Haneke and the Hollow Audience

Linking to this AV Club article about Michael Haneke's Funny Games (the German and American versions), is really just an excuse to say something that I've been talking about for years.

I'm surprised that writer Mike D'Angelo doesn't mention what every other article mentions about the film(s). In short, the film is about two upper-middle-class young men that torture a similarly affluent family, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally. The most noteworthy scene, at least according to serious critics, is the one in which, in the midst of a moment of toying with a victim, one of the malefactors turns directly to the camera and gives a knowing look.

The idea is that Haneke is acknowledging the audience in order to relate the characters' sadism with those of the viewing public. By watching this, you are in league with the sadists. This is horseshit. It's Haneke's film, not ours, and we participate because we're led to believe that his work is important. It's this reason that I won't watch his films--I don't want to participate.

To compare, imagine a man waving at you from a corner. "Hey, you seem pretty hip. I've got something to show you. It's really cool." You think, "Okay," and come over. He shows you a picture of a woman having sex with a horse. "Ha, ha. Now you're a pervert, too." No, you're not. You've been tricked into seeing something you didn't ask for.

It's disheartening and a dark sign of our times that our most important films are those considered to be "challenging" in the manner of "how much can you take?" Haneke's films are consistently about man's inhumanity to man--is this new ground? Does it need to be addressed by heightening the cruelty and rubbing our faces in it, disconnected from any judgment or resolution?

An artist has to go where the muse takes him but is this the best use of one of the world's best directors? More importantly, what does it say about the elite audience that these type of films are considered must-see?

Part of it, of course, is that the "elite" audience is no longer what it once was. Whereas the audience for "art films" at one time had a grounding in the Western canon and a capacity to understand film language--classic liberal arts training in the humanities. Today's audience is more likely to affect high-culture cinephilia as a status-indicator. Their training is in spotting fictional white men being evil.

The issues in The Seventh Seal or Viridiana, questions of faith and morality, are no longer part of the elite's mindset. A generation ago, the cultured allowed the challenges presented in those films to be taken as conclusions and we're left with a Nietzschean world; the only subjects considered worthwhile are sex, madness and extreme violence.

I played my part, too. When one pursues alternative media--artistic, cult and "bad"--the rabbit hole to extremity is too large to miss. Herschell Gordon Lewis leads to Cannibal Holocaust, leads to the Guinea Pig series. Eventually one looks to discover whether one has a breaking point.

One comes to realize that these extremes have an effect. Not necessarily a long-term, warp-your-mind effect--though that's possible. One gets through a movie showing the detailed torture of someone, or a painting of children being molested or a musical track of pained screams and one is forced to take stock of exactly how he feels. And that feeling is terrible:  disturbed, uncomfortable, dirty.

The films of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier (truly a waste, considering his earlier work) and works like A Serbian Film are for people who don't know how they want to feel. These are our cultural arbiters, hollow zombies who have no higher calling than their lifestyles, who fill their spiritual voids--a place normally for joy, wonder and love--with depravity, cruelty and disgust and call it high entertainment.

METH LAB! More Semantics...

Quick, what do you think of when someone says "meth lab?" Walter White in a sterilized warehouse? The image one gets from television, Intervention and Law & Order, is of a filthy kitchen with pots cooking, putting out corrosive vapors.

How about a 20 ounce soda bottle?

That's a "mobile methamphetamine lab" according to police and the news media. Couple faces meth charges weeks after release from jail, via WLKY, Louisville.

Naturally, upon finding a coke bottle in the car, the entire building was evacuated.

The locals got all het up, too:

"I just kept getting worked up. My heart is still racing over the whole thing," said William Smith, who lives in the apartment complex.

Is meth made from nitroglycerin? How is it that this "lab," small enough to fit into the pocket of a pair of cargo pants, can endanger an apartment building from the parking lot?

Police later found two more "labs" in the couple's hotel room.

Remember:  "Meth Lab"="Poison" and "Explosion." "Meth Lab" also equals "Walter White's industrial chemical warehouse" and "Coke bottle with 20 Sudafeds and brake fluid."

Where We're Headed

In general, what we're seeing is the dysfunctioning of our society.

We've lived so long with a functioning government, a functioning economy and a functioning society that it appeared indestructible. What does it matter that a political appointee is incompetent, that another entitlement is added to the tax roll, that another individual violates the social order?

The effect is like that of drilling holes in a foundation. One doesn't hurt--even twenty might not hurt. There will be a point, however, when the holes have begun weakening the foundation. Eventually it will collapse.

We see the evidence every day. NSA agents, "qualified" but poorly vetted, tracking their ex's communications. Misappropriation of funding everywhere. Schools playing the testing system. Single motherhood and the attendant problems everywhere. The US is slipping into the Third World, except with electronic gadgets.

When it collapses, it will be like a machine that's never been maintained, lurching and struggling to keep moving, slowing and grinding until it finally comes to a stop.

At least, I hope so. As this happens, the resourceful people whose ancestors built the machine will begin to work around the broken system. Once a critical mass of people start mistrusting the government--not generally but to accomplish whatever specific tasks they want done--then we'll start to see a real change.

What's unfortunate is that, following the principles of anarcho-tyranny, the government will attempt to use its power on those that were always obedient (while ignoring those that won't submit). Luckily for us, the force will be wielded by an incompetent.

The Girl Guides Believe that We All have Saintly Hearts

Dalrock points out the recent change in the Girl Guides' vow. The organization, the UK's Girl Scouts counterpart, now asks girls to pledge to “be true to myself and develop my beliefs” in place of “love my God,” which itself replaces “do my duty to God.”

More than the devolution of the sentiment, it shows a destructive assumption our betters hold.

They seem to believe that there is a lowest common denominator to morality. If we simply remove the strictures of organized religion and other small-mindedness, we could all live happily by following our hearts.

If there is a universal bottom to human behavior, rules which come entirely from one's gut, then it's close to that which we see in the wilds of Afghanistan and the darkest regions of Darfur.

The lowest common denominator is very, very low. It's best that we never approach it.

A Few Semantic Association Games

Reading an article about "sex trafficking:"  Are they talking about trafficking as we've been taught it is, the kidnapping, through force or trickery, of individuals for transport into another country followed by coercion into prostitution? Or are they talking about run-of-the-mill prostitution, with the sad-but-common indignities of pimps and brutality?

The Steubenville rape case:  After all this time, I still don't have a good idea whether the crime was an actual, multiple partner, PIV full penetration gang rape, or what I originally heard, a group of kids that stripped a drunk girl and took pictures with one young man digitally penetrating her. According to the foot soldiers of the feminist ranks, the difference doesn't matter.

"Sexual predator:"  The term conjures a criminal who hunts and exploits the innocent. The label may be applied to those charged with nearly any sex-related offense, no matter how solitary or consensual.

Semantic association has the same problem as diagnosis drift, that the description becomes larger and larger until its original meaning has lost its usefulness. Thus, the "racism" of the lynch mob becomes equal to the "racism" of the little old lady who locks her car door upon seeing a black man. Even the difference in degree is lost.

Thus no victory is ever won, and the enemy never shrinks in ferocity and ubiquity. Thus there is always a need to escalate the war.

A Word on the Sophisticated Defense of Miss Manning

Vice published a pro-trans response to Bradley/Chelsea Manning's announcement that he is seeking a sex change and wishes to be referred to as "she." (I, on the other hand, believe that it's a perfectly good rule to wait until the surgery has been performed and all the legal hoops have been jumped through; if I'm called to refer to Manning, it will be as "him" until something has changed.)

The piece is a middle-of-the road anti-cis rant, notable only for being a typical example of how they are pushing their agenda. A few thoughts.

• The alliance between the homosexual community and the trans community doesn't seem to be an easy fit. In fact, the whole alphabet soup of the alliance (LGBTQ and whatever else has been added in the last two years) is shaky. In a large way, tolerance encompasses the group but gays want tolerance for alternate forms of sexual expression and transsexuals want tolerance for a conception of the human form and substance that really is unlike what we've seen before.
• Feminists have a shaky alliance with transsexuals because of their shared belief in the division between sex and gender. However, it's doomed to fail before the gay union falls apart. Transsexuals change their sex to fit what they perceive to be their gender--in their minds, gender is fixed while biology is not (think about that for a second) while feminists believe that gender is a social construct. This, and it doesn't look good to have men becoming women when the feminist message is that women are victims of our culture.
• As the trans-rights issues become more prominent, it's important to realize that, even in this article, the count in America is 700,000 trans-identifying people. That's 1 in 500. Gay marriage laws only affected the privileges of, at most, 4% of the population; this community is on .2%. Take that with you as the media rants and raves.
• Equally important is to take the propaganda's historical and cross-cultural citations with a big grain of salt. Same-sex attraction has been threaded throughout history. Sex-identity-confusion is very rare.
• Attaching this movement to history is useful because a simple run through our living memory makes a strong case that, put bluntly, gender identity disorders seem to be made up. I see a parallel with the rise in Mulitple Identity Disorders from the 70s to the mid-90s. People didn't seem to have it until they've heard of it. Both conditions being entirely self-reported, its easy to parrot the accepted narrative and receive validation.
• My prediction is that the coming years will see a rise in those that identify as trans and even more so as homo- or bisexual. (Particularly the latter. I imagine we'll see a lot of "retired" bisexuals who've settled into heterosexuality as they've gotten older.) My ugly reason for this? It gives alienated kids a reason to be special. This will be hard to prove, of course, but it's my instinct--how many adolescents flirt with communism, anarchism, goth culture, hippie culture and the like because it creates a more concrete identity as being different from those around them. By increasing acceptance of the fringe, we're increasing the options for the disaffected.
• The focus of the article is that wanting to change one's sex is not a sign of mental illness. I like the sputtering disbelief that Kevin D. Williamson brought up Body Identity Integrity Disorder. For one, the only difference I can see between wanting to cut off one's leg and wanting to cut off one's penis--in order to feel that one's body matches one's internal perception of it--is that the latter has a lot of gender theory behind it. For another, it's a great example of a leftist using the "I can't believe you said that" shaming tactic. How dare you compare two like things! And in the next paragraph, we get sex-change operations compared to body modification--only a square would discriminate against that.
• This is the work in the semantic world we've been seeing a lot of. In the largest frame, so much chatter from the Left is about human and civil "rights" as if these are tangible objects. Americans believe in rights--they're written right into our most seminal documents--so we have a hard time arguing against more and more "rights" being discovered and inscribed into law. In this formulation, a "sex change" is nothing more than a "body modification" like a nose piercing. We have a "right" to modify our body, so why stop at complete removal and change of our genitalia?
• But the argument is betrayed in this line:  

I imagine he opposes less radical body mods like corset piercings as well—or maybe he doesn’t, since he finds them less icky, which seems to be his criteria for who deserves to be labeled “sick” or “normal.”

I used the example of nose piercings, a common alteration. Writer Harry Cheadle just had to use corset piercings, in which several dozen rings are put through the skin on one's back. Those rings are then looped through with ribbon or something similar and pulled, mimicking the tie to a corset. Please note how boring and conventional Cheadle finds this modification, nothing nearly as cool as splitting one's tongue in half. The goal, it shouldn't surprise you to learn, is not to advance the transsexual but to push back at the normal people. It's more r/ selected, passive-aggressive warfare--find your enemy's enemy and help him. Cheadle can't help but identify himself as one of the sophisticated people, who finds a corset piercing an everyday occurrence and has the most up-to-date attitudes toward transsexuals.

• Finally, note this:

Why do so many trans people try to commit suicide? Could it have something to do with the widespread prejudice they face—i.e., people like Williamson calling them mentally ill?

Traditionalists and others on the Right need to find an answer to this kind of question right away. This is the same motor that's behind anti-racism, feminism, communism and anything that's out to destroy society--the slightest whiff of intolerance for the cause du jour is enough to wreck everything. The rate of suicide among post-op transsexuals couldn't be that they are profoundly disturbed individuals who have made irreversible changes--no, it's that someone, somewhere, doesn't like what they've done and they can't live with the intolerance. 

India's Pornographic Invasion

Geez, there sure are a lot rapes in India making international news, huh?

It makes one wonder what's going on over there. Is it that there are actually more rapes in India than before or that the rapes have gotten more horrifying? Or is it that the police are taking it more seriously than before? Or is it that they are getting reported more often? Or is it that their news media is more expansive than before, meaning local crimes get national coverage?

I was lucky enough to travel in India in 1998. I can say that the attitude toward women there is similar to what I've always heard about Italy, namely, that the men there are always on the prowl and free with their hands.

I wonder--and there's no way of knowing this from the outside--if the rapid Westernization of the country has something to do with the upswing in rape. That is, maybe India wasn't culturally prepared for the sexual liberty their American friends have been importing.

When I was there, just as India was becoming a technology center, the internet was hard to find (and I wasn't looking for it; communication was still through land lines). They had cable television, which everybody seemed to love, and Western programming was rare. The culture, despite the grabby proles, was very chaste.

My ex-wife said, "It's like the fifties here." As a long-time student of the other entertainment (I'm nothing if not diverse in my interests), I figured it was more like the mid to late sixties.

I mentioned Bollywood films the other day and it's fairly well known that Mumbai produces films at a rate comparable and sometimes greater than Hollywood. And just like the West in the sixties, India had exploitation films and grindhouse theaters.

I only got to see one, though I would have seen all that crossed my path if I didn't have to take a woman with me. Because these theaters were no place for a woman. My ex-wife definitely got sized up as we walked in. We were able to avoid any untoward activity by buying the most expensive seats, which were probably 8 cents or something.

And even though the aura of the place was seedy and forbidden, the film was, again, surprisingly chaste. There were two female leads. In traditional sexploitation fashion, one was attractive and remained clothed and the other was a bit pudgy and had a nude sex scene.

The story, briefly, was about a couple who go out to the country for their honeymoon and discover that their seems to be haunted. In fact, the elderly owners are pretending to haunt the hotel in revenge for the gang rape and murder of their daughter years before. How this all worked was lost in the Hindi dialogue, if it was addressed logically at all. (Most Indians, and the media, speak in a mix of Hindi and often archaic English. I knew it was their honeymoon, for example, because the husband kept sing-songing "Honeymoon!" in excitement.)

I was charmed by the framing of the sex scene within the context of a honeymoon, as if seeing a couple have extra-marital sex would offend the audience. I was disgusted by the sex scene itself. For one, it went out of focus, like the cameraman covered his eyes out of shame while they were filming it. For another, there was a strange fixation on tongue kissing, with a good 90 seconds devoted to the couple rubbing their fully-extended tongues together. The nudity, too, was strange, like a camera shoved into a dressing room, barely pointed in the right direction, one shot showing a hairless pubis (without the attendant organ) that looked like a rippling plain of flesh.

Bollywood films are long and are usually structured like two feature-length films. It's as if Jaws II played for forty-five minutes, then Sheriff Brody had a flashback in which the entirety of Jaws was played. After the flashback is finished, we watch the second half of the film. This film wasn't quite that accomplished, so we had a little more than an hour of the newlyweds' experience in the hotel and then the same amount of time devoted to the flashback, ending in the aforementioned gang rape which was the second "sex" scene of the film.

At the same time, I found a copy of India's answer to Playboy, which was just as explicit as Hefner's brainchild was in 1967--that is, not very. I did find the advice column particularly interesting, though:  one question was whether the above-the-clothing fondling the writer was engaging with his sister (both early 20s) was normal or not. The magazine, ostensibly for the sexually sophisticated, struck me as sexually naive, if not ignorant.

The mid to late sixties is known as the beginning of the "roughie" era in sexploitation history. The time of "nudie cuties" was over because naked volleyball and window-peeping no longer did the trick. The average pop culture enthusiast has heard the name Ilsa:  She-Wolf of the SS--this is a late entry to the roughie genre. I got the impression that Indian exploitation culture was more or less at that point in pornographic development.

I'll thumbnail the progression from here. The roughies gave way to penetrative sex, through art films like I am Curious--Yellow and "scientific documentaries" along with 8mm loops. That led to Deep Throat and a national conversation about pornography, mainstreaming it to a great degree and eventually losing the violence that marked the late sixties era. Pornography was a legitimate business long before I got to India.

What I'm getting at is that India probably got a full-bore dose of our modern-era pornography in the last ten years. I'm not saying that porn leads to rape but I do say that it alters our perceptions of sex. I also say that the introduction of porn into India wasn't gradual. Their sexual attitudes were changing--Bollywood movies didn't even allow kissing between married couples when I was there--but they probably weren't ready for what the West found common-place. I think it made India a worse place to be a woman than before.

More on the Semantic World

Describing the semantic world is difficult without going into deconstruction-speak, where words start taking quotations and "meaning" becomes ""meaning"" until nothing means anything. But it's a lot more simple than that.

The semantic world is about the associations we bring to abstractions. The pictures we create when we hear a word.

"I like drugs."

If I were to follow that with, "Penicillin is my favorite," you'd be surprised but not confused. I simply took a word with multiple meanings and used it in its less-popular form.

"He lost his toes to frostbite in Africa." Africa, in the understanding we share, is not a place to get frostbite. At the mention of Africa, you might get a picture of the sweltering Congo or the sun-baked Sahara but probably not the frosty peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It's possible to get frostbite in Africa but we don't think of it.

The semantic world is the foundation of culture. Culture is having the same associations to the same subjects.

This is obvious but understanding the semantic world is vital at those places where we meet the unknown. "Undefined" is a better term. Are the lights in the woods spirits or the eyes of Vulpes vulpes? Is this investment risky or a sure thing?

The semantic world is a map of our entire environment, physical, mental and beyond. Mississippi is full of rednecks. The Ivy League is full of idiots. Heaven is full of souls.

The semantic world is where we argue. Are people that sleep in the street homeless or bums? Are some of them addicts or debauchees?

Generally, over a long time, the semantic map approaches reality. There are no arguments over what constitutes cheese, for example. The heart is a four-chambered organ. Jerry is a homeless addict--he keeps going to treatment but can't keep a job or pay his rent. Jim is a debauched bum--he tried to smuggle wine into the shelter.

A false understanding of the abstract can only be maintained by studied avoidance of the concrete. That which makes the most sense wins, even if it's later rather than sooner.

The Semantic World and the Narrative

If there's a better name for the semantic world, I'd like to hear it.

Steve Sailer and others talk about the Narrative. In small form, the Narrative is about whatever PC elements apply to a particular news story. Trayvon Martin was a victim of stereotyping in the Narrative, for example. In this way, the Narrative is the way we are supposed to think about hot-button topics when they appear.

In a larger sense, the Narrative is about the West's unerring march of progress. Ideas of the past are conquered unconditionally and today is better than all the days before it. We are smarter and more free than we ever have been but we still must do battle with ignorance and oppression. Tomorrow, more false ideas will be defeated and we will be better people than even today.

More people every day are seeing that the Narrative is fiction as what we see in the media becomes more of an alternate universe than a picture of reality. In this separation we can see what I mean by the semantic world.

The thought first came to me in one of my universities. We were studying early colonial writings about the Americas, particularly Amerigo Vespucci's. Vespucci's accounts were salacious, portraying the natives as being lax in apparel and loose in morals. It was advertising, really, to get royal subjects to become colonists but it was also creating an understanding of the Americas in the European mind. It was an expansion of the semantic world.

Operation in the semantic world is most obvious in talk show monologues. Shallow and obvious, the jokes are precisely about what we all are expected to understand. Lindsay Lohan likes drugs. Donald Trump has weird hair.

And, of course, Paula Deen. The old connection was "Paula Deen=butter." "Butter" is "butter=unhealthy food." "Unheathy food±white trash." Paula Deen also equals "Southern," which also plus-or-minus equals "white trash."

Clearly, there weren't too many steps to "racist," so the revelations of her using the Forbidden Word easily attached that association to her. "Racist" is our cultural trump word, the association that blots out all other qualities. Turn on Letterman tonight and see that "Paula Deen=racist."

I don't mean to start talking in formulas; they don't effectively communicate what I mean, anyway. The semantic world is more of a cloud than clear connections.

Semantic connections are both malleable and stubborn. We're reaching the end of the age in which they have been the most manipulated and moving to a time, I think, of battling understandings.

Let me unpack that statement. In our post-Christ era, understanding of the things in the world was dominated by Catholic meaning. The printing press was an opportunity for that understanding to be both spread and challenged by alternative viewpoints. The marketplace of ideas was open to the public.

The marketplace remained free, if limited by means and geography, until the early 20th century as the media industries became centralized profit generators, the era of Hearst and Pulitzer, the movie studios and the broadcast companies. (Europe and Britain were a little further along and a little different but we've ended up in the same place.)

Around the time of WWII--and I heard about this a lot in J-school--the news industry made it a goal to become objective reporters of the day's events, abandoning the proselytizing that was the reason most newspapers were founded.

Looking back, this aspiration to objectivity was more about sales than nobility, no matter what Edward R. Murrow might tell you. Being a Republican paper in a Democratic city limits the number of possible readers. Still, the ensuing generations of reporters were taught with objectivity as an ideal.

An illustrative thumbnail aside:  Take the different semantic representations of the reporters in The Front Page and those in All the President's Men. In the former, the reporters are eager to find facts that make a hot story; in the latter, the reporters are out to expose corruption.

The main problem with centralization is that the temptation to abuse one's power is irresistible. As the news and entertainment media became more monolithic, it became too easy to editorialize in subtle ways. Show Dan Quayle staring off into space, maybe. Show footage of the president throwing up into someone's lap. What was someone going to do, turn on ABC instead? They're all showing the same stuff.

The internet is a return to the free marketplace of ideas, where anyone can write a book or make a video and have it available around the world, which is more than any content producer in history ever had. The media conglomerates are scrambling as profits fall and their producers cling to their prestige.

As Big Media declines, we're entering an age in which ideas are battling on a more level field. The cognitive dissonance one feels when watching the news is no longer confined to the individual and his immediate circle--now he can go online and find out just how many people think the Narrative is fictional.

All of this happens in the semantic world, the world of our understandings. The monolithic media understands Paula Deen to be a racist; we understand her to be a victim of a PC witch hunt. The monolithic media understands itself to be a noble force of progress; we understand it to be an alienated echo chamber of elites.

The Narrative will fail because it doesn't fit the world as we already understand it, through our own experiences. It will fail because we bring the realities it ignores to the forefront again and again. It will fail because it's about understanding first, reality second.

The colonists eventually discovered that the natives weren't as licentious as they were led to believe.

Current Obsessions: Tyler Perry Part 3

Various thoughts:

Last night I watched the film that started my recent interest in Tyler Perry, Temptation:  Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.

Not surprisingly, I enjoyed that one, too. I was most excited by the element that none of the liberal critics wanted to mention:  the villain is clearly Satan. Yes, the HIV that the female lead gets is none other than the wages of sin.

The film is more a parable than a morality play, a fine distinction but Temptation is allegorical where a morality play isn't. There's even a scene in which the husband descends into Hell, in this case a nightclub, moving past sexy women who stroke his chest to find his wife drunk and probably high as one of several women lounging on the satanic figure. Not to mention that her mother calls him "The Devil" several times.

I've made a couple of theoretical defenses of Perry's films but I don't understand the general distaste for him. His films are fun even when they're completely serious like this one. Sure, there's a message, and it's not a subtle message, but so does every other film, in one way or another.

I guess I've answered my own question. The establishment media thinks they're giving the ultimate damnation when they call Perry's movies "corny." They are corny and neither Perry nor I think that's a bad thing.

If anything, he's rescuing corny movies from oblivion. Watching Leave it to Beaver or The Waltons today, we've got no point of relation. Those worlds are not only not connected to our world, they aren't even part of our semantic world--that is, the Great Depression is more alien to us than Alien. The suburban world of Beaver is now Desperate Housewives. Perry makes sentimental, moral movies that take place in a world with strip clubs, rape and HIV--our world and the world as we understand it. No wonder the "enlightened" hate him.

Temptation is the first non-Madea film I've watched and I had some trepidation about seeing it. I love the character of Madea; she hits me in a way that bypasses my brain and just makes me laugh.

From the outside, it appeared that Madea was just the old stereotype:  a take-no-guff, sassy, moralistic old black lady. She's that but she's also a semi-reformed bad girl. The Madea sub-plot in Madea's Big Happy Family is that she doesn't know (or care) who the father of her adult daughter is. She creates criminal chaos and even goes to jail in, well, Madea Goes to Jail.

Big Happy Family is not the best film, even by the standards of the soap opera style Perry has, but it's a great example of what his movies are all about and a great example of what Madea can do. My favorite scene is a big, big throwback. Madea's single-time lover, Brown, the supposed father of her daughter Cora, has come from the hospital with the news that he's diabetic. Madea and her brother, Joe (also Perry), sling insult after insult at him. This scene is old vaudeville, like watching W.C. Fields throw barbs at a child.

But Big Happy Family's structure is a good example of the mechanical style that the critics don't like. As a mother tries to tell her family that she's got terminal cancer, her children are too wrapped up in their personal problems to hear the news. Madea is called in as an expert and, in the end, deus ex machina.

It's the least deft denouement in a series that isn't know for its deftness. After allowing the animosities between the family members to rise to the surface, Madea sits them down at the mother's funeral and proceeds to tell the secrets and home truths that make them understand and forgive one another. This allows for a comic--and too long--final scene in which Madea goes on Maury to find out Brown is not Cora's father and make the typical Maury scene.

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

Steve Sailer has a half-review of The Great Gatsby here. It's nice to know that I wasn't the only one who waited until the week before it comes out on DVD.

Director Baz Luhrmann is another that I keep an eye on, having enjoyed Romeo + Juliet but also having walked out of Moulin Rouge twice. I don't have a problem with the flash of his style except that it's so infuriatingly empty. He has a great sense of just how much can be put on the screen but no idea how to connect all that stuff to the themes of the story.

The flash is equally pointless in Gatsby but it didn't bother me as much, except for one trick repeated from Moulin Rouge in which the camera pulls away from the parties to show the entire dark city. I guess Luhrmann thinks this looks impressive even though it's a basic violation of film language--zoom in for significance, zoom out for perspective. Seeing Gatsby's enormous house dwarfed by Manhattan makes his parties look like no big deal. It's like seeing a red octagon with the word "GO" written on it.

Luhrmann would probably find the most success if he kept his glittery hands off of Important Works. No one thought Gatsby needed more Jay-Z songs, but an old Danielle Steele novel might. He doesn't seem to be a good story generator, so he needs source material, but he aims too high--Shakespeare doesn't need to be Bazzed-up.

Luhrmann's Gatsby reminds me of George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five in that neither director seemed to particularly care about the novels, opting instead to faithfully adapt the story without spending much time thinking about the themes. Zack Snyder's Watchmen was the same way, a very shallow and literal translation. In Gatsby this is most clear in the character of Daisy--Sailer's friend said it best:

Daisy Buchanan, of course, is supposed to be shallow - but I couldn't tell if Luhrmann understood that, or if he thought she was just dandy.   

I can say that this is the first movie since This Boy's Life that I enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio; he's very charismatic here and seems to be having fun. His performance also showed me why so many prominent directors like working with him:  he does exactly what they ask him to do, even if it's wrong. In the scene in which Gatsby reconnects with Daisy, DiCaprio goes way over the top, turning the film into a teen virginity comedy for a few minutes. I suspect the choice was Luhrmann's.

And of course my usual complaint--why did it have to be two-and-a-half hours long?

Current Obsession: Tyler Perry Part Two

In my first piece, I discussed my reasons for looking into Tyler Perry's films. I found that I liked them quite a bit. A few thoughts:

I've been following Perry's career since Diary of a Mad Black Woman. I had never heard of him and was just as surprised as the critical establishment that the film opened at number one.

I chalked the success up to The First Wives Club Syndrome. An underrepresented market, one that aren't regular movie-goers, seizes on a film and makes it a surprise hit. The next few years see an attempt to mimic the movie but the audience returns to its old habit of not going to theaters. Sister Act and Boyz N Tha Hood are other films like this.

Perry didn't let the iron cool and made his name a brand. Now a Tyler Perry fan can go to see a new film every few months.

From reading reviews, my impression was that critics don't understand black audiences. 

Subtlety is not a valued quality in black media. It just isn't, and it makes white critics uncomfortable. That's why they can watch a high-camp spectacle of degradation like Precious and think it's an important film; they've been overwhelmed. The somber approach and Lee Daniel's pomposity guided them through their confusion to arrive at praising the film.

Take a look at, say, Prince. His work is brilliant but no one would call it subtle. Listen to "conscious hip-hop" from KRS-ONE to Arrested Development to Mos Def--it's downright didactic. Look at the writing of 70s blacksploitation films. Even the most mainstream black director, Spike Lee, is not subtle, only sometimes ambiguous.

White critics are used to Jack Nicholson raising an eyebrow, not Angela Bassett setting fire to a bathtub full of clothes. They want to see blacks in a ghetto being abused, not in a McMansion with marital problems. When melodramatic action is applied to non-exotic situations, suddenly it's over the top.

Which brings me to the next element that the critical establishment doesn't understand about black entertainment. The most persistent knock on Perry's films is the dramatic shift in tone from scene to scene. They don't seem to understand that this isn't inconsistency as much as putting on a full show. 

I don't find it any more jarring than the love interest sub-plot in a action or comedy movie. And Perry doesn't let the lines cross. His comedy characters (except for the central character Madea) don't suddenly become dramatic and vice versa. Considering some of the subject matter and performances in his films, the comedy scenes are like getting air before diving back in. 

For cultural comparison, I suggest watching Bollywood film from before 2004 or so, before Indian-American cross-fertilization really began. In those films, there's always several comedy scenes, many large musical numbers and every major character gets a scene in which they cry. To say that Bollywood and Perry films have inconsistent tones is like calling a Persian rug "too busy."

What I'm saying, then, is that one is too strap in and take the ride when watching these films. Judge them on what they're trying to accomplish, not on how they compare to a Lars von Trier film.

Part 3 will discuss, finally, what I like about the Tyler Perry films I've seen.

Once Again, Dangerous Minds Crows About GOP Problems

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned Dangerous Minds' Richard Metzger and his frothing rants about the Republican Party.

This whole “GOP Civil War” thing we’ve been hearing about sounds like it’s about to get very interesting, very quickly. This is a loud shoe dropping. With the deep, deep unbridled fanaticism within the party’s ranks, any sort of perceived ideological “betrayals” by former allies in the conservative movement makes the likelihood of that once ironclad coalition splintering into warring former Republican factions seem likely indeed.

This piece isn't as full of schadenfreude as others but it is insightful as to what exactly Metzger believes is going on within the party. I'm allergic to this kind of horse-race politics but I am interested in the ideological assumptions that are on parade. Metzger is wrapped up in the spectacle as much as any eight-year-old that doesn't realize wrestling is fake. 

He's a great example of the myopia afflicting the Left's soldiers. Not only is he gleeful about any news that foretells the GOP's demise, he really thinks that it is a diametrically-opposed enemy. This is common among the garden-variety liberals that I know. The Republican establishment are theocratic puppet-masters, the Tea Partiers are in KKK robes after nightfall, and Ron Paul supporters are foil-hatted lunatics trying to return us to Hobbsian chaos. They truly have no idea that there are growing numbers of people with truly contradictory opinions.

I don't see a better possible option than the collapse of the Republican Party. For one, all it's been for the last 50 years is a fly trap for everyone who opposes the Left's policies, a way of neutralizing dissenters. More importantly, once it's gone, the Liberal Hate Machine will be forced to cannibalize itself. Soon enough, those that want Change Now! will be demonized by those who want Change Yesterday! God have mercy on the liberal who actually has convictions and finds that his views, once center-left, are now far-right.

Metzger reminds me of something I read at First Things (I think) when Andrea Dworkin died. Speaking to the writer, she was smart, witty and engaging until a feminism-related subject came up. At that, she snapped into street crazy mode and started ranting. (Anonymous Conservative is great at explaining this.) Metzger is the same way and it ruins his site. He's got very similar tastes in entertainment as I do (though we draw very different lessons from them). It's unfortunate that he regularly drops a bomb like this into the mix.

Mainstream Lady Gaga Backlash Begins

From Flavorwire:

“Applause,” by contrast, is empty self-referentialism, both in its visual aesthetic and its lyrics: “I live for the applause.” But we’ve always known that — Gaga’s entire career has revolved around being that girl in drama class who stands up on stage and demands that everyone look at her.

It shouldn't be a surprise, but it is a shame. I found "Bad Romance" and "Telephone" to be extremely interesting pop songs. The horror-sex aesthetic of that era fascinated me. I hoped that the modern-relationship dystopia in those songs would be further explored, but it seems, as the quote above illustrates, that Gaga's primary artistic goal is more, more, more attention.

Pop music is a window into the changing nature of romantic relationships from the earliest days of the sexual revolution. I find the mid-seventies to mid-eighties to be the most confused and thus more fun to examine. On the one hand, there are plenty of hot-one-night-stand songs while on the other, sex-as-doom songs.

Gaga's two biggest hits are really about relationships that are defined by unprincipled and unconstrained women. "Bad Romance" is about just that, a passionate, ugly and ultimately hateful sexual relationship, built on lust and aggression. "Telephone" is about the disposability of men; the incessant calls of her paramour are interrupting her good times at the club.

I think that Gaga would be better served by staying a nightmare sex object. It's already successful, no one else is doing it (or can) and it fits right into our current stage of the sexual revolution. Being an art world prophet probably strokes her ego and can be a source of inspiration--think of all the otherwise worthless art majors flocking around her to offer their best ideas, if they can get close enough. But she doesn't seem smart enough to make her grad-student frames compelling. Especially if she punctuates it with feuds with Perez Hilton and confessions of eating disorders.

What she's trying to do, I think, is parallel Madonna's essential secret of success. The visual and performance parallels are obvious, but what really made Madonna the icon she is now is that she routinely collaborated with cutting-edge music producers. Gaga seems to be trying to do the same thing with visual and conceptual artists but I think that she's neglecting her core product. If nobody wants to dance or sing along to her music, why should we watch her?

The quote gets to the most likely future for Gaga:  that woman who's always doing something weird and becoming increasingly desperate.

"I wouldn't let what happened change the way I approached life"

Via The Council of Conservative Citizens

Salon's political writer Brian Beutler writes about "the shooting that nearly killed me."

The Council performs their duty, pressing back the orthodoxy that being a victim of a black criminal demands a redoubling of anti-racism. I don't disagree, but this rang a chord with me:

But the moment I woke up in the hospital I promised myself I wouldn’t let what happened change the way I approached life. I wouldn’t flee the city. I wouldn’t start looking over my shoulder.

I woke up the morning after my 31st birthday with no memory of most of the night or how I got home (my friend told me that the police helped drag me into my apartment) and in terrible, wrong pain. I realized I had to call an ambulance.

To make a long story short, after getting a catheter put into me, a scare that I'd been dosed with antifreeze and hours in the emergency room, I was told that someone had slipped me opiates and tricyclic antidepressants. I won't get into the urological details, but the drugs started a chain of events that resulted in acute kidney failure.

(I've suffered no ill effects since my recovery, which is a blessing. My kidneys shut down because they were working properly, not because they had been damaged.)

Needless to say, going through such an experience is a tornado of emotions. When I discovered that I'd been roofied, for lack of a better term, I had a brief moment of relief that I hadn't given myself alcohol poisoning. That moment passed in an instant, replaced by the gravity of the knowledge that someone had almost killed me.

(I believe the incident stemmed from recklessness, not malice. The person wanted me to get really, really hammered, probably. After all, there are more efficient ways of poisoning someone.)

I had a moment much like Beutler's. Once we had figured out what happened, after I was in the clear, they moved me to a private room elsewhere in the hospital. In the quiet, I had the same thought, "This doesn't change anything." My philosophy, the worldview I'd constructed allowed for anyone to be a random victim, even me. Especially me. I believed that the universe was mechanistic and random. My appearance in the world was happenstance and my exit would be, too. 

The important thing was that I already knew this. That I was a victim was no surprise--my worldview already told me that I was just another ant in a colony. I was reflecting on what happened to me and finding that there was no incongruity between ugly reality and what the world looked like to me.

So I know what Beutler is talking about. I hate to use the word but the feeling is very close to being smug. Something close to vindication but closer to some kind of martyrdom, like a pacifist allowing marauders to murder his family, pretending that his principles somehow make it all right.

That instant stuck with me for a while, more than the pain and more than when the doctor told me that I'd been dosed. Ultimately, I realized that it was hollow. Thinking that way made me a pinball, bounced around by impersonal forces; I can say that it unequivocally felt untrue. Looking back, I can say that it was the beginning of faith.

I wonder what's really gone on in Beutler's mind. I suppose it's too much to hope for that he's gowing through the same process in writing about it now. But we know that the Left has its own faith and that is to believe in a priori principles despite all evidence. 

But his mind can't be the same as before. What happened to him was much worse than what happened to me and, as much as I wanted to say that nothing changed, my deepest instincts have been altered. Several years later, I had a brief but intense bout of food poisoning. I was almost delirious and was convinced that the source of my illness was poison injected into me by an operative using one of those umbrellas with a needle at the tip used in the Cold War. I remembered it perfectly and, if I could only move properly, I could find the mark where the needle went in. A few years after that, I drank too many shots at a holiday party and went home to send text messages in gibberish, asking for help because I knew someone had put something in my drink again. When my rational mind has been stripped away, I'm convinced that an unknown assailant has made me a victim again. 

Since Beutler has made his victimization a parable of anti-racism, how will he react when the adrenaline is flowing?

Current Obsessions: Tyler Perry - Part One

Last week I spent a lot of time working on a piece about the shift in attitude towards Tyler Perry and what that represents about the Left's change in attitude toward the black community. It won't be published.

I'm not interested in journalism and I wouldn't be satisfied making a long-form case for my opinions without doing a lot of work to back them up. There are plenty of people who are doing great work in that respect; I couldn't really add much to the discussion, except that my perspective comes from the world of entertainment rather than politics.

Still, I'll summarize. My impression is that, as Steve Sailer pointed out, gays are becoming our Most Favored Oppressed Minority, supplanting the black community. I looked at this through a piece at The AV Club detailing the backlash to Tyler Perry's Temptation. That film ends with the revelation that the female lead contracted HIV in the process of having an affair. Though the article doesn't explicitly mention homosexuality, rejection of the idea that AIDS is a punishment for moral transgression is the seed for the contemporary gay rights movement and is sacrosanct in that community.

I feel that Tyler Perry is generally supporting traditional morality in his films, sexual fidelity, centering on the family and all-around moral uprightness. The introduction of HIV to his latest film was an opportunity for progressive libertines to start attacking his message after thirteen successful films in seven years.

Up until then, as the article points out, Perry was only given left-handed praise, lauding his success as a black filmmaker while always emphasizing that his movies were poorly made. In our contemporary media, we can only attack from the left, so his race and prominence protected him from the full force of the Cathedral's semantic division. That is, unless a more favored group could be found in conflict.

Criticizing the black community for not supporting the gay community is a new development. I wanted to explore how black leadership has created problems for the ruling Left and created an opportunity for gay rights to become the Most Important Issue of Our Time.

In the piece, I discussed that the Great Racial Incidents of the last ten years have been humiliating failures. The Jena Six, the Duke lacrosse team rape accusation and, finally, the George Zimmerman case have all been proven to be smoke and mirrors. In addition, the outrage from the Left and the black community has become more rote and perfunctory with each progressive incident. The holes in these stories are easy targets for the opposition and have resulted in the Left being the subject of mockery, which they absolutely hate.

Gays, in the media-approved stereotype, are pleasant, fun, hard-working, put-together and support a message of sexual liberation. Not to mention that this stereotype is white, with the same cultural touchstones and education, less likely to go on television and accuse the police of systematic murder of young thugs or calling folks "devils."

My point was that the backlash of Temptation was a siren call that it was time to call black leadership on the carpet for taking too much and not giving enough back. (I stress "black leadership" because the evidence online shows that the black community is growing more diverse in thought each day. The self-appointed leadership is as monolithic as ever.) After fifty years of granting black demands--and getting a black president--it's time for blacks to start carrying the Left's water and get with the whole program, not just their interests. 

As I was writing, I realized that I was defending Perry without, you know, having watched his films. I've been following his career and caught a few scenes here and there, but I hadn't sat through a single one. I was interested in his right to send a traditionalist message but hadn't listened to what his message actually was. 

So, as a matter of due diligence, I watched a few. I loved them. More in Part Two...

More on Lee Daniels

I have to admit that I'm getting excited about Lee Daniels' The Butler. Whew! It looks terrible and, like I said before, it just may be Socially Significant enough that the critics will give it a pass.

The main problem with Daniels is that he has no sense of humor. The only light-hearted part of Precious was a scene about stealing fried chicken, a scene that prompted these questions: Are we supposed to like that Precious is stealing? Does a girl that dangerously obese need to eat a whole box of fried chicken? And fried chicken?

Daniels has tried to compensate for his lack of humor by being Important. He doesn't seem to understand how people relate to one another--see his directorial debut Shadowboxer.  That film, like the reports of The Paperboy, is ridiculous on paper and boring on celluloid. Let me sum up: It's the story of a May-December, interracial romance between two contract killers who help raise a child. If Daniels hoped to say something Important about human relationships, he jacked up the absurdity factor so high that there's nothing real between the characters.

I think of Precious the same way I think of Kids. Kids was cause for much hand-wringing; "What has happened to our children?" But it was simple exploitation, part of a chain that stretched all the way from the first teenager films through Little Foxes to Thirteen and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers today. Precious also purports to tell what's "really happening" in the inner city.

I find Precious to be a lot of fun to think about. The main character has so many catastrophes pile upon her that, when it's revealed that she's contracted HIV as a result of being raped by her father, one throws one's hands up and says, "There's nothing left that can happen to this poor girl." The big ending is that Mariah Carey, as a social worker, tells off Precious' mother and makes her feel bad; it's wholly unsatisfying but, on the other hand, what could possibly happen to Precious that would make things look brighter?

That the film earned Best Picture and Best Director nods shows just how alienated Hollywood is from the real world. I imagine they were so wowed by showing the first big-budget depiction of people dining on pigs' feet that they imagined that they'd found a window into the ghetto. So much so that they completely ignored all the incompetence they take Tyler Perry to task for.

Egypt Stuff

As I check in with the news from Egypt, the first thought I have is the crowing of my Facebook friends (mostly liberal) about the first wave of protests that brought down Mubarak. I thought they were incredibly short-sighted and said so; I'm too polite to say, "I told you so," but I did tell them so.

When I think of dictatorships, my thoughts go to General Franco of Spain. It's an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes people simply can't get along. Dictatorships come about when a country is being pulled in irreconcilable directions and major violence is about to erupt. In Spain, the Left had just enough manpower that it could refuse to work with anyone on the other side brought the functions of government to a halt. It was blackmail--give us control or everything falls apart.

The romantic aspects of the Spanish Civil War waft up to us from Orwell and Hemingway--despite the fact that neither of those authors made the war sound justified or noble. The aura around one who joined the "Republicans" is that of an advocate for freedom putting his body on the line for his principles. The picture is tainted when one realizes that the war was also a test run for the conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. 

The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt reminds me a little of both sides. Just as the communists of Spain called themselves Republicans while having no intention of setting up anything other than a dictatorship of the people, the Brotherhood has been shouting about democracy as if they have respect for the theory. Just like the Nazis using their sliver of democratic sanction to leverage complete control of the state, it appears that the Brotherhood wanted to use their position to oppress any opposition.

The conflict is plenty ugly and I put a lot of blame on the Obama-led West. The worst aspect of our modern political era is that our leaders really believe their bullshit. Across both parties, they seem to believe without question that people across the world crave democracy. So, time and again, the levers of power are abandoned to the mob while we applaud. Later, we shake our heads at the bloodshed and never learn our lesson.

My perception is that the crisis in Egypt came from the general uprising across the Middle East (the "Islamic Vortex") and the simple fact that Mubarak was getting too old to rule. Other elements within his government had grown in power and probably were maneuvering to assume his seat. Mubarak had some hopes that his son would take over. It appears that this was both unpopular with other power-holders and ineffectively secured.

It was here that the West should have stepped in, conferring with the major players. In the old realpolitik days, we would have struck a deal with a reliable autocrat and supported him through the backstage machinations. Rather than find someone within the administration that was credible as a leader and loyal to established policies, our noble leaders said, "We'd really like to see real elections," and chaos has ensued.

It appears that the military, who ousted Mubarak in the first place, never really took their hands off the steering wheel. We can see that in how quickly Morsi disappeared and in the protests of the Brotherhood that they never really got to rule. I think this was probably the best out of a lot of bad options.

Juntas aren't especially great to live in, I imagine, but they're infinitely preferable to Islamic theocracy or a government driven to fulfill an ideology. Military rule is primarily about order and maintaining power, not controlling the lives of each individual citizen. Sure, you publish a pamphlet listing the crimes of the government or quoting Marx, you'll be disappeared in no time. But if you go to work, take care of your family and obey the law, you won't find much interference.

As my Facebook friends cheered the uprising in Cairo, I tried to remind them that there were people with families and livelihoods all over Egypt that would be negatively affected by the change in power. Most people want to go about their business--riots in the town square are not helpful. I'm not pro-dictator but I am anti-civil war.

Lee Daniels, The Butler and Precious

Criticwire has a picture of the early reviews for Lee Daniels The Butler. It sounds as though it's getting better reviews than his last picture The Paperboy.

I've been following Lee Daniels' career since I watched Precious and had a distinct feeling that the emperor had no clothes. Precious was praised to high heavens but it was critic-proofed by being a "realistic" depiction of extreme poverty in the ghetto. Because it dealt with incest, rape, AIDS, babies with Downs Syndrome, the welfare system, emotional and sexual and physical abuse, obesity and dark-skin/light-skin rivalry, white critics threw up their hands and said, "It must be good." 

In fact, it was high camp, which I realized the moment a frying pan (frying pan!) flew in from offscreen and struck the protagonist in the head. Precious is a suffering-woman film, like Stella Dallas and the genre's best tribute, Polyester. As my friend Jon said, "Depravity is the new corny."

The Paperboy was an unqualified failure; reviews routinely took pains to list the outrageous elements of the film and then stress that the film is actually quite boring despite those elements. So it was a surprise to me to see that Daniels got in-title billing for this film.

It makes some sense, though. It looks as though this film is almost as critic-proof as Precious by way of Social Importance. I'll keep an eye out; it just may be over-the-top enough to be worth a watch.

The release of Lovelace this weekend means that the subject of the film, Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, is back in the public conversation. It sounds as though the film wants to satisfy both Lovelace's claims of abuse and others' opposite claims. This article gives a decent, if biased, sense of the chronology.

While I have no doubt that Chuck Traynor, the manager/boyfriend behind Lovelace and, later, Marilyn Chambers (post-fame), was less than a good guy. It's entirely reasonable to assume he used physical force to get his way from time to time. But Lovelace's whole story paints a picture of a manipulator.

Of course, I don't know what really happened but I do know that, after Deep Throat, she parlayed her celebrity into more films and many cash-in appearances. When her fame faded, she revealed she had been abused in a best-selling book. When the other seminal participants in the porn boom contested her allegations, she claimed to have been exploited by the anti-porn movement. She did a late-in-life portfolio for the skin mag Leg Show. She was an addict and died when her car "inexplicably" ran off the road.

I'm naturally skeptical at many of Lovelace's claims not because I'm unsympathetic or because I'm defender of pornography. The reason is because her behavior is too consistent with a certain breed of woman usually found among the poorer classes. The future is always bright, the present transformative and the past hellish.

Vice: Portrait of a Future Failure

I'll refrain from smearing the entire upcoming generation and instead focus on the comedian/correspondent of this piece in Vice, "I Interned for Pauly Shore (and It Really Sucked)." I'll leave his name out of it, though it's easily found, because I'm not interested in a personal takedown as much as pointing out some ugly thinking.

The writer's attitude is self-negating and crab-pot envious, alternately telling us how pathetic he is and giving us (poorly chosen) damning details about Pauly Shore.

A couple of things:

• I was an MTV viewer during the Totally Pauly years. It should come as no surprise, then, that I am no fan of Pauly Shore. I've never been a fan of comedians whose acts are personality--rather than joke--based. This, coupled with his constant presence on the only channel I really watched, made me stay far away from anything he's done.
• Still, I've kept an eye on his career. Where does one go when one becomes a fad, especially at such a young age? My interest in him was piqued when I saw what was probably the nadir of his career. During an infomercial for sunglasses, probably BluBlockers, he appeared as one of the random men-on-the-street who tried the sunglasses and liked them. He was not the one who wore the product, which was one of the small group he was with, but he made sure to interject himself and, most importantly, he was not credited. Perhaps this was his choice but it was a real "Didn't you used to be famous?" moment.
• The piece reminds me of Arthur Marx's biography of Bob Hope. I'm a fan of "unauthorized biographies," a genre that focuses on smearing celebrities, primarily through interviewing the little people that the celebrity might have snubbed. While Kitty Kelley's works on Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan are the towering pillars in the field, thick, mean books that attach a stink to their subjects, Marx's just aren't as good. His subjects are more of your run-of-the-mill jerks. His biography of Bob Hope makes him out to be a cheap womanizer who is short with anyone who isn't another big shot. In this article, Pauly comes across as a guy who lives in his own world, a world that's pretty much as simple as he is. Nothing to idolize, but I don't find it worthy of vitriol.
• Of course, the real issue is that our special, "obese," "barely tolerated," drop-out and impoverished author wasn't treated well enough. Pauly didn't buy him a coffee or a burrito. He didn't help him get stage time. He made him copy DVDs on an "old PC with Windows XP installed."
• That seems to be the main theme of every "I Interned for..." pieces, that the intern wasn't treated like an honored guest and made to do dull work. I'm not a fan of the prevalence of internships but this is precisely what one is supposed to expect. The benefit is to see, in action, those aspects of the business that aren't publicized. If I were in that position, I'd be looking at how he got booked, how he worked on the act, how he kept his name in the public's mind, how he set goals and accomplished them. After all, he has come out with a couple of self-produced movies since his star fell.
• When the writer does pay attention to these things, it's to mock them in an obnoxious way. He sits in on a writing session, listening to Pauly rant and then seeing his assistant turn them into five minutes of material, which is no small feat for a comedian.

Then there's this:

After the show, the comedians all got together to hang out in the Green Room and I was invited to join. I’m not really sure why, but Don [Barris, of the Big Three] kept getting into a boxing stance and smacking me in the shoulder, yelling “Fight me! Fight me!” Every time I would back away, he would smack me again. Eventually he slapped me in the face while his friends pointed and laughed. It was one of the most humiliating things I have ever experienced, and I totally cried in my bed that night.

Okay, one comment about the upcoming generation:  Getting over things like this should have been accomplished in high school. What are they teaching these kids?

Dead Girlfriends Stepped In It

I learned today the word kyriarchy, which seems to be an extension of the concept of intersectionality, the idea that a person with multiple minority identities can be oppressed according to different -isms.  Taken as a whole, those -isms are called the kyriarchy.

Got it? Now you can avoid people who use the term, lest you end up like white-male-probably heterosexual-maybe crypto-Christian-almost certainly cis-musicianist and exploiter-of-his-privilege-as-a-successful-performer James Brooks.

Brooks is currently recording under the name Dead Girlfriends. He recently released a new song entitled "On Fraternity" and will probably be dragged before the Soviet Council and summarily shot.

His crime? The song appears to be an anti-rape culture screed that makes the mistake of trying to draw parallels of the pain a rape victim feels with being victimized by the same culture. And being part of a similar culture in the record industry and feeling the same kind of...

Here's what he said to Flavorwire:

“On Fraternity” is specifically supposed to leave it open to dealing with any kind of oppression. When I wrote [the song], I was attempting to focus on experiences that are common across the entire spectrum of oppression and how I feel about that as a white male.

As the first flames of hysteria began, Brooks decided to offer a brief and vague defense. It did not help:

That’s where the “women aren’t the only people who get raped” comment came from, the statement is factually correct but it’s really harshly worded and might have made some women feel like their rape experience had been trivialized, which is why I apologized for it. Especially on the Internet, debates about feminism often get really contentious and labyrinthine — for example in a lot of circles the phrase “feminism” by itself is often taken to basically mean “white feminism” because women of color don’t feel like their interests are being properly reflected by mainstream feminists. A lot of people find the word “patriarchy” inadequate to describe the nature of society because they feel oppressed on the basis of class or race or sexual orientation to the same extent that they feel oppressed because of their gender, and so they use the word “kyriarchy.”

I think--think--the story is that Brooks has been seeing all the liberation and righteous thought over in the Academic Revolutionary Front and wanted to join in using his thoughtful sensitivity as a membership card. They took one look at the skin color of his penis and shouted, "YOU DARE TO PRESUME TO SPEAK FOR ME?!"

It doesn't help that he'd been exposing himself to poisonous thinking:

The entire “men’s rights” movement on Reddit and elsewhere is predicated on the idea that feminism is about being pro woman at the expense of all others, that it’s about replacing one hierarchical power system with another. I believe that sexism hurts everybody, so when I was writing the song I wanted to take into consideration the fact that the person whose heart speeds up when they hear somebody walking behind them could be anybody, about how I don’t want to be complicit in creating a world where anyone has to feel that way.

Oh, I see. Brooks wanted to join in the conversation with the point that the very people labelled as oppressors by virtue of their identity could, in fact, be victims as well.

Kind of an "Everybody Hurts" kind of message. Kind of being against divisions of identity.

"WELL, WE'RE NOT BUYING WHAT YOU'RE SELLING, MISTER!"

James, you stepped into an endless battleground. People who use terms like kyriarchy are fighting to be the most prominent victim. Is it worse to be black or gay? A woman or Hispanic? What about a black-Hispanic woman who wants to become a man so she can have gay sex with furries? They only unite in order to scream at people who look just like you.

These aren't problems to them, so you shouldn't try to solve them. And especially with a message of universality.

You're probably a crypto-Christian, anyway.

Polyamory: Probably Not as Sexy as it Sounds

Salon from Monday:  My Two Husbands by Angi Becker Stevens

Why is it that every polyamorous union I see in the media looks like this?



My ranking of their smiles by measure of real feeling, from left to right: Boyfriend, 2; Wife, 1; Husband, 3.

Why is the husband the least pleased here?

I married my husband and remained in a monogamous relationship with him for many years. I knew I wanted to be with him for the long haul. But I was never entirely fulfilled. I couldn’t shake the feeling that some part of me was repressed.---One night, I sat down with my husband and spilled everything. I told him that being polyamorous was a part of who I am, and I asked if he would at least do some research and give it serious consideration before dismissing the idea. He understood that I never would have asked this if it hadn’t been extremely important.

Perhaps he's less happy because a brave act of boundary-crossing was imposed on him. Because his wife decided to change their philosophy at the behest of a smooth talkin' libertine.

 When I learned about polyamorous relationships, I knew that’s what I wanted. My husband wasn’t so sure, though. It sounded fine for other people, but just not him. And it still seemed unrealistic to me, so I never pressed the issue.

When I returned to school to finish my bachelor’s degree in my late 20s, I became friends with a man who changed my mind about all that. He believed in polyamory, too, and we had long conversations about it together: how it could work, how it was truly possible.

I bet her husband has spent some time thinking about how he supported her desire to go back to school.

But philosophy takes time to set in. Her husband had to wrestle with his inner oppressor.

My husband was an incredibly jealous person back then, but he began to question its usefulness and purpose.

And efficacy.

That first romantic relationship of mine only lasted 10 months (though he remains one of my closest friends). Afterward, I didn’t actively seek another partner. I was hurting from the breakup and not in any rush to put my feelings on the line again. Still, I was happy knowing I had that freedom when the right person came along. 

Can you imagine being in the house as your wife mopes around because she broke up with her boyfriend?  How many times do you think she came up to him on the couch for a long, depressed embrace? Do you think she cried on his shoulder?

My boyfriend and I met through our leftist politics. We were members of the same organization. We built a friendship over a period of months, often sitting up talking until sunrise on my back porch. He hadn’t been familiar with polyamory before, though he said the idea made sense to him immediately.

I bet.

After we finally kissed for the first time, I forced myself to have an upfront conversation. Because polyamory don’t rely on familiar social scripts, it’s crucial to spell out terms and expectations rather than relying on assumptions.

This fetish of communication comes up so often in polyamory that I wonder if the conversations aren't the point of the whole thing. Can you imagine the interminable conversations that led up to that first kiss, probably all punctuated by awkward laughter? "I'm very interested in starting a relationship with you but I'm concerned that your husband will feel that we haven't known each other long enough. Henh-Henh."

When we talk about "polygamy," we're usually talking about a man with multiple wives sharing resources and producing lots of kids. "Polyamory," however, is usually woman-centered, maybe a single child conceived back when they were squares. Resources are shared, but not everyone's:

A year ago, my husband and I started looking to buy our first home, and we did so with the full intention that my boyfriend would come live with us.

It sounds like the boyfriend isn't contributing financially here. I hope he didn't get a vote on which house they chose, at least.

Every portrayal of polyamory I've seen always seems extremely emasculating. The problem is, I can never figure out which man is the most pathetic, the man browbeat into sharing his wife or the infiltrator who is so eager to get part-time lovin' from another man's woman. (I suspect that the original lothario is a special type of harvester who looks for low-hanging fruit among the neurotic and progressive. Probably an adjunct professor.) It certainly looks as though she's getting everything she wants out of it, though.

And my husband feels that he benefits a great deal from being non-monogamous. He is far more introverted than I am 

That explains a lot.

and knowing I have another partner to spend time with helps him to feel like it’s OK for him to spend time alone, or to turn down invitations to social events he once would have felt obligated to attend with me.---At least one night a week, the two of us stay up and do nothing but talk for hours and hours.

Great.

My boyfriend and I are planning a (non-legal) wedding ceremony next summer, and would likely legally marry if we could. 

What would that look like? Would the husband give her away? He'd probably have to stand fifteen feet away, looking on the happy couple with a simpering smile frozen on his face. Then, after the kiss, he joins them and it looks pretty much like this picture.

My partners are equally free to pursue other relationships, and both value that freedom a great deal.

Though there's no evidence that they have pursued other relationships. If I were wealthy and cruel, I'd like to hire an escort to pretend to fall in love with the husband and start a relationship with him. I have the feeling that, given the option of an attractive woman who wants a "normal" relationship, he'd find his testicles very quickly.

As to the writer's, er, unconventional looks, I have no comment. The non-progressive standard of chivalry forbids it.

Barely Trying with Vice: Monarch Mind Control Edition

A writer from Vice does a report on herself speculating about Monarch mind control based on, I guess, ironic tweets linking Amanda Bynes' breakdown with the Illuminati. How does she attack the theory?  With feminism!

Monarch mind control theorists claim they want to expose an Illuminati dystopia of shadowy handlers, but they’re really claiming that every successful Hollywood starlet—regardless if she has or hasn't been placed under a 5150 hold—is managed by a powerful male handler. After all, what would be a more attractive theory to a bunch of male nerds sitting behind computers than the idea that all powerful women are actually passive, mind-controlled sexbots? 

One of the seminal books from my adolescence was Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I spent hours poring over the material I received from mailing to the addresses in Ivan Stang's High Weirdness by Mail.  Psychotropedia, Amok Books, Feral Press, Re/Search--fringe theories and culture have been one of my interests since I was a kid. And I still don't have a good enough handle to really write about Monarch mind control.

Then again, my goal wouldn't be to toss off a list of the shallowest aspects of the theory, dismiss it and go on patting myself on the back for being smarter than everyone else on the Internet.

But let's toss off a few observations that come from years of experience, rather than a single afternoon.

• The other day I mentioned recovered memories and the Satanic Ritual Abuse accusations that went with the belief that the mind records and hides memories. The genealogy is this:  Recovered memories of extreme but non-systematic, Sybil-style abuse; further work with recovered memories revolve around organized groups of child abusers, moving into Satanic rings; the rise of Cathy O'Brien and Brice Taylor and their accusations of being programmed sex slaves for the famous; to now, a Satanic conspiracy creating and manipulating pop stars in order to soften our minds for the coming enslavement, as well as the pleasure of the powerful.
• The latest link the chain is probably the most believable, on the surface, simply because it relies on connecting the dots that are visible to everyone, not the memories of a weird woman with a troubled past. 
• If you're at all interested the subject, you've already visited Vigilant Citizen, which is the best-looking conspiracy material I've ever seen. Browsing through the site, which spends a great deal of time on evidence from the entertainment world, one starts to think, "Geez, they really do use a lot of checkerboards, pyramids and eye iconography." After a while, one notices it a lot.
• Vigilant Citizen, especially, and a lot of other sites that cover this material, constantly reference books by Fritz Springmeier.  I've gone a bit through his guide to creating a Monarch slave--which is extensive--and it's quite a brutal work. I get a kick out of the footnotes referring these books as if they are established authorities. My guess is that Springmeier at least spoke to many who claim to have recovered memories and collected their common stories and used those as his sources.
• For a breath of fresh air while digging into this subject, I suggest one read some abduction stories from the moribund alien conspiracy world. The parallels are hard to ignore--it seems that when people start thinking of the worst things that could happen, they all start saying the same things.
• The most telling part of the Vice article is that writer Emalie Marthe seems to think she's spotted a flaw in theorists' reasoning by saying, I guess, it all fits together too easily. She uses the example of Mariah Carey's breakdown in the early 2000s. It appears that she's saying, "Why don't you think she's a victim of the Illuminati?" How hard is it to Google it?
• As I mentioned, her coup de grace is that kitten programming seems to be only practiced on women, thus the theory is false. I guess this is taken as an argument among those programmed in the feminist way (mangy house cat programming?) but it doesn't do much to combat the theory with logic or common sense. If anything, it's proof that the Illuminati are misogynistic and ripe for equalitizin'. And another thing, why are none of these "kittens" fat and gross like Beth Ditto? Big women are sexy, too!