<===Inspired by this guy. I've decided to write a list of ten movies that must be seen. I do not claim, as he wouldn't, that they are all good, nor do I claim that there is any sort of redeeming value, as I'm sure he wouldn't. But, as he's probably equally unlikely to claim with his list, some of them contain some qualities that resemble...well-done, thoughtful, filmmaking and screenwriting. Others don't. Movies to See and Perhaps Enjoy

1. Dead Alive. Peter Jackson before he got "fat" and "rich" and "popular" and "a budget" . Highlights include: The Lawnmower scene. "I kick ass for the lord!" "Your mother ate my dog!" and a tender moment when he takes the baby to the park, for no reason.
2. The Idiots. Dogma 95, but without Bjork, and with a completely unneccessary, completely nude, real penetration, birthday gangbang scene. Also, a scene where a biker holds a guy's dick for him so he can pee. (The guy is pretending to be retarded at the time)
3. M.1931. Fritz Lang directs, Peter Lorre stars. No real characters- it's the story of a criminal community trying to catch a pedophile child-murderer. Vigilantism. Hysteria. Thrilling conclusion.
4. La Strada. 1954. Fellini. Anthony Quinn stars as the constantly abusive strong man Zampano. Poor Giulietta Masina stars as Gelsomina, his clownish victim/wife/assistant/slave. People say this movie is a vindication of the rights of women; I think that's bullshit. If I wanted to assign a deeper meaning to it, I would call it a post-neo-realist allegory in response to Boccaccio's last tale in the Decameron, of an abused wife who turns out to be humanity, and an abusive husband that turns out to be god. Fellini turns that paradigm on his head by having Gelsomina die as a result of her devotion to Zampano, turning allegory into an atheistic fairy tale. But I really just think it's a story about hobo circus people.
   
5. Night of the Living Dead. 1968. Romero. The best zombie movie, ever. The first time, in history, a black man is able to slap a hysterical white woman without immediate consequences. And the leisurely pans over the crowd of zombies- some in wedding dresses, some in nightclothes, some scantily clad...chowing on cadavers like KFC. Tasty.
6. Dark Passage. 1947. Humphrey Bogart. Really weird movie. If you do get your hands on this movie, and you're a person who knows me, would you please invite me over?I'll bring popcorn and alcohol. Because I didn't get to see the end. Three times I didn't get to see the end. So I can't vouch for the ending. But it's a pretty cool movie. Lauren Bacall. Plastic surgery.
   
7. Return of the Living Dead 1-3. 1985-1993. Not worth seeing apart, but the perfect snowed in/ sick day/lonely weekend trilogy. It shows just how far you can run with a premise. It's actually pretty great. Totallly fucks with your idea of what a zombie is, how they make more zombies, and other conventions. Zombie Gas, canned zombies, and the military figure large. The third one features a goth girl who cuts herself, as she turns into a zombie.
8. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and her Lover. 1989. Very fucked up movie, with very bizarre production design. It was a huge indy cult hit at the time, but recently has been exposed as a post-modern, slick, fraud. But it features a scene in which one main character is cooked by another main character, and served to yet another main character by Helen Mirren. At which point she says "Try the cock- you know where it's been". Features Tim Roth as a low-level gangster. A good companion movie, that ends up in an orgy of cannibalistic gore like this one, is Titus, 1999. Anthony Hopkins in Shakespeare's worst, goriest, most gleefully violent play. Directed by Julie Taymor, who later went on to design the costumes for Broadway's the Lion King.
9. Cry Baby. 1990. If John Waters did Grease- actually, this is John Waters doing Grease. It's pretty great. Hatchetface is my hero.
   
10. Debby Does Dallas. It's porn, with a plot. It contains a scene in a candle store. Owned by a man named Hardwick. Cheerleaders with ceasarian scars. A scene where an actress chokes on a dick, and the actor says "Don't choke, baby...I want you to live.". Do you want to be the only person who hasn't seen Debby Does Dallas? I don't. So I did. And it was worth it.

Here are seven movies you shouldn't see, don't have to see, and should actively avoid.

1. Exorcism of Emily Rose
2. There's Something About Mary
3. These Hands. (A documentary. About women. Breaking rocks. With their hands. For 45 minutes. No narration. No subtitles. No plot. Waste of time)
4. Man Bites Dog
5. The Notebook
6. Old School (sorry.)
7. The Thin Red Line

Show me your pussy!

Actually, please don't.

But my friend made me a cd with that song on it, so it's in my head. It came on as I was driving my mom to the grocery store. She laughed.

So there's this court case that was in the news the other day; they called it Roe v. Wade for men. Which is mostly bullshit. In this case, a woman who said she could not get pregnant had sex with a man who did not want to get her pregnant. She got pregnant, had the baby, and sued for child support. He doesn't want to pay.

This is not Roe v. Wade for men, by the way. If masturbation, condoms, and coitus interuptus were illegal, because it kills sperm, and a case made it legal for men to masturbate, or pull out, or spoo in a baggie- that would be Roe for men.

Because Roe isn't about having or not having children. Roe is about the bodily integrity granted to a woman by the laws (or founding principles) of this nation. A human being has the right to bodily soveriegnty; what is within them is assumed to be of them, and under their control. Thus, a woman has the right to have another person, living within her and entirely dependant on her, removed. Even if it causes the death of that person. Generally, pro-choice people don't talk about the fetus as a person. I don't like to, either, because I don't fully believe that it is. But, for the purpose of argument, and the purpose of explaining why Roe isn't really about stopping a reproductive process, I'm calling it a person.

A person has the right not to allow another person to parasitise their body, no matter if it is (and it is) their only means of support. That's it. That's Roe. Forget fetuses. Forget bone growth and dilation and extraction vs. dilation and evacuation vs. dilation and curettage. A person has the right, inviolable, to their own body.

A woman having an abortion doesn't sever her parental rights, or prevent the birth of a child- her primary act is one of medical self defense. Not becoming a parent, not bearing a child, are side effects of abortion- not the primary aim. It seems absurd, but consider: If perfect artificial wombs were invented, and a procedure perfected that transfers a fetus at any stage of development into that artificial womb- would any woman with a healthy, normal pregnancy have an abortion instead of a transfer and adoption?

A man cannot find his body suddenly in the service of another body. It's unfair (ish), but in this case, biology is destiny. So he can't have an abortion. He can't force a woman to have or not have an abortion because that, in itself, would nullify the woman's proper somatic soveriegnty.

So this can't be Roe vs Wade for men. Men don't need a Roe vs Wade. They are granted, by virtue of the cock and balls rather than the clit and ditch, an impregnable border. There's no chance that they will end up in anatomic obsequy to an unformed human.

So what is this case really about?

This case is about the voluntary abdication of parental responsibilities to a child, based on the pre-natal conduct of the other parent. A man was lead to believe that he was not engaging in acts that could lead to conception, as conception would be against his wishes. Conception occured, a child was born, and he became a parent with all responsibilities inherent to that. He wishes that, since he was unable to convince the woman to have an abortion, that he be relieved of responsibility, as she didn't.
Doesn't work. Forcing someone to undergo a surgical procedure is as much a violation of somatic soveriegnty as forcing someone to continue with an unwanted pregnancy. So he couldn't have made her. Totally wrecks up the point of abortion. Unless you think the point of abortion is killing fetuses. Which I wish it were. I like gory shit.
And, since she didn't have an abortion, and since the child was born, it has a father, and has a right to support from that father. I'm pretty sure he'd have the same right to support from his father even if his mother raped his father. Because the child was uninvolved in deception or conception. And cannot lose or waive his rights.

What should this case be about?

Fraud. If a person uses another person to concieve a child, under false pretenses (especially ones that would lead a person to believe an unsafe sex act was safe), it should be a crime. As far as I know, it isn't. But, it should be. Perhaps it's a crime if the person was doing it explicitly for the purpose of obtaining child support payments from the other party. However, despite the crime commited by one parent against the other, that does not relieve a parent from the obligation to the child, who was not involved.

So in summation:

1. Both genders have control over their bodies.
2. Both genders have equal responsibilities towards children that are born.
3. Fetuses=crunchy

The Death Of Romance

Romance is dead.
Or persistently vegetative.

Either way, its time has past. And that's fine.

It's cute to pretend that sweeping gestures, breathless vows, and hearts, flowers, and passionate self-sacrifice are not only relevant, but appropriate and effective methods of conducting sexual business contemporarily.

It's also cute to pretend that a pretzel is a cigar, and your finger is a gun, but try developing a sourdough carcinoma, studded with kosher salt, or defend yourself from a mugger with a fresh French manicure.

Not gonna happen.

Romance is an adaptive response to sexual inequity. Despite what the fine departed Ms. Dworkin made a career whinging about, American society is currently suffering from a dearth of sexual inequity. While it may be true that women bear more costs of childbearing and rearing, hit glass ceilings now and again, are finding it harder to get into college, and are beginning to lose control over their own bodies, the experience of an American woman is more similar to that of an American man than that of an American man of today to an American man of good ole' Scotty Fitzgerald glittering 1920's.

Similarity of experience results in common ground between the sexes. Common ground between the sexes and the contraceptive revolution (which granted the possibility of shared interests in heterosexual relationships by distributing more evenly the consequences of recreational coitus), has drawn creaking romance down into obsolescence.

In English-
Romance is what there was before men and women had things in common.

Picture Tristan and Isolde. Romeo and Juliet. Desdemona and Othello. Portia and Bassiano. Dante and his Beatrice. Petrarch and Laura.

Did they linger over coffee, sharing stories, hopes, memories of childhood, and fall deeply in love upon finally finding someone who, like themselves, is deeply moved by iams, trochees, spondees, and gets off on dying young? Did they share a single common interest or ability? Even in the one example, above, where the female of the couple had both a character trait and an ability, the guy didn't. (Portia and Bassiano- she's a brilliant princess, whipsmart with a talent for law and oration, he's a pretty social climber with credit problems and a venetian sugar daddy). There's a story in the Decameron about the most desireable woman in the world- men kill, die, and go to war over her- and she's entirely mute and passive.

Lest you think I'm a feminist, about to go on about the male gaze for two hundred words and finish up with a chorus of recriminations on the publishers of hustler and barely legal...I remind you...I hates the womens. But I go on.

At the time our modern/premodern/postmodern/zblarb idea of romance was born, women's worlds were entirely separate from men's, at least among the aristocracy and high bourgoisie, where there was the cleanliness and leisure time to engage in the practice. Secular men were becoming educated, becoming consumers of media and literature. Women were still having babies and running households. There were two solutions to the intellectually mobile man searching for the sexual companionship of someone to have a conversation with: concubine or catamite.

But buttfucking and paying for it aren't systemically sustainable. Energies, money, and genetic material spent on boys and unmarriageable women are time, spoo, and ducats lost to the family.

So romance was invented. Romance is the interest men have in women when they have nothing in common, and the actions and gestures that interest manifests as. (Genders did reverse occasionally, by the way. There's some lovely romantic poetry written by women during the early rennaissance period, and Eleanor of Aquitaine made an honest effort to codify romantic interactions during her time in France.) Romatic love is what you do when you love someone you can't have a real conversation with. Flowers, candy, dancing, even standing underneath a window with a tape player- our contemporary gestures that reference old cadaveric romance all share one thing in common: in general, they suit one individual as well as another. Romance dresses up in ribbons and meter a completely irrational obsession with someone you don't know very well.

But now, there's no excuse.

Men and women have as many things in common as men used to have with their catamites. Plans and freedoms, responsibilities, concerns and toils are gender non-specific. Instead of writing a sonnet about the sweet breath and silky hair of a beloved, there's an opportunity to find out if that cute waitress likes Star Wars, nougat and titfucking as much as you do.

You can suck it up and say "Hey, how 'bout I buy you a snickers and slip my wookie between your death stars and see if I can make it a milky way?" And if she doesn't hit you, you've found some common ground.

Conversations must happen. Entertainment. Recreation. Consent. Love can grow out of familiarity and shared goals. Just like between a greek man and a willing young boy.

So romance is dead. That's why trashy magazines redefine it every month, in between a hardhitting piece on hemlines and some thoughtless fluff on date rape. If romance was a necessary componant of interaction between sexual partners, we'd know what it was. Instead, we try to redefine it, in a post-modern, new-age, consumerist sensibility that turns it inside out: romance is now finding something the person you're fucking has said would be significant to them, remembering it a month later, and buying a present based on that.

Of course, with all of this, you have to keep in mind, that I'm entirely full of shit.