season of the bitch

“To me, the real truth is always a bigger turn-on. Send me your most pathetic moments, your most anything, as long as it’s real. I want the size, the shape, the feel, the smell. I want blood, sweat and tears on these letters. I want brains, and ectoplasm and cum spilled all over ‘em. Hallelujah.”

I got a late-night text message the other day from a friend that reminded me that yes, Pump Up The Volume is still an excellent movie. (What happened to you, Christian Slater? Samantha Mathis?)

So last night I watched it myself, trying to get some sleep after ranting and raving about McCain’s hypocrisy and the economic bailout plan, and remembered what I loved about it. Of course, I like the idea of a pirate radio DJ fucking up the whole town to the tune of Leonard Cohen and the Descendents, but I also like the idea of just spilling your guts out all over the place, of telling everything and nothing all at once.

We’re the overshare generation, we don’t feel like anything’s really happened unless we’ve shared it on Facebook or Twitter. I wrote about all this a few days ago. Yet so little of it feels like honesty. Much more of it feels like public relations. Managing your image, putting up only the flattering pictures, the ones that show how cool you are with all your friends, telling only the best moments.

Real, unflinching honesty comes either with anonymity, whether it’s disguising your voice on pirate radio in an 80s movie or putting up a blog with a pseudonym and no identifying details, or with those moments when you’re actually looking someone in the eyes. Where the bullshit collapses.

Sometimes I feel like one big raw nerve that despite all my words, the pretty ones and the ugly ones, is hidden away from people, just below reach. Wrapped in a layer of something that dulls all the little sensations, just enough so I can think about ‘em.

I still have some secrets. I turn some of them loose in ‘fiction,’ making them into pretty stories for others to read, putting meaning behind events that I still can’t quite interpret, making people into characters I can understand.

More often, though, my scars and damage are on as full display as my filthy sense of humor and my willingness to debate issues with anyone. I prefer raw. I want to know all the mistakes, all the messes, all the problems, the things that hurt, that make you cry. I want to know what you think about when you’re alone at night, even if there’s someone there next to you (those moments can be worse than any when you’re actually alone, can’t they? When the person who’s supposed to get it just doesn’t anymore?)

Maybe it’s how I’ve kept myself out of therapy. Or maybe I do need therapy, who knows.

I know I’m a good listener in part because I collect stories. But it’s also because I like the messes. I screw up so often I can’t even count ‘em at this point, I break my own heart more than anything else. Perfect has little appeal to me.

Bring on the pain, the mistakes, the losses, the scars. I want to know. Tell me your stories.

I usually expect revisionist history (or historical fiction) that purports to show the women’s side of things to have a rough time of it, for the simple fact that quite often the women had a rough time of it. A story of the Boleyn sisters isn’t going to end well—we all know what happened to Anne Boleyn.

But still, I would assume that the film would attempt to take some sort of a feminist tack, right?

I’d be wrong in this case. (Spoilers below) » Read the rest of this entry «

but it’s late and I’ve had a few and there are things in my head that need spilling.

a dream of someone who used to love me so much it freaked me out and made me run, and who did the same thing when I finally told him I loved him. a dream of a moment we won’t have again.

a memory of so many moments, some that were fucked up and some that were perfect and others that were just special because it was him and me.

it sounds romantic and stupid sometimes when I talk about it.

but you know, sometimes romantic and stupid is all I’ve got left.

this movie explained how I feel about love so perfectly.

Got an essay up at Shotgun Reviews about Watchmen and aging. Check it out.

The Watchmen trailer is beautiful, a comic fan’s wet dream—it’s lush and dark and brooding and scary, and the world is perfect. It gives away a little too much, but that’s not my biggest complaint.

It rubbed me the wrong way only for one reason—the ages are all wrong.

Marie Antoinette, as Sofia Coppola imagined it, is all about beauty, ‘sparkle’ and femininity as the only pleasures available to a woman in a society where she is just a bargaining chip to be bought and sold—even by her mother, a political force in her own right.

Coppola gives us Kirsten Dunst, a star we are familiar with precisely for her lack of uber-glamness, her waifish build and glowing skin with little makeup, and transforms her before our eyes into the Queen, powdered white and perfect, hair not just styled but turned into a living sculpture on her head, seizing her pleasures where she can.

Marie Antoinette is, after all, denied even the freedom to dress herself in the mornings, and her husband is incapable of sexual performance, so she is denied not only pleasure in sex, but her very identity. It must be her fault, after all, that he cannot perform.

Beauty is both a millstone round her neck and the thing that saves her, at least for a time. She is dressed in the clothing of her new country—the forcible public removal of her clothing happens more than once in this film—and presented to her new husband as a cake upon a platter. The same as the cakes she so gleefully crams into her mouth later, and like the one she is mistakenly accused of telling the people to eat when they have no bread.

The aunts are jealous of her beauty, and they turn her against the one woman who might have helped her gain any freedom and happiness, Madame Du Barry, the old king’s mistress, played lushly by Asia Argento, all blacks and reds to Marie’s pastels and blonde. Du Barry is of course the ‘whore,’ yet she wants nothing more than to be friends with Marie, and is only angered when she is spurned. The simple pleasure on her face when Marie speaks to her is telling—and leads directly into a scene contrasting her lively sex life with the aging King and Marie and Louis’s bedtime conversation.

Later, of course, Marie takes up with another woman of questionable virtue, and it is then when she starts to have her own life.
» Read the rest of this entry «

It’s been a bit since I’ve done this, since I’ve been unholy busy, but here it is.

1. La Lubu has a comment on Octo’s Feministe post that says a lot of what I was trying to say below far better than I did. Octo also linked to this post at La Lubu’s blog that, well, yeah. Because without the basics, we can’t do any of it.

2. And Octo yet again has a thought-provoking post, this time on individualism. She’s seriously on a roll over there, and instead of freaking out because she’s violating lefty dogma, take a minute to think about it. Then think about what La Lubu said. Then…synthesize?

3. Hilzoy on why John McCain gets scarier every day.

4. A post at Racialicious about the true purpose of satire.

5. Emily about the latest round of trans wars (do we really still have to have this discussion, people?) but more importantly, again: A woman is dead, and her killer got off.

6. Debi has a round-up of things you can DO. She has lots of other goodness, too, including a big kiss-my-ass to everyone who’s treating her like a wayward child. Rock on, Debi. And thanks for the Arcade Fire.

7. The Jaded Hippy actually went to see Tropic Thunder to tell us all about it. Frankly, no matter how much Robert Downey, Jr.  was involved, I wouldn’t have been interested in that movie before I heard anything about protests about its racism and ableism. And she’s aware that she’s white and able-bodied. Something to think about, especially in terms of the successful-satire post above.

8. Finally, I’m stealing this quote from Pop Feminist.

“We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining their limits. Under the crossfire of gynecological surgery rooms and television screens, we have buried love within shame for the benefit of pleasure, desire, if not revolution, evolution, planning, management–hence for the benefit of Politics. Until we discover under the rubble of those ideological structures — which are nevertheless ambitious, often exorbitant, sometimes altruistic–that they were extravagant or shy attempts intended to quench a thirst for love. To recognize this does not amount to a modest withdrawal, it is perhaps to confess to a grandiose pretension. Love is the time and space in which ‘I’ assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity.”

- Julia Kristeva (1987)

Working still. So, Tori for you. Bizarre video, but, um, Adrien Brody?

Lyrics below jump.

» Read the rest of this entry «

We will now have a break from talk of feminism and whether or not I’m a sellout to the patriarchy. Why? Because I’m going to talk about a big summer action movie!

Which was amazing. Get on seeing it now. For those of you that haven’t, there be spoilers below, so click at your peril….

» Read the rest of this entry «

“There are so many people who will try to force you to apologize at every turn. Do not do it. If anything, amplify the traits that chafe people–there is a reason that you are provoking a response.”

-Diablo Cody, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno, in BUST magazine.

Not that I really need an excuse to post man-pretty on my blog–it’s MY blog, and I don’t have a boyfriend to get jealous, so what the heck, right? But there are a few more that I wanted to get on here before this whole shebang ends. Plus a few more thoughts on desires.

See, I think the point to all this (other than gratuitous pretty men) should be thoughts about ‘the gaze,’ as it were, and what it really means. If it is about power, or just about appreciation, and if we can look at someone just purely in a sexual manner (tell me that if you’re attracted to men

at all, that bottom picture here doesn’t get you going) without necessarily taking away their humanity or acting as though we’re entitled to them.

I suppose in one way or another I am acting entitled to these pictures–they’re up on the web and I used them.

At the same time, I’m not treating them as less than human because I’m acknowledging that they are attractive–particularly because these pictures are put out there (particularly, again, the last one) to give a specific impression. I’d hope that if someone posted a picture on their blog of me in a pretty outfit and said I was sexy, I wouldn’t take offense. That doesn’t mean that ALL I am is sexy. (whereas if they said “it’s a good thing she’s hot because she’s so dumb” or suchlike, well, that’s a different ballgame, isn’t it?)

I suppose that at the end of the day, sexuality isn’t going anywhere, no matter how badly the religious right or the radical feminists want it to. And it’s not going to stop playing a large role in our lives unless we deliberately ignore any and all occurrences–and even then, someone’s probably finding you attractive whether you like it or not.

So enjoy, from top to bottom: Adam Foote and Joe Sakic, Robert Downey, Jr., the guys of Lucero, and Josh Hartnett without his shirt on.