Dante and the Lobster

The Anti Room Film Club

2011-06-09T14:36:00.002+01:00

Media Slut Shaming began with Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-25T16:43:00.003Z

Outside the purity ring set (those who adhere to a nut-job religious worldview, the type to equate women’s sexual desire with the toppling of collective moral firmament) reasonable folk would concede that seven is not an excessive number of sexual partners for a woman to have, especially if she married them all. By leading accounts, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the least promiscuous women in Hollywood, yet she was the target of relentless slut shaming by the media over the years, a nefarious cultural dictate which bullies any woman who claims a degree of sexual agency beyond the narrow proscription outlined by the hoary old Madonna/Magdalene stereotypes. Elizabeth Taylor fit neither category; she defied the rote pigeonholes virgin or harlot to which other women such as Doris Day or Marilyn Monroe easily succumbed. Taylor was an iconoclast by comparison. She wasn’t just the good girl or the bad one. Elizabeth Taylor was a woman in love. She followed her passion, announced it publicly and then refused apology or conformity.

At 18 and a virgin on her wedding night to ultra-scumbag Nicky Hilton, Taylor placed an emphasis on general propriety within marriage and wifedom. Hollywood Babylon, the raunchy tell-all of the industry dishes copious dirt on plenty of otherwise wholesome star biographies, except the only names it can link to Taylor besides the men she married are Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra. Three book length treatments of Taylor’s life (Liz: An Intimate Biography, How to Be a Movie Star and Furious Love) contain no evidence or rumour of her lovers taken outside marriage. Extramarital affairs and sexual hijinks are the bread and butter of the celebrity biography circuit, but there’s little to whisper about La Liz.

Hedda Hopper, the Pope and the international press traded on calling Taylor a slut, a homewrecker, morally bankrupt and the rest, when really, she was a fairly conservative lady who conjoined sex and marriage. The sexual double standard at play reeks to the rafters. While men in the industry slated hundreds if not thousands of conquests, Taylor was vilified for less than ten. Taylor’s treatment illustrates women’s perpetual vulnerability to cultural scrutiny and judgment regarding sexuality. Virgin until marriage and no sex without a ring means little in the end. Slut shaming is fickle business, one that ultimately reserves the privilege to denounce women who have the temerity to claim bodily sovereignty and independent sexual desire. The grim overview of Taylor's post mortem in the press is a reductive assessment of the lady as the sum of husbands, rather than her true legacy as the most gifted and bewitching woman to ever grace the screen.

Omar in Glasses Triggers Guffaws

2011-03-09T00:52:00.004Z

Mr. M knows how to tickle my funny bone.

There's No Irony in Sexism, Hipster

2011-02-24T15:39:00.004Z

Among the criticisms levelled against hipsters, such as they’re shallow, derivative, overly privileged, snobby, or that they demonstrate a misguided fashion sense which equates hideous cast-offs from yesteryear as an opportunity for an ironic pose, not enough is written about sexism disseminated by some in the hipster scene. Sure, plenty of folks point out the sexism marketed in pornified campaigns by American Apparel, a favourite haunt for those aficionados of white canvas belts and all bright things lycra, when really, the lady-hating and belittlement extends far beyond the letchy toad that is Dov Charney.

The most recent example of hipster machismo occurs not in Vice as you would expect, but in the February 28th edition of The New Yorker, of all periodicals, a bastion of highbrow culture. Of the 14 contributors listed in the current issue, only two are women, in what continues to be a grim trend in the magazine’s standing record, as has VIDA has already documented. The new issue features Demetri Martin in the Shouts & Murmurs column, a comic beloved by hipsters, and one who also dons the style with schoolboy locks and ugly-on-purpose sweaters, begins his essay ‘Who Am I’ with the following winky Cartesian inspired account of himself:

‘Who am I? That is a simple question, yet it is one without a simple answer. I am many things—and I am one thing. But I am not a thing that is just lying around somewhere, like a pen, or a toaster, or a housewife. That is for sure. I am much more than that. I am a living, breathing thing, a thing that can draw with a pen and toast with a toaster and chat with a housewife, who is sitting on a couch eating toast. And still, I am so much more.
I am a man.’

The problem is that sexism rates as a poor host for satire because we have no point of distance or respite from it in a culture marked by bashing on women. We have not arrived at a place where a dude can refer to housewives--to women--as dull objects lying about for his perusal. Nor can a dude snigger that housewives sit around doing little else but eating toast, an update on the old bon-bons joke. Indeed, we have not safely disembarked the patriarchal steam liner that has navigated the course of history in order to accommodate an ‘I’m a Dude, Hear Me Roar’ stab at comedy. There is no parody here. Demetri Martin has more in common with Larry the Cable Guy than he would be willing to admit. A dude who regards his subjectivity as the centre of the universe, the sum of all parts, the definition of humanity warrants nary a chuckle. Martin highlights the prize tucked inside every blue birth announcement which all but says

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU, FELLA!

Hipster sexism same as the rest.

My Sure-to-Lose Oscar Ballot

2011-02-22T20:51:00.002Z

Best Picture:

Black Swan

Best Actress:

Natalie Portman

Best Actor:

James Franco

Best Supporting Actress:

Melissa Leo

Best Supporting Actor:

John Hawkes

Best Director:

Darren Aronofsky

I can't bring myself to watch either The King's Speech or The Social Network. Colin Firth radiates such smug detachment and that Jesse Eisenberg guy may mean well, but I don't enjoy sensitive dude entitlement any more than the macho version.

Even the Dudes are Subject to Photoshop

2011-02-20T16:05:00.002Z

Maybe it had more of an impact as a large advertisement on the subway, because when I was staring at a nearly life-sized version of Liam Neeson in the promotion for 'Unknown' last night, I turned to the husband to remind him that said dude was 58 years-old, and not 35, as he appears to be while posed with a gun.

One line; one crease; plump cheek.

Even the dudes aren't allowed to look aged anymore.

Shrews & Doormats VS. Dude-Bro Heroes

2011-02-16T18:16:00.005Z

At the end of the fifth instalment of Episodes, I could not help but shudder over how the pitch for this series by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik must have gone down. Did the pair approach Showtime intent on a script to complement the male privilege already celebrated in their fare such as Dexter, Californication, Shameless, Brotherhood and Penn & Teller? Showtime’s Sunday night line up in particular boasts Episodes, Californication and Shameless, in what amounts to a master study of male entitlement to treat women like garbage and behave as abusive dickwads. Is there any character type creepier than a misogynist who wants to get back at women by fucking as many as he can manage, as that Hank Moody character in Californication? And how many tear-rendered memoirs have been penned by folks who suffered drunken abusive fathers like the one William H. Macy plays in Shameless? Oh, and they gave him an Irish name, too. Way to break those gross stereotypes, Showtime.

At best, Episodes could be viewed as a cautionary tale for women with career aspirations in the entertainment industry. The show makes it clear that La-La Land is a mug’s game for women. Tamsin Greig plays a smart television writer, a transplanted Brit named Beverly Lincoln. Bev sports chic ensembles from Hobbs that underscore a London career-gal background. (In fact, one blouse she wears when they arrive in LA, a mustard in geometric print, I cheered to recognise the same hanging in my closet from our trip last year.) Bev’s predicament, as for all smart ladies in Hollywood, the show tells us, is that you can expect to be patronised, marginalised, excluded as the downer, the adult, the one who won’t laugh at kids with Tourettes. If you are the female lead in a sit-com, like Morning Randolph (played by Mircea Monroe) you will be the centre of on-set gossip about how you played William Shatner’s wife onscreen in the 80s. She’s old, plastic, shallow, a laughingstock. The central lady in the production team, Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins,) is a toady, yes-woman doormat who carries on an affair with the network boss, Merc,(John Panklow) behind the back of his blind wife. The show thinks so little of the blind wife that I couldn’t locate the actor’s name at IMDB or the Showtime website. Merc ignores, humiliates and mocks his wife. Not only does the show make fun of a blind lady, it makes a direct connection between disability and being an insufferable pain in the ass. Politesse dictates that you can’t tell a blind lady to shut up with all the yackity-yack, so just roll eyes and make faces in order to indicate displeasure at a skirt taking up airspace. They made a woman’s spirit, resolve, and generous philanthropy a punch line. The same line of low-blow humour stages riffs during a fundraiser for a rape crisis centre. Yep. There’s nothing funnier than smug dudes making jokes while a woman onstage describes how she was raped.

Such unsparing and unkind characterisations are not shared out for the men in the cast. The one long-running joke for Matt LeBlanc is that he has a really big dick. Ouch. Now that casts quite the aspersion. Dudes, as we all know, are fun as a barrel of monkeys. They just want to go to Vegas, talk about chicks and how banging the nanny in front of the kids results in the bitch-ass ex keeping you from them. Joey-I-mean-Matt is presented as a good guy, a total bro, a misunderstood hero.

In Episodes, the sour and lazy jokes come at the expense of women while men get fantasy fulfilment. All crudity aside, none of this seems fresh or interesting. Women are a pain in the ass; Men want to fuck around. *Yawn*

Give us something we haven’t heard a gazillion times already, Showtime.

Squint and You'll Find a Woman

2011-02-13T20:39:00.003Z

After playtime and walksies, I pull open the Toronto Star with snack in hand.

What's wrong with this section?

How about only finding lady performers in the small print?
Yanni, Randy Newman, Charley Pride, who-the-fuck-is Matt Dusk, Gipsy Kings, Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engwall, Colin Mochrie, Brad Sherwood, The Chieftains and Gordon Lightfood.

Not one woman pictured or in top billing.

Forgive me if I pass on the Peen Fest.

Dudes Have a Tampon Phobia

2011-02-11T15:32:00.003Z

This Kotex commercial ran at least a dozen times during the NBC lineup last night. Even if it's staged with actors, you get a sense of how truthful this is for many dudes who balk at the idea of having to negotiate the products for menses. In her book The Female Thing, Laura Kipnis cites a study conducted in 2002 which revealed a deep fear of menstrual blood. University "researchers studying how menstruation shaped attitudes towards women found that when a participant in the study 'inadvertently' dropped a tampon from her handbag, the research subjects, male and female college students, sat farther away from her than when a neutral item like a hair clip was dropped. In contamination studies, the majority (69 percent) of subjects, both men and women, were unwilling to put a new, unused, and previously wrapped tampon in their mouth; 3 percent wouldn't even touch it."
The vagina is a designated source of pollution for lots of folks.

In the Kotex ad, dudes act like their junk is gonna fall off if they purchase a box of tampons.
Weak.

With Pals Like Him, Who Needs Enemies?

2011-02-06T22:27:00.003Z

While he presented the highlights of Ernest Borgnine’s career, for which the 94 year-old was being honoured with a lifetime achievement award from SAG, Tim Conway, that no-talent hack who thinks pretending to be short ranks as a pinnacle of physical comedy, slobbered all over his former cast member’s accomplishments, including Borgnine’s turn to work with Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. No shit, I almost went through the screen after the weasel to shake the idiocy from his mouth for overlooking Montgomery Clift—a true star—for a former mob flunky. Frank Sinatra is for me one of those actors inextricable with their real life persona. Ava Gardner may have loved the dude, but to me he’ll always be the man who left his child bride Mia Farrow sleeping at casino tables as he yukked it up with buddies playing cards and swilling hooch. When Sinatra plays vulnerable in films such as FHTE or The Manchurian Candidate, I can appreciate him as an artist, and restrain my fingernails from tearing palm flesh. Yet in his Rat Pack visage on display in Guys and Dolls or Pal Joey, I marvel at any woman able to look him in the face without hocking one up. Not even the regal goddess Rita Hayworth could keep me from shutting off Pal Joey after the knuckle walker, woman-hater, dog-abuser finally seduces Hayworth's character and leaves her the morning after in a full-on glow as a younger Gilda onscreen. His character Joey employs the creepshow pick up tactics such as ‘The Neg’ as a method to win over the women played by Hayworth and Kim Novak. He pretends not to remember names, trades sexual innuendo, stalks them, insults them and maintains that in order to win one over, you treat a dame like a lady and a lady like a dame.
Awful.
Joey also thinks coffee and bagels are fit feed for a dog, as well as a chicken leg.
Oh, and he ‘outs’ Hayworth’s society lady as a former stripper at a fundraiser in her own home. She’s all class in the number regardless of his attempt at humiliation. Watch ‘Zip’ and skip Sinatra’s thug performance.

Snow Pooches

2011-01-29T17:35:00.004Z

Fashion Skeletons Excuse for Lady Bashing

2011-01-27T19:27:00.007Z

A recent study reports women in the UK have 22 outfits hidden away that they never wear. This is nothing but an opportunity to point out how stupid and wasteful women are, with an invitation to collective hand-wringing and tongue clucking. Bully tactics follow from the likes of Liz Jones, a woman who will harangue you about your own spending habits while she throws away far more cash on designer gear in her ‘do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do’ Daily Mail privileged worldview. Fashion is a primary double bind for women. While women are expected to conform to the beauty mandate and an ideal version of femininity, regular scorn and judgment accompanies their capitulation in the never ending hot-or-not sliding scale. If you eschew fashion, you are a de-sexed frump made invisible, but if you have ever slid foot into heels and applied slap, expect open season, to hear how you’re doing it all wrong, just like with the wifery, parenting and career.

In a Janus-faced turn, culture tells you what to emulate and then derides your best as less than perfect. One can’t help but wonder where all the fluff pieces are on the cavalier purchases made by men that hold little outward utility or justification. Take a gander at any Sky Mall edition during a flight in order to appraise plenty of useless crap men buy from Hammacher and Schlemmer and such. Double binds harbour double standards, as in the consumerist version which places value on male expenditures as necessary ‘gear’ and dismisses female purchases as ‘impractical’ waste.

Inevitably, women who take an interest in fashion will pull a faux pas off the rack on occasion, because style is an unerring trial and error, tempered by the whims of the season along with the woman’s mind and body at the moment. Fashion rests on caprice, even if you hold steadfast Ms. Coco’s declaration that ‘fashion fades; only style remains’ or a similar aphorism. (It makes little sense to claim that style trumps fashion since the two are intertwined and dependent. You may have a style bent on pantaloons, waistcoats, turtlenecks and braces, but such a mess would only rate as fashionable for a quick minute). Most folks have ugly items in their closet, their fashion skeletons if you will. Indeed, if the study attributes the bulk of the unworn items to impulse purchases culled during sales, it is little wonder when shoppers are browbeaten to treat a sale as moral absolution and permission, the only time spending isn’t laden with the charge of reckless consumption. The fashion industry markets a sales event like a guilt free benediction to salve the pennywise conscience. No wonder women rush to them and take home garments that will never again see the light of day.

There’s no way I have 22 unworn outfits in my closet. I’m too fond of giving away clothes to friends or charity agencies. Yet you can be sure I have some unworn duds tucked away. Instead of chastising women for what they don’t wear, the point for fun’s sake resides in a little sharing, in an equalising move to say okay: we all have made regrettable purchases. If it doesn’t fit, scalds the eyeball with aesthetic offence, is age-inappropriate in a borderline hello-kitty and pigtails on a grown woman way, ultimately, who cares? Let’s have a laugh at ourselves instead of another finger wag or guilt trip.
Here are four things in my closet surely to never again see the light of day.

This was a rush purchase in Barcelona at COS. It seemed like a candidate for the Irish Blog Awards gala, but sadly, as I recognised as soon as I unpacked, this dress is more lounge-singer than Betty Draper. This could be a Halloween costume though? A Vegas zombie perhaps?

The Ralph Lauren plaid trousers are a never-worn gift. Even with Versace showing plenty of plaid in the 2011 S/S collection, I doubt I could ever wear these with a straight face. Oh, and they have a crease down the centre which makes me feel faint.

I forget the name of the little dress shop in Dublin where I picked this up. Hippie nightmare. Buttons! Pleats! Tablecloth-pseudo-tribal pattern! Again, I'd need smelling salts to walk out with it once more.

Most of you will not agree with my hatred for this pair that I bought 6 years ago and have never worn. The fact remains that I might as well present my ugly hooves barefoot in public than wear this wimpy/ strappy/ sling-back mess.

Hate.

My tastes have and will continue to change.

Maybe one day I'll wake with a love of plaid, creases, pleats, sequins and open shoes.

It could happen.

Jersey Shore Cast or Academy Award Winner?

2011-01-20T17:20:00.002Z

Big shades. Ed Hardy t-shirt. Droopy jeans. White crocs.
No, it's not Ronnie's older brother dropping by to explain why dudes should refrain from screaming at or otherwise terrorising women less than half their bodyweight.

Do a double take and notice Javier Bardem on pooch duty.

Even the Dudes We Like Drop Sexist Jokes

2011-01-18T01:15:00.002Z

Just in case the women nominated at the Golden Globes were under the impression that they were present as an equal among peers, Robert Downey Jr. steps up to deliver a ham-fisted joke about how he’d be willing to bone them all. Or something. First his approach fails because he insinuates that they need to sleep with him in order to nail the part, but then it switches to an imagined porn scene where he offers to bang Julianne Moore, Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Annette Bening and Emma Stone all at once onstage.

Nevermind talent, ladies. All that matters is how fuckable you are. Oh, and perhaps an ability to smile through a crude joke at your own expense helps. Don't get all uppity and think too much of yourselves.
His mighty penis thus ruleth.

Seriously, if this if what passes for humour from the so-called cool guys, then what the heck are the other guys saying?

Rape Alley

2011-01-17T21:37:00.003Z

Out with the pooches, I caught sight of 'helpful' graffiti cautioning women about a Rape Alley located on the Westside of Toronto. It's not even an alley since it extends at least twenty feet wide with a city parkette on one side.

What kind of warning is this exactly?

Am I to believe the tagger has only women's safety in mind, that the person with the spray paint remains unaware that women make a dozen decisions each day in order to avoid this threat?

I'd like to see a sign that says Rapists Beware for a change.

Three Year Puppyhood

2011-01-11T22:57:00.005Z

Tomorrow Omar & Kima celebrate their third birthday.

Where does the time go?

Ignore My Failure to Post with Some Rage Against Advertising

2011-01-06T16:31:00.003Z

What, is Amnesty International PETA all of a sudden?

Why do folks assume they can assemble a public service campaign about a human rights violation by violating a woman's human rights?

Folks at baggage claim should be more horrified by the fate of the woman bound in the case suspended in circles than in the Amnesty's invitation to moral outrage.

She's a woman, not a billboard.

Assholes.

Kitchen Aid Ain't Sisyphus

2010-12-29T16:46:00.002Z

In a Sociology course lecture (many years ago when I was an undergraduate) a professor argued that all of the so-called labour saving devices marketed at the American housewife only created more work for her. The Sisyphus model seems to make sense when put in context with all the products unveiled in the 1950s, when modern kitchens were presented as some nirvana temple for women to cloister themselves making unholy aspics with spam and gelatine. Men wanted women to vacate the positions they took during the war effort, so dudes advertised housewivery as though it were some light and fun respite from paid labour. Yeah, because paychecks are unladylike.

The idea that patriarchy realises its true design by subjugating women with appliances to extend drudge work looks good on paper, but in real life, women can recognise a time saver when we see one. Did you know that one of the leading causes of death for women in the 19th century was complications from doing laundry? Yep, try washing and wringing your sheets and undies in the winter and say hello to pneumonia. Women spent endless hours doing laundry, even if they only washed clothes a few times a year. I barely notice it as a chore now with the stacked Maytags in the hallway.

Or, for another example, how about the Kitchen Aid Mixer? Yesterday I made a batch of cookies and a cheese souffle in a fraction of the time and without the physical expenditure of whisking all those eggs and batter. Turn a switch and two minutes later you have perfect stiff peaks.

Blame patriarchy all you want. These nifty gadgets are a boon of modernity, not a boulder up the hill.

Greenface Horror Show

2010-12-29T15:48:00.002Z

Slated for a mid-March release, Kill the Irishman features a cast of big name actors sleepwalking for a paycheck amidst a whole lotta stereotypes.
The car bombs induced a full body cringe.
This picture looks like a cheap mash up of Goodfellas and Leprechaun.
Cue the tin whistle.

Jewel of the Xmas Genre

2010-12-24T21:51:00.003Z

Among the many delights in Scrooged is Bill Murray's impression of Richard Burton.
Love it.

Rubberbandits Mania

2010-12-22T20:57:00.001Z

I'm late to watching the video, although the sanitised version was all over Irish radio when we were there last week.

Infectious tune with smooth moves to boot.

Vomit-Inducing Book Review

2010-12-12T21:14:00.002Z

Paul Auster has always seemed like one of those antiseptic, bloodless postmodern dudes.

After reading the NYT review for Sunset Park he appears to be the literary equivalent of a Member's Only jacket, and not even in the cool winking version James Caan wore in The Way of the Gun. This stuff looks old-fashioned and embarrassing, the prose that stems from nostalgia for the days of unchecked male privilege and a wanton Lolita fetish.

The chunks started to rise in my throat when the reviewer refers to Auster's protagonist Miles meeting Pilar, an underage girl, one who has deep insights into The Great Gatsby. (The few regular readers I have will note my long standing distaste for Fitzgerald's vastly over rated novel). Auster acts like finding a smart 17 year-old girl is a rare and miraculous find amidst scores of empty-headed dingbats. There are in fact legions of bookish and well read teenage girls in the U.S. To suggest otherwise reflects a serious strain of cluelessness. Also, Auster expects his reader to accept that since this brilliant teenage girl experiences a fear of pregnancy, she prohibits vaginal intercourse, which she describes as "the mommy hole was off limits."

Mommy hole

I doubt even a 5 year-old girl would use such an expression.

There's so much blatant arrogance underneath his poor characterisation of a girl he just uses as a mechanism for spank-bank fantasy projection that I am struck dumb.

Count the Female Stereotypes Called 'Craft'

2010-12-12T16:12:00.004Z

The NYT's video montage 14 Actors Acting assembles the Hollywood classic stereotype formula for women which traffics in the 'ol hooker, victim, doormat onscreen.

I didn't see any of the men asked to strip down for the cameras to show sexy underwear.

Natalie Portman's dead-eyed femme fatale; Noomi Rapace's dissolute smoky-voiced chanteuse; Jennifer Lawrence's horror scream queen; Leslie Manville as the doormat; Tilda Swinton another weepy victim. Even Chloe Moretz's portrayal of anger makes her look more unhinged with crimson lips rather than a subject with agency.

The acting craft should ask more from women than simply channeling boilerplate roles from the Women are from Venus playbook.

Hello, Gorgeous

2010-12-11T21:40:00.002Z

This Carolina Herrera dress up for sale at Neiman's is to gouge eyes for.

Normally I find the tulip skirting overwrought.

Here there's just the right degree of drape to keep the frock from adding bulk to your hips.

The canary yellow is sublime.

The hose and shoes seem all wrong though.

Entertainment Weekly Says a Size 4 is Fat

2010-12-11T17:43:00.002Z

My first magazine subscription to the liberal stalwart Mother Jones must have been in 1986 or thereabouts. The real reason I signed up for the monthly was because they had advertised a free doormat featuring Ronald Reagan’s picture with some rude caption as part of a paid subscription. My spiky-haired anarchist self thrilled at the idea of a daily opportunity to smash my feet on Grandpa Caligula’s cabeza. Unfortunately the hippies who ran the publication never sent the doormat, as I was to learn they promise lots of things they never deliver, maybe from all the privilege they hold. I even wrote a letter to complain and call them out on their oh-so-shady conduct. Don’t promise a girl she can stick it to the man and then fail to have it materialise.

I’ve subscribed to many magazines over the years: Gourmet, Bon Appetite, Animal’s Agenda, Elle, Bitch, Bust, The New Yorker, along with what is probably my most cherished guilty pleasure, Entertainment Weekly. Folks get real sniffy about EW for some reason. I clerked in a bookshop with a woman who recoiled at its very sight, a woman who would read People magazine at the counter yet still hunch away from EW. Of all the subscriptions, I’ve never had any one of them send me a promotional gift. That is until yesterday, when a package arrived from EW bearing a stamp T-Shirt Extra Large. Ignoring the husband’s protests over why he can’t keep novelty t-shirts (duh. I won’t wear mine in public), I pulled out a white shirt with a red Magnum P.I. logo, one of those ‘ironic’ shirts the hipsters go for, which is fine and dandy to sleep in, except for the major error in labelling. The tag at the back of the neck also said ‘extra large.’ In what kind of Anna Wintourian alternate universe is a shirt that fits a size 4 ‘extra large’?

Seriously, Entertainment Weekly, the shirt made blood rush to my head. Are you trying to drive women crazy? It’s not bad enough I’ve heard how I have to trade my ass for my face from numerous folks in the past year or so, now that I have to counteract the fun house mirror in my head from reflecting a rear end that verges on Hottentot in an attempt to retain volume on my face. Issues! I have them, just like so many other women over body size and food. And your rag has now sent the body image whirligig into overdrive. Hey, fuckers: keep your shitty t-shirts.

No one needs a size bully.

Fashion Craze Circa 1958: The Chemise

2010-12-10T16:10:00.005Z

Had you quizzed me on articles of fashion more than a few days ago, I would have described a chemise as one of those filmy undergarments, also known as a camisole. My patchy design knowledge was corrected by scrolling through Life magazine’s archives from 1958, the year when the chemise trend became a sensation that ignited protests as well as a revolution in women’s fashion. Also known as the sack dress, it seems more appropriately referred to as a tube dress, since the garment remained the same width from shoulder to just below the knee. I guess ‘sack’ conveys more of a pejorative than ‘tube,’ however. In an era defined by severe undergarments such as the long line bra and girdle, the chemise offered respite from such constrictive body shapers. As many women snapped up the new style, others organised a rally against them, such as the woman pictured holding the sign ‘Bring Back Curves.’ No doubt she went on to have a prosperous career writing copy for the Daily Mail. One dude, Gerry Granahan even wrote a song about the tube dress titled ‘No Chemise, Please,’ which lamented the impediment it posed to groping dates at the end of an evening. Ladies had a chance to be comfortable and still pulled together, yet folks went apeshit.
How dare they.

No wonder it was a short-lived trend.

Men come together for the common cause, to beat your ass, just because

2010-12-10T15:14:00.002Z

Russell Brand is STILL bragging about how many women he's had sex with.

He said in Ireland he was with nine women in one evening.

If there's a bigger piece of crap taking breath, who clings to more anxious and retrograde ideas concerning masculinity, I'll eat a dog biscuit.

Real Human Beings Get to Cover Up and Stand Straight

2010-12-09T15:03:00.002Z

I see how you are, American Apparel.

You don't subject your male models to the bedroom, come-hither, jail-bait, titillate, half nekkid scopophilia treatment reserved for the ladies.

Dudes get to be fully clothed with purpose and reason.

More evidence for me to avoid the clothing chain, just like a bug-infested mattress on the street.

Patriarchy in Tablet Form

2010-12-09T14:16:00.002Z

Nicholas Ray's 1956 Bigger Than Life features a scenery chewing turn from James Mason as a mid-century patriarch who becomes a monster to his wife and son after taking too much cortisone, prescribed in a last ditch effort to keep the otherwise terminal patient alive. Ray had a knack for unflinching portrayals of toxic masculinity, as in his earlier film In a Lonely Place, a film Bogart could not stomach watching himself in the starring role because he was such a nasty thug to Gloria Grahame.

Check out Mason in the clip above when his shadow eclipses the doorframe until he indeed becomes Bigger Than Life.

You can watch the whole film on YouTube.

Ray concocts a clever hat trick depicting the evils of patriarchy by blaming the whole thing on a cortisone dosage error. We all know no man ever terrorised his family unless a white tablet was involved.

The director needs the bottle of pills to act as safety valve to keep from blowing the lid off culture.

Fantastic.

I Heart Billboard Liberation Front

2010-12-03T21:38:00.002Z

They call bullshit where they see it.

Chemical Fart Products are Gross

2010-11-26T15:46:00.003Z

There are many elements of keeping house up to popular standards that I neither understand nor perform. Accoutrements such as dust ruffles, doilies, napkin rings, hot water bottles, electric blankets, mops and tricked out tupperware all seem pointless extra crap to take up too much space with little true function or utility. But none of them draw the same level of disgust and repulsion as air fresheners. The size of the product display for fake scent is fairly astonishing when you go to the supermarket. Take the commercial posted above for a Glade room deodorant which farts out a continuous spray of stank. Are people curing meat, conducting surgery, cultivating indoor compost heaps or anything similar to require synthesised lilac and pine odors in forced concentration? I just do not get this. It's nothing less than toxic chemicals masquerading as nature.
That's just as creepy as the spot's suggestion that a day in a woman's life should be that she never leaves the house or stops caring for others.

Male Evolution on Film

2010-11-23T22:34:00.002Z

Some writer for EW was jizzing about how great Nicholson is in the diner scene for Five Easy Pieces (1970), which led me to recall how awful it is, one of those ham-fisted scenes of tough guy grandstanding of epic proportions. Tell me just how exactly the middle aged, overworked and underpaid waitress is 'oppressing' the privileged young rich guy? Like she doesn't have to deal with a dozen entitled jerk-offs each shift who want her to account for the restaurant owner's policy? If you want to stick it to your daddy, go ahead, but leave the working woman alone.

Contrast the macho thuggery of the hippie era with Tarantino's first film 22 years later. Holy crap, even with all the gun play and bloodletting, he imagines a crew with more empathy for the women waiting tables than the Jack ass managed. Every dude at the table knows Mr. Pink is dead wrong for not 'believing' in tipping wait staff. Pink sounds like an MRA crybaby with a dry eye for the brutal reality of women in poverty or in the workforce in general. I'm guessing if he had pulled the chicken salad crap, every other dude at the table would have shot him for being such a rude pig.

The Way It Is Can Change

2010-11-23T14:33:00.002Z

Each time I hear a guy apologise for outlandish behaviour or practices among men, such as institutionalised sexism or any manifestation of patriarchy wherein girls and women should expect to eat crap and take less than their full measure of dignity and rights as human beings, almost always, the fallback rationale contends ‘it’s just the way things are,’ or more to the point, the fixed way some men view the world. Never mind the fact that folks who argue discrimination as the natural order have a not-so-secret vested interest in making arbitrary power seem legitimate, but an additional problem is that guys who excuse unchecked privilege among their brethren all too often characterise men as uncivilised brutes; those unfortunates caught in some paludal evolutionary cave-man vortex, which renders them unable to exercise impulse control or a functional moral compass. You’ve heard it before. By way of explanation, we hear of a particular guy: ‘he snapped,’ ‘he couldn’t help himself,’ ‘he lost control,’ ‘men are programmed to view all women as boink material,’ that he was ‘just being one of the lads’ or whatever record spins round to gloss over the perceived inexorable right of some men to act like predatory knuckle walkers. Why every guy doesn’t stand up and cry foul when this Men are from Mars rubbish appears leads me to cast a gimlet eye over the business of having their-cake-and-eating-it-too dimension of privilege. Gender differences and power differentials are masked in presentation as a routine matter of essential human nature. Why anyone would settle for such a retrograde estimation of the human capacity for justice, progress and empathy proves bafflement.

Pop culture bursts with evidence illustrating how much people are capable of embracing progressive relationships and ideas based upon equality and fairness. For example, in an ironic turn, Joan Crawford’s titular Daisy Kenyon serves as celluloid exhibit A for how much society has changed regarding the existence or treatment of child abuse. It’s really quite shocking by today’s standards. Otto Preminger’s 1947 drama situates Crawford as the sympathetic other woman who gives up on waiting for her married beau (Dana Andrews as Dan O’Mara) to leave his wife Lucille (Ruth Warnick). Instead she marries an impulsive GI (Henry Fonda, takes a departure from his usual bloodless method and musters a serviceable effort for the part). Dan’s marriage busts up shortly after Daisy weds Peter. The plot is all pot-boiler adult with plenty of noir-ish under and backlit scenes set in Daisy’s loft in The Village. The point for the modern viewer to catch the vapours occurs with the characterisation of the relationship between Lucille and her daughter played by Martha Stewart (IMDB lists the name Mary for the girl, except I kept hearing ‘Marie’ when I watched it). Off-screen we hear Lucille smack the girl around in a serious way. Frequently, Dan, his daughters or Daisy refer to Lucille’s abuse, yet the result affects nothing more than a shrug of shoulders. Lucille’s little problem, that she physically and psychologically terrorises her daughter, casts the spurned wife as something like the original Betty Draper. Nowadays, we watch Mad Men and shout at Mrs. Draper-Francis for being so cruel and heartless to her daughter. (In general, Mad Men serves as a cautionary tale for how messed up society was back in the supposed good ‘ol days, what with the Jim Crow racism, sexism in the secretary harem dynamic added to the blind acceptance of child abuse). Even Sally gets some degree of intervention in the guise of a therapist who at least lends the girl some context to bolster her self-image amidst her mother’s abuse. The O’Mara girl isn’t so lucky.
After a day in court, where Dan pretty much halts the proceedings to cave to Lucille’s demands in order to spare Daisy ugly treatment on the stand, they meet his daughters in the corridor, a screen shot of which is featured above. Marie/Mary holds a handkerchief against her ear. Dan explains to Daisy that there’s some bleeding as a result from an injury Lucille inflicted as a means of taking out her frustration over the divorce. There’s a brief pause for pity and then the abuse disappears. Pause on that for a moment. An 11 year-old girl still bleeds from an attack she sustained days ago, she could have brain damage among other trauma, a fact which is overlooked without concern. Child abuse in 1947: It’s just the way it is.

I’m optimistic that someday folks will observe the pay gap, objectification of girls and women, rape culture and gender essentialism with just as much disbelief that we could stand by and allow such injustice to persist.

Members of a Pack

2010-11-23T14:06:00.002Z

The dog walker lady sent me this picture of Omar and Kima looking like model citizens for their afternoon playtime with a pack. She keeps telling me how great they are while I wait for the 'but' to rear its head. She finally gave me one. Apparently they hide under the table or desk when she comes to pick them up and I'm not here. Lady, you don't know the half of it.

When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, Do Your Own Damn Laundry

2010-11-23T01:00:00.002Z

As Jacqui, Jeryl Prescott had the best lines in the third episode of The Walking Dead.

The adult women line the lake scrubbing laundry by hand. With a raised brow she deadpans "I'm beginning to question the division of labour."

Cut to Shane catching frogs with the boy, or all the other men in camp lollygagging around while the women do the grunt work. She wondered why the ladies were stuck doing the Hattie McDaniel work.

Indeed.

Zombies or not, men should not be above domestic toil.

I Hate Olives Almost as Much as Being Called 'Meg'

2010-11-22T16:33:00.002Z

My simple order, a cheese pizza and garden salad seems pretty hard to fuck up, right?

I like a clean pizza, nothing on it but sauce and cheese.

It was fine even if the crust smelled funny, like hair in olive oil.

Then holy cannoli, when I opened the salad I performed a full-body recoil because of all the chopped green olives. Cue the wretching. They were all over the place. I had to throw it out.

*shudder*

Elle Does Greenface

2010-11-19T16:45:00.002Z

What the Dickens is Joyce doing up there in the corner?

Lucky Charms? Oh say it ain't so.

Usually the glossies wait until March before they resort to the Greenface Oirish feature.

Not only is everything hideous for the piece in December US Elle, the prices are eyepoppers of another sort.

The Zanotti sparkle-green flats in the centre are listed at $495.

Off to the right, the Van Cleef & Arpels shamrock necklace goes for $5,000.

Those Miu Miu sandals (are they gladiators circa 2005?) are tagged as $450.

Even worse, the BluGirl t-shirt retails for $800 and the skort-looking skirt for $540.

I'm woozy from all the expensive green cheese on display.

Community: How You Make Me Giggle

2010-11-14T02:19:00.002Z

By far the best line of The Aerodynamics of Gender episode:

"Why name your daughter Megan? Are you stocking up for a bitch shortage?"

Ahahaha.

Awesome.

Headlines You'll Never See in Lady or Lad Mags

2010-11-10T20:59:00.006Z

Can Men Really Have it All?

Women's Weight Insignificant

Diets Don't Work

Feminists Love Men

Pornography is Creepy

Body Hair on Women is Sexy

Intelligence More Important than Beauty

Stop Worrying about What He Thinks

Opinionated Women are Hot

Try Talking to Her Rather than Trying to Score

You Never Need to Buy Anything Ever Again

Racism Bad. Gender Essentialism Good.

2010-11-08T17:56:00.004Z

This French PSA campaign against racism bears the tagline 'Your Skin Color Shouldn't Dictate Your Future,' which certainly sounds like it promotes an ethical civic climate.

The execution seems problematic upon closer inspection, when you notice the gender essentialism present.

The ad suggests that the girl can only hope to be a cleaning lady, while the boys enjoy the more prestigious and higher paid positions of road and construction worker. She's dressed in a blue cap, grey smock and blue duster that look inspired by Dickens, with only a hint of pink relegated to gloves and a bucket underneath the crib. It transmits a subtext about how the girl's less feminine or female as a menial member of service staff. By contrast, the boys wear recognisable attire from a modern workplace.

According to this series, tracking kids for life and limiting the scope of available social mobility based on race is wrong.

But hey, go ahead and allow a narrow prism of gender to shape their lives instead.

A summary for the campaign could be: Women Clean Up and Men Build Stuff.

Yeesh.

Prosaic Fantasy Stems from Privilege

2010-11-05T14:57:00.004Z

A constant refrain among the littany of sexual fantasy and spank-bank material for many a dude registers a bit about men reduced to sexual slaves, always at the behest of some leather clad hottie. In this pedestrian video for a crap tune, Slash's Beautiful Dangerous, belted out by Fergie, the plot boils down to another version of 'sexy-crazy bitch' who drugs and binds the man she desires. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but just how does Fergie manage to haul him from the car and to a flea bag motel when he's at least twice her weight and size? On a practical level, women built like Fergie can't pull off the logistics necessary to slip a mickey for sexual predation.

This type of exercise in male erotics is galling because it's so far removed from reality. Most men can rest safe that they'll never be restrained against their will and raped by a woman. Slash's fantasy ranks with Don Draper paying a sex worker to smack him around. Dudes choked on privilege are able to relegate submission and victimisation to fantasy role play.
Slash has so much agency he can turn weakness into a wank fetish.
How obnoxious.

Testing: Gold-Digger or Tramp?

2010-10-27T16:09:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-25T21:12:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-25T18:10:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-22T19:22:00.002+01:00

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

2010-10-22T16:04:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-20T15:13:00.006+01:00

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

2010-10-19T22:11:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-17T21:59:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-17T15:27:00.002+01:00

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

2010-10-14T22:02:00.002+01:00

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

2010-10-13T17:52:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-08T14:45:00.003+01:00

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.

Nothing Says Love Like a Bullet in the Brain

2010-09-29T16:30:00.003+01:00

A charge often lobbed against feminists is that they go looking for things to be upset about or somehow cherry pick the sexist and misogynist examples in pop culture on purpose. The problem with this line of reasoning is that you don’t have to seek out evidence of lady hating in order to be confronted with it. In fact, even when you attempt to make a selection clear of a potential for such content, lo and behold it turns up on schedule just like the trains in the Netherlands. I put From Paris with Love in my ScreenClick queue sure that I’d only get at worst a clichéd buddy-cop movie, with otherwise lots of gunplay and action scenes, plus a peek at what Travolta does with his own bald pate instead of yet another Eddie Munster lace-front. (He seems liberated by it and should really stick with the au natural. Willis and Statham prove the bald virile type onscreen).

Yep, I can dig the genre with fare such as Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours, the Diehard franchise, Turner and Hooch, Penn & Duvall in Colors, or in the television series The Wire with McNulty and Bunk among other paired characters on The Job. The buddy cop dynamic can be great fun. In the case of From Paris with Love, audiences are shafted with an exercise in misogyny. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays James Reece, the straight guy in the pairing with Travolta’s renegade Charlie Wax. Reece lives with a fashion designer Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). All he seems to want from her is dinner on the table and hot sex, the usual feed-and-fuck mainstay of the demands upon women in hetero relationships. When it turns out that she may not be who she seems, Reece blubbers that he doesn’t know any of her friends and family or anything about her life. How could he have missed glaring evidence of her guilt, he whinges.

The idea that he’s living with a stranger, someone he doesn’t know, fails to be of pressing concern until her culpability in terrorism becomes apparent. This sentiment was echoed not long ago on an episode of Mad Men when Don Draper was asked what women wanted, to which he issued the terse ‘who cares?’ in response. The assumption for guys choked with gendered entitlement is that women are not worth knowing. Don’t trouble a dude with the messy business of relationship maintenance, learning the narrative of a partner’s life, hopes for the future, worries or social network. Like many guys, Reece’s operating from his privilege not to be inconvenienced by a woman. Women should be accommodating and fuckable and then quiet about their own life and needs. Caroline fails to claim her own agenda even in her rogue politics. She’s doing it to please a thug. Not only does the plot devolve to the inevitable scene where he has to ice the bitch, but Reece delivers the bullet between her eyes after a rambling speech about how all that matters is that he loves her. Nothing says love like a clean head shot, afterall.

No one has to look for evidence; the stink slaps itself on everything.

Drama in Dublin Bay

2010-09-24T16:30:00.003+01:00

Verily, the stretch of sand in the Dublin Bay from Booterstown to Dun Laoghaire is as familiar to me as angry rants are to Mel Gibson, what with me serving the canine masters thrice daily. Let me tell you how rare it can be to see folks even at high summer, let alone so many on a chilly day in September, which is fine, really, because it means the pair can’t get in much trouble. Today when we were entering the beach behind the Booterstown DART station, I noticed a guard running up the stairs in a hurry. Once they were on sand, off leash and in pursuit of birds, I noticed Gardai fanning out behind me. Six men. Naturally I thought they were coming after me to haul in the juvenile delinquents who share my bed. If you know the bay there, you’ll recall that it’s not quite even in its grading. Therefore there are gullies and rivulets running from the sea even at low tide, making it difficult to negotiate without wellies. I watched three guards walk through water that was shin high. Ouch, I thought. That’s nasty to have your shoes and feet soaked through at this time of year. They exited the beach at the staircase next to the martello tower at the end of Blackrock Park. We followed right behind. There was a man in his skivvies across from the stairs, just vest and pants with his arms crossed in obvious discomfort. He looked to be in his early thirties. Surrounded by guards, all I could hear were snippets but ‘robbed’ was one of them. No other clothes, shoes, possessions. He looked so vulnerable. Listen, guy, I’m sorry that happened and that so many folks had to witness your distress. That sucks big time. I hope they catch the person and that you were given a ride home.

Double Standards extend to Demonic Possession

2010-09-22T19:46:00.006+01:00

When it comes to viral marketing strategies, the recent campaign where the girl turns into a possessed demon to scare the bejeebus out of the dudes looking for a wank on Chatroulette ranks as my personal fave. I tip my hat to pulling a good scare on the porn hounds. Other than that tiny amusement, the possessed girl onscreen is a motif more skewed and corrupt than Cheney’s moral compass. You don’t have to be a Spinster Aunt in Texas in order to discern the trope as a sign of serious misogyny. Evil girls from Rhoda Penmark, Rosemary Woodhouse and later Regan MacNeil were just the start of a trend of females as the personification or conduit of evil on celluloid. Horror movies are part of the cultural backlash against the gains made by feminists, a rise in ladies spewing green chunks grew in frequency as a reaction against claims made to women’s desire for social, political and economic equality. Firestarter, Carrie, Ghostbusters, Ginger Snaps, Constantine, The Possessed, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, Jennifer’s Body, Drag Me to Hell, Paranormal Activity and the Last Exorcism all squarely hinged on demonic females. Add Hit Girl to the list since she’s a brainwashed zombie who functions as an instrument of death. Aside from the repellent view that the vagina-bearers are empty vessels waiting to be filled by phantasm if not peen, these possessed females serve as a repository and reminder for how much our culture hates and fears women.

If we examine the small number of films involving male characters in the throes of demonic possession, there’s a clear difference. The double standards applied to gender fail to fade even when it’s a question of a spectre from hell taking up corporeal residence. Whether it’s Damien the Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, the dude in Amityville Horror or the rest; when male characters are agents of el Diablo, they invariably are invulnerable forces of destruction. We don’t see their bodies getting pummelled unless it’s that doll Chucky. Rosemary, for example puts down the cleaver to coo over her demon child instead of hacking him up. Boys are always prized and valuable, no matter their paternity with satan. In the unwatchable Ghostrider, Nic Cage plays Johnny Blaze who trades his soul to satan for superhero status for shit’s sake. Ash in the Evil Dead series loses only a hand to the evil spirits with the rest of his faculties and resources in check while the women turn into demonic hags.

When girls and women become possessed it’s used as an opportunity for audiences to see them beaten or overtly sexualised in an exercise to satiate culture’s deeply ingrained misogyny. I must have written at least half a dozen times here about the trend for seeing women’s bodies terrorised either in outright pornography or else in the horror genre. As if it wasn’t stomach churning enough to see Hit Girl shot and beaten by middle aged men, there’s an eye-bulging scene in Case 39 where parents stuff a little girl in an oven, secure it with duct tape and then turn on the flames. The modern Grimm’s fairy tale won’t let us exempt girls from brutalised treatment onscreen.

Sometimes the misogyny extends beyond the basic belief that the female is the more deadly of the species and draws some extra-special twisted messages about women’s subhuman status. Take for instance Case 39, a cautionary tale about the misgivings of liberal do-goodism. Renee Zellweger plays a naive social worker with a messianic complex who gets her comeuppance by saving a girl who is not a victim of abuse but possessed by an evil spirit. The film tells us it’s better to not get involved because lordy, the child may turn out to be a bloodthirsty demon.
The only reason to watch Case 39 is to see the demon spawn call Bradley Cooper’s character facile and smug. Talk about nailing character traits on an off screen. Also, the Chinese hold a proverb which measures a person’s intellect by how high one grasps a pair of chopsticks. Zellweger has her fingers wrapped at the bottom near the tips. Enough said of this rancid little film.

Five Strikes and You're Out

2010-09-22T11:58:00.001+01:00

1. Crap tattoos

2. Adolescent jewelry

3. Tight distressed faded denim

4. V-neck showing meavage

5. A leather cowboy hat!

Might as well pass me a cuppa saltpeter.

I Would Cut a Bitch for These

2010-09-21T19:32:00.004+01:00

Since high heels cripple my lower back I'm not a big shoe gal and will easily snub the 'it' model of the season. Only holy crap do the Balenciaga colour block platforms for a/w '10 have me in a swoon. They are more Modernist art than footwear.
This Burberry navy zip coat also has me similar covet-mode.
You could wear this until threadbare without stepping out of style.
The prices are hideous.
*sigh*

I'm a Sucker for a Cute Face

2010-09-17T15:02:00.000+01:00

The husband sent this to me.

I suppose as a reminder of how adorable they were.

Something to recall when they take turns waking me at 1, 3 and 5am.

The After Life Better Offer More than Pasta

2010-09-16T17:22:00.002+01:00

One of the long-running jokes in ‘Defending Your Life’ (1991) is that when you're dead, you can eat as much as you want without worrying about weight gain, a concept which Meryl Streep’s character takes to with abandon. In the scene above, she’s thrilled to be served 3 lbs. of pasta in a cream sauce with broccoli smothered in cheese on the side. She wants to eat her way through the great beyond. Dudes such as Albert Brooks hold dear this hoary chestnut that the only thing that stops women from putting fork to mouth is the fear of ballooning against the beauty norm. Honestly, I’m the opposite; my dream of an ideal existence post-mortal coil would be to never have to eat again, what with the hassle of shopping for comestibles, then all the preparation, mastication, clean up and digestion in a never ending cycle. To be rid of such a charge would be paradise. The husband, now on his own in Toronto, had an epiphany that he eats too much in our last Skype session. Not because his caloric intake is excessive, but in the recognition that keeping a body going entails too much hassle.

So Meryl, fabulous as you are in this and every role, I’ve got to say not every woman considers the bottomless plate of pasta as nirvana.

Misogyny Lasts from Cradle to Grave

2010-09-16T11:47:00.003+01:00

Trust the Daily Hate Mail to report on curios from culture's long-standing misogyny.

This charming 'wife tamer' from the mid-19th century channels the way in which woman hating dominates a lifespan.

When the wife is giving out, simply lock her up in this cradle-coffin hybrid and hit the pub.

Yack.

And by all means, skip the comments over there.

Noir Gone Wrong

2010-09-16T10:53:00.005+01:00

The exact moment Nicolas Cage’s career took a turn towards woe betides for the viewer occurred during his desperate, hyperbolic, scenery chewing performance in the 1995 remake of the classic noir ‘Kiss of Death.’ Two years earlier he delivered an inspired part in the little known noir ‘Red Rock West.’ The problem is that even though everyone loves the noir genre, a production can go tits up for any number of reasons. You can already consider my money down that the new version of ‘Mildred Pierce’ is sure to blow chunks, because she may be an Oscar winner, but Kate Winslet could never hope to fill Joan Crawford’s platform pumps and shoulder pads. Crawford may have played the martyred momma in the role, except the audience had no doubt that she could have wrung that little bitch’s neck whenever the mood struck. Mildred was never really Vida’s doormat.

Folks lazily assume that genre productions are easy to assemble based upon a set pattern of elements in plot and character. It’s not like you can conjure up one third femme fatale to equal parts gumshoe and a frame and end up with a brilliant film (or book for that matter). For all the hundreds of films released in the noir heyday (1944-1955) many of them are tedious exercises in stereotyped static characters and hole-laden plots. No less is true of the neo noir cycle. For every ‘Last Seduction’ there are reams of celluloid as stinky as Belacqua Shuah’s preferred luncheon cheese, just as with ‘Kiss of Death,’ the supposed star vehicle for an insufferable David Caruso. After Cage channelled Dennis Hopper in ‘Blue Velvet’ for his inhaler affectation, the list of predictable lemons followed, such as ‘City of Angels’ (an embarrassing remake of ‘Wings of Desire’); a creepy ‘8mm’ look at snuff films; the mindless ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’; what the heck was up with ‘Snake Eyes,’ ‘Ghost Rider,’ or that trilogy of ‘National Treasure’ films? If it could get any worse, he’s slated for the lead in a film adaptation of ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,’ a forty year-old American television series which displayed some really ignorant racist ideas about how demure and servile Asian women are. All I’m saying is avoid the noir Kiss of Death path, you actor types.

Like what the hell was Salma Hayek doing in the one-note psycho Latina role in ‘Lonely Hearts’? Not only does the character demand that the limp love interest Jared Leto kill in order to prove his love for her, but when she goes down on a cop to get the pair out of scrutiny at a traffic stop, she’s branded ‘crazy,’ ‘unstable,’ and fucked in the head for shrugging off a little fellatio. In this picture, Hayek is stuck in the Hollywood default position of being a crazy bitch simply because she has a vagina, a role Glen Close epitomised in ‘Fatal Attraction,’ a shitty, misogynist Reagan-era noir. 'Lonely Hearts' veers more towards bad comedy than nail-biter. I spent most of the run time wondering which wig rated higher on the ridiculous scale, Jared Leto’s in costume or John Travolta’s fluffy, glue-rooted locks. When Scott Caan’s (sorry I mistakenly said Speedman earlier) idiot character called James Gandolfini’s detective ‘a sack of meat,’ he was extending inordinately keen powers of observation rather than just slagging off a colleague. Gandolfini carries so much flesh that his lungs labour to draw a full breath aross the concrete-heavy chest. The guy sounds like he has too much gabagool congealed in his blood to take in an easy bit of air.

‘Lonely Hearts’ reaches for significance around two dead women in the bathtub, one Travolta’s wife onscreen, and the other a victim of the serial stalkers of women who write to the lonely hearts club. None of this works. There’s no joy in the dialogue, performances, plot. Even the 1940s fashion looks imitative, mere cheap reproductions hashed together in a rush.

Avoid, I say.

Great Wardrobe for a Bad Actor

2010-09-14T13:33:00.000+01:00

Evan Rachel Wood plays a petulant vampire queen more camp than even Harvey Fierstein would have matched in his youth. Her bodywork is limited to eye-rolling, brow arching and sharp elbows. To perhaps offer recompense to the audience, Sophie Anne takes every scene in True Blood decked out in the most divine ensembles from the 40s and 50s. Take her widow's weeds in mourning for Russell. Holy crap is this dress an inspired mash up of Bette Davis, Betty Draper by way of Betsy Johnson. The shawled collar, nipped waist, flared skirt with the red embellishment, topped with the gloves and hat equal aesthetic perfection.

This is how you grin fuck the guy who forced your hand in marriage.

Roll on season 4 and keep the yummy clothes coming.

I Bought a Hipster Bag?

2010-09-10T19:06:00.002+01:00

During a transit strike when I was doing the coursework for the 'ol peehachedee, I selected one of these Chrome messenger bags to haul stacks around to and from campus.

2003 or 2004ish.

Although I enjoyed the car seat buckle strap design, it really did not accomodate breasts, since it tended to smash them and poke a hole in my sternum, so I turned it over to the husband after a semester.

He still uses it when he takes the bike out for errands.

Now what-the-what is this marketing campaign advertising the bags as 'back to school' ready, packed with ice and PBR tallboys?

Even in 1999 this would have induced eye rolls with the Vice crowd.

That's it kids, get ahead in your expensive programme by drinking crap beer.

Yeesh.

Sarah Silverman Wins me Over

2010-09-08T13:08:00.003+01:00

Like many women with an eye cast for the next great dress to come along, I was an athletic tomboy as a child. In a game of kick ball on the block one day when I was ten, I tagged out a boy from a few houses up. I walked to school every day with his sisters Kathy and Reenie. Patrick was 7 at the time I called him out in a set of rules for a game I no longer remember. His response to my taking him out of the game was to throw a tantrum and then a punch that landed square on my chin. I recall the embarrassment at having to report in the emergency room that a mere seven year old had struck a blow that in turn fractured my jaw. There was no gendered implication in my perception of the event, only chagrin that a first-grader had done the damage. Of course from an adult perspective one worries that he grew up to become a champion wife-beater as one may with such an early predilection for raising a fist to a girl. What I remember about staying home in recovery most was the day when his father stood behind him on our porch while he rang the bell and then proceeded to beat the crap out of Patrick for my benefit. The performance did put me into a fit of painful giggles, even if my adult self can rationalise how using more violence on a violent boy probably didn’t help produce a good citizen. I remembered the father last night while reading Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee. The combination of her childhood memories of nightly emissions mixed with her awe upon getting hired on staff and Saturday Night Live could have been the trigger factor to have me recall Patrick and his father. After the man delivered a beating on his son and told him never to raise his hand to a girl again, I experienced an instant bonding moment with the man. While I waited in the living room for Kathy and Reenie to pull on their coats or grab their books every Monday morning, I would talk about the funny bits from the last episode of SNL with their father. His own kids were in bed early for 9am Mass and not permitted to watch, but my own ability to be quiet and unobtrusive won me the freedom to stay up late and watch adult programming such as SNL, Second City and Monty Python when I was still a pipsqueak. I was just as surprised as Silverman to find the crew full of Harvard snobs. I expected to hear it was a boy’s club, just not a really rich boy’s club.

Even though I’m not a fan of Sarah Silverman’s ‘dickface’ repertoire which boils down to acting like a 14 year-old boy in hoodie drag, I did relish her truncated life story. Silverman says she's never been raped or abused, except she goes on to tell about a group of boys who caught her alone in the cafeteria and force-fed her cold cuts because she was a vegetarian. It was a horrifying gender-based assault at any rate. The sole regrettable chapter revolves around her mewling defence over making a joke on Conan’s show that used the word ‘chink.’ You can’t cover your ass by declaring your audience too sensitive, clueless or humourless. Own that shit and move on. I think she wants the liberty to say stuff for shock value without being responsible for it other than laying claim to satire. The rest of the memoir is funny, relatable and succeeds in creating a favourable view of someone whose work I tend to avoid. That’s no mean feat, to turn someone around from indifference to the cash register for a sale. Well done, Silverman.

Chelsea Handler: Lap Cat of Patriarchy

2010-09-07T13:47:00.004+01:00

Folks harbour a popular misconception about there being a sisterhood among women, as if vagina-bearers operate under a rote ‘you go, girl’ mentality in their interactions with other women. In reality, the sisterhood is more fabled than unicorns or vampires. In a culture which regards everything female as second-rate and subordinate, always already less than, girls cop on pretty quickly that anything coded feminine or female is silly, shallow and less cool than what the boys do or have. Some women learn that they can win approval and popularity by going on the defensive against other women. I’ve come to regard this class of women as lap cats of patriarchy because they participate in culture’s business of putting down and testifying to how awful women are to behold. Plenty of women make a career and get paid for this commentary, such as every woman in front of the camera at Fox News.

A lap cat’s arsenal ranges from gossip and talking trash, taking pleasure from cruelty towards women, slut-shaming, sabotage by croissant, and the ever popular ‘body snarking’ as they phrase it over at Jezebel. Women who brow-beat other women generally seem to play the ‘I’m one of the guys ’card more often than not. The motive is a mix of the desire for male approval and the longing for release from an inferior position, in a bid for exceptional stature otherwise known as being one of the ‘good ones.’ There are palpable rewards for women who act as lap cats of patriarchy and do the business of reminding women of their loathsome status.

Take Chelsea Handler, the American best-selling author and late night show host with a considerable audience. Handler’s the new version of Samantha Jones telling women that they can have a better life if they can mimic traditionally male behaviour such as hard drinking and promiscuity. The new Rollingstone cover celebrates her 'slutty' persona. The problem is that Handler wants it both ways. She wants to be able to trade on a slutty persona in her books or on the programme, but instead of reclaiming the pejorative in a contest to culture’s arbitrary estimations of women’s sexuality, she routinely lays the charge of slattern against other women. Just recently she referred women on a reality show as ‘tasteless sluts.’ So it’s bad to be a slut unless you’re Chelsea Handler? She makes a sex tape, poses for Playboy and boasts about her conquests but chastises other women for doing the same thing. Talk about duplicity.

I’ve taken more than one attempt to watch ‘Chelsea Lately,’ especially when a guest from ‘True Blood’ was scheduled. At least half a dozen times I could not watch more than a few minutes, appalled by the glee with which she skewers women, stages cat fights and portrays women as irrational beasts. There’s no limit to the mars and venus mythology and stereotypes in the attacks she wages against women. Handler can’t muster any substantive comedy about women, as say Sandra Bernhard, Jeanine Garofalo or Kathy Griffin create. Chelsea Handler’s affectless shark-eyed delivery, which other critics mistakenly label deadpan, relies heavily on attacking women just for being women. There’s also the way she uses ‘chocolate’ to refer to African Americans and ‘nugget’ as a description of little people as evidence of a raging mean streak.

Nancy Franklin’s recent profile of the comedian in The New Yorker criticised Handler’s act as too self-centred. The real problem is that she’s too self-delusional. Just like her predecessor Joan Rivers, a certain type of comedian are convinced if they savage other women on stage, they’ll be exempt from the culture’s antipathy for women. Each time a woman tears down another in public it’s frequently for male benefit. I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. We need to stop. The easy thing to do is talk trash about women. The truly subversive, daring tactic is not to participate in the ritual gender humiliation.

Chelsea Handler’s not funny. Hating on women may bring her a paycheck and fame, but the presence of a navigable moral compass becomes less certain. Handler’s brand of comedy is Mean Girls on television.

Black Beans are Versatile

2010-08-30T19:56:00.000+01:00

Black beans accomodate all diets.
Start with the basic recipe:
2 cans drained (soak them if you have time but during the week, cans are easy. Fallon & Byrne sells Progresso, my preferred brand)
2 small red onions diced
3 habanero peppers minced
3 med red bell peppers (remove membrane & seeds)
3 large tomatoes (scoop out the seeds)
Heap of chopped fresh coriander (pick out the stems and only use the leaves)

Add lime juice and you have a great salsa. Put it in a tortilla with added rice and you have a vegan dinner.

This is one of my staples. It's the basic recipe with lots of shredded cheddar to make a quesadilla. Top with salad.

Add sauteed ground beef seasoned with chile powder and some crushed tomatoes and you have beef burrito filling when you add shredded cheese.

See, everyone's happy with black beans.

Think of Your Body as a Drawstring Sack

2010-08-28T14:44:00.001+01:00

The supplement store GNC has a new ad campaign for a diet gimmick called Burn 60.

Their marketing tie-in wraps the snake oil in tablet form inside a sack featuring a woman's disembodied waist in a short skirt with thigh exposure.

Consumers are supposed to marvel over proof of the product's efficacy in pulling the drawstring taut to a smaller waist.

Bingo.

Magic.

Your waist will whittle down just as easily.

Or not.

Drop Those Hemlines

2010-08-28T10:47:00.000+01:00

Stacy and Clinton abide an old fashion rule that mandates no mini skirts after a woman turns 35. I say bully to that, since plenty of women maintain active lifestyles to keep the stems in shape beyond their supposed expiration date. Youth is no true hallmark of fitness or muscle tone anyway.

The glossies in unison proclaim a longer hemline for this autumn.

Personally, I find the mid-calf drop a wee bit dowdy, depressing, mumsy and nun-like.

Skirts or dresses that fall just at the knee are kicky and much easier to wear.

This is another trend to ignore.

Dogs Do Delayed Gratification

2010-08-27T09:38:00.000+01:00

The prospect of managing full-time dog duty on my own for a few weeks induced a case of the shudders recently. My stars, I do complain about the effort it takes to keep the pair exercised and sedate. If Omar doesn't get to run to the Pigeon House from Blackrock at least once a day he's a little poop head. Ditto for Kima's need to march down to Dun Laoghaire.

But then last week there was a moment where they had me almost in tears with a small gesture. Tromp, tromp down to the beach as always where I met two men who were having a chat and drew me in. One was a pensioner, the other a middle aged dude with a camera. I let the dogs off leash to do their job clearing the birds off the beach. The men extended the conversation beyond a few words. After about ten minutes I looked down to see Omar and Kima sitting on either side of me like my little canine sentinels. By far, it was the sweetest thing they've done for me to have the impulse control to leave the beach to make sure I was okay.
Yes, I am that easy.
Sniff.

The Hangover Part 2

2010-08-25T11:19:00.002+01:00

"The Hangover Part 2" also known as "Due Date," set for a November release is yet another installment in the dude-bro hijinks picaresque where women will appear onscreen in brief scenes to yell vague threats in a mobile, in the modern day version of brandishing a rolling pin with their hair wrapped in curlers in the vein of Andy Capp's wife. Wives are shrews who make demands as they sit around waiting for the man to finish his adventure.

Someone tell the bearded Jodie Foster that he's not funny.
Shame on Robert Downey Jr.
The dog sure is cute though.

Hate the Name

2010-08-25T09:25:00.001+01:00

As a woman with pale skin, it's a constant struggle to find foundation and powder that match without too much yellow or pink. Normally I'd jump to try the new range Nicola Roberts designed for folks low on pigment, but why did she have to brand the slap with such a horrible twee name such as Dainty Doll? The name for the cosmetic line sounds infantilised and insulting. I'm not dainty and I don't wanna be a doll.

How about Pale Face, Milk Skin, Glow in the Dark or any number of other ways to signify makeup for us honky ladies?

Ladies Have to Get Cancer to Stop being Doormats

2010-08-23T08:12:00.001+01:00

On the surface, Showtime’s new series The Big C resembles AMC’s Breaking Bad since both centre around protagonists who teach high school and grapple with a terminal diagnosis. The big difference resides in how the characters react to the news that cancer has etched a rough expiration date on their mortal coil. Bryan Cranston plays a guy who decides that having nothing left to lose, he’s free to cook and sell drugs, commit murder, rape his wife and generally act like an insufferable bully. By contrast, Laura Linney’s Cathy Jamison uses her diagnosis as prompt to stop living like a doormat. Viewers get a clear sense of the dissonance between characters who vow to start living for themselves when only one of them can claim a loss of privilege or identity.

The first episode of The Big C consists of a series of revelations wherein Cathy negotiates all the expectations from her husband, brother, son, students, neighbours. Her brother Sean (John Benjamin Hickey) calls her boring because she’s obsessed over trivial matters such as replacing a couch stained with fruit punch by Cathy’s husband Paul (Oliver Platt). Having thrown Paul out of the house, she consents to a dinner to talk and asks him to respond to her brother’s assessment of her humdrum personality. Paul confirms Sean’s perception by noting that he likes to have fun and she doesn’t; he spills punch on cushions and she doesn’t. Now, aside from the skewed definition which equates fun with being a slob, Paul’s observation points to a larger truth for many married women. Paul doesn’t have to worry about spillage or much else, since he knows that his wife will take care of it, clean it up, restore order and all the rest. The series underscores this nugget of truth later in the episode when Cathy tells her petulant son that she had Paul move out because she’s only choosing to raise one child, not two. All too often wives and mothers get stuck in the killjoy role while the man in the house gets to be the carefree scamp. Cathy says that she wants to be the fun one for a change and sets about doing it.

The multiple scenes where Cathy turns off the internal censor based in the norms of gender propriety are delightful. Even the difficult moments when she harshly tells a sarcastic student (Gabourey Sidibe) that she can’t be fat and mean, she has to choose between either fat and jolly or being a skinny bitch, Linney makes every scene feel authentic. She calls the old woman across the street a cunt, which shocks the woman (played by the wonderful Phyllis Somerville) out of her lonely somnambulance to forge a connection with her neighbour.

At some level, the premise that it takes cancer for a woman to speak her mind and hold ground over her own personhood remains a depressing prospect. Talk about dire straits for it to take cancer for a woman to grow a spine. Aside from that, The Big C promises a host of stellar performances around Cathy’s awakening

Dublin City Council's Anti-Litter Campaign

2010-08-22T12:57:00.001+01:00

Dublin city council's new PSA campaign strikes a more civic-minded tone than the previous one. The past anti-litter campaign featured the tag line "Litter is Disgusting/ So are Those Responsible," which really seemed unlikely to win hearts and minds through insulting the public. The new approach strikes the right tone with an emphasis on the unappealing nature of rubbish thrown on the street. The simple instructions to bin the refuse will be more likely to influence litter bugs than harsh admonishments.

Enough with the Aviator Jacket Trend Already

2010-08-21T17:45:00.002+01:00

Glossies for a flight are a must have.

The September British editions of Elle and Vogue were proclaiming the big autumn trend of the aviator jacket. The new Grazia concurs.

Yack, I say.

Shearling is heavy, adds bulk and does shorter women like myself no favors.

I'm already tired of looking at them and it's still August.

Every other woman walking down the street will have one in a month's time.

Do yourself a favor and skip this trend.

2 Days in Amsterdam

2010-08-21T09:59:00.000+01:00

Mr. M had some business in the (hinter)Netherlands so we had a diversion in a small town before taking the train to Amsterdam. My guess is we would have enjoyed the city more had we gone at another time when it was not a prime holiday period with swarms of people around. Both the Van Gogh and Rijksmuseum housed masterpieces, but they were so full of folks it was hard to view the pieces properly. Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" was worth the trip alone.

We walked all over, as usual along the pretty canals and tree-lined streets. I told the husband that if I spent any time there I'd probably grow to despise cyclists, a group who were outrageously aggressive, unpredictable, all over pedestrian spaces and always acting as though they had the right of way. We witnessed several screaming matches among them which kinda put a damper on the notion of cycling as a civilised urban development.

Mr. M looking contemplative outside a cafe along a canal.

The line for Anne Frank's house snaked around for almost two blocks so we settled for pictures.

Here's some pussy in the Red Light District. That was going to be the title for the post only I feared the deluge of creepy google searches.

I read a post somewhere online about coffee shops, the places that legally sell weed in the city, which rated the Bulldog chain as the equivalent of McDonald's. When in Rome, I told the husband as we entered their shop in the Leidseplein. The bar was packed with a predictable enclave of neo-hippie kids. To the left stood a woman behind the counter and an inscrutable menu with whimsical names for the herb. By law you can purchase up to 5 grams. We're not big pot smokers so we opted for the smallest amount they sold: 4 joints for 12 euro. The last time we smoked together was probably during our honeymoon in Antigua 16 years ago.

Right after I said "Gee, we've smoked three quarters of this and I feel nothing" *blammo* it hit me like a sledgehammer. My tongue swelled to treble its normal size. Add in heart palpitations to the sensation that I had a boulder strapped across the bottom half of my pulmonary system and there was no mellow for anyone to harsh. We went back to the room where Mr. M fell asleep and I watched "Murder She Wrote" and that show with an evil Dick Van Dyke, wondering about both if they were truly that awful or if the weed was to blame.

Dinner at Lucius up on the Spuistraat was a highlight of the trip. The restaurant was loaded with gems from the sea. I stared around at people's plates in envy. My sole complaint would be the American-sized portions.

Short Holiday

2010-08-16T08:18:00.002+01:00

Off to Amsterdam for a few days.

Up 'Do with Attitude

2010-08-15T09:16:00.000+01:00

The pics from the Goodwood Vintage Festival in the UK are full of style on parade, including this masterful, sweeping hair creation that's adding a few inches to a lady's height. I'd wear it without hesitation. The pink: Not so much.

Discount Designer Goldmine

2010-08-09T20:12:00.000+01:00

Just as I was almost out of a shop today I glimpsed this pair of Chloe trousers.

They're what I'd consider formal jeans.

The fabric is a fancy grade of denim.

Patent lining at the front pocket and ankles.

Skinny zippers at the bottom hem.

Medium rise, as I prefer.

40 Euro at checkout.

You can find similar bargains from designer houses such as Prada, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo, Max Mara, and Dior at Ruby Couture on the second floor in the Blackrock Shopping Centre.

Michael Moore Asks: What Would Jesus Do?

2010-08-08T12:18:00.002+01:00

Aside from the novelty of archival film clips, including the shock horror of Ronald Reagan administering an open handed smack against an unsuspecting woman onscreen, Michael Moore’s screed against capitalism was disjointed, hyperbolic and presented little evidence to make the case. His work is knee jerk liberalism at best. We jeered at the screen for much of it and then turned it off before the end.

You can’t make an argument about the merits or pitfalls of capitalism without first talking to any economists or even folks who are degreed in political science. Wallace Shawn, an actor beloved by many, does not really fulfill the ‘expert’ call to explain the mechanics of an economic system. This has to be the most juvenile assessment of capitalism outside a dorm room filled with pot smoke. Most of his examples illustrate evidence of corruption, cronyism, anti-union, corporate lobbyist greed. All of that could exist under any form of economics.
Moore lost me entirely when he played the jeebus card. In a segment that went on far too long, he consults priests about the evils of capitalism while he intones how much god loves the poor. Moore says “Jesus would refuse to be a part of capitalism.” Who cares what your mythical figure thinks? The sanctimony was so thick I nearly had to rub a cloth over the screen. Thanks, but don’t mind if I refrain from taking any advice from an organisation which disclaims the full human identity of women and the LGBT community, not to mention the authorisation of raping children.

After being unable to make it through this propaganda, seeing any of his future work seems unlikely.

Brow Fixation

2010-08-07T20:18:00.004+01:00

Among the endless examples of the makeover onscreen, few appear as dramatic and life changing as the experience Bette Davis’ character Charlotte Vale has in “Now, Voyager” (1942). In the film she’s transformed from a matronly wallflower into the arch beauty poised by imperious glances and chin tilts, those staple maneuvers Davis mastered on film. In the switch from wearing shifts with a limp belt to evening gowns topped with a sequined butterfly cape, the most arresting part of Vale’s appearance is the eyebrow wax. More than the weight loss, clothes and up ‘do, Vale tweezes down the caterpillar above her eyes and emerges a great beauty. You can tell I have a brow fixation on par with the ladies at Beaut.ie. A woman’s brow create a bold parenthesis to her mien and maquillage. In my aesthetic economy, a thicker brow connotes strength, intelligence and empathy.
There are so many enviable brows onscreen.
Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novack, Ava Gardner, Rachel Welch, Ali McGraw, Halle Berry, Brooke Shields are among the standouts.

Soap Hunt

2010-08-07T12:26:00.002+01:00

When I was waiting for Mr. M to join me in Bergamo not long ago, I popped in a shop to buy facial soap and what with my lack of language skills, purchased the box the nice lady picked out. Now I've run out of the Collistar multivitamin soap and would love to find more. The soap is velvety smooth, gentle on my face and has only a faintest scent.

This stuff is heaven on my skin.

Tired Dogs are Good Dogs

2010-08-05T15:08:00.000+01:00

There's nothing like the hush that falls over the house after Kima and Omar have had a run on the beach.

Violence Against Women Marketing Tool for VW

2010-08-03T13:26:00.000+01:00

Copyranter has a post on this campaign for the VW Beetle.

He calls the subtext one of multiracial blowjobs.

Looks more like two women with a bloody mouth clenched in pain.

Images of violence against women are all over the industry.

Boo hiss.

Has J Crew Jumped the Shark?

2010-08-03T09:38:00.002+01:00

Hard to believe there's not a pretty dress to be seen in the email advertisement J Crew sent out.

The spotlighted frock above looks to be little more than a shapeless cheap satin sack with a limp waist and tatty hem. I wouldn't wear it to bed.

Have they expanded too quickly in an attempt to capitalize on Michelle Obama's patronage?

The dress is seriously unflattering even on the super slim model.

Sabotage by Croissant

2010-08-02T16:12:00.002+01:00

The Daily Hate Mail puzzles over a syndrome they identify as the “office feeder,” a woman on staff who pushes food on other women without indulging in any of the treats. There’s no great mystery behind a stock competitive ritual among women. Foisting baked goods or chocolates on women in the office is one of the many ways that women grin-fuck each other while smoothing over a competitive agenda. What are the office feeders competing for, you may ask? The same thing women are enculturated to vie for since knee highs: male approval. I’ve never met an office feeder, but I have no trouble picturing her or such methods of hoping other women gain weight while she keeps a prim mouth closed in abstention. Dear dogs, even though I’m a feminist and do my best to not perpetuate or participate in misogyny, still there is a heady rush one gets from approval for a slim body type. Yes, of course I know I should wipe the shit-eating grin off my face when someone compliments my ability to restrict calories. Really, it only rewards my collusion in the beauty mandate, something I’m not about to boast over or recommend. The natural extension of this weight contentment for many women is in turn to act as the treat bully, a horrible thing which I’ve never done.

Women should recognise this tactic for the Mean Girl behaviour it really is, as a base exercise in getting cookies of attention and regard from men. Lookit, in a culture entrenched in misogyny, women learn to hate and cast the side-eye at other women. Patriarchy reserves only a limited amount of free space for women to have a decent life. Instead of tearing each other up, sabotage by croissant, back-biting gossip, the rumour mill and all the rest of the tools in the passive aggressive female arsenal, why not call this crap out for what it is, an ugly set of tricks that belittle and thwart all women from full human status.

Ladies, you don't have to play those reindeer games.

Alan Ball, Stop Messing with Sookie Stackhouse

2010-08-02T13:19:00.000+01:00

*Spoilers*

Episode 7 in the third season of True Blood was even better than the week before.

Debbie Pelt: Psycho Bitch.

Alcide is so much more likeable in the series than in the books.

The Mickens are lower than dog shit.

The dog fighting scenes were gut-wrenching. But holy hell did Sam Merlotte save the day and all those abused dogs. I never cared much for his character in the past but now he's on my list.

Same for Russell who had a brilliant showdown with the Magister.

This season is such a delight.

But then there's a glaring problem here in how Alan Ball has chosen to revise the books onscreen.

Charlaine Harris developed Sookie Stackhouse as a resourceful, independent woman who takes responsibility for saving herself and those she loves on more than one occasion.

In the books, Sookie killed Rene the serial killer by herself.

Yet in the series, it was re-written so that Bill and Sam came to her rescue.

Is it a case of imperiled blondes satisfy the crowds?

Because for as many other risky choices they've made in the production, why can't Sookie save the day for once? Or cover her own ass.

Now in this episode, Bill plays the major role in staking Lorena by pinning her with the chains.

Whereas in the books, Sookie battles it out on her own until Lorena's toast and then saves Bill.

Damn, Alan Ball.

Enough of the damsel in distress.

Let's see Sookie be the heroine she really is and kick some ass.

Overlook the Premise

2010-08-02T08:40:00.001+01:00

"The Dinner Game" ("Le Diner de Cons") makes little sense in the opener.

The film's premise revolves around a bunch of alpha males playing a game where they each invite "losers" to dinner in order to mock them.

I'm not really seeing the joy or pleasure to be had in sitting at a table listening to the assembled "losers" drone on about their obsessive hobbies collecting boomerangs or creating matchstick models. When you're rich and powerful, it seems in poor taste to say the least to pick on random guys. Even worse, we hear that they used to play the game by competing to see who brought the ugliest woman, but then decided it was more fun to pick losers.

Aside from being mean-spirited, the ruse doesn't look like it's any fun.

We can see that when the man on the train's stuck listening to the guy with the matchstick compulsion. He's clearly bored to the bone.

I'm also unconvinced by the claim that the marks never figure out why they're chosen when in the one scene set at the actual dinner game, the alpha bros are rolling their eyes and making side gestures, which are so obvious that even the dimmest bulb would guess they were being had.

The surprise and confusion is that we only get the one scene from the dinner game while the rest of the plot's set in an alpha dude's luxurious apartment. By the end, when the smug guy says that he learned so much that evening, you get the sense maybe he's being sincere.

The Hollywood remake seems less concerned about showing us a jerk having an epiphany and more invested in having us laugh at the freaks around the table.

DATL Update

2010-07-30T16:10:00.003+01:00

When I remember to come over here and check up on my forlorn little blog, you can bet your ass that I will delete comments which tell me I'm suffering from Angry Lesbian Syndrome or which place patriarchy inside quotation marks, as if to question the reality of its ugly imprint upon human history.

I'm not running a Feminism 101 blog and your education is not my responsibilty.
As no doubt your teachers told you: look it up.

*Update on the Update*
I decided to move from blogging as Medbh to using my real name.
There really was no need for the screen name.
I stand by what I've written.
I'm reviving Dante and the Lobster so that I can post as frequently as I like.
The Anti Room is still high on my priority list and I'm so excited about the site, but it's a large group blog and perish the thought that I would hog too much of the space.
Cheers, folks.

Bad Dreams

2010-07-30T12:04:00.000+01:00

Spanish instructors used to say in class that it was a positive sign when you started dreaming in the language, as a normal part of language immersion.

Now I've started dreaming about the characters in my novel.

One elaborate scenario involved my namesake staging a moment of comeuppance for a racist regular customer at the pub where she used to tend bar in a flashback scene. The sweaty-pitted man made horrible cracks about the Chinese cook from a smug seat at the bar where he's perched over takeaway from a Chinese restaurant.

The patron taunts the cook with his 'superior' fare.

My protagonist suggests that he tell the dude in question that he's eating nutria, rather than duck. Since the racist dude can't read what's written on the box, the ruse has him fooled and he's repulsed by the wild rat meat in plum sauce. And then he leaves.

I woke up to curse my subconscious.

Dreams are a load of shite.

So Let it be Written; So Let it be Done

2010-07-20T00:47:00.003+01:00

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Manuel was rewarded with a comparison to James Joyce's writing style.
I plugged in the first paragraph of my novel and received the totally scientific analysis that I write close to Margaret Atwood's style.
Yes!
I'll take that as a compliment.

Every Woman Knows a Debbie Pelt

2010-07-14T13:08:00.003+01:00

Debbie Pelt finally showed up in the fourth episode of True Blood's third season.
Played by Brit Morgan, she resembles so many bullies from my youth, with those bangs we used to call "wings" and the disposition of pure anger. She would think nothing of tearing off Sookie's head and pooping down her neck.

Debbie's far scarier than Mary Anne.

Movies I Never Wanna See

2010-07-13T11:56:00.002+01:00

Dear dogs.
Girls are just like presents under the christmas tree.
One man beats her up, another, her saviour, is a gun for hire.
As long as she keeps up the baby talk about sparkly things, well, he'll stalk and protect her.
I need a lie down after that.

Mr. M Rides the Wicklow Mountains

2010-07-11T10:27:00.000+01:00

Treme

2010-07-11T10:07:00.001+01:00

Had I been a student in Creighton Bernette's (played by John Goodman) class when he dismissed the understanding of Kate Chopin's novel "The Awakening," as the first feminist novel, instructing the class to resist putting a narrow interpretation on it, to instead not "ghettoize" the novel with such constraints, which only limit its value and importance, I would have walked out in a huff. Dear dogs, I've heard professors say some stupid shit over the years, but this tops the list. Sure, buddy, Chopin's work is "important" and "universal" to you so therefore you can't paint it with the F brush and live with yourself. If a woman happens to write a brilliant book, gender vanishes into the ether. Lemme guess: she’s an honorary man. The novel’s protagonist Edna Pontellier does not choose or get to enjoy ‘spiritual growth’ as he puts it when she walks into the water to pull an Ophelia. Suicide is not an uplifting or positive ending, you jackass. Bernette's reading is even worse than that professor I had who argued in class that Melville's Bartleby was a Christ-figure. Yeah, asshole, he died for the sins of capitalism, is that it? Geez.

One of my minor beefs with "The Wire" was the small number of fleshed out women characters. David Simon sure has taken care of putting strong women in his programme about post-Katrina New Orleans. Khandi Alexander is riveting as pub-owner Ladonna Batiste-Williams. Hard to believe she was born in 1957. I'd have guessed she was in her late 30s. She has some of the best lines in the series, such as when she's writing the check to the undertaker, she leans against the crypt when he thanks her, puts her ear to the stone and says "sounds like every motherfucker up in there spinnin.'" In the first episode a patron asks why her marriage with Antoine went sour. “You want to know what went wrong? I married a god-damned musician. Ain’t no way to make that shit right.”Kim Dickens as Jannette Desautel just needed to catch a break, poor chef.Lucia Micarelli as Annie was so talented you wanted her to dump her loser boyfriend from the outset.The men onscreen were not nearly as likeable, save for Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste and Clarke Peters as Albert Lambreaux. Steve Zahn's Davis McAlroy comes off as a horn dog scumbag and the self-righteousness oozing from Goodman's Creighton was unbearable."Treme" is stellar television at any rate.

My Teeth Ache from the Sweetness

2010-07-05T21:59:00.002+01:00

A shorter version of this commercial for the Shangri-la hotel chain has been featured on the network showing the Tour de France, which has glued Mr. M to the television as always.

The advert spot is a take on Jack London's story "To Build a Fire," only with a happy ending.

Yes, I wanna cuddle with a pack in the snow!

Can't Keep Up

2010-07-04T21:41:00.000+01:00

Many women opt for boob jobs.
For others, it's botox or those injectibles that resemble silly putty in their cheeks.
I've been colouring my hair since forever.
I'll probably cave to the face lift in a decade.
The business of muliebrity is taxing, endless and often scary.
Now we have the advent of the circle eye contact lense, so we can look like dolls and cartoons.
Sufferin' succotash, I could weep.

Vuvuzela: The Brown Sound for Dogs

2010-06-30T22:00:00.002+01:00

Since the World Cup began, this is the first night without a game on the televison, and the return of normal dog behaviour.

The husband put two and two together after I told him about this video where the horn makes a dog crap in the house.

When the hyper-obnoxious horn blares in the background, Kima and Omar launch into spasms of aggressive barking, wrestling and general bad manners against all commands or rules of the house. They're two and a half now, yet have had to be restrained on their leads inside these past nights.
Unprecedented.
The pair have their demands for exercise met every single day.
After four hours minimum of three separate jaunts, they normally settle down after the post-dinner walk.

Tonight they are gentle lambs, which proves the vuvuzela is an instrument of torture for canine as well as human ears.

Public Toilets in Dublin

2010-06-29T22:13:00.003+01:00

In a recently aired episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," viewers were given an update to the "Seinfeld" characters when Larry David helmed a new production of the programme. George's plotline revolved around his invention of the i-toilet, an application for the i-phone, which would alert users to the nearest public facilities. He then lost the money in the Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme. What a great idea.

An insider's view to getting around any city is learning where you can pee when the need arises.

In Dublin's city centre, there are plenty of pubs and fast food restaurants, but I'm wary of trying to use them when I'm not going to spend any money, so I avoid those when I'm on walkabout. I also feel weird going to a hotel to use the toilet. For ages I used the pay toilets for 20 cents at the top of the St. Stephen's Green shopping centre. The problem there is that you have to go through the crowds all the way to the top using the escalator and stairs, and even then, you may have to wait in line to pee. Same with the toilets at M&S or Brown Thomas on Grafton Street.
The best facililties to use are in the National Gallery (second floor) on Clare Street or at the Irish Film Institute on Eustace Street. Both are clean and I've never had to wait for them.
Any others you would suggest?

Time for Something New

2010-06-28T14:25:00.000+01:00

This poor little blog has been my pet project for more than four years.
A change seems in order.

Sinéad Gleeson has invited me to join a resurrected The Anti Room.

Thus I shall be in new blogging digs in the company of fine women writers.

Go, read and tell all your friends.