Overheard on the drive to work…
June 30, 2006
Felicia: I\’m debating whether or not to get a garden gnome.
Me: I\’ve already sprayed for gnomes. They wouldn\’t survive in the garden.
Felicia: (Laughter) I suppose you\’re right.
Me: Besides, a garden gnome might get kidnapped and I don\’t want the headache of dealing with the authorities.
Felicia: What?
Me: Yeah. There\’s an organization that kidnaps garden gnomes in the misguided belief that gnomes have been enslaved.
Felicia: Alrighty, then.
Pause.
Me: People are weird.
Overheard on the drive to work…
June 30, 2006
Felicia: I\’m debating whether or not to get a garden gnome.
Me: I\’ve already sprayed for gnomes. They wouldn\’t survive in the garden.
Felicia: (Laughter) I suppose you\’re right.
Me: Besides, a garden gnome might get kidnapped and I don\’t want the headache of dealing with the authorities.
Felicia: What?
Me: Yeah. There\’s an organization that kidnaps garden gnomes in the misguided belief that gnomes have been enslaved.
Felicia: Alrighty, then.
Pause.
Me: People are weird.
Shadows Out of Time
June 26, 2006
I stumbled upon a link to Thomas Edison’s 1910 version of Frankenstein this afternoon. This was once one of the most sought-after lost films, but it resurfaced in the mid-1990s (which gives hope that other “lost” movies may eventually be found). It’s in bad shape, but it’s watchable. You can watch it here.
Movies of this vintage sometimes seem like transmissions from another dimension to me. This movie is almost a hundred years old, and everyone involved with it is dead now. We have their shadows, though, trapped in time. I don’t believe in ghosts, per se, but it’s hard to deny that we’re watching ghosts here. These are the projections of the dead, trapped in their moment, endlessly reliving the same events over and over again. That sounds like a ghost to me.
Enjoy.
Safe, Sane, and Consensual…especially the safe part…
June 25, 2006
I came across a blog this evening that got me to thinking about kink. (And isn’t it amazing how, no matter whose 360 page you surf through, you only seem to be two steps away from something kinky?). It didn’t get me thinking about sex or even about clothes–kinky clothes being something of a weakness for me. It got me thinking about the practical aspects of staying safe while indulging one’s sexuality. For most people, safe sex involves using a barrier between oneself and someone else’s bodily fluids. For anyone who engages in sexual activities that go beyond simple intercourse–spanking one’s partner, for instance, or tying them up or what have you, safety includes lots of other precautions as well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The author of the blog that set this off–and I won’t embarrass the person who wrote it by naming her–described herself submitting to an online dominant by gagging herself with a pair of panties and a strip of duct tape and then engaging in self-bondage. Which, of course, is FUCKING STUPID! Any cloth item you put into your mouth can work its way into your windpipe. At best, this will result in a sore throat and a hoarse voice. At worst, it will kill you. Putting duct-tape over your mouth is even worse, because it impedes access to the gag. If you’re choking on a pair of panties, or on anything else for that matter, seconds count. This is the sort of thing that really should be done with a competent partner who never leaves you alone. Needless to say, this sort of thing would count as profoundly un-safe in the BDSM equation of “safe, sane, and consensual.” It may well count as insane, too, even if it does fall under the “consensual” heading. That this person is still alive is a relief, but I wouldn’t count on a long life expectancy. This is the sort of thing that shows up in the Darwin Awards.
What we have here is an educational problem. There is good information on the use of gags in BDSM play, even on the internet. Neither the person submitting to this play, nor the person giving the orders, appears to have educated themselves in the safe use of gags (I know some dominants who won’t play with gags at all, claiming that there IS no safe use for gags). The key component to erotic power exchange is trust. Trust that your partner won’t harm you is only part of that equation. You have to trust that they know what they are doing, too. Sometimes the fantasy gets in the way of this. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the blog entry in question was pure fantasy and never happened in the first place. Likely, even. TG slash porn, after all, is chock full of things that are patently dangerous even when they aren’t physically impossible. And someone out there has SURELY tried this particular kind of play.
Mind you, I don’t know if anyone reading this is interested in this subject, but if you are interested in exploring kink, please, please, please make sure you know what you’re doing and don’t play with anyone who doesn’t. It doesn’t take much to educate yourself on any kind of kink you like, so take the time to learn.
Let’s be careful out there…
Sharpe as a tack
June 23, 2006
I\’ve been reading Bernard Cornwell\’s Sharpe\’s Rifles books this month. These are set in the Napoleonic wars. This is a period of history in which I have an unhealthy interest, so these things are candy to me. These books are great fun, but my reaction to them has been more understated than I would have expected. The main problem I have with them is that the central character, Captain Richard Sharpe, is basically invincible. He\’s a superhero, if you will, whose kryptonite is the incompetent officers around him. While this may make for a charismatic hero, it makes for poor drama. This is a big problem in, for example, The Lord of the Rings, in which the bad guys are basically a straw man–they are so incompetent at warfare that one wonders how they became a threat in the first place–but I digress.
Ordinarily I would write this off as an awkward convention of the historical adventure genre, but in Cornwell\’s case, I understand what has led to this fault. Sharpe serves under Wellington, and the real Wellington never lost a battle, so Cornwell is fully justified in his depiction. Something of a problem, I would say, for a writer with a dramatic bent, but historical accuracy isn\’t something to be pushed aside so blithely. Fortunately, the period detail and characterizations are all first rate, the stories impell the reader to plunge ahead to find out what happens next, and, hell, I don\’t fault James Bond for being indestructible, so why should I fault Sharpe? And, as I have said, these books are great fun. I suspect that my own thinking along these lines has more to do with the fact that I just finished reading a bunch of Patrick O\’Brien\’s Aubrey-Maturin books, and O\’Brien deftly sidesteps these problems. His Captain Aubrey is as much a superman as Sharpe, but he actually loses on occasion. Plus, he has a polar opposite in his friend, Doctor Maturin, who is the antithesis of these kinds of heroes, but never the less manages to be co-equal with them. Sharpe has no such foil, alas.
My local library has most of the TV movies the BBC made of the Sharpe books, starring Sean Bean as Sharpe. I like Bean and I think he\’s well cast. Bean so identified with the role that in all of his subsequent parts, he usually has a line referring to it (usually \”Still Sharpe…\”). How he wound up mostly playing villains on the big screen escapes me, but I won\’t quibble. As a purely glandular reaction, Bean cuts such a dashing figure in the period costumes that I can fully understand why Dawn French was so fixated on him in her Vicar of Dibley series. I\’d do him in a heartbeat if he\’d have me. But the BBC Sharpes isn\’t nearly so much fun as Cornwell\’s version. Two things torpedo them: they have a budget of about a buck fifty, and they indulge in pointless changes in the source text for no discernable reason. There\’s nothing to be done for the first part, I guess, but it does rather make the battle of Talavera, for one example, look like very small beer. The real-world battle was one of the largest battles fought to that time, with tens of thousands of soldiers on either side. The battle in the BBC production looks like it was fought by a couple of football teams. One almost wishes that the producers had had the wit to borrow the Chorus from Shakespeare\’s Henry V:
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i\’ the receiving earth;
For \’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o\’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass…
It almost hurts to think how far English drama has fallen. And so it goes…
Sharpe as a tack
June 23, 2006
I\’ve been reading Bernard Cornwell\’s Sharpe\’s Rifles books this month. These are set in the Napoleonic wars. This is a period of history in which I have an unhealthy interest, so these things are candy to me. These books are great fun, but my reaction to them has been more understated than I would have expected. The main problem I have with them is that the central character, Captain Richard Sharpe, is basically invincible. He\’s a superhero, if you will, whose kryptonite is the incompetent officers around him. While this may make for a charismatic hero, it makes for poor drama. This is a big problem in, for example, The Lord of the Rings, in which the bad guys are basically a straw man–they are so incompetent at warfare that one wonders how they became a threat in the first place–but I digress.
Ordinarily I would write this off as an awkward convention of the historical adventure genre, but in Cornwell\’s case, I understand what has led to this fault. Sharpe serves under Wellington, and the real Wellington never lost a battle, so Cornwell is fully justified in his depiction. Something of a problem, I would say, for a writer with a dramatic bent, but historical accuracy isn\’t something to be pushed aside so blithely. Fortunately, the period detail and characterizations are all first rate, the stories impell the reader to plunge ahead to find out what happens next, and, hell, I don\’t fault James Bond for being indestructible, so why should I fault Sharpe? And, as I have said, these books are great fun. I suspect that my own thinking along these lines has more to do with the fact that I just finished reading a bunch of Patrick O\’Brien\’s Aubrey-Maturin books, and O\’Brien deftly sidesteps these problems. His Captain Aubrey is as much a superman as Sharpe, but he actually loses on occasion. Plus, he has a polar opposite in his friend, Doctor Maturin, who is the antithesis of these kinds of heroes, but never the less manages to be co-equal with them. Sharpe has no such foil, alas.
My local library has most of the TV movies the BBC made of the Sharpe books, starring Sean Bean as Sharpe. I like Bean and I think he\’s well cast. Bean so identified with the role that in all of his subsequent parts, he usually has a line referring to it (usually \”Still Sharpe…\”). How he wound up mostly playing villains on the big screen escapes me, but I won\’t quibble. As a purely glandular reaction, Bean cuts such a dashing figure in the period costumes that I can fully understand why Dawn French was so fixated on him in her Vicar of Dibley series. I\’d do him in a heartbeat if he\’d have me. But the BBC Sharpes isn\’t nearly so much fun as Cornwell\’s version. Two things torpedo them: they have a budget of about a buck fifty, and they indulge in pointless changes in the source text for no discernable reason. There\’s nothing to be done for the first part, I guess, but it does rather make the battle of Talavera, for one example, look like very small beer. The real-world battle was one of the largest battles fought to that time, with tens of thousands of soldiers on either side. The battle in the BBC production looks like it was fought by a couple of football teams. One almost wishes that the producers had had the wit to borrow the Chorus from Shakespeare\’s Henry V:
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i\’ the receiving earth;
For \’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o\’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass…
It almost hurts to think how far English drama has fallen. And so it goes…
So gay people can\’t get married but…
June 19, 2006
…15 year-old girls are free to marry the parole violator of their dreams. At least, they are free to do so in Colorado, according to this story. In fact, under English Common Law–which is recognized by Colorado–it may be legal for 12 year-olds to marry. If the acid test of the viability of marriage is the ability of that marriage to produce offspring, then the corrolary of this as it relates to this case is that \” if they are old enough to bleed, they\’re old enough to breed.\”
Please pardon my abject disgust.
I once read an interview with the great session guitarist Scotty Moore–Moore played for Sam Phillips on most of the great rockabilly songs from Sun Records–in which he commented on the moral uproar over Jerry Lee Lewis\’s marriage to his 14 year-old cousin. Moore was non-plussed. \”We didn\’t see what the big deal was over him marrying a 14 year-old,\” he said, \”because we all knew she was only 12.\” Lewis himself got the last word on it many years after the fact. There\’s a bootleg of a performance he gave in the mid-1970s in which he lamented: \”It\’s a goddamn cryin\’ shame when a man can marry his 14 year-old cousin and still not get a virgin.\”
So gay people can\’t get married but…
June 19, 2006
…15 year-old girls are free to marry the parole violator of their dreams. At least, they are free to do so in Colorado, according to this story. In fact, under English Common Law–which is recognized by Colorado–it may be legal for 12 year-olds to marry. If the acid test of the viability of marriage is the ability of that marriage to produce offspring, then the corrolary of this as it relates to this case is that \” if they are old enough to bleed, they\’re old enough to breed.\”
Please pardon my abject disgust.
I once read an interview with the great session guitarist Scotty Moore–Moore played for Sam Phillips on most of the great rockabilly songs from Sun Records–in which he commented on the moral uproar over Jerry Lee Lewis\’s marriage to his 14 year-old cousin. Moore was non-plussed. \”We didn\’t see what the big deal was over him marrying a 14 year-old,\” he said, \”because we all knew she was only 12.\” Lewis himself got the last word on it many years after the fact. There\’s a bootleg of a performance he gave in the mid-1970s in which he lamented: \”It\’s a goddamn cryin\’ shame when a man can marry his 14 year-old cousin and still not get a virgin.\”
Some thoughts on Seven Samurai
June 15, 2006
One of the hallmarks of a legitimately great movie is the ability of that movie to reveal hidden depths after multiple viewings. The greatest movies are bottomless wells in this way. Akira Kurosawa\’s Seven Samurai (1954) is one such film. It still functions as one of the best action films ever made. It still functions as an archetypal hero\’s journey. It still functions as a probing drama. It reminds me of the description John Steinbeck gave for East of Eden in his introduction to the book: it\’s a box into which Kurosawa poured everything that he was.
With this week\’s viewing, I noticed that it functions as epistemological inquiry. It never dawned on me before that great whacks of the film are based on misrecognitions. This begins practically at the outset, in which a bundle of twigs turns out to be a peasant carrying a load on his back and continues through Takeshi Shimura\’s samurai masquerading as a priest, Toshiro Mifune masquerading as a samurai, and so on. When this thought dawned on me, my first instinct was that it was accidental until I caught myself in the realization that Kurosawa also made Rashomon, in which epistemology is the whole point of the movie.
I also noticed that the camera occasionally functions as an echo of the blocking of the characters. During the duel near the beginning of the film, the camera moves not like a camera on a track, but like an additional samurai, watching the action. It mirrors the hyperactive loser of the duel, actually, and when he dies, the film speed slows down, as if the camera movement during the duel and the film speed during the aftermath have put us into his skin. Interesting. I was also very conscious of the way Kurosawa frames shots of groups. Groups of non-samurai always seem to be in motion, fleeing something or running towards something else. Samurai almost never hurry, and are often static against the tide of villagers or bandits. Kurosawa–in this film in particular–is often compared to John Ford, but a more apt comparison is Howard Hawks, who composed shots of groups as a means of building communities. Kurosawa rarely separates the seven samurai when they are in a scene together–he generally keeps them all in the same film frame, even at the end when four of them are marked by gravestones.
I could probably spend a lifetime with this film.
Some thoughts on Seven Samurai
June 15, 2006
One of the hallmarks of a legitimately great movie is the ability of that movie to reveal hidden depths after multiple viewings. The greatest movies are bottomless wells in this way. Akira Kurosawa\’s Seven Samurai (1954) is one such film. It still functions as one of the best action films ever made. It still functions as an archetypal hero\’s journey. It still functions as a probing drama. It reminds me of the description John Steinbeck gave for East of Eden in his introduction to the book: it\’s a box into which Kurosawa poured everything that he was.
With this week\’s viewing, I noticed that it functions as epistemological inquiry. It never dawned on me before that great whacks of the film are based on misrecognitions. This begins practically at the outset, in which a bundle of twigs turns out to be a peasant carrying a load on his back and continues through Takeshi Shimura\’s samurai masquerading as a priest, Toshiro Mifune masquerading as a samurai, and so on. When this thought dawned on me, my first instinct was that it was accidental until I caught myself in the realization that Kurosawa also made Rashomon, in which epistemology is the whole point of the movie.
I also noticed that the camera occasionally functions as an echo of the blocking of the characters. During the duel near the beginning of the film, the camera moves not like a camera on a track, but like an additional samurai, watching the action. It mirrors the hyperactive loser of the duel, actually, and when he dies, the film speed slows down, as if the camera movement during the duel and the film speed during the aftermath have put us into his skin. Interesting. I was also very conscious of the way Kurosawa frames shots of groups. Groups of non-samurai always seem to be in motion, fleeing something or running towards something else. Samurai almost never hurry, and are often static against the tide of villagers or bandits. Kurosawa–in this film in particular–is often compared to John Ford, but a more apt comparison is Howard Hawks, who composed shots of groups as a means of building communities. Kurosawa rarely separates the seven samurai when they are in a scene together–he generally keeps them all in the same film frame, even at the end when four of them are marked by gravestones.
I could probably spend a lifetime with this film.
