Upsetdate

Okay, Lord only know how many hours later, but it seems-- seems, Madam, I know not seems-- I have finally won my battle against the stubbornly evil Windows monster. Almost a dozen reinstallations later, after hours & hours & hours of consulting Microflaccid's endlessly unhelpful "support pages," and just as many trudging through various internet fora trying to fix the problem, it seems everything is finally working again. What ultimately made the difference? This neat little gizmo which, among other things, did a complete check on potentially corrupted or out-of-date files (which, naturally, worked days ago), figured out the update gobbledygook, and reset all the ridiculous permissions that Windows arbitrarily and inexplicably imposes when it gets bitchy. Takes forever for it to plod through everything, but eventually it does work--- which is faaaaaar more than I can say for any of the official tips from the Gates gang of profligate bafflegabbers. Something to remember if any of you wind up in the unfortunate position of having to reinstall pre-Vista Windblows.

I'm now exhausted. Passionate-shag-in-a-tornado exhausted. And yet I feel I accomplished nothing. All that just to get back to where I was before, and not a spot better-off. Reminds me of grad school.... (And every bit as rewarding.)

Somehow, You Can't Imagine The Church of England Behaving Like This

If you're in North America, all you probably heard about today-- before Reverent Teletubby's passing-- was the Church of Scientology's YouTube attempts to expose the insidious nature of the report done on it by the BBC's John Sweeney for Panorama. Well, you can watch the report here, and you can judge for yourselves who's right and who's wrong, or some complex admixture in-between. May also be worth casting a glance at the comments here: The Guardian's position is clearly to knock Sweeney, but the audience's response strikes me as constituting a pretty sharp rebuke to it.

Now, given room for editing-- that Sweeney may well have, and in fact probably did at least somewhat, reframe things for his own purposes-- I can't blame Sweeney for exploding. I, with very little doubt, would probably have clocked the malignant little twerp, repeatedly and bloodily, until my knuckles turned into something roughly akin to melted cheese. But maybe that's just me....

I hesitate, only slightly however, to note that, historically, most of the major religions have done exactly the same stuff the CofS seems to be doing. (Can we say Torquemada, boys and girls? I knew you could.) And yet we call them "religions," some of us much more reluctantly than others.

New Rules

Bill Maher (see also here) comes up with his every week, so now & again maybe I'll come up with a few of my own. Heed them as you will, even if mine aren't half as funny:

• One Step Forward, Duceppe's Back: If you're going to decide to run for political office, don't change your mind a day later. Seriously, Gilles, your candidacy's now the stuff of Britneyesque legend, that equally comical icon of separation anxiety-- except her flirtations last longer.
  

• A Little Blow In The Can: Friends don't let friends take pictures of them snorting coke in a bathroom so they can be posted online for the tittersome edification of computer-bound cultural onanists. (Insert your own down-Lo download jokes here.) Let this be a new rule for ladies: Don't go to the can with your so-called friends! Or, if you must: Don't let them into your god-damned stall. Or, if you really really must have them into that bastion of personal privacy: Tell them to keep their mother-effing camera-phones off! Sheesh. You'd think the star of Mean Girls would have learned something from the experience. Men, by the way, if the recent news is any indication, should never, ever, say anything to their daughters except, "Yes, sweetheart. You're not recording this, are you?"
  

• The Gap: Poker commentators have to stop saying that players are "open-ended." Their hands may be, but unless there's something we don't know, the players probably aren't. At least not at that moment, anyway. (We hope.)
  

• Caveat Lecter: Anthony Hopkins has to stop playing murderers. He's done the shtick to, um, death: the seething glare, the menacing intonations, the smarmy smiles. Like Laurence Olivier, he has now reached the stage where every performance is a caricature of a previous one, and Hannibal Lecter's the pretext for most of them. Also much like Olivier, Hopkins has mellowed into the class-for-cash actor in Hollywood, the token British Thesp whose presence ostensibly, and ergo automatically, lends legitimacy to a project. Instead, he has become the film version of a high-end whore, and I'm just waiting for him to end up hawking fava beans and Chianti as Olivier did Polaroids.
  

• Tsk-y Business: Relatedly, if you finally get nominated for an Oscar, for God's sake, don't follow it up with a discarded Tom Cruise joint. Ryan ("My-Surname-Is-Not-Indicative") Gosling's option into Fracture suggests he needed cash, fast, and it's a trying shame watching him play the callow would-be legal-superstar who has to go through the oh-so-Cruisy too-damned-cocky-for-his-own-good path-to-redemption plot. (By a silly technicality that a first-year law-student would have caught, no less. So much for the superstar bit.) If you're a young actor building credibility in Hollywood, don't rush to destroy it by doing someone else's cast-off crap. Just ask Halle Berry.
  

• Matter and Impertinency Mixed, or Here Comes The Knight: And lastly, scholars have to stop acting like needy, approval-desperate politicians.
  
  I've recently been reading through Michael Taylor's blandly but aptly titled Shakespeare Criticism In The Twentieth Century, and have subsequently been reminded, as if I needed it, what a piss-pot of intellectual churlishness criticism so often is. When it's not ridiculously acolytical, it's sneeringly ahistorical and bizarrely Oedipal, as critics seem preternaturally compelled to assail most viciously their most significant forerunners. It's an anxiety of influence, and an imperious one at that, as they smirk with Commodian disapproval at the work of greater minds largely for show. It's the classic case of scholarly communities slaughtering onetime sun-gods for their own survival, and then slaughtering them time and time again out of agonistic habit. To this day, few scholars-- and God knows there are enough of them-- have contributed as much to the study of Shakespeare as A.C. Bradley, or G. Wilson Knight, or Caroline Spurgeon; and yet, they're the figures most likely (still!) to be attacked, reduced, vilified and generally dismissed. (So too C.L. Barber, Frank Kermode, T.S. Eliot and Helen Vendler, among others.) Translation: Go after the Big Guys, especially the dead ones. It'll show how smart and enlightened you are. And implicitly, how superior you must be, you with your darlingly contemporary thought!
  
  Well, balls. It demonstrates pettiness, righteousness, and fundamental weakness at the intellectual core. It's one thing to engage and to challenge intellectual and critical tradition; it's quite another to make your own name by belittling more Protean thinkers for your own aggrandizement. So where's the New Rule, you're asking. Here it is: Make your name in your own bloody terms. We remember Marcus Aurelius for his imperial legacy, including the Meditations; we remember Commodus, if we do, only as the guy who came after and did an appropriately craptacular job in the same position. Nigglesome disputation seldom accomplishes anything. Inspiration, breadth of vision, sincere negotiation with the lessons of the past: these qualities more usually do. It's one thing to want to make new tracks in the snow, to use one of Taylor's metaphors. It's quite another, however, to piss on the tracks left by others with much bigger boots. And it's pointless: those tracks are still there, and now they've had human highlighters taken to them in most odious fashion.
  
  Call me antiquated or old-fashioned, but what's so wrong with giving credit where credit's due? I reread Bradley and Knight at least once a year, regardless of need, because they're still worth reading. Can I say the same of most of the scholarship written in the past twenty or thirty years? Not even close. Most of it, in fact, barely warrants a preliminary glance, largely because it's predictable, cluttered and rigorously half-coherent. It's also painfully dull, and when combined with that ingracious and tendentious sniggering that's all-too-typical of the genre, I feel little remorse in tossing it so casually aside. It's the classic contradictional scenario, as historicists gladly de-historicize (how's that for tortured language?), and arbiters of intellectual tolerance practise everything but. But respect? Natch. Let's just say it's more common in the breach than in the observance.

It Also Applies To Jerry Falwell

Shamelessly lifted from Christie, but it's always nice to be able to explain complex human processes with simple equations.

Paging Helen Lovejoy

Once again, society is bedeviled by the dangers of eye-rhyme. Bedeviled, we tell you, bedeviled! Will someone PLEASE think of the children!!!

Seriously, if the campaign offends you, it says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about the campaign: specifically, that you're (probably) a self-righteous, ululating prig with nothing better to do with your much too ample time. In other words, you're a card-carrying member of the School of Injurement, and you desperately need to get a motherflicking life.

FOLLOWUP: Reminder from Leonard Cohen: "There are no dirty words-- ever." Except maybe ululate. That word just sounds kinky.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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. )