pretty dumb things

bitchslapping 101

Last Saturday, I went to a play. It was, and I wish I could be more charitable, really pretty awful. It did, however, give me the platform to indulge in what very likely is the bitchiest bundle of prose I've yet committed to .doc and which was published today on one of my favorite blogs, Tits and Sass. The play in question, Stripper Lesbians (or possibly Lesbian Strippers, I can never remember), raised my ire not merely for its unabashed sloppy writing but also its lack of fundamental knowledge about strippers and stripping. Here's a choice morsel of my T&S post for you:

I also had difficulty following the logic of this play. To wit: Aisha is both a stripper and, as DJ reads from Evan’s thesis, “unemployed.” DJ himself is actually unemployed, although he does audition for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night using a monologue taken from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and appears to live with Evan post-breakup under her good graces and on the money that she earns as a stripper, despite the fact that she was a finalist in “Glamour’s College Student of the Year” for her article that “Mak[es] Anti-Sex Trafficking Sexy,” which was taken from the thesis she wrote while working at Wildlands, a strip club that does not appear to dabble in sex trafficking but has attracted the interest of Playboy, which wants Aisha to pose, to which Evan is opposed to because it’s anti-feminist, which they discuss in a scene that takes place after one showing on-stage discourse that culls equally from a Gender Studies 101 syllabus and any episode of South Park featuring Cartman’s mom’s scheisse films (suffice to say that Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, spanking and German accents make cameos). Oh, Aisha is also a cellist. She plays not for money but because it’s her “passion.”

However, I suspect my greatest antipathy to Stripper Lesbians came not so much from the kind of sense it made—which was none—and more from the fact that it didn’t seem as if anyone connected with this show had ever been inside a strip club, much less talked to an actual stripper. 

You can go here to read the rest.

I found it an interesting exercise writing about a play, especially one this rife with issues. This play held a deep-fried King Rat of problems, really, and its dusting of condescension only made it more perplexing. In short, I had to make some really hard decisions.  

For example, I had to cut any discussion of the moment when DJ, the ex-boyfriend and thus token heterosexual male, auditions for Long Day's Journey Into Night by reciting a passage from feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves. On the surface, it's a joke that works. It's a funny conceit for anyone--male or female--to give a monologue gleaned from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the surface concept that someone would do it to get a role in Eugene O'Neill's quintessential American drama of addiction is even funnier. 

And yet.

The passage that Stripper Lesbians playwright Kate Foster chose for the script is one centering on sex-workers. It is, in fact, this:

Some feminists have been critical of prostitutes for reinforcing sex-role stereotypes, by allowing themselves to be sex objects or for participating in the sex industry… and contributing to violence against women, as some see sex work as a form of violence in and of itself. Others insist that it is a legitimate way for women to earn money from men. As one prostitute said, "It's my body; why shouldn't I be the one to decide how I should use it?" In the words of an ex-prostitute: “I've worked in straight jobs where I've felt more like I was prostituting my being than in prostitution. I had less control over my life, and the powerlessness wasn't even up front. People didn't see me as selling myself, but with the minimum wage so little and my boss so insulting, I felt like I was selling my soul.”

Again, it could work dramatically. DJ, the former boyfriend, is angry. He is angry not only that his girlfriend has become a lesbian but that now that his girlfriend is now a stripper she is no longer his girlfriend. His anger permeates the play, driving the dramatic action, such as it is. So, ok. I can see the logic for why this is the excerpt.

It could work, but for the way that the actor performs the monologue, and the way he performs it is this: he puts on his very best crack-ho voice, slouching in the corner, pretending to smoke a cigarette, like he'd just walked off a street corner.

Because, you know, prostitutes are funny. As are strippers. And, I guess, lesbians.

There's this thing that The Atlantic and The New York Times do when they write about sexytime sexy sex, and it's kind of like my mom's face when she talks about my former strip job or my fake boobs. It's this pursing of the lips that liberals do that shows their genteel distaste for certain kinds of sex. Look around you, and you'll see the liberal in the corner clucking over the perverts. It's a thing, and it's in this play, and it's in Tina Fey, and it's in major media, and it's all about us.

This play was steeped in righteous condescension, but because the underlying message is "See? Strippers (and lesbians) are just like us!" the play gets off the hook--and the audience can feel validated as they laugh along. 

I'm not suggesting that there's not anything funny about strippers, stripping or strip clubs. There is. Lots. I'm also not suggesting that it's not a place for parody. It is. Boy howdy, is it ever. I'm just suggesting that there's laughing at us strippers and there's laughing with us. And that we're smart enough to know the difference.

 

pubes, politics, pop and words, words, words

The crickets chirping on this blog wouldn’t make you suspect it, but I actually have been kind of busy the last few months. For one thing, I’ve been enjoying a simply crushing melancholy, one that has come complete with a charming shame spiral and the consumption many big blocks of cheese. It has been simply fabulous trying to get out of bed in the morning (and usually succeeding). Fortunately for those who love me, or even those who love to loathe me, it remains as difficult now as it ever has been to find a guillotine on EBay, and thus I suspect I'll be with you for a while longer.

Beyond going fetal early and often combined with cheese-eating, I’ve done some writing for pay on the website 4-Letter E-Books. The site is also publishing one of my fave erotica writers—and by “fave” I mean one whose writing I admire enough to have stolen whole clauses—a woman who goes by the name Remittance Girl. You should check her out.

“The Honeypot,” my column for 4-L E-B, takes an analytic look at sexytime stuff happening in media, on the news, or in popular culture here in the States. It’s sort of “Love, American-Style” for curmudgeons, misanthropes and anhedoniacs, which is to say my people. I might start writing about actual sex should I start to have actual sex again, but in the meantime, I’m feeling like the Dorothy Parker of sexuality, so I’m just going to stick my tart tongue out and go with it.

The first piece I wrote is about pubic hair. More specifically, it’s about the clucking liberal-in-the-corner Atlantic magazine take on pubic hair written by Ashley Fetters. Here’s a choice follicle plucked for your reading pleasure:

Porn is the cause for all this missing pubic hair, according to not only Fetters’ piece but also conventional wisdom—both the LA Times and The Guardian responded to The Atlantic article with scathing opinion pieces condemning in one huffing breath cosmetic surgery and porn, as if the two industries are holding hands, if not swapping fluids. Commonplace says that the sight of bare, glistening, wet, split, open and, above all, shaved beavers has driven women on both sides of the pond to extreme acts of depilation. Shaving’s passé; waxing is, like, so totally late ‘90s; everyone who’s barely anyone, Fetters suggests at the end of her article, gets lasered. It’s a whole big, bare thing, really, and Fetters’ piece caused, as Fashionista reported, women to get their muffs in a huff—so much so that Londoners took to the streets last Saturday for the Muff March, a protest in favor of natural genitals.

The easy way out of this hairy situation is to state obliquely that it’s a woman’s choice. You can shave it, you can save it. You can let it grow, you can make it go. It’s your pubic hair, and as in other things vagina-related, it’s your choice. The problem is that while we would like to pretend that it’s simple, it’s not. You can hum along to Amanda Palmer’s “Map of Tasmania,” the woolly-happy-spirited pubic anthem while twirling your armpit hair around your fingers as much as you like, but hair is never just hair.

You can go here to read the whole ball of wax.

I wrote my next piece on Newt Gingrich. It’s kind of awesome to see a Republican presidential nominee with Gingrich's mind-bending hypocrisy become the accidental posterboy for open marriage, at least it is if you’re a Progressive Democrat with serious perverse leanings, as I am. So I wrote about Maryanne Gingrich and how her announcing that Newt wanted an open marriage made for some very, very strange bedfellows in the polyamorous community. Below is an excerpt, but go here to read the full Gingrichian orgy. (If you want to see something really fun, compare these two Google Trend graphs of Newt Gingrich and Open Marriage. They're like Castor and Pollux.)

Gingrich has a famously problematic marital history. Currently, he is wed to wife #3, Callista Bisek, for whom Gingrich both converted to Catholicism and left wife #2, Marianne Ginther, who had just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when Gingrich left her. Gingrich has a pattern; he began sleeping with Ginther before he’d divorced wife #1, Jackie Battley, who was just beginning her battle with cancer when he announced to her that he wanted a divorce. It’s a whole big thing, really, and all this Newt and Callista and Marianne and Jackie history only serves to complicate any connection between Newt and polyamory, 

Not that this complication doesn’t mean that advocates of open relationships haven’t tried.

And then last week, I wrote the piece that I feel proudest of. It all started when I tweeted, “Oh, I get it, Lana Del Rey is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction. Dirgetastic!” And then I wrote a whole piece about death and sex and repression and white skin and eyelet tops. It’s a whole big thing, and here’s a snippet:

Here’s my simple explanation for the LDR phenomenon: LDR is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction.

Stay with me here, setting aside your feelings for either entity, or both, if need be.

LDR and Twilight share a deep, abiding love of all things dead or dying. Life is just the thing in the way standing between you and your eternal white-toothed youthful glory. Life is that dead part, that portion where you’re standing around, beer in hand, rivulets of dew running down your teenage wrist, waiting for your boyfriend to put down the joystick and notice you in your blue-jeans. Life is roaming the halls and the hills in your godforsaken small town dreaming of a better death. Life is that inconvenient bit where you’re clothed, however attractively.

You can go here to read the full chewy thanatos and eros black-and-white cookie.

Look for my 4-L E-B column the last week of every month, or just follow me on Twitter. I’m delighted to know what you think or if you’ve any suggestions. You’re the meerkat’s monocle just for reading.

 

stand back. woman with a sword.

Oh, Dr Who. You showed such promise with the creation of Dr River Song. Whatever happened? Whither the love for the single, childless, middle-aged woman?

I realize that I react as a single, childless, middle-aged woman myself, and that my reactions to your most recent episode, “The Girl Who Waited,” speak as much about you as they do about me; my anxieties; my nightmares; my things that, while silent, go bump in the night. And yet, even as I recognize that I view this episode through my own “Rory-cam,” that is to say lenses that show you what you cannot see and what I can, I cannot forebear expressing that it is deeply, profoundly, and unremittingly bullshit. It is an episode simply fetid with bullshit, and yet more troubling, it continues a thought-free streak earlier exhibited in “Let’s Kill Hitler.”

Which is to say a troubling representation of women in general, and single, childless, middle-aged women in particular.

Dr River Song (see, I use the UK version of “Dr” here in deference to your cultural genesis, such is my respect) seemed so terribly fantastic. Beautiful in an atypical and even feline way, lusty with life, smart and competent, wry and sanguine, River Song is pretty much everything a SCMAW could hope to see on the little screen. That she is played by the incomparable Alex Kingston is merely a delicious cherry curled mop-top on the already very cool cake. And that River Song is also secretly a time-lord? Oh, dear sweet timey-wimey goodness. Be still my beating hearts.

Yet in the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler,” you gave an inkling that all is not self-empowered, if a touch melancholy, with River Song, for after Mels regenerates into River, the character is preoccupied with only one thing: her looks.

“Excuse me, you lot. I need to weigh myself!” She exclaims joyously.

Trust me. Women may enjoy their hair, their curves, their bodies and their clothes, but there is one thing women do not ever enjoy, and that is stepping on a scale. But let’s shelve that troubling moment and ask why for the love of all things wibbly-wobbly, when River regenerates her entire identity is centered on what she looks like and not, for example, what nourishes her. There is no fish-fingers-and-custard moment for River Song. There is only “shopping.” This episode suggests that a woman, even one as unique as River Song, is defined by what she looks like, and what River Song looks like is “mature.”

“I might take the age down a bit,” she says, “just to freak people out.”

Indeed. You’ve succeeded, Not-Quite-Dr-Song.

All of this ambient kowtowing to conventional representations of women and of sacrifice on the part of the SCMAW that “Let’s Kill Hitler” showed was nothing—nothing, I say—but sad preparation to what happened in the most recent episode, “The Girl Who Waited.”

"Spoilers!" below. Read on at your own discretion.

feeding the dream of The Impossible Girl

I don’t remember when I started following Kim Boekbinder, The Artist Also Known as The Impossible Girl (or TAAKaTIG, for brevity), but I do remember when she first responded to one of my Tweets. I posted a picture of myself in her “Kim Boekbinder believes in me” t-shirt with commentary along the lines that I wear it whenever I feel immersed in a pit of self-doubt. Kim said, “So all the time, basically.”

Yup, pretty much, I wrote back.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason. I’m more of one of those people who believes that everything happens. And yet every once in a while, something happens that makes me reconsider that pragmatic if chaos-loving stance. Becoming friends with Kim is one of those things.

We’re not close friends. We don’t call each other up or braid one another’s hair. When I have a problem or a celebration, Kim is not the first person I text. She’s not even the seventh. That’s not Kim’s role in my life, though I’d be open to it if it were. We occasionally do things together like go places and eat dinner; we’re often at the same parties. Sometimes we Gchat. We’re not close, but we are friends.

Despite my ethos of chaos cut with pragmatism, I do believe that Kim is in my life for a reason. I believe that Kim shows me that sometimes, if you work hard and are genuinely nice to people and completely true to yourself and do your best to make art that means something to you, if you do all this (and even if, or perhaps especially if, you fall down and fail and then come back again with a radical tactic and a galvanized sense of purpose), you will do something new, something wonderful, something magical, and something transcendent.

Kim may call herself the Impossible Girl, but I’ve come to think of her as the “Anything is Possible Girl.”

Last spring, Kim had a disheartening touring experience when attendance at venues was low because the club hadn’t really marketed her well, or properly, or at all. It made Kim sad, so she drank whisky, which got her drunk and in turn gave her an epiphany. She decided to create a tour based on her fans’ desires and to use Kickstarter to presell her own tour. I’ve already bought my ticket for her New York show, but if you live in San Diego, LA, San Fran, Seattle, Portland (the one in OR), Minneapolis, NOLA, Boston, or Hartford, you can also see her there. Or you can just throw money at her. She’ll catch it.

I believe in Kim Boekbinder, and not merely because my shirt says that she believes in me. She’s got this combination of artistry, savvy and grace. It’s a combination that’s unicorn rare, and it’s why I feed her dream. This and the fact that she does make some really good music.

 

i was afraid i'd eat your brains: a meditation on The Walking Dead

They’re here, they’re dead. And they’re everywhere you want to escape. They’re zombies, and they’re on your television, and in your movies, your X-Box, your indie rock lyrics and your classic literature.

Zombies now occupy a privileged pop culture position that rivals the place of perhaps the most protean of mythological creatures, vampires. However, in the past couple of decades, it seems like we’ve hit the saturation point of vampires. A trend long in the making, vampires have gained traction since Anne Rice’s Interview—and in the process, they’ve lost their bite. Much of the vampire’s cultural trajectory has been built on making the vampire a good middle-class citizen. Gone is Dracula’s effete and perverse aristocratic lineage. Banished are Nosferatu’s lamprey mouth, bat ears and rodential hands. Squashed are Lamia’s unrepentantly deviant desires. Well, mostly. If you’re talking True Blood, vampires still got sex game, but not so much if you’re watching Buffy or Twilight.

In the past fifteen years, vampires have been made safe for public consumption. They’re good; they’ve become a “care-bear with fangs,” as Buffy’s Cordelia Chase sneers about Angel. They have souls. They have remorse. They hunt only animals. They drink artificial blood made by Japanese companies and heated in a microwave oven. They want the right to vote. What pop culture has done to vampires is, by and large, remove the danger and the perversity, and in the process, castrate them. Divested of their castles and their capes, vampires have slowly been folded into mall culture. They may wear vaguely vintage-inspired duds, but given their preoccupation with diets, morality and home remodeling, vampires have become just like us. That is, except for when they’re very, very bad, and then they need to be punished, naughty vampires. Punished, and possibly replaced.

The proliferation of zombies in every possible medium argues that zombies are the new vampire.  The king is undead, long live the king of the undead.

Perhaps the best, most explosive example of the cultural prominence of the zombie is the hit AMC series The Walking Dead, the entertainingly evil spawn of writer-producer Frank Darabont. Based on a best-selling graphic novel of the same name, The Walking Dead is AMC’s most popular television series ever—in fact, as the New York Times Brian Stelter notes, it has gained viewership over its short six-episode run. Which makes a kind of sense, because strange sorghum hillbilly accent aside, it’s astoundingly good.

The Walking Dead works on somewhat of the same premise as the film 28 Days Later. The protagonist, in The Walking Dead it’s police officer Rick Grimes, wakes from a coma to find everyone around him is a dead man—or woman, or child—walking. Grimes is a good guy adrift in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of staggering necrotic ex-humans. (Forgive me, but the sight of hordes of people with so much shredded flesh careening like so many ambulatory carnitas really does bring the Monty Python skit to mind: “This human is dead. This is an ex-human!”) Grimes is, as much as the desolate, hungry world around him, the walking dead.

What is truly remarkable about The Walking Dead is less the story line, the script, the production values or the acting—series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have proven how good AMC is at picking talent and producing quality television—it’s the raw visuals of gory bodies. If you are a fan of cinematic decapitation, exploding skulls, misting blood and exacting evisceration (and I am), this show is a thirteen-course delight. I can’t remember a television series that has reveled in innards as much as The Walking Dead. One scene centers on a long, drawn-out, almost loving evisceration of a zombie whose entrails get festooned like garlands over Rick and his fellow survivor, Glenn. Good times.

I can only assume that such gory play is allowed because the zombies are no longer human. The light is literally out of their eyes—the sudden cataract-like filming of the eye is one somatic signifier of zombiehood. Living humans can’t be treated this cavalierly. Their innards are not playthings. But zombies’ are, and that strange, diaphanous distinction is what separates the Walking Dead from the walking dead, and it’s what allows us to enjoy the blood without guilt.

Except at the same time, it’s not. The humans in The Walking Dead are not all created equal. Some are more compassionate than others, and, indeed, it’s this mark of compassion that designates Grimes as the Very Good Guy. He looks at a zombie woman staggering toward him, hands outstretched, mouth open, and apologizes to it softly. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says, and then he shoots her in the head. Other survivors are less magnanimous. Daryl Dixon, half of a cracker brother duo, distinguishes himself as bad through his callous treatment of the zombies (alternately called “walkers” and “geeks”). It’s less man’s inhumanity man that makes the man bad; it’s man’s inhumanity to the ex-man.

And, really, what of the zombies themselves? The great mark of the zombie, other than its flayed flesh, dead eyes and flesh eating is its lack of individuality. The zombie is not a person, not merely because it’s, well, dead, but because it no longer has difference. The zombies in The Walking Dead have the same zombieness of zombies everywhere, and of all time. They walk, crawl, or chomp until they can walk, crawl or chomp no more. They hunger for tasty flesh, preferably human, preferably live, preferably yours.

Zombies are, theoretically, the ultimate consumer. The Walking Dead returns repeatedly to a department store in Atlanta; it serves as a major plot point and, of course, a visual metaphor. As the zombies clatter their decaying palms against the glass doors of the store, they look like a very focused and amoral scrum of Black Friday shoppers. Their mad rush at the humans locked inside looks like nothing as much as the running of the brides at the Filene’s Basement bridal sale. If only zombies carried credit cards, they’d resuscitate any flailing economy. But, sadly, they don’t. They consume, but they don’t buy.

The world of The Walking Dead is very small. It’s bands of people with tenuous bonds to one another, bonds that strain at the seams with every human impulse, emotion and foible. If what makes the zombie a zombie is its unutterable uniformity, then what makes the human a human is his or her keening difference. And, of course, it’s those differences that imperil the living. Racism, xenophobia, brutality: what the zombies can’t eat could kill the living.

And therein lies the drama and really answers what is so compelling about The Walking Dead. Unlike Shaun of the Dead, a brilliant movie, this television series will not answer affirmatively “Why can’t we all get along?” We can’t. We won’t. We’re human.

Bless our tasty, tasty brains.

(Also, bless Brian Stelter's tasty brains in specific. This piece owes a great big debt to a conversation we had while waiting for our dinner when we were out with other friends. He had salmon. I ate, yeah, carnitas.)

the dearth of cool

Music may indeed soothe the savage beast, but what it does best is separate the cool from the dorks. We judge humans first on their clothing and their hair; our costumes provide a map for what we do, where we live, how much money we make and what we value. But nothing tells us whether someone has that ineffable waft of hip or that damning fug of square like the music that person loves.

The problem is, of course, that as Maxïmo Park tells us, the coastline is always changing. (This sentence was, of course, a multi-part test, like one of those grade school standardized reading comprehension exams. If you know who Maxïmo Park is, you sail past bubble A; if you don’t, you’re screwed. Bubble B then tests how you understand Maxïmo Park. Being British and marginally on trend with post-punk music, you’ll feel one way; being similarly American, you’ll feel another. If you love, love, love Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a kindred cool spirit; if you hate, hate, hate Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a tarnished poseur. And even if you don’t know the band at all just their gratuitous use of umlauts could make you see me as a reborn idiot.) Where you are along the musical vista makes you hear the song differently. It’s a Pavlovian Doppler effect, but with rhythm and harmony and bass. Or, you know, if you’re listening to ambient, not.

tattoos numbers 9 and 10

Yesterday I met with Stephanie Tamez, the woman whom I refer to as my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

Breaking News! Joss Whedon as Popular as Anal!

My pretty dumb things have had exactly three days of traffic that topped 10,000. The first were Wednesday and Thursday, June 28 and 29, 2006 and the other was yesterday (it looks like today is pretty on-spot to break the 10K threshold too. Fingers crossed!). The first 10K spike occurred when as an editor at Fleshbot I compiled a sex-blog roundup of all posts that were all-anal all the time and then mirrored that compilation here with an anal greatest hits of my own.

The second 10K spike that happened yesterday and which I continue to ride the crest of today came as a result of my Joss Whedon/Dollhouse post being placed on the front page of IMDB and then being picked up by the fine fanatics at Whedonesque. I use StatCounter to keep track of my traffic; below are the two StatCounter graphs of my blog's traffic for the dates in question, the top being anal's 2006 and the bottom being Whedon's 2009:

 

(Note that this second graph was downloaded at approximately 10:30 a.m., Saturday, 7 March. This data is therefore incomplete.)

What we see here is pictorial evidence that supports my supposition that anal sex and Joss Whedon share a nearly equal popularity. Indeed, if you moderate yesterday's findings to reflect that my blog is less popular now than it was in 2006 because I've more or less ceased writing about sex, the argument could be made that Joss Whedon is in fact more popular than anal. Plus, Joss Whedon does not require lubrication, and he's been legal a lot longer. Clearly, the only thing to do now are side-by-side blind anal/Joss Whedon taste tests to see which people enjoy more.

In the meantime, I've already ordered my "Joss Whedon: More Popular than Anal" t-shirt for ComiCon 2010. Because I like to know that whatever my activity of choice may be, I will come prepared.

(Thank you to the kind people of Fleshbot, IMDB and Whedonesque, as well as the assorted perverts who congregate there. I could never have spiked so high and so hard without you.)

on the dollhouse dilemma and joss whedon's body of work

It’s no secret that I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon, and the irony of that statement, given Whedon’s avowed atheism, is not lost on me. I am one of the legions of people who are autodidacts of the Whedonverse, those who will from time to time exclaim, “Shiny!” when pleased, who can sing along not merely with “Once More with Feeling” but also “Commentary! The Musical,” and who secretly lust after a Smile Time Angel puppet. I am a shameless Whedon geek. Should Joss Whedon cross my path, I would be reduced to a blithering idiot and be overcome with my need to kiss his, well, anything, really.

Which is all a preamble to my explanation of both why I find Whedon’s new series Dollhouse not very good and why, despite recognizing that I don’t like it very much, I’m still watching it.

so many words, so little skin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realize the limitations of my skin; its cognizance is limited to expressions that feel metaphorically onomatopoetic. “Ow!”, “mmmm!” and “eesh!” are about as articulate as my soft tissue gets. The time has come to get tattooed, for my usually dumb dermis has started to scream.