What a Bum Rush

I have always thought, since Nixon started it and the Reagans gave it new life (particularly by introducing the unconstitutional power of civil asset forfeiture) to give Nancy something to do other than choose china patterns, that the Drug War has been one of the worst things to happen to the United States - barring actual wars - in my lifetime.

So, that fact that Rush Limbaugh is now in trouble for being a drug addict, buying illegal drugs, and evidently "laundering" money (according to the laws introduced by the Drug War) to do so, makes me sad - even though I'm a liberal and think Rush a jerk. Even jerks don't deserve to be persecuted due to bad laws. The laws of the drug war are mostly bad laws (I don't think we ever want to legalize the truly bad ones like heroin or crack).

For instance: right now, Tommy Chong, of Cheech & Chong, is in prison for selling bongs over the internet. We can thank John Ashcroft for this, and his abuses of the PATRIOT Act to prosecute the Drug War.

So, we have Tommy in jail not for selling drugs, but for selling paraphernalia - also made illegal for the sake of the Drug War. (Btw, the recent items added to the drug paraphernalia list are baby's pacifiers and glow sticks since they're used at raves. Yes, you can really be charged with possessing drug paraphernalia if you have a pacifier - it's gotten that outrageous and dangerous.)

(And here we come to the big BUT, har har:)
But Rush is probably going to get away with buying and using actual drugs because he's a popular conservative mouthpiece, and they all think that the laws shouldn't apply to him.

Just on whose planet does this count as justice?

When are we going to end the Drug War?

(And, for what it's worth, I don't think either Tommy or Rush should spend time in prison for what they've done.)

Rules for being Republican these days

Got this from Moby's site and had such a fine guffaw over it, I had to post it here, too.

25 Rules For Being A Good Republican by Michael Holman

1) Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an "illness" and needs our prayers for your "recovery".

2) You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

3) You have to believe that the US should get out of the UN, and that our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.

4) You have to believe that government should stay out of people's lives but it needs to punish anyone caught having private sex with the "wrong" gender.

5) You have to believe that pollution is ok, so long as it makes a profit.

6) You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don't pray to Allah or Buddha.

7) "Standing Tall for America" means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

8) You have to believe that a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, but that large multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind with no regulation whatsoever.

9) You have to believe that you love Jesus and Jesus loves you, and that Jesus shares your hatred of AIDS victims, homosexuals, and Hillary Clinton.

10) You hate the ALCU for representing convicted felons, but they owed it to the country to bail out Oliver North.

11) You have to believe that the best way to encourage military morale is to praise the troops overseas while cutting their VA benefits.

12) You believe that group sex and drug use are degenerate sins that can only be purged by running for governor of California as a Republican.

13) You have to believe it is wise to keep condoms out of schools, because we all know if teenagers don't have condoms they won't have sex.

14) You have to believe that the best way to fight terrorism is to alienate our allies and then demand their cooperation and money.

15) You have to believe that government medicine is wrong and that HMO's and insurance companies only have your best interests at heart.

16) You have to believe that providing health care to all Iraqis is sound government policy but providing health care to all Americans is socialism personified.

17) You believe that tobacco's link to cancer and global warming are "junk science", but Creationism should be taught in schools.

18) You have to believe that waging war with no exit strategy was wrong in Vietnam but right in Iraq.

19) You have to believe that Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney was doing business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

20) You believe that government should restrict itself to just the powers named in the Constitution, which includes banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

21) You have to believe that the public has a right to know about the adulterous affairs of Democrats, while those of Republicans are a "private matter".

22) You have to believe that the public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades but that Bush was right to censor those 28 pages from the Congressional 9/11 report because you just can't handle the truth.

23) You support state rights, which means Ashcroft telling states what locally passed voter initiatives he will allow them to have.

24) You have to believe that what Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest but what Bush did decades later is "stale news" and "irrelevant".

25) You have to believe that trade with Cuba is wrong because it is communist, but trading with China and Vietnam is just dandy.

Vanessa Beecroft

Ever heard of Vanessa Beecroft? I hadn't. I had seen fleeting images of her performance art installations where she has a group of people, typically women, usually partially or entirely nude, stand, sit, or mill around in an art gallery - but I didn't know who the artist was. Turns out to be an Italian/American artist called Vanessa Beecroft.

I'm not going to debate the supposed artistic skill it takes to tell someone to strip and stand over there for an hour whilst art gallery patrons try to appear blase upon encountering several naked people in public as this is not about skill; it's about concept. For once, I think the concept has merit.

Now, I've seen a lot of performance art and most of it registers on my personal appreciation rating level just below most abstract paintings, which themselves register below someone hurfing up hors d'oeuvres and box wine in the corner of the gallery. This particular, uh, display, however, intrigues me - and not just because there's nekkid girls involved. Heck, in this age of the internet where you have to explicitly tell your search engine to not return porn, strip clubs that festoon every berg, Mardi Gras, "Girls Gone Wild" and so on, the connoisseur of flesh does not face a dearth of product.

What intrigues me is the visceral reaction most patrons must have when encountering one of Vanessa's performances, especially if they didn't expect to. We are all hard-wired to react to the nude body of another; we are helpless in the face of this ingrained response as we are to other notable human events, such as the cry of a child, seeing someone getting hurt, laughter, a passionate kiss, etc. What must it be like to happen upon this kind of thing?

So, there ya are, bebopping along, inwardly shaking your head at the smearings of pigment on canvas that mean something only to the artist, his/her mom, or his/her shrink - or perhaps you have had that rare exhilaration of encountering something truly beautiful, moving, and artistic - and HOLY COW THERE ARE A BUNCH OF NAKED PEOPLE HERE! (Whoa ... Don't look like an idiot, put on your art observation face...)

Imagine bumping into this, for instance:
(Warning to those at work, nudity ahead. Click to view full size.)


Or this:


This too:


Or, Dear Lord, this:


Look at the faces of the people in the crowd in this pic. Barely suppressed shock or lust or embarrassment or who knows what - all barely suppressed, though.

I imagine I would react much like I did when I encountered it on the web by accident, with no explanation for context. (The trail of blame: I found it via CrazyAss13 [DON'T open this at work, either!], who I found via Dooce.) Since the verbiage of the link was "I Have No Idea" and went to a page of unexplained thumbnails, the only difference from my experiencing it live (though a very significant difference, for sure) is the actual live presence of the nude women themselves. (The men in her performances are always fully clothed, evidently. Odd, that.) I was curious, enchanted, confused ("What the hell?" crossed my mind in capital neon letters a few times), and intrigued by what the point, if any, could be. It had me thinking about it for a couple days. Thus, the artist succeeded.

The artist herself describes her performances like this (btw, I'm assuming she herself does not participate in the performances, I was unable to find that out):

"Beauty creates shame," Beecroft claimed "...I want women on heels because that’s powerful, that’s not natural nudity or pureness," she explains. "When men see this woman standing on heels as if she were dressed, and facing the audience, well, if that’s what they like to see, then here it is, so what. I don’t know if that will create more respect or go somewhere beyond that. Maybe after they see it twenty times they’ll start not to think of it the same way, I’m not sure. It’s an experiment."

For the first and only time, a performance piece has made me think about it - the topic itself and not all the ways that I could laugh about it and mock it.

I wondered how the women in the piece felt about the experience. I wondered how each and every person who saw the performance felt about it, and what they thought, maybe how they interpreted it.

I still haven't worked through all the reactions and questions this has provoked for me. I wonder... What do you think about it? Have you seen a performance live yourself? What were your reactions? Were you one of the women who participated in one of the performances? How did you feel and what did you think about it? How does it make you feel?

______________
Update:

So, having thought about it, I think this is what hadn't formed in my thoughts when I posted this:

The intriguing thing about this is that art has always celebrated the nude, as it should, because nude bodies can be beautiful. And as I said before, we are simply built to respond to them.

However, at least for me, when they are offered in a purposely prurient way, say as a stripper or as porn, the effect is corrupted because there is an overt attempt to manipulate the spectator sexually - not really allowing a choice on how he/she might choose to perceive it - and the subject or object of the porn is lying, essentially, as they are not there for their own reasons or artistic reasons, and are certainly not there for any reason other than selling sex. (Obviously I consider the selling of sex a less than honorable thing.)

At these performances, the spectator gets to choose how he/she feels about the encounter, and I don't imagine the women are offering themselves for sexual or pornographic purposes anymore than models for nude paintings/sculptures/pictures/etc. are (not that I can totally assume that or rule out dubious purposes since I can't read their minds). Rather than viewing a painting or a sculpture, we get the model his or herself and not a representation or a reworking of the same. In other words, one can (perhaps naively) choose to approach or regard this as a pure admiration of beauty; art in its purest form, say.

(Which reminds me. I also find it odd that is there never anyone who is obviously a little fat, or old, or otherwise towards opposite end of what's typically offered as aesthetically pleasing. Not that I would want to round a corner and encounter 27 octogenarians milling around in the nude - heavens no. But it might go towards a broader definition of beauty if some not-quite-so-perfect people were included in these performances. Just a thought.)

Get Your Kicks

Something that has been a source of grim amusement for me during my period of unemployed repose is the vitriolic glee I keep encountering regarding the vast sea of us jobless Information Technology/Computer Science folks.

I won't point fingers (via links) at the various blogs who've tee-hee'd over it; because, so what. I laughed, bitterly, at some of the things said, visions of the snotty computer tech guy from the Saturday Night Live skits dancing in my head.

I even chuckled, darkly, at my wife's boss taking a swipe at us (he owns an independent window coverings shop which competes directly with the big box, home decor stores), when he said: "And another reason why you wouldn't want to buy your blinds from [a big box store] is because the people wearing the red (or blue) vests are nothing but laid off IT workers." Heh heh. Ouch. Yet, true.

BUT, when a headhunter / placement service feels cocky enough to include this in their "too bad, so sad" blowoff letter: "Our clients' demand for these skills is low right now", a disenfranchised IT worker has to wonder if he/she should pretend he's/she's been selling colostomy bags and trusses for a living.

Rock and Roll, Part 3
or
Ubiquity Alert

You know that great tub-thumping song by Gary Glitter, glam rocker and pedophile, called "Rock and Roll, Part 2"? Sure you do. (Just listen.)

Well, a new song has arrived that will be as ubiquitous and as long-lived as it is. It will be used at sports games, probably at least three commercials, and it will play mercilessly for the next year. You will hear this song for the rest of your life.

I'm only telling you this so you can pace yourself and not come to hate it since it will be played to death in the coming year before it takes up permanent residence in our cultural soundscape.

Luckily, it's a great song.

"Hey Ya" by Outkast.

Shake it like a Polaroid picture, indeed.

Nightmares

My daughter asked me why she couldn't watch the movie I had just rented: The Matrix Reloaded.

I said, "because it's very violent and it would give you nightmares."

"Will it give you nightmares?" she asked.

At the time I chuckled and told her it wouldn't. Since then I've reconsidered.

My lovely wife and I went to see the final movie, The Matrix Revolutions. Hmmmm. It's not a bad movie, but it isn't necessarily a good one either. Though my opinion might be a function of my age - I dunno. (These days, I'm often wondering if my impressions regarding some music and movies are based on their actual artistic merit, or my possibly shifting tastes.)

We emerged from the theatre with dual headaches, kinda shrugged at each other, then went and got some McDonald's fries to get rid of the sour taste leftover in our mouths. (Dollar menus, good idea!)

Just to say something positive, the women definitely have the best lines in the flick. Jada Pinkett (Will) Smith has two of the best. It must have been a blast to have the best catch-phrases all to herself, especially as a minor character.

But the rest is dark, noisy, and sad. The original one had some fun gee-whiz, freshman dorm stoner philosophy and that great, mid-show smack upside the head. The last two have been rather grim marches through swat-fu and chase sequences. They're spectacular in each, but even really top-notch beer is still just beer after all (to make a really clumsy comparison). The story has been rote since the first one gave all the goodies away, so even blowing past the road signs of plot points is just like enduring one of those grueling family vacations that center around a long car trip, where dad eventually freaks out and screams at everyone that we're not there yet so stop freakin asking already (you've all been there, I know you have).

The primary thing that did finally get to me was how fantastically dark the story is. Since life has thrown a few curves at my family and me this year, we don't have much tolerance for dark these days, so that part of it was an endurance test. The first one had some nice light moments and some humor. This one has some humor, but it's about four laugh-out-loud lines in the midst of the big swirl down the drain to the sewage treatment plants. I imagine teens and young adults who still have nothing but a future so bright they gotta ... continue the cliche on their own ... they will like it.

Me, I might have nightmares.

Oh, and every single preview was for an upcoming war movie. We have Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thorton and on and on in war movies on the sea, in Japan, in Texas, in ancient Greece, blah-de-blah. Hasn't even one of these movie executives who green-light films ever studied the history of how well war films do during an actual war when real soldiers are dying?


Dreams

I'm becoming increasingly convinced, even though I've held some form of this opinion since my late teens, that well-done children/family films are really some of the best entertainment there is. Yeah yeah, I love some great adult movies and wouldn't want to have missed them, such as the "Godfathers", Apocalypse Now, Body Heat, Alien, Fight Club and such. But a glance at my DVD rack reveals a lot more all-audience classics than not. The best "National Lampoon's Family Vacation" is the sole one in which Beverly D'Angelo does not do a topless scene (hint: "Christmas Vacation"). I say this because the movies I've enjoyed the most lately are family films.


Elf has been the family favorite so far this season. It's just sweet and innocent, which is such a relief anymore. After all the crippled fish of Finding Nemo and the "lifetime partners" couple (though I like the phrase one of my friends uses: "the friends of Dorothy") in Good Boy (which was terrible in many other ways as well), a clean and light-hearted kids film with no agenda and no politics was like an ice-cold Coca-Cola with ice and a bag of chips on the hottest day of summer. We laughed and laughed and had nothing icky to try and explain away after the movie on the way home. ("Honey, some fish and people are just born with small limbs and stuff." "Yes, it probably did hurt to land on those dental instruments." "'Two daddies' just means they both owned that dog, honey." Etc.)

We liked Disney's Brother Bear, too, but it did not evoke the "can we buy the DVD when it comes out" sure sign of a good film from the MPC. The best thing about the whole flick was Bob and Doug McKenzie from the old SCTV skits reincarnated as moose, which is kinda sad and funny all at once. I chortled to myself about the way imaginary Eskimo life was portrayed. Most children's films anymore make "native" life seem like some sort of utopia where everyone lives a comfortable, happy middle class American life where everyone is cherished and all the children are above average, doo dah doo dah. The grandma of the tribe assigns everyone's "spirit animal" in a ceremony similar in tone to the huggy, warm ritual they had for my daughter's kindergarten graduation. It's no wonder bored suburban kids become suffused with bullshit weltschmerz about such things when they aren't shown what a truly hardscrabble life a hunter-gatherer's is. Yet, this is a Disney film after all; we wouldn't want the quasi-verisimilitude of Quest for Fire, would we? That would be harder to explain than gay doggy owners. Oh, and supposedly this is the last Disney film that will be "hand drawn" as all the new ones will be animated by computer via Pixar; it's too bad that the film wasn't any better since it's supposedly the last of its kind.

And, finally, we saw Holes on DVD today. It was a pretty rough film for anyone under 10. It is essentially a prison film for the Capn' Crunch demographic. Even though critics and friends said it rocked, we only kinda liked it and have decided to stick with Elf as our fave so far.

And there you have it.

Loophole!

Does it count if I'm not the actual composer of a political post? I think not.

In a great interview on Salon.com today with Bobby Kennedy Jr., there's this, which says in a nutshell my biggest concern with the way our country is being run at the moment:

Salon: In Rolling Stone, you use the term "corporate fascism" to describe what's happening under Bush. Do you think that's excessive rhetoric?

Kennedy: No, I don't. When I was growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism leads inevitably to democracy. And I think that's the assumption of most Americans. Certainly if you listen to people like Sean Hannity or any other voices of the right, there's an assumption that capitalism in any form is beneficial for democracy. But that's not always true. Free market capitalism certainly democratizes a nation and a people. But corporate capitalism has the opposite effect. The control of the capitalist system by large corporations leads to the elimination of markets and ultimately to the elimination of democracy. And we desperately need to understand that point in our country -- that the domination of our country by large corporations is absolutely catastrophic for our democratic process.

Corporations don't want free markets, they want profits. And the best way to guarantee profits is to eliminate the competition; in other words, eliminate the marketplace, through the control of government. And that's what we're seeing today in our country. There is no free market left in agriculture. The free market has almost been eliminated in the energy sector. These are two of our most critical sectors, and the marketplace has disappeared. We're seeing the same process underway in the media industry now. So there's very little consumer choice and Americans aren't getting the benefits and efficiencies that the free market promises us.

Under Bush we're seeing the complete corporate domination of the various departments of government. The Agriculture Department, which was created to benefit small farmers, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of big agribusiness and the principal instrument of their destruction. The Forest Service is being run by a timber industry lobbyist, Public Lands by a mining industry lobbyist. Virtually all Bush's Cabinet secretaries, department deputies and agency heads come from the very industries that those agencies are supposed to be regulating.

The same thing happened in Germany, Italy and Spain during the fascist takeover in the 1920s and '30s -- you had industrialists flooding the ministries and running the ministries, and running them in many ways for their own profit. If you read the American Heritage Dictionary definition of fascism, it says "the domination of a government by corporations of the political right, combined with bellicose nationalism." Well, we're seeing that today.

Of course the first people who start talking about this connection are going to be derided for it. Even though Rush Limbaugh calls feminists "Nazis." The right wing for years has tried to discredit anyone who believes in the idea of community as a "communist" or a "pinko." But it's time that people started telling the truth about what's going on in this country. And start realizing that democracy is fragile, that corporate cronyism is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

The other day I got something in the mail from a farmer -- small farmers in this country understand better than anyone how markets are being stolen and democracy is being eroded. He sent me a quote from Mussolini that said fascism should really be called "corporatism" -- because it's the control of government by large corporations.

Another farmer sent me my favorite quote. This one was by Lincoln, in 1863, during the height of the Civil War, when he says, "I have the South in front of me and the bankers behind me -- and for my country, I fear the bankers most." Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower and all of our great leaders have warned our nation that the greatest threat to our democracy is from large corporate interests.

Rimshot

"How many politically correct assholes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

"Zero. They are perpetually in the fucking dark."

- Dennis Miller

The eclectic joys of Ween

Ween is a couple guys pretending to be brothers but doing anything but as musicians. To the truly musically trained, these guys must be like the smartass idiot savant of the class who can ace every spelling test or math quiz, but gets F's regularly because he would rather clown around and make unappreciated fart jokes. "Talent" doesn't even begin to cover it, and then they play songs so full of juvenile prurience and glee, it would make a South Park character blush.

Folks who are Ween fans can't just review the albums, they have to give a Harry Knowles-like review where they describe the weather that day, what they ate, what their nightmares were, the position of the planets, the placement of the lint in their navel and so on. THEN they tell you about the first time they discovered Ween.

My experience was during the time I lived in Minneapolis, and I had made the long voyage on foot (I had no car at the time because a license and insurance in the Miniapple was more than my rent) to one of those great old-time music stores with the skank of a thousand incense sticks burned over time and sun-bleached posters of bands who didn't last beyond one solar-induced shift in the Pantone (R) spectrum of the same. I'd had a gyro for lunch, having only recently discovered Greek food to my utter delight, and was avoiding breathing directly on anyone should they react like a cartoon character encountering Pepe LePew with bad intentions. It was a cold, sunny day. I think it was the month of Aquarius with Venus descending. Over on the new rack was a primary red and blue line drawing of a face with a storm sewer mouth and shocked hair, entitled "God Ween Satan - The oneness". Cartoon satanism in rock has always annoyed me, so I picked it up to see how bad it really was. Well, it had songs like "You F*ucked Up", "I Got a Weasel", "Never Squeal on the Pusher" and, geez, "Papa Zit". Nothing about the devil, though. It was way cheap, about half the price of the other CDs, so I took a chance. Later, as my roommate and I were gasping with laughter only half way through, he wheezed, "Stop! Turn it off! My side hurts! I'm gonna hurf up my beer!"

I've been a big fan ever since.

I wish I could find the review I once read where the reviewer related his Ween discovery story about an entire group of partiers who had to gang up on a guy who had recently purchased "The Mollusk" and played it over and over until a spontaneous intervention erupted and someone chucked the CD out the window. This threw the guy into such a black mood, had tossed everyone out and wouldn't forgive his girlfriend until she bought him another copy. That's dedication.

And, how could you not love an album cover like this?

(This contains the hit "Voodoo Lady".)

With each subsequent album, they have gotten better, wierder, and much more diverse. They even did a country album . Their last studio release, "White Pepper", is so all over the road, if you didn't have the label to tell you differently, you would assume it was a sampler CD of different bands.

Frinstance, check out:
- "Even if You Don't" - where they sound just like the Beatles.
- "Bananas and Blow" - with steel drums and a Caribbean beat.
- "Stroker Ace" - a hard rocker with a title taken from a very bad Burt Reynolds movie.
- "Ice Castles" - which sounds like they discovered mom's Optigan in the garage, fired it up, and got this one last song out of it before the plastic sound disc shattered from age.

And they're all on this one CD.

Maybe your Ween experience is out there waiting for you. I hope it is.

In the meantime, pop open this short little spurt of a number: Papa Zit.
(I added the movie quote on the end, btw.)

Recent viewings

Being an official geek (though I may lose my membership if I can't get another job in IT. and since the industry currently thinks (stupidly) that India is the solution to everything, it looks grim), I have to watch each Star Wars film more than once. With the original three, that was no problem as they were great in each and every Ewok-free frame.

The new ones, of course, blow hot and cold, but since they're so patchy, they may as well just suck out loud completely. The whole first one is kind of a trial with only Ewan McGregor's dead-on impersonation of Obi-wan Kenobi being enjoyable. (Ok ok, Natalie Portman is very easy on the eyes, but that's like saying sunshine is bright.)

Over the course of three nights the family tried to wade through eppy 2 - "Attack of the Clones". The child bailed sometime during one of the many committee meetings that festoon the film like leaf rot. The wife remarked that it was a particularly bad soap opera, and she was right.

However, the last half-hour of the movie is nearly perfect, kinda gets the old skank back. From the time Natalie and future Darth arrive at the droid factory, the movie rocks. (The one scene where Obi-wan is escaping debris from the god-like flatulence bombs that turn asteroids into a deadly projectile sandboxes is kinda cool, too, but it's just a little too much like what we've seen before, so only that wild sound rescues the scene.)

If they were to edit together the first two movies, cutting out all the dross, leaving the last half hour or so alone, they would have one bitchin' movie.

Saw the newly restored Superman DVD on the library shelf, and snagged it for the MPC (Most Precious Child), as it is almost the perfect movie for her age. And since Superman is such an icon in American mythology (alongside "Star Trek", "Star Wars", "The Wizard of Oz", and "Gilligan's Island"), I wanted her to see it. She really liked it. I had forgotten how charming it was. And, for once, the footage they added actually improved the film.

It had some pretty good "making of" documentaries, too, better than the usual HBO/Showtime marketing campaign castoffs. The screen tests for Lois Lane were fun, especially the one with the ultra-hot Anne Archer. The discussion over the size of Superman's, uh, codpiece should make its way into every film school's texts. Oh and Cliff Claven has a bit part. He's the guy who can't turn the missle from nuking California. That alone made the revisit good enough for me.

Please, baby...

Don't be doing porn, k?

According to this Salon.com article (and if ya don't want to go through the ad to read it yourself, I excerpt most of the skankiest parts here), we have begun to cross that barrier that John Waters predicted we would: Mainstream actors and actresses are crossing the line into graphic sexual scenes for mainstream movies. I'm talking obvious genital contact and total everythang hanging out nekkedness.

Full frontal ain't such big news, because many have bared all before. A short list of major stars who have: Kathleen Turner, Richard ("gerbil boy") Gere, Sissy Spacek, Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan, the younger), Kathleen Quinlan, Elizabeth McGovern, Harvey Keitel, Karen Allen, Kathy Bates, blah-de-blah. We've seen a lot of thespian skin. Onward.

No, kids and kittens, I'm taking full frontal technicolor contact with the uglies outside of porno. I for one don't like it. I guess it blows (ahem) my suspension of disbelief, because one moment I'm in the middle of a story, but once the porn starts, suddenly I'm looking at Meg Ryan doing porn, and the story is kaput.

Frinstance, there ya are, handful of popcorn, engrossed, then:

In [Jane Campion's choppy, erotic thriller, In the Cut], a mustachioed and criminally attractive Mark Ruffalo takes recovering-moppet Ryan to bed, plants her on her stomach, spreads her legs, and performs oral sex on her from behind in a scene that lasts a breathtaking two minutes. A steady master shot with no quick cuts and no "Is that what I think it is?" moments, the scene depicts exactly what you think it does, and even the most jaded filmgoers will feel their pulses quicken.

Kinda makes you wonder if they left an "n" out of the title of the film, doesn't it? [Rimshot!]

Or, another frinstance is this:

After a rushed and awkward first encounter, [William H.] Macy's character [in The Cooler] makes amends by paying [Maria] Bello lip service. The cut of the film that screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January shows Bello's face grimacing in a quiet, almost pained orgasm. The camera then moves lower, where Bello's own hand and Macy's face rest in the actress's thatch of brunet pubic hair, earning the film a dreaded NC-17 rating.

You remember William H. Macy, right? He played the schlepp who tried to have his wife fake kidnapped in Fargo, but everything goes wrong and it ends with him being dragged by police from a hotel, screaming, in his undies.

I don't think I can make a believable assertion that I am not a prude, but I will state that I have found some scenes of sex in past movies wonderful, tasteful, and appropriate for the story, thus my suspension of disbelief expanded into other happy suspensions, if you will. But Kathleen Turner and William Hurt going at it in Body Heat, or Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lang in The Postman Always Rings Twice putting a cutting board to good use, were exciting and titillating, and most precisely because we don't see any genitalia during an erotic scene. Seeing someone's privates does something to our wetware (ultra-geek term for our brains, you perv), and suddenly we are slammed into another mode (whether we like it or not). I guess because that is something related to one of our most intimate acts that we can't feel anything but the emotions related to the same. It breaks the fourth wall in a way nothing else does, even a creepy 3-D Michael Jackson reaching out of the screen for your kids at Disney World.

For the record, I don't think seeing someone's nude crotch outside of a sex scene is the same, because - even though it still sends a spark to that lizard part of our brain - if we are just seeing someone nude outside of a sexual situation, we just register that they're nude and don't necessarily lunge into that part of our brain that is involved with intimacy and such. I think we register, "oh, nekkid body" and go on, essentially -- perhaps, at most, making a mental note about proportions or aesthetics.

For myself, I hope that Hollywood gets through this phase quickly, that it does not catch on, and that it's remembered only as something to avoid, much like "smell-o-vision".

Douglas Coupland booster club, meeting three

Just finished a raft of Douglas Coupland's fiction. Hey Nostradamus! made my jaw swing low in awe so many times, I just had to see what came before.

Thus far I've read:

- Shampoo Planet - Twentysomething deals with the initial steps out into the real world, hippie parents and cheating on girlfriend
- Life After God - Short story collection
- Girlfriend in a Coma - High school friends' stories that revolve around one of their group awaking from a coma after 16 years, and the world ending (no shit!)
- Generation X - His first novel, about three twentysomethings of the post babyboom generation out in the real world for the first time, which coins several memes and terms now taken for granted in journalism, fiction, and film. This was the mother ship.

I'm thrilled to gush that only the short story collection made me eye the TV remote a couple times. Everything else was fun, touching, and most of all written so well that sometimes it makes you (gentle reader) ache.

Every author has his or her constant themes. John Irving: the sweet comedy of life and the constant proximity of violence and tragedy. Stephen King: the horror and humor pulsing under the surface (like a straining boil) of modern American life. Patricia Cornwell: forensic medical examiner who hates men, loves guns, and solves nasty crimes. Dean Koontz: something evil is created in a government lab; everybody pays.


Douglas Coupland's common themes are:

- Fear of obliteration by nuclear war, especially seeing the flash that indicates detonation, thus having time to think about the coming wave of fire, and the world ending in general.

TLD: I think this is common for people my age. I once had a dream where, after the nuke hit, I walked around and saw the shadow left on the walls where my friends had been standing when it hit. I later discovered all of my friends have had that dream. A month or so ago, during a wicked thunderstorm, two lighting strikes detonated like explosions in the sky. Since we are more likely to get hit by a terrorist bomb now than we were in danger of being nuked by the Russians during the cold war, this scared the hell out of me. The whole room went completely white, with only a few stark shadows standing out in relief behind say, a chair, and the shock wave made the windows bulge.

- Fear of humanity wasting our opportunity for making the world a better place.

- Having a wasted life.

- Fear that God isn't there; wanting badly for God to be there.

_ Fear of love and the heartbreak it can bring.

- Inappropriate hair care.


The primary problem with Coupland's fiction (that I've read so far) is that there is never a single happy, uplifting, unalloyed moment. Yes, characters report hitting little pools of contentment, but as a reader, we are never allowed to see one of those moments live, with perhaps the exception of the ending of Generation X where the main character is essentially dog-piled on by jubilant retarded children, which the character reports is the happiest thing to have happened to him. (That isn't really a spoiler, btw.) Thus, there is never a let-up of the wonderful sad tone that Coupland is a master of. Another writer who's tone is primarily comic blue, John Irving, does provide a few laugh-out-loud moments in most of his best work, probably to provide relief. Coupland doesn't do that, to his detriment.

Still, he's a wonderful stylist, a master of tone, wonderful with dialogue, and tells compelling stories. Bet you'll like him if you're not already a fan.

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Here are some quotes I liked:

"History does not record my response." [As a response to another character's question] - From Generation X

"Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes." - From Generation X

"I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God." - From Life After God

Quits

Three books I have tried and tried to read and enjoy, but will now forever avoid as though they were homework from an Accounting 101 class:

- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Ulysses by James Joyce

I'm officially giving up for good on all of them.

Sorry guys.