More Teeth

The trouble with remakes, in which I come to no conclusions

2011-08-31T17:59:00.000-04:00

Many of my friends and people I follow on twitter are bristling at the upcoming remake of Straw Dogs. I want to see it. But don't worry - I will be sure to watch the original first. Straw Dogs is one of those movies that's been on my list of "Movies I should probably watch when I get around to it." The positive outcome of this remake is that it pushes the original to the forefront of my list of "Movies I am actively seeking opportunity to watch."

The same is true of Fright Night. I just saw the original and enjoyed it immensely. The remake boosted my interest in seeing the original. And judging by the audience reaction to Chris Sarandon's cameo, a fair number of people in the cinema *had* seen the original.

Why do people moan about remakes? It's something I'm guilty of myself. If the original is good, detractors of the remake will insist that it doesn't "need" to be remade. Of course it doesn't need to be remade. Very few movies - original or not - "need" to be made. If it's a good story, why not tell it again? How might the story be different in a different place or time? And if the original is really that good, then surely it will hold up and not be diminished by the remake. If the original is not-so-good, is it nostalgia that holds people back?

When it comes to American remakes of foreign films, however, there is further snobbery. "Americans are just too lazy to read subtitles," they will say. In reality, it seems to me that it's a case of "Keep your filthy mainstream off my subculture." An Asian film forum I used to frequent once had a headline on April Fool's Day announcing that Brad Pitt would be starring as Kakihara in a remake of Ichi the Killer. Shudders abound. But actually, Brad Pitt could totally pull off Kakihara. He may be a big-name hunk, but he's got the chops.

If pressed, I don't think I could name a bad remake of a good Asian horror film. I'm sure they exist, but I generally avoid them. The remakes that I have seen have been pretty good. The Ring isn't a far cry from Ringu. They're both good. I think it's a positive thing that they both exist. The American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters looked terrible. I didn't see it. I don't know anyone who did, whether they'd seen the original or not. It has had absolutely no impact on the original in terms of quality or, as far as I can tell, audience.

When they announced they were going to remake Infernal Affairs, I was skeptical. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio? Jack Nicholson? Mark Wahlberg? What is all this? But The Departed was fantastic. It is an entirely different movie than Infernal Affairs. I would even argue that it's a *better* movie. So I am pleased that the same producers are in charge of the remake of Oldboy. (Thank God that Speilberg/Smith talk never came to fruition!) I'm not the biggest fan of Spike Lee, who is set to direct, but he knows what he's doing. Announcements regarding the casting of Josh Brolin and Christian Bale as the protagonist and antagonist, respectively, have me very optimistic.

Today I got the news that El Orfanato is being remade with Amy Adams. I love El Orfanato. It is the only horror movie to actually *scare* me since I was a child. I don't really want it to be remade, but I can't seem to put my finger on why. I think it's just a sense of possessiveness. I enjoy introducing the film to people. With an American remake, I won't have that sense of "Look at this awesome movie I found." But that ownership is is an illusion in the first place.

For the most part, I am interested in film theory more than film production. But there are some films I would really like to make. One of them is a remake of Battle Royale. Don't get me wrong - I love the original. But it differs from the book (which I read before I saw the film and also love) in some really crucial ways. I'm not saying I could do better than Kinji Fukasaku, but I see no reason why there can't be more than one film adapted from one work. How many different film versions of Frankenstein are there? If I had the resources, I would write a screenplay adapted more faithfully from the book. It would be in English (because I don't speak Japanese) but I would cast Japanese-American actors. But no matter how I did it, fans of the original film would scorn me.

Coming soon: new blog posts!

2011-08-04T21:59:00.000-04:00

I've been slacking on blogging because I've been not-slacking on other things. BUT! I've been writing new posts in my head, including a doozy of a post about LARPing, geekery, and melodrama (the mode of film, not the high school social phenomenon).

In the meantime, a piece of advice:
When a job interviewer asks you what your weakness is, "Kryptonite" is not an appropriate response.

Doesn't anybody ever know that the world's a subway?

2011-08-04T21:57:00.000-04:00

No, because what does that mean?

Cookie blogging - Milano melts

2011-04-09T14:37:00.000-04:00

I love Milanos. They aren't my favorite Pepperidge Farm cookies (that would be Brussels), but I do love them. So I just *had* to try the new Milano Melts.

When I opened the bag I was kind of taken by surprise because the cookies looked naked. The only analogy I can think of is mildly obscene, so here's a picture:

I was skeptical. I assumed that there would not be very much chocolate inside and it would not be as creamy or melty as it looked on the package. I was pleasantly surprised:

They're delicious! The chocolate is indeed creamy and melty. More filling would be nice, but then the cookie would probably collapse.

Rating: B+

Doing it Right: Hobo with a Shotgun

2011-04-03T20:38:00.000-04:00

Dear Robert Rodriguez,

THIS is how you make a grind-house flick. If you recall my post "One-Trick Movies" (since you're obviously a regular reader of my blog), I said that "Machete" would have been better off if it had just remained a trailer. Not so for "Hobo with a Shotgun." The big difference? Hobo has heart.

Love,
R.

My thoughts on Lucky McKee's "The Woman"

2011-03-29T17:00:00.000-04:00

The film is about the upper-middle class New England Cleek family. Chris Cleek is an estate lawyer. His wife Belle is a stay-at-home mom. He has a moody teenage daughter, Peggy, and a tween son Brian who watches his every move to see how to behave. One day while hunting in the woods, Chris comes across a wounded feral woman (the character is a carry-over from the film The Offspring). He captures her and restrains her in the cellar. He introduces her to his family as their project. She must be civilized. If this were an entirely different movie, he would put marbles in her mouth and have her recite English vowel sounds over and over. But this is not that movie. In this movie, the method of choice is torture.

This movie is NOT “torture porn” – a topic deserving of its own blog post. It does not seek to shock or titillate. Andre Dumas writes in this spot-on review, “I often talk about my problem with films that do not commit to their story and that do not push things as far as they need to go in order to tackle the themes they’ve proposed. The Woman however is one of the most committed films that I have ever seen. It goes to places that I did not anticipate and places that I didn’t plan on seeing ever in my life.” This is not a midnight movie that you go see with your buddies in a theater full of people who have been drinking and cheer on the gore. Even when the woman gets her justifiable revenge, there will be no cheering.

The movie is unsettling, disturbing, and very difficult to watch. It works as a parable for domestic abuse. Even before he captures the woman, Chris Cleek is a physically and emotionally abusive husband and father. Once the woman comes into the picture, the abuse is externalized and focused on her. She becomes a metaphor for domestic violence. Chris tells his family that she is their “secret.” She is also their shame. Mike Everleth over at All Things Horror writes in his review that when Belle runs into an acquaintance at the grocery store, “you can almost see her searching the internal databanks for answers that are normal and acceptable to an outsider.”If you take the woman out of the equation, the scene would still stand – she’s not just covering up for the woman chained up in her cellar, but also for the treatment she receives from her husband.

I had a college professor who explained patriarchy, the rule of the father, as “the father can fuck or kill whoever he wants.” Mr. Cleek exemplifies this more than anything I have ever seen. And that is why I consider this to be a feminist film – though not one that I would recommend to many feminists I know. It unflinchingly shows (and condemns) the stranglehold that misogyny has over all women in a patriarchal society, and it does so with a rare gravity.

When I asked Lucky Mckee via twitter whether he would classify this film as a horror movie, he responded, “I would classify it as being my only horror movie.” To me, it is only in the third act that the film truly becomes a horror film. When Belle finally reaches her breaking point, it was at first a relief to me. All of that simmering repression needed to come to a boil. But her outburst also cracks Chris’ twisted Mr. Cleaver veneer and unleashes the raging and unabashed misogynist monster that we’ve known the whole time to be right under the surface.

And now I’m going to discuss the rape scene. So if you don’t want to know how it happens or you don’t want to read about rape, you should stop here.

As I said, this is a difficult movie to watch. For me, the hardest scene to stomach was the rape. This was the most disturbing rape scene I have ever seen (disclosure: I have not seen Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible).

The rape happens the night after the woman has been “cleaned up” (hosed down with a high-pressure hose) and put in a dress. Chris checks to make sure his wife is asleep, goes down to the cellar, and fucks the woman. She doesn’t/can’t fight back as he fondles her breasts and lifts her dress - her hands are chained. To be sure, rape is an act of violence, not one of sex. But it is also an act of entitlement, and this scene’s clear illustration of that is what makes this scene so upsetting. It isn’t explicit. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t hit her. He owns her. He can do whatever he wants with her.

During the scene, there are cuts to the other members of his family. His daughters asleep in their beds, his wife crying in hers (she wasn’t really sleeping, dickhead), and his son, who wants to know what his father is up to, follows him to the cellar, and spies. As the son peeps through a hole in the cellar door, the woman stares at him with unblinking eyes. It is the hatred and behavior the son learns during this scene that ultimately sets up the climax of the film.

Movies I Wanted to See in 2010 but Didn't

2010-12-31T13:07:00.000-05:00

Bitch Slap
Legion
Frozen
Shutter Island
Repo Men
Chloe
Kick-Ass
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Descent 2
Metropia
Holy Rollers
Splice
Toy Story 3
Cropsey
The Killer Inside Me
Restrepo
The Kids Are All Right
winnebago Man
The Last Exorcism
Never Let Me Go
The Town
Catfish
You Again
Buried
Enter the Void
Hatchet II
Let Me In
The Social Network
My Soul to Take
I Spit on Your Grave
Marwencol
Boxing Gym
Monsters
Four Lions
127 Hours
Tangled
Black Swan
I Love You Phillip Morris
The Fighter
The Tempest
Rabbit Hole
Blue Valentine

Na na why don't you get a job?

2010-12-11T21:52:00.002-05:00

Because of the economy, ass wipe.

The Walking Dead, Authorial Intent, and Why I Need to Go to Grad School

2010-11-21T16:08:00.001-05:00

The "Why I Need to Go to Grad School" part is because this post is not very well structured, and I'm not sure if I prove all (or any) or my points.

**Disclaimer: Walking Dead spoilers (the comic) ahoy!**

I read the first several volumes of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead a few years ago. I stopped reading them because they were sexist/racist drek. Unfortunately, I can't really remember the specifics. I know there were very clear instances of sexism and racism, but I can't argue the point because I don't remember. I DO remember, that in the "letters" page, in which fans write to author Robert Kirkman and he responds, Kirkman was TOTALLY dismissive of all accusations. HE wasn't being racist. HE was just showing reality and racism exists in reality. The only black woman in the series just *happens* to get raped. HE wasn't even thinking about the fact that she's black. YOU must be racist for even thinking that!

Now, I'm not an artist. I can't say what kind of moral responsibility and artist does or doesn't have. But I think that an artist ought to engage his or her audience. And I think an artist can NOT deny someone's reading of his or her art - regardless of the intent.

Is it racist for a black character to get raped? Not necessarily. But as fenzel on my new favorite blog Overthinking It writes, "no one character, no one statement, no one discrete thing, is ever 'feminist' or 'anti-feminist' (or even 'sexist' [or racist. -R.]). What is feminist or anti-feminist is the way we include how we talk about and associate discrete things in a broader discourse, and then what that has to do with how some actual group of people thinks, acts and behaves." Now I have been told that some of the female characters in The Walking Dead get a lot more, well, character later on in the series. But up until that point, all the women were defined in relation to the men. (Again, I can't give examples because I don't remember specifics.) In comic books of the superhero genre, an overwhelming number of women are killed, raped, tortured, and/or de-powered - often in a sexualized manner. So in the context of comic books, and within the world of The Walking Dead, I think that it is absolutely racist and sexist for the only black woman to be raped and tortured.

Do bad things happen to the white characters and male characters, too? Yes. Am I a racist for thinking that Michonne's rape is not unrelated to her being black? No. Are there racist and sexist men out there? Yes. In the introduction to her book Reel to real: race, sex, and class at the movies, bell hooks writes

Movies make magic. They change things. They take the real and make it into something else right before our very eyes. Usually when I critique a movie lots of folks like, they tell me, "It was just showing the way things are. It was real." And they do not want to hear it when I make the point that giving audiences what is real is precisely what movies do not do. They give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real. It may look like something familiar, but in actuality it is a different universe from the world of the real. That's what makes movies so compelling.

I would argue that the same goes for comic books and any other form of popular art entertainment. If we accept that Robert Kirkman is giving us a world with zombies, then we accept that he is not giving us reality. It is his reimagining of a reality (with zombies). And this reimagining of his, women are not defined outside of their relationships to men. And the one black woman, the "warrior woman," gets raped.

One-Trick Movies

2010-09-06T19:06:00.005-04:00

I am so sick of movies that are just one joke extended to a feature length. I've seen two recently: "RoboGeisha" and "Machete." I'm not going to grace their trailers by posting them here (ie, I'm too lazy) but if you've seen either trailer, that's all you need to see. "Machete," of course, was originally just a trailer - it was one of the fake trailers in "Grindhouse" - until someone thought it would be a good idea to make it into a real movie. Spoiler alert: It wasn't a good idea.

You know you're watching a one-trick movie when it starts off with a pretty great opening scene and then quickly goes downhill and never recovers. There are usually a couple of "memorable" lines that are supposed to stand out as inappropriately cheesy, but they are too forced and self-congratulatory to actually be funny. Overall, these movies suffer from too much dialogue. There will be a few good sight gags, but not enough entertainment value to sustain interest. There is a prolonged final showdown. This kind of movie isn't the class clown, but the kid who acts out to get attention only it backfires because nobody thinks s/he is funny. It tries too hard. Yes, it is supposed to be exploitative and over-the-top, but it ends up just being sloppy and feels at least half an hour too long.

"Machete" and "RoboGeisha" don't take themselves seriously at all. Their tongues are so far in their cheeks that they can't enunciate. It's muddy, a mish-mosh. It's masturbatory writing - nobody cares, only the writers who pat each other on their backs at how funny they are. (If anyone actually read this blog, I would re-read Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and write about the difference between true camp and self-aware camp and how that applies here.) The difference between these films and a film like "The Human Centipede" - which could easily have fallen into the trap of not transcending its own premise - is that "The Human Centipede" actually tries. Same thing with "Piranha 3D" - yes, it is silly and aware of its silliness, but it isn't content to stop there. No matter how self-aware, a movie must take itself seriously. Or else it's just boring.

It is interesting to note, however, that both "Machete" and "RoboGeisha" do follow the Bechdel-Wallace Rule... Hmm...

Blood draws the pack

2010-08-25T17:08:00.001-04:00

My laptop has a virus, so I'm posting from my Droid. But I just HAD to write about Piranha 3D. In five words: it was sooooo much fun!

Champagne Supernova

2010-07-26T22:26:00.004-04:00

Where I was while you were getting high:
- Reading a magazine
- Playing Bejeweled Blitz
- Plucking my eyebrows
- Checking Twitter on my droid
- Not getting high

Europeans Will Kill You

2010-07-24T19:45:00.003-04:00

Getting killed by Europeans isn't just for American tourists anymore. Two movies I watched recently were European films of the tourist-torture genre of horror.

The first was the 2006 British film "Severance." Severance is about a group of office employees from a weapons manufacturing company that goes off to a cabin somewhere in Eastern Europe for a team-building weekend. Only the cabin they wind up at is not the luxury retreat they were expecting. And they keep getting killed one by one. Oops. The irony is, of course, that they are being killed off with weapons supplied by their own company. Severance is VERY funny. Who doesn't love a good satire-horror about the military industrial complex? (Complete with one office worker whose interest is in building more humane land mines.) The characters are all pretty likable, and I was sad to see a couple of them get it.

The second film was Iceland's 2009 "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre." Sit right back and you'll hear a tale...of a bunch of tourists who get massacred while on a three hour tour, er, whale watch. This film is very, very bleak. It opens with grainy found/archival footage of whalers butchering whales. (Have I ever mentioned on this blog that I'm afraid of whales?) The movie plays out kind of like Texas Chainsaw Massacre but on a boat in the North Atlantic instead of in some Southern US backwoods. The idea here is that the Icelandic Mrs. Fratelli and her sons are pissed about Greenpeace's actions to take down the noble whaling industry and so they take it out on whale-watching tourists. (Although someone not on the boat is concerned that people don't look at whale watching from the whale's point-of-view. What about their privacy?) Also: the song that plays as the credits roll is Bjork's "Oh So Quiet" with the choruses covered by a metal band. Awesome.

The two films are about equally gruesome, but RWWM is a lot less fun simply because the tourist characters are just so mean and selfish. Not only do they not try to help each other make it out alive, they sometimes actively thwart the others' chances of survival. Sure, the crazy inbred hunchbacked Viking Nazi Jesus-freak killers are pretty messed up, but the characters trying to avoid getting killed by them are a brutal bunch themselves. Jeesh.

Anywho, the moral of the story is that if you're ever touring in Northern or Eastern Europe, and wackos come after you with murderous intent, try to help your comrades-without-arms to survive, k? Otherwise you're fucked.

It's called Inception.

2010-07-16T23:23:00.008-04:00

I don't really want to write about Inception until I've seen it again, but I need to get these thoughts out of my head and into writing so I can pay attention to other things. No significant spoilers ahead.

- This movie makes very clear the similarities between film and dreams. As the movie points out, one doesn't often start at the beginning of a dream. It's already in progress. The same is true of any scene in a movie. The viewer doesn't know what came before, but fills it in. I was acutely aware of that with this movie, because every shift in scene asks "Is this 'real'? How did they get here?"
Another way that film is like a dream is the dilation of time. In the film, one hour of dream-time is equal to five minutes of real-time. When I entered the movie theater, it was daylight. When I exited, it was dark. I checked the time because I didn't know how much time had elapsed. (Going to see a matinee is even more like waking from a dream because going from the dark of the theater into bright daylight is especially jarring.)

-It is my belief that Christopher Nolan only directed The Dark Knight and made it so awesome so that he could get the name recognition and funding to do this film. "Inception" is very clearly follow-up to "Memento." At a thematic level, both films deal with memory and the perception of reality. On a narrative level, they both feature a man who is tortured by the death of his wife and haunted by memories of her and what he did or did not do to contribute to her death. "Inception" throws dreams into the mix. But both are about the playground that is the subconscious.

- Speaking of "spoilers" there were a couple of plot points that I saw coming right away. They weren't really "twists," because they were fairly easy to guess. But it is a testament to Nolan's writing and direction that figuring it out didn't feel like I was getting ahead of the film, and a testament to the cast's acting that they sold it even though I knew it was coming. The same can be said of a few confusing parts - I didn't entirely understand the details what was going on, but it didn't really matter.

- True or False? Inception : Dreams :: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind : Memories

- I love Leonardo DiCaprio. Has he won an Oscar yet?

- I love Joseph Gordon Levitt.

- Cillian Murphy's cheekbones are to die for.

- At one point near the end, I think Leo shouts "ELLEN!" at Ellen Page instead of her character's name.

- Speaking of Ellen Page's character: the character is named Ariadne. If I'm remembering my Greek mythology correctly, Ariadne is the woman who led Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Reeeeal subtle there, Nolan.

- As with Memento, the film is peppered with just enough really funny lines.

- It is unfortunate that the movie does not follow the Bechdel-Wallace rule, but fuck it. EDIT: Scratch that, I think it does.

- Towards the beginning of the film there is at least 20-30 minutes of scenes that feel overly expository - explaining dream architecture and inception and extraction, etc. I didn't much like that because it felt like the part of Ocean's 11 where we're walked through the plan for the heist. (And yes, I know Inception can be nutshelled as an existentialist heist film, but it's not that easily summated.) It just seemed like too much set-up and0 it was trying to hurry up and get to the good part, the dream. Well it was worth it. And there probably wasn't a better way to do it. But it bugged me at the time.

- The ending is excellent. The whole audience (and the theater was packed) let out a simultaneous expression of delicious frustration. It is ambiguous but not tormentingly so because it doesn't really make a difference which way the cookie crumbles.

- And there is another way the film is like a dream; it is like a dream that you wake from just before it ends and you try as you might, you can't fall back asleep and pick up where you left off.

- At one point early on, a female character (I can't remember if it's Ariadne) is standing at some sort of height or ledge and asks Leo, "What happens if I jump?" I reeeeally wanted him to say "You jump, I jump." (Titanic, people!)

I think that's all I have to say, at least until I see it again. (Tomorrow?)
Oh, and God I fucking love film.

EDIT:
One more thing I forgot about how the film is like a dream:
There are bits of dialogue that are repeated a few times throughout the movie. It is dreamlike in the way that dreams are like a sort of deja vu, variations on and repetitions of themes, objects, and events.
Oh, and also in the film they refer to the people who populate the dreams as "projections." To the audience, all the characters are literal projections on a movie screen.

"Tangled" up in blue (not pink)

2010-06-10T20:12:00.004-04:00

So Disney's next outing is a take on the Rapunzel story (presumably without the part where Rapunzel ends up stranded in the desert and the Prince blinded).
Here is the latest trailer:

According to Cinematical, Disney changed the title of the film from "Rapunzel" to "Tangled" in order to have more appeal to boys. It seems that they thought that "The Princess and the Frog" didn't do too well because it had the word "princess" in the title and that they therefore alienated their male audience somehow.

Fine. Change the title. It gives you that nice line in the trailer: "It takes two to get...Tangled." But I'm not sure how I feel about making the trailer entirely centered on the Prince. On the one hand, I don't like that they are taking away the female narrative. It's not about Rapunzel being trapped in a tower, it's about Flynn on the run from the law! (Wait...wasn't that the plot of "Aladdin"?)

But what bothers me even more on a personal level is that it doesn't give me enough footage of Rapunzel to work with to decide whether I am interested in how she is portrayed or not. We see more of her hair than we do of her face. (Her hair can somehow move independently - it's like a cross between AVATAR hair and tentacle porn.) She could be kinda spunky - she's not taken in by Flynn's "smoldering" face. Or she could be a dumb blonde - her only line in the trailer is "Best. Day. Ever!" while swinging from a tree.

So is this a movie I should be supporting or not? Give me something to work with, Disney!

PSA: OMG BREAKING BAD

2010-06-07T16:26:00.002-04:00

OH MY GOD BREAKING BAD IS SO FUCKING GOOD. BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION. EVER. EVERY EPISODE IS THE BEST EPISODE YET OMG OMG OMG
THE ACTING IS SO GOOD AND THE WRITING IS SO GOOD AND THE CINEMATOGRAPHY IS SO GOOD AND EVERYTHING ABOUT IT KNOCKS MY SOCKS OFF EVERY TIME EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT WEARING SOCKS.
HOLY COW.
SO GOOD.

That is all.

Bad Horror: Right vs. Wrong

2010-05-10T14:24:00.003-04:00

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet George A. Romero - the man who created zombies as we know them today. But I overslept. Instead, however, I attended a free screening of his latest film, Survival of the Dead, which he introduced.

First things first: George A. Romero is a tall man.

[Disclaimer: I have seen Romero's original Night of the Living Dead. But I am ashamed to admit that I have not seen his other Dead movies (The Dawn of the Dead remake is one of my favorite zombie movies, though), including the recent first-person POV Diary of the Dead, from which Survival takes a minor character as the lead protagonist.]

My review of the movie:
It was really awesome seeing the Man himself introduce the film. But that's where the evening's awesomeness ended. Survival of the Dead is boring. Flat-out boring. I would post a spoiler warning for this review, but the whole thing is so glaringly obvious that there's nothing to spoil. The plot is tepid. The only interesting things Romero does to move his mythos forward is to suggest that zombies might eat something other than human flesh - but he does this only at the end and just kind of pokes the idea with a stick and walks away from it. The dialogue is awful. I didn't care about any of the characters. It could have been interesting to have military characters as the protagonists since Romero is so very anti-military, but all the characters were totally flat. The zombies weren't the only lifeless ones. (har har har.) If you recall, my criticism of Zombieland was that it had no conflict. Zombie movies aren't about the zombies, but about the survivors. In Survival of the Dead, I *wish* it had been more about the zombies. At least Zombieland was entertaining.

My review of the screening:
When Romero introduced the film, he said he had a lot of fun making the movie and encouraged the audience to laugh at the funny moments. Somehow, the audience took this to mean "add your own sound effects, guffaw at everything, and be a total d-bag" because that's what they did.

Now to do a 180 and look at a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed.

On Saturday, I went to a midnight screening of The Human Centipede. The premise of the film is that this Mengele-esque retired surgeon kidnaps three tourists and sews them together anus-to-mouth to create a "human centipede" with a single digestive tract. Gross. Awesome. I love bizarre movies. I don't usually pay attention to reviews, but Cinematical touted the film as "All concept, no follow-through, " so I was apprehensive. I didn't want to sit through a total stinker. But I had to go. Wow.

My review of the movie:
The film was actually not that bad ("bad" being subjective, of course). It strikes the right balance of taking its concept seriously, but not taking itself too seriously. The actresses who play two American tourists were godawful. Luckily, neither was the head of the centipede, so they don't get to talk at all after the operation. (They do groan and squeal and whine a lot, but they're okay at doing that.) Dieter Laser's Dr. Heiter is fan-fucking-tastic - creepy, insane, deadpan, whacked out of his mind, hilarious. He almost reminds me of Beat Takeshi. His lab-coat/aviators/shotgun get-up gives him the potential to be one of those iconic movie villains. As with Survival of the Dead, it's hard to spoil this movie, but for a different reason - once you know the premise, there's not much more to it. But it's not boring. Not at all boring. Sure, there are a couple of plot-holes, but they're easy enough to disregard or to write off as character stupidity. And as with Survival, I didn't particularly care about any of the characters (Except maybe the Japanese guy who is the head of the centipede, but about whom we know nothing). But that's probably for the best, as it would be real tough to sit through if I identified too closely with any of the victims. As for the gross-out factor, it wasn't that bad, actually. The medical stuff made me a bit squeamish - an IV gets ripped out of an arm and Herr Doktor cuts open a couple of kneecaps - but it was more than bearable. There's some oozing pus which is pretty gross. But the (objectively) grossest parts are implied. You don't get X-ray vision to see the extra long digestive tract in action. Of course, I have a pretty high tolerance for this kind of stuff - on film, that is. That's not to say that I was disappointed, though. It's pretty gross/bizarre, all right.

My review of the screening:
Except for one guy who kept making fart noises (you're not funny, guy), the audience was great. The laughed at all the appropriate moments - the first one being in the opening credits when the Director of Photography's name is displayed: his name is Goof de Koning. It makes me a little bit sad that this film will probably just turn into a sort of trophy for movie-goers - an endurance test, if you will. Oh well.

AVATAR

2010-03-15T21:25:00.006-04:00

So I saw "AVATAR" last night.

First let me say that AVATAR is actually in 4D - 3 dimensions and time. We had to wait in line at the IMAX theater for an HOUR before they let us in to be seated! Jerks.

I give it a B-. It both managed to exceed and fall short of my expectations.

**Some spoilers ahead, but none that you didn't see coming.***

- The script wasn't as awful as I thought it would be. And the acting wasn't too terrible either.

- I knew in advance that it was the same general story as "Ferngully" (and Pocahontas, and Dances with Wolves, etc.) but certain shots and lines of dialogue were lifted DIRECTLY from Ferngully! Maybe James Cameron thought that nobody would notice, but Ferngully is one of my top three favorite movies of all time. I noticed. Maybe one day I will even do a shot-for-shot comparison of the plagiarized scenes.

- I HATE what they did to CCH Pounder! I was under the impression that the Na'vi animation was neat because the Na'vi looked like the actors that played them. This was more or less true of Zoe Saldana and Sam Whatsisface and that Norm guy. But look what they did to CCH Pounder:
Just look!

- Sigourney Weaver rocks my socks off. She was awesome. Maybe the Na'vi could have saved her life if they hadn't taken the time to wrap her in leaves before trying to heal her. What were they thinking?

- Giovanni Ribisi was pretty good, too.

- I don't care if Michelle Rodriguez almost always plays the same character. I like her.

- I felt like Colonel Badguy should have been played by Robert Patrick.

- I liked the part where the giant Mecha fought the giant jungle panther.

- For me, the most compelling scene was wherein Jake Sully gets his pet pterodactyl. That was a cool scene.

- The narrative economy was very tight. Kudos! Well played.

- The idea of the trees having synapses was really cool - original, even. I wish the movie was more about that and less about Ferngully.

- Okay, AVATAR probably should have won best sound design. I guess. Of course, I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, so I don't really know.

- The 3D: Here's my beef. Yes, the film was visually stunning. But I don't think it really added anything. Ostensibly, the point of 3D is to create a more immersive viewing experience, to make the audience feel like they're really there on Pandora. Instead, the 3D effects were distracting - they onlly drew attention to themselves. "Look what we can do! I bet you wanna reach out and touch those space jellyfish, huh?" No, I'd rather pay attention to what's going on, thanks. I think that a good director can give the viewer an immersive experience with more traditional techniques. I know James Cameron can! Remember that scene in Titanic when the ship goes end-up and the one guy falls off and hits the smoke-stack on the way down? I saw Titanic five times in theaters and every single time the guy hit the smoke-stack every single person in the audience cringed and went, "Ooh!" Just the camera angle and the sound design puts the viewer there. There were no moments like that in AVATAR. (That being said, Titanic is coming back to theaters in 3D. And I'm shooting for a sixth time.)

- My other beef: Eywa ex machina. Sure, the white guy comes in to save the day. But when it looks like all hope is lost even for him, the deity *literally* comes to the rescue. F'real?

The image in this post was yoinked from somewhere on the Internets.

Keep Pushin', Watson

2010-01-19T12:37:00.002-05:00

Sherlock Holmes was rad!

*Possible spoilerishness ahead*

- There were two women of any importance in the film, which sucks but is more than Guy Ritchie usually has. It is unfortunate that they were both such flat stereotypes - the Good Wife and the Sexy Thief Rival/Love Interest. I felt like more could have been done. Mary, especially, had potential, I thought.

- Could someone please direct me to some good Holmes/Watson slash fic? kthx

- The narrative economy wasn't too tight. I get it, Guy, you like boxing. But that scene in the boxing ring wasn't really necessary, now was it? When you have a film where every little detail is supposed to have significance (as Holmes points out to Mary), there should be no flab unless it serves some red herring purpose.

- I don't usually like it when movies set up the sequel with such a groaner of an ending, but I look forward to the continuation of this franchise, so it's fine.

- Actors I would like to see more of: Mark Strong (Lord Blackwood), Kelly Reilly (Mary), Hans Matheson (Lord Coward)

- I would like to see it again at home so I can pause on images from the Book of Spells so I can see whether the Hebrew actually says anything. It didn't look like it, but maybe? The word "tzedek," meaning "justice," appears on an object on Sir Thomas' desk, and the word "shlemut," meaning "completeness," appears under the throne Blackwood sits on when he passes around the goblet.

- I'm not sure how I feel about Blackwood. He was a pretty neat villain, but his goal was pretty dumb. World conquest? Such a tired objective. And his means - a chemical weapon? Really? Kinda weak.

Ponderings

2010-01-19T12:32:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been thinking a lot about:
- Fashion
- Art!
- Subcultural aesthetics
- Communities

At some point I may or may not put these thoughts into blog form.

Good Riddance

2009-12-25T13:46:00.004-05:00

I know I did a post with some year-end lists last year, but I really dislike year-end lists. I dislike decade-end lists even more.

2009 kind of sucked. A lot. There were lots of good things, but I'd rather not look back at them in a blog post in list format. A list of things I'm looking forward to in 2010 isn't much better than a year-end list, but here goes anyhow:

Movies:
Frozen
The Wolfman
Shutter Island
The Crazies
Kick-Ass
Toy Story 3
Inception

Music:
Contra - Vampire Weekend

Wow, is that it?
What else is there?

UPDATE: How could I forget!? Season 3 of Breaking Bad!

Silver Bells, Silver Screen

2009-12-12T13:08:00.003-05:00

Some of my favorite Christmas movies, in no particular order:

Survive Style 5+

Die Hard

Gremlins

Bad Santa

Batman Returns

Brazil

I'll Be Home for Christmas

And just for good measure, the alternate ending to It's A Wonderful Life

Friends Forever, or until further notice

2009-11-11T14:51:00.003-05:00

Of all the ridiculous and alarmist articles I've read about Facebook, this one is particularly upsetting. Writing for O, The Oprah Magazine, Tim Jarvis writes:

Increasingly, if you're not plugged into a social network, you feel out of the loop. But as scientists start to study our newfound connectivity, some worry that we're heading for a massive friender-bender.

"It can be exhilarating, at least at first, to connect with long-lost friends," says network science expert Steven Strogatz, Ph.D., a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University.

But the downside, he worries, is growing confusion between our weak ties (people who might be useful in referring us to a good dentist or helping us find a job) and our strong ties (those we're very close to).

"The distinction between genuine friends and acquaintances is becoming blurred. Users are spending time maintaining relationships with people they don't really care about."

First of all, the dude is a professor of applied mathematics. 'Nough said.

But more importantly is this weak/strong tie distinction. Why is it so bad for the line between friends and acquaintances to become blurred? Right now, I don't have a whole lot of close friends in my area who I can hang out with. I'm out in the middle of suburbia. In order to connect to people I can either hop on the T for an hour or I can go online. On Facebook, if I comment on the post of someone who I haven't really seen in a long time, I don't consider it maintaining a relationship with someone I don't really care about. It isn't time wasted. Who knows who I might end up connecting with at a deeper level? What good would it do to burn those bridges?

The article then goes on to talk about how "Heavy reliance on the rapid intake of certain information -- especially in younger, developing minds -- could have consequences on our morality." Oh no! Think of the childrenz! The next generation is going to be completely unfeeling and immoral! So clearly the thing to do to avoid being unfeeling and immoral is to cut ties with people with whom we don't have "strong ties." Yes, mass un-friending is the key to future happiness.

Black, White, Yellow, etc.

2009-11-09T13:54:00.002-05:00

This "Characters Unite" spot shows on the USA network during commercial breaks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tpVjt2IhvQ

Can you guess what bothers me about it? I'll give you a hint: it's 0:12 seconds in.

How to pick a Halloween costume (if you're a chick)

2009-10-20T23:34:00.009-04:00

1. Decide what you want to be.
2. Make it sexy.

Easy!

Here are some examples:

You want to be the great detective Sherlock Holmes:

Now, make it sexy!

Or if you want to be horror monster Freddy Krueger:

Just sex it up!

If you're not sure how risque you want to be, sometimes there's a range:
Normal:

Sexy:

or Slutty:

As long as you're showing some leg and some cleavage, it doesn't really matter what you are.
Are you a sexy clown? Or sexy Wonder Bread?

Nobody really cares!

Of course, you might offend some prudish feminist-types if you sexualize something like a dead body:

or an infant:

But they just don't know how to have fun! Let's go egg their houses!

All images taken from elsewhere on the internet.

Why Film Studies Matters

2009-10-17T13:25:00.006-04:00

I've been thinking about grad school. One of the "nice" things about graduating from college into a recession is that I have a lot of time to think about what I *really* want to do. There are lots of things I could do, lots of things I want to do. But after much thought, if I follow my passion I will go to grad school for film studies.

Although I was (am?) an English major, I mostly took film classes. I did the work I am most proud of in those classes. So why wasn't it readily apparent to me that I would want to continue my education in that field?

Well, it's not very practical. When I tell people I want to go to school for film, the response is usually along the lines of, "Oh, you want to make movies?" And then I explain that actually, no, I don't want to make movies. I want to watch movies, and read about movies, and write about movies. "You want to be a reviewer." No. I want to be a theorist. Theory, by definition, is not practical.

Going to grad school for film studies would prepare me for pretty much one career: academia. This was where my passion hit a snag. I didn't think I had any interest in being a professor. And what interest I did have was more about the perks (summer vacation!) than about a desire to teach. So why spend all that time and money studying film if it's not going to get me anywhere? Well, because I love it. But isn't that selfish? Is there any field more self-serving than film theory? Nobody gives a damn! It's all an academic circle-jerk. I want to do something with my life that matters.

But then, as I was trying to articulate my frustration with Zombieland to a friend, it hit me: studying film DOES matter. What I want to do isn't just analyze and write about film - I want to show people why it is important to do so. I want to teach. (It fits! Life makes sense!)

When I look at the body of work I've produced from my years in college, the issues that come to the fore are very real - how gender is codified on screen, what it means to look at a body, the visceral reactions people have to certain images. If you can't sleep at night because you're too spooked from watching El Orfanato, that's real. If you tear up just thinking about Jack Dawson sinking into the freezing Atlantic Ocean, that's real. If a director in Japan and a director in Germany both use horror-comedy to explore queer issues, teasing out why is no less important than unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity. It matters.

Now to put my theory of why I want to go to grad school into practice and go buy a study book for the GRE.

Zombieland wasn't that great.

2009-10-15T16:34:00.003-04:00

There. I said it.

I love a good zom-com (that's short for Zombie Comedy), so I wasn't going to pass on seeing Zombieland. I should have.

[Disclaimer: possibler spoilage ahead.]

By my count, Zombieland is the first mainstream US zom-com to come out of the uptrend of zombie movies over the past decade. And it is indeed decidedly mainstream, ie., lackluster. Here are my issues:

- Lack of Conflict
"Zombies are a conflict!" you might say. And you'd be wrong. In any good zombie movie - whether horror or comedy or in between - the zombies are merely a catalyst. The real conflict is between the living. Zombieland didn't have any of that.

- Not That Funny
I can't remember a single good line. Looking through the memorable quotes on imdb, I'm unimpressed.

- Tallahassee
Woody Harrelson's character is problematic. And by that I mean that it's a half-assed characterization. They try and give him some back story and emotional weight, but it falls flat. If you want to see a real zombie-killing badass, take a gander at Guitar Wolf:

Now THAT's a badass.

- US-centric
The opening of the movie says that the United States of America has become the United States of Zombieland. During this voice over, the camera zooms out to show the whole globe. Um, what? If the whole earth is affected, why call it the United States of Zombieland? Why not Planet Zombie?

- Heteronormative
The happy ending is the formation of a nuclear family unit. Yawn.

- Genre Identity Crisis
Any good zom-com recognizes and plays with the conventions of the zombie movie genre. Zombieland recognizes them (to some extent) and doesn't do anything with them. Columbus' zombie survival rules are cute, but more of a nod to the parafilmic zombie fandom than to its predecessors. In terms of self-awareness, Zombieland scores some points for having Bill Murray as himself. But even that seemed out of place. The fact that the poster uses the critical acclaim that it is "the funniest movie since The Hangover" is disappointingly appropriate in that the type of humor was nonspecific to its genre.

I am disappointed in Zombieland. It could have been more, but I'm not surprised that it isn't.

For some *good* zom-coms, check out:
- Wild Zero (2000) - Japanese rock n' roll zombie movie
- Shaun of the Dead (2004) - British zom-rom-com (that's zombie romantic comedy)
- Dance of the Dead (2008) - Indie US teenage zombie movie
- Fido (2006) - Zombie movie meets Douglas Sirk

Post College Blues

2009-09-15T13:22:00.005-04:00

It is well documented that the class of 2009 graduated into one of the worst job market in decades. It sucks. It's tough.

But for me, the tireless job-searching isn't the hardest part of being a recent college graduate. The hardest part has nothing to do with the recession. The hardest part is the sudden loneliness.

I have been flung from my academic cocoon into life without a campus. I no longer have my college community of teachers and classmates. My friends are spread out across the country and abroad, each struggling to make their way in grad school, the working world, and other endeavors. Sure, I have a few friends here in Boston. I try to see them as much as possible. But it's too easy to feel disconnected.

A quick Google search for "post college depression" shows that this feeling is common, and not a new phenomenon. Indicators of this phase include inability to concentrate, feelings of worthlessness, excessive anxiety, loss of identity and lack of direction. Of course, the recession does have an effect. With so few prospects, recent grads have struggle more than previous years of graduates to stay positive.

So what's an unemployed 22-year old living at home to do? Well here's what I'm doing:

- Try to stay focused on my job search.
It's not easy, but I have confidence in my job hunt. I know that I have the skills and the qualities to land a great job. The fact that I'm unemployed is not a failure of my self.

- Get active.
Physical activity helps ameliorate anxiety. I signed up for a kickball team through the World Adult Kickball Association. I had my first game on Sunday. It was a blast.

- Create my space.
Living at home isn't all bad. I don't have to pay rent. But I need to make my own space under my mother's roof. That means cleaning my room. I'm working on it.

- Make friends.
This part is hard. I made some friends while temping at a bookstore. And joining the kickball team is as much for socializing as it is for physical activity - if not more so. I'm also trying to get in touch with old friends, as well as friends of friends.

- Take it easy.
I try not to stress myself out. I allow myself to watch TV for a few hours, even if I feel guilty about it.

Who let the dogs out?

2009-09-05T17:44:00.005-04:00

Moving back home to live with my mom also means living with Brette, the two-year-old Jack Russell Terrier. Oh yes, she's adorable. But she's also a total brat. She barks viciously at the "other" dog in the mirror. She still poops on the kitchen floor from time to time. She has no grasp of the concept of "fetch."

Of course, I'm much more of a cat person. Cats take care of themselves, for the most part. You don't have to keep a cat entertained. Cats are - relatively - quieter. I like cats.

But what is it about puppies that makes them so damned heart-melting!? Check this out:

I know that YouTube is at least 25% videos of cute little animals, but doesn't this cute little puppy just make the muscles in your face go all weird? Is that just me? It never fails to make me feel all squishy.

Then there are sad puppies. The Turing Test may tell you whether you're dealing with a robot or a human, but the way to tell whether a being has a soul is whether it cries at the end of the book "Where the Red Fern Grows." Aw man, just looking at the cover of the book makes my eyes well up.

And don't tell me you don't change the channel when that Sarah McLachlan puppy commercial comes on. You would be lying. And you can try to make excuses about how long of a commercial it is, but we both know it's because it makes you get all teary. Don't be embarrassed. How could you not!? That commercial would make Cruella DeVille cry. And she loves to hurt puppies!

(P.S. Are the titles of my posts getting funnier/lamer or what?)

All the Single Ladies (Put Your Fists Up)

2009-08-28T11:19:00.006-04:00

A couple days ago I got a letter inviting me to enter to be a contestant to participate in this year's Miss Massachusetts USA Pageant. Rather than just throwing it out right away, I opened it in hopes of some amusing blog fodder. I got something a lot more blog-provoking than I'd expected.

Here are the eligibility criteria:

If you are single (never married/never given birth to a child,) a United States citizen, a resident of the State of Massachusetts, and between the ages of 14 and 26

That first criterion is the one that interests me.

I can understand that they want contestants to be single - this is, after all, the Miss USA pageant, not the Mrs. USA pageant - never mind the Ms. USA pageant. But what is really interesting is how they define single-hood. In my mind, someone who is single is someone who is not in a committed relationship. But the Pageant defines a single person (assumed to be a woman) as someone who has never been married and never given birth to a child.

Let's start with the first part: "never married." That means that the contestant can be in an exclusive, committed relationship so long as there have been no wedding vows. "Never married" as opposed to "not married" excludes women who were married but are no longer married - whether due to divorce, annulment, or the death of a spouse.

The second part, "never given birth to a child," is the one that first caught my attention. What in the world does parturition have to do with relationship or marital status? "Never given birth to a child" excludes single mothers and women who have given birth but are not the child's primary caregiver - such as women who have given a child up for adoption or women whose children have died. (Women who have had abortions would seem to still be eligible, interestingly enough.)

So what does this all mean? It boils down to two things, which are unremittingly intertwined: availability and virginity. They can't very well explicitly state, "Women must never have had sex," so they go with the traditional patriarchal markers of lost maidenhood: marriage and babies.

The letter I received says that contestants will be judged in three categories - Personal Interview, Swimsuit, and Evening Gown. What it doesn't say is that to even become a contestant, one will be judged in two other categories - Sexual Availability and Conformity to Traditional Family Values.

I think I'll pass.

Going Gaga?

2009-08-14T11:26:00.005-04:00

(Apologies for the title of this post; I couldn't resist.)

A few days ago Feministing called out Lady Gaga for some comments she made in a recent interview. (Disclaimer: I did not watch the interview.) From their transcription:

You see, if I was a guy, and I was sitting her with a cigarette in my hand, grabbing my crotch and talking about how I make music 'cause I love fast cars and fucking girls, you'd call me a rock star. But when I do it in my music and in my videos, because I'm a female, because I make pop music, you're judgmental, and you say that it is distracting. I'm just a rock star.

Are you also a feminist?

I'm not a feminist - I, I hail men, I love men.

Blogger Vanessa then writes, "Good on Gaga for making a feminist statement, but bad on her for not owning it as one." The way I read this, Vanessa mainly takes issue with Lady Gaga's refusal to identify as a feminist despite making a "feminist statement." To me, the more immediate problem is that Lady Gaga sets up feminism and loving men as mutually exclusive. Her logic would go something like this: Feminists hate men. Therefore, if you like men then you are not a feminist.

But what is more interesting to me than these two issues - not identifying as a feminist and stigmatizing feminists as man-haters - is the first part of the transcript that Feministing quotes. On the face of it, she is pointing out a double standard and advocating equality. I'm all for those things. But what she says reminds me of a quotation from Riot Grrl Queen-mother Kathleen Hanna:

What (some) bands do is go, 'It's not important that I'm a girl, it's just important that I want to rock.' And that's cool. But that's more of an assimilationist thing. It's like the 'just want to be allowed to join the world as it is'; whereas I'm more into revolution and radicalism and changing the whole structure. What I'm into is making the world different for me to live in.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Lady Gaga may be denouncing a societal double standard, but ultimately she is just upholding the status quo.

So rather than post the Lady Gaga interview, here's something a little more radical:

"Whatever you do, take care of your shoes"

2009-08-11T21:07:00.005-04:00

I like high heels. I really do. I don't think they're (entirely) an instrument of patriarchal torture. I don't think they're "empowering," either.

But they have to be the right high heels. I would LOVE a pair of John Fluevogs, like the pair above. Alas, if only I had $225 to spend on a pair of shoes.

Then again, a good pair of shoes can be worth the dough. Today I speed-walked for several blocks downtoan in a pair of cheap black pumps from Target. Not a smart movie. I walked home from the T barefoot because my feet hurt too much. When I took the shoes off I found that my heels were bleeding and I had a nasty blister on my left pinkie toe. The corresponding blister on my right pinkie toe had already popped and the skin rubbed off. Ew. Perhaps if I can't afford some better shoes I should invest in a pair of these fold-up flats to stick in my purse.

Miscellaneous Movies

2009-08-06T17:21:00.005-04:00

Some quick takes on movies I've watched in the past month and a half:

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes, 2007)
This time-travel movie was pretty good, if not a little confusing. (Trailer)

Stardust (2007)
I remembered kind of wanting to see this when it was in theaters because of Michelle Pfeiffer. It was fabulous! (Trailer)

Lat den ratte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2008)
I'd seen this Swedish vampire love-story before. I can't find the right adjective for it, but it's very, very good. (Trailer)

Away We Go (2009)
I already blogged about this one, but I saw it again. I was less enthusiastic the second time around, though I laughed just as hard. (Trailer)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
I never re-read the sixth book, so I didn't remember it enough to compare it with the movie. But I thought it was pretty entertaining. Way better than the fifth movie. (Trailer)

The Dark Crystal (1982)
Mad impressive puppets, yo. (Trailer)

Dod Sno (Dead Snow, 2009)
I'd been wanting to see this one since I first heard about it. It's a Norwegian movie about Nazi zombies (or zombie Nazis?). It lived up to my expectations quite well! (Trailer)

Bloody Mallory (2002)
I found this one on Hulu. It was friggin' awesome! Just read the description that accompanies the trailer. (Trailer)

Session 9 (2001)
Pretty slow moving and could have been a lot scarier. Some interesting editing choices. (Trailer)

Internet Ephemera, the Extended Mind, and the Death of the RSS Feed?

2009-07-31T14:49:00.005-04:00

I am a Google Reader fiend.
I am subscribed to over 100 active feeds.
Every day when I wake up, I check my e-mail and then I check Google Reader. It usually takes me about half an hour to wade through everything.

Mostly I'm subscribed to blogs. I read blogs on topics like movies, feminism, Boston-interest, PR, cupcakes, sports, music, and technology. A handful of my friends have personal blogs which I read. I'm also subscribed to about a dozen webcomics. It's convenient to have them all show up in one place so I don't have to visit each website separately. The other major category of feeds that I'm subscribed to are updates - when the latest chapter of a manga or video series is released. Whenever possible, I like to direct all my daily or regular web content into Google Reader.

My weakness is what I call internet ephemera - blogs such as Photoshop Disasters, Ugly Overload, Sorry I Missed Your Party, Cake Wrecks, Overheard in New York, and Contrariwise - blogs that collect things. These are usually the first to be marked as read if I fall behind. I myself am a collector of things, a pack-rat. I don't throw out fortunes from fortune cookies - I keep them in a jar. (Maybe someday I'll do something with them, right?) I save ticket stubs from movies, concerts, and sports games. I have a box of programs from theater shows. I save all my graded papers. I am loath to throw anything away. It makes it very difficult to clean my room, I must add. But it's easy to see why I'm attracted to blogs like these. They don't add much to my day. I don't gain any information from them. At most, I get a chuckle out of them and move on. But I can't bring myself to unsubscribe!

It's the same sort of compulsion that drives me to bookmark sites on delicious. It's my collection of references and information. I don't have to remember the recipe for Andrew W.K.'s party pan-friers as long as I remember that it exists and that I have it bookmarked. (Tags: andrewwk snacks recipes) In the alt-text of an xkcd comic, Randall Munroe refers to "Wikipedia's role as brain-extension." That's how I feel about the entire internet sometimes - it's a repository of information. I don't have to store certain information in my memory because it's at the tip of my fingers. Carl Zimmer recognizes this in his article "How Google is Making Us Smarter." He writes:

The Internet and iPhones seem to be crashing the gate of the mind, taking over its natural work and leaving it to wither away to a mental stump. As plausible as this picture may seem, it does a bad job of explaining a lot of recent scientific research. In fact, the mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.
...
Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we’re sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.
...
The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies. There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to offer fresh ways to enhance our brains, whether with drugs or with implants. To say that these are immoral because they defile our true selves—our isolated, distinct minds—is to ignore biology. Our minds already extend out into the environment, and the changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

Pretty cool stuff.

But back to Google Reader. Lately, there has been a change taking place. The instrument of that change is Twitter. Now when I come across a new blog I want to follow (such as Insanewiches), I have a choice: I can subscribe to their RSS feed or I can follow them on Twitter. If I pick the former, I can view new posts in Google Reader as I do with all those other blogs I read. I can scroll through without reading if it doesn't interest me. If I pick the latter, their tweets will show up on my Twitter homepage announcing when they have a new post. I can choose whether to click the link or not.

The difference is in where I go for my information: Google Reader or Twitter. Of course, I could subscribe to the RSS feed of tweets - I did say that I like having all my web content in one place. But I'm curious as to the greater implications of such a choice. If Twitter truly is The Next Big Thing, and if it's here to stay - at least for a little while - then perhaps we'll see a move away from syndicated feeds in favor of the Twitter platform. But maybe this is not a case of VHS vs. Betamax: maybe they can coexist. RSS will stay strong among those who already use it and Twitter will offer an alternative for those who prefer to be updated in bite-sized chunks. Time will tell, I suppose.

PB&J FTW

2009-07-30T13:35:00.003-04:00

I really meant to post more entries about my various cupcake escapades. Yesterday for a friend's birthday I made my favorite batch yet: peanut butter & jelly cupcakes with a peanut butter butter-cream frosting. I used this recipe for the cake (using margarine instead of butter), and this recipe for the frosting. It was my first time making my own butter-cream frosting and I'm super pleased with how it turned out! Rather than injecting the cupcakes with jelly, though, I baked the jelly in, as this recipe does. The wells for the jelly were a little too close to the bottom, though.

Insurance, Adultification, Transportation

2009-07-22T17:43:00.007-04:00

"And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!"
- Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook which says that "1 in 3 twentysomethings is without health insurance." Blame it on: The Recession. It's kind of scary. I'm still covered by my mom's health insurance plan, but I don't know for how long. (Note to self: Remember to ask Mom how long her insurance plan will cover me.) Pretty soon, I'll have to fend for myself. I haven't been concerning myself with benefits packages in my current job search. They're just that: benefits. To hell with health insurance packages if I find something I really want to do.

Thinking about health insurance gets me to thinking about how I'm entering the adult world, where I have to support myself. I had a job throughout college, so I'm used to supporting myself in terms of spending money. I know how to schedule my own dentist appointments. But there there are things I haven't had to deal with by myself: Paying rent, paying taxes. I'll have to pay my own bills for utilities, cable, internet, and phone service. (Cue "Bills, Bills, Bills" by Destiny's Child.) It's kind of scary, but kind of exciting.

And then there's the whole driving thing. I went on a road trip to Washington DC with some friends for the Fourth of July. On the way back, not 15 minutes away from our destination, the car started making weird noises. We pulled over. It seemed that there was a leak in the oil tank. My friend had bought his car used only nine days prior. His car insurance didn't cover roadside assistance. Long story short, he needs a new engine. His dealership, warranty company, and insurance company have been duking it out for three weeks about who should pay for the work the car needs done. It's a nightmare, and one that I am sooo glad I don't have to deal with.

I don't have a car. In fact, I don't know how to drive. I never even got my learner's permit. (I was supposed to go to the DMV on my sixteenth birthday, but my friends took me to the Museum of Science instead.) In Boston, I don't really need a car because I live within walking distance of a T stop on the Green Line. It is convenient, although somewhat limiting. I'm not looking at any jobs not accessible by public transportation, for instance.

I really should learn to drive, even if I wouldn't get a car. It would be a good thing to know how to do if I'm ever really in a bind. I feel bad that I can't help out on long distance road trips and that I'm out of the running for designated driver. And getting a license would mean that I wouldn't have to use my passport as ID at bars and clubs.

Or maybe I'll just wait for a consumer line of fuel-efficient flying cars.

OK Computer

2009-07-14T01:33:00.005-04:00

Alas, it seems that soon I will have to put my 4-5 year old Dell Latitude D610 out to pasture, which is a euphemism for taking it out back and shooting it. The old girl's in pain. Watching her try to load a program is agonizing for the both of us. I must ease her suffering.

So I need a new laptop. Here's what I'm looking for:

- A PC
I'm sure Macs are wonderful, but I've grown accustomed to PCs.

- Speedy multitasking abilities
I need a computer that can run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, iTunes, and 3 instances of Firefox with 12 tabs each all at once without throwing a hissy fit.

- Multimedia expertise
I will primarily be using the computer for accessing the interwebs, digital imaging, playing music, and watching and editing movies. I won't be using it much for gaming, but it should be able to run World of Warcraft smoothly in case I ever decide to make more friends online than I have in real life.

- Willing to travel
It doesn't have to be thin, but it should be lightweight. If I wanted it to stay on my desk, I'd get a desktop.

- >30GB hard drive
Size matters here.

- New computer smell
I'm not looking for used goods. I want longevity.

- <$2000
Preferably <$1500, but I'm willing to compromise for the right candidate.

- Benevolence
In case this new laptop becomes smarter than me (see end of previous post), I would like my ruler to be a benevolent machine. I'm no John Connor.

Any takers?

Image taken from www.shannonburns.com

Planning ahead

2009-07-13T14:30:00.010-04:00

One of the things I do when I'm in a new place is to assess the strengths and vulnerabilities of that place in the event of the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

The first task is to establish a sealed perimeter. The fewer doors and windows, the better. Block the doors with heavy furniture and seal up the windows. Are there any entrances that are not immediately obvious, such as a cellar door? Be sure to check.

Next, arm yourself. If you have guns, great. I don't usually frequent places with a stash of arms, but if they're there you should use them, by all means. Just remember that guns run out of ammo. And aim for the head, natch. In most cases, however, you won't have proper weapons. Find various improptu blunt objects around your safe zone: a baseball bat, an umbrella, a croquet mallet, a shower curtain pole, etc. Knives are no good; if you're close enough to use a knife, it's probably already too late for you.

Now that you're able to rest for the time being, get whatever information you can. If the internet still works, try to find out whether the outbreak is localized or global? If "zombies" is a trending topic on Twitter, see if there is help available. If "braaaaains" is a trending topic, then the zombies have learned to use Twitter and we're all doomed.

It's probably about time to start thinking about food. What supplies do you have? How long can you make them last? Can you grow an herb garden on the roof? If you're able to send a scout to the grocery store, don't leave the reusable shopping bag in the car.

The one thing that many people forget to do, and which is sure to get you killed if you don't, is to lose the ever-man-for-himself attitude. "Survival of the fittest" is void if the dead are moving. You absolutely MUST help out other survivors that you come across. But if someone is bitten, kill without prejudice.

So that's the general outline I follow. But today it occurred to me: What if it's not zombies? I am totally unprepared for, say, a robot uprising or an alien invasion. What's the game-plan then?

Well I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Image swiped from Google image search

Art fail

2009-06-30T15:40:00.005-04:00

I was going to write about personal branding and Barthes' "Death of the Author." But then Heidegger, Derrida, and Kant came along and started to call me names and throw things at me. They're such bullies. So now I can't get my mind straightened out in order to wrap it around authorship and branding as I'd intended to.

I watched The Strangers last night. It wasn't very good. The whole thing was like the last reel of any good slasher - the killer's in the house! - but for a whole movie. Steven Tyler may be the Demon of Screamin', but Liv's just not cut out to be a Scream Queen.
Because it left us with such a bland aftertaste, we watched Scream. Damn. That movie gets better every time I see it.

Image of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" stolen from here.

Discretion and Disclosure

2009-06-11T13:56:00.005-04:00

Last night I went out to a bar in Harvard Square with some friends from high school for trivia/karaoke night. Despite getting all the answers right in the first round, we came in last place. Oh well.
I rocked karaoke, though. A group of girls were cheering me on. I felt so loved.

I feel like I'm in a somewhat difficult position when it comes to blogging and other internet activities. How much about my personal life do I want on the internet?

If you google my name, this blog doesn't show up. My LinkedIn profile is the second search result. The rest of the results on the first page are not me. My Twitter page showed up until I removed my last name.

I have my Facebook privacy settings set up so that I do not show up in search engine results. I will show up in a search on Facebook, but only friends and members of my University network can access my profile. I try to pay attention to the privacy settings. There are certain people - some relatives, former campers of mine, colleagues - that can only view my limited profile. The Office of the Dean of Students put out a pamphlet called "Your Face on Facebook: Thinking Carefully, Posting Conscientiously" which encouraged responsible use of social networking sites, reminding students that faculty and future employers may be able to see what you post.

The bit about future employers is where the difficulty comes in for me. I'm always conscious of what shows up on my Facebook profile. There are pictures tagged of me holding a drink - whether in a martini glass at a club or in a ubiquitous red plastic cup - but they're all in good taste. Besides, I'm 22; I'm allowed to drink. You often hear that employers want to hire someone they would have a drink with. If I were really nervous about what potential employers might think of me based on my Facebook profile, I could up my privacy settings. But if I'm going to be working with social media, potential employers need to be able to see that I'm familiar with Facebook and that I use it well. I try to keep a balance between personal and professional. I do not think I will get a vanity url when that option goes live on Saturday. I do not use Facebook in such a way that it would be useful to be able to direct people right to my profile.

For the sake of my job search, I feel that I need to solidify my personal brand. If potential employers search for me on Facebook, yes, I'd like to use it to sell myself. But to what extent? And at what cost to my social life? I use Facebook primarily as a social tool. If I keep it too polished, it won't be of any value.

And then there's this blog. I usually don't share personal details. My first blog - the LiveJournal I had in high school - was all personal. It was a diary that I kept on the web instead of under my pillow. This blog is a little more public. It is attached to the e-mail address I use for both personal and professional correspondence. But when I blog about certain topics - feminism, for example - I like to relate what I'm saying to my own life experiences. In those circumstances, where sincerity matters, I feel confident that I can divulge a little bit more. It's not gratuitous, not gossipy.

Perhaps I will put my last name back onto my Twitter profile. I don't have anything to hide.

Spice Girls vs. Special Relativity

2009-06-10T15:46:00.002-04:00

I couldn't sleep last night. While tossing and turning in bed, I had a realization. Please note the lyrics I have bolded in the first two verses of "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls:

If you want my future forget my past,
If you wanna get with me better make it fast,
Now don't go wasting my precious time,
Get your act together we could be just fine
...
What do you think about that now you know how I feel,
Say you can handle my love are you for real,
I won't be hasty, I'll give you a try
If you really bug me then I'll say goodbye.

What's going on here, girls?

Tweet Tweet

2009-06-08T12:47:00.005-04:00

Martha Stewart follows Snoop Dogg, apparently.

Yes, this is a post about Twitter.
I've been on Twitter for just over two months.
At first, I signed up for Twitter to use it similarly to the way I used MySpace, as a consumer of content, a spectator. I used MySpace to get updates from bands I liked. I figured I would follow a few choice people on Twitter, but I didn't think I had much to add myself.

In a recent post, Brian Solis of the blog PR 2.0 asked "Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform?" The statistics he puts forward suggest that most Twitter users are spectators. 1/4 of users aren't following anybody, and more than 1/3 of users haven't uttered a single tweet. My guess is that many people are driven to the site out of a curiosity that the MSM's preoccupation with Twitter has instilled. Flipping through Us Weekly in the bathroom, I saw a page that compared different celebrities' Twitter styles. So readers of Us Weekly, as well as viewers of CNN, want in. They sign up. They don't know what to do next. They abandon it and become statistics. I too abandoned Twitter.

The next stage in my personal Twitter story was that of broadcaster. I started a new account to tweet my random food cravings: tater tots, chicken salad with craisins and walnuts, meatballs, sweet potato casserole, etc. My friends are all familiar with these cravings I get. And Twitter seemed like a better platform than texting my friends "I want cinnamon sugar pita chips" at 11pm. Around this time, I also started to follow people I know rather than just celebrities, brands, and services. Along with my food craving tweets, I occasionally responded to my friends' tweets.

Then came #lofnotc
On Friday, May 15th Amanda Palmer tweeted:

@amandapalmer i hereby call THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS to ORDER, motherfucker.

I re-tweeted it - the first time I re-tweeted anything. Not even ten minutes later:

@amandapalmer holy shit…judging from replies there’s like 200 of us in the LOFNOTC. what has become of rock n roll? what is wrong with us? i feel shame.

200 soon became 500. People starting using the hashtag #lofnotc so that all our posts would go to one place. #lofnotc soon became a trending topic. People who didn't even know who Amanda Palmer is began to join in. The search results page for #lofnotc began to resemble a chatroom. Amanda designed a t-shirt. We plotted a government takeover. We had a toast.

@amandapalmer i present to you....our official logo, comrades!!!!!!! (yes, that thing on the right is a pizza.) #LOFNOTC

Amanda blogged:

so anyway, there we were, on twitter on a friday night.

we hung out for two hours, came up with a list of things that the government should do for us, created a t-shirt (thank god sean was awake and being a loser with me because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts - that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG” (thanks emilyn brodsky).

and basically had a real-time party on the fucking internet. we ended with a long toast to the power of friday night loserdom and drank virtual wine togehter (well, i know MY wine was real. and tasty).

THAT, my friends, is the "collaborative, two-way meaningful dialogue that represents Twitter's greatest promise" that Brian Solis is waiting for.

Amanda Palmer is an inspiration to me in many respects. For the purposes of this post, she is my Twitter Hero. She had been harnessing the power of Twitter long before #lofnotc. She uses it for instant ticket giveaways and organizing impromptu soccer games and pillow-fights on the road. She does Q&A sessions with fans while she's bored on the tour bus. She takes songs requests via Twitter - onstage. Of one surprise gathering she writes,

i twittered some random flashmob-come-say-hi gatherings in australia and was overwhelmed to see that it WORKED.
i would pick out random places on a map nearby and twitter the night before.

i was at a point in auckland when i was just at the end of my rope, barely holding it together and i twittered the night before the show for people to meet me in front of the spiegeltent at 3 the next day.
(i also did this because the shows were not booked as all ages and i was getting heaps of sad emails, so i figured i would give people a chance to at least come and say hi and see me attempt to play the ukulele and get shit signed).
anyway: 10 pm twitter, and by 3 pm the next day, i walked over from my hotel with my ukulele case and was fucking shocked to see a group of over a hundred people.
a little teenage girl who spotted me first ran over and dive-bombed me. i let her. and then a bunch of people ran over and sat down and i just burst into tears. i couldn’t believe how simple it was.
all i had to do was ask, and all these people came, and it was so simple.

But for all its ability to bring people together, it can seem awfully atomizing. I think many people have the love/hate relationship with Twitter that Amanda expresses:

twitter hurts me. but i love it, but i hate it. i am always afraid of running into a human experience-camera-machine.
but it’s so fun. and awful. torn, torn, torn.
we’re all going to die anyway.

In a recent article in the Boston Globe IT professor Tom Davenport is quoted as saying, "As a professor there's a certain 'Decline of the West' aspect to the Twitter idea that you can say anything meaningful in 140 characters." Has this guy ever heard of Hemingway? And one particularly alarmist article from CNN.com reports:

Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development.
Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.
"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

I don't really buy it that Twitter is hindering our ability for compassion. As I write this, two trending topics on Twitter are "Euna Lee" and "Laura Ling." Aside from sex-tape-spam, the tweets are all outcry, prayers, and petitions for the US journalists sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in North Korea.

So that's my post on Twitter. Take it or leave it.

Old news

2009-06-03T14:58:00.005-04:00

Today while cleaning my room I found a copy of the Boston Metro from October 31 - November 2, 2003. The front page headline is: "Jobs outlook bleak" and the subheading is "Unemployment duration among worst in country"

BOSTON. The more than 1 in 9 Massachusetts residents who are either unemployed, underemployed or no longer actively looking for work face the fourth highest average duration of unemployment, according to new research by Northeastern University that claims the state is failing to recover from the recession.
...
Comparing 2000 and 2003 statistics, researchers found unemployment during the first seven months of 2003 increased 140 percent.

At the end of the article there is a little teaser "National economy soars p/24." So I turned to page 24. The headline: "Economy at best pace since '84"

The economy rocketed ahead at its fastest pace in more than 19 years in the third quarter of 2003 as consumers, their wallets fattened by tax cuts, went on a buying spree, an unexpectedly strong government report showed on Thursday.

Sigh.

I also found what appears to be a list of daily accomplishments. Some highlights:

2/11/00
- I played well in Hockey
- I got a good score on my Math Journal
- I got an A- on my LA quiz
- I won in Scrabble
- I handed in a science extension
- I handled a lamb heart

2/12-13/00
- I stayed up all night

2/17/00
- I got a 90 on my Tanach quiz
- I did my Math homework ahead of time
- I was nominated as "excellent" in reading comprehension by my class
- I walked with Sandy for 1/2 an hour
- I wore my headgear

Cleaning my room is more like an archeology dig than anything else.

Away We Go (2009) is awesome! Here's why.

2009-06-02T22:29:00.004-04:00

I just got back from a free sneak peek of Sam Mendes' Away We Go, which is to be released later this month. All I knew about it was that Dave Eggers was involved and that John Krasinski was in it. But hey, it was free.

I was blown away. I think I liked it more than American Beauty. (Although I should note that I saw American Beauty years after it was released, and saw Away We Go before it was released. The hype around American Beauty may have lessened its impact on me.)

This post may include "spoilers," but they wouldn't actually spoil your viewing experience.

The movie is about a couple in their early thirties that gets pregnant. They visit friends in a few different cities, trying to decide where to settle down.

From the opening scene I had a good feeling that this would be a feminist-friendly film. I was not disappointed.

The protagonists, Bert and Verona, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, look like real people. In fact, all the characters look like real people - and the cast is quite impressive, I might add.

And finally, a film that obeys The Rule!

I'm actually realizing that I'm a little too tired and scatterbrained to write coherently right now, but I want to get this down. The movie is hilarious and touching. It really is wonderful.

What I like most about the film is that from beginning to end, Bert and Verona are in love. Like all of the families in the movie, their relationship isn't perfect. But they love each other. One of biggest problems with romantic comedies is there is always some Conflict: things start out smoothly, The Conflict comes along, the couple fights or breaks up, there is A Resolution, and they get back together, the way it should be. But that's not how relationships work!! There is no epic battle to win a person's heart. You get to know somebody over time.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write more about the film. Now, sleep.

Wants.

2009-06-02T15:26:00.005-04:00

I want an apartment. I really, really want my own apartment. I want to move in and settle.

I've been working on cleaning my room. I'm a pack-rat, and my room hasn't been cleaned up in ages. I'm finding all sorts of things - newspaper clippings and ticket stubs, mementos and souvenirs. I don't have anywhere to put all of my photos. I don't have enough space for my books. I haven't unpacked my clothes from school yet because I don't have anywhere to put them.

I want to move into an empty apartment and start from scratch. I want to find a place for all my things. I want all my knick-knacks to have homes. I want to decorate a new living space.

But first I need a job, so I can pay rent. I'm working on it.
Moreover, I *want* a job. I want my potential energy to become kinetic.

I also want this skirt.

Thoughts on Star Trek (2009)

2009-05-30T11:24:00.006-04:00

I finally saw Star Trek last night. I'd never seen a Star Trek movie before, and have only seen a couple episodes of one of the TV shows. Most of my prior Star Trek knowledge came from recognizing references to it in The Simpsons, Futurama, Can't Hardly Wait, xkcd, etc. Here are my thoughts.

- In the event of a Romulan attack, I don't think it should be necessary for Star Fleet crew to stand at attention whenever the captain walks by. I think they should keep doing whatever the hell it is they need to be doing.

- The average shot length, towards the climax at the end, was probably about 2 seconds.

- About halfway through I realized that the actor who plays Uhura was Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked her better as Anamaria.

- Speaking of Uhura, this movie fails the Bechdel-Wallace Test with flying colors. The movie pays lip service to equality at the end, making a point to say "To boldly go where no one has gone before" instead of "no man." But why talk the talk if they ain't gonna walk the walk?

- Who knew that Hoth was really just Delta Vega?

- Simon Pegg rules. There needed to be way more of Scotty. I also liked his little walking cabbage sidekick.

- My other favorites were Bones and Chekov.

- The clever thing about the time travel plot device is that it allows J.J. Abrams some leeway - if it's an alternate reality, he can stray from the canon. But even so, having Kirk born in space strips Riverside, Iowa of its claim to fame.

- There was not nearly enough pandering to K/S slash fiction writers. I demand more fan service, dammit!

- I am soooo glad I was an English major. They don't shoot English majors off into space before we even graduate.

Why I will be proud to have been a member of the Class of 2009

2009-05-28T12:52:00.005-04:00

I graduated from the University of Rochester a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite moments of the commencement ceremony was when President Seligman, addressing the class, said, "And I am sure you will all find jobs" and everybody laughed. He didn't mean for it to be funny.

A feature story in this month's Boston Magazine calls us "Generation WTF* *As in, 'My time to join the real world had to come /now?/ What. The. F#@&?!?!'" We are "the cursed Class of '09."

In a Boston Globe article that ran on January 28th of this year, headlined "Who will hire the Class of 2009?," Christine Bolzan wrote, "There's no question that the Class of 2009 faces one of the most challenging job markets in decades." And it's true - NONE of my friends have found jobs. (Granted, I don't have *that* many friends, but that's not the point.) Even the engineers are having trouble.

But I don't know how much I buy the hype. I know that I will find a job. I am smart and talented. I am qualified for an entry-level position at any of the firms I'm applying to - even if they're not actually hiring. I can't use "It's the recession" as an excuse.

One positive thing about the impossibility of trying to find a job now is that I'm not alone in it. I don't feel like a loser for moving in with my mom. Everyone else is in the same boat - or childhood bedroom, as the case may be. In addition, the adults in my life are all eager to help me out. They are sympathetic to the situation and want to help me succeed.

The recession will get better, eventually. But economic hardships are sure to return in my lifetime. And when they do, I, a member of the Class of 2009, will know that I will be able to thrive regardless.

Welcome to the

2009-05-27T15:17:00.003-04:00

I saw the first episode of Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" when it premiered. I wasn't impressed. But then I happened to catch the last episode of the season a few weeks ago. It was damn good. So I've been catching up on all the episodes in between. I may do a more developed entry about the show at some point, but for now I have this to say:

Tahmoh Penikett is great as FBI Agent Ballard. But I can't help but feel like the role was written for Nathan Fillion. Hm.

Three of the Most Romantic Songs Ever, according to me

2009-05-23T18:06:00.003-04:00

1. "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails

	Nine Inch Nails - Closer

	Found at skreemr.com

2. "Kiss From a Rose" by Seal

	Seal - Kiss From A Rose

	Found at skreemr.com

3. "The Purple Bottle" by Animal Collective

	Animal Collective - The Purple Bottle

	Found at skreemr.com

Honorable mention goes to:
"Daughters" by John Mayer

	John Mayer - Daughters

	Found at skreemr.com

The Thing (1982)

2009-05-22T13:54:00.002-04:00

In horror movies it's generally not a good idea to split up when there's a monster/killer on the loose. I understand that sometimes a group of characters doesn't realize this and feels that they can cover more ground or whatever by not staying together.

But if the monster can only attack when it's alone with the victim, why in BLOG'S NAME would you go ANYWHERE by yourself!?

What I've Been Doing

2009-04-11T18:43:00.004-04:00

FIVE
Recent videos I have favorited (that's a word, right?) on YouTube:
1. Ukrainian Polka band covers Katy Perry
2. "You Gotta Believe" Ghostwriter music video
3. "Drop Me" by Amanda Palmer
4. "Shut Me Up" by MSI
5. Adorable snoring duckling

FOUR
Four latest items I starred on Google Reader:
1. Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions @Lifehacker
2. She's Baaaaaack! @The Official Early2Bed Blog
3. Make your own mini-urban garden with DIY Veggiepatch @BoingBoing Gadgets
4. One Word for the new THIRST Trailer: Brilliant @Twitch

THREE
Last three alcoholic beverages I consumed:
1. Half a bottle of Tisdale white zinfandel
2. A shot of potato vodka
3. A couple swigs of raspberry rum

TWO
Last two movies I watched:
1. Fried Dragon Fish
2. The Uncanny

ONE
What I'm about to go do:
1. Contra Dance!

Spring Break is coming soon.

2009-03-04T10:07:00.004-05:00

www.toothpastefordinner.com

A couple weeks ago my mind checked out from college a few months in advance of my graduation.
This morning I realized that it checked out to a really bad place - the real world - where there are things like hiring freezes, unemployment, and living with my mom.

I have a paper due tomorrow that I haven't started yet. If I fail this class, I won't be able to graduate and I'll be able to stay in college. Except I'll be even deeper in debt when I eventually do graduate. So I guess I have to write this paper. Damn.

www.marriedtothesea.com

X marks the box in the hole in your head

2009-02-21T11:52:00.003-05:00

The weather's kinda lousy today
So what oh what oh what'll we play?
- "Guitar Hero" by Amanda Palmer

My family's first video game system was a Sega Genesis. Man, we looooved that Sega Genesis! (Still do!) My siblings and I spent countless hours playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. We also played a whole lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but we, like everyone else in the world, got stuck on that godawful barrel in Carnival Night, and lost interest. We also had Vectorman, Madden '9something, a Toy Story game, and some stupid Kirby game where he kept slipping on a skateboard and dying in the first minute of the game.

When we upgraded to N64, it was a big deal. We got it as a Chanukah present, and it stands out in my mind as the most excited I'd ever been for any Chanukah present ever. (Though not quite as excited as N64 kid.) Our first three games were Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, and Buck Bumble. Goldeneye is still my favorite FPS (though I haven't played all that many.) Despite having the Ocarina of Time guidebook, my brother and I got stuck in the water temple. I think we used a key in the wrong place or something. Buck Bumble was about a bumblebee with sunglasses and guns who flew around shooting evil mutant bugs in the garden. It would have been pretty unremarkable were it not for the kickass theme song. We got a whole bunch of other N64 games as time went on, mostly my brother's sports games, I think. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater stands out because it had an awesome soundtrack. Alas, N64's biggest weakness, in my eyes, was that it had no Sonic games.

Enter the Gamecube. The Gamecube was (is!) an awesome little system. My favorite Gamecube game is Sonic Adventure 2. I love it. I would only embarass myself to go into detail about how much I love it. I also have Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic Mega Collection, and Sonic Heroes. Those were pretty much the only games I ever played on the Gamecube, though, again, my brother had more.

Then came the Wii. I bought myself a Wii two years ago. It was the first gaming system that was mine. The main reason I bought it was because of this video. I think it's hilarious, what can I say? I started off with Wii Sports (of course) and Twilight Princess. I bought Sonic and the Secret Rings, and was sorely disappointed. But I didn't give up on Sonic and bought Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. It's more fun watching people play that game than it is to play it. I got Wii Play for the extra wiimote. I also bought the port of RE4. Disaster struck at the end of last spring semester, when my wiimotes, charger, carrying case, and RE4 were stolen right out of my dorm. I still haven't replaced everything that was stolen. My next Wii acquisition was Smash Brothers Brawl. Now THAT is what I call a video game! (Sonic is my character of choice, naturally). Unfortunately, I kind of suck at it. My friend stopped playing it with me because it got too boring for him.

Then there was a lull. The video games I wanted (Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge) weren't for the Wii. Was the Wii's accessability, the very thing that made it so popular, also it's biggest drawback? My Wii sat mostly unused. Until last week.

As a birthday present for myself, I bought House of the Dead: Overkill and the Nyko Perfect Shot gun attachment. This. Game. Is. Awesome! It's a rail-shooter - like the arcade game. The graphics are really neat, as is the whole grindhouse motif they got goin'. It's totally over the top. I've had it for less than a week, but it looks like it will have plenty of replay value. And best of all? It's kind of easy. I like games that I can beat. In Overkill, the challenge isn't in getting through the game as much as it is in achieving certain goals - high accuracy rate, long combos, collecting all the golden brains, etc.

The Perfect Shot gun I got was defective, but Amazon sent me a replacement the next day. It's a little big for my hands, but I like it a lot.

It looks like there are a bunch of games coming up for the Wii that should appeal to a more adult gaming set, such as Mad World and Dead Rising.

Skincare takes smarts!!

2009-02-20T20:12:00.001-05:00

Sarah Haskins' latest installment of Target: Women is relevant to my latest post! Hurrah!

So Vain

2009-02-14T09:15:00.003-05:00

I just managed to spend about $50.00 at CVS even though they didn't have what I went there for.
I hate going down the aisles at places like that because it makes me feel like there's so much I should be doing to make myself look better - all these creams and serums and whatnot. I did need some anti-frizz stuff. But not only are there about a dozen different brands of hair products, each brand has two or three variations on each line of anti-frizz products in order to take up more shelf space. And even though I know that there isn't any significant difference between them, I'll still spend some minutes debating which product to buy.

While I was in the store, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" was playing. The chorus, "You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you" is mind-boggling to me. Is it about that person or not? It's a paradox!!

Did I mention that I woke up before 7am today? Yeah.

Derrida? More like Derri-duh!

2009-02-05T22:47:00.003-05:00

I just finished the Derrida reading that I was assigned to read for tomorrow. I started Monday. I read 30 pages every day. I rapped the last four pages aloud to myself. Here is a list of the words I had to look up:
invagination
exergue
ternary
lemmatic
stela
mediacy
copula
hypotyposis
Dasein
callistics
architectonics
prolegomenon
sachem
supererogatory
quoins
equivocity
aleatory
syntagm
appurtenant
striction
involution
involucrum
conceptacle
embouchure
cise
sublation
irruption
noumenal

Spell check does not recognize most of them.

Attack of the Facebook!

2009-01-14T14:44:00.004-05:00

Recently, some hackers stole the personal information of a few hundred students at my school through a university database. A few days ago, while I was eating lunch, a TV news crew came by and interviewed me about the theft. I told them I had a friend whose identity was stolen. After the interview (Yes, I was on TV that night. No, I'm not posting a link), I sent this friend a message on Facebook to give him a head's up. Apparently, the reporter also contacted him via Facebook. My friend wrote to me, "Don't you find it odd that reporters are now using facebook as a means to uncover their stories????" Weird, right?

Oh, Facebook. The staff writers at the Boston Globe love to write about Facebook, and how it's changing our lives.
"Facebook broke my heart" is the headline of this November 25, 2008 article about how Facebook affects relationships and cheating.
This article from November 30, 2008 is all about the 35+ crowd and Facebook as "a never-ending high school reunion."
That article is not to be confused with this one, from November 29th, 2008 (also found here with a slightly different headline, for some reason), about how Facebook will render high-school reunions obsolete.
There's this article from December 14, 2008 about how students and universities are using Facebook in the college admissions process.
And most recently, on January 11th, an article about how the police are increasingly using Facebook to track down suspects and witnesses.
There was also a recent one (more recent than this one) about Facebook and boss/employee relations.

It's not just the Globe that finds Facebook to be such fascinating news fodder - just do a Google news search and you'll find all sorts of fluff pieces about Facebook.

Facebook can be very useful for keeping in touch with friends, sharing information, and spreading awareness about events and such. But it can also be a black hole.

In other, completely unrelated, news, I've been listening to a lot of female-fronted '90s punk/rock/ska: Letters to Cleo, Save Ferris, and No Doubt, mostly. Good shit.

Who needs love when there's Law & Order?

2009-01-07T16:04:00.003-05:00

Law & Order is my TV vice.
Yesterday I realized that it is also my brand of soap opera.
"Law & Order? A soap opera?" You ask incredulously.

I know, it seems like L&O doesn't have much in common with ubiquitous daytime TV fare such as The Bold & The Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, or All My Children. Yes, the structures and formulae are different. Soap operas are serialized - each episode picks up where the last left off. L&O is episodic - each episode is a self-contained story. (L&O does have serial strands from time to time, such as the storyline around Olivia's mother in SVU, but is by and large episodic.)

The most obvious difference, of course, seems to be one of genre. Soap operas deal in complicated romances and family secrets. Law & Order is a hybrid of crime and courtroom dramas. Both, however, are melodramas. In her essay "Melodrama Revisted," Linda Williams argues that melodrama is not a proper genre, but a trans-generic mode. The melodramatic mode, whether as it is manifest in a 1940s' Douglas Sirk pic or in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, is largely about morality and righteous suffering. Law & Order has both of those themes in common with soap operas.

The settings of Law & Order and soap operas are also vastly different. Soap operas are set in the domestic sphere; L&O is set in the public sphere - whether the urban space of the streets of NYC or government buildings such as the police station and the courtroom. But in both instances the setting is very important. The details of the mise en scene form a shorthand for viewers. These shorthands work across series (in the case of the soap opera) and spinoffs (in the case of L&O). Props, and costumes give us familiar character types - the oily boyfriend and the scheming mother, the edgy cop and the virtuous ADA.

Formal and structural techniques are very similar between soap operas and Law & Order. Intense dialogue-driven scenes are shot with shot-reverse shot close-ups of expressive faces. Dramatic music comes in at crucial moments in both, driving up the tension.

Finally, the way the two are shown on TV are pretty similar: they're both always on.

To close, I leave you with this video of Amanda Palmer's "Leeds United," the source of this post's title:

Lists!

2008-12-30T18:43:00.007-05:00

Chanukah Haul:
- A 2009 Little Prince calendar
- A grow your own venus flytrap kit
- Slippers
- A book about fairytales and feminism
- 4 new bras
- A book of Anne Taintor collages
- Chocolates
- A periscope (from my Secret Santa)
- Cash

New Year's resolutions are dumb. Here are mine.
I resolve to:
- Floss my teeth every night
- Make schoolwork a priority
- Go to the gym more
- Not obsess (as much) about things beyond my control
- Not use most of my meal plan on holiday cookies
- Spend less time on Facebook

Favorite movies of 2008:
Teeth
Baby Mama
Mongol
The Wackness
Sukiyaki Western Django
Dance of the Dead

Famous people whose deaths made me go "Awww":
George Carlin
Michael Crichton
Bobby Fischer
Eartha Kitt
Paul Newman
Bettie Page
Roy Scheider
Heath Ledger
Charlton Heston

Favorite albums of 2008:
"Vampire Weekend" Vampire Weekend
"Afterparty Babies" Cadence Weapon
"Alopecia" Why?
"Arm's Way" Islands
"Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" Amanda Palmer
"Paper Crane" Walri

Chanukah Miracle 2008

2008-12-27T14:41:00.002-05:00

Last night my external hard drive fell down the stairs. It is still okay. Praise Gob!

Yesterday, my dog had diarrhea all over the kitchen floor. Cleaning it up was the least fun I've had all vacation.

All I want for Chanukah

2008-12-21T14:51:00.003-05:00

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. I'm still in Rochester until tomorrow morning. I should be packing, but instead I'm blogging. ("Blogging.....is such a subversively naughty sounding word. Like everyone knows what it means and yet it still sounds dirty." - J.)

Here is my Chanukah wish list:

The first thing I want is the Dresden Dolls' Virginia Companion songbook. It has the lyrics and sheet music for all the songs off the albums "Yes, Virginia" and "No, Virginia," as well as lots of pictures and other cool things.

I need a new electric hand mixer. My trusty old (and I mean really old) Toastmaster 3-speed mixer broke. I don't really need something as fancy as this Kitchen Aid 9-speed professional mixer, but it's yellow!

This scarf is beautiful. I don't really wear scarves like this, but I'd wear this one! It's really expensive, though. The design on it brings me to the next item...

I want this illustration tattooed on either the inside of my left bicep or on the side of my ribs.

I also would like a new digital camera and also a digital camcorder. I don't have any particular models in mind, though. I really like the Canon Rebel series of DSRL cameras, but I don't know if I really need something that heavy-duty.

Non-material things I want:
- My room to be magically clean
- Obama to appoint more women to high positions than he has been doing
- Better yet - a feminist revolution
- Someone to cuddle and make out with
- Straight 'A's
- The Patriots to win the Superbowl

Gobble Gobble

2008-11-24T13:08:00.002-05:00

I hate this time of year.
The lack of sunlight starts to really get to me.
I'm starting to think about the stress of finals, but at the same time I'm not ready for the semester to almost be over.

I hate traveling for Thanksgiving.
I hate packing. (I hate unpacking, too.)
I hate airports, especially when they're very busy.
I hate the stress of being picked up at the airport.
I hate Black Friday, the crowds.
I hate wanting to buy things that I don't need or can't afford.

On the bright side, I love my friends.
I'm actually looking forward to my final papers.
The snow can be beautiful.
I have a decent amount of money in my bank account.

I made a delicious flan on Friday. I accidentally baked the tin foil into the flan, but I managed to salvage it anyhow.

I'm feeling fat. I know I'm not fat, but I've put on 5-10 pounds since the summer. I feel heavy.

Yes on 2

2008-09-22T10:25:00.014-04:00

Two of the three movies I saw in theaters over the summer centered on the friendship forged between a stoner and his dealer. However, these two movies, The Wack ness and Pineapple Express, have little else in common.

Pineapple Express is an action-comedy buddy flick. Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a shiftless pothead who is on the run with his dealer (James Franco) after witnessing a murder. The Wackness is a poignant bildungsroman set in NYC in 1994. Josh Peck plays Luke Shapiro, a recent high school graduate and pot dealer who befriends one of his customers, psychiatrist Dr. Squires (played by a brilliant Ben Kingsley), while falling in love with Squires' step-daughter (Olivia Thirlby). The Wackness, directed by Jonathan Levine, played on 6 screens its opening weekend. Pineapple Express, directed by David Gordon Green and produced by Hollywood's darling du jour Judd Apatow, opened on more than 3000 screens.

Aside from these and other technical differences, the films are fundamentally different in their ideologies. They deviate in their representations of marijuana, the people who use it, and the effect it has.

In Pineapple Express, pot is the source of gang violence and polic corruption. The major players in the drug trade are "bad guys." A farcical prologue shows the illegalization of marijuana as the arbitrary result of a stoned Private insulting his superior. In the film, smoking pot, an act that is exclusive to white males, brings people together superficially, but is ultimately harmful to social relationships.

In The Wackness, pot is shown to be benign, especially in comparison to commonly abused drugs such as alcohol and prescription medications, which are legal, yet less accessible than pot. As implied by the film, the illegality of marijuana is a matter of politics, not because of any harmful property of the drug. Smoking pot helps to forge meaningful social relationships across generations, social classes, and economic statuses.

My pot smoking experience is non-existent. However, I've been friends with the stoner crowd since high school. Drawing on that extensive experience, I have come to certain conclusions about pot. Some are negative, some are positive, but my overall stance on the matter is neutral. Marijuana is what it is.

In the general election this November, voters in Massachusetts will have the opportunity to vote to decriminalize adults' possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. The bill, which will appear on the ballot as Question 2, will also impose additional (non-criminal) penalties on minors. The current presidential race is sure to elicit an impressive voter turnout. Hopefully the people will make their voices heard on this issue as well.

- More info about Question 2 on ballotpedia.org
- More info about the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy initiave

Images used in this post were culled from Google Image Search.

It's hard out there for a [feminist]

2008-08-03T17:13:00.007-04:00

Sometimes it is so friggin' hard to be a feminist.

Case in point: I went out last night with my sister and some friends. We went to a couple of bars and clubs. (-"Is that what you're wearing?" -"We are going to a nightclub" <-- Name that movie and win 10 points) My plan was to go out, drink, dance, have fun. Should be easy enough, right? Turns out it's not so easy to have fun while being bombarded by the overt misogyny thrown at a woman who is drinking and dancing.

We went first to a dive-y sports bar. We were left alone for the most part. Walking into the pizza place next door to grab a slice, however, merited whooping and catcalls from the men loitering within. I ignored them as if I were oblivious. I just wanted some pizza.

Our next stop was a club with a mechanical bull (for Friday night Bikini Bull Rides, of course) and a dance floor. The harassment started in line outside. A large drunk man had appointed himself to the position of keeping the line orderly. Mostly this job included eyeballing all the women and mentally undressing them. "What's your name?" He asked, looking me up and down hungrily. I do not take kindly to this type of harassment. It's such a pervasive example of how widely accepted male entitlement is; it is the "harmless" end of the spectrum of rape culture. But I suppressed my raging inner feminist. I was in a good mood and having fun with my friends. I wasn't about to let this asshole spoil it. I didn't just let it go, however. "What do you think my name is?" I asked, playing along. "Happy," he replied, eying my bright yellow top, but clearly thinking about what was beneath it. I had nothing to say to this, so I rolled my eyes and moved up in lines.

Inside, it was about as dark, loud, and sweaty as is typical of this type of establishment. (Note to club DJs: Playing two different songs at once does not qualify as a "mash up." Sorry, you're going to have to try harder than that.) The woman who collected our cover, as well as all the female bar tenders, had her shirt cut open to reveal what can be best described as heavaing bosoms. On sale behind the register were all sorts of bachelorette goodies (feather boas and cowboy hats) and sexxxxy souvenirs (ladies' underwear that said "I got bucked" with a picture of a lasso). We walked through the bar area and down a ramp to the dance floor. My stomach did a little jerk when I saw the stripper poles on raised platforms at each end of the floor. There were no professional dancers, just waxy tanned club-goers, some with bachelorette tiaras, gyrating against the poles and each other. (Ariel Levy, eat your heart out.) At this sight, I tell my shoulder feminist (like a shoulder angel or shoulder devil) that she might as well retire for the night. [Note: I realize that I haven't explained why the stripper poles were problematic. I don't intend to use this post to go off on that particular subject. It is the same reason why the "I got bucked" undies are a problem. For more insight, I highly recommend this "click"-inducing post by Twisty over at I Blame the Patriarchy.]

As we snaked our way through the crowd of grinding bodies, I felt a hand reach out and grab at my stomach. Ew! Who cops a feel of a girl's stomach? I whipped my head around, but there was no way of knowing which leering creepoid was the perp. I shook off the slight but glaring violation and continued on, following my group towards a less dense spot on the dance floor.

Sigh. Being a feminist is hard work. It's hard to "turn it off" for a night. It feels like the only way to have fun in the nightlife-scene is to put your principles on pause. But not to worry, the Patriarchy will still be there in the morning. You can resume your fight once you've sobered up.

That being said, I had a great time last night. I drank, I danced, I had fun. I hope to have more nights like it before the summer is out.

Things Facebook Thinks it Knows About Me

2008-08-02T14:21:00.003-04:00

Based on the advertisements I see, Facebook thinks I am:
- Female (true)
- A student (true)
- Single (true)
- Jewish (true)
- Broke (true)
- A Yankees fan (false! EGREGIOUS ERROR! Why would you even think that!? What in my profile could possibly lead you to that conclusion!?)

Once you pop, the fun, etc...

2008-08-02T12:25:00.008-04:00

dear mr. and/or mrs. sender-
we're pleased to inform you that your application's been accepted
- "Sex Changes" by the Dresden Dolls

If I were a rap music producer, I would sign a rapper called 35 Cent. She would be just like 50 cent, but her albums would cost 70% less. Y'know, to market to women who get paid 70% less than their male equals.

If I had my own cable channel, one of the shows I would launch would be called "Patriarchal Myth Busters." It would be just like Myth Busters, but it would bust Patriarchy-instilled societal myths rather than urban legends and pop culture hypotheses. The pilot episode would debunk what is perhaps the most persistent and pervasive product of Patriarchal invention: the existence of a thing called "virginity."

What is virginity? Is it a state of being? Or is it something that can be lost, taken, given up and given away? Ask a know-it-all grade schooler and she or he will tell you that a virgin is a woman whose hymen isn't broken. So then "virgin" is a category of woman, right? It is a category based on the state of one's hymen. In Virgin: The Untouched History, (which I admit I never finished reading), Hanne Blank goes through quite a bit of trouble to show that the "natural" state of the hymen is very indefinite. Therefore, women can't really be categorized by their hymens or lack thereof.

As is the trend with many Patriarchal myths and inventions, virginity is not a pseudo-scientific assertion of biology, but a social construct. (See here for an excellent introductory explanation of [feminist] usage of the term "social construct.") It is yet another way for men to appraise the value of a woman. Hanne Blank delves into the history in depth in her book, but I found one particular explanation especially compelling: virginity was invented to ensure the continuity of a patriarchal line. When a man wanted to marry (read: sell) off his daughter, she was worth more if she was a virgin - not because virgins are inherently more valuable or more "pure," but because that way it could be guaranteed that any children she might bear would have been fathered by her husband. It had little to do with the woman and everything to do with the offspring. (Remember, women aren't people; they're slaves for making babies and sandwiches.)

The reason I am writing about this now is because of this article called "The 19-Year-Old Virgin" that will appear in the magazine section of tomorrow's Boston Globe. The tagline is "Sure, I've had the opportunity to have sex. Here's why I've decided to abstain." The article is written by Emma Morgenstern, a 19-year-old who has never had sex. (Shock and awe, right?) Morgenstern is an articulate Jewish college student, in other words, normal. She is not a promise-ring-wearing, wedding-day-waiting loony. What the article attempts to do, though I'm not sure if it is Morgenstern's intention, is make abstinence cool for the atheist crowd.

Morgenstern writes,

But I've realized that being a virgin isn't that big a deal - except for one thing: The one real downside (aside from not having sex, of course) is the unknowns that come with it. I don't know how my first experience will change my life or my relationship. I don't know if my first time will be with someone I love. I don't know how to buy condoms. That's OK, though. I know I have plenty of time. Being a virgin simply means that a person hasn't had sex and therefore probably has more unanswered questions about it. But maybe even this isn't accurate - after all, that senior on my couch seemed as if he had some things he wanted to ask.

Drinking alcohol the week before I turned 21 did not feel much different from drinking alcohol the week after. It makes one realize how arbitrary the age limit is. It is my hope that when Emma does have sex, she will find that not only is virginity not a big deal, but that, "the drinking age," it doesn't really exist in any concrete way. (I realize that this is not a perfect metaphor.)

I had sex for the first time when I was 19. December 8th. It is a big deal to have sex for the first time. But everyone's circumstances are different, so the extent to which it affects a person will vary. When my then-boyfriend brought up the subject for the first time, it was something that I too was thinking about. I really wanted to have sex with him. But I'd never done it before, so I wanted some more time to think. Like Morgenstern, I didn't know how having sex with him might affect our relationship. We'd been seeing each other for two months and were already very intimate - we just hadn't actually "done it" yet.

[[Digression: Morgenstern writes, "You might be wondering what it's like, in today's sex-obsessed world, to be a virgin at the age of 19. Well, you get used to the stares after a while. If I confess my sexual status to the cashier at the movie theater, he'll often give me a children's-price ticket." Why would you confess your sexual status to a box office boy?
Anecdote: At the beginning of my sophomore year in college, B.C. (Before Coitus), a bunch of my housemates were sitting around in the kitchen trying to figure out the house ratio of virgins to vegetarians. They asked me if I'd had sex and I said no. One girl responded, "Really!? But you seem so...liberated!" She assumed that because I kept condoms in my drawer (courtesy of Planned Parenthood) and talked freely and openly about sexuality that I had, in fact, had sex.
Moral: Nobody can tell if you've had sex or not unless you tell them.]]

So after a couple weeks of deliberation, I decided to go for it. We did it. The only thing that changed about our relationship is that we had more sex.

I don't like to say that I "lost" my virginity. The only thing I lost was my ace in the hole for winning Never Have I Ever.

Image used in this post yoinked from Rakka.

Notes on seeing The Dark Knight

2008-07-31T16:20:00.004-04:00

***Here there be spoilers!***

- For all the buzz about Heath Ledger's performance, I think that Aaron Eckhart was equally compelling. His turn to the dark side was a bit hard to swallow, but that's a weakness in the script. I only wish that Harvey Dent had been a more likable character.

- The scene in which the Joker burns the big pile of money is problematic for two reasons. 1) Gotham must exist in some very alternate reality in order for the Joker to be able to say that gas is cheap. 2) His monologue is too self-righteous. Who is he to talk about the glory days of Gotham villains?

- This film is definitely non-compliant with the Bechdel-Wallace Rule.

- In a similar vein, of the three female characters who have names, one gets killed, one is a turncoat, and one is a mom. (And isn't Barbara Gordon supposed to be Commissioner Gordon's daughter?)

- I wonder how they write action and car chase sequences for movies like this. Do they write it out specifically: "Motorcycle drives up wall and does a flip thing"? Or just "Insert badass blow-up-y stuff here" and let the action choreographers figure it out?

- I wonder how many mpg the Batmobile gets.

- The trope of a villain putting both a friend and love interest of Batman in peril and making him choose who to save always seemed really gimmicky to me. I'm glad that Batman was not able to save both in this reworking.

- I liked that Joker's exploding ferry scheme was an exercise in Game Theory. Very fitting.

- My favorite thing about Christian Bale's portrayal of Bruce Wayne is that he makes it very obvious (to the audience, at least) that the whole playboy millionaire thing is an act. This is much more convincing and laudable than previous incarnations in which Bruce Wayne has little personality and actually is a playboy. Bale's Wayne is more to Batman what Clark Kent is to Superman - an actual alternate identity - but rather than meek and mild-mannered, he goes for arrogant and air-headed. ("Should I go to the hospital?")

- It was a little too long. One too many climaxes, if you ask me.

- I want an "Ichi the Killer"/"Dark Knight" crossover Christmas special in which Joker and Kakihara go on a crime spree together.

Irreconciliable?

2008-07-13T00:07:00.006-04:00

I am a fan of the New England Patriots. However, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Green Bay Packers because my brother has been a Cheesehead since he was three years old. For his Bar Mitzvah, we went to Lambeau Field to see them play. He has something of a shrine to Brett Favre in his room. When Brett Favre announced his retirement in March, I was sad to see him go, but knew it was the right thing. He had a remarkable run. The latest controversy regarding his possible return is therefore somewhat tortuous. This article in the Globe makes the whole thing seem like a messy public break-up:

It ended amicably. They had many fond memories together, but it was time to part ways. Brett broke the news to the Packers in a "tearful goodbye news conference."

Some people close to the couple were surprised it had lasted so long, given the near break-ups they'd every off-season for the past few years, "but it seemed to be for real this time."

They still had strong feelings for each other: "'[General manager] Ted [Thompson] always wanted Brett back,' [coach Mike] McCarthy said. 'We always wanted Brett back.'"

A few weeks later it seemed like they might get back together, but Brett felt that he "had reached a point of closure."

They kept in touch, and "regularly communicated." But there was a "rising tension" in late June. Brett wanted the Packers to take him back, but he still wavered as to whether he "was ready to make a 100 percent commitment."

Then last week, in a "text message exchange between Thompson and Favre," Brett said he needed to talk urgently. He wanted to commit.

But it's too late. The Packers are "committed to Aaron Rodgers as their starter," they "have since moved forward." No doubt this only makes Brett want to get back together even more. Green Bay hopes that there is "some role that he might play here." They still want Brett in their lives, if only as a friend.

Brett thinks it will be too hard to continue seeing each other if they can't have the relationship they once had. He wants out. But the Packers aren't ready to let go. They won't release him.

Where does that leave the Packers and their beloved three-time MVP?
In a pretty big mess.
"Quite frankly, it's a little gut-wrenching as an organization to go through it, and certainly for Mike and myself," Thompson said. "This stuff hurts a lot of people. I mean, it hurts. I'm not talking about physically hurting, but the sensitivity."

So what now? If Brett stays with the Packers, he'll be relegated to the sidelines, forced to look on in envy as his team plays with a different man in his place. His other option is a trade. But can he imagine playing football with someone else? Someone new? He may never find another team with the same chemistry. And what would happen when he'd have to play against the Packers, meeting awkwardly on the field? Would he well up with nostalgia? Or feign a stoic indifference?

Oh, Brett. Breaking up is hard to do, yes. But you should have thought earlier. Now you're left scrambling to hold it together. It isn't fair to us that you keep toying with our emotions like this. We don't want to burn any bridges, but we can't live suspended like this. You broke our hearts, got our hopes up, let us down - we can't take this roller coaster relationship much longer.

Things You Might Not Know About Me: Rachel as Sporty Spice

2008-07-11T18:18:00.007-04:00

This post is first in what may become a series.

The summer following 11th grade, I went to Israel for six weeks on a program through my summer camp. The beginning of this post finds me panting as I climb the ridge of a mountain in the Negev desert. The rest of my group is ahead of me. The only person behind me is Elad, our armed guard of the week, who makes sure nobody gets left behind (I did get left behind at a beach in Tel Aviv, but that's another story). Elad says to me, "I don't get it. You seem to really like hiking, and you have great hiking boots, but you're so slow. You're always the last one." Israelis are pretty forward, so I know his curiosity is genuine; he's not trying to put me down. And quite the opposite, I take it as a compliment. Elad's observation is a perfect summation of the story of Sports & Me.

I am by no means an athletic person - I'd take Wii Tennis over real tennis any day - but I do enjoy being active. My general distaste for sports probably stems from the humiliation I suffered at the hands of my elementary school gym teacher. At the beginning of every class period, we'd have to run laps around the gym. Fine. No big deal. The traumatic part was when the teacher would disallow passing. At this point, the entire class would lap me and be stuck running behind me. As their frustration increased, so did my mortification, until they all finished and I was left to run my last lap alone. And so a string of similarly cruel gym teachers discouraged me early on from enjoying physical education.

I used to hate team sports - I didn't like anything where I could cause the team to lose - and so I'd goof off instead of trying to play well and failing. I liked Capture the Flag because I didn't have to make a run for the flag if I didn't want to, which I never did. I was damn good at guarding the jail, though.

To this day, the sports I really like are non-competetive. Ultimate Frisbee is the most competetive sport I play (although unfortunately I haven't played in a long while), and it's known for being laid-back, holding the Spirit of the Game holy above all else. I don't get many opportunities to be active these days. When I was much younger I took horseback riding lessons, and five styles of dance classes - ballet, jazz, hip-hop, tap, and flamenco. We haven't been on a vacation in a while, but my family likes sporty getaways such as snorkeling and kayaking in Belize or downhill skiing and snow tubing in Maine. On a school trip I went ice climbing, cross-country skiing, and dog sledding. At camp last year I was the head of the rock climbing staff. I love hiking.

When I was thirteen I tried to go to the gym at the JCC with my sister, but I got kicked out because I was a year too young to use any of the equipment. I didn't go back. Of course, It's easy to blame my lack of athleticism on bad experiences. But the real reason is that for a long time I had a lack of motivation. I'd made up my mind that I was bad at sports, so I turned my attentions elsewhere.

This past semester, I started going to the gym at school. All it took was a few friends to show me the ropes. Now, I've started boxing. I'd always wanted to learn how to box, and this summer I finally have the opportunity. I love it. The people and trainers at my gym are all wonderful. I feel myself getting stronger and more competent. I might even step into the ring to spar before the summer's over.

But don't get me wrong - I still loves mah Wii Sports.

---

Below: Mini Golf is totally a legitimate sport.

About that title...

2008-07-09T18:39:00.005-04:00

The title of this blog is a reference to the song "Less Teeth & More Tits" by Lunachicks, off the album Luxury Problem (1999). The chorus goes:

Am I smiling enough? Am I smiling too much?
Am I tucked in and buckled, do my tits touch?
Hi, how are you? How high are you?
Less teeth and more tits
It's never enough
You'll never be good enough

So a simple reversal gives me the title "More Teeth." I should note, however, that the reciprocal is not necessarily "Less Tits." Lots of teeth, lots of tits - it's all good.

Festive Cupcakes

2008-07-04T16:16:00.002-04:00

I've always loved cupcakes, so I'm happy that they're so hip now. It means cupcake bakeries cropping up all over. Before today I hadn't made cupcakes in ages, so I was mostly on the eating end of the craze. But today I baked cupcakes. This is not going to be a cupcake or cooking blog (I recommend Cupcakes Take the Cake for that), but this post is going to be a play-by-play of my epicurean endeavor.

For the cake, I used this recipe for Love Potion Cupcakes. I used margarine instead of butter, and didn't add the chocolate chunks. Here's the batter:

The recipe said to put a frozen raspberry into each cupcake after pouring the batter into each cup. I tried a couple of other techniques as well - pouring the batter over the raspberry (Fig. 1), and pouring batter in, then placing the raspberry, and covering it up (Fig. 2):
Fig. 1 Fig. 2

End of phase one:

...and clean up for phase two!

I watched Law & Order while the cupcakes baked and cooled:

I wanted to decorate them to look like fireworks. I think they look kind of like Spider-man webs, but whatever. They're red, white, and blue, so that must count for something. This sequence shows the process:

This one looks more like fireworks:

Here's how they all came out!

Eating the cupcake:

They were good! I'm rather proud of how they came out. The texture of the cake is more turgid than I'm used to. The raspberry inside is a nice touch. I don't know if it will be as good when it's not still warm. Should be fine. The frosting is where the cupcake loses points. I didn't trust myself to make my own frosting; I worried I wouldn't be able to get a good consistency. But next time I'll have to give it a go.

That wraps it up!

(Yes, I ate two. :-P )

Abstinence Bites.

2008-06-11T11:11:00.000-04:00

I would like to turn your attention to this article in the Boston Globe:

Taking a pledge to remain a virgin until married may help some teens and young adults in delaying the start of sexual activity, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday.
A study by the Rand Corporation research institute found that 34 percent of youths who took such pledges as teens had had sexual intercourse within three years compared to 42 percent of similar teens who did not make virginity pledges.
...

The Rand report cited estimates that 23 percent of U.S. females and 16 percent of males have made a virginity pledge.

...

"These findings do not suggest that virginity pledges should be a substitute for comprehensive sexual education programs, or that they will work for all kinds of kids," said Martino. "But virginity pledges may be appropriate as one component of an overall sex education effort."
One debate has centered on whether school-based sex education policies should focus on abstinence-only, with virginity pledges as a possible component. Many sex educators argue that youths need information about how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

The headline of this article - "Virginity pledges help some delay sex - US study" - is not misleading, but the implication is. It might be assumed that what it means is "Virginity pledges help some delay sex until marriage." But this study does not show that teenagers who take abstinence pledges wait until marriage to have sex. It does not show that abstinence pledges effectively decrease the number of teenagers having sex. All it shows is that teens who have taken abstinence pledges tend to have sex a few years later than other teens.

It is problematic to suggest that this study demonstrates that abstinence-only sex-ed is successful. People have sex for the first time at different ages regardless of what they plan to do. (Note: I do not use the term "lose virginity," but that's a post for another time) Someone who reallyreallyreally wants to have sex might not do so until much later than another like-minded individual. It doesn't matter when a person starts having sex (taking age of consent laws into consideration, of course), as long as she or he is prepared to do so in mind and body.

Mitchell Lichtenstein's recent film "Teeth" could be called a horror film for the virginity-pledge crowd. I call it the feel-good chick flick of the decade. The movie is about one of my favorite topics, the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina. (Cue music.) It stars Jess Weixler as Dawn, a high schooler growing up in a town where diagrams of the female genitalia are covered in the biology textbooks. (Oh, and did I mention there's a nuclear power plant behind her house?) Dawn and her culty friends wear Promise Rings, a symbol that they have pledged not to have sex until they put on that "other ring." No folks, not the NuvaRing - a wedding ring. In my opinion, Dawn's wedding fantasies are the creepiest scenes in the movie. Unfortunately, Dawn will never live out her virginal wedding fantasy, because she gets raped by one of her Promise Ring buddies. Then something goes wrong - wrong-er than most rapes, that is. But Dawn doesn't know what's wrong because she doesn't know what a "normal" vagina is supposed to look like in the first place. She figures it out, though, and talk about female empowerment! The scenes where she puts her nether-teeth to work are the most satisfying, cheer-out-loud moments in recent cinematic history. The film is bold and hilarious. Even the ending credits are delectible, including a "No men were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer, and a special thanks to Camille Paglia.

My friends and I can't wait for the sequel - "Teeth 2: Wisdom Teeth" and "Teeth 3: Dentures." And a prequel, "Baby Teeth," perhaps? Oh, if only. We also like to speculate about the daily tribulations that might face a woman endowed with a vagina dentata. How does she floss? Does her electric toothbrush double as a vibrator? Does she douche with Listerine? (Troubling fact: Lysol used to be marketed as a douche.) What if she gets cavities? Is there a vagina Tooth Fairy?

At this point I should mention that the title of my blog is only tangentially a reference to vagina dentata. A more in-depth post about the title is forthcoming.

Images used in this post yoinked from IMDb and ArtThrob

2008-06-11T11:04:00.000-04:00

R: I really oughta blog
J: it's certainly cathartic
R: but I don't think I'd want a personal blog
R: I've tried starting one a few times before
R: but I can never decide if I want to make it anonymous or not, and whether to tell friends about it or not
J: yeah, my one goal with this blog is to not repeat my last blog
J: aka my livejournal from high school
R: haha
R: yeeeeeah

Well, I'm at it again. But unlike my past attempts, I'm not going to even try to set a theme or agenda for my blog yet. I'll just see where it takes me. For now, I'm keeping it to myself, though.