Further experiments into veganism

I made this up the other night and even the leftovers are so good that I have to share. I mean, even my dad liked it and he's a vociferous and confirmed carnivore.

Marjorie's Lentils Provencal (-ish)

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic
12 oz chopped cremini mushrooms
3/4 cup white wine
1 1/2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp dried basil
2 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp rosemary
1/2 tsp paprika
salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste
1 lb pre-cooked green lentils
1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
2 cups flash-frozen spinach leaves

Heat olive oil in a large pan. Saute garlic until fragrant. Add the chopped mushrooms and mix well to coat with oil. Saute until the mushrooms release their liquid, then add the white wine. Bring to a simmer and add all the herbs, paprika, salt, pepper and lentils. As it begins to dry out, add the stock a little at a time. When the whole thing is heated through, add the frozen spinach leaves and let them melt directly into the lentils, et al. Let it simmer for about 10 minutes and serve. Delicous! I promise!

A Laughable Contest

OK, so, I know this is only going to be a test of how truly paltry my readership really is. But, I have a new car and *it* (*it* will remain non-gender-specific until appropriate nomenclature is determined) needs a name. My old car was kinda champagne-colored, and because my last name is "Wine," it was only logical that its (it remained un-gendered for the duration of its lifetime) name was "Sparklin'."

The new car is silver. It does not have a cracked transmission case and--this is the best part--the "check engine" lamp isn't even ON!!! That's really all you need to know. Have at it. Name away!

Look at it this way: because so few people read this blog, and even fewer still are going to actually submit a name for consideration, your chances of winning are tremendous!

The prize will be, uh, a congratulatory mention on this very blog. And if I like the winner, and the winner lives within a reasonable proximity to my person, I will also hug the winner. What more could you want?

OK, I'm gonna go ahead and rule out "Poopsy." "Sugar-tits" is still in contention, though. As is "Hagelian Dialectic."

(Nobody call my car "Poopsy," OK?)

the last frontier of disempowerment

There's one big hole in my fully-functioning-adult training. And at the bottom of this hole, you'll find everything to do with cars, including, but not limited to, changing tires, driving a stick, figuring out where to take a car that isn't working, describing car noises, knowing how to not get ripped off by people who know a hell of a lot more about cars than I do, buying a new car, and being able to name, on sight, a single solitary item that lives under the hood of a car. I attribute this dirth of knowledge to two things: a) the relationship I had with my father when I was a teenager and b) that fact that my father is really smart about cars. On the first point, the process of passing knowledge from father to daughter was often quite contentious when I was younger. I'd get bored and he'd get impatient and he'd wind up swearing aloud, while I swore silently in my head. And then I moved away and so-called "teaching moments" became fewer and further in between. The upshot of that is that Fred and I haven't had a screaming match in some years! Most days, in fact, I find that he's pretty good company. And a fine fellow, to boot! And on the second point, well, when your dad is so GOOD at taking care of such things for you, it makes your learning how to do it yourself somewhat unnecessary.

I bring this up because, today, I learned that my transmission case is cracked (does that make sense to someone? Because I really don't know what it means), I need new brake pads and rotors (I could have SWORN I just got new ones, like, 3 years ago! You have to do that every three years??? That's, like, a lot!), and several of my emissions-related sensors are blown and in need of replacement. All in all, they tell me that I need to spend $3300 in order to get my car to pass Virginia safety and emissions standards. My car is already 10 years old and not worth anywhere near that sum. And so, today, Super Fred sprung to action and managed to, in exceptionally short order, procure another car for me. See? For what purpose do I need to learn anything? I've got this amazing dad! Meanwhile, of course, my old, hobbling, sad car is paid off. And now I've got friggin' car payments, like every other American young adult on the planet. Blech!

Now, I've chosen to write a post about all this for only one reason. Car issues scare the crap out of me and make me feel like a totally helpless female person, straight out of a generation other than my own. There are not too many things that make me feel anything other than self-sufficient, but when my car freaks out, I, too, freak out. On one hand, I hate having to have a car in the first place. I feel crappy about myself and call myself a hypocrite every time I put gas in one, because I'm hyper-aware that I'm contributing to the war effort. And global climate change. And the depletion of natural resources. And, pretty much, everything about being a car owner operates in direct opposition to my most core values. But dammit, I'd have to get up two hours earlier if I were gonna take the freakin' metro/bus into work every morning. And I already get up at 6 AM! Owning a car is, for the time being, a necessary evil. And I mean it when I say "evil."

But the truth is, I'm wholly at the mercy of anyone who knows more about cars than I do. And it seems, until now, I've always managed to live with or near someone who is smart about cars-- or at least presents a convincing lesbian tough-girl front when necessary. And in this way, I find that, at thirty years of age, I'm hopelessly ripe for victimization, both at the auto repair shop and at the car dealership. And this is the case sheerly because of my own negligence on this front.

So, because I'm somewhat disinclined to sign up of a class in basic auto mechanics at any point in the near future, I'm going to issue forth a tremendously retrogressive request to the cosmos: Dear Cosmos, please send me a beau who, not only has read some or all of the books on my previously posted reading list, but also knows lots about cars. In my next life, I promise I'll take that auto-repair course. Regardless of whether I have a vagina or penis in that next life. I promise.

Dear Cosmos, please don't take me up on that last promise.

Dear Cosmos, P.S. Please note. Make sure that afore-requested beau does not place undue value or any amount of his/her self-worth in his/her own car. Driving a fancy car does not make for a good suitor of me. Such attitudes make me want to vomit a little. Preferably in said fancy car.

Who's more self-important--me or David Lynch?

A handful of my friends think David Lynch in as asshole who makes annoying, inaccessible, masturbatory art for the simple purpose of entertaining himself. This same handful of friends think I'm quite pretentious because I'll admit to getting a kick out of Lynch's inaccessible and masturbatory films. It's not as though I claim to actually understand them. I'm just intrigued by the ride, really. Yeah, I, like everybody else, have a theory about what happened in Mulholland Drive (a theory about which I'm pretty convinced I'm right-- and, no, it's NOT the one in which the first half is a fantasy and the second half is real--how could a plotline as mundane as THAT have come out of a brain like Lynch's?), but I would never purport to actually have access to any authentic Lynchian machinations. It's just that I like stuff that's not easy. And I like stuff that alienates me a little-- or rather, bewilders me and hence, opens up some heretofore unknocked-upon portal in my own mind. This is why I'll also go see Matthew Barney films in the theatre and why I'll spend a good chunk of my film-festival time watching experimental student shorts. But anyway, while I do think that Lynch's films are, for the most part, designed to be in conversation with Lynch himself, rather that with any other audience in particular, I happen to think that whatever this muck is that keeps pouring out of him happens to be pretty interesting muck. I also happen to marvel at the fact that something as downright oddball as Twin Peaks actually aired on prime time television. And for that alone, I'm willing to declare Lynch an aesthetic hero of mine.

Yep, you've probably guessed it. Inland Empire is now out of DVD. And as you may have heard, it's three flippin' hours of Lynchian muck, shot on cheap, poor quality DV, as opposed to celluloid. For the most part, the film is pretty ugly. Imagine The Blair Witch Trial, but with decent acting and no plot. Or, maybe, 40 plots that are only tenuously connected. Or two plots that continually fracture. Or one plot as seen through a psychotic subjective point-of-view. Or, really, actually, kinda... no plot, after all. And no chopped liver. Truly, this movie doesn't have the lushness of Lynch's previous films, but something in his exploration of this new technological medium gives Inland Empire a rare immediacy. It's as though, in this haunted, moody meandering, Lynch has removed the polish inherent in real film and has replaced it with a home movie of the insides of Laura Dern's character's, Nikki Grace's, head.

Folks have been proclaiming the death of cinematography since this digital technology first creeped into the marketplace. And someday, it may, indeed, become the lingua franca of visuality-in-motion. However, regardless of whether or not this is "good" or "bad" for filmmaking, Lynch seems to have commandeered the medium and, truly, was able to accomplish some stuff I've not yet seen. More than anything else, Laura Dern's tortured, Modigliani-esque face is the subject of this film. From creepy up-the-nose shots, to distorted, fun-house-mirror images, never before have I seen an actress be asked to show so much of her own ugliness. And Lynch is known for pushing beautiful women to a point at which the audience begins to wonder where the laying-bare of acting ends and where the degradation of humanity begins. (Let's all recall Naomi Watts' masturbation scene in Mulholland Drive--as she tells it, she wasn't supposed to be crying. Lynch kept pushing her to the point where her humiliation must've been quite real.) There is one scene in which Nikki is watching herself through a window (just go with it-- in this film, there are multiple dimensions and metaphysical doppelgangers galore). She appears to be picking her way, on her long toothpick legs, around the walled edge of some sort of back yard or garden. As she nears the camera, her face full of red lips, chimp-looking teeth and horrified eyes swells to fill the screen before you. It's terrifying and you're not quite sure why because there does not seem to be reason for such terror. It's like your lover, looming up out of bed at you, suddenly, after you've shared a bad dream. It's so fast and so intimate. Again, I've not quite seen anything like it in film before. Probably because it couldn't happen, were such a thing to be attempted, within the inevitable remove of film.

Aside from the visual curiosity embodied by this movie, Lynch's score is a big part of what carries this film. Other than a couple of humorously chosen old familiar standards (Etta James' "At Last", the original "Locomotion," by Little Eva...) and an excellent placement of Beck's "Black Tambourine," most of the noise you hear throughout is Lynch's, with the help of Angelo Badalamenti. What's crazy about the score is that it's all absolutely relentless suspense movie music. It builds and builds and crescendos and... and... and...then the scene changes and it starts over again. While there are, actually, moments of heightened drama within this utter absence of linearity, the music, which is most filmmakers' most reliable method of cuing the audience, functions here as yet another disorienting device.

Actually, I would argue that the whole thing is something of an exercise in cinematic device operation. If Lynch were a painter, he'd doubtlessly be an abstract expressionist. In the way that abstract expressionist paintings are about paint on canvas, his movies are about movieness. Sure, he throws a bone in the direction of "meaning" every now and again. Here's his description of the film: "It's about a woman in distress." Dern says she played Nikki as though she were devolving into psychosis. Personally, I find his explanation to be the truer one in its nonchalance. Dern could have played her any way she pleased and Lynch's camera angles and everlasting-dread melodies would have made the film into a film "about a woman in distress."

This is not to say, by any means, that Dern's performance is anything short of astounding. She changes physical locale, accent, clothing, socio-economic class, hairstyle, and plane of existence in virtually every scene. Despite Lynch's every attempt to leave us stranded, at every turn, in some inter-synaptic storm of his own making, Dern's focus is the specter and dark heart of the anti-narrative. It's just that, ultimately, Inland Empire is not a movie "about a woman in distress." It's a movie about being a movie. And I would say that even if it weren't, incidentally, full of deadpan Hollywood commentary. I say "incidentally, " because the Hollywood setting and characters whose occupations happen to be acting and directing are ultimately not that important. Why would they be when there are so many creepy surfaces to explore?

Now, it's true that Lynch has creates an unremitting and pervasive ambiance of menacing dread in this film. But it's also true that Lynch is funny in this way in which you're not ENTIRELY sure he knows he's funny. I mean, what IS David Bowie doing standing in that hallway in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? And the man himself.... good god. If you've ever heard him try to relay some narrative, he's probably the most boring storyteller, even with that nasal mid-Western accent and that wild hair, on the planet, but you can't help but listen because you can't help but think he's amusing himself by testing his audience to see how much prattle they can take.

So, while the majority of Inland Empire pours out of your TV screen like so much green, ominous fog, there are still a few choice moments during which Lynch's weirdness just becomes funny. Midway through the film, Nikki somehow acquires a Greek chorus of hot, languorous chicks. One flashes her tits while the others admire them (let's not forget Lynch likes tits a lot. A lot.). Three of these girls snap their fingers and say, "You gotta swing your hips, now," in what seems to be a totally random reference until, two or three minutes later, the entire chorus launches into a full-out line dance to "Locomotion." While Nikki stares at them in dismayed disbelief, you wonder, am I mimicking Nikki, or is she mimicking me, little anonymous audience member that I am? And Jeremy Irons (*swoon*) plays a self-important film director who appears to have a relationship with irony that is as obscured as Lynch's own. How is any of that stuff not funny?

Interestingly, though, Lynch's tiny pin-pricks of poker-faced fun do not function as comic relief. They do not, in any way, mediate Nikki's sensations of impending doom. In fact, because they make so little narrative sense, they only serve as more layers of labyrinthine disorientation. Really, it's not until we get to the closing credits that Lynch lets up on us at all. And the closing credits are NOT to be missed. They're a director's send-up to, uh, himself--full of references to the Lynch oeuvre in general (Dern wears a blue velvet dress (no scissors, thanks!), there's a capuchin monkey a la Twin Peaks, Laura Elena Harring from Mulholland shows up...). Beyond that, the scene this great celebration in which the Greek chorusgirls-cum-prostitutes dance while another woman lip-syncs into the camera to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman." One might question the choice of ending the film in this manner if it didn't provide such desperately needed release. You've just sat through three solid hours of dream-scape-like anxiety and you're not sure whether or not you've trusted the directorial eye for a single second of it. So then, you get a party at the end! What's better than that?

Watching DVD extras, that's what! This DVD comes with a whole second disk of extras. I can't really, in good conscience, recommend that you sit through them. I did, of course--just call me Pandora. If you, too, are oft goaded into doing things against your better judgement by your bald-faced curiosity, please allow me to make a few suggestions. The "deleted scenes" section, entitled "Other Things That Happened," will make you feel grateful Lynch deleted them. You see Dern in a pink fuzzy bathrobe. You watch Dern take out the kitchen trash. You see some footage of some torches around a pool. You see some footage of some lamps (the lamp image is a recurring one with indeterminate meaning in the film proper). You see a couple of the chorusgirls playing with a toy flying saucer. None of it will grant you sudden enlightenment about the film. Sudden enlightenment is not to be had. Move on.

I will, however, recommend the little film short entitled "Quinoa." Yeah, it's the most boring 20 minutes you may ever spend. Except that it's so friggin' funny! Quite literally, it's Lynch narrating the process of cooking some quinoa with broccoli and then eating it while his camera guy watches through the lens. This isn't like Robert Rodriguez' film short in which he teaches us how to make puerco pibil (DEEE-licious! My brother made it!) in the extras on Once Upon a Time in Mexico. This is, "You take out the pot. You pour a little quinoa into a measuring cup. If you get to much, you pour some back. You get a paper towel because the pan lid is too hot..." all the way up until, "You get out a spoon and take it into the dining room to eat." The fact that Lynch thought people would actually want to watch this kinda stuff just cracks me up. I mean, nobody could possibly be so self-important as to assume people will give one shit or two, right? Right? See, this is what I mean by not quite being able to tell of Lynch is in on the joke or not. Regardless, I was perfectly scandalized to watch him scrape out the bottom of his lovely Viking pot with a little paring knife. Mr. Lynch, I know you've got plenty of money, but can you please take better care of your cookware?

Also in the extras was a little film of a ballerina dancing to the creepy score of the movie. She danced in and out of what I suspect was a digitally-derived fog. The music remains creepy. I have no idea for how long she dances because, by this point, I'd sat through 5+ hours of Lynchian madness and I needed to go to bed. However, if you do watch this particular DVD extra, I suggest doing so during a massive thunderstorm, such as what we had last night here in northern Virginia. It lent drama to the piece. And by that time, I was in need of excitement.

So, no, Inland Empire isn't going to wind up being a favorite of any of my aforementioned nay-saying and name-calling friends. I realize this stuff isn't for everyone. But really? Do I have to call myself out on being pretentious AGAIN just because I actually see value in wallowing in this weird man's cranial matter every now and again? I call myself an egotist all the damn time in this blog. Can't we let me off the hook this time?

And for those of you who are afraid I've spoiled the experience for you, never fear. There are so many more oddities awaiting you in this film that you'll quickly realize I've barely scratched the surface of description here. Enjoy the rabbits. That's all I'll say.

Rape prevention, bio-diverse mate selection and funny-looking private parts in the animal kingdom

It seems I've strayed from my path of writing about movies a little bit lately. I will doubtlessly be back on course pretty soon, but in the meantime, I continue to scan the internet for curious little nodes of interest. For example, a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this article, complete with porn-for-ducks. I don't have a hell of a lot to say about it, except that I was intrigued, and that probably makes me weird. Surprised?

So, then, a couple of days ago, I found another article of a similar ilk.

Seriously, though. Aren't the lengths a body will go to do its part in ensuring the continuation of a species just plain remarkable? I mean, all I do is wear sexy shoes and expand my lipgloss collection on a regular basis. If I had to grow a corkscrew vagina or a psuedo-penis in order to make sure my babies were healthy, I'm not sure I'd be up for the job.

Cheers to you, ducks and hyenas! Thanks for doing your share to maintain diversity within the gene pool. And also for setting such inspiring examples of the benefits of consensual sex.

when solipsism taps into the cultural moment

Most days, I assume my long, ranting posts about bizarro-feminism-- and whatever other topics I decide deserve rants--have nothing to do with anything except, well, me. But then I stumble upon little articles like this one. It seems other people are using suits as metaphors, too! And then there's this article, which is even more specifically about Hillary Clinton's tits.

And though Hillary's toe-dip into the wonderful world of skin displays isn't new news, I guess that I just find it a little serendipitous that I'm not the only one getting in trouble for what I wear to work. I mean, I would never deny that there is a particular symbology to women's clothing. Nor would I fail to note that the clothing a woman wears speaks volumes about her. Whether or not appearances should matter, they do...and so, why not openly acknowledge that they do?

I particularly like this excerpt from the latter article:"Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn't necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed." In my mind this last sentence here is of primary importance. This notion that a woman who is comfortably sexual takes it for granted that she'll be accepted as intelligent is so very fundamental.

Anyway, these articles speak for themselves. Please read them. I've already done plenty of yammering on about my clothes and my frustrations about the sexy/smart dichotomy and how I don't think it should be perceived as a dichotomy at all. I'm currently just enjoying the fact that my obsessions--and my blog--reflect their age. As well they should.

If they're the future, Fourth-Wavers can eat me!

Several times in recent posts, I've invoked the term "third-wave feminism," and then committed one of the cardinal sins of critical writing--I didn't stop to define my terminology. So, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Third-wavers. This definition is somewhat more academic and historical than the one that has somewhat congealed in my head. This line ("Third wave feminism seeks to challenge any universal definition of femininity.") comes closest to what I mean when I use the term. But more specifically, inherent in the idea is that a woman should have to concede neither her desires to act and appear outwardly feminine and sexual, or not, nor her desires to be treated equitably in the workplace/classroom/mechanic's station/bank account/board room in order to gain anyone's respect and be free from harassment. In other words, my basic conception of third-wave feminism is that I don't want to have to behave like a man (i.e., live up to a standard of maleness) in order to achieve whatever the goals I set for my life might be. Obviously, the concept is inclusive of much more than this--honoring the experiences of minority women who, not only have to contend with a male standard, but also a white standard, the attempts to reclaim some dirty words (I would argue, however, that we have been less successful than the queers on this front, as "queer" is now a generally acceptable term in polite company, but "cunt" (which etymologically, and ironically, means "sacred cave" (thank you, Jen!)) is not), widespread global activism, etc., etc., etc. But when I use it, I mean to describe women who want to be simultaneously taken seriously as functioning contributors to the culture and taken seriously as sexual beings (not objects-- we'd like to maintain our agency, thank you! Though, it seems, we're still working out the kinks in our sometimes contentious relationship with that "male gaze" business) in whatever way we choose to express our sexuality.

In contrast to this concept, of course, is the second-wave. And while the second-wave laid much of the necessary groundwork for my generation of girl-power-proponents, the problem with their ideology can be easily summarized within the symbol of The Power Suit. This unfortunate item of apparel hit its stride somewhere in the 80s, I guess. Its notable characteristics include massive shoulder pads, wide, boxy jacket style and a complete obfuscation of the female form shivering beneath it. As a free gift with purchase, buyers of power suits received a cold and heartless persona that was supposed to be "manly" (men, if you aren't every bit as offended by that set of assumptions as I am, I'm inclined to feel a little ashamed of you). However, included in the price of the suit was the woman's ownership of her own sexual place in the world. Buy the suit, become an asexual automaton. Quite a deal! Off course, all this hearkens back to my post in which I whined about being chided for my own clothing choices at every job I've ever had. Not every woman wants to be as outwardly feminine as I do, but the ideas that a)I won't be taken seriously as a professional if I am outwardly feminine and b)I am somehow threatening to men? other women? the very foundations of American corporate culture? if I refuse to conceal my sexual persona is an intensely frustrating holdover from second-wave thinking. Hence, I've lit my third-wave torch and will wave it frantically for as long as I can.

And then along comes Wendy Shalit, proclaiming the emergence of the Fourth Wave. First she wrote A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue and now she's just released Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. To be fair, I don't have much of an intention to read either one of these books. But I did enjoy this pointed review of the latter book. As Deborah Siegel notes in this article, Shalit tries to blame permissive baby-boomer parents for the oversexualization of women of my generation and younger. I really don't want to discuss five-year-olds who dress up like my girl Britney--that stuff doesn't fit too well into my discussion here. But honestly, I think Shalit's idea is hilarious. I know my parents never really set arbitrary rules for me, and whatever consequences I incurred from assorted teenage missteps were real-world consequences, rather than the I-told-you-not-to-do-that-but-you-did-anyway-and-now-you're-grounded variety of punishment. My parents were not big on the "Because I said so/because I'm the parent and you are the hierarchically disadvantaged child" variety of discipline. Given, I got in trouble very rarely. I was not rebellious in any of the normal ways and so, I was probably difficult to punish. Seeing as I spent virtually EVERY weekend of my adolescence alone in my room reading, grounding me would hardly have carried the penal weight that it would have for most kids.

So what were they to do when I acted like a smartass? Well, more often than not, my mom would laugh and applaud my spunk. It's not like they were gonna force me to, I dunno, attend football games with hordes of other teenagers-- which would have been a truly miserable experience for me. But I do recall a conversation with my father (he denies recollection of this event), when I was about 15, in which he told me that, in this day and age, when there is so little social stigma against premarital sex, it was absolutely ridiculous for a person to wait until they've committed to a marriage before they discover whether or not they're sexually compatible with their partner of choice. The stereotypical protective-of-his-only-daughter dad, Fred is not-- in any way, shape, or form! In later years, his lack of protectiveness has led him to giving my phone number out to a stalker, but that's another story for another post. Suffice it to say, having a dad who so believes that his daughter is fully capable of taking care of herself is mostly really great-- and great for my self-esteem-- but every once in a while, it would be nice to have a firewall in place to guard against the crazies.

But were my parents permissive? I don't know. I didn't really get into enough trouble to test them. Was their permissiveness the reason that I've gone to some lengths to sexualize myself? In some ways, perhaps-- but only because they respected me and knew that, from a very young age, I have tended to make decisions based on what I actual want, as opposed to in opposition to arbitrary rules. And for the most part, I'm sculpted my sexual persona into the exact shape I find most suiting to me. Thank you, Mom and Fred, for granting me the freedom to make my own decisions! And for respecting the fact that I'm neither an idiot nor defenseless, such that I might need excessive sheltering.

Now, this is not to say that arbitrary rules don't piss me off. They do, but I'd rather deconstruct them and understand them than to haphazardly rebel against them. So, did my baby-boomer parents undermine my self-esteem by not issuing forth an edict that I was never, never, never allowed to have sex? Um. No. If you've met me, you can probably determine that this is far from the case. The fact that owning my sexuality is empowering for me pretty much shits all over Shalit's notion that being sexual equals being insecure.

And what a cockamamie idea it is! Shalit's real underlying assumption here-- the one I find so problematic-- is the one that insists women always use sex as a commodity, ripe for trading. In Shalit's world order, sex is what women give in exchange for diamonds, houses, cars, babies, security/stability (financial? emotional?), monogamy, external approbation (love of another), intimacy (in opposition to solitude), jobs, raises, cold hard cash. I mean, if women were to view sex as a satisfactory and appealing end unto itself, rather than trying to employ it in some misguided bartering system, why would being sexual make us feel bad about ourselves? If we give sex and expect any one or all of the things from my list above, and don't receive them, well, yeah, that feels lousy. If we give sex and expect, um, sex in return, well? Then we've made a pretty good deal, haven't we? In effect, Shalit is calling us all whores when she insists that casual sex leads to demoralization-- because, really, demoralization only arises when one party feels his/her end of the deal wasn't upheld, and that only happens when something expected was not granted. So, Shalit's "return to modesty" really means "own your inner prostitute." Uh, thanks, Wendy.

I'm also quite perturbed at Shalit's notion that sexual abstinence equates with goodness. This, of course, pisses me off because, here we are, right back at moralizing about sex. People who have sex are not bad. People who kill, steal, manipulate, lie, eat babies, poke their dogs in the eyes, drive Hummers, eat nothing but fast food, lie to the American public about the existence of nuclear devices are bad. Ah, crap. Even I can't say that with any conviction. People who do those things engage in immoral acts, in my opinion. I do not think they are correlatively bad people. But my point is, these are ACTUAL immoral acts. Fucking someone hurts no one, burns calories, hopefully ends in orgasms for both, and is fun. Where's the immorality there? Of course, I'm already granting the fact that this illustrative fuck is occurring without anyone expecting something more tangible than said orgasm in return. If one party promises something and reneges after the fuck, well, then, yes, a small morally questionable event has occurred. But the sex itself? Why is it that a sexually active girl with a bullet-proof sense of honesty and integrity still cannot be a good girl, by Shalit's definition? Because she presupposes that all women use sex as a commodity, that's why! And using sex as a commodity is, in my world order and in Shalit's, immoral. So. Now, I know this seems obvious but, um...girls, why don't we just stop using sex as a commodity? Hey, problem solved! No more moralizing about sex, right? Well, no...

Shalit, instead, opts for coining the term "Fourth-Wave Feminist" to denote she who is a prude-- um, I mean, she who "feels oppressed by how public sexuality is." Siegel cites, in a positive light, Shalit's congratulatory description of girls who organized a "girlcott" of some silly Abercrombie t-shirts. (The example given is one that reads "Who needs brains when you have these?") And I think this kinda willingness to get offended over something so goofy is, again, distinctly disempowering. I personally find shirts like that to be hysterically funny. If one so small-breasted and verbally bombastic as myself were to wear such a shirt, I would think that the ironic re-appropriation of the message would be worth its weight in feministic gold! The thin-skinned-ness of the sort of activism Shalit is applauding is so counter-productive and encourages girls to seek out ways in which the culture at large wants to victimize them and then camp out in that place. Beyond that, one of the really brilliant tactics Wikipedia credits third-wavers for instituting was that very re-appropriation of the language that had previously oppressed us. Has Shalit missed all the lessons of the post-modern era? Are we now so ensconced in the Post-Ironic Age that we can no longer see how there is power to be in had in turning dirty words on their heads and claiming them as our own?

Please tell me that, if we are indeed at the tail end of the third wave, there are still enough of us who are still in our child-bearing years that we may still produce enough daughters willing to embrace and defend the hard-fought sexual liberation that their, and our, mothers have tried to establish for us. Shalit wants to incite a whole new war-between-the-generations here, and I hope she doesn't. Solidarity between the generations will doubtlessly be more profitable. What good will it do if a bunch of little uptight, prudish brats turn their noses up at the work to which their earthy mothers have dedicated their lives?

And so, in a feeble attempt to keep the third-wave flag waving, I title this post with a crude cunnilingual reference and declare Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears to be among the most compelling cultural icons of our day. I'd hate to see Shalit and her coterie of young regressive thinkers made much headway towards tamping down the joyful, sexually satisfied sluts, bitches and hos of my generation.

And no, I still haven't read her damn book. Nor do I want to. It's a good thing I'm not a real journalist, eh?

Jousting Blonds: more defense of hot chicks

No sooner had I laid the foundations for my argument for solidarity with the hot young panty-flashers of the day, did I find this article that irritatingly posits everybody's favorite dead princess in opposition to Paris the Heiress. Now some of the stuff this article says, I can agree with (I'll get there shortly, don't worry), but a lot of it is just insane. I, for one, am sick of the comparison. They're both blond. They're both wealthy. They're both media-hounded celebrities. But Paris is the slut while Diana at least looked lady-like out the outside. And if I had my choice about with whom I'd rather have sex, I'd pick Paris every day of the week and 6 or 8 times on Tuesday (that's for you, H!). That shy, pouting-through-the-eyelashes thing just does nothing for me, Di. Sorry, Lady. Not that I hold any grudges against Diana, it's just that she's just another human-- albeit, one who was pretty good at manipulating the media such that she's been virtually canonized posthumously, but an ordinary human, nonetheless.

In any case, Chaudhry spends lot of time arguing that the the primary difference between Diana and today's crop of female celebrity flesh is that Diana played up her victimhood in her image (well beyond those pesky confines of reality) while P, B and L (like the sandwich, but thus far, none of us have been so lucky!) attempt to suppress theirs (which is sometimes quite real, indeed) in favor of presenting an image of independence and party-girlhood. Bullshit, I say! Here's a quotation from Chaudhry:
"In a June 17 column, Naomi Wolf complained about a culture that "seems increasingly obsessed with showcasing images of glamorous young women who are falling apart," citing the spectacle of Britney Spears's meltdown, Paris Hilton's arrest and Lindsay Lohan's various stints in rehab. The more women advance in the real world, Wolf argues, the more "the broken, out-of-control ingenue--who clearly can't manage without lots of help--is reassuring. And, I'd say, seductive." In other words, Paris may be no Marilyn or Diana, but she serves exactly the same purpose: to assure us of feminine vulnerability.

It would be a convincing argument, except these young women present themselves as neither broken nor fragile.Where Diana made much of her indifferent mother, Lindsay plays down her far more dysfunctional family life, which includes an ex-convict dad. Like Paris, these young women position themselves as overindulged princesses rather than scarred little waifs. Peddling emotional pain is just not their thing."
And, yes, perhaps they do covet that image of "overindulged princess," but what about that which appears to be a very real drug addiction (Please note: application of the spa version of rehab is NOT helpful) in the case of Lindsay Lohan in particular is so well-concealed that one might want to call this girl a self-sufficient new model of femininity? So Chaudhry concedes that Diana was probably far less "tragic" (a.k.a, fucked up) than the princess might have had us believe, but she never quite gets around to conceding that Lindsay is probably every bit as fucked up as she would have us believe. I really don't see a hell of a lot of effort, on the part of these girls, to hide much. (On a side note, I did read Naomi Wolf's article back in June. She, too, offers some interesting, but far from bullet-proof insights into this issue.) But, basically, as much as I'd love for the new iconic female image to be one that freely flouts social mores and unapologetically refuses to conform to anyone's notions of feminine vulnerability, I don't think our flashy girls are really as renegade and stolid as Chaudhry wants so badly to give them credit for being.

Chaudhry does, however, get quite a lot right in this article--her willingness to grant the fact that the image of the saintly Diana and the image of the debauched Paris are equally concocted figments of the public imagination, for example. As I intimated in my previous post, we don't have access in any real way to any of these women and therefore our interpretations of the images are ultimately pretty meaningless, based on so much hot air as they are. The idea that Diana played her audience, manipulating us with a contrived vulnerability and shyness-- well, I like the idea, of course, because it grants the woman a whole new sense of agency. But, in reality, I have no idea which of those iterations of the princess would be most accurate-- probably neither! And I'm nauseated by the "Candle in the Wind" Diana because she is created in the outdated image of what Chaudhry called "tragic love goddesses." Yawn. I'd rather watch a reckless and unapologetic party girl any day. At least she owns her life, even if she's not too great at taking responsibility for it (yet?).

Chaudhry goes on to make one other point that I think is dead on. Here's another excerpted paragraph:
There is, however, a price to pay for their transgressions. "I find of particular interest the amount of hatred people have, especially male commentators, for Paris Hilton," says Karen Hollinger, author of The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. "She isn't portrayed as looking for love--and finding or not finding it--but as beautiful and rather wild. On the other hand, Diana fit so well into the model of the beautiful woman searching and suffering for love that men were falling all over themselves to celebrate this 'candle in the wind.'"
Truer words regarding the Hilton/Princess deathmatch may never have been spoken. Among my female friends, sure, there are a handful who write poor Paris off as a "dumb blond slut" (an image that is such a transparent decoy for the purposes of attracting media-generated target-practice that I'm not quite sure why anyone actually buys it), but a number of us either don't care one way or other about her, or nurse little crushes on her. After all, that leather-onesy-clad burger commercial seems to have had an effect on many a female libido. From my male friends, however, I've never heard such vitriol regarding a woman who is scarcely more than an abstract concept in any of our lives. I should say, I do have one male friend who owns his crush on Ms. Hilton, but I can't imagine this particular friend EVER feeling threatened by bold-faced female pleasure-seeking. So, what gives, guys? Why do you hate her so? What is it about the particular zeitgeist into which this woman has tapped that makes you so uncomfortable? I don't mean these questions accusatorily, but rather, because I'm actually curious.

(There is one more forthcoming post on this topic and then I'll be be done with my flagellations of this dead horse for a while. Promise.)

In defense of hot chicks

It's no secret my job makes me crazy. Even if my supervisor hadn't recently enacted a de facto prohibition on taking advantage of the best benefit ever (paid time off), I would find my job demoralizing. Daily, I spend 9+ hours contributing to the bastard baby of the American educational system--testing. Teachers hate us for crippling their creative impulse within the classroom. Parents hate us because, sometimes, their kids wind up on the downside of that age-old parabola known as the bell curve. Kids hate us because we wield both the whips and the chains of the 9-month school year. And President Bush loves us because he thinks what we do actually measures something-- and that something is actually something possible to measure in the first place.

So, I'm beginning to entertain the idea of pursuing yet another degree-that-will-not-ever-ever-lead-to-gainful-employment. It's really such a shame that my motivations so rarely stem from the desire to support myself. I've got two books already half-written in my head-- one would require an anthropology doctorate and would result in a cookbook that might resemble the creative lovechild of culinary anthropologist/English professor Jessica B. Harris (author of my beloved Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim) and Al Gore in his documentarian incarnation. And the other? Well? I think I might have to invent my own inter-disciplinary field so that I can learn all the critical tricks of the trade so as to formally discuss softcore porn films and the joys of being a sexpotty-mouth (ahem, I meant third-wave feminist) in a scholarly fashion. Critical film studies? Gender studies? Sociology? Creative non-fiction? Regardless, neither of these books would grant me the cache it takes to procure a more satisfying J-O-B than my current one. I may, eventually, have to resort to teaching after all. Man, I hope my advisory committee doesn't make me give up swearing when I write my dissertation. Fuck, no! I won't do it!

Beyond my usual working-girl malaise, I've recently become bombarded with little tidbits of media that make me feel as though we sexpotty-mouths need some pretty serious defending in a greater social context. But firstly, I must delineate my argument. Last week, I found this article. And I found it kinda ridiculous. The idea that the American Pin-up is the poster girl of female empowerment and sexual liberation? Come on, now! She's an apple-cheeked farm girl or a bubble-headed Farrah Fawcett. She's cute and I don't mind looking at her, but Rosie the Riveter is certainly the exception to the rule in her pedigree. She's entirely sexualized and her sexuality is necessarily associated with selling stuff, rather than being for her own pleasure. While she may reflect assorted changing mores about female roles in our cultural landscape, really, what is she beyond the ultimate subject for that old hobgoblin-ish male gaze? Calling her "subversive" and "self-aware" is a stretch, for me, when all she's really doing is riding the fence between wholesomeness and titillation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but what's representative of the forward motion of the female in that? I mean, looking for the sweet spot on that very fence has been the primary goal of every commercial image since the dawn of capitalism. I just find Buszek's argument to be so far-fetched!

She goes on to amorphously describe the "pin-up's legacy" on third-wave feminists. She says this: "Today, the subject of sexuality is being proposed as reason for and a way toward a thoughtful, plural feminist culture, and at least one generation of young feminists has come of age to internalize and apply this idea as a matter of course, rather than a point of violent debate." And I don't really have too much of a clue as to what that means. As she doesn't offer a working definition of "plural feminism, " the best I can estimate is that she's arguing that the modern-day pin-up represents, as do women of my generation and younger (who steadfastly and promisingly refuse to concede that the word "feminist" has been abused by the Limbaughs of the world to the point that it has come to be synonymous with that vomitious coinage "feminazi"), the idea that any one of many diverse notions of girl-power can lead one to the golden water trough of female empowerment. And this, my friends, is a load of crap. To be clear, I do agree that there are many paths that could potentially lead a girl to take control of her life. You could label any one or all of those paths "feminism," if you please. But this is not the legacy of the pin-up!

That actual legacy of this pin-up, well, we know them well, don't we? Let's just say her name starts with a "P", an "L" or a "B" and ends with an "aris", an "indsay" or a "ritney." These beautiful, decadent trainwreck girls are the product of several generations of the commodification of female sexuality. On one hand, they're brazen and unabashed about the splendor of their bodies (pre-baby-ruination, in poor Britney's case, anyway-- her little bloated face just breaks my heart!) But they seem ill-equipped in terms of real empowerment to deal with the fact, once you submit to the world's ravenous appetite for the pin-up, the world has a hard time shifting gears so as to allow the pin-up her humanity.

As we watch each of these girls fall deeper into her own abyss of drugs, jail time, and demoralization, I find my own sense of camaraderie with them expanding exponentially. I suppose that's a strange thing to say. And I don't mean to imply a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I sentiment here. But when I look at the real-world consequences of these girls' attempts to own (and, I guess I must concede, make a profit from) their sexiness, I'm wholly disheartened. In actuality, I don't have much of an opinion about how they choose to lead their lives. I think it's unfortunate that their every little folly becomes grist for petty misogynists and camera-happy raptors, but who am I to have any particularly strong conviction about the lifestyle choices of some perfect stranger? I'm no one, that's who.

Still, it rankles (a friend recently made fun of me for using this word in an email. People say "rankle," right?) me a little when I hear someone call Paris, Britney or Lindsay a "slut," for example. I've been called a "slut" plenty. Often, I've had the privilege of being present to defend myself (which these girls, being merely figuratively ubiquitous, usually do not). But even if I weren't, I'm pretty much okay with the moniker-- for one, it implies I'm getting a lot more ass than, in reality, I am, and for another, I find the "monogamy model" of relationships to be a VERY sketchy concept, and so, if sluttery is my only option, I guess I'll own it. But these pretty and famous girls? In the public discourse, they're equated with prostitutes, despite the fact that a very small number of us actually have access to knowledge of their sex-lives. How dare we judge them when we just don't, and can't, actually know anything truly substantive about them? Are we not, in fact, judging them for their public images? The very same images for which we begged them? And paid them?

Does the selling of a pretty picture, alone, now constitute whoring oneself? Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say that it does. If we're paying for that picture, thus providing the demand for the supply (see, Joe, I understand the laws of supply-and-demand just fine!), how're we not implicating ourselves in a warped system that worships and then ravages pretty, young starlets? And how is our purchase of the wares of these so-called "sluts" not all the more repugnant?

And now, let's throw into this particular nausea-inducing little economy the fact that the selling of those images comes at great personal cost to these girls. Yes, they've got all the money in the world--and, one could argue, enough cultural capital to constitute "power"-- but Lindsay Lohan was, what? nine years old? when she started making movies? Now, I think, of the three I've called by name in this post, I think she's both the most talented and the downright sexiest, but there's no doubt this poor child was never given an opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to manage her life, not to mention her effulgent sexuality (some girls just can't help it-- they're born with that with which they are born!). And Britney? You can't seriously tell me you didn't think those big brown eyes were cute as buttons when she was 15. Can we take a moment to mourn the fall of one of greatest fin de siecle sexpots? Are the effects of mundane human weakness and the effects of being eaten alive by the media monster, combined, not wholly tragic? And Paris. Once a girl who was guilty of no more than having celluloid evidence that she enjoys being penetrated (and, well, not having need for gainful employment) is now a blubbering, tearful ex-con. Personally, of the three, I think Paris is most likely to right herself and live out a long, well-photographed, skinny, blond life. But I suppose it's equally plausible that she, too, will slide down rabbit hole of celebrity. And wouldn't we miss her if she did?

So, I guess the real moral of the pin-up's story is that, if you are sexy and refuse to apologize for it, and perhaps even attempt to profit from it, the world will idolize you and then the world will get sick of you and then the world will deride you and eventually, the world will cannibalize you. Gee, that just makes me feel right cheerful! And subversive! And full of third-wave pride! Gimme a break, Ms. Buszek.

in need of weeding

I feel like it's been a year since I posted anything here. I'm afraid my blogging panache is on the verge of atrophy. It's not that I haven't been obsessing as much as usual, it's just that my obsessions haven't led to anything about which my writerly mind cares. However, this is short lived. Doubtlessly, I'll re-alight in my saddle in short order.

Who's the rube?

As I often praise films that are joyous and refrain from moralizing about sexuality, it should come as no surprise that I have a wee soft spot in my heart for John Waters. To be fair, I'm not all that wild about watching people eat dog poo, as per the infamous Pink Flamingos scene, but the purity of his unapologetic sexual glee in a movie like A Dirty Shame, in which the notably flat-chested actress Selma Blair is transformed into something of a mammary anomaly, in which Tracy Ullman works her campiest, leopard-printiest charms, and in which Johnny Knoxville peers deep into my soul, well...it's a comedy that actually made me laugh. He's somehow managed to key into a counter culture for which I can think no term more apt than "queer," in a manner that plays to a kitsch sensibility of the highest order. He's like Pedro Almodovar without the Spanish heartbreak. And with more poo-eating.

And while Waters' stories do seem to well up from the Baltimore queer underground, they somehow don't alienate an audience the way that films made via the vehicle of queer-culture pastiche, for a exceedingly insular queer-culture audience alone, most certainly do. Of course, over the years, assorted write-ups testify to the fact that Waters is capable of riling up an audience now and again. But what strikes me as so ridiculous about all those uptight, prudish, scandalized reviews is that they pretty much feed Waters' fire. He's pressing buttons just for the fun of pressing buttons. And he's something of an equal opportunity button-presser-- by which I mean, surely, at some point, you'll see yourself (no matter what variety of stereotype in the smack-dab middle of which you find yourself) depicted in an insulting manner in one of his films. But then it's on you, dear audience member, to decide whether or not you can take a joke.

Now, one might imagine that I'm writing a post about John Waters so soon after the release of the big-budget remake of Hairspray because I have something to say about THAT movie. Really, I'm not. I don't have too much interest in seeing the new Hairspray. The Waters' version was campy and full of lousy acting and had a message about how segregation was bad and we shouldn't judge fat girls. The new one looks fizzy and watered-down. And altogether too sparkly and expensive. Also, Waters' grassroots approach to casting means that half your laughs are aroused by poorly delivered lines. How'm I supposed to laugh at Queen Latifah in such a manner? Casting the damn thing with real actors spoils a good portion of the fun.

So, instead, I'm gonna talk about Pecker, which is quite possibly the best John Waters film ever. And it was on cable night before last. Oh, how I love this movie. And upon repeated viewing (well, 3rd or 4th, this time) I think I began to appreciate it on a whole new level. Lately, I've been reading Greg Bottoms' new memoir/art response (it's not exactly criticism or history, either one) book, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys into Outsider Art. It's an interesting text because, pervasively throughout, Bottoms seems deeply and personally troubled by questions of intended audience for religious fundamentalist art and the commodification thereof. And truly, he's not sure which is the more sinister force: the artists who are espousing a bigoted, often illogical-bordering-on-clinically-insane, fundamentalist Christian perspective or the liberal hipsters who buy the stuff because they think it's cool to be cultural tourists in the overwrought world of revelatory religious visions and quirky, obsession-generated art.

Now, perhaps it's just that I happened to watch Pecker once again during the course of my reading of The Colorful Apocalypse, but I really do think two resonate with each other, both in terms of sensibility and by mere coincidence. For those who've not yet seen this 10-year-old film, Pecker is the story of a cheerful, ostensibly culturally oblivious kid who finds a crappy 35mm camera in his mom's thrift store. He begins taking grainy black-and-white pictures of everything in his life--rats fucking, his laundromat manager girlfriend yelling at people, his big sister playing emcee at a gay bar, his creepily sugar-crazed kid sister, his best friend shoplifting, the pubic hair of strippers from the local lesbian stripclub, and other assorted scenes of glorious depravity. By chance, some schmancy agent from NYC happens into the sub shop dive where he's having a "show" and voila! he's the toast of the New York art scene. Of course this proposed persona of innocent and uninformed "outsider" artist is a pretty disingenuous conceit on the part of Waters--Pecker's eye for underworldly seeminess and basic photographic composition are clearly far too accomplished. The photos in the film are actually pretty great.

When Pecker's fame begins to accumulate, his family and friends back in Baltimore (home-base for all Waters' cinematic confections) begin to give him the whole "you're a sell-out, Pecker!" song and dance. And so, he relocates his operation to his very own gallery/lesbian strip club/pit beef stand/gay bar in his Baltimore neighborhood. On the walls, he hangs revealing and insightful and slightly insulting pictures of the fancy New York hipsters, taken on the night of his New York debut. Again, the knock-you-over-the-head message of the photos is far too clear, given the keenly cultivated innocence of the Pecker character. But, the point is still made.

Pecker's family and friends are, as is the case with pretty much every Waters protagonist ever, ridiculously provincial in their perspectives while simultaneously being happily liberated about and accepting of all things queer. For example, Pecker's Memama (uh, grandmother) has devised her own interpretation of the Catholic liturgy, such that a giant puppet of the Virgin Mary (whose "miracle" is that she repeatedly squeaks "Full of Grace!" while Memama's lips mysteriously move) becomes part of her very own sacrament. Meanwhile, Pecker's sister Tina calls everyone "Mary," attributing the term of endearment to the Baltimore-specific gay scene. While the artists that Bottoms profiles in his book seem to be pretty universally anti-queer, they are otherwise very similar to these characters. They're prone to interpreting fundamentalist religion in intensely idiosyncratic and non-capitalist ways. They sometimes seem comically insular and bumpkinish, despite Bottoms' valiant--and mostly successful-- effort towards portraying them with dignity.

And while it's troublingly tempting to make folk heroes out of these people, both Waters and Bottoms manage to resist that old impulse towards fetishization. Waters characters ARE goofy, awkward yokels. And the Bottoms' artists ARE scary in their rabid views that lean, not just towards a conventional brand of homophobia, but also towards a very weird revisionist-history version of anti-Semitism that contends that the people commonly denoted as "Jews" are actually merely dirty, money-grubbing Hebrews, while the term "God's chosen people" really refers to "white people." Whew! I'm sorry, but talk about crackpot! Still, they are passionate, creative and steadfast, not only in their beliefs, but also in their drives towards artistic expression. And the Pecker's rift with his family that results from the onset of his fame is hardly atypical. Though they do not intentionally model their lives after the Romantic idea of "the ArtEEST," certainly, these folks make personal sacrifices for their art. It would be difficult for me to NOT respect that.

Bottoms and Waters also have virtually identical presentations of art world vultures. In the film, a busful of citified Pecker-enthusiasts (hehehe) take a little jaunt down to Baltimore, and upon arrival, someone at the front of the bus yells, "This! Is! Baltimore!" And all the New Yorkers cheer. They're so horrendously excited about their little venture into the wilds of urban Maryland. Similarly, Bottoms describes a couple of encounters with various art critics and buyers who are trying to apply the vocabulary of art criticism to work that comes out of a very different impulse than the more usual sorts of gallery art, which he describes as "fueled by aesthetic concerns." Outsider art pretty much always defies art criticism, and so, the folks that seem so committed to putting it into an art-world framework wind up making themselves appear to be pretentious assholes.
The real kicker, however, is that Bottoms is an English professor, well-versed in the business of critical writing, and John Waters is really no longer the cinematic pariah he once was. Both of their oeuvres are well-informed by all the rest of the critical and creative work that has come before them and continues to happen around them. I would hedge my bets that the both of them are more likely to identify with this latter group of derision-attracting sophisticates, rather than the former pack of impassioned hayseeds. So then, my question with which I've titled this post becomes absolutely central to both of their concerns. Waters never really needs to make a decision about who he thinks is the biggest asshole, because he is so democratic in his parcelling out of light-hearted ribbing. Bottoms, though, tortures himself with guilt over his own discomfort with fundamentalist Christianity. He doesn't WANT to judge these guys... but it's so HARD not to, especially when they are so open in their hatred of queers, Jews, Masons, Buddhists (how do you hate a Buddhist?) and everyone else who isn't a card-carrying Jesus freak.
And so he does that clever liberal-guilt-absolving thing (dammit, I'm pretty sure I'm good and guilty of this one myself) wherein he saves up all his best critical skewers for the folks most like himself, in a show ever-so-slightly tinged with self-loathing, while offering a moderately cool reportage of his interviews with the artists themselves. Midway through the book, he virtually interrupts himself to quote Janet Malcolm's book, The Journalist and the Murderer:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance of loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

In all honesty, if I didn't so easily identify with Bottoms' writerly plight, I would, perhaps, find it a little overwrought. After all, it's just the next iteration of the age-old artistic concern that, if your subject matter is something other than your own innermost, most abstract thinking, you necessarily open yourself to the criticism that you are an "exploiter." For me, however, this awareness makes the landscape of Bottoms' memoir one in which I feel pretty comfortable. Were it handled any other way, I'm not sure I could say that.
As one final point of ironic comparison, I'd like to point out that Waters presents his hometown of Baltimore as the anti-New York. It's homier and more rustic and appears to be stuck in the 70s, even though the film is ostensibly set in present-day and was filmed in 1998. And all of its denizens are blissfully unaware of their lack of sophistication. Meanwhile, the real Baltimore is home to what is probably this country's biggest hub for outsider art: The American Visionary Art Museum. Bottoms spends a good chunk of his book in this museum, generating a running commentary on how everything therein has been so absurdly commodified, manufactured, spun and spat out for the consumption of the average outsider-art-museum-goer (a decidedly different crowd than the outsider-art-makers, themselves). I daresay, Baltimorians probably aren't so removed from New Yorkers as Waters might have us believe.
Can I just say that I love the serendipitousness of the manner in which I receive aesthetic input? As I've been reading The Colorful Apocalypse, I never would have stopped to relate it back to Pecker, had it not, just by chance, graced the cable listings late on a Tuesday evening.

The smell of your sex: more on what noses do

...and you all thought my theories about pheromones ruling the world were horse shit, didn't you? Well, check THIS out!

What I find interesting about this article is not that it, in a roundabout way, supports my crackpot thesis, but rather, that the study in question suggests that gendered behaviors are so easily modifiable. If all it takes to make a mouse behave like a man (er, male mouse), is flipping a little receptor switch in its brain... well, doesn't that just completely undermine the notion that male and female behaviors are intrinsic and unchanging in a totally fabulous way? I mean, just think! If something that came out of this study on mice held true for humans as well, maybe, when I try to convince people that my motivations stem from my humanity rather than my femininity, people might not scoff at me. Seriously, people: gender roles are pretty darn malleable, when it's all said and done.

Also, the fact that gendered behavior in mice is comprised of two components--an internal sensor and the sensory information (smell) that it receives is pretty interesting, too. In other words, a mouse doesn't just act like a girl because it's how she's made. She's gotta smell something to kick those behavior patterns into gear. Oh, the implications!

Not the eco-agricultural gem for which I was hoping, but stylish non-fiction filmmaking nonetheless

Ever since I returned from my orgiastic-ly exciting film-viewing vacation wherein I went to the Nashville Film Festival last spring, I've been talking everyone's ears right off about Monteith McCollum and Ariana Gerstein's spooky and spot-on documentary, Milk in the Land. If you don't believe me, please take a li'l jaunt back into my archives. And also, please refer to all the conversations that you've had with me in the last four months. Undoubtedly, I will have mentioned that film no less than twice in your average five minutes.

In hopes of finding more of the same, I rented McCollum's earlier documentary, Hybrid-- maybe it would be another beautifully presented cautionary tale about the American food pipeline. But that's not at all what Hybrid is about.

Instead, Hybrid is artful near-biography of Milford Beeghly. Milford Beeghly is one of the pioneers of practical corn hybridization. He's also a quaint--and ancient--Iowa farmer, a singer of old Irish brogues, a champion hog-caller (endowed with an elusive quality he and his son call "hog-appeal"), a stoic father, and a dude who likes to bicker with his second wife, Alice.

It seems that McCollum fell so hopelessly in love with his subject matter-- the man, not the corn-- that I really learned very little beyond the most basic of rudiments of corn hybridization. I mean, I was all geared up to be freaked out by the ways humans have figured out how to fool nature into doing crap nature shouldn't be doing... but I arose from my sofa without much framework for forming an opinion about how we grow corn, one way or the other. And it's not like corn is the LEAST controversial food item on the market-- not by a long shot! So, I was thinking that this was fertile ground for some good ol' eco-agricultural rabble-rousing! Instead, I sat through 93 minutes of a love poem to an old guy.

So, once I got over not getting that for which I had bargained, it became pretty clear that many of the cinematographic techniques that lent a polished, yet otherworldly sense of menace to Milk in the Land were experiments in Hybrid. McCollum squanders long sequences on time-lapse shots of the Beeghlys' farmstead, of farm cats drinking milk, of corn stalks in silhouette against the sun, the barn, the silo, a tractor... The thing is, I would have expected such sequences to have an air of piquant nostalgia for the small-scale American farms of yesteryear. Once again, however, McCollum defies my expectations. The whole thing is shot in black and white and so, lush, sunlit scenes of farm life become acrid, slightly over-exposed and a little to harsh for comfort. Or maybe it's just that the light/dark contrast and McCullum's own emotive viola-playing is keyed up so as to create an atmosphere of barren-ness in a landscape that is so often idealized. Clever, eh?

McCollum is also in possession of one decidedly understated sense of humor. And he doesn't really let us forget that the hybridization of corn is, as is everything else, really all about sex. The film is primarily narrated by Mr. Beeghly himself, but every once in a while, his son Weyland offers a comment or two. And Weyland's description of normal corn reproduction-- that without any human intervention--involves the concept of corn masturbation. Basically, an unbothered corn stalk is pretty likely to fertilize itself-- the tassel on top is the male, pollen-producing part. And the pollen seeps down into the undeveloped ear-- the female part-- and fertilizes each ovary, and then each ovary becomes a kernel. Next time you eat a cob of corn, will you remember that you have a mouthful of ovaries? I dunno... but Weyland's description of corn "playing with itself" was pretty cute in and of itself.

McCollum's particular artistic sensibility may have given rise to an entirely new genre of filmmaking--corn porn! Honestly, I never knew you could eroticize an ear of corn, but he managed to create some stop-action animation sequences that, well, make corn sexy. In one of them, a couple of ears dance and flirt and, finally, rub up against each other. In another, a single ear upended on a stool performs a luscious striptease, ever so seductively slipping out of her-- uh, its--husk. By the end of it, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to have found little nipples on each kernel of that damn corncob!

Much of this film reads, not so much as an informative documentary, but more like an experimental art-house film. While Milk in the Land demonstrated the ways in which McCollum is able to employ his virtuosic visual techniques towards imparting a distinct and moving message, Hybrid shows less of his investment in reportage and more of his remarkable ability as a film stylist. While I quite like the idea of there being plenty of room for cinematographic risk-taking within the genre of non-fiction films, I suppose I must admit that I really liked all there was to learn in Milk in the Land. And so, while I really do heartily approve of this director's idiosyncratic style, I still want more than mooning over a geriatric Iowan for my 93 minutes, thank you.

Will someone please teach me something about corn now?