Polish your shoes. You’ll feel diligent and purposeful, and the smell will remind you of grown ups you knew and liked as a kid. If you are me, for instance, you’ll think of your mum in her dress uniform and oddly-shaped hat clipping along in high heels that sound like someone taking care of business.
TRUE CONFESSION: I’m rather looking forward to the opening of ‘New Moon’ in November. I’ve even coerced someone into coming with me, possibly because I’ve hinted that there’s a positive relationship between opportunities to see my boobs and willingness to engage with the ‘Twilight’ franchise. I read the first book on a flight to New Zealand for a conference. I’m terrified of flying, but I’m trying to wean myself off drugs when I fly, and I thought ‘Twilight’ might be a nice substitute for benzodiazapenes. Stephanie Meyer’s incredibly profitable saga of sparkle teen vamps and the sullen girls who love them is, in a word, ridiculous. It reads like fanfic, which is to say that it is totally, completely earnest. Meyer means everything in these books, and when you factor in the paedophile werewolves, Clair de Lune, incestuous vampire families, magical brown people (this time they’re native American!), sports cars and a marriage consummation that, no kidding, involves pillow biting, that’s saying quite a bit. For instance, take this section from the third book, ‘Eclipse.’
The way he stared at her! It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collector finding an undiscovered Da Vinci, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn child.
His wondering eyes made me see new things about her – how her skin looked like russet coloured silk in the firelight, how the shape of her lips was a perfect double curve, how white her teeth were against them, how long her eyelashes were, brushing her cheek when she looked down…
Watching them, I felt like I better understood what Jacob had told me about imprinting before – it’s hard to resist that level of commitment and adoration.
To clarify: Bella, the barely-sketched, mildly hysterical everygirl heroine, is watching a werewolf relative of nonthreatening magical brown man, Jacob, interact with a two year old girl. Jacob infodumped earlier that werewolves ‘imprint,’ which is to say, form longstanding erotic fixations on people just by looking at them. So the above is Meyer’s description of an adult man with an erotic fixation on a two year old child. When I read this I literally cackled with glee. If you can put aside your irritation at the clunking, faintly juvenile prose it’s rather delightful and completely, batshit insane.
And the ridiculousness, as Gabe from Videogum notes, keeps on giving. The films quickly made to cash in on the fandom are ‘The Room‘-level awful and, again, in my opinion, similarly satisfying. It’s all you can do to keep from flinging spoons at the screen as Kristen Stewart and R. Pattz endure each scene, each looking equally bored and constipated.
So: in short, I have affection for the Twilight franchise, and I don’t totally understand the level of vitriol directed towards it and its largely female, largely young fan base. It strikes me that there’s a bit of ‘Madame Bovary’ style fingerwagging at foolish girls and their silly novels in the response to Twilight. Indeed, ‘Twilight fan’ has become a sort of shorthand for dim girl, and while many fans hardly help themselves with their hand-painted shoes and themed prom nights, I can’t help but bridle a little at the nastiness. There’s a lot of concern that the Twilight franchise is somehow Bad For Young Women, as in the fretting that Edward will somehow prime girls to seek and tolerate withholding, controlling, pouffy haired partners. It’s just another case where young women’s media consumption is again rendered pathological, a sign of poor psychosexual development or something like that. I will enjoy ‘New Moon,’ sir, mostly because of the tide of youthful fandom. As Meyer herself said, it’s hard to resist that level of commitment and adoration.
So I was coming home from work yesterday, when I noticed a rather twitchy, ropy-looking man in his 40s board the train and sit next to a girl in school uniform. They were in the row of seats directly across the aisle from me. She was a fairly typical, with confusing hair and hepatitis-coloured fake tan and a phone in her hand, but as soon as the man sat down she stiffened, crept closer to the window and became absorbed in her texting. I heard the man start to talk to her, and thought for a while they might have known each other, until he asked how old she was.
‘Fifteen,’ she replied.
‘Oh, I better keep my hands to myself, then.’
I was determined to see it at the Imax, on account of the extra scenes promised by Mr Michael Bay, who, in my imagination now resembles Patton Oswalt’s version of Robert Evans, so I started a lengthy email thread to see who was up for coming. By the time I got enough replies all sessions, seriously, even the 11.30 were sold out, so after another exhausting email exchange it was decided to go to a regular multiplex. We went for dumplings beforehand, and I brought a bottle of rose and everyone else brought beer, and they drank the beer and I was left alone with my bottle of wine.
I do not believe in wasting good food or drink, so I took it with me to the theatre. I drank wine out of the bottle through a straw during ‘Transformers.’ That might explain why I fell asleep during the lengthy scene where, to quote Clem Bastow, ‘the Decepticon that looks like the Large Hadron Collider anally rape[s] a transforming cement mixer truck.’ I couldn’t follow anything that happened, not one thing, from Shia LeBeef looking confused and nebbish, to Megan Fox pouting and sulking, the very embodiment of all Laura Mulvey’s film theory, to the hideous stereotype robots, paralleled only by Jar Jar Binks in their level of racism.
I walked out.
The only good thing about the film was I got to see the ‘District 9′ trailer on the big screen, and, my how I lost my shit for that. Honestly, the best part of the last two films I’ve seen have been seeing trailers that previously only existed on the internet come to life. I squealed like a little girl during the trailer for ‘Drag me to Hell.’
Movies are making me sad.
This review for Transformers, however, is a work of staggering genius, and it does not make me sad.
Two stained, traumatised pads of Post-Its, from when I marked essays in bed late at night and put the numeric grade on a Post-It and wondered what had become of my life
A copy of ‘Encyclopaedia of Tropical Fishes’ by Dr Herbert R. Axelrod
Five pens, in varying stages of usefulness
Every belt I have ever needed and not found over the past week
3.5 kilograms of hair pins
A copy of Marie Claire from January
My sense of self-worth. ZING!
So J.G Ballard has died. I learned this through the Twitter, where I get all of my news these days, and I felt a little sad because he is responsible for Crash, one of my most favourite movies of all time. Actually, favourite is probably the wrong word. My obsession with Crash is similar to the character’s priapetic fixation on sex and cars. It’s not exactly enjoyable, but I can never look away.
I first heard of Crash when I was but a wee kid secretly watching Liquid Television late at night. One night they showed a stop animated short, a re-enactment of Crash played out by teddy bears, and I knew I had to track down the original and watch it. I finally found it three years ago in my university’s library, back when I first moved to Melbourne, and I was forced to watch it in a library carrel, listening through giant, ill-fitting headphones. Now that I think about it, Crash triggered a broader obsession with uncomfortable mid ’90s erotic thrillers, especially those written by cinema genious Joe Eszterhas. None of this has anything to do with Ballard’s literature, but I like to think he’s shaped me as a person, or at least the part that appreciates icy, schizoid ’90s blondes having disinterested, chiaroscuro-lit sex. Thank you, Mr Ballard, thank you very much.
…. sigh. The internet has been pushing the trailer for ‘Moon’ for a while, and I finally caved and watched it. Listen, indie filmmakers, I know you want to explore the potential for scifi to be socially aware and hand-wringing and full of alienation and longing and shit, but that is not why I go to see a movie about the moon. This looks disturbingly similar to The Onion’s story on Franz Kafka International Airport. Snore.
If you want to make socially aware, artful scifi, do it like this.
What a week! First I see Australia’s own Alice Burdeu on the tram, her hair substantially less red (as a fellow fake ‘ranga, I feel you), but just as pretty as always, on the Lygon St tram, and she was polite enough to not be weirded out by my open staring and frantic texting. Then FourFour drew my attention to America’s Own Elyse Sewell and her entirely delightful LiveJournal, chronicling her work as a model in China. Here are some reasons why I eat Elyse with a spoon if given the chance.
1. She comes across, and documents, things like this.
2. She’s a DIY kind of girl. As an aside, I came across a store selling these candy fruit sticks in the city, and I’m dying to go there and try it, but that involves a degree of going to the city that I’m simply not comfortable with any more.
3. She reveals that modelling for money is less getting painted like a lobster and smiling with your eyes, more naked on a cold beach early in the morning..
4. This.
5. Also, she’s real pretty.
‘”Australopithecine disregard for the cleanliness and well-being of couture”: that’s my middle name.’ Oh, Elyse, bless.
Via Swiss Miss.
Don’t get me wrong: I fucking hate kneejerk, Adbusters-style, sanctimonious anti-consumerism. I’m superficial and materialistic and, dangitall, I’m proud. But I do feel a little uncomfortable with advertisers co-opting the surprising, surreal joy of Improv Everywhere’s style and using it to sell things. Yeah, it’s fun that all those people were dancing in a train station, but please don’t tell me such happiness is dependent on a mobile phone. Please let a pantsless subway ride be simply a pantsless subway ride, without trying to sell me anything.
Akihiro Furuta’s witty and beautiful family portraits have been doing the rounds of the Internet for a while, but when I came across him on Neatorama this morning it made me pause. Yesterday, as I was walking up Nicholson St full of the contended drowsiness only too many dumplings eaten too quickly can give, I suddenly had A Realisation. That realisation was that my imaginary future daughter will be named Olivia, so both my imaginary future child bases were now covered. Imaginary future son will be called Henry, imaginary future daughter is now Olivia, there will be chickens and I will be living in a yet to be decided foreign city. (Montreal? Amsterdam?) Now that I’ve clicked through Akihiro’s photo stream I now know exactly what we’re wearing, that the dog will be a prim shiba inu, the kids darling and easy to photograph.
The purpose of an imaginary future family is to avoid the present, and having a darling visual to accompany mid-afternoon zoning out helps enormously.