I failed to fall asleep last night which is often the case before I fly.
I hates it.
Around 4 I had an idea for a post and then at 5, got out of bed to write it.
The lovely ladies at The Anti Room asked me for a guest post, so I sent it to them.
It's my response to Elizabeth Wurtzel's unbearable take on aging and losing her looks.
Poor her.

We'll be taking the pooches to a farm in the "green belt" outside the city (spoiled rotten) and then we're off to Dublin.
Posting may be out of the question until we return next week.
Cheers.

Parker Posey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Jane Lynch are all in "Spring Breakdown" set for release on dvd on June 2.
I've been dying to see this.
*Please* don't let the plot resort to take a cheap shot by telling women that they can find "empowerfulness" through jello shots, tit flashing and sex with random dudes.
Ack.
Is it too much to ask for there to be a comedy about womens' friendships and hijinks without all the usual femmebot fucktoy compliance?

Check out Peter Howell's estimation of the rampant misogyny at Cannes this year.

"Lars von Trier's sex horror film Antichrist won an 'anti-prize' at the closing of the Cannes Film Festival last weekend for being "the most misogynistic movie" at the fest.
Right sentiment, wrong movie. Despite its scenes of graphic mutilation, including one where star Charlotte Gainsbourg lops off her clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors, Antichrist was actually less hostile to women than many other high-profile pictures at Cannes.
The ecumenical jury, a non-official panel of Christian filmmakers and critics who judge films by their spiritual values, awarded the dubious 'anti-prize.' Their unprecedented slapdown was denounced as 'a ridiculous decision that borders on a call for censorship' by festival chief Thierry Frémaux, who had the last laugh when the official Cannes jury gave Gainsbourg its Best Actress award."

What's that? Cutting off her clitoris?
By all means, dudes need to remain "free" to explore their hatred for women by hacking up their bodies onscreen. It's artistic, not at all a scurrilously vicious attack on women's very existence and right to live without being subjected to male violence.

Howell quotes the fuckface director:

"Von Trier has been called misogynistic before, most famously by Nicole Kidman, star of his earlier Palme contender Dogville. He offers a complicated and contradictory defence in his production notes to Antichrist:
'I don't think women or their sexuality is evil, but it is frightening ... I provoke myself, too, you know. My mother was a dyed-in-the-wool women's libber. I'm pretty open about gender equality. I just don't think it'll ever really happen.'"

Speechless, I am.
Women aren't evil, they're frightening.
Misogyny's the distillation of fear and hatred for women that fucked up dudes harbour, and it often starts with mommy.
Von Trier not only negates the possibility of gender equality, he's evading the question by not acknowledging that he's doing all he can to dehumanize and brutalize women in his ugly film career. Gender equality won't happen if he can help it.

Read the whole thing.

Debra Black has a fascinating peek into a 15th century publication for women in yesterday's "Toronto Star," discovered by Dr. James Weldon, the new head of English/film studies at Wilfred Laurier University.

It would be a bit pithy to shorthand this as a medieval Cosmo, which may be a tempting headline tag for some newspapers or blogs; instead, we should regard it as the first identified periodical geared towards women readers.

Packed with recipes, medical information and advice, housekeeping tips and romantic fiction, the Biblioteca Nazionale was the premiere English press for wealthy women. Even Chaucer graced its pages with The Clerk's Wife.

I'd love to see the anthology.

I'm guessing there has to be some inclusion of a 15th century equivalent to the modern "99 Ways to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed" approach to remind women of their subordinate worth and station. Or at least something about how to manage the chastity belt from chafing in order to keep that "fresh" feeling while you wait for the key master to return.

Behold Mr. M's dinner thanks to a trip to the St. Lawrence market.

Penne, parmigiano reggiano, fresh basil, olive oil, red pepper flakes and prawns the size of my fist.

Phone transcript:

Medbh: Hello customer service lady. I'd like to secure a withdrawl from our account in Euros. How can I do that?

Dipshit service rep: Wait. What? Like, you want to open an account using Euros?

Medbh: No, I'd like to take some money out of our account but I'd like it in EU currency.

Dipshit service rep: Oh. Like how much?

Medbh: Around one thousand.

Dipshit service rep: Wow, that's a lot. Like, for what purpose?

Medbh: For renting a house. (not that it's any of your business).

Dipshit service rep: Why don't I call your branch and see what they have?

Medbh: Okay, great.
*a few minutes later*
Dipshit service rep: They said they only have 75 Euros on hand, but if you go in they can take the money from your account and then put in an order for more which would be ready to pick up in like 3-5 business days.

Medbh: Well that doesn't really help since we won't be here.

Dipshit service rep: Each branch will have a small amount on hand, so you can just go around and pick up what you they have until you get the amount you want.

Medbh: May I have the number to the main branch, please?

So this lady thinks it's perfectly reasonable for me to walk to a dozen different fucking branches to get what I want. I call the main branch and she tells me which one to go. Pretty simple, right? Then another woman from the bank calls Mr. M to tell him that they've cancelled our credit card because there was suspicious activity on it yesterday. This is the second time they've done that right before we were set to leave the country. The *suspicious* activity was that I went to the fucking mall yesterday. Now I'm heading out to get the damn Euros and I'll wager that they won't give them to me because Mr. M isn't with me.
Because every fucking time I make a withdrawl or even deposit over a few hundred they treat me like I'm a shiftless gold digger who's out to fleece him.
There's no point in switching banks.
They're all this bad.

Jonathan Rabb's novel Shadow and Light has an intriguing premise and a sturdy exposition set in Weimar-era Berlin. The problem settles with the characterization which feels overly derivative and flat. The plot centres around police detective Nikolai Hoffner's case investigating the death of a mogul at Ufa motion picture studio. The dude apparently shot himself in the bath in a manner that resembles how Fritz Lang's first wife died. The director and his second wife Thea von Harbou look suspicious. There's nothing particularly memorable about either one in this historical fiction. We never actually learn the motive or the killer's identity. Hoffner's a pastiche detective figure with the dead wife, estranged sons, lonely workaholism, heavy drinking, rumpled suit and insomnia. The most original aspect of his character gets only a brief mention with the experiments he conducts at headquarters to reproduce scents from crime scenes. The narrator remarks on the stinky Alexanderplatz police building:

"Hoffner had been known to add to the general pong over the years--a few experiments of his own to approximate the smell of a decomposing corpse (sulfur and rotten fruit), or gunfire residue on a man's suit (damp cigar ash, dog hair, and chicory), or, his most recent, skin scrubbed clean of human blood (an old rag saturated in iodine and dark chocolate). More than a few of the junior detective had broken cases based on their intimacy with Hoffner's concoctions, the best a young Kriminal-Assistent named Donicker, who had cracked a particularly baffling murder case simply by smelling a woman's panties. The woman, Molly Dimp, had seemed the perfect innocent--grieving sister and partner in a not terribly promising music-hall act--except for a slight burn mark on her upper thigh, which no one had been able to explain or fully identify. She had claimed to have received it from a man trying to recover payment on her brother's gambling debts, but it had seemed an odd spot for intimidation. K.A. Donicker, with nothing much to lose, had asked to sift through the young lady's laundry, whereupon sifting had become sniffing and the incriminating pair of silk blues had quickly been discovered. The scent of tobacco, Schnauzer, and chicory--so Donicker described it--had sent Fraulein Dimp to the galows, her burn mark later identified as the nub end of a Luger pistol placed too soon against the skin after firing."

That's a stylish bit of prose carrying an inventive angle on the detective's trade, but there's not enough to set Hoffner apart as an engaging protagonist.

Rabb fleshes out the narrative through plausible cloak and dagger machinations around the technology of sound in the cinema. Ufa cracked the sound track enigma before Hollywood, and predictably, the Americans do everything possible to secure it for themselves. Leni Coyle, Hollywood talent scout, rinses out like a typical femme fatale on the page, a cunning woman who's there to do Tinsel Town's dirty work. The only thing that keeps the Americans from being utterly unsavoury villains in the novel occurs with presage when the Nazis show up and begin leaving their bloody fingerprints smeared across history. I'd say this would appeal to those curious about Weimar Berlin more than movie buffs.

This trailer for "Sorority Row," a film slated for an October release looks like a standard slasher flick with plenty of tits, ass and blood to arouse the scopophilic.
You have to wonder what Carrie Fisher's doing in this.
I love her last line "Don't think I'm afraid of you. I run a house with fifty crazy bitches."
Hah!
She would know.

Of the three popular television shows featuring casts with four women, "Designing Women" was my favourite by far, mostly due to Julia Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter) and her wacky sister Suzanne (Delta Burke). I think I enjoy rocking the pencil skirts just like the fashionable feminist on the small screen who didn't take shit from anyone.
The first season has just been released on dvd and I'm tempted to pick it up.

Speaking of patriarchal missives loaded with gender binarism, check out Margaret Wente's pearl-clutching for the demise of working class masculinity over at The Globe and Mail.
The crisis resides in an economy changing from one based in manufacturing to one based in service and information. For dudes who cultivated their masculinity around hard labour and little interpersonal skills, they're unable to transition into jobs where they are now asked to do what she's calling "emotional labour." The stuff of the dreaded muliebrity, which is the essential opposition of virile masculinity.

Working class dudes are suffering an identity crisis Wente notes because

"The conventional answer is that their education levels are too low and their skills are too poor. But the more accurate answer is that they're psychologically mismatched to the seismic shifts in our economy. The new economy (over the long term) is creating tons of service jobs in retail, customer support, and personal care. The trouble is that these jobs require temperamental attributes that are stereotypically feminine - things like patience, a pleasant demeanour, deference to the customer and the ability to empathize and connect. Another way to put it is that these jobs require emotional labour, not manual labour. And women, even unskilled women, are much better at emotional labour than men are.
The author of the study, Darren Nixon, did his field work in Manchester, where he interviewed dozens of long-term unemployed men. Once the embodiment of proud working-class culture, Manchester has had its guts ripped out by deindustrialization, and is trying to reinvent itself through the arts and tourism. Some of the men he interviewed had tried their hand at retail or other service jobs, but none had lasted long. 'I've got no patience with people, basically,' one subject told him. 'I can't put a smiley face on.' Or: 'Telephone sales, no. Too much talking.' Another man said, 'If someone [a customer] gave me loads of hassle, I'd end up lamping them.' Several of them, in fact, had lost their jobs when they lamped the boss."

What this article really suggests is that men are resistant to change and are limited and incapable of adaptation. So we should pity them?
Meanwhile, women's lives have changed enormously over the past forty years and have failed to suffer the same type of "seismic shift." Once women married young, had a bunch of kids and had little to no education. Now the majority of university students are women, who are getting married and having kids much later and in smaller numbers.
I'm also detecting that Wente's informed by the idea that once an occupation becomes predominated by women, it's feminized and devalued. All this emphasis on communication or service jobs being suited to women is bullshit, because all of those jobs used to be done by men back when women largely worked only at home. Also, isn't it to be expected that someone near retirement will have outdated skill-sets that don't match the current technology or upgrades in the labour market?
The idea that men cannot be expected to interact with the public is based upon the most ridiculous gender mythology out there. What, they're just savage brutes who can only rely upon rude physical strength to make a salary?
Men should be offended by such a reductive rendering of their capacity for communication and growth.
Some version of this garbage has been appearing regularly as part of a backlash against feminism for the past 30 years.
The menz are in danger!
Society wants them emasculated and sissyfied!
Give me a motherfucking break.

Alex Williams' feature in the NYT on the return popularity of being nice and waving smiley faces demonstrates the same reductive polarity that patriarchy always advances.
I know, you're saying what does this have to do with patriarchy?
Please. It's always about patriarchy, the sum of human history.

Williams identifies a new trend towards folks being "nice" instead of "mean," which is explained by Paul Rudd's career as leading man, Obama's election and the economic downturn forcing companies/marketers to seek a competitive edge by treating consumers with a smear of courtesy.
For example, they point to a company that didn't want to shit on women by accepting a snarky campaign that drew an analogy between their product and real and fake breasts:

“'There’s more spark to nice — it is really in,' said Graceann Bennett, the director of strategic planning at the Chicago office of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. She said clients are shying away from the arch and sardonic campaigns that were in vogue when the economy was flush. Ogilvy recently pitched an ad for Truvia, a new sweetener, showing two mounds of white powder meant to suggest female breasts, one more perfectly shaped than the other. The proposed tagline: 'The difference between real ones and fake ones is obvious.'
The agency wanted to make the point that Truvia is derived from stevia leaves, a South American herb, not from a laboratory. But executives at Truvia’s manufacturer, Cargill, thought the ad was mean to the competition and to women with breast implants. They rejected it."

And lo, sexism and misogyny will instantly disappear from marketing campaigns from this moment. From now on they'll simply peddle their products by using the faux-empowerment angle instead.

What bugs me about this article is the proposition that we're expected to fit into and see the world from a binary set of opposite choices.
You're either nice or you're mean.
Well, no, that's fucking stupid.
But it's patriarchy's bread and butter.
Culture is full of converse pairings based on difference, opposition and hierarchy and which lack any fucking nuance, degree, gradation or complexity.
It's one or the other.
Good or evil; masculinity or muliebrity; black or white; blah, blah.
Our collective powers of reasoning trade upon antagonistic adversaries at every turn.
The words "nice" and "mean" don't really hold water, either.
The professor dude who is quoted as expert in the article equates "nice" with mediocrity and banality when really, we can understand Obama being called nice by definition means that he's not an arrogant warmonger and a bully like his predecessor.
"Nice" does not necessitate over-accomodating or spineless.
For men in particular, it seems to suggest not being choked by your own privilege, being well-mannered and aware of the folks around you.
A definition for "mean" seems even less collectively shared.
When folks wear "mean people suck" t-shirts, they don't always just decide on a basis of cruelty or those who are unkind. Quite often it gets tossed folks for being honest, candid. For having a mouth and speaking up like those mean feminists.

I just have to reject that you select one or the other.
Folks should not aspire to always being "nice."
Women get told that shit to be nice and pleasing from the cradle.
And to smile.
Fuck that.
People are more complex than this.

The Tory Burch clothes on display in Holt Renfrew during my browsing trips over the past year or so have reminded me of what ladies who retire to sunny climes would be sporting. Everything looked matronly and I hated her large monogram all over everything. I'm not interested in advertising for clothing designers. Labels belong on the inside of my clothes.

Then I saw the dress pictured above and thought *snap* how very 1967.

The last year before everything turned to scruffy hippie shit.

Is she waving or doing some sort of interpretive dance?

I'd take a geometric print over florals any day.

Burch's dresses and skirts are all for the most part fetching, except for the maxi dresses.

Not only am I way too short to be swallowed up in one, there's something very Mrs. Roper about those caftans that makes me unable to take them seriously.

The highlight of "Toronto Stories" was seeing our corner included in a scene.
*Spoilers*
Otherwise, the film could carry the subtitle "The Lives of Fucked Up Dudes" for three of the four segments.
In "The Brazilian," Soon-Yin Lee plays Willia, a woman who is incomprehensibly attracted to a hipster dude named Boris (Tygh Runyan). He sports varying types of ironic facial hair and ugly ensembles. He refers to his beard as "female repellent" in one scene. Yeah, all smart women are attracted to men who want women to find them repugnant. He's taking a page from the tagline to "He's Just Not That Into You" in failing to recognize hanging out with a woman as dating. He even looks up dating in the dictionary to see if the label fits them when she asks. He can't entertain labels or defintions from chicks, yet he still looks it up and decides they're both right since a date has social as well as romantic denotations. Willia throws herself at the uninterested dude, telling him she has a crush on him, offering to teach him about sex and asking to see him. When he disrobes to reveal he's pubeless because it's "less animalistic," she halts the encounter because she's packing a bush and doesn't want him to recoil in horror. Hence the title, she gets an extreme wax and the viewer gets a full-frontal screen shot of it, even though the camera had not reciprocated with the dude. Female nudity is a given onscreen; it's what viewers expect to be revealed. He responds to her query about when she'll see him again by saying he's like Polkaru and will show up from time to time. She's at the library twice for hours to research his "love-shy" anti-commitment demeanor and then to learn that Polkaru was a local kid's show years ago featuring a mythical character who intermittently disappeared. Ladies have to do their research if they want to land the man, naturally. Boris is an infantilized dude who doesn't want to enter into adult relationships with women. 'Cause they're like gross and stuff. Despite his admission that he doesn't want a relationship, that he never thinks of her when she's not around, Willia fawns over his beauty and specialness.
Female masochism in the cinema never grows weary.

In "Windows," K.C. Collins plays Alton, a window washer ex-convict on probation. His friend Doug (Joris Jarsky) appears recently released from prison. Only Doug actually escaped to confront his ex who has become engaged to another man. At home with his very pregnant girlfriend, Alton runs out after a call from Doug alerts him to a violent confrontation. In the tony neighbourhood in her daddy's house, Doug holds a gun to her head. This shit happens everyday when women have the audacity to remind men that they're not their property to control. Although we're given the story from the male point of view, at least she glasses him and gets away. Unsuspecting Chantal (Ingrid Hart) doesn't get the skinny about how the father of her baby almost threw it all away to save some maniac from himself. Now that would have been worth watching.

Then in "Lost Boys" we get closure on the little boy (Toka Murphy) who walked out of the airport evading the customs agents without knowing any English at the beginning, and whose presence links the four stories. Gil Bellows plays Henry, a raving homeless dude. He spots the boy in Union Station and decides that he'll find and save him. It's hero time, folks. A dude with a messiah complex can redeem himself of smoking crack on the streets. Henry approaches the door to a well-fitted townhouse. Turns out it used to be his home, that is until his son drowned in the family swimming pool. His wife gives him money and wants to talk. His grief is so much more profound than hers, so it justifies his abandonment, wallowing in self-pity and rock smoking. What woman would put up with that shit without smacking the dude in the head? But Henry gets to be Superman and save the lost boy. Now he can find himself. Hallelujah!

The city looks great but it's all about the menz.

An eager member of the gender police, Carol Sarler's article in the Daily Hatemail excoriates women like myself who have chosen not to have children:

"Yet if she says she hasn't a shred of maternal feeling in her, moreover, if she says she would prefer to concentrate on her career and that a child would only get in the way of it, then my head might acknowledge her right to do so. But my heart whispers: 'Lady, you're weird.'

It was welcome news, therefore, to discover this week that I am not alone. Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd.
As a result, it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls 'an essential humanity'. And I know exactly what they mean."

That's it, I'm 'weird' and lacking an 'essential humanity' for exercising my right to opt out of motherhood. Sarler forgets that in patriarchy, all women are less than fully human.
How shocking that women still buy into the myth characterizing biology as destiny.

The older I get, the more I feel empathy for women who are mothers.
Like the woman we often see in the dog park who attends with monstrously ill-behaved boys and a husband who acts like they're all strangers.
I cannot imagine how taxing her life is surrounded by dudes big and little who pay her scant regard.

But fuck me if I'll tolerate being deemed less worthy in the workplace or otherwise for not having had children.
She offers such a ridiculously reductive rendering of women workers.
Women may be up all night or missing hours because of their children much more often than those without.
Plus, let's not forget that her understanding of how much employers value mothers doesn't in any way match reality, when women continue to be "mommy-tracked" for positions outside promotions and raises.
What a load of bullshit.

Tomorrow we're celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary (and 18 years of co-habitation) by taking in the "Surreal Things" exhibit at the AGO. I dig the playful spirit and the commitment to the "make it new" ethos of the modernist art movement. I'm also curious to see how many women are represented in the collection. I'm guessing it'll be a sausage-fest as usual.

Penelope Rosemont explains in her anthology that women enjoyed a significant presence in the surrealist movement, even if history allowed their work to be lost or eclipsed by dudes:

"Unlike most twentieth-century cultural and political currents, the surrealist movement has always opposed overt as well as de facto segregation along racial, ethnic or gender lines. From the very first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, writings by women appeared alongside those of their male comrades. Works by women artists were regularly included in surrealist exhibitions. As one perceptive commentator (Robert Short) has pointed out, 'No comparable movement outside specifically feminist organizations has had such a high proportion of active women participants.'"

I'm partial to Meret Oppenheim's "Lobster Phone" pictured above.

"Tell No One" demands your attention with multiple plot twists.

But by the end, it just seemed deeply overwritten and unbelievable.

Montage sequences set to music were bluntly indulgent and manipulative, particularly the wedding flashback set to Jeff Buckley's "Lilac Wine."

And why does every neo-noir have to have child molestation in the plot?

François Cluzet plays Alex, a dude graduating from med school when the film opens. His wife and childhood sweetheart Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) gets attacked as she's leaving a swimming hole. Cut to eight years later, the police turn up to tell him that they've discovered two bodies buried in the vicinity where his wife was victimized by some serial killer and they're not satisfied with his explanation. At this point it looks like Alex snuffed the dudes who killed his wife. Then he gets an email with a video clip taken of a woman who looks just like his wife speaking into the camera, sent in time to commemorate her death or their anniversary. The rest of it traces Alex's efforts to discover if his wife's alive and what really happened eight years ago.

Critics creamed their jeans for this one.

I'm going with "meh."

Graham Rawle's maniacally inventive novel "Woman's World" took five years to complete. After he sketched out the story, he sifted through British women's magazines from the early 1960s to cut and paste the words for the narrative meticulously on each page.

Rawle's book proposes that if all one knows about femininity is gleaned exclusively from the glossy pages, the results are a staggering mix of comedy and tragedy.

A careful reader will discern the big reveal long before it gets formally presented about 250 pages into the story. It's fun and skillfully plotted.

Out for pizza on this holiday (blech, for Victoria) we were sat in an uncomfortable proximity next to a couple who were on an obvious first date.
She was trying so hard to be gregarious and pleasing.
Then their food came.
Readers, he ate his pizza with a knife and fork.
Ack.
One of my many "food issues" forces me to recoil in horror at the site of cutlery digging into a pizza.
Fuck no.
Pizza should only be eaten with your fucking hands.
Now Mr. M has virtually no "food issues" (other than needing lots of it), but even he fully shares my disgust at this affected practice.
We exchanged a knowing glance.
I've said it before: if a dude cuts up his pizza into little bites, there's no way in hell that he'll be eating pussy with enthusiasm.
Yeesh.

Alec Baldwin enjoys a reputation for being a big liberal in the entertainment industry, and just like many liberal dudes, he has his head up his ass when it comes to women. They'll denounce every injustice in the world, serve as cheerleaders for Obama, yet these dudes will never cast a gimlet eye on their own gender privilege and blatant sexism. Bill Maher's another example of lefty men who are unwilling to see women as more than cum dumpsters, property or servants.
Joking about getting a mail order bride is pretty fucking lame.
And then naturally the horn-dog Letterman chimes in that he can get one for him, too.
Why would any woman put up with their shit?

The title "Role Models" may be regarded as referencing more than the plot about dudes who become mentors to boys. In context with the contemporary epidemic of films that addle our collective psyches with a concentrated distillation of pure misogyny (a.k.a. the Judd Apatow and player's film credits), "Role Models" stands out as a clear departure from all the lady hating on the big screen. Sure, it's still a product of a patriarchal nexus wherein men and boys oggle boobs and joke about gay dudes, but by comparison, this film is a refreshing stand out. And let's be realistic: trying to find a completely non-sexist comedy today would be as pointless as looking for a voluntary confession from shrub and company. Ain't gonna happen.

Instead, let me suggest that "Role Models" does three fairly radical things by the norms set for popular comedy.

#1: A woman turns down a marriage proposal, makes the best decision for her personal well-being and breaks up with a dude.

Normally, Hollywood presents the proposal as the be-all, fucking end-all for all vagina-bearers. Have a pussy? Then you are obsessed with getting married. What was "Bride Wars" if not the quintessence of such a reductive estimation of women? We've had the "Bridezilla" stereotype shoved down our throat for far too long. Additionally, I don't need to see any more women who happily accept any old shlub into their lives even though by all rationale she should run the other way. You know, like Katherine Heigl's character did in "Knocked Up."

Let's see more women onscreen who are granted the common sense to refuse a proposal or walk the fuck away when a relationship sours, and to do so without getting shit on and humiliated for it as in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." In "Role Models" Elizabeth Banks' character Beth tells Paul Rudd's Danny that she won't marry him because he's been a serious dickhead for years. His anger and frustration realizes itself in a steady stream of arrogant and smarmy responses. He considers himself as wasted talent beset by the mediocrity and mendacity. When he cruelly attacks a barista about the names for cup sizes at Starbucks, his seething misplaced contempt gets shut right the fuck down by Beth, who knocks him off Mt. Superior by telling him the cup's called a Venti because it's twenty ounces. You can imagine how much I enjoyed the scene for being able to watch a dude who gets off on correcting other people get corrected.

Beth's a lawyer, she's smart, she's not going to waste her time with Mr. Angry Douchebag.

#2: Men are called out for being self-absorbed dickheads and have to cultivate a moral compass directed with a sense of empathy.

So often in film as in real life, women are charged with the burden of doing all the emotional maintenance for relationships and with caring about everyone else over and above themselves. Meanwhile, dudes get to hang out in life and coast on gender privilege, reaping rewards based on their existence rather than any emotive effort, caring for others or selfless decisions. Men can be selfish, lazy and even physically repulsive onscreen and they still get a Hollywood ending. Seth Rogen has built a career on this unwarranted indulgence. It's also a popular trope on television in typical shows such as "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The King of Queens."

Sean William Scott's character Wheeler learns only a basic lesson, that you can't abandon a ten year-old for your libido, but Danny learns to connect with people outside his ordinary mocking reserve. Yes, it's made safe for him to grow emotionally because it's done within the macho-approving context of fantasy battle, but still, he steps outside himself and values what's important to Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). He stops thinking about himself for a minute. Even better, he doesn't know Beth's watching, so his participation in the medieval contest is not feigned just to win her back. It's rare to see men develop or make emotional connections onscreen outside the goal of getting laid or possessing a woman at some level.

#3: Women don't have to suppress ambition or pay deference to men.

Jane Lynch is by far the funniest actor in the film and she doesn't hold back and bat her eyelashes for the headlining actors. She reminds them in every scene and doesn't apologize or wilt. Her character gets to be in charge and decide what happens to them. Then there's Alexandra Stamler's Esplen, a character who appears to be meek and waifish but boldly seizes the crown at the end. And guess what? Dicks don't fall off in the presence of strong and capable women.

Men are actually happier when they can interact with women as equals instead of fucktoys, incubators or property.

Go figure what might be possible if we follow through with this thread, for both the cinema and the real world.

Oh, and when the naked woman falls asleep on Ambien she isn't raped for laughs as with the unconscious woman in "Observe and Report."

How lovely to see the new 120 metre-long Beckett Bridge gently laid into place in Dublin.

Yet somehow a white harp doesn't quite resonate with the master's work.

If it were up to me, it would have been a lobster as in the title of his first short story and my blog.

The lobster taps into his preoccupation with the arbitrary nature of suffering and how really, we're all not long before the pot.

What about the rocking chair used in both Murphy and Rockaby?

Or how about the lonely tree from Godot? Or the banana from Krapp's Last Tape?

Maybe the dustbins for the old folks in Endgame?

He had so many protagonists with foot trouble that I could just as well see a set of feet stand for the man's work and his life of travel.

Hmmm. The harp just seems a bit generic for Samuel Beckett.

Two years ago I started wearing foundation, and although I've kept it up, there's always been difficulty finding the appropriate shade.

Most base makeup carries too much yellow or beige tint, even in the lowest number.

Especially with the whole tanning trend where women are encouraged to look as though they've been lounging in the sun all day, it has been impossible to find a brand matching my complexion.

Then months ago I found Dior's "Pure Light" #100.

Finally.

It was the right hue; it was lightweight.

I say was because when I went to Sephora to pick up a second bottle, they apologized that the line had been discontinued.

Of course.

The Bay and Holt Renfrew gave me the same spiel.

Today I tracked some down online.

Duh.

Why did it take me so long to figure that out?

"Would you like a cup of tea?" I offered, holding the kettle.
"No. I can't take the chamomile tea. It tastes like I'm drinking a steeped dandelion."

Alrighty, then.
He's out of peppermint.
Mr. M doesn't drink caffeine so my Twinings is no good.
It's a sign that I'm overdue for a trip to the market.

Vile.

Two dudes in the local press were tripping over their tongues in reviews for the Colombian telenovela "Sin Senos No Hay Paraiso," ("Without Breasts There's No Paradise) which began airing this week on Canadian television.

So naturally I had to have a look at the programme concerned with a teenager's quest to get breast implants.

It's as cringe-inducing as you would expect.

The heroine Catalina internalizes the male mammary fetish and sets about to get bigger boobs.

In order to secure the 5 million pesos required for the surgery, she joins a group of girls at a drug lord's house to exchange her virginity for the cash. She's gorgeous, but the drug dude doesn't show any interest since she's not packing melons in her shirt. Without them, she's undesirable. One of the henchmen offers her the money in exchange for sex and she agrees. He lays her down on a pool table; the pink rose falls out of her clutch in a close up, symbolizing her loss of "maidenhood." Afterwards when she's crying he cops on to the fact that it was her first time. Catalina demands payment. He begs her off with meeting tomorrow when the two other henchmen walk in and demand sex with her, or else they'll tell the boss who will surely kill the dude for poaching on the women designated for his own use. As she cries and repeats that she doesn't want to, they rape her on the pool table.

¡Ay, caramba!

Watch out ladies: if you consent to have sex for money with one dude, you're asking to get raped.

At the end of the third episode, the boss tells the three men that he wants the virgin, to take the bag of money to her and bring her back. The henchmen decide to kill Catalina in the car.

What's truly frightening is that Catalina's obsession with getting breasts mirrors a widely held sentiment and preoccupation for girls and women. Part of the residue in the wake of the pornification of culture is that girls and women want to look like women in the industry who equate augmented breasts with being sexy. Plenty of parents collude with the rationale that says girls with small breasts have a problem with self-esteem. How fucked are we if bags of saline are considered an appropriate graduation gift? We hear the constant refrain that women get implants to make themselves feel better or to *gasp* "empower" themselves, when really they've just taken the cue concerning compulsory femininity and what's considered desirable for women's bodies. Implants are invariably about male privilege within patriarchy. Exaggerated characteristics and markers of gender have always been the norm whether we expect women to have inflatable tits or wear a burka. Where once feminists used to emphasize that women are worth more than their dress size, now we need to take note that women amount to more than their cup size.

This lurid telenovela seals the deal on implant aspiration.

Not one character has suggested to Catalina that she's perfectly lovely and doesn't need the surgery. How many in the audience will follow her lead?

I shudder to think.

Enda Walsh's "BedBound" (2000) is in its premiere run here at the Tarragon theatre until May 17. The 70 minute production is brilliant, evoking shades of "Waiting for Godot" and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Maxie (Richard Greenblatt) and his polio-stricken daughter (Cathy Murphy) are trapped on a bed for the duration, but the actors move around a bit in order to stretch the space into various shapes to fit the narrative. Greenblatt in particular marks out the sense of a door, table, counter, and a van as a means of lifting the story into the larger world outside the bed. Maxie winds through the tale of his career as a furniture salesman in Cork from his days as a 15 year-old boy in a damp suit trying to find the opportunity to advance, until he opens three shops on the same day in Dublin. His daughter serves as both his audience (she often mouths his lines as a gesture to note how familiar she is with it), and to chime in as a supporting cast of characters Maxie has encountered over the years. Murphy really shines when she's impersonating the men who worked for her Maxie. It's as if her character does know them through being in the ambitious man's shadow as an underling. He barks out orders to her just as to his employees. Maxie's story unravels in bursts between the daughter's own desire to fill up the silence, to figure out what's happened since she's been confined to the bed. She recalls only snatches, say of her mother sharing the bed and reading from a pulp romance novel while reassuring the girl that they were in a fairy tale. Her mother's cheerful estimation is distorted by the harsh reality of the filthy bed and girl within it. Burdened by greasy matted hair, she drags her legs around in soiled pajamas, tucking them under, almost cowering due to the way her father "bruises the air with his words."

Walsh mines the same brazen level of psychological rapport between the characters here as with his earlier "DISCO PIGS."

The climactic twinge sucked the air from the tiny theatre.

It's not to be missed.

Jayne Mansfield died a freak auto accident before she completed filming "Single Room Furnished" (1968).

So she was spared from ever having to view it.

It was the first time I've seen her act.

The film was just unwatchable.

I struggled through more than an hour before yanking the dvd out.

The Marilyn inflected baby-whisper drives me bananas.

Sure, I dig that women latched on to infantilized mannerisms coupled with overtly sexual aesthetics as a means to advance a career based on boners, but there seems to be a way to make a cheesecake role or persona more dignified than the baby talking bullshit. The wide-eyed, blank, affectless delivery on top of it makes me want to pull my eyelashes out.

The film's prefaced with commentary by Walter Winchell who says that Mansfield's performance was about how we struggle to bridge the gap of loneliness which separates two people.

He's using loneliness as some twisted euphemism for a woman who is forced to become a sex worker once she's abandoned by her husband.

"Single Room Furnished" is like a low-rent "BUtterfield 8" with Mansfield attempting to imagine herself in Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar winning role.

Except Mansfield is a tabula rasa with none of the verve or fire of La Liz.

It's a cheap cautionary tale about all the Very Bad Things that can happen to a woman who makes the mistake of having sex before marriage. Hell, going outside the door is like totally asking for trouble. There are a series of flashbacks. Mansfield has so many names in this (Jo-Annie, Johnnie, Mae, Eileen) that the film may as well just write it in the sky that she's unstable with multiple personalities. Because of teh sex, you see. There's another pair of lovers who're meant to serve as an "ideal" which seems to be to live with your father until you're 40 and then take the insensitive shlub who calls your face leathery as a husband and get pregnant ASAP. What audience could this have found upon release?

Hippies humping madly would have scoffed at such rigid sexual moralizing.

And they would have been right for once.

Mr. M told me last night that a Tamil protest group shut down the Gardiner expressway for several hours.

It's a highway which bisects the city to carry traffic from the east and west.

Listening to the CBC while preparing dinner, they said that women pushing strollers marched up the ramp.

So you seek intervention for your family being slaughtered in Sri Lanka by endangering your family here?

It's a wonder no one was injured.

This collection of photos indicates that a significant number of kids were used as political pawns.

What a fucking disgrace.

On the way home from their weekly romp at the beach, this song was on the radio again.

It makes me want to jam pencils in ears.

What kind of faux-punk excrement is "Young Cardinals"?

I swear I'd sock the singer in the balls if I had the opportunity.

Yack.

I'll be catching the Star Trek movie at some point once the crowds die down.
Anthony Lane's review had me choking with glee, especially his take on Kirk and Spock:

"He is played here by Chris Pine, who struggles with a screenplay, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that could have been downloaded from a software program entitled “Make Your Own Annoying Rebel.” Sample line: Kirk is hailed as “the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest” by Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who exhorts him to put aside his brawling and enlist in Starfleet. Jim rolls up next morning on a motorbike, hung over, with bruises from the night before, as surly as Steve McQueen; but roll up he does, taking his place beside the other recruits—among them Bones McCoy (Karl Urban)—and from here on the path to Kirkhood is plain. True, he boards the Enterprise by subterfuge on her maiden voyage, but since when did a little insubordination prevent a guy from winding up as captain? I thoroughly approved of his bedding an extraterrestrial female with green skin, eco-sex being all the rage two centuries from now, but that is the only downtime afforded by the recklessly rolling plot, although Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair color from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don’t worry, he’s still a natural dickhead underneath."

It has "two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the “Star Trek” scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear. On the other hand, it does mean that we get more of Zachary Quinto, whose very name sounds like the sacred text of a superior race, and who, in his role as the youthful Spock, is the most commanding reason to see this film. He alone prepares the gray matter. Bowie-thin, solemn but not humorless, tacitly quoting Sherlock Holmes, and nipping around like a sixties groover in his skintight costume, he wipes the floor with Kirk, while making time for a Vulcanizing smooch with Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana), the resident linguist, who is said to have 'exceptional oral sensitivity.'"

He is utterly hilarious and one of the best film critics out there.

Have I mentioned that I have a thing for Dustin Hoffman?

Big time.

I watched "Last Chance Harvey" for that reason and because of the reviews which praised it for being a refreshing take on the rom-com genre.

The mars and venus gender mythology is deeply imprinted in the characterization so I couldn't take any pleasure with it.

A significant portion of the running time draws a parallel between Dustin Hoffman's Harvey Shine and Emma Thompson's Kate Walker as similarly dejected sad sacks who are out of sorts and unappreciated. Within the context of "last chances" we have a clear disconnect of parity for what that means for men and women. Harvey gets his at 71 but for Kate it's only 44. It's the assumption that men have a longer shelf life in both their careers and in the dating circuit. Kate, on the other hand, should grab at whatever dude will have her because she's old. Thompson's character is depicted as so overtly frumpified that she's forced to play the majority of her scenes wearing a scrunchie.

A scrunchie!

It's hard to believe that she's regularly outfitted with the international symbol of the fashion blind. No woman living in London would walk out with one of those in her hair every day.

Harvey's supposed equivalent is attending his daughter's rehearsal dinner with the security tag still attached to the sleeve of his jacket. It's hardly the same thing. We're not invited to mock him for it.

Harvey's fired, his daughter wants her step-father to give her away, his ex-wife is dismissive. Yet all of the scorn he endures is a result of what he's done. He stopped writing commercial jingles that clients enjoyed. After the divorce, he slunk away and didn't make any effort to see his daughter. At some level, we can see that he's responsible for being unhappy or at least made poor choices.

Kate on the other hand appears to be taking shit just because she's a woman of a certain age. She suffers the humiliation of being set up on a blind date with a much younger man who obviously signals that she's too old for him. A bunch of young women he knows join the table and make her feel even more alienated and alone. She has a demanding mother who calls incessantly. She can't escape because women almost always have to shoulder the burden of caring for elderly parents. She has a shitty job at Heathrow conducting surveys that no one wants to take, and then there's the damn scrunchie.

The makeover scene where he buys her a dress so he can walk into the reception with her on his arm creeped me out. Women are just window dressing or arm candy so that some dude can puff out his chest.

I didn't find anything endearing or refreshing about "Last Chance Harvey."

Behold the trailer for "Tip Toes," one of worst looking films I have ever laid eyes on.

The lovely Fat Mammy Cat sent it along to shock me with its awfulness.

Yes, Gary Oldman plays the dwarf father to Matthew McConaughey.

Un-fucking-real.

Perhaps you are not as obsessive enough to plow through the eight Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, the inspiration for the HBO series "TrueBlood."
Ahem.
Of the eight, "Dead to the World" (the fourth in the series) was my favorite.
*No Spoilers*

Sookie's driving home from work one evening and glimpses a half naked man tearing through the woods. She pulls over to discover that it's Eric Northman, the Viking vampire boss of the northern part of Louisiana. He's confused and scared. His memory has been erased.
Sookie takes him home to later broker a deal with his assistant Pam through her brother Jason's wheedling. They agree to pay her $35,000 to keep Eric safe until they find the witch responsible. Eric's shucked of his arrogance in wake of the memory loss and starts to give a shit about other people. In a subplot, Jason goes missing for days without a trace.
Harris doesn't leave the character development, suspense or plot twists neglected.
If you only have time for one, pick up "Dead to the World."
I'm guessing this is the backbone for the programme's second season.

"Whistle Stop" (1946) attempts to hit so many noir notes while never settling on a decisive narrative thread or a consistency among characters. Is it about a heist? Nope. Leading man in a frame? Not really. Burned by a dame? Not in the long run. It's uneven, derivative, unfocused. But even the worst noir remains watchable over the contemporary cinematic stinkers. This is far preferrable to say that awful woman-hating, let's get to the catfight "Obsession."

Ava Gardner doesn't morph into the classic femme fatale of the genre as the studio marketing strategy suggests. She has no agenda of her own when she returns to the shit stain town from Chicago swaddled in mink. Spider women run away from the tedium and drudgery on order for women in the rural wasteland. Witlessly, she comes back for Kenny (played by the wooden yet oily George Raft), a man with no vision, prospects or position. Women are sure to swoon for an unemployed middle aged-looking dude who lives with his parents and spends all his time playing cards and scrounging drinks. Puh-lease. A woman like Ava Gardner would never settle for so little. You can discern a hint of disgust in her eyes for having to play this kind of Hollywood horseshit.

There was one standout gimmick, however. In the only saloon in town, the bartender Gitlo (Victor McLaglen) pulls down bottles bearing specially fitted stoppers that open into a pour with a music box melody to the tune "How Dry I Am." Maybe that was part of the bar room decor for the time? It would seem to have some cost-saving ability because you would know exactly how much liquor was being dispensed. Anyhoo, Gitlo clutches one during his dramatic death scene and it wryly breaks into the tinkly tune. Noir often takes some level of shits and giggles in a death scene.

Look, I'm a fan of "Office Space" just like most folks.
What's not to enjoy?
Mike Judge nailed the way in which the workplace can be soul-destroying and rob you of the will to live. Peter Gibbons is the modern day Bartleby contending with TPS reports rather than copying law documents and coping with dead wall reveries. Melville's titular protagonist was the very first cubicle dweller after the lawyer dude closed him off with screens.

Yet this trailer for his upcoming film "Extract" promises a shitty film.
How many stereotypes about women did they manage to squeeze into less than two minutes?
Wives won't have sex often enough. Jason Bateman says he gets "nothing" once his wife puts the sweatpants on, as opposed to, you know, getting a little "somthing."
Women lure men into marriage and then cut off the sex, the lazy schemers.
The sweatpants hit the dudely register to inform the audience that she's given up on herself.
Gone are the days of g-strings and short skirts once a woman slides her ass into them.
Notice the close up on her pulling the cord as if it were a type of chastity belt locking her up for the night? Classy, Mike Judge.
We can see the answer to the manager-dude's problem when the new young temp who Ben Affleck calls a tramp for cheap laughs is introduced.
She's young and will re-invigorate his manhood and pay him the attention he deserves, for fuck's sake.
Then there are the female workers who provide the harpy element to complete the holy trinity of gender stereotypes for women in film: cold wife, nubile hottie, shrew.
The workers scream and squawk and make more of a ruckus than the dude who had his balls blown off.
Teh poor menz suffer so.
They need some weed and homosocial time to mellow.

Check out "Recession Chic: Why Blondes are Having More Fun," a blatant attempt to justify racism in the modelling and advertising industries.
The wretched economy has forced agencies to select the safe, non-threatening blondes, we're told.
Non-blondes, which amounts to the majority of women are "quirky," scary, dangerous types who "shock the consumer."
Cue the pearl clutching:

"Advertisers, they claim, no longer want the quirky faces that have dominated the catwalks, billboards and weekly glossies in recent years. Instead, they’re searching for safe, wholesome-looking girls with flaxen manes who will reassure rather than shock the consumer.
'We have definitely experienced a larger than usual demand for the classic rather than the quirky,' says Carole White, founder of Premier Model Management. 'In a recession clients won’t stick out their necks, they know what sells and they want to hire models with wideranging appeal. When every penny counts, they’re much more likely to opt for the formula that sells the best.'"

Way to go objectifying women as a commodity "formula," Ms. White.
The foundational racism in the industry attempts to authenticate or authorize racial privilege through fairy tales and bullshit pseudo-science:

"In mythology and fairytales BHBE characteristics are ascribed to heroines, while their enemies are dark and ugly. Blonde hair also has magic powers: strong enough to use as a rope ladder in Rapunzel and as a powerful aphrodisiac in Pelléas and Mélisande.
The traditional theory, according to Dr Lance Workman, an evolutionary psychologist at Bath Spa University, is that 'men in the northern hemisphere were drawn to physical signs of youthfulness because women have a limited period of fertility. Fair or lighter coloured hair is one of these signs because hair darkens the older you become.'"

You almost have to be embarrassed for a writer who offers such sloppy, slip-shod evidence as proof of why folks reportedly prefer blondes. Lance Workman and other evolutionary psychologists want to forever remind the public that we're just like the ancient cave dwellers, despite the eons of social and physiological developement. If it were up to them, men would still be dragging us around by the hair. Rational folks avoid framing their lives around templates such as Cinderella or Fred Flinstone.
This line of reasoning is such a pathetic plea for race privilege while it also underscores the standards of compulsory femininity.
Iconic blondes like Marilyn Monroe, who Scarlett Johansson's channeling in the D&G campaign above, embody and telegraph the feminine ideal: dumb and fuckable.

Liz Canner worked for nearly a decade on the documentary "Orgasm Inc."

She was present at the screening this afternoon to confess that she'd just finished it four days ago. The project began when she was hired by Vivus (Latin for alive), an American pharmaceutical company to create an erotic video for women to view as part of the trial for their experimental cream Allista, a product designed to treat Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). The company had released the drug Muse to treat Erectile Dysfunction, but then was eclipsed by Viagra when it appeared fourteen months later.

From there she began an investigation into the legitimacy of FSD and in the other drugs being formulated by twelve different companies to come up with the female equivalent to Viagra.

The Federal Drug Administration accepts FSD as a genuine disease despite the fact that it was a marketing concept created by the drug companies, along with other manufactured maladies they wanted their products to solve such as Restless Leg Syndrome or Social Anxiety Disorder.

Even the proponents of FSD as a national health crisis could not define or explain it in detail or characterize what exactly women suffer from. Canner includes clips from the media circuit which enthusiastically parroted the pharmaceutical corporation's agenda. The morning news programs and Oprah were quick to drop the statistical bomb that 43% of American women suffered from FSD. One woman working for Vivus said "forty million women suffer from psychological disorders--sorry-- sexual disorders."

She had lap cat of the patriarchy written all over her.

Ray Moynihan was one of the doctors interviewed who rejected the medical veracity of FSD. Canner turns to the JAMA study that first heralded the 43% number; she found that it was based on a survey where women were asked such broad questions as "was there ever a time in the past year where you were not interested in sex." Any affirmative answers were immediately registered as signalling sexual dysfunction. So if you're not constantly interested in sex, you're a sick woman. The researcher dudes must take their cue on women's sexuality from porn where all women want sex all the time. There's no mention of FSD for lesbian women; it's only a problem for women shacking up with men.

The peen needs service.

Also, it turned out that the men who published the study were on the payroll of drug companies.

Shocking, right?

One particularly scummy dude was marketing the Orgasmatron, a device to be surgically implanted in a woman's spine to produce orgasm. One poor woman named Charletta was a test subject for the gizmo. On camera, she says of her "condition," "not only am I not normal, I'm diseased. That feels real bad." She explains that she was raised to regard the flesh as evil. Charletta's problem as she identifies it, is that she's not normal because she cannot have "normal sex" by reaching orgasm through intercourse alone. Canner includes the truth that 70% of women are in a similar position and need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm. It seems to make Charletta feel better. The Orgasmatron she had implanted was removed since all it did was make her leg fling out in a reflexive reaction. The possible side effects for the procedure range from paralysis to nerve damage, so she was lucky. One activist against the FSD hysteria noted the hypocrisy of a culture conducting so much research and marketing on orgasms when bullshit abstinence only programs pass as rational sexual education.

The segment on the Berman sisters was especially informative. I knew that they acted as sex gurus, but I had no idea that their programme was so harmful to women and that they were paid $75,000 a day to tell women that they needed to take Viagra until some other drug came along to cure them. Canner visits the Berman Center and gets charged $1500 to assess her degree of sexual dysfunction. Wow, the Bermans have profited enormously through an emphasis on female pathology. They have a bunch of books, a television show, a radio programme and seminars to exploit womens' fears and insecurity. The Bermans continue to claim women need Viagra even though all clinical trials show that it's as useful as a sugar pill placebo. Lap cats of the patriarchy don't understand science.

Canner interviews a woman who had undergone Vaginal Rejuvenation surgery. She had her clitoral hood shaved down (among other snips) in order to achieve orgasm through intercourse alone. That's the theme running through most of the barbaric justifications for the surgery.

We musn't forget that it's all about the peen!

Men might get their feelings hurt if women aren't replicating porn stars.

After her operation, a suture popped and she lost 1/3 of her blood and nearly died.

Sexy!

There are 200 genital surgery clinics worldwide for carving up lady bits.

Proctor and Gamble came up with Intrinsa, a testosterone patch for women to wear in addition to taking estrogen supplements. One doctor from Emory notes the myopic focus on hormones as responsible for producing sexual arousal in women. You know, like it may have more to do with relationships, stress levels or past experiences. He rightly points out how short-sighted the company is for assuming that because there's a link between male sex drive and testosterone, then there has to be one for women. Medical research has always used the male body and experience as the generic, I wanted to say. Shit, even breast cancer studies used men since those vagina-bearers are unreliable subhumans not worth studying. Intrinsa failed to get FDA approval based on the risks associated for heart attack, stroke and breast cancer. Ah, reason prevailed at least once.

Canner's film is brilliant. I hope a studio picks it up for wide release.

Omar has an ear infection.

Kima beat that by developing some sort of bladder infection.

Ugh.

On a blog-related note, I had to put the comments into moderation for the time being.

Charlotte Roche latches on to a sure-fire bestselling novel concept with "Wetlands" by creating a female protagonist who wholly internalizes male privilege and the prevailing disgust with women’s bodies. She invites the reader to contemplate the female form not in order to render historical taboos connected to it as unwarranted or prejudicial, but to affirm and authenticate cultural opprobrium reserved for the bodies of women. The whole novel reminds us how awfully repulsive women are through the idea that women are the source of pollution precisely because they inhabit a messy corporeality. We amount to a collection of waste material. The gross-out gag factors are presented in a steady continuum so that we never forget how dirty and base women are. You cannot claim to be championing feminism simply because you catalogue one fictional character's obsession with bodily functions and waste. Feminism extends beyond the self in a political recognition that women are full human beings. The protagonist Helen Memel doesn't concern herself with much more than her own pleasure and pain. Roche's scatological musings are about as feminist as the Marquis de Sade.

Helen's eighteen years old but she's such a clear case of arrested development and appears more often as twelve or thirteen years old. She wants desperately to get her divorced parents back together again, so much so that she orchestrates her stay in a hospital to remove an anal lesion as opportunity to play cupid. In a horrifying scene she slams her anus on a peddle connected to the bed in order to tear up the stitches. Helen almost bleeds to death. So too, the fascination for eating her bodily debris, picking at her body and smearing her wastes around are based on selfish motivations that seem fully childish. When she drank and spit into the bottle of water she then poured out for the candy-striper volunteer, I wanted to smack her.

Helen largely holds other women at a distance with derision.

Then there's the section where she recalls her visits to brothels. Women's bodies are cruelly evaluated and judged with a special racist component. This section especially reads like a male character's thoughts which are presented as female for some sort of cheap shock value or to trade upon a misguided idea of women's liberation.

"Since I learned that black women have the reddest pussies, I only go to black hookers. There are no other black women in my world--not in my school, not in my neighborhood. Prostitution is my only chance. I'm sure plenty of men understand my problem.

I had a really bad experience with a white hooker. She had skin as pale as cheese and light-red hair. She was a little chubby and--totally unnecessarily--completely shaved. And I mean everywhere was bare. Not a single pubic hair anywhere. Her crotch looked like a sculpture of a newborn baby made out of cheese.

I had been looking forward to her tits. From beneath her shirt they made a good impression. Big but still pointing upward. When she undressed and took off her bra, it was a big disappointment. She had big droopy breasts with flat nipples. Flat nipples are something really bad."

The writing just isn't any good for one thing. For another, she's objectifying and exploiting other women just as dudes are told to take as a matter of privilege in patriarchy. This is the Samantha Jones interpretation of feminism where you're free to be just as horrible as some men are in your relationships and interactions. How is that transgressive or radical?

It's just same old, same old.

It's the least sexy book about sex out there.

It's a massive understatement to point out that the misogyny in "Fight Club" pales in comparison to what's on display in "Choke." The gender politics in "Fight Club" look almost benign when put into context with the plot and characters from his bestselling novel.

Chuck Palahniuk suggests that men are beseiged by crazy bitches and that the only natural reponse is to condemn and conquer women. The bitter contempt reserved for women shocked me, which is not something that's easy to do anymore, but then I guess the poster should have been a tip off. The dismembered woman's body serves a stand in for the bits of food Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) lodges in his throat in order to manipulate folks into taking part in some fucked up rescue scenario. The poster takes a cue from Larry Flynt's depiction years ago of a woman going into the meat grinder. I can't bring myself to warn you that I'm going to spoil the plot for you because this shitstain of a film can't really be spoiled.

It opens with a group therapy meeting of sex addicts, familiar material from his earlier work where he suggests that men don't benefit from talking about their feelings. That's the stuff of feminized girly men who walk around with boobs like the Meatloaf character in "Fight Club." Instead of sitting in the meetings, Victor sneaks off to hate fuck the woman he's supposed to be sponsoring in the recovery program. You see, Victor fucks women as a means to get revenge for having a crazy mother. What Anjelica Huston is doing in this steaming pile of shit one can only wonder. Her character Ida is deteriorating in a psychiatric hospital costing Victor 3 thousand dollars a month. He moans that he had to drop out of medical school as a result to meet his financial obligations. When a man fails or make poor decisions, there's always a harpy woman around to take the blame.

Each time Victor encounters a woman he imagines the sex they've already had or will have. There's never been a more perfect example of sex as a method to dominate and subdue women outside of hardcore pornography. Victor's not driven by lust. His motivation is pure hatred. We know this because when Victor falls for his mother's doctor (Kelly MacDonald) he can't maintain an erection. When he explains that he can't keep it up because he likes her, she asks all too reasonably if he had ever considered that the two are not mutually exclusive. You know, as if some dude who hates women will suddenly be led by the force of reason into recognizing how fucked in the head his worldview is and will acknowledge that women are not cum dumpsters. The big plot twist is that her character Paige is actually a patient and not a doctor. That explains her plan that they have sex while she's ovulating so she can use the embryo in order to heal Ida's dementia. Or her translation of Ida's diary written in Italian that his mother was impregnated with cells from the holy foreskin and that Victor is therefore a new jeebus. The messiah complex complements his dudely desire to be powerful and singularly special, so he doesn't hesitate over the logic involved in this explanation.

It's fitting that Victor works in an historical theme park recreating colonial America, because his views about women are straight out of the 18th century. When his friend Denny decides to stop masturbating 15 times a day and pursue an actual realtionship with a woman, Victor seethes contempt for her and their relationship. Victor attempts to deflect his growing affection for Paige by spiralling out in anonymous and meaningless sex. He hooks up with one woman who wants to enact a rape fantasy and in order to punish her for trying to control the scenario, he shoots his load all over her pricey duvet cover. Yeah, that'll show the bitch.

Victor's penchant for choking functions as a lame metaphor throughout the film. He explains to Denny that he does it as a selfless act designed to let someone else feel like the saviour, the hero for a change. In turn, Victor feels cherished and saved and later uses the "bond" he manipulated to squeeze those who came to his aid for cash to pay for made up ailments. We get a flashback to the origin of his choking fetish when he was on the run with his mother who continually kidnapped him from foster homes. He's tired of the adventures, sees himself on a milk carton and wants to be rescued from her. Young Victor purposefully chokes in order to secure his escape from Ida. We can see the choking as symptomatic of Victor's psychological pathology. He wants to be the centre of attention and will maneuver the public into it.

He hates women because he hates his mommy. Victor finally gets his revenge on Ida when she lays dying. She confesses that she's not really his mother, that she snatched him from a stroller in another state. He chokes her to death with chocolate pudding. Now he's free to fall for the "beautiful psycho" Paige who knows that she can save him.

The idea that a woman can save a man from himself and get him to stop hating her for being a woman if she just devotes herself to him has sold more tickets at the theatre than others.

It's one of the most durable fables patriarchy has produced.

And it's bullshit.

Wasn't it Richard Pryor who did a stand up bit asking "what is it that you white folks do on a friday night that makes you get up early the next day and put all your shit out on the front lawn?"
Exactly.
The whole block is having some sort of joint yard sale today and I didn't blink before tossing the flyer for it last week.
Once, when we were preparing to finally move from the jeebus freaks, anti-science republicans in Kansas I consented to have my first and only sale.
One woman badgered the marked modest prices down so far that I was about to tell her to fuck off and forget it altogether. Later I realized she had stolen a necklace she didn't want to pay for by placing it in one of the many "collectible" boxes given to Mr. M over the years. Then another mother and her starved daughter wanted to go inside the house to try on some clothes. We didn't make much money at the end of the wasted day and should have just taken it to a charity.

Honestly, I'd rather watch my shit burn on the lawn than folks pawing through it and trying to haggle me down to a quarter.
I've also never browsed at someone else's sale.
Why would I want the crap that they don't want?