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Continuing at Huff Po is another small minded review of Inglourious Basterds http://tinyurl.com/nyeqfc (please bear with me until I learn...

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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Lyrics for John Mayer:SHOTGUN EYES











SHOTGUN EYES Lyrics for John Mayer


Hey country girl

With your shotgun eyes

Takin aim at me

Long after I saw you comin

Long before you guessed I did

Peek-a-boo dresses

With cowboy boots

Shirley Temple curls

Lurin me in

Meant to fool me

Floatin signs

Lurin me in

Singin there

Movin there

But hey country girl

With the shotgun eyes

Aimin at me

Medusa gazin at me

I've read Butler

And Rubenstein too

I know about drag

And masquerade

But I don't think

That you do

Yet


I'm gonna tell you baby

I'm gonna tell you baby

I'm gonna show you baby

I'm gonna show you baby

Yeah that's what I said

It's all about pretend

All about pretend

I didn't give you a baby, baby

I jes gave you a song

Instead

Instead

Instead

Taylor Swift singing Dear John with Lyrics

Lovely. Click off the ad. Page loads faster this way.


Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Lyrics for John Mayer: WANNABE VAMPIRE GIRL


She walks the red carpet

In masquerade

And she knows it

Yeh she knows it

The wannabe vampire girl


Hidden in hoodies

Slouchin towards LA town

Stumblin through paps

Who would run her down

And watch her die

Like Princess Di

Not rape her

Jes kill her

Not rape her

Jes kill her

Watchin her die

Through a lense's eye

Watchin her die

Like Princess Di


But the wannabe vampire girl

She walks the red carpet

In masquerade

And she knows it

Yeah she knows it

Just for you

Just for you

Can't touch her now

Can't touch her now



She walks the red carpet


And she knows it

Yeah she knows it

The wannabe vampire girl

Can't touch her now




Copyright Janet Abbey 2010

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The PC Feminist Word Police - The Dominating Discourse of Feminism and Their Censorship Techniques

This is from another rob site. It is an example 

of how authoritarian - read fascist - the 

Feminist Discourse really is. OMG to use the 

word RAPE in a different way than a woman 

getting banged against her will is a huge NO-

NO for the PC Feminists.


Well fuck those cunts! How dare they censor anyone's words! And those of another woman! As if meaning doesn't migrate through time and signs and intonations all the goddamn time. These cunts are so literal they remind me of men. Hmmmmm. As Lacan said, "How do you know  she's a woman?" Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they aren't cunts after all.


Standing Up For Kristen Stewart in a Personal Way


Here is the original site : http://rpattzgirl-fortheloveofrpattz.blogspot.com/2010/06/standing-up-for-kristen-stewart-in.html?zx=34b71a06ad4a8ea7 Harder to read but it does have a lot of comments.


I'm stepping away from my normal Rob lusting posts to talk about RAPE, and a comment that Kristen made.

In a recent interview with ELLE UK Kristen was quoted as saying this:
“It's so... The photos are so… I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped. A lot of the time I can't handle it,” the 20-year-old actress said when asked how she feels about being photographed in her everyday life. “I never expected that this would be my life.”

Stewart further explained that life as a celebrity can become a too intense at any given moment because the cameras can be plentiful and ruthless.

"What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction,” she lamented.

That comment has created a shit storm of epic proportions, and she's being verbally raped now by so much hate and criticism.

Katherine Hull, a spokesperson on behalf of Rape and Incest National Network (R.A.I.N.N.) thinks so, telling FOX411.com that “Kristen Stewart's comments are regrettable. Portraying a rape survivor in the film ‘Speak’ should have led her to use a more appropriate metaphor to describe the intrusive nature of the paparazzi. Rape is more than an intrusion, it's a violent crime, that causes serious long term mental health effects for victims.”

Similarly, Margaret Lazarus, the executive director of RapeIs.org, who has written extensively about violence against women, thinks Stewart may need to reevaluate her word choice the next time she sounds off to the press.

“Rape is a violation in which one has no choice. A star seeking publicity has choices,” Lazarus told Fox411.com. “Although rape involves loss of privacy, loss of privacy does not constitute rape. Let's use a little logical thinking here.”

Does this look like she's choosing this kind of treatment??? And these are not even the worst ones.



Although she may regret using that word, RAPE now, it's certainly an apt description of how her life is. Because she chooses to be an actress, and to possibly be linked with the hottest man in the world, she's asking for this?

As a rape victim, I can understand why some people would be "upset" over her word choice. But now they're raping her in the media, on blogs, twitter, and probably facebook.

Yes, rape is a violent crime. Paparazzi chasing you in a car, shoving you, shoving people to get to you, screaming obscenities at you to get a reaction is also a form of violence, and I get why she said that.

Rape is also about power, and taking that power away from the victim. Losing your right to say NO. Do you think Kristen can say NO? Do you think it would do any good if she did? Nope. Then they call her a moody bitch. Awkward. Unable to form a coherent sentence in public. Maybe it's because her skirt was too short. She asked for it right? By her choice of profession?

I said this recently on another blog, we've become stunted as a human race because we can't say anything anymore without offending this group, or that group, or this culture. When did we become so weak?

Please stop the hate...and think about how you would feel to live her life. Take away the money, the glamour, the fame, the boyfriend, and walk a mile in her shoes.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick and The Paintings of Diane Burko

Diane Burko


Diane Burko - Volcano Series: 2001 by Discover Channel: Volcano Vacations
from Diane Burko on Vimeo.

Diane Burko
Diane and I go back a long time, since she was an MFA student at Penn. She has spent her entire career doing landscape paintings, very unusual ones. Flying over glaciers, mountains and volcanoes she has recorded our planet in a way no one else has. As it has turned out she has become a witness to the destruction of what are some of the most beautiful inaccessible landscapes on earth. The world has been willing her in this journey as it was not her intention that she would ever be documenting a lost world. We can only be grateful to her for doing this.

Diane Burko
Her images are very like those in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. So many moving in time images resonating with Burko's paintings. The film is a wonder to see as are Burko's paintings. In the film I wept in surprise for seemingly no reason at all, just the sheer beauty of moving paintings, abstract, expressionistic, and realistic all at the same time before my eyes. The music is classical, haunting and reaches somewhere you haven't been in a long time. The relief in seeing a film where the music doesn't tell you how you are supposed to be feeling. Music that is just there, simply there.

Spencer Tunick Greenpeace Installation
And then I come to the Installations of Spencer Tunick with all his naked bodies. And his Greenpeace Installation coupled with Burko's glacier paintings. Malick's The Tree of Life is not easily classified so why bother. It is an experience like a Robert Wilson opera. You are aware that you can feel yourself breathe while watching it.

Diane Burko




Diane Burko

Review: The Tree of Life Terrence Malick


The Tree of Life fulfills the promise that the technology of film reproduction promised. It cannot be discussed within the dominant discourse of film criticism.  It is a Foucaudian cut in the history of film. This film is a miracle. Time has slowed for us in this film. We inhabit our own lost time or a time we never knew. The experience is the same as reading In Search of Lost Time by Proust.

The dialectic rhetoric does not apply to it. When reviewers discuss it in words that portray it as revered, loved, adored, a prayer, a revelation contrasted with boring, hated, intolerable, and walk-outs, their flat earth thinking is displayed. When they go on to wade into the interpretive psychological swamp of Oedipal relations between the boy and his father, they are done for. 

Synopsis

The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father. Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick's signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
It sounds good doesn't it? Freud himself lamented against this tendency, in his time, in his essay Wild Analysis. What is revealed is a complete ignorance of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language a long detailed analysis against the futility of psychological, historical and scientific interpretation, Jean Baudrillard's dismantling of it, and Susan Sontag's great essay Against Interpretation shredding it, as only she can.  This is the reason contemporary reviewers are so inept, so complained about, so uninformed, etc etc etc. And also why they are taken to task, disagreed with, praised, and all the other aspects of the dialectics. 

We are no longer in liner time. There is no longer any orderly progression which depends on linear time. We are moving into simulation. When simulation becomes total, we will be in Virtual Reality, which is irreversible. The last World War is being fought before our eyes and ears. It is the war of Speed described by Virilio.

Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies suggests opposing speed with extreme slowness. And Tree of Life is obeying his dictum. We become immersed in a world of slowness. A world of lost time now. A time when there was contemplation, when connections could be made, when cause and effect linkages were perceived, when meaning existed independent of media manipulation, when the dialectic ruled. Values, aesthetics, rules, ritual, the law, were all a part of human behavior in Western societies. We see the beginnings of disintegration in this film. The father cannot live in a post World War II with his values intact and neither can his son in his. This has little to do with Oedipal conflict.

Walter Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Illuminations pp 217-251) warns us what to expect. Malick has taken notice. He doesn't disappoint.

I saw it in Springfield Missouri at the independent film theatre The Moxie. I am grateful for their presence here in the Ozarks. What was astonishing was the faces of the audience as the lights went on at the end. Every face was bathed in beauty, all 21st century angst removed as if by magic. I saw traces of an unhoped for joy on them.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Box Office: Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Water For Elephants

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Domestic:  $10,095,170    9.7%
Foreign:  $94,289,245    90.3%

Worldwide:  $104,384,415
 
Domestic Summary
Opening Weekend: $335,502
(#23 rank, 34 theaters, $9,868 average)
% of Total Gross: 3.3%
> View All 44 Weekends
Widest Release:  202 theaters
Close Date:  February 24, 2011
Release Date: March 19, 2010Genre: ThrillerRuntime: 2 hrs. 32 min.MPAA Rating: RProduction Budget: $13 million
Water For Elephants
Domestic:  $57,192,169    50.3%
Foreign:  $56,430,306    49.7%

Worldwide:  $113,622,475
Domestic Summary
Opening Weekend: $16,842,353
(#3 rank, 2,817 theaters, $5,979 average)
% of Total Gross: 29.4%
> View All 9 Weekends
Widest Release:  2,820 theaters
In Release:  59 days / 8.4 weeks
Release Date: April 22, 2011Genre: DramaRuntime: 2 hrs. 0 min.MPAA Rating: PG-13Production Budget: $38 million









 I put these stats here for comparison. Allowing for the fact that GWTDT has been out 1 year longer than WFE the difference of 25 million in the production budget is significant. We do not know what the promotion costs were for WFE but when you trot trick ponies all around the world for promotion they are considerable. Add that in for all the TV time and trailers for months. Gulp!

GWTDT had none of that and opened at $335,502 and never had more than a total of 202 theaters at any given time, this is impressive. The US Domestic total at 10 mil is low but consider that the film is Swedish, with English subtitles and you have the answer. The American masses are not known for their literacy chops.

So a small limited release art house film is giving the Hollywood WFE a run for its money.

Without getting into an interpretive swamp here, I see an interesting trend emerging. Am I the only one? If you were an actor which way might you decide to go for both esthetic reasons and financial ones, and considering your time and energy selling as a large part of the equation?

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body

The Foucauldian grid of power.knowledge/capital is the matrix that Georges Duroy exists in. All the reviews judge him a scoundrel, rotten, a terrible person who seduces, sleeps and fucks his way to the top. But what else is new. Ambitious men do not marry waitresses. Usually. Or hardware store clerks, do they? And don't women gauge men that they plan to marry as furthering their position in life? Being a good provider for them and their children? As Glenda Jackson says in Sunday, Bloody Sunday, "doesn't marriage always get down to property?" Why does Georges Duroy draw such condemnation as a character.


I read a few English translations, mostly early ones. He felt insecure and lost in the beginning, while trying to present himself as a normal person in Paris. He meets an old military acquaintance on the street. They have been acquaintances, not comrades and not even good friends, but Duroy is accused of betraying his friend who helped him get a start. If you read the book it is clear that Forestier had plans to use Duroy for his benefit at the newspaper as well as giving him a start. It is not difficult to see that someone you know, somewhat who is in need of some advice and guidance, and who might be of use, could generate an impulse of kindness in you to help out. As long as it is not going to inconvenience you too much and as long as there stands a possible future benefit to you. Forestier quickly cools off the second time Duroy asks for help and Duroy backs off.


He simply is attracted to women and they to him. He intuits what they want to hear and desires to please them. He has few social graces and those are mostly copied from watching others. He is a rural rube who went into the military. Know anyone like him now?









His first women are prostitutes, and his first real woman is Madame Marelle. She is from Bohemia. For an understanding of immigrants from Bohemia in the early to middle 19th century read Willa Cather's My Antonia


Willa Cather My Antonia
The writer as a child has a beloved playmate who is a young child of cultured but struggling parents from Bohemia. She is an alive spirit as is Clo, full of spontaneous curiosity and emotional changes. So Georges has an affair with Clo, married to an old man who is away a lot and who probably doesn't mind as long as it is not thrown in his face. Clo wants to go out and be seen with him and he spends all his money on her until he doesn't have any anymore. Then she begins to slip money in his pocket to help him so she can continue to see him. (Later he gives her the financial tip that will get her 70,000. Nice payback, eh?) He feels reluctant but acquiesces quickly. What is so wrong about this? Unless you yourself are a petit bourgeois, and then of course you will judge him for this. 


Forestier's wife encourages him to see her, helps him with an article or two to get him started and he begins to learn journalism the way it is practiced at a successful newspaper. This is wrong? 












When Forestier's sickness worsens and he goes away with his wife to hopefully recover_but really to die_ she asks Georges to come and stay with her. He does. Forestier dies. And he sees his chance to marry a woman he has long admired for her wit, her intelligence, her ambitious nature, and because he is sexually attracted to her. He proposes right away in a very careful and seductive way to her as he knows he must make his intentions clear immediately before someone else does. This makes him a bad person?









They spend their wedding night on a train and Georges is amorous. He has no social experience at all as to how he should conduct himself. Men are supposed to be attentive and amorous, aren't they, just after they are married-on their wedding night? He pushes, is rebuffed, pushes some more and in one of the English translations it skipped to the next morning, in another it said they copulated, so I went to the French original:








un accouplement violent et maladroit which is pretty clear.

It's a clumsy, violent quickie. LIke he might might have rolled a peasant girl at home in the fields. And Madeleine clearly expected more in a nicer place and didn't get it and she makes him pay for insulting her that way. She is never warm and passionate with him again, and even indicates its OK with her when he takes up again with Clo and seduces him into seducing Mme Walter. This is his fault completely?
Victims?
He plays his seduction game with Mme Walter and she falls fast for him being married to another clumsy man, with two young girls, and craving something else. Not to go there too far but why is this so terrible  except for the fact that she bores him very quickly and he can't figure out a way to get out of it smoothly as he doesn't possess the social graces necessary for that? He sees that if he hadn't been married he could have married the young daughter he has so much fun with. But if he hadn't been married he wouldn't have the veneer of varnish on him he now has, nor the money he now has from the death of Madeleine's "friend". He has learned how to negotiate from his wife__ to play poker__ and I suppose people want to blame him for that too?

He finds out through Mme Walter, who confides in him that her husband__his editor and owner of the newspaper__ have used his writing to cover up a big government money deal that will make them filthy rich. Just not Georges. No loyalty there at all. Does he owe them devotion? Or honesty? Or anything else? He is confined in the Foucauldian matrix and he is surviving by allowing Destiny to offer him chances, windows of opportunity, doors to go through, that he takes. He learns journalism, or how it must be practiced to continue working and moving ahead career wise. Is this any different from 99% of career hungry people today? It may not be an example of integrity, but how many people do you know that would sacrifice their upward mobility just to do the right thing? Count them on a few fingers, would you please.

He perceives at a big open house celebration that his wife is very friendly with one of the men in on the big financial deal. He is wishing he were not married so he could marry the young now very wealthy daughter of his employer and editor and husband of his ex-lover. This is complicated, but is it bad? Is he a snake or a swine because of this? What has he really done so far?

HIs wife Madeleine has taken his affection and thrown it away. I grant you it wasn't a great passion, but it was affection. She has betrayed him and now is deceiving him with this government official who got a power position because of the copy George wrote about the African colonies and Tunisia government debt. Everyone got something out of this but Georges and now he is being cuckolded.

Georges enters the parallel universe of Symbolic Exchange and Death. His wife has given him a "gift" and he must return the "counter-gift", which must be greater than the gift received, or he must suicide. (Baudrillard looks at 9-11 in this way also. The US has not returned the counter-gift and has no way of doing so.) Not necessarily die, but become a passive partner of his wife like his predecessor Forestier, which is a suicide. He returns the "counter-gift", divorces his wife, ruins her lover, and plans a runaway strategy to capture the young daughter who already adores him. This is diabolical in an evil way? She should marry an effete title instead? And he has learned not to rush the sex this time.

Her father, his employer Walter, tells his wife that he is going to marry Suzanne over her furious protests, and thinks it might not turn out too bad as Georges has shown great intelligence and ingenuity. And he is dangerous. Georges has entered the Order of Production and Exchange and has willed his strategy for success. Why is he seen as a cad who mistreats women and ends up with it all? Are all these women victims? I don't think so. I think they are full participants.


And I wish fans and reviewers and Rob Pattinson would stop wading into the psychological swamp of interpretation.

On the first page Georges is worrying:



He regretted that he had not remained where he was;but he had hoped to improve his condition--and for that reason he was in Paris!


So here beats the heart of a petit bourgeois who wants to make it in Paris and leave his peasant origins behind. Understandable.


And then one of the finest examples of Marxian class struggle I have ever read. Georges takes Madeleine to his family's tavern following their wedding train trip, at Madeleine's insistence of course, and she is appalled at his family background. He is happy to see them and unashamed, although he understands why it would be difficult for her and agrees to leave when he sees she is uncomfortable.









Millet










Mother Duroy did not speak, but remained sad and glum, watching her daughter-in-law out of the corner of her eye, with hatred awakened in her heart__the hatred of an old toiler, an old rustic with fingers worn and limbs bent by hard work__for this lady, who inspired her with the repulsion of an accursed creature, an impure being, created for idleness and sin. (65 words)

The hatred women have for one another is here. The complete antipathy and 
irreconcilable hatred of class differences and class struggle can be felt in a way Marx could never have expressed it in all his pages. The terrible Inscription of the Body Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard describe is all here in 65 words. The slyness out of the corner of her eyes, her rigidity, and not least, her terrible hatred. Brilliant.

Mu Nu by Hung Liu
Measures 80" by 140" almost 7 ft by almost 12 feet showing a mother harnessed with her young daughter behind her, taken from a 1920 photo before Chairman Mao changed all this. It hangs at the Kemper Contemporary Museum in Kansas City on the right as you come in the door. It is huge. The horror that you don't see in this image is the other pair in this diptych following, just as huge with an image of a barge being pulled in a canal in China by a mother and her daughter, who is learning very young to inscribe her body for backbreaking_literally_ labor. And this is during the same time period that young girls are still being tortured by having their feet bound to be idle ladies. And while the US is supporting Chiang Kai Shek.
free download pdf at google books
Is there one of the judges who has a better plan for him? One where he could have remained other than one of the bumbling older men we see in this novel? Is he any different from us? From Rob Pattinson who must make his compromises with his harassing fandom, his employer Scummit, the Hollywood machine?