vaginkhram

The moment I saw her enter the classroom I felt a wave of freshness pass
through me as she walked and sat infront of me. I was so lost in my thoughts
about her that I didn't realize the teacher calling me.

I came back to reality when I heard a bang on my desk. There I saw her
looking at me, the most beautiful hazel color eyes that were so mesmerizing
that I didn't hear a word the teacher was telling me. The words were just
flying over as I stared into her eyes. I was no more in control of reality I
felt so light headed and full of emotions.

I said, "Ouch!" the teacher had slightly hit me on my arm. That's when I
realized that I was acting stupid. My first impression spoilt.

The last bell of the day rang and everyone started to leave. However, the
teacher held me back for misbehaving in class as she put it. I was so stuck
in detention, but this time it felt good coz I was so lost in my thoughts
again about her, that I didn't find the detention time wasting or boring.

After an hour of daydreaming, I left the college premises heading to my car.
There I saw her waiting for someone. I got in my car and drove near her
asking her if she needed a lift home. She agreed on it. She got in and I
headed to the address she mentioned.

While driving we introduced ourselves and got to know her a bit. I dropped
her at her place. She invited me inside, but I refused as I told her, "Its'
getting late and I need to get home." We said our friendly goodbye, thanks,
as we shook each other's hand and drove off.

At night, I couldn't sleep, I was thinking about her. Her eyes, personality,
face, style, hand shake, cuteness etc. She is so beautiful I thought only if
she was one of my teddy bear I could cuddle her in my arms while going to
sleep. I don't know when I fell asleep, coz I woke up late in the morning
for college.

I hurried up, got dressed gather all my stuff and headed for my car. "Damn!"
I said. My car tires had flattened out. Therefore, the only choice that I
had was to walk to college and be late. As the saying goes, "It's better to
be late then to remain absent."

I reached college half an hour late. It was my luck, the teacher hadn't
arrived yet so I was safe. I saw Kiara (the same beautiful girl) calling me.
I took a seat next to her and we got busy chatting.

We got to know each other a lot better as days passed by. We became good to
best friends. We talked about everything (personal, public, social etc) and
did everything together. We never got tired of each other, as there was
always something to do when we were together.

As we were getting to know each other, my feelings for her were getting
stronger. By now, I already knew she was the only one for me. I didn't know
how to tell coz I was scared what if I loose her forever, as she was
straight, but she still didn't know that I was a lesbian (one secret that I
kept from her).

ed_rex

After last week's appalling display of auctorial onanism, writer Gareth Roberts brought The Sarah Jane Adventures back down to (an empty) earth with a welcome return to story as priority one.

"The Empty Planet" won't go down in history as a great Sarah Jane serial, but it should stand out as a good one, with a nice balance between adventure and character development and not too bad a let-down between the cliff-hanging end of Part One and the anti-climactic drop to the ground in Part Two.

This week's episode's set-up is given away by the title, "The Empty Earth". After Mr. Smith notes a mysterious alien energy signal the previous night, Clyde and Rani awake (alone, you 'shippers! Roberts plays with the sexual tension that's developing between Clyde and Rani, but this is still a children's adventure program (thank god!) and not a children's soap opera) to find themselves inhabiting an empty city, apparently the only people left in the entire world (well, in the Bannerman Road neighbourhood, anyway; but in context of the Whoniverse, their deduction isn't too presumptuous).

The last humans on earth ... read the full review at Edifice Rex Online.

ed_rex

Detail of image by The Unknown Photographer, © 2010. Click to view the original.

Tim Burton's movies just keep getting dumber.

Having now watched this bland and witless travesty of a take on Lewis Carroll's immortal diptych, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, I can only imagine that Burton's next project will be a "re-visioning" of Winnie the Pooh, one in which the bear of very little brain — no doubt played by a pumped-up Johnny Depp — will be on a mission of vengeance: not to trap the heffalump, but to slay it.

Worst of all, Winnie-ther-Pooh, Heffalump-Slayer, will succeed in gory 3-D, only after we have been forced to sit through a back-story that includes Kanga's prescient investments in the Australian coal-mining industry and Piglet's unhappy marriage to Eyore's cheating cousin, Beyoncéyore.

Excuse me. I digress ...

Once upon a time, there was a young movie director called Tim Burton, who burst upon my consciousness with three arguably slight, but nevertheless well-written, witty and wonderfully visualized fantasies, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. (I suppose I should confess that I haven't seen any of these films in many years; it is quite possible my impressions are tinted infra-red. But I think I retain pretty clear memories of all three. Onwards.)

Burton showed a subtle comedic touch along with the ability to limn character with a few strokes of the cinematic brush, along with a love for the macabre and a strange and genuinely original visual imagination.

Yet signs of his onrushing senescence manifested almost simultaneous with those of his blossoming talent.

Enter the Batman ...

Though a box-office and a popular hit, Batman epitomized Hollywood block-busters at their worst.

The movie probably sounded like a fabulous concept when it was being pitched and the end-product looked great — Burton's Gotham is a decaying hulk of a once-great city; organic and sterile, futuristic and yet built upon the cast-iron fantasies of the early twentieth century; the aesthetic anticipated (or was at least an early example of) steam-punk, with atmosphere and imagery that suggested another Terry Gilliam in the making.

But unlike even Gilliam's worst failures, Burton's Batman had no brain. And, if anything, his Alice is even worse.

Read more at Edifice Rex Online, but beware of spoilers.

ed_rex

I see the one-time enfant terrible of the American Academy, Camille Paglia hasn't entirely disappeared since she decided not to complete the second volume of Sexual Personae some time during the 1990s.

Writing in the 25 June edition of the New York Times in response to an article about the FDA's rejection of a drug to "treat" "female sexual desire disorder", Paglia goes on at some length to discuss "the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country" despite "a media environment drenched in sex."

Paglia rhetorically wonders, "...to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?" but the answer is never much in doubt.

"The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety." "Victorian prudery" gets a ritual (ahem) spanking, Shakespeare a scholarly nod and the "priggish 1950s" usher in a return to the (repressed and repressive) norm with a weak rear-guard fight for sexual liberation engaged by "the diffuse New Age movement".

But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.</p>

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Reading through the dense and mannered academese, it seems men have been emasculated by a brave, new androgynous world in which men "are simply cogs" in a world machine run by women. At roughly the mid-way point of the essay, just what this has to do with the alleged outbreak of female frigidity is unclear, but the next paragraph explains it all.

Men are boyishly frumpy — "visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife" and the sexes "are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left."

Paglia goes on to blame Hollywood, which has forgotten about foreplay in favour of nudity, sexual depictions, unreal objectifications of contradictory female ideals (skinny, muscular, busty, depending on the paragraph), to praise black and latino ideals of feminine beauty, country music and to disparage current trends in rock and roll (etcetera), before declaring that "[p]harmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra" because "inhibitions are stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist."

And maybe that's so, what do I know?

But one thing never seems to have occurred to Paglia. Americans, men and women both, when they are not un- or under-employed, are working longer hours than they have in generations and, either way, are suffering from a great deal of economic anxiety.

Isn't it possible, if there is truth to the claim that American women are in need of a boost for their collective libido (and I suspect the same is true for most of the men who are using Viagra and its lesser-known cousins for an erotic boost and as a performance crutch), that old-fashioned stress is at the heart of the problem?

"Honey, I have a headache" may often be an excuse, but "Honey, I'm tired can very often be an all-too real reason for losing that lovin' feeling.

This entry was originally posted at http://ed-rex.dreamwidth.org/7488.html. Comment there using OpenID, or here as per normal.

ed_rex

'Art' of Onanism:
Pop Life mocks the National Gallery of Canada

"It's not pandering. We have certainly not lowered our standards or principles in order to have line-ups at the door." — National Gallery of director Marc Mayer, quoted in the National Post.

Well. Thank God that's settled! But the denial does beg the question, "Just what kind of standards did the National Gallery have before Thursday's opening of the "blockbuster" travelling show, "Pop Life"?

Lonesome Cowboy, by Takashi Murakami: theft as art, in the worst tradition of Warhol (Wikipedia.)

Jeff Koons tells it like it is in the November 1988 edition of ArtForum. (Image: Sex Sells.

It's not just that we expect our politicians and priests to lie to us, and our journalists to transmit those lies with straight faces; it is also that we have somehow come to habitually lie to ourselves, unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that which is spelled out before us, unless some Authority does so first.

So concerned are we with our status in the eyes of those we accept as authorities or experts, we will happily gorge on shit and, chins dripping with the muck, we will grin excitedly as the last chunk slips past our teeth and beg for yet another serving.

The opening of the National Gallery of Canada's summer blockbuster, Pop Life on June 10 (on until September 19), was crowded with hipsters and art-students and those members of the bourgeoisie who feel it imperative to put in an appearance at such events.

The crowd milled about with all the electric excitement of a herd of cattle on anti-depressants.

The men and women gazed with bovine approval at a second-rate sculpture of a naked man's huge and hugely erect penis, eternally spurting semen into the air; at pages torn from third-rate 1970s-era pornographic magazines; and at poorly-lit, still photos of an "artist" having sex with a man who has paid her $20,000 for the privilege.

Not to mention at a "dead horse", symbolizing ... well, I forget just what it symbolized; there was a little card with several explanatory paragraphs typed onto it, but the words seemed to have very little to do with what we were looking at.

But most of the audience seemed to nod knowingly at one another, and they exchanged stock phrases such as "transgressing boundaries" and "challenging patriarchy" and (to quote from the exhibit's PDF accompaniment, Sex Sells) "...tread[ing] too closely within or against the lines of common decency", as if imparting to one another the wisdom of the ages.

ed_rex

A dance of slicey death
(with apologies to Eddie Campbell)

Hit-Girl takes a licking.

Chloe cuts with a knife.

There is a possibly apocryphal story that at a certain point in his career, Picasso (or maybe it was Dali) grew so cynical about his own fame that he took to selling blank canvasses alongside his paintings. The story resonates, because I remember seeing a Picasso at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Admittedly I was a callow youth and might have missed some brilliant subtlety in that enormous canvas, but what it looked like to me was nothing more nor less than a joke at the expense of whoever would be willing to pay money for such a sloppy monstrosity. It looked to me like Picasso had slapped the canvas with a house-painting brush until it was mostly filled by artless black lines and white spaces.

As I said, it might be that I missed some deeper layer of meaning but I suspect not. I've seen that Picasso damned well could paint when he was of a mind to, and I didn't see any evidence that that painting was one of those times.

That canvas is why I am so ready to believe the story about the blank canvasses. The fine art world is such a confidence racket (see Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word if you haven't noticed it for yourself) why wouldn't a succesful and cynical artist test it to see just how gullible it could be?

I've seen a couple of movies recently which brought to mind the above anecdote, as well as the fable of the emporer's new clothes.

One is an art-house film, directed by one of Canada's regulars at Cannes, at director whose movies win prizes but sell few tickets. The other is a crass and violent film that made Roger Ebert "sad" and which has also appalled all sorts of people who haven't seen it.

One film boasts leaden dialogue, the other reparté that, if not quite Shakespearean, still sparkles by comparison; one boasts an utterly forgettable score of sacharine strings that bear no apparent connection to what is occuring on-screen, the other a soundtract carefully chosen not just to accompany but to augment each scene; one film opens with a narrative voice-over which is almost immediately forgotten, the other begins with the voice-over and — succesfully — maintains it.

One is (or pretends to be) a study of sexual obsession and a portrait of a family threatened by the estrangement of man and wife and by a sexually powerful interloper (which also gives the director the chance to get his actresses naked and to make out with each other though — since this is Art — neither of them appears to have any fun doing so.

The other is an unabashed fantasy of violence and vengeance, a portrait of a nerdy teenage boy who dons a costume to fight crime (and who mostly gets brutally beaten for his troubles) and of an 11 year-old girl who lives out her father's fantasies and really does succeed in slicing, stabbing, gutting, shooting and otherwise slaughtering a veritable legion of bad-guys, all while cursing up a blue storm (yes, folks, even the dreaded C-word).

No prizes for guessing which film I think is worth your time.

Warning: Come-on: Swearing and gratuitous nudity behind the fake cut to my website.

genderpac

The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition is pleased to announce the release of its 2008 GENIUS Survey in partnership with Ernst & Young.  GenderPAC works to ensure that classrooms, communities and workplaces are safe for everyone to learn, grow and succeed.

The Gender Equality National Index for Universities & Schools (GENIUS), GenderPAC’s most recent effort to end discrimination and promote awareness, encourages colleges and universities to recognize the benefits of a GenderSAFE^tm campus - supportive equitable and protective for all students. Choosing to participate in GENUIS sends a strong public statement that bullying or discriminating based on the race, sex or gender of a student, faculty, or staff member is not tolerated at your institution

Fill out the survey at:  www.gpac.org/GENIUS2008survey, and make sure that we have data for as many schools as possible. Your voice will help us continue to work towards a safe and welcoming environment for every student.

While we greatly appreciate the interest taken in GENIUS by students, staff and faculty at academic institutions outside of the United States, at this time GENIUS is only able to track schools based in the United States.

ed_rex

Image copied from the MP's website.

Nobody likes to be held in contempt; nobody wants to be lied to. When an ambitious sitting politician does both, especially in the guise of self-criticism and self-reflection, the contempt is wondrous to behold and must be noted, even by those who are not members of Canada's "natural ruling party".

In the August 5th, 2007, issue of The New York Times Magazine, Micheal Ignatieff has revealed what I have suspected since his odious final campaign speech at last December's Liberal Party leadership convention: that he holds the general public in contempt and that he is a liar, if only by omission. ( read moreCollapse )

ed_rex

Calling the rule banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women racist, four other teams followed Asmahan Mansour's team, the Nepean Selects from Ottawa, after she was thrown out for running afoul of a Quebec Soccer Association rule.

deani

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mood

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rushed

]

What discourages me most is how much I can't trust the candidates. Me, being a democratic liberal, I'm finding it hard to pick someone who I would vote for. I'm watching Howard Dean right now and I am loving what he's saying, loving what he's preaching, but I don't know if I can trust his words. This IS a competition to win your votes, isn't it? There's bound to be manipulation and a bit of lies strung here and there. So what do I need to find the TRUTH about the candidates? How am I supposed to trust these people in running my country? In both Republicans and Democrats. Will the candidates' lies and deceiving be so hard to pick out from the truths?

I expect candidates who run for office to do what they say they'll do. I'm sick of bs from both sides. I'm waiting for someone who can lead my country to its fullest potential.

But what can I do? I can't even vote. I'm not even 16.

Where can I find unbiased news?

WLELTKJSET.