Doctor Who: Bi TV

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

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

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

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!!!

..........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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion, Science--the Whole Megillah

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

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

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

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

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

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