My, but I'm feeling like an old hag.

After watching Pete Campbell wheedle a dress from Joan Holloway while she was working as a manager at Bonwit Teller (so that he could pay for rape with the nanny next door), I remembered how much I loved shopping there, at the branch on Walnut Street in Philly.

They went out of business years ago.

Anyhoo, in 1989 I spent $75 bucks at BT on a pair of velvet footed tights, which was truly an enormous sum for the time. Last night I put those fuckers on to wear out for pizza.

The tights are still as soft as downy geese.

I am now one of those weird middle aged women who have held onto shit for twenty years.

Blee.

Ask most folks knowledgeable about art to issue a list of "important" artists from the twentieth century and invariably Francis Bacon, with his signature gawping nightmarish images will turn up as a prominent figure. He carefully cultivated his own mythology as tortured artist from an abusive childhood locked in the cupboard to the dead lovers, strange loft and workspace that demonstrated compulsive hoarding. Bacon could not have done much else to signal how afflicted and tormented he was.

"A Terrible Beauty" at the Dublin City Gallery, Hugh Lane promises more of a demonstration of behind the scenes than an overview or retrospective of the artist's paintings. If you're not already familiar with Bacon you may be disappointed by the number of unfinished works and the slashed canvases. I don't find it novel or shocking that an artist would wholly or partially destroy his/her work, but it does add to the mentalist mystique surrounding Bacon's legacy. I could not help wonder why so much gallery space was dedicated to the study guides he secured for the human form when what's on offer shows that he did his best to discard or dismiss the messy details of real human bodies. One of the last unfinished paintings on display is composed of a seated female figure. You can trace a smear of pinky flesh behind dark streaks and swirls that efface and blot her image entirely. "A Terrible Beauty" leans too heavily on the terrible without much beauty to behold. The crux of Bacon's project here is the obliteration of the human form with angry gestures of distortion and chaos.

His style may have been one of the most influential.

His work leaves me crestfallen.

The painstaking replication of his London studio with all 7,000 catalogued items in tact is really worth seeing. I especially enjoyed the box of L'Oreal black haircolour on the shelf visible from the window to the right. There's more humanity in the workspace than on the canvas.

Omar has taken to showing signs of affection.

This means he launches his fifty pound frame on top of you and gets cosy.

Hey, well done Lonely Planet for ruining my morning bagel by telling me I should recognize the artisitic rendering of Bernini's statue "Rape of Persephone" 1621-1622.

"Just look at Pluto's hand pressing into the soft flesh of Persephone's thigh."

Yes, folks. We're told to admire a rape scene.

Rape has a long and ugly history in classical art.

There's so much beauty in brutality for these dudes.

I'd like to see more in Rome than the virgin fetish and the rape is sexy school.

Of all the actors who have played Philip Marlowe, Robert Montgomery in "Lady in the Lake" (1947) counts as my least favourite. I'm digging the classics that are up on YouTube posted in ten minute clips. I watched this one last night. The camera work presents Marlowe's point of view through his sight line which seems too gimmicky, while it also empties the leading man of all personality and gravitas. We catch glimpses of Marlowe in the standard noir mirror shots. His voice also sounds more mean than just hardboiled. It would be more accurate to say that he wants to beat up Audrey Totter's Adrienne Fromsett more than cop a smooch. His performance had the same level of wife-beater creepiness that Ralph Meeker delivered as Mike Hammer in Mickey Spillane's "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955). The inflection of misogyny crinkles my brow and sours the genre. There's no depth or nuance to Montgomery or Meeker.

Dick Powell as Marlowe in "Murder, My Sweet" comes off as a decent fella. He has chemistry with Claire Trevor's Helen/Velma and maintains this sort of "what the fuck just happened" demeanor as a response to getting drugged and beaten. You don't want an arrogant private dick, he has to be shown vulnerable and human or else why should we give a fuck? "The Big Sleep" looks like a hot mess, but more so because Faulkner was a booze hound who had trouble formulating a coherent script. Bogart and Bacall are otherwise flawless and endlessly watchable. Eliot Gould interprets a fresh understanding of Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye" (1973). The scenes where he feeds the cat are delicious. No longer a bruiser, Marlowe gets transplanted in the sexual revolution as a skinny, smart-aleck Jewish dude. Just my type, actually. Poor Robert Mitchum came too late to playing Marlowe in mid-70s remakes. We can only imagine how good he would have been in the role as a young man.

Now there's word that Clive Owen's cast in a production playing Chandler's iconic detective slated for a tentative 2012 release. On the strength of his performance in "Croupier" and "Children of Men" I'd say he was a brilliant choice.

Repeat after me: Porn is Not an Instruction Manual

Mary Elizabeth Williams has a hilarious article up over at Salon "How Not to Make Love Like a Porn Star" which argues that watching porn makes men bad lovers. There's a whole generation of dudes growing up with unlimited access to the triple x stuff. Feminist bloggers such as Nine Deuce have articulated the problematics of porn and how the industry treats women like cum dumpsters rather than human beings. The problem is that men aren't swayed by the ethical implications of getting off to women's subjugation and pain.
Perhaps Williams takes an angle more likely to convince men to drop the porn habit.

"There's something cold and sad and deeply unerotic about being in the throes of it with somebody and thinking, 'I saw this in 'Weapons of Ass Destruction 4.' As a friend said recently, 'Just because it looks good doesn't mean it is. Then I wind up feeling inadequate because I'm not enjoying it.' Soon after, another friend mentioned a man she'd been dating, whose erotic repertoire included withdrawing his member at key moments to thump it on her. After puzzling over it with friends, she finally figured out: It's a porn move. Listen, if you're a professional showing off his stuff for the camera, that sort of thing almost makes sense. Out of context, however, it's another situation entirely. You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? 'Baffling.'"

Men may think having a porn star in bed is appealing because women are generally depicted as forever compliant and submissive and hysterically turned on by any move a dude pulls. It's a huge mistake, however to take what the porn industry produces as an instructional guide.
You will be more likely laughed at than anything else.

I was looking on YouTube for that commercial for pan loaf where the woman would rather eat a bacon sandwich than have sex with her man.
It boasts the mars and venus crap about how women have an insatiable appetite but low libido. I'm surprised they didn't put chocolate on it too since we're all supposedly helpless in the vicinity of the cocoa bean.
Instead I found this far more scary commercial advertising toaster bags, as in these industrial strength plastic bags designed to cook sandwiches in the toaster.
I can only imagine the charred chemical smell they produce.
When we're shown how one can cook a burger in a bag my stomach churned.
Forty shades of wrong.

When Hollywood approaches the plotline of unfaithful husbands, there's not much range in the spectrum whether you're watching classic noir such as "The Woman in the Window," neo noirs such as "Fatal Attraction" or one of those aiming-for-whimsy-war-between-the-sexes movies which preceeded the rise of second-wave feminism such as "A Guide for the Married Man" where Walter Matthau instructs Robert Morse how to get away with it. Across the board, the message ladled out is that dudes shouldn't cheat only because the bitchez are trouble. Edward G. Robinson's character runs away screaming from a woman on the street asking for a light after having a nightmare in which he imagined a drink with a pretty woman leading to murder in self defense and ultimately his own suicide when the pair are blackmailed. Dudes, those dames will be the death of you! Avoid any woman but the one you are legally bound to or else you will end up dead or in jail. Or else the crazy bitch will stalk you, the family and even the family pet. The baseline assumption holds that all men want to cheat.

Hollywood tells them not to do it because bitchez are more trouble than they're worth.

I expected more from Edward G.

Just the other day I caught myself up with what little association I have with food production, so it was with great interest I opened the Irish Times to Fiona's interview with Darina Allen, author of "Forgotten Skills," a primer for folks to brush up on foundational culinary skills.

Allen comes off as such an insufferable food snob that I doubt I'd buy the book. She appears to be choked with the smug assumption that if you are not a farmer preparing your own food, then you're a witless dupe of the multinationals. The classes she offers demand labour and time intensive devotion to getting food on the table. She holds folks to impossible standards.

"Darina Allen has been filling these gaps in knowledge for a while now, providing courses not just in cooking, but in all manner of what she calls 'forgotten skills', including vegetable-growing, bee-keeping, pig-curing, keeping chickens, and smoking your own food. 'They started off quite slowly but they really have been gathering momentum.' "

Most folks don't have the capacity for this degree of involvement in food preparation. Her tone is as self-righteous as those folks who prattle on about "reducing their carbon footprint" and "green living" at every moment. You're not better than anyone else just because you grow your own food and spend your days devoted to getting meals on the table. Her approach is scolding and makes folks feel bad about themselves. After a hard day on the job and raising kids, folks deserve their leisure time and should not be guilted into tilling dirt or animal husbandry. Allen sounds mean-spirited when shares the story about the woman who was about to throw away the butter she hadn't realized she made. Her tone was unbearably arrogant.

It strikes me that Darina Allen's vision is also financially impossible for most families.

"The only downside to her theorising is the cost: 'We’re simply going to have to pay a bit more for our food – that’s the reality.'
People attending her courses are already aware of that reality: the 12-week certificate courses cost €9,795. Darina makes no apologies. 'A lot of people look at the prices and think ‘Oh my God, it’s so expensive’, and it is expensive, but it’s expensive because it has to be that price to give the quality we want to give. A lot of times people don’t charge enough to allow themselves to do a good enough job.'"

No one wants to hear that they have to pay more for anything right now. Allen's tuition fees are higher than what many universities charge . Her food revolution must only be for the rich. How funny to reason that charging nearly ten thousand euro for a course in farming is necessary so that she can do a good job. The manure has to be the highest quality poo in the country. Anyone would be happy to muck about for that kind of profit.

Happy Halloween (must I use titles now?)

In a nod to the holiday, I picked up a copy of "Boy Eats Girl" at Tesco for evening entertainment.

Zombies in Dublin!

Can't wait.