The Tory Party

Bathmat Faces

Is this you? You’re using someone’s bathroom, and they don’t have any reading material (what is this, a Nigerian prison?), so to amuse yourself you look for faces on the floor. Not in a scary William Burroughs sort of way, but like you would pick out figures and things in the clouds, which I understand is a normal pasttime and not at all upsetting. Like, there’s two specks close together — they kinda look like eyes. And that kinda looks like a Hapsburg lip. And before you know it — a face.

I find myself doing this a lot. And suddenly I thought, hey, maybe I should draw them and improve my creative thinking and crap.

Nice notepad — your 300% pharmaceutical markup at work.

Here are some faces I saw in my dad’s bathmat. See, I would normally never draw a rabbit with an afro. But now I have.

Any floor material is up for grabs, I think — tile or rug or towel. A stucco ceiling is good, too.

Do you do this?

When the turkey runs out

;[The One and
Only Goddess posted this before
Thanksgiving, but only now am I releasing it
into the world. Yeah, I`m that weak. - T]

I have invented a new game. Try it
this Thanksgiving [or New Year’s Day, or
Arbor Day, or whenever - T] after your
cousin Jethro just told you about the boil
he had drained, aunt Thelma ran off with the
friend you brought to dinner, and your
little brother Chucky threw up the whole
pumpkin pie he tried to eat. I promise you,
you`ll feel better.

Kim’s Rules
for “Drinking Trivial Pursuit:”

1) Forget the
board. Just pour all the little pieces out
on a table.

Tsunami Donations

Bush pledged $35 million for flood and earthquake disaster relief. That is pretty damn pitiful.


Wait — how many zeroes is that?

$35 million is a good opening weekend, or MC Hammer’s house, or how much Dick Cheney made selling his Halliburton stock (”And I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.”). It’s not a good offering from the richest goddam nation in the world.

Ain’t they got bootstraps in Indonesia?

Horrible crap is happening. If you feel as helpless and scaredy and griefy as I do, take your clicking finger to one of these:

The Red Cross

Amazon.com has a badge link that makes it freakishly easy to donate if you’ve ever used Amazon before.

Maybe that $20 from Granma could get you The Prisoner of Azkaban, or maybe it could get a mother some clean water for her only surviving child.

OMG I am sanctimonious FEAR ME!!!1

Random Thoughts IX

• $87 billion could have bought a lot of disaster relief. Sorry for the turn for the dark, but I can’t not bring it up. Can I also mention how the tsunami newspaper and TV coverage around here has had a really weird emphasis on white people? CBS’s piece last night didn’t interview one native — they showed a lot of dead brown bodies and grieving families, but of the at least seven people they showed in interviews every one was from the West, and, excepting one black American tourist, white. In the paper there was one picture of Indonesian rescue workers on the front page, and all the other people-centric pictures were of white people.

  I`m not trying to be a pretty pretty bleeding-heart princess here, but the cumulative effect of the coverage was pretty gross. The paper had this interview with a white tourist whose family were whisked to the hills by natives, where they had to go without food for hours OMG the hardship!!1 Then they came back to their hotel, where the natives fed them, but the second tsunami wave meant they had to flee again. This interview was the heart of the short article. On TV, CBS told the story of tourists who escaped to (and survived major harm on) the upper floors of their hotel while the lower three were washed out. Hmm. Much more affecting to me would be the story of the natives choosing to feed these rich white tourists while their loved ones, home and livelihood are being annihilated. I dunno.

  Meanwhile, according to the front page of today’s Raleigh News & Observer, a Johnston county high school band will play in Bush’s inauguration parade. The story of 10 people getting killed by a Baghdad car bomb yesterday is on page 3. Oh, that zany liberal media.

  I`m no good at being serious — it gives me shingles. Back to being wacky.

• Witness the Essential Nature of Mom-ness: My mom and I are watching TV, and an ad for the new Elektra movie comes on. You know — the one that looks all Crouching-Tigery and has tattoos transforming into creatures and ribbons and sword-slinging and such. And my mom says, in quintessential sarcastic mom voice, “*That* looks believable.”

  I would say my mom possesses exactly the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy a Robert Altman movie, but she digs Harry Potter, so I think the thing is she just hates boobs.

  
  And I`m all like Elektra PSHAW RITE!

• Buy Skinny Cow stock now RITE NOW. Skinny Cow ice cream rocks me like Cinderella’s “Nobody’s Fool.”

  
  Their sandwiches kill, too, but they’re kinda ’spensive.

  Not only is their ice cream low in fat, and tasty as all hell, but it has FIBER. You newcomers may not know this, but fiber is my favorite nutrient and the fatal flaw in run-of-the-mill ice cream. Plus — now hold on to your butts for this one — they’ve got this chocolate ice cream with peanut butter cookie dough in it. Yeah. You heard me. Cookie dough. That you would use to make peanut butter cookies. Because these sweet hot box-breaking mofos were like, “chocolate chip cookie dough? Surely we can make our cookie dough ice cream much more crack-actively insane than THAT!” Mmm. Skinny Cow.

• Showering in my dad’s bathroom, I found the following mysterious product:
    

  Blushin` Apple? Huh? Am I not aware of the famous country colloquialism that this shampoo embodies? “Vern, you git those blushin` apple kids in here afore supper gits cold.” The back label, if possible, is even less scrutable: are apple-scented hygiene products supposed to make me blush? Has the hair-cleaning-as-sexual-substitute promotion of Herbal Essences overtaken the industry? I dunno. It struck me. I share. For what it’s worth, the stuff does smell good.

• I`m wearing these Oscar the Grouch underpants I got at Ross for $2. I rule. They’re that boy-brief kinda style that doesn’t ride up anywhere ever (refuting the immortal words of my sister re: thong underpants — “So what? It all ends up your ass anyway.”) And they’ve got Oscar the Grouch on them, people! It’s like a secret superpower: somebody’s giving you an ass-chew at work? Ticket on I-40? Their A-game in an attempt to take you home? Remember you’ve got on OtG underpants, and I dare you not to giggle.

Dogville (plus stuff that doesn`t suck)

In the wake of NCSA’s Intensive Arts, which I confess for film students is not that intensive ( although I still managed to fail it), I have the following to report on the foreign films shown therein:

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - Oh, sure, that’s the man behind scowly monoliths Elrond and Agent Smith. What’s he doing being all vulnerable and slouchy as he pussyfoots around coming out to his son? Could he be a little more captivating? Could it be easier to forgive a Jeepful of cranky friends for calling me “Hugo Weaving” as at 3 AM I drive the last leg from Orlando in something less than a straight line? Could that be Guy Pearce with more plump muscle than bucket of chicken? Or Terence Stamp looking freakishly hot as a mature woman (Susan Sullivan beware!). I give it three out of four Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches — it loses points for not being longer.

Good Lord, have you seen Guy’s neck?

Heavenly Creatures - This movie enters conversation periodically for me, such as when I`m trying to illustrate the use of Orson Welles lookalikes in film (see “Ed Wood”, cf. V. D`Onofrio obsession) or trying to explain to a female friend that she looks like Melanie Lynskey. But even without its helpful cultural contributions I`m happy to report that it kicks the ass. Peter Jackson just runs the show from start to finish, and every moment feels essential and perfect and upsetting. And I send clay people to maim those who say otherwise.

So I`m all like, more like “Bored of the Rings”! HAW!

Also seen and enjoyed were Cinema Paradiso, Ju-On, Not One Less and Burnt By the Sun, though I sharked out during the end of this last and I`m pretty unhappy about it, since I would have liked to see how it ended. Maybe later. What I would have liked to have done is traded the hours of my life that I spent watching Dogville.

Think you can break me, Trier? I was married to a SCIENTOLOGIST.

Dogville. What a P.O.S. About 20 minutes of merit stuffed into a three-hour turkey of self-indulgence.

A woman hides in a remote mountain town during the Great Depression, and the townsfolk come to exploit her brutally. The set is a naked stage — the structures of the town are painted on the floor, although there are a couple of doors, windows and trees.

Fine. Sure. I`m no Philistine — I’ve been known to build the occasional pachinko-symbol installation out of burlap and bamboo. A little deconstruction never hurt anyone.

Then Lars “if I could suck my own pike I`d never leave the house” Von Trier unloads the triple threat of Tory’s movie torment: mime, hand-held camera, and an endless, redundant narrator.

Mime: Some homes represented on the stage don’t have doors; well, it would be WEIRD to have the characters freely come and go, so let’s have them mime opening and closing a door. And it would be WEIRD for these doors not to make a sound, so let’s drop in some really obtrusive Daggerfall-quality door-foley. Let’s do this through the life of the movie so we don’t forget to be jarring and unpleasant.

Hand-held camera: To the point of illness. It was like “Voices from the High School” crossed with Cops. I suppose this technique was used in case the multiple false starts in the story didn’t induce enough nausea.

The Narrator: I guess the narration is there to help create the mood of a fairy tale — albeit a fairy tale with a whole lot of raping. He gets to do wacky, hilarious things like state the obvious, contrast his chipper voice with the dark content, and make sure all the raping is played for laughs.

I should mention the narrator is John Hurt, and there could really be no better training for this movie than having monsters burst from your chest.

Remember what smiling looks like. It won’t happen again.

Let me touch a little on the raping. Every male character in the town rapes or sexually assaults Grace, and each occasion is played for optimal combination of degrading Grace and titillating the audience. Consider this — the single striking metaphor in DOGville is that Grace is treated like a DOG — her introduction is by stealing a DOG’s bone, the town puts a DOG collar on her, the DOG is the town’s only survivor — and yet the great host of rapes are all performed missionary-style. Implying that Grace is complicit in her assault? Oh, but isn’t that Von Trier’s recurring cinematic one-hand fantasy?

And what does it mean that, when Grace gets her revenge, there is no sexual element to it? I suppose she can take it but she can’t dish it out — who wants a rape fantasy spoiled by the victim retaking ownership of his/her sexuality, anyway?

I digress.

I’ve heard this movie is “visually stunning.” Visually stunning, my sweet ivory ass. There are only two good-looking things in this movie: the scrim-covered truck bed full of apples, and Nicole Kidman. The rest is poison for the senses: ugly textures, ugly colors, arbitrary composition, and the whole time in your ears THAT DAMN NARRATOR!

I’ve heard that, whatever a righteous ass Lars Von Trier is to his actors, you could say it’s worth it for the performances he gets out of them — the example, in this case, being Nicole Kidman’s. Yeah, here’s a memo — Nicole Kidman is a bullgod, and you don’t need to show and deride her Eyes Wide Shut nude scenes to the crew to get good work out of her. I think Nicole Kidman’s gift is that she can completely jack in to the Essential Nature of a movie, and as long as the movie has an Essential Nature (Moulin Rouge, yes; Cold Mountain, no), she delivers exactly what is required. I have a hard time believing her “performance” would have lacked anything without Lars Von Trier acting like Lord of the Douche.

What I want to know is, if the insufferable nature of the movie is the punitive part of the treatment — the same reason that nurses can’t be compelled to give a piss test for an STD when swabbing a man-whore’s urethra is so much more satisfying — then why is this movie so clearly directed to non-American viewers?

For me, the US is like an alcoholic dad. Yeah, he’s dysfunctional, neglectful, violent with the neighbors, abusive to mom — but he’s our DAD. Tell me he’s a broken man who can be repaired, and we`ll talk. Tell me he’s a waste of life who should be destroyed, and there’s gonna be fisticuffs. This movie isn’t an appeal to the US to change from within — it’s an appeal to the industrialized world to destroy us from without. Fine. But don’t saddle me with three hours of it and tell me it’s art.

You could argue that this was an effective film because it Made Me Think. Yeah, well, the war in Iraq Makes Me Think — that doesn’t justify its existence.

Dogville. I would rather have watched Not One Less ten times than this movie once.