Women On Fire

I found a Chinese blog entry about Holmes slash and for kicks, I asked Google to translate the page.

Found myself staring for a long time at the phrase "piebald tape" before I figured out it had begun life as "speckled band."

This isn't going to make much sense for non-WOFsters, so I'm putting it behind a cut tag.

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So, for ordinary people this is trying enough. It would drive shriias insane, and probably render not a few of them shrimarbh. First shriia to have a kid is going to need a lot of support from the community.

If you want my take on the Gulf disaster, it's over here.

Why go back to the old Pete Seeger albums when Lady Gaga is so apropos?

This Is A Bad, Bad Hotel

When they tell you the left doesn't have a sense of humor...send them that link.

So, I finally caught up with a couple of the most recent Castle episodes the other day--"Food to Die For" and "The Mistress Always Spanks Twice." My burnt-out reptile brain enjoyed both. However, even in its burnt-out reptilian state, my brain couldn't stop fuming over the plotting in "Mistress." Spoilers behind the cut tag.

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Ah well. Won't stop me from watching it. It's because I actually like the male lead, which is really unusual, especially for a crime show. Female lead is OK though I wish her character would actually do more to justify this ballbreaking bitch reputation she seems to have around the precint.

I reread Jane Eyre a little while ago for the first time in a long time. I kind of overdosed on it in my youth, and had to put it away for a while until I forgot some of it. Now that I am no longer breathlessly enthralled by the characters and the romance, I can better appreciate some of technical stuff that makes Jane Eyre work. I can also better appreciate (and acknowledge) how much Jane Eyre's fingerprints are all over my own writing, especially the first three books in the WOF "trilogy".

This part will involve spoilers for Jane Eyre:

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And this part contains spoilers about Women On Fire:

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Anyway. Done now. As you were.

Wrote this draft up weeks ago; never got to finish it. It's a shame to let all this work go to waste.

I learn from my morning corporate-rock station that Lady Gaga continues to extol to her fans--apparently known now as "little monsters"--the virtues of celibacy. "It's OK not to have sex," she tells them.

Sure, of course. It's OK not to have sex. In fact I can easily imagine circumstances arising in which it might be the right decision for a woman to decide that for a given duration it's just better if she doesn't mess with it. There's still something about this news item that I just find kind of...creepy.

When I was a teenager, it was all about Madonna. And this was early Madonna--you know, "Borderline," "Like a Virgin," "Holiday," and so on. By the time I got to college she'd moved into her "Justify My Love" period, and there were furious debates over whether it was bad and wrong from a feminist perspective for her to be doing these quasi-pornographic BDSM things. And then Sex came out, in its shiny mylar wrapper. And at some point, I said to myself: A day will come when Madonna will seem as quaint and wholesome as the Andrews Sisters now seem to us. Hard to imagine who's going to come along and make Madonna look square.

Well, I guess the person I was trying to imagine was Lady Gaga. It's true that the outlandishness of her outfits, makeup, and wigs does lend them a certain campy charm, but mainly I find the whole aesthetic terrifying. As for her videos...I...guess?...I'm supposed to find it very hip and hot that she's sending up the whole "women in prison" B-movie genre in "Telephone," and I guess that just as in the "Paparazzi" video and the "Bad Romance" video I'm supposed to see the killing off of the obnoxious man (or men...or whole restaurant) as the feminist stinger that makes this self-objectification worthwhile. I have to say, though, I don't. Too old, maybe.

Anyway, my point was: On one level, for someone who seems intent on turning herself into an animated fetish object to be now preaching celibacy seems insane. As with 90% of the music videos out there, the main purpose of hers seems to be titillation. Her whole public persona appears to be about sex, and she's now telling the youth of the world to save it till they're ready? What?

But then again in a way it does make sense. A fetish is a fetish, at least according to Freud, because it stands for sex. It's some ordinarily non-sexual body part or object or whatever which becomes invested with the libido that would normally attach to the traditional erogenous zones. Lady Gaga's outfits, from what I can tell, accentuate her shoulders, feet, and hair at least as much as the more traditional T&A; and most of what she typically wears would make actual skin to skin contact pretty difficult. From that point of view, Lady Gaga's celibacy makes perfect sense. As she says herself, she's too busy for a 'real' relationship; the demands put on her by her role as that which stands for the sexual leaves her no time or energy for actual sex. Makes sense, in a warped Freudian sort of way.

Weird things have happened to the way sexuality relates to symbolism in our culture. Used to be you had to read between the lines to see sexuality. Now, since people don't have to read *through* to sexuality--it being boringly on the surface everywhere you look--apparently the thing is to make them read past it or around it. Which I guess is why, bizarrely, I listen to Lady Gaga saying this stuff about celibacy and I think, "Why run down sex? Sex is awesome! And so much more enjoyable than this...thing...you seem to be wearing!"

Get off my lawn! I'm old!

She's not having any fun and it's no fun for any of the rest of us either.

We get really bad digital reception; the signal gets repeatedly hung up and there are regular blackouts. Nevertheless, I did get to see Kate Gosselin's paso doble to "Paparazzi" and I have this to say: She needs to go home. For her own sake as well as ours.

There's all this tabloid crap about whether it's wrong for her to be doing this because she's the mom of 8 kids. Who's taking care of the kids, they ask. Is she a bad mother, they worry. I'm quite sure the kids are being taken care of and I am not at all interested in passing judgment on her as a mother. Judging a mother is the easiest fucking thing in the world to do and I hate watching people do it. Besides, nearly all the women over 30 who have been on DWTS are also mothers, some with quite small children, and somehow nobody raises these questions about them.

No, my problem is simply this: She can't dance. What's more, she's not trying to learn how.

Many DWTS contestants show up unable to dance. Most of them learn how before the show begins, and then over the course of the season, they gradually or sometimes very quickly get better. Even those who are voted off early have usually made some improvement by that point. There are exceptions--Billy Cyrus, for instance--but often those exceptions are able to get some charm points for making an effort before they are regretfully eliminated.

I never watched Jon and Kate Plus Eight and I don't know what Kate Gosselin normally looks like. All I know is that on DWTS, she pretty much always looks miserable. The only thing that varies from week to week is how many other people around her also look miserable. She seems to be so petrified that she is unable to profit from instruction. Now, I can't say the same wouldn't happen to me in that situation--the constant presence of the producers, the cameras, the body image thing, the millions of people watching you dance live--but then I haven't spent the last how ever many years of my life having my every move filmed by the crew of my own reality TV show.

The academic part of my brain finds it very interesting that someone who has made a career out of having her 'real life' turned into entertainment falls apart to this extent when asked to help generate a 2-minute fantasy. But that's apparently what's happening. There was so very little content in that dance, and yet she still couldn't really execute it.

Ah well. My fault for watching.

glaurung_quena has a long review over at his place conclusively proving how awesome the new Sherlock Holmes movie is even for longtime fans of the original stories. I don't dispute his evidence or his conclusions, yet I feel curiously reluctant to see it. And I don't think it's about the stories, either. I think it's about the adaptation on which I got imprinted, which was the Granada TV series made in the late 1980s starring Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and David Burke as Watson.

Wait, I hear you say. Wasn't Edward Hardwicke in that series? Yes, he was--after the first season. Burke left to go do some other project, and they brought in Hardwicke as Watson. And after that I stopped watching, because with a different Watson it just didn't work for me any more. That's what I'm like. I get attached to one thing, and then I don't want a newer, shinier, improved version of it.

The Granada series was broadcast in the US via PBS's "Mystery" series. I watched that show a lot. It was through "Mystery" that I originally discovered G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, which I then went and read all of. I was very into Father Brown at the time, partly because I was still really into being Catholic. Now, I find the stories nearly unreadable. Anyway, my point was, I was already pretty familiar with the print canon when I started watching the Granada series. At that point all the shows on Mystery were still introduced by Vincent Price (I think they have Gillian Anderson doing it now) and I remember how scornful he and his teleprompted text were of all the previous film adaptations. All the stuff about how Holmes never really said "Elementary, my dear Watson" except in the movies, how the deerstalker/meerschaum thing is a totally filmic invention, and all of that. So oddly enough, my first encounter with a Holmes adaptation was embedded in this printocentric dissing of the whole category of Holmes adaptations (minus, of course, the one they were promoting).

Hypocritical though all that was, I have to say I do love that series--and it's mainly because of the chemistry between Brett and Burke. Brett himself had a great interpretation of the character which brought out all the things that I had always seen in the stories but which other people persistently failed to read there. The nervous energy, the volatility, the mood swings, the darkness, the gone-to-seed bachelorosity alternating with natty Victorian sartoriality, the snark. What I liked about Burke's Watson was that he made Watson attractive. Loyal, stouthearted, handy with a pistol, all of that--but he also had a sense of humor and had no problem getting angry when Holmes pushed his buttons.

Though they made a big deal about the series being faithful to the original stories, the fact is that many of them were adapted with a fair amount of freedom. Most of the time, it was an improvement. The writers made an effort to find Watson more to do, and making their working relationship more of a partnership made everything a lot more compelling. It is true there were some howlers. For instance, to an otherwise very good adaptation of "The Greek Interpreter" they tacked on a ridiculous 'high-speed chase' on a train for no other reason than to add excitement and zest to what they had evidently decided was a downer ending. There was also the obligatory strengthening of the addiction plot line; every contemporary adaptation seems to feel a need to make Holmes's cocaine addiction a bigger deal than Doyle ever made it. And there was some funkiness done in order to link the stories into a more coherent arc, such as establishing that Moriarty was the mastermind behind the bizarre scam being run in "The Red-Headed League" in preparation for their showdown in "The Final Problem."

Anyway, so Jeremy Brett and David Burke were my first Holmes & Watson and I find that I don't want them displaced. I am not one of these people who can't stand it NOT BEING EXACTLY LIKE THE BOOK--at least when the book in question is one that I believe could stand some improvement. Doyle's stories certainly fall into that category; so (heresy!) do the Tolkein books, in my opinion. I used to be more like that when I was younger. I am tickled pink to discover that some studio has lost its mind and decided to remake Clash of the Titans. This is a film that came out in the 1980s and which I went to see because I'd had Greek mythology pushed on me in school and which I thought even at that tender age had to be the worst film ever made. There, again, I kept fuming about how they got the stories "wrong," unaware that the versions of these myths that I myself knew were the result of a process of adaptation which was equally open to challenge. Still, you don't have to know ancient Greek to figure out that providing Perseus with a mechanical owl named Bubo just because Star Wars had R2D2 is pathetic. The sense of outrage has not survived; but I have to say that every time I see that damn promo and watch a glowing Zeussified Liam Neeson intone, "Release the Kraken!" I just about bust a gut laughing.

So, I watch Dancing with the Stars. I'm not proud of that, but I do. And this season...well, there's Pamela Anderson. And...

First of all, I find her terrifying to look upon. She's like a cyborg Barbie. Second...so, last night she put on a blonde wig (or maybe that was her 'real' hair, it's hard to tell) and a sparkly dress and danced a foxtrot to "I Wanna be Loved By You" and all the judges got all excited and told her how she WAS Marilyn Monroe.

I was surprised at how pissed off that made me. I'm sitting there going all Lloyd Bentsen on them. "I knew Marilyn Monroe, and let me tell you, honey, you are NO Marilyn Monroe!"

Of course I didn't know Marilyn Monroe, except in the way that millions of people knew her from looking at her in pictures and in the movies. But still. Let me just say a few things about what the difference is between Marilyn Monroe and, say, Pamela Anderson.

1) Marilyn Monroe's body was real. The hair, not so much. The face, I'm not sure. The makeup, sure, not exactly the 'natural' look. But from the neck down, that was a real woman's body. Not every woman's body, of course; but real nonetheless. That means that by today's standards, she would be considered 'fat,' because in addition to cleavage and a butt she had a tummy. This, to me, makes her 1000X sexier than Pamel Anderson, who is like a stick insect everywhere else but has these enormous, incongruous, uncannily spherical breasts.

2) Marilyn Monroe had talent. You know, she was no Judi Dench, but she was very good at what she did. When Arthur Miller wrote a real part for her in The Misfits she rose to the occasion; and even playing Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she's hilarious. She made some of our favorite movies work. (If you have never seen Some Like It Hot, go to Netflix and put it in the queue right now.) She was also cast in a lot of really crap movies, some of which I have seen. For whatever reason she was cast as a crazy stalker woman in two different films (Niagara and Don't Bother to Knock); in both she's pretty creepy but it was clearly not her forte. But in a decent movie, on screen, she's pretty compelling--and not just because of her cleavage.

Anyway. I had to get that off my chest. It is not that easy to be Marilyn Monroe. Takes more than platinum blonde hair and enormous tracts of land. Really it does.

In other news: Any woman who can piss off Tony Dovolani has got to be a real piece of work. Too bad they didn't pair her up with Max; that would have been some quality TV.