So, yeah, I brought the new year in by doing an illustration and then watching this 1978 Swedish exploitation flik starring Christina Lindberg. And wow, what an utterly bizarre movie. Anita is literally a nymphomaniac — that is, she has a psychological compulsion to have sex. So far, it could be a porn set-up, and obviously soft-core is a lot of the point here; Lindberg is extremely good-looking if you have any interest at all in the innocent waif look, and she seems to take her shirt off every other scene or so. And obviously, the clinical set-up is more or less an excuse to have her do that. But the movie never quite treats it as an excuse; instead, Anita’s compulsion is played for sympathy/psychological drama as much as for thrills — Lindberg is a decent actress, and she seems genuinely distressed by sleeping with all these guys, having her reputation destroyed, her horrible relationship with her parents. The sexual encounters are also played really grimy and depressing and sordid for the most part, more depressing than arousing.

The exploitation elements and the pyschological drama and sordidness collide in some (I think intentionally) hilarious ways. There’s one scene in which Anita starts out singing a demure series of songs at a dinner party with her parents — and then she does a striptease for all their friends. And her parents are just like, oh, gee, what should we do now that our daughter is thrusting her crotch at Dad’s boss?! And they don’t do anything! It’s completely surreal and weird; like Bunuel just wandered in, directed one scene and left. There’s also a laugh-out-loud funny moment where a young, earnest psychology student explains to Anita that to save herself from nymphomania, she must have an orgasm as soon as possible — and he’s telling her this at the breakfast table with two other female roommates present! I guess since he’s a student he can’t afford a room with a couch….

That psychology student, incidentally, is pretty much a sweetheart and fairly good-looking to boot; his obsession with Anita is certainly creepy, but compared to most of the guys she deals with he’s obviously a gem. So…he screws her into orgasm and she is cured, right? Uh uh. The end of the movie is somewhat incoherent, but as near as I can tell, Anita manages to obtain an orgasm…by sleeping with a woman. Then she joins a lesbian sex show, and thereby discovers she has lost her compulsion to sleep with men. Only then does she screw the psychology student, and they live happily ever after.

Obviously, this is an example of Fanny, and it’s icky fascination/disavowal/lascivious sympathy with female deviance/psychology isn’t any kind of feminist message. And, inevitably, the cure for lots of sex is better sex, rather than, say, no sex, or less sex, or, you know, taking up a hobby. But there’s also (and somewhat out of left field) an acknowledgment of the importance of female-female relationships (the movie passes the Bechdel test). And there is some effort to find a man for the heroine who is moderately attractive. Though, of course, we never exactly see her falling in love with him (rather than vice versa.) He just sort of gets her as a prize for being such a good guy and sticking with her and not having sex with her when she couldn’t control herself and generally being there for her over a long period of time, all of which is cool but not necessarily a reason in itself to have sex with him. Though that’s better than having sex with someone for being a nerdy loser with no redeeming qualities, I guess.

…or something like that. Anyway, I’ve linked to a couple of my drawings, over the last couple of days, but I decided I’d just post them here because, damn it, man’s uploads must exceed his bandwidth, or what’s a blog for? So here they is, with links to their pages on the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible Site, so you can see which Bible verse I have arbitrarily attached to them if you so desire:

Daniel 12:6

I Corinthians 11:15

Leviticus 18:25.

here

I have a review of C.S. Lewis massively underrated Space Trilogy up on Culture 11.

But why is it comforting to be insignificant? Isn’t insignificance at the heart of the fiction of Wells and his heirs? Isn’t man’s nothingness at the base of the horror in Wells or (for example) in Lovecraft? At first that seems to be the case, but when you look closer, it’s less clear. In The Time Machine, for example, what terrifies and disgusts the narrator is not the absence of man, but his presence — the hideous hopping creatures which, in more and more degenerate form, populate the far future. Frankenstein’s monster is horrifying not because he isn’t human, but because he is. The gothic tradition on which much of sci-fi rests is about doubling; about recognizing one’s own twisted visage in the face of infinity. The supposed evolutionary ruthlessness, the acknowledgment of the “truth” of man’s insignificance, is, in these books, a kind of ruse. The real emotional power is in man’s proliferation; man is everywhere, inescapable. The future does not create the sci-fi writer; rather it is the sci-fi writer who creates, in his or her own image, the future.

I was thrilled to get a chance to write this. The Space Trilogy is one of my favorite works of twentieth century literature, period. Peter Suderman, the arts editor at Culture 11, very kindly agreed to let me write the piece, and to pay me for it, though there’s no discernible news hook for it anywhere in sight. So thanks, Peter.

My wife’s an Angelina Jolie fan, so we rented Wanted — and, oy, big mistake. We watched maybe 30 minutes and that was all we could stand. You can really tell it’s from a comic-book — it has the white, male, nerdy angst thing down cold. Except, where the point with Spider-Man was always that Peter was at least somewhat likeable, the hero here is just whiny and despicable and boring. The by-the-numbers transformation into incredible assassin who bends bullets is thunderingly dumb, and the whole super-hip visuals and urban coolness thing is more or less utterly undermined by the fact that the whole schtick has been stolen wholesale from the Matrix.

This is definitely one of those movies, too, where the wish-fulfillment is all about some nerdy schmo getting with (or in this case, just being somewhat near) incredibly hot babe. They can’t even seem to get that right, though; at least in the first quarter, Jolie’s hardly on screen, and by the time you’ve watched that, you don’t want to watch anymore. I guess I just don’t quite understand why you’d have Angelina Jolie in the movie, and then spend most of your time following this relentlessly boring, whiny guy. You’ve got someone on screen with actual charisma, for god’s sake. Couldn’t we just watch her? Why not have her be the depressed nobody who turns into the amazing assassin? Surely that (or anything really) would have been better than this.

The holidays gave me the opportunity to do a little bit of drawing for the first time in a while. You can see the result on the Flaming Fire illustrated Bible website.

This review ran in Bitch Magazine a while back.

Point of No Return
Shareefa
(DTP/DefJam)

You know Shareefa is real because she keeps telling you that she went to prison. Also, she has a skit in which some random radio doofus earnestly asserts that her songs come “from the heart.”

And once you get past these irritating authenticity claims? Well, as it happens, you’ve got a top-notch R&B record without any of the self-conscious stiffness that usually dogs those obsessed with their own sincerity. Shareefa has a low, slightly raspy voice which drips soul, and the productions are excellent. Many of the songs are genuinely old school — “Phony” and “Assumptions” do the Philly Sound almost better than Gamble and Huff themselves; “Hey Babe” has a gorgeous horn motif right out of a Stax ballad. The Rodney Jenkins-produced “Need a Boss,” on the other hand, with its unrepentantly gimmicky stutter, is clearly of the oughts. And then there’s the Chucky Thompson-helmed “Eye Wonder,” which splits the difference with a deep, menacing throb I’m sure they would have concocted back in the day if they’d had the production technology. (Hard to believe this was the guy responsible for much of Mary J. Blige’s wack, over-rated early output.)

Lyrically, there aren’t many surprises — we’ve got cheating, no-good men, and a hard-knock life. We’ve got (of course) a song about her man in prison. And we’ve got “How Good Luv Feels,” about what the title says. But if you’re afraid of a few clichés, you’ve probably given up on pop music altogether and are busy listening to Beethoven. Shareefa may not be as real as that, but when she makes music this great, I can’t hold it against her.

People Who Should Listen to This Record and Just Go Home, Please: Macy Gray

If Put In Prison, This CD: Wouldn’t care. It’s just a piece of plastic, y’know?