I was gaping in awe at the elephant in the room during this interview with Paul H-O, an artist and art journalist who has made a documentary about his 5-year relationship with Cindy Sherman, in which he garners the world’s pity by dwelling on how hard it is to be overshadowed by the Great Artist. Finally, finally, the damn interviewer asked H-O the question that really should have been up towards the front, especially considering how Sherman’s art examines gender and therefore there’s no way you can’t just ignore the issue.
For centuries women have gotten used to being the second fiddle.
I know. I know what it’s like to be second fiddle, and I acknowledge my inferiority to the greater body. But then, I got tired of it. I’m sick of fabulous people. It’s just a bunch of gas being blown up everyone’s skirt. If Sean Penn doesn’t know who you are, he’s not going to blow smoke in your face, but I don’t have anything to say to him, either.
Then that’s it. They don’t discuss what struck me as the major issue—the very premise of H-O’s movie would be laughable if the genders were reversed. Not that women don’t get to biography relationships they’ve had with Great Artists, but in order to make it interesting, and especially to get people feeling sorry for you, you got to come up with more than, “Well, people tripped over me at cocktail parties to talk to the Great Artist,” or “His Rolodex was like ten times fatter than mine,” both of which are examples of what made H-O so fed up with the relationship he had to get out. Female partners of male Great Artists tend to get the public’s attention and sympathy if their partners are drunks, abusers, try to shoot them, steal their work and pass it off on their own, seduced them when there was a huge age difference, or were otherwise weird men that are hard to tolerate. If a woman dared tried to scratch out the tiniest complaint about being overshadowed, she’d probably be called a whiner, and probably rightfully so to a degree. (I mean, you know what you’re getting into with your Great Artist lover.) The proper role of women who are coupled with Great Artists is to be quietly supportive, to the degree that women who merely buck expectations by having careers of their own that shine in their own right—even if they are less talented or famous than their husbands—open themselves up as targets for misogynist scapegoating by the public. Think: Courtney Love or Yoko Ono.
Not that I’m trying to bash this guy. He’s not doing anything outrageously sexist or cruel. He doesn’t demonize Sherman, though that’s something that does well at the box office. But it’s the whole situation where he’s getting sympathy and attention because he’s a man that had a role—second banana—that’s reserved for women. I don’t think he’d be getting attention otherwise.
Aliza Shvarts’ little hoax-art is really doing a bang-up job of compelling people to indulge their misogyny. Check out the comments at Alternet. Everyone is immediately “diagnosing” her as “attention-seeking”. Which says more about society’s expectations of female behavior—that women are best seen and not heard—than about her mental health.
At least she’s making a political statement. G.G. Allin was just an asshole, he was openly violent towards others, and I still have never heard him diagnosed as “attention-seeking”.
Update: Kathryn Joyce emailed me this and confirmed my suspicions. Now onto a favorite right wing strategy of arguing—don’t admit you were wrong in the first place, but just move the goal posts. I’m sure they’ll start saying she was a bad person to do this, instead of realizing that she totally pwned their paranoid asses.
A ton of people have been emailing me this story about a woman who supposedly self-aborted a number of embryos and kept them as an art project. Conservatives like Drudge have been going nuts, but if they gave it one moment’s thought, they’d realize that this story is so not true. I’ll give you a hint why:
If self-aborting were safe, easy, and relatively painless, that object above would not be an emblem of the pro-choice movement. We pretty much wouldn’t need the right to medical abortion if it were that easy. But simple self-abortions is what this art project would need to exist.
Lindsay has a more in-depth analysis.
(1) Julie Taymor is a genius (and perhaps even a Super Genius) who
(2) has the most striking and inventive visual imagination of, like, anybody ever and
(3) I’m just guessing here, but on stage and screen, “directors” tend to be “guys,” and if Julie Taymor were a “guy” I betcha millions more people would know (1) and (2). Not that she isn’t acclaimed or anything; she is. I believe she was the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical, and she has her share of devoted fans. But still. You get my point, I’m sure.
Immediately after the “Seattle Sound” was supposed to come the “Portland Sound”, as Sub Pop and want-to-be-indie major labels combed the city for the Next Nirvana. Every time we attended a Hazel, Heatmiser, Sprinkler, Thirty Ought Six (can’t find the video I used to have, dammit!), or Crackerbash show we always said “you know, this may be the last time we hear these guys in a small club.”
Quick, if you’re not from Portland: Remember any of those bands? Didn’t think so. Heatmiser gave us Elliott Smith, and Sam Coomes of Quasi. Hazel gave us Jody Bleyle of Team Dresch. And if you’ve heard of the latter two, you’re approaching IMS territory, anyway. But we weren’t the only ones who thought so; all the big music magazines were profiling our little burg, trying to get out in front of the trend. I guess they got too far out in front, eh?
It’s entertaining to read, circa 15 years later, how Portland is “America’s Indie Rock Mecca”. Only this time, according to the author, it’s not because Portlanders themselves are creative, or anything.
[U]nlike, say, Seattle’s grunge boom in the ’90s or the Bay Area’s recent hyphy movement, Portland has neither a distinctive “sound” nor a “scene” to speak of. Sonically, there’s not a whole lot that the twisty pop of the Shins has in common with the “hyper-literate prog-rock” (to borrow a phrase from Stephen Colbert) of the Decemberists. And virtually none of these groups can be considered “Portland bands” since, with very few exceptions, they all moved to town after gaining some level of fame. (Generally speaking, it’s rare to meet a young, creative Portlander who’s from Portland.)
Eat me.
I like most of our Portland bands, even the transplanted ones. (Frank Black/Black Francis lived here for awhile and is now in Eugene, by the way.) And I love my city. But the fact that the big stars live here doesn’t have anything to do with the health of our “scene” (and although I’m too busy to actually participate in it with the frequency I’d prefer, I still love it.) If you haven’t heard Helio Sequence, Stars of Track and Field, talkdemonic, Dat’r, Menomena, et al., then you’re to one extent or another missing out.
Dammit.
(Link via Liberal Avenger.)
I think the internets are trying to tell me something
Existential crisis courtesy of Lindsay, whose original photo is beautiful, if your life story is better than mine.
Do not let your lying eyes deceive you—this is no painting!
Leonard at Sadly, No has documented the perfect storm of wingnuttery that emerges at The Corner when it’s a slow news day. He has many, many examples, so check it out if you want a good laugh. But this particular one from John J. Miller might be my favorite, since he manages to invoke so many conservative bugaboos in such a short post.
Perpetrator of Communism Memorial [John J. Miller]
Less than a month after the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts is opening a new exhibit on Frida Kahlo. She was, of course, an unrepentant Stalinist whose paintings carried titles such as “Marxism Will Heal the Sick.” By the way, the NMWA isn’t in Pyongyang or Havana. Here’s the bizarre part: The museum thinks it will attract visitors because the exhibit includes “a new collection of images … of Kahlo’s private bathroom at the Casa Azul and its contents.” This isn’t an art exhibit—it’s a shrine, to a woman in the thrall of a murderous ideology.
You can just imagine the first draft of the post:
I hereby declare war on the banality of your anti-war art. Your decades-old, sing-songy, boring-ass copy and imagery. Yeah, I’m looking at you. There’s no reason for it. Especially when all this glorious goodness is yours for the taking.
I swear to the disco ball that I just thought of this video three days ago:
and wondered when I might get a reason to post it (more than just “It’s Tom Waits!”). I didn’t have to wait long.
A chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ that’s caused an uproar after it was scheduled to be displayed to the public in a Manhattan hotel’s gallery during Easter week will no longer be on exhibit, New York City CBS television station WCBS-TV has confirmed…
Cavallaro says Catholics shouldn’t be offended by the chocolate creation. “I’m doing it as a celebration of Christ. It’s food, it’s nurturing, it’s sweet, there’s nothing menacing about it,” he told WCBS-TV. “It tastes great. I love it and it’s all about taste for me — if I can taste it before I can touch it — on a religious object, on an inanimate object, on anything.”
Yeah, Catholics weren’t offended in the least. Right, Bill Donohue?
“This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group. “It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.”
WORST ASSAULT EVER! Worse even than the crucifixion itself! As for the timing, according to the web site, Chocolate Jesus (known as “I Did It, Daddy”) was created in 2005. Takes awhile for the outrage to build sufficiently, I suppose. (Although I haven’t discovered where else the sculpture has been exhibited.)
There is no word yet as to what Cavallaro plans to do with the sculpture now.
Yeah, it’s a mystery.
I’ve invited Michael Bérubé to be a weekend poster at Pandagon, having dug him out of his post-nuclear fireball bomb shelter. Hi, Michael!
Wednesday’s J*ff G*ldst*in hilarity dissolved into a nerdfest (probably won’t be the last time, as long as I’m around) about comics; specifically Y: The Last Man. This post scores low on the timeliness scale; the series started, and established most of its themes, in 2002, but it’s winding down now and if I don’t hurry and write the post I’ve been kicking around, even fewer people will care than are going to care now (at least until someone exercises their movie option).
Disclaimers: 1) Spoilers will, by necessity, abound; 2) I am aware that other comic book fanpeople have already written about this series long ago, and I haven’t read most of those. I would imagine others will have touched on many of the themes I’m going to bring up, but we’ll survive; 3) Yes, it is worth spending this much time on a comic book, in certain cases, so please don’t ask incredulously.
(more…)
This is the Orgasmatron 3000 by Dominic Wilcox. Ann at Feministing has posted on it. My question: who has a leather-bound washing machine?
As for its ostensible double purpose, I can’t help but note that a man clearly designed this. Not because it insinuates that the gender that uses washing machines is solely the kind that orgasms from straddling vibrating things. It’s obviously a cheeky comment on that stereotype, anyway. No, it’s because it looks so damn uncomfortable. Anyone who tried to use it would either blow out a knee or have deep indentions inside her thighs.
The question is, since it’s about inducing women to do more laundry, do you think we might make it legal in Texas?
Oh Great Cat, I can’t believe the whole controversy over the rape song in “The Fantasticks” is getting dredged up again. I usually just shake my pom-poms at the fine ladies at Feministing, but in this case I have to disagree. I think that taking the song “The Rape Song” out of the play and replacing it with the inferior tune “Abductions” is a really bad idea.
A bit of background here before I explain my reasons: I did a lot of small town theatre stuff when I was in high school and I worked as the director’s assistant when we finally worked up the courage to do “The Fantasticks”. Our director was a feminist-minded woman (her follow-up show to this had a joke in it about consciousness raising and demanding that a husband learn what the clitoris was, which caused some amount of fluttering in the audience) and I think the reason she hesitated to do the show in our conservative small town was because of the rape song, but also because the play has a somewhat subtle and complex theme for a light musical, which is things are not what they seem and that reality is a lot messier than melodrama and other things of that nature.
In all truth, I don’t think it’s that great a play. The theme of unveiled illusions and anti-sentimentality falls apart as the writers tack on a feel-good second half that is, well, kind of sentimental. But the first part of the piece, with the rape song in it, works pretty well. The play opens with a couple of young lovers who meet in secret because their fathers, who are neighbors, hate each other. But you soon find out that the fathers actually are best friends and are only pretending to hate each other to get their kids to rebel and fall in love. They fear the kids aren’t moving fast enough, and the boy needs some more courage to propose so they hire a guy to stage a fake abduction of the girl so the boy can rescue her, and the fathers can pretend to make up and happily ever after. The first indication, though, that they can’t turn real life into a pretty fairy story comes when the guy they hire sings about what he’s selling:
You can get the rape emphatic.
You can get the rape polite.
You can get the rape with Indians:
A very charming sight.
You can get the rape on horseback;
They’ll all say it’s new and gay.
So you see the sort of rape
Depends on what you pay.
It depends on what you
Pay.The kids will love it.
It depends on what you pay!
So why be stingy?
It depends on what you –
The way I always read it was the song was supposed to shock the audience out of their complacency, was supposed to remind people that the melodramatic storylines in so many action movies and shows where the pretty young woman is taken by the creepy older man only to be rescued by the virtuous hero are storylines based around rape. The fathers in the play are initially shocked, of course. They just want his to enact the melodrama, you know, where the guy steals the girl…..oh yeah, to rape her. We ignore that part and focus on the rescue. This play is making a comment on that cliche of how the attempted rape in melodrama is not about rape at all, but an excuse to give the hero a moment to shine.
Jess’s point, that rape has two meanings and can mean “abduction” is the excuse that the hired gun of the play hides behind. But it doesn’t and has never really had two meanings. The hired gun tells the fathers he means a literary rape, but the fact of the matter is the term “literary rape” makes as much sense as “literary murder”. Yes, rape and murder are plots of stories but that’s because they’re drawn from real life. When Hades makes off with Persephone, he’s not stealing her from her mother in order to play checkers with her. But at some point in time, it became taboo to have sex in stories while violence stayed, so the cliched rape in melodrama doesn’t even have a rape in it, but tying the victim to railroad tracks or what have you. In other words, the violence of rape is deemed acceptable, but the sex not, which has the ugly side effect of making the audience minimize the horror of rape—oh, she’s just being kept in the back room until Indiana Jones arrives. Hey, the villian might waggle his tongue at her, but the rape victim never gets raped in stories. It’s probably because people turn so much on rape victims that showing a heroine in actual danger of rape might make the audience unsympathetic.
I think the original point of the song was that it was the first indicator that our belief in romantic stories is dangerous and misguided. Staging a rape is a horrible idea, and sure enough, even though the plan works initially, things begin to fall apart as reality intrudes on the fairy story. Replacing the word “rape” with the word “abductions”, as has been done in this updated version of “The Fantasticks”, removes this element of unease and undermines the theme of the play. After all, if they’re supposed to be telling a story of illusions shattered, then why do they work to preserve the illusion that villians just abduct women to give the hero something to do?
The ‘Presidential Bust’ of Hillary Clinton. I think I’ll leave the commenting to you all.
The nude study of Senator Hillary Clinton used in creating her first portrait as U.S. President is featured in a documentary now viewable at YouTube.com, the net’s leading video download site. “Hillary’s Bust“, an eight-minute short produced by Goodnight Film, reveals the sexy origins of a statue of the former First Lady planned for display at New York’s Museum of Sex. The film contains the only footage taken of an unclothed preparatory study of Hillary Clinton’s upper torso used for developing the heroic-scaled “Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: First Woman President of the United States of America.”
The documentary reports Hollywood actor Sharon Stone’s recent statements regarding Mrs. Clinton’s potential White House bid as inspiration for her Presidential portrait. The bust’s creator, Daniel Edwards, points out that during the promotion of her most recent Basic Instinct film, Stone sparked a sexual power debate with, “I think it is too soon for her to run. This may sound odd, but a woman should be past her sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power and I don’t think people will accept that. It’s too threatening.”
“I’ve depicted Hillary Clinton in the traditional manner as befits the head of state — with head held high and face matured with wisdom,” says Edwards, “but with unmistakable ’sexual power’ as a nod to Sharon Stone.” The bust prominently portrays Mrs. Clinton’s cleavage spilling from a lacy, low-cut inaugural gown with her bare shoulders enhanced by a “delicate” nape.
Today’s random ten is dedicated to Arthur Simone, whose ad above has a link to his website. He’s a New Orleans artist who’s relocated to Austin and how he obtained this post dedication is that my friend Shannon had a fundraiser for a comedy festival and we auctioned off one Friday Random Ten for Pandagon at the auction. Arthur was the winner and I’m super glad, as his artwork is purty and there was that random fear that the winner of the post would not give me a purty image.
Ten songs from the iPod shuffle. You know what to do.
- “Down on the Street”—Iggy Pop
- “Suspicious Minds”—Elvis Presley
- “So Mystifying”—The Jay Jays
- “Rainbows in the Dark”—Tilly and the Wall
- “Mystery Train”—Little Junior’s Blue Flames
- “Crazy”—Gnarls Barkley
- “Cars Can’t Escape”—Wlico
- “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken”—Camera Obscura
- “I Want My Woman”—The Emperors
- “Let Me Make You Happy”—The Superiors
Leave your random ten in comments and discuss painting or what have you. Turns out that Arthur and I were trying to arrange this post at a crosshairs and it took 3 weeks because we both were in NYC. Here’s hoping he got a shot to check out the badass Dada exhibit at the MOMA. That exhibit rocked my socks off.
Bad news in music: Arthur Lee has passed. Ross has more. Music for Robots has an MP3 up of “Everybody’s Gotta Live”.
Piny has a post up about the controversy over Diane Arbus’ life and photography. Every time I read about this particular controversy, I’m put in mind of the low rent version, the controversy over the movie Freaks. (Which appears to be out on DVD; I should buy a copy.) The essence of the controversy over Arbus’ work and over this movie is the same—does the work exploit or humanize? Arbus was the beneficiary of the wide berth given to people who are accepted by the establishment as Artists, whereas the director of Freaks, Tod Browning, was regarded with suspicion because he was a horror film director. (Most notably of Dracula, which was a big commercial success and therefore the reason that Browning got a green light to make Freaks.) The film was derided, censored, and driven underground for a long time and some years ago it began to make a resurgence some years back. (The 70s, I think, considering that the Ramones wrote the song “Pinhead” after seeing it at a revival show. I’m sure Arbus’ popularity probably fed this revival.) If you haven’t seen it, this write-up here is a solid overview.
So is the movie exploitative or humanizing? Well, the only real answer is “both”. Browning hired real freaks to be in the movie, which brings up the typical mixed feelings. On one hand, it was intended to be a marketing move, the film version of the very freak shows the movie portrays. On the other hand, it comes across as a lot better than the alternative of having “normal” people play these characters while wearing costumes and make-up, because their humanity is all the more real to the audience. To make it even harder to parse out, the movie is mostly a bunch of scenes showing the freaks going about their daily business, which is definitely intended to humanize the characters to the audience, though the success of this choice is somewhat mixed. The best bit of business is when one Siamese twin kisses her boyfriend and the other one feels it and smiles. But Browning can’t resist stuffing the movie with a bunch of gratutious scenes that are more freak show than just set-in-a-freak-show.
Via Robert Farley, Jonathan Korman writes:
And whether your movie is a documentary or screwball comedy or a thriller, you must maintain a disciplined focus on where you are going, what you are doing. If something doesn’t make your point in a documentary or make you laugh in a comedy or move the plot in a thriller, then you must cut it for the sake of the health of the film. Prose writers understand this, and so one of the great adages of writing is “murder your darlings,” because the greatest threats to the structure of your work are the bits you love too much.
And this is even more true in film than in prose, because film is a very unforgiving medium. The ideal running time for a feature film is 100 minutes, which if you think about it is very little time. Break down your favourite film sometime, and you’ll see that it probably has less than a dozen real scenes, plus a few little bits of glue holding it together—and the better the film, the less of that mortar you’ll find between the bricks of the major scenes. In that short time, you must control the pace every single minute. If you kill the pace—if events drag and you lose interest, or if things get rushed and you cannot follow what’s happening, or if the focus goes to the wrong place and you’re so intersted in what’s happening to offscreen characters that you’re frustrated by what the film is showing you now—then you poison, or even kill, the whole movie. Conversely, mastery of pace will sustain a film that might otherwise disintegrate. Think of the fast pace of Lola Rennt, the languid pace of Apocalypse Now, or anything Hitchcock ever did.
I think I rather strongly disagree with this notion. I guess it’s not a bad rule of thumb in a way, and I could see how it applies to a documentary or otherwise didactic work. And it seems to make sense for strictly genre work. But that’s hardly the high-water mark of expression.
I think my first problem is a conflation of pace with structure. If we criticize Michael Moore for superfluous moments in his documentaries, we’re criticizing the structure, but not the pace, are we not? (And if we criticize him for haranguing Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, I’m not sure if we’re even critizing the structure).
But overwhelmingly I’m opposed to the idea that every element of a narrative work must be essential to the work. This is similiar to Checkov’s dictum I suppose, which I always thought of as artificially confining, and a rather outdated view of writing fiction. And in fact, reliance or disregard for this rule does not seem to reliably point to quality work.
I think Korman himself buttresses this point with his conclusion that Out of Sight is a better movie than Magnolia. I mean, I don’t know, you can differ, but that seems a little crazy to me. I thought Magnolia was a great movie. A sprawling, messy, unevenly-paced yet riveting mess of a movie. While Out of Sight was enjoyable, well crafted pulp. Which goes to show, I guess, a difference in the way we consume movies. But I don’t think I could ever understand a person who’s main avenue of criticism was structure, naw mean?
And I mean are you to tell me that every moment in Apocalypse Now was truly necessary?
I think the larger point is not so much the discipline to exclude that which is not necessary. I do think there’s a lesson to learn in terms of editing in here, but I don’t see a hard and fast rule. It’s more complicated than that, and can only be expressed in some sort of tautalogy: Only cut that which should be cut, or somesuch. But I don’t think there’s a universally applicable ideology to imbue in that “should.”
And is it really the rabbit lady in Roger & Me that rubs us the wrong way about Michael Moore? I mean I’ll admit there’s something about him that bugs me. But I don’t think it’s a lack of discipline.
How cool is this? The Blanton Art Museum is opening this weekend and Pong is playing the Saturday night show. Definite must-see. Oh yeah, and the museum, too.
Speaking of cool bands to party down to, for B-52s fans like me, Pepper has a video up of them performing “Rock Lobster” back when they were first starting out. Definitely worth it just to see Fred Schneider go bananas on the cowbell.
“Why would anyone even bring up the issue (of the statues) in a country where there are more than 10 state-owned institutions that teach sculpting and more than 20 others that teach the history of art??
– Gamal al-Ghitani, magazine editor asking the obvious question as the fundies launch a morality campaign against statues and scuptors
Good grief. Another feather in the cap of religious extremism, this time in Egypt.
A fatwa issued by Egypt’s top religious authority, which forbids the display of statues has art-lovers fearing it, could be used by Islamic extremists as an excuse to destroy Egypt’s historical heritage.
Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the country’s top Islamic jurist, issued the religious edict which declared as un-Islamic the exhibition of statues in homes, basing the decision on texts in the hadith (sayings of the prophet).
Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, also says the use of Qur’anic verses as cellphone ringtones as insulting to Islam,Intellectuals and artists argue that the decree represents a setback for art — a mainstay of the multi-billion-dollar tourist industry — and would deal a blow to the country’s fledgling sculpture business. The fatwa did not specifically mention statues in museums or public places, but it condemned sculptors and their work.
“We don’t rule out that someone will enter the Karnak temple in Luxor or any other pharaonic temple and blow it up on the basis of the fatwa,? Gamal al-Ghitani, editor of the literary Akhbar al-Adab magazine, told AFP.
…Gomaa had pointed to a passage from the hadith that stated: ?Sculptors would be tormented most on Judgment Day,? saying the text left no doubt that sculpting was “sinful? and using statues for decorating homes forbidden.
…Ghitani added: “It’s time for those placing impediments between Islam and innovation to get out of our lives.?
Lest we laugh at the idiocy of this latest nonsense, it’s only been a short while since the boobage of the Spirit of Justice statue was covered up in the Justice Department by John Ashcroft because it offended him.
I blame Jill. Sure, she looks all sweet and nice, but deep down inside, she has an evil knack for reminding me to check out stuff that’s sure to make my eyes bug out in shock. Recently, she did it again by reminding me to check out Dawn Eden’s blog, which I haven’t done for awhile. Well, I’m sorry I’ve been out of the loop for awhile, because that means this must-blog item is about a month out of date. No matter–you will still find it funny.
As I’m sure regular readers are aware, I’m a big fan of reading between the lines, symbolically speaking. I’m loathe to dash to the “just a cigar” excuse too soon, but I fear this is one of those cases where I must. Witness these pieces of jewelry:
In case these necklaces haven’t properly appalled you at the gruesome sight of them, let me explain–these are actually made of expired birth control pills and are being sold by the demonic Planned Parenthood to raise money to help people plan their parenthood. Dawn sees tragedy where the rest of us see “cute”.
I find it ironic that Planned Parenthood is attempting to market oral-contraceptive jewelry by associating it with the plant world—particularly the “pod.” Peas in the pod are flora’s most popularly cited equivalent to pregnancy. It’s as though Planned Parenthood implicitly realizes that the concept of nascent life is what sells products to women — even products that celebrate self-imposed sterility.
It would be a low blow to point out that Dawn is childless. I’ll make that low blow, because she’s a big meanie who’s made it her life’s mission to take her pissed offness about being childless on Planned Parenthood. Why all the single, bitter folks in the anti-choice movement can’t pair off and start procreating and leave the rest of us out of it already, I will never know. And this, I think, is why some of us are just fascinated by the angry hoardes of childless anti-choicers. You’d honestly think that every time one of us contracepting feminist sorts swallows a birth control, we’re denying a perfect stranger an opportunity to get pregnant.
Dawn better watch that logic, though. I’m a willfully childless woman and I love me some flowers. If I wanted, I could reverse the logic on her and say, “Hey, maybe if you embraced your true calling and learned to garden some, you won’t resort to openly longing to get pregnant and lashing out at those of us who’d rather not.” Because the truth is that children aren’t substitute plants; they are very expensive substitute pets. I suggest a dog or a cat to avoid the nasty fate of carrying on about babies as if they were a rare commodity on a planet with 7 billion people.
Looks like the artist below is a prankster, as many of us hoped. I hope to god he actually did take money from the anti-choicers, then.
Added: My first thought on this was that it was a joke, but part of me was loathe to be so small-minded as to assume straightaway that anyone with that amount of talent must be a liberal.
I don’t know what the fuck this picture is about. Anti-Racism maybe? I dunno. I hate both legos and jigsaw puzzles. One being the province of little kids, and I dunno… nerds? And the other being the simple tragic joy of widows unable to afford to buy yarn on their limited incomes, what with the steeply rising healthcare costs and all. If that makes me racist, so be it. But I do happen to believe that legos and jigsaw puzzles can happily co-exist on this planet. Apparently the creaters of this image have a different opinion. Apparently they believe legos and jigsaw puzzles are doomed to remain segregated. That’s some glass-half-full thinking, my friends. But that is their wont. I’m nothing if not tolerant of the viewpoints of others. Am I right friends?
But via Dadahead, Michelle Malkin says of it “If you can’t see the poster for the Islamist-pandering piece of propaganda that it is, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
Umm, yeah…
[insert “unhinged” joke here/read Auguste]
I am beyond Michelle Malkin’s help. But that’s okay.
On the other hand, this is a pretty cool image… about the deficit or something.
I know you’re probably a lot like Blue Girl, thinking to yourself that with the “longer term maturities now having gradually increased in yield… [you] don’t seem to worry about the federal deficit at all.”
But it’s still a pretty hot image. And you’re probably thinking to yourself a “finely engraved, highly conceptual lithograph” of such an image autographed by the artist would look great on the walls of either my living room or bathroom or guest bedroom or perhaps to “class up” one of your friend’s spartanly decorated homes.
And you know what?
That’s so true.
And the good news is, you can now purchase one for the low-price of ten dollars American. Details here.
The opening was last night, which I missed due to the BlogHer stuff and various other taking Roxanne around downtown things, but the show is still going on–a Biscuit retrospective at Gallery Lombardi. One of the organizers sent me this sample picture:
If you like funny stuff or cluttered, colorful stuff–and anyone worth knowing should–then check it out.
