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PROBABLY THAT GUY WITH THE BEARD AND OVERALLS

IF YOU GOT THIS:
A) YOU ARE A NARC
B) YOU ARE ON URBANDICTIONARY.COM
C) YOU ARE A HEP CAT AT A BEBOP HAPPENING
D) YOU ARE IN A POORLY SCRIPTED NOIR HEIST FILM
E) ALL OF THE ABOVE

What It Is

Chastity Belts for the Woman of Today

The Desperate House Wife

The Biohazard

The Burqa

The Miley Cyrus

The Penis Envy

The Climate of Fear

The Yearning for Zion

But Herr Doktor, vat is dis vord, "degenerate?"

Liberal Vampires vs. Conservative Vampires

These days, I can't even relax with a beer and enjoy some hot vampires without having to rip apart bodice ripping for its underlying sexual politics. America's moral crisis has found a platform in the recent spate of vampire inspired media, most notably in HBO's "True Blood" and the teeny bopper phantasmagoria of "Twilight." Vampires have traditionally served as a moralizing metaphor for the seductive danger of the sexually exotic, and both True Blood and Twilight exploit this fully, but to very different ends. Both borrow heavily from each other in terms of characterizing the psychological and practical difficulties of human-vampire inter-dating. Both equate fangs and boners in a hilarious visual pun. Both share the strange conception that "good" vampires dress like they are working in a trendy graphic design firm, while "bad" vampires dress like extras in some horrible pop-rock music video. But costuming aside, these two guilty pleasures speak to two very different audiences with very different politics.
"True Blood" creator Alan Ball has made a name for himself through the gen x existentialism of "American Beauty" and "Six Feet Under," through character driven plots about childish anti-heros trapped in the body of adults, who can't quite fit themselves into that suburban neighborhood, or that perfect nuclear family. His unspoken message has always been don't fit in, be true to your self and your journey, even if you end up looking like an asshole, hurting everyone you think you should love if you weren't so self involved, and (SPOILER ALERT) ultimately dying . With True Blood, Ball keeps the moral relativism but loses the heavy handed philosophical and psychological crises. True Blood is a cheesy, sexy fun fest which at its deepest level seems to be a promotion of what Bill O'Reilly might call "San Francisco Values." Set in the stylized, southern gothic town of Beau Temps, LA, the plot lines mostly revolve around the difficulties of social pariahs (vampires, psychics, shape shifters, gays, blacks) as they struggle for acceptance and equal rights, and against ignorance and intolerance. Along the way, there are a lot of vampire clichés exploited for knowing laughs, and, in true HBO style, a lot of very sexy scenes of people giving into their darkest desires. Ball seems to be writing to an audience like himself, who view the south as a code word for black magic superstitions and bigotry, who appreciate sex, drugs and alternative lifestyles, who get a chuckle out of ironic rehashes of vampire mythology.
In contrast, Twilight's weakness and strength is its sincerity. The plot line consists mostly of the two ethereally beautiful protagonists staring at each other while breathing heavily, both seemingly on the verge of puking. In this movie, the most evocative acting was done by the leads' cheekbones. There enough is enough painfully heartfelt romantic dialog to wet the day of the week panties of an army of tweenage true love waits tramplettes. (A personal favorite: "You're like a drug to me, my own personal brand of heroin.") but what there is absolutely NOT is sex. There is barely any physical contact. Sex is depicted in all forms as a dangerous threat, whether it be the threat of gang rape by a group of local rowdies, or the threat of your true love being so consumed by desire that he literally consumes you. The message was explicit. The final scene is Prom Night, the traditional cinematic site of a virgin's ravishment. Moody, awkward 17-year-old Bella begs her sulkily sultry date Edward to man up and turn her into a vampire already. He is tempted but begs her to reconsider, reminding her of all the love and pleasure they already share, with out the intrusion of this life-ending, deviant act. No one is missing the symbolism here.
Here is the danger as I see it: True Blood is fabulous, sexy, funny, scary, gory, and so is Twilight. But Allan Ball is preaching to the converted, an ironic snarky, liberal minded audience, while Twilight is speaking to the most susceptible audience there is: preteen girls. While there is nothing wrong in theory with 12 and 13 year olds being encouraged to not have sex, my concern is the larger cultural trend that this message represents. This kind of promise ring mentality once confined to the heartland is now seeping into all realms of media production, and is being passed off as light bubblegum media, not as serious ideological propaganda. I'm afraid that for this generation, there are no alternative message. Juno, the darling of alternative painfully ironic indie teens everywhere, was supposed to be so smart and witty, but she didn't even think to bring a condom to her preplanned seduction? For Juno, abortion was creepy icky and Plan B was a moot point. Good thing her family and boyfriend loved her more when she decided to keep the baby. Why is birth control in all forms the most taboo subject there is in teen entertainment, even in screenplays supposedly written by culturally savvy ex-strippers? If we have learned anything from Victorian sexuality, its that repressed desires will ultimately express themselves in the most dangerous and freakish of ways. It doesn't work people! Frankly, it freaks me out, and keeps me from enjoying even the most escapist of entertainment. It's like Handmaid's Tale here we come! I hope Obama addresses this issue soon. Until then, Jonas Brothers, I'm coming for YOU!

Der Untergang

• BUT

• HERR

• DOKTOR

My heart goes out

God, it must be so stressful to be Kanye and to always have to be coming up with the freshest music videos. This is amazing. I feel for him.

Like in his mind-blowing Spike Jonze directed video for "Flashing Lights," Kanye adds multiple new levels of meaning to his lyrics with the video imagery. On the surface, the song seems to be about a doomed and obsessive love affair. The contrast in the video between Kanye dressed in white in a sterile white environment and tribal dancers could fit in the context of a love story. The dancers could be stereotypically symbolic of the irrational, wild forces of passion, that yeezy must keep locked down, but which he can't prevent from invading his ordered life and thoughts. But I think that this song and video are also symbolic of Kanye's contested and ambivalent relationship with the media. Even though Kanye is political and vocal about black issues, because his music is different he is often criticized for being whitewashed, not black, or street enough. His efforts to redefine or transcend the genre of hip hop have been met with a huge critical backlash. Lyrics like:

"Gotta keep it going
Keep the lovin’ going
Keep it on a role
Only god knows
If I’ll be with you
Baby I’m confused
You choose, you choose"

accompanying a shot of kanye in white collapsed in a corner next to a looming masked tribal figure seem to recast the video as a story about ye's struggle with the limited and stereotyped roles projected onto black performers in mainstream media. Despite the final repetition of "you lose, you lose," which hints at the culturally stunting consequences of forcing performers into these roles, the final imagery of the sexy rave-y day-glo tribal dancers seem to suggest a positive ending. With this synthesis of styles, Kanye is offering a visual representation of a new musical catagory he is inventing for himself. On the other hand, these gigantic idol-like women could be representative of the new fetish, the new way primitivism is present in our post-modernist information age. I don't know, what do you think?

Monkids

Something happened to me once years ago, but the mysterious nature of the event has troubled me ever since. I was walking on haight street with willy and peter, and we passed this woman getting what looked like a toddler out of a car seat and putting it into a stroller. BUT IT WAS A CHIMPANZEE!!! IT WAS WEARING CLOTHES< AND SHOES< AND A HAT< AND IT LOOKED LIKE A BABY!!!!! We were all taken aback, peter said to the woman: "You are going to scare a lot of people with that!" The woman gave him an icy stare of death and replied: "What? my monkey or my disability?" I never could figure out what she meant because she seemed completely able bodied. We concluded that it must have been a help monkey, but then why was she pushing it in a stroller and not the other way around? anyways, I closed the mental file on this one until recently when I was taking a shit and reading this article in a back issue of radar about monkids. Monkeys that people raise instead of children! It burst on me with the force of a revelation, and suddenly my life began to make a little more sense, kind of.

The Voice of a Generation!

Pure Genius!

calling NY's most elligble bachelors!

who wants to take me on this sexy kultur-date before 11.10.08? No strings attached, unless that's like, your thing...

True Love Will Find You in the End

The Winter of our Sweaty Tent

As the cold descends and the heat is turned on, I've been researching energy conscious ways to transform our backyard into a year 'round chill zone, no pun intended. Here are some ideas. What do you guys think?

Sobibor Uprising

Up until the hour that had been set for the outbreak of the revolt,
life in the camp continued as usual.  Except for the underground members,
the vast majority of the prisoners in the camp did not know what was about
to happen.  The first stage of the revolt was also carried out as planned:
between 16:00 and 16:30 hours, eleven SS men who had been called to the
workshops were killed, among them the commander of the camp,
Untersturmfu"hrer Niemann.  These were all the SS people in the camp that
day, save for one--Frantzel--who was called to the workshops but did not
come.  The operation in Camp 1 was run by Pechorsky, while Feldhendler
commanded the operation in Camp 2.  The telephone and electric lines were
cut, and the motor vehicles immobilized.  The blacksmiths' group removed
six rifles from the Ukrainian guard room, and these were handed over to the
underground.  (Pechowsky, op.cit., p.54; testimony of Blat, op.cit., p.81;
Rutkowski, p.35; Stanislaw Shmeizner, "Me-Opole le-Sobibor," Sobibor,
op.cit., p.65.) All of these activities were carried out without the
Ukrainians at their posts or in the guard towers being aware of what was
happening.

At 16:45 Positzka and Czepik began assembling all the prisoners into
roll-call formation.  At that point the rest of the prisoners sensed that
something was afoot, but they still did not know what. According to the
plan, the prisoners of war and the members of the underground, some of them
armed, took up position in the front rows. The operation plan was now
disrupted.  A truck that had arrived from outside the camp appeared in Camp
2 and came to a halt near the building of the camp headquarters.  The
driver, Oberscharfu"hrer Bauer, spotted a dead SS man lying there and then
saw a prisoner running from the building.  He immediately opened fire on
him. (Testimony of Biskowitz, Eichmann's Trial.) At the same time the
commander of the Ukrainian guard, a Volksdeutsche from the Volga area,
appeared at the roll-call square.  The insurgents attacked him and killed
him with ax blows.  The rest of the prisoners became panic-stricken.  The
Ukrainian guards, who now realized what was happening, opened fire.  At
that point Pechorsky decided not to wait until all the prisoners were
assembled, as planned, and instead began stage two of the revolt.  With
cries of Come on!  Hurrah!  the insurgents broke toward the gate and the
fences, and from that moment on there was no control over what happened.
Some of the insurgents broke open the main gate and escaped from there
southwest toward the woods.  Another group broke through the fences north
of the gate. The first of this group triggered the mines, were wounded and
killed, but the others who crossed the area where the mines had already
exploded, managed to flee, as they stepped over the bodies of their
comrades.


from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/resistyad.html

Isabella's recommended reading '08

BERLIN NOIR BY PHILIP KERR
like raymond chandler but with more nazis and less L.A.

BOYS AND MURDERERS BY HERMANN UNGAR
extremely bleek. eastern european. I bought it at the kafka museum. enough said.

THE WORM IN THE BUD: THE WORLD OF VICTORIAN SEXUALITY
BY RONALD PEARSALL
it's absolutely terrifying how little has changed. An emotional rollercoaster with some very esoteric sex jokes along the way.

GEORGE & MARTHA BY KAREN FINLEY
A dramatization of a sexual encounter between Martha Stewart and George W. Bush, written by legendary feminist performance artist Karen Finley. As a Victorian might say: not for
the faint of heart

Hmm....

Everyone loves to hear about Victorian Sexuality...
And the hot bods of Weimar Berlin are equally popular....
But does any one else ever wonder about Wilhelmine Sexuality? I bet it's crackin'!

Food for thought!

The Short Story of Malcolm Lamb, Instalment the Third

The Short Story of Malcolm Lamb, Instalment the Second

Murder Sonnet?!

The poetry career was doomed from the get-go. My creative spirit is too literal.

I never thought It’d come to this:
A stifled cry, a stolen kiss.
With something unmistakably amiss
I’ll cross your name off every list.
I won’t pick up if some one calls
I’ll watch my back. The ears have walls,
And it seems the man across the hall
Did not hear anything at all
Last night around ten PM
When I begged for you to let me in
And whispered from Corinthians
About how true love never ends.
Your heart was like a sticky wicket.
My heart is dust. Looks like you bit it.

I threw a picnic at hanging rock!

Too bad no one showed up! :-(

The Short Story of Malcolm Lamb, First Instalment

As always, there is a Lynchian Undercurrent to the Pleasure Club's 2013 Leisure Romp

In other news, can orientalist pop passion permeate the frosty feminist heart of Vagihad?

Dentata Awareness: The Sarlacc Pit

This post goes out to Vagihad Zine
HOT OFF THE PRESSES
coming soon to something near you, maybe.