Rocking the mockumentary

Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck take a ride down the white-water rapids of the mockumentary and drag the audience along for fun.

I'm not sure if I'M STILL HERE is more THIS IS SPINAL TAP or THE BLAIRE WITCH PROJECT because it feels like the latter, which is good. Phoenix has said they were inspired by the seriously terrifying rise of reality TV shows and that industry's insistence they were not scripted. As entertainment insiders, Affleck and Phoenix want you to know all those Survivor obstacle courses and Wife Swap marriage meltdowns have their poker game tells.



Phoenix is absolutely mesmerizing from start to finish. He's a mumbling, smoldering wad of celebrity persona drowning in his own stew of self absorption. His bizarrely meek assistants are arrayed around him in a ratty Hollywood villa -- the kind of unkempt real estate you'd expect to see lurid shots of on Entertainment Tonight detailing another celebrity meltdown.

The assistants arrange plane tickets for him, make desperate calls to music producers and struggle to find "JP" drugs in the middle of the night while traveling. One (Antony Langdon) strikes back at Phoenix in a particularly raunchy fratboy revenge scene -- and all I can think of is: David Spade and his supposed fist-a-cuffs with a former assistant. (Affleck has insisted ALL of the film was fabricated even the faux feces which was made up of hummus and coffee grounds).

Everyone visits the celebrity "JP" -- Ben Stiller and Edward James Olmos among them. And it's Olmos who manages to steal one scene from Phoenix's over-the-top character by giving a speech that is part inspirational and part utter bullshit.

The L.A. Times reviewer sniggered there was 'more male frontal nudity than you’d find in some gay porn'. Bitch, please. It's good to know the MPAA aren't the only homophobic twits deciding the fate of film but, if movie critics are that intimidated by a 2-second shot of a guy's wilted turtle, they should stick to reviewing Michael Bay's crap.

The most provocative sequences in the film are when Phoenix is in character and interacting with people who were not in on the joke. Their slack-jawed stares and stammering conversations create the kind of cinéma vérité French filmmakers dream about.

It's a shame the Hollywood machine was too stupid to see the genius in this film. The joke's on Tinseltown, the industry too busy self congratulating to truly laugh at itself.

Censorship is un-American but ...

I saw something at ComiCon a few weeks ago and it's been bothering me ever since. I'm THE last person on earth to advocate any sort of censorship, especially since it gets me lumped together with evangelists, Harry Potter haters and other groups I can't stand.

But I saw a graphic novel (comic book for the uninitiated) that made every single Matrix or Schwarzenegger movie positively pale in comparison. The Matrix scenes where the bullets fall like raindrops seem grade school acceptable compared to this graphic novel. Every lame (is there any other kind?) slasher flick conservatively used fake blood compared to Crossed.

Here's what happened: I walked into Comicon and over to the Avatar Press booth (no relation to the film). Glancing at the covers of all the issues of Crossed on display I immediately thought: zombies. After all, their booth wasn't too far away from Max Brook's. So I prepared for decapitations of the undead and started thumbing through a copy.



A main panel (that's comic talk for large illustration) on page three of one issue showed a male character (mostly clothed) raping a female character (totally nude) from behind. That was on page three. Then there were stabbings, decapitations, slashings, more rapes, shootings and, oh yeah, a lot of these violent acts? Were being carried out by male characters (generally clothed) against female characters (generally partially nude). Chainsaws and fire axes included! I could be wrong, but I think there was a panel depicting a male character cutting a female character's nipples off. With a pair of pruning clippers.

I put the copy back in the display rack and glanced at the booth minder. I think he was one of the main artist/creators. He was busy working on a large illustration (fortunately it was just a character's face in a rictus of rage under the banner title). He was chatting into his cell phone. A few twentysomething white guys stood in a loose line waiting for him to autograph their copies or tell him how much they loved Crossed. They all had a slightly downtrodden, whipped dog look to them, like these were young guys who had been cashiering at the local AM/PM since high school. They probably also had subscriptions to Fangora and way too many speed metal albums.

I took a couple steps back from the booth to take a picture of it. As I did, a kid wandered up to the booth. To be fair, the artist was busy talking to his fans and signing books and the boy, about 10, was on the far side of the display rack. The kid, who was wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt, picked up one of the graphic novels and started thumbing through it. He had a piece of candy in his mouth and was crunching it loudly. My skin started to crawl. Finally, I walked away and as I did, I noticed the boy was still there, crunching away and flipping the pages of a graphic novel with the kind of gratuitous violence that would give Larry Flint pause.

I really hope I'm wrong, but I didn't see any "MR" label on the front of the graphic novel. Hopefully there was one on the back near the bar code. For the non-comic fans, MR stands for Mature Reader. It's basically an NC-17 for books and looks sort of like this one for video games. Again, I'm no fan of censorship but when (pretend) violence hits that kind of nadir, maybe it's time to reconsider?

I found Crossed on Wikipedia and read the plot summary. It's an interesting though not revolutionary premise. A futuristic plague wipes out most of humanity except for a few who survive with a weird cross skin rash. They are doomed to live out their days fighting the most depraved violent and sexual impulses that come into their tiny post-apocalyptic minds. So the majority of the violence in the graphic novel occurs only in the characters minds. Spiffy.

Apparently, this comic has some serious fans. So much so Kevin Spacey's production company is negotiating a film deal. Okayyy ...

I just keep wondering: is this the sort of thing Jared Loughner would like? Or is he more of a traditionalist Spiderman fan? Maybe Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold would have favored it, seeing as they were both avid fans of The Matrix? Or maybe they both had their rooms decorated in Care Bears and I'm just jumping to conclusions.

Finally, I want to say every time you produce art you produce two things; the art itself and the implied subtext of the art. I'm sure the creators of Crossed are very nice, talented young guys and I'm glad they've found success in a creative field. But I wonder about the subtext of their art and whether they are even aware of it?

Half the World

David Horsey blew me away with his latest column and cartoon regarding women's rights which go together with human rights like peanut butter goes with jelly.

In case you've been locked in a deep dark misogynist's closet: dozens of UN and WHO studies have shown that when the status of women in a country improves, the whole country improves. It's the 'rising tide raises all boats' theory that works (unlike the sham of trickle-down economics). Conversely, countries that don't liberate their female citizens from oppressive misogynistic practices continue to flounder in poverty, civil war, high infant mortality rates, etc. for decades (see: Somalia, Congo & Pakistan).



His column was just as astute as a previous one where he argued (un-popularly) that maybe teenagers shouldn't be smoking copious amounts of marijuana while their brains are still growing.

I posted a link to his column on Christopher Ryan's FBook profile only to have it removed within a few hours. Apparently, women's rights are trivial to Ryan (author of "Sex at Dawn") compared to more important things like whether or not certain primates have penile spines. Whiskers on dicks are way more pressing to Ryan than say, whether or not women are being murdered in the Third World for suspicion of infidelity. Or trying to drive cars, something equally slutty.

Speaking of Sex at Dawn, where the hell is this mysterious co-author, Ryan's wife? He's looking a bit more like a white male apologist every day, which is just sad.

One thing Horsey didn't really discuss is what impact Third World misogyny is having on First World tourists and their tourist dollars. If I ever win the lottery, I won't be spending my money visiting the pyramids of Egypt (as much as I'd like to). I'll be going some place where middle-aged women can stroll through markets unmolested by random assholes. Sorry Egypt.

Sorry Fat Girl Haters

It must suck being skinny, white male and so full of hate toward overweight women your BP might kill you. But take heart, Howard Stern (who slammed Gabourey Sidibe right before she landed a role on a hit TV drama) will hopefully die of hypertension long before you do. It's a shame too as he's spent more money on hair weave than any other white guy alive. I mean think of the army of hair people that will be out of work the day Stern dies.

Oh, and before I forget, my cholesterol levels? Pitch perfect again. For like the sixth year in a row.

Are We Equals?

http://www.weareequals.org/

Too Much Information!

I'm as entitled to my idiosyncrasies and contradictions as much as the next homo sapien. I'm gonna lay down a few realizations I always thought were self evident. And then argue against a common trend amongst vagina owners (and occasionally penis owners too).

I like dick, have been a huge fan for ages. While I have a devout preference for washboard abs and Wrangler butts I rarely drop a name or give anything beyond the most generic details as in we had a great time or he was smoking hot.

When I was 19 I had a friend, we'll call her Ann*. She was a couple years behind me in school so when I was attending the Tiniest Community College in Nevada, Ann was finishing up high school.

One day, after classes, I walked over to my friend Nancy's* house and Ann was there. Ann was regaling us with tales of her wild vacation spent in California.

Ann was 18 going on about 35. She smoked, drank, was overweight and latched onto young men like one of those lampreys they made us dissect in biology. Ann started telling us about some guy she'd hooked up with in California. Then Ann went into detail, a lot of detail. As in where he put his right leg, where she put her arms, how much and how long the thrusting went on, how many times she blew him, etc., etc.

(Ewww!)

Nancy and I were both sighing, rolling our eyes and glancing at the clock before Ann finished burning our ears with every freaking detail of her sexcapade. Had the phrase been coined back in 1985 I would have shouted "TMI!"

Too Much Information.

I mean, seriously. None of us were virgins. We didn't need a blow-by-blow account of Ann banging her cousin twice removed to fill in the blanks. Had Ann taken a more tactful, succinct approach we could have moved on to more important things: like driving to the store for Big Gulps and playing PacMan.

Eventually Ann married husband No. 3 or 4 (I forget which) and moved permanently to California where she is probably grossing out a friend right at this moment with TMI.

This was the first time my psyche was seared by the noxious fumes of Too Much Information.

A few years later, while visiting another friend in that very same town, I offhandedly made some remarks about the guy I was seeing at the time. Afterward, I wished I had never opened my mouth. The only reason I did it was because a) my friend was about 10 years older than me and far more experienced sexually, b) I was trying desperately to "fit in" with her and her worldly friends and c) I was an idiot who didn't stop to think what would happen if my TMI blurt ever got back to the guy I was seeing? (It did). Wouldn't he be a little offended that I'd seen fit to divulge details about him with a friend he'd never met?

I'm pretty sure that's the only time I ever took the wrong turn down TMI Avenue and ran my mouth about stuff I should have kept between me and my amour at the time.

Flash forward to Seattle 2004. I was working a retail job with a bunch of twentysomething guys. They were a mixed bag of skate punks, UW students and rock musicians. One slow day, the subject of anal sex came up. No idea why. Someone made a joke about our uptight, "anal" supervisor who had just left for lunch. The next thing I knew, Hipster Dude* was going into detail about the last hipster chick he ass fucked. Just like that. Under the unflattering fluorescent lights of work, he was listing the pros and cons of butt fucking. This wasn't really anything unexpected coming from him. Hipster Guy was after all, God's Gift to Womankind, and he behaved accordingly.

The shocker was when one of the nice guys joined in the conversation. Nice Guy* was in his late twenties and had been married for a few years. I had met his wife. She was a nice gal. So when he started talking about his experiences with ass fucking I KNEW instantly he was talking about his wife. No pun intended, but what a shitty thing to do. In an effort to not appear naive or less experienced than Hipster Dude, he started engaging in TMI. Afterward, Nice Guy always looked a little guilty and worried whenever our gaze met, probably because he was wondering if I would say anything to his wife the next time I saw her. (I didn't).

A few years later in Seattle, I made a friend, who at first was an awesome pal. Then she started to tell me about her husband and her marriage. The TMI detector in my brain started ringing. Oh shit, not again.

My new friend, Christine*, hinted that prior to marrying her husband -- who makes great money -- she was gay or at least rowed hard for the Isle of Lesbos at one time. That's fine, she tried one lane on the freeway and now she's in this lane because she found the man of her dreams.

One day Christine announced unprompted that her husband doesn't do anything for her sexually. At all. I guess in the entire time they've been married he's never rung her bell. I have no idea WHY people like Christine dump personal stuff like this in my lap, I'm guessing it's mostly because they're seeking sympathy. Which is fine, to a point. That's what friends (and I think more appropriately therapists) are for. As a longtime happy Singleton I'm baffled and perplexed how you could date, live with and then MARRY someone who doesn't do anything for you sexually. That's a question a good therapist should ask Christine because I don't wanna know and I have no plans to take up marriage counseling.



Today, thanks to the last onion skin of Puritanical mores being shed from Western Society, it's okay for us to talk about our sex lives. Occasionally it's a good thing. People with serious sexual dysfunctions are able to find support groups, non-fiction books and there's always Oprah. The hated Double Standard (guys are experienced, gals are pure) that has dogged women for centuries is finally disappearing behind us as we assume control of our sexuality. Gays have found acceptance and can celebrate their unions in most progressive areas.

There's a tribe in a remote corner of China that's resisted indoctrination into the standard one man/one woman marriage scenario for hundreds of years. The Musuo don't recognize marriage, virginity, etc. the way the dominant Chinese culture around them does even after the Mao Regime tried to force them at gunpoint. Women are free to accept as many male visitors as they like and visa versa. They only have one rule: nobody is allowed to ever discuss their sexual encounters, doing so is the height of bad manners.

Back in America, all of this fairly recent liberation doesn't mean it's okay to let the wheels come off and spew every tiny detail to casual acquaintances. Seriously, if you have vaginal dryness during sex why are you telling me? I'm not an OB/GYN.

Personally, the older I get, the more down low I'm keeping it. I don't want to ruin the memory of a good romp with unwanted comments from friends, neighbors, etc. And it isn't just the possibility of avoiding ridicule if the relationship doesn't pan out. I don't want any reviews of my sex life when it is going well either. If I may be conservative for a moment: it cheapens the experience. If I care at all about the guy I'm sleeping with, I'm not going to invite comment from anyone who isn't sleeping with him.

If you just met a hot guy, things are going well, feel free to tell me and I'll virtually high-five you. But spare me the intimate details.

So who am I hooking up with these days?

As Salt-n-Pepa said, that's none of your business.

* (It should be obvious, none of these people's real names were used.)

Occasionally priests still like vaginas?

Ah-hah, now we get to the truth behind exorcisms. All the free poontang for the exorcists!

Priest confesses of 'indiscretion' during exorcism

Oh and apparently this diaper stain was the poster child for the Catholic anti-abortion movement in America. Was, past tense.



I'm not sure what's creepier, this sleaze who's already slunk off into the night or some of the scary Catholic family blogs. One has photos of a miscarriage which they had already named and 'pre-Christened'. Yes. Photos of a miscarriage. On their blog.

My period started today. Should I post photos?

Francis Whooo?!

I sincerely hope somebody files a civil suit against Beck.

Christmas Carol Redu

I'm finishing an awesome good book by my fav author, Margaret Atwood. Payback is a non-fiction collection of lectures written a few years ago. It's amazing because she wrote it before the Great Recession really hit in late 2008 and, for a fiction writer, she's awfully clairvoyant.



What the hell does it have to do with the ultimate consumer holiday, Christmas? Atwood looks at the social concept of debt from a writer and story teller's point of view. She looks at the mythic representations of debt beginning in early agrarian Europe. Partway through, she starts talking about the most famous of loan sharks, Ebenezer Scrooge. There's a lot of references to Charles Dickens' classic, including the reality of debtor's prisons in England when Dickens was a child (his own father was held in debtor's prison for many years).

Time and again, Atwood makes thoughtful correlations between debt and the Christian concept of sin. Being in debt is the same as being a sinner, etc.

The end of the book is a witty retelling of Scrooge's midnight encounter with three ghosts. This time, Scrooge is a teeth-whitened, suntanned, fat Yuppie with a Steve Forbes mansion and lifestyle.

Perfect reading for this Christmas.


Scrooge before the hair-implant, teeth-whitening, Florida tanned makeover.

What'd you get for Thanksgiving?

I got seven (nearly identical) letters from the Department of Education right before Turkey Day. Like hundreds of thousands of others, I am a victim of predatory student loans.

Here's a little FAQ.

1. Why did I take out student loans? Because I had been going to college part-time for years, taking 100-level classes at community colleges, etc. I was 25 and working unbelievably low-paying jobs. I naively believed the myth you can't earn a decent living without a four-year degree.

2. Why did you take out loans for every school year? Every time I tried to get a SEOG, BEOG or an addition PELL, I was told I didn't qualify and/or there were no funds left. The UNR Financial Aid office kept stacks of private loan applications at their front counter and they would shove the stack toward me. Also, I tried for several scholarships but the person primarily responsible for deciding who got which scholarship in my department was a mean shriveled dick who hated me. He got a thrill out of causing kids to drop out of the Reynolds School of Journalism.

3. Why major in print journalism? Naively, I had no idea how desperately underpaid 90% of people working in journalism are or that the entire newspaper industry was a house of cards that would collapse when the World Wide Web reached critical mass. Today, print journalism is ranked No. 1 in lowest pay per education followed by public school teacher and nurse. To quote P.J. O'Rourke: "Thanks to the internet, I'm no longer a (magazine) staff writer. I'm a 'content provider' and I'm supposed to work for free."

4. When you realized that journalism was a lose/lose situation, why didn't you change your major? I tried to twice and was told I could not by the academics counselors.

5. Why didn't you work your way through school? Are you kidding?! On five bucks an hour? I could barely make my rent working 50 hours a week at Kinko's, let alone magically produce a couple grand every semester for tuition + books. The three years I went to college full-time I worked part-time jobs, one of them was as an unpaid 'intern' at a local paper. I also worked for the college newspaper, which was virtually unpaid, but necessary as without 'clippings' I couldn't build a portfolio and without a portfolio I couldn't get a job as a reporter.

6. Why didn't your family help you out? Good question. My mother was retired and living on a microscopic pension from her government file clerk job. She was poorer than I was and died while I was in the middle of going to college. My father and stepmother had all kinds of money but, as my friend Louis Hornstein once said: "You know how rich people get rich? They don't like to share."

7. Didn't you realize you'd have to pay the loans back some day? Yes, I did. I imagined myself the variety editor of a mid-sized paper in a second-string market making $40,000/year while writing movie reviews and somehow making monthly payments of $300-$500/month probably for the rest of my life. Reality sunk in when my first newspaper job paid just $8.50/hr, I averaged 100 miles per week on my disintegrating truck and I got my first real bill from Sallie Mae for over $1,600 per month ... on the interest.

8. Are we (American taxpayers) paying for your defaulted loans? Yes and no. Supposedly, the Dept of Ed guaranteed half of my loans. So when the loans defaulted, theoretically the Dept of Ed paid my original loan writer, CitiBank Student Loans. (CitiBank was a recipient of the Wall Street bailout orchestrated by the Bush Administration and the Federal Reserve.)

9. Why are you reluctant to make payments right now? Because of the above reason. My original loan amounts HAVE BEEN PAID by the Dept of Ed to CitiBank. Any money I send to Sallie Mae is basically gravy, it's strictly a for-profit collection agency, any money they collect goes toward the operation of their 1,000+ collection agencies which engage in horrendous, illegal collection practices because the Truth in Lending Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a dozen other federal laws do NOT apply to Sallie Mae.

10. What's the big deal, why not declare bankruptcy? I can't. Basically the year I left college, 1995, was the year Sallie Mae had the bankruptcy laws re-written. Student loans are the only debt that cannot legally be discharged through bankruptcy court.

11. So you don't pay your loans, so what? What's happened is Sallie Mae has reported my bad credit to every one. I literally cannot get a monthly cell phone plan because my credit rating is so bad. I can't get a lease on a decent apartment because of my credit. Even potential employers run credit checks on job applicants. I was told by a headhunter that I was "barred" from ever applying for a job with Amazon.com again. Ditto for T-Mobile. All of these companies deny they are doing this but if you've ever applied for a job, you know they often ask for your social security number. My ss# is tied to my loans for all eternity. Even government contract jobs are off-limits to me. If I was fortunate to land a gig with the USFS, BLM or even the military, Sallie Mae would be garnishing up to 60% of my pay within three month's time. I have a friend who is in the Army. He took out a tiny student loan years ago when he was only six months into his military career. The lenders sold his loan to Sallie Mae and a few years later they seized his entire Army pay for several months. He nearly lost his home and car.

12. What are you going to do? I don't know. But in the mean time, along with Alan Collinge, Robert Applebaum and the folks over at DEFAULT, I'm going to tell everybody I can about this crime and warn every college freshman and every parent of college-age kids NOT to fall into this trap because financially you will never escape.

13. Surely they're not that bad, can't you reason with collection agents? I have a high school friend who took out a tiny student loan back in 1986 for about $1,200. She then had a baby, went through a bad divorce and stopped attending community college. Six years later, while she was on welfare and trying to raise her then 5-year-old daughter, the student loansharks tracked her down. She started making payments to them, fell behind a few times, but kept going all while working two full-time jobs and raising a child. One day the loansharks called her. They told her they were going to garnish her wages. She told them if they did, she would quit both her jobs and go back on welfare. They went back and forth, finally they said they would take her income tax return (again). Ultimately, she paid over $3,500 on a loan which originally was $1,200. Yes, they're that bad.

14. But if you contact the loan collection agencies things will improve, right? Let me tell you another story. While I was a temp employee for an airplane company in Seattle, one of the collection agents called my temp agency with 'urgent information concerning a sick relative' of mine. The collection agent persuaded a receptionist at my temp agency into giving out my business cell phone. This was a cell phone provided by the airplane company I worked for and was for business only. The collection agent called me under the guise of telling me my grandmother had died! I don't HAVE any living grandparents!!! When one of my on-site supervisors found out a collection agency had gotten access to my business cell number, she hit the roof. I was nearly fired and my temp agency nearly lost the contract.

Thanks to the economy, up until a few months ago I've been on unemployment for over a year and a half. Right now, I'm currently undergoing physical therapy for a back injury and I hopefully will be physically able to return to work again ... if I can find any.

None of the original loan amounts listed in the letter (transcribed below) matches my original loans. When I went to UNR, I could not take out more than $2,300 max from Citibank per loan per semester, and only two of these per semester. After "processing fees" I usually got a check of about $2,200. Toward the end, when UNR's tuition tripled in just two years, I was getting even less as the Financial Aid office deducted any tuition before I got a check for the remainder.

Apparently, Sallie Mae has some how managed to sell my loans back to the Dept of Ed with the interest rates attached as principal. So I'm guessing the Dept of Ed paid Sallie Mae for my original loan amounts (or whatever number they gave them). This is the ultimate shell game for a corporation. Or rather the ultimate Three-Card Monty.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
November 18, 2010
The U.S. Department of Education now holds the defaulted student loan from Citibank NA SLC to attend University of Nevada, Reno for which you are responsible. The entire outstanding balance on this loan is now due. You will also be liable for the costs of collecting this loan. These charges can add substantially to the amount needed to satisfy your debt. (Actually, they've tripled it.)

The department wants you to know that paying your debt by a mutually agreeable installment plan may make your loan(s) eligible for loan rehabilitation or payoff through consolidation, which will remove your loan(s) from default status and may improve your credit rating, and will make you eligible for additional Title IV student financial assistance. (My loans were consolidated when Sallie Mae bought them from CitiBank Student Loans in July 2000).

To remedy your default status, you can pay the total amount due immediately (follow the instructions on the above coupon), or contact our customer service representative to enter into an acceptable repayment agreement or to find out additional information on the benefits of the department's loan "rehabilitation" programs. You may contact our customer service center at 1-800-***-****. (Where did I put that six-inch stack of 100-dollar bills?)

All of the department's repayment opportunities are designed to assist you in remedying your defaulted student loan status.

Failure on your part to repay your debt may result in the department moving against you with one or all of the following collection measures:

• We will report your default status to national credit reporting agencies; this may hurt your ability to obtain further credit. (Too late, Sallie Mae already has.)
• We can refer your debt to a collection agency, and charge you the costs incurred by the department in having that agency collect this debt. These costs are currently up to 25% of the principal and interest owed on your loan. The department applies any payments you make first to these costs, and then to your loan balance. This will increase the cost to you of paying off your loan by up to 25%.
• We can notify your employer to initiate wage garnishment; (Again, too late. Sallie Mae did that while I was making monthly payments to them.)
• We can refer your debt to the U.S. Attorney for litigation; (So they can ship me off to debtor's prison???)
• We can perform computer matches with other federal agencies to determine if you are a government employee or recipient of other federal aid for purposes of offsetting all or a percentage of these funds; (See? If I manage to land a government job, they'll take every dime I make.)
• We can refer your debt to the Department of Treasury for offset of federal funds due you (including your federal income tax refund). (Again, see what I mean? They have more power than the IRS.)

To avoid our reporting this loan to the credit bureaus as in default, you have 60 days from the date of this letter to repay this loan in full, make satisfactory arrangements to repay and actually make the first payment under this arrangement, or to request an administrative review.

To request review, an explanation of this debt, copies of documents, or an opportunity to dispute this debt, you must send a written request to the following address: (Note: the Dept may use a contractor to provide information, arrange repayment terms and process payments.)

U.S. Department of Education
PO Box ----
Greenville, TX 75403
Sincerely,
Dwight Vigna

'Couve Pics

There are travel pics. They are now finally all up. Go, look at them, my readers. All three of you.



Vancouver

Fucking Monkeys

(I couldn't resist the title.) I finally got to hear author Christopher Ryan read excerpts from his provocative non-fic, Sex at Dawn, which has been sparking discussion since June.



Everybody could have happily giggled the night away when Ryan dropped quips about "penguin poontang" and "fucking monkeys" but the underlying thesis in Sex at Dawn is no joke. In a nutshell, Ryan has surmised that humans are:

• not "naturally" monogamous, neither men nor women
• women are NOT the choosy, non-libidinous sex
• homosexuality is an integral part of human socialization, not just sexuality
• the status of virginity is entirely a construct of the Standard Narrative (patriarchal society)
• forced female fidelity has been the source of untold pain and suffering (see: stonings under Islam and nearly every Shakespeare play)
• a post-agrarian society that embraces polygamy is as socially stable as a three-legged chair
• homo sapiens are just as closely related to bonobos as we are to chimpanzees
  

But the real whopper in Ryan's argument has little to do with sex. He argues that agriculture and the end of homo sapien's hunter/gatherer nomadism led to war.

It's not excessive promiscuity that sinks us as a species but the lack of it used to form and cement bonds.

Awfully good bedtime reading.

Greasers Vs. Socs

This Massachusetts teen committed suicide after she was systematically cyber
stalked, beaten and harassed by her schoolmates.
Recently Dan Savage (of Savage Love) started a thoughtful campaign to try and stem the tide of bullied GLBT teens from committing suicide. It's called It Gets Better and it's a good idea. My only politically incorrect concern is: why tell just gay teens "it gets better"? Why not tell ANY teen who's suffering under some school tyrant it gets better?

The high school I attended nearly 30 years ago was abysmally backwards in every way socially. It had a lot of things wrong with it -- really low state scores, high drug use and teen pregnancy -- and it was located in rural Nevada aka Reagan Country. Despite being a public school, the administration was comprised mostly of white Mormon men (who drank and beat their wives). These "administrators" towed an overt fundamentalist Christian party line. The list of books we were not allowed to read was long, from the obvious Judy Bloom to Salinger to Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (too pornographic). If you were: not white, poor, not Mormon, being raised by a single parent or were really poor, you were an outsider. And when violence was meted out by the popular kids, it was always us outsiders that took the beating.

That book by Susan Hinton? I lived it. Instead of Greasers and Socs, we had Stoners and Cowboys versus the Jock/Preppies (athletes and those bound for college).

In fall of my first year, a senior jock sat directly behind me in freshman science with his feet propped on the shelf under my seat. Ignoring the befuddled teacher at the front of the class, he bragged to one of his buddies how he'd raped one of the school "sluts". He told his friend he wasn't worried if she filed charges as nobody would believe her. I walked to school terrified and walked home a jittery mess. By the end of my freshman year, I'd gone from an A-minus junior high student to a D-plus high schooler.

I was a bright, articulate kid and raising my hand and volunteering answers in class began to earn me black eyes in girl's P.E.

My sophomore year, things went from bad to worse. A bully in the entering freshman class put me (along with several other victims) high on his list of people to torment. It started out with name calling and progressed to getting tripped/knocked down at least once a week.

The bully chased a friend of mine across the campus one day, knocked him down and jumped up and down on his arm. My friend spent several months with his arm in a cast.

The verbal insults were so extreme and so rude, I don't remember them all. If a jock/preppie called you a cunt or a fag, you got off lightly.

Believe it or not, actress Michelle Trachtenberg said she was bullied
so badly in high school, she had her ribs broken. By another girl.
I was clocked in the back of the head with heavy text books and had basketballs and volleyballs pitched at my face so many times ... it's a blur. I had full cans of soda pitched at my head while walking fearfully "up the hill" for first period class in the "main building". I got jabbed in the ribs with Exacto knives during art class, stabbed in the hand with compasses during drafting class, pushed down hallways, knocked down stairs and shoved against lockers.

By the end of my sophomore year, it was beginning to dawn on me, that not raising my hand and not answering the teacher's questions was the most prudent route, GPA be damned.

Eventually the torment eased. The spring semester of my junior year, I briefly got to attend a real public high school in California. It was laid back, decidedly rich and slightly eccentric. But cliques were not something anyone at that school lived or died by. It was finally okay to be an individual. All the popular kids were busy playing competitive tennis, modeling for Macy's or just being Californians; they didn't have time to bully anybody. That would have been gauche. I'm not suggesting there were no cliques or fights, there were, but the teens at the California school didn't seem so terrified to do anything odd, goofy or slightly eccentric. Bizarrely, they actually respected intelligence and creative talent.

There was a mentally retarded teen who rode the bus with me every morning. Nobody beat him up, he was minimally teased. Every student council rep, every senior-class girl politely endured "R's" overly enthusiastic hugs and one even helped tutor him in Special Ed. This was astonishing to me as the Special Ed kids in my Nevada high school were pariahs, stalked regularly by every popular teen.

Back in Nevada, during my senior year I skipped over a hundred days of school -- writing fake sick notes, etc. -- essentially doing anything to not be there. I sat in shocked silence when a male teacher, famous for his dynamic wit (and ridiculous biases), told his English class 'girls don't get in fights'. At the time he said this, my friend "Jo" was sitting next to me in his class. "Jo" had a black eye from a fight she'd been in with one of the popular girls.

I had a couple of gay friends at my high school in Nevada. "T" skated the whole four years with nary a fight, maybe one dust up and everybody knew he was gay. He existed in this realm of blond coolness, kinda like David Bowie, who was our favorite singer. Another was a gregarious, stout dyke with a booming voice. She did attempt suicide but it was because of her father's abuse, not the occasional harassment she caught at high school.

The Jock/Preppie clique had fringe followers. Hanger-ons who never failed to laugh at the bully's jokes or join in the harassment of outsiders. One of them is now openly gay, married to another man and they have kids. Awesome. I still remember the way he and another hanger-on harassed a homely girl for years. Unfortunately, the homely girl didn't fare as well as the hanger-on who is now Out and Proud.

After graduation, she died suspiciously in a car accident that may or may not have been suicide. Her best friend told me memories of high school bullying haunted her long after it was over.

You do not have to be GLBT to get harassed in high school. You don't have to be a minority. You just have to be a tad smarter, a tiny bit more clever or a teeny bit independent to become a target. For some mysterious reason, teenage kids have access to a kind of cruelty many parents deliberately ignore.

I believe the person you are when you are 15 is essentially the person you will be at 25 and 35, 45 and so on. Whatever sort of moral compass we have starts spinning in our teens. You either align yourself with the "strong" out of fear or become a member of the "weak" by default because you refuse to kowtow to the "strong". The only difference is in adulthood, instead of being called a Jock/Preppy you change your title to Conservative, Country Club member, etc. and if you're a Stoner/Geek when you grow up you might become a Liberal, an environmentalist ... an individual.

Does it get better? For me it did. High school was like four years in a county jail. At 17, I made parole. Virtually every experience since high school, including hospital stays and getting fired from jobs, has been a step up. To all the Outsiders I'd like to say, "it gets better."

• An Irish girl is pushed to suicide in Massachusetts


• A 14-year-old girl in Australia drops out to avoid daily beatings


• A Bakersfield, California girl gets cyber bullied
  

Sexy vs. Sporty Spice

Any time a group of 40-year-old skater dudes support a cause that appears vaguely feminist; I get worried.

At first glance women's roller derby, eagerly goofed on in the Drew Barrymore flick, Whip It, seems like an empowering phenom. Women strap on 70's-style roller skates, and skate around in a big circle over and over again apparently with the goal of out-circling each other (I'm guessing). Occasionally they seriously hurt each other with the kind of blows to the head that would get an NHL player benched for a year.

The fundamental difference between women's roller derby and, say, the WNBA? Guys show up for this. Some of roller derby's most loyal fans are men. Droves of them appear regularly, PBRs in hand, at Seattle's local Rat City Roller Girls meets. Again, this seems like a good thing. For once the boys are willing to let the women show off their athletic prowess via strength and competitiveness; something 95-percent of American men are hardwired not to do.

But all is not right in post-feminist roller girl world. First off, the uniforms. I've seen more spandex on strippers. These aren't clothes that facilitate speed or agility, they're basically saucy cheerleader costumes designed only to titillate. There's absolutely nothing wrong with dressing sexy if you're a stripper or trying to get into the next Girls Gone Wild shamefest, but it sends a creepy, skewed message. A blogger far more erudite than I summed it up best over at Mean Feminism:

If Roller Derby is really about how awesome the girls are at their sport, then it should REALLY be about that. It should really be about how empowering it is to see women being competitive and athletic and downright bad ass regardless of what they're wearing. Why does "embracing your femininity" in this context turn into wearing sexy clothing? Are there no other ways for women to assert their femininity? And if not, maybe we should reconsider what's so great about (socially defined) femininity in the first place. And if it's primarily about playing with sexual norms and doing some kind of Suicide Girls type performance with a little bit of violence added in for spice, well then I think we should stop pretending it's feminist and empowering.

Conversely, our women's pro basketball team just brought home the most prestigious prize in their sport. It was a very big deal, a very big win and somehow these young athletes managed to do it without flashing their tits or slapping each others asses in the prescribed faux lesbian way.

Photo: Erika Schultz/Seattle Times

Yet the Storm's win barely registered in Seattle. Sure, they had their one-time cover pic in the Seattle Times and there was a small parade for the team just up the street at the Key Arena.

But where was Sherman Alexie??? The writer who wasted entire essays in The Stranger moaning about the death of the Seattle Sonics. I'm guessing even for a self-styled "male feminist" like Alexie, a women's pro basketball team (even the best in the country) .... just doesn't rate.

A year ago, as I was walking up past Key Arena, there was a Storm game starting and a few (mostly female) fans were filtering into the arena. A gaggle of college guys in an SUV roared by, hanging out the windows. The guys started chanting "Go Storm!" in hyper lispy, effeminate voices as they cat-called the unamused fans.

And that's the rub: legitimate women's sports is seen as a bad joke in America while entire magazines are devoted to Tiger Woods' philandering, LeBron James' betrayal of his home town and Bret Favre's rather feminine indecisiveness.

A recent indie Canadian film, Breakfast with Scot, revolved around a gay couple adopting a decidedly fem boy. The butcher of the couple is a Toronto sports announcer. When his straight boss threatens to cut his hours, he's told "you'll be covering women's volleyball forever." No small irony, a gay man was being threatened with the ultimate put down of covering women's sports.

Recently, the Universal Sports channel aired women's rugby playoffs held in England. It doesn't get anymore "bad ass" than rugby. When the cameras panned the stadium I was shocked. The stadium was well over half full and the spectators were pretty evenly split between male and female fans. Something we'll never see in America as long as Sports Illustrated runs covers like this.

Remember the first step in dehumanizing is objectification and to create mindless consumerism you must first commodify sexuality. Don't believe me? Watch Mad Men.

Congo Time

Possibly the coolest thing David Schmader has ever written: Last Days (re: the DR Congo gender genocide).

And Amy Goodman had a chance to talk to Eve Ensler, who took time out from battling uterine cancer to mention to Goodman how important it was to stay informed about the Congo and the ongoing gender genocide there that has been giving feminists nightmares for years.

Animated! Now with more robotic voices!

If you aren't some grad student contemporary English lit geek, you probably won't get this. If you are one of the above, please don't send me hate mail. I do like some of David Foster Wallace's stuff, specifically his short story Forever Overhead which is a sublime piece of prose.



And P.S., I'm sorry he's dead. It would have been nice to verbally spar with him. Now all we have is that stick in the mud, Franzen.

More to bemoan about student loans

Another story about student loan debt that mentions the CORPORATE (not liberal, you teabaggers) MEDIA bias surrounding the coverage of the rising tide of former college students unable to repay their loans.

Twisting path of history

My aunt, age 5 and my mom, age 2.
I stumbled across a website dedicated to the tiny grease spot of a town my mom and aunt were born in. Their mother was a bush farmer's wife in southern Ontario in the 1920s.

My grandmother had an affair with a migrant farm worker, my grandfather. It was all very scandalous and to this day my aunt, who is in her nineties, rarely talks about it.

I imagine Canada back then was as empty and gaping as a giant hole. Sort of like rural Nevada, where I grew up. I wonder if geography pushes people to wild excesses of passion or madness?

One Negative Summer or Why Zoloft is a Bad Vacation Idea

For those of you just awakening from a big pharm sponsored Zoloft coma, things are fucked. Not just kinda fucked, but really in a big way, let’s-all-move-quickly-toward-the-lifeboats fucked. So forgive me if I’m hesitant to post anything sweet about your kid’s recent birthday party photos or offer you solace on your latest breeder relationship hiccup out there in sunny suburban land. In the immortal words of Christian Aguilera, I think we got a problem here.

Bitter, bitter Bierce

I should back up and provide a little personal and historical perspective. In 1868 while Mark Twain was rolling around barely civilized San Francisco working as a freelance reporter, a journalist named Ambrose Bierce became a coworker and occasional friend. Bierce was legendary for his biting sarcasm, the teeth of which he often planted in the ass of the American robber barons of the day, namely the railroad industry. Both Bierce and Twain also wrote eloquently about the treatment of Chinese immigrants in S.F. and the general abhorrent way employers on the frontier often treated their employees. Twain often referred teasingly to Ambrose as Bitter Bierce because he saw Bierce as a pessimist who favored trucking in doom-n-gloom stories and essays. Ironically, both of these men's writing – especially their doom-n-gloom exposes – ended up fostering some significant social changes when people read their articles.

On a more personally front, I’ve been unemployed for nearly two years. Yup, two … fucking … years. And in the midst of my unemployedness, I’ve been in a legal fist fight for nearly the same amount of time. (There were court dates and hearings this spring, the stakes are very fucking high.) Think you can remain upbeat and as happy as a warm bowl of puppies after two years of getting doors figuratively slammed in your face? Please try, by all means SHOW ME HOW YOU DO THIS. Does Jesus help you comb your hair every morning? Or do you just swallow copious amounts of prescription drugs so you can view your mini-van, your kids and your life through a drugged fog and then feign surprise when the drugs don't make the problems go away?

Do your parents console you with love, fresh brownies and unlimited cable TV as you park yourself in their basement indefinitely while the winds of the worst economic crises ever perpetrated by Wall Street/Ayn Randian shitheads howl outside? Does your spouse high-five you every time you drag yourself home from another painfully depressing job interview in which some lobotomized twit sits across a conference table from you and spends five minutes trying to deal your resume out of a thick pile of others?

Because both my parents are long dead, I have no spouse (last boyfriend didn’t make it to the three-month mark because he had to MOVE out of state for a JOB) and I can’t afford cable TV. And neither Jesus nor any other celestial being helps me comb my hair or make life decisions. Yep, my life decisions are my own and I will neither apologize for them or shovel them off on any vague metaphysical belief as a way of placating any judgmental friends (internet friends included).

Recently someone posted a link to an article that, as my UK friends would say, left me gobsmacked. Not gobsmacked by insight or summation but by sheer, unblinking stupidity. The very idea that a “human potential expert” can shovel that much shit electronically and (Gawd forbid) get paid has left me gobsmacked.

I knew the Fourth Estate was dead. I’ve known this for several years but do we really need the likes of this dancing in its entrails while the old horse finally dies? Factoid: 80% of the “writers” and “reporters” of the Huffington Post, AlterNet News and the conservitard Noise Machine are un-paid. Most of what you read on the internet is not news, it’s not researched, no experts were consulted, and NOBODY fact checks like a real editor would in the olden days. At least half of what’s floating like turds at the top of the Infobaun’s septic tank are not “news articles," they’re op/ed pieces just like this one. Wanna read about President Obama, the predatory mortgage foreclosure crisis or the giant multi-disaster that is the BP oil spill? Rest assured when you Google any of those subjects at least half of what pops up is a link to someone’s O-P-I-N-I-O-N. Some where in there you might find a link to the Associated Press’s website and an actual story punched out on a keyboard by an actual reporter but those are getting rarer and rarer. And that’s just one of the reasons I’m so pessimistic and pissed off.

The gist of the “human potential expert’s” piece was: if women face their fears, their lives will improve. STOP THE PRESSES! This just in: THE SKY IS BLUE! It’s interesting because I had a discussion about this very subject with my mother. When I was eight. We talked about me getting up in the night (when the closet monsters were most lively), turning on my bedroom light and opening the closet door to confirm that, in fact, their were no closet monsters. It was just my wildly energetic imagination.

My first thought upon skimming the “human potential expert’s” essay was Jay Leno and Madonna. Several years ago, Jay was doing his monologue and he swiped at Madonna for a totally uber-celebrity stupid comment. Madonna said “human urine can stop the spread of Athlete’s foot”. Jay nearly fell out of his chair giggling and recounting this comment. He then very astutely said: “Listen, if you’re peeing on your own feet, while you’re in the shower, you got a lot bigger things to worry about than Athlete’s foot.”

Folks, we got a lot bigger things to worry about than Athlete’s foot.

Californigation

Oh boy, this is funny. Jon skewers the 'tards at CNN.