Huzzah to Dawn Hagel, the bus driver in Calgary who saved the 16 month old cattle dog Duke from certain death by a bunch of coyotes.

Duke was off leash, gave chase to a pair of the wild dogs and was soon cowering under a truck. The poor boy had been bitten twice and was bleeding. Hagel opened the bus door to invite him aboard, an invitation which the pooch wisely accepted.

I can attest to imagining Omar and Kima being capable of pulling a similar stunt in the thrill of the chase before realizing they were outmatched by beasties who don't get fried eggs and assorted treats on top of regular kibble.

I would love to hear this album.
The "Telegraph" has a slide show featuring the "Jews on Vinyl" exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
"Mrs. Portnoy's Retort" was recorded in 1969 with the comedian Mae Questel as the most maligned Jewish mother in literature. Questal did the voice for the cartoon characters Betty Boop and Olive Oyl (among others) and played Woody Allen's mother in "New York Stories."
She's slicing the salami!
I don't know if it's any good, but that picture is priceless if you've read Philip Roth's notoriously misogynist novel "Portnoy's Complaint."
We once hosted this dude, a friend of Mr. M's from high school who brought along one of his interchangeable young girlfriends. It was easy to peg her as clueless when out of all the thousand books in the house she chose that one to pull down and read surreptitiously in the guest room.
Later she said her favourite author was Ayn Rand.
Uh huh.
It was a brutally long weekend.

This dress first caught my eye when it appeared in stills from some film Katherine Heigl's shooting with Ashton Kutcher (not that I care for either actor's work).
It's an Oscar De La Renta.
I think the mix of rust and robin's egg is just smashing and I'd wear it in a heartbeat.
But holy shit, not for the money.
It's over two thousand dollars.
Designers need to get a grip and scale back their prices.

I stumbled upon the listing for the film "Welcome to Academia" the other day and was trying to locate a trailer or more information. It wrapped production in January but doesn't have a release date scheduled.

Here's the plot summary from imdb:

"A young graduate student is made to jump through hoops during her dissertation process at the fictional liberal arts school of Victoria University. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators engage in debating tenure issues, fight over deanship positions, and jockey for power - activities that often take precedent over the daily operations of the school."

Intrigue in the ivory towers sounds promising.

I need to see it as part of my ongoing interest in the depiction of academics in film which I rambled on about long ago. Let's hope it's not full of stereotypes steeped in the culture wars about the mythological PC police.

Callie Thorn has the top credit, so that adds to my curiosity.
She's a talented actor who has thus far been smothered in supporting wife roles to dudes in "The Wire" and "Rescue Me."
They should have attempted to get a May release to coincide with the end of the academic year.
Or maybe wait until the autumn when it starts up again?

Both Jezebel and Salon's Broadsheet had this clip up so I finally took a look.

What's funny about it?

Rikki Lindhome and Kate Micucci performing the song "Pregnant Women are Smug" seems like a cheap shot at women who choose to become mothers.
There's already so much antagonism between women who do have kids and those that do not.
Do we really need to stoke this antipathy?
It troubles me to see young women snarking on pregnant women by saying that they creep them out. It's mean spirited and juvenile.
I bet it really impresses the hipster boys though.

Watch, Comedy Central will give them a show now so that they can build on the Sarah Silverman tradition of humour designed to appeal to dudes. I can't remember who said it, but in a "Bitch" magazine article which mentioned Silverman, one woman said she performed in "dick face," meaning that she postured herself like a teen boy. Hah! How accurate.
I've said it a million times.
Any woman willing to attest to what awful cunts women are gets a spot as a media darling with a nice paycheck.
You can take female misogyny to the bank.

My raisin bran almost didn't make it down this morning when I opened the paper to see an ad for Kid Rock's "Rock n Roll Jesus" tour.
For real?
How the fuck is he still selling tickets to his lame act exploiting stereotypes about men in the working class while setting up women as cum dumpsters?
Who the fuck goes to see this monstrosity of masculinity?
Apparently folks do buy his albums and see his macho burlesque.

Much to my chagrin, "Rolling Stone" magazine, the fountainhead of boomer entitlement and fetishizing the 60s gave Rock's album 4 out of 5 stars.

Take a look at the opening paragraph:
"As its title suggests, this balls-to-the-wall album finds Kid Rock latching onto the verities of sex, drugs and rock & roll as a path to redemption -- both his and the country's. He'd never admit it, but hurt over losing Pamela Anderson fuels his appetite for salvation. She's the target of the hilarious country romp "Half Your Age," which proclaims Rock's new girlfriend to be "half your age and twice as hot.'"

It's impossible to take a reviewer seriously when they use such a puerile phrase as "balls-to-the-wall." It makes him sound like a 14 year-old who obsessively jacks it in the bathroom to hide the habit from his mommy. Additionally, I find this analysis troubling because he's saying that men can find salvation by debasing and insulting women. He's so upset by his breakup with Pam Anderson that he writes a song to humiliate her? The idea that misogyny redeems men or restores their manhood is the most hackneyed sentiment in the patriarchal playbook.
The whole "bitches ain't shit" mantra is sure to make you a happy man. Grow the fuck up.

Here's a sample of the lyrics to "Half Your Age":
"Oh she wakes up every morning and she folds my clothes. Doesn't care about the strippers dancing at my shows. She knows that I love her so I just wanted you to know."

Yeah, hilarious!
I get it; the ideal woman is servile and keeps her trap shut when he demeans other women.
Perfect.
I've met houseplants with more personality and depth than this piece of shit.
Grrrr.

Check out this fascinating documentary "Sisters of '77" produced by PBS about the National Women's Conference held in Texas to formulate a plan of action to eradicate gender discrimination and to lend momentum to the vote on the Equal Rights Amendment. It's just under an hour long.

Predictably, Phyllis Schlafly (lap cat of the patriarchy extraordinaire) turns up to protest women who had the nerve to consider themselves fully human.

Feminist activists made the world a better place for all of us.
We're all in their debt.

Some dude working at the bookstore asked if I needed help.

The store had a display of the Sookie Stackhouse novels for a few weeks then replaced it with that Mormon lady's chastity-cult series. I wondered where they would shelve it?

Mystery? Horror? Fiction?

He drew his chin back with a sneer and made the interrogative a declarative.

"What, a children's series."

More disdain and snobbery.

I thought about pointing out that it wasn't, how impolite it is to offer elitist judgments about someone's reading material or the fact that I've earned a Ph.D. and yet held no countenance for bullshit book snobs.

But I didn't.

I walked away and found what I was looking for.

The second season of "TrueBlood" starts up in June.

Based on all the plot lines developed thus far by book 5 (I had to skip the fourth since they didn't have it stocked), there's a panoply of supernatural creatures roaming in rural Lousiana, including maenads (devotees to the god Bacchus), werewolves, werepanthers, faeries and goblins, some of which will surely turn up on the programme.

I'm ignoring the fact that Lafayette dies in the first novel.

*Spoilers*

"Watching the Detectives" was a delight until Lucy Liu's character Violet gave an explanation for her behaviour, telling Cillian Murphy's cineaste Neil that the reason she concocted hijinx and wacky adventures for them was because she didn't want him to grow bored with the relationship and look at her in a year's time as if she were an old familiar shoe.

Gah.

She wasn't quirky, spontaneous and full of whimsy because she just wanted to be herself.

Nope.

It was all to enchant and get the man.

She points out that he's spent half his life with fictional characters in the cinema and how could any real woman compete with that?

We know she's right since he broke up with a girlfriend earlier because she wasn't close enough to Katherine Ross' character in that Butch Cassidy film.

It's the woman's responsibility to keep a relationship exciting and full of mystery.

Cue the gag reflex.

Aside from that wholly maddening proposition, the actors have a palpable chemistry, the supporting cast is great and the frame for the romance instantly appealed to me. Neil runs a little video shop packed with classics for film buffs. When Violet returns the first film she rented, Neil sees that she hadn't finished watching it. He hands the tape over the to collection of film geeks and based on where the tape stopped, they toss out guesses to pinpoint the scene that was playing when she hit the eject button.

It had such potential.

Until they ruined it with the Cosmo's Guide for Landing a Man bullshit.

Have you seen Channel 4's revolting programme "Supersize vs. Superskinny"?

Here's a clip from the episode I watched which covers the first day's breakfast and lunch of the producer's "extreme dieting challenge."

The blonde douche doctor's also peddling a book claiming to help women gain control over their weight issues and unhealthy relationship with food.

Yet what I witnessed was unadorned torment and abuse.

I'll bet this dude isn't licensed to care for house pets, but by all means, let him brow beat women with eating disorders because then it's entertainment!

Last night's episode featured 19 year-old Charlotte and 22 year-old Heather.

Charlotte weighed just over 6 stone; Heather weighed in at 20 stone.

"Dr." Jessen prescribed that the young women swap diets for five days in order to understand how "extreme" their eating habits were.

What kind of sound health care professional counsels such radical shifts in food intake?

Clearly, we're dealing with a dude interested in making fun of women and watching them squirm and suffer.

At breakfast, Charlotte goes from eating a slice of toast and a banana to eating a huge fry-up.

You'll never ever cure someone leaning towards anorexia by over-feeding them.

She looked like she was going to vomit by the end of the meal from being overly full.

When you don't eat very much, your stomach shrinks and cannot comfortably accommodate portion sizes that large. I have no doubt that she was in gastrointestinal distress after ingesting so much food. Trust me. I know this shit firsthand.

On the other side of the table, Heather was also openly in distress from hunger. By lunchtime, she looked weak and ready for an emotional meltdown from the sudden deprivation of having to subsist on a borderline anorexic's fare.

The camera pans in for a close-up of Heather's lunch: one biscuit.

Her exasperation was clear when she admitted that she wanted to smack Charlotte for eating so little. It was really an excuse to give the allure of a cat-fight and to watch the hungry woman react.

I found the whole thing obscene.

There's no legitimate medical explanation or authenticity to this appalling exercise.

It's just concerned with punishing women so that the audience can chuckle over the fat and skinny bitches having a hard time of it.

The show also uses a repeated creepy cut away to full frontal nudity between segments where they erase the female genitalia in barbie doll fashion, as pictured above. Viewers are invited to judge the female form without getting too grossed out with the nasty lady bits to confront.

This is a rancid pox upon our culture.

I used to worry about my first love's younger brother.
The dude spent years in his bedroom watching wrestling obsessively.
Never seemed to have any friends.
He flashed in my head tonight during the shots of the crowd in the orgy of pain and blood on offer in Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler."

I thought wrestling consisted of theatrics alone, that the violence was pantomime.
What kind of twisted psyche laps up this type of bloodsport for entertainment?
A steady sampling of this sadistic fare must erode one's reserve of empathy and replace it with a taste for brutality and suffering.
Staple guns, barbed wire and broken glass gouging male flesh ranks as a leisure activity for spectators? Savagery for recreation must surely indicate that we as a culture are indeed fucked.

Mickey Rourke's turn as the former star of the ring held my sympathy until he bullied women into filling the self-cultivated emotional void in his life. The worst part was that the film didn't allow Marisa Tomei's character Pam to maintain the same level of integrity as extended to The Ram. Although the audience is clearly invited to draw a parallel between the wrestler and the exotic dancer as aging entertainers within industries which place a premium on youth, we don't get the chance to see Pam as more complicated or complex than her sex worker persona, Cassidy. Shit, the character's even listed by her stage name in the credits. She isn't written independently of her relationship to the dude, just another woman subsumed by the romantic supportive role in Hollywood.

The Ram gets treated with dignity by the other wrestlers and his fans, while in turn, he looks at Pam outside the vintage shop and demeans her by saying that she looks clean outside the club. You know, because she's just a dirty slut otherwise.
He makes demands beyond the dancer/client scenario and reads into their "relationship" by issuing a proprietary snap " I thought we had a little something going on here." Then he insults her and barks commands about how she can't refuse him if he has money and wants a dance.
No dumbass, she was nice to you because she needed the money; it was her job.
He's so choked with privilege and entitlement.
Dudes like that turn from sweet to snarling pretty quickly when women try to exercise a will outside their control.
Pam draws the line compartmentalizing Ram as a customer separate from her real life.
It's a realistic and natural point of view for women in the business.
Why does the film flinch from upholding the probity of her character?
Why the fuck does she drive over to apologize and brush off her personal code of ethics as mere bitchiness?
What a fucking cop out.
Sure, point out the degree of cruelty to women over 35 in the sex industry, but don't depict a dancer who has the ability to place limitations upon her dealings with men.
Of course Pam would fall for the "broken down piece of meat," leave work and follow him to a suicide gig.
It's all about the dude, naturally.

The other day we were trying to figure out how old someone's kids are now.

Wow, does that smack you in the side of the head with a ticking clock.

Take the celebrity version as an example for the children who're now suddenly all grown up.

This handsome young man is Ronan Seamus Farrow, formerly known as Satchel, the boy who was the centre of the custody battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow after Allen decided to start fucking his step-daughter.

At 16 years-old, Farrow was accepted into law school at Yale.

No shit.

It also appears that he's a dedicated human rights activist just like his mother.

Now tell me that doesn't make you feel creaky with age.
Wah.

Not only does Eliot Spitzer suffer from the psychological defect of misogyny which leads him to think that women are cum dumpsters, his strain of repulsion regarding all things female goes so deep that he admits perceiving that a dog threatened his macho self-image.

In an interview with Newsweek, Spitzer frames his dog walking habits as a sign of personal growth.

"When he was a young politician with a tough-guy reputation, he preferred to walk only James and leave Jesse, the other family dog, at home. Jesse is a bichon frisé, the kind of dog that blue-haired women leave their fortunes to. 'I wouldn't take her out in public,' Spitzer recently explained. 'I thought James was the better image for me.' Now, most any weekend, he can be seen trailing after both animals. 'It's like, OK, I have a bichon, a little white ball of fluff … I don't care. What do you have to lose?'"

Teh menz is emasculated by a fucking dog.
He wouldn't be seen with a bichon frisé because she would ruin his tough guy reputation.
That's how tenuous masculinity is for some dudes.
Any taint of the feminine and they'll swoon.
Now we're supposed to understand that he's over being a douchebag control freak since he'll stand to be seen in public with such a testosterone killer.
That's mighty big of him.

Mr. M read out the the end of Hinton Als' review of Neil LaBute's "Reasons to Be Pretty"

"He is a meathead who understands that his physical strength and his resistance to thought are terribly attractive to women—or, at any rate, to women who conflate masculinity with insensitivity, and enjoy being objectified. The women in Kent’s life get turned on by their own moral superiority as much as they do by his slablike fingers slapping their fannies. He’s a cuter Andrew Dice Clay, and, the night I attended the show, women laughed as uproariously at his sexism as they did at Steph’s cluelessness. It’s as if LaBute’s—by now canned and adolescent—'transgressive' point of view were what audiences needed in order to feel anarchic, to shed the boring safety of their lives. Watching women in the audience laugh at Steph’s anger and at Kent’s arrogance is terrifying but predictable. It’s rare that the oppressed don’t identify with their oppressor."

"What, did you write this?" he asked me.
Hah.
Hinton Als knows the score.
LaBute's macho braggadocio gets old quickly.

Flipping through a display of dvds yesterday, I caught sight of this specially packaged one because the tell-tale black stripes on yellow were a dead give away.

Cliff's Notes in the movie section of the bookstore?

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Why don't they just go ahead put it in the fiction section so that unimaginative 16 year-olds who don't want to take the trouble to read Golding's novel can cut out all pretense?

Let's call this the "Lazy Fuckers" series.

Oh, I despair.

John Goodman's playing the role of Pozzo in a production of "Waiting for Godot" that's opening in NYC at the end of the month.

I couldn't point to a performance he's given where I wasn't delighted or impressed.

If I'm up late enough, I'll find a re-run of "Roseanne" somewhere on cable.

That was the best sit-com ever regarding the American family and his father figure is a wonderful mix of the everyman and the funnyman.

He steals every scene in "Raising Arizona" and "Barton Fink."

Of course he can do Beckett.

Sick

He deserves to have a bloody tampon thrown at his head.

With extra clotting.

My mobile phone usually gets tossed into my bag only as an afterthought because I generally hate the phone and see few opportunities to use it. I observe many folks carrying on an obsessive-needy relationship with their pocket phones; the ubiquity of mobile phones spells out inevitable consequences for celluloid communication. In particular, it means that a cinematic tradition will gradually fade from popular culture. Think of how many films feature scenes where characters duck into a phone booth for a pivotal moment in the plot. How often has that little space acted as comfort, confessional or a claustrophobic box onscreen? The phone booth was an invaluable staple in film noir for dropping a dime, calling the coppers, or luring your targets. Phone booths were an indispensable tool or resource for the private dick.

"Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" or "The Matrix" depended heavily on the phone booth.

It was a central device to the plot of the original "Dirty Harry" when the scumbag sent him running from phone to phone to make sure he wasn't followed.

Phone booths provide trysting spaces in "Angel Baby" and "True Romance."

Or how about when we first see Nancy caterwauling in the red box in London during "Sid and Nancy"?

There was even a Colin Farrell movie named for the titular service station (didn't see it).

Character and plot development often hinged upon access to a phone booth.

One of my favourite examples would be the lovely Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse ducking into the phone booth to contact Dr. CC Hill (Charles Grodin) on the sweltering August day to tell him that a coven of witches is trying to take her baby.

How will cinema change when the phone booth goes the way of the dinosaur?

Dermaclay's tinted moisturizer appearing in the current marketing campaign from a Belgian firm is running with the tagline "Conceals all Facial Imperfections."

For women apparently, it means that having a visage is in itself a flaw, a blemish.

Body cropping routinely occurs in advertising to dehumanize subjects and reduce their bodies to a display case for product placement, but holy fuck if erasing women's faces isn't the creepiest incarnation of the industry technique.

All you bitches need is a thin frame, lotsa hair and a discernable rack.

Yack.

*Blink, blink*

Can it be happening?

HBO is developing a series about a feminist professor called "Women's Studies."

Playwright Theresa Rebeck is writing the script and working as executive producer along with Ben Karlin from "The Daily Show."

Fucking pinch me.
This is either going to be epic or tragic.

Don't fuck it up with stereotypes, folks.

For the past week I've been taunted by all the reviews out for "Let the Right One In" while I waited for my copy to come by post.

I didn't want to be tempted and read any commentary lest my pleasure be reduced.

All I knew was that it's a Swedish vampire film everyone was praising.

* No major spoilers to follow*

LTROI presents a blistering portrayal of the power struggles in adolescence.

I was mesmerized by Eli's enormous globular eyes that appear as a mood ring of sorts in order to signal her emotive state. At once azure or beryl when she's with her friend or the darkest charcoal when she's in bloodlust, her eyes signify the soul's complexion.

Set in 1982, the film revolves around Oskar (played by Kare Hendebrant), a painfully lonely twelve year-old boy who is mercilessly browbeaten by boys at school. Friendless, Oskar turns to the new girl in the apartment next door for companionship. Eli ( Lina Leandersson) sits impassively in the cold without proper clothing and what she does wear is filthy; her hair is greasy and matted and her fingernails are caked with grime. Oskar sniffs and mildly suggests that she smells funny. We can tell that Oskar's a sensitive boy because he demonstrates a sharp intellect in class and at one point turns out the light as he finally leaves a classroom to linger from meeting the cruel boys. His dilemma is that he won't fight back. Popular knowledge intones that boys have to retaliate, but this film asks that we consider the boys who don't have violence in their dispositions. Is it really a solution to simply cajole the sweet boys into the tactics of the bully? Why do we insist that the bully gets to frame the tenor of human relations? LTROI points out that petty tyrants operate as a parasitic infection in society much like the vampire in folklore.

They drain lifeblood just as surely.

The scene where Oskar is beaten by two boys at the command from a third made my stomach curdle.

Eli's character invites additional feminist analysis.

It seems far from accidental that she's on the cusp of menarche when she becomes a vampire at twelve years-old.

Instead of the "curse" of menstruation, Eli struggles with another scenario involving blood.

Perhaps we're even meant to understand that allegorically, menses offer no true liability to women.

Blood is power, or something like that.

I suppose we could also arrive at a more jaded reading which renders Eli exceptional because she's saved from the indignity of ever having to become a woman.

Eli never has to be compromised or hailed by gender.

She asks Oskar if he would still like her if she wasn't a girl, a query designed to find out if she's prized for mere sexual attraction or if he really acknowledges her as a full person, not just someone to get in the sack.

I'll have this rolling around in my head for a few days.

It's brilliant.

We went for pizza last night and hammered out some of the technicalities concerning our year in Dublin which starts this summer.
Getting the house occupied for the period was of central importance and it's not as though we were comfortable about inviting total strangers to live here.
Mr. M was worried about offering the place to only one new colleague as opposed to all three.
I assured him that I thought it was perfectly fair for him to make the offer to one person because it avoids anyone else getting their feelings hurt or any sort of competition among new folks.
Anyway, the dude accepted enthusiastically today, so we've a major issue resolved.
Then it'll just be a matter of putting a ton of shit in storage.
Phew.

Sociological Images has a link up to the Newsweek chart calculating what "the modern diva" spends on beauty products and services to reach a lifetime total of of nearly half a million dollars.

Yep. Half a million bucks they claim.

Newsweek doesn't offer any thoughtful analysis behind the numbers, only a hysteria characterizing girls and women as shallow, superficial and profligate.

The totals are clearly inflated in order to muster up scorn for self-absorbed women who waste money.

We get no recognition that femininity is compulsory for women.

If you don't avail yourself of products and services to enhance your fuckability and non-threatening appearance to men, then you may as well be invisible.

This bullshit magazine feature is another example of the patriarchal wink. The rhetorical duplicity implies some concern over what lengths women have to go on order to maintain or enhance their beauty, when all the while it's an invitation to dismiss the silly bitches for their over gullible consumption.

Girls and women receive countless daily messages underscoring appearance is everything, that if they're not thin and pretty, they don't matter.

I also don't believe for a minute that most women engage in all the procedures they tally up such as laser hair removal, microdermabrasion and botox.

Included on the menu for shitting on silly women is an article by Jessica Bennett drawing a parallel between freak-show parenting on reality television and how young girls are being raised to be little divas:

"I stumble into a spa that brands itself for the 0 to 12 set, full of tweens getting facialed and glossed, hands and feet outstretched for manis and pedis. "The girls just love it," says Daria Einhorn, the 21-year-old spa owner, who was inspired by watching her 5-year-old niece play with toy beauty kits. Sounds extreme? Maybe. But this, my friends, is the new normal: a generation that primps and dyes and pulls and shapes, younger and with more vigor. Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group."

How can I believe anything she says as reality-based when she claims that five year-olds are "salon vets"? Five year-olds aren't old enough to be considered "veterans" of anything, because they're only five! Instead of the hyperbole and scorn for little girls, why not question the standards set for beauty and femininity in a culture which tolerates the sexualization of children or the corporations who market to children? That'd be a whole lot more productive than in the facile head shaking and hand wringing.

Bennett discloses the rigors of her own grooming process:

"I should know: at 27, my daily maintenance regimen takes at least an hour, and I own enough products to fill a large closet, not to mention a savings account. I have three shades of tanning lotion and $130 Crème de La Mer face cream I use so sparingly it defeats the purpose of having it, and 34—I counted this morning—varieties of lip balm, gloss and tint. I have hair wax and cream, a balm that's made of latex, surf spray for when I want that weathered look, and grooming cream to get rid of it. And I haven't even started to look at the anti-aging products yet."

Wow.

It takes her at least an hour when she's only 27?

34 brands of lip balm?

Femininity can be a real pain in the ass, but no one has to act as though they have utterly no control over how they manage the process.

Shit, at 27 I wore a little mascara or lip stick and was sure to wash my face before bed.

I reject the idea that we're powerless zombies who must spend endless dollars and hours on our appearance. This does not resemble most women's lives.

It's media hype and a flash of the patriarchal wink.

"Are you trying to gaslight me?" was a commonly used refrain around the house when I was a kid as a response stemming from the sense that someone was trying to pull a mind-fuck.

It would be difficult to pinpoint how many times I've seen the 1944 film with Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten. Until today, I had no idea that it was a remake of the 1940 London production directed by Thorold Dickinson. Or that MGM tried to destroy all existing copies of the original so that it wouldn't overshadow the version by George Cukor. Based on the 1939 play by Patrick Hamilton, the drama also premiered on stage in New York starring Vincent Price; it was his first stab at villiany, a character type that would go on to punctuate his acting career. Oh, the wonders of imdb.

The original is far superior.

First, because I never cared for Ingrid Bergman as an actor. She simpers too frequently.

Additionally, Cukor is waaaaay too heavy handed with the shadow play and darkness employed.

The 1944 version is too damn murky by comparison.

Cukor made many incredible films, but film noir didn't suit his aesthetic sensibilities. He was more attuned to the sunny screwball comedy.

Thorold Dickinson's production clearly hits the noir emphasis on cruelty with an old lady getting viciously strangled in the opening scene. It doesn't take long to discover that Paul Mallen's scheming to make his wife Bella think she's losing her sanity. Anton Walbrook plays a man who carefully orchestrates his sadistic plan to have Bella (Diana Wynard) certified and committed to an asylum. There's a symbolic scene when Bella leans out the window to watch a puppet show in the square, leading the audience to recognize Paul who stands behind her as a self-styled puppet master.

He has to be the iconic male gold digger on film.

* No Spoilers*

If you enjoyed the HBO show "TrueBlood," then you'll relish the first in Charlaine Harris' series of eight novels featuring the protagonist Sookie Stackhouse.

I picked up "Dead Until Dark" yesterday when out doing errands and swallowed it in two sittings.

It's presented in a first person narration from Sookie's point of view.

The 25 year-old waitress from Louisiana has moxy to burn from the opening chapter when she saves the new resident vampire Bill Compton from getting drained of his blood by local trash bent on profiteering based upon the human demand.

In one scene that's not depicted on the programme, when Sookie first visits Bill at home, she meets vampires and their attendant "fang bangers" (humans who get off on being bitten and fucked by the undead). She watches as Bill's about to taste a willing supplicant, and in an outburst cautions him that the dude is infected with Sino-AIDS. Apparently, if the vamps drink infected blood they can become weakened for a month or in some cases even die for real.

Since the producers and writers were invested in drawing a parallel between civil rights for vampires with homosexuals, it's easy to see why they revised the scene.

Bill's a sexy motherfucker in the novel as he is on the show.

Bill secures the charms of the virgin Sookie because she's telepathic and discovers that he's the first man whose thoughts she is unable to decipher. She asks the reader how unbearably creepy it would be to be able to "hear" what your sexual partner is thinking. No doubt.

Normally a dude with a predilection for virgins would put me right off, but then one has to factor in the fact that he was made vampire just after the Civil War, a time when women were prized for their lack of sexual experience above all else.

Harris crafts snappy prose which melds the true crime with the vampire genre. When Sookie lurks with her brother's chains in the parking lot in order to thwart the Rattrays from taking Bill's blood, Harris writes:

"I went for him with every intention of hurting him as badly as I could. But he was ready for me and jumped forward with the knife while I was swinging the chain. He sliced at my arm and just missed it. The chain, on its recoil, wrapped around his neck like a lover. Mack's yell of triumph turned into a gurgle."

Love the sexual simile in there with Sookie's smackdown.

Now I need to find time for the other seven novels.

Fab.

The female body as service station never ends.
Yack.

If you're fascinated by all the reports of pirate activity on the high seas in the media, you may want to pick up a copy of Royall Tyler's novel "The Algerine Captive, or The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill." It was serialized in 1797. The first half of the novel is a comedy of manners in the United States. For the second half, Tyler based his fictional account on existing captivity narratives of white American dudes who were kidnapped by pirates in Africa and held for ransom. The postcolonial nation had to come to terms with losing the protected status under British power in an international sense. America was no longer covered under the deal the British had with the pirates and tribal chiefs, and the crown even encouraged attack on the uppity new nation's ships. Nearly 700 Americans were held hostage by pirates along the Barbary coast in the period 1785-1815. Tyler spins an adventure tale inside an anti-slave trade polemic. As critics have widely noted, it's also the first novel to treat the American engagement with the Muslim world. "The Algerine Captive" has an appeal greater than that of the menz wishing to gawp at white male victimization, it should be noted.
The novel's funny, complex and an overlooked gem of its era.

Next month will mark three years since I started this blog.

I've been fortunate enough to have met many lovely people in the blogosphere and in real life as a result. I dig blogging and consider it part of my identity.

Now seems like a suitable point to articulate my sense of blogging etiquette as a follow up on my post about the moral compass.

Folks can expound upon whatever they wish on their own blog.
I've never made it a practice to turn up on another blog and demand that anyone address my issues or badger anyone about their lack of feminist or any other politics. I've never left multiple comments telling folks I disagree, that they're wrong with half baked or disingenuous arguments designed to elicit a "gotcha" moment where I claim to be the rhetorical victor.

I welcome and enjoy getting comments.
Thanks to the folks who are interested and comment frequently.
But there are also comments that openly seek to waste my time or derail my right to say what I desire. Polite blogging entails the realization that I'm not obligated to entertain your views here.
If you disagree with me, make your point and then move on with the understanding that you shall not convince me that feminism isn't necessary, that patriarchy and misogyny are fiction or that I don't have the right to cover topics in the language that I see fit on my own blog.
I'm not asking or expecting anyone to agree with everything I say here.
But I do have the right to write about my own interpretation and perspective without having to accommodate every dude who wants to tell me that I'm wrong or untowardly angry.
Cheers.

I'm feeling like a grumpy old bitch after reading Viv Groskop's feature in the Guardian on the Muffia, the performance art duo created by Sinead King and Kate O'Brien.

On one hand, it's encouraging that their public appearances might get girls thinking about feminism:

"Their main audience seems to be young women, aged 13 to 18, who have heard nothing about feminism. On the chilly Saturday I spend with them, groups of girls gather to watch the performance, giggling and frowning, running up to take pictures and ask questions. Shalini, 17, a student from north-west London, says: 'They're so interesting. They're talking about how the media is making us have an image in our heads of how we should look. No one has ever talked to me about these things before. It's interesting because it made me think about how I feel about not being pale and blonde.'"

Okay, but doesn't parody need to imply a conscious distance from the original in order to draw forth the humour and reach the level of criticism? I mean, by all appearances being young, white, skinny and wearing blonde wigs they just embody the patriarchal beauty norms set for women. Even with the fake pubes, I don't see much of a clear protest here.

How would anyone be able to identify the feminist message?

The merkins don't seem likely to get them more than ogled by dudes, which they already admit.

Also, I cringed when King says at the end that she feels "really liberated" by flashing the merkin.

There's no liberation for women in being semi nude in public.

Patriarchy eats that shit up. When you're a member of the sex class, being naked is a given.

It's another way of saying that she's just "expressing her sexuality," a phrase we'd all be better off never hearing again.

Yes, I'm on the slack this week.

Robert Downey Jr. has to be the most dynamic and appealing in the super-hero set.

The genre frequently bores me. This one had a larger ethical consideration about the logistics behind the arms industry that seems timely.

"Iron Man" sucked me in and was loaded with stellar performances and eye candy.

Save for Terence Howard's presence making me want to tear my eyelashes out (as always), Downey and Jeff Bridges carried the film.

Is it me or was Bridges totally hot with the shaved head?

What a fucking douchebag.

The guys on CBC radio were talking about Billy Bob Thornton's interview with Jian Ghomeshi.
I found the clip over at Michael K's and put it in the link above.

What, are you like ten fucking years old?
Way to go insulting Canada in addition to being a petulant little prick.

Move over, Christopher Guest.

Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming crafted such a funny and smart comedy.

"Hamlet 2" goes for broke in its embrace of sentiment and optimism without being cornpone.

Sure, why does everyone have to die in "Hamlet"?

Hee.

The cast was fabulous.

Steve Coogan's face frozen in terror after "The Creative Process" title card had me screaming in delight. Man, I've been there with the freaking dissertation.

He's an adorable goof ball.

The students also gave great performances, including Joseph Julian Soria as Octavio, the dude perceived to be a gang-banger when he's really a model student from an affluent and refined home.

Amy Poehler killed me with the line "I could have you put away for a year, you fire fucker!"

Brilliant.

As was Coogan's Jeremy Irons impression.

Many times I've walked into a classroom and asked students to respond to this query:
What makes a good man?
What are ideal masculine characteristics that men should strive to adopt?
Feminists have been doing this for nearly forty years so I'm not claiming any originality in this exercise.
Invariably, the first response is always that good or ideal men are strong.
Next usually comes that they are in control.
Honesty and good providers routinely follow.
I put what they call out on the board.
Next they brainstorm another list for what makes a good woman or what counts as ideal feminine characteristics.
Caring or nurturing usually gets offered right away.
Modesty and patience are also suggested.
When I ask them to go back and start defining the characteristics they become more reticent or uncertain.
For example, even though everyone agrees that good men are strong, there is no consensus on what that exactly means.
Does it mean to have developed muscles, to be able to carry or lift heavy objects?
Does it reach to be synonymous with stoicism or that they are impassive without discernable emotion?
What does modesty mean for women? That they cover their bodies and abstain from sexual activity? Or does it mean that they not brag about themselves? Or both?
The truth is that all of us carry around similar lists in regard to the world we inhabit.
No one escapes the nursery school snips 'snails and sugar and spice dichotomy which matures into the mars and venus mythology I frequently reference.

Why is morality gendered at all?
Why isn't the question more often: what does it mean to be a good human being or what are the ideal human characteristics?
What would that conversation and list be like?
As a feminist, I wonder about this often and to what degree our lives would be altered if we removed the overwhelming emphasis culture places upon gender difference.

When I think about what characteristics are ideal and what it means to be an individual with a functioning moral compass, gender has jack shit to do with it.
My list includes:
Curiosity. Why does culture insist that "curiosity killed the cat?" What a perverse interpretation of the innate human need for learning and discovery. Cats as we know have always been historically gendered as female, so this desire for investigation gets codified as some prying, busy-body or gossipy notion instead of the healthy inclination to acquire knowledge.
If one is incurious, such as say George Bush, one embraces a willful ignorance. If one is not curious; not inquisitive or observant or inattentive to the larger world, it'll put you in a world of shit but quick. Lack of curiosity leads to self-aggrandizement and the perception that you know everything already.

Empathy. One has to have the capacity to identify with the affective condition of other folks. Most social ills begin with a empathic deficiency. Specifically, you need to be able to identify with the plight of the weak and the powerless especially when you're born with considerable privilege. Having a developed sense of empathy leads people to realize that everything in the world is not all about them; a loss of ego or self-absorption becomes possible only through honing your sense of empathy. Empathy also produces kindness and compassion which the world certainly could use in greater reserve.

Sincerity. To be sincere means moving beyond maintaining appearances or social hierarchies in exchange for earnest and unaffected communication. It may be impossible to operate with unwaivering sincerity, but at the very least we should strive to be honest and engage others in a genuine and sincere manner. Sincerity cements our relationships and inspires trust.

These three traits are my foundations, what I hope to cultivate and also look for in others.
As you can see, gender has absolutely no bearing on the ability to set your moral compass to guide for curiosity, empathy and sincerity.

I'm trying to strengthen my stomach in order to go and see "Polytechnique," the recently released production from Montreal recreating the events from December 1989 when Marc Lepine murdered 14 women as some sort of fucked up response to how he perceived feminists had ruined his life. You know, when women succeed in winning scholarships, they do a man wrong.

I feel compelled to see it, even though the thought of it makes my blood run as cold as the night I was waiting tables and heard the news report.

Lordy.

How is it that I've never seen "Foxfire" before now?

My sense is that this film was wildly popular with women in my generation when it premiered in 1996.

Which is too bad because this film doesn't deserve to be cherished.

It spews the same cheap cautionary tale about female bonding that we get in "Thelma and Louise."

Women's friendships are wholly characterized as based in pathology and geared toward chaos and criminality.

The film says:

Girls, you may think it's okay to band together to stop a teacher from being a sexual predator, but wait! Soon you'll be stabbing ink-filled needles in your boobs, wielding guns at innocent men and kidnapping them.

Get a pack of chicks together and bedlam soon follows.

Angelina Jolie is just as unbearable here as she is in "Girl Interrupted."

Naturally they make the most "unstable" woman a lesbian.

I couldn't believe that this was based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, not that I've ever read the author, but this drivel totally stems from a poisoned pen.

Bleurgh.

A dude out in Washington killed his five children when he found out that his wife was leaving him for another man.
Awful, right?
You can't shudder enough over a tragic story like that.

Only, if you read the comments attached to the report, you'll see folks blaming Angela Harrison for leaving her husband, not James Harrison for killing five human beings in cold blood in an attempt to get revenge.

Some dude going by luke_4u writes:

"Women need to think about what they're going to do, 'before' they do it. Every action brings a 'reaction'. Before they put 'themselves' before everything and everyone else, they need to consider the consequences. Anyone, yes anyone can be pushed over the top, and evidently she pushed her husband over the top and past the point of no return. I think she should be held at least partly responsible for what happened, as should the man she was committing adultery with. He knew he was messing with a married woman, and he knew it was wrong. But he didn't care, he too was selfish, and without a thought for anyone else, just wanted something that he had no right to, another man's wife. Too bad the husband couldn't have got this guy too. Now she has to live with the fact that the man that loved her is dead, as are her five children, all because of her selfishness and adultery. Personally, I think she deserves a few years in prison, maybe there she could think about what she's done, and how wrong it was. With any luck maybe she could come out a better person, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Usually once a woman crosses that line and goes bad, it anybodys guess whether or not they'll ever be any good again. I hope she rots in hell, for this terrible situation, that 'she' caused. "

According to this patriarchal worldview, men have no moral compass or impulse control.
They are but a witless collection of id-based urges under which they are powerless.
Men just snap.
They cannot "help" themselves.
Women in turn, belong to their husbands for life, no matter what.
By attempting to assert themselves as full human beings with the ability to end a marriage, they give men no alternative but to become savage murderers.

Luckily feminists hold a higher estimation of men.
We know that men do have a moral compass, impulse control and the faculties necessary for rational judgment.
If only everyone else believed it we could stop reading about a man in the paper everyday who "snapped" and killed his wife or kids.

There's been a landmark verdict in a court case in Ontario which just found Johnson Aziga guilty of murder for wantonly infecting women with HIV during unprotected sex.

Rosie DiManno's article underscores how deadly one dude's misogyny can be:

"When he wasn't busy fornicating them to death, Johnson Aziga must have hated women.
Alternatively, the former Ontario civil servant was entirely indifferent to females, without feeling or conscience as he introduced a silent killer – cloaked in lust – into their lives.
Dishonest and duplicitous, thinking only of his immediate sexual gratification, the 52-year-old knowingly and intentionally exposed his unsuspecting lovers to the HIV virus right up until the morning of his arrest on Aug. 30, 2003.
He cut a wide swath with his penis."

Showing absolutely no remorse, Aziga attempted to defend his reckless behaviour by arguing --wait for it --that the bitches had it coming.

"This is an issue in which it takes two to tango, the sex issue," he expounded. "Somebody may be ... fraudulent and so mean, but it takes two. It's unfortunate, some people are being reported dead ... As I said, this is a statement of frustration, not necessarily of anger, especially when you see the exercise that is going on. When we are talking about somebody dying, trying to see whether it should be accepted (as evidence) or not."

Aziga's emphasis on "it takes two to tango" implies that because women consented to have sex with him, they were guilty or asking for the disease's transmission. It's the hoary old virgin/whore dichotomy rearing its ugly head. Two women are dead and five others infected as a direct result of sleeping with him. He badgered women in to letting him have sex without a condom and denied being infected. He couldn't give a shit about the women he pushed into the grave.

Now he'll probably die in prison.

Here's your Mos Def song for the day.
Ignore the jeebus talk in the opening voice-over.

If you ask most folks who they would rate as the King of Camp, most votes would go to John Waters. Waters no doubt deserves acclaim, yet my unreserved enthusiasm for Bruce Campbell's celluloid canon far surpasses my appreciation for the favourite son of Baltimore.
Maybe with Waters it's because I sometimes get the impression that he's too invested in portraying women as ridiculous creatures we are invited to mock.

Aside from being blessed with movie star good looks with that chiseled chin and strong brow, Campbell always seems to enjoy himself and never flinches from getting a laugh at his own expense.
A few weeks after we moved in together, on an early saturday morning, we plopped in front of the television randomly choosing "Maniac Cop 2." Holy shit were we choked with the hysterics.
In the horror genre, it doesn't get any better than "Evil Dead 2." Even all these years later the film still fucking holds up mostly because of Campbell's lead role. And if you can find someone who didn't like Bubba Ho-Tep well, let's say they wouldn't be invited to my house for dinner.

That said, "My Name is Bruce" would only suit the most die-hard of Cambell's fans.
He's kidnapped by a fanboy to battle the ghost of Chinese miners killed in an accident who now haunts the town to take revenge. In addition to the white dude in yellow-face doing the wretched "engrish" performance, Cambell seems sapped of his magnetism onscreen. You see everything coming five minutes into the film.
Every other actor is flat.
Hugely disappointing.
Watch "Bubba Ho-Tep" instead.

This commercial dominates late-night television.

I am being hypnotized into wanting Bumpits!
Ack.
Must not call...

We all know there's no shortage of bad advice for men and women in popular magazines.
The difference seems to be that other than the rogue death from inhaling too much Axe body spray, most of the advice is a way to keep the boot on women and uphold male privilege.
Take for example "Top 10: Subtle Ways to Tell Her She's Getting Fat" over at AskMen.com.
Virtually all the advice over there instructs men how to lure a cum dumpster into bed or how to maintain their sole dominion over an inferior pussy-bearer. Men's magazines assume that dudes have goals to be successful and that getting hot chicks is their birthright. In contrast, the lady mags are fairly dedicated to the mantra that women need to land a man and do all we can to keep him despite our own pleasure or preference.

Historically, women have been painted as the manipulative, sneaky, conniving sort who will play games in order to get what they want.
AskMen now advises men to do the same by "tricking" their receptacles into weight loss.

Number 9 recommends yoga not as a healthy lifestyle choice, but as a means for men to get what they want in terms of a thinner girlfriend:
"The beauty of yoga is that if you dress it up as a way to relieve stress, she may not realize that she’s being tricked into shedding a few pounds, and even if she does, you’ll end up with a happier, more self-confident girlfriend rather than a grumpy lard-ass."

Number 7 includes this little gem:
"When dishing up meals for the two of you, try giving her smaller-than-usual amounts. By making her ask for more food, you might succeed in shaming her into an acknowledgment of her recent weight gain." Don't worry, dudes are told, if you're hungry from smaller portions, just go and eat later when she isn't looking. Only chicks have to lose weight, afterall.
Shame her into weight loss and starve the bitch.

Number 3:
"Sometimes as men we have to get downright nefarious to get what we want. You might not be proud of stooping to this level, but nothing says 'better lose some weight' like a broken chair. After you loosen a few screws or remove some important slats of a chair in which you know she’ll sit and subsequently break, sit back and watch the guaranteed dietary transformation that ensues. It will profoundly amaze you."
No, what should profoundly amaze him is that he's being told to injure and humiliate a woman he supposedly loves just because she gained weight.
We all know that the worst thing a woman can do is either gain weight or get angry.

The magazine also encourages men to openly lie about their schemes if a woman cops on: "Keep in mind, if she confronts you about trying to shame her into losing weight, the key approach here is denial, as you reply: 'Do you actually think I would be that manipulative?' Of course you would, but she doesn’t need to know that."
Honest communication is for suckers!
Manipulation is manly!

Oh, and the comments attached are just as cringeworthy as you would imagine.
This one's my favourite:

"Frank Johnson says:
not the strapped on toy your lesbian girlfriend, er I mean faggot boyfriend has to strap on because his dick goes limp whenever he sees you naked. Queer lesbian feminists, the scum of MANkind. Please continue to post here as every post you queer lesbian feminists make here sets your (bowel) movement back another notch. You are such a source of laughter. Feminists will soon be extinct but MEN and REAL normal women will never be extinct. Feminists are not normal. They are a freak of nature with a mental disability. They should be exterminated."

At some level it's refreshing to hear a man openly admit that he despises women instead of all the usual subterfuge and posturing to the contrary online.

I stepped away from the desk long enough to make a cup of tea.
As the water boiled, I caught the headline "Prodigy or Precocious?" in the Star, along with a picture of Alec Greven, author of "How to Talk to Girls."
Check out this quote:
"By popular definition, the boy who compares pretty girls to 'cars that need a lot of oil,' is a bona fide child prodigy."

Wait a sec.
A boy who simply parrots society's disdain for women by using tacky similes comparing women to inanimate objects designed to serve man ranks as gifted?
Why doesn't anyone else get creeped the fuck out that a boy whose balls have barely dropped is considered an expert on the subhuman female?
We're so fucking simplistic and silly that even a child can figure us out!
Ugh.

Back to sanity with Hawthorne.