Thanks to all of you who crossed fingers and lit candles. If all goes according to plan, The Study of Witchcraft will be out in time for Samhain ’07. I’ll give more details after the contract is signed.
Huzzah!
Archive for Deborah Lipp
Big Fat Link
The latest Big Fat Carnival is up, and I’m in it. Go look!
The Taming of the Shrew
Continuing on my tirade about whores whores and more whores, I’ve decided that the only acceptable script for an interesting woman in which said woman survives happily is The Taming of the Shrew. All scripts written before 1988 (and most since) punish a woman for her freedom, especially her sexual freedom, as well as her willingness to compete with men.
(In the old days, women were punished for unmarried sex. Unmarried sex=slut. In recent years, sexual freedom is not simply unmarried sex. A woman can have unmarried sex without necessarily being a slut, but only if it’s fundamentally pre-married, not un-married. Uncommitted sex is still Teh Slut; women who fall in love and fuck are not punished, but women who fuck for fun are.)
Punishment is herewith defined as death (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), prison (High Sierra), drunken misery (the aforementioned The Long Riders), or just plain ol’ humiliation/ostracism/misery (Dangerous Liaisons).
Anyway, cheer up girls. There’s a way out. The Taming of the Shrew (a.k.a. Annie Get Your Gun, a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a.k.a. Spellbound). Any woman who admits her wrongdoing and gets in touch with her inner wifeliness and desire to be dominated by manly manly macho men is off the hook.
Phew.
(Cross-posted for your reading pleasure.)
Fun With Language: Oh, those wacky kids
My friend’s daughter, being incredibly rambunctuous, lends herself to language fun. Yesterday, my friend O was heard saying to his seven year-old girl:
No using the spear on the trampoline!
He meant it, too.
Monday Movie Review: The Long Riders, the Wild West, and Whores, Whores, Whores
The Long Riders (1980) 7/10
Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach) ride with the Younger brothers (David, Keith, and Robert Carradine) and Clell Miller (Randy Quaid), robbing banks and being pursued by the Pinkertons.
The Long Riders is stylish and earthy. It feels authentic and sticks fairly close to history. It is a sweeping celebration of outlaw machismo, a pure boy sort of experience. This movie is so obsessed with the idea of brothers—real brothers—that the fourth Younger brother, John, is here called a cousin, presumably because there wasn’t a fourth Carradine to play him. (The brothers motif continues into Dennis Quaid playing Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest playing the Ford brothers.)
David Carradine gives one of his most relaxed performances. He’s terrific, and the performances in general are good. The complex history of the Civil War guerrilla actions that took place on the Missouri/Kansas border; important to the story of these men, is lost, but then, it is complex, and it’s not the story the movie chooses to tell.
I have lately been fascinated by Westerns. I find them terribly sexy—not in an artificial fetishistic Midnight Cowboy sort of way, but in a cool, silent, scary Man With No Name sort of way; although I suppose that, too, is fetishistic. They are washed, rinsed, and wiped down in testosterone; stark, iconic, and dramatic. They rely on silence, restraint, and very cool costumes.
So naturally, they are usually sexist.
Which Sandman Character Are You?
| Which Sandman Character are You? |
 You are Dream! Many people see you as living in your own little world. Though you would never try to harm someone needlessly, you are not always aware of the consequences of your actions. Take this quiz!
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You will not see a weirder picture this week
It’s like a deleted scene from Gregory’s Girl.
Friday Kittenblogging: Say Goodbye
This is the last edition of Friday Kittenblogging. Next week, I unveil….TA DA!!…Friday Catblogging. That’s right, the Gang of Two will be one year old on October 5th. The little monsters.
So without further ado, I present
Belly flap
Pretty much the minute she stopped looking like a kitten, Fanty developed El Gato Belly Flappo, the fat furry bit that flaps back and forth as she walks.
The other day, I noticed that when she lies on her side, it sorta POOFS up. Photography was mandatory.
Cute Adorable Sales Pitch
I just upped my bandwidth, which also ups my monthly fee. No big, but I thought it was a good time to remind you:
Thanks.
Jews on TV
Via Roberta, I find this short (not very short) history of the portrayal of Jews on television on the wonderfully-named blog Jew Eat Yet?.
The author speaks my heart. My experience of Jews on television, for most of my life, was that Jews are okay as long as they are Woody Allen. A proper Jew is nebbishy, funny but vaguely unpleasant, and preferably short. A Jew must! Not! Be sexy!
And then along came thirtysomething.
A girl can get slammed pretty hard for admitting to thirtysomething love, but I’m brave. The first episode I ever saw was the season 4 opener. As soon as I saw the episode title, Prelude to a Bris, I knew I was in for something different.
As the show opens, Hope (Mel Harris) gives birth to baby Leo. Michael (Ken Olin) is Jewish, Hope is not.
Michael. Is. Jewish. He is tall, handsome, nice, doesn’t wear glasses, isn’t a nebbish, an accountant, or particularly funny. He’s a human being. I am, in short, stunned.
The episode revolves around Michael’s decision to circumcise Leo (the ceremony known as a bris). Michael barely practices Judaism and, like about 50% of American Jews, he has married outside of his religion. He wonders if it even makes sense to go through the ceremony, and he wonders if he can bear to forego it.
This is a real dilemma for many modern Jews, a poignant and complex one, but I had never seen it mentioned on television before. I had never seen drama speak dramatically about the experience of being a Jew.
In the final moments of the episode, Alan King, as Michael’s mother’s boyfriend, plays a role in the ceremony. He dons a prayer shawl as I have seen a hundred Jewish men don prayer shawls—but never on TV. I got a chill, I swear to God, seeing this secret, invisible world, the world of Jews-as-real-people, suddenly become visible.
Plus, y’know, it was brilliantly written and acted and filmed and I was totally hooked and Roberta had the past three seasons on video and I was home with a baby so I watched them until my eyes bled.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, Jews: They’re not just for comic relief anymore.
