gadarene

Thought I'd pass along this Salon article about the Refuse to Sign campaign:

"I cannot with good conscience perform weddings for heterosexuals knowing people who are gay and lesbian are being denied that opportunity," [Art Stubbs, United Church of Christ, San Marino, Calif.] said.

All Saints Church . . . in Pasadena, Calif., [has declared] "We are no longer in the civil marriage business."

"We are not going to allow the state to make us agents of discrimination," Susan Russell said, the congregation's senior associate.

. . . for someone who alters their birth sex but not their birth gender. Is there a term?

NICE psychedelic soul version of Otis Redding's "Respect" (famously covered by Aretha in 1967) by the lovely Minnie Riperton with the Rotary Connection. I'd never heard this before!

Got together with a few folks a while ago to gossip about The Namesake and share in an amazing and delicious potluck. I made samosas. Our next potluck is a brunch in August, for Charlotte Brontë's Villette. (We're alternating genres.) I have no idea what to make, though I think the theme will be English and French fare. Eh, I have time to figure it out.

Also I should finish reading the book.

Don't know how I missed this Miss Manners column back in April!

We are inconsistent, human beings. We’re supposed to be. I admit that it’s difficult for me to find affection for the work of Salvador Dalí, after learning about his exploitative intimate proclivities, ego and grandiosity, and penchant for paying forgers to paint his canvases for him. Somewhere taste became distaste, and I’d like to think I get how that happens.

Even so, whatever revulsion I have toward the person inside the Michael Jackson suit, I still find it hard to understand when I observe the 40-year musical contribution of MJ being diminished to whatever slice of the 1980s some MTV brat paid attention to and disparaged: a glove, a dance move he borrowed and popularized, “Beat It.” (An admission: We couldn’t afford MTV for more than a little while growing up and I’ve likewise spent most of my adult life without television, so my own cultural references, as rich as they may be in musical genealogy and influence are largely devoid of that medium known as the music video. I have never seen the “Thriller” video.) As a lover and student of music, a devotee of, among other genres, soul and Motown, the short shrift is unfathomable to me. Ask me about his musical legacy, and I think of those 18 albums under Jackson’s belt before Thriller (including that 1972 soundtrack for Ben)—offerings that overlapped with and engaged in dynamic relationship to the contemporaneous releases of Bill Withers, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, George Clinton, Stevie Wonder. The 5 albums that wound down his career were disappointing, in my opinion—he was no longer at the eye of any kind of storm creatively—but they didn’t evaporate the foregoing records.

I feel like I’ve gotten a taste of the reductionism we’ll see when Springsteen and Wonder pass on: “What, ‘Born in the USA’? The ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ guy? Big fucking deal, they sucked.” (That is going to make me crazy, I can tell you right now.) Neither am I looking forward to discussions about Woody Allen once he dies and his life’s work is up for review and, for a few, dismissal—because of the sex abuse charges concerning his 7-year-old daughter (evidence for which was deemed—sound familiar?—“inconclusive”), the skin photos of his other stepdaughter, the banning of visitation with the younger siblings, and the simultaneous sexual relationship conducted with his common-law wife and their daughter. I’ve thrashed that out with people, and there’s no way to talk someone into or out of their grounds for artistic assessment—either they engage in biocrit or they don’t. It depends on the hot button issue and how close it is to their heart or their pain, the artist in question, and that figure’s intersection with their life and interests.

The question for those not very attached to (or aware of) the Jackson musical legacy as well as for fans is whether we’ll find out MJ harmed children. (Some consider that a “when” not an “if.”). I hope we do find out sooner than later, that with the passing of Jackson the lives of those kids, should they exist, becomes that much better daily, that some portion of that fortune becomes theirs, that they find some way to spit on the memory of their abuser whenever they damn well please. Were Jackson demonstrably a pedophile and predator in life, how much better had he been imprisoned and punished, no matter when that might have cropped up in his career, no matter what albums would never have existed. Who gives a fuck about the release of a single compared to the anguish of a human being?

But that didn’t happen. He was a free man, guiltless in the court system, if suspicious. And should we learn the worst tomorrow, I don’t know whether it will turn that taste to public distaste on a large scale, and this is why: No one is going to take from people anything they’ve claimed as theirs, including songs that stopped belonging to MJ decades ago—no one’s going to repo or usurp that, least of all Michael Jackson himself. As much as he was the King of Pop, a self-aggrandizingly delusional drug addict, rich as Croesus, he just ain’t that powerful, neither in life nor in death.

The death of this celebrity, practically a fictional character, for whom I had great antipathy and great nostalgia is nothing I find devastating or vindicating. The sentiments cancel each other out. You won't read a panegyric for an artist I felt to be a kind and ethical kindred spirit or a pathography of a figure I loathed with every fiber—just an absence of grief but a refusal to gloat, and renewal of some appreciation for a body of work, a portion of which moves me to this day.

That's how I described going out dancing last night. The first two hours were the typical soul and funk, with a Michael Jackson or Jackson 5 cover or remix thrown in occasionally to placate the dancefloor. The last two hours were an all-J5/MJ set, and I actually got to dance to "Big Boy," the very first Jackson 5 single, pre-Motown, recorded for Steeltown when Michael was eight years old.



Lots of bodies, lots of earnest singing and peacocking into the faces of strangers—"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" was hilarious—lots of dropped drinks. I think sweating it out and dancing it out worked for people. My favorite dancers—they're Asian, they're brothers, they're B-boys—were there, and a few more friends turned up. My rubber-soled wedges felt clattery, like tap shoes, embedded as they were with pieces of glass. I made a single request, "I Wanna Be Where You Are," which I was happy to hear early on. The night was sweetly closing down with "Butterflies," and the announced "last song" was "Never Can Say Good-bye." (Perfect.) Then it turned out there were a few minutes left, and the dancers didn't want to leave, so they eased us out with another song and a half.

The mood was so high and mixed, soulful and cathartic, heedless, like a New Year's party five minutes past the ball dropping, when the reality of 20XX has started to crash down on you. I felt a little blue by the time I got back home half past two, thinking of the death of this public figure (Peter Pan, Captain EO, the Scarecrow, the baby Jackson, the court defendant, epaulets and mask and glove) and realizing how much music connects people to themselves, not necessarily to the performers and composers. Whatever moments one associated with each single, the ways those songs originally dropped into our lives, the specific experiences each tune soundtracked or the times in one's life they've defined—it felt like that was the loss and connection people were honoring—multifarious combinations, diverse and private and, for a night, synchronous.

Goodreads, Visual Bookshelf, Library Thing, Delicious Library, Shelfari . . .

I don't know much about these or why one would be better than the next, or if there are options that blow all these away, or if they're all a waste of time.

Hoping to see one or two of you in Burbank for the Stoker Awards Weekend.

The statistics that make me sick with outrage whenever I'm admonished to "support our troops": 33% of women soldiers are raped while serving in the military, and 90% are sexually harassed. Female soldiers are further terrorized at the hands of brothers-in-arms should they do their duty and report the assaults, suffering at best harassment, ostracism, punches in the face. At worst is this account of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, then eight months pregnant by her rapist, who disappeared in December 2007.

Later she was found murdered, burnt and buried in the backyard of Laurean, the accused rapist. He went on the lam, but was caught and accused of murder. In testimony at the July congressional hearing, Mary Lauterbach [the young woman's mother] sadly concluded, "Maria regretted reporting the rape, and more than anything, I regret urging her to report the rape. If she had not reported the rape, both Maria and my first grandchild would be with us today."

In other testimony about the case given at the hearing, Lt. Col. Curtis Hall, public affairs officer for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, made a revealing admission: "Cpl. Laurean denied having any sexual contact with Lance Cpl. Lauterbach, and this was believed to be significant evidence." In other words, while her testimony was not believed, his mere denial was.

Other stories, also in the Fall 2008 issue of Ms.:

In 2006, when Army Spc. Suzanne Swift went AWOL to avoid redeploying under the sergeant who had been raping her for months, she was arrested, court-martialed for desertion, demoted and jailed for a month.

When Maricela Guzman, a young Navy recruit, was raped by a drill sergeant at boot camp and tried to report it to a supervisor, he made her drop to the floor and do so many push-ups before she could talk that she lost the will and ability to report her attack. She didn't tell anyone about the crime until 10 years and a suicide attempt later.

In 2006, when Cassandra Hernandez of the Air Force reported being gang-raped by three of her comrades, she was charged with indecent behavior. That same year, Army Spc. Chantelle Henneberry had a promotion delayed after reporting a sergeant for sexually assaulting her in Iraq. Meanwhile, he was promoted almost immediately.

Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and offshore torture—whose victims weren't "some of ours"—have made little dent in the national self-perception that American might is closely matched (and earned) by American right. It's said that publicizing those "aberrations" of duty is a disservice to "our boys," and the innate nobility of those who self-select to enlist is defended at every turn.

Even at the price of "our girls":



Army Pfc. LaVena Johnson, just 19 years old, was found dead on her military base in Balad, Iraq, in July 2005.

At first the army initiated a homicide investigation, then suddenly, without explanation, closed it and ruled her death a suicide by an M-16 rifle. Yet her parents said she had been calling home every day—she worked in communications and so had access to a phone—always sounding happy and healthy.

When her father, John Johnson, a veteran of the Army himself, viewed his daughter's body at the funeral home, he noticed several suspicious factors. Her face was bruised, the gunshot wound did not match the description in the autopsy and white uniform gloves had been glued [!!!] to her hands. He pressed for more investigation, later gaining access to photographs that showed abrasions to her face, a broken nose, burns on those hands, signs of sexual abuse and more burns to her back and genital area. He also learned that she had been reclothed after her death, dragged across the ground and set on fire inside a tent. None of this made suicide likely or even possible. Johnson and his wife believe that their daughter was raped, murdered and burned to cover the evidence.

The Johnsons have been pressing the Army to reopen the investigation ever since, but so far have been stonewalled at every turn.

The L.A. Times also had a story this spring following up on Pfc. Johnson's death, still officially ruled a suicide, as well as reporting on similar casees. There's a substantial Web site dedicated to the case, which gathered names for a petition until last week, and it's being prepared for delivery to House and Senate Armed Services committee, demanding that the Army reopen the investigation into the private's death.

AMENDED: Here is a related CNN article, which puts the percentage of women being raped during their military service in Iraq at 41%.

Wikipedia article:

Grammar controversy

During the campaign's long run in the media, many criticized the slogan as grammatically incorrect and that it should say, "Winston tastes good as a cigarette should." Ogden Nash, in The New Yorker, published a poem that ran "Like goes Madison Avenue, like so goes the nation." Walter Cronkite, then hosting The Morning Show, refused to say the line as written, and an announcer was used instead.

Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, says that this "ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of 'like' instead of 'as' created a minor sensation" in 1954 and implies that the phrase itself was responsible for vaulting the brand to second place in the U.S. market. Winston overtook Pall Mall cigarettes as the #1 cigarette in the United States in 1966, while the advertising campaign continued to make an impression on the mass media.

In the fall of 1961, a small furor enveloped the literary and journalistic communities in the United States when Merriam-Webster published its Third New International Dictionary. In the dictionary, the editors refused to condemn the use of "like" as a conjunction, and cited "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" as an example of popular colloquial use. [emphasis mine] After publication of Webster's Third, The New York Times called the edition "bolshevik," and the Chicago Daily News wrote that the transgression signified "a general decay in values."

When the players in The Beverly Hillbillies spoke the line [Winston was a sponsor], they stretched the grammatical boundaries further:

Jed: Winston tastes good . . .
Granny: Like a cigarette had ought-a!

In 1970 and 1971, Winston sought to revamp its image and chose to respond to many grammarians' qualms with the slogan, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?"



MAD Magazine published a parody of this on the back cover of its January 1971 issue; set in a cemetery, it featured four tombstones who spoke in the past tense ("What did you want, good grammar or lung cancer?"). With the new slogan in wide use, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" was retired permanently in 1972.


(A still photo of a Winston advertisement featuring Fred and Wilma Flintstone. This particular still is from the end-of-show sponsor bumper that aired at the end of every episode while Winston was the show's primary sponsor.)

After the "Star Trek = Good Enough" post, I got to talking to my old friend and writing classmate Gabriel Morgan about the "suspension of disbelief" in film and art. Gabe had had reactions similar to mine over the same movie.

Me: I still think the issue is that enjoying a movie is not about analysis and research back into flaws, but simply that when you know something, you can't "unknow" it—and when realities you're deeply conversant with get thrown out the window then the experience degrades quickly.

For example, if you know a point-blank shot to the heart kills a victim dead or that a newborn infant is incapable of speech—if you know these things—then a film or narrative that skips past those facts is, in point of fact, supernatural. This unnaturalness, when deliberate, can be thoroughly amazing and satisfying. When the uncanny is the byproduct of a ignorance, arrogance, stupidity or a combination of all three, a work of art fails to those who don't need anyone to tell them that babies can't recite Shakespeare and planets aren't super next-door to one another.

To those who don't have an informed grasp on reality or don't have an instinct for character motivation and cause and effect in their head, our recoiling to the lazy supernatural elements in movies like this recent Star Trek actually looks like fake hoity-toity reaching and deliberate contrarianism, simply because the film didn't mess with some of their basic knowledge of the world around them. If the movie had had talking preemies, we would have hear a lot of complaining and impatience from the moviegoing public at large.

So, I guess the thing is that you make a movie and if it doesn't fuck with 80 percent of the viewers' concept of reality, if it's got funny scenes and interesting action and good character work, then you're golden.


Gabe: From Futurama: You watched it! You can't un-watch it! Eli, that's the same point on 'suspension of disbelief' that I've been trying to make for a long time (sometimes to captive audiences like university classes - bwahaha) - often, people are ready to suspend disbelief about bits of reality that seem like outliers to their general knowledge and experience, but aren't willing to do the same to those ideas they view as common-sense.

I usually talk about flying cows. If we were watching a movie and suddenly cows flew through the sky behind the main character, the entire audience would have one serious collective 'what the fuck?!' moment. But that's no less ludicrous than any one of a number of things that happen in this movie. As specfic writers, most of us understand that, when we break the rules of reality, we need to do it with full intention and to some artistic or narrative purpose. It's lazy writing to think that, just because there are starships on the page, anything goes.

This is incredibly fascinating to me!

"The other night, while attending a small dinner party, the conversation turned suddenly to the subject of Jughead's trademark; his goofy, crown-like hat. . . ."

SPOILERS ABOUND. Just watched Star Trek, and while I enjoyed all the characters and characterizations, I couldn't find a story that made for any sense or satisfaction whatsoever. I loved all the domestic scenes—the little exchanges and relationships—and would gladly have watched a cocktail party with the new cast, or My Dinner with Andorian. All that to say that the characters get big ups from me. And their gadgets and blasties and thingies rocked.

But I think that what might happen when you start with a goal—get the original crew back on the Enterprise, launch a new series of films—and write backwards is throw any old thing into the storyline to satisfy a checklist, no matter how much it degrades integrity, or a viewer's spell that the events equal something that actually was supposed to happen to these people in that time. As far as I'm concerned, you write a story backwards, your pitfall is that you're obliged to reconcile events, period. At least the process seemed to me to be that way, rather than a movie conceived from a beginning point and allowed to extrapolate and develop with some regard for being "true"—in some way, somehow, give us something. Now, I'm only guessing that they wrote back to front, because a forward development seems like it would have ruled out half a film's worth of WTF.

People boast of getting swept along by a movie and for that reason being unconcerned with "nitpicking," but I wonder if they're simply not as caught up as they believe they are—since they're not rocked by stuff that would feel all sorts of wrong were it happening to them in some life's adventure. When I'm sucked into a film, I do suspend much of my judgment and thinking-through, and just feel it or live the story, designed to be consumed vicariously. Getting immersed in a film a wild ride, it's fun, it's the magic of movies—the immersive nature of film pins us to a spot and makes us captive to an onslaught of events that are supposed to be really happening in the arena presented—when enough of those scenes are fishy, that's when the whole story just starts itching. Itch, itch, itch—until we escape the misconceived tour two hours later or the script cannily remanipulates those parts that made us edgy into the story; we gain relief and relax and trust the helm again. Or we don't. I itched most of the way through Star Trek, my only relief from WTF being the fun little chatty bits. And I love battles, and I love explosions, and I love mad villains—I am, in fact, an easy mark, a softie for all that. It doesn't take much: Just don't have the story tell me lies, and I am yours.

Film begins with a great sequence, concluding in the birth of Baby Kirk and the battlefield promotion and subsequent death of Papa Kirk at the hands of a Romulan miner who believes that a ship that was following him through a black hole/time tunnel set (by one drop of "red matter") to absorb a supernova might actually have come out of it in front of him. (It appears the plan is to prevent the destruction of Romulus by fire and replace it with the destruction of Romulus by ice, frozen when it lost its sun entirely—but we'll set that aside, as well as a lot more.) Admiral Spock has not preceded Nero into the past. Something else that didn't precede Nero into the past through the black hole? The expanding supernova, which became, to me, the proverbial pistol that appears in the first act. At this point, I honestly thought, "Ah ha! Stuff is traveling to all different places! That supernova could be anywhere! Not only that, it's going to be traveling through a black hole while it's making a black hole (as is the fate of supernovae), and won't that be something. This is going to be amazing."

Yeah, the itching started when the story spits Admiral Spock out of the black hole 25 years later. So they were all going to the same place after all. The time-traveling supernova doesn't exist. Only people in ships can time travel. I don't know why, and I'm starting to realize that my movie is taking on water.

(Actually, the annoyance started with one of the two "very worst of Star Wars" scenes—the kiddie car race/chase from Episode I, translated into the Iowa hinterland with prepubescent James T. Kirk daredeviling behind the wheel fiddling with Nokia dash controls. Not a plot point, really, but a wanking scene I just was waiting out. As much as I love car chases, that was lame. He grows up, and seemingly abandons his mother or vice versa, who doesn't appear again even for a farewell "See ya, I'm joining Star Fleet" and "No, Ma, I don't want fresh clothes, and stop fussing with my cuts and bruises from my drunken bar fight last night." All this, slightly iffy, but not patently wrong-feeling. Though a scene where Kirk calculatedly taunts Spock about not loving his human mother made me think, "PROJECTING!")

So now we're at the black hole, a generation later. In the meantime, waiting for Spock to appear aaaaany minute now, Nero's fixed up his ship. (Romulan cloaking would have fixed this whole stealth problem of having to get through 25 years unnoticed, but they didn't throw in that shimmer/disappear effect, so I'm guessing it didn't occur to the writers.) Nero doesn't have to make sure Romulus is evacuated and a new home world established—fire or ice, that sun's a goner. He doesn't even have to go over to fix the oops of the mistimed rescue operation in the past. The Romulans are dead to him because the were dead to him because they will be dead to him. That's enough to drive anyone crazy, and I buy it. Crazy man is going to swallow his anger for 25 years and stir up no suspicion of his presence, and I don't buy it. It's okay, he cracks at just the wrong time, you'll see.

His plan, after cogitating for 25 years is this: Kidnap Spock, maroon him on a planet that somehow sees the next planet Vulcan up close (think of how Venus looks to us on Earth, and you realize the idea of an intramural ringside seat is just WTF?), steal the red matter to use on Vulcan and rub the genocide in Spock's face, start in on the rest of the Federation planets, starting with Earth (for which he will need defense codes), Spock's other ancestral planet. Leave a bunch of fucked-up black holes all over the place. (That's okay. He's crazy.)

How does Nero fuck up his own plan? After 25 years of sitting pretty (or cloaked!), he attacks some Klingons, blowing his cover. Yes, NOW. That's a generation's worth of patience and a quarter century of planning to muck up with target practice. Someone will have to remind me how much time passes between the Klingon distress-call gambit and the Vulcan attack SOS. How does Nero forget his plan? He's on his way to destroying every Federation ship coming at him before he realizes that the Enterprise has young Spock on it; then he snaps out of his distraction to recall he needs those defense codes for target Earth. Send Captain Pike over to get brainwashed, please.

None of the foregoing made me as edgy as this: The mining ship begins to drill a hole to the center of the planet, so the planet-eating/time-traveling black hole will form symmetrically. I actually leaned over to say to my sister, "WHY do they even need drill anything? It's a fucking black hole, they could land that shit anywhere." And then I told myself, Oh, right, to slow down the story for no reason at all, except so our guys can save the day (in one case) and almost save the day but significantly lose a mother (in another case). That's victory, I guess, but on a T-ball field. I like my good guys to win for reals.

We are now up to two black holes and time tunnels (seems like the red matter QC would have included that side effect in the product literature). It looks like the planet Vulcan did not time travel anywhere. We are skipping science stuff, too. Next stop, another needless drilling operation on Earth rather than just black-holing it without the fanfare, which artificially gives the good guys enough time to win again. ITCH!

By the way, through a series of coincidences, Spock Prime has appeared to Kirk and (instead of going to the Star Fleet base he knows exists to warn them of an impending attack on Vulcan, waits and waits so that he can [accidentally or on purpose?] bump into his old friend; which racks up two planet explosions he's partly responsible for because of his tardiness, by my count) told him that the purpose of his mission in the past was to head off a supernova that would threaten the galaxy. The GALAXY. A supernova would be insignificant; everyone knows that. So I thought, "Oh, shit! Spock is lying! Oh man. This is getting good. He knows Kirk is a bonehead he can scare into buying the 'killer supernova.' I wonder what that tricky old bastard really has up his sleeve." As I said, I was fully immersed, as though it were happening. Would that the writers had been similarly engaged. Turns out Spock was lying, but about there being a time paradox—apparently galaxy-killer supernovae exist. (The time-traveling itself is received with such mild surprise, I was totally freaked out by the new crew: It's TIME TRAVEL. Why is it instantly old hat to you? Casual jadedness takes about five seconds. I end up wondering if Star Fleet are all just a bunch of beleaguered Lost viewers who have been desensitized to shifting reality by a steady stream of the arbitrary. Yeah, time travel—we get it, thanks. Yawn. And the idea of rerebooting the time line doesn't even get brought up in committee to be shot down.)

Anyway, black hole number three should be the mother of all black holes because not just one drop but a ship's worth of that red matter is involved. Is THAT going to eat up the universe or pull everything through the needle and out again into some weird time thing that encompasses everything forever always? No, it just sucks Nero's ship through—with everyone forgetting entirely that opening a red matter black hole is just a time travel trapdoor (bye!) and Kirk and company for some reason act like it's Nero's certain death. Ha ha! Another victory . . . of the ADHD kind. (Now, of course, it would be anyone's certain death. No one survives a black hole. See "spaghettification." But that inconvenient fact was rejected and ditched earlier, so can't use it now—we've submitted to the liberties taken with science. Except you can use it. Oh, Lord.)

So we have three black holes/time corridors. Maybe one is way bigger than the others. Maybe they fly around places. I'm not sure. What's the statistic? A black hole that consumes Earth would be about the size of a nickel? A quarter? The size of the black holes in J. J. Abrams film make me go, "What the fuck did those singularities eat?!"

And now comes the second "worst of Star Wars" scene, being the medal-pinning, wave one's clasped fists over one's head, self-back-patting final scene of Return of the Jedi, or as I referred to it elsewhere, the "Congratulations! You've just beat the video game!" screen. (I will note that I was so intent on loving this film that I didn't get caught up in the minor things, such as baby soldier cadets being put in charge of the flagship Federation vessel or just how far you can get in this man's army in three years.)

Because the characters did right by me, at least, I left the movie theater enjoying Star Trek's supreme okayness. It was a pleasure to look at and listen to, as well, though a little over-leaning on close-ups for people scenes kept reminding me of television direction. I didn't overthink this, although I did need to center to organize and recall my emotional reactions. All those responses and leaps of run-of-the-mill moviegoer's intuition were true to the moment. It makes me wonder how much more distanced and uninvested other audience members were around me, who walked out thoroughly sated. At least it was fantastically better than Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture.

* * * * *

As a woman watching this movie and coming off the greatly reimagined and female-powerful BSG, I felt horrible. Here was a chance to make women in a non-1960s new-origin the tough, strong, badasses they are in our own daily lives. Sorry. Girls are allowed into the new Star Trek for one reason only: to show us the men have feelings and sex drives. As proud as we are of a Dominican Uhura, the chick is nothing more than a window into Spock's inner life, as is Spock's mom. They ventriloquize the deeper reality masked by his outer stoicism. Kirk's disappearing mother serves only to heighten the stakes and emotional anguish of the dilemma her husband faces. Green chick is only there for Kirk to get off in her. And I think that's all the babes accounted for. I kept watching the movie waiting for a moment I could put myself in it via a female stand-in and just fucking shine, rather than feeling used by all the "real" characters because here we are at the cusp of a new film series created in 2009, free to ditch the 1960s baggage, reimagined for our lives. Here is a series for me. Instead, I got the shameful sense that I should feel lucky they allowed skirts in the movie in the first place. I felt barely tolerated.

I wonder if it's often that men leave these films with that vague shame of belonging to a useless (or rather, tactically exploited) gender. I should be accustomed to that—it's similar to the familiar and commonplace undercurrent of shame some of us eat watching a movie with all white players (or all white heroic players) or all notably and touchily hetero characters—but it still gets me every single time. And when that dis comes in my science fiction, which can easily give sexism a "fuck you," but doesn't, the letdown feels worse.

Attention publishing folks—

I have many boxes of Sanford Col-erase Pencils I'm ready to part with in these colors:

Indigo Blue (1)
Vermilion (6)
Lavender (18)
Rose (15)


I just find I prefer working in Tuscan Red, Violet, Carmine Red, or Brown these days, and will probably never crack open the other boxes, each of which holds a dozen pencils. I'll entertain offers before I put them up on eBay, if anyone is interested in them.

(I happen to be out of Carmine Red and Violet, so am up for trading, as well.)

New research supports the idea that many people are driven to parenthood by a desire for social connection.

Scientists at the University of Helsinki compared the temperaments of nearly 2,000 young Finns at two time points nine years apart and noted how many children they had in that period. Highly sociable people were more likely than others to breed, even after controlling for their increased chances of finding partners.

Lead researcher Markus Jokela guesses that sociable people find the parent-child bond more attractive. Also, parenthood can expose you to more opportunities for interaction—with family, other parents, neighbors. "Being a parent is quite a public social role," he says. Collaborator Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen notes that extroverts' desire for such a role is not always consciously strategic. "They enjoy children. They don't think that children somehow help them."

Parenthood also affects personality. In guys who started off highly outgoing, sociability increased as their family size grew. but introverted guys tended to become more introverted.

[excerpt from "Daddy Makeover" by Matthew Hutson in the new issue of Psychology Today]

Tell me, have you made things that express romantic love? Written a sonnet or a novel to her, built him an arbor, planted her garden, carved a sculpture, written a love song, built a home? Tell me what pieces of your desire live outside you.

South Park parece haber conseguido lo imposible: frenar al ego del rapero Kanye West.

La serie que se emite por el canal de cable Comedy Central mostró al famoso rapero como una figura de gran narcisismo tan alejado de la realidad que ni siquiera pudo aceptar un chiste politicamente incorrecto.

El amor de Kanye West por Kanye West es legendario. El año pasado, dijo que era "la voz de su generación". También en fecha reciente dijo que lo que más lamentaba era no verse a sí mismo cuando actuaba en vivo y en directo.

Sin embargo, el jueves, en su blog, Westo reconoció que South Park "me asesinó anoche y fue bastante divertido. Lastima mis sentimientos pero, ¡qué puede esperarse de South Park!".

West dijo que comenzó a cultivar su egolatría hace mucho para tener más confianza en sí mismo, pero que se ha dado cuenta que necesita ahora superar esa etapa.

Y para demonstrar que está dispuesto a cambiar, West ofreció un enlace como uno de los momentos más mordaces de South Park. También agradeció a los guionistas de la serie.

[Sábado 11 de April de 2008, La Opinión]

I missed this New York magazine article by David France back when it came out, though I've seen a lot of the information presented in other places. It's a long piece, well worth reading. This, especially, caught my eye—in particular the bit I've boldfaced:

Michael Bailey—who, as a heterosexual researcher, is a minority in this field—even doubts the existence of female sexual orientation, if by orientation we mean a fundamental drive that defies our conscious choices. He bases this provocative gambit on a sexual-arousal study he and his students conducted. When shown pornographic videos, men have an undeniable response either to gay or straight images but not both, according to sensitive gauges attached to their genitals—it’s that binary. Female sexual response is more democratic, opaque, and unpredictable: Arousal itself is harder to track, and there is evidence that it defies easy categorization. “I don’t yet understand female partner choices very well, and neither does anyone else,” Bailey wrote me in an e-mail. “What I do think it’s time to do is admit that female sexuality looks in some ways very different from male sexuality, and that there is no clear analog in women of men’s directed sexual-arousal pattern, which I think is their sexual orientation. I am not sure that women don’t have a sexual orientation, but it is certainly unclear that they do.”

He contends that what they have instead is sexual preference—they might prefer sex with women, but something in their brains can still sizzle at the thought of men. Many feminist scholars agree with this assessment, and consider sexuality more of a fluid than an either-or proposition, but some don’t. “I think women do have orientations, but they don’t circumscribe the range of desires that women can experience to the same degree as men,” says Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, who is writing a book on the subject. “For women, there’s more wiggle room. You can think of orientation as defining a range of possible responses, and for women, it’s much broader.”

Bailey stops short of saying that lesbianism is a myth (although he has notoriously declared that true male bisexuality doesn’t exist and dismissed many transgender people as peculiar sexual fetishists, drawing lasting enmity from gay and trans groups). But it may be less hard-wired. And it appears to have separate triggers and correlates that haven’t been identified yet. In studies of twins, there is a lower correlation of sexual orientation between female siblings than male siblings, for instance. “We’re at a place,” agrees Diamond, “where everyone agrees that whatever is going on is quite distinct between the sexes.”

[This other part fascinated me, something I had also read in the layman's mag, Psychology Today, namely that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay.]

Immunological response is the ascendant theory, in fact. We know from a string of surveys that in any family, the second-born son is 33 percent more likely than the first to be gay, and the third is 33 percent more likely than the second, and so on, as though there is some sort of “maternal memory,” similar to the way antibodies are memories of an infection. Perhaps she mounts a more effective immunological response to fetal hormones with each new male fetus. To determine whether the fraternal birth order might also suggest that baby brothers are treated differently in a way that impacts their sexual expression, researchers have studied boys who weren’t raised in their biological families, or who may have been firstborn but grew up as the youngest in Brady Bunch–type homes. In every permutation, the results were the same: What mattered was only how many boys had occupied your mother’s uterus before you.

[And I've talked about the following on stage a little bit, about men's reported penis size and avowed sexuality.]

One study that supports the hyper-masculinity theory of male homosexuality involves penis size. An Ontario-based psychological researcher named Anthony Bogaert re-sorted Kinsey Institute data—in which 5,000 men answered detailed questions about their sex lives, practices, fantasies, and, it turns out, measurements of their erect organs—along sexual-orientation lines. Gay men’s penises were thicker (4.95 inches versus 4.80) and longer (6.32 inches versus 5.99).

I didn't see this until today.