T.M.I

I've been fighting what seems to be the stomach flu for the last little week or so. Really, you never know how much you miss the simple things-snacking, a beer after work, taking a solid dump-until you can't endulge in them. The first time you enjoy these things after a long layoff is a revalation.

Yawn.

I heard my first ever SoofYAWN Stevens song the other day. Oh my God, what rubbish. It was the one about John Wayne Gacy and the lyrics read like the wikipedia entry on the guy. At one point, I jokinly turned to my girlfriend and said "I bet he says something about dressing up like a clown." The next line? "He dressed up like a clown for them." Sooooo shitty.

I am pleased to see that art has finally started to imitate life over on "The O.C.", with Marissa/Mischa Barton starting in on the marching powder. No that I watch that show anymore, it's so bad.

"The Office", on the other hand, is dead funny. So is this, Chaleee.

Last night, something on TV really pissed me off and I wanted to write about it. But I forget what it was. Oh well.

Hope I die before I get older

I'd like to think that by the time I'm 40 (not too far away now), I'll be wearing suits to the office, going to bed at a reasonable hour, drinking wine that costs over $25 a bottle and generally enjoying the shit out of getting old. I hate the kids: why would I want to be them?

Then along comes this and frankly, it hits a little too close to home. Thank god I still have time to change my ways.

Buck

So this morning, I had a weird bit of jingle jam (when you get a song or a song snippet stuck in your head). It was the bit from CCR's "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" that goes: "There's a dinosair Victrola/listenin' to Buck Owens..." That isn't all that weird, but for the fact that I came into work and found out Buck Owens died today.

Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, stop being such a dick

Brakes are fantastic.

Conservative women hate vaginas, monologues

Today I present the (belated) International Woman's Day edition of our favorite game "Conservative idiocy". This week's edition stars Monique Stewart.

Monique Stuart was a teenager when Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" first appeared off-off-Broadway a decade ago.
But by the time the 24-year-old saw the play in her senior year of college, she'd already made up her mind that it wasn't worth much.
"It really confirmed everything I already thought about the play," she says.

I don't know about you, but I form all my opinions from snap judgments based on little or no evidence.

Which explained why she was standing behind a lectern at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Northwest recently, telling other young women how to be good conservatives -- and how to bring some protest drama of their own to Ensler's work.
"It's disgusting," she said. "The play defines women as their sexual organs."

I think her choice of words is pretty telling. She might as well have said "It's disgusting, it smells bad, it looks weird and it gets slightly wet when Ann Coulter is on T.V. I hate my vagin...I mean The Vagina Monologues."

The show has always had its detractors, but this year conservatives worked to transform the season of "The Vagina Monologues" into a season of the Vagina Debates. Stuart can take some credit for that.
As program officer at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, a Herndon-based group with ties to some of Washington's most powerful conservatives, Stuart helped coordinate the movement.

Holy shit. This nitwit gets paid for this job? I wonder what her business card says? "Vagina Agitator?"

The play strings together interviews with 200 women into a series of stories, some full of humor, some full of pleasure, others full of abuse and violence. "Women's sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them and turning our rage into positive action," feminist Gloria Steinem wrote in 1998.
But Stuart sees a different message, one that "tells women to look for their own fulfillment through sex."
Stuart asks, "Is that supposed to liberate them or empower them?"

The lowly vagina, you see, is not meant to be an empowering sexual organ. That distinction belongs soley to Teh Cock.

It's been a road to empowerment for Stuart, at least, who seems to have found her conservative voice through protesting the play. She took up the cause as a student at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.
Stuart grew up in a liberal Connecticut family, but in her sophomore year, she attended a debate that included conservative commentator Ann Coulter and came away enthralled. Soon she had joined the College Republicans.

Well no wonder she has a problem with vaginas. The sight of Coulter's parchment-like flesh, emaciated frame and tooth'd maw is enough to shrivel any wang and dessicate any cooter within a 1,000 yard radius. Also: "enthralled"? Did the WaPo reporter check Stuart's neck for Coulter fang marks?

Then, the summer before her senior year, while she was an intern in Washington, she went to an event featuring conservative author Christina Hoff Sommers, who attacked the play.
Stuart finally read it -- and decided she was on Hoff Sommers's side.

Anyone else getting the picture of someone really desperate to rebel against her "liberal" family background? So desperate that she's willing to absorb any half-baked conservative idea without question or analysis? Just an observation.

During winter break of her senior year, she retyped "The Vagina Monologues," replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and called the result "The Penis Monologues."
"When you call it 'The Penis Monologues,' that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous on the other side as well," she says.

Actually what's really ridiculous is spending a significant amount of time retyping "The Vagina Monologues," replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and calling it a clever send-up. Quite simply, the amended version would completely lack and meaning or context. It'd be like replacing every reference to "liberals" in Ann Coulter's entire ouvre with the word "booger". It's sophomoric and utterly nonsensical (though in the Coulter/booger case, a vast improvement).

Stuart held a reading of her rewrite last spring and invited Hoff Sommers to campus for a lecture. To promote it, a friend of Stuart's dressed in a six-foot phallus costume and distributed fliers.
It impressed Hoff Sommers enough that she wrote about it in the National Review online.

If you read the Hoff Summers NRO article is pretty funny. She takes great issue with the play's "vulgarity" and sums it up as a "raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy." It's clear the conservative ire with the "Monologues" is simply this: they don't want to hear about those gross, dirty, smelly vaginas. In other words, the Vagina Monologues backlash is precisely the kind of partiarchal, anti-sex, anti-woman crap the play was written to counter in the first place. But anyway, back to little Miss Vagina.

Stuart traveled the country and visited local campuses to organize the campaign. In November, she was on Georgetown University's campus, where Luce was co-sponsoring a talk by conservative Michelle Malkin. Stuart handed out books resembling Playbill that criticized "The Vagina Monologues."
Early last month, Stuart joined a conference call with more than a dozen women's outreach directors from the College Republicans to talk about protesting the play, says Sarah Armstrong, the national women's outreach director. "We try to get good speakers who are not only real role models but who can help us in our states with increasing activism," Armstrong says. "She's coming from the same place we're coming from."

What place is that? The Land of Trivial Obsessions?

Georgetown freshman Anthony Bonna took a copy of Stuart's Playbill back in November. A few weeks later, he called her to get one of the institute's anti-V-Day kits, with posters that ask, "Aren't women worth more than their private parts?" He and a few friends plastered the campus. Later, shortly before one of the "Vagina Monologues" Georgetown shows, he went door to door in a dorm to raise money for the same battered women's shelter that the show was benefiting.
It was an act to "show you can help out women without seeing a play that attacks traditional values," he said.

I can see the placard now: "Vaginas are not a Family Value".
these fuckers really parody themselves, don't they?

Danse Moronic

Somewhere on my internet travels today, I came across some dude’s photos from SXSW (that is South By South West, the music conference where big record labels send big bands for the big media to cover. Or something.) Anyway, dude had pictures of the Go! Team and something-the two drummers? the fact the photog had captured one of the band members mid-pogo?- reminded me of a certain local “buzz” band with a overly long and repetitious name (kinda like their songs, actually nyuk nyuk nyuk) whom I’ve mentioned before. (Standard disclaimer* applies)

The immediate visual parallel got me thinking about how skull-fuckingly stupid the kids are and, correspondingly, how dumb their favorite bands are. I mean, really: it seems like all the bands currently dampening panties and poppin’ boners all over MySpace are fucking retarded brainless party bands who care not a jot for artistry or depth, only for “getting people moving”. And I wonder what that’s about.

Obviously, stupid music has been around since Og the caveman first started bangin’ on a hollow log with a rock and was joined by his friend Ug on the vocorder (whoops!), but indie music has always seemed to be a bit above that noise. Back in the day, we listened to Yo La Tengo and Weezer not just because they kicked ass, but because they were clever and we saw ourselves in their music. They read books like us, appreciated films like us, got beat up in high school like us. Actually, Weezer pretty much epitomizes the Great Dumbification of music, going from the wry Blue Album to the heartfelt Pinkerton all the way to the copped Dokken riffs on shit like that shitty song about Beverly Hills. But I digress slightly. Anyway, indie music used to be the only place to go for music with brains: it was a refuge from the brainless, bloodless and calculated mainstream “party” music like Britney and the Boys. Now, though, the kids can’t egt enough of the Stupid. And I think I know why. It’s the TV, the internets, the video games, the MacDonald’s and the rest of the nonstop parade of disposable crap that was the amniotic fluid of a new generation of text-messaging, coke sniffing, cowboy boot-wearing retardokids. Stuff like the Go! Team (and any band with exclamation points in their name) and the Shou…er, that Local Band I mentioned are, to me, indicative of a kind of cultural nihilism, a way of saying to a world that is rife with forces designed to make us stupid, unhappy and happily stupid “Hey: I give up! Let’s do a line and dance, dance, dance, dance!” (Not that I’m against dancing, of course: insert well-worn Emma Goldman quote here. But there’s a hedonistic element to the stuff I’m talking about: the dancing is a metaphor for what I see as a whole ethos of not giving a shit about anything but one’s own immediate self-gratification. Dig?) Oh sure, there’s smart indie bands out there, but most of them are unlistenable folk garbage like SoofYAWN Stevens (the Decemberists are alright, but their cleverness is cloying in a “I’ve got an English Lit degree, now listen to me.” kind of way).

Anyway. All that is what makes the new Belle and Sebastian album so great. You can dance to it, but it also makes you think. Sometimes both of these elements occur within the same song! Daaamn!


*Standard disclaimer: “I’m sure they’re all very nice people etc etc.”

V

I took in "V for Vendetta" on the weekend. It was one of those films that, when you walk out of the theatre, you don’t want your 10 bucks back, but gets crappier the more you think about it. My overall impression was of a film whose creators wanted to walk the fine line between Message Movie and Action Flick, but wound up missing the mark on both counts. The few action sequences were straight Matrix retreads, all billowing capes, blurred knives and blood going squirting-psssssh!-in slow motion: nothing groundbreaking or even particularly interesting. The Message? Well, it would have been nice if they had tried to create a Chilling, Yet Plausible Vision of a Totalitarian Dystopia instead of just cobbling together a bunch of Nazi imagery and Orwell references (fun fact: John Hurt, who plays Big Br…er…the High Chancellor in “V…” portrayed Winston Smith in1984’s “1984”) with a few allusions to the “War on Terror” for the sake of appearing timely. But subtlety is not something you go looking for in a Wachowski-penned action pic or in American cinema as a whole (incidentally, I wonder if this project would have fared better in the hands of a British creative team). Anyway, the point is the message that fascism can happen here is most definitely lost when you simply re-hash old signifiers; fascism is an idea, not just a pair of jackboots.

Another aspect of “V…” that I found wanting was the visual scope. The bulk of the action is centred on a handful of interior locations (the government’s “star chamber”, V’s lair, the detective’s office and a few others) making the film seem very limited: after two hours of that, the (brief) “sweeping“ climax feels tacked on. And I’m not talking small in a claustrophobic way (which would have conveyed the stifling oppression of the regime). Nor was the film big enough to demonstrate the size and scope of the government’s oppression and the enormity of the struggle against it. It was just…small.

The last thing that bugged me was the filmmakers do a piss poor job of relating what life is like under this brutal, totalitarian regime. For example, Natalie Portman’s character works at a FOXNews style propaganda network, but it doesn’t seem like it’s much different from working at Clear Channel. The rants of the station’s main attraction and resident government mouth piece don’t sound too far off of what you hear on U.S. talk radio, the people seem pretty much doing what people do today. And maybe that was the point. Maybe what they were trying to do was show the banality of evil: not only can fascism come here, when it does, you won’t even notice it (or you might even welcome it). But that doesn’t square with the atmosphere of constant fear the Wachowski’s keeping telling us the people live under, let alone the sheer spectacle the regime makes of itself. Really, the only window we get into the lives of ordinary people are a bunch of reoccurring shots of various families and individuals watching events unfold on the TV (except at the end where we see the empty living rooms and pub: the people have stopped watching and have started participating. Get it? Get it?), It’s a ham-fisted device that only underscores the filmmakers’ limitations.

In the end, there isn’t much to recommend “V for Vendetta” other than the fetching Ms. Portman. “12 Monkeys” and “Brazil” do a far better job of conjuring a nightmarish world, while films like “Syriana” nail the timely down cold. And while “V…” is Citizen fucking Kane compared to the next “Fast and the Furious” installment (the trailer for which drew appreciative applause from douchebags at the Saturday screening), it is, at best, a well-intentioned mess. A good idea, poorly executed; I wonder why they try at all.

Fuck blogger.

Had a wicked post all ready. Blogger ate it. Fuck you, Blogger.

Every now and then I fall apart

At the crappy faux-English pub this weekend, having a Good Time for the first tme in I don't know how long, I discovered I have aquired a reader. (Hey.)

This prompted a re-evaluation of the whole operation over here. Looking back, I'm actually quite pleased with some of my work (especially the older stuff) and I think I'd like to raise the bar a bit (or "grow the pie"). You know what that means: more porno.