It Is A Car Analogy

KUNGE!  and the car goes right into the ditch, the back wheels lifting off the ground entirely.  Sam, Barry, and Nate (in the driver's seat) groan and gingerly check their limbs.  Sam pipes up from the back seat.
SAM: Fuck you, Nate!  You said you were a good driver!
NATE: I am a good driver!  No one's hurt, are they? 
SAM: Fuck you, no one is hurt! My neck is fucked up!  You're an asshole!
Barry is riding shotgun.
BARRY: Let me drive for a while.
SAM: Yes!  THANK YOU.  God, Nate.
NATE: No!  I have to drive!
A brief scuffle ensues, with Barry ending up in the driver's seat.  Nate keeps trying to regain the wheel, but Barry uses one long leg to pin him against the door.  
Barry turns the key in the ignition.  The engine stalls.
NATE: You're terrible!  Let me drive!
SAM: Shut up!
Elle and Tee have been watching this exchange, and now come up to the car to offer advice.
ELLE: I've seen this before.  You need to get out and pull the car out of the ditch before you can drive on.  Just starting it up won't help, the back wheels are in the air. 
TEE: Boy, are you wrong.  That car's just a write-off.  You should get out ASAP and walk to town. 
ELLE: It's not even that dented, it's just tipped.  If everybody gets out and we all push--
TEE: NO!  We should all get as far away from the car as possible.  It could explode at any minute!
Nate hangs out the window to talk to Tee.  Barry continues trying the ignition. 
NATE: You're right, you know.  This car is dangerously unsafe.  Look at these spark plugs I took out, the tip's all weird and silvery. 
ELLE: HEY!
TEE: That's what I'm saying! 
Elle moves over to try to get Barry's attention.
ELLE: Did you see that?  He said he took out the spark plugs!  You need to--
BARRY: I really have a lot to concentrate on here.  Please don't distract me.
SAM: Come ON.  We don't have all fucking day.
Barry tries the engine again, and this time it turns over.  He puts the car in reverse and accelerates.  The back wheels spin. 
ELLE: You need to push it out of the ditch first!
TEE: It's fucking broken!
NATE: You broke the car!  Let me drive!
SAM: Fuck this, maybe Nate should be driving, you're obviously not taking us anywhere.  It's not like he could be doing worse. 
BARRY: Hey!  I got this engine started, you know!  You're not patient enough!  We're almost there!
NATE: Let me drive, let me drive!
BARRY: We're all together in this, I'm sure I can drive in a way that suits both of us.
NATE: You smell!
ELLE: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, he's a saboteur!  Why won't you listen to me!
TEE: You're all fools!  Fools who are about to explode!
Let us pull the curtain on this scene now, and drink until we can forget.

Hindsight

There is an idea for a series of brief films I had some time ago, at a time when I was driving regularly, that is so simple and easy to pull off that I cannot (and, indeed, do not) believe it has never been used as station idents, ads, or simply for youtube.  I'd prefer, though, to describe what I pictured before...let's say polluting my vision, by seeing how others have pulled it off.

Just this: a shot from the perspective of the front seat of a car, of the car behind in the rearview mirror.  A little slice of life is playing out back there: two people arguing, or headbanging, or talking animatedly, or wearing a Tudor costume and a Gorilla costume and staring out opposite windows.  There's no sound from that car, but only the diagetic sound in the perspective car, which would be used (subtly, please!) to overlay thematically the action in the mirror.  It could also be possible to see out of the windshield of the perspective car, depending on depth of focus and how it's framed, so that could open up more possibilities.  The duration of each--only the length of a stoplight.

Proportional Response

Annoyed!  Annoyed by something on the internet.  In this case, a formula for determining the ideal length of skirts.  The idea is, your upper and lower leg are of different lengths, right, but they ought to be of equal length, so we can correct the natural flaws of the body using a skirt length that creates the appearance of an evenly balanced upper and lower leg.  So that part is already objectionable, as it cheerfully acknowledges an impossible ideal while encouraging women to bend themselves towards it.  That's just regular, though.  That's everywhere.

No, what's really annoyed me is the math.  The formula for determining your ideal skirt length--which is to say the length that visibly bisects the lower half of your body, creating two visibly equal sections, is as follows:
( length of longer leg section - length of shorter leg section ) / 2.  That's your magic number.  If your upper leg is longer, you go that far above your knee in whatever units you measured, while if your lower leg is longer, you go down from that point.  It's so simple!  What simpler way could there be of determining half of something!

Anyway, my curiosity got the better of me and I mocked up some straight skirt lengths from this paper doll I made of myself a few years ago.  It's all from the high hip, and at some point when it's not after 1 AM I should really do the same with A-lines and high waists.  edit: have done this, below

10", 17", and 33" have all been recommended for me as lengths, while 12", 25", and 29" have been direly warned against as leg-thickening.  Presumably each number would shift depending on the apparent length of my leg (skin-colored shoes being quite in style) and height of my heel--I've noticed that wearing heels with flares makes my lower legs look freakishly elongated, for example.  I think I'll be sticking to the rubric of "buying things I like to look at and wear."

dreams and the Internet are similar

I didn't know Satoshi Kon.  I suppose that's obvious, but all the same it makes me uncomfortable to eulogize someone based only on his public face.  I've seen nearly all of what he made, though (with the exception of Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers, which in such a small filmography is a fairly big gap), from Magnetic Rose to Paprika.  I'll tell you this.  The impression he left with every film I saw was of an upward trajectory.  Is it ghoulish to say I wanted to see his very best, to see when he would naturally stop improving his art and exploring his visions, before he died?  I just don't think the body of anime will be as good as it would have been if he'd gotten to become an old granddaddy like Miyazaki. 

I <3 Lairds

More now in my series on cosplay you can do quickly if you happen to have been shoring up your collection of these specific cosplay elements.  I had one in mind, and once I saw this atrocity, it was ON.

Of course it's the Baroness!
Didn't you see the little
Cobra symbol at the neck?

Now of course like anyone, I have a spandex catsuit, a selection of false glasses, and some high-heeled boots, but the COBRA badge was hard to come by.  (Also a belt.  I never did find a belt.)  I fashioned my emblem out of a promotional film poster for the ill-conceived adaptation of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell.  It's a bit impressionistic, but I think if you give it a good squint, you can probably make out the medically accurate vulvar diagram that is the COBRA insignia.

I tried to think of some non-sexy things to do in this outfit but there aren't any.

As my friend whom I’ll call Sam says, “I’ve dated women with everything from an A-cup to a D"

Every day or so I spend on the internet, I come across one of the five to six hundred iterations of this article, on what women can stop doing to attract men.  It's always written from the perspective of someone whose sole claim to authority on the subject is that they are a guy, which mystifies me: can there really be women who have no male friends or acquaintances that would bloviate rapturously on what they believe would most please a man?  In any case, all these articles boil down to a variation on the sentiment, "It's important that you be well-groomed, but I want you to stop spending time on grooming so that we can have more time to do things I like, such as touching a boob."  There is some kind of disconnect in these men's brains between cause (grooming) and effect (groomed) that probably also makes them Libertarians. 

Anyway, if men would like to take my big-ass gametes as qualification to tell them what all women think, and if they would like to stop doing something which completely fails to impress me, they could stop pretending to give a shit about sports.  I know, some women may claim to enjoy sports or like the company of men who do, but because they disagree with me, they're unrepresentative.  I suspicion that all the women who say they like sports don't really but are just pretending in order to attract men.  I am myself constitutionally incapable of enjoying sports and generally distrust the motives of anyone who does, but that shouldn't affect how totally right I am about this. 

Men, I think, only profess to like sports because if they don't other men will relentlessly hound them with accusations of homosexuality.  In men, I judge liking a thing which is inherently unlikeable to impress men to be understandable, and pitiable in a sympathetic way.  In women, I judge liking that unlikeable thing to impress men to be a contemptible betrayal of one's authentic self.  This double standard is my stake in the ground, now let's pretend it's the Daily Show and go to the part of the tape where I contradict myself utterly. 

So, video games.  I am strongly attracted to video games because for the past twenty years they've had the exciting, disreputable sheen of The Next New Media, with regularly-scheduled moral panics providing a rebellious charge to liking them.  And, if I'm honest, because the boys I always liked always like gaming--the weird boys, the boys with the D&D books and the graph paper and anime porn.  Though they could stop with the anime porn, frankly.

Now, I am fucking shit at video games.  I have terrible reaction time and I am emotionally devastated if I can't beat a level on the third or fourth try.  I can't play against people because I get upset if they win too much and worried about what they think of me if I win too much, and if I have any difficulty at all I'll be fighting the urge to wander off and never finish. 

It's clear to me that games, even more than films or books (but maybe not as much as music), serve as mile markers in the lives of the people who love them, bound up in memories of where and who they were when they played Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock or Chuckie Egg.  Nostalgia is such a powerful force in the industry because gaming is so experiential: when you play something that touches you, you're really stitching it into your life in the strongest way possible without actually parachuting into the jungle and fighting Russians while feeding on tree frogs.  And my favorite thing is to hear people articulating their memories, to know what they love and why it animates them.  But ideally without reference to the infield fly rule.

Might stop to holla and pop my collar

I had this plan.  Having, at one point, changed dramatically in my look and style to the point where people who had known me well did not recognize me when I passed them on the street, I developed some interest in the makeover genre of films.  I was going to make myself a project, looking at the styling of all these movies and trying to duplicate the stages the actresses travel through, but in reverse. That is to say, refiguring the films as though they had been about women blossoming from trembling Hollywod beauties into self-possessed awkward-looking freaks. 

Let's be honest, though.  Every Hollywood film is populated with Afters.  It's the Befores that really hold my interest, the films' ideas of what is unacceptable for a woman to look like while still being good enough to look at that people won't flee the theatre.  Among other things, I suppose, it's about making sure the typically perfectly serviceable selves from Before pictures don't remain uninhabited cast-offs, but are thrifted and refurbished as cherished vintage identities.  Also, apparently, I would most like to shoot these costumes as though they were American Apparel ads.  

This image pinched from
the Self-Styled Siren's
excellent post on costuming
she's enjoyed in films. I
do hope she'll forgive me.

Let's start with the granddaddy of 'em all, Now, Voyager.  It is the story of a carved ivory box-maker (Bette Davis) driven to being upset and mildly snippy to a teenager by her vicious and controlling mother, who keeps her locked away to prevent her from doing the things she enjoys (fucking in a car on a boat, like in Titanic).  She's rescued when her sister-in-law hires Dr. Claude Rains, who packs her off on a cruise to reignite her love of  tweezing her brows.  There, she meets some kind of European guy called Jerry (though he is not a Jerry) with a bitch wife and a hysterical, socially awkward daughter, Tina.  Tina is, incidentally, the spitting image of myself at her age. 

After returning home, Charlotte stands up to her mother, who thoughtfully kicks it mid-sentence once Davis has established that the tension of their relationship has run its course.   Charlotte then re-establishes ties with her European cruisemate, who elects to not leave his hateful wife but instead to gift Charlotte with their less popular daughter.  Charlotte promises to love and keep Tina with her always, which is not at all similar to the actions of her controlling mother because Charlotte is, I guess, prettier.

Besides the unusual ending, in which Davis' married love object's wife does not usefully die or depart and she forms a familial bond instead with his similarly distressed daughter, the most interesting thing about Now, Voyager is how it further develops Hollywood's love affair with psychiatry.  Rains is sort of a fairy godmother here, giving Charlotte not only her clothes but a bunch of pseudopsychiatric tips and tricks perfectly worthy of Carson Kressley or Gok Wan. 

Davis' costume when she is introduced seems to have been assembled from a checklist of fashion don'ts of the 1940s, and I've managed to tack on a couple more in my own take on the thing.  Her hair is flat, worn low on her head and parted in the center--later it will be up in a big pompadour.  She's wearing a lot of powder but no eyeliner or mascara, and, unforgivably, glasses, which the movie seems to believe are something that you might eventually grow out of wearing, perhaps if you lose some weight.

Her dress is just a train wreck.  Her mother refers to it as "the black and white foulard", if I'm hearing it correctly, but mine is just cotton.  The skirt length in particular hits at the widest part of her calf, which is said to make your leg look wide.  Mine is cut to my knee.  Davis is also wearing a fat suit, which I don't really have access to, but I can replicate the effect by generally being about thirty pounds heavier than she was in 1942.  I can't really muster anything as well-constructed as her foulard from my wardrobe, fast fashion having taken its toll on the garment industry, but I do have an incredible collection of polka-dots based on an offhand comment my mother made at some point about how dots are good because they attract men's eyes, like men were mynah birds or something.

"What man would ever look at me
and say 'I want you'?!  I'm fat!  My mother
doesn't approve of dieting!  Look at my shoes! 
My mother approves of sensible shoes!"

Unlike films of the 1940s, I am able to muster even an ounce of sympathy for women who don't want a kid but are made to have one anyway, so I can't really get on board with the fire-breathing demon portrayal of either of the two bad mothers Charlotte is set at odds with.  Even the teen who relentlessly trolls Aunt Charlotte seems to my eye to be acting out of a not-uncommon fear that she could become Aunt Charlotte if she doesn't do everything in her power to stave off spinsterity.  Even in films where fucking isn't a big thing, it is extremely important that women be thoroughly fuckable.  That's the main thing in Now Voyager, as in life.  Having myself been convinced already of my fuckability, I am free, free!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

"I am my mother's well loved daughter. 
I am her companion.  I am my mother's servant. 
My mother says.  My mother!  MY MOTHER, MY MOTHER!"

Here's a special closeup on my makeup, which I love, I don't care what you say.  I think I just about doubled the width of my eyebrows, but I still can't quite match Davis', which appear to be tiny false mustaches. For authenticity, I shouldn't have used mascara, but I did. 

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.

Catahoula cat

Oh, you had ridiculous taste in clothes when you were in high school?  Hey--fuck you, buddy.  This is what I was wearing back in ninety-aught-nine: 

I guess I can explain, sort of.  First, I'm not a furry.  I bought these ears with this girl I liked around Halloween, and then we just wore them, to school, every day for months and months after that.  She had longer hair and wore the pink leopard ears, which I thought were somewhat prettier and would have liked for myself.  To this day I have very little trust in my own taste when it comes to accessories. 

Inexplicably, it was around this time that other people first started allowing as how they wouldn't mind spending time with me.  Go figure. 

Instructive Failures

 I am something of an academic by nature, and it is to this I attribute my (apparently unusual) high tolerance for didactic cinema.  I'm not saying I could sit through Crash without yelling at the screen or anything, but I stuck with Studio 60 long after the show had dropped all pretense of being anything other than Aaron Sorkin's Chew On That Hour.  Sorkin is that entertainer who pulls a rabbit out of a hat in a novel and entertaining way, and then when the audience clamors "Amazing!  More tricks!" just pulls the same rabbit out of some slightly different hats over and over again until everyone has left.  It's not an uncommon mode for artists, and the first rabbit you see can be really something.

I never watched Sorkin's most beloved creation, The West Wing, but I feel like I understand the kind of catharsis it provided to progressives rendered catatonic by the actions of the Bush administration to have a shadow cabinet play out their Al Gore fantasies.  I'd seen Sports Night and enjoyed as much of it as I understood when it was first on, years before my partner told me he was really getting into Studio 60.   We watched almost all of the doomed first season together.  It's probably telling that I've seen the show up to the big nineleveny cliffhanger in which a main character's life hung in the balance, and have not yet felt a need to see whether she lives or dies.

What finally killed my willingness to indulge Studio 60's oratory, that I might learn something about how American topical sketch comedy shows are formed, was a dawning awareness of a certain tendency it had in common with a lot of modern screenwriting.  It was what instantly put me off Fringe and of course Heroes: a compulsive need to subvert audience expectations that turns pathological.  The fall of Heroes between its first and fourth season is...well, already this post is of extreme length, and I could go on essentially indefinitely about what went wrong there, breaking it down fractally, shot by shot.  But basically what killed Heroes was trying to surprise the fan community by refuting their expectations, especially when they expected a sensical, meaningful plot. 

For Fringe, the expectations it was subverting were those created by The X-Files, which in 1993 was itself subverting an audience expectation by creating a skeptical and science-minded female character (who was still always wrong) and an intuitive and credulous man who seemed to assemble his near-unfailingly correct interpretations of weird events by the same word-association method the Bat-Man uses to solve the Riddler's clues.  Fringe, then, seemed to be based on the assumption that audiences would find it daring to see a credulous and intuitive female investigator paired with a skeptical and science-minded man, and would not correctly identify their subverted subversion as a tired stereotype.

The subversion I remember best from Studio 60 is when Evangelical funnywoman Harriet is misquoted in an interview in a way that suggests she believes that homosexuality is uniquely sinful, after which she is violently attacked by some large angry gays.  You may recall this particular story--in which god-fearing men and women innocently expressing a nuanced version of their beliefs are physically threatened by the same depraved sex perverts who control the media and twist around their words to suggest that not wanting gays to marry is somehow an expression of hate or fear--from the recent Supreme Court case on whether petition signatures from Washington state's Referendum 71 would remain public record or become secret, in the interest of protecting people who feared that their public expression of bigotry might cost them something.  (The court ruled 8-1 that the plaintiffs' wish to keep their terrible opinions between themselves and their legislature did not override well-established laws promoting civic transparency. The plaintiffs continued plainting after this, wishing the court to note how unfair it was that they had no chance of proving how fellow co-signers of this, their attempt to protect the solemn gravity of marriage by keeping it safe from people who really really want to get married while reserving it for people who have been cooling on the whole idea for 40 years, might be targeted with a similar level of harassment to two men who want to hold hands.)  So I found that to be a somewhat irresponsible bit of writing, in that, like most of Harriet's character on the show, it felt intended to pander to and soothe the ruffled feathers of a moderate Christian audience I'm pretty sure was never watching.

The second notable subversion attempt I wanted to talk about is one I misremembered, which came up during a discussion with my partner of blogospheric rumblings on whether Olivia Munn's disastrous Daily Show appearances were yet another manifestation of The Daily Show's "woman problem".  The female problem in question is one that should be familiar to students of television: shows, but especially comedies, have trouble attracting and keeping female writers even when they are actively seeking them out, let alone when they aren't.  My partner mentioned that Studio 60 had had a subplot involving a lawsuit by a former writer, Karen, alleging that the writers' room on the show-within-a-show was no more than a boys' club and that she had been fired for being insufficiently like the chick in the men's mags who just, you know, likes totally normal, pudgy guys and wants to wear push-up bras and Daisy Dukes and get beaten at video games.  I recalled that the episode contained a sequence in which Karen's lawyer asks around the show to find out why people believe she was fired, and to a man, they answer "Because she wasn't funny."

This did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that none of the characters expressing this opinion were actually contemporaries of the fired writress.  Also, when I went to look at more detailed summaries of the episode, I noticed that the final word on the matter came from one of the executive producers reading out the actual text of the complaint, which begins to make Karen look like she might not be talking completely out of her ass.  The content of the scene is based on a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the producers of Friends by shitcanned stenographer Amaani Lyle, where besides discussion of David Schwimmer's orientation and Courtney Cox's fuckability, she alleges that the writers had collaboratively constructed a parallel Friends in which Joey was a serial rapist.  Regrettably, this is not the plot of Joey.  The complaint in Studio 60 relates an extensive public discussion of various ways the male writers would fain fuck Harriet--on an altar, with a crucifix, in Pat Robertson's mouth, etc.--which would itself constitute excellent grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit.  The executive producer is of course deeply troubled by this, because Harriet is his woman.  So let's call Sorkin's opinion on the frivolity of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits--because I think it is pretty safe to say that the words coming out of his characters' mouths are intended primarily to advance his opinion--ambiguous.

It sounds like I'm saying I disliked the show for not toeing my particular party line, and maybe that's the case, though I wouldn't be watching much TV if I couldn't put my politics to one side in the interest of entertaining myself.  I think it's more that I don't really believe Sorkin thinks that scary gays will bash Christians or that bitches be trippin', but that he is condescending to the imagined prejudices of his audience in order to feel he has leeway to make his point.  I'm not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom here: all reviews I've read of Studio 60 involve some variation on calling it condescending.  But, you know, it's not awful to be condescended to if you're genuinely ignorant on a subject and are interested in getting a quick grounding.  What Sorkin managed by talking down to me on subjects I know something about, and by not seeming to mind if he was getting them all wrong, is just to make me doubt his credibility on anything I thought I might be learning from him.  The only times I've ever minded a lecture are when I know I have a hell of a lot better handle on something than the guy who's trying to explain it to me in very small words.

But I'm Not Bitter Or Anything

The day after Columbine, which hit geographically close enough to home that lessons were canceled for the day in favor of having everyone sit in homeroom and watch the red-faced teacher publicly buttonhole the goth kids to ask them why they were being so weird and whether they had plans to blow us all up, an unusual thing happened to me.  It was at lunch, in the cafeteria, where because I had transferred to the school in the third of the three years one spends at middle school, and because I had zero social skills or charisma and was so unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them, I usually sat in a far corner with two Jehovah's Witnesses, Kevin, a sad roly-poly bullying victim I could never politely get rid of, and Erica, a girl who would alternately hit me and try to touch me up.  It was this day, sitting there, when one of the popular girls approached the table. 

I've seen Mean Girls and I'm still not quite sure I have a handle on what "popular" means.  It doesn't seem to mean that many people like you; I guess it's meant to have something to do with occupying a coveted spot in the hierarchy.  There were some girls I liked and wished I was their friend and considered popular, though whether they were or not I will never know.  There was Michelle, who was chubby and had cropped dyed-black hair but wore lots of eyeliner and jewelry and had an amazing singing voice.  She was supposedly "easy" but then as now that designation didn't make a lot of sense to me and simply served to lend her a mystique.  And there was Jennifer, who was a plain-faced sport billy and student council member who was unfailingly nice to everyone.  This was neither of those girls, but some other person who, because I've never committed her name to memory, I'll call Claire Bennet. 

I had a class with Claire, in which she mostly distinguished herself with a sneering air towards the idea of knowing anything, and a Palinesque smugness when presenting her class projects that I assume came from how secure she was in the knowledge that nothing she did academically would affect the real parts of her life.  She was also quite mean to both teachers and students.  To my knowledge, before she approached my table, I had never personally interacted with her and had no indication that she was aware of my existence.  I was basically aware of our different positions in the hierarchy, hers being "popular" and the most common appellation I'd heard for myself being "dirty", as in "why would you want to hang out with the dirty kids".  So when she approached me I already disliked her and doubted her intentions. 

It transpired that, following the massacre, Claire was having some kind of crisis of conscience that was prompting her to try and stop the next school shooting by reaching out to the down-and-outs and inviting them over to her table and presumably at some point re-enacting the makeover scene from films.  It had clearly not occurred to her that I would consider spending time in her company as anything but a longed-for privilege, and she reacted with a sudden shower of invective, cursing me and my sort, when I gave her the kind of brush-off she would have given Kevin if he'd asked her out.  She flounced off back to her table, and while I'd like to think she took with her the idea that maybe not everyone wanted to be her, it was probably more along the lines of confirmation that the unpopular deserve every bit of it. 

This is all to say that the scene in The Breakfast Club where Molly Ringwald calmly tells Anthony Michael Hall that the reason he would not diss her to his friends is that "you look up to us" and Hall responds by laughing, crying, and telling her "You're so conceited" seems to be erring a bit on the side of saying that the popular kids are comfortable and settled in their self-images, while it's the nerds who are insecure and over-emotional.  I suppose if Hall had maintained an autistic affectlessness while Ringwald called him diseased and told him she hoped he'd shoot himself in the face with that flare gun, the ending where the outcasts are starting to become just a little more popular wouldn't have seemed like a happy one.

Platonic Ideals

Last night was the second time I saw this romantic comedy I like very much, and which I liked as much on the second viewing, I Love You, Man.  So this would be about the seventh time I've seen a romantic comedy I liked, counting rewatchings of Addicted To Love and The Truth About Cats & Dogs.  When I watch a film, the first thing I'm watching is always the writing, and this is about the most expertly written romantic comedy I've seen.  What I mainly have against romantic comedies is the ubiquitous device where what comes between the obviously fated lovers is a misunderstanding that, once the characters actually speak to each other to clarify it, leaves them happily in each other's arms, which annoys me with the implication that they are complete idiots.  I Love You, Man avoids this by having the characters' real actions hurt and grate on each other, but then have them apologise and forgive after an appropriate amount of time.  The way the characters get gradually revealed to each other and to us just makes me really happy.  I suppose I'm especially susceptible to films like this since I have both a great interest in how lonely people are supposed to make friends and how relationships function between men of the same gender. 

There's problems with it too, of course, ones typical of the--UGH--"bromantic" genre: of a cast of intricately bequirked characters, the only one lacking development is the girlfriend, played by the winning (if preppily-clad) Rashida Murphy, whose only apparent characteristic is that while she seems to adore processing issues to help along her fiancée's plot development, she has never engaged and was never planning to engage with him about what he likes in bed.  The guyfriend (played by 250 pounds of Jason Segel in a 180-pound bag), on the other hand, with his...well, I was going to list his character-revealing quirks but they are vast like the ocean--he's fucking fascinated with Paul Rudd's sex life, intent on improving it.  And subsequently intent on introducing breakup-inducing tension into Rudd's romantic relationship. 

Why I bring it up, though, is that I think in the future this will be regarded as an early polyamory film, the same way The Kids Are All Right won't.  The movie treats the relationship between the male leads as nominally nonsexual, but they do tongue each other, and get involved in each others' sex lives in advisory capacities, and the ultimate scene is the two of them repeatedly confessing love for each other before the film zooms out and fades on the straight wedding.  The primary partner's encouragement of the second relationship and subsequent jealousy, the secondary partner's passive-aggression, and all the characters' insistence throughout the film that "what I said to you was supposed to stay between you and me!"--it's textbook. 

While I'm no polyamorist--surely one of the major perks of getting into a longterm relationship is you can stop dating--I think the ideals of communicative honesty, trust, respect and mutual accommodation that polyamory, queer, and BDSM types have built to support nonstandard relationship structures are laudable and should be studied by anyone who wants to be with another person.  And I think that some variation on the relationship structures they're hammering out today will be the future if the arc of the future keeps bending towards sexual tolerance and egalitarianism, which is why it was the subject of the second Futurama movie.  But I could be wrong, and it could be that people are always gonna be more willing to live in some rickety (or "time-honored") prefab structure than go through all the honesty and processing and work it would take to plan and build something to suit themselves.

Blood & Salt

The things that managed to interest me about Salt (a largely unremarkable entry into what, to me, will henceforth always be the Jack Bauer genre) are, unsurprisingly, gender issues, courtesy of Angelina Jolie.  By the IMDB's account, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play the part of Evelyn Salt, but backed out when he discovered the film would portray him married to the Marxist from The Counterfeiters.  The part was subsequently rewritten for Angelina Jolie, which seems to have mainly involved changing the pronouns.  I approve!  Jolie is a fine actor and high in essential charisma, though I always wish she'd get back up to her Gia weight because right now the way her robust head is set on that tiny, ropey neck makes her look like a spoon.* 

But imagining each scene as it would play with a man of equal height also allowed me to imagine I might be observing something about the culture, something I could later use as a jumping off point for gassing about gender equality in a blog entry.  So: I believe that Tom Cruise's torture scene would have been longer, and I believe the discussion I had in the car driving home wouldn't have been about whether crashing a van into a police car would have snapped Cruise neatly in twain.  I believe, too, that I can back up my belief with comparisons to pretty much all the other 24-style action thrillers, which depict with loving detail the suffering of their leads.  To keep this fairly brief let's just take it as read. 

It would be usual to follow this line down a regular feminist argument: women are presented in media as weaker than men in their ability to withstand pain, when in fact blah blah childbirth, oorah.  I feel that, besides being the kind of bullshit that social conservatives use to argue that men and women may have their separate spheres, but each is of equal importance and equally fulfilling, this argument is just missing something.  I can't truly blame anyone for missing it, because, pardon me for getting all Morpheus here, we're soaking in it.   What we've become blind to by its constant naturalization in basically all media is violence against men, aka "violence". 

Men are constantly situated in media as the ideal subjects of violence.  I'm not saying there's not also an agenda running in some Hollywood films of punish-the-feminine; that would be a silly claim.  But we perceive depicted violence against women as particularly brutal against a backdrop of near-constant violence against men.  Salt, for example, kills somewhere between twenty and a hundred men in her film and I think kicks a lady cop in the chest, but the villain is unforgivably evil because he shoots a female attaché after shooting a dozen equally defenseless dudes. 

A conversation about how men have it kind of rough is uncommon in feminist circles, though I know so many women with interests in genders outside their own.  Primarily, if one brings up the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women and that this is normalized and celebrated in media, it is viewed as an attempt to undercut and equate violent victimization of men with dehumanization and control of women, drawing attention away from this important subject.  Fair enough, but who's going to stand against systematic, socially-approved gender-based violence if not feminists? 

Now, I enjoy very much the privilege of being considered unhittable.  I've only been punched once, in the fourth grade, and I doubt there are many men who can say the same.  But it seems to me that the protection I enjoy from being considered an appropriate target for violence isn't based on a recognition of my human dignity, but rather on a societal calculation of the value of protecting me as a resource.  Men's value is calculated differently, and so they are naturalized as the targets and perpetrators of violence.  While they are overrepresented as CEOs and politicians, so too are they overrepresented as the homeless, prisoners, and soldiers.  The Expendables, as opposed to Precious.

So one of the things we could do to increase gender equity in the affluent West is increase assaults, robberies, and carjackings against women, and of course by women.  We could get comfortable with the idea of more women being homeless and more women being exploded and shot fighting for us.  We could accept that whatever men are experiencing is the gold standard for what should be considered human, and strive always toward getting women to experience the same shit.  Or we could acknowledge that men are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, stop viewing and portraying that as perfectly reasonable, and try to, you know, decrease violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, against them, just like we campaign and rail against violence toward women.  That's the option I like. 

* It is wrong to focus on women's appearances in this manner.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

It's Just Noise

One thing that makes my eyes bulge in their sockets--though please bear in mind I did not go to school in the hippest part of the US, but rather the hippiest--is seeing college-age kids, who were at the time I attended college about four years younger than me, all wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love of musical artists of the 60s and 70s who are for the most part dead. 

I feel like I understand why a Boulder resident would choose strategically to wear a Bob Marley or Grateful Dead shirt.  I suppose Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have their own rebellious, binge-drinky appeal, and professing reverence for Jimi Hendrix would certainly help justify one's decision to irritate other Native Americans with a hipster headdress.  It is a bit more opaque to me why someone would want to broadcast their love of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (who no longer benefit from the cachet of not being the Beatles, as no one seems to remember that they once had a Blur/Oasis-style rivalry [though of course it is deeply insulting to the Rolling Stones to allow them to be compared even momentarily to Oasis]).  It strikes me as sort of like wearing a shirt announcing your enjoyment of inhaling air and exhaling somewhat more carbonated air; it's not like it's avoidable.  I'm sure even the Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols kids (who, again, may feel free to choose a band whose collective ages total under two centuries) love Helter Skelter or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or Savoy Truffle or something. 

Dead artists and the canonized living are safe to like because their meanings have become fixed; they'll never again produce anything which will be subject to critical scrutiny.  And god knows there's a broad enough range that could be expressed by a Beatles shirt to be the stiking-up point of a conversation with a stranger: so which is your favorite Beatle?  What was their best album?  What's your favorite of their songs featuring beating up women?  Would you like to experiment with some drugs with me, in case it makes us creative? 

But this is the music of our parents and grandparents.  They weren't burning up the dance floors with ragtime and the Charleston in the sixties, they were out seeing contemporary bands and screenprinting their names on really thin cotton t-shirts and wondering when the sexual revolution would reach them.  I wish keenly for a popular culture not controlled by Baby Boomers and their sensibilities, but more and more I think that we are not built for populism the way they were, and are doomed to narrowcast all the deeper parts of ourselves while our video of a cat falling off a chair gets seventy million views.

On Being Feminine

Axiom: "One must suffer for beauty."
Corollary: "Whatever is most painful is most beautiful."

Sometimes I do really stupid shit.  In this case, I bought an epilator.

An epilator is one of those devices that people from the future will look back on yellowed period ads for and go "I can't believe they really invented a device made of dozens of rotating tweezers working at great speed to pluck the hairs from people's bodies, and the credulous fools actually bought it!"

I knew--I knew--that I had a historically low tolerance for having my hair torn out by the root.  But reading enough recommendations (while ignoring the ones that said "I wax a lot but this hurt like buggery") and imagining leg hair with softly-tapered, pigmentless tips instead of a harshly-cut end swayed me.

 Hair follicles are amazing little things, tiny organs fed by individual capillaries.  The root of each is filled with dormant stem cells which the body uses to repair itself after an injury.  For this reason they are notoriously hard to destroy, and attempting their destruction is inadvisable even if you would like to be sort of like an egg or a statue.    
 
My main concern was that I would bleed too much.  Generally, I am like the proverbial stone, but I have drawn blood with a home waxing kit before.  My painkiller of choice, ibuprofen, is a noted blood-thinner, so I went to the store that morning and picked up some acetaminophen.  Here's something you may not know about acetaminophen: historically, I have never experienced a reduction in pain after taking acetaminophen. This time was apparently no different.

After a while I got into a rhythm: epilate for ten to fifteen seconds on each leg, wait ten minutes for the pain to subside, and return like a dog to its vomit.  It did get better after a while, both because I had less hair to pull out and because I started getting more able to leave my body during the plucking.  Oh, and I guess I had a beer as well.  

The next night I went back and did it again.  This time, running it over areas whose hairs had been plucked or broken off already, it was bearable.  The sensation of having one or two hairs pulled at once was even sort of meditative.  Running it over areas with more than two or three hairs continued to be excruciating.  But I've kept at it, just tearing out a few hairs each night, like a religious fanatic in a terrible novel about some secret Jesus societies. 

Neither tremendous, crippling pain nor the foreknowledge that I'm potentially endangering my future healing ability are able to prevent me doing something that will make me look, like, 4% better to the only person who ever sees my legs,* my partner, who, as you may recall, already loves me anyway and requires no convincing of my ardour through self-mortification.  I have some kind of brain illness. 

* I guess in retrospect the internet also sees my legs.  That's disturbing to me.  I should really give this more thought.

On Giving Offense

Recently, somewhat to my chagrin, I have adopted the word "retarded" into my daily vocabulary.  I don't consider this in any way laudable, and I don't intend to advance a defense of my practice.  Just because I enjoy something, that doesn't make it right, is the basic theme of this blog.  What I'm interested in is interrogating what gives the word its appeal to me and its offensive punch.  As for me, I like its sort of Southern US drawl...what're yew, some kine a ree-tawrd?  I also like (if I can move beyond that word association without insulting the South more than is absolutely necessary, as they have their own problems, the poor dears, and besides, the South seems to hate being labeled an intellectually deficient region almost as much as they hate being compelled by judicial fiat to treat fairly the people they had planned to treat like shit) how it is basically the way anybody who doesn't think much of education or curiosity (e.g., a Southerner) calls somebody stupid.  It's a word you might get a slap for saying as a child, which makes saying it at this point in my life kind of giggly and exhilarating. 

As to offense, well, thereby hangs a tale.  A certain portion of a word's offensiveness is tied to its meaning, but obviously not all, or else Richard Herring would genuinely have been censured as much by the BBC for saying "clacka-lacka-dack-dack" as if he'd said "cunty-cunty-cunt-cunt".  There are ways to refer to taboo subjects long and turgid enough to dissipate all but the most histrionic of hurt feelings, and cruel and ugly ways to phrase nice sentiments.  The offense content of swears, slurs et al., then, is mainly the implicit contract that one party ought to intend to give offense, and the other party should be courteous enough to take some of it.  People are always renegotiating one side or the other of this bargain for any term sufficiently charged with vigorous feeling--hence your reclamation efforts, your refusals to let a word "define me", your PC thuggery, your South Park episodes. 

Now, the word retard, as you probably know, is similar to the words moron, idiot, fool, simpleton, imbecile, and cretin, in that it was once advanced as a neutral term for someone with a cognitive  impairment but rapidly increased in pejorative use until its proponents abandoned it and jumped onto a new, more passive term.  Inasmuch as disabilities will likely always carry some stigma that will stick to words used to describe them, this is pretty much a treadmill for disability advocates, which sounds exhausting and disheartening.  "Retarded" is fresh enough as a term created to provoke an outpouring of sympathy that its use as a synonym for "stupid" still carries a shocking and painful sting. 

I should say, here, that like "retarded" I also have a history which does not reflect well on me.  Until I was around seventeen I had a hysterical fear of being perceived as having Down Syndrome by strangers.  I would examine my face in the mirror to make sure that no inadvertent expression would make me look slow.  I knew a couple kids in grade school who seemed to have greater than average learning disabilities--Wayne, my childhood boyfriend for around a week, who manifested an obsession with Chuck Norris before it was ironic to do so, and Michelle, an obese girl with cornrows, who could only discuss the band TLC.  They evoked a certain horror in me, particularly Michelle, whose overuse of ketchup at lunch created in me a longtime aversion to the sauce.  I tried my best to avoid them until they switched schools, just in case. 

In middle school, as a desperately fat, charmless, and unpopular child myself, I was often the remainder of any group-formation exercise, and would as such be placed by the teacher with the autistic or Down's kids.  Rather than risk displaying any kind of warm human fellow-feeling, which frankly I still have yet to develop, I treated them with an arms-length minimal politeness that I'm sure did not endear me, particularly to the autistic ones.  It was essentially a manifestation of my fear that the one thing I believed I had over the other kids, my freakish smarts, would go unrecognized or be stripped from me, and then I would have no way to feel superior (and therefore good about myself) at all. 

I don't mean to conclude with the suggestion that calling things retarded decreased my anxiety around being, if I may slightly misuse the term, socially deprived.  That was resolved instead by finding people who would tolerate me and help me build feelings of worth that wouldn't be so brittle as to shatter if someone didn't think I was smarter than them.  Today, I don't believe too much empathy can damage me, and if someone regards me as a pariah for believing that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, whether convict or miner or immigrant or ned or misogynist or paedophile or suspected Lockerbomber or bipolar or Israeli, well, I don't think that person is very nice, but I try to see where they're coming from. 

I still use that word, though.

The Fantasy Scenario In Which I Can Imagine Myself Wearing This Lipstick

Just as the alarm sounds to tell you that the doors are closing, a woman bounds onto the 8 AM train.  She's in low heels, sheer black nylons, and a dark skirted suit, very conservative and businesslike.  Hair's up in a well-pinned french roll with a slight quiff, sleek and put-together.  She sits down but remains erect, smoothing her skirt front and back.

When she pulls a compact mirror out of her purse (barely larger than a clutch, logoless and nondescript in an expensive-looking way) and starts gently powdering her face, it's a little offputting--doing makeup on the train?  Pretty much on the same level as clipping your toenails on the bus, as far as I'm concerned.  Keep personal care personal.  Anyway, she lightly powders her lips and replaces the puff.  I guess she's fairly made-up already, mostly around the eyes.  Unusually light on the blush and bronzer for Glasgow.  She pulls a short, slim tube out of her purse.  It's some kind of lip gloss in a navy-colored bottle, which she sets on the little table to unscrew.  Compact mirror in her left hand, she touches the applicator to her lips.  It's dark, darker than you expected.  The color of the bottle actually seems to be the color of the gloss itself. 

With a practiced hand she draws herself a little bee-stung mouth, then very carefully makes eye contact with absolutely no one on the train the whole journey in, just gazing out the window at the cows. 

Taste the Rainbow

Look, if you can't finish a bottle of Urban Decay Primer Potion in under a year, I think a collection like this is sort of overkill.

To Know Too Much

It's a fact and you're just going to have to come to terms with it: knowing certain things is going to make you gay.  If you're a man, a good example would be sewing (or grooming, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer); if you're a woman, it's harder to become gay but a good example of something that would make you a male-homosexual-style social pariah (i.e. an unattractive but disquietingly still sexual woman) would be vibrators, cats, or Twilight.  Avoid vampires in either case. 

Maybe you acquired intellectual curiosity early in life, and you're trying to gain information about everything, particularly things that seem like social phenomena that matter deeply to some people.  Maybe you have the mistaken belief that learning will enrich your life.  Don't fall for these lies.

Be a smart information-consumer: if you're unsure whether a particular knowledge base is gay, check out a popular internet forum.  If the guys there hate it but are willing to post long, punctuated screeds about why it is awful, it's just fine and you may learn more about it without becoming gay.  If, however, they're simply using offhand references to someone with this interest metonymously to represent people of low character and social standing, then you will immediately have to give up playing Pokemon, and disavow and/or forget everything you have learned about it. 

If this is making you feel qualmy, be assured that thinking less of someone because they know more than you is perfectly natural, and, why, just everyone does it sometimes!  Yes, even Phil Nugent.  When directed toward the educated of means and privilege, it is a regular human trait called "anti-intellectualism", the source of the term "over-educated".  When directed towards the knowledge bases of school-leavers (e.g. sport, making a lamp), it is called "elitism".  When directed toward those with specialist subjects, it is called "being a normal person with girlfriends and not a creepy autistic-spectrum shut-in".  When directed towards women with domestic or personal-care interests, it is called "WIN A LOAD OF MAN-GADGETS".  All of these groups of people--riches, poors, nerds, women--are vile, and have helpfully signified themselves as such by having different priorities from you, probably out of spite.  If it's not spite, well, maybe they're just too dumb to know how stupid knowing all that stuff makes them look.

Terms for Anal Sex That Make it Sound Like A Cheerful, Twee Pastime

Bumming.