kontextmaschine:

Wolf extermination is land improvement

So after a long and overwhelmingly successful campaign to exterminate wolves in America we’re starting to actively try to reverse course and reestablish wolves in the wild. And part of that involves retrospectively casting the earlier extermination efforts as the product of some sort of misguided fear or ignorance but bitch please, we knew exactly what we were doing, it was cold, pragmatic land improvement.

Now, our stock image of “land improvement” is agricultural - grading land flat, draining wetlands, adding irrigation, so as to enable it to produce more crops. You’ll remember that a lot of the formal ideology of American settler-colonial land appropriation was that the native inhabitants didn’t have ownership of the land because they hadn’t made it theirs by performing such land improvements, and were instead something like long-term vagrants.

(As a side-note, in early America land clearance was effectively free or even profitable if you were tied into the transatlantic economy - a landowner could hire a gang of men to chop down the trees on his plot and then immediately pay for the effort by reselling the wood, depending on the local markets and geography either raw as fuel or construction material, or instead processed into lumber, furniture components or [in the deep woods where transport was toughest] by burning to ash for use in lye manufacture. Keep in mind that in this period wood was quite dear back in Europe, while in the New World it basically grew on trees.)

Now, as you’ll know if you followed my recommendation to read Changes in the Land, American natives actually did perform extensive operations on land to improve its productivity, but were often overlooked in this because what they were optimizing weren’t the familiar forms of either manorial or smallholder agrarianism. The classic example is setting regular forest fires, which cleared out underbrush and allowed for fresh green growth, thus increasing the carrying capacity for game like deer, thus increasing the productivity for hunting and gathering.

(Another side-note: you see similar if less intentional dynamics today. When people talk about deer-human conflict - car crashes, nibbled gardens, etc. - as a result of humans pressuring deer through invading their habitat that’s exactly wrong. That stuff gets worse as exurban development continues because humans are creating new deer habitat. The deep woods are too tangled and impassible for deer and don’t have enough sunlight to support nibbling-height plant growth. Plains are better food-wise but too vulnerable - deer escape predators by bounding over undergrowth that predators can’t follow through. So their ideal habitat are edgelands - lightly wooded areas, ideally with access to marginally more and less overgrown regions. And exurban development functionally creates edgeland.)

So once a few years ago I took Blue Bitch from Portland to Missoula and back, for a cousin’s wedding. Got a few good stories out of that. Did you see that New York Times package? I should tell you my Sandpoint story sometime.

And back in Portland OR-7 had been in the news, this wolf with a tracker that was the first wolf known in Western Oregon for more than half a century, and he wandered down around to California (first known for nearly a whole) and against all odds found a mate and birthed a litter, real heartwarming story. But after I crossed over the Cascades range, and intensifying as I continued east into Idaho and Montana, I started to run into merchandise, on gas station shelves, pickup truck bumpers, locals’ torsos, that all ran around themes like Fuck Wolves; or Kill Wolves; Wolves Can Go To Hell; Kill All Fucking Wolves, Who Can Go To Fucking Hell, And Then The Fucking Wolf-Loving Hippies Too. I was actually a little impressed at how many variations on the theme they managed to pull off.

Because wolf extermination was land improvement. Like, we knew wolves were apex predators and important to the functioning of the natural ecosystem when we killed them, THAT’S WHY WE KILLED THEM. By killing the apex predators we became the apex predators, and wolf-cleared lands became much more productive for hunting. The state government of Alaska sends helicopters out to kill wolfpacks every year for this exact reason, to enrich the hunting prospects. (A substantial share of the Alaska population derives a nontrivial portion of their yearly diet from wild game.) By replacing the apex predator with ourselves we allowed for animal husbandry - livestock raising - which is essentially hunting plus low time preference.

It wasn’t because we were afraid of them although their reputation as mankillers (mostly lone forest travelers in prey-scarce seasons) sure didn’t fucking help their cause, it was an economic decision. We killed them as an act of land improvement, to raise the yield of hunting and animal husbandry.

Now of course animal husbandry and hunting don’t provide as much calories per acre as intensive agrarianism, but they’re still perfectly viable for regions with lower population densities or ill-suited to agriculture - soil too rocky or acidic, insufficient water, no easy transportation to markets for low-value, high-volume bulk products.

And this - the mountainous terrain of eastern Oregon into the Rockies - was hunting and animal husbandry land, this was the land, the culture, the economy made viable by wolf extermination, and so I’m not surprised they said Fuck You to wolves and wolf reintroduction, because wolf reintroduction was basically saying Fuck You to them.

After I found a hotel for a night I ended up in a bar, struck up a conversation with a local, wanted to know what it was like from that side. It was basically like you’d expect - that the government that acted in their name had abandoned the duty of protecting their livelihood from predators was improper, that it would actively try to stop them from protecting themselves was repugnant. She attributed it to city folk in Portland who couldn’t imagine what it was like to be a farmer. (Nearby Idaho, for example, started annual wolf hunts as soon as federal protection as “endangered species” was lifted.)

I said that wasn’t true, Portland’s the earthiest city I know, people are very in touch with the land and the truth of fundamental production, there are lots of people who can imagine what it’s like to be a farmer.

And let that sit a beat and then delivered the punchline: …there’s just more people who can imagine what it’s like to be a wolf.

Which is it, really, that for all the foofaraw what we’re doing is actively and intentionally degrading a functional segment of our polity in the name and interests of those not only not our countrymen but not even our species, and when they ask why we would do this, and what we’re offering in return we basically tell them - they who actually fucking know from wolves - “well, it’s really cool to think of yourself as a wolf”.

She also said Portlanders wouldn’t be so positive if they were the ones who had to deal with the consequences. Which is completely correct. In LA and Portland, I’ve seen some of the greenest, circle-of-life ecology types get quite tetchy about coyotes sneaking into their yards and eviscerating their housepets. Their precious social media star reduced to a mess of fur and blood, the skull’s hard to chew so they often leave the head intact, dangling off a stripped spinal cord.

And yeah when a farmer comes across a calf like that okay maybe it’s not ~a member of his family~, instead it’s just his job and his retirement and college savings accounts. So hey.

hbshizzle:

check it out, it’s the three flavours of Republican

kontextmaschine:

It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form

People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.

You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.

Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all

Reblogging at a more reasonable hour because I originally woke up and wrote it down in order to get it out of my head and fall back asleep

Oh, something else important on the way was thirtysomething, clear progenitor to relationship dramedies like This Is Us, that was basically a 1987 My So-Called Life for adults, or at least Boomer yuppies

Also interesting are the false starts - the miniseries boom after 1977’s Roots revealed an audience for multi-episode narratives; the 80s “prime-time soaps” Dallas and Dynasty that didn’t have much episodic drive aside from the overarching plots.

I suppose we should also consider the soapy 90s youth dramas on Fox and the WB - 90210, Melrose Place, Dawson’s Creek. I’d say you really see some of the seeds of modern TV here – the shipping-bait plotting that seeped into action genres through things like Buffy, Smallville, and Supernatural; soliciting pop soundtracks from bands looking for breakthrough opportunities; The OC as a revival of the Dallas/Dynasty style prime time soap

skelenabones:

i find the use of the term “witchcraft” when people are discussing actual popular historical magical practices from the early modern or medieval periods of Europe to be vexing and confusing, because the way people use it tends to carry along an ahistorical set of assumptions that has more to do with early neopagan misunderstandings of history than anything else. namely, when people seek ‘witchcraft’ in these time periods they are usually seeking non-christian folk magical practices and beliefs. a big reason this is the case is because early neopagans like Gardner bought into poor scholarship that suggested that during the period of the witch trials there existed sects of surviving pagan practitioners who did magic, and that often these practitioners were the target of the trials. most people seeking historical witchcraft know this was never true, these witch cults did not exist, but the way they use the term witchcraft means they’re ironically basically looking for the mythical practices Gardner and others believed in. why this is especially vexing is that it causes people interested in ‘witchcraft’ to skip entirely over the large corpus of christian magical practices that are decently well documented and were practiced by people in almost every level of society from the bottom to the top. pro-tip you know who was the most prevalent professional magical practitioner in most medieval western European towns, almost certainly even surpassing wise women and other similar folk? the village priest

kontextmaschine:

Listening again to Taylor Swift’s Red, picked up something I hadn’t - “memorize” used in two different songs

In Stay Stay Stay,

you took the time to memorize me
my fears my hopes and dreams
I just like hanging out with you
all the time

and then in Red,

memorizing him was as easy as knowing all the words to your old favorite song

and I thought on it and realize this downright sapiosexual knowledge-as-intimacy theme is pretty important in Tayswift, it’s the load-bearing element of YBWM

I’m the one who makes you laugh
when you know you’re ‘bout to cry
I know your favorite songs
and you tell me bout your dreams
think I know where you belong
think I know it’s with me
can’t you see I’m the one who understands you
been here all along so why can’t you see
you belong with me

it’s even important in negative (which is how interrogators tease personality from pretense) in Red,

forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you never met

thinking about that, and also remembering when her transparent brand strategy was accessibility and fans chosen to meet her would gush about her casually referencing something they mentioned on their tumblr long ago, and it’s like

AWW, she really IS just like us, in that her real output is multilayered invocations of accreted culture but she charms incidental humans by studying up on whatever incidental shit they happen to be and mirroring it back at them

I just want to know you better
know you better
know you better now
I just want to know you
know you
know you

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

yo no joke every time I hear Jeff Sessions’ name my mind puts it in the Bob Evans jingle

~Jeeeefff Sessions, down on the farm~

(in contrast, I read “Steve Bannon” to the tune of Rhiannon)

kontextmaschine:

bambamramfan:

kontextmaschine:

Yes, that’s the reading I mentioned going with on first viewing, and yes, that’s the unflattering comparison I lampshaded.

I can see it, the show does a lot less work to undermine the character’s consciously presented self-image than others, even other therapists (Melfi’s own, the brusque one that tells Carmela to leave, the priest Carmela was close to) or other “innocents” outside or against the organized crime dynamic (Artie Bucco, Meadow’s college bf).

But on reflection (and that late-season bit where her therapist explicitly theorizes her interest in Tony as slumming voyeurism) I started to see things, and distinguish the sessions (“sacred” as central to the mechanics of the show) from Melfi the character, and realized how much of “it doesn’t undermine her” was “it shows her as a fleshed-out totebag meritocrat” and I was just reimporting that as the standard of virtue while thinking myself above just that

I kind of understood the lesson at stake here as the reverse, that a professional, educated idiom and a training/tendency to see things in terms of larger dynamics doesn’t exempt you from, I guess, “the social matrix” or from bending your “objective” judgement to self-validation and that – as with that unflattering comparison – you should be aware of that stuff and incorporate it into your self-understanding.

This whole thing is good, but if we’re talking the (rather heavy) authorial voice here, the entire last episode is about David Chase telling people to stop sympathizing with Tony. He was basically forewarning the decade of the prestige anti-hero.

It’s not like Melfi’s surprise realization was that Tony was a bad person. She had known that for six seasons. Her epiphany was that “It’s been six seasons and none of what I do is making him any better.” Which you know, wasn’t at all wrong.

When I first watched it I disagreed, because no one should be given up on, but Chase is right, in that there’s a difference between “giving up” and acknowledging “this thing isn’t working, even if it is really fun/making me a lot of money.”

Well that’s the lesson as Melfi would take it, as a good totebagger convinced there’s a totebagger inside all of us trying to get out.

But I resist the notion that that’s Chase & Co.’s final uncomplicated word, because they do complicate it. Think about that other therapist’s critique, that she’s just a slumming voyeur, think what that does.

Melfi is a good educated totebagger who makes an hour appointment every week to keep up with the Tony Soprano Story. Melfi IS the Prestige TV audience. And what’s the critique amount to?

“You started following this gritty sexy violent gangster story because you liked it. Something in Tony Soprano reminded you of yourself, only he lived a more interesting, less constrained life, and it enthralled you. You loved living vicariously through him.

And what were you expecting, redemption? An AFFIRMATION of totebag values? That doesn’t even fit your fig-leaf of interest in social verisimilitude – after all you’ve seen that this other world is an actual whole functional culture with its own rules and norms, after all you’ve seen how respected “straight” culture actually relies on it, you were expecting it to just roll over to educated nonviolent passive-aggressive totebaggery because… why, exactly?

Because you were sure you’re the crown of creation, and people just need your help removing the obstacles to being you? Or because pretending there was a bourgeois affirmation coming let you span the gap between your self-image and your desires, and taking its absence as a flaw lets you present as an innocent, tricked?“

And Melfi, the avatar of talk-it-out, know-thyself, after coming this far just runs away and washes her hands of it.

And if that’s not a critique of the Prestige TV audience

kontextmaschine:

multiheaded1793:

memecucker:

you know theres some fanfics especially AUs where by the later part of the story it bears absolutely no resemblance to the original work in any meaningful way well DuckTales is basically that but for A Christmas Carol

reminder once again that the film Birth of a Nation, which inspired the formation of the Second Ku Klux Klan, was an adaptation of a sequel to a gritty AU/Confederate fix-it fic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a popular trend at the time

kontextmaschine:

we-are-legion-for-we-are-taco:

Oh my god

Cats and humans have gotten along for millennia, spaying and neutering them only started to become common in the first world in the 1970s.  (Which means when Bob Barker started ending Price is Right episodes by imploring people to spay and neuter their pets, it was still novel.)

Part of it’s back when the world was a lot more agricultural, cats tended to be considered more “allied local wildlife” than family members - you’d never even think of neutering the squirrels in your trees, would you? And farmers are not squeamish about killing animals for practical reasons.

Killing surplus kittens was considered a matter of proper, pro-social animal husbandry and “tied-off sack in a pond” was a well-recognized trope for this.

kontextmaschine:

micdotcom:

— Mikki Kendall, Neo-Nazis have threatened CNN employees’ families. Many writers already know what that’s like. (Opinion)

During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.

This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:

He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.

I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.

They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)

The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.

This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.

They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.

- Connecticut Journal, Nov. 20, 1775

kontextmaschine:

One thing about the ASoIAF books that had annoyed me was how as the series went on and GRRM filled in the cultural worldbuilding stuff, how much the religions - with the exception of the Old Gods, who are reskinned Germanic paganism - were riffs on Christianity.

The Faith of the Seven started off as kind of novel polytheism, but as the fluff grew it accumulated a heaven and hells and holy scripture and stained glass and a Pope High Stepton.

The religion of the Drowned God is Protestantism, with a focus on baptism (even arguments over the validity of infant baptism) and unlettered charismatic preachers inspired by life-changing rebirth experiences.

And the Red God gets the resurrection stuff, and the ritual sacrifice of a chosen son, and the angry/jealous “no god before me” stuff (there’s a bit of Zoroastrianism in there too, with the fire worship and the R’hllor/Great Other bit mirroring Spenta Mainyu/Angra Mainyu).

But I’ve actually come around on that a bit - one of the triggers was Rod Dreher wondering whether there’s actually anything distinct about cultural (as distinct from religious) Catholicism in America and asking whether there were any culturally Catholic writers, and and someone nominated GRRM.

(For the record I was raised nominally Irish Catholicish by my former altar boy father, taken to weekly masses, took communion but was asked not to come back to CCD before confirmation [as I had been asked not to come back to that parish’s school after kindergarden, as I had been kicked out of three preschools, as I probably would have been asked not to come back to public school if my father wasn’t the district’s lawyer], probably to the relief of both sides and to the bemusement of my mother, nominally German Protestant from a midcentury mainline tradition that didn’t so much believe in God as in being better than those filthy Papists)

Because I guess the thing about nonreligious Catholic identity is you can reject the idea that this mythology is true, that these divinities exist, that these doctrines are correct, that the notions of sin and salvation are important. But you’re faced with the fact that the Church itself was a real thing, something that existed and insinuated itself into every single aspect of life in Western culture, from thousands of years ago to, in pockets, the modern day, and if that can’t be attributed to inherent truth, than it demands otherwise accounting for.

And the whole schtick of the ASoIAF books is this feudal realism, making the point that so much fantasy confuses the legitimating myths of feudal society - chivalry, nobility, legitimacy by royal descent - for the actual mechanisms by which it operates, which were realpolitik as always. (I mean, I shouldn’t act so superior here, I used to be into the kind of civil libertarian constitutionalism that does the same thing with democratic society.) And as I thought about it, I realized that while GRRM parceled out bits of Christian doctrine amongst the religions, they had basically nothing to do with what things came to pass. But at the same time, he parceled out bits of Christian function which does.

The Faith of the Seven is the rule of Rome, entwined with the status quo system - kings are crowned and knights invested in their name, their preaching legitimating the state of things and shunting dissatisfaction into the promise of an afterlife. The election of the High Septa, nominally in the hands of the curia of the Most Devout, is subject to pressure from secular leadership. But for all that, their role as the repository of legitimacy, nominal in times of peace, can in times of misrule and fractured rule become an alternate power base to challenge secular authority. And however corrupt the institutional church is, it still produces, and as with the Sparrows occasionally falls into the hands of, people who really believe in the populist doctrines. In its ubiquity, it serves as a core around which the little people can organize and enforce their claims against the rule of warriors.

The Drowned God is Protestantism, yes, powered by individual charisma, but this lack of formal structure renders it vulnerable to subversion. Earnest born-again preacher Aeron Damphair, the most faithful, calls a revival meeting/kingsmoot with intention of inspiring a renewed faith, but in the end Euron Greyjoy the heretic wins the men over with his display of treasure, and promises of more to come. The charisma of piety competes on level ground with the charisma of strength and fortune, and loses, humble faith giving way to the gospel of wealth.

The Red God is I think the most interesting case - Christianity as experienced from the receiving end of a missionary effort. Arriving from a distant land, acquiring as patrons dissident nobility with with the promise of the weaponry to claim power in their own right - steel and gunpowder at various stages of Christian expansion, Melisandre’s shadow magic in the books. Particularly intriguing is the implication that there’s more at play than the new converts realize, that awed by the twinned display of power and demand for exclusive fidelity they lack the perspective to realize that the two are not actually related, and that their quest for dominion, if realized, would actually result in becoming a mere satrapy of a greater empire.

obiternihili:

zanbamon:

magicxmc27:

burloire:

rin-kaenbyou:

deaderidan:

basebasebasebasebaseknowledge:

micromanaging:

basedrubby:

jaegercraven:

thealexanderparable:

kenobi-wan-obi:

This is a GIF set of Astronauts falling on the Moon

aeiou

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

999999

holla holla get $

john madden john madden john madden john madden john madden 

here comes another chinese earthquake abrbrbrbrrbrbrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrrbbrrbrbbrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbbrbrrbbrbrrbrbrbrbbrrbbrbrbrrbrbbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrrbbrrbrbbrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbbrbrr

snake

snake

snakee

question mark exclamation point question mark exclamation point question mark exclamation point question mark exclamation point 

John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden

can you imagine what someone who has no idea what video is being referenced must think of this

what

kontextmaschine:

A Cheeky List of 90s Films About Fucking Teenagers!

With the Kavanaugh nomination fight we’re being reminded how openly exploitative ‘80s teen sex comedies were, full of nudity and what would now read as rape played for laughs!

But while young flesh may never have been as hot a commodity as the decade that saw top-line porn star Traci Lords revealed as 15 with a fake ID, and preteen sex symbol turned teen sex symbol Brooke Shields in her prime filming the “incestuous sexual awakening” movie Blue Lagoon naked, the ‘90s saw their fair share of adolescent sexuality, as the victorious young Pro- side of the Sexual Revolution inherited mainstream culture!

But with tumblr tots stumbling around scoffing that teenagers are MINORS, they’re SEXLESS INNOCENT UNDERAGE MINORS, we’ve obviously lost touch with the Miramax Age and need reminding, so check these out!

Aerosmith’s Alicia Silverstone Trilogy – “Cryin”, “Amazing”, “Crazy” (1993-1994)

When ‘70s groupie sex rockers Aerosmith looked to make a ‘90s comeback, they turned to the period’s leading art form - the music video. The music was bluesy crap, so good thing they had sexy sixteen-year-old actress Alicia Silverstone for these three videos!

Cryin’ – Tattoos, navel rings, flannel-clad teen suicide and bungee jumping! How ‘90s is that!

Amazing – A nerd uses video editing software to have VR motorcycle cybersex with the girl from the last video! How ‘90s is that!

Crazy – Catholic school girls playing hooky! Shoplifting! Stripping! Disrupting the farm economy! All with lesbian chic undertones! The other girl is lead singer/widemouth bass Steven Tyler’s 16-year-old daughter Liv in her breakthrough role! How ‘90s is that!

Mallrats (1995) – At one point the protagonists meet Trish “The Dish” Jones, a 15-year old representation of the transition from Kevin Smith’s burnout 80s adolescence to the new neurotic professional-bound model – she fucks a lot of guys, but diligently records it for a book she’s publishing (“Boregasm: A Study of ‘90s Male Sexual Prowess”) to feature on her college applications!

In the end this is how slacker Brodie beats the career-oriented-Ben-Affleck romantic rival who wants to steal his disaffected thus vulnerable girlfriend and fuck her in a very uncomfortable place: they interrupt a live filming of a dating show with the video of Ben Affleck having anal sex with her!

So he gets carted off for “statutory rape”, as if Trish weren’t the New Empowered Woman in control all along, serves him right for trying to play straight and uptight against the true “alternative” culture! So he gets thrown in prison! To be raped in the ass! All come no after Silent Bob slapstick slams through a changing room wall and sees some titties, and the boys go to a topless three-nippled fortune teller!

American Beauty (1999) - In this middlebrow masterpiece, dissatisfied Kevin Spacey wants to fuck his daughter’s cheerleader classmate, and has a famous fantasy sequence where rose petals fall on (and conveniently clump on) her naked body!

Meanwhile his daughter (Thora Birch)’s boyfriend makes a high school art video about a plastic bag so moving that she shows him her tits from adjacent bedroom windows in a scene I KNOW that “You Belong With Me” video director Roman White has seen!

Finally Kevin Spacey has a shot at the cheerleader and is like “nah, this is about my midlife crisis and it’s bullshit to put that on you”, then his Marine Corps neighbor kills him for not being gay enough!

Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) – in this coming-of-age film about class and belonging, Natasha Lyonne is a fourteen-year-old on the seedy edges of incredible wealth, complicated by the fact she’s horny as hell, just sprouted a huge pair of knockers, and it’s California in the ‘70s!

Dazed and Confused (1993) –That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I keep getting older, they stay the same age.”

In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!

Almost Famous (2000, cut me a break) – “Let’s deflower the kid!”

In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!

American Pie (1999) - not only does it have Jason Biggs fucking a pie, band geek Alyson Hannigan losing her virginity talking dirty, and a “secretly broadcast the exchange student as she changes” bit that goes overboard when she starts masturbating, but also Stifler’s Mom, the zipless Mrs. Robinson who introduced America to the term “MILF”!

The Virgin Suicides (1999) – adapted from an acclaimed novel, shot beautifully by Sofia Coppola and set to a diaphanous soundtrack by Air, this feature-length Lana Del Rey video sees three mid-70s teenage girls mess up a trio of teenage boys for life by killing themselves ‘cause their parents don’t want them to fuck!

Romeo + Juliet (1996) - the teens are less nude and explicit than the ‘68 Polanski version, but this contemporary-set, contemporary-scored, original-dialogue Shakespeare adaptation is just a really really good movie!

Calvin Klein Jeans campaign (1995) – they’d gone to this well before with 1980 ads with Brooke Shields purring “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (like panties!) but this mid-90s campaign used young models in an overexposed, wood-paneled basement responding to off-camera urging so as to evoke the aesthetics of child pornography, and were roundly protested by critics who apparently recognized the aesthetics of child pornography!

This was also the aesthetic of Fiona Apple’s 1996 Criminal video. Several years later these ads graduated from college and became American Apparel!

BONUS: Ghost World (2001) – From a graphic novel by Daniel Klowes, who with Klosterman and Kunkel was a backbone of the 2000s Brooklyn literary scene that inspired Achewood before it degenerated into girlblogging, a story of two outsider girls who meet in art class back when outsider girls dressed like Daria or Janeane Garafalo, and start sexually grooming a skeevy older man (Steve Buscemi)!

Scarlett Johansson plays a girl who hasn’t yet realized she’s Scarlett Johansson – in every scene you’re like “for a shirt that shows off what a great rack she has, it could show it off a lot better” – but for the second time in this list Thora Birch gets more action!

kontextmaschine:

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.

Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.

And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain foreign sovereigns through internal political pressure.

That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.

Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.

The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

kontextmaschine:

The Scotsman asked what was up with “African-American” as distinct from incidentally African “American” and I was like, “Ah, you want to understand race in America? First, you must learn everything.”

There are three classic topics in American history and they go

1. Race, huh?

2. Why no socialism?

3. The frontier, huh?

and basically the answer to any of those is the other two

(cont)

atomicdomme:

i love the tripartite division of the day into computer, beer, and moon

kontextmaschine:

So, thoughts about this Caitlin Flanagan article:

First, it’s kind of scattershot:

Hollywood is self-serving but at least Oprah lent this movement authentic legitimacy, but… post-Jezebel new media feminism has discredited it all by… posing women as vacuous drama-queen redpill stereotype flibbertigibbets… for example using the same breezy tone to discuss how terrible it is when men disregard your desires to use you as a sexual object and how sexy it is when men hold you down and use you as a sexual object… in the name of attention- and profit-seeking.

As such it REALLY resembles the common criticism that Caitlin Flanagan is more committed to the project of putting down #MeToo in the name of feminist principles than in any particular feminist principles themselves.

I was around and aware in the ‘90s for the last culture war, or at least the mopping-up operations, how part of that was coopt the appeal of “feminist” as an identity by propping up a (good, libertarian individualist) “equity feminism” against a (bad, left-identitarian) “gender feminism”. Like, we’re talking the exact same players from the old “Independent Women’s Forum” set, Caitlin Flanagan and Kaitie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Summers, don’t think I don’t notice that.

Second, if your goal WAS to squash the momentum of this “moment”, and I and everyone else saw a counterattack coming from the get go, this is probably the right time and point to strike. A few days prior the bluecheck goodthinkers were openly trying to threaten Harper’s over running a potentially critical piece on the media men list, clearly thought they still had command, but now moving on to the Ansari stuff, they’re just huffing and puffing to explain how actually, it’s not an issue, there’s no problem here.

Now I’m not going to say that “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” – as a descriptive statement I’m not sure that’s true, and as a normative one it’s anti-intellectual and obnoxious – but it is a sign that you’ve lost tempo, you’re not setting the terms of battle anymore, you’ll need a good push to get it back, and if they get one first you might have to retreat.

Third, you know what this reminds me of? The 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

A New York Times #1 bestseller made into a 1977 film with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, it was quite the conversation-starter but largely forgotten now because its concerns were so of-the-moment. That moment being the immediate aftermath of the sexual and feminist revolutions, figuring out how to incorporate the new “liberated woman” into society. New “fern”, or “singles” bars flourished as new places for people to meet for sex or companionship.

(Or rather, new places where respectable women could seek them on their own terms as patrons, rather than provisional guests or employees somewhere on the sex work spectrum.)

The plot of the book is basically this: a kindergarten teacher in New York City falls into the habit of trolling singles bars for men to have one-off masochistic sex with. That’s more or less it. I know I’ve said that before pornography was an established genre of its own, mass-market novels came a lot closer to erotica, maybe thinly masked as some sort of moral lesson, but it’s not stroke stuff. The sex isn’t that sexy or all that frequent, most of the time in between she just worries about her life - are her confidence and assertiveness too much? Too little? Is this an okay way to live? Are what she wants in bed and what she wants in life compatible?

If it’s any kind of exploitative pulp it’s true crime, starting off as an article about a 1973 killing in the Upper West Side, because the moral lesson is she gets straight-up murdered at the end.

She brings some new random home, he isn’t satisfying her so in the middle of things she just tells him to stop and leave. This is kind of presented as her finally, comfortably claiming agency. When he rolls off her and moves to finishing himself off she starts berating him, angry that he expects her to physically deal with his semen (and thematically, HIS sexual desire). Enraged, he chokes her to death with an electrical cord.

So yeah, that’s what I’m reminded of, the hit parable from the LAST time we went through this part of the cultural cycle:

“All this chase-your-desire sexual liberation is a way for women to degrade themselves as sex objects. And even if they do interpret it as empowering, they’ll mistake themselves as toe-to-toe equals with the bestial aggression of male sexuality and just get themselves hurt.”

yesterdaysprint:

Daily Mirror, London, March 4, 1939