Yearly Archives: 2009

something is rotten in the garden patch

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A terrible, terrible metaphor I ran across in a story on tomatoes at the NPR site:

I could never stand to see tomatoes treated that way. Just thinking about it makes me hungry. And it’s almost lunchtime. Out in the vegetable patch, the Brandywines are as red as raw steak. The Juliets are as ripe as their Shakespearean namesake, and the Arkansas Travelers are blushing pink.

The Juliet of the famous play, age 13, was not even ripe by the standards of the day, much less now. I have by now seen a couple of excellent Juliets, which was enough to bring me around on the romantic power of the play and the character, but calling the tween Juliet ripe has ickily Lolita-esque implications. Bad metaphor! Bad!

Female Yakuza Tale

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Matthew Brady promised me that Female Yakuza Tale would be good, and he was pretty much right. The sequel to Sex and Fury it’s got a different director, Teruo Ishii, who largely ignores telling a coherent story in favor of extravagantly gratuitous violence and sex. High points include a prostitute hawking and blowing a wad of snot down the throat of a guy trying to sneak a surreptitious peek; the moment when female swordswoman Ocho is about to cut off the fingers of gambler Big Tiger, and Tiger’s wife begs Ocho to spare his middle finger as a favor between women (the wife waggles her own middle finger suggestively); a character named Yoshimi of Christ who declares “When I pray, I kill”; and a final battle scene involving gaggles of women fighting nude — especially the moment where a bunch of them beat their former rapist to death, and then piss on his corpse. It’s all done with cheerful insouciance — there’s never a moment where you feel like the filmmaker actually thinks he’s imparting a moral or elevating lesson (as there is throughout Lady Snowblood: Lovesong of Vengeance for example. (There is one moving scene where, in flashback, a 17-year-old Ocho is caught cheating at cards; she is about to have her finger cut off, but a big crime boss intercedes, and offers to allow his own finger to be chopped in return. Then he tells Ocho to go forth and sin no more…but, and this is kind of the best part, in some sense, she does actually spend the rest of her life as a professional gambler. So much for life lessons.)

Where was I? Oh, right, no moral center. Also, it doesn’t have the grim rape-revenge intensity of Scorpion/ It’s almost parodic in its offensiveness — the mood almost seems within hailing distance of something like Toxic Avenger, though this is infinitely cleverer and better made. I enjoyed it pretty thoroughly. I may well have to try to find more movies by Teruo Ishii. Any recommendations as to what I might look for next?

Super Edward (Female Creators Roundtable)

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This is the first post in a roundtable on female creators here at HU. Tom, Miriam, and Cerusee will have posts up on this topic as the week goes on.
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As threatened, I did in fact see the Twilight movie this weekend. It was actually a good bit better than I thought it would be. I Admittedly, all the actual suspense and vampire stuff is incredibly clichéd – the good vampires vs. the bad vampires; the oh-so-painful need to keep from sucking human blood…the darkness! The tragedy! It’s Buffy light, which is saying something. Even the effects are mediocre and half-assed for the most part. Still, there were good parts. I’m not especially in to the pale slight goth-looking thing myself, but I have it on good authority that if you are, Kristin Stewart is something special. Moreover, her acting was quite good — she manages to come across as both painfully awkward and definitively intelligent, which is not all that easy to pull off. Indeed, the cast as a whole is a lot less cringe-inducing than you might expect. Partially I think it’s the director, Catherine Hardwicke (who also did the very decent Tank Girl movie) who seems to have a real talent for awkward high school interactions. The moment where one of Bella’s friends is asking her to the prom, and she’s so fixated on staring at Edward that she doesn’t even hear him is pretty priceless. Meeting the families was quite funny too…the vampire clan is both cute and freakish, and Edward’s exasperation with them is about exactly what you’d expect from a regular 17 year old dealing with a regularly weird family. I wished more than once that Stephanie Meyer had just written a teen high school drama without all the fantasy crap.

Though, of course, it probably wouldn’t have been popular enough to get made into a movie in that case. The movie seems almost scientifically designed to appeal to the tween-girl hindbrain. Several commenters over at this Robot 6 roundtable noted that the relationship dynamic between Edward and Bella is extremely creepy – and, yep, that’s the case. He’s a complete romanticized stalker, breaking into her house every day for weeks to stare at her sleeping, constantly talking about how his love for her compels him to hurt her. When he first sees her, he stares and stares and stares and is utterly creepy.

So right; encouraging teen girls to romanticize their stalkers — bad. Except that…the whole point of the story, what’s exciting about it, is that Edward will never hurt her. In fact, he won’t even have sex with her. He’ll barely kiss her. There’s a scene where he shows up in her bedroom, and he makes her hold still so he can kiss her…and things start to get hot and heavy, and he leaps away from her, bashing into the wall of her room. Then they spend the night talking, until she falls asleep in his arms. Her mom asks her “are you being safe?” at one point and the irony is that she isn’t, of course — Edward’s anything but safe! But the bigger irony is that she’s being super, ultra, duper safe. No condoms needed here. You might as well say that the story is fetishizing virginity as that they’re fetishizing stalking. Indeed, the whole point seems to be that they’re fetishizing both. The appeal is that you have all the darkness and danger and sex and lust you want, all the magic irresistible power of female sexuality – and its all utterly defanged. You can be dangerous and cool and sexy and stay completely safe and untouched.

What’s funny about the Twilight/San Diego Con flap, in fact, is that, if Twilight belongs anywhere, it’s at a comic convention. It’s the perfect female power dream complement to the male power dream inaugurated by Siegel and Shuster, and still running Superman is a fantasy for boys about having secret power and being invulnerable. Twilight is a dream for girls about having a secret lover who will keep you invulnerable. They’re both utterly transparent and infantile and clueless; Superman wears his underwear on the outside and that’s supposed to be tough and glamorous? Edward drives a Volvo and plays baseball and that’s supposed to be dark and cool? But that cluelessness is also a kind of innocence, and a charm. I don’t necessarily want to read the Twilight books, and lord knows I don’t ever need to read another Superman comic. You could argue that either vision is damaging or dangerous, as you could argue that any fantasy is unhealthy and unrealistic, I guess. But I don’t know. I was a kid, and, for that matter, a tween. I can see the appeal.

Update: Cerusee posts on Ordinary People, Jane Austen, and Zombies.

Do people still care about decades?

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When I was younger, newsmagazines and regular people spent a lot of time on deciding what mood the world was in during a given decade. The practice goes back a while (the Mauve Decade, the Gay ’90s, others), but it mainstreamed hard during the ’60s, and then the ’70s were a reaction to the ’60s so they needed an assessment too, and then the ’80s were a reaction to the ’70s, and the ’90s were a reaction to the ’80s, so the chain kept going for a while.

The assessments had something to do with big-league events in the world, such as assassinations and wars, but their heart always seemed to be this: for the past few years “we” have been behaving and thinking differently than we were a few years before that, and these changes in thought and behavior amount to a whole new climate for life. How shall the climate change next?  
The official sequence of decades went like this:  ’60s (idealism! upheaval! violence! challenges to established norms! liberated lifestyles!), ’70s (cynicism! self-absorption! stagnation! liberated lifestyles!), ’80s (money! traditional norms! consumption!), ’90s (austerity! youthful ennui! spirituali — wait, the economy’s back up — dotcom!).
I make that sound pretty stupid, but the changes in behavior and attitude that happened just before, during, and just after the 1960s really were a sea change. If you want to refer to them all, “the ’60s” is the neatest way to do it. During the 1970s and ’80s, people really were working out what to make of the changes, how far to take them and how far to retreat from them. The silly aspect of the decades business, never a small thing, got larger as the post-’60s consensus worked itself out.
By the ’90s we had a new generational shift, so chances looked good for a new, highly distinct zeitgeist unit. But Gen X didn’t really have much of a new set of attitudes. People thought they were pretty mopey, but that turned around when they started finding jobs. Therefore, the newsmagazine aspect of the ’90s changed almost in mid-year. One month you were hearing about how “the ’90s” were a time of hardship, disaffection, creepy enthusiasm for serial killers, and so on. Then, all of a sudden, “the ’90s” was a period of crazy amounts of money and consumption — “excess,” as journalists like to put it. 
With its raison d’etre running out, the decades business also encountered two important technical obstacles. First, there was a new millennium. That looked like a fat invitation for more zeitgeist assigning, but guessing at a spirit for a whole millennium makes one feel pretty stupid. At the same time, figuring out a decade looks too trivial to bother with. Second, it’s tough to talk about a period of time when there’s no number to go with it. What do you call a decade whose years are marked out by 0, as in ’01, ’02, etc? Somebody in Slate suggested “the Oughts,” which was enough to show the decades business was in trouble.
Finally, 9-11 happened, and then the Iraq invasion, and then Barack Obama’s election. I’m tempted to think that these events have provided us with such immense milestones that the this-decade-vs.-that-decade parlor game has slipped people’s minds. On the other hand, the 1960s and 1970s had their own jumbo events, and what happened was that people assigned the events to serve as markers for the start and end of the decade-as-zeitgeist units — I mean the assertion one used to hear that “the ’60s began in 1963 and ended in 1974,” which is keyed to the Kennedy assassination and the end of the Watergate scandal.
With the 1980s we had a pair of big, zeitgeist-defining events to get the decade started: Lennon shot, Reagan elected, and (as newsmagazines reminded us at the time) the ’80s are underway. 
But no one talks about how our current decade really began on Sept. 11, 2001, or how it ended on Nov. 5, 2008. Back when the market crashed in ’87, Newsweek got out in front with a cover story saying, in so many words, “The ’80s Are Over.” Nothing like that now.
Maybe people are getting smarter, though that’s never a good bet. My own theory is that all this goes back to the baby boomers. The ’60s-’70s-’80s chain of zeitgeist assessments was a means of arguing about where those crazy kids would take the culture. The two choices being discussed always seemed to be idealism/libertinism vs. traditional values/greed. Conservatives would say the choice was between libertinism and traditional values, liberals would say it was idealism versus greed. What it came down to was arguing about whether the country would continue to change in line with the changes kicked off during the 1960s or whether it would swing back to the pre-’60s status quo.
Now the baby boomers are all going to have urinary problems and then die, and it looks like nobody else is planning any big departures from present modes of operation. Which probably means that steam is gathering for a direction that’s so new nobody will figure it out until we’re 10 years into it. At which point we’ll hear about “the Teens” or “the Age of Palin” or some damn thing. 

Tough guy dialogue

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Yeah? I’m going to lay it on the line. Smoke this down, pal. Smoke it cool.

Overheard at Troublemakers Studio during a story conference that involved Brian Michael Bendis. (Not really.)

She’s a big jerk

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 “It violated all common decency, all protocol,” says Ramras. “It just showed such disrespect.”

That’s Jay Ramras, a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives, talking about Palin’s tongue-lashing of an aide to the House speaker. The aide had told Palin it wasn’t the done thing for governors to leave the state when the legislative session still had a few days to go. Apparently Palin overreacted.
Mr. Ramras also has this thought, on Palin’s misfired nomination of a loudmouthed attorney general:

“He was voted down, and she blamed all of us,” says Ramras. “She’s perfected victim psychology.”

The quotes are from a piece in the New Republic by Suzy Khimm about Palin’s activities as governor since ’08. These activities appear to have been few but frenzied:

… upon returning to Juneau last fall, “she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate,” says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. “It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges–she blew them up.” 

Mr. Persily “spent two years working in the Alaska governor’s Washington office,” the article says. I guess that mean he was working for Sarah Palin, though the wording’s bit unclear; if he was, he must have come back to Alaska at the start of ’09. At any rate, he’s Republican and so is every politician and aide mentioned in this post. Judging by Ms. Khimm’s article, I’d say Republicans who take part in the Alaskan legislative process really enjoy talking about Sarah Palin. 
More from Mr. Persily: 

“We couldn’t get any decisions out of the governor,” says Persily … “It had nothing to do with critics harping at her–it was a lack of attention to governing.”

Rather than hash things out with lawmakers, Palin repeatedly rebuffed their engagement efforts, most notably canceling a key April meeting with legislators. When she changed her mind at the last minute, the frustrated legislators declined to meet with her. Palin issued a press release blaming them for the meeting’s failure, prompting both the Senate president and the Republican House speaker to denounce her claims as completely false. “You don’t see that often–the Senate president calling the governor a liar,” says Persily. 

You don’t! Palin coped with the situation, as mentioned above, by chewing out the speaker’s aide. She showed up at the aide’s office to do so, which may have been the only time the speaker and his team ever got sight of her. All right, that’s hyperbole. But:   

When it came to legislative matters of any substance, “we got very little information from the state,” says Republican House Speaker Mike Chenault. “All I wanted was to know what her response was…. There were many times we couldn’t get a clear answer.” 

One complaint about the article. Like the lousy Purdum article in Vanity Fair, it goes light on Palin’s attorney general fiasco. We’re told she nominated the guy to please the NRA and national Republicans nationwide, and that she left him out to dry when the going got tough — I believe that’s more than Purdum offered. But we’re given only a gesture of an explanation as to why Alaska found it so tough to swallow an attorney general who says mean things about gays. Maybe I just need someone to underline for me that the situation regarding gay respect/tolerance in Alaska is not what I imagine it to be.