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Men Who Hate Men Who Hate Women

Last month the book club I joined read Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I have a few things to say about it.

SPOILER ALERT. Those who have not read or are in the middle of the novel will not want to read this post.

Perhaps I have a hitherto unknown proclivity for mystery novels, as I really got into the mystery of Harriet Vanger's disappearance in TGWTDT. But I found the resolution of the mystery a little anticlimactic, and Harriet's miraculous reappearance at the end was a bit hard for me to swallow.

A friend who heard I was reading the novel told me, "I didn't like it, because I felt like Larsson was a misogynist." Now, it's true that the original Swedish title of the book translates literally to Men Who Hate Women. But would someone who really hated women give his book that title? I didn't feel that Larsson was a woman-hater, reading the novel....a womanizer, maybe. What I did feel was that his female characters were two-dimensional. I found it hard to believe in them as real human beings. Maybe, for a variety of interesting reasons, it's difficult for a straight man to create convincing female characters. (Though certainly not impossible.) To make a comparison - last month my book club read Patricia Highsmith's novel (and Hitchcock film inspiration) Strangers on a Train. I felt that Highsmith was much better at creating believable male characters than Larsson is at creating believable female ones.

Lisbeth Salander, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, was the sort of angsty, angry, tattooed, pierced, antisocial alternative girl-fox that I've encountered so many of in my adventures through the various alternative scenes and subcultures of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. And the way Larsson created her in his book, she had more in common with an adolescent boy than with most women I know, which could lead to an interesting psychoanalysis of the author, which I will refrain from attempting, because as an author myself I know that shit is annoying. The additional element of Salander being a brilliant computer whiz, hacker and personal background-checker - sort of an idiot savant amateur private investigator - was also a little tough to take, but not completely beyond the bounds of credibility.

I am in the middle of watching the film version of TGWTDT right now on Netflix. For the most part it remains faithful to the novel, so far, but there's something a bit lackluster about watching a film version of a mystery novel for whose mystery you already know the answer.

The God Question.....and the GlamRockTiger Answer

I want to be a good strictly rational scientific agnostic/pantheist, but I'm also drawn to mysticism at times. So I've decided: From now on on WEEKDAYS I will quote Richard Dawkins, scoff at those who read horoscopes and openly mock followers of organized religion. (You can mock me back...that's fair.)

On WEEKENDS I will express expansive feelings that "SOMETHING is out there," delve into tarot cards and numerology, and possibly even attend a Sunday Celebration at Glide Memorial.

As for HOLIDAYS....on Holidays I will just be drunk, and God, whether he exists or not, will be irrelevant.

The pope's comeuppance?

Atheist authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to arrest the Pope when he visits England in mid September. Wow...if they were to pull this off, it would be such a media spectacle. Godspeed you, my friends, I wish you the utmost success! Lord knows I would love to see that sick, creepy, pompous little degenerate get his comeuppance!

Chinese Laughter

Tonight I again attended one of my favorite events, Pub Trivia at the Presidio Cafe. It was so much fun. We just missed placing in the top three this time. I didn't drink a drop of alcohol. And still I'm so glad I went.

I have a team, and they are a fun group. One or two change each week, but there is a stable core of which I am, or am becoming, a part. We learn, we laugh, we eat fairly decent food, some of us drink, some of us don't. And usually we come in the top three.

I now know that the Statue of Liberty is the heaviest statue in the world, the U.S. is the biggest exporter of grain in the world, and the first woman to climb Mt. Everest was Japanese.

Although there seems to be some debate over which country has the largest standing army - China or North Korea.

I joined the team thanks to Bay Area Linkup.

On the bus ride home I watched the Chinese people enjoying a joke together. Even though I didn't understand a word of it, seeing them laugh, I laughed too. Which reminded me how unimportant spoken language can be to communication.

Bouncer Redux

Katy St. Clair got a bunch of hate mail in last week's SF Weekly for her previous "Bouncer" column in which she dared to question gay men's musical taste, based on the bland, formulaic, so-not-rock-and-roll music that is played in typical gay clubs. I thought she had a good point. And this week's "Bouncer" is really good, too. And really funny.

"No one wants to drink alone. Except George Thorogood."

"I was like a ronin grandma: I get to play with kids and then hand them over to their parents after about 40 minutes."

"All of this reuniting was of course facilitated by Facebook, that site we all love to hate, but check several times daily."

There's a part about how good babies smell, which includes this:

David's 11-year-old daughter thought this was weird. "He doesn't smell good!" she laughed.

"Oh, indeed he does," I said, like a wise old sage on the mountaintop. "When you get older, you take the time to stop and smell the babies." She nodded, no doubt edified by my wisdom.

Read the whole column here.

My version of AA's Serenity Prayer...

God grant me
The profanity to bitch about the things I cannot change,
The fierceness to change the things I can,
And the sexiness to know the difference

nightmarevolution

Also at Another Hole in the Head last night (see previous entry) I saw Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. This is a really great documentary on the evolution of the horror film, starting in 1910 with the first silent film version of Dracula and continuing up to modern times, when many people are turning away from American horror films because they've just become a contest to see who can be the sickest, most graphic and sadistic. It touches on SO many films and places each in its proper chronological context. It's similar in tone and style to the IFC films documentary The American Nightmare that I love (and own a copy of), but much more ambitious and exhaustive in scope, and features new interviews by horror greats like John Carpenter, Joe Dante and George Romero.

"What does it take to kick people in the ass hard enough to wake up?" Romero asks at one point, discussing the post-Sept. 11th American political landscape.

Also one of the commentators makes note of the fact that, when you meet the men who make horror films - Carpenter, Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Eli Roth, etc - they are peaceful men, not mentally disturbed in a violent way, intelligent, politically active, liberal. "These men," the commentator states, "open themselves up to all the things other people repress, and it's the people who repress those things you have to worry about."

Good point!

Strange Symbol

Tonight, volunteering for San Francisco's horror/sci fi/cult film festival, "Another Hole in the Head," I saw a fantastic, and fantastically strange, film: Hitoshi Matsumoto's 2009 cinematic mindfuck Symbol. (A few years back he made a splash with Big Man Japan, which I missed but will see soon.)

This was one of the weirdest and most unpredictable films I've seen in recent memory. And the only one I've ever seen whose main plot elements include sushi, a man trapped in a seemingly holographic room, a toilet plunger, a key, a rope, a Mexican pro wrestler named Escargot Man, and....baby penises.

LOTS of baby penises.

I said afterwards, "That movie is a work of genius." Warped, surely - but isn't that so often true of genius?

A Taiwanese kid, a fellow volunteer, said he thinks Matsumoto was indebted to Stanley Kubrick and that the finale was a sort of homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can sort of see that, in the ending sequence.

Anyway, if you want your mind blown by something truly strange, I recommend checking out Symbol. If you're in San Francisco, it plays one more time - on Saturday the 24th, at Viz Cinema - as part of Another Hole in the Head!

Dogshit galore

J.F.C., does EVERYONE in San Francisco own a dog?

That adds up to a lot of dogshit.

By the way, if one more person tells me that dogs are loving and cats are cold and selfish, I'm going to throw fresh dogshit at them.

You can look at dogs and see that they're loving...I see them as needy and constantly in need of validation. Whereas cats, rather than being selfish and disinterested, are merely more secure in who they are.

Basically, human-dog relationships are more codependent.

Yes, this is a generalization and not true of all dogs (or all cats).

But, on the flip side - Yes, there are people who get crazy and "hoard" their cats, and end up with way too many of them, but that stereotype is of a mental illness that by no means represents the vast majority of people who own cats.

There are more domesticated cats in the U.S. than there are dogs.

Although you wouldn't know it here in my city!

Where the Wild Things Weep

“I like the way you destroy stuff, good technique, there’s a spark to your work that can’t be taught.”

So says one of the Wild Things to Max in the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. I fancy the makers of this film had high hopes of it being something like the Wizard of Oz of our time. Spike Jonze directed; Dave Eggers co-wrote the screenplay; Tom Hanks is a co-producer. Catherine Keener plays Max's careworn mother. The Wild Things - portly, ramshackle muppet-monsters - are voiced by well-known actors like James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano. And the soundtrack features songs by Karen O and various other musical hip-stars. It's all very cool. And it's awfully emo. There's a lot of intimate talking, sharing of secrets, sensitivity to other peoples' shortcomings. There are times when it feels like a therapy session. I enjoyed it, but it didn't have quite the impact I wanted. Whether that's due to the shortcomings of the film or to my own status as a jaded, cynical adult, I can't say for sure.

Generally, when adapting a book into a film, I think it's best to maintain as much fidelity as possible to the source material. The problem with this film, of course, is that the source material is a slim, succinct children's book with nowhere near enough dialogue or action to fill an hour-and-a-half movie. The screenwriters had to fill all that extra space with their own imaginations, and unfortunately, their imaginations aren't nearly equal to that of Maurice Sendak.

I was going to say "Jim Henson has nothing on the Wild Things," but then I read this article stating that it was the Jim Henson Creature Shop that was behind their creation. Call it a muppet monopoly!

One gripe: the film missed my favorite detail about the book as a child: the way Max's room grows, over the course of three pages, into a moonlit forest wilderness!

Tosh-point-Bullshit

There's a new media "personality" who has displaced both Perez and Paris Hilton as the most noisome, aggravating, idiotic and annoying figure on television...it's Daniel Tosh, whose "comedy" seems to be really thriving on Comedy Central of late. (I run into it when I flip to that channel early to watch The Daily Show.) He is German. He is physically attractive. He is hot. But his material is absolutely moronic and his comments on it drag it even lower than it is to begin with. And his audience and their stupid canned laughter seem so fake. Why is this guy still on ANY channel, let alone Comedy Central, which is supposed to specialize in things that are actually funny? His jokes and video clips are all of the lamest, most anti-intellectual, sensational variety, and his comments on them are so insipid they make Joel McHale on The Soup look like a genius. Is this an experiment to see how low American audiences are willing to go?

Pop culture does NOT have to be brainless tabloid fodder with absolutely no redeeming artistic value. The great thing about Pop Art was the ART.

It's shit like this that makes me mourn the loss of great comedians of the past like Richard Pryor and George Carlin all the more.

Here comes the fog again...

Some people who live in San Francisco complain about the fog, but those people are fools. The fog is one of my favorite things about this beautiful city - and there's no shortage of things to like about San Francisco. Sure, I love a sunny warm day (like today) as much as anyone - I love to get a little color in my pale Anglo-Saxon skin. But I don't whine and gripe when we're fogged in, which happens pretty regularly on top of Mt. Davidson where I live now (until I move into my own condo at year's end). I love the eerie, ethereal quality it imparts to reality - I feel that it's my own imagination, the interior of my mind, made visible.

Sometimes it's as thick as cotton wool, and we could be living in the midst of a dense rain forest, for all we can see of our surroundings when looking out the living room windows.

A dinner guest last night said, "I don't know of any other city that has fog like this." Someone suggested, "London," but even in London the fog doesn't persist the way it does here - sometimes lasting all day, or even days on end, without ever letting up.

But you won't hear this tiger complain...

The Goddess

At the recommendation of one of my new roommates, I'm watching The Goddess, a 1958 film (dir: John Cromwell) starring Kim Stanley, who was better known as a stage actress - this was her first film role. The movie is reportedly based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, but it was released four years before Monroe's death.

Stanley's performance is top-notch, to say the least.

Sometimes I feel that I really love old movies, and other times I feel that I love the idea of old movies, but the reality of actually sitting down and watching them - well, let's just say I like to multi-task while they're playing. This is a case in point.

Go, Katy, go!

When I first moved to San Francisco last year, I quickly became a fan of Katy St. Clair's "Bouncer" column in SF Weekly. This week's column starts with a sentence that, if I had not already been a fan, would have pushed me over the edge.

"I know scientists are working diligently to isolate the so-called 'gay gene,' but while they are at it, I hope that they can also pinpoint the part of a gay man's brain that likes shitty dance music."

I've been hoping the same thing for years now. BRAVA, girlfriend! From a boy in the Bay who does NOT like shitty dance music, and cringes every time Britney or Lady GayGay or any other cheesy, dialed-in dance-pop crap starts playing on the jukebox of any bar or club I happen to be marooned in, on those relatively rare occasions when I find myself so marooned.

Read Katy St. Clair's latest Bouncer column here.

A plumcot by any other name...

In produce news, this just in: pluots are fucking delicious! I first had one on Maui last year, a golden-yellow miniature globe of sweetness that I can only imagine as the fruit of the gods, comprising a glorious mixture of plum and apricot. Pluot, I am given to understand, is actually a trademark of a hybrid fruit previously called a plumcot, which is about 70% plum, 30% apricot. There are also apriums, with a reversed ratio, being more apricotty.

I didn't see pluots at Safeway this afternoon, and asked the produce guy (it's always a good idea to make friends with the produce guy), who told me "they should be in soon."

Set a case aside for me, please!

Fantastic!

Good morning, everyone! Did you know that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that "Faggots are Fantastic?" And the tenth one has shaky hands - I wouldn't let him operate on me!

Somebody's Mother

I have posted an ad in the rideshare section of Craigslist, because Courtney Love's Hole - her new, improved Hole - is playing Live 105's BFD at the Shoreline Amphitheatre this Sunday, and it would be shameful of me not to make an honest attempt to finally see this borderline psychotic, borderline genius, enduring freakshow of a woman - an icon in whom I have, for some highly questionable reason, invested so much emotion and significance for at least 15 years now - live and in concert, at last.

How would I describe Courtney to an alien from another planet who had never heard of her? Well, to me anyway, she's sort of a rock-and-roll (Bride-of-) Frankenstein combining the poetry of Patty Smith and Anne Sexton with the fiery scorn of Lydia Lunch, the punk-rock style of Siouxsie Sioux and Exene Cervenka (not so much the talentless Nancy Spungen), the sheer emotional intensity and towering cultural iconicity of Janis Joplin, the combatively controversial persona of Madonna and Yoko Ono and Sinead O'Connor, the fragility of Tori Amos and a dozen other vulnerable and more traditionally feminine singer-songwriter types, with...the glass-and-gravel vocals of PJ Harvey and Johnette Napolitano and Medusa and Medea, the on-stage spontaneity and unpredictability of Iggy Pop and Wendy O'Williams, the plastic surgery of Amanda Lepore, the trainwreck life-as-performance-trash-ness of Frances Farmer and the late Anna Nicole Smith, the smoky glamour of an old-school movie star like Clara Bow or the younger Bette Davis, the oversexed brashness of Blanche DuBois....shall I go on? What I'm saying is, girlfriend is COMPLEX. She's not just a walking study in demonology, she's....sort of a walking study of womanhood in the 21st Century. She's an enigma, and I love enigmas. For all her TMI and metaphorical nakedness, seeming to throw it all away and tell us all the truth, there is something central and secret that she never actually gives away. That must be what keeps me guessing, and paying attention.

I just received my copy of Hole's new album, Nobody's Daughter, today - the first real, solid, physical album I've purchased in...years? (I stopped buying music about a decade ago? Abandoning it, for some reason, in favor of other art forms like film and literature.) And it's pretty fucking good. Good enough that I'm sure after a few dozen more spins it'll permanently bond itself to my soul and psyche the way ALL of Love's four previous albums - including her not-entirely-terrible solo album, 2004's cheekily titled America's Sweetheart - have done.

For better or worse, she fills a space in (un)popular culture that would be naught but a gaping hole in her absence.

From the liner notes of Nobody's Daughter (quoted without permission, yet with respect):

Nobody’s Daughter is dedicated to all the motherless children and fatherless babies in this world. This record is dedicated to the light and to the eternal clonthian fire. This record is dedicated to numinosity and to vengeance and to sobriety. To the delusion of the ten world and to the endless cycle of birth life old age and death with enlightenment firmly in our sights.
We are dedicated to the deepest love, the truest love and the purest self love. We are dedicated to a rapacious greed for living and for Gods sake holding onto yourself in a hurricane knowing you are so loved.
This is dedicated to complete surrender. Just give in baby, just give in and you will find the light inside of yourself full of hate and fury, piss and vinegar, cracked mirrors and total self annihilation.
But the light, the light will overcome, just hang on. And in the end, Love and nothing but Love.

Feline Personality Disorder

This morning, after observing a couple of my new roommates engage in droll displays of loveydoveness, I had a little epiphany of the power and freedom that my “single” state affords me. Most people belong to or are attached to other people, or else in a pathetic state of wanting to be so attached – the relationship becomes both a strength and a hindrance, at least it appears so to me – but what do I know? Well, I have had some experience with dating, in the mists of the past. Maybe I’m codependent and so I color all relationships I see as codependent – it’s possible. But I don’t feel very dependent at all, in that emotional / physical way. I am not attached, and do not belong, to anyone but myself, and I find this to be the ideal state – the best fit for me.

The “power” this confers on me is that, being unattached, I can attach myself or belong temporarily, in the moment, to anyone I choose, at any given time, then withdraw back into myself before any serious loss of independence occurs. I can share moments of closeness, laughter, intimacy with people, but it’s not a commitment, there is no contract – I refuse to sign a contract. I like the feeling of being completely unfettered and able to do anything I want at any moment without consulting anyone else or compromising my actions because of how they may affect other people. Of course, I still have to compromise in many ways, especially now that I’ve moved back into a cooperative living arrangement – but not to the extent that people in serious, long-term relationships have to. Being single is not loneliness to me – it is freedom.

Now, does this not describe the personality of a cat - many cats, anyway - to a tee?

Speaking of cats...I wore my kittycat T-shirt out on the town last night (you can see it in the photo above! although that's from Halloween 2008), and a woman on the train complimented me for it. I've heard SF described as "a dog-lover's city if ever there was one." If that's the case, I'll be going against the grain as usual...

Obama Called Indian Slur By South Carolina Senator

Now this is just plain sloppy racism. At least get your racial slurs right, people! If you're going to be part of the proud tradition of offensive racial prejudice in this country, RESPECT it. Obama's not Indian!