Beyonce vs Beyonce

The world of feminist theory seems to be split on whether or not Beyonce's latest mark in the world of pop is either the greatest or smuttiest thing since Madonna made out with Brittany Spears for the sake of ratings.  But the entire debate is isolated on her recent videos, when a more revealing stance would look at Beyonce (or any pop star for that matter) as a whole, not individual moments in their careers.

Does her dancing control her sexuality, taking it back from the male establishment, or is she eye candy?

I think a better question would be, can she be normal without feeling  like less?

Beyonce dances and looks like a million bucks, and doing it certainly makes her money and keeps her personal brand value high.  She is playing the game.  In maintaining this image, in acting this way, Beyonce keeps her top spot as a symbol of sex, just as Lady Gaga is a symbol of weird.  And in doing so she also remains the bar at which young women rate themselves.  That's why they buy her perfume, do her dances on Youtube, buy her CD's, and keep posters of her (nearly naked) on their walls.

She is, in fact, playing into the hyper-sexualized, hyper-perfect, masculine fantasy culture that sets women (and men to a degree) up for failure; a tenth grader girl with acne, still growing into her body cannot (will most likely never) live up to the celluloid dream that is Beyonce.

And neither will Beyonce.

It's why celebrity mags like People and all the other tabloids exist in the first place.  They thrive on catching the famous in their embarrassing, ugly normality.  It's so hideous to us, seeing our visual gods so mortal.  They are less than perfect.  They have fat and acne, too.  Look at that ugly sweater she is wearing to walk the dog. Ugh!

Despite the fact that it's normal, and that they really are as average as you and me, the Celebrity cannot own up to it.  They do not buck the system, as Marlon Brando and Barbara Streisand did.

"I'm not twenty.  Why should I pretend to be?"

"Am I not allowed to age?"

There is lay the difference.  These two monsters of their time were fine with getting older.  Old age was not a sin, but a joy.  That is something that Beyonce and the other sex icons of our celebrity aristocracy cannot grasp, and until they do there will be no true feminism in modern teenie-bopper, make the money, super commercialized culture.

Because you are only as good as the boobs everyone is searching for on Google Images.

Because you're brand is not your skills or talent, it is you look, how long you can keep it, and how many types of makeup you can sell before your age shows through.

Saying Goodbye

It's funny:  the day you realize that a hobby is slowly devouring your life.  So it is time to say goodbye to a typewriter or fifteen it would seem.

Saying goodbye to a typewriter is like leaving a girlfriend, for me.  I'm the first to admit that I'm a bit of a polygamist when it comes to these wonderful machines.  Also like a polygamist, no two machines get nearly enough attention from me.  Many of them go neglected.  That's what happens when you have a typewriter commune.

But when it finally comes time to say goodbye, I can't help but ruminate on all those times we had--no matter how few.




"You haven't touched this typewriter since you bought it," my sensible mind would say.

"I know.  But it looks so good in these photos!"  the child in me replies.

But no matter how much I fight over it, there just isn't enough room in one house for this many machines, and some of them have to go.  No matter how pretty.


But we always have the old times.

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table, saying goodbye to the fine SM-4 and ROYAL SAFARI

Reading and Watching Thompson

I like Hunter S. Thompson.  It always give me hope to see a writer of the modern age who is revered, respected, and (oh, hell) known.  He was an uncompromising idealist, who didn't care about making you like him or being nice about the truth.  If you didn't like him, or couldn't take it, well--any ready of Thompson knows where they can go and what they can do.

But I don't get Thompson.  I don't understand idealism, even though I am an idealist.  At his best, he was a knife to the social fabric of American.  At his worst, Hunter looked like a child, stomping his feet for not getting his way.

All or nothing thinking can drive you mad.  If nothing else, it leaves us gridlocked.

Looking around, I can't see how anyone could look at the USA and maintain a state of belligerent idealism as Hunter did before he died.  The 2000's have been an patent rip off of the 60's and 70's.  Our military is essentially dictating foreign and domestic policy.  We are fighting wars, not out of necessity or moral compulsion, but because we're scared.  

There is an idea we don't understand, lurking in that mysterious place beyond our colorful borders, and we will bankrupt this country searching for the bomb that can finally annihilate thought--kill mind, not state.  Until then, all liberties--except the right to mow down unarmed civilians as fast as you can per second--is up for the chopping block.  It's like being at GM on bailout day.

It's all so eerie just how similar Iraq and Afghanistan are to Korea and Vietnam, apart of how most Americans cannot find them on a map.  They were wars against the idea of Communism.  We were scared that the thought might spread if we didn't shoot as many people as possible.  There was no real goal, then or now.  Stop Communism?  Defeat Terrorism?  You might as well wage war on Osmosis.

Vietnam, like Iraq, was a set up from the beginning.  We were lied to by our leaders, and dragged into a cowboy's wet dream.  It took years to wake up and realize that there were no WMD's--another Tet Offensive.  The end for both has been only negative.  Saigon fell without us to prop it up.  Iraq is always threatening to fall into Civil War...again.

Hunter may have wanted to be the catalyst or fuse in the powder drum, but 30 years and countless wars later the world is much the same.  Things might move a little faster.  Cars burn less fuel.  Facts are still facts, even if leaders are still all about keeping them under wraps.

All that changes are the faces.  Congress got a bit browner.  The White House is a lot blacker.  That doesn't change our policies of undeclared wars, spying on Americans, detention of innocent civilians, war crimes to never be accounted for.

My greatest fear is that out entire political system has gone Gonzo.  It's an easy things to imagine when he you see Tea Party Repulicans wishing to tear down our social safety nets, pour guns out on the streets.  Libertarians, like Ran Paul--a pale shadow compared to his better qualified father--as they try to choke out our economy with shutdowns and sensationalism.  It's as though it is all being filtered through a pill, vodka, and peyote fever dream.


I guess what I really would have liked is for Thompson to have grown more as a writer, so that he could have broke out of his persona--his Gonzo character.  We might have gotten the most insightful work of the 2000's out of him.  Who knows, maybe it could have been the format for the next 30 years of politico in the USA.  The thoughts of a wiser, aged man, whose mind has been form through tumultuous times and an IBM Selectric.

Reading E.B. White

Reading E.B White, it's hard to believe that at one time the world used to consume the written word in more than just the massive novel, the thin People article, and the tweet.  There was once a time when insight could come in bites--a paragraph or two.  And at one time we had a host of writers who could write insight with just 150 words or less, just as they could write with 150,000.

White wrote for the New Yorker for years, and only the other day did I discover that his works from the New Yorker had been compiled into a book.  All those little insights add up to something to marvel at, even if they aren't as respected or read as his novels, Charlotte's Web and Trumpet of the Swan--a book I loved more than any other growing up.

He was a lot like Hemingway in his love for nature, though White seemed to have lived a far healthier life.  He lived into his eighties, and I saw nothing in his biographies regarding mental illness like Hemingway's.  White has the look, too:  the twentieth century manly man look. Like Steinbeck.

It sometimes bothers me that I read so many male authors whereas there are less female authors.  Then I think of the book series that got me into reading--Harry Potter--and become less concerned.  My obsessions change from year to year.  One day my to reading list will be filled with the names of women.  Literature is sexless when you get down to it.  So many authors don't even offer their names.

The Forgotten Cutter

I have been plying my memory the past few days and it is so strange the things that come to the surface.  Things that I thought I had forgotten completely.

There are the memories of sleep overs gone horribly wrong, where you sit in terror as your friends watch The Faces of Death:  a kind of death and pornography film, showing the mutilation of the human condition is so many ways.

Then there are the girlfriends gone wrong.  It's funny how many of those I could not remember for the life of me.  I needed other memories to jog the primary one into action, bring my past into view again.

It's a nice exercise. Stories of your childhood, when framed right, can be very entertaining.  David Sedaris has taught me that.  I only hope that I can learn something from that brand of storytelling.

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table, spinning his wheels a little bit.

Movies for Black People v. Movies with Black People

I was walking my son out of the movie theatre.  We had just seen Planes or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.  I cannot remember which.  As we neared the doors, I noticed an advert that made one eyebrow go up, and my mind wonder what Hollywood was thinking when they green lit this forthcoming production: I'm in Love with a Church Girl.


I guess what bothered me the most was how painfully saccharine the whole affair looked on the ad, with its glossy looking cast, standing on what looked like a time share for a Rap video production company.  What underlay that was the fact that clearly Hollywood still believes that the only movies with black people worth making are ones that look as though Tyler Perry had a hand in them, or involve gang banging.

A drug dealer falls in love with a nice Christian girl.  Oh the dilemmas that must follow!

Reading the review of the movie, I am led to believe that it is based on the life of the screenplay writer, who did the whole "street life" thing. But how many of these films about street life have to come out before we ask for something more?  Are we so culturally entrenched that, if it isn't a screwball comedy with Chris Tucker or Ice Cube, or a melodrama possibly starring Medea, we don't want to see it.  

I understand that Butler movie was pretty good.  Great even, if one is to believe those around him.  I just wish that there could be more like it.  Not cookie cut either.  Just in that spirit.  Capture an experience without reverting to what the marketing metric says will or won't sell.  If everyone listened to their marketing metric, we might never have gotten To Kill a Mockingbird or Cast Away.  But listening to marketing got us four bad Star Wars films, The Godfather 3, and too many Jason and Freddy movies to bother naming.  

That's all from Elliott at the Kitchen Table

Snail Mail

It doesn't matter how old you get.  The moment you see the mailman or woman walking down the block, your heart skips a beat.  "Oh, boy!  What am I going to get today?"  you think.

Of course the reality is never so good as the fantasy.  As a child I couldn't wait till the day came that I got mail.  As a child I only ever received cards for birthdays and holidays, and Playstation Magazine.  As an adult, I get junk, trying to sell me stuff, or bills for stuff I already bought.  The thought of mail doesn't fill me with glee.  Just anxiety.

That hasn't stopped me from passing down the tradition, though.  My son is practically beside himself when he doesn't get mail.  So much that I have taken to giving him my junk mail.

"Here. You have mail, Buddy."

"I do?" His eyes light up with glee.  "I love getting mail!"


There is a fragment of that child's joy in all of us.  It's there when we see the mail truck.  On those rare days, when we know something is coming for us--and we cannot wait--it burns in us like a torch.  It just takes a little tapping in to.