Passive vs Active

Couldn't say no to this quote/comment on Feministing regarding ESPN's Body Issue photo spread:

In a culture in which women’s bodies are typically valued for being passive objects that are nice to look at, admiring female athletes’ bodies for being active agents that are nice to look at has the potential to be a truly great thing. 

 (Sarah Robles is not in the ESPN photo spread)

Interesting how this plays into the larger theme of objectification through passivity that I touched on in one of my posts long ago. In contemporary storytelling, female characters are seen as characters who things happen to, versus male characters who do things. Male characters are allowed to be mufti-faceted in a way female characters, especially in films, television and video games almost never are.

Underneath Prometheus

Now that I've had a second chance to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus I'm more sure of a few things.

First, the gist of it: in the near future a bazillionaire, Peter Weyland, funds a space trip to a distant planet based on a couple of archeologists' finding a stellar map. Since this is Ridley Scott, the guy who gave us Alien the quintessential blending of horror and sci-fi and also the moody, existential Blade Runner; things go bad quickly.

The ship lands on the barren planet and under the thrumming soundtrack we enter the haunted house. It quickly becomes clear that this place has more in common with the Nellis Testing Range in Nevada or Chernobyl in Russia than any mythical garden of creation.

Contrary to what most film critics have said, the supporting cast are not stereotypes. We have a black ship's captain with a Eastern European name who speaks with a Texas accent and is fond of accordions. There's also a geologist with a punk hairdo and tribal tattoos who looks like a roadie rather than a scientist. Scott is forced to move the film along at such a brisk pace we don't have time to really know who any of these characters are.

The aliens are equally enigmatic and raise lots of questions. Why do they all look like the product of a white supremacist eugenics project with freakishly perfect physiques and superman strength? Most importantly, why are they all male?

And then there's the leads: Elizabeth Shaw played by Noomi Rapace of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame and David, an android, played by Michael Fassbender. Both actors seem right at home in dark, moody films with depressing story arcs. Fassbender described his character as asexual. I disagree. David, despite his not being a "real boy" has all the trappings of an angst-ridden 21st century man. He's conflicted, vain and seems to remember he's supposed to empathize with and interact with his fellow explorers a few moments later than he should -- just like your run-of-the-mill geek prodigy.

At it's core, Prometheus is a love story. Early on David gently strokes Elizabeth's cryogenic chamber as he watches her dreams via the magical technology of this future world. The android also watches Lawrence of Arabia and pantomimes Peter O'Toole's dialogue. It's no accident David is attracted to a film where the lead is other worldly and sees himself as alienated from his fellow English men. For a being incapable of emotions and lacking "a soul" he does a hell of a job convincing us otherwise. Underneath his conceit, David is desperate to fit in and win approval of his team members and creator, old man Weyland. David even has a couple of sibling standoffs with Vickers, one of Weyland's corporate execs who is clearly envious of David's position as the No.1 son.

And he does what every male lead inevitably does in every love story. He betrays and disappoints Elizabeth and, she in turn, has to forgive him if they're both to survive when the sky starts to fall.

Some of the most nuanced scenes in the film are between David and Elizabeth. When he realizes she's accidentally been "impregnated" by the weapon they find in this sterile Eden he's impersonal and efficient but there's a hint of envy when he asks Elizabeth if she's "recently been intimate" with her boyfriend, fellow archeologist Holloway. And the scene after Elizabeth gets the monster removed is especially interesting. Elizabeth wanders bloody and drugged through the ship and finds David gently fawning over his creator, Weyland. When David sees Elizabeth he gallantly tosses his lab coat over her and then makes an awkward pun as though her physicality, her femininity, is at once fascinating and scary to him; just like a regular man would.

This film is about the dislocation between the head and the animal body, between the intellect and it's creative science and the body with its drives and appetites for oxygen, food and sex. It's a metaphor first brought up when one of the characters asks David why he's putting his helmet on even though he doesn't breathe. It's echoed again when the explorers find a decapitated alien and in the finale.

David is an intellect who tries to rise above his albeit manufactured physical self and fails. Just like he tries to separate himself from any possible emotions for Elizabeth. Prometheus is a meditation on the quintessential male and female archetypes and what they're compelled to come together to do: create. And destroy.

Boston Review's 'How to be Poor'

Pretty interested article in the Boston Review on the sociology of poverty. I saw Charles Murray on Real Time with Bill Maher and I think he's an idiot but Fischer's article is pretty insightful:

The American impulse is to target the culture—teach abstinence, discipline kids, lecture parents, preach punctuality, provide moral training—so that the chronically poor will be ready when opportunity knocks. The alternative, more European, is to target the opportunity structure—provide jobs and practical training, guarantee health benefits and housing—so that tomorrow is more predictable and middle-class scripts are more practical.

I'm poor, I'm here, get used to it

I'll be turning 47 in a few weeks. A big number. But arthritis aside there's one thing that pisses me off more than anything else. See, I'm poor. And some people, especially my own family, are oblivious to this. You might even say they're conveniently oblivious.

This was fine 20 years ago. At 27, I was trying to go to college. (Not surprisingly, this was something I couldn't afford). But now that I'm staring 50 in the teeth, it's a bigger deal. I have no retirement, pension or 401k.

A friend (from a moderate upper-middle class family) came and visited me after I had foot surgery in February. Upon surveying my noisy, cramped apartment she said: "This is just like an apartment my parents had in college." And that would be fine, if I was still in my twenties, but I'm not.

Another friend was shocked when I asked her for a loan (which I paid back) in spring 2010 because I couldn't pay my rent. "Couldn't you take it out of savings?" she asked. "What savings?" I answered. I had a modest savings account when I'd been laid off from my last contract job in late 2008. I'd squirreled away about five grand but that was long gone by 2010 after two years of the Great Recession, unemployment/under-employment and a lingering Workman's Comp suit-slash-back injury.

That friend had a house, mostly paid for. She and her husband both worked for a software giant. They had a motorcycle, paid for. Two late-model cars, one a Porsche, paid for. They had home entertainment systems, new personal computers that were replaced seasonally and numerous other gadgets including a top-of-the-line digital camera that cost more than all the digital cameras I've owned put together. My friend and her hubby had comprehensive medical insurance. If they got the sniffles, they dropped everything and went to the nearest holistic doctor. They both had multiple gym memberships that included free massages and physical therapy. They both had retired parents who had pensions and owned their own homes.

Back in Reno circa 2000, I had an acquaintance say to me: "You're so lucky you rent. You're not tied down, you're footloose and fancy free." Yeah, footloose enough that I might loose my apartment at a moment's notice thanks to Nevada's draconian rental laws (and I did a couple times). Oh, lucky me.

I know part of my poorness is because I'm not married. I've been engaged and had live-in boyfriends in the past but these days finding my "one true love" and cramming our stuff into one rental sounds about as much fun as my next root canal. I'm not looking for anyone to "complete me". That's such a fucked up, co-dependent way of looking at relationships I could devote an entire separate post to it. Suffice it to say, I have dalliances, not live-in relationships because live-in relationships are expensive. When and if that loving feeling ends, somebody's gotta move out. Rental trucks have to be hired and breakups are expen$ive.

I'm starting a new job next week. It will be the first time I've worked as a technical writer since 2008. And, though I'm thrilled to be going back to work, I'm not eager to rejoin the Cubicle Prairie. I'm not in love with the colors gray or beige and not looking forward to staring at those colors for 40+ hours a week, while waiting for my lumbar sprain and sciatica to make a painful return.

As Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

While contracting at Boeing in 2008, I shared a cubicle with a guy who had a heart attack. In the cubicle. At work. He's okay now but it was scary and jarring and made me take a long look at what I was doing with my life and how I wanted to live the rest of it.

As for housing, I’ve never had the privilege of owning one. I toyed with the idea in 1994 (a year of profoundly bad decisions). I had an idiot relative insist I could buy a tiny plot of land outside Reno, make a go of it in some weird mobile-home-converted-into-a-fire trap. Of course, I didn’t have the advantage of having a spouse who would support me via three minimum-wage jobs while I dipped my toe in the real estate market and pondered my wonderfulness. But I was going to a state university and student loan debt blasted whatever vague semblance of credit I might have had right out of the water.

It’s amazing that after YEARS of being poor I still have to explain that I’m poor to my relatives. They’ve been down playing my poverty to assuage their guilt for so long I am forever hearing phrases like “your apartment must be cozy.” Cut the Century 21 bullshit. A $500,000 cabin with a wood stove overlooking a lake is cozy. I live in a dumpy, low-income apartment with paper-thin walls. Just like I did when my mother was raising me. If that was “cozy” why did my Mom have so much trouble paying the winter heating bill?

When I say I'm poor, I'm not suggesting I'm Third World poor. I'm not typing this from a cardboard shack perched atop a landfill in Guatemala, the Philippines or some other living hell. I don't forage for food in dumpsters like the street urchins of the Ukraine.Yet. But sitting here in my tiny apartment, I'm close enough to the street to hear the homeless people pushing their shopping carts up the sidewalk. Unlike a whole lot of upper-middle class folks I know, I visited food banks before late 2008.

So stop whining about how much in taxes you had to pay on your stock dividends this year, rich bitch in my yoga class. And quit complaining about how your $8,000 retreat to Maui was cut short because your parents reined in your trust fund, other rich bitch. And I don't give a crap if your Lexus got towed while parked in Belltown because I haven't owned a car in eight years. This was a choice but, like 90-percent of all my decisions, it came down to money. And that's something I've never had enough of to really pass for middle class.

Better and better

64 days post op. The doc today said it looks super good, esp. the x-rays, so I can continue wearing regular shoes no problem.

22 days post-op

Got my 3 week post-op x-rays and clinic visit yesterday. They want me to go another three weeks no-weight-bearing/on the crutches. Argh! But I kinda see the point. My no.1 metatarsal looks like the curved leg of a chair (it should be relatively straight). All those years of walking on the deformity caused the foot to over compensate and form the bunion and torque the metatarsal out.

At least now I get to wash it! It looks way better, swelling's gone way down, movement has returned to the outter three toes and the middle one that was shortened. The big toe is still super stiff and sore but coming along.

Say 'no' to Blimpbaugh

Senator McCaskill,

I heard via online news that you have put forward a motion to stop having Rush Limbaugh's bust installed in your state's hall of fame.

As a non-Missourian but a U.S. citizen and registered voter, I applaud your effort. I hope you succeed.

I understand your state's hall of fame is for persons of historical note, people like Mark Twain.

I wonder what someone like Mr. Twain would think if he knew that an inflammatory, misinformed "commentator" like Limbaugh -- who earns some $50-$100 million per year -- was having his likeness installed in such an august place?

Limbaugh has never run for political office. He is not William F. Buckley, Jr. He is not even a passable George Will and he's certainly no Barry Goldwater.

Other than slur the good name of those who have successfully held office like Al Gore, make fun of actors with crippling illnesses like Michael J. Fox and refer to enlisted personnel with political views opposing his as "phony soldiers" -- what has Limbaugh done to warrant a bust in the hall of fame?

Thank you again,

-- M. Murphy
Seattle, WA

Go here to thank Senator McCaskill for her efforts to halt the installation of Limbaugh's bust.

Foot 8 days post op

1st Before/After Pic

Yesss

Feminists have a sense of humor. Here it is:

Olde Raypey Tymes

Somebody get this lizard out of my wig!

I'm coming to this debate five months late, but since I'm reading the books (just started No. 4) I wanted to say something about the controversy surrounding fantasy author, George R.R. Martin's books aka HBO series Game of Thrones.

Completely unfamiliar with this melodrama? Martin began publishing a series of fantasy novels in 1996. He's an obese, old nerd who once wrote for television, was a fan of Tolkien and decided he wanted his own Middle Earth. So Martin came up with Westeros, which is like medieval France with more dismemberment (and rape).

Except he didn't like the way Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, T.H. White and a dozen others wrote fantasy. There was too much swishing of magical swords and not enough actual hacking of limbs with "real" steel swords. Apparently, Martin is a man who knows his Society for Creative Anachronism's jousting rules -- heavy vs. light armor ... (Sorry, I nodded off for a sec). So Martin's world is envisioned with all the vérité of the Dark Ages or maybe the Inquisition. Beheadings and maimings galore!!! This is fantasy for the adults. Westeros is a place where The Lord of the Rings' Frodo-n-Sam would have been court jesters by day and S&M bottoms by night.

Except that wasn't vérité enough, he wanted Westeros to feel like effed up Europe in Olden Tymes and that meant lots of misogyny. The book's narrative voice gleefully details numerous rapes with dated cheesy verbiage.

Of all the prejudices and fears of those times, why'd he pick the monotonous rape and perpetual oppression of women???

The answer's simple. Martin's a former Catholic school boy. There are two kinds of women in the Catholic school boy universe: WHORES and virgins (yee faire maidens). The end. No multi-fauceted characters as deeply flawed as the male characters allowed. In Westeros, you're either a sexless 11-year-old girl or a WHORE. And George Martin loves that word. I counted WHORE eight times on one page in the first novel.

Never mind the fact that in re-imagining a mythic Olde Europe, Martin ineptly leaves out the primary impetus for misogyny -- women weren't allowed to own property or businesses, say 'no' to a marriage proposal, lead mass, etc. -- the Church. The religion that instigated the Inquisition, burned countless Jews, women and "witches", re-wrote the New Testament, demanded exorbitant taxes from lords to build their Liberace-style Vatican, required celibate males for their priesthood ... and the absolute subjugation of women by medieval society. So what's with all the WHORE calling, George, in a pagan society???

Well today, it's titillating for one. It's sexy if you're an overweight, pasty-white nerd to imagine helpless slave girls writhing at your feet. And this hypothetical nerd has envisioned himself as being like Conan the Barbarian, with pecs bloated from steroids, legs like oak trees and a swept back Fabio hairdo (Kal Drogo!).

But I can't blame parochial school for George's fixation on pre-teen virgins. And that's just ... creepy. In one interview he glumly explains how HBO wasn't thrilled that one of the key characters, Daenerys, is just 13 when she's "wed" to a 30-year-old barbarian. So they made her 18. And George was upset that they had to get an actual adult -- a 22-year-old actor -- to play the child bride. (Damn ye censors!).

And all his fans are crying foul because snarky blogger Sady Doyle, and other women writers, are outraged by the rabid misogyny in the books and now the TV show. The argument Alyssa Rosenberg and a dozen others ineptly make is that Things Really Were Like That Way Back When. Well, yeah maybe. And if they still were, Alyssa, you and I wouldn't be sitting at computers debating the merits of a fantasy novel. All us vagina owner would be washing some feudal lord's clothing by hand, dying during child birth or maybe standing on the slave block waiting to be auctioned off to our next owner/husband. I can't wait for the re-enactment at the next renaissance fair!

Is Martin responsible for upholding his imagined characters to some higher standard? Why should he when most other sci-fi/fantasy novelists can't be bothered and their armies of mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly male fans are happy to consume their writing while defending any overt sexism and racism as attempts to "keep it real." (Umm, it's pretend, okay?)

But don't make the female characters as flawed and multi-fauceted as any of the dudes and thus empower them to DO SOMETHING! Rather, George (and his ilk) incessantly objectifies them so that they just sit there like inflatable dolls waiting for something to be DONE TO THEM.

Like Sansa. She just sits there, cries a lot and is the negative stereotype of the vapid, helpless, pretty teenager. Likewise Daenerys, the teen queen, who isn't allowed to have a sex life with Jora Mormount or anybody because ... because ... because ... in Martin's eyes she has to stay vaguely virginal or else she'll fall off the misogynistic precipice and into the stereotype of WHORE. And we all know what sexually active, adult women are!!! They're WHORES. They're manipulative, scheming, power-mad, hyper-emotional, duplicitous WHORES. Unless they're like Ygritte -- in which case they pay for their liberation with their lives, 'cos ya know womens is not to be trusted!

Yeesh.

But apparently complaints about Martin's Whore Tourette's Syndrome got back to him, because by book four, he's toned the WHORE-calling down a bit. Now Little homicidal Arya is traveling to distant lands (rather than being kidnapped by every murder/raper in yon Westeros). And Brienne (the Ugliest Woman in Westeros, oh the shame!) is on a horse galloping off to save Sansa (because what the hell else can you do with a one-dimensional female character except tie her to the tracks and then save her over and over?).

Too pretty to raype? Me thinks not.

Meanwhile, even if you like Martin's bloated sentences (Yee Olde Tyme Talk Es Dyfficult, M'Lord) and his endless over-use of adjectives and adverbs (please save me from "waddles") you've got to wonder: why aren't all the boys getting raped or threatened with rape? If Jaime Lannister is that pretty, why haven't any of these barbarous villains bent him over and horse fucked him yet?

And sure there are token gay male characters but they get conveniently killed off before George has to bother fleshing out their characters ala Renley Baratheon (already dead!). Apparently lesbians don't exist in this pseudo early-Euro world.

And what's up with the overt classism? Did George tour the Tower of London and just not get it? Monarchies are bad and democracies are good, right? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Surely George isn't dragging us through thousands of pages of fantasy just to drop that cliche at our feet? I thought sci-fi/fantasy readers were a tad more sophisticated than that.

Fear not ye not-so-gentle readers of ye tomes. I shall continue to dodge hack sentences and dead-horse adverbs all the way to the end. I want to get to the part where little Arya grows up, has normal sex (not rape!) and sticks her sword so far up one of the misogynistic villain's asses it comes out his mouth.

P.S. Dear HBO, Peter Dinklage is a lot of things: talented, dynamic, hella fun to watch act. But he is not ugly, not by a long shot. Shame on you for casting him as the Ugly Character Standing in for the Ogreish Author.

Pooblished, pooblished again

But not for money.

The Legendary has published one of my short stories, The War with Canada, which is good as it was starting to feel really ignored (if short stories even have feelings). A couple of my other short stories were hogging all the attention.

"It's ALL about the body ..."

Miss Representation was made by documentarian/actor Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Newsom says her impetus for making Miss Representation was the birth of her daughter. She hopes her child’s life will be less limited, bigoted and oppressive than it is right now for anyone born female. Sadly, with every corporate media conglomerate owned by old white men like Rupert Murdoch that won't happen any time soon.

Feminists are aware of how pervasive misogyny is in movies, TV, the internet and magazines but Miss Representation hammers home statistic after statistic that had the SIFF audience groaning under the crippling sociological reality.

As one high school teen said, “It’s ALL about the body, not about the brain.”

Newsom didn’t have to look hard for material that reflects the dominant view in America she just had to turn on FOX News (owned by Murdoch) where shrieking “TV personalities” debate whether Sarah Palin had breast implants and why does Mrs. Clinton look so old?



Thoughtful interviews with prominent people like Pat Mitchell had the audience’s hands wringing. Mitchell heads the Paley Center for Media. Nobody is surprised hyper-sexualized and negative images of women has got teenage girls cutting themselves, developing eating disorders and becoming victims of assault in schools.

It’s like the entire media (magazines, films, TV and the internet) is now run by a bunch of angry teenage punks who care only about fake tits and catching female authority figures doing dumb things; except it’s not.

Corporate media is run by middle-aged and elderly homophobic men, all of them white, most of them fabulously wealthy, who arrogantly believe they have their fingers on the pulse of American culture. People like the porcine Rush Limbaugh (age 60, earned $285 million from 2001 to 2008) who slammed Michelle Obama for being "too fat" or shock jock Howard Stern, (57, net worth $500 million) who viciously attacked Gabourey Sibide after the film, Precious, for being over-weight and black. Previously, Stern hypocritically attacked Ellen DeGeneres for being a lesbian.

Amongst the points hammered home: America is near the bottom of countries that have women in their national governments, behind nations like Cuba and even Iraq. Girls as young as seven now experience body dysmorphic disorder, begin diets and obsess over dressing sexy.

Amongst the luminaries interviewed: Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinhem, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. But it is experts like Jennifer Ponzer of Women in Media and News and Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media who make the most compelling points. Ponzer points out that “reality” TV shows where hyper-sexualized characters dressed like strippers fight over bachelors drowns out the voices of real female authority figures, like members of Congress.

Actress Geena Davis laments the root of the problem with television and film. Women almost never write or direct the narrative in these mediums. Hollywood is profoundly white, male and heterosexual, and filmmaker Paul Haggis points out, female characters in the past had more depth, were allowed more range and able to present characters that were more real ala Betty Davis in Dark Victory.

All these fake boobs, Girls Gone Wild and uber-violent video games like Grand Theft Auto have sent a clear message to young women: you’re just a hole, you’re good for fucking but nothing else and, you might not even measure up for that. And, girls are told, once you hit 40, just go away, disappear because a woman is only of worth when she’s young and appears sexually available. It’s a message that’s been voiced by Howard Stern on his radio show many times and chanted endlessly in so-called mainstream media like primetime sitcoms where every single female character is white, underweight and always under 40.

Never mind that Howard Stern is an ugly, old white guy with hair weave who bought his most recent wife.

Teaching women's rights

Lindsay is a public school teacher in central California and a friend of mine. She is amazing, so is her BLOG.

Happy Turkey Day to Lindsay and all her students.

Lie to Me (Please)

A novelist’s business is lying. – Ursula Le Guin, Preface to The Left Hand of Darkness

What’s the biggest mistake fledgling writers make? They’re afraid to lie. I’ve done this, everybody has. It’s an elephant-sized faux pas in fiction writing.

A great deal of writing is born out of journaling, which is an erudite way of saying keeping a diary. Writing tends to have its roots in psychological therapy and so short stories often spring from journaling. This is fine if only the roots of a story are planted in the dark, murky compost of our actual lives.

But really good fiction is just that: somebody made it up. Only from fiction can we find emotional truth. Shakespeare was never an actual prince in Denmark or any where else, but from Hamlet comes a lot of profound emotional truths about human existence including: grief, guilt and anger. Pretty much everybody with a pulse has experienced these feelings at one time or another. It’s easy to empathize with Hamlet, even if he is a prince, Danish and never really existed.

If you don’t believe me, consider these examples.

Was Annie Proulx ever a gay cowboy living in Wyoming in the 1960s? No, she’s a straight woman who was born in and spent most of her life in New England –- Stephen King’s neck of the woods -- not Ennis’ empty rural waste. But she did an award-winning job convincing us she was a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

Never a gay cowboy.
Was there ever a land called Narnia with a giant, Christ-like lion who talked to little English kids? No but Carroll Lewis makes us believe this in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Did an evil spirit cause the death of a family in Amityville, New York? No, but writer Jay Anson did a bang-up job convincing a lot of people that one did in The Amityville Horror. Anson performed the oldest trick in the book: he based a series of lies on a truth. A guy really did kill some family members and, like countless other convicted murderers before him, he alleged for years that the devil made him do it.

Did you go through a tumultuous marriage in your youth? Maybe got married at age 20 and then divorced at 22. Did you and your spouse literally pull each other’s hair out in fights and war over custody rights for years? Do you really want to even hint that you’re writing a story now about that event and risk getting sued? Think up a character, someone NOT like you. Change their hair color, age, height, etc. Now change the setting. If you live in Vermont (like Ms. Proulx) set the divorce story in Wyoming. If you live in Florida, set your story in Nepal.

It’s okay to lie, fellow writers, really it’s just fine. It might even inhibit an angry relative from filing suit. You will never find emotional truth until you learn how to lie about the details that bring your reader to that truth.

The Darkest State

Kevin Smith's latest effort, Red State, came out in a swirl of controversy. Whiny film critics and distributors threw figurative rocks at him after the initial screening at Sundance in January 2011. Too bad because it's a good and interesting film.

I suspect a lot of the ire leveled at Smith comes from the same peanut gallery that slammed him for 1997's Chasing Amy. They went in expecting fart and dick jokes; instead they got a scathing commentary on the state of America's deeply broken religious and political ideology.


I'm of two minds regarding the critics that trashed Red State. One, they're cynical Hipsters living deep inside the cultural bubbles of New York or L.A. and they simply don't believe that a place like Cooper's Corner could actually exist. The Heart Land is something they occasionally fly over on trips back to see the 'rents and demand more trust fund money. Or, on the other hand, they're cynical Hipsters who live in non-culturally insulated places like Memphis, Cincinnati or Austin -- and Red State flies way too close to home, which is probably a small, dusty town too much like Cooper's Corner. This second crop of critics is afraid to give a thumbs up for the film because it would ruffle feathers, put beads on them as they're driving home on dark country roads late at night.

Once upon a time I lived in one of those non-bubbles (Reno, Nev.) and I had to be careful what I wrote as a journalist or else I'd earn the rage of a local fundamentalist librarian (yes, she really existed) or a fuming minister would show up in my editor's office.

Red State is very much a here-and-now tale. Three teenage boys drive to an internet hook-up expecting sex with a horny housewife and instead are kidnapped by a fundamentalist Christian cult that has judged them "social parasites".



Smith has no qualms about mentioning Waco's infamous Branch Davidians, Fred Phelps or any other of the vast, toxic soup of Right Wing extremists who form the edge of America's political landscape. These are the real Freddy Kruegers, the real specters who haunt us not because they're horror-film scary but perhaps because they give some of us pause: how easy it would be to agree to their hate edicts like so many Glenn Beck followers. If we could identify a specific scapegoat in America (gays, blacks, immigrants) we could root them out, eliminate them and all would be Right again. We would metaphorically kill the collective self doubt that has plagued this country since its inception.

Red State rides almost entirely on the shoulders of a Rev. Phelps-inspired lunatic mesmerizingly played by veteran actor Michael Parks. Parks' Abin Cooper is a mumbling, preening dictator whose only congregation is his immediate family and grandchildren. His egotism is so complete he seduces others into, if not believing him, at least doubting themselves as in the critical scene where John Goodman's befuddled ATF agent takes him into custody.

Abin Cooper's power is his egomania. To doubt him is to doubt God. Cooper is God in the film: he sees all and, freakishly, appears to know all. With an ego the size of the Houston Stadium, he stomps out anything that offends him, especially his chosen scapegoats: homosexuals. In another life, Abin Cooper would have been a KKK leader because his kind cannot exist without scapegoats, they are the fuel for his fiery hatred and the focal point of his murderous rage.

Toward the end of Red State, Goodman's character muses over the schism that separates America politically and religiously. The metaphor of the two dogs fighting over the bone tells us that for Agent Keenan there is no doubt that the specter of rabid bigotry lives in America because it threatens to swallow reasonable men like him whole.

I have hiked ...

... and now I'm paying for it. Oh yes.

But what are you?

This is just beautiful!



I'm always behind the curve when it comes to whatever is "trending" right now in pop culture or literature but I LERV Samantha Bee's comedic autobiography. It starts out a little serious but finishes real strong.

This book has everything you could hope for in an autobiography: an idyllic Toronto childhood, unhygienic roommates, crazy divorced parents AND -- that most taboo of subjects -- animal rapists. (See page 182: Stan the Guinea Pig rapist).

Scratch my back?

A hundred years ago, way back in about 2000, if a blogger posted a link to your blog (irregardless of what it was) you reciprocated. It was the polite thing to do. Remember polite?

Alas, those days and the concurrent politeness are gone. I've had two blogs/websites listed to the right for a while and both bloggers/webmasters recently deleted some comments I made on their blogs.

You're probably jumping to conclusions thinking, what crazy shit did I say on their blogs? On one blog, I said 'Ditto, I agree with the above commenter'. And the website owner deleted my comment. Nothing risque, no profanity. The comment I was agreeing with was equally vanilla except the commenter was questioning the blogger's whole reason for having the website (it has gotten whiny and super redundant). You're a writer, you're frustrated, you've been rejected by oodles of literary journals. Okayyy ... not sure how you milked that one for over a year.



I could write a fucking novel on the freaky crap that happened to me (and my scripts) when I tried to break into the rigged spec screenplay market back in 1997-2000. I burned entire weekends and hundreds of dollars on the Hollywood Creative Directory, SASEs and query letters that I mailed fifty at a time.

I blew money I didn't have on entry fees to The Austin Heart of Film, Slamdance, Maui Writer's Conference, etc. To what end? I got part of one one script pirated by an A-list star. Though it probably wasn't him personally. More likely it was his assistant's assistant or maybe the AD's assistant who eventually ended up making a film that was somewhat like my script minus the suspense but close enough that they used the same name for a key character. And this was no Jane Jones or John Smith, it was an uncommon name with a specific spelling.

But who cares, that was a hundred years ago. So for the sake of looking forward, I've deleted that particular blog amongst the links at right. I've got better things to do than use this blog to feed the hit counts on a mediocre site that seems to be focused on looking backward at past literary failures, something any professional writer wouldn't have time to do.

Winning?

Eddie is a schleppy, hipster writer who is unemployed (is there any other kind?) and an eternal under achiever. One day he bumps into his ex's brother who gives him a little pill that looks a lot like either A) piece of dried Super Glue (ooh, don't put that in your mouth!) or B) some suspicious new type of nicotine gum.

Ever the game idiot, Eddie takes the pill and slightly dizzying CGI kicks in while he fucks his landlord's girlfriend. She agrees to do him after he miraculously tells her how to write her law school term paper, or whatever. Later that evening Eddie cleans his apartment (nothing smoking pot can't induce!!!) for the first time ever and then sits down and cranks out his soon-to-be-best-selling novel in one fell swoop.



Eddie goes gambling and wins big and then goes to the creepiest casino on earth, the stock market, and starts winning even bigger. The New York Post interviews him. Um, I thought the goal of every New Yorker was to stay out of that rag? The only people that end up on the cover of it are celebrities that have fallen off the wagon and murder suspects.

Eddie goes on a tropical vacation, screws a lot of nameless, faceless women, drives a rented sports car real fast (terrifying and enraging the locals) and then jumps off a cliff into the ocean ... because he's now totally cool.

In the voice over, Eddie describes this wonder drug as having eliminated his awkwardness, his shyness and his ignorance -- essentially everything that makes him human. Apparently this pretend drug (NZT) is like cocaine with a crystal meth chaser and an extra dollop of arrogance.

Eventually Eddie goes where all the morally deficient "winners" go, to the stock market to make millions and get into some vague argument with Robert DeNiro's minor character about "not having paid his dues" (does this mean real stock brokers HAVE?). Eddie helps DeNiro's character broker some "deal of the century" and who gives a shit if thousands of employees get laid off or ass raped? 'Cos Eddie is WINNING!!!

Eddie is such a winner he may (or may not) have murdered a woman he picks up in a bar. But never mind that because then he has to win back the Perky Blonde who dumped him for previously being a slacker and then stop the Bad Guys from stealing his stash of NZT (Christ, the comparisons to cocaine just about hit you in the face).

At one point Perky Blonde Girlfriend sez something like "This drug is a lie" -- yet another cocaine reference -- but then the script and the plot dashes off for another dizzying round of tracking cam shots and punchy soundtrack.

Of course the muddled message is the same old trope: "winners" get lots of tail and lots of money and losers don't.

All this reminds me of something a high school teacher said to me eons ago: "The most interesting people are interested."

Who would wanna spend ten minutes in a room with a know-it-all like Eddie?