Sunday, June 24, 2007
Female porn
I'm sorry if you came to my site by Googling the above phrase but shouldn't you be ashamed of yourself? The MPAA certainly thinks so, as evidenced by the investigation into its rating system that can be found in the amusing indie documentary
This Film Is Not Yet Rated which I just watched on DVD. Most of the press I saw had to do with director Kirby Dick's attempts to learn the names of the anonymous judges who decide what rating movies will get, with NC-17 (no one under 17 allowed into the theater no matter how liberal your parents are) being the proverbial kiss of box office death.
But where he really makes his case is in the taboo arena of female pleasure. Bolstered by interviews with directors who grappled with the MPAA over an NC-17 rating (including Kevin Smith, Alison Anders and John Waters), This Film makes good use of the compare-and-contrast technique by alternating censored scenes of women (Chloe Sevigne in
Boys Don't Cry, Maria Bello in
The Cooler) enjoying their orgasms -- a lot -- with any number of scenes from R and even PG-13 rated films in which sex is used to degrade and objectify women.
(My daughter, who will be 14 in a few weeks, tuned in at this point. She has probably seen more R-rated movies than I have in the last year, thanks to the lax monitoring done at the local cineplex, including the girl-hosing films of the
American Pie stripe. It was, as they say, a teachable moment. Just the other day she told me, appropos of some song on the radio, that she liked a lot of rap but didn't appreciate the fact that the guys rapping just wanted to use girls. Feminism lives.)
I haven't polled any women about their reactions to the censored scenes mentioned above (both of which involved energetic displays of cunnilingus, performed by Hilary Swank and William H. Macy respectively) but I don't actually know too many women who claim to be looking for good sex scenes in movies. And only a precious few that I have known will even admit to enjoying porn. I was reminded of all the derisive comments I have heard over the years about traditional porn from women: that the girls are just tools for fantasy, no different than an inflatable doll, that their characters are two-dimensional, even if their bodies are 3D. ("The acting is terrible and the plot is ridiculous," as Julianne Moore says of "Logjammin'," a porn video briefly glimpsed in
The Big Lebowski.) Women don't want cardboard cutouts in their fantasies; women want...Jude Law.
At least this is what I concluded watching another DVD of a film I had missed in theaters, Nancy Meyers'
The Holiday. Meyers' movies often look like soft porn to me -- the clean anonymous houses in which her characters are supposed to live, the fairy tale lighting, the lame music -- but in Holiday she doubles her pleasure with the story of two women (played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) who have suffered at the hands of caddish boyfriends and who swap houses over Christmas to discover, yes, true love.
Winslet's character, an unhappy British newspaper scribe in the Bridget Jones's tradition, gets the consolation prize in the form of a defanged Jack Black (you wait for his manic side to emerge in vain), while Diaz, coasting on her Goldie Hawn-like career of playing accomplished blonde ditzes, hits the jackpot when a drunken Jude Law arrives unannounced at her hobbit-like cottage. At first he seems to be playing to his nanny-shagging reputation (they fuck that first night hardly knowing each other's names). But then he turns out to be a widower who is single-handedly raising two adorable girls who cries at the drop of a handkerchief. The perfect man: safe (widowed), nurturing (single dad), vulnerable (weepy) and virile though all the sex scenes between them are pre and post-coital. Their second encounter finds Diaz lying in bed sated -- and still wearing her bra. I guess Meyers really wanted that PG-13 rating.
As Julianne Moore said of "Logjammin'," "You can imagine where it goes from here."
Friday, June 22, 2007
One door opens
Seeing
Richard Thompson at the advent of summer has become a rite of passage in New York (I wrote about one of his summer concerts in
my very first blog). His arrival seems to herald the summer concert season, at least for Celtschmerz types like myself, and last night's concert at the
Prospect Park bandshell was a fitting opener, timed nicely as it was with the solstice. (Did yesterday seem really long to anybody else?)
Though the skies were clear when I left on foot from Ft. Greene, ominous clouds had gathered by the time I arrived at the park -- twenty minutes later. The Sybil-like weather of summer serves to remind us how little we are in charge of, so it was fitting that we ended up sitting beside a row of guys from a local AA group. (My friend Ellen Oler deduced this by asking the aging punk rocker in the seat beside her about the A-in-a-triangle tattoo on his arm.) As the umbrellas came up two songs into Thompson's set -- and he and his band were forced to flee the stage probably out of fear of electrocution -- the Bill W gang sat there getting drenched and singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" and laughing at the rain. ("It could be worse -- we could be crucified!")
Backed by a versatile three piece band, the Mock Tudor man drew from his ridiculously deep catalogue of songs (including such Richard and Linda standards as "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" and "The Wrong Heartbeat") while bypassing his more recent output. Pride of place was given to songs from his latest CD,
Sweet Warrior, which sounds like it could be his best since, uh,
Mock Tudor. While some detractors (and fans) say he is stuck in the 16th century or so, there are some topical numbers here, most notably the Iraq war song,
"Dad's Gonna Kill Me." The title, he said, was inspired by hearing soldiers in Baghdad refer to the city as "'dad" as in "Dad's got the blues tonight."
The theme of mortality recurred like the rain, most notably in oldies like "Wall of Death" and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (the theme of suffering soldiers -- these from WWI -- got a reprise too with "Al Bowlly's in Heaven," in which Thompson took a solo that sounded like he was channeling
Django Reinhardt) but when the dark clouds parted, and we were all cold and wet, he blessed us with the middle-eastern sounding
"One Door Opens," reminding the faithful that each end marks a beginning as seasons roll over each other. By the time his son Teddy joined him on an encore of
"Persuasion" (which dad cowrote with Crowded House's Tim Finn), the crowd didn't need that much persuading. The mostly older (and white) Brooklynites who had gathered for the occasion were no strangers to thoughts of mortality, I suspect. But rather than lie down and wait for their dirt bath, most of them came to play, to stand and shout back on the chorus of "Tear Stained Letter" as the dark clouds were carried away toward the sea.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Killing me softly
Thursday evening I attended a
panel on torture and other extra-legal US activities being held at Fordham Law, and who says I don't know how to have fun? One of the panelists was Josh Rushing, with whom I wrote the just published
Mission: Al Jazeera, and I had really come in a show of solidarity. (Josh will also be reading and signing books Tuesday, June 19 at the
Barnes & Noble on Astor Place.)
Given the subject matter -- the official title of the event was "Sunlight in the Torture Chamber: Expert Views on the United States' Use of Secrecy, Detention and Interrogations in the War on Terrorism" -- I thought the few hundred in attendance at Fordham's McNally Ampitheatre constituted a pretty good draw. But fellow panelist and former Army Colonel
Janis Karpinski wondered aloud why it wasn't "standing room only." As the proverbial fall guy for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, Karpinski had more insight than most into the institutional nature of our national insanity and had several revealing anecdotes about the brass that brought the tactics used at Gitmo Bay to Iraq. Where is the outrage? she seemed to be asking, while the last time I checked most Americans were saying, Where's the remote?
Tara McKelvey, author of
Monstering: Inside America's Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, was perhaps more realistic when she said, "I'm surprised anybody comes to these things at all given the subject matter." McKelvey, who waded into the blood of this business researching her book, may be more jaded that Karpinski (who resigned her commission after the Abu Ghraib scandal) but she also saw signs of hope. In response to a question from an audience member regarding the rights of individual soldiers to refuse torture orders, she recalled a 230-lb guard at a US military prison who had been instructed to put his charges on "the sleep plan" -- to play loud music at periodic intervals to keep them from sleeping.
One night, she recalled, he couldn't take it anymore and turned the music off. And nothing happened. Why was he able to get away with that, she wanted to know? "Not everyone has that gift," he told her, by which he might have meant his height and weight -- though I suspect he was also talking about character.
For those who wish to do more than merely talk about this topic, the ACLU is sponsoring a
"Day of Action to Restore Law & Justice" (who comes up with these zippy titles anway?) in DC on June 26. There is free tranportation from NYC as well as that good feeling you get when you don't look away when unspeakable things are being done in your name.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Egg Slap
That's how I remember the
Seven Deadly Sins -- Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Anger and Pride. It's a mnemonic device that you are free to borrow or even take credit for. No, don't thank me. It's my little way of trying to deflate at least one of those mortal failings.
For slapped with egg is how I feel when I have to confront my own weaknesses. When trying to chart such murky territory, the original maps are still the greatest. Los Super Seven are the basis for much of the accounting AA members do of themselves, as described in
The Big Book and they also made for the best supporting cast since the Seven Dwarves in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore film
Bedazzled. (Raquel Welch was typecast as Lust but she didn't have to say, or wear, much to make her point; Pride had a mirror fastened before his face and was forever falling down.)
I went to bed last night thinking about
Greed. I just quit a job I was working for at least one wrong reason. Though it concerned a topic of importance to me, and I saw the potential for this unlaunched venture to actually be of some value to many people, I ignored early warning signs that the folks I was working with were, perhaps, incompatible for one overriding reason. I thought I would make a lot of money.
Not that there's anything worng with that. Old hippie that I am, I never said no to a windfall and actually made some dough from investing time and even some money on internet ventures in the past. And retirement is a subject that is less abstract every year and would hate to end up a greeter at McDonadld's ("Will dance for fries"). But here I ignored my own instincts about this gig (perilous both on the street and in the work place) and proceeded through a mine field with my eyes on some imaginary furture. Is there any other kind?
In fact, if it's not too late, I would like to add Future Tripping to the list of Deadly Sins. I know, it ruins the mnemonic device ("Fegg Slap" sounds like a banjo style or a lost lyric from "I Am the Walrus") but I think the projection we do, sending ourselves into some imagined outcome, makes the other sins more palatable. It's an enabler, if you will. To be greedy of what you have is one thing (think
Silas Marner) but to be possessive of that which is not in your possession, that which is not real, is a chump's game. Hand me a handkerchief.
