Your results:
You are Spider-Man
|
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Archive for Deborah Lipp
What Superhero Are You?
Walking on fish
Sometimes you don’t know what a dream symbol means, but you’re sure it means something.
Last night I dreamt I was walking on fish. I was walking in a stream, and it was some sort of punishment or penalty or something, that I had to take this extra walk, and the stream is very shallow; ankle-deep, and my path is all these small pebbles. I see some tiny fish swimming past (downstream) as I walk uphill, and then I realize that some of the pebbles are the bodies of the tiny fish. No, all the pebbles are really fish. I dislodge a few from the path and they’re little silver-blue fish, about an inch long and kinda fat.
I wake up thinking, That’s got to mean something.
Friday Catblogging: Waiting for the door
I just love the way he sits at the door and waits. Fanty will mewl, but Mingo just sits there, like assuming that I’ll mosey along and open it for him.
In the City
I heard this amazing song on the radio. It’s called “In the City” by a band called Milton.
The lyrics describe the panolopy of experiences and sensations involved in walking in New York City. I felt moved by it, and I think no one has ever nailed down the contrasts quite so urgently and beautifully.
You know what’s great about the Internettubes? I couldn’t find the lyrics anywhere, so I looked up the band’s MySpace page and wrote to them and explained how moved I was and asked for the lyrics. They sent them! (Lyrics below the fold.)
» Read more..
Literary Interval
I interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog for this literary interval.
I am currently reading The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I came to this sorta backwards, having loved Brick, and noticed that it was practically a remake of Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and then Brick’s writer-director said his biggest influence on the film was Hammett, and there it was in the bookstore, so…
What is remarkable about this book is how fresh and modern it sounds. Sometimes I pick up an older book and I feel like I’m plodding through an earlier style of writing that doesn’t agree with me. F. Scott Fitzgerald does that to me. So does Ian Fleming, but I put up with it because it’s important to me. But Hammett is immediate, lively, and sly. He’s stylized without being overblown, he’s dialogue-heavy without being melodramatic, he’s funny but not ironic. The whole thing breezes by and it’s wonderful.
I am definitely going to read more Hammett, and also give Raymond Chandler a try.
Ignorance in the face of victory
Today, the New York Transit Authority settled a lawsuit with a transgendered woman. She had been arrested three times for using the women’s bathroom in the subway (she works for Verizon and was repairing payphones in the subway).
When I heard this story on the morning news, they chose to devote a lot of airtime to some “woman in the street” interview spewing a lot of ignorance. Seriously, they give major news ten seconds and this woman was quoted twice, for a total that must have approached a half a minute.
First, she blathered about how “they” shouldn’t be in the “wrong” bathroom and so on and just basically expressed her discomfort with the whole notion of transgender. And then she said how the obvious solution was to have them use the bathroom for their “real” gender.
Right. Because it would be so much more welcome for a woman to show up in the men’s room. That would definitely go over better. Geez Pete, even if you insist that a transgendered woman is “really” a man, how thoughtless do you have to be not to envision the kind of problems, including violence, that would ensue?
The beer is out there
Jill at Feministe is on a roll. This is frickin brilliant:
And while I’ve written before about the headscarf and the hijab, my opinion that they should be neither required nor outlawed, and my belief that a woman can wear whatever she wants and still be a perfectly autonomous human being, I do have a big problem with the underlying message behind the idea that women should always dress modestly. It essentially comes down to the idea that men are incapable of interacting with women in public, and that women should shoulder the burden of men’s animal nature by covering themselves and not “tempting” them. It’s sort of like blaming grocery stores for alcoholism — I mean, the grocery stores put the beer out there!
This is such a great quote. It was in the middle of a very long (and great) post, so I wanted to highlight it. It’s smart about feminism and women’s choices. It’s smart about rape and contraception and “asking for it” and being punished for choosing it. The hard right has been expanding its anti-choice umbrella to include more and more. To include contraception and “immodest” attire. These rights are at risk. So it’s good to trace it back to the underlying message:
Women must not trick men into having sex. Women are permitted to trick men into marriage in order to have sex, on condition that they be punished by the inequality of marriage and the inability to control how many children they will have.
That’s the Christian Right anti-choice message in a nutshell. Whenever they disguise their agenda as being about “life” or “choice” or “protecting women” or “decency,” run it through the anti-choice message translator and see if it doesn’t change significantly.
Best dinner ever
Sauté leeks in garlic & oil over low heat for about 15 minutes.
Add ten peeled shrimp and one cubed tomato, and cook about 5 minutes more.
Add a handful of frozen peas and some fresh thyme, and cook about 3 minutes more.
Serve with pasta. Your eyes will roll back in your head.
Mythic dream
Every now and then you dream in mythology. This was very interesting. It’s a little dirty, so stop reading if you can’t handle naked body parts.
Monday Movie Review: The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch (1969) 8/10
Aging outlaws (including William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) have outlived the Old West, but still cling to a life of bank and train robberies, even as cars and machine guns make their appearance. Directed by Sam Peckinpah.
Sometimes you’ll see a fanboy say that so-and-so must “hate comics” (or whatever the subject matter is) because so-and-so criticized them fiercely. I saw this recently in Bond fan circles when those opposed to Daniel Craig’s casting were dismissed as “haters” and “not real Bond fans” by enthusiasts of the choice. But to criticize something in minute detail, you have to love it. There’s simply no way to absorb and understand the minutia without affection.
Peckinpah must have loved Westerns, and he must have loved violence, but The Wild Bunch is also a bitter criticism of both.
I’ve never seen The Wild Bunch before, but it’s impossible to be a film fan without reading both the praise and the criticism. Peckinpah, it’s said, adores and adulates violence; he makes it a dance, and he makes it gruesome to an unprecedented extend. Even in 2006, it’s obvious when watching The Wild Bunch that it depicted a violence the genre had not seen before. And while it is easy to be offended by the spurting fountains of blood, it’s impossible not to know that the film seeks to acknowledge a truth about brutality. Peckinpah wasn’t the first to see a kind of poetry in a dying lawman falling off his horse, that had been around for years; instead he was the first to see (and film) both the poetry and the ugliness in the same lawman falling off his horse. This is a message to those who love to watch the deaths of those lawmen, a message about what it might really be like. Indeed, I have no idea if big gushes of blood are any more realistic than no blood at all, never having seen an actual lawman shot off his horse, but the blood sends a message that bloodlessness does not.
There are no beautiful outlaws in The Wild Bunch. William Holden was certainly beautiful as a young man, but he is not glamorized here. Indeed, our outlaws are introduced in World War I era Army uniforms, and if ever there was an uglier, more sexless uniform, I don’t know it. It’s like a mockery of (and reference to) John Wayne wearing his iconic Civil War uniform in The Searchers. If Holden is unbeautiful, try standing him next to Borgnine, and that’ll really drain the pretty out. Ain’t an Eastwood in the bunch, I tell you.
There are no good guys here, and indeed, it’s hard to know for whom to root. The opening shoot-out is like an ode to the meaninglessness of choosing a side. In a later extended sequence across multiple battles, Mexican general Mapache fights it out with Pancho Villa. Our outlaws are working for Mapache, but he is a brute, and is hated by a Mexican outlaw whose village he destroyed. Meanwhile the U.S. Army, our outlaws, bounty hunters, and railroad men are all in a gun-battle in which nobody seems to be on anybody’s side.
Our “heroes” are definitely not heroic either. Certainly Holden’s Pike has a sense of honor, as does Borgnine’s Dutch and Edmond O’Brien as Sykes. But they also leave their dead for the buzzards and brutalize whores, whom they then underpay. (This is a very misogynist movie.) We are meant to sympathize with these men, but not to like them.
Peckinpah avoids iconic scenes. [SPOILERS AHEAD] » Read more..
