Skip to main content

Leaving wrinkles to the scaly

Leaving wrinkles to the scaly

Speaking as someone who is looking forward to the day when we have chips in our head that will allow us to see people as they would prefer to be seen (or not -- we could dialog it), I am not anti-botox. This said, I am someone who strongly suspects that a good portion of people over 50 are going to be spending the next twenty years of their lives doing things like this, writing humorous, what-they-prefer-to-deem-self-effacing-but-will-prove-to-be-largely-self-elevating articles, on their struggles to deal with anti-agism in the work-force -- their struggles with aging -- their kids' neglect, wine and au provence, and of how wonderful it is to finally have a prince back in the white house (did you hear what that nasty person at Salon had to say about Obama?! They've had their fun but isn't it about time they put an end to it -- he's such a nice person, who is really, really, trying, and . . .).

We're afraid as a mass you'll not just be freezing your faces but all cultural growth, lest it have the least potential to cause you any anxiety, as you FINALLY come to focus on your own needs after a lifetime of selfless giving and neglect. Some of us are thinking Brazil, that is. And a bit, White Noise.

Open Saloners might hope they'll breach a Salon echelon trespass, but when Salon itself is leaving some of the pointed and wirey behind (think a Mary Elizabeth Williams over a Stephanie Z.) for the slow but fiery, it may feel scary and alone when you get here, but you'll be welcomed, made to feel as if you've become part of a club, as you would upon leaving any salon.

Wit, brutal honesty, no longer ruled, once 20's style seemed but viper threat in an upcoming age of mules.

(Originally posted as response to “My visit to the skin-torture doctor” Mary Kelly, Salon, 18 Dec. 2009)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more