Random pop-culture musing 3

When I saw the trailer for Colombiana, my first thought was "Finally someone realizes the danger amnesia poses to high-level assassins."

My second thought is that I've started going to films tactically. It looks godawful but it's the first major action film headlined by a woman of colour since Catwoman so I feel like I should go and see it.

Cleavage alone is quite capable of every wickedness.

I may have to amend that to swearing to write something every day I'm actually awake. I'd forgotten how long this takes. With apologies to those concerned.

I'm used to bad films. I've most of the best known examples (Manos The Hands of Fate, Showgirls, Birdemic, The Room, Catwoman, etc) and gained the usual slightly masochistic pleasure from them. I'm also used to being offended by films, to the point where it sometimes barely registers. Earlier this year however, I saw a film so bad, so infuriating, so offensive on almost every possible level that I can't even review it yet. I'm going to have to review another couple of quite terrible movies first just to warm up.

There are ways of proofing your film against bad reviews. One is to make a film of clear outstanding excellence but this is very difficult and not always successful in the short term. Lots of films now considered classics were initially slated by the critics (what does that even mean, they were metaphorically covered in roofing tiles?). A much simpler approach is to call your film something like Bitch Slap. Really anyone who watches it clearly deserves what they get. Like me.

So why was I watching it? The first on-screen reunion of Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor since Xena went off the air plus Zoë Bell cameoing and choreographing the fights. As the main characters were introduced cleavage first I got an inkling that I'd made the wrong decision.

Bitch Slap bills itself as smut for the Thinking Man. Pleased with yourself aren't you Thinking Man? Too good to jerk off to porn like everybody else aren't you Thinking Man? Need a bunch of quotes from Joseph Conrad, Cosimo de Medici and Sun Tzu's Art of War to help you get off, don't you? You make me sick. Also you need some intelligently non-pc comedy. Mustn't forget that.

This is about as intelligent as it gets. In fairness, this was one of precisely two laughs I got out the film. I'm pretty cheap really.

As a sidenote I'm sort of tired of everyone acting like being non-pc is in some way a courageous stand, as if angry lesbian vegans of colour might descend upon them like ravening maenads (actually that might make a pretty decent exploitation flick, if you want me to write one send me a few grand and I'll have it done by Tuesday). It was brave when Bill Hicks did it, you are risking nothing with your tired little provocations. The worst of which is probably the sadistic Asian schoolgirl Kinki who talks in broken English. Bitch Slap, you're racism is so ironic. A lot of the dialogue is supposed to be daringly offensive but come across as kind of baffling. One characters exits the film with "The woman's movement will hoist my skirt for all eternity!" What is that supposed to mean?

I'm not even angry, but I'm weary, oh so very weary. I spent most of the film feeling like a primary school teacher (elementary my dear Americans) confronted with a precocious 7 year old trying to get them to spell ICUP.

The film has a plot which isn't precisely good, but it is surprisingly complicated. Hel, played by Erin Cummings, is a glamorous conwoman and sex-toy tycoon (or is she?).  Trixie, played by Julia Voth, is an innocently naive stripper (or is she?). Camero, played by America Olivio, is a sadistically violent pill-popper and borderline psychotic (or is... actually she's pretty straightforward). They're in a remote desert location are looking for a fortune in diamonds (or are they?). Nothing will stop them, although they'll maybe have a sexy waterfight (or will they?).

Of course they will. All hardened criminals have sexy waterfights.

It's got violence (and cleavage), betrayal (and cleavage), non-linear storytelling (and cleavage), ridiculously purple dialogue (and cleavage), green screen (and cleavage), soft-core lesbian fondling (look you see where I'm going here OK). It doesn't have attractive male characters or in fact any nudity but if you like cleavage, this is the film for you. Being pretty uninterested in cleavage I'm clearly not the ideal audience.

I do like violence and Zoë Bell and the cast have done their best but when you've only got a weekend to train, it's best not to plan a 14 minute fight scenes. I actually fast-forwarded past most of it. Also she doesn't get any lines and her cameo amounts to less than 20 seconds. Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor do have a pretty funny cameo as nuns in the convent where Camero is hiding out under the moniker of Sister Prudence Bangtail, leading to the second laugh I got out this film.

Nunsploitation is a beautiful word. The films are mostly shit but it's a great word.

Unfortunately it does draw attention to the difference between a performance that is comically broad and exaggerated and one that is merely terrible. I feel pretty bad saying this as when I was writing this I found an interview with America Olivio and she comes across as funny and likeable. Her story of being cast for the film is funnier than anything she says in it, although I doubt Judi Dench could give a line like "You ruined my boobs skank twat!" a convincing reading.

I just mentally recast this with Judi Dench as Camero, Vanessa Redgrave as Hel and Helen Mirren as Trixie and Bitch Slap suddenly got a lot more entertaining.

I know what boys like. Patrician British actresses with long distinguished careers, am I right?

In fairness the woman may be ludicrous fantasy figures but they do drive the film, have agency and have sex with each other for fun and not attention. The Bechdel Test is easily passed and the crowd at AfterEllen seemed to like it, heaven knows why.

Depicted: Why.

Interestingly for this review I got the unrated version and the only difference I noticed is an innocuous short scene where you see that Trixie has a daughter. Lesbian strippers are OK but lesbian strippers who are single mothers clearly need to be censored.

To conclude, I never expected to type the word cleavage into my computer so many times in quick succession. I am tired now.

Sometimes a cigar is just a carcinogenic fun tube.

For reasons that are too complicated to go into right now, I'm suddenly honour bound to write something daily. Fortunately, I'm not bound to write something long, complicated or even halfway-readable thus my goal remains within the realm of the possible.

So I was writing a review of when I got distracted by the memory of something I read about a completely different film, Kick-Ass. The films most notorious element was Hit-Girl, an 11 year old who says cunt a lot and has been trained as a brutally violent "superhero" by her father. The reviewer complained about how sexualized the character was, noting that at one point she even wears a "fetishistic schoolgirl uniform".

I'm not going to bother reviewing Kick-Ass myself, a film that I didn't like very much and that clearly thought it was so cool. But one thing I wouldn't accuse it of was overly sexualizing Hit-Girl, when she does disguise herself as a schoolgirl the only layer to the costume is that it's supposed to point out the difference between the child she's assumed to be and the killer she actually is, a symptom of the film never getting round to deciding if a child whose been conditioned to viciously murder people without remorse is tragic or fabulously awesome. It never felt like moral ambiguity, more sloppy storytelling but it's not, you know, a sex thing.

This is a long preamble to my main point which is that adult (or at least late teenage) woman dressed as schoolgirls have become such an ubiquitous fetish, a fetish so mainstream it barely counts as a fetish, that people have forgotten that schoolgirls also dress as schoolgirls because they actually are schoolgirls. Suddenly depicting schoolgirls is automatically sexual. Also that swearing a lot and killing people is automatically sexy. That seems somehow indicative of our cultures fucked up attitudes but maybe it's just that I'm trying to cut down on caffeine and everything feels very far away.

PS: As creepy as I find parents who put their kids in child beauty pageants, I find parents who arm their children and get them to kill people a lot creepier. This may also explain why these characters are almost always girls, if they were boys they might remind people too much of real child soldiers used by drug cartels, the Khmer Rouge, various other genocidal groups, etc. That would definitely push the story towards tragic.

PPS: Yes I know that they sometimes use girls as soldiers too.

It's a riot sheer criminality.

So the riots. You may have noticed something about them in the news. Or if you live in the right area, by which I mean the wrong area, you may have noticed people rioting. "But why did this happen" is the call from people who apparently aren't that perceptive or skilled with grammar. Although to be honest that's a needlessly archaic rule, I mean everyone starts sentences with "but" these days and how did we get onto this? I'm supposed to be delivering trenchant political analysis.

The obvious answer is that smashing shit up is fun. David Cameron and Boris Johnson should certainly be able to remember that from their Bullingdon Club days, although unlike the rioters they left large checks behind to cover the damages (it's perhaps unworthy of me to speculate if this was how they approached dating). Even little Nicky Clegg (or Cleggums as I plan to refer to him for no particular reason) has apparently spent some time arson about (that doesn't seem to scan that well, it's supposed to sound like arsing and therefore be funny although it's actually quite a weak pun, sorry I brought it up, should I change it, too late anyway).

Look, it's been a while since I've written anything.

Let's imagine for a , that you're one of the rioters. I want you to imagine a boredom, almost since birth. Not your regular Sunday afternoon boredom, the corrosive bone-deep tedium that comes from not being part of the world. Not really. Boredom is perhaps the wrong term, like referring to crushing depression as feeling a bit sad.

Think of it as a continuous low-grade sensory deprivation like a thick blanket of pointless. You're maybe not very politically minded but you see that there are two kinds of people. People who have meaningful lives, filled with attainment and purpose, who matter. Then there's you, your family, and pretty much everyone you know.

No future for you.

Of course if you happen to be from an ethnic minority that won't sharpen your sense of resentment at all. There's no racism anymore it's just that immigration is an enormous problem and clearly multiculturalism has failed. The Daily Mail says so. What do you mean that black teenagers are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched, don't start playing the race card.

Recently though, the future you don't have has been looking bleaker than ever. Class warfare is a term that isn't used much anymore but the demonisation of claimants of all kinds and the incoming regulations that will make the task of scraping your frugal income out of the government an ever more lengthy humiliation for even less.

"But" you are thinking dear reader, still not caring unduly about sentence fragments, "some of those rioters were totally middle class, students and people with jobs and careers". True enough but these were specific examples ie not the majority of rioters. We'll come back to them later. Try to stay in character.

Did you even know about Mark Duggan's murder (writing from a veiwpoint dear reader, writing from a viewpoint)? Was it a sharp reminder that you can be killed without anyone caring, the way they would if you were a real person. Did you even see the initial protest where it all kicked off? Does it matter? Let's skip to the action.

The city has been where you lived but it's never been yours. Tonight that changes. You're wearing your ritual uniform of hood and mask and you run with the sound of breaking glass in your ears and the stink of burning cars in your nostrils. They've lit the sky.

The breath rasps in your throat but you feel superhuman, you've stepped into how the world is supposed to be and anything is possible. Nothing you've experienced, sexdrugsrockandroll, all the little petty distractions from how fucking tedious your life really is has ever matched up to this.

You round a corner and see a double-decker bus, a black skeleton wrapped in fire. Smoke and flame billowing up to heaven. The headlights are still on. It's the funniest, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

A text, a mob, an instinct(?) leads you to a street of shops. Other hooded and masked figures are smashing in the windows. You love them instantly. A love tinged with fear because anything is possible. Except stopping.

But don't worry about that now. If this is the haves vs the have-nots then shopowners are inevitably the haves. Look at all the stuff they've got. The reason some trainers, some clothes, some hi-def plasma TV's are better than others isn't that they're all that great. It's that the people who buy them know you have to make do with cheaper ones. Not tonight. See it before you. Reach out. Take. It's all yours.

Cops appear, you're natural enemies. Think of all the times you've been stopped and searched and "sonny"ed (is it only Edinburgh cops that still do this?). Run and circle. Throw whatever you've got to hand. If you're not human to them then they're not human to you, especially now. Riot gear does not encourage empathy. They may be dressed up like sci-fi stormtroopers but they're scared of you now. They can't be everywhere at once. And you are.

Let us leave our hypothetical rioter chucking molotov cocktails at the police and move on to pastures new. It's perhaps clear how the odd middle-class kid may have been swept away by the glamour of the riots (bright lights, big city). And the initial protest may have been where the violence kicked off but attempts to connect that to the protests there have been over the summer is pure spin.

Considering that they've been large groups of angry teenagers and the police use of agent-provocateurs in protest movements is an open secret the student protests have been amazingly peaceful. A few broken windows, a couple of inconvenienced royals and an idiot throwing a fire extinguisher who'd probably have been horrified if he'd actually hit someone. Most of the protesters have been essentially nice middle-class kids who were genuinely startled to be pilloried as a violent mob.

That doesn't mean there might be a connection of a kind. If they're willing to kettle and club and cavalry charge those well meaning kids with their non-violent resistance, if it's made as clear as possible that peaceful  protest won't be tolerated it sends a message of hopelessness all the way down to people too dispirited to ever protest but who might be up for a good night of fire and loot and pillage. It might be worth bearing in mind if they really want to prevent more riots. It might be worth trying to provide a possible future that wasn't even worse than a shitty past.

Random pop-culture musing 2.

If you change "amore" out for LSD, not only does the song still make sense it becomes a great deal more factually accurate.

When you dance down the street with the clouds at your feet, you're on drugs.

Relationship problems.

I have a friend who used to be one of those people who'd get serious about relationships way too quickly. She'd meet a girl and then two weeks later she'd be shopping for engagement rings and asking her to move in. Telling her that she was being too careless with her heart, in love with love and embodying an embarrassing stereotype did nothing to bring her back to earth. Neither did politely trying to change the subject when she was rhapsodising about the maid of the moment's sky blue peepers. Her mind was fixed monomaniacally on someone she barely knew . The only reason she was hanging out with us was that she whose smile made the sun rise and the dew moisten the grass (which was a hyperbole too far in my opinion) was currently off somewhere or other.

Then, inevitably, things would start to go pear-shaped. The current centre of her universe would stop being some mythic embodiment of all goodness and light and start to turning into a real person with real problems. There would be crying phone calls where she'd sob that her girlfriend wasn't coming round when she said she would, that she was screening her calls and even when she was there she wasn't there if we knew what she meant.

The early bonding had been founded on deception, her girlfriend had used the word "campy" to describe the stage presence of Horse McDonald. It turned out her girlfriend had musical tastes she didn't share, sexual kinks she wasn't keen on, a large collection of weaponry and passports she hadn't known about and why wouldn't she say where she kept vanishing off to. Of course it had been obvious to the rest of us for ages that she'd been dating La Zanzara, former Red Brigade terrorist turned international mercenary and assassin.

Again.

I mean fair enough there was the whole "as beautiful as she is deadly" thing going on but it's not even as if she was particularly good at disguises. Wigs and a selection of oversize novelty sunglasses, that's about it. After the third or fourth time it was hard to be sympathetic, "You want to be fooled" we'd say to her as she came round for the first time in weeks with her eyes red and swollen with tears and the CS gas La Zanzara had let off in her apartment as part of another daring escape from Interpol and intimacy.

Anyway, eventually she outgrew the whole thing and now has a nice girlfriend and some dogs that aren't perfectly housebroken.

My New Years resolution is to either write more regularly or give it up for good. I'm not sure which.

The morality of beating transwomen.

It's International Transgender Day of Remembrance when we honour the murdered and unavenged. Therefore it's a good time to break my no-blogging rule and revisit the case of Duanna Johnson, the transwoman who was viciously beaten by the Memphis police, sued them and was shot to death on her corner a few months later. Seems her case against the police officers who beat her finally came to trial in April. Despite overwhelming evidence, the jury debated for 5 days before being stalemated by one stubborn juror who said that he could not impugn "the morals of an officer of the law". The judge had to declare a mistrial.

Seriously Tennessee, what the fuck?

Fortunately, the case came up again in August and this time Bridges "Womanbeater" McCrae pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Meantime the police are looking really hard but haven't managed to find Duanna's killer. Reflective surfaces are apparently in short supply in Tennessee.

Here's an interview with Duanna before she was murdered. I'm not sure if you should watch it but it made her more of a real person to me, as opposed to one of the endless, faceless dead. It shows the video of her beating so do bear that in mind.



She wasn't the first, she won't be the last so take a moment to remember and stay safe everybody. It's going to be a hard winter.

The Not-A-Lesbian way.

A long time ago I was friends with a woman who's mother actually was a Jewish Stalinist lesbian child abuser. This unlikely escapee from a Daily Mail reader's wet dream had long since passed on leaving her daughter poor in money, but rich in mental health disorders which manifested in unusual ways. For a party she'd stapled bin bags stuffed with newspaper to the ceiling to create a padded cell effect and it took her several years to take them down. Despite her questionable interior design choices she had a razor sharp brain, a fiercely feminist outlook and about half a dozen copies of Bridget Jones Diary: A Novel, the well known chick-lit trendsetter by Helen Fielding.

This was the result of her ex-girlfriend (who I years later became friends with) being given a copy by every member of her family, this being that years gift to give female relatives whose tastes you remain wilfully ignorant of. When they broke up and she moved out she neglected to take them with her for some unknown reason. With that many copies lying around and the zeitgeist causing insomnia and mild indigestion it was inevitable that we'd end up reading it. The results were predictable.

I found it a bit irritating but she was infuriated by it and ranted late into the night, spewing venomous but surprisingly well articulated and thoughtful bile (Thoughtful Bile would be a really good name for a punk band), fixating particularly on one line:

"Suddenly think I might love Perpetua, but not in a lesbian way."

After a long rant on this, a short discussion on the merits of book burning (reluctantly against) and a medium length debate on setting fire to the building (in a surprise reversal, I was con), she decided to fall unconscious. I could of hung out and slept on the sofa but if you spent any time in her house, your eyes would inevitably be drawn up to the lowering black ceiling, it would start looking like it was somehow breathing and pulsing and it would start to do your head in so I walked the couple of miles back home. I spoke to her again a few days later when she asked if I'd seen our mutual friend acquaintance Ben. I can use his real name because there were so many boys called Ben in those days that we eventually had to have a cull, now remembered as the Great Clone Massacre of '99.

"I ran into him at CC's last night" I said "but not in a lesbian way."

Such an apparently innocent beginning. From there it snowballed, initially using it to pointedly underline the absence of sexual activity we eventually started using it for almost anything, except of course a lack of attraction between two woman. When I think about stuff like this, I realize that the number of people who've tried to kill me is amazingly low.

"I think government by consensus could work but not in a lesbian way."
"Beetroot stains are impossible to shift but not in a lesbian way."
"I fucked her brains out with my new dildo harness but not in a lesbian way."
"You have to soak it in cold water or it'll be like cement but not in a lesbian way."

I wrote this because when I was asked if I'd seen someone I knew from Queer Mutiny I said yes, but not in a lesbian way:

total silence except for the chirping of crickets and the eerie rustle of a tumbleweed rolling through the foreground

None of my friends now, old and valued as they are, knew of the not-a-lesbian way and that truly saddened me. It's so poignant when people drift out of our lives. Anyway Anyhow, I've been thinking of writing more recently but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

Beyond the bounds of prudence and good taste.

I've been letting a lot of things slide. I sometimes wondered if anything would drag me out of my self-imposed exile from blogland but happily, Final Girl has selected a film I wanted to see for Film Club this month. The immortal classic, Spider Baby. What do you mean you've never heard of it?

Spider Baby occupies a strange niche between The Addams Family and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'd like that to be an original observation but to be honest everyone (who's seen Spider Baby) thinks that so I'll impress you by saying that it's a lot more like Shirley "The Haunting of Hill House" Jackson's lesser known novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Both feature two weird sisters living in a world of childlike insanity who's existence is interrupted by a greedy distant relative. See, I've read something.

In Spider Baby the sisters are Elizabeth and Virginia Merrye who are as dainty and demure as you could wish.

We strive to be decent, normal, sensible girls like God intended.

Err, sorry wrong photo, we'll try again.

This was the strangest production of Swan Lake I had ever attended.

Much better. They live with their brother Ralph in the rambling old Merrye House being cared for by the family's long suffering chauffeur Bruno. All three children suffer from a progressive brain disease unique to the family which will eventually cause them to lapse into primordial savagery. The children while away their time playing games and occasionally killing someone who's unlucky or foolish enough to wander onto the grounds when Bruno isn't there to stop them. These victims go down to feed their aunts and uncles in the basement who've already succumbed to the Merrye Syndrome.

Sadly their distant relatives, grasping Aunt Emily and hopelessly straight-laced Uncle Peter, arrive bringing a their lawyer, the awesomely named Schlocker, with them. He also has a secretary because it was the rule at the time that every film needed a love interest. Things start to get very nasty, very fast despite Bruno's attempts to keep a lid on things.

Keeping a lid on things: How not to do it.

Eventually Bruno accepts that there's only one way to keep his beloved kids safe. Of course first the unwelcome guests have to be... disposed of.

I'd heard a lot about this film and it actually turned out to be as good as I'd hoped. This is rare with unseen cult classics who's reputation usually grows with obscurity. You can see echoes of it in so many films (I was particularly reminded of The People Under The Stairs) and it echoes so many films before it (The Wolf Man, The Fall of the House of Usher) that it has an odd resonance beyond the simple exploitation flick that the makers probably intended.

It's helped by a strong script and competent direction from Jack Hill, beautiful cinematography by Alfred Taylor and terrific performances. Jill Banner's eerily sweet and homicidal Virginia is a memorable character and a young Sid Haig is sinuously unnerving as the even more regressed and sexually creepy brother Ralph. He's like a pervier Pee Wee Herman but a Pee Wee Herman who could pin you in a wrestling match.

I could sense that my attempt at witty flirtation had somehow gone awry.

Best of all is Lon Chaney Jr. as the devoted Bruno. A lot of the early horror greats mined a deep sense of tragedy in their later performances (if you haven't seen Boris Karloff in Targets then I suggest you do so now) and Chaney, who was battling alcoholism when this was made, brings real pathos and desperation to the film which stops it from being a simple farce.

I could probably spraff on a bit more but it would probably be better if you just looked the film up on the Internet Archive and watched it yourself (if you're a good technical person you could take the hiss off the soundtrack and repost a clean version. Just saying).

Their escape could only be temporary. Soon the aphids would be mine.

Hooray it's a new year.

I survived Hogmanay (seriously it wasn't 100% certain I would) and will be continuing to produce semi-coherent blog posts in the future.

I'm not making any resolutions on account of the whole doomed to failure thing which seems to afflict them. I do have stuff I want to get done in the future though (improve mental stability, do more Queer Mutiny stuff, write a bit, workout, etc) but I'm keeping it vague and fuzzy. Apparently what I should do is have definite goals, split into smaller sub-goals with appropriate rewards for accomplishment. That sounds like fun. Fun in the sense of baffling and frustrating drudgery.

The rewards thing is particularly confusing. Your supposed to come up with little treats and presents for yourself and then threaten to withhold them if you don't do what you're telling yourself to do. I know perfectly well that if I come up with something I want, I'll get it/do it whether or not I do what I'm supposed to. Not only that, but I failed to follow my own explanation of how it's supposed to work. This might be why I don't get much done.

Maybe I should resolve to work on my flirting skills, my current approach (ignore cute guy, if cute guy approaches make hostile remarks then leave the area) isn't working as well as I'd like. I should try something more pro-active (take-off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure).

The best resolution though is to be more radical. The last year has shaken up my ideas a lot, this seems like pivotal time in history (although what time doesn't really, I've already lived through countless pivotal historical moments) and what's needed isn't to be cautious and polite. Now that the bloom has worn off Obama's rose (more inadvertent filth) I'm hoping people will realize that it's not enough to vote and join Facebook groups. What is enough is always the question. I'm pretty sure that demos and placards and protest sites aren't enough either. The people most directly responsible for the mess the world's in get happily rich of the proceeds. Will anyone hold them accountable? Probably not, bit depressing really.

My predictions are: The Torys will win, Scottish independence will consequently start being given serious discussion. Obama will continue to disappoint all liberals, progressives and those of us further out than that. Any US health care reform that eventually gets through will mostly benefit the insurance industry. UK, US and allied powers will continue to quietly be involved in human rights abuse. There will be a major Israeli/Palestinian flare up in the next year. Promising new developments in renewable power will be debunked with suspicious speed. Queer Mutiny will have another party at which I will unfortunately be myself.

I think what I'm saying is that the future kind of sucks.

Actually I haven't been up 24 hours.

News, news, news. That's all they ever seem to print in the papers, I don't know, end of print medium, Bambi, etc.

This week brings adorable news: first gay marriage in Latin America. It's apparently still illegal, they've just given this couple special dispensation. Weird.

Sad news: Vic Chesnutt has died. I'd just started to listen to his music which had the wonderful quality of being instantly dislikeable and then slowly convincing me it was some of the best music going. To put it another way, not destined for mainstream chart success. A paraplegic, he seems to have killed himself with an intentional overdose of muscle relaxants. I could make a lot of points about medical marijuana or the failings of the US health care system but I'm sure they'll occur to you as well. There's an interesting interview with him at The Quietus and his friend Kristin Hersh has set up a tribute and donations site to help his family cover his medical bills.

Further sad news: The actress, Zelda Rubinstein is dying. You're most likely to remember her as Tangina the medium in Poltergeist but she was also (among other things) a commited AIDS activist long before it was fashionable, starring in one of the first ever series of safe-sex ads in America. May it go easy for her.

I feel the need for a distraction and fortunately Iran has provided. Monday, David Miliband, the British foreign minister criticised the Iranian crackdown on anti-government protesters so their foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki summoned the British ambassador to whom he gave this statement "If this country does not stop its prattling, it will receive a slap in its face."

That is the single funniest thing anybody's said in international relations all year.I know this is a deadly serious business, that human rights are being abused and that this could indicate that the Iranian will decide to start openly sponsoring terrorism and so forth but that only makes it harder not to laugh. Anyway corruption and pomposity always demand our laughter. Footage from a future meeting between representatives of the British and Iranian government is included below.

I guess I should be doing a big end-of-the-decade thing like everyone else but I can't be bothered. After 2000 turned out to be a big anticlimax, I'm having a hard time getting excited about this one. Of course I could just be bitter as it looks like I'm shaping up to spend Hogmanay with the cats and they're not even my cats, they're Mum's. The next decade will be an artificially demarcated interval of time. I'm not making a lot of sense so I'll let Utah Phillips explain it.

Rape-rape are you fucking kidding me?

I'd managed to avoid writing anything about Roman Polanski and I wasn't going to bother but to be honest, his Christmas message to his supporters rankled. Everything about how widely he's been supported, by people that you would expect to know better gets on my nerves. Personally, I believe that retributive justice is a luxury we can't afford, that prison should be only for people who present a physical danger to the world. This would be more humane in most ways, harsher in others (none of these people would be wandering around if I could help it). According to my own logic then, putting Polanski in jail would be pointless and it looks like they're not going to. I just kind of want him to be in jail forever and ever. Somehow I just can't feel any sympathy for him.

I got partway through trying to summarize my position on teen sexuality when I remembered I don't need to. It was rape, clear and simple. Whilst he was licking her, penetrating her vaginally then anally, she was begging him to stop and take her home. If she'd been a 57 year old hooker it would not matter because she was not consenting. The acts are upsetting enough in the denatured language of the court deposition, to commit them suggest that Polanski had very little compassion in him. If Polanski had taken advantage of a 13 year old with a crush on him that would be deeply skeevy behaviour but the girl actually didn't consent or want to have sex with him. Trying to posit this as American's lack of sophistication about the European tradition of sexual mentoring is beside the point (incidentally most Europeans were surprised to hear it was considered traditional to be sexually initiated by a man almost old enough to be your grandfather).

Reading the deposition also made me angry at the way responsibility keeps being put on the victim. Why did they ask about her sexual history or about her previous drinking and drug taking? I hope the way they question minors has at least improved (I'm pretty sure the way they question adult women hasn't). You might say she was stupid to take the drink and drugs he offered her but that's not the point. Rape isn't a natural phenomenon. If you get drunk and wander outside in a g-string and freeze to death tonight it's your own silly fault. If you get drunk and wander outside in a g-string and somebody rapes you it's their fault. They're thinking beings, they make the decision to rape (as opposed to suggesting you stop lying in that snowbank).

So strike one for sympathy. It was rape-rape, Whoopi notwithstanding.

Some say he's been punished enough, having to live in a series of beautiful chalets and château set in their own grounds and working with some of the biggest names in film. I haven't raped anyone but I'm sure I've done something that merits some of this brutal treatment. I've not paid my council tax, is that not enough? No? Oh well.

Strike two.

The judge was unfair to him, trying to give him an unusually harsh sentence. A situation akin to people wanting Paris Hilton to do serious jail time for a DUI even though the punishment is normally a slap on the wrist. The thing is, although raping a 13 year old was a slap on the wrist type thing in the 70's (unless she was a good girl of course), Polanski was probably right, if self-serving, when he asserted that it was common practice but that is not important. I personally like the current standard where it's a more serious offence. For that matter, DUI should have more penalties, you could kill someone?

Strike three. Is baseball like rounders? We used to get just the three goes but I suppose he is famous. Why am I using sports metaphors? One more for luck?

He's has had a hard life. This is the most common and the only one that has much merit. Having lived through the holocaust and having your wife, with whom you were expecting a family, murdered in a spectacularly horrific crime will do things to you. Polanski had apparently spent most of the time between then and the rape on a nightmare descent into booze and pills in the rarefied and consequence free environment of Hollywood. It's possible that that could make even a basically decent man go into a moral freefall where sodomizing a frightened teenager doesn't seem like a big deal. History shows that most people if shaken up the wrong way can do terrible things. Deserving of punishment perhaps but also understanding.

The thing is, if that were the case, you'd expect him to feel kind of bad about it. In the famous 1979 interview with Martin Amis he said.

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

He hasn't said anything in the intervening years suggests he's changed his attitude. That's what finally stops me from having any sympathy at all with Polanski. As far as he's concerned he's done nothing to feel bad about. Come to think of it, his lack of remorse for his crime and his continued fondness for young girls maybe justifies keeping him inside. Not that they will.

That was no fun at all to write. I've remembered why I stopped talking about the news.

Gucci flesh eaters.

Do you remember that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie sees a plump woman walking down the street and has a quasi-erotic fantasy of tearing into her with teeth and nails then devouring her still living flesh? It's in the book.

I mention this because Naomi Wolf has decided that Carrie Bradshaw is the most important female icon of the last decade. She writes:

Rather, the core of the tale was always the life-sustaining friendship among four women, as the men in their lives came and went. This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women – no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms; it was also radical because, in a very un-PC but admirable flouting of feminist norms, Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret – that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales.

This suggest that she only watched the show and never got around to reading the book. The whole female friendship thing? Not in the book at all. How do I know? Because unlike Ms Wolf I have read the book. I picked it up for 15p in a charity shop because anything that makes that big a cultural splash engenders a certain curiosity, even though the show had always bugged the hell out of me. This is the bit where someone normally say that it's a guilty pleasure and that people (sometimes they just say men) complain about it but always watch it when it's on. I don't find it even a guilty pleasure, it grates on my nerves like a rusty saw.

The book, however, is something else again. I'd be interested how many woman picked it up expecting a nice dose of chick-lit to lift the spirits and confirm gender norms while pretending to flout them. From the looks of my copy, whoever had owned it previously got no further than the first 10 pages. It's funny how people have generally overlooked the massive difference in tone and content between the book and the series. Much funnier is that since the massive success of the latter, Candace Bushnell has gotten stuck writing books that try to ape the series that's supposedly based on her first book.

It's a deeply disturbing book and not just for it's occasional cannibalistic reveries. Originally serialized in the New York Observer as a cross between roman à clef and gossip column, it's set in a dystopian Manhattan where concern for status and appearance have totally consumed all genuine emotion. The authorial "I" gives way to her stand in, Carrie, but it doesn't really affect the plot because there isn't one. The cold harshness that sometimes undercut the TV show is pretty much the whole of the book.

People called Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte turn up but they're talking heads who make one or two appearances, not particular friends of Carrie or each other. They bear no more resemblance to the TV characters than any other woman in the book. Female friendships in the book are mostly depicted as long-running attempts to subtly undermine each others relationships and jostle for status, the most important status symbol being an appropriately wealthy male.

One character who does get a substantial appearance is Stanford Blatch. On TV Carrie's chubby little gay friend, in prose a freezing A-gay who pours withering scorn on others plastic surgery and tries to buy the affections of a straight underwear model who he decides he's in love with although really he feels nothing. Another episode concerns men who find women they're deeply compatible with, and love as much as their foetid little hearts allow, but who they judge to be not attractive enough to be acceptable mates for men of their status. So they avoid being seen in public with them and eventually dump them for prettier woman for whom they feel nothing. There's also the famous depiction of a group of women having lunch discussing how comfortable they are now having sex with men for whom they feel nothing.

You may have noticed a theme developing. Incidentally, I can't be the only one who thinks that setting the next Sex and the City movie after a zombie uprising would be beyond fabulous. I can even see the tagline "They Shop, They Fuck, They Kill!!!"

It's obvious who Candace Bushnell models her prose on and as I put the book down I silently said to myself "You, my dear, are no Dorothy Parker". Interesting as it was to spend the hour or so it took to read the book in the company of people who know their pursuit of designer label status is destroying their souls, afterwards it was necessary to spend time with my friends who are still capable of human feeling and are all remorselessly non-aspirational. Thank God.

I'm always the last to know.

More news that everyone else had already heard is that Demonoid is back online. Torrent sites like this are a valuable way for creative people to reach new audiences and distribute their content and that's all I use them for. Allegedly

I'm still foggy from Christmas which went much better than expected. I walked home past a nightclub which had a lot of people standing outside as if it were any other Friday night. Is it just me or is there something inexpressibly sad and pathetic about going out on the pull on Christmas? It just seems wrong somehow. I don't know. I think I'm the only person who loves sodium vapour streetlights. The short ones with the little hats, you know the kind of thing.

Brain should be back online tomorrow. In the meantime, there is always Youtube.