Skin Deep

Proof positive: Drudge knows his news.

Only in America....

And in other news: Gawd Darwin Marx Roland Barthes Peter Cushing help us all. I'm sure it'll be every bit as funny as we expect it to be. (You know, just like that time Marlo Thomas met the abortionist for dim sum....)

The Power of Myth

Briefly: If you missed it, check out Bill Moyers' report Buying the War online here. It's a fairly searing indictment of the journalistic complicity that helped get the US into the Iraq debacle, though it's largely old news to those of us in other parts of the world. In Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and many other countries, the media were deeply-- and often quite profoundly-- skeptical of the case for war. (And that's why Canada, for example, stayed the hell out of it.) The failures of the American fourth estate were as horrifying as they were galling. BTW, since Moyers' report was aired this week, you'd think the major Sunday chat-shows out of the States would have addressed some of the issues raised and accusations made. You'd think.

Something to remember: the Shrubbies aren't the only ones in a state of denial. Enablers always are.

Colour Me Amberdextrous

Sorry, folks--- very much behind on just about everything, email & blogging included. For the next several days I'm dog-sitting Amber, the darling pictured at the right, while her owners are off in Florida. She's a very sweet dog, and she's getting on in years, so she needs a bit of extra care. Have to say, it's nice having a dog around again.

So for the next while, I don't know how much I'll be able to post/write/whatever. Am shuffling between two abodes for now, and only fleetingly attending to Other Stuff. Will try to catch up when I can. Until then....

And Finally The Miscellany

And on this day of non-stop (read in: compensatory) blogging, a few short-takes on Recent Things:

• Some of us remember too well the terrible insecurity when Mikhail Gorbachev was ostensibly ousted all those years ago. Insecurity is a bit of an understatement. I remember watching the TV without stop, wondering if we were witnessing a giant leap back in time. Then Yeltsin happened. He literally "happened." And from there, the rest is history, even if his successor, Mr Putin, these days sounds and acts more like a mafioso Secretary-General than a President. For whatever his faults, for whatever his inadequacies as a reformer and/or statesman, Mr Yeltsin stood up and said, defiantly, that there was no going back, there was only going forward. That, my friends, took courage. Let that be what he's remembered for.
  
  And, to all you right-wing Reaganite nutjobs: Gorbachev and then Yeltsin ended the Soviet Union, so stop taking credit for something you didn't bloody well do. Let us pray (pray, pray) we're finally near the end of this age of willy-nilly historical revisionism.
  
  
• Yesterday was Saint George's Day-- and as I meant to note, the date of Shakespeare's death. (Some claim it as his birthday, too, but the evidence for that's iffy at best.) So, go celebrate by reading, and ideally viewing, some Shakespeare for the rest of the week. And please, please, please, don't just reread Hamlet. For God's sake, don't. Try King John or Cymbeline, just for a change.
  
  
• 24 continues its full-throttle dead-slowness in resolving a season best forgotten, like that thing you did with the gerbils, a tuning fork and the cast of Oz. For those of you not watching, as if you should, there are still a stabbed President, a murderous Farmer Hogget and a one-armed Russian terrorist unaccounted for. Oh, and a story that, I think everyone agrees, sucks bloated, muddy donkey balls. Or so say the show's fans. Those of us more critical would say much, much worse.
  
  (Correction: I was wrong. These preening, clueless dunderheads disagree. Then again, they use the word "significant" where most of the rest us would use the words "laughably ridiculous.")
  
  
• I imagine Sylvia is ecstatic that I mentioned her specifically in my earlier re-crud-escent post. I assure all of you, she is NOT the first person of whom I think when poop comes to mind. I also imagine Syl's equally thrilled I've felt the need to qualify this. ;-)
  
  
• If I hear one more thing from CNN about the Virginia Tech massacre, I think I'll beat my TV into a mass of busted circuits. The ghoulish, pretentious, manipulative "all-massacre-all-the-time" coverage has finally waned, but the cheap cynicism of their reportage remains shameless. I won't even begin to comment, so of course I will, on its "show-the-Cho-tape-ad-nauseum" day-later reversal as it feigned sensitivity to viewer disgust. Once it had decided to air the material, it had to stick to its journalistic guns, arguing relevance. But it didn't. So, beyond being pandering and exploitative, it's also gutless and unprincipled, which renders it lower-than-Mitt-Romney-low.
  
  
• Opening line for a Cohenesque novel, if one can still be written in this tsk-tsk-tsk-ing age: "She was a damsel in gossamer, but only because of the cobwebs that had formed permanently around her dank and forbidding cu...." [Stop! Stop! We interrupt this sickening, sexist perversion to protect you, the genteel and possibly innocent readers of this blog. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blathering.] Okay, maybe more Mailer than Cohen, but six, half-dozen and the other....
  
  
• Andrew Sullivan offers an interesting but nearly-hagiographical assessment of Obama-mania. (As Homer Simpson would say, "Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending.") Obama, for now, is getting the RFK man-who-would-be-king treatment, but I remain skeptical. He can't, at least, be any worse than the current President. Inanimate carbon rods, however, couldn't be any worse.
  
  
• And two items, both brought to my attention courtesy Hockey Jones. First, evidently "old, inefficient bulbs" in Ontario will be reduced to running for parliament, with the dimmest and most wasteful vying for the Premiership. Secondly, this link will provide you with some of the most disturbing images you'll ever see. Gives new meaning, however, to Phil Collins' "Coming In The Air Tonight." *shiver*

Okay--- enough. Some stuff on the burner now, so don't be too surprised if I go quiet for a bit. Until time avails itself again. Best.

Once More Unto The Well, Once More

Didn't this appropriately-URLed blog already rant about such despicable cynicism? And only two months ago, no less. Pffft.

Notes for the less-familiar: Tracks collected here are mainly from albums from 1993-present, some good ("Days Like This," "Steal My Heart Away," "Crazy Love"), some bad ("Too Long In Exile," "Georgia On My Mind," the torpid "When The Leaves Come Falling Down"), and only a few excellent ("Ancient Highway," "Shenandoah," the epic, electric and righteously-asskicking "Lonely Avenue"). The album's hardly necessary and inexplicably selected, with no real insight offered by the compilation, as the songs are merely presented in chronological order. To rewrite a certain urban phrase, it seems this damn Van's gonna get ridden 'til the mutherfuckin' wheels fall off.

Mystery Meat

Because some jokes are just too obvious.... Key quote: "Last night cops were trying to establish the Pole's background."

UPDATE: An eminently reliable source adds this: "And the best thing is that in French slang your 'zizi' is your, well, you know." Well, definitely not my, thank God Darwin Ray Charles.

Scatman Druthers, or Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Plopping

For your, er, delectation: Laudator Temporis Acti spoons-- er, ladels-- out a bit of shining wit. (A crusty trap, or just a plain dropping?)

And remember: The world's most famous anagram of toilets is T. S. Eliot. The waste land, indeed.

FOLLOWUP: I wonder if Sylvia will recall this from our Foundling days. If she's lucky, not.... ;-)

O Commodore, My Commodore!

Most of my readers either won't remember or won't want to remember the Commodore 64, but some of us, way back when dinosaurs were turning into oil, spent more hours on it than we would care to admit. Oh, the sophistication! The graphical detail! The luxury of having to type LOAD "*.*", 8,1 every time you wanted to run a programme! (On the other hand, your computer served you rather than you endlessly serving, and servicing, it.) I won't even begin to bore you by explaining how many hours I spent playing Qix, Ghostbusters, Bruce Lee, Alter Ego and Defender of the Crown; or how I turned the entire Spanish Main Dutch in Pirates!; nor even how I eventually and heroically-- to my friends at the time, anyway-- disproved the titular claim of Impossible Mission. ("Stay a while! Stay forever!!!" It's also where most of us learnt the word "cormorant.") At long last, however, those of you brave, bored or nostalgic enough can finally play some of those warped blasts and blast-em-ups from the past, collected for your retrogressive satisfaction here. Then tell me how much time you spend waste on all that antiquated silliness. ;-) Providing, of course, you can get the games to work....

Not For Your Eyes Only

It’s amusing how petty some corporations can be. The article’s author might be a tad over dramatic comparing BA to Soviet Russia -the company's behaviour seems more akin to a teenager cutting an ex's head out of photographs after a break up.

O My Darling Clement Times

Here in my little neck of Southern Ontario, we're on our third consecutive day of genuinely gorgeous weather. The sun's out, the sky's blue-- and best of all, forgive me ladies, halter tops are back, and they truly comprise a sight for sore eyes. (*Sigh.* Go ahead, sue me for having a Y chromosome.) We've been through a long & dreary winter; not a brutal one by any stretch of the imagination, but a bleak and apparently-endless half-suffering, like a Henry James paragraph. So we're in a period of probably too-brief beauty here. Canadians are to climatological goodness as pimply teenaged boys are to sex: they're grateful for any little bit they can get.

And for all that sunny talk, one of the items most on my mind of late is Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, a brilliant film in so many regards, though sadly these days it's largely remembered for its so-called stunt-casting (Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland; and, though not stunting at the time, William Shatner's presence will invariably but ahistorically seem a stunt of some sort). Watching it again lately with many interruptions, and ergo pausing it, I was impressed by how easily one can cease the movie's movement and land upon a perfect still shot. Kramer had a magnificent eye, and everything about that film sustains visual arrest. I can think of no recent director of whom I could say same, and very few of the classic ones.

Another thought thereto: It's easy to forget, amid the respect generally conceded him, what a truly magnificent presence Spencer Tracy became in his later years. Beyond playing the legal-judicial part to which he got regularly assigned in this period (Inherit The Wind, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?), he manages to indicate so much with so little. There's a scene in the film in which he has drinks with Marlene Dietrich, and you can perceive, in the mere postulations of his eyes, first his desire to understand Germany, then his disgust with it, and then his disgust with himself for lapsing into (temporary) hatred as he tries to remain objective as a judge in the Nuremberg climate. Tracy knew how to register to a camera, and he reminded me of the critic who said that Alec Guinness could say more with a furrow of his brow than most actors could by shouting from the rafters. Tracy was probably the Robert Frost of modern acting, deceptively folksy, but always making the complexity of his art seem so easy, or at apparent ease, you'd never notice it. Consider it a bit of a reminder, or a cautionary suggestion: sometimes the most transparent is the most opaque-- and the most opaque the ostensibly clearest; and that there's sometimes genius in being so manifestly clear. Something to keep in mind?

And-- And-- And--- You Put The Load Right On Me-e-e-e

This blog will not comment. This blog will not comment. This blog will not comment.

*whistles innocently*

Nope, still not commenting.

*continues whistling*

This blog knows she's from Wales. From Mold, Wales, no less. But it STILL isn't commenting.

*glances evasively askance*

Don't look at this blog like that.

*looks directly at feet, which are beginning to shuffle anxiously*

Okay, okay: key quote from the judge: "I cannot ignore the difference in your ages - you were 34 and twice his age." And thrice his....

This blog feels so dirty right now. Thank you, thank you very much.... Rotten filthy perverts, the lot of ya....

A Metaphysical Dilemma (updated)

Seems everyone's favourite hate group is at it again: this time, they're planning to picket funerals for Virginia Tech victims because "God does not do [this] to his servants." The logician in me wants to point out what their God allowed to happen to his own son, but that'd be too snarky by half. Instead, I prefer to wonder: If these people hold a picket, and one of the grieving friends or family members gives one of their revolting brood exactly what they all so richly deserve, would the survivors have to picket the funeral for their own fallen one? After all, God wouldn't do that to one of his servants, would He?

If nothing else, we'd quickly learn the answer to that old question about how many asswipes can dance on the head of a pin.

SEMI-RELATED UPDATE: The intellectual and moral skidmark that is Dinesh D'Souza has essayed spitting in the face of atheists (and, presumably, agnostics & alternate believers) using the VT shootings as his platform. One professor from VT, an atheist, responds to him beautifully here--- though, like almost anyone with a PhD, he unfortunately doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. His initial response, however, is pitch-perfect.

D'Souza is a grotesquerie, and a despicable one at that. The difference between D'Souza and the Phelpses is, as Northrop Frye used to say, merely one of degree and not of kind. Worth remembering, I think.

Slipping you some tongue

Possible consequence of dating someone who is either really into you or hasn't been kissed in 38 years.

Also, I'm now thankful that the incident with the alphabits cereal made me take mine out years ago. Always listen to your dentist!

Words Fail

And sometimes they just seem inappropriate.

Admit It, You'd Hit It

Because there's nothing like pokin' it old school....

If it weren't for those meddling kids

Tonight, I went to see Disturbia. Technically it was my choice, but I was only given a choice between it and Blades of Glory so my expectations were pretty low. It’s really not that bad, a bad Hitchcock rip-off maybe, but the suspense is so far from the quality of Rear Window that the only connection between the two is that the plucky hero is stuck in his house with binoculars (and a whole assortment of stalker-recommended equipment). All things considered, it was probably best that the filmmakers decided to just run with the premise in a b-movie way instead of trying to remake the original –it would’ve been disastrous particularly since the 'Lisa' character is noooooo Grace Kelly. Instead it was just a smart-alecky, mildly amusing and voyeuristic bit of fluff for the tween crowd (I kept wondering: ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ Oh yeah, Will Ferrell in lycra pantsuits and relentless boner jokes…)

Here’s the scary part about it -I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie in what felt like, a high-school cafeteria with the lights out (Maybe Billy Madison? Long, long time ago that’s for sure). There was stuff being thrown around (mostly popcorn but I think napkin spit balls are making a comeback), kids yelled out at the screen, made cat calls, threatened someone 2 rows over to ‘turn off your f#%king phone!’ they screamed unnecessarily at all the predictable jumpy parts and then- they clapped (clapped, for godssakes as if we were sitting at a Cannes screening).

Deeply disturbia.

Quarrel In A Straw

What, dare I ask, is worse: being called a "nappy-headed ho" by a disheveled crank, or being falsely labeled a rapist by a county prosecutor and most of the national media? Watching the news coverage out of the States this week, you'd think the former. In fact, watching the various programmes that constitute the tradition of Sunday morning talk, you'd think Don Imus the worst person since Joe McCarthy. On Meet the Press, Reliable Sources and This Week, one story dominated the other completely by a huge margin in terms of air-time devotion. Guess which one. Meet the Press didn't mention the other at all; This Week elided over it almost completely; and Reliable Sources came to it only in an epilogue that rhetorically, and utterly emptily, asked if the media should apologize.

I wonder-- could there be an ulterior reason for this? The media couldn't be using Imus as a straw man to deflect attention from their irresponsibility, and their fundamental complicity, in the Duke fiasco, could it? No, the American media would never do that. It's just that there was no vigil to keep outside Mike Nifong's house.

So it comforts me to know that, as the clamour suggests, it's okay to make and perpetuate criminal allegations against male athletes, and to actively participate in grand public libel. But toss off a crude and thoughtless epithetical slander against female athletes, and there will be Hell to pay. It comforts me that being slurred in a couple second sound-byte is a greater act of victimization than being dragged through the courts for more than a year on the most serious and invidious charges. It comforts me that every news programme in the US, and every talking head featured on it, will go on effusively about how impressive the Rutgers women are, while those few that bother to mention the unimpressive Duke boys do so now to emphasize that they came from wealthy families who could afford fancy-shmancy legal representation. It comforts me that we're supposed to feel the pain these young women felt, while we're supposed to slough off the pain those young men felt because they were college boys and must have been bad in other ways we just don't know about. It comforts me that the social priorities are so clear.

Now, please, let's get on to the important business of going after certain cultural sections that use what's now clearly taboo. Let's get the rappers and the shock-jocks and the comedians and the satirists and the moviemakers. We all know they're the real problem.

After all, since we're discussing so intently the damage that can be caused by words (so much for sticks and stones), it's good to know which ones are really hurtful. So, feel free to call me a rapist. Just don't call me a ho.

Who Gives A Friggatriskaidekaphobia....

Yes, it's Friday the 13th technically, but as far as I'm concerned it's still Thursday the 12th. Hit once again with a brutal bout insomnia (an affliction since kid-hood), this morning's just a daze until I can finally attempt sleep again, and this entry just an exercise in killing Time. But to send you off onto your weekends with stuff about which to think:

• Easter came and went with nary a resurrection to be had, but I did realize something bizarre. For reasons beyond my ken, my maternal unit insists on buying me chocolate and other confections, but which I never end up touching. (A mother who repeatedly buys you something you neither need nor want? Imagine that.) Then it occurred to me: without a girlfriend, or a semi-steady involvement, this stuff will never, ever get eaten. For as long as I can remember, the only people who ever ate any of it were-- you guessed it-- entanglements of one form or another. Strange thing to realize as a new stockpile begins to build. And ladies, before any of you try to Imus me: Any of the women that actually dated me would adore being described as "entanglements." Without that peculiar sort of humour, they'd never have cast their eyes in my direction in the first place. ;-)
• I started to write a discussion of the Imus brouhaha, but it became apparent the bloody thing would turn into a tome before I knew it. Maybe I'll put it all down eventually, but as you can probably imagine, I've watched the spectacle with worried eyes. For reasons far too complex to explain now, I regard the situation as a dangerous crisis point with no good result in the offing. Imus' firing will be seen-- is being seen-- as the legitimation of swarming upon improper speech with pious imperative, and, of course, selective ignorance of hypocrisies and mob-mindedness. It worries me-- no, alarms; nay, terrifies-- that the idea of "free speech," however offensive, has become nothing more than a phrase to be inevitably followed by a giant, contradictory "but." The hypocrisies of those that led the charge against Imus are myriad and manifold, and the bases for their attack equivocal (and oft-qualified) at best. And now they've effectively been encouraged to pursue further agendae of silencing and correction. This does not portend well, because those that taste the victory of (faux) moral outrage can never have just one bite. My reasons for thinking this are only slightly less-involved than a Henry James novel-- it has to do with, among other things, race-baiting, metonymic thinking, PoMo silliness, arch-Puritanism, and the historical evolution of (small p intended) protestant piety. It also has nothing to do with Imus himself, who's largely beyond defending. The righteous, and conspicuously unforgiving, bullies won a significant skin this week. God help us all if they win another.
• Okay, yes, that rambled BIG-TIME, and became much more anticipatory than I'll probably ever be able to satisfy. Shall I curtail? Every single commentator, protester, scholar and activist who supported this move should be willing to stand by this resolution: Should I ever, for any reason, slip from the standard I've just established, may I be treated as I have treated. (Professors, that may will mean renouncing your tenure so you can be fired, too.) Then watch how many stand back from their stalwarcy in stone-throwing. (And, by which standard, both Jesse "Hymie-town" Jackson and Reverend Al would already have been exiled to pariah-land.)
  
• There's a bizarre irony that all of this is playing out against the much-too-late indemnification of the Duke lacrosse players. Shouldn't we ALL beware the rush to so-called justice? Shouldn't we all beware the cheap satiety that comes from advancing before one sobers with thought? You'd think Americans would be especially wary after the rush to action that led them into Iraq. Evidently not, alas. And gee, what did Reverend Al say about the Duke accused before the evidence was in? How conveniently we forget.
  
• Which, by the way, is why Reverend Al is a poseur. The Right Reverend Al is an entirely different person altogether. Sharpton's a mullah. Green's an Ayatollah, and a mercifully honourable one at that. What was his most famous song again? "Let's Stay Together...."
  

Forgive me, please. I'm old, tired, ranting, and subject to flights of cultural, social and intellectual offense and anger. The difference between me and Reverend Al? I admit my Claptonian capacity for folly and stupidity-- regularly. (And probably demonstrate it at least twice as often.) Reverend Al, however, is to civil rights as Mrs Malaprop was to language.

And The Voice Of This Calling

Because the Doctor is sooooooooo In....    As the lotto ad goes, Just imagine....

Unstuck In Time

Ladies and gentlemen, The Big (Sad) News, though CNN will surely report it with a thirty-second bit that ends with "He was 84." Remember, in the American media, if you write a dozen and more novels articulating with a disturbingly Zen humour the contemporary human condition, you'll get thirty seconds; utter a three-second quip about "nappy-headed hos," and you'll be covered, albeit with tar and feathers, around the clock. Which offers a jarring reminder: Vonnegut was a cynic; the American media, for the most part, are just plain cynical. Vonnegut, bless him, would have understood the distinction.

Alas, we have probably lost the last of the red-hot humanists. At least the cigarettes ("a classy way to commit suicide," he once said) didn't kill him. You can just imagine the cynicism that would follow if they had.

UPDATE: Yes, I wrote "contemporary human condition." A horrendous and meaningless cliche, but it was 2am.... Forgive me. On the other hand, damn I nailed the CNN coverage: exactly 30 seconds, with "He was 84" as the closing sentence. Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket.

You See, Words Are Like Bullets...

The Don Imus fiasco proves one thing, that Oscar Wilde was right: life imitates art, not the other way around. Quad erat demonstrandum. Link is long and very much NOT-SFW, but almost eerily prescient. Key words: "Oh yeah, apologize...."

Jaunting Belinda

And she wondered why so many people described her as capricious....

Misty Water-Colour Mammaries... or, The Shames of Juvenile Retention

Oh dear: a few things to note in this article's regard, all embarrassing, almost all dumber-than-dumb, and without exception rooted in my own experience as a 9-13 year-old in deeply provincial Ontario during those odd days of the early 80s:

1. I remember watching every single one of the movies mentioned in it. And then some. Oy vey. Mostly on the then-new invention called videotape, and rented with surreptitious glee. In those days, though, it was still common for parents to send their kids to get cigarettes for them from the store. Those were the days....
   
2. I also remember sneaking into movie theatres exactly, EXACTLY, the way the author describes. I hope there's a statute of limitations on that crime.
   
3. And yes, things were damned tougher then for boobie-batty boys. (Say that ten times fast!) No internet for easy access to all things perverse; no wardrobe malfunctions; no lolita-wannabes going half-way for you just by walking down the street. Porn proper was almost impossible to acquire, unless Dad had something hidden away that you weren't supposed to find. So even a brief and partial boobie-flash, like Judi Bowker's in Clash of the Titans, was a kind of Kinder-Surprise that would have to tide one over for ages. Or what SEEMED like ages. Movies like Porky's then were like hitting the mother-lode, the cornucopia, the Lands of Plenty and Cockaigne.
   
4. These were also the only, er, exposure most of us had to Canadian movies. At the time, for adolescent and pre-adolescent boys, Canadian movies were the equivalent of the Amsterdam Red Light District. You knew you could get what you were looking for. Then again, none of us were really looking for Caligula or the raunchier stuff. It was bums and boobies, rather than the intrauterine gynocolism that makes its way into even the so-called SFW pages now.
   
5. These were the movies of the Star Wars babies going through puberty, or trying to. Hence the pervasive innocence and naiveté, to say nothing of the smarmy villains and the manifest bimbos, all of them (of course) easy substitutes for Darth ("Preppy") Vader and Princess Leia. And sure, I was on the young side for that stuff, but I was a precocious little bugger. A LOT of us were. BTW, Princess Leia in that gilded bikini in Return of the Jedi sent most of our eyeballs right out of our stupid little heads.
   
6. When it came to nudity, the interest was largely the reverse of the way it is now. The obsessions weren't so much with getting the youngest things to show some skin; it was with getting the more ostensibly "mature" women naked, the women like Sylvia Kristel and Kelly LeBrock. Believe it or not, I remember one of the common qualifiers of the time: She's not a girl, she's a WOMAN!!!! Contrast this with the Britney-LiLo-Keira-Natalie thing these days. There's a sociology paper in there somewhere.
   
7. The line "enough wool you could knit a sweater with" -- from Porky's, for the only one among you who doesn't know where it comes from-- became a lurid mantra, and a short-hand movie review. (Aside: See, you are not required by law to follow the word "lurid" with "details.") Then again, you almost never saw pubic hair in a movie back then.
   
8. Similarly, you almost-never saw male nudity, and a guy's bare-ass was more horrifying than anything Mama Voorhees ever did. It wasn't, of course, but if you didn't act like it, if you didn't protest your disgust as if you'd just seen an autopsy performed before your very eyes, you were in shit. Deep shit. Deep, deep rhino shit. The key phrase at the time was Awwww, groooooss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   
9. Heather Thomas was The Rage. Mind you, Victoria Principal and Morgan Fairchild were pretty big, too. *shiver* But so great was the mammary-mania, some people actually rented S.O.B. just to see Julie Andrews' -- yes, you read me properly-- breasts. *shudder* (The hills were alive, after all.) On the other hand, it was during this period that I fell permanently in love with Michelle Pfeiffer.
   
10. What did we learn from these movies? Not a god-damn thing. It was like studying Botticelli by leering at caricatures. But maybe it kept some of us from fainting upon the first, and eternally blessèd, revelation of The Real Thing. And maybe it kept us from doing some of the most ridiculous things one could do in that situation. Perhaps there's something to learning sexual stupidity from the very stupidest.
    

But as lascivious as all this probably seems, it was all rather innocuously innocent. We're in much more cynical times these days, as ten year-olds with a little technical sophistication can with ease get their paws on darker and often more intensely misogynistic material. It's all so easy now; a few key-strokes, a couple mouse-gestures and half-an-hour online without Mom and Dad peering over your shoulder, and viler plenties can be had. No wonder so many of the current crop of young are jaded about all things sexual. And that, as far as I'm concerned, may be one of the more disturbing aspects of our grab-and-get-it culture-- maybe even more disturbing than Julie Andrews' scary poppins. Now that's spine-chilling.

our normal impulses

In the sentencing of a Nevada man charged with child porn possession the judge offered a strange insight into the condition of pedophilia:

"As an example, having sex with a girl between 12 and 16 is prohibited because we say it's prohibited. It's because we decided as a civilized society you do not want adults engaging in sexual conduct with children below 16 years of age, which flies in the face of our, I guess for lack of a better description, our normal impulses," he said.
"I guess we could just ignore them, say it's just like a traffic ticket, it's malum prohibitum, it's only against the law because it's prohibited."

some people just shouldn't speak, ever.

Smokin' Asses

Sometimes it's hard to tell where rabid Puritanism ends and outright stupidity begins. Sometimes, however, they're joined at the bloody hip. I can't wait for the MPAA to justify slapping Casablanca with a hard-R--- and, well, just about every movie made before the Age of Rectitude.

(This blog will also refrain from noting that It Happened One Night would eventually receive the same rating as Hostel, Saw and The Devil's Rejects. Or maybe it won't. )

Going Commando

This blog assures you that this article is NOT trying to plant subliminal suggestions in your head. Nope. Not. At. All.

Key snip: "California's Hummer-loving governor." Well, some things really ought to go without saying....

Two In The...

Probably the last time the American Presimuhdent showed any semblance of humour--- and didn't speak like a grade-two English teacher.

/link thanks to Hockey Jones, with whom I agree: this guy's almost likable. Almost....

Coming Through Slaughter

• What's Gould For The Goose: If you missed it, Jimmy Kimmel guest-hosted for Larry King the other night, and in one priceless bit, he pretty much crucified Emily Gould, one of the editors of the vile Gawker website. You can catch the video here. Note how the lass's face grows positively histrionic in her expressions of confused injurement. Her eyes pretty much say everything: she's like a dippy fourteen year-old trying to justify breaking curfew. Too bad: she's a cutie, but thicker than pea soup. (What? Gawker doesn't mention her evisceration appearance? You don't say. I guess no one is stalking her....)
  
  Key quote: "... I would hate for you to arrive in Hell and [sic] somebody sending a text message, saying Guess who's here..."
  
  
• It's An Uncut Log: I keep thinking about blogging and what a bad influence it has on my own writing. I never take blogging too seriously: I just type straight into the computer, maybe half-editing, and shrug everything off with the alibis of informality, ephemerality and ultimate insignificance. In short, it makes me sloppy, or encourages my innate sloppiness more than I should allow. Call me old-fashioned, as if you haven't already a hundred times, but I need to see things on paper. I need text to be tangible for it to matter. (Then again, I grew up writing on a typewriter.) I wonder if the kids these days suffer the same sort of hang-up. For me, blogging is improv: one just does, and tries not to fall too seriously on one's permanently pock-marked face.
  
  
• Take Me To The River (And Yes, It Is A Big Pussy Joke): Read some of the reviews of Grindhouse-- quite a lot of them, in fact-- and have decided it's just not for me. Maybe this makes me officially a Pussy, but I tired of gore-gasms when I was, oh, thirteen or so. (Ninja movies starring Sho Kosugi, with people getting shuriken tossed in their eyes; I vaguely remember when they seemed cool to me.) Gore's fine in Webster and Shakespeare and such, but the sexual edification some people find in gross-out action turns me off just as much the sick imaginations themselves. Some of the stuff I've heard about-- a trampolining cheerleader in one of the trailers getting, ahem, sharply penetrated you-know-where-- is enough to make me want to lose my lunch even in the abstract. (I dare not say "specular.") And it's almost always women: the most disturbingly "creative" deaths-- to say nothing of the humiliations-- are reserved for the women, as they were in Shakespeare's day, but taken to radical extremes in modern movie-making. But maybe my stomach just turns too easily these days; or maybe I'm just getting increasingly intolerant of obnoxiousness, or what some call "audacity." Who knows. *shrug* It hardly matters; Rodriguez is skilled but not essential viewing, and I've pretty much gone off Tarantino completely. And yet, why do I feel so guilty about determining so firmly not to see this? Probably because it's judgmental before the fact, and I despise people who commit that intellectual fallacy. I feel like such a fucking hypocrite.
  
  
• 'Tis Pity She's A Slore: Re Tarantino: I'm really surprised more feminists aren't taking him to task for the increasingly blatant misogyny in his work. Sure, in his past few pictures he has been going out of his way to establish the female action hero. But I get the impression he does so largely to ameliorate the violence he wants to play out on screen. It's like making his central characters women somehow redeems, or tonics, the deeply fetishistic barbarities in which he wishes to revel like a rutting pig. (I use "barbarities" as a kind of median between "indignities" and "atrocities.") He enacts them with such casual glee, and yet so many women I know aren't bothered, and the leading feminist voices remain conspicuously mute on the subject. Sure, rake T.S. Eliot over the coals for much, much less; but Tarantino slides past like a coke-dealer at a night-club. Pfft.
  
  Two things further: First, yes, it's always a perverse sign of some imminent apocalypse when I prattle on about gender issues. And secondly, Tarantino's greater sin, in my estimation, is that he has become intolerably pretentious about his cinematic onanism-- and, ergo, boring. Like a power-drill to the forehead. Oh, crap, I may just have given him an idea....
  
  ADDENDUM: The competition to succeed Anthony Lane continues. Somewhere, Rex Reed is pounding bitchily away on his desk and insisting that "a shotgun filled with handjobs" was his, damn and blast.
  

I'm Your Fan

Found some old pictures today, ones I frankly forgot existed. This one below is of Bandit, our alas departed chien. He used to use, in the (ahem) dog-days of summer, the base of the fan as a headrest. Dogs, unlike humans, can still be cute when they're old.

Aren't ya glad it's not another cat picture?

Please, Please, Please...

... will someone, anyone, punch-- forcefully and repeatedly-- Lou Dobbs in the throat? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

Luckily, up here in Canada, we don't find most of the worst American faux-populism on our airwaves. But Dobbs, somehow, makes it across the border, with his revolting, and often downright racist, jingoism that in less-tolerant countries would be regarded as hate-news. Every night, it's the same old story: how the politicians are fucking everything up, which is harmless enough in itself; but then it's The War On The Middle Class and Broken Borders and Border Betrayal. He's the putrefying voice of self-righteous, contemptuous, xenophobic America, which, thankfully and mercifully, is not the real voice of America to anyone who actually knows even a single American. He's the living manifestation of bourgeois injurement.

And yet, many cleave to him as a messenger of news, not least of which has to do with his time-slot at the 6pm hour on CNN. I hope that audience is just the O'Reilly and Limbaugh company feigning diversity.

Every day, I thank God, Darwin, or Ray Charles that reportage, generally, is left in the hands of actual reporters. (Watch people like Dana Bash when they have to "report" for Lou: you can see them choking back the desire to argue with the Dobbsian spin.) I'm glad-- heartened-- gleeful-- to say there's no real version of O'Reilly here in Canada. No Limbaugh, no Dobbs. You get a few such types on radio, mostly out of Alberta or working for the Sun, but they're never given the full credentials of a legitimate journalist.

"Newsmen" like Lou Dobbs are anti-newsmen. They're polemical, cynical, jingoistic provocateurs; they're the most despicable pretenders toward anger, so satisfied as they are in proclaiming their anger and rattling on about "wars" on this and that.

In Canada, you'd never see any credentialed network proclaim something like "War On The Middle Class." You'd never see a report on how Americans are "killing" our jobs. You'd never see given legitimation the passed-off racism that regularly qualifies as journalism on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

Lou is hate, contempt and anger, without solution. He's also smarm. He deserves exactly what he issues--- and a few dozen shots to the throat.

Captioned Accordingly

I can't tell you what an honour it is to address this hallowed board of New Yorker cartoonists....

The Horror, The Horror...

And RB wonders why I keep a rusty fork handy.... *shiver*
Next up: Neil Young's "My Hips Don't Lie."

Ohhhh, Fudge....

Sad this, but I don't buy the official story. I suspect he probably saw the remake of Black Christmas and just lost the will to live.

(Odd how the article doesn't mention any of his Canadian movies other than Porky's. Sure, forget all about Breaking Point, Dead of Night and Murder By Decree. Hosers.)

The Gift Of The Bad Guy

As most of you have likely heard by now, Iran has announced that will return, as a "gift," the fifteen British sailors it took prisoner. Naturally, the prognosticators are trying to figure out what Iran got out of it: some sort of sanction relief, an exchange of prisoners unnamed, a diplomatic promise of one form or another. Seems to me Iran already got what it wanted. After a very public demonstration of the state of the prisoners, Iran decides, seemingly unilaterally, to release them in time for Easter. This is geopolitical posturing of High Order, and brilliant posturing at that. After making a grand show of standing up to the West, it releases the prisoners in a grander show of magnanimity. Hard as it is to believe, Iran has managed to seize the moral high-ground that the Brits and Yanks left so conspicuously unguarded.

Consider the carnivalesque dichotomy here established. The lasting image, especially in the Muslim world, of UK and US prisoners will be of them being tortured, humiliated and scorned; it'll be a macabre mosaic of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Saddam Hussein. The countries preaching most fervently about freedom and decency will be associated with confinement and abuse, and worse, justifying them. Iran, on the other hand, typically vilified for its repressiveness and authorised cruelty, ends up looking like a humanitarian state. While the West is associated with launching military strikes on holy days, like the start of Ramadan, Iran will be associated with the ostensibly generous observance of Western holy days, namely Easter. The West ends up looking aggressive, violent and hypocritical, especially as it tries to tamp down Iraqi insurgents; Iran ends up looking assertive, but civilised and direct. In short, it's the Bush administration's worst nightmare. It wanted-- needed, very badly-- Iran to behave provocatively, defiantly, despicably. It wanted Iran to demonstrate why it can't be trusted, why it can't be dealt with diplomatically. Instead, Iran gave the West exactly what it professed to want, and then some. In the battle of international perception, the West just took a very nasty hit: it now looks worse than Iran, and you can just imagine how this will play out in the international, and especially Muslim, presses. And worse, Iran will have claimed, however speciously, the moral high-ground not because the UK and especially the US ceded it. The whole thing's a fiasco, and the timing couldn't be worse.

On top of all the nuclear kafuffle, the Bush administration's very public denunciation of House Leader Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria portrays the American government as a bellicose bully that refuses all manner of civil negotiation. (Tony Blair doesn't come off too badly in all this, but he doesn't come off particularly well, either.) I suspect the Pelosi visit was supposed to be the Good Cop part to the Bushy Bad Cop in a diplomatic version of an old routine of dissociated engagement. But even if it wasn't a carefully orchestrated gesture, the American President now looks as obstructionist as he does obstinate, as frustrated (and frustratable) as he is fractious. Ahmadinejad didn't just outplay Bush here. He kneecapped him when he was already limping. The American government could ill-afford another weakening of its international credibility, especially on the so-called "Arab street," but Ahmadinejad managed to lure the President into yet another embarrassment. (He's known so many, you'd think the President would have learnt how to avoid them by now, but no one has ever said he was a quick study.) You can practically hear world leaders snickering to themselves, Methinks he dost protest too much. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad looks like a Shakespearean Duke whose surprising intervention suddenly makes things right.

Factually, of course, much of this is bollocks. Iran hasn't suddenly transformed into a tolerant state, and the West isn't the sneering villain twisting his mustache. But as the saw goes, politics is perception, and the mischaracterizing dichotomy has been established. It won't sell in the West, but in the parts of the world capable of influencing Iran on anything-- China, Russia-- and in those parts most suspicious of American policy-- Pakistan, various African and Middle Eastern states, and above all Iraq-- this will affirm their more cynical inclinations. Sure, it's all theatre, and disingenuous theatre at that. Alas, I expect it may well be more important how all this plays in Waziristan than in Warwickshire or West Chester, and in that regard the American President just got spanked, badly, by the political equivalent of a two-bit thug, who can now boast about how much more benevolently his country treats its prisoners than That Other Country does. And he will. You can count on it.

Then watch the world react as Bush and his gang prattle on about torture and state-sponsored terror, reaping as they will and already are the results of exceptionalism and equivocation. Worse Than Iran. Now that's the gift that keeps on giving.

Creaky Fryeday

Just some pointless points, assembled for no reason whatsoever:

• Glancing again over some of the fragments from the Northrop Frye notebooks, I'm reminded how eminently quotable the man was even when he wasn't trying to be. Here's one I'd love to see splattered all over the ALDaily or Chronicle pages:
  

  The 'publish or perish' syndrome created a variety of prefabricated formulas for enabling sterile scholars to become productive: they were aided by a recrudescence of the old myth-as-lie syndrome.
  

  One of these days, I'll publish (here, probably, where I have editorial control) the template for a publishable paper in the humanities. There are only three reasons why I haven't yet: 1) I'd have to put it into legible form, heaven forfend; 2) after releasing it, I'd likely be picked up and sent with the Simpsons and Patrick McGoohan to a mysterious island where I'd be drugged up daily with all the wrong bloody drugs; and 3) Dave Barry probably did a better job years ago than I ever would when he pithily remarked that the job of an English student is to prove that Moby-Dick is really about the Republic of Ireland. My template would spill the beans more methodically, but the end result's about the same.
  
  
• SiteMeter, among many other odd things, tells me that (by far) the most popular single entry on this blog is this one on Emily Dickinson. Every day for the past three or four weeks, I've been getting at least five visitors a day just for that very, very old post, and always without referrers (Google, &c.). Truly odd, and wish I knew why, though I have heard that apparently it has been quoted in at least one undergrad paper on Emily D. Go figure. I have the sneaking suspicion I may be the subject of some ridicule on a mailing list out there--- which is fine with me, since even I'd admit that post's a mental-mess. *shrug*
  
  
• Also from Frye:

  I think social feminism, genuine social & intellectuality between men & women, a centrally important issue. Feminist literary criticism is mostly heifer-shit. Women frustrated by the lack of outlet for their abilities turn to pedantic nagging, and the nagging pedantry of most feminist writing is a reflection of frustration unaccompanied by any vision of transcending it. As Newman resignedly said of English literature, it will always have been Protestant. Perhaps female (not feminist) writing has a great future, but that doesn't make its effort to rewrite the past any less futile.

  Ouch. (Or, as the Net-kind say: Ewwww, SNAP!!) I would probably agree with this, but I'm contractually barred from doing so publicly. But now you know why grad students read Frye like Soviets used to read Solzhenitsyn: under their bed-covers with a flashlight. Big Sister, after all, is watching, Big Brother long shut into permanent quietude, and Big Mama having ceased to care about such trifle years ago.
  
  
• Frye might not have had the chance to cameo in Annie Hall, but this guest appearance is funny. Especially since the illustrators obviously had no idea what Norrie looked like.
  
  
• The photographer here has one hell of an eye. Shot in question recalls some of those Catherine Deneuve-Nastassja Kinski pics that still look magnificent. The stunning young lass, of course, has nothing to do with it, even though she bears a striking resemblance to one of my exes.
  
  
• I wonder if I'm thinking so much about Frye because I've been bothered a bit lately by the lingering itch of a book in me. Not a dissertation, alas, but a book, though one more like Frye's Spiritus Mundi or Barthes' Mythologies than a sustained project. But writing always seems pointless, as I know all too well I'd inevitably rip the work asunder and toss the shreds into the dustbin. So many unwritten pieces, but none of them more than études. Meh.
  

The Prank On File

Some of you might find these videos amusing. Reminds me that when I was an undergradling, a female friend of mine decided to get my roommate back for something he had done. Being the twit that he was, I agreed to abet in the plan, which mostly consisted of letting said friend borrow my key to the room whilst I kept him occupied. Naughty lass had apparently collected a stack of even naughtier magazines, from which she clipped all of the, ahem, protruding parts. She then hid the clippings anywhere and everywhere she could: in drawers, in clothes, in books, in his bed, everywhere. Months later, he was still finding dismembered members-- though inserting so many into a book on Gandhi probably wasn't such a good idea.

The Blog's Official Nominee For The Nobel Prize

Because freedom fighters matter, dammit.

Warning: the following images may cause nausea and uncontrollable giddiness

Ever wonder what some of the worst album covers throughout history looked like? No? Oh...well, maybe these will change your mind:


As a testament to Dave's awesome power of rhyme, I'm going to be saying 'Devastatin' Dave, the turntable slave' all week in my head now and bursting into laughter.











No Julie, RUN! That skeezy drunk bastard is not planning to give you a pony for your birthday!














Finally, someone to show Britney how to get it back together and leave the boys panting.













Oh God, no! No, no, nooooooooooooooo....













More here (I think The Louvin Brothers one might be valuable if you happen to have it in your basement)!

All The World May Wonder

I finally got around to screening the much-ballyhooed 300 this weekend, and it seems to me a bizarre piece. As an out-and-out battlefield pic, it's a mediocre effort, all style and shot, with the requisite homages to Peckinpah and Jackson. That it's ultimately uninvolving is almost beside the point. It's so gloriously superficial, one might be tempted to overlook the particular demand superficiality requires: Analysis. For all of its apparent anti-intellectualism, the movie is most interesting as an intellectual exercise; it's so temptingly allegorical, one has to think twice about leaping to the automatic implications and consider matters more closely. The people for whom Xerxes is an icon of Arab-Persian hostility have it all wrong, I think, every bit as much as those who think the film's Leonidas some symbol Western of courage and bulwarkism. The allegory breaks down; the equivalencies falter. The allegorical dimensions, though, are fortified if read slightly differently. And here's where I make a perhaps absurd suggestion: that 300 may well prove to be the Al-Qaeda training film par excellence.

Think about it. Leonidas is a leader fed up with the corrupt priests (the ephoi) being bought off by the decadent Persians aligned with Spartan forces bent on consolidating their own power. Against this, Leonidas rallies a small force of true soldiers of Sparta for whom slaughter is glory, and the conquered dead emblems of righteous rebellion. The enemy? A gargantuan but inexplicably fey Xerxes, in command of the world's grandest armies and the most exotic and ostensibly terrifying weapons. But Xerxes' greatest weapon is neither: it's his capacity to corrupt, to provide wealth and power to those who bend to his will. Leonidas' heroism is rooted in his refusal to submit, and his resistance by most determined violence that's justified as part of a great martyrdom to awaken an otherwise complacent Spartan society to stand against the Great Evil. Sound familiar?

Follow the quadrations and the suggestion becomes bizarre: Leonidas as Bin Laden, the ephoi the Saudi and other Arab governments in bed with the enemy, and Xerxes the ineffectual Bush in command of all the great weapons of the world. The three-hundred, then, are Al-Qaeda, experts of death, staving off the intrusion of a foreign force that's fundamentally perverse-- and against which any act is justifiable and necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I don't for a second think the filmmakers intend us to read the film this way, but I suspect that's how it will be read in some quarters, especially since the allegory, as they say, holds the reading; that is, it allows it, and even unintentionally encourages it. In this way, 300 may speak to a different part of the zeitgeist than anyone in the Western world may want. 300's Persia isn't really Persia, much less contemporary Iran: it's the great world power, it's the United States, with its tentacles everywhere. If 300 becomes a kind of message-picture, I suspect that around the world it won't say what its creators meant it to say. In a film devoid of irony, that of course would be become the great irony.

But 300 offers another kind of contemporary reflection. It's a film that casts violence in video-game terms, every death an artful spatter, every character a cipher. Its intonations are declarative, its characters entirely without nuance. If any film in recent years has rejected irony so firmly, it's this one, and it may (as Star Wars did in the late 70s) signal a shift away from the would-be realisms of doubt and complication. The movie essays a kind of Homeric heroism at which even Homer baulked, but which intensifies the vicariousness of the heroic tale in the same way a video game does: it welcomes you to the killing spree, and you participate without question.

In this way, it may indicate something that I think has been coming for some time, ironic-fatigue. Whether or not that's a good thing, I'm not sure. As Mr Wilde once warned, those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril; but as Mr Eliot has also noted, art of the surface can also be the art of great caricature. Maybe audiences really are yearning for spectacle without complication, as a moribund cultural fatuity inures itself. (Let's see how Grindhouse does.) And yet, the anti-ironic often becomes, with time, more ironic than the most duplicitous satire. (Right, Mr Cheney?) Consider it a reminder of the old lesson that one man's hero is another man's terrorist-- or should that be insurgent? Consider it a reminder too that art of the surface presents itself at its own peril, and just as often to its own detriment.