Tag: ranting and politics

Boy terror

sarah

The rest of that horror essay I was quoting yesterday debates a super-Freudian interpretation of the “final girl” in slasher films— the one who doesn’t die— as a simultaneous castrator and phallus-envier. Cut something off that monster and wave your big knife in the air, ladies. The horror can’t end until the cocks are properly distributed according to your moral fortitude. Meh.

After all the feminist sexuality reading I usually do, it is bizarre to read an essay where somebody takes Freud seriously, even temporarily. Nobody seems to get away with discussing Freud’s take on sexuality without at least a disclaimer about the myth of vaginal orgasms, but in discussing horror apparently it is acceptable to dive into repressed womb envy and castration complexes with all sincerity. Maybe the academic tone of the essay disguised the author’s disdain, but it seemed like she was buying it.

I got a lot more interested when she started pondering why it has been so much easier to have women transition into monster-killing hero roles on film than to spend any screen time on men screaming in terror. Gender as theatre, this is more my speed. It actually made me sad for guys, to think of (mostly) guys in the ’80s making slasher movies for (mostly) other guys and having to kill all the men quickly in the distance while the women got butchered in close-ups. The audience’s only chance to identify with fear in most of those movies was through feminine characters. Men had a very limited range of possible emotions and options for expressing them. How were people supposed to learn about masculine fear? That’s terrible!

The author pointed out that the cliched lack of stereotypical femininity in the surviving girl (always the smart one, or the one wearing pants, or the one who doesn’t put out… also usually the one named Stevie or Georgie or something) might not just be about misogynistically killing all the feminine or sexually active women. She suggests it’s about giving guys a somewhat mannish hero to identify with, since an actual terrified man is off limits. The last girl is the character who realizes the full scope of the danger— she’s the most afraid, and spends the most time being afraid. Those are the interesting emotions, the ones that prompt the shivers and startles. I think it’s terrible that it’s still largely taboo for that to be a man’s role! Hopefully my kids will be able to activate their repressed fears with screaming victims of all genders.

If anybody knows some movies where men scream and cry in terror (preferably half naked?), do tell. I feel like I must know some, but all I can think of at the moment is Deliverance. Maybe some war movies would fit the bill.

“Babe of the day”

sarah

Flickr photo sharing

‘birdi speaking of her son while undressing on her (sorta)ex-lover’s father’s rented roof’ by tetheredto

Casey phoned the other day to ask about my top photos of undressed women, as a response to seeing one of those lame “babe of the day” widgets on somebody’s Facebook profile. (I think he wanted to build an arsenal, in case he had the opportunity to unleash it on somebody.) I am pleased that somebody thinks I am a potential resource for images of people who are sexy in the body hair and bellies kind of way, but I don’t have a stash of that stuff at all.

For a start, I thought of Rose and Olive, photographers I found awhile ago, I think on Warren Ellis’ blog. Their photos are often quite posed, and they seem caught up in starving artist glamour and that artier version of girls gone wild that hipsters like (wet shirts, polaroids, poetry…), and they have a blog at Nerve.com which is a creepy place to have a blog… and the photo above is one of only two black models in their entire archive as well as one of a very few models who look older than nineteen and aren’t showcasing skinny bony shoulders… but also, they seem to know that wide thighs and forehead wrinkles and messes are beautiful, and they seem sincere, so I pick and choose from their photos.

I appreciate the love of armpits, textures and complicated facial expressions going on in this photo, and the way the model is kinda subverting a classic pin-up pose. It makes me want to be on that roof, in that light, touching skin with somebody. So this might go in my babe of the day stash, if I had one.

Imax, slasher films, pornography

sarah

I feel a meandering mind-map coming on, starting from an essay about slasher movies by Carol Clover (roughly summarized here ) that I read in this anthology about gender in myth.

On the civilized side of the continuum lie the legitimate genres; at the other end, hard on the unconscious, lie the sensation or ‘body’ genres, horror and pornography, in that order. …

It is a rare Hollywood film that does not devote a passage or two— a car chase, a sex scene— to the emotional and physical excitement of the audience. But horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success…

I’ve seen a lot of people try to show that horror and pornography are related, usually based on some inarticulate statement about the similarity of sex and death. This bodily-sensation aspect seems like a more accurate connection. It’s got me editing my ideas about pornography (again), too.

For the last couple of years, my working definition has been that something is pornographic (to me) when it is presented for its own sake with no intention to communicate further meaning. Literal as opposed to symbolic, I guess. Showing literal sex rather than any experience of eroticism, or showing literal blood and gore rather than communicating a meaning of injury or death or fear (a la gore-porn). I don’t mean that as a diss to actual porn, more as an explanation of why I call Cute Overload cute-porn, and why I sometimes object to the ways other people use hyphenated, non-sexual porn labels. (I’m not sure I experience the Ikea catalog as storage-porn just because it shows a lot of shelving.)

This sensation definition is way simpler, and avoids having to argue about what is meaningful or symbolic. Since porn is some of the most intensely deconstructed media around and easily supplied with symbolic meaning, I think this simple sensation definition is a lot more accurate too. So thanks for that, early nineties essay collection.

Thinking about movies that are made for my body got me thinking about imax. All I want from a six-story tall movie is a strong sense of vertigo! I see an imax film about once every two years, but in my limited sampling they seem to be getting less motion-sick overall. Anybody have better evidence on that? (Tosczaks, or other bearers of yearly passes?) At the least, I’ve been disappointed with the imax films I’ve been seeing. I don’t want a plot at the imax, I want a bodily experience. More helicopter shots going over a cliff, please. I want imax to be more pornographic. Imax has not been fulfilling its potential.

So yup. The other idea I want to store here is about “legitimate” genres. I don’t really buy the idea that they’re less focussed on bodily sensations. The most pretentious, high-class films I’ve seen could be called superiority-porn. Feeling superior is a real sensation, although not often acknowledged as a physical/chemical state. I just dug up a clip from the Helvetica movie where Erik Spiekermann explains that he just likes looking at type. “Other people look at bottles of wine, or whatever, or you know, girls’ bottoms. I look at type.” He looks; it feels good. I’ve only seen the trailers, but that documentary is clearly modernist-typography-porn, and totally classy. (Or, ahem, neutral.)

The pretense seems to be that some cinematically-induced sensations are intellectual, rather than bodily, which actually seems very similar to my original working definition about pornography being devoid of meaning. So again, why am I reading anthologies about symbol and myth in these “body” genres if they are so literal and physical? This seems like a very weird manifestation of the usual classist aesthetic distinctions, where “legitimate” good taste just happens to be whatever working class / uneducated / trashy people don’t appreciate. Classy movies are secretly about sensations, and trashy movies are secretly full of cultural symbolism. Oops.

I’m probably specifically bad at this game— personality quiz questions on the theme of “do you pay more attention to rational thoughts or gut feelings” make my head explode, because surely thoughts and feelings exist in the same soup. I mean, you have to feel whether you’re being honest about your logic; I don’t know any other way. From now on I’m paying special attention to how my body feels when I watch fancy art films.

Reading Marjane Satrapi interviews

sarah

A hand-animated movie version of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s two-part graphic novel about growing up in Iran during the 1980s Islamic Revolution, will apparently be out on December 25. I’m curious about this movie. I read the first of the two books quite awhile ago, and I remember liking it, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and learning since then and I wonder how I’d find it now. I think it has promise.

Out of this curiosity, I’ve been reading a bunch of interviews with Marjane Satrapi. She’s pretty opinionated and direct, so even though the same topics come up over and over, I like to read her responses.

Most press I’ve seen about her is by writers who see her books as “complex,” because she writes about “good” people who do bad things and “bad” people who do good things. In interviews, she talks a lot about dealing with people as individuals rather than making assumptions based on their culture or race (that really doesn’t sound complex). But in this recent promo interview in the NY Times, the journalist seems to want Satrapi to act as an anti-fundamentalism or anti-Islam spokeswoman, rather than taking the usual “complex,” general progressive stance.

All that intro (hmm…) so that I can announce: I love the turn that interview takes, right here.

Your books denounce Islamic fanaticism, particularly as it curtails the rights of women. Is that your main theme? Oh, no, not at all. I don’t consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.

Still, in your work, you are constantly contrasting your love of food, smoking and sensual pleasures with the acts of self-denial demanded by the mullahs, like wearing a chador. It’s a problem for women no matter the religion or the society. If in Muslim countries they try to cover the woman, in America they try to make them look like a piece of meat.

Are you suggesting that veiling and unveiling women are equally reductive? I disagree. We have to look at ourselves here also. Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?

I never really thought about goose anatomy. I looked when I was on a farm in France.

I am making an effort to barf more on this blog, and to write long-winded, feelings-based rambles like when I first started making the vagina website, ages ago. But I am still self-conscious about it. I have realized that even though I was always in favour of keeping my various websites fairly integrated and putting the vagina website on my resume etc, it’s been a really long time since I wrote anywhere that I actually expected my friends might read, rather than just writing for internet strangers. Not as fearless as I thought. So, working on that. Fewer “this sure is long” disclaimers in the future.

Red and blue, glass and shoes

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Smashed glass and stripey shoes, originally uploaded by dreadfuldan.

When I wore mary janes a lot, I used to be into the toes turned in thing. This photo is suddenly making me uncomfortable about it, presented like that with no irony at all regarding women in fancy shoes standing like little girls. I’m hoping my general hairiness was enough to contrast and balance the baby toes.

I had never related the toes to the shoes until last week. I noticed that when I wear my boots I tend to stand like Captain America, feet planted especially wide. Design affordance, I guess. Superhero boots afford superhero stances.

About this new design

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I feel like a bit of a wanker talking about My New Website Design since the point for me is to be self-explanatory (I already talked about this stuff by posting the design). But I do like talking about design in regular words too, so here goes.

  • The monster’s name is Pearl. That takes some pressure off.
  • Mouthful of words.
  • Guts out.
  • Memento mori in general, and in specific.
  • These colours make me want to work.
  • The monster is modelled after the radiator that faces our toilet.

Toilet monster

  • There are more hiding throughout the apartment.

Hey you.

Sex, death and consensual education

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Christina Aguilera as a schoolgirl in a Skechers ad.

I’ve finished reading Instead of Education, one of John Holt’s influential tomes about unschooling and home schooling. As soon as I started typing my notes into the thesis wiki, I had to make a Vagina deja vu category to keep track of all the concepts I recognized from studying women’s sexuality and reproduction over at All About My Vagina. The root of all the deja vu seems to be one single thing, and it’s one of my favourite things, too! It’s consent.

John Holt spends a lot of Instead of Education making the point that compulsory education is, by nature, oppressive and unethical. (The book is a bona fide manifesto! ‘Students, you have nothing to lose but your chains’… the whole deal. I liked it.) My favourite quotes on this topic are in the wiki:

This seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why until, about a hundred pages in, Holt started writing about teacher-learner relationships. He insists that because these relationships involve one person assuming a position of authority and power (the teacher), teaching relationships need to be temporary, well defined, and free to leave. Maybe I’m the only person who hears that and thinks immediately of BDSM, but I think it’s a really useful parallel!

There is a huge amount of sex writing about boundaries, relationships, temporary roles, domination and, above all, consent. I think what John Holt was after was consensual education. When he talks about the impossibility of consensual education within the framework of compulsory schooling, he sounds exactly like lesbian feminists who believe hetero sex is automatically oppressive within a patriarchal society. It’s about consent, and the circumstances under which it is possible.

My favourite discussion of consensual sex is The Ethical Slut‘s characterization of consent as an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons concerned. An ‘active collaboration’ is exactly the kind of learning John Holt promoted. E.g.,

Like a few children I know in the U.S., [unschooled children from Ny Lilleskole in Denmark] are probably much more able than most of their [conventional] schoolmates (who can only submit or resist it) to make use of [conventional] school, to get from it at least some of the things they want for their own reasons.

It makes perfect sense that a freedom loving gal such as myself would want all relationships to be consensual, but I’d never thought of teaching as a relationship. I started to wonder what other situations I might enjoy more by examining the relationships involved and finding ways to make them consensual.

I think this definitely applies to self-defense (I had trouble making sense of it until I realized that being attacked is a relationship, not a situation). Cooperation and competition in business is another one.

Mainly though, I think this might be a good way to think about dying and death. There are obvious hot topics about death and consent (euthanasia, living wills, etc), but I wonder what could be gained by trying to have a consensual relationship with Death itself. It clearly has terms of engagement; maybe I could come up with my own set of terms and we could collaborate.

Our town

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Last night I found more people who have independently created a fantasy about choosing a small town and moving there with all their friends. This makes… five times, I think, in the last few months, that I’ve run into this daydream.

It’s straightforward enough: pick a small town with cheap real estate, move there with all your friends. All of you make some contribution like growing organic vegetables or opening an indie cinema. Get enough people on board to make the town really cool. Optional bonus features include buying a huge statue for the center of town— say, one of the Lenins that periodically gets offloaded by former Eastern block countries— or hiring a promising architecture student to design a whole street or subdivision, like a mini version of Gaudi’s Barcelona.

I’ve heard different opinions on the ethics of taking over a town, and how to be respectful of the existing townsfolk, but the main idea doesn’t seem to surprise anybody.

So now I’m curious. Why is this such a common fantasy right now? What is it about?

I wonder about a couple of things. (Warning: I’m high on coffee and I’m about to dork out.)

Fear of complexity. I might as well put this first; it’s the only thing I seem to talk about these days. Is the desire to move to a small town, where it is easy to be influential, a reaction to overwhelming complexity? Cities are second only to maybe anthills as the most commonly discussed example of systems that are too complex to understand or control without special new theories, and where individual actions have unpredictable impacts on the whole. Could moving to a small town be a way to get away from information overload and find a less confusing, more simplistic cultural life?

The death of indie. I’ve complained before about how the indie/hipster counterculture has become pretty much just a commercial shopping habit. We’ve had what, twenty five years worth of young people moving to the big city to get in the loop with indie culture (meet tastemakers, be creative, go to shows, buy sneakers, etc)? I think of moving to a small town as a hipster fantasy, because that’s who I hear it from and also because having a freelance creative job— the kind of thing you could transplant to a small town— is kind of a hipster ideal. Are hipsters ready to find a new way to be countercultural, now that everything indie is so mainstream and so designer? Seeking cheap rent is, to me, usually a sign that people want more time to work on changing something, or more time to participate in something meaningful. Or, is this like the last gasp of hipster vanity, to get into a pond so small that you can be indie and amateur and still be the biggest fish around?

Displacement. The more obvious factor is just how expensive cities are getting, and this one in particular. This is basic gentrification— a neighbourhood gets expensive and only one kind of people can afford to live there anymore. All the diverse tradespeople, artists, families, students, businesses and various workers who made the neighbourhood awesome go somewhere cheaper. Maybe this desire for everybody to move to the same place is just a survival instinct, trying to preserve the diverse, fun city life by moving it to a sort of cultural nature reserve. Is the idea of moving to a remote, small, undesirable town a protective manoeuver, to get as far away as possible from invasive condo developments, and to avoid ever being displaced again?

OK! No more explainy voice! I keep turning this over in my head to see if it would actually be an awesome thing to do, or whether it would be a weird, defensive, vain thing to do. I can’t decide. (I also can’t imagine getting many people to commit to such a plan… but still I must get to the bottom of it, for some reason.)

Swallowing the toad

sarah

I’ve been catching up on some internetto that I neglected while I was on vacation, and while I was really busy before I went on vacation. So I was listening to an October podcast on 43 folders, where Merlin Mann interviews David Allen about procrastination.

It’s a great little interview, although I didn’t get any new ideas out of it (probably because I’ve read practically everything Merlin has every published on the internet… while avoiding work of course). But I did get really fascinated by the phrases and metaphors David used to describe the kind of personal epiphany where you stop being afraid of secret parts of yourself, and just get on with your life. He first describes the topic starting at 2:18.

The thing that is closest to your soul is the thing you’re gonna avoid the most. The thing that will tap into… the part of you that has not yet come to the fore but wants to be expressed but you’re so afraid of it— you will absolutely find every single thing in your life to avoid doing that.

And that one… there is no trick about that one. You just need to be aware of that.

(Aside: business people are so much more into self help than aging single women. I’m waiting for a Bridget Jones type franchise about a bumbling marketing manager with a heart of gold.)

This being-aware-of-your-fear thing is kind of an ongoing theme in our house. I’m really big on solving personal distress by looking for the scariest or most embarrassing course of action, since it is probably the thing I want to do the most. Lately, Galen has been into a similar thing— in his gentler way— of trying not to be afraid by accident. These both sound just like what David mentions.

I don’t have a name for these assorted processes, but I like to collect the metaphors people use to describe them. I say things like “it popped” or “pop the cork” a lot, or things like “cut to the chase”— aggressive shortcuts. Alternately, I talk about hunting and finding and getting to the bottom of things, about being thorough or honest. And then I have my hard-ass forms of encouragement like “grow up,” “suck it up” and “skip to the good part.”

The David uses some familiar words—

  • jump right to the real bottom line
  • show up
  • uncork
  • step up to the plate

It’s funny to me that a mental experience can spark common physical metaphors in different people. I’m a little weirded out by how kinetic— almost violent— most of these are. Pop, jump, cut.

So, simple contrast might be the main reason I like my favourite version so much. I found this description on a random mailing list archive: swallowing the toad. Evocative, yet gentle! It’s more like “take your medicine” than “smash your fear,” and I appreciate a peaceful option.

The post attributed the phrase to Jung, but I haven’t been able to find other references to this anywhere. Maybe it’s a blissful mistranslation? In any case, cheers to finding more toads.

This is the dawning…

sarah

This is a bit flaky, but I’d like to propose that we are living in The Age of Complexity. Not the information age, or the age of media, internet, connectivity or whatever, but the age of complexity. I think that’s the primary obstacle in modern problems and stresses: how to stop clinging to simplified half-truths and start understanding complex, interconnected systems. Naming the thing might help us to remember to figure it out.

Complexity— and how counter-intuitive everybody seems to find it— comes up everywhere these days: in media and internet, software design, urban planning, health, environmentalism, psychology, and anything that tries to organize a group of people. I think George Lakoff’s work with the Rockridge Institute, to provide priorities and frames for progressive ideas, is part of dealing with complexity, even though his books are about politics and linguistics, not systems theory.

I’ve been thinking about generalism and distributed knowledge for my independent education project, too, which just struck me as a sort of complex system of learning. Rather than specializing in a particular field, I’m trying to figure out what would count as graduate level work on a general problem (the topic so far is what I want my death to be like). And rather than hook up with a structure or institution, I’m trying to use a lot of small, independent resources. This pleases me more and more, because it suits how I think about information and the web, etc. (Is that called symmetry, when different levels or parts of a system have the same patterns?)

So. This is the link that finally put me over the edge, when I was catching up on Kottke today.

I wanted to ask a more general question: how can people stop needing simple stories, and what can we use instead? I remember, back when I first started making websites in the ’90s, when I first understood hypertext as an alternative to linear narrative, it seemed like the same idea that Kottke is looking at, up there, in the history of science. (How’s that for a hyper sentence, remembering things in the past and present? It seems accurate so I’m going to leave it.) My favourite websites are still the ones that use links as complex context, instead of in sequence.

All of this is just the last chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities all over again. That’s the chapter where Jane Jacobs describes the kind of problem a city is, and suggests that human knowledge needs new tools to understand organized complexity. The longer I live after reading that book, the more I can’t believe how many people haven’t read it, or how I hadn’t heard of it until I was 25. I come back to that book all the time, and it wasn’t even the first thing I read about complexity or emergent systems.

I think the reason Death and Life had such an impact on me might be because Jane Jacobs is so definite and concrete in that book— she really captures the “aha” of suddenly seeing patterns in chaos, of seeing the bigger, realer simplicity. She sums up the problem of cities in only four principles. Four!

The books I’d read before were much looser. Christopher Alexander’s pattern language for designing houses and cities has over 200 items. Godel, Escher, Bach never intends to sum up intelligence in a set of patterns, although it nearly does anyway. Jane Jacobs got her perspective down to a tight, efficient package, without simplifying anything. It’s inspiring.

There are more general introductions to complexity and emergence (like say, Emergence), but I would still recommend Death and Life as the essential tome on the subject. So far. I’m still learning.

Compassion for freaks who buy the t-shirt

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I just finished reading Douglas Rushkoff’s old book, Playing The Future, about how people are adapting to the digital age and how it isn’t the end of the world (I gave it 3/5 on Amazon). He points out the conflict between rebel attitudes in subcultures like skateboarding and snowboarding (the book came out in 1996) and the masses of commercial logos and general expense of those sports. Buying commercial products to display your outsider status.

I have noted this commercialism in a lot of subcultures that for me are about DIY or revolutionary acts— geeks buy gadgets, crafters buy stash, sex activists buy toys, environmentalists buy organic, hipsters buy everything, even vagina-body-image nerds have products they promote.

This sometimes gets me down. What is wrong with people that they can’t rise above shopping? Two little quotes that I’ve been saving up are helping me appreciate rebel shoppers.

If your popular revolution demands that its adherents eschew popular culture it’s not going to be very popular.

– Cory Doctorow in conversation with RU Sirius

The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

Jyri Engeström on ‘object-centred sociality’, after Karin Knorr Cetina

To me, activities and ideas can be excellent objects to share with friends, but it is starting to make sense that people are eager for more and more stuff to share with their outsider pals. Why just knit together when you can fetishize handspun yarn as well? Maybe sometimes that’s just friendly, not so much evidence of weird addiction.

Compassion for teenagers

sarah

I get the Baby Fever off and on, and I usually try to remember that babies don’t stay babies, and that if I want to spawn I’ll have to learn to love a teenager. The hormonal creepiness, the narcissism, the volume levels. I’ve actually been practising this, more because I like new skills than because I am laying away emotional supplies for a baby event. I am like a bird-watcher, for teenagers, except I don’t follow them to their nests or anything.

My favourite teenager thing right now is watching little groups of 14 year old girls out on their own. Physically, they are hilarious— even in groups of eight or nine kids, you only get one of each kind. Small and skinny, big and moosey, tall and gangly, eerily voluptuous: nobody has caught up to anybody else by 14, and nobody understands her own hair. I call these groups Variety Packs.

I’ve come to realize that an easy way to love teenagers is to basically laugh about how ridiculous they are. It’s about camp: “Oh, they’re so terrible— I love them!” I’m working on finding a less condescending way to appreciate pupating humans, but for now, the I’m so bershon Flickr pool is feeding my addiction.