer Sidney Luft, she made the film as a come-back after having her contract canceled with MGM. This film was to show the “real” Garland, the power of her voice and acting, addressing the evils of the Hollywood studio system and its pressures on actors to be more machine than human.

Certainly, the power is there. When Garland sings “The Man that Got Away,” arms shooting out in all directions and the improvisational feel absolutely tangible, her belt is enough to shake the rafters in a way I can only envy and adore.

Yet, even as the film sells authenticity like a hot stock tip, there is the usual Hollywood artifice all over this film. That belted voice is taped then mouthed by Garland in the actual film, however strong the song seems. In many scenes, she is corseted and forced into ridiculous gowns and dresses to produce that starlet look, even as the film critiques Hollywood’s beauty norms and demands of its stars.

Most compelling to me as I analyzed all of this while rescreening the film was an article entitled “Feeling and the Filmed Body: Judy Garland and the Kinesics of Suffering” by Adrienne L. McLean from Film Quarterly. McLean analyzes Garland’s quirky and neurotic-seeming body movements and their relationship to the way her body was controlled and filmed. She argues, “The signs of Garland’s neurosis and pain not only appear in but are in no small measure caused by the struggles of her body and temperament to adapt to the demands made upon them over time by the visual conventions of women’s stardom itself.” Read the rest of the article here yourself to appreciate the rich analysis of her singing style, her dancing, and her movements in general as they relate to the demands of Hollywood. Truly engaging stuff.

Now, you may already know that Garland was heavily corseted for her role in The Wizard of Oz. The post-pubescent Garland had to be rendered pre-pubescent for the film. And such control and youthening happened to her throughout her young adult career. Her hair was dyed and she was heavily made-up, always. She was even made to wear nasal prosthetics to remove some of the pugness of her nose. Garland also had scoliosis, so she was only allowed to be filmed from certain angles that would not show a hunch in her back. As a more mature adult, she continued to be heavily corseted as she gained weight. She was under 5’ tall, so she always had to be made to look longer and less short-waisted. McLean makes plain that the short, stocky top/middle-heavy body of Garland is perfect for projecting the powerful voice she had. Instead, her body was controlled and regulated by norms that both hampered her movement and made her look awkward and neurotic when trying to use her body to belt those amazing songs. There simply was no acknowledgement of the fact that some people just don’t look like pointy-nosed hourglass models of Hollywood femininity—and of course that is still true today.

I can only imagine what that kind of manipulation of one’s body does to one’s sense of self and self-esteem. Clearly, the diet pills and the alcoholism and the suicide attempt make that plain.

I always knew Garland was a victim of her stardom, but now I know more fully why I cannot watch her act like the perfect American sweetheart in those Andy Hardy films or as the Plain Jane in need of transformation in Easter Parade. I feel badly that I was suckered into misreading distress for complacency in her performances. And I’m glad to have another perspective now.

Fresh Air was Stale Today

2006-09-18T20:25:00.000-05:00

I’m not a huge fan of Terry Gross, but my heart really went out to her today as she appeared to struggle openly in an interview with John Hagee of “Christians United for Israel,” a right-wing end-of-days evangelical mess of an individual with delusions of grandeur, a condescending attitude toward Jews, and a loathing of all things Islam. He’s one in a growing number of loud voices arguing that Islam is an inherently hateful religion advocating the slaughter of Christians and Jews. Now you can guess how I feel, as a Jew, about Christians who champion Israel with even louder voices than Jews. And you can imagine my bafflement at the idea that Islam is a violent religion when the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament for my Christian friends and nemeses) is so full of examples of eye-for-an-eye justice and giddy stonings. But this idea that the wrongs in today’s world can all be laid at the door of Islam is horrifically disturbing. By all means pay attention to “radicals,” to fundamentalism – but let’s have that across the board. Any group that sees only one path to the Truth that requires dismissing, banishing, or destroying other ways of living is dangerous to all. And we all know Islam by no means has a corner on the claim to Truth market nor on the wishing or doing ill to others. As Hagee mouthed off his nonsense about the second coming and the protection of Israel, his belief that the Christian Bible has greater authority than the U.S. government and that there can be no compromise on that score, and his open disrespect for “Islamists” (you just knew he wanted to use Bush’s new favorite term “Islamofascists”), all I could think of was how poignant were Terry Gross’s silences after she asked each question. One or two follow-ups to try to get him to clarify the depth and breadth of his judgmentalism, his closed-mindedness, his ignorance, his overconfidence in every word out of his mouth, and the rest was silence or quick movement to the next topic. I felt dirty just listening to all the vile nastiness spewing from this man’s rhetoric, rhetoric he may even believe. I can only imagine how it must have felt to sit beside him and know with certainty that nothing you could say would shake this man’s “faith” in his own Superiority, his own Rightness, his own—in the words of Stephen Colbert—Truthiness. Just keep saying it, preaching it, praying it, writing it, forwarding it in little vicious “true” stories via email chain letters to family members you know damn well don’t agree with a word out of your mouth. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll silence the little voice in your head that reminds you that loving your neighbor will do more to stop hatred in the world than any doom-and-gloom gospel you care to make up from your arbitrary personal interpretation of that gloriously confounding and partial mistranslated text called the Bible. Me? I need to not listen to you, to try to forget you exist, for as long as possible, so I can find peace and love in whatever small spaces they still exist on this glorious and terrible planet.

Jerry Springer Made Me Happy?

2006-09-09T16:37:00.000-05:00

Doing dishes and tidying the livingroom this morning, I put on Air America Radio as background entertainment. My general experience of the station is a repeated chant of "preaching to the choir" without much content or opinion I didn't already know or believe. The station also, of economic necessity, has dreadful repetitive annoying cheaply made commercials for annoying products and services I (and the bulk of the Left listening, I venture to say) do not want or need.

But there is value in preaching to the choir, at very least as balance to the dreadful preaching to the choir of Right-wing talk radio. It can be good to hear an "official" media voice reflect my perspective. It can be refreshing to hear dozens of callers phone in and none of them lament the lack of prayer in school, celebrate the greatness of owning guns, cheer on the destruction of the environment, or champion Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq, Katrina, or anything else he's "handled." And this is true even when the callers are as rhetorically ineffective as their Right-wing counterparts, because it reminds me that there actually are progressive bubbas out there.

Today I happened in upon the Jerry Springer radio show. It was the usual banter and series of repetitive callers and it felt as superficially comforting as always. But then Springer told one caller that things would turn around, and soon. I'm used to this line and to continuing to wait for the Democrats or a truly progressive third party to emerge and be the voice of the 70+% of this country who are well and truly sick unto death of every word that comes out of Bush, Rice, Cheney, and the rest of the current administration. I keep being told that the next election it will all change, but I'm still reeling from just how many people have taken so many years to see through the evil (and I don't use that word lightly) that is going on in Washington -- largely by Republicans but also by Democrats. And how many people (even if only 30+%) still have any confidence in "W." and his cronies.

But, somehow, Springer's words still penetrated my pessimistic and justly cynical mind. He said, simply, "Progressives always win." And, thank heavens, that actually is, relatively speaking and with multiple qualifications, true. Emancipation of the slaves did take place. Women do have the right to vote. Integration was made law. We do have a social security system. We do have some healthcare for the poor. One can join a union. I can write this blog, critical of the president, without being imprisoned. Again, all this is relative: I could write many times the number of sentences above about injustices and wrongs that have not and may never be addressed, both related to the rights above and to many other vital issues. I do realize all that. But, in the end, I do believe that progressives do move us forward in this country, however long and rocky the road, however many times we get one step forward and two steps back. It will not be soon enough, but sooner or later gay marriage will be a national right, we will have a liberal woman president and/or a president of color, the corporate capitalist mindset will give way to true democracy. I just hope I'm alive to see all of this and more and cheer it on with equal gusto to the deep sorrow and anxiety I feel about the state of the nation -- and most of the world -- right now.

However odd it is that Jerry Springer is on Air America saying "Progressives always win," I thank him for reminding me.

Stop the Personification of Food Ads

2006-08-24T07:29:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person out there who is sick to death of ads that personify food and then do violence to it?

Pop-Tarts leads the way with its constant ads showing their little pseudo pastries running around with arms and legs and getting lured unto death by consumption. They're either being shoved into vans or ice cream trucks or giant toasters or pounced on by starving islanders! Most recent ads are cartoons, but I remember the one with the guy in a strawberry costume being stalked as he walked blissfully to work then shoved into a truck to be made into Pop-Tart filling. No matter that Pop-Tarts have no relationship to real fruit, I'm just sick of seeing food made into humanlike beings then chased, kidnapped, and prepared for slaughter/devouring.

The human-in-a-food suit continues, too: Papa John's now has a little person in a brownie cube suit being chased by a hungry horde. And Eggo frozen waffles have people in waffle suits falling from heights to be smashed and turning into cereal.

The sweet, innocent Tin Man with the Chef Boyardee can painted on his back is another variety of the same, and I just can't watch that evil lunchroom kid telling everyone to lock the doors. I can't decide if it's a Suddenly Last Summer/Lord of the Flies cannibalism moment that horrifies me so or the idea that little boys just have no souls.

I am sure many people find these ads funny, or they'd be off the air rather than a growing trend. Certainly, people dressed up in food suits has a long tradition, from the Fruit of the Loom guys all the way back to the girls in food box outfits on variety shows.

But this is different for its cruelty. The aim of the commercial is not simple anthropomorphization. Like the Chick-fil-A ads that feature cows pointing at chickens so you'll eat them not cows, it's about cutthroat meanness. The goal is to trick or to torture something that has been brought to life only to be tricked and tortured. It is another example of psychic numbing and our culture going down the crapper of intolerance and greed. And it's not funny.

stamping out diversity in second grade

2006-08-16T07:28:00.000-05:00

My son's first homework assignment for second grade had him interview his parents for information about his name. The teacher connected this to the book she read them on the first day of class, Chrysanthemum. Apparently, it is about the title character's name and some difficulties she has with it. The assignment was for the children to interview their parents about their own names, and the description of the book on the assignment sheet included the following charming sentence:

"The book teaches diversity and how children can overcome it productively."

Can you spot the error? Is the problem with this sentence...

(a) a likely typo or spell-check error, where "diversity" should be "adversity"
(b) evidence of the lousy education given to educators in Tennessee
(c) a self-confessed "conservative" teacher (yes, she put that on her self-description on the bulletin board) accidentally expressing her true feelings about issues of diversity

CGI Ants and You

2006-08-01T15:24:00.000-05:00

I love ants. They are my favorite insect (with wasps a close second). My next tattoo is going to be an ant trail. I love ants’ neat little compact bodies, their physical strength, their communalism, their complex chemistry. I know I’m anthropomorphizing and ignoring traits I don’t like, but so be it: I love ants.

So do scientists. Ponder the recent Madagascar discovery of the missing link “Dracula Ant,” which may explain how wasps evolved into ants! Marvel over the fact that ants may have internal pedometers (and boggle at the insane image of an ant with stilts attached to its legs)!

CGI animators love ants, too. But I’m less sure why. In A Bug’s Life, Antz, and now The Ant Bully, ants are starring figures for representing traits antithetical to ant life, as I understand it. Individualism, integrity, independence: all traits with which ants are entirely unconcerned. The triumph of the underdog may be an occasionally relevant them, when a colony is attacked by bigger, meaner ants, but basically ants just do their communal thing, not trying to stand out, to be heroes, to puzzle out the contradictions of self vs. world. Not only do they lack the “higher” brain function needed for such mental acrobatics, but their chemistry directs them along a completely oppositional path.

Pupae get a hormonal bath that determines whether they’re a scout, worker, nurse, or soldier. Males aren’t produced but once a year for impregnating the queen and other fertile females who might start their own colonies if they find a good place and survive predators and beat the odds. As far as scientists have been able to determine, ants do not struggle against their biochemical destiny, do not seek to stand out but simply live, “contentedly” (yes, total anthropomorphizing there), doing what they do.

In CGI worlds, ants have individual personalities and names (A Bug’s Life, Antz, Ant Bully), there are lots of males everywhere (all three again), especially in positions of power other than queen, they face predators unrelated to life in the wild (A Bug’s Life’s grasshoppers were the most wacky example), and look more human than insect (too few legs in A Bug’s Life, human eyes and teeth in all three).

Clearly, then, CGI ant films are to be read metaphorically. Even when there is the literal (referencing ants’ ability to lift many more times than their own weight, farming aphids, etc.), they are, like most insect-centered narratives – from Aesop’s “Ant and the Grasshopper” to Caribbean Anansi tales – about human beings and human culture.

So, why are we telling tales about ants? By “we,” now, I mean the white guys bankrolling and producing all the CGI films. They seem to be “fun” to animate, but so are cows and cars and toys. Even though I don’t understand the purpose and quirk an eyebrow at what seems an odd allusion to Aztec culture (likely also present in the original book on which the film is based), I enjoyed the beautiful tribal markings on the ants in The Ant Bully. And jokes about crossing your heart that can be made by crossing your abdomen (or “butt” as Peanut/Lucas calls it) are good for a laugh. And these films provide opportunities to sketch in lots of other insects, from ladybugs and stinkbugs to grasshoppers and wasps. But still, the question remains, why ants?

Well, they’re harmless and you can torture them and they keep coming back, for one. A recent documentary on masculine socialization is called “Burning Ants,” for example, referencing a common suburban boyhood experience in America that is linked to emotional distance and violent behavior in adult males. Or, as in The Ant Bully, we have the boy who takes out the pain of being bullied on “lesser” creatures who can’t fight back. So, are we into ant stories because they teach us about the importance of carrying on, regardless? Certainly, these films don’t feel to me like any kinds of insect rights narratives, where we learn to be a kinder, gentler species. But superficial anti-bully stories, sticktuitiveness tales, and underdog championing all work for the kids and families at whom these films are aimed (except Antz, which kids watch but is more adult – more metaphoric and obviously not about ants).

And we Americans do love underdog stories, even as we Americans act more like watchdog (or snarling, foaming, rabid dog) to the rest of the world.

And most of us sitting in the multiplex theater see ourselves as cogs, as peons, and long to be told that we are either (a) vital, important individuals rather than tiny dots in a vast, unfeeling universe or (b) no worse off than any other of the other 6,531,991,670 tiny human dots on the planet (as of 1 August 2006, 2:34pm CST). CGI ant movies can help us with this, I guess, without risking encouragement of a challenge to the cultural status quo – though ants should challenge us with their differences, if only we’re open to seeing them.

In addition, there is the communalism. There is much in ant life that might be deemed threatening to human cultures, especially western, first-world nations like the U.S. of A. We are scared of some forms of communalism, like communism, in which we see threats to individual life choices, to the mythic American Dream. Our choices may be trivial (what brand of dog food to feed the pooch) or significant (abortion or no abortion); and we may envision others as foregoing choice for mindless obedience (e.g. Fundamentalist Muslims), while we actively restrict our choices for wise adherence to a greater truth (e.g. Fundamentalist Christians).

These CGI ant movies definitely do reflect our obsession with the tension between community and self, standing out and fitting in, insider and outsider, what we owe others and what we owe ourselves. And they firmly acknowledge the needs of social creatures (like ants and humans) while validating the importance of individual acts of genius, bravery, and creativity, especially in service of the culture/State (less ant, more human). We obsess about this stuff and find few answers that content us as we face love, loss, illness, death, war, poverty, and a host of other messy aspects of human life. Ultimately, ant stories seem to reflect these necessary obsessions, whether they’re created as childish diversions or philosophical treatises in harmless entertainment guise.

What can we conclude from this? Perhaps that we fashion these ant narratives to process, superficially, our collective angst as American homo sapiens at the turn of the millennium. We really don’t understand how ants can be “happy” and this bothers us, largely because we don’t know how to be happy. Instead, we use this truly alien species to reassure ourselves that differences don’t really matter, that our myths and platitudes (such as the underdog can win and bullies can be scared off with a little teamwork) truly satisfy us. CGI ant movies tell us nothing about what it would mean to be an ant, if they were sentient; they indoctrinate children to see difference and reduce it to the known and the manageable; and they reassure adults that nothing is truly alien and all is as it should be. What a small, scared little species we are.

talking to a conservative

2006-07-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

Do read this blog discussion between a liberal and a conservative (the link to which I found at my cousin's blog). Entertaining in a deeply depressing way.

Reminds me of the time I saw a woven wallhanging in the home of a particularly well-to-do right-wing person I know. It was made in Pakistan and had the artist's signature on it, and I said I was glad to see that because it meant that it was unlikely to have been made by slave labor. The person's response? "Well at least they [enslaved children] get food, water, and a place to sleep." Apparently, sometimes even decrying slavery is too liberal.

Lisa Schwarzbaum: Stop Annoying Me!

2006-07-09T11:40:00.000-05:00

What can be the possible excuse for Entertainment Weekly’s random, ranting film reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum? Sometimes I agree entirely with her assessments, other times I disagree fervently, and still others I have no clue whatsoever why or how she reaches a conclusion. One ornate plot is brilliant, another tedious. One action-adventure flick is a product of a heartless Hollywood system invested in special effects over character development, another is a joyous spectacle (especially if it stars Vin Diesel). I’ve reached the conclusion that, simply put, Lisa Schwarzbaum neither uses nor actually has any specific criteria for reviewing films. She offers me no logical means by to predict, even in small ways, how she’ll feel about any film whatsoever; not even a sense that I can look forward to some wit and wisdom, even if I disagree with her (which I do find, by contrast, in the work of her EW co-reviewer, Owen Glieberman). Ms. S likes what she likes, dislikes what she dislikes and the day of the week or the weather forecast or whether the coffee at Starbuck’s was strong enough may determine the contents of a review more than any facet of the actual movie.

In particular, I have long found myself in disagreement with her when it comes to animated films, where it seems she’ll praise anything CGI over anything handdrawn and glorify Pixar in the highest. Her panning of Lilo and Stitch focused on its drab drawings and trite plot, while I found its broad notion of family progressive and its attempt at a Hawaiian aesthetic charming if superficial. By contrast, she adored The Incredibles, finding both content and style original, glorious, magnificent. Never mind the glaring patriarchal, white, middle-class nuclear family-ness of it all.

Now I’m confronted with her reviews of two new Disney flicks, Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean II, and I’ll be damned if I can make the slightest bit of rational sense out of what drives her opinion, yet again. She labels Cars a “beguiling comedy adventure,” while Pirates II is merely “ostentatious extravagance,” an interminable theme-park ride, “a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.” Funny, my experience of the two films is pretty much the opposite, though I wouldn’t go to such extremes, and I could easily reverse her descriptions and find them apt. To me, Cars’ main characters were simply “whirling teacup figurines” rather than (or perhaps as well as) Will and Elizabeth of Pirates, and the focus on car racing (especially the races themselves) made me feel strapped in, “overstimulated but unsatisfied.” In fact, even my seven-year-old son was bored with Cars and more than ready to leave and forget his experiences (except the tractor-tipping, which he found troubling to his animal-rights loving spirit, though he has not quite been able to articulate why because they were tractors not cows, or were they?).

Honestly, I didn’t loathe Cars and I didn’t find Pirates II an unqualified piece of cinematic brilliance. Both were superficial flights of fancy, both were Disnified escapism. Cars did attempt to offer a message about how fast we speed past the “beauty” of little towns and out-of-the-way spaces because we’re always on interstates going 80 mph, but in the face of our guzzling imperialistic oil-dependence as a nation, I found the message nostalgic and trite. I much prefer the corporate critique of Monsters, Inc., if we’re championing Pixar.

And good heavens, Lisa Schwarzbaum does love her some Pixar. She gushes, “I [...] bet that any story the Pixarites came up with about dust and socks [...] is bound to be more rewarding than 90 percent of anything coming out of Hollywood Blockbusterville this summer.” While I’ll grant you that “Hollywood Blockbusterville” generally does suck (for artistic and political reasons Schwarzbaum is only occasionally willing and able to engage), glorifying Cars because it features a “bunch of computer-animated, anthropomorphized vehicles who express emotion with eyes made from windshields and smiles from metallic front grills” then slamming Pirates because it features human-portrayed characters without greater depth is to fail entirely to understand that making a CGI car come to life is a hell of a lot easier than turning a human being into an effective cartoon, as Depp does so joyously and with such fabulous effect with his Captain Jack Sparrow.

Moreover, to champion Cars by giving it an A- and to bash Pirates II with a D+ on the basis of plot is beyond inane. Cars offers a time-worn tale, the upstart who has to learn his lesson the hard way (“The Tortoise and the Hare” meets “City Mouse and Country Mouse”). I have no problem with this emphasis nor the choice of cars/racing as a focus. But let’s call it like it is: a film for NASCAR fans and Southerners. If you don’t like racing and you don’t like Blue Collar TV, you may find yourself more than a tad bored with the film’s trajectory. Now I’m the first to admit that Larry the Cable Guy provided fabulous white trash humor in the film; and it may be the fact that I’ve been living in middle Tennessee for 15 years that let me laugh with his bubba truck character, Mater. But, really, even George Carlin, Click and Clack, and Cheech Marin couldn’t keep me from yawning as the predictable plot unfolded.

Pirates II ain’t Shakespeare, but if the plot truly was “barely intelligible” to Ms. Schwarzbaum, then I don’t know whether she was simply not paying attention or is looking for random excuses to hate the film. I was delighted with the twists and turns and never bored. Perhaps Lisa was not allowed to play pirates as a kid or they always made her swab the deck.

Finally, to blast Pirates II because its ending makes plain there’ll be a Pirates III but fail to note that Cars has spawned a billion-dollar merchandising extravaganza before the film was even released (and I’d guess there will more than likely be a TV show on the Disney channel by 2007) is to be blind, ignorant, or just incapable of a good film review. You be the judge.

Superman Returns, and I Go See Him!

2006-07-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

After a fabulous evening of escapism to see Pirates of the Caribbean II on its opening night in Bradford, Pennsylvania with my mother and her husband, we decided to risk deflation by going to see Superman Returns the following night. I did not expect to enjoy the film much, not being a fan of the Christopher Reeve’s films and not particularly liking this particular superhero overmuch, finding him too stiff, too patriotic, too uptight. I generally prefer more complex, angst-ridden superheroes, from X-Men to Xena. So I was much surprised by what I found in this new Superman.

First, I was quite pleasantly surprised by Brandon Routh’s easy, comfortable portrayal. I liked his quiet voice; I relaxed into his small gestures and controlled, compelling facial expressions; I enjoyed his combination of confidence and insecurity. And I grooved on the silent and smooth way Superman flew. With a risk of falling prey to reactionary white masculinity in superheroic form, I found a real allure in his mellowness. Unlike the excessive X-Men, I did not feel overwhelmed by constant slashing and crashing. Unlike the twitchy adolescent Spiderman, I was not nervous watching him. Unlike the dark Batman of recent memory, I did not have to worry that he would act unpredictably, jarring my senses every scene.

What was best of all for me in the film was the way it challenged conservatism that I entirely expected to see. I’m not arguing the film is radical. But, I like that the film makes Lois a single mom with mediocre parenting skills to say the least. She forgets to pick her son up, takes him to follow up a lead that takes her right into Lex Luther’s lair, and doesn’t worry overmuch that he might be traumatized for life by what he has been through. I also really like that the limits of the nuclear family are pushed in the film. Lois’s fiancé Richard keeps his machismo at bay, doing a lot of the parenting (and better than mom) and letting Lois call the shots in their relationship, from waiting around until she is ready for marriage to going back to save Superman at her command despite his jealousy and fear that he may lose his already skittish fiancée to him. While the film could use this depiction to make the character dismissible, a placeholder until Superman can come along and sweep her off her feet again, it does not. As we see in Jason’s drawing of the family, Superman, Richard, Lois, and Jason can all be a family together. Ok, we don’t get true polyamory (Lois and Superman do not even kiss in the film), but we do get a sense of alternatives that do not require traditional marriage as an endpoint.

This is capped off with a resistance to gratuitous nationalism and flagwaving—as Superman lets us know that he hears the voices of the suffering all over the globe and not just in the God-blessed U.S. of A. This is highlighted when Perry White—played with love by Frank Langella—actively resists completion of the Superman tagline “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” reflecting that truth and justice are the real concerns here and the “American Way” is outdated, predictable, perhaps irrelevant, and maybe even distasteful in today’s global economy.

Such delights let me ignore the poor casting for Lois, the glaring plot gap of no one noticing Clark Kent is missing for the entire time that Superman is in the hospital, and troubling awareness of ongoing American desire for escapism in superhero discourse (however cynical it usually is) rather than waking up and changing the way we live our lives and practice our version of democracy. With chin clefts and ultra-blue contacts like Routh’s, it’s so tempting to feel reassured when Superman says, “I’m always around.”

Two Quotations

2006-06-28T07:16:00.000-05:00

"If people want to get to know me better, they've got to know my parents and the values my parents instilled in me, and the fact that I was raised in West Texas, in the middle of the desert, a long way away from anywhere, hardly. There's a certain set of values you learn in that experience."—George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006

"Artaud believed that the function of theatre was to teach us that 'the sky can still fall on our heads.' [...T]he Slapstick Tragedy that opened on September 11th was also a theatre of cruelty and might warrant some utopian explorations. The sky has fallen on our heads, and what we are seeing [...] threatens to blind us. At a time when every cultural practice is reassessing itself and its role, perhaps we will entertain Artaud's mad vision of theatre as a place to encounter the unknown and the unimaginable, a place that teaches us the necessary humility of not knowing."—Una Chaudhuri

Deadwood, Queerness, and Domesticity: Can't Stop Watching It!

2006-06-10T10:38:00.000-05:00

For activist purposes, Hollywood does best to serve the “gay agenda” (we of the Left might as well reclaim the expression, eh?) when it offers open and expansive portrayals of homosexuality, of expressions of love, connection, communication, and (com)passion. Yet, there’s still value and pleasure in covert representations and in queer readings of texts that continue to offer repression as their primary strategy for depicting homosexuality. Take my recent preoccupation with Deadwood, for example.

The Western has long been an important genre through which repressed homosexuality thrives. As Brokeback Mountain acknowledges and the montage Jon Stewart unveiled at the 2005 Academy Awards outs, getting a bunch of tough, emotionally challenged men together is bound to result in some hanky panky, however codified.

In more sophisticated terms, Steve Neale, in “Masculinity as Spectacle” (Screen 24.6, 1983, pp. 2-16), argues that “‘male’ genres” of film are “founded upon a repressed homosexual voyeurism.” He notes that “in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed.” (Note: I also use Neale’s focus to discuss the voyeurism and masculine anxiety in Fight Club: here.) In the Western in particular, there is significant focus on intense rivalries between (two) men, fetishization of phallic weaponry, and what I would call “intimate” violence (two men slugging each other and rolling around in the dirt). Neale discusses how such elements encourage male spectators to adopt an erotic gaze usually reserved for viewing female characters. Though they are not passive, as in the prototypical Hollywood female sex object, the activity of men in Westerns is stylized to be watched, and the line between violent display and sexual display is often thin.

While Brokeback Mountain uses this insight in its overt depictions of homosexual intimacy as a sometimes-violent, emotionally complex and difficult subject, particularly for its homophobic protagonist Ennis Del Mar, Deadwood offers repressed representation, the series being deeply invested in reinvigorating the Hollywood Western tradition. Arguably a “meta-Western,” commenting on the genre primarily through depictions of omnipresent muck, glorification of foul language of a sexual nature (especially “fuck” and “cocksucker” and “cunt”), depictions of women-as-chattel, and unremitting graphic violence, the series does not opt to comment on other generic elements, such as the predominance of whites and heteronormativity. Racism against Asians and Native Americans/Indians we do see, but Indian characters and such commonplace realities of the Old West as African American cowboys and prospectors are nigh invisible (in the first season and into the second at least). And repressed homosexuality abounds through the miasma of machismo the series exudes.

I’m not sure whether the gay overtones in the relationship between Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock are intentional or not. It is possible that the writers are aware of the homoeroticism of the Western and are enjoying it, particularly in the heavy-handed swagger of hyperhetero Bullock. But, in the first episode of the second season, when Swearengen calls Bullock out for his dalliance with the widow Alma Garret and the two end up stripping (ok, Bullock just takes off his gun and badge) and wrestling and punching until they fall off the balcony and land in the mud, one atop the other, exhausted—well, it’s just too queer to miss. (Punching in male genre texts always has violent sexual overtones, as I read it, but the tumbling tumbleweeds way these two roll around just made me laugh out loud. Just admit you want to fuck him, Al, and get it over with.)

I also see homoeroticism in Sol Star’s sidekick hero worship of Bullock, but it’s nowhere near as fun(ny) to watch as Bullock and Swearengen.

There is also a fear of femininity that is part of the repressed homoeroticism of Deadwood. As I read the movement from first to second season, as Deadwood goes from camp to government-controlled county, there is an encroachment of domesticity, represented literally by women who exemplify the figurative invasion of femininity. Steve Neale’s analysis of the Western also includes discussion of gendered codes whereby the male hero must reject literal and figurative domesticity (no marriage or children for the sheriff/marshal, a rugged individualism and need for open spaces). Hence, women represent a threat to Western genre masculinity and must be contained (as hookers, or butch drunks like Deadwood’s Calamity Jane) or gotten rid of (consider Joanie’s threat to Cy Tolliver as she develops a need for independence). (This is also the mechanism of the male gaze, according to Laura Mulvey.)

Yet the encroachment of femininity reaches beyond literal female characters to a more generalized anxiety/fear of the domesticity that femininity signifies in the genre. Swearengen’s fear of losing power and control over Deadwood is significantly greater when he faces the domesticating government than entrepreneur Cy Tolliver; Bullock is far more threatened by the arrival of his wife and child than any other dangers in Deadwood; and even Calamity Jane can only shout “cocksuckers!” at the stagecoach that brings new whores (to be managed by a Madam and not a man) as well as Bullock’s wife to town.

Interestingly, the character most impacted by this change in town is Alma Garret. She has spent much of her time in Deadwood first drugged by laudanum then peering out of her window, gazing at this masculine space and wanting to be part of it; yet being told, repeatedly, that his is not her place. First, her husband keeps her cloistered (hence her escape via drugs). She does not love him, but more importantly, he also symbolizes her entrapment by gendered norms. When he is killed, she experiences a desire to live beyond upper-class feminine norms, and begins to do so. Though saddled with a child—a heavy domestic dose—prostitute Trixie provides the opportunity to shed this sudden maternal role (an option generally available to upper-class women) but also to see beyond other traditional feminine behavioral norms for women of privileged class. Alma wishes to venture forth into this non-domesticated world. At first, she uses Wild Bill Hickok then Seth Bullock as her “agents,” living vicariously through their freedom (something Calamity Jane is also permitted through her dress and crass manner—though she has her feminine vulnerabilities). But as she decides to stay in town she is asserting a feminist resistance to gender norms. She is still too mired in gender and class norms to do everything herself, so Bullock serves to rid her of a conman father who uses her femininity against her to attain his greedy ends and to give her access to sexual pleasures beyond the marriage bed.

My main point here about Alma, however, is how domesticity returns from without to threaten her budding independence. Through the symbolic arrival of Bullock’s wife and child, Alma is staggered by the changes coming to Deadwood. The domesticization of the town does not threaten her as overtly as it does Swearengen and Bullock, but approach of civilizing influences in which she may be expected to return to her “proper” feminine role are definitely a key tension as season two begins.

Though I am still routing for a more developed and satisfying role for genderbender Calamity Jane, as I watch the second season on DVD, Alma appears to be the most dynamic and gender complex character in the series. Well, unless Al keeps getting queerer.

Doctor Who: Bi TV

2006-06-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

I’m a longtime fan of Doctor Who. Like most Americans, Tom Baker is the first/best Doctor I’ve watched, but I think Jon Pertwee is fabulous and I liked the final 80s episodes with Sylvester McCoy, too. Though the body count was always high when the Doctor was around, there was also this fabulous escapism—go anywhere anytime and anyone could be the Doctor’s “assistant,” even me. Ridiculous cyborgs and robots like the movement-impaired Daleks and the gold-challenged Cybermen plus silly rubber masked extra-terrestrials from everywhere and anywhere just added to the fun.

The new incarnation of Doctor Who (first season just now airing in the States) does a superb job of retaining the old “feel” while adding some new flourishes—primarily in the areas of character development and relationships. First, the Doctor tells us that the entire Timelord “race” has been wiped out. So now he’s even more of a loner and renegade. Second, he’s flirty.

It’s delightful to see the very charismatic Christopher Eccleston play the Doctor with such working-class-boy-made-good chutzpah, excited like a child when he saves lives instead of destroying them (a great comment on the death toll of many a past Doctor’s life) and impishly flirtatious with his assistant Rose, the sweet blonde who’s even more white trashy than her predecessor Ace, and other young women he meets.

At the moment, though, I most want to praise the new Doctor Who for the character of Captain Jack Harkness. Reminding me a lot of an even flashier “Ace Rimmer” (Chris Barrie’s alter-ego from the British SF sitcom Red Dwarf), John Barrowman (whom I know best as a singer—his work in the Sondheim revue Putting It Together and part as Cole Porter’s lover in De-Lovely come to mind) is wonderfully hyper-competent and out-flirts the Doctor repeatedly (much to the Doctor’s dismay). Best of all, in the first season, he’s entirely and openly bisexual in his attractions, flirting with equal pleasure with women and men. I particularly loved the moment when he created a helpful diversion by chatting up a group of WWII pilots. Even when the Doctor finds Captain Jack an annoying nuisance (with obvious streaks of jealousy of his attractiveness to Rose and everyone else he meets), he never shows distaste for his omnivorous sexual attractions. I find this a delightful way to depict a future where bisexuality can be taken for granted.

Can’t wait for season two to air!*

*Yes, I know Captain Jack is getting his own show in England as I type... I'm guessing it won't make it to US television (or beyond a first season)--he's not the lead character type, imo, but let me know if anyone out there sees it.

Child Porn and Octavia Butler's Fledgling

2006-06-02T09:01:00.000-05:00

I’m currently on page 73 (of 319) of Octavia Butler’s last novel Fledgling. When I finish it, I may blog about how much the novel shares with all of Butler’s other works, other vampire novels, and dark fantasy romance such as Christine Feehan’s Dark series. For now, I just want to comment a bit on how the novel deals with age, consent, and morality.

Butler’s protagonist, the amnesiac Renee/Shori, looks 11 but is actually 53 (still a child in vampire—or, as they call themselves, Ina—years). I won’t go into too many plot details, but suffice it to say she gets involved with Wright, a 23-year-old human male (i.e. bites and unintentionally compels to become her companion). They begin what Butler calls a symbiotic relationship. This is a central core to all of Butler’s fiction, and I cannot help but think about it alongside my knowledge of the author’s relatively solitary life. Her fiction often suggests that it takes outside forces to bring people together and keep them together. When not dealing with outright enslavement, the most intense relationships in much of her writing are about beings compelled to stay together. Often it is alien chemistry that does so or an absence of other viable options. Rarely do two characters meet, fall in love, and stay together.

Now, in Fledgling, Butler pushes an interesting envelope with her symbiosis theme, as she has this pre-pubescent-seeming vampire gal have sex with Wright. She enjoys giving him pleasure through her bites—and the particularly sensuous licking of his neck—but also through sex. Wright definitely expresses concern that he’s being seduced by a flat-chested, pubic-hairless girl, but he absolutely takes the elfin "child" into his arms and does the deed. Butler makes sure to make our heroine the aggressor, to show Wright’s discomfort, and even to make jokes about it. The word “jailbait” is used (an understatement!); and, when Renee/Shori meets another of her kind (so far he says he’s her father), he taunts Wright with reference to how others might see his relationship with this apparent pre-teen.

The first sex scene between them is, so far, the only one described at all, and Butler is, as always in her fiction, hesitant to describe sex graphically. (I repeatedly feel she simply does not understand love or lust; like Orson Scott Card, I get the feeling that passion escapes her entirely or turns her off.) But choosing to depict sex between consenting people who are not both adults is a risky proposition and I have mixed feelings about it. In choosing a protagonist who appears so young and also has amnesia, is Butler offering commentary on our current obsession with stopping child porn? (I read the current administration as using child porn concerns to further its McCarthy-esque invasions of privacy, but let’s leave that lie for now.) Is Butler pushing boundaries, intentionally depicting something that makes readers uncomfortable in order to challenge a current trend to censor rather than analyze? Is she commenting on the Christian Right’s hungry brush that tars a wide path of everything it deems “obscene” or “immoral”? Or is she, less politically but very typically for Butler, just messing with our easy reliance on rigid, overly simplistic categories (adult/child, moral/immoral, human/other)?

In any case, the opening of the novel did make me uncomfortable, and I’m sure intentionally so. Furthermore, however, it also made me angry. Following the Lenny Bruce quotation I cited earlier in this blog, I am frustrated by what we deem smut and what we deem “literature” and who can get away with what and how. If it’s “literature,” then you can describe an 11-year-old female body writhing on top of a 23-year-old male one. Yes, Butler must quickly explain that she’s not really 11 and she’s not even human, but she still has this guy fuck a kid before our startled eyes. (My husband is reading the novel Aztec right now and comments that it, too, contains sex with children, in this case because it is relying on historical evidence that the Aztecs did this.)

By contrast, if Fledgling or Aztec emphasized sex as central to the novel and was brought to a publisher of erotica, it would never have made it to print. There'd be no passing the huge “NO UNDERAGE SEX” warning. They also have NO BESTIALITY, NO RAPE, and other prohibitions, upholding these to stay in business in a difficult cultural environment, like those porn sites that now have to keep consent forms for every nude photo they post.

This reminds me of another literary/porn anecdote: about 10-15 years ago, a publisher issued a reprint of Samuel Delany’s pornographic novel Equinox. At the time, I found it excessive and in no way arousing, full of sex with minors, questionable consent issues, and very unsavory (unwashed) characters. (And now I can’t find my copy to see how I'd read it today.) What I remember most is an editor’s note that preceded the text, stating that the ages of every character had been increased by 100 to address concerns with child porn and consent! So the kids were now 110, the adults 142, etc. It was simply absurd, but also an interesting way to address the issue of censorship. We couldn’t publish the book as written (and originally published in 1968), so we had to do this stupid thing and pretend they’re all longlived aliens!

In the end, I’m not sure whether Butler—who always depicts lovers with big age differences where the woman is much younger than the man (Lauren was 17 to Bankola’s 45 in Parable of the Sower, if memory serves)—is making political/social commentary, trying to make readers uncomfortable as a psychological strategy, or just exploring the nooks and crannies of her own psyche. However, as always, she does make me think. Not a bad contribution to human existence, especially in this day and age.

Making Peace with the Guilt Monster

2006-05-25T08:05:00.000-05:00

My wise graduate school buddy Jan once said, “Guilt is never a good reason to do anything.” I do agree with this sentiment, though I long ago lost count of the wide variety of things I have done and the countless times I have done them out of guilt. I joke that it is inherent in the Jewish experience (and the Catholic, Baptist, and, well, pretty much all of the Judeo-Christian tradition—which explains my friends who’ve become Pagans as well as those who’ve become atheists perhaps better than just about anything else I can think of), but it does burden me.

Now, I’m better than I used to be, working harder to distinguish purely guilt-induced motive from guilt-plus, where there is some other reason I might do something as well as a little guilt engine driving it. Compromise, the Golden Mean. I still haven’t gotten to the anti-guilt state my friend Rick touts, embodied in his slogan “Always take more than your fair share of the available resources.” Even though he is careful to point out the qualifier “available” here, it just smacks of more greed than I can usually muster. (But then, I’ve seen Rick, too, knuckle under to guilt, that Great Equalizer—we all do.)

This topic came up for me this morning in particular as I watched my son amble off from my car to his first-grade classroom. Chewing his hair a bit, walking with a casual, weaving gait, he was making his way casually and calmly. I caught myself thinking, as I have thought before, how he has his own little life that I am not part of. And how that is FINE. I want him to have a life of his own. For one, it takes some responsibility off me for what his moment-by-moment existence consists of. This is not to say I like our educational system, Bush’s inane and evil “No Child Left Behind” test-mania plan, our particular grammar school, or my son’s particular teacher. But I like knowing my child has some responsibility for himself as he makes choices of friends, playthings, how to color his worksheet, when to ask for a drink of water, and what in his lunch to eat and what to mash into a little ball in the bottom of his lunchbox for me to clean out. And I like this, at least in part, because it frees me of responsibility (a.k.a. guilt) for a few hours of the day.

(This definitely clarifies why being the parent of an infant was so horrific for me. There is no moment of the day when you are not totally responsible for an infant, and with my guilt already riding high, having an infant pushed me over the edge for a while, even with a superb co-parent along for the ride.)

Taking care of others’ needs is really tough for me. I do it lots, and I’m good at it. It has been a big part of my psyche from a very young age. But being good at it means it drains me. More specifically, I’m thinking as I type this, responsibility and guilt are very much blurred in my worldview. The difficult but intelligent Papusa Molina once said in a workshop on diversity, “Responsibility can be defined as the ability to respond.” Who can respond should. Who can’t need not feel guilty every moment of the day over it. But to what in this life can I not respond, with all my middle-class privilege (while others starve, suffer, die)?

How much money to charity is too much?
How many rescued pets is too many?
How often is leaving our son with a sitter too many?
How many visits to family instead of vacations is enough?
How many cookies are too many?
How often can you just let the phone ring and not answer it?
How often is often enough for taking the dog for a walk?
How long can you avoid housework without feeling like the Queen of Filth?
How much money do you give to friends whom you want to tell to “learn to budget”!
When will I stop feeling guilty that I had only one child?
How much work is enough, and when will I feel like “enough” IS enough?

The list goes on and on, and some days are better than others. Some days I don’t ask any of those questions at all. But most days I at least ask some. And, honestly, I think I differ from others not in how many questions I ask myself or how frequently I ask them (my guilt does usually come in leading question form, not in exclamation) but in how openly I admit (to myself and others) that I have such guilt.

“Just don’t worry about it” doesn’t work for me any more than for most of my friends and family. But some people are much better at blocking than others. And I know I annoy my friends most when what I say and do interferes with their blocking ability. When I confess to guilt, I bring up the subject for them. Sorry, friends, that’s just how it is. In fact, it's part of my best self, the one that analyzes and processes and works to make sense of things rather than just letting life flow by unquestioned. (Wow, not much guilt about being myself on that score apparently, hoorah!)

Actually, despite the sometimes crushing burden of guilt I take on, I do like myself. I do like my “ability to respond” and willingness to do so on many fronts. Perhaps this is a defensive strategy, praising myself for how much guilt I take on. But what else is our personality made up of apart from ways of seeing and ways of defending our ways of seeing? Coping strategies, blocking strategies—all kinds of strategies that spin around in our over-evolved heads. All that and blogging (don’t want to let too much time slip between posts or I’ll feel guilty about THAT!) keeps me a happy, busy (and busy-ness is next to godliness) human bean.

Google Trends-iness

2006-05-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

Mark Morford has inspired me again. Today’s column was on Google Trends, a handy service where you can look up which places in the world most often use Google to surf the Internet for certain terms (stats change daily). Morford discovers that Elmhurst, IL, for example, is the US city that most often looks up “anal sex” and “porn.”

Morford is wise in noting that this is more pseudo-information than truly useful fact. I definitely see the trend he sees in Elmhurst, but if I look up “feminist,” is it feminists or anti-feminists who are looking it up most? What do “global trends” mean when we have language issues (what is the equivalent word for “feminism” in Polish, Hindu, or Zulu)? Clearly, this tool has serious limitations. …But it’s addictive.

Here are some of the Googlicious factoids I discovered today:

Nowhere in the world do people look up the term “Christ” more frequently than in Nashville, TN, but it is Ashland City, TN and Lebanon, TN that top the list for looking up “Nashville.”

Delhi, India is the #1 city on the planet for looking up “namaste,” “masturbate,” and “hero.”

Halifax, Canada is off the charts on the term “empire,” with New York, London, and other US, UK, Canadian, and Australian cities trailing far behind.

Washington DC is champion for “feminist,” “genocide,” and “nuclear.”

The US is nowhere in the top ten for looking up either “Islam” or “clitoris.”

“War” is looked up much, much more often than “peace.”

...What can you learn today?

ok ok......i give up.........you win..........CUTE ATTACK!!!

2006-05-18T16:22:00.000-05:00

..........must sit down...............

............too much cuteness.............

..........omigod...............

.........somebody help me..........

........awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...........

i'm gonna lose my Cynics Anonymous membership card

.....don't let anyone see me with this goofy look on my face.........

Bifocal Bliss

2006-05-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

In addition to the awful CAT scan (about which I’ve already blogged) and the recent horrid cystoscopy and the forthcoming ultrasound (the bladder and kidneys are fine, now let’s look at those uterine and ovarian cysts we found during the CAT scan, my dear) and annual routine mammography, today I went to the optometrist. My distance vision is definitely worse than it was a few years ago (and I haven’t had my eyes checked in six years, their records say—whoops), and I hate night driving now. Plus my reading glasses are clearly not strong enough anymore.

I find out from Good Dr. Martin that I’m now a welcome member to the Over 40 Eyes Club, in that I am now officially farsighted. The previous/ongoing issue of problem with focus remains and is worse. I think my vision, which was 20/20 or better beforehand, got ruined by living in front of a Macintosh SE while writing my dissertation, back in the dot-matrix, pre-www days of 1990-1991. In any case, the prescription for the old glazzies is now higher, the distance vision is shot, and so...I must now embrace the wicked truth that, in one week when it’s time to pick up my fabulous new pair, I will be an Official Bifocal-wearing Old Fart.

The Doc did some laughing at my/our expense when I asked if I could have one pair of reading glasses and one pair of driving glasses. After all, I still don’t have to wear them all the time and they are for two separate purposes (hence the “bi” in “bifocal”). He said many people “in denial” do this until they just get over their vanity and acknowledge that this is just how things go when you hit your 40s. As your reading prescription gets strong enough to avoid the whanging headaches you’ve been denying have any relationship to your vision, it also means that when you look up from your book at your clock or your dog or your child smearing mashed potato on your clock or your dog that the world will be a fuzzy, blurry place. Now he did not say all of this, just the “denial” part. And he is, of course, absolutely right in my case.

Of course, as with all good pity parties, we must eventually stop the dance and take a moment to acknowledge that the cup may, indeed, be half full. I can still wear the glasses for reading and driving and keep them off other times. I made it 30 years with no glasses and another 10+ with weak ones. But the Bifocal Train is pullin’ into the station and I gotta ride it, however far from Youth Town it may be headed. Chugga chugga wooooooooo wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Trying to Blog About Breakfast on Pluto

2006-05-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

I’ve let my viewing of Breakfast on Pluto simmer a week now, trying to figure out what I have to say about it. I watched the bonus materials, including the making-of documentary; I’ve perused IMDB for info on Cillian Murphy (whom I did not recognize from Batman Begins – I remember finding him very offbeat-sexy in what I felt was an otherwise uninspired movie); I’ve thought about the film’s relationship to others, from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to Hedwig to Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. And then I’ve thought about the film’s themes: what it says about youth and seeking meaning/purpose in life; defining/finding family; Irish politics; culture, subculture, and gender/queerness; etc.

In the end, I find myself wanting to read the novel that is so highly praised to see if perhaps my “It was good but not great” response to the film has something to do with the translation of novel to film. And I look forward to seeing more of Cillian Murphy’s work, ideally outside the superhero or other trite Americanized genres.

Meanwhile, I’ll read some more reviews and welcome feedback here about others’ experiences of the film.

Trying to Do Deadwood

2006-05-05T15:41:00.000-05:00

In preparing to teach a course on gender and film this term, I spent some time with westerns. It’s not a genre I’ve ever been drawn to, any more than action-adventure generally. However, reading theory about men watching men in action (a.k.a. violence) sequences and homoerotic repression has given me a lens through which to grasp the western genre when handled in interesting ways (despite several attempts, I can’t get through Rio Grande and I think I may always find classic John Wayne films insufferable).

Given this interest and friends’ recommendations, I wanted to give Deadwood a try. Since it is on DVD, seeing the first season, episode by episode, seemed ideal. Because I don’t watch violence easily or lightly in most circumstances, I liked the idea of choosing when and how I’d watch it. And I like Ian McShane from his days in Lovejoy.

I’ve watched the first three episodes now, so I thought I’d weigh in on my response so far. First, this is typical genre stuff. The “Wild West” is as cartoonish as in good-old classic Hollywood westerns, and then you layer on HBO-style “gritty realism” (without ever dipping into actual “reality”). You get tons of swearing, hookers with gonorrhea, drug addiction, and a big death toll from living in a “real” squatter gold town beyond the reach of the U.S. government (Deadwood was, indeed, a real town similar to what is shown on the show—not to mention the name of a popular laid-back bar in Iowa City). You mix in some “real” famous people (Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok) and dance around historical reports of their relationships while making a bunch of crap up as you go along to heighten tension.

Heightening tension gets at the heart of my current response to the series. There is so much tension, so much wondering who will get killed when and by whom, how dastardly will the next murder be…that it keeps my adrenalin flowing at what I can only call a toxic level. SO MUCH fight-or-flight response just isn’t good for my nervous system. Doesn’t matter whether I watch it at night (then have to find some way to come down for the next hour so I can go to sleep) or in the morning (then have to find some way to purge adrenalin that feels like a hit of speed or a dozen cups of coffee); in either case, I feel positively poisoned from riding the tension rollercoaster.

I know some people are addicted to this kind of a ride, and it definitely is a physiological experience as well as an emotional and marginally intellectual one. I’m guessing The Sopranos works similarly on people, as did NYPD Blue. I want to compare it to a literal rollercoaster ride, though for me it lacks the high.

It might help me if there were more character development in these first episodes. McShane’s Al Swearengen is about the best I’ve seen in episodes 1-3, especially if you like watching train wrecks. His depth of unethical, immoral, vicious behavior coupled with sociopathic calm in line delivery is engaging, in its villainous way. But watching him slap around prostitutes or order the murder of children gets exhausting, and predictable, fast.

And Calamity Jane better get more interesting – fast. Such an opportunity, and they have her cower before Swearengen without the (feminist) kindness of having him trigger memories of abuse as a child or some credible reason to bring down this calamitous cross-dresser. Her relationship with Hickok, however unrequited, has great genderbending implications, but so far the show is making her more the butt of jokes than a truly compelling character. She doesn’t have to be Xena, but she should be compelling. But hell, so should Hickok. Not to mention Seth Bullock, the dullest character this side of any western (does he have the ability to look at someone in a way other than up at an angle from beneath his hat/brow, or has someone told the director this is “sexy”?). And Sol Star (oy vey that name) is our token Jew (ho hum).

I do get that Deadwood is a show about westerns even more than it is a western. It’s a postmodern western. It’s a metawestern. But then, not really. I think my biggest criticism is that it isn’t fully in the genre and it isn’t fully outside the genre. Some will say this is its brilliance. But until it has some characters that truly grip me, it’s a long hour. Just pass me some of Alma’s laudanum so I can come down more quickly after the adrenalin poisoning and I’ll try to make it a few more episodes before I move on to something else.

The Cultural Politics of the CAT Scan Experience

2006-04-22T09:52:00.000-05:00

I had to get a renal/pelvic CAT scan yesterday. Just ruling out some options for a trace of blood in my urine (kidney stone, polyps in the bladder—who knows). I’m not convinced I truly needed the procedure, but I decided to play Good Little Patient and let the young, overconfident urologist order it. He’s been reassuring that we’ll figure out the problem with the blood and some urethral burning (yes, I know, that's more info than you want or need), and the antibiotics he gave me first did cure the burning symptoms. But the blood hasn’t (yet) gone and no kidney stone has been forthcoming, so he wants to rule out any kidney problems (after thumping me in them a few times to no effect in the office) before we head for the office-visit cystoscopy (a.k.a. scope up the urethra, which makes me turn into Kevin Meaney and think “that’s not riiiiight!”).

Anyhow, the point of this unpleasant blog is how unpleasant the damn CAT scan was! The real rant, though (given the general aims of this blog), is less to bitch about the procedure than to bitch about the way the procedure is and is not represented to the patient. Here is a list of my complaints:

1. The doctor made it seem entirely simple and without complication or discomfort. He did give the usual caveat, glibly babbled off, about people dying from the procedure in very rare cases, to which I replied, “How can you say I have nothing to worry about AND that I might die from it?” “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you,” he smiled into my face. And off I went to schedule it.

2. The nurse in the X-ray area gave me two bottles of yuck to drink without ever once mentioning—verbally or on the instruction sheet—that this barium stuff causes bloating, cramping, serious gas, and even diarrhea. She did say it has a metallic taste and to put it in the fridge before drinking it. (The flavor was mildly coconut, but the texture was something between school glue and male ejaculate—ok, that’s DEFINITELY more than you wanted to read, but it gets across the point of how difficult it was to guzzle down in quantity.) She did not, however, say “Watch out for the runs!” (The CAT scan technician put it this way when I complained of the cramping during the procedure: “Oh, some people don’t even get diarrhea.”) In that waiting room after swigging the shit down, I made several potty trips in half and hour and passed so much gas I could’ve filled a hot-air balloon.

3. The “contrast dye” they use for your organs is, as the doctor said, “an injection,” but he didn’t say it was through an IV! Those things HURT and the dye can cause hives, shortness of breath, or more severe allergic reaction, including death. No one told me this until I was already in the CAT scan room with the Donut of Doom looming before me. The technician did tell me that the dye would give me a burning sensation in my throat and bladder, and it did, but it passed quickly.

4. Oh yeah, they make you injest ANOTHER large cup of barium yuck (this time it wasn’t coconut glue but metallic orange fizz) just before you lie down, to “top you off” as the technician said.

5. The actual renal/pelvic CAT scan requires that you hold your breath about 10 times during the procedure, between 10 and 30 seconds each. This isn’t tough unless you’re already hyperventilating, of course, which I’m happy to say I wasn’t. However, it is not easy to hold your breath over and over again when you’re having increasingly sharp gas pains from being overfull of barium yuck and having to lie prone with it gurgling through your guts.

In the end, I lived to tell the tale. I withstood the horrid IV experience, held my breath as required between stabbing gas pains, passed the barium yuck over the course of the day from every orifice, and then went shopping (found a remarkable pink tank top with Tank Girl on it, saying “Oh, the preposterous bollocks of the situation!” at Marshalls—an unexpected treasure).

What I want is for doctors and nurses to let people know this stuff awaits them with this “simple procedure.” Just a little sheet saying that some of this may happen to them. But truly informed consent seems something the medical community is just simply uninterested in.

Riddle

2006-04-18T19:40:00.000-05:00

What do you get when you combine strep throat, a urinary tract infection, 2 weeks of antibiotics that give you a yeast infection and make you sensitive to the sun, a follow-up headcold, spring allergies, and end-of-term workload?

Yes, I Enjoyed V for Vendetta

2006-04-02T10:21:00.000-05:00

I was disturbed to hear that V for Vendetta cost $54 million. (Worldwide it’s already earned $70 million, so all is right with the world, eh?) Now, I’m always frustrated by how much a few hours escape at the cinema costs, even when a film is life-changing (this one isn’t). (Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which was life-changing for me, cost $6.5 million, by contrast. And Brokeback only cost $14 million.) During the film, I’m generally in filmgoer space, mentally, but before and after I often think about those abstract “liberal” ideas like “feed all homeless people for a year or make one movie…hmmmm….”

But if we surrender to the wisdom that says “it doesn’t work like that” and just look at the film, what do we have? First, we have to consider the issue of the Wachowski brothers label on the film. Yes, they are able to tap into cultural anxieties and do a good job of rendering comic books (literally and metaphorically) in the (cinematic) flesh. The Matrix, like V for Vendetta, captivated through focus on a world beyond our control—one via extra-terrestrial domination and one via political repression. Each film gripped and entertained me, got me thinking about how much we take for granted and also how much life resembled the film world. (Come to think of it, I liked Dark City this way, too.) Yet, The Matrix had more in common with the first Alien film (and the sequels yielded horror to sci-fi for both series—though the second Matrix film was no Aliens). By contrast, V for Vendetta, from a graphic novel I liked less than Watchmen but enjoyed, has more in common with 1984 (and I did like seeing John Hurt go from a long-ago turn as Winston Smith to another incarnation of Big Brother in V for Vendetta). Given that the Wach Bros. didn’t write or direct the thing, my criticism of them centers primarily on the ghastly budget and a curiosity of how much of that budget was truly needed to make the film.

With that out of the way, I want to praise the content and political pleasure I had in the film. I absolutely loved the heavy-handed Bush slams in the film. From a graphic novel aimed at Thatcher to this obvious and downright gleeful attack on Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the gang of lying, dangerous thugs; V for Vendetta is a wonderful reminder that many of us can see that the emperor has no clothes, that Empires must fall, and that intelligence and art will triumph over greed and power-mongering (thank you, Cyrano). It was uplifting, dammit. Like watching The Daily Show, I need some good Leftist uplift in my media, however hammer-you-over-the-head simple in metaphors and symbols it may be.

Does this mean that Natalie Portman’s shaved head bit doesn’t rely on Holocaust imagery it does not earn (can’t help but compare her negatively to Hurt in 1984, where the metaphor was far better earned and not played for titillation)? Naah. (And omigod, look at that picture! Found it on a random search. “Prison torture can make me feel soooooooooo sexy!”)

But go see the film. I did truly enjoy it.

A Little Lenny Bruce

2006-03-21T10:58:00.000-06:00

I’m sitting at my desk, avoiding some work I must do in order to do some work I want to do, and I’m reading Lenny Bruce, a chapter of The Essential Lenny Bruce called “What Is Obscene?” And with his hip Jewish druggie oft-sexist charm, Lenny spells it out by differentiating between “obscene” and “disgusting.” It’s all about arousal, he argues. If it turns you on, it’s obscene. If it offends you, it’s disgusting and, hence, not obscene.

He celebrates the importance of the First Amendment and ridicules our use of it. We can deny others’ gods, say “A fat slob, the Buddha” or “go in front of a synagogue and sing about pork.” We can disrespect any group we want, “Cause that’s our right—to be disgusting.” After all, “[T]he reason we left England was just for that right, to be disgusting.”

But obscenity is about arousing the “prurient interest,” about turning people on. And, Lenny says, “The prurient interest is like the steel interest. What’s wrong with appealing to the prurient interest? We appeal to the killing interest.” And, more, he notes the classism here. If I write about trailer trash having vivid, graphic, sloppy sex, then that’s obscene. But if I’m “classy” about it, if I know how to “handle” the sex scenes with artistic beauty (he talks about Lady Chatterly's Lover as an example), if it emerges as “legit” art, then I’m far less likely to be prosecuted. In Lenny’s words, “So, in the opinion of this court, we punish untalented artists.”

You and Me and ADD Makes Three

2006-03-18T11:56:00.000-06:00

Chad and I have very strong feelings about ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). We’ve developed these over time, and I have been guided by Chad’s experiences as a student of clinical psychology/counseling, his work as a pre-school (aka daycare) teacher, and readings on the subject. With some guidance from the editorial stylings of Mark Morford (in “Let’s all get ADD”), I have come to a more formal thesis on the disorder recently: ADD is both a rare bio-psychological condition and a common social condition. Let me explain.

First, in diagnosing ADD via the DSM (huge encyclopedia of psychological disorders put out by the American Psychiatric Association – aka doctors not psychologists), the criteria are so broad (everything from lack of ability to concentrate to disliking work tasks) and the determining degree so vague (one has to display only “some” of the characteristics “some” of the time), that every single kindergartener in this country could be aptly diagnosed with ADD. Add to this the fact that many medical doctors with no psychological training are diagnosing the disorder and prescribing Ritalin and you have, in my opinion, a recipe for self-made epidemic.

My conclusion has caused me conflict, to be sure. For example, Chad and I have dear friends who assert that both father and son have ADD and the son is now on Ritalin and they are seeing a marked improvement in his ability to concentrate and succeed in school. I do not doubt their results nor their frustration with their son’s past behavior and difficulties. Who am I to second-guess what they need to do for their family?

Yet, I do have concerns. Chad has cited studies that show that therapy works for this type of disorder/situation. We both have more faith in therapists/counselors than medical doctors. And now I’ve found a way of seeing ADD that reduces my conflicts and eases my mind. As Morford puts it, we are an ADD culture.

With the demands for and pleasures of constant multitasking (like right now I’m on yahoo messenger chatting with a friend, talking now and then to my son about a videogame he’s playing with his dad, writing this blog entry, and finishing breakfast), ADD is a treasured commodity. An ability to concentrate on one thing too long would be excessive, a waste of valuable time that might always be stuffed far more full if we just try a little harder. I remember an NPR editorial a few years back that talked about our being a culture more invested in seeming busy than in actually doing work (or doing pleasure). His ultimate example was people on cell phones in public bathrooms, wanting others to hear them as they make important business decisions while they piss. From the critical vantage point of this moment, the commentator’s description is positively naïve. Everybody not only has a cell phone and uses it constantly, but increasingly few people aren’t willing to talk while on the pot.

If we are, indeed, an ADD-inspiring culture, then when numerous adults and their numerous children tell me they have ADD, I have a new lens through which to see it that keeps me from being at odds with their definitions and even their cures. After all, as Joshua Foer in “The Adderall Me: my romance with ADD meds” makes plain, ADD drugs can help everyone to better deal with a culture that increasingly insists on ADD personalities to meet the needs of our ADD culture.

Nothing like a political/sociological perspective to shed light on the medical/psychological, eh?

Codepink Event

2006-03-17T14:54:00.001-06:00

What an image. What a message. Read the story here.

Religion, Science--the Whole Megillah

2006-03-12T09:56:00.000-06:00

I am pained and exasperated by ongoing and increasing fundamentalism in the world’s major religions today. Irshad Manji, for example, changed the title of her book The Trouble with Islam to The Trouble with Islam Today when it came out in paperback to encourage us to separate current fundamentalist extremism in the Muslim world from previous, more enlightened eras, when the Islamic world offered magnificent libraries, extolled education and critical analysis, celebrated life.

Discussions of “Creationism,” that frightening pseudo-concept that reminds one of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” more than of a logical and meaningful combination of religion and science are more disturbing than I can say as a college professor. It seems clear to the point of inarguable to me that what science intends and how science works is incompatible with the concept of religion. Religion and science are, in intent and usage, often simply antithetical.

Take the scientific method: a systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the formulation of a question or problem, collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. Religion is simply not interested in data collection, experiment, and testing, except metaphorically or philosophically (and not even that if we’re talking fundamentalism). Religion is about taking things on faith. So, we plain and simply cannot bring religion into the science classroom. It just won’t fit through the damn door.

This said, science should not be taken for/as religion. There are questions science is entirely uninterested in, ill-suited for, or just plain incapable of addressing. Chemistry lab can’t help me answer “Do human beings have a soul?”, nor need it do so. If science becomes the only valuable way of knowing, we place equally artificial limits on ways of seeing and being in the world. There are questions of personal and cultural values that science cannot adequately address for me. But then, organized religion often cannot either.

In a recent issue of Reform Judaism, I read an article entitled “Evolution and Eden: Why Darwinism and Judaism are Perfectly Compatible” (Spring 2006: 44-46, 48). The Encino, CA rabbi who wrote the article, Harold M. Schulweis, may go places I do not because I am a secular Jew, but he offers some discussion of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or “Old Testament”) that I wish other well-meaning people of faith would grasp.

Schulweis asks, “What rescued Judaism from a rigid, fundamentalist literalism?” and answers that the Torah “possesses the essential character of poetry, not literal prose. To comprehend Torah you have to understand symbols, parables, metaphors, and allegories. Torah is art, a spiritual interpretation of life, not a mechanical record of facts—more like a love sonnet than a legal contract.”

I remember to this day a course at the University of Iowa taught by the amazing Rabbi Jay Holstein. His Old Testament Survey courses were among the most popular at the university when I attended graduate school there. The story of Cain and Abel as he tells it is illustrative. Let's take just a moment of it, stylized in my own fashion:

Q: If the name Cain is based on the Hebrew verb “to buy” and Abel means “vapor,” what are the odds this story is more important at a literal level (a tale of the children of the first humans) than as parable (what happens when you try to buy God’s favor)?

A: Who the heck names their son “vapor” and expects him to stick around, for pity’s sake?!

Frankly, I don’t engage much with religion in my life because religion is too slippery, too ripe for self-fulfilling prophesy and bandwagon craziness. The beautiful “poetry” of the Bible, for example, is in too many minds and hands a tool to interpret with personal bias then beat people over the head with. If I agree with Rabbi Schulweis that “Science is concerned with facts. The Torah is concerned with values,” I may not agree with him on defining and/or applying those Biblical “values.” If “Science is concerned with ‘what is’” and “The Torah is concerned with ‘what ought to be,’” then I’m very nervous about who gets to decide “what ought to be” and how these “morally driven” religious folk come to their conclusions.

What Schulweis does not distinguish is as important as what he does. We are allies in not wanting religion in the science classroom, but I do not believe you need religion to address the fact that “because science is morally neutral it is morally malleable; it can be made to justify healing or greed, selflessness or selfishness.” Everything is political, nothing is “morally neutral”—especially not the way it is practiced. A textbook definition of the scientific method may be “morally neutral,” but this method has been developed by “moral” beings within specific historical, political, and social contexts. It cannot be free of that stain, nor can any way of doing or being.

Certainly, I am thrilled to know that “[r]are is a rabbi” who would argue that “permitting the use of federal funds for medical research with stem cells taken from human embryos […] runs counter to God’s will,” yet I do not know that “[s]cience needs the conscience of Torah.” Science needs conscience, Torah needs conscience, “all God’s children” need conscience. But who decides the contours of that conscience, who decides how, when, where, and why to apply conscience? That kind of question I don’t want (interpretation of) Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, or any religious text to dictate, in or out of the classroom.

My Patron Ancestor

2006-03-11T14:38:00.000-06:00

As an agnostic Jewish American, I realize I am not, strictly speaking, entitled to a Patron Saint. But I think I am entitled to a Patron Jew. I’ve chosen Anzia Yezierska.

Anzia Yezierska is an early twentieth-century immigrant Jewish American writer of Eastern European decent. Her stories and novels (and ficitionalized autobiography) center in the lives of first- and second-generation Russian Jewish immigrant women who struggle against religious, ethnic, and gender oppression and discrimination to build an America they can live with and in. She writes with high emotion in Yiddish-accented English of impoverished yet ambitious New York ghetto Jews, with liberal fervor, pleasure, and pain.

I love her work because it is earthy, intense, and witty. Though I rarely find her completely “honest” in her depiction of self or other, I am swept up in her “Old World” emotionalism and zeal for justice and equality.

This quotation, from her first novel Salome of the Tenements, speaks to me, for example, perhaps as a descendent of the author in spirit: “I am a Russian Jewess, a flame—a longing. A soul consumed with hunger for heights beyond reach. I am the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires. I am the unlived lives of generations stifled in Siberian prisons. I am the urge of the ages for the free, the beautiful that never yet was on land or sea.”

And I also share some of the guilt and anxiety of Yezierska’s “Salome” (aka Sonya Vrunsky), who asks: “Why do I feel guilty when I’m happy? […] Is it because I’m a sentimental fool? Is it the craziness of Russian youth that feels a secret shame at happiness?”

Thus, I'd like to imagine that it is at times said of me, “Those Jewish intellectuals—those chaotic dreamers are a mystery to me.”

Does this ring true, or am I having delusions of the grandeur of my Russian Jewish heritage?

A Few Words for Don Knotts

2006-03-10T09:14:00.000-06:00

I’ve come to appreciate the TV and film work of Don Knotts in specific ways over a long period of time. As a kid, Knotts was the guy in two films I saw repeatedly. The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) was, I thought, a very cool movie when I was little. I was only two when it was released, so I’m guessing I saw it on TV at some point. But it stuck in my memeory because it went from live action to a cartoon, with Knotts as Henry Limpet the man and bespectacled fish version of himself. The fish looked remarkably like Knotts, too. I don’t remember the plot, though.

Plot was more memorable in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which I think I saw annually around Halloween in grammar school for several years. It was the perfect combination of pseudo-scary and silly, and it got us out of class and into the auditorium, so I associate the film with good feeling and a great holiday. I remember a lot of physical humor, with Knotts shaking and stuttering amply, letting us tots feel extra mature and brave by comparison with this childlike man.

I came to The Andy Griffith Show much later. It plagued my youth, interrupting (or so I interpreted it) perfectly good Cubs games on WGN (the actual appearance was because of rain delays, but I mostly saw it as an inappropriate imposition—I couldn’t sit through it to get to the break in the rain, if it came, and I’d end up simply watching something else or turning off the TV). I’ve already blogged about this last September, but I’ll quote the Knotts/Barney Fife parts again here:

“I suppose my greatest pleasure in the series comes from the fact that my husband and I have developed a way of watching the show through pop psychology. We read Andy as an 'enabler' (or rescuer). Andy keeps the status quo going beautifully in Mayberry, from the easy-going charm of it all to Otis's alcoholism to Barney's pathological overcompensation for pipsqueaky ineptitute. Episode after episode has Andy saving Barney's ass with a loving smile, excusing everything from his bungling to his powermongering and even trying to make him look more competent than he ever is. And Andy rescues and enables even when Barney's actions threaten Andy's livelihood or his very life. Given that, without a doubt, Barney is a pretty realistic and still-timely portrayal of those scary-ass small-town officers who thrive on treating others like crap to make themselves feel adequate all across this great nation of ours (wow, sounds like Dubya, don't it?), it can be downright painful to watch Andy keep puffing him up when he should remain deflated awhile...or forever. But somehow it's addictive. The pleasure is knowing what will happen every episode, that everything will be 'all right' in this safe little white Southern town... If I think too much about it, it's appalling. But just before bed it can put a ridiculous smile on my face that I should certainly not be admitting to.”

Reviewing Mr. Knotts' page on IMDB let me see just how many guest appearances he made on television programs and films throughout his life. He's been steadily doing voiceovers and guest appearances steadily through 2005, which is more than most actors can say. So, my son got to hear his voiceover at age 80 as Mayor Turkey Lurkey in Chicken Little even as we watch Andy Griffith reruns together in the evenings. A boy born in Tennessee, my son has none of my Chicagoan prejudices against the show, and though he prefers cartoons and superheroes, he does "sort of" like it, for its "couple of funny parts" -- especially Barney. Perhaps we'll rent The Ghost and Mr. Chicken next Halloween to see how it holds up.

RIP and shake the heavens with self-effacing mirth, Mr. Knotts. Or reincarnate into the next higher lifeform: like Marty Feldman and others of your ilk, your willingness to play the fool with such serious dedication is certainly a form of generous humility that merits rewards beyond this lifetime.

Dallying with Darby O'Gill

2006-03-05T09:01:00.000-06:00

The Murfreesboro Center for the Arts showed Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) yesterday afternoon, as an early St. Patrick’s Day treat for the kiddies, complete with free popcorn. The film is a Disney special effects extravaganza, complete with leprechauns, a banshee, and a singing (definitely dubbed) Sean Connery in one of his first films (at a spry-looking 29).

I’d never seen the film, and was enchanted by its combination of:

*stereotypical Irish accents so thick my son leaned over several times to say “What are they saying?” “Can you understand it?” “I can’t figure out a word of what they’re saying”;

*the charming studio-lot Irish village, complete with friendly yet stern-when-he-needs to be village Priest in full garb; big dumb lug types hassling old alcoholics in the town tavern;

*meddling old lady (Sheelah Sugrue, played by the fabulous Estelle Winwood of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Camelot, The Producers, Murder by Death and more sitcoms and detective series on television than you can shake an old-lady stick at);

*obligatory bonnie young lass (Janet Munro) of independent yet entirely normative nature;

*delightful giddy “little people”—all somehow male—dancing their lives away in an awesome cave within a mountain;

*and grizzled, classically trained lead actor (Albert Sharpe as Darby O’Gill) that could distort his face with acrobat agility Cirque du Soleil would be proud of.

Now that’s the cynical me, of course, and there’ll be more of that momentarily. I will pause, however, to say a few truly positive words:

*the special effects stood up remarkably well to the test of time, with the banshee actually scaring my son and the blue screen work marvelous throughout;

*the relationship between Darby and Brian, the King of the Little People (Jimmy O’Dea), was incredibly rich; the two men were “worthy adversaries” and convinced the audience well of their genuine affection as well as macho one-upmanship;

And some film analysis:

Most fascinating to me was the male-male scenes. Though a fantasy and a romance story, the film is also about how men relate to other men. In addition to the aforementioned Darby-King Brian friendship, Darby also had a warmth with his employer, Lord Fitzpatrick (Walter Fitzgerald). Both relationships involved competitiveness and disagreement, illustrating how male friendships must be kept from any hint of homoerotic (or even homosocial) quality by involving conflict as well as closeness.

Similar was the tension among the younger male rivals, Connery’s Michael McBride and Pony Sugrue (Kieron Moore), but in this case it involved what Steve Neale (mentioned in other blog entries on male-centered films below) discusses as scenes of aggression between men that both deny yet present repressed homosexual desire—and invite the audience’s gaze upon it. As the film ends, Darby O’Gill has returned to the living from the Death Coach’s door, his daughter is well and in the arms of her beloved Michael, and all is right with the world. But we can’t end there: Michael and Darby must go to the tavern where he must prove his meddle against the bully Pony. As Michael is pummeled by Pony, Darby and the other regulars—including barmaid Molly Malloy (Nora O’Mahoney)—gawk away, cringing yet prevented by the wise Darby from intervening. Men need to have these confrontations, and we, apparently, need to watch them. Of course, in the end, Michael wins, handily, and his mother Sheelah is the only one to comfort him.

Because I can’t leave this post without a final immature swipe, I must say I found the teeth in this film hard to watch (or to look away from). Between Darby’s missing upper choppers and crooked, yellowed bottom row and Connery’s hideous cap job, I found myself marveling at how long Hollywood has been tooth-obsessed. With updates in Austin Powers and constant tooth-whitening ads alongside movie stars whose mouths seem to glow in the dark with their expensively bleached and over-polished whiteness, it was fascinating to have this film remind me that Holywood’s always insisted on ridiculously “perfect” teeth, even when it lacked the technological/medical means to have them.

Reviewing the Best and Worst of The Aristocrats

2006-03-03T15:39:00.000-06:00

WARNING: MATURE CONTENT. GROSS LANGUAGE AND DESCRIPTIONS.

I won't deny it. I have very mixed feelings about Provenza/Gillette’s The Aristocrats. A busy life kept me from remembering to rent the DVD for some time, but this week my husband brought it home and we finally watched it. Here's my breakdown:

GREAT

The importance of taking advantage of First Amendment Right to Free Speech in the making of this film—especially the shots of the father’s telling the foulest parts of their versions of the jokes to their infant sons—that was just so “wrong” and its “wrongness” was what was most “right” about this film.

My favorites: The mime version of the joke. Judy Gold's pregnant version.

GOOD

The analysis of why this joke is a comedian insider joke. The joke’s not particularly funny except among comedians. The genuine laughter at moments was wonderful.

Chris Rock’s analysis of why Black comedians don’t tend to tell the joke: we expect Black comedians to tell dirty jokes, and this one just isn’t that shocking, except, arguably, to middle-class white people. I’d put this aspect in the Great column, except that (1) being white and middle class, I really wanted to hear Rock’s version and (2) Whoopi Goldberg was the only other Black comedian in the entire video and, though her version was absolutely hysterical (foreskins pulled up over heads as they sang!!), she did not adequately fill my desire to see a more diverse cast of comedians presented.

FAIR

As I just noted, how about some Variety?! Dump the horrid ventriloquist guy and trim a few others and you’d have time for more women, comedians of color, and other kinds of difference. Amazing cast of Jewish comics, but it gives the illusion that that’s all that’s going on in stand-up, and it ain’t. Provenza and Gillette could have dug a lot deeper and presented more new, non-whiteboy comics, surely.

POOR

Filming. Horrid camerawork throughout, annoyingly amateur in a number of scenes.

Several poor, pointless versions of the joke. Steven Wright’s version of the joke was high on my list of bad versions. Where is the creativity in some of these takes? How many times can we hear about sodomizing young children, dog sex, and scat without just getting bored?

Moments of forced/fake laughter. Come on, y'all, we're not that stupid.

Cutting out Ron Jeremy’s poem/rap version of the joke (see DVD extras). Why??

OTHER

Too bizarre for words was the mime act of an abortion (on the DVD extras). Troubling politically, psychologically disturbing (that this mime thought through his presentation so meticulously was very creepy). And why is a male mime doing an abortion? Just shock value? I doubt you'll think that if you see it. I hated it but couldn’t look away.

MY VERSION OF THE JOKE

After listening to all the repetitive boring versions, I’d definitely go more for either the meta-joke (the joke that is a critique/twist of the joke, like Sarah Silverman’s “Joe Franklin raped me” version, the “we already have an act like that” take, or the one where a polite and elegant act is called “The Cum-sucking Twats”) or add some new kinky flavors to it. How about the boy being hoisted on meat hooks above the floor so when he shits it splashes the first three rows of the audience? or the family painting themselves ritually with their daughter's first menstrual blood then doing the hora around a goat fucking a chicken? maybe a bit too Jewish...

RIP Octavia Butler

2006-03-01T19:04:00.000-06:00

OCTAVIA BUTLER

(June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006)

Black feminist science fiction writer

I devoted a big part of my dissertation to her work back in the early 90s. From that work, I published an article on her superb story "Bloodchild" in African American Review in 1994. The story deals with alien-human relations on a faraway planet that have master-slave, human-animal, and fascinating race/gender implications. Though old and not my very best work, my article does express how rich I find the story. You can read the article here.

For first-time readers, I recommend "Bloodchild" and her breezy yet potent novel Kindred, about a contemporary woman who is thrown back and forth in time to save the life of her white (future slave master) ancestor. Her Xenogenesis Trilogy is also worthwhile, starting with Dawn, in which aliens called Oankali offer to save the remants of humanity after a global nuclear war if, and only if, they "gene trade" (i.e. mate only via gene mixing with the aliens -- no more pure-bred humans). Earlier, she penned five novels in her Patternmaster Series, about mentally powerful beings from the 18th-century (healer Anyanwu and body-vampire Doro in Wild Seed) to the present day (Mind of My Mind and AIDS-suggestive Clay's Ark). I'm not a fan of her more recent Parable series, about a young girl in an evironmentally ravaged near-future U.S. who creates her own religion (with a core of "God is Change"), but it has its fans. I have yet to read her newest, Fledgling, a vampire novel, but it's on my to-read list.

Writing older man/younger woman romances that never rang true and fell prey to sexist stereotypes, failing to offer LGBT options in her worlds, and too conservative for me despite being one of the only African American feminist writing science fiction, Butler's work has always been a complex, difficult read for me. But her writing inspired my dissertation and I thank her for that. And she was a fascinating person when I met her and shared a seat on a fan convention panel with her back in the 90s. I argued humanity should be kept glued to this planet so we don't foul up the universe; she argued the only way we'll evolve is to leave Earth behind. Despite the disagreement, I enjoyed her presence.

RIP

Thinking Through It Should Happen to You

2006-02-27T08:58:00.000-06:00

In It Should Happen to You (dir. George Cukor, 1954), Judy Holliday plays Gladys Glover, a woman longing to stand out in the world. [Yes, I'm going to tell you the ending so consider this your spoiler warning.] Fired from her modeling job because her boss made a bad bet about her hip size, she has only the $1000 she has saved up and the drive to make something of herself. In walks Pete Sheppard (Jack Lemmon in his first film), hopeful documentary filmmaker, who finds himself romantically drawn to this woman while claiming not to understand her need for recognition. He recommends, several times in the film, that she enjoy being part of the crowd and stop trying to stand out. He is most baffled by her decision to spend $600 to rent a huge billboard on Columbus Circle for 3 months. On the sign all she puts is her name, in enormous letters. She thoroughly enjoys just looking at the sign, though Pete continues to fret over it, going so far as to refuse to make any real commitment to Gladys until her rental time is up. The sign, we might argue, represents (phallic) power that intimidates Pete.

That Pete is a filmmaker and, thus, wields the gaze, would suggest his need for power: to control the lens through which he and his audience (if anyone actually does see his films, which we don’t actually know) see the world. Why can he not understand what Gladys wants, knowing as he must the implications of his own career choice? Probably because he does not know himself as well as she does: he craves attention too, he just gets it less directly than she does, as she soars into appearing on television talk shows, being the Adams’ Soap girl, and having a fighter plane named after her.

Eventually, of course, the lovers commit to each other, thwarting the playboy antics of Evan Adams III (Peter Lawford) and ending Gladys’s shortlived career…sort of. Pete has been waiting for Gladys’s fame bubble to burst, and a powerful moment over her delicious homecooked dinner happens when she straightforwardly recommends to Pete that he not be the one to burst that bubble himself. He forces her hand when he decides to leave the apartment house where he rents Room 7 while she lives down the hall in Room 9. He makes a short film, ending their relationship, and, in a note, dictates the terms under which she should watch it (turn down the lights, sit, turn on projector, etc.). With his real self unable to control her actions, he uses the medium of film to hold her attention. Does this signify male impotence? The power of the gaze? The need to use mediated methods to control this media-gripped woman? In any case, the trick works, and she faces, through this mediated message, the “fact” that she has been too obsessed with her own image to keep this man. The film fails to critique Pete’s methods, melodramatic background music and Gladys’s tears attesting to the truth that a woman’s success/fame is hollow without a man beside her.

More broadly, the film argues that success/fame is hollow if you don’t “stand for something.” I’m not sure what Pete stands for, but the film seems confident he does. Perhaps the shorthand here is that documentary filmmaking is “real,” which is entertaining to find delivered as a message through a non-documentary film about “unreal” characters. (Of course, we know, all film is artificial, including documentaries, but I can’t quite tell if It Should Happen to You knows this or not.) When Gladys, in stilted prose, finally tells off her manager and ends her life in the limelight, she repeats Pete’s words, and it isn’t just his “stand for something” phrase, it’s five or six lines, verbatim, and though perhaps they are meant to ring true because she now is living them, there are other interpretations available. They ring hollowly because they are not her words, any more than is the ridiculous speech she broke down in the middle of presenting at the airbase where the plane was being named after her. She is mimicking men’s words and maybe we are meant to see both as equally inappropriate, even though Gladys does not seem to get it. She is a puppet of patriarchy, whether via a boyfriend or a PR manager. Women are scripted in romantic comedies and this scene points us to awareness of this. Hence, it is not surprising that her words sound stilted more than self-aware…Holliday does not let her character even pause with the standard “Oh my gosh, he was right” moment as she speaks. We can become aware at this moment that these are not her words but part of the Hollywood norm of women characters being scripted into dulling down their own lives to make room for men.

It is only this rereading that makes palatable a scene that, taken straight, can seem to simply suggest that Gladys has come to her senses and will give up this wild public life for a nice guy she can cook for. Pete is not domineering in traditional ways, giving a whiny opinion but not insisting on anything. He seems more bent on performing masculinity than feeling comfortable in it, which would be pitiful if not for his effect on Gladys. Yet Gladys does speak her mind several times, quite pointedly, yelling at Pete and dumping Mr. Adams III not for making a pass at her but for doing it with so little emotion. I’m not saying her character doesn’t get nasty moments of comeuppance that a feminist perspective eschews, but there are gaps and fissures in the patriarchal armor of this film that are worth exploring.

And this gets us to the ending, where Gladys gives up a nationwide tour and the rest of her fame for Pete. Yet, as the two drive off together, they see a billboard for sale. Gladys stares at it, Pete freaks out and asks her what she’s staring at (using her gaze to reframe herself once more), and she says “nothing at all” or words to that effect, then lays her head on Pete's shoulder. The threat of her own control of her life and the fact that she (and actress Judy Holliday) shines so much brighter than wimpy Pete (and witty yet very secondary Jack Lemmon) are still present in the film and could re-erupt at any time.

I cannot help but think how sad it is that all that energy “erupted” for such a short time, as Ms. Holliday died of cancer after only a few more films at age 44. Yet you can feel, between Holliday's acting and Cukor's directing, a kind of feminist tension crackling throughout the film.

Note: I just learned that Judy Holliday’s given name was Tuvim and that she was Jewish! Moreover, her career was stunted not only by cancer but also by being brought in for questioning by McCarthy. Though not blacklisted, only a year after she won the Best Actress Oscar for Born Yesterday, this remarkable woman found it difficult to get good film roles. I will definitely need to read up on her relationship with Cukor, who cast her in four films: Adam’s Rib, Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, and It Should Happen to You. While I can’t make myself watch The Marrying Kind (yet) because Holliday’s character’s young son drowns in it (too hard to watch with a young son of my own), I have seen the other three and loved her in all of them.

Contemplating A Bill of Divorcement

2006-02-26T19:32:00.000-06:00

My ongoing work on the films of George Cukor brings me to ever new films. In addition to films I already knew well (Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Born Yesterday, The Women, My Fair Lady), I’ve bought a bunch used on VHS or DVD (as available) through half.com, including some I’ve never heard of and found fascinating and flawed (A Woman’s Face, Heller in Pink Tights), never heard of and never want to see again (Two-Faced Woman), heard of and found much different than expected (A Bill of Divorcement, It Should Happen to You, A Double Life), or just enjoyed for the ride (Dinner at Eight). I’ve found themes of alcoholism and aging, the thrill of the theater and the melodrama of madness, queerness and heteronormativity – Cukor directed such a diverse lot of films that it’s impossible to pigeonhole him, but you can definitely see reiterated themes and a love of acting.

Today, I watched A Bill of Divorcement (1932) for the first time, knowing it was Hepburn’s first role. You can see what Cukor saw in the young actress: her long, lithe, angular form and her confident, controlled acting. She handled both the arrogance of youth and the trauma of tragedy well in this melodrama. But I so did not know or expect the plot. [spoiler warning!!]

Perhaps linking it in my mind with her next films, Morning Glory and Christopher Strong (both 1933), I thought the plot was something about a young woman who fell in love with a married man and insisted he divorce, hence the title. Instead, I got a melodrama with John Barrymore (that superb thespian's thespian) and Billie Burke (voice always aquiver but admirably restrained, given the character). At the heart of the film is the impact of mental illness on a family, as Barrymore’s Hilary Fairfield returns to his family after 15+ years in a mental institution. Shell shock, the film argues, triggered a genetic predisposition to some form of delusional schizophrenia, and after 15 years, wife Meg (Burke) gets a divorce so she can move on with her life, can marry her lawyer, Gray Meredith (Paul Cavanagh), a warm yet patriarchal type. When the veil lifts one day, Hilary heads home and is devastated to find he has lost so many years and no longer fits into his home or wife’s life. He is at turns sad and abusive, pensive and calm. Barrymore is over the top at times, but such is the role. Wonderful is his daughter, Sidney, played by Hepburn: a girl on the verge of adulthood and marriage, confident and optimistic, yet soon brought down by her father’s pain and her knowledge that it is her “place” to care for him. She never knew her father, yet she is immediately drawn to him and to caring for him. Knowing the insanity is genetic, Sidney opts to break off her engagement with handsome and loving young Kit Humphreys (David Manners). (One of Hilary’s sisters, we are told, was also institutionalized for a time; his other sister, Hester (Elizabeth Patterson), is a determined spinster—in every sexist sense of the word.) Hepburn is at her heart-breaking best as Sidney marshals her strength and ends the relationship, knowing she and Kit can never have children and, worse, she might herself become mentally unstable and force Kit to suffer for years as her mother did.

What surprised me most about the film was where it ended. Melodramatic excess was everywhere, but I fully expected the unstable and childishly clinging yet also generous and wise Hilary to let his daughter go, as he did with his wife. Though he suffered for it, he did let Meg go, realizing that he did not truly know her anymore—if he ever did—and she deserved a life of love and happiness without him. Yet, when Kit returns one last time to whistle at the window (as the lovers romantically did early in the film) to see if Sidney will marry and go away with him, she closes the curtains and sits down with her father at the piano as the two play Hilary’s unfinished sonata (begun before his illness) with increasing (hysterical) gaiety. Fade to black.

It is a tidy film, neatly directed by Cukor, who can sometimes sacrifice cohesiveness for the sake of particular scenes or actors. But I’m astonished by this ending. Shall I read it as a tragedy? Hilary Fairfield is too emotionally unstable to do the right thing for his daughter, even if he could do it for his wife? Sidney is a generous soul who takes over her mother’s burden so the middle-aged woman (who married a soldier she did not love because that is just how things were at wartime) can at last have a few year’s happiness? Those with mental illness in the genes truly shouldn’t have children or even marry? (How popular a scientific thesis was inherited mental illness at this time?) Is the film simply about how well melodrama sells, regardless of specifics? Or perhaps a larger subject is being considered here: Is the film perhaps about a culture wrestling with the subject of divorce? Is it a study in masculinity-in-crisis?

Ultimately, I’m not sure what the film is arguing through its ending, but I know I feel trapped by it. Particularly remarkable is that the young daughter is trapped before even achieving adult independence while the mother, the older generation, is freed. Perhaps not only masculinity in some abstract sense is challenged here but also the price paid by succeeding generations for the wars and marriage traditions of their fathers (and mothers). If something does not change, the film might be said to argue, the ills of the older generation will destroy the younger? All I can say for certain is that I would not be contemplating these larger (political) themes if our heroine simply married her young man and they went off into the sunset together.

Why I Am Loving the First Season of Inuyasha on DVD

2006-02-24T07:42:00.000-06:00

1. Creativity: The demons may be relatively known to Japanese audiences (hair demon, enchanted blood-ink that brings forth demons from Japanese images of hell) but all are new and amazing-creepy to me. I also like the focus on reincarnation; makes a wonderful change from Judeo-Christian notions of life/death, good/evil, and our generic demons.

2. Well-handled Quest Motif: always good for retaining audience attention. I also like that episodes alternate between finding jewel shards and character development/cast building – and some episodes have both. Definitely keeps me watching—several episodes at a time.

3. Subtitles (vs. Dubbing): You can watch all the DVD episodes in Japanese, and it’s been enlightening. Not only are the translations sometimes more cultural than literal but characters names are different in pronunciation (for example, it's "Kah-go-may," with no emphasis on any syllable, not "Kuh-GO-may"). Also, the voice for Inuyasha is more menacing in the original Japanese. Are Americans incapable/undesirous of grasping the cute-sexy-evil triple threat? See point 4.

4. Badboys so Cute You Can Eat 'Em with a Spoon: Could anything be cuter than Inyasha? Those dog ears, long silver hair, tiny pointed nose, big amber eyes – could make anyone go Furry. Then there’s Sesshomaru: evil incarnate yet beautifully, ornately feminine. What is it that makes beautiful evil so alluring? Why don't Americans get it (without hysterical homophobia)? The Japanese are unmatched in blending cute, sexy, and evil. That odd childlike cuteness factor is just bizarre to me, and it works. (I will add, though, that I also used to have a crush on Rayek from Elfquest!)

5. Working Through Issues with Kagome: Though I like the cute-sexy in the adult male characters (esp. those delicious demons), I have issues with the schoolgirl thing the Japanese seem to groove on. Though there are no sex scenes and she varies between child and adolescent as she should, I feel I’m supposed to see Kagome as sex object and, well, bleh. Admittedly, we’ve been made so culturally paranoid about any thoughts/feelings that might in any way be at all linked with sexualizing anything under 18 that it’s positively a knee-jerk response to feel weird about Kagome and her insanely long legs and her link to the very-adult priestess Kikyo, whose soul is reincarnated within her. (I feel driven to add my frustration about this: Dammit, teens sexualize themselves constantly—and even pre-teens: those damn Kids Bop kids singing along to adult-themed sex/relationship songs...Bratz dolls and the whole pre-teen-girl-as-Diva craze…What the hell kinds of double-messages and double-standards are we giving kids—especially girls—and adults??)

(Next episode: Elyce Saves Money to Afford the Boxed Set of Season 2! See you next time!)

Moment of Being

2006-02-17T07:26:00.000-06:00

Some moments in life are so simultaneously filled with the best and worst of life one, apparently, just has to blog about it.

Yesterday morning I was driving around campus, trying to find the ever-elusive mid-day parking space. I was listening to my new RCA Lyra (a less expensive, not-white iPod), having just uploaded a variety of tunes meant to gently wake me to the day’s labor. I included The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and “Across the Universe,” “Frank Mills,” “Aquarius,” and “Let the Sunshine In” from Hair, and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” among others.

So, I’m pulling into a lucky space not too terribly far from my office as “Imagine” is concluding and I’m thinking about how I’d love to share the song with so many people, but the “no religion too” would make them call it a radical Commie song still (presuming they listened to the lyrics, of course), and feeling upset that the Right has so shifted discourse in this country that even mild peacenik anthems are linked to terrorism and the destruction of all morality. And then the opening words of “Let the Sunshine In” add fodder to my mood…

We starve-look
At one another
Short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation
Of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes

…and I’m getting out of my car walking to the beat and trying, through outdated rock musical soulfood by well-meaning white boys, to purge the thought that that Dick Cheney and those who share his perspective and any fragment of his power are all shooting us collectively in the face and how can you keep the birdshot out of your heart…

...when what should pass me on the sidewalk but a line of ROTC college students in full fatigues, carrying (fake?) rifles and marching, single-file, staunchly forward and out of time to my music.

I shook my head, disbelieving this could be happening right after John Lennon and during the climactic "Let the sunshine, Let the sunshine in, the suuuuuuuuunshine iiiiiiiiiiiiin" ending of the song...

But it did happen, and at least I had the protection of Ragni and Rado and thoughts of my pacifist and otherwise radical friends and family to sustain me: especially Sunfrog/Anu and his tireless activism and Kate Aulbach who saw the 1979 film version of Hair with me and we lived in the soundtrack for months, wishing we were hippies rather than stuck in the late 1970s—where we did have Rocky Horror but not a lot else—except things did get so much worse—and how could we have known?

Charles Wolfe: Rest in Peace and Rock the Beyond

2006-02-10T19:38:00.000-06:00

Charles Wolfe, a brilliant man and wonderful colleague and friend, has moved on. But he will live on in 15 books and many other writings on country and folk music, in compiled CDs, in documentaries, and in the minds and hearts of those of us lucky enough to have known and worked with him. Go see what you think: read A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Old Opry or The Legend of Leadbelly.

Hope to meet you again in a future life, Charles. Thanks for being there for me so many times when I needed someone to talk to in this one.

Weight Watchers Confessional

2006-02-08T08:36:00.000-06:00

Let’s talk (the cultural politics of) Weight Watchers, shall we?

Chad reviewed Consumer Reports’ study of diets and diet organizations, and found that Weight Watchers (WW) is the only diet/plan that has a proven track record of helping people actually lose weight and keep it off. No other diet or plan has as good a record, and even WW can only boast a 20-lb. loss for the average member.

Now, Chad is in good health and looks great, and I am not obese. Yet, we both felt we wanted to lose some weight (around 20-25 lbs. for me, about 15 for Chad) and have control over it. I have never lost weight…almost literally never. Maybe 5 lbs. then gain it back, that kind of thing. The few times I did shed those 5 lbs., it was due to illness or a miserable attempt to eat no sweets and fiercely fight hunger. Anything called a diet made me miserable just to hear about it. But also, I’d have guilt when I ate a candy bar or 4th slice of pizza, so dieting or not I wasn’t wildly comfy about food issues.

When you couple this with my feminism and a politics of anti-weightism (anti-fatism), frankly, you get a mental mess. We absolutely live in a weight-obsessed culture. We pretend to work against anorexia and bulimia, but we also cultivate a climate that not only encourages but champions these illnesses. The media saturates us with messages that thinness equals beauty equals love and romance and wealth and happiness for a woman. How many big fat female CEOs do you see on prime-time drama? For every (admittedly sexist) brief “Baby’s Got Back” message, there are a dozen competing direct and indirect messages encouraging diets, creams, and surgeries to remove your back, your front, and your sides. Except your breasts, of course, which should be increased and raised to point skyward.

So, I can’t ever be this unqualified champion of WW, even if it has helped me responsibly and relatively painlessly lose more than 10 lbs. to date while feeling healthier (yeay fiber and exercise). It’s a very logical plan, involving reduction of consumption of high-fat, high-calorie foods in favor of low-fat, high-fiber foods. You need to eat 5 fruits and veggies a day, 6 glasses of water, exercise as much as possible, plus keep to a certain number of “points” worth of food (based on combination of calories, fat, and fiber). So far so good. Logical, reasonable, and good for your health. (And you can even eat a donut every day, if you’re willing to “pay” for it out of your points.)

Now, you can follow this plan by reading up on it online and never joining WW, but Chad and I felt we needed motivation and responsibility to make sure we stay on it. Enter WW meetings, where you weigh in and then get a little talk about staying on track over the holidays or how to find exercise in unexpected places or how to cut fat in recipes. From anagrams to carrying around a little bell over the holidays (so when it jingles you remember not to eat), this is really kitschy stuff. Moreover, the talks often smack of something between corporate retreat and cult religion. Go team go! This comes with the price of membership (around $30) plus $11 a week, which must be paid each week (you can't come and go and skip without repaying the initial membership fee). Yet, even as I cringe at the worst of this very very capitalist program, I have lost the weight without anguish and the meetings are part of the success.

I know I’m probably going to find out worse any day, like the WW Founder is a neo-Nazi or donates all his money to the Republican party or has three anorexic, sexually-abused daughters. But right now, I live with a precarious balance of healthy cynicism and sincere pleasure in knowing my pants fit and that I’ll likely get a cleaner bill of health on my cholesterol level from the doctor. I’ll deal further with the politics and repercussions of my deflating belly skin (tummy tuck, anyone?) another day.

Happy Chinese New Year!

2006-01-29T11:05:00.000-06:00

I am not into astrology. Generally speaking, I'm a cynic. Most likely because I am a control freak and I don't like feeling fated. Also because I have deep issues (personal and political) with romanticism (though I do fall prey to it on a semi-regular basis -- but don't tell anyone!). I'm a combination of agnostic, athiest, and kinda-sorta pantheist (everything on earth as "divine," a.k.a. worthy of respect). Astrology falls into the romantic, fated category for me, and often seems a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and I have noted casually with friends that the more an individual believes in it, the more the descriptions ring true. Chad is an even bigger cynic than I am, for example, and we've never read a single astrological profile that fits him more than 50%. I'm a cynic with a hidden inner core of romantic mush, and well-written astrological profiles (not astrological advice in newspaper columns and magazines, which, a friend who worked for USA Today once told me, are written randomly by staff and often contain hidden jokes about other staff members) often fit me about 70%.

Anyhow, I do like this description of my animal, the Tiger:

"The Tiger is the restless, adventurous, and always courageous risk-taker of the Chinese zodiac. With a sense of "empowered entitlement," nobility and humanitarian causes appeal to the generous Tiger. These souls are tenderhearted, and affectionate with their friends and family, yet self-reliant and fiercely independent. This is the most unpredictable of the 12 signs, blessed with charm, nerve and grand ideas. Tigers flash brilliantly through life sometimes without caution for their own security. Fearless, enthusiastic, and optimistic, the passionate Tiger is an unconventional, yet most humanitarian soul. The noble Tiger needs a sexy, exciting partner who forever remains a challenge, and gather their legendary strength during the pre-dawn hours they rule, between 3:00am - 5:00am."

Now, I do NOT like the hours 3-5am. I can say I am sometimes, when under stress, awake and miserable during those hours, wishing I were asleep. But I don't have "legendary strength" then, as far as I know.

I am tenderhearted, enthusiastic, and independent of mind. I like to think of myself as charming, nervy, and full of grand ideas. And how marvelous to be described as having a sense of "empowered entitlement"! Makes me laugh out loud with pleasure.

Definitely, I need a sexy, exciting partner, and I love a good challenge.

Check out your Chinese Astrological sign here and let me know if yours rings true.

More Masculinity: The 40 Year Old Virgin

2006-01-28T13:24:00.000-06:00

Films about masculinity seem to be dominating my blog landscape as much as queerness lately. We finally rented The 40 Year Old Virgin (shouldn't there be a hyphen between "year" and "old"?) based on all the hype and friends telling me to see it and a longtime love of The Daily Show. The film definitely surprised me several times and it was, at moments, laugh-out-loud funny. Sadly, my favorite joke in the film was only visible in the deleted scenes section of the DVD. It's the ad lib scene talking about first experiences, where Paul Rudd’s character David says his first climax came so quickly it took a “negative” amount of time. I can only paraphrase, but he said something about knowing time actually moved backwards because when he was done, Lincoln had just been shot.

As far as overall portraits of masculinity, I was most drawn to the way in which the guys became friends. Incredibly implausible, even as you watch it happen, but so endearing. You start to see all the men’s insecurities and enjoy their ridiculously sexist means of trying to bolster each other’s egos and/or snap each other out of embarrassing behavior.

I also loved several of the film’s women, including the incomparable Jane Lynch (a delight in both A Mighty Wind and, especially, Best in Show -- the latter of which being one of my all-time favorite, most repeat-watchable films). Her “seduction” scene of Carell’s Andy was priceless in its inanity. Catherine Keener (Trish) was also stupendous, with her incredibly infectious laugh, stunning smile, and … I confess it was only a visit to IMDB that let me know she was the woman from Living in Oblivion, another film I really enjoyed (the “dwarf scene” is a must-see).

I didn’t like the character of Jay (Romany Malco), I must say. By the end (and in some deleted scenes), he reached the giddy, over-the-top masculine embarrassment factor of his fellow buffoons. But he really felt written by white boys to me, showing more homeboy player machismo than necessary (though we do learn much of it is false bravado…still, it felt like “this is what the Black guy should be like” than a more quirky misfit like Andy, Cal, or David.

Because boss Paula and girlfriend Trish were definitely quirky, I could enjoy a few moments of freedom from women getting worse treatment than men in the film, though the bookstore slut and the drunk chick made up for any equal treatment the film might have wanted to offer.

But sexism is not a major concern for me in the film. First, because both genders come across as neurotic yet well meaning, for the most part. Second, because racism and ageism so overshadow them.

Because the scene was improvised, Carell allegedly really did let his chest be waxed, and the waxer was not scared by his abusive language but laughing at him, I can try to keep a lid on my reaction to any scene with Asian women in massage parlor type spaces. But the film also had other Asian and Arab characters…

I can just imagine the scene where the whiteboy writers/directors/producers/actors all sat down together and decided some funny Indian and Arab guys at the store (Mooj, Haziz) would be hilarious, as would old people talking dirty ( Mooj, the elderly Black couple living upstairs from Andy). I can’t say Gerry Bednob wasn’t fabulous, delivering his grouchy, foul-mouthed old coot performance with delightful gusto -- and we’re not talking evil Arab terrorist characters at least. Moreover, his friendship with Jay was an unexpected twist to a possible antagonism between men of color. But in a film that is about breaking down the stereotype of the nerd, the sensitive guy, the flunky, and the player, why add wacky old farts quipping lines straight out of bad denture and candy bar commercials?

There’s also the Black drag queen, but I haven’t much to say about her. The scene was cropped into a momentary spectacle, though it had the predictable transphobic moment. That Jay may have had some relationship with her keeps it from being just an offensive throwaway.

Overall, I did enjoy the film and found it more creative than I had anticipated (and more creative than originally scripted, if the commentary track is true and the plan was to make the guys the typical nerd-baiters instead of eventual friends). From the male anxiety and unexpected bonding to the wise decision to cast Carell’s love interest as of appropriate age and type, I’ll try to retain fond memories and repress my recollection of the old woman remarking to her husband that Andy needed to get some action or whatever “witty” way she unconvincingly put it.

Hoodwinked and the Return of the Sissy

2006-01-22T19:27:00.000-06:00

[I hate that I have to give a spoiler warning -- can I just assume my readers (all 4 of them) will know my reviews will be spoil-rich?]

It seems that queerness is continuing to need center stage in my blog.

I really enjoyed Hoodwinked. The plot is thin but cleverly structured, Patrick Warburton’s voice is always a pleasure, and it didn’t feel like a Pixar ripoff (though the squirrel was Scrat-like -- see 20th Century Fox’s Ice Age). Ok, Granny was predictable and ageist even as the writers were no doubt patting themselves on the back for their presumed anti-ageism in making her look like a fat, fluff-headed old grandma who is actually “GGG” the X-treme sports enthusiast.

But you could have knocked me down with a feather (boa), however, as Boingo the sissy bunny (complete with lisp) hopped his way through the movie and emerged in the end as the predictable-in-his-apparent-harmlessness villain. (Andy Dick’s voice made me think of Big Gay Al of South Park fame.)

If you know Hollywood history, you know of the Sissy, that staple of light, early film fare, including multiple characters played by Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and the like. Whether he was the desexualized, ineffectual sidekick, the skittish, squeamish waiter, or the swishy, fussy clothing designer (or just a Cowardly Lion), the Sissy was a flat, stock character at/with whom we were meant to laugh. We easily read him as gay despite his lack of any sign of adult sexual drive because common “wisdom” held/holds that effeminate men are gay. Dandified and harmless, we could laugh safely at but not hate him. And while he might have made gay viewers feel less alone, it was not a positive reflection this Hollywood mirror offers.

Later, the Sissy would become evil, such as Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and, perhaps, The Lion King’s Scar, showing a change from early film tolerance (if you want to call it that) to a more virulent form of homophobia. Of course, representations don’t change in linear fashion. There are cycles and trends, exceptions and breakthroughs. From Don Knotts and Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde to Nathan Lane and Mr. Garrison and the Queer Eye guys, Hollywood has produced harmless Sissy men from the silent films to present-day television. The Sissy has even been given an empowered makeover, thanks to Harvey Fierstein and his Sissy Duckling (book and made-for-TV film). (And, while we're at it, I like Tomie DePaola's book Oliver Button is a Sissy, too.)

So that’s why it really freaked me out to see Boingo in Hoodwinked: why is the Sissy-cum-villain” back? Because Andy Dick’s fag voice is hip? Because it’s so incredibly clever that the seemingly feeble Sissy bunny is the criminal mastermind? Because it’s so incredibly clever that the seemingly feeble Sissy bunny is the criminal but no mastermind and is easily brought down, in need of Schwarzeneggerian muscled back-up, and even self-loathing enough to ridicule one of his henchmen, Keith, for his not-masculine-enough name?

Just what are we meant to be laughing at, and why? I had hoped to agree with the "A" Owen Glieberman gave the film in Entertainment Weekly -- and, dammit, I did enjoy the film. Moreover, I had hoped to have an afternoon off of blogging about homophobia. Is nowhere safe?

Breaking Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-18T08:59:00.000-06:00

(spoiler warning)

I get this gut ache – deep and low – every time I hear the quick rising then slow descending of notes in the main motif of the theme song from Brokeback Mountain. That I saw the film during my period and while going through a complex re-negotiation of an important friendship is likely part of the ache. Driving to work on an early, rainy Tuesday morning and listening to NPR as they discuss the Golden Globes, the theme from this intense film for an intense era playing in the background, my stomach tightens; I feel like crying.

What is not about a monthly biochemical dance or anguish over interpersonal miscommunication is the melodramatic core of Brokeback Mountain. I don’t mean the word “melodrama” to be an insult here, if we define the term as a (film) genre featuring exaggerated emotions and intense interpersonal conflicts (much like my life the day I saw it). When I told those with whom I saw the film that I had concerns about the implications of Jack Twist having to die to move the narrative to its conclusion, one said that, as a writer, she understood a need to heighten the drama. The other said that the film called it like it is: gay men are brutally murdered for being gay; people do waste their lives away because of social and psychological constraints and norms. I noted the obvious Matthew Shepard reference (no missing the Wyoming setting) that actively linked fictional text about homophobia and hate violence to its lived counterpart.

I am deeply moved by the tortured sadness of the film, the bleakness of lives that might have been filled with that most blissful of havens in a difficult world: intimacy, passion, love. That misguided torturer CBN is absolutely correct that Brokeback Mountain is “the biggest, boldest attempt yet by Hollywood to gain sympathy, if not outright support, for those practicing the homosexual lifestyle.” Screw their rhetorical choice of the words “practicing” and “lifestyle,” but we might not disagree that, as David Kupelian (author of the charmingly subtitled The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom), cited in CBN’s “review” of Brokeback Mountain, argues, “[T]he entire purpose of the movie is to make homosexuality seem like something good and appealing, and to make people who are opposed to homosexuality bigots and homophobes.” To the degree this is so, bless the magnificent hearts of every single person involved in the film and let me never say a word against it. Of course, I will share my concerns about the film presently, but let me pause to say that Mr. Kupelian, darling of diverse reactionary mean mouths (from Dr. Laura to Fox News’s Michelle Malkin), shortchanges the film when he simply dismisses it as “very, very propagandistic.” There’s more here, heart-wrenching and problematic, gorgeous and garish, to consider.

What most concerns me about the death of Jack is what concerns me with the predictable depiction of violence as part of the Ennis-Jack relationship (especially their entrance into sexual intimacy) not to mention the theme of self-loathing. I thought mainstream America was further along. From a liberal perspective, certainly, this film is groundbreaking. It took me some time to reflect on the fact that I have seen a number of films that feature gay intimacy and love at their center (e.g. Torch Song Trilogy, Frears/Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, or Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, to take a few random examples) or periphery (De Lovely and Kinsey, in recent memory). But none of these films is a major Hollywood studio blockbuster. One that is, by contrast, is Demme’s Philadelphia, which tidily kills off our protagonist, and a tragic dying guy is so much easier to take than a living, thriving queer. And this is central to my mixed feelings about Brokeback Mountain as a cultural document at the beginning of the second half of the first decade of the new century, as a state of the art and politics as my son begins his second semester of first grade and stops calling himself a “birl” (part girl/part boy – so he can play with “all the toys”) and buys two sets of Valentine’s because girls will want “Bratz” while boys will want “Star Wars” or “Power Rangers”: I thought we were further along.

If, as The Celluloid Closet and other histories of LBG representation argue, U.S. cinema went from offering us desexualized “sissies” to menacing/evil fag and dyke stereotypes to sympathetic AIDS victims but not beyond, why aren’t we ready now for LGBT narratives that aren’t about anguish and misery? Why is a pre-Stonewall-era narrative what we most need? Why are we stuck at demystifying the cowboy movie instead of telling of present-day, everyday struggles and triumphs?

This said, I don’t want to be mistaken for arguing that what the film does show us is not important. The film is a glorious antidote to my depression over all the anti-gay marriage crap that clutters my atmosphere and the minds of so many of my students. The wide-open vistas of 1960s Wyoming are, however illusory, a delicious escape from the strangling atmosphere of pollution, corporate greed, and warmongering we live with in America today. It’s just that…dammit…I want to be living in a culture that doesn’t need to rewire homophobia through anguish, torture, and death. I don't want a conflict-free, giddy queer romp (though that's nice too), but I want the characters to live, to keep struggling and working things through despite everything against their happiness. I want this world to be a beyond-Brokeback Mountain world, though I know we’re not.

So, as I struggle with tears at the levels of narrative (why is there nowhere for these two men together? so much self-loathing is so hard to watch), setting (so much space and beauty around their tortured selves), image (tight-lipped Ennis in his wretched trailer, fingering Jack’s shirt), and melancholy theme music, let me turn my critical eye to the film itself and let rhetorical acumen ease the impact of narrative subjection.

The eroticized gaze was fascinating in the movie, for example. Very obvious shots juxtaposing beautiful landscape with glorious blue skies and Jake Gyllenhaal’s glorious blue eyes had me thinking about the sexual objectification/adoration of (white, young, handsome) men in film. If this film is about homosexuality and homophobia, it’s also about the beauty of men. And the linking of male beauty with nature is not something I’ve seen explored much in film. It’s a compelling reversal of links often drawn between women and nature (vs. men and culture). I did find the actual cinematography to be hit-you-over-the-head obvious in this pairing, but I confess I’m also concerned with the possibility of reading the men = nature equation as implicitly saying women = cultural constraint. A reversal, in other words, does not get us past the opposition itself.

Women in the film are kept entirely from nature, and this jives with the way the men’s lies about going fishing resonate in the text. Fishing as a “men’s sport” (not to mention wrangling, rodeo, and other physical and outdoor labor in the film), the idea that the wide outdoors are, generally, for men leave women to bear the burden of being stuck indoors and as representatives of the constraints of normative, life-strangling culture (as well as being baby machines, where children themselves are also stifling burdens men need to be free of). I know Lureen is at first a rodeo rider -- far better than Jack -- but this quickly desolves in the film to her being primarily a seductress (like Ennis's last girlfriend) then attached at the hip to her adding machine.

On a larger level, I did wonder why women could not be part of the liberatory aspects of the film, like male friendships/intimacy and nature. I’m not saying nature wasn’t compromised (the domestic sheep, Randy Quaid’s horrible boss character, the murdered/mutilated body in the field that Ennis was forced to view as a child) nor that we did not see the pain of the female characters, especially Jack’s mother. But I kept thinking that the narrative could have done more to signal something more “alive” about the women, more struggle than pathos (Alma), more self-awareness than self-absorption (Lureen). Instead, did the film fall into the gay = anti-women/children trap?

This brought me to ponder why a story by a woman writer, E. Annie Proulx, was chosen for Hollywood’s breakout gay movie. I have not read the story yet but plan to in the near future. My cynical eye says this may be a case of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author building a hip text from melodramatic and clichéd bits of cultural repression, angst, and kitsch. I may wrong her, and the story, and the film, with this reductive perspective. But I can’t help but thinking about the episode of South Park when Sundance comes to town and Eric Cartman laments that all the films are about “gay cowboys eating pudding.” The appeal of such a story (with elk meat instead of pudding) is just too tempting to pass up for Hollywood.

But I can’t end there. I have to end optimistically. For one, the film has stuck with me and made me think—about film imagery, about gender representation, and about our culture and what we are or are not ready for. I'm still wallowing in the pathos, though I'd rather not be. In the end, I confess I am glad for any film that pisses off the wrongful religious right and happy we’re ready for Brokeback Mountain, however fatalistic and flawed it may necessarily be.

Contemplating Cuteness

2006-01-14T09:33:00.000-06:00

I’ve long known the cuteness factor accounts for much in this life. Of our three cats, the cutest one (heck, his name is T.C., which actually stands for “Totally Cute”) is also the one most likely to claw up the furniture—and you still want to hug and hold him. My husband Chad has told me about various psychological studies of what determines attractiveness in humans (such as symmetry) and how a person can identify one face as handsome and another as dangerous depending on the sharpness of the features. I also remember an article in a college composition reader that talked about the evolution of Mickey Mouse to maximum cuteness by enlarging his ears and eyes, flattening his face, and other forms of infantilization.

Then, recently, an internet pal (a guy I usually talk to about politics but who has a definite pet fetish) recommended I go visit Cute Overload, the blog that “scour[s] the Web for only the finest in Cute Imagery™. Imagery that is Worth Your Internet Browsing Time. We offer an overwhelming amount of cuteness to fill your daily visual allowance. Drink it in!” The internet pal asked me if I’d visited, excited to know if I’d seen “the Chihuahua hugging the kitten” and other works of art. (He is also excited about kittenwar.com, a site where you can vote on your favorite kittens.)

I swallowed about 3 pictures worth (a kitten in a cup, a german shepherd in a donut salesman costume, and a snail slowly stretching across the slats in a picnic table) and I felt positively bloated with cuteness. I guess that about meets my “daily visual allowance,” which I didn’t even know I had. (Actually, the snail pics were pretty cool; they’re very stretchy little creatures).

My son, by contrast, wanted to go through all recent posts, then spend a while at the kitten and dog pages. Most pictures (wet cat in rain, close-up of puppy nose, wee mousie in hand, baby seal in snow) were met by gushed “Awwwwwwwwwwwww’s” and sweet “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh’s” from my son. Meanwhile, I found myself distinguishing between the “truly cute” and the “supposed to be cute but isn’t making it.”

A few days after our little cuteness binge, Chad told me about a New York Times article on The Cute Factor. It seems “Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.” These “cute cues” “indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.”

This is not news to me. Having had a baby and enjoyed the bliss that is 19 hours of labor, a parineal tear, bruised nipples, post-partum depression, insomnia, and many other joys of early motherhood, I know damn well we’re wired to nurture “cuteness.” If we weren’t, the human race would be extinct.

Furthermore, though we consider ourselves a sophisticated species, we ain't all that. Says the NYT article, “The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof.”

The article goes on to discuss the distinction between cuteness and beauty and to remark upon Floridians’ obsession with manatees (though it does not assert that cuteness may explain the popularity of Jeb Bush).
What really interested me (enhancing my contemplation of my son’s goggling over “teeny froggie on fingertip”), however, is this: “New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

Cute Overload, Animal Planet, pet stores, Look Who’s Talking: all plots to get us so hopped up on cuteness we won’t notice what’s really going on in the world.

Or wait, no: cuteness research is part of the Just Say No to Drugs crap my son is getting in elementary school. “Cuteness Not Crack” will make a great commercial. And the anti-sex crusaders can join in too: “Cuteness Ever, Coitus Never.”

But wait (again). Best idea yet: the Democrats can take back the Whitehouse by running someone who looks like a puppy.

That won’t work, argues Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Apparently, “The rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived.” Says Dr. Dutton in the same NYT article, “Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let's not worry about complexities, just love me. That's where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow.”

Well, I’d argue you can be entirely not-cute and still want people to ignore meaning and complexity and swallow the evil b.s. whole…
“Awww, Mommy, look at the manatee—Hey, how come he isn’t cute like the others?”

Queer or Bisexual?

2006-01-13T09:25:00.000-06:00

Now that I’m all queered up from writing about Fight Club, I want to explore the uses of and distinctions between “queer” and “bisexual” a bit. I have no problem saying Fight Club is more (repressed) gay (narrator and/with Tyler) or queer (Bob, narrator’s relationship with Bob) than bisexual, even though bisexual is not inaccurate in terms of the desires (gay/queer) and actions (straight-ish) shown in the film. What makes me want to use one term over another?

Like Alexander Doty, whose work I thoroughly enjoy, I like the term “queer” to “describe non-straight things that are not clearly marked as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered” (Doty, “Introduction” to Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, p.7). As the narrator of Fight Club – to stay with this example a little longer since it’s handy – dates the significant change in his life (his psychotic split, which queers him, arguably) to being pressed into Bob’s maternal male breasts (though he immediately decides to re-date and change his flashback, addressing well his anxiety and need to repress and re-repress his “non-straight” attractions), I see queerness as taking up central space in the narrative. Bob is neither straight, gay, bi, or trans. He’s a castrated male (not his choice) with cock and hormone-induced breasts, macho past, anxiety about the change to queerness, and tendency to tears. (Casting Meat Loaf adds to the queerness, of course.) The more the narrator is drawn to Bob – culminating in his breakdown over Bob’s dead body in his paper house/compound – the more he breaks from easy categorization. To me, the easier the categorization, the less queer.

So perhaps that’s where I’m at presently: queer is harder to categorize than bisexuality. This does not mean bisexuality is simple. Doty, in an analysis of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as the uber-bisexual musical, cites critic Chris Cagle as distinguishing between “straight-identified bisexuals” and “queer-identified bisexuals.” Straight-identifiers are those who maintain primary relationships with partners of the opposite sex and enjoy shorter-term or “on the side” relationships with same-sex partners. These bisexuals, argues Cagle, can then “enjoy the protection of straight privilege” (Doty, Flaming Classics, p.149). This distinction may be too binary for some, and it does not help me define queerness. Why “queer-identified” bisexual rather than “lesbian/gay-identified” bisexual?

Is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight about how you partner up and queer how you may choose to identify beyond partners/relationships?

To take another tack, what is the opposite of queer? At the moment, I’d argue there is no opposite, and that this is the attraction of queerness.

I’ve recently begun working on a manuscript that explores relationship triangles in three romantic comedies directed by out-gay Hollywood studio director George Cukor. In all three films, Katharine Hepburn is at the center, playing a character who breaks from traditional femininity. Cary Grant is at her side, part of the triangle. The third member is a more orientationally ambiguous male that brings queerness into the romance (or makes the queerness more overt). In Sylvia Scarlett, it’s Brian Aherne’s Michael Fane, an artist and bohemian who comes to love Hepburn’s character best when she’s dressed as a boy. In Holiday, it’s Hepburn’s brother, the perhaps-gay alcoholic brother who is forced to tow the family line as the only son of a wealthy, tyrannical father. In The Philadelphia Story it’s Jimmy Stewart’s marriage-resistant Macaulay Conner, the reporter who falls for Hepburn’s Tracy Lord only because, I’d argue, she’s beloved of Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven – the real figure of mystery and intrigue for Conner.

(I cannot tell you why Hepburn looks like a curly-headed lesbian priest in this picture. But isn't his cravat delightful?)

Regardless of whether you find my angle compelling here or not, what I’m puzzling over at the moment is whether I’m writing about bisexuality or queerness. I’d argue everything in Sylvia Scarlett points to queerness, including Aherne’s immortal line, “There’s something queer when I look at you” as he gazes at Hepburn in drag as the youth Sylvester Scarlett. Yet Doty, in a footnote in his Gentlemen Prefer Blondes chapter, calls Fane "bisexual." As I wrestle with why Fane is bisexual not queer or bisexual and queer or queer not bisexual, I find myself concocting definitions by the score. Fane is clearly attracted to women, never actively attracted to men other than Sylvia/Sylvester, yet ends the film happiest when with Sylvia fully disguised as Sylvester (ostensibly in disguise as part of their effort to find Fane’s ex-girlfriend who has run off with Grant’s con artist Jimmy Monkley). Now, that complex kind of attraction could be described as bisexual, though Fane is in such a case closeted/repressed about his own homosexual desires. But if it’s a woman in drag he’s most drawn to, then to me that’s more queer. More easily labeled bisexual is probably Grant’s Monkley, who, when thinking Hepburn’s character is definitely male, suggests he’d make a “proper little hot water bottle” to sleep beside when they’re on the road.

To be sure, my angle on these three films is in seeking out queerness, romantic triangles that break with conventional sexualities, even straight/bi/gay distinctions. So I’m looking at/for queerness rather than bi or gay “subtext” in the films. I think.

When, mid-footnote, Doty uses the phrase “gender queerness and bisexuality” as at the heart of Sylvia Scarlett’s romantic conclusion (p.153), I’m pondering again. Here queerness is about gender and bisexuality is about orientation. I guess this works, but it’s still another binary that doesn’t fully get to Fane falling in love not with a young man or even a woman in drag: he’s falling for genderfuck, I think. But that’s yet another term to ponder....

Work Cited

Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. NY: Routledge, 2000.

A Long, Hard Review of Fight Club

2006-01-07T12:52:00.000-06:00

Ok, so it took me six years to get up the gumption to put myself through the film Fight Club. I knew it would mess with my adrenalin and energy for the day, and it definitely did. It’s a long film (even longer on DVD), and it definitely needed an editor to trim some of the excess. But that’s about the only negative thing I have to say about it.

Here's what I most loved about it:

(1) Critique of corporate capitalism. The film is all about how it crushes the soul and drives white, middle-class men insane. Oddly, it actually brought The Incredibles to mind for me, with its much-lauded critique of the life of (white, middle-class) men in cubicles. But where The Incredibles argued that there’s a superhero waiting to burst forth from that petty insurance job, Fight Club argues there’s a vulnerable, insecure man, suppressing his desire to do the right thing, wrestling with the contradiction that what is supporting his existence (and encouraging him to buy in at a deeper and deeper level – Ikea!) is what is psychically numbing him and driving him mad.

(2) Masculinity. I have seen few recent films that do white, middle-class heterosexual masculinity this well. From the inability to express emotion without absurdly potent encouragement (testicular cancer group, anyone?) to the need to beat each other up to process said emotions, it's right there. I will also give the film credit for having our increasingly psychotic protagonist encourage men to take it out on each other rather than their wives/girlfriends, but that leads me to several other points…

(3) Freud! This film was such a great exemplification of Freud’s “Latency Period,” where boys hang with boys in “No Girls Allowed’ clubs (perfect that our hero called it “Fight Club,” which was so geeky and pre-teen, even if he later “grew up” to form his “army”) and are far less concerned with sex than camaraderie. (That the protagonist wanted to beat up William Shatner was so perfect: the original Star Trek series can be read beautifully as a Freudian latency narrative—see Ilsa Bick’s chapter in Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek (a collection I co-edited in 1996).) It is latency that explains why there is no killing in the film (by the narrator or his "army"). This was a truly surprising element of the film and inexplicable to me without this helpful Freudian framework.

This is also where Marla (Helena Bonham Carter’s character) becomes necessary: she is woman and disrupts the illusion of idyllic boyhood (a la Peter Pan). She forces him to see the pleasures of adult malehood that war with the narrator bond with his “imaginary friend” Tyler Durden and their boyish games. (And the narrator does say something about being a 30-year-old boy or the like, I believe.)

Furthermore, Tyler Durden is phallus personified, and there are all the guns (especially in the narrator’s mouth) as well as the constant castration issues (no coincidence that the threat to the city official is to cut off his balls, nor that if the narrator/Tyler tries to back out of his plan that his army has been commanded to castrate him). Which leads me to…

(4) The Gaze. Fight Club is amazing as it engages with Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze” in film. Using Freud, Mulvey argues that mainstream films are driven by a libidinal/political economy of constant castration anxiety. Basically, we see the film’s through the male director and male protagonists’ eyes, and these eyes are full of fear of castration (seeing woman-as-difference, he sees that she hasn’t got a dick/balls and realizes his could be taken!). Though castration anxiety can’t be processed consciously, unconsciously it can be resolved, says Freud, through either scopophilic pleasure (turning the threatening object, woman, into a pleasurable object in his control) or a sadistic kind of voyeurism (seeing the woman be controlled or punished, via marriage or murder, for example). And Mulvey argues this drives Hollywood film’s images of women. (To read the article in its entirety, see Mulvey). For Fight Club, the castration stuff couldn’t be any more direct. Marla, then, comes to represent the threat. She is desired object, but the narrator has trouble getting her to fit the fully objectified mold he needs to control the anxiety she brings. She appears in the guise of film noir femme fatale early in the narrative, a figure Mulvey discusses as invoking this threat through her combination of hyperfeminine appearance yet powerful sexuality (and often wielding the phallus/gun). Now, Marla is herself rather castrated, if you will, a pretty poor femme fatale. But she is strong enough to lure and threaten the narrator, who desires her yet cannot manage her. She sees through his masculine guise (showing up at all the support groups he attends) and offers cultural critique (e.g. of bridesmaid’s dresses) and has sex in ways that leave him both part of the experience (via the Tyler persona) and an alienated, impotent voyeur (as he disassociates from his Tyler persona but cannot fully escape it—staying in a nearby room, according to his delusion). In the end, he is either yelling at her to leave or instructing his army to destroy her (not sure if this means killing her or what…hard to tell given the intentionally confusing nature of the representation of his psychosis). Reading through Mulvey, what we have is a situation in which the narrator can neither make of Marla a controllable sex object or adequately punish her. At the film’s conclusion, it seems he will marry her (or at least this may be his delusion as he is dying), and this is, says Freud, one viable solution to castration anxiety.

What is even more interesting re the gaze than how the film plays it out is how it turns it around. Instead of having a narrator constantly gazing at his femme fatale or sex object (a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for one), Fight Club has him gaze at his hypermasculine alter ego, Tyler Durden. Both the protagonist and the camera linger over Brad Pitt and his buff bod—as well as over the many other men who must strip to the waist when they fight and the pumped up army dudes. This goes even further as the film fetishizes blood, scrapes, and bruises (and I’ll get to kinkiness presently), but first…

(4) Queerness. Where to begin? Certainly, there is the ease of reading the film’s central fight metaphor as a homophobic men’s method of displaying/repressing homosexual desire. I’m certainly not the first to read punching as intercourse or spurting blood as ejaculation, and those guys certainly did hug a lot after each bout (not to mention sharing a cigarette and a beer). Then there’s the love relationship between the narrator and Tyler (which turns out to be his alter ego, but as we watch the film for the first time, we don’t know/see that). From Brad Pitt’s arguably gay stylings throughout the film (I dare you to look through the International Male catalog and tell me that’s not where Tyler's clothes came from) to the narrator’s voiceover saying he and his imaginary pal lived like “Ozzie and Harriet” and fear of Marla getting between them, we’ve definitely got some queerness going on. (Here, Marla is the third member of a romantic triangle who is necessary to prevent the consummation of the male-male love axis).

Now, that it is Bob (fabulously played by Meat Loaf) who causes the beginning of the breakdown for the narrator of his dual selves also has good queer overtones. The hypermasculine space of his “paper house” army bunker reinforces his delusions. Nor can Marla, that representative of femininity, do more than just spur it on (see above). But Bob—as he blends masculine and feminine, male and female, in body, voice, and personality—does exemplify that there is more to the psyche than the gendered polar opposites which (in combination with oppressiveness of corporate capitalism for Mr. Average) cause his psychotic break. So when Bob dies, arguably, so does the impenetrability (to use a Freudian term) of his delusion. He no longer has a figure through which to externalize his anxieties. Queerness must be acknowledged not just as a part of Bob, but of himself. (Ok, I’m out on a limb here and trying this out as I write it, but it’s working for me.)

Finally, S/M in the film. The narrator is obviously a masochist, and though it’s not a new image (people into S/M are predominantly psychos in films), Fight Club does seem to me to suggest something more: rigid masculine norms lead to kinky fetishes. If (middle-class) men can’t display emotion (or engage in sex with each other), they can beat each other up. It’s acceptable male display, and you can always pretend it wasn’t sexually arousing (as long as you can keep your erection down). As Steve Neale argues in “Masculinity as Spectacle” (Screen 24.6, 1983, pp. 2-16), “‘male’ genres and films constantly involve sado-masochistic themes, scenes, and phantasies,” and these are “founded upon a repressed homosexual voyeurism.” Neale notes that “in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed.” In this light, what’s great about Fight Club is that it both illustrates the validity of this argument and shows the consequences (psychosis) for those who do not repress. Gayness and/or queerness aside, the film does more than most in reflecting kinkiness in the blending of pain-pleasure and the enjoyment of showing off of “battle scars.” Indeed, like most who share the BDSM credo of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual,” the Fight Club men in their secret society are even allowed to use safewords (the word “Red” in the BDSM community becomes “Stop” in the film) and, as in BDSM circles where people use pseudonyms (like Tyler Durden) and do not “out” others, the first rule of Fight Club is “You Do Not Talk About Fight Club.” Unlike BDSM, however, male fighting is more marginalized than socially ostracized (as in the scene where the Fight Club members are instructed to pick a fight and have trouble doing so), and so the men do not fear showing off their black eyes and stitches, while those into BDSM, especially women, are unlikely to do the same. (No one accused the narrator of being beat up by his girlfriend, for example.)

All in all, few movies I’ve seen have encouraged me to process (and blog-purge) quite so fully or satisfyingly. I found the film compelling on many levels and regret only that its cultural critique did not seem to sink very deeply into the American consciousness. For one, corporate culture is very good at co-opting critique. For another, most of the men about whom the film speaks most loudly are too busy repressing to get it. Session of Fight Club for Xbox, anyone?

- - - - -

My thanks to Chad for processing the film for hours with me as well as for his awesome insights about Freudianism, cultural co-optation, and many other points. Thanks also to Jonathan Beller’s Fight Club review. While I disagree with some of his arguments and he gets some details wrong, it was an inspiring critique.

Witty Definitions

2006-01-07T11:01:00.000-06:00

I regret that I cannot give credit to whoever came up with these entertaining definitions, but they're just the thing for a literary nerd (not geek, not dork) like me. Enjoy.

Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having aflat stomach. [too true]

Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk. [funny if cliched]

Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp. [bizarrely clever]

Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam. [not quite funny but kinda cute in a little puppy with big eyes kinda way]

Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumedby a proctologist immediately before he examines you. [nice]

Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxershorts. [oh, is that what it's called]

...and my favorite of the day:

Frisbeetarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die,your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there. [I think I've found my new faith!]

Got any more you particularly like? (I have read more but these are my momentary faves.)

As If I Needed Another Reason to Loathe Wal-Mart

2006-01-06T07:16:00.000-06:00

One blog, however big, can't hold a complete list of all the horrors of how Wal-Mart mistreats employees, encourages sweatshop labor, and lulls greedy customers into accepting its choices of what deserves to be sold or not sold and how. So just Google "Wal-Mart" and "sweatshop labor" or "ADA violations" or "lawsuits" or "health insurance" or "American made" or whatever other qualifier you like and you'll find plenty to occupy and depress you.

Despite the fact that nothing about Wal-Mart shocks me anymore (not even that I have, in recent months, occasionally shopped there for vegetarian soymeat products or that J.C. Penney's has an even worse record for the use of sweatshop labor), I must confess I was still surprised when I learned that the Wal-Mart website sold Planet of the Apes TV series DVDs and featured recommendations for "Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.").

Thanks to blogger Blackfeminism.org who credits Crooks and Liars who credits Firedoglake for sharing this story and Wal-Mart's response. For your entertainment, here is an excerpt from the Wal-Mart "oh shit, we fucked up again" letter of apology:

"We are heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to correct the problem. The offensive combinations that have been identified will be removed from the site by 5:30 CT today. However, with thousands of movie items available, there is an almost endless number of possible combinations. Because of that, we will be shutting down our entire movie cross-selling system until the problem is resolved.

Walmart.com’s item mapping process does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles. [...]

We were horrified to discover that some hurtful and offensive combinations are being mapped together.

To further illustrate the bizarre nature of this technical issue, the site is also mapping movies such as Home Alone and Power Puff Girls to African American literature."

How touching that the Wal-Mart "we" (in this case almost certainly some woman making minimum wage and without health insurance) is using such powerful adjectives! It warms the soul. From "heartsick" to "horrified," how can we be so cold as to think the warm, family-like corporation that is Wal-Mart would somehow have input descriptors into their system for mapping that would link a show about sentient apes with African Americans?

Even if its true that searching for the DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also produced recommendations for the MLK and Jack Johnson films, as affirmed by Wal-Mart PR folk, I have to agree with Firedoglake that Wal-Mart's "'mapping' program sure does have a low-rent cracker sense of humor."

Of course, we can have a lovely talk about why the gorillas in PotA were played by African Americans while the more powerful and rational orangutans and chimpanzees were played by white actors. We can talk about the films' and tv series' use of extrapolation or metaphor as science fictional devices, where white human characters stand for African Americans while the apes represent white slavemasters, colonizers, or other oppressive whathaveyous. But it does not surprise me that racism is part of the Wal-Mart infrastructure. Hell, it is threaded into every institution in our nation; it's just that Wal-Mart (like several other gargantuan corporations who make a few white men rich at the expense of everyone else) does it bigger and better than most.

(Let me conclude with a delightful related anecdote: Though I never got a nice emotional letter of apology--or any other response for that matter--I did once write to The Music Stand and ask them to remove the musical ape from the toys they sold in their catalog based on its racist connotations, and...only a few short years later... it was gone. Imagine that.)

Am I Janeane Garofalo?

2006-01-02T11:23:00.000-06:00

Until Janeane Garofolo made it big, no one ever told me I reminded them of anyone, famous or otherwise. I was just me, in all my outspoken, opinionated, gorgeous glory. But now I'm "Hey, you remind me of Janeane Garofolo" in all my outspoken, opinionated, gorgeous glory.

Certainly, she's not a bad person to be compared to. We look somewhat alike (dark hair, full lips, not thin). We're both loud. She's close to my age -- 2 yrs. and 9 months younger (actually only two days younger than my brother Reid), so in reality people should be telling Janeane that she reminds them of me.

We generally share political perspectives (why don't I have my own show on Air America?). Those who know me know I certainly could have said either of the following:

"Iraq is a manufactured conflict for the sake of geopolitical dominance in the area."

"I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."

Given all of this, how can you tell us apart?

1. Salaries: she wins.
2. Fame: she wins.
3. Height: I win.
4. Bust size: I win.
5. Overall hotness: Well, I'm a bigger babe, but she can get you into the best clubs and pay for your lobster. You choose.

Being One-Upped by the Praying Type

2006-01-01T11:11:00.000-06:00

I’m really sick of not having something fabulous to say when someone emails about a sick relative, a personal loss, or other intensely stressful life challenge. So many people simply pick a quip from their religious bag of tricks:

“I will be praying for you.”
“God/Goddess will provide.”
“I am sending healing energy.”

What if you’re agnostic at best and don’t have a pile of pithy sayings at hand? What if you don’t pray, don’t believe in God/s or Goddess/es, and don’t channel “energy”?

“You have my sympathies” or “I wish you well” sounds too much like “Good luck and good riddance.” And “You are in my thoughts” is a pale imitator of “You are in my prayers.”

Please, dear friends, help me with this crisis of verbiage and perspective. Send recommendations. (Do not, by contrast, send energy or pray for me.)

My Visit to Narnia

2006-01-01T10:29:00.000-06:00

I expected the following two things when I went to see Narnia:

(1) Heavy-handed Christianity would slap me in the face.
(2) Special effects would wow me.

What I got was neither of those. But before I discuss my response to religion and f/x, I’ll respond to other aspects. First, the film, overall, was just...ok. The plot was a bit thin, the world of Narnia underexplored and underexplained. But I found that true of the book, too (which I never finished because I found it boring). It really is a book for kids not adults, and the movie made that plain. That is interesting to me, come to think of it, because I did enjoy all the Harry Potter books (though I do not find them particularly original; still at least they have some character development, largely because they are low fantasy not high--see below).

Now, the acting was good. I liked all the kids, despite their smarmy whitebreadiness. Tilda Swinton was perfect for the White Witch. I’ve loved her since Orlando, which was a far better fantasy spectacle. Her costumes were a bit on the football player plasterboard side, but still she was a delight to watch. Liam Neeson’s voice as Aslan was deliciously warm and rich; you could fall right into it.

The special effects, meanwhile, really disappointed. I know we’ve reached a positive obsession with perfect use of CGI and blue screen and forced perspective and such since Lord of the Rings, but, dammit, the budget on this film was plenty enough for better than the many obvious bits of mediocrity I witnessed.

Still, that’s a petty critique, and certainly my son didn’t notice any of that. Nor did he pick up a wallop of Christian dogmatism, as far as I can tell. Certainly, Aslan is a Christ figure, but there is, in my opinion, plenty of paganism to go around in the film. The whole explanation of Aslan’s resurrection makes quite plain that it isn’t his power (or the Judeo-Christian God's) that did it but the nature of the “deep magic” about which the White Witch, being but an overambitious woman, failed to read the small print. ("Deep Magic" was nicely ambiguous in terms of its spiritial/religious significance. Is it Christian? Is it Pagan? You be the judge. In this, it reminded me of the "Force" of the Star Wars movies--and I'm sure Lucas, like Rowling, found ample source inspiration in both Lewis and Tolkien.)

Sexism was ringing merrily in the film, as might be expected. Adult women are evil and female children can go on adventures but it is boys who shall lead and take care of business. I was particularly disappointed that Susan only got to shoot Ginarrbrik, who was more annoying than menacing, and was labeled queen of Gentleness. Not that women wielding weapons is the pinnacle of existence, but in this film there's not much else to do, apart from galavanting through the countryside on sentient horses. (And I did find the rule about what could be sentient and what could not rather difficult to assertain...reminded me of the Goofy/Pluto connundrum.)

Which brings me to race. The whole concept/genre of High Fantasy, with the forces of Good pitted against and winning out over Evil, seems always to rely upon colonial fantasies of civilized vs. savage that bring race to mind. Now Narnia does reverse the binary by having the White Witch be white/light and not black/dark (it’s usually light/good vs. dark/evil in these type of texts, again see Lucas’s “Force” for a good example), but that’s just a simplistic reversal rather than any real complication of the paradigm.

In the end, I did find the film tolerable as an afternoon’s diversion, but I can’t say it was particularly compelling or that it approached the excellence in filmmaking that is the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Heck, those films deflected my objections to sexism and racism by just being such glorious spectacles. Narnia, by contrast left me with a shrug. I honestly found the most exciting moment to be the preview for Pirates of the Caribbean 2! Yo ho! Ahoy there, Mr. Depp!

Dear Santa,

2005-12-21T09:32:00.000-06:00

I'm finding it difficult to decide what I want for Christmas this year.

So many things, and one doesn't want to be greedy and end up with coal.

Requires a lot of careful thought.

So much unrest in the world, so many things more important than my selfish wishes.

With that in mind, I have gotten my list down to just TWO choices. I would be equally happy with either. Please pick for me:

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

HAPPY SOLSTICE...and one more thing:

2005-12-21T07:50:00.000-06:00

HAPPY HALF-BIRTHDAY

TO MY PERFECT CHILD LANE!

(aka Leafboy)

All Hail the Semicolon!

2005-12-20T21:09:00.000-06:00

Ok, I was bored and tired of playing Text Twist on yahoogames. So I took the "Which Punctuation Mark Are You?" quiz. I found the idea compelling. And I'm fascinated that I am the most obscure and most often misunderstood of punctuation marks! How delightful!

Semicolon

You scored 30% Sociability and 76% Sophistication!

Congratulations! You are the semicolon! You are the highest expression of punctuation; no one has more of a right to be proud. In the hands of a master, you will purr, sneering at commas, dismissing periods as beneath your contempt. You separate and connect at the same time, and no one does it better. The novice will find you difficult to come to terms with, but you need no one. You are secure in your elegance, knowing that you, and only you, have the power to mark the skill or incompetence of the craftsman. You have no natural enemies; all fear you. And never, NEVER let anyone tell you that you cannot appear in dialogue!

The Gender Politics of Housework

2005-12-13T08:19:00.000-06:00

It's been said before and in various ways (such as this great recent "Bitch Ph.D." blog post which includes commentary on the subject), the fact that housework is political and gendered should be reiterated on a regular basis for everyone of every gender and race and class. It is amazing how easily so many of us live out the patriarchal status quo in this aspect of our lives, even when we are otherwise progressive, feminist, even radical.

The Second Shift. One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact. In the 1960s, Hochschild found that women did 15 more hours more housework and childcare per week than their husbands. This results in what Hochschild calls a “leisure gap” between men and women in heterosexual married relationships: men get more time to rest and think (which can mean more happiness, more career success, more time for contemplating one’s place in the cosmos, for activism or even thinking about activism, etc.). And doing more housework and having less leisure time increases women’s anxiety, depression, and worry.

In 1997, Chloe E. Bird updated Hochschild’s findings. Using 1990 and 1994 National Opinion Research Council data, she found that: women who marry (heterosexually) gain 14 hours per week of additional household labor, while their husbands gain only 90 minutes per week; and women report doing at least 70% of household labor, while their husbands self-reported doing only 37%—whether their wives worked outside the home or not. In 2003, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted the “American Time Use Survey,” which reported that employed adult women (18 years and over) spent about an hour more per day than employed adult men doing household activities and caring for household members, and men spent more time doing leisure activities (5.4 hours) than women (4.8 hours). Though the gap may be seem to be narrowing, we want to keep in mind that the American Time Use Survey lumped financial and other household management tasks in with housework and that leisure time has been lessened over the years for both men and women in middle-class career tracks.

Though these statistics are based on heterosexual and otherwise traditional family relationships, it is important to note that imbalances in housework sharing occur in many varieties of relationship, from LGBT couples to communal homes to parent/child living arrangements to college roommate arrangements. The key is to recognize that housework is, indeed, political, and that who does what and how much is often gendered or otherwise imbalanced in the home.

The next step is to strategize for equality and justice. A central element of strategizing is education. As Pat Mainardi of the Redstockings argued in her 1970 article “The Politics of Housework”: “[W]e women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine. Probably too many years of seeing television women in ecstasy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognize the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks.” To come to this kind of recognition, we need to learn to “desocialize” or “denaturalize” how we think, which means to think through the bases of our perspectives and actions rather than taking them for granted. We must ask, To what degree have we been conditioned to believe and act in certain ways and to consider these ways “normal” or “natural” without exploring or questioning them?

After careful thought, if you decide the way your household views and does housework needs some reworking, it’s time to move toward a participatory democracy. Everyone needs to be working toward the same goal: equality and fairness in the home. The specifics of how you work out who should do what and how often may vary from household to household (based upon work schedules, finances, skills, and personal preferences), but they need to be out in the open and a matter for discussion.

Some things to keep in mind as you work toward your democracy—especially if you find active resistance:

· It is not acceptable to presume that one’s biology determines who is better at housework or even given tasks. Do not base negotiations here.

· The one who is doing less and not analyzing is the one who will feel the change more: (s)he is losing some leisure and you’re gaining it.

· Watch out for red herrings. Do not be swayed by claims that discourage change, such as: “I’m not good/new at this; let’s do what we each do best”; “You’ll have to show me how to do it”; or “My career is more difficult/important than yours, so I need more ‘down time.’”

One useful approach for creating positive change is to make a list of all the regular (daily, weekly) housework chores that must be done for the household to function. Estimate how much time/effort each task takes. Separate these from chores you’d like to see done but are not vital, and leave space for additional now-and-then tasks. Then, share the list with your housemate(s). Often just looking at the list together can be a form of consciousness-raising. Next, review the list to consider who generally does what and how often. Work toward a shared understanding and agreement of how you currently share housework. (This may be easy or may take some time.) Finally, discuss each item on the list. Decide who prefers which tasks and whether tasks are permanently assigned or if you want to take on responsibilities on a schedule.

If the discussion gets tense, remember your ultimate goal: housework assignments that are reasonable and equitable to all. While negotiating, avoid defensiveness. When we feel attacked or threatened, we get defensive. Once defenses go up, it is difficult to process new information. Validate each other’s perspectives, allow for “cool down” time, and use praise.

Once you’ve accomplished the difficult task of toppling housework from its status as “women’s work,” you can begin to bring your new consciousness to your entire household. With a combination of assertiveness and patience that will vary in proportion to the resistance of those in your home, you may come to live in a household that sees housework as both political and negotiable. Such a change is a vital—if often unexplored—part of achieving feminist goals for empowerment, equality, and justice for all.

Anti-Death Penalty Season is Here

2005-12-12T15:56:00.000-06:00

Today Governor Schwarzenegger said, "After studying the evidence, searching the history, listening to the arguments and wrestling with the profound consequences, I could find no justification for granting clemency" (AP article) for Stan "Tookie" Williams. How much more NOT in a holiday mood could we be? Love, forgiveness, and recognizing that people can change enough to deserve life in prison instead of legalized murder...is that SO hard?

For Mr. Williams, I don't know if he's innocent or guilty. I do have evidence of his trying to do good in the world, though others may decide he is insincere. I know that if you can spend most of your adult life atoning working to right grievous wrongs (and Williams claims not to have committed the murders of which he is accused), and you even get nominated for a Nobel peace prize...when the hell else IS clemency warranted?

Why don't we, as a culture, believe in penance, let alone forgiveness? There is public discourse about lack of faith in the fairness of our legal system -- entrenched racism for example, that results in a black man actually confessing to the murder of a pregnant white woman when it turns out her white husband was actually her killer. There is DNA evidence that now clears convicted "criminals" after they are legally murdered. Yet, while this kind of questioning and critical thinking is going on, Mr. Schwarzenegger, the President, and many many in this country still think the death penalty "works," is merited, and that clemency is for sissies.

With this in mind, I'd like to ask the handful of people who might read this to spend some of the last hours of "Tookie" Williams' life (or after he is gone...only a few hours from the moment I'm typing these words) by visiting some anti-death penalty sites and really thinking this thing through. And if you still approve the death penalty? Think it through until you change your mind.

Savetookie.org

Stop the Execution of Stan Tookie Williams Blog

Abolitionist Action Committee

Campaign to End the Death Penalty

Death Penalty Focus

Death Penalty Information Center

More links...

To Be Depressed or Not to Be Depressed, That is the Quiz Question

2005-12-04T19:54:00.001-06:00

So my husband is leaving town for 10 days, starting tomorrow, and it’s right at the end of a long semester and I’m in a musical revue that is woefully underrehearsed and inadequately cast, and I have to take care of myself and my son for these 10 stressful days. Plus I stayed out too late last night (though I had a great time).

So I decided to try a little experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I took an online psychological depression test right now. I took the 18-question Goldberg Depression Test (has to be a good one, Jews are often depressed as an ethno-religious trait and Goldberg is a family name on my mother's side) via "Dr. John Grohol's Psych Central" (random Google hit) and was surprised by the obviousness of the questions, and also how hard it would actually be to come up with a "no depression" result. Check out the results table:

SCORES
If you scored... You may have...
54 & up Severe depression
36 - 53 Moderate/severe depression
22 - 35 Mild to moderate depression
18 - 21 Borderline depression
10 - 17 Possible mild depression
0 - 9 No depression likely

(Below this table reads: “This is not meant as a diagnostic tool.” Well, then what the heck IS it meant for?)

I got a 15 on the quiz, and my depth-of-a-fortune-cookie response was this:

“You appear to be experiencing some depressive symptoms which are often common amongst the general population. It is unclear as to whether you suffer these problems severely enough to need to seek further diagnosis and treatment of them. You should not take your responses to this self-report questionnaire as a diagnosis or recommendation for treatment of any sort. Consult with a trained mental health professional if you are experiencing depressive feelings and/or difficulties in your daily functioning that you are worried about.”

I’m left wondering what the heck the point of the quiz is.

Certainly, I understand the importance of not making superficial diagnoses via website tests. It seems entirely meant to get you to that last line, which I'd restate as: "If you're taking online tests about depression, you're probably depressed. In any case, you're worried about depression, so go see a psychologist."

But this is a media studies blog, so let's check the rest of the page's rhetoric. If we look to the right of the quiz and results, we see ads for various psych-related websites, and we also see a little boxed ad that reads:

"Ad: Purchase medications onlineand help underwrite this resource: Paxil Prozac Zoloft Celexa Viagra"

(all names of drugs in the ad are hyperlinks)

Ah. The pharmaceuticals may be in very plain font--there are no huge or flashing letters nor images of happy people giddily downing Zoloft--but I do wonder about who visits this site and what they get out of it.

As for me, I'll just get through the next 10 days without Dr. Grohol, Prozac, or any more depression quizzes. Maybe I'll blog some more about Xmas instead. That keeps me on my toes.

Xmas Rant, Part II

2005-12-02T08:35:00.000-06:00

Have you heard about the “Friend or Foe Campaign” that Jerry “Just Begging for Karmic Justice” Falwell has established? Not only are he and his band of thugs—I mean Christian followers—going to stamp out all of this “Happy Holidays” stuff and get everyone saying “Merry Christmas” whether they want to or not, he’s got a nice stable of lawyers ready to litigate so all those poor frightened masses of Kindergarten teachers can put “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” back into the federally funded secular classroom where it belongs!

And, no longer allowing that heathen ACLU or a reasonable separation of church and state to decide who gets to define freedom, the conservative “Alliance Defense Fund” is ready to do battle with their “Christmas Project.” Its delightful slogan? “Merry Christmas: It’s OK to say it.”

Hallelujah and amen! How good and beautiful it is and how blessed we are to know that there are folks out there to make sure the rights of the majority are so well protected against the minority! After all, isn’t that what this country was founded on? Majority rules and let the minority go move somewhere else? Give the playground bully your lunch money and just be glad you’ll get dinner when you get home--that is, if your parents don’t take the bully's side!

Nay, but seriously, Brethren and Sistern... What is really astonishing to me in all of this is the cultural shift it suggests. No longer is the Christian Right peddling all that “Jesus is the reason for the season” gibberish. (Yes, it’s gibberish and always has been. Jesus was born in July and Christmas trees are a ridiculously obvious pagan symbol incorporated into Christianity long ago to lure the heathen masses to their spiritual doom—I mean salvation.) Instead, we’ve moved to boycotting Target for not posting the word “Christmas” all over their store like good little supporters of the “majority rules” doctrine.

In other words, as long as we see signs that suggest we are a Christian nation, then Christians need not behave in a Christian manner at all. We all know “Love thy neighbor” has never been given a fair chance. It seems humanity just isn’t capable of it--and the Christian Right never bothered to try, enjoying the "stone thy enemies" doctrine ever so much more. But now they're actually touting rabid consumerism as a virtue as long as there’s a sign above that Nintendo that says “Merry Christmas”! And I may be wrong—after all, I’m a Lefty feminist non-religious Jew who can’t be trusted to quote Holy Scripture--but didn’t Jesus say, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”? (Answer: Yes, he did, see Matthew 19.)

I can only hope Mark Morford is correct when he asserts, “All the mad marketing and all the product gluttony, they're all merely further indicators that we are just about ready to burst, to grow up, to snap the hell out of it.” Though this is clearly willful optimism (for surely, as the best-selling, g(l)ory-to-godifying Left Behind series makes plain, the only “bursting” and “snapping” in the near future is going to be the bones of all us unbelievers--including you Catholics!), I do want to believe him. I want to think the increasing desperation and excess of the Right is its death throes, is evidence that karmic retribution is a-comin’.

Most days, though, all I can do is sigh, keep my faith in the slow and painful route of education, and shake my head at the irony that I’m actually living a more “Christian” life than a whole lot of Christians out there.

My Recent Publications

2005-11-30T18:13:00.000-06:00

Haven't tooted my own nerdy scholarly horn lately, so here goes:

You'll find my chapter on gender in the sitcom Red Dwarf in the just-published anthology British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide. It's an academic critical romp through shows from The Avengers and Blake's 7 to Dr. Who and Hitchhiker's Guide. I was happy to be invited to contribute, and studying masculine anxieties and queerness in popular culture is something I very much enjoy.

I also published an entry on feminism in Gary Westfahl's three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Feminist SF is a primary area of research for me, and it's nice to know I was chosen to write this entry and that the subject is valued enough to merit mention in the summary of themes on the publisher's webpage for the book.

In 2006, I'll be busy too: my article on feminism in 1975 as viewed through Laura Mulvey's theory of the "male gaze" and Brian Forbes' The Stepford Wives will appear in Feminist Media Studies and I'll be writing then shopping for publishers for a piece on queerness and romantic triangles in three films directed by George Cukor. And over the summer, I'll be writing my chapter for an edited collection called Critical Forces: Reading Star Wars and the Expanded Universe.

I love pop culture research!

Happy Non Religion to You!

2005-11-27T13:46:00.000-06:00

I was thinking about how I’m already sick of Christmas decorations, Christmas music, Christmas movie previews, endless toy commercials for Christmas presents, and all the rest of it, and I wondered just what percentage of Americans actually are Christian…or of other religions. With the help of a website of Composite U.S. Demographics, here’s what I’ve learned:

Christians make up 76.5% of the U.S. population.
24.5% are Catholic.
12% are Baptist.
5.6% are Southern Baptist.
4.6% are Lutheran.
2.9% are Methodist (United Methodist Church).
2.7% are Presbeterian.
2.1% are Pentacostal.
1.93% are Mormon.
1.7% are Episcopalian.
.7% are Non-denominational.
.6% are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
.55% are Menonites.

Meanwhile, outside the Christian faith…
1.3% are Jewish.
.87% are Buddhist.
.5% are Muslim.
.5% are agnostic.
.4% are athiest
.36% are Hindu.
.3% are Unitarian.
.28% are Neo-pagan.
.05% are Baha’i.

This lets me know why we see so much Christmas everywhere, why the Religious Right can take up so much space without even people who disagree with their extremism objecting, and many other things about life in the U.S. of A.

Yet, there is another category I found on this site. Did you know that a whopping 13.2% of Americans identify as “non religious”? We don’t outnumber Catholics, but we do outnumber Baptists! (You’d never know that living here in the South, where Baptists have somehow convinced themselves they are the majority denomination in the country.)

The problem regarding Christmas is that we just get lumped together with everyone else who isn’t putting up Christmas decorations, and it's tough to find a way to put up “non religious” decorations that let people know you’re non religious and proud of it.

But hey, what about lights for windows that spell out “Non Religious Decoration”... or "Proud to Be Non Religious"... Think I could make an ebay business out of that?

Why I Am a Critic

2005-11-12T11:59:00.000-06:00

I love being a critic. With particular emphasis on entertainment television and Hollywood film and their representations of gender, race, class and feminism(s), engaging in criticism gives me great pleasure on many levels.

“Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to just sit back and enjoy the show?” I am sometimes asked. Or, somewhat less kindly, “Don’t you ever turn your brain off?” I get the dismissive “I just can’t look at it that way” on occasion, as well as the “I hate to see you get so upset over TV.” Then there’s the guilt-inducing “You’re ruining it for me,” which is most true, of course, when a friend or family member makes the mistake of actually watching a movie with me and has to listen to me analyze and gripe the whole time.

Now, in my defense, I am capable of “turning off my brain” or at least actively choosing not to engage in overt critique as I watch a particularly favored program. Sure, I can give you a postcolonial critique of Doctor Who, a nuanced feminist reading of Katharine Hepburn or Angela Bassett, or a queer studies take on The Daily Show, but I reserve the right to opt not to at a given screening.

That said, I do pity the friend who catches me just after I’ve seen something that’s truly disturbed me (like those who had to hear me wax maniacal after seeing The Incredibles and wondering how the film earned 5 stars from every critic in the country despite the reactionary 50’s setting and message that white middle-class women’s disempowerment through return to suburban housewife drudgery is less worthy of attention than middle-class men’s midlife crises). It is sometimes difficult for me to assume that all is right with the world when I fear I’m the only one who makes counterhegemonic (resistant, oppositional) readings of certain popular texts.

Keeping all this in mind, I find it important to pause to note the importance of criticism, and of critics--particularly entertainment media critics.

First and foremost: I enjoy being a critic. While I may at times feel driven to critique for political reasons, I also get personal pleasure from it. There is downright masturbatory glee in delving into a text I thoroughly enjoy, in discovering clever and creative ways of reading the texts that others have not yet considered, in using language effectively to inspire challenges to mass-produced crap that invades our minds and makes it difficult for us to question the status quo. Plainly put, media criticism is intellectually satisfying and feels politically empowering.

This commentary has been partly inspired by rereading feminist media critic Bonnie Dow’s Prime-Time Feminism (U PA Press, 1996). Her comments on the critic via rhetorical studies are insightful and persuasive (despite the whiteness of her gaze throughout the book). For instance, Dow opines, “I view criticism as a species of argument rather than as a quest for truth” (Introduction, 3). Moreover, she reminds us that media criticism is “a kind of argument that, whatever its value to the reader, articulates the interests of the arguer first” (3). Good reminder there: you learn more about me than the music video we’re watching when I offer my critical take on it.

Criticism encourages the listener or reader to reevaluate a text, to see and evaluate it anew. Hence, says Dow, “criticism is not about discovering or reporting the meaning in texts. Rather, it becomes a performative activity, that is in some sense, dedicated to creating meaning” (3). When we do criticism best, we “persuade the audience that their knowledge of a text will be enriched if they choose to see a text as the critic does, while never assuming that that particular ‘way of seeing’ is the only or best way to see that text (or that all audiences do, in fact, see it that way” (4). And that is a real challenge: I must be persuasive yet remain humble, knowing I am offering but one of many possible readings.

And the feminist critic must be respected in her own terms, by “her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significance from […] texts: and, at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all, asking new and different questions of it” (Annette Kolodny, qtd. in Dow 6).

Dow helps me stand proud as a media/cultural studies critic. In whatever arena (from after-movie chat to classroom teaching to academic scholarship to blogging), being a critic gives me personal-political pleasure and is a form of activism I esteem highly.

Odd Quiz I Took (Because Friends Did)

2005-11-03T19:16:00.000-06:00

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.5
Mind:	7.4
Body:	5.9
Spirit:	6.5
Friends/Family:	6.9
Love:	7.3
Finance:	9.4
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Worth a gander, but if you take the quiz, also take the time to analyze what questions are asked and how. Many assumptions here about what makes for happiness and what doesn't (e.g., more friends = better life, what does "strong moral code" mean and do I really need one?, etc.).

In reviewing the quiz's commentary on my score, I got this, for example:

"Spirit: Your spirit rating seeks to capture in a number that elusive quality which is found in your faith, your attitude, and your philosophy on life. A higher score indicates a greater sense of inner peace and balance. Your spirit score leaves room for improvement. Consider making a concerted effort to redefine your attitudes and focus your beliefs. Boosting your spirit will lead to greater life satisfaction."

Ok, I do agree that in life in general I'd like to feel more at peace. But I think I got this fortune cookie comment because I did not put that I believe everything happens for a reason. And who is this stupid quiz to tell me otherwise! If my "moral code" were "stronger," would I get "You are super happy giddy girl" in response?

I think I prefer superficial quizzes like "What Kind of Dog are You?" They're inane so they don't piss me off.