::::The Melting of the Botox Faces:::: [ photography ]

::::Junk Blossom:::: [ photography ]

The Careless Language Of Sexual Violence

For those that thought that yesterday was a bit flippant and lighthearted here on Either/Or/Bored here’s an article on the casualisation of the language of rape in modern society:

We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days, like today, where I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the “paper of record” can write an article that comes off as sympathetic to eighteen rapists while encouraging victim blaming. Have we forgotten who an eleven-year-old is? An eleven-year-old is very, very young, and somehow, that amplifies the atrocity, at least for me. I also think, perhaps, people do not understand the trauma of gang rape. While there’s no benefit to creating a hierarchy of rape where one kind of rape is worse than another because rape is, at the end of day, rape, there is something particularly insidious about gang rape, about the idea that a pack of men feed on each other’s frenzy and both individually and collectively believe it is their right to violate a woman’s body in such an unspeakable manner.

The Careless Language Of Sexual Violence – The Rumpus.net.

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fiddling whilst the dollhouse burns

Spoiler Alert!!!:::: Uh, go watch dollhouse, make sure you watch epitaph one before epitaph two, then come back, k?

I finally got around to watching the last two episodes of Dollhouse. It is, for me, a crying shame that the show got fucked around like it did. So much potential. It left me thirsty for answers which i kinda already knew but Dammit! I wanted a bit of closure! Sometimes I just think Whedon should end his doomed star-cross’d love affair with TV and just write novels.

So here’s an interview with Joss Whedon wherein he talks about dollhouse, its demise, the coming television apochalypse and his directing stint on Glee. Plus, you know, a bunch of other stuff.

Charlie Brooker: A man of the times

Charlie Brooker has been providing scathing and satirical insights into the twisted machinations (oh, how I love that word) of the media since, well, whenever he started doing it. Below, see him lay into television news with, um, scathing and satirical insight.

( via 23narchy in the uk. )

Several dozen moons ago my friend Matt would often clue me into the latest of Mr Brooker’s brilliant Guardian column Screenburn, in which he takes a rusty hacksaw to the banality of television and dismembers it’s corpse with disturbing glee. You can find an archive of the column here.

Below, an excerpt from his latest piece where he goes to town on vapid and soul-destroying ITV dating show ‘Take Me Out’, something which I was planning to do myself, offering a poor facisimile of his writing style, after accidently catching the opening credits and first 30 seconds. Thank fuck I don’t have to now, because it would of actually involved having to watch it.

Anticipation is everything. If someone tells you to close your eyes and open your mouth while they feed you a slice of the most delicious chocolate gateau you’ll ever encounter, only to spoon a pawful of dead mashed mouldering cat on to your tongue, chances are you’ll vomit. You’d vomit anyway, of course, but the contrast between what you were expecting and what you actually got would make you spew hard enough to bring up your own kidneys.

This also works in reverse. Over the past few weeks, several people have emailed imploring me to watch Take Me Out (Sat, 8pm, ITV1), ITV’s new Saturday night dating show. They described it using the sort of damning language usually reserved for war crime tribunals at the Hague. I rubbed my hands together, like a sadist approaching a car crash, settled in to my sofa and watched an episode. And you know what? It’s not bad.

Okay, it is bad, obviously, but only if you compare it to something worthy or suave or less shrieky. On its own terms, as a raucous chunk of meaningless idiocy, it succeeds.

( read the rest of that column here )

But Brooker is no mere columnist, oh no, for surely that would be a waste of his talents. He created the brilliant zombie/big brother parody/horror/drama (the reality show, not the orwellian concept of surveillance society) Dead Set, which was screened over 5 consequitive nights on E4 in the UK. I actually tuned in eagerly for every single part, which is a rare occurance indeed. He only wrote the first episode though.

He’s also worked quite extensively with another british satirical genius Chris Morris, co-writing the absolutely hilarious satire of London media-type assholes, Nathan Barley. The show featured alot of the Mighty Boosh/IT crowd bunch and was no only insanely quotable, piss-yourself funny and largely ignored, It also managed to ring disturbingly true, as if this was what these people are like in their vapid cocoon of popular-culture and fad fed idiocracy. For weeks after seeing it on DVD I had nightmares that I would become one of these people. I still fear that I will wake up one day and, finding this to be true, ride my miniscooter screaming under a double-decker bus.

A click from episode 5 of deadset:

And the only two clips from nathan barley that I could find that hadn’t had embedding disabled by request. It’s worth a trip to youtube to check out the other stuff though. There are whole episodes to be seen in bite sized parts.

Fictional Drugs from Movies and Telelvision

*snip*

Whether it’s Tony Montana snorting lines of coke the length of pool tables, Cheech and Chong puffing on some quality bud, Harry Goldfarb injecting himself with smack, or crack smoking on The Wire, mind-altering and recreational drugs have been a major part of movies and television for a long time.  But there are also a gangload of fictional drugs to consider, when the stuff that already exists isn’t potent enough.

Some fictional drugs can be simply a great time, while others grant the user incredible perspective or abilities.  One thing’s for sure, they are all a lot more powerful than the dime bag you bought from the creepy guy on the corner.  Anyway, there are quite a few that stick out, so take a look at the most memorable fictional drugs in movies and television.

Unreality – Fictional Drugs from Movies and Telelvision |.

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg Return to WWII for The Pacific

*snip*

When asked about the importance of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg said “I had a sense in Saving Private Ryan that I was establishing a template based on the experiences of the veterans that were communicated to me, and the very few surviving photographs by the great wartime photographer Robert Capa. I combined those to make a 24 frames-per-second representation of terror and chaos. Although we’ve done the same with The Pacific, it does have a different “look” to it than Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers.” Hanks went on to explain that, “After that HBO blip at the beginning, this was our story to tell with our own pacing.” They began talking about this project in earnest when they both worked on The Terminal, so this has been six years in the making.

via Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg Return to WWII for The Pacific – Film School Rejects.

The Simpsons – Salon.com

What a difference 20 years makes! On Dec. 17, 1989, the still-infant Fox Broadcasting Co. aired the first episode of “The Simpsons,” the animated show about a dysfunctional family from Springfield that has since become the longest-running prime-time series in American history. It’s hard to overstate the show’s impact. It has spawned a merchandising empire “Simpsons” air freshener, anyone?, been at the center of a culture war Barbara Bush called it “the dumbest thing I’d ever seen” and inspired a hit movie not to mention comedy writers’ rooms everywhere. Plus, “d’oh!” is now in the dictionary.Thursday marks the show’s two-decade anniversary – an event that serves as a reminder not only of the show’s extraordinary staying power, but also the extent to which it’s disappeared from the cultural conversation. While “The Family Guy” and “South Park” have kicked up controversy – tackling subjects like Scientology and abortion – “The Simpsons” seems to have aged from envelope-pushing misfit to grandfatherly institution. But as John Ortved argues in “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History,” an oral history of the show’s tumultuous rise and creative demise, the “Simpsons’” legacy continues to be felt everywhere from “Wall-E” to Barack Obama’s speechwriting.Salon spoke to Ortved over the phone about the show’s effect on television comedy, Marge’s recent Playboy cover, and whether it’s finally time to pull the plug.

via The Simpsons – Salon.com.