text:
I'm not generally inclined to like right wing agitprop. Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen were some of the worst films I've ever seen; cheerfully swaggering calls to genocide, unrelieved by either intelligence or any conviction beyond, "blow up those non-white people, yeeha!" Their bland irresponsibility was only rivaled by their cynical opportunism; the first used North Korea rather than China as the villain because the Chinese market means we have to pretend we don't hate the people from that part of the world; the second deployed Morgan Freeman as vice president to show that non-white people are okay as long as they're played by perennial comforting side-kick black person Morgan Freeman.
On the surface, Red Dawn, from 1984, is in the same vein as these turkeys. As in Olympus Has Fallen, the U.S. suffers an invasion—not from North Korea, but from Cubans and Russians raiding middle America from Mexico. And as in Olympus Has Fallen, the exciting fantasy is to see righteous Americans kicking the invaders butts. It's all turning America into the scrappy underdog resisting oppression, a paranoid wish-fulfillment/fever dream in which someone does to the US what the US is always doing to everyone else, allowing us to expiate our guilty consciences in an orgy of xenophobic violence.
What makes Red Dawn different, though, is the ruthless, tragic vision. Olympus Has Fallen is a cheerful empowerment fantasy for macho imperialists; the heroes are a virile secret service agent and the American president. And the good guys unequivocally win; it's a rousing ode to the awesomeness of coastal elites and the national security state. The right people are in the right place, and they'll kick some terrorist ass.
Red Dawn, though, really thinks that the United States is on the verge of collapse. The heroes here aren't the national security personnel, who, from the little we hear of them, are distant and probably incompetent. Rather, the protagonists are a group of high school football dudes—a scared, battered band who survive on team slogans ("Wolverines!") and tearful determination.
The whole thing is preposterous, of course—the idea that the Cubans somehow gain immediate air superiority is as goofy as the fact that the Wolverine resistance fighters appear to have a virtually limitless supply of high tech weaponry. But the melodramatic details have the vivid, dumb terror of overdetermined nightmare. The way the black history teacher —the only black man in the film—is the first one shot by the enemy; the grizzled dad telling his boys through the concentration camp wire that he was tough on them in anticipation of just such a Communist invasion; the NRA sign declaring that you'll remove my gun from my cold dead hand, flashed right before one of the Commies removes a gun from some poor bastard's cold dead hand.
What makes the film, I think, is the yearning—for justification, for apotheosis, for death. People talk about liberal guilt, but I've never seen a film so utterly sodden in maudlin self-loathing, like a sentient sponge adrift in the stale beer of bad conscience. From the reflexive, furtive references to Native Americans to the Cuban officer recalling his own days as a partisan, America's history of imperial atrocity wafts over the Wolverines like a ragged, hacking football cheer. The heroic deaths, one by one, seem both expiation and justification. When Patrick Swayze is asked what's the difference between them and us he declares "we live here!" before standing by as one of his teen soldiers shoots another to death for treachery. That's a pretty forthright stand against imperialism—or a forthright, desperate declaration that good football players like Swayze are incapable of imperialism, as the case may be.
Olympus Has Fallen is happy with the status quo; it just wants the same Americans to triumph who always triumph, with maybe a few more explosions and dead bodies thrown in. Red Dawn, on the other hand, is about an American heartland that feels both alienated from and implicated in power, and sees the only honorable resolution in apocalypse. It's America's death wish on screen, the last stand of god-fearing freedom lovers, knee deep in blood, building their own gulag.]]>
On HU
Subdee on Homestuck.
Chris Gavaler on Louise Simonson and Queen Kong.
My ebook on exploitation film is coming soon! There's a contest thingee where you can read a free copy, which nobody really tried for, so…still time!
Su-Min Lim with a long essay on Belle and Sebastian and twee for non-white people.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Playboy:
—Independence Day and reverse colonial fever dreams.
—I wrote about Ralph Stanley as metalhead.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
—how grit is not the key to my success, Angela Duckworth.
—7 Golden Vampires and how Hammer Dracula is better at diversity than current Hollywood.
—the fact that Trump will rise, so don't panic when he does.
Other Links
Katie Schenkel on why Starfire should be pansexual.
Ellie Lockhart on the queer themes, or lack thereof, in Independence Day: Resurgence.]]>
Todd: You know, sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a series of loosely-related wacky misadventures.
Diane: I think that's just what being in your twenties is.
From Bojack Horseman, season 5, episode 2, 'Chickens'
When I was a child, a certain relative used to berate me for things I hadn't done. Not just crimes that I might plausibly have committed – like, say, being rude, or not studying enough for a test. No, one recurring theme of her anger was how I was certain, when I grew up, to put my parents in a nursing home. Having driven my father to his death from overwork through my insatiable appetite for swimming lessons, I would abandon my mother to gasp out her final breaths in agonising solitude, probably in some kind of kerosene bath. This after having sucked them dry, my long suffering parents, of all the money they had sacrificed their very lives to accumulate, all for my sake, yes, all for me.
Ah, nostalgia. These days, anyone who knows me well will say that I'm a dour sort of person, not a fan of much aside from sleeping and the internet. It would be tempting, though not exactly rigorous, to point the finger at my childhood, genetics and experience being entangled as they are. I don't pretend to know how much of my general anomie is attributable to a childhood during which death and money were always on my brain, always closely associated, for reasons we will get to later. I don't want to imply that my family was otherwise than deeply loving. But if anything, this made the underlying message of all those guilt-inducing monologues all the more horrific: not only are you murdering actual people by your selfish demands for movie tickets, you are killing those who love you most.
When I was in my first year of university, I started listening to Belle and Sebastian. They never made my cry, although I often thought there would be something cathartic about doing so. I do remember how a very intimate part of my psyche quivered – yes, that is the operative word – listening to the background stylophone part in 'Sleep the Clock Around'. I don't know how many times I listened to 'Sukie in the Graveyard' – several dozen, fifty five? – but for a while, I took it as a kind of manual for life. Like Sukie I would be exuberant yet unhappy in an aesthetically pleasing way. I would slum it financially, in an artistic fashion. I would be sexually open but emotionally abstracted from my various affairs, on a quest for romantic self-knowledge rather than actually participating in anything that could be classically defined as romance.
I go through stages with Belle and Sebastian. There are times I go for days listening to their back catalogue on Youtube. Sometimes the music and lyrics still make me quiver, and sometimes, listening to them makes me want to put my head through the screen with embarrassment on their, and my behalf. I always go to see them when they're in town, either alone or with a friend, and I hope I don't stop doing that, and that they don't stop coming. At a festival, I pushed my way to the front before they came on, to make sure I got a good spot. The opening band was the Hold Steady, and for a forty minute set I was moshed back and forth by an audience comprised of large beefy guys of extensive hairiness. When it was time for B&S to start, these men melted away to be replaced by a row of skinny, pale-faced children (or child-like adults), wearing glasses and swaying gently from side to side with expressions of deep melancholy.
There is a particular genre of art devoted to evoking, to a greater or lesser extent, the mood and period of life represented for me by those Belle and Sebastian albums. It's a genre which spans numerous forms, and includes but is not limited to: Frances Ha and Mistress America by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (movies), This Side of Paradise by Scott Fitzgerald (novel), Girls by Lena Dunham (shadow puppet theatre), God Help the Girl by Stuart Murdoch (movie), My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum (essay), Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion (essay), and Raphael Bob-Waksberg's tumblr. (RBW writes the excellent Netflix series Bojack Horseman).
The protagonist (or writer, in the case of the autobiographical essays) is always an avatar of Sukie, or so it seems. They're almost always white, and you can tell by their lingo, lifestyle accoutrements, etc that they were born into the middle or upper class. At the time of the story, though, they're experiencing a particular kind of broke-ness characterised by housing instability and poor decisions about cash – say, flying to Paris on a whim and a credit card. They don't have any dependents – where money changes hands, it's always parents providing support rather than the other way round. (Children are out of the question). They're always an artist of some sort – writer, dancer, musician – but don't seem to spend a lot of time making actual art. They live in New York, and this fact is highlighted. There are chaotic and often hilariously awful romantic and sexual encounters, but sex isn't exactly the point – the real quest is for 'a deeper understanding of oneself'.[1]
There are stylistic things in common, too. A sense of distance – the story represented as if it's already a part of a romantic past, mythologising life even as it's happening. (Why are Belle and Sebastian covers always in black and white?) Often, there's only effectively one character (the protagonist), the others being less individual people than dramatisations of certain situations or fears that the protagonist has faced, and the challenges faced by this protagonist tend to be internal rather than external. Losing a job, say, might lead to embarrassment, rather than being unable to care for your sick parent (or to pay for their well-deserved kerosene bath). What's at stake is never genuine poverty, or loss of life or health, but a particular conception of self. The quest is working out what this self-conception should be.
There was this one summer we all pretended to be adults and lived in Florida for a few months. The original idea was to move to New York and do comedy, but the apartment fell through so we decided to go somewhere else…
We rotated who slept where every night – two in the master bedroom, one in the smaller bedroom, one on the living room couch. I didn't mind sleeping on the couch, because it meant I had the whole downstairs to myself and it meant when the first person came down for breakfast at two or three in the afternoon, I would wake up too and I wouldn't miss anything.
We had dial-up internet. We made each other food. We had a make-your-own-pizza night. One night Ben made us all soup in bread bowls and I put too much salt in mine…
One day I swam out really far and I swore I could feel the undertow carrying me out to sea. I thought I was going to die, but I was too embarrassed to call for help. I slapped the waves with my arms full of jelly and kicked my soft legs as hard as I could, struggling back to shore.
From Raphael Bob-Waksberg's tumblr, boringoldraphael.tumblr.com
Obvious stuff: these features I've identified don't have to be shortcomings. Being white and rich doesn't preclude you from being the subject of passionate, interesting art, and no story can be all things or reflect all people. I've never minded the whiteness of 'Girls', which presumably reflects Lena Dunham's own experience, and therefore what she feels most qualified to dramatise. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it: 'My question is not "Why are there no black women on Girls," but "How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?"'.[2] Still, like bottom trawlers depleting global fishing stocks, continually mining the same milieu runs a risk of diminishing returns. Watching Frances Ha (and its quasi-follow up, Mistress America) just after watching Girls gave me a queasy feeling. Adam Driver is a wonderful, charismatic actor, as are almost all the cast of Girls, but I'm sick of seeing them and their family members in coming of age stories in New York.
More damningly, the absence of permanent consequences to failure is part of what appeals, but also puts a lid on how meaningful or memorable these stories can be. I admit to being obsessed with money and death to the point of minor dysfunction (thanks, wacky ethnic relatives!), but, well, they are objectively important parts of life. Without them, it can feel like there's not really much at stake – if things go wrong for the hero, this will presumably be followed by further wacky misadventures until they go right again. I fully acknowledge, though, that people's mileage on this issue will vary – First World problems are real problems, after all, and people in the First World have feelings too, and just because, say, people living through a civil war don't spend their time panicking about, say, the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence doesn't mean it's not a profoundly real experience for those who do think about such things. (And who says people in civil wars don't experience existential panic? Has anyone asked?) What's considered 'important' enough to be represented in fiction is always going to be subjective, no doubt the work that feels intensely truthful to me seems ridiculously trivial to someone else, and who am I to comment.
Another elision: for stories supposedly about artists, there is surprisingly little space devoted to showing how people actually make, or become good at making, art. By 'becoming good', I don't mean accumulating turbulent life experiences to turn into a novel – I mean actually doing stuff, and doing it again until you get better at it, the arduous process of Malcolm Gladwell-ing your way to the top. Possibly the process of learning to write, dance, etc is inherently boring and undramatisable, like making an action sequence in a movie about hackers (what are you going to show, lots of fingers stabbing at a laptop?) Possibly the issue cuts too close to the bone for the creators, and has to be presented at arm's length to avoid uncomfortable self-exposure. Still, these stories can't help but function as a sort of humblebrag, a case of highly accomplished people trying to charm you with a dumbed-down version of themselves. There's something unreal about these artistic avatars, stripped of the hustle and determination they must have shown to get to a position where they can successfully self-deprecate. Look at how young and adorably clueless we were, they seem to say. Look at our lovability, and love us!
It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.
From 'Goodbye to all that', by Joan Didion
Money and death were always linked in my relatives' minds. The word they used as a synonym for earning enough to support yourself and your dependents was 'survive'. As in: 'You can make pocket money working as a [academic, teacher, postman], but is it enough to survive?' Wasting time, failing to study enough at school, any kind of decision in favour of less rather than more future earnings: all of these were linguistically equated to a rejection of survival, aka, a rejection of life itself, aka, a suicidal death wish.
Given my family's status as recent migrants, from a country that only recently made the transition from Third to First World status, this wasn't exactly a crazy attitude. Neither, however, can it be described as entirely sane. They grew up poor, my relatives, poor to a depth of material deprivation that hardly exists in a contemporary Western nation. They were born to the kind of lives where the word 'survive' was not just a metaphor, but actually made some kind of literal sense. They may not be poor now, but these early experiences have given rise to a set of attitudes they've sought to inculcate in the next generation, with mixed success. A strong preference for concrete achievements, like degrees and jobs, over more nebulous ones like self-discovery. Distrust of introspection, which might so easily shade into 'navel gazing' – a dangerous distraction from the more fundamental business of getting and spending and accumulating. A work ethic which, in their adopted Australia, might be regarded as bordering on the pathological.
When I was a child, a certain relative (the same one who used to berate me for transcending the laws of time and space to put my parents in a nursing home) used to occasionally remark in tones of great disgust, "Life is good." This was not in any way reflective of her own attitude. She made it clear, more or less explicitly, that she thought life was pretty shit. Rather, it was an insult deployed to describe other people, maybe me, maybe some acquaintance who was committing the cardinal sin of enjoying themselves too much. Having too much fun – or just being happy, full stop – was evidence of a shallow and vacuous character.
It's not that I'm ungrateful, really. This is not a story of my persecution at the hands of my crazy ethnic relatives. In a lot of ways, they were objectively correct – life was good for me, in contrast to the deprivation they experienced. And to the extent that I had the privilege of growing up to be a dreamy, spoiled brat, it was thanks to their actions: their strength, their sacrifice a necessary condition of my current lifestyle and aspirations. You can see, then, how this genre might not appeal to them; how they might, at best, be nonplussed by all of these stories about twenty-somethings on a journey to 'find themselves'. You can see how they might, at worst, find the entire concept a little bit rage inducing and punchable.
For all that, though, I do believe there is something beautiful and idealistic and right about these stories. They speak to something which shouldn't be ironicised away, namely, an impulse to find life and love and all good things. "It makes me want to run out and find the love of my life," as someone wrote in the comments on the Youtube clip for 'Dylan in the Movies'. I don't want to be the kind of person who mistakes the 'The Life Pursuit' for life, who thinks the world is really made up of skinny white people wearing berets looking wistfully out into the middle distance. Still, nauseating though it may be, I also don't want to cease being the kind of person who still on occasion gets weepy over Belle and Sebastian albums.
He stretched his arms out to the crystalline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."
From This Side of Paradise, by F Scott Fitzgerald
Self-knowledge is a worthy goal, and this passage is beautiful. But if self is the only thing you know, or are interested in knowing, then you are probably an asshole.
What would a successful 'twenty-something' story look like – one which preserved the romanticism, the elegiac feeling evoked by the stories described above, but avoided their solipsism, elisions and unexamined privilege? Obviously I can't answer that question here without, say, being a literary genius, but I can describe some works which manage to an extent to avoid these pitfalls.
In Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Toru Watanabe studies English, hates phoneys, and does his best to ignore Japanese politics, all while wondering around an emotional landscape supersaturated with loss and longing. While nursing his suicidal sort-of girlfriend Naoko, he meet exuberant, sexually liberated Midori. At first, I was scared that Midori would be a sort of a literary Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see, for instance, her super hotness and predilection for dragging the unwitting Toru to watch porno movies). As the story progresses, though, she reveals a disarming mix of resilience and vulnerability. This is her, explaining to Toru how she cares for her father, who has brain cancer:
Relatives come to visit and they eat with me here, and they always leave half their food, just like you. And they always say, "Oh, Midori, it's wonderful you've got such a healthy appetite. I'm too upset to eat.' But get serious, I'm the one who's actually here taking care of the patient! They just have to drop by and show a little sympathy. I'm the one who wipes up the shit and collects the phlegm and mops the brows. If sympathy was all it took to clean up shit, I'd have 50 times as much sympathy as anybody else! …
What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? …
I can be hurt, you know…
And on top of it, you see your savings disappear. I don't know if I can keep going to university for another three-and-a-half years.
Money and death, my twin preoccupations, are very much present in the novel. I counted four suicides and one unexplained disappearance, apart from Midori's father's cancer, and even the nominally 'healthy' characters all seem to be teetering on the brink of an unnameable despair. There's an implied soundtrack of nostalgic music (the title is a bit of a giveaway), but here, unlike in other of his novels, Murakami knows exactly how to walk the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality. Toru's enough of an everyman that you can project yourself onto him, but particular enough to be a person instead of just a surrogate for the reader. (The bit about his annoying roommate is hilarious). He feels no malice towards anybody, and is straightforward to the point of naiveté. He is studying English literature, but never mentions any literary aspirations of his own – or indeed, any aspirations at all. In career terms, he is perfectly passive, but this passivity isn't rewarded by artistic or other success. His triumph at the end of the novel is, to borrow my relatives' term, 'survival'. What he survives is not so much career disappointments or injuries to his self-esteem, but a more free-floating kind of despair.
As a novelist, Murakami has often been charged with the same accusations of childishness and emotional stasis as Belle and Sebastian. This is fair enough. His protagonists are almost invariably men in their late 20s or early 30s, living in Tokyo, less overtly self-obsessed than, say, Hannah Horvarth or Amory Blaine, but still preoccupied with the question of who they are and what to do with themselves. Still, there's an additional depth that saves Toru from the solipsism and narcissism which plague the former characters, an assumption of responsibility towards other people. An awareness that loss and entropy and decay are things that actually happen in life. Which can deform a life, not only a self-image, and not just temporarily, either.
'Survival'. Real physical and financial scarcity, and the imperative to escape. After a point, it becomes a psychological crutch, a way of not taking responsibility for your own decisions. Who can blame you for any choice you made, if it was what you needed to do to 'survive'?
I don't doubt my relatives' tales of poverty during their early years, but I do wonder about their reliability as narrators when they describe the period that came after. Certainly after moving to Australia they were no longer poor (or not on paper, at least – psychologically there might have been a different situation). They must have had more choices than they let on. There must have been hundreds of moments when they might have moved in the direction of fun and fulfillment, rather than financial accumulation. Casting every decision in hindsight as being the only possible choice under the circumstances, the only thing a responsible adult could do given the yawning beaks of their dependents, is a great way of avoiding regret, guilt, internal conflict. Or rather, displacing it onto someone else. 'All of this was for you!'
What happened, I think, is that my relatives' view of themselves, and of their viable possibilities, was formed against a backdrop of material deprivation. They were able to escape this deprivation through a combination of personal fortitude, intelligence, and luck. But having escaped, they found themselves set in ways of thinking which precluded their fully enjoying their good fortune. They would always be afraid, and enraged with other people who (in their view) were too dumb or innocent to know that there was something to be afraid of.
The last point I want to make about the 'twenty-something coming of age' genre is the most esoteric. There are plenty of 'young artist'-type protagonists, but where are the stories about people who like maths or robotics or computer science or engineering? To put it more bluntly: where are the nerds?
Murakami, again, provides something of a counterpoint:
Shinjuku Station is enormous. Every day nearly 3.5 million people pass through it, so many that the Guinness Book of World Records officially lists JR Shinjuku Station as the station with the "Most Passengers in the World." A number of railroad lines cross there, the main ones being the Chuo line, Sobu line, Yamanote line, Saikyo line, Shonan–Shinjuku line, and the Narita Express. The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways… During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools.
It's hard to believe that every morning and evening, five days a week, this overwhelming crush of human beings is dealt with efficiently, without any major problems, by a staff of station employees that no one would ever accuse of being adequate, in terms of numbers, to the task.
The only real interest [Tsukuru] had was train stations. He wasn't sure why, but for as long as he could remember, he had loved to observe train stations—they had always appealed to him. Huge bullet-train stations; tiny, one-track stations out in the countryside; rudimentary freight-collection stations—it didn't matter what kind, because as long as it was a railway station, he loved it. Everything about stations moved him deeply.
From Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami
Colourless is, in many ways, quite a bad book. Nevertheless, it has redeeming features, not least of which is the unusualness of its protagonist and his interests, at least in the genre I've described. Outside of science fiction, very few 'literary' works try to capture the profundity or beauty of a complex mechanical or logistical system just working. Neither do they seek to represent or explore the inner life of the sort of person who has these interests.
I don't mean to suggest that the lack of romantic young mathematicians in fiction is on par with, say, the exclusion of working class people, or people of colour of any class. Nonetheless, it is a Thing and it has ramifications. It shouldn't be the case that writers concerned with interiority should only be interested in the inner states of a very particular kind of person: artists like themselves. Some might argue that the sorts of people who do equations in their spare time don't make very appealing protagonists, but this is nonsense. Randall Munroe's lovely comics about romance at xkcd.com should put paid to the idea that people who like numbers don't have any feelings.
What I am going to say next may be reaching a bit, but here goes: I think there is a connection between the extreme whiteness of the authors of most of the 'twenty-something coming of age' genre, and the near total absence of the physical/numerical sciences in these stories. Again, I am going to say it in the bluntest way possible: Asians do maths.
Yes, yes, I know. It's a stereotype. Not every Asian guy in the street is Terrance Tao. Still, Asians do value maths more highly in comparison with the Western baseline, there's no denying it. The West gave us 'Beauty and the Geek', where you're invited to laugh at the idea that a 'nerd' (always male, because the show doesn't even consider that women who like computers might exist) could ever pair off with a beautiful woman. Mainland China gave us 'If You Are the One', a hilariously brutal dating show where everybody wants to go home with the engineers.
Here I will reach a little more, and ask: could there be a link between my Asian relatives' terror of poverty, and the fact that I can't think of a Western analogue to Tsukuru – a protagonist caught in a whirlpool of longing and nostalgia, who still loves trains? Could it be that the fear of real material deprivation, so absent from Hannah Horvarth's and Frances Ha's lives and so present, from an early age, in mine, lends itself to and a heightened sensitivity to the romantic possibilities of numbers, finding answers to logistical problems, and Building Stuff?
I have no idea. I am intrigued, however, by what impressionistically seems to be a relative abundance of Asian creators of science fiction (on both page and screen) compared to their absence, as both characters and creators, from the more 'literary', feelings-heavy works of the kind I've described above. I wonder what it would look like if the gatekeepers of film and TV showed more interest in stories with Asians in them which weren't about, say, kung fu. And if on the supply side, Asians as a group became a little more willing to treat our interior states as being something worth excavating, a process which might yield value to ourselves as well as others.
Questions: at what point does introspection become narcissism? The gossamer line between taking your own feelings too seriously, and not seriously enough.
The kind of question whose very asking is a sign of privilege.
Material scarcity versus psychological dilemmas.
What to withhold, and what to reveal.
When to reflect and when to act and when to go to bed, go on the internet and not get up for a very long time.
Earlier this summer I was walking down West End Avenue in Manhattan and remembered, with a sadness that nearly knocked me off my feet, just why I came to New York seven years ago and just why I am now about to leave.
From 'My Misspent Youth', by Meghan Daum:
"Here," he said, "get yourself some healthy food. You look awful." I said he had done more than enough for me and that I couldn't accept money on top of everything else, but he refused to take it back. "It's not money," he said, "it's my feelings. Don't think about it too much, just take it."
From Norwegian Wood
Andy: So what do you do?
Frances: Eh… It's kinda hard to explain.
Andy: Because what you do is complicated?
Frances: Eh… Because I don't really do it.
From 'Frances Ha', by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig
"I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world.' I said after giving it some thought. "I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me."
"You mean, if you knew me better, you'd force stuff on me like everyone else?"
"It's possible," I said. "That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other."
"I'm glad I ran into you," I said. "I think I'm a little more adapted to the world now."
Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.
From Norwegian Wood
[1] See 'The Loves of Lena Dunham', by Elaine Blair, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/loves-lena-dunham/
[2] It doesn't really work when Lena Dunham tries to write people of colour. A Korean girl with parents who bankroll her vanity art gallery? Yeah, no.]]>
I'm putting together a collection of my writing on exploitation film and publishing it as an ebook. Vom Marlowe (who used to write here way back when) designed the really pretty darn awesome cover above. The still is from Night of the Living Dead, which is out of copyright because the filmmakers forgot to put the copyright notice on the print, and it mattered back then.
The book will be out July 11, at least if all goes well and I am not devoured by an evil ichor from outer space.
I thought I'd post the table of contents too. Most of the pieces here have appeared on the web already in one form or another—but not all of them.
Looking Wrong at Halloween
Fecund Horror
The Child Is Father of the Child:
On the Friday the 13th Series
American Torture:
On Hostel and Hostel 2
The Top Ten Rape/Revenge Films
I Spit On Your Quietism
Rape the Children Well:
On The Last House on the Left
Suffering With a Purpose:
On The Virgin Spring
Every Thing In Its Place:
On Irreversible
Patriarchy in You:
On The Stendahl Syndrome
Disgusting Women:
On Under the Skin
Bloody Conventions:
On Martyrs
Men in Women-in-Prison:
Masochism, Feminism, Fetish
Waiting for the Revolution:
On Switchblade Sisters
Embrace the Exploitation:
On Calum Waddell's Jack Hill
And hey, we can do a promotional contest thingee. First person who can correctly identify the new essays (in comments or on social media) will get a free copy of the ebook! Note some titles have been changed, so googling isn't going to help you necessarily.
Who is the truest Berlatsky superfan? Do Berlatsky superfans in fact exist? This is our chance to find out.
If contests and/or Berlatsky superfandom makes you spew vile ichor in a flylike manor, you can also get an exciting preview copy if you are a blogging/writing type person and swear on the fishy tentacles of Cthulhu to write a review praising my dextrous prose and awesome insights, and/or taking me to task for lack of same.
The Berlatsky superfandom Thunderdome death duel begins..now!]]>
I don't know what Warren Publishing had in mind when they commissioned Frank Frazetta's "Queen Kong" in 1971, but Eerie devoted an entire issue to the image in in 1977. The cover of No. 81 declares: "SHE'S BIG! SHE'S BEAUTIFUL! SHE'S ATOP THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING! WHY? READ THIS STARTLING ISSUE FOR SEVEN TOTALLY DIFFERENT ANSWERS!"
Each of the 5-10 page comics offers an explanation for Frazetta's giant naked woman:
a) breast enlargement injections gone terribly wrong
b) espionage at the 2090 Worlds Fair
c) King Kong blood transfusion
d) "physiological freak"
e) lab-grown mutant engineered to terraform alien planets for colonization
f) giant robot suit
g) Little New York populated by tiny, human-imitating aliens
Explaining the ape in her fist proved even harder, but Queen Kong's size isn't her most fantastical quality. It's her breasts, because a) perfect circles are only possible in space, and b) no nipples. The issue's other artists offered their Frazetta imitations:
The first tale, "Goodbye, Bambi Boone," I remember best, perhaps because the artistic style was so familiar. Carmine Infantino and Dick Giordano were renown artists at DC in the 70s, and both had just contributed to the 1976 DC-Marvel team-up, Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man. The two heroes also battle atop the Empire State Building.
My copy was supposed to be signed by the two companies' top editors, but it arrived with only Stan Lee's faux-scribble on the cover because DC had just dethroned Infantino. He went from DC publisher to Warren freelancer. Giordano would become editor a few years later, but meanwhile both were earning extra paychecks by drawing naked women on skyscrapers.
Infantino pencilled writer Bill DuBay's "The Bride of Congo: The Untold Story," the most comically subversive of the seven stories. Like Peter Jackson in his 2005 King Kong remake, DuBay depicts a Fay Wray deeply in love with her giant ape, and the two even elope and raise a family. Louise Jones and David Micheline give their Queen Kong a happy ending too, sending the colonizing starships away so the narrator's genetically engineered mutant sister can live a peaceful life alone with her little monkey friends.
And that's it for Queen Kong survivors. Roger McKenzie's is just a machine operated by a thug for power and profit–which is as close to feminist allegory as Eerie gets. The rest of the writing staff murder their heroines, some more misogynistically than others. Cary Bates' teary-eyed manager replaces biplane blanks with real bullets because his beloved actress was dying anyway. Bruce Jones' mother-exploding freak dies unloved and alone after growing so large she displaces the Earth from its orbit. But Nicola Cuti's finale is the worst of the batch–a tale of a money-obsessed "Golden Girl" whom aliens kill and then erect as a gold-embalmed statue of liberty.
The stories strip Frazetta's painting of any quasi-feminist edge by punishing its female hero-victim for her uppityiness. But Eerie and Ms. weren't the only 70s magazines with nakedly revolting women on their covers. Newsweek began the trend in 1971, the year before Frazetta painted "Queen Kong."
"Women in Revolt" triggered the first female class action suit when 46 Newsweek employees sued for sex discrimination the day the issue hit newsstands. The magazine allowed no women on its writing staff. A second suit followed in 1972, but this time the owner of the parent company, Katherine Graham, stepped in. Graham was friends with Gloria Steinem and the giant Wonder Woman who appeared on the cover of Ms the same year. Newsweek agreed that by 1976 a third of its reporters would be women, including a senior editor.
James Warren, the king sitting atop Eerie's 1977 masthead, made no such agreement. Of the sixteen writers and artists in No. 81, Senior Editor Louise "Weezie" Jones is the lone woman–Gloria Steinem was long gone. Jones entered comics in 1971 as the model for Bernie Wrightson's cover for House of Secrets No. 92, edited by her first husband, artist Jeff Jones. She is fully clothed and only somewhat imperiled since hero and threat are ambiguously merged into the monstrous first appearance of Swamp Thing.
According to the Eerie bio page, she "worked in advertising/promotion before moving to Warren, where the thirty-year-old editor scripts an occasional story. She lives in Manhattan with her daughter." "I was willing to work in any kind of publishing," she told CBR. "One of my friends said there was an opening at a comic book company that paid more than the job I had!"
Jones (originally Alexander, later Simonson) was hired in 1974. She described the process of scaling the Warren skyscraper to Bleeding Cool: "I essentially twisted James Warren's arm into giving me the line of books as an editor. . . . Warren said to me 'Girls can't do superhero comics.'. . . I just kind of rolled my eyes and said, Look, I will edit the line for six months on my Assistant Editor salary . . . So of course I did it and then he made me the editor of the line, then he made me a Vice President."
In 1980, Jim Shooter hired Jones for Marvel, where she edited The Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants and created the supervillain Apocalypse (featured in the latest X-Men film). Marvel in the early 80s was still a "boys club," she said, but "I was always kind of one of the guys." Her pay was "as good as the guys around me," she said, "as far as I knew." Ultimately, she concluded, "gender doesn't come into play if [your work is] good enough."
After moving to DC in the 90s she was instrumental in the Death of Superman and the Reign of the Supermen story arcs, but aside from Red Sonja, she never worked on superheroines: "I had generally avoided doing female characters and being put on female character books — in part because I felt it was a great way to get stereotyped as a person who does female characters, and that's all you do. . . . I kind of regretted that I hadn't gone more in that direction when I was younger, because it was so much fun. But you do what you do."
In Jones' Eerie story "Starchild," the mutated giant Janey does her job too, builds a city on a suitable planet for Earth's growing multitude. But after a week of biblically hard work, she finds "acceptance" and "friendship": "'Cause y'see, Janey'd never had friends before. And those tittering monkey-things filled a gap in her childlike heart she never knew existed. . . . And for the first time in her prearranged life, she had fun. . . "
"Starchild" offers Frazetta's Queen Kong a happy ending, but unlike "The Bride of Congo," the revolting giantess escapes even the fetters of marriage to live as a nurturing and playful God to the "monkey-things" of her adopted planet. Unlike King Kong, she is not a monster but the narrator's secretly beloved sister. Her telling, however, receives only five pages, and so is the shortest of the issue's tales. It is also fifth in sequence, denied the privileged positions of opening, closing, or colored middle story–all of which feature Queen Kong's cathartic and/or admonitory deaths. "Starchild" is the best in the book.
"I think the women who make it in superhero comics don't make it because they're as good as the guys," said Jones, "they make it because they're better than the guys."
On HU
Philip Smith on Jeeves and social change.
Chris Gavaler on the sci-fi power and sexism of giant women.
on Serpieri's Druuna and rape in Heavy Metal.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Establishment I interviewed Jillian Keenan about her book Sex and With Shakespeare, and why spanking can be child sexual abuse.
At Playboy I wrote about
—why the NRA is influential (it's not the money.
—why there's nothing wrong with fan entitlement.
At Quartz I wrote about Brock Turner and why we should get rid of sex offender registries.
At Random Nerds I interviewed sci fi author Kameron Hurley about criticism and geek feminist revolution.
At Splice Today I wrote about
—Sense and Sensibility and the relief of finding a boring male romantic lead.
—Hammer's The Satanic Rituals of Dracula and how James Bond unfortunately beats the vampires.
Other Links
Tonia Thompson on racist double standards in attitudes towards parenting and tragedy.
Robert Greene II argues that the Civil Rights movement started with the New Deal.
Ken White on why celebrating the woes of Gawker isn't a good idea.]]>
In 1986, Heavy Metal changed their format from monthly to quarterly. As part of this format change, they began to print full stories instead of serializing them. Mostly, these stories were originally printed in Europe – where the Francophone market published 48 page collected editions called albums.
The third full album printed in the new quarterly format was Morbus Gravis (Severe Disease) by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, in the Summer 1986 issue. This feature introduced Druuna, a sexually charged woman navigating her way through a nightmarish dystopic society with nothing but her wits and her sexual availability to keep her alive. Over the course of the story, she is forced to expose herself, prostitutes herself for medicine, and is forced to perform fellatio at knifepoint. In retrospect, this was tame.
In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) this appalling level of sexual violence, Serpieri (and Druuna, especially) became massively popular among the Heavy Metal readership. So much so that a parody strip was published asking the question "Where is Druuna now?" (Answer: married, with two kids.)
The appeal was not and is not difficult to understand. Serpieri is a master craftsman. From the various sketchbooks that have been published, it is obvious that he enjoys drawing women. Naked women. Sexy women. And because he enjoys drawing them, he has gotten really good at it.
Any casual connoisseur of pornography can tell you that the act of sexual intercourse is not inherently anything – visually sexy, meaningful, or even necessarily pleasurable. It's the elements that make up the context of the act that add significance. Even something as simple as bad lighting or poor framing can push a visual depiction towards embarrassing or arousing.
Making something look sexy is not an easy feat. Serpieri knows this and the amount of effort he puts into his work is obvious. He is an incredibly talented illustrator who also happens to have a very good grasp of sequential narrative. That he likes to use those talents to draw people having sex would seem like a net positive – until you realize that a lot of the sexual activity is non-consensual. But he has somehow managed to draw the assault as sexy, which makes the realization very uncomfortable when it hits.
Serpieri works best as a pin-up illustrator, creating one off images that are designed to titillate and arouse the viewer. These are, to a one, perfectly suited to do just that. There is no problematic text to distract from the purity of the visual depiction. Which feels like an argument for the platonic ideal of looking at women without talking to them, so as not to spoil the illusion, but there you go.
To be sure, there is a straw-man argument to be made (half-hearted at best – like you'd find from a certain kind of Twitter account holder, one who doesn't like to be challenged on his enjoyment of problematic entertainment) that the story is set in a dystopic future where survival of the fittest is the rule and depicting sexual violence is both natural and understandable. After all, that's what happens when society collapses and there is no means of enforcing mores like consent. Sure, but it is really necessary to depict it so much? And if society has to collapse for these kinds of things to be normalized, why does rape still occur in this day and age?
Serpieri himself claims that Druuna's approach to sexual pleasures is actually a challenge to Judeo-Christian mores on sexuality. Which would be laudable if there wasn't quite so much rape. And it's not like Serpieri is unable to depict healthy, consensual sexual situations. He is. He just choses not to, for reasons.
To be clear – Heavy Metal had a long history of problematic stories. Sexual assault and rape are not the sole province of Serpieri. And he was not the first artist to produce beautifully rendered, overly sexualized science fiction that didn't make much sense (I'm looking in your direction, Fernando Fernandez). However, to the extent that Druuna became emblematic of Heavy Metal as a publication, she also became emblematic of the sexual assault problems at the heart of the most problematic stories published by that magazine.
In the Spring 1988 issue, Heavy Metal published a follow up Druuna story. In this story, Druuna is only raped once – by someone she knows and was actively fooling around with before he brutally and suddenly crossed the line into non-consent (page 42). About the best I can say is that it's a very realistic example of a date-rape scenario. The sequence to that point is incredibly erotic, but subsequent rereads retroactively taint any potential for arousal.
The real sexual violence in the story is reserved for Hale – a woman that Druuna meets in the wilderness. Shortly after they meet, Hale's father is killed by a group of soldiers. One of those soldiers immediately rapes Hale and takes her as his possession. The most disturbing part of this is the panel where we see Druuna and one of the soldiers standing by passively while we can read the off-panel dialog of Hale screaming "no" and being ignored (page 23). The page turn shows the actual rape in progress. As a piece of sequential storytelling, it's very well executed. Both the reaction shot and the actual rape are excellent example of show, don't tell. But that's about all it has going for it. That and the heartbreaking shot of Hale wrapped around herself post-trauma.
Druuna's advice to Hale is to just let it happen (!) because whatever the soldiers can do to them can't be worse than the monstrous mutants who wander the wastelands could do instead. Survival is the key, and the best advice is to endure. Which is an interesting thing for a young, impressionable young man – a demographic that was reading Heavy Metal at the time – to read. Especially so close to such a graphic sexual assault.
Hale is raped a second time, and the act is used to drive the plot. While the soldier is distracted, a mutant comes out of nowhere and drags him away (page 29). Hale is laughing hysterically at her salvation and near-death experience and the death of the soldier is given a little too much dramatic emphasis, considering that he was mid-rape when he was whisked away. Again, Serpieri is a good enough sequential storyteller that we get to see this occur, from the rape onwards.
Completing Hale's arc, we are shown a single image of her working as a prostitute in a military barracks and we hear nothing more about her for the entire series.
In the Summer 1988 issue of Heavy Metal, an editorial addressed current events. It seems that copies of the previous issue had been seized at the Canadian border for being in violation of code 9956 – a writ denying the importation of material dealing with sex with violence, bondage, etc. The editorial admits there was "sex with violence" in Druuna.
But there is a side of the strip that seems to have been ignored. Beyond the breasts, beyond the sex, there is an extraordinary power within the story – the horror of a world gone mad. We were not condoning the violence, simply presenting a frightening oftentimes exaggerated look into a future even more violent than the times we live in now.
That very issue, they featured a slew of stories from the Spanish version of the Illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because they'd been censored, you see. This was a free speech issue.
Heavy Metal has always been a commercially-minded magazine. That approach has worked out very well for them and gave the publication a kind of self-aggrandizing swagger. You knew they were going to be over-the-top and merchandise everything, so nothing came as a surprise after the first five or six years.
Heavy Metal in the late 80s was filled with material by Daniel Torres and Peter Kuper – to the point where they felt like house artists. However, no character captured the public attention like Druuna. The two first books were republished as stand-alone hardback editions, as well as a slew of sketchbooks and other art books. Serpieri reprints became big business for Heavy Metal. So much so that these are all still in print, decades later.
An interesting side effect from the free-speech editorial board was that Heavy Metal began to censor some scenes of sex and violence. The series The Waters of DeadMoon received the most obvious changes, but Serpieri's later works were given special attention. A few panels were altered, but mostly word balloons were placed at strategic spots to cover penetration, like a modern day da Volterra. In later years, this got to be almost farcical and a bored archivist could spend hours spotting the unnecessary bowdlerizations. In one later story, an entire six page sex scene disappeared, leaving readers confused.
Ironically, there was a note in May of 1992 (the first issue that Kevin Eastman's name shows up in the masthead as publisher) that read
We have gotten a lot of flack about censorship in the Raoul Fleetfoot story (January 1992). Those little black bars covering up "casual indiscretions" were part of the story and not our way of screwing around with the First Amendment.
Given previous behavior, it would not have been that unlikely a conclusion to arrive at. I certainly came to the same conclusion when I read the story in question.
In the November 1992 issue, the third Druuna story, Creatura, was published. Infamously, this story contains a four page sequence (pages 45-48) where Druuna is drugged and gang-raped. On the last page of the sequence, she wakes up and the following internal dialog shows up in a thought balloon.
Forgive me, we might have been able to live together. Your little devils gave me so much pleasure, you know? I don't know how much those drugs were responsible… But I can reassure you it was a wonderful experience.
Which is, in my opinion, the crux of the problem with these stories. If there were no word balloons, it would be entirely possible to read at least one of the pages of the sequence as just a very well-drawn group sex scene, with attendant pornographic associations. It is drawn sexy. That's how Serpieri draws these things – he's very good at what he does and his artistic choices are on the page. With the context added in, the juxtaposition of sexy and horrific makes the mind recoil in realization.
However, the apology that the victim utters (even if it's only in her mind) seems to absolve the instigator of the assault (a woman) retroactively on the theory that it was fun, once Druuna got into it. I cannot think of a more dangerous sentiment to present to the kinds of people that would find those pages more sexually arousing than horrific; keep in mind that I count myself as one of those individuals.
The first Druuna story was published in 1986, the year I entered high school. Heavy Metal was not news to me – on the contrary, my father had the complete run as I was growing up, so there was not a time when I did not know that Heavy Metal existed. But the perfect bound quarterly issues starting in 1986 did not fit into the official commemorative binders that held the first nine years of the publication. The new issues sat alone and were easier to consume as they came in.
The second story was published when I was still in high school and Creatura came out when I was living at home, having dropped out of college. In those pre-internet days, anything pornographic was a precious item and this one was mailed directly to my house. I'll spare you the gory details, but I honestly wonder how much those three stories impacted my sexual development.
If you can read Marain, figuring out my FetLife profile shouldn't be that difficult. I'm not going to make it easy for you, but I will say that enthusiastic consent is a massive turn-on for me. And even the slightest hint of reluctance makes me very uncomfortable. I guess that means I got the right message? It's difficult to say for sure if I am representative of the average reader reaction or an outlier.
I will say this, though – I tend to be attracted to women with bodies that are similar to Druuna's and that's probably not a coincidence.
Five additional Druuna stories were published between 1993 and 2003 (fun fact: more Druuna stories were published under Kevin Eastman as publisher than not), but I'm not going to recap them all in nauseating detail. They all are all set in more or less the same technorganic futuristic hellscape, a place full of horny soldiers, brutal authoritarianism, sadistic sexual predators, disease, ravenous mutants, and bewildering recurring characters.
There is a lot of philosophy and soul-searching. Consensual sex is found throughout the series, but usually only in the context of idyllic dream sequences that serve to demonstrate what the world could be like. On the other hand, the constant threat of violence and sexual assault seem to serve as a cautionary element, describing how the world is messed up.
Which works, on an allegorical level. But the stories themselves tend to duck and weave considerably around the outright identification of self-identification as allegories. In fact, Serpieri's hyper-realistic artwork tends to work against reading these stories as allegorical. These are specific events, happening to specific people.
If Druuna is, indeed, some kind of ur-woman, what do her repeated sexual assaults mean, exactly? Are they meant to imply something about the universal condition of women? That's pretty bleak, no matter how you turn the interpretation. However, if there is no meaning to these assaults, then the allegory argument falls apart on first principles.
It is entirely possible that I think too much about these things.
One final story: When I was in a mall outside of Antwerp earlier this year, I was flipping through Anima, the first new Serpieri book in thirteen years, at FNAC. My girlfriend looked over my shoulder and noted that the book was not just "a little rapey" (as I had described his work in Heavy Metal) but depicted actual rape, complete with knives to throats during intercourse. Considering that the book is largely silent, this is both a testament to his sequential art capabilities and his pre-occupation with sexual assault.
Paolo, you've still got it!]]>
It's 1977, so I'm eleven, older if the magazine I found in one of my cousins' bedrooms wasn't his most recent newsstand purchase. The cover price is $1.50. I paid $8 after pulling it from a vendor's long box at the Roanoke Comicon. Frank Frazetta painted it in 1971 for Warren Publishing's planned POW!, a magazine that was never published. I don't know what his fee was, but Warren must have paid it, since they used it six years later for Eerie.
The timing is no mystery. No. 81 is cover-dated February, so it was on newsstands after the Christmas release of King Kong. My father probably took me to see the remake that same month. I was annoyed that the promotional poster featured King Kong straddling the twin towers, while in the movie he has to take a running leap. The poster hung on my bedroom wall for years. It's also on the Eerie back cover.
I was a Frazetta fan in middle school and high school, but I doubt I recognized the artist as a sixth grader. "Queen Kong," like most of his other artwork, is about titillation. It's a picture of a giant naked woman. Warren Publishing used it on the cover to sell copies of the issue to heterosexual males. My eleven-year-old self felt it too–but I was puzzled by the nonchalant placement of the magazine on my cousin's bed, his bedroom door left wide open. Where was the Catholic shame? I apparently still felt enough residual embarrassment that, after giving into nostalgic urges, I did not share my new purchase with my fourteen-year-old son on our drive home from Roanoke.
And yet if you're going to indulge in softporn, it's not the worst choice. Type a Google search, and you'll find Caroline Liddell includes "Queen Kong" on her Pinterest page "Images of Powerful Women," explaining: "The male fear of what happens when women refuse to behave according to expected gender stereotypes–they run amok! It's a wonder we all haven't climbed up the Empire State building, swatting away annoying little gnat like buzzing planes since the vote made us all too big for our britches!!"
Maybe Frazetta was influenced by Dick Giordana's Gulliver-esque cover art for the July 1971 issue of Lois Lane.
Those are actualy tiny Justice League clones tying her down, but the effect is the same. Gloria Steinem, a former assistant at Warren's Help! magazine, also featured a Kong-sized Wonder Woman on a 1972 Ms. cover:
But not even a titillated eleven-year-old could mistake Eerie for second-wave feminism. Look over the previous year of covers, and all of the women are damsels in distress incapable of saving themselves from the monster of the month.
Rape is a thinly-coated subtext.
Frazetta, one of Warren's most employed cover artists, was a big fan of women-in-peril. Each sprawls uselessly on the ground while a muscular hero battles to protect her. In terms of composition, the women are foreground, the heroes are central, and the on-coming threats are furthest from the viewer. In order to be heroic, the hero must be smaller than the threat, and so the woman crouches to give him comparative stature. The pose is inherently absurd, but the repetition is comic.
But Frazetta was okay with women-in-peril minus the heroes too. That sometimes requires her to take a more active position, occasionally substituting twirling hair for the missing hero's combat gestures. Sometimes Frazetta even reverses angles.
When not in peril, Frazetta women fall into typical good girl and bad girl poses, the eroticism unmitigated by other action. Rather than presenting their backs, they face the viewer, though only a seductress offers direct eye contact.
Though all of Frazetta's women are sexualized, and many are imperiled, not all are powerless–or their power is not always exclusively sexual. Erase the heroes, and the threatening animals can become an extension of the woman's power.
Although the body of a Frazetta woman is too idealized to be monstrous in itself, she can command other larger and more monstrous bodies.
Which is why "Queen Kong" is unique. When not climbing the Empire State Building, Frazetta's Fay Wray is just another seductress or imperiled-woman-sans-hero.
But Queen Kong is the monster herself. She follows the gender-flipping impulse of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the 1958 knock-off of The Amazing Colossal Man. Although previews warned that actress Allison Hayes, "once a beautifully voluptuous woman," would become "the Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All," Hayes appears no different after her transformation. It is simply the sight of a giant woman (even an initially unconscious one) that produces Horror, Shock, Frenzy, and Devastation!
Queen Kong is beautiful and revolting too. Since all Frazetta women are first and foremost sexual objects, her body remains proportionally unchanged, but the context establishes her monstrous size. Her twirling hair isn't emblematic of her gendered helplessness anymore. It is an extension of her combat pose, a nearer equivalent to a hero's bow or sword. And though the foregrounded biplane is nearly her size, she is larger than the threats circling her–and so compositionally larger than Frazetta's typical heroes.
Queen Kong embodies what Carol J. Clover terms "the female victim-hero," that gender-disrupting monstrosity born from Stephen King's 1974 Carrie and first embodied by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film adaptation–both still popular when Eerie No. 81 shipped. We're happy when Carrie kills all those high school bullies–just like we rooted for Kong against those pesky biplanes.
Provided, of course, the sympathetic monster knows when to die. "Monster" shares its etymology with "warn" and "demonstrate," and a giant woman usurping King Kong's crowning spectacle is a warning against and a demonstration of 70s gender revolution. Frazetta doesn't paint her corpse after its plummet, but her death is implied. Queen Kong's beautiful revolt must fail. Even a titillated eleven-year-old reading softporn comics on his cousin's bed understood that.
One gem I uncovered during that period was the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse and when I look back on my formative years as a reader I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't have been better for me to set aside the weighter tomes (all those hours spent looking at Shakespeare) for a while and instead have devoted myself fully to the task of devouring the Wodehouse canon.
I found Jeeves and Wooster to be Wodehouses' most compelling creation (history appears to be on my side on this point). Each J. and W. story follows, broadly, the same plot; Bertram Wooster, a well-meaning but somewhat, to use Jeeves' affectionate words 'mentally deficient' man-child of independent means, gets into some kind of a mess and Jeeves, his faithful butler, rescues him from it. Bertie's misadventures are rarely his own doing – they are generally instigated by an old school chum who has had a fall-out with his affianced and in need of help, or an aunt who is trying to out-maneuver her husband. Bertie's problems are almost entirely external; left to his own devices he can generally be found sitting around in his New York or London apartment, spending time with his friends at the Drones (a gentleman's club for boisterous – fourth sons with a lot of money and no occupation) or some of the more fashionable areas of France, reading a pulp detective novel, recovering from a hangover, or indulging in a little gambling. He occasionally finds himself temporarily besotted with a member of the opposite sex, but the danger soon passes. As each novel progresses a comedy of errors ensues. Various parties appear to foil the plans of Bertie and those he holds dear, often in the form of some terrifying patriarch who, as a result of some misunderstanding, wants to tear our young hero limb from limb. Just as we reach the moment when all seems lost, Jeeves swoops in with one of his ingenious plans and the whole matter is resolved.
One does not read Jeeves and Wooster for the story, of course, but for the language. One can let a Wodehouse novel fall open and, briefly surveying the page, find a marvelously-wrought sentence. Consider, for example, the following, found in Carry On, Jeeves:
Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy overpowering sort of dashed female. Not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips this season.
In just three sentences Wodehouse leaps from the theatre ('o.p.' and 'prompt side' being opposite sides of a stage) to the language of fashion. The word 'dashed' wonderfully evokes not just a language but a world-view laden-heavy with the Edwardian era. His very phrasing at once evokes and gently ridicules a world of waistcoats, high collars, and entitlement.
Despite the oft quoted phrase that analysing Wodehouse is like 'taking a spade to a souffle', we have a variety of terms which we can bring to bear upon the numerous literary devices found in his prose. He is the master of dramatic irony (in Right Ho Jeeves Bertie sips a cocktail and feels like 'Cesar having one in his tent the day he overcame Nervii') and the transferred epithet ('I pronged a moody forkful'). It is perhaps his bathos which produces in me the most glee. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, as a pair of lovers have a tearful and passionate reunion Bertie, witnessing the scene, muses that the toast he is eating is a bit cold, but that's quite alright – he rather likes cold toast so long as it has plenty of butter on it.
We can describe the mechanics of Wodehouse's prose, then, but there is a gulf between taxonomy and analysis. Here the spade soufflé analogy becomes apt, as Wodehouse's works are often determinedly detached from historical and social realities. Evelyn Waugh, writing in praise of his peer, describes the world Wodehouse presents works as 'idyllic', and Auden described him as 'one of the great English experts on Eden'. The two wars which Wodehouse lived through, including internment in a Nazi prison in France and a shattered reputation in England, never intrude upon his works. As a professional book botherer and Wodehouse fan one would think I would have a lot to say on his works, but I often find that there is little in Wodehouse which is not already on the page.
The quaint and insular world of the English gentry which Wodehouse presents is not entirely apolitical, however. Some have found in Wodehouse a reversal of roles and an unbalancing of the social order. Sophie Ratcliffe argues that in Wodehouse stories those of the lower social orders (butlers, chorus girls), often prove themselves to be more capable than those who were seen as their social betters. She defends the point by observing that in his correspondence Wodehouse shows a 'lack of snobbery and prejudice', being as diligent in writing to a former housekeeper as to George Orwell.
Following Ratcliffe, one can read Wodehouse as social critique. Bertie is unwittingly snobbish and child-like. He is a well-educated imbecile who wields his impressive vocabulary like a blunderbuss. He has achieved almost nothing in life (the prize for scriptural knowledge which he won as a child comes up with comical regularity). His opulence and unconscious disregard for anyone outside of his social class is striking. He worries, often, about Marxist radicals baying for his blood and when one sees how he lives one can understand why. It is a testament to the insularity of his world view that Bertie's implied reader is one of his own ('I don't know if you were at Cannes this year…' he writes).
Despite the heroic role given to the lower classes in Wodehouse's works, it is rare we have more than a few lines of dialogue from the subaltern. Even Jeeves lives a life largely shrouded in mystery, appearing only to assist the young master in his time of need. We know that Jeeves likes to bet. He sometimes takes fishing trips. He has an extended family which is particularly replete with aunts. He routinely quotes Shakespeare and Tennyson, but these things appear only as glimpses of a larger, submerged, whole. We see him only through Bertie's eyes – as a kind of dutiful sorcerer (he eats a lot of fish) and idealised mother rather than a human being. Even when Jeeves narrates one of the short stories he sticks to the particularities of the matter at hand. His inner life remains, frustratingly, obfuscated.
When Sebastian Faulks took the reigns he pushed this criticism a little further – his version of Jeeves lost a relative in the Boer War and, when he reports this, receives no sympathy. Some of Bertie's lot lost money when Emily Davison threw herself before a racehorse and they are far more concerned about a poor bet than the social changes promised by women's liberation. Faulks, unlike Wodehouse, situates Jeeves and Bertie in history, even if that history seems to pass them by, making their time on this earth jarringly finite (in one of his letters Wodehouse laments that his novels would become 'historical' after the war given that Bertie would not be able to afford a butler with income tax as it was).
This is not to say that the changing political climate in England never pushes against the boundaries of Bertie's world in Woodehouse's books. Plum was fully conscious that he was capturing the dying days of the British aristocracy; Bertie attempts (unsuccessfully) to learn how to darn his own socks, and at one point witnesses a Marxist rally (only because a chum was trying to win over a lady there present). The world never pushed too hard, however. Bertie encounters threats to his way of life, but those threats, like those internal to his world, are always resolved.
It is hard to read too much social criticism in Wodehouse, then, because there is no sting. Wodehouse does not want to see the British gentry come to an end – his work is a celebration of useless people. Bertie's shortsightedness does not make him a monster, but a child, and Wodehouse, if anything, wants to protect him. We find Bertie, like my thirteen year old self, poised, precariously, on the cusp of adulthood, but (unlike self) he never quite falls. This is, perhaps, why he has such fondness for overbearing aunts, why he is terrified by father figures such as Robert Spode, (who reminds him of his old schoolmaster and tries to talk to him like an adult). Marriage is a prospect Bertie often, in moments of madness, embraces and then seeks to escape from. Bertie, Peter Pan-like, lives out a fantasy of perpetual youth. He belongs to a world of no responsibilities, where nothing really changes, where Jeeves' maternal embrace will always encircle him. The predictability and insularity of Bertie's life is comforting. Aunts will be disappointed. Old school chums will fall in, and out, and back in love. Fearsome men like Roderick Spode will make sincere attempts to kill Bertie. Social change looms. But at the end of the day Jeeves sweeps in and fixes everything.]]>
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Consuela Francis and Qiana Whitted on Captain America: Truth.
bit of a short week…though we do have more for next week, I promise.
Chris Gavaler explores the line between abstraction and narrative in comics.
On the tragedy of being named Noah.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Establishment I wrote about indigent defense, and how it can reduce mass incarceration.
At Quartz I wrote about how even if Mexico is not a race, Trump's comments about Mexicans are still racist.
At The Week I wrote about Al Giordano, an activist and organizer threatening to run against Sanders for the VT Senate seat in 2018.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
—Dracula A.D. 1972 and old vampires same as new vampires.
—third parties, which don't work in the United States.
Other Links
Daniel Harper on Death Proof.
Cripin Sartwellon why Stephen Hawking doesn't know what he's talking about.
John M. Harris praises the Confederacy.]]>


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


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Comparative Analysis of TDMA Scheduling Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks
Energy conservation is a major issue in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In order to obtain energy conservation, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) has been discussed as one of the potential solution. Many researchers proposed TDMA as a Media Access Control (MAC) in order to conserve energy. The main advantage to ...Download Now
Efficient Load Balancing Using VM Migration by QEMU-KVM
Load balancing is a computer networking method which is used to distribute the load across computer clusters or multiple computers, central processing units to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time and prevent overload. There are various methods to balance the load. This paper discusses the design and ...Download Now
Traffic Engineering Based Load Balancing in LTE-A Heterogeneous Network
LTE-A is the latest cellular network technology. LTE-A is the use of Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) which contains combinations of different cells such as of a macro cells and Low Power Nodes (LPNs). heterogeneous network is used to increase capacity of the system and as well as to increase the demand ...Download Now
Secured Transmission Through Multi Layer Perceptron in Wireless Communication (STMLP)
In this paper, a Secured Transmission Through Multi Layer Perceptron (STMLP) guided encryption/decryption in wireless communication has been proposed for exchange of data/information. Multilayer perceptron transmitting systems at both ends generate an identical output bit and the network are trained based on the output which is used to synchronize the ...Download Now
Transmit Antenna Subset Selection in MIMO OFDM System Using Adaptive Mutuation Genetic Algorithm
Multiple input multiple output techniques are considered attractive for future wireless communication systems, due to the continuing demand for high data rates, spectral efficiency, suppress interference ability and robustness of transmission. MIMO-OFDM is very helpful to transmit high data rate in wireless transmission and provides good maximum system capacity by ...Download Now
Network Simulators for Next Generation Networks: An Overview
In this modern era of technology, the advancement and development specifically associated with network simulators make them a significant tool for enhancing fundamental understanding in the field of next generation wireless network technologies, worldwide. Network simulators provide consent to investigators and developers to test diverse scenarios with an ease that ...Download Now
Survey on Routing Approaches in VANET
VANET is defined as the ad-hoc network in which the capabilities of sensor network and mobile network are combined. The open environment of this network also increases the complexities in different environments. In this paper, the exploration to the VANET scenario is defined along with discussion on associated challenges. The ...Download Now
Impact of Various Network Attacks on Time Synchronization in Cognitive Radio
Time synchronization in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is a demanding task due to the dynamic and cooperative nature of these networks. DCR-Sync, a novel time synchronization protocol for CRNs is proposed. DCR-Sync is fully distributed and resilient towards failure of root nodes, i.e., the nodes which play the role of ...Download Now
A Compact Multi Antenna System with DGS
A compact multi antenna system with Defective Ground Structure (DGS) for Electronic Counter Measure (ECM) applications is proposed in this paper. Two monopoles are located on the opposite corners of the PCB and spaced 10 mm apart by a small ground portion. To decrease the mutual coupling caused by near-field ...Download Now
Wireless Communications Enlargement: A Review of Advancement in Technologies
In this paper, the authors intend to serve as a summary review of the collective experience; the structural engineering community has gained from the use of wireless sensors and sensor networks for monitoring physical parameter. A benefit of wireless structural monitoring systems is that they are inexpensive to install because ...Download Now
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SAIC Awarded Contract by US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center
- Company to Provide Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Services
Under the contract, SAIC will provide support for Navy and Joint C4ISR systems located at worldwide shore and ship operational commands, centers and facilities, as required. SAIC will provide support as needed on various technical systems and will provide services in areas including operations and security management, as well as help desk, training, shipping, transportation, and equipment and system related support. SAIC is one of two contractors that will compete for task orders under the contract.
Related Research on ASDReports.com:
Global Aerostat Systems Market Insights, Opportunity Analysis, Market Shares and Forecast 2016 - 202...
Global Aerostat Systems Market Insights, Opportunity Analysis, Market Shares and Forecast 2016 - 202...
"We look forward to providing SSC Atlantic with operational insight and knowledge management to help successfully integrate secure solutions to help naval, joint and national agencies achieve their critical missions," said Tom Baybrook, SAIC senior vice president and business unit general manager.
Your company's press release on ASDNews and to thousands of other journalists and editors? Use our ASDWire press release distribution service.
Source : Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) (NYSE: SAI)
International Fighter Conference
Nov 15 - 17, 2016 - London, United Kingdom
US Export Controls on Non-US Transactions Seminar
Oct 3 - 6, 2016 - Amsterdam, Netherlands


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Music Association of Minnetonka
Join us for our final Summer Concert!
Minnetonka Civic Orchestra Summer Concert
Sunday June 26, 2016 at 1:00 p.m.
Landmark Center, 75 5th St., St. Paul
Halligan Insurance Services, LLC
The Music Association of Minnetonka is proud to partner with the city of Minnetonka to provide musical arts programming for the residents of Minnetonka
The M.A.M. Youth Choirs sing the National Anthem at all 2016 home games for defending American Premier League champions FC Minneapolis.
Next Game: Sunday, July 30 at 7 p.m. at Einer Anderson Stadium at Minnetonka High School
Music Association of Minnetonka
18285 Highway Seven, Minnetonka, MN 55345
Business Office - (952) 401-5954 - email@example.com
Artistic Director - Roger Hoel - (952) 401-5956
Many Thanks to our Sponsors
Mission of the Music Association of Minnetonka
Provide musical opportunities that expand the performer's creative, artistic and recreational goals and enrich the lives of audiences in the greater metropolitan area.
Are you looking for a musical community that embraces talent at all levels?
We have 10 performing groups, including choirs for ages 8-80+, plus a band and two orchestras for adults, offering FREE community concerts. To learn more, browse our site and attend an upcoming performance.


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Hodgkin Lymphoma Treatment May Raise Risk of Stomach Cancer »
"Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer of the immune system. It is one of the most common cancers among adolescents and young adults in the United States. Major advances in treatment for this cancer, such as different types of chemotherapy and more target"...
Read the Hodgkin Lymphoma Treatment May Raise Risk of Stomach Cancer article »
(ondansetron) Oral Soluble Film
ZUPLENZ (ondansetron) oral soluble film is a white opaque orally dissolving film designed to be applied on top of the tongue where it will dissolve in 4 to 20 seconds and then is swallowed with saliva.
ZUPLENZ does not require water to aid dissolution or swallowing.
The active ingredient in ZUPLENZ is ondansetron base, the racemic form of ondansetron, and a selective blocking agent of the serotonin 5-HT3 receptor type. Chemically it is (±) 1, 2, 3, 9-tetrahydro-9-methyl-3-[(2-methyl-1H-imidazol-1-yl)methyl]-4Hcarbazol-4-one.
Figure 1: Structural formula
of ondansetron
The empirical formula is C18H19N3O representing a molecular weight of 293.3. Each 4-mg ZUPLENZ oral soluble film for oral administration contains 4 mg ondansetron base. Each 8-mg ZUPLENZ oral soluble film for oral administration contains 8 mg ondansetron base. Each ZUPLENZ oral soluble film also contains the inactive ingredients butylated hydroxytoluene, calcium carbonate, colloidal silicon dioxide, erythritol, hypromellose, monoammonium glycyrrhizinate, peppermint flavor, polyethylene oxide, sodium bicarbonate, sucralose, titanium dioxide and xanthan gum.
Last reviewed on RxList: 10/1/2014
This monograph has been modified to include the generic and brand name in many instances.
Zuplenz FDA Prescribing Information
Additional Zuplenz Information
Report Problems to the Food and Drug Administration
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit the FDA MedWatch website or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
Get the latest treatment options.


text:
Please remember to follow the manual of style and code of conduct at all times.
Check BNN and Bulbanews for up-to-date Pokémon news and discuss it on the forums or in our IRC channel #bulbagarden on irc.systemnet.info.
Check BNN and Bulbanews for up-to-date Pokémon news and discuss it on the forums or in our IRC channel #bulbagarden on irc.systemnet.info.
Golett (Dragons Exalted 58)
From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
Golett (Japanese: ゴビット Gobitto) is a Psychic-type Basic Pokémon card. It is part of the Dragons Exalted expansion.
Card text
Pokédex data
|Golett - Automaton Pokémon
|3'03" (1.0 m)
|202.8 lbs. (92.0 kg)
|Pokédex entry
|The energy that burns inside it enables it to move, but no one has yet been able to identify this energy.
|たいないで もえる エネルギーに よって かつどうしているが どんな エネルギーなのかは ふめいである。
Pound is a move in the Pokémon games that Golett can learn. This card's Pokédex entry comes from Pokémon Black. Dragonspiral Tower is featured in the illustration.
|This article is part of Project TCG, a Bulbapedia project that aims to report on every aspect of the Pokémon Trading Card Game.
Latest Pokemon News
- Mark McQuillan's Machamp to be distributed at Australian National Championships: Based on 2015 ...
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- Red Rescue Team, Blue Rescue Team, Explorers of Sky coming to North American Wii U Virtual ...


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MURRAY — Criminal charges were filed Wednesday against two people who allegedly took an iPhone from a 15-year-old girl and her deaf uncle at gunpoint.
Christopher Wayne Hatton, 41, and Amanda Rose Wilson, 21, who also has the nickname "Pitbull," were charged in 3rd District Court with aggravated robbery, a first-degree felony, and theft, a class B misdemeanor.
On July 17, a 15-year-old girl and her uncle went to 5982 S. Stratler St. (380 West), to sell the uncle's iPhone to two people, according to charging documents. The teen translated for her uncle because he is deaf.
Once inside, Wilson asked to see the phone and then ran into a back room with it, police said. While pleading to give the phone back, Hatton pulled out a gun, pointed it at the two and said, "You guys just got jacked," according to the charges. Wilson then allegedly told the two to leave before they were shot.
Wilson was charged with felony drug possession in June and had a warrant issued for her arrest July 10 for failure to appear in court.
— Pat Reavy
- Video: How to choose the right helmet for...
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- Body of missing hiker found above Alta
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- Nearly 70 percent of Utahns say Donald Trump...
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- ACLU sues the state over inadequate... 26
- Utah GOP brings up father's bank... 25
- Rio Grande neighborhood 'more unsafe... 21


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Report: Cameron Diaz Not Exclusively Dating P. Diddy
It hasn't been long since Cameron Diaz separated from New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, but she is already linked romantically to another man. According to Life & Style Weekly, the Lenore Case of "The Green Hornet" might be dating music mogul P. Diddy.
An insider, however, noted that the 39-year-old actress' relationship with the Diddy-Dirty Money founder is still in the early stages and is "not exclusive". Though so, it allegedly helped her get over her romance with Alex. "Diddy is someone Cam can have fun with, no ties at all," added the source.
Cameron and Diddy reportedly went out together on October 24 when they enjoyed dinner at seafood hot spot Catch Roof in New York City. The next day, the twosome were spotted strolling through Washington Square Park. One onlooker claimed, "Cameron was beaming. They looked really comfortable together."
This isn't the first time Cameron is linked to Diddy. Back in March 2008, the two were seen dining at Osteria Mozza restaurant. "Cameron was already seated when Diddy arrived wearing a brown Jump Suit and brought his own bottle of red wine wrapped in a ghetto Ralph's plastic bag," a source spilled at the time. "It was obvious they were on a date as the couple giggled and flirted with each other during dinner."
More Cameron Diaz News
- Steven Tyler Confirms Aerosmith's 2017 Farewell Tour
- 'Rogue One' Releases More New Photos. Also Get Detail of Mon Mothma's Bigger Role
- Taylor Swift Flies to U.K. to Meet Tom Hiddleston's Mom. See Picture of Their Happy Outing
- 'Game of Thrones' Season Finale Won't Slow Down the Pace, People Will Die
- Audrina Patridge and Fiance Welcome Baby Girl Kirra Max
- Getting Married? Tyga Calls Kylie Jenner His 'Wifey'
- Christina Aguilera Performs 'Change' on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' to Support Orlando
- Justin Bieber's Music Video Vixen Xenia Deli, 26, Marries 62-Year-Old Man in Lavish Wedding


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Employer: "So, what did you study in college?"
Shiny New College Graduate: "Exploration and Discovery."
Particularly given that changes like these are driven strictly by financial considerations (despite the occasional pretense of intellectual or pedagogical justification), the pro-cluster people should keep in mind that students (and parents, and employers) really, really like actual, normal-sounding majors they can identify and understand. Moreover, these cutesy names impose strange limitations. Are we to assume that exploration and discovery only take place in courses contained in the Exploration and Discovery cluster?
The comments on the story are surprisingly thoughtful.
The adjunct union could probably use some new leadership.


text:
I am creating a custom VirtueMart order item export. Some products have a custom field of type "Cart Variant". In this specific case, customers can select "yes" or "no" from a list when they put the product in the basket. I need to include the customer entered value in my order item export.
It seems custom field values are not stored as one might expect. The only thing I have been able to find, is a piece of json wrapped HTML in column
product_attribute of table
#__virtuemart_order_items. I could
preg_match the value out of there, but that's rather crude and quite unreliable. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the actual data as a plain value anywhere.
Can anybody tell me if I am missing something?


text:
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"Looking for local Beauty Consultant and Makeup Artists? visit: http://www.meticulosa.com These guys did such a fabulous job!!! I felt really beautiful and all the bridesmaids looked great! Highly ..."


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Dartmouth News
Local news for Dartmouth, NS continually updated from thousands of sources on the web.
Iran Nuclear Agreement: Black Mark or Gold Star for Obama?
What role do you think humans play in global warming?
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20 Shocking Celebrities Who Lost Their Virginity To Other Celebrities
Updated: Sun Jun 26, 2016 02:30 pm
Copyright © 2016 Topix LLC


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DEKALB MURDER-SUICIDE: A father and daughter are dead in an apparent murder-suicide at a home on Fair Lane in DeKalb County, Ga. According to media reports, police officers were called to the home, where a family gathering was being held, after 7:30 p.m. Sunday night after gun shots were fired. DEVELOPING STORY. STAY TUNED.
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Have Legal Questions? Ask a Lawyer Now.
Paid time off is indeed part of earnings and reportable to state and Feds for taxation. If your company is required to withhold taxes and social security etc from your pay, then they should withhold from paid time off also!
All the best,


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