Testing: Gold-Digger or Tramp?

After being wooed by an oil baron’s son with a steak lunch at the 21 Club, then a flight to Miami on his private jet, advertising agent Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), clad in the working gal staple of the 1950s, a broadcloth shirt rolled up above the elbows over a slate grey pencil skirt, enters a lavish hotel suite. Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) ushers her about the room, pulling open a drawer nested full of a dozen fancy clutches in assorted fabric and styles, a bureau housing a complete trousseau, topped off by a walk-in closet hung with evening gowns, hats, shoes and wraps. Even the least experienced woman taking breath recognises the scenario for what it is: a honey trap, a test of her character and mettle. Hadley’s best friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) sneers when they’re alone in their own suite later that Lucy must be just like all the other girls, because if she were any different, she’d have spit in his face over such presumption. Lucy’s own reaction turns out to be far more pragmatic. She takes a taxi to the airport and boards a plane for NYC. Hadley pulls her off to try to win her over again and asks why she left, if she wasn’t pleased with all the beautiful things in the suite. Lucy confesses almost in a shrug that the room wouldn’t look as lovely in the morning. She had to leave.

Douglas Sirk’s gorgeous “Written on the Wind” opens as a contemporary fable for the modern woman who has to make her way in the world, all while balancing culture’s proscriptive gender norms which test women to resist the charge of gold-digger or tramp. Meanwhile, the rich dude gets to claim the playboy persona. All Hadley has to do to win favour is to refrain from being a falling-down drunk, then daddy and everyone else is happy. His sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone), has more of the devil in her to put Hadley and his dissolute uncle in the shade, he says. Marylee’s problem is that she can’t be a playboy, she pines unrequited for Mitch, acts out in a promiscuous manner and therefore gets saddled with the public condemnation of ‘tramp.’ No shrinking violet, Marylee flaunts the social sanction. Hadley calls her a ‘filthy liar’ at one point. She snaps back ‘I’m filthy, period!’ You can imagine a young John Waters realising his destiny at this moment.

This bold treatment of the ugly double bind for women softens through eye candy costumes in a range from swing skirts and cardigans, column dresses with a train, sheaths, scarves and elaborate gems. All the vintage minded women in the audience will turn a sick shade of green and swoon over the designs. There was one pearl-hued nearly iridescent dress Malone wore that caught my fancy. Rock Hudson’s wardrobe underscores his hulky good-looks; even in a rust coloured suit he looked dashing. This is well-dressed melodrama of the highest order.

Penn & Teller & Cheerleading are Bullshit

In their so-called concern for the safety and well-being of cheerleaders across the states, Penn and Teller nonetheless skip no opportunity to perv on underage girls and have *hopefully* women above 18 take out their tits to fill their spank-bank reservoirs regarding girls in short skirts. Yep, they're so concerned for you, ladies. Now show them your tits.

The pair jump through rhetorical hoops to single out feminists as the culprit behind the campaign to keep cheerleaders from being recognised as athletes, which prevents established safety standards for sports being applied to protect girls from so many severe injuries. The global feminist cabal wields such power. And feminists only want to hurt the young hotties cause we hate their youth and beauty, one assumes the crap logic to follow. No, it couldn't be that culture regards cheerleaders as a disposable female support group in line with their subordinant status in patriarchy. Cheerleading is just one point on a long trajectory of shitwork set aside for women. When you break your back, be ready to smile about it.

I was hoarse by the end of the programme.

How is it a radical notion to believe that women should cheer for themselves rather than their rapist or gangs of dudes who think the sun shines from their behinds, just because coach and daddy says so?

Cheerleading makes the Victorians look like gender renegades by comparison.

The Husband as Editor

He's laughing.

'You have four words on the first page that people will have to look up.'

'Like what?'

'What's this mee-uh,' he says pointing.

'Miasmic.'

'Uh-huh. What's that then?'

'Polluted atmosphere, a fugue in the air.'

'A what?'

'A fugue.'

'Oh, I see that word here further on the page.'

'Anyone reading a novel about grad school will expect wordy.'

'Here then, here's the good part. Keep this. The last two sentences. Start it there.'

'And ignore the previous 18? Are you mad? I've revised that paragraph a dozen times and I'm still re-writing it. I'm not going to trash it.'

Need I point out that his publication record--although impeccable--isn't in fiction?

Shit.

He's probably right, the bastard.

Q Tip Helps Me over the Hump

Stuck in a classroom scene I couldn't write my way through until Lo and Behold, Q Tip's Barely in Love queued up on my iTunes.

Phew.
Like 4 shots of espresso.

Glossy Gaffes: Elle November Issue

There are too many cringey moments in the latest Elle (US edition) to overshadow the gorgeous spread on updated looks from the French New Wave fashion in film. The prints, scalloped edges, and polka dots had produced an automatic envy-drool.

But then the glossy features an ad for the new Garnier line Blow Dry Perfector, an application designed to smooth your hair out for 7 washes. It looks like 'creamy crack' for white ladies (see Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair for the reference). The reviews for the relaxer cream are piss poor.

One woman wrote a piece about her experience having breast implants deflate twice requiring three separate surgeries. But she's like totally empowered or something.

The part that had me cracking up with a deep throated guffaw, however, came on the Elle Intelligence entry on page 213 by Nojan Aminosharei. The author has a brief profile or tween actors Isabelle Fuhrman (the possessed girl in Orphan), Hailee Steinfeld (cast in the Coen brother's remake of True Grit) and Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper on Mad Men). Aminosharei quotes Shipka as having declared herself 'team Jedward,' which the author interprets as evidence that the young actor 'is too sweet even to choose between Twilight's Jacob and Edward.'

Oh my. He's unaware of the quiffed Dublin boys.

Elle may want to consider hiring writers who are up on all the latest crushes girls and women hold dear.

Affluence & Guilt

In an early moment in Nicole Holfcener’s Please Give, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a meek radiology technician meets a guy she met online for coffee. He unleashes a speech about how the city is an inappropriate setting to raise children, a dirty and loud backdrop ill-suited to a wholesome childhood, despite Rebecca’s counter that growing up in the city made her more independent and resourceful, something he obviously fails to value. At first the guy looks everywhere but at the woman across the table, until he stops the conversation to gawp at her hair. With a suspicious mien, he wants to know why Rebecca wrote in her questionnaire that she had brown hair. Somehow she maintains composure to establish that she’s indeed a brunette. The dude insists that her hair is too dark, more like black than brown. This small moment registers the crux for a nimble assessment of how our perception can muddy the waters with ambiguity in which our moral compass floats. The dude in the coffee shop sees the city as an expanse of crime and danger, just as he dismisses brown for black. He reads people and situations to fit his extant narrative frame. His skewed perception echoes a larger significance that runs deep in Please Give.

A more nuanced and developed version of warped acumen occurs in the main plot around Kate (Catherine Keener), a woman who runs a shop with husband Alex (Oliver Platt) that sells furniture they buy from the recent departed’s children. The harried offspring are too busy or clueless to identify the Eames chairs and other modernist gems lurking among the apartments of Manhattan’s elderly, so Kate and Alex snap the pieces up for a cool profit. It all seems too easy and a bit tawdry to Kate, leading her to develop a guilty complex about their affluence, the means through which they purchased the apartment next door, waiting for the old lady to die and the renovations begin. In order to compensate for her good fortune or circumstances, she gives alms to the needy on the streets.

The brilliance of Please Give is how complicated Kate’s generosity becomes. Some of the folks she hands cash to truly look bereft and desperate, except we soon learn that Kate has little ability to distinguish the needy from the trendy. Daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) tells Rebecca, whose grandmother resides in the adjoining apartment her mom and dad have purchased, that Kate presses money on a so-called homeless woman who carries Chanel lipstick. In another scene, Kate approaches an elderly black man proffering her leftovers if he’s hungry. The man appears dressed in the Hep Cat attire of his youth. He tells her quietly that he’s waiting for a table in the restaurant we see him leaning against. The shame or recognition which Kate should have experienced fades. She doesn’t get it, because she sees everyone as tragic, suffering have-nots. Inside her tony shop or soon to expand apartment, she redistributes her privilege into a sense of misguided pity instead of the usual outright snobbery. Kate thinks she’s crying for the city’s dispossessed; instead, the viewer can see she’s really crying for herself.

Kate’s magnanimity rings false through a disregard for her own family over the strangers she can instead use for a psychodrama designed to authenticate herself as a good person. At one point Abby snatches the twenty dollars Kate holds out to an old man, screeching how it wasn’t right to hand it to a random passerby when she would never do the same for her. Kate’s blinded from seeing that charity should begin at home, or that real generosity calls for more than throwing indiscriminate cash around.

There’s much to like about Please Give, starting with the cast and performances, especially the difficult characters such as Kate and Mary (Amanda Peet). If Kate seeks to share her bounty and empathy, Mary serves as a converse demeanour in her pitiless, sarcastic response to the world. Peet moves from angry to wounded in an affective turn. It’s a sure bet I’ll be thinking about this film and the questions posed about how to be authentically generous for some time.

Maggie O'Connell Put the Bleach Down

My subscription to the weekly guilty pleasure Entertainment Weekly resumed today.
Loved the reunion pictorials on old cast members (although does Gilmore Girls really count since it only closed production four years ago? And I've never seen even one episode).
Rob Morrow from Northern Exposure is still the hotness, one of the many short Jewish dudes who tickle my fancy. Or something.
But Ms. Janine Turner looks as though she's doing an off-off-off Broadway staging of Marilyn Monroe's tragic-femme story.
Oh, honey: No.

Women are Marketing Sight Gags, Not Human Beings

Earlier in the week I noticed the print campaign for Mrs. Mac's beef pies done by an Australian ad company. The tag line remains the same for this television spot: "Lean Meat with a Crusty Top."
The wink and nudge humour relies upon showcasing a scantily clad hotty on camera while ending the shot with an incongruent face of a senior citizen.
Get it?
Double the objectification for the carnivore consumer.
Yack.

Season of the Witch

My second rebellion in youth entailed the study of witchcraft beginning when I was 18. After studying for a year and a day, I went out and purchased a silver pentagram to wear as a charm, one that hung on my neck until I was 37, several years beyond the point when my practice or interest had waned. For an 18 year-old woman who was poor, without much education or prospects, becoming a witch was a means by which to exercise a degree of control, to boost my sense of self and place in the world. I wasn’t a poseur like some folks who liked to announce themselves a witch without having ever picked up a book on history, lore or application. For me, it was a chance for independent study in herbal remedies, ‘Herstory,’ pagan culture and ritual, crystals and the whole Wiccan tradition. Witchcraft compensates the powerless with a sense of direction, order and purpose. The problem for me with the larger community was that I wasn’t a hippie, but only looked to the craft as a natural extension of feminism, as a four-dimensional buttress against patriarchy. Calling on the goddess of ten thousand names was a way to stave off the dehumanising strain implicit in a culture that hates and fears women. To be clear, all the study, rites, spells and such were a vehicle to harness symbolism and metaphor to improve my life; there was no literal belief in a deity such as you’ll find among monotheists who want to supplicate the daddy in the sky, nor did I become obsessed with power or manipulation as Hollywood later came to interpret in a film about sexy Wiccan schoolgirls. No, I just wanted to be safe, healthy and happy.

Once, early on in my study, I went to pull a dinner shift waiting tables and complained to some witchy-minded co-workers that my period was late. Probably the first thing every newbie, hetero witch learns about are emmenagogues, those herbal treatments we used to say that existed to ‘bring on your period’ or give your menses a kick-start. Since I was broke, scraping by on two jobs to pay rent on a shitty apartment in Philly’s Gay Light District (honest, who knows what to call the area cordoned off by a gay porn theatre, sex toy shop and lots of male sex workers, but GLD sounds accurate), my budget didn’t always cover birth control. Don’t get all judgey, either. 18 year-olds often overlook precaution and good sense. So I was 18 and late. And poor. There’s no way I would have wasted money on a pricey pregnancy test when I was only a week late in the still-no-big-worry-yet-stage. The women took me aside and said we’ve got this bitch, or the 1987 slang equivalent. Back in the kitchen of the vegetarian restaurant they had one of the guys make me a large cup of carrot-beet-cucumber juice. When I was mopping up at close a few hours later, it was time to surf the crimson wave. With a sigh of relief, I forgot about the late period and continued living in the moment like most folks that age.
Those witchy bits of lore remained a priority for many years. The high holy days and summer retreats at witch camp were to be looked forward to with relish. Even my marriage to the accommodating Mr. M was a Wiccan ceremony presided over by a high priestess in a circle of thirteen. You can make out the pentagram around my neck in the bridal shot above. I grew out of witchcraft naturally enough when I went to university as an undergraduate at 24 and grad student at 30. I didn’t need the symbolism of power once I had the sheepskin bona fides. Witchcraft served its purpose when I was young and insecure in the big world.

Yesterday, however, I realised how foolhardy it could be to discount lessons from the craft. Plus this month of the year always revives my interest in the ritual observance of Samhain and the Day of the Dead.
Recently I’ve taken to drinking a glass of veggie juice in the afternoon to cram some more nutrition in my spotty diet. I don’t eat five servings of anything in a day. The only way to consume more veggies is through the juicer. Then late on Friday I plonked two fresh beets, three medium carrots and half a cucumber in the juicer thinking that those lovely beets would level out the bitter strain of the carrot, plus a crispy tang from the cuke. The next morning I woke sick as a pooch, complete with unyielding mud butt. Then the blood came and I wanted to smack my head for forgetting that food is medicine. I can’t offer you conclusive proof that the vegetable mix in liquid form is an emmenagogue for reals, except take my story as a cautionary tale if you are pregnant or hope to be. As much as I enjoy those separate ingredients, there’s no way I’ll combine them again.
Thus concludes this chapter of memory lane.

Cheap Beer & Free Tits

During the dinner prep, cursing over leathered spinach, I heard an advertisement on the radio for some club in the 'burbs called Body English.
Their promotions included $2 beers & drinks.
Plus a chance to win a Harley Davidson or breast implants.

I'll take the chopper.
Give the fake tits to some dude.

Jeebus wept.

Romance of the Century

Years ago when friends were going through an acrimonious divorce, and even before that, when we saw the husband of the pair with another woman’s ass smashed into his junk on a dance floor, Mr. M opined that you never could really tell what went on in someone else’s marriage. For many folks, the private moments seldom match the public front of coupledom put forth. For me, witnessing the dissolution of their marriage was more traumatic than learning Santa Claus was a hoax, to find the so-called perfect couple inveigled in years of serial cheating, deceit and psychological abuse. In every relationship post-mortem, onlookers want to fit the story in tight narrative parameters which single out saint and sinner, the aggrieved and the villain. When I picked up Kashner and Schoenberger’s Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, I expected the familiar account of a woman wronged by an insufferable bastard choked upon his own dudely privilege. Tucking in, I was convinced I’d have no choice but to cultivate a sour dislike for the Welshman by the end of it.

To my great surprise, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger bypass the familiar tropes of celebrity couples, except for the one on conspicuous consumption, what with all the jewels, a yacht, property, art and luxury the pair imbibed upon for more than a decade. Taylor and Burton had one of those hyperbolic heated-up relationships that remains fairly difficult to comprehend. While their lusty bond nurtured them, take a look at photographs charting their meteoric affair from the set of Cleopatra through the end of the decade, and you’d guess those eight years aged them fifteen in regular years, sort of like some celebrity equivalent to the aging process of us mere mortals. They had talent, beauty and passion in spades. They were equals who pushed each other on. Taylor taught him how to trade his stage acting for the screen while Burton taught her how to emote for the stage.

There’s no villain in Furious Love, this lover’s biography, no blame to measure out against either partner. Both were brilliant, but flawed. Elizabeth loved the drama, the fights, the making up, the extravagance of emotion and Richard’s presents. She played the diva card and refused to work during her periods, as written into her contracts. She also wouldn’t stop with the boozing even when it became clear he was on the path to drinking himself to death. Richard bent towards maudlin, had a mean streak, couldn’t shake his family’s hardscrabble roots in the mines. Poverty can traumatise a person just as easily as abuse. The authors note Taylor’s gift of the thousand-volume Every Man library as one he most prized, when really, it was her beauty and unreserved love that he cherished above all. Taylor and Burton had a great love that burned too hot, leaving them scorched and spent by the second divorce.

The juicy bits of their union and film careers burst forth on every page. Not only was Cleopatra the most expensive film production of its time, each copy of the four hour reels weighed 600 pounds. Burton delighted in ‘lava bread, a Welsh dish consisting of the froth of boiled seaweed plunked down on a plate “like a cow pat.”’ Elizabeth had a jealous streak which led her to lingering on film sets to keep an eye on women such as Ava Gardner, Edna O’Brien, Sophia Loren and Genevieve Bujold. It appears as though Burton initially won Taylor over with a ‘neg,' one of those manipulative techniques taught by pick up artists. Apparently he said she was too fat, and routinely held pet names such as Lumpy and Twittle Twaddle for her in letters. Monty Clift thought little of him and countered that Burton didn’t act; he recited. When she donned the famous white swimsuit for Suddenly, Last Summer, director Mankiewicz criticised her weight, telling Elizabeth ‘it looks like you’ve got bags of dead mice under your arms.’ Burton dreaded the publicity stunts they had to pull to warm audiences, such as their appearance on Lucille Ball’s show Here’s Lucy. I’ve always had a deep aversion to Ball’s broad sight-gag style of comedy, which Richard also shared, in a mild horror that she could perform the same one-note humour for twenty years without going mad. In the clip you can see how disgusted he is to be there.

Furious Love lends detail and depth to the biggest romance held on and offscreen.
Could. Not. Put. It. Down.

Canadian TV Misses the Point of Come Dine with Me

Everyone loves Come Dine with Me, the programme which brings together five strangers who take turns hosting dinner and rating each other's efforts.

The new Canadian version, however, is a big fat fail.

No one wants to listen to bitchy 'experts' such as this Althea lady in the clip above. Funny how those self-styled masters of manners are always the most boorish and tedious folks taking breath.
Dinner Party Wars puts three couples in competition for best host.
The producers killed the joy of the original series by having the two hosts score the contestants, rather than the participants themselves.
The whole point of Come Dine with Me is the rubber-necking over group dynamics, personality clashes, hideous decor and culinary dramatics.
No one gives a shit about what so-called experts have to say.

CDWM assumes its audience is smart enough to discern those disasters of etiquette or palate. Too bad the Canadian show thinks North Americans are rubes who need their hands held in explanation.