"The Surrey With The Fringe On Top"

This song runs through my head all the time even though I've never seen the musical in full. However, I've seen When Harry Met Sally and love the scene where Harry runs into his ex-wife mid-song.

No Gender = No Hot Sex

So I'm kind of over the idea, back in my college days, that men and woman are completely alike - that kind of thinking, says Camille Paglia, leads to no sex in the champagne room or anywhere else for that matter. Paglia can sure write. As some would say, she writes good.

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

Read the whole thing as they say.

Tiny Literary & Cinematic Reflections

Last night I went to see True Romance, a movie I absolutely adored but haven't seen for about five years, at the Brattle. The reel was a bit jumpy and while I still loved all the dialogue there was something off. I mean I still love it, but to say it gave me the same kind of joy it used would be untrue. I don't think it's the movie as much as it's me. Which is sad, since going to see movies like True Romance made a happy girl once.
I completely forgot about Bama's awesome fight scene with one of the gangsters - that was pretty awesome. I still love all the nicknames Clarence gives Alabama - I have a soft spot for good nicknames and Terantino is certainly good at it.

I also finished Stieg Larsson's Girltrilogy. I can't say I didn't like it, because the novels were well plotted and a lot of the characters were interesting. But, and there is a big but, I found the moral and political undertones of the novel highly annoying. Sweden doesn't have the death penalty and according to the book even when defending yourself you have a likely possibility of facing manslaughter charges if you kill your attacker. Yet the whole series is a fantasy of exacting revenge on people who have done the protagonist wrong. (SPOILER)Even in the end when Lisbeth, no-longer under guardianship, is about to kill a man who has done her great harm, stops because as a full citizen she cannot murder someone not only because she will do time in jail (even though it has been proven that this man has tried to kill her and her associates) but because as a citizen of Sweden the murder would be immoral. There is also a lot of "I'm not a political person, just a moral one" type of thinking by the other main character, Mikael Blomkvist. It's ridiculous, since Blomkvist is a complete lefty. The other part that irked me is the lenient terms all the criminals get for their violent crimes. I assume Larsson based this on actual terms. Instead of years spent in jail, the terms are in months. A serial killer has possibility for parole?! WTF? So yeah, it was a fun ride, but in the end the heavy handed anti-capitalist message with a dose moralizing from the author (via Blomkvist), and the retarded Swedish made the novels hard to completely enjoy. I did love the mention of Astrid Lindgren (one of my favorite children authors) though.

Hitchens does a better job than me.

But Larsson is very much of our own time, setting himself to confront questions such as immigration, “gender,” white-collar crime, and, above all, the Internet. The plot of his first volume does involve a sort of excursion into antiquity—into the book of Leviticus, to be exact—but this is only for the purpose of encrypting a “Bible code.” And he is quite deliberately unromantic, giving us shopping lists, street directions, menus, and other details—often with their Swedish names—in full. The villains are evil, all right, but very stupid and self-thwartingly prone to spend more time (this always irritates me) telling their victims what they will do to them than actually doing it. There is much sex but absolutely no love, a great deal of violence but zero heroism. Reciprocal gestures are generally indicated by cliché: if a Larsson character wants to show assent he or she will “nod”; if he or she wants to manifest distress, then it will usually be by biting the lower lip. The passionate world of the sagas and the myths is a very long way away. Bleakness is all. That could even be the secret—the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author’s demise. If Larsson had died as a brave martyr to a cause, it would have been strangely out of keeping; it’s actually more satisfying that he succumbed to the natural causes that are symptoms of modern life.

No Good in Communism

Yup. Never understood why people who hated Nazis didn't feel the same about Communism/Communists.

But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s

“Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran.

In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power.

Mass murder and terror have always been intrinsic to communism. “Many archives and witnesses prove conclusively,’’ wrote Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to “The Black Book of Communism,’’ a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, “that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern communism.’’ The uniqueness of the Holocaust notwithstanding, the savageries of communism and of Nazism are morally interchangeable — except that the former began much earlier than the latter, lasted much longer, and shed far more blood.

Double Standards at the UN

Friday Music

Playground Love covered by Phoenix.

Sophia Coppola's Next Flick

I can tell you that the soundtrack is going to be great.

Yes. What Not To Do At A Concert

Michelle touches on some of my pet peeves about going to big arena (heck even small arena) concerts:

The encore is like a parlor trick. “Ok, watch while we say goodbye to the audience and thank them for a wonderful time and then PSYCH! we come back on stage and play again!” Except it’s an old parlor trick. Very old. Everyone knows how this is going to go. You play your last song, which will be your most current radio hit. For reunion tours and bands who haven’t put out an album this decade, it will be your best ballad. The crowd will sing along and everyone will feel good as the song ends and you say “Good night (insert city here)! Thanks for coming! Get home safely! Buy a t-shirt, a poster and a mouse pad commemorating our time together on your way out!” Then the ritual starts. It’s sort of like going to Catholic church where you stand, sit, stand, sit, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, run out the back door before everyone else. The concert ritual goes like this: you says goodnight, crowd applauds wildly as you leave the stage, crowd gets louder after you disappear, feet stomp, hand clap, shouts of “more, more more!” Then – what a surprise! – you’re back on stage singing one of your Golden Hits of Yesterday. This goes on for the next 45 minutes or so, with you doing a song, saying goodnight, waiting for the crowd to get really loud then coming back out until finally, after maybe the fourth time of doing this you break out into whatever your band’s “Freebird” is and the audience goes wild.

Stop it, ok? All that time you spend listening to the crowd scream your name and stomp their feet? Sure it’s good for your ego. But you could have spent that time playing another song instead of making us beg and plead like some musical BSDM game. And then you come out and play that song we all knew you were going to play anyhow. Think about it! Instead of all that empty time spent backstage throwing back a few more beers and grab-assing some groupies, you could have been playing. Instead of probably snickering to yourselves while the older people in the crowd flick their Bics and the kids turn on their iPhone Bic apps, you could have been playing of few your less popular songs. You know, the ones the old school fans like us know all the words to but you don’t play because the kids don’t know them.

Keanu Is Excellent

Recently I've come across a bunch of Keanu Reeves links. This is by far the funniest, I don't know how this meme got started but it's making laugh a lot. Supposedly Keanu is a really nice guy.

I'm So "Guess"

Ah, this makes so much sense. I completely come from a Guess culture and I think it's time to try the Ask culture.

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers."

Even though I'm originally from Russia, my family doesn't fall into the "typical" Russian mode of taking whatever we can, in any way we can. Honestly, it sounds that Ask culture get a lot more things that they want. I need to practice this.

Green Insight

Wow, an environmentalist actually asses that he and other "activist" can be self-righteous annoying pricks to people who don't share in their views or way of life:

Personally, the work we did at Walmart opened my eyes to my own arrogance that I believe is shared by many smart, well-intentioned environmentalists who can’t understand why “normal Americans” aren’t more engaged….be it in sustainability, global warming, or slow foods. We’re always talking, trying to convince others of the majesty of our points-of-view…and to most people this comes off as self-righteous, some say elitist, and dare I say…really annoying. I can’t tell you how many times I took part in training sessions in Indianapolis, Tampa, or Milwaukee with 50 Walmart associates, arms crossed thinking (and sometimes saying) “what are you hippie freaks from San Francisco trying to do….telling us what we should care about, what we should buy, how we should live our lives.”

That was their take, and honestly they were absolutely right. During our initial design process, we had brainstormed hundreds of clever ideas and mini campaigns. We were going to try and enlist them in this movement that was largely designed by “smart” greenies from San Francisco

I happen to think that even if the green house effect was man made there is very little we can do about it, since countries like China and India would still be polluting and progressing, while all we will be doing is impeding the American economy. I don't see any problem with encouraging people to turn off the lights or clean up their neighborhood (save money, looks better) or developing alternative fuel resources so we don't have to depend of the Middle East for our energy needs. But, I hate, hate, people pontificating and calling me lazy because I don't want change my light bulbs to florescent kind or have a low flow shower that I know doesn't work. Nice to see someone being a little bit self aware.

Postcards of the Southwest

"We met by a trick of fate..." I would like to report that I'm still quite obsessed with Camera Obscura's "French Navy" song (below). It was the song of the trip besides all the other music Peter played for us in the car. I would say "Maestro!" and he would step up to the role of a world class DJ (who has a propensity for British bands)! I know vacations can't last all the time, but really it's not a bad life going from one interesting (and very beautiful) to place to another with the one you love. I highly recommend it.
I would never have thought to go this part of the country if it wasn't for Peter. It is awe inspiring. I still can't wrap my mind around the Grand Canyon. "Grand" doesn't do it justice - majestic, mind-blowingly big would probably be closer to how it felt to me.
I'm sad to be heading home, even with minor crappy stuff that occurred on the trip. Every trip has moments of slight crap, some more than others, this one had one or two and came towards the very end...all having to do with my absent mindedness - but you know what time and time again I'm reminded it's not what happens to you it's how you deal with it (or how your wonderful, supportive, smart boyfriend deals with it). In one word: awesome.

P.S. 75 mph is a truelly awesome thing, but not when you are driving a Nissan Versa. #horriblepickup #leadfoot