Life through a lens
Sunday, 27 February 2011
WINTER'S BONE FOR OSCARS
Ye-ha for the underdog in the Oscars – Debra Granik's film, Winter's Bone.
A gritty low budget film with a hicksville mulekick to it. It's already won the Grand Jury at Sundance and should be a deserved Oscar winner. It's up for four Oscar nominations for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress for Jennifer Lawrence and best supporting actor for John Hawkes.
But let's see if the judges go for it's emotional edge over the likes of Social Network, Toy Story 3, The King's Speech etc. Of course I'm gunning for King's Speech – it's a great film. But wouldn't it be fantastic if another female director could make headway in Hollywood as Kathryn Bigelow did last year with Hurt Locker.
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
What if?
What if you were the wife/child of a suicide bomber? Would the legacy of your husband/father's mass murder haunt you forever? Would you regard your husband/father as a martyr or mass murderer? Would you always bear the sins of your husband/father?
It's an interesting question.
How would you explain what played out in the past to people you meet in the present? Undoubtedly it would make an interesting drama.
The inquests of the 7/7 Tube Bombings heard that the plot's ringleader, Mohammed Sidique Khan, left a will in which asked his wife to understand what he did.
Khan, 30, said leaving his baby daughter behind when he blew himself up on a Tube train at Edgware Road station in London was "the most difficult thing in my life". In the will, he wrote to his wife Hasina Patel: "You have been very patient with me even though I never told you what I was doing and often lied to you. I know you trusted me and for that I thank you.
"Please forgive me for the deceit, lies and my absence, it was to please Allah."
Addressing his baby son, he wrote in the will: "The most difficult thing in my life was to leave you...
"I ask you to forgive me for not being a part of your life in this world."
It's an interesting question.
How would you explain what played out in the past to people you meet in the present? Undoubtedly it would make an interesting drama.
The inquests of the 7/7 Tube Bombings heard that the plot's ringleader, Mohammed Sidique Khan, left a will in which asked his wife to understand what he did.
Khan, 30, said leaving his baby daughter behind when he blew himself up on a Tube train at Edgware Road station in London was "the most difficult thing in my life". In the will, he wrote to his wife Hasina Patel: "You have been very patient with me even though I never told you what I was doing and often lied to you. I know you trusted me and for that I thank you.
"Please forgive me for the deceit, lies and my absence, it was to please Allah."
Addressing his baby son, he wrote in the will: "The most difficult thing in my life was to leave you...
"I ask you to forgive me for not being a part of your life in this world."
Friday, 11 February 2011
Pubic hair removal: The naked truth
Goya's Naked Maja - pug style by By Gwen's River City Images. Check out on Flikr.
I found this article on the Guardian website. Penned by Bidisha, it completely chimes with my thinking on the matter of 'to hair or not to hair.' Personally, I think a certain amount of pubic hair is actually rather sexy and defines us as women - not pre-pubescents. Oh, and in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. In other words, when all around have shaven havens, vive la difference and be proud of your lady garden. Read on, nod and enjoy!
Young women are doing it, and now they're being aped by their mothers. Why are we imitating porn stars and shaving our pubic hair, asks Bidisha
Pubic hair elimination. It's a small but itchy area of contention. Last month's Elle magazine and this month's Vogue contained long, unruly articles, by Avril Mair and Rachel Johnson respectively, combing through the various strands of argument for and against total pubic purging. The hot topic for winter 2011 is clear: to bare, or not to bare one's labia?
In a sympathetic mirroring of the melting Arctic glaciers, the hair around our vaginas is fast disappearing, propelled by a force even greater than climate change: pornification. First it was a light quim-trim. Then a narrow snatch-strip. Then the full-on Brazilian, plucked pudenda, Christmas goose look. Now, technological advances mean that women will soon be able to permanently annihilate their entire chocha bush and surrounding strands, for ever. Yes ladies: laser flange is here.
Women can now expose their pipi to the breeze from now until the day they die. Great.
Why would they want to? If porn told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that too? Porn has introduced a new aesthetic – perhaps as a joke or momentary experiment – and women have responded with unquestioning servility and breezy abandon. At least now we can confront the naked truth about women's submissiveness in all its stark, raw, bald reality.
Men in porn are often also fully waxed. You can see the spring branches of their willies and their little bobbling balls, outlined in their scrota like farm eggs in a chammy cloth. But men in the non-porn world are not dedicating themselves to full deforestation, writing about it in major publications as though it's a serious consideration, or putting pressure on other men to do it. Men are not as cowed, self-hating, obedient or biddable as women in this regard. They are not going to make the effort to do anything to please a woman, at the cost of their own comfort. That is something I have always respected about men. They are busy pursuing their own happiness, leaving women to fight through the thicket of their own Stockholm syndrome, perpetually pruning their pubic hair in a desperate bid to gain approval.
Will a woman really do everything she can to meet every passing fad, even if it's uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating? And look at the reward: intercourse with a porn-adoring male who actually loathes women's real, naked, hairy bodies?
Are women so ashamed of their bodies' natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it's degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady's crotch doesn't deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children. He should stay at home instead in front of a computer, masturbating alone to the hair-free images he reveres.
I worry about these men too, of course, those poor poonani-policing body fascists. They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that, like the hairless, passive and benign feminine allegories of grand masters' paintings, women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both. That is something I'd like to see: a man so dizzied by the shortfall between reality and his own ignorance that his brain can't take it and he loses consciousness.
As for the women, don't you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet? I got "cassoulet" from The Joy of Sex, by the way. It means "general musky pussy area". Check out the original 70s hand-drawn illustrations. The couple are as hairy as anything, but they look like they're having a lot of fun, fur and all.
I found this article on the Guardian website. Penned by Bidisha, it completely chimes with my thinking on the matter of 'to hair or not to hair.' Personally, I think a certain amount of pubic hair is actually rather sexy and defines us as women - not pre-pubescents. Oh, and in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. In other words, when all around have shaven havens, vive la difference and be proud of your lady garden. Read on, nod and enjoy!
Young women are doing it, and now they're being aped by their mothers. Why are we imitating porn stars and shaving our pubic hair, asks Bidisha
Pubic hair elimination. It's a small but itchy area of contention. Last month's Elle magazine and this month's Vogue contained long, unruly articles, by Avril Mair and Rachel Johnson respectively, combing through the various strands of argument for and against total pubic purging. The hot topic for winter 2011 is clear: to bare, or not to bare one's labia?
In a sympathetic mirroring of the melting Arctic glaciers, the hair around our vaginas is fast disappearing, propelled by a force even greater than climate change: pornification. First it was a light quim-trim. Then a narrow snatch-strip. Then the full-on Brazilian, plucked pudenda, Christmas goose look. Now, technological advances mean that women will soon be able to permanently annihilate their entire chocha bush and surrounding strands, for ever. Yes ladies: laser flange is here.
Women can now expose their pipi to the breeze from now until the day they die. Great.
Why would they want to? If porn told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that too? Porn has introduced a new aesthetic – perhaps as a joke or momentary experiment – and women have responded with unquestioning servility and breezy abandon. At least now we can confront the naked truth about women's submissiveness in all its stark, raw, bald reality.
Men in porn are often also fully waxed. You can see the spring branches of their willies and their little bobbling balls, outlined in their scrota like farm eggs in a chammy cloth. But men in the non-porn world are not dedicating themselves to full deforestation, writing about it in major publications as though it's a serious consideration, or putting pressure on other men to do it. Men are not as cowed, self-hating, obedient or biddable as women in this regard. They are not going to make the effort to do anything to please a woman, at the cost of their own comfort. That is something I have always respected about men. They are busy pursuing their own happiness, leaving women to fight through the thicket of their own Stockholm syndrome, perpetually pruning their pubic hair in a desperate bid to gain approval.
Will a woman really do everything she can to meet every passing fad, even if it's uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating? And look at the reward: intercourse with a porn-adoring male who actually loathes women's real, naked, hairy bodies?
Are women so ashamed of their bodies' natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it's degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady's crotch doesn't deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children. He should stay at home instead in front of a computer, masturbating alone to the hair-free images he reveres.
I worry about these men too, of course, those poor poonani-policing body fascists. They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that, like the hairless, passive and benign feminine allegories of grand masters' paintings, women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both. That is something I'd like to see: a man so dizzied by the shortfall between reality and his own ignorance that his brain can't take it and he loses consciousness.
As for the women, don't you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet? I got "cassoulet" from The Joy of Sex, by the way. It means "general musky pussy area". Check out the original 70s hand-drawn illustrations. The couple are as hairy as anything, but they look like they're having a lot of fun, fur and all.
Monday, 7 February 2011
Beat the devil
A friend just shared this with me and I'm blown away by it. It's from a series of shorts by famous directors for BMW with budgets the size of our national debt!
But hey they WERE made a while ago, when budgets were as big as ideas and CamClegg inc. weren't in power!
This short's by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley and maker of The Hunger (one of my fave films) and Top Gun, True Romance and too many other films to mention. Am loving the nod to Alan Parker's Angel Heart and the egg-peeling Louis Cyphre.
Enough of the filmic detail...Starring the salacious, outrageous, sizzling Godfather of Soul selling his to the devil so he can do the splits again is truly 'take it to the bridge!'
And hell yeah, Gary Oldman is a very honky tonk bee-el-zeebub and characteristically unhinged in showy satanic fashion. His sidekick...Machete himself – the uber hardcore Danny Trejo. And even the self-styled prince of thrash darkness, Marilyn Manson, puts in an appearance. It's uptight, outta sight - all ten minutes of it! Be inspired, be very inspired!
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