All publicity is Vlad publicity

Fishing for compliments. #fatherofthenationbod

During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this May, enjoy this honest and unbiased video in which ORDINARY CHINESE PEOPLE have DEFINITELY NOT BEEN COACHED OR COERCED into giving their opinions of Russia and particularly of its “handsome leader, like President Xi”: Vladimir Putin. Show solidarity to COMPLETELY UNPROBLEMATIC COMRADES WHO ARE IN FULL COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL LAWS AND TREATIES by eating bread, consuming dairy products, admiring Putin’s “big muscles” (not shown in these pictures), and repeatedly, SINCERELY expressing your desire to marry him. But REMEMBER to appreciate Putin’s big muscles only in a HETEROSEXUAL MANNER because he strictly forbids any reception upon his person of HOMOSEXUAL EYE BEAMS. Pity all countries which do not have handsome, shirtless, DEFINITELY HETEROSEXUAL leaders with big muscles. Presumably photos of Xi Jinping in his budgie smugglers are to follow shortly. You will ENJOY THEM and praise the MANLINESS of President Xi and announce SPONTANEOUSLY and VOLUNTARILY that you would like to marry him.

His Little Pony.

Marry yourself

Merry War (Christmas is Over (If you want it))… or something!

Apparently there’s some kind of public holiday going on. But sod that, how about some proper “me time”? Why don’t you start the new year by having a solo wedding with yourself in Kyoto?

You are single and you don’t know if you would be able to get married and have a wedding ceremony in the near future, but you would like to have some pictures of yourself in a wedding gown or in a gorgeous bridal kimono now, when you are young and beautiful..

..or you even believe that you don’t really have to get engaged to be able to wear a bridal outfit..

..or you are already married, but didn’t have a proper ceremony with a beautiful dress and you find this fact to be quite regretful..

..or you did wear a dress, but it was so long time ago that you would like to experience it again, or you were too busy with the wedding preparations to enjoy yourself fully during your special day and you are looking for a second chance..

Offer yourself an opportunity to experience the feeling of being a princess in a beautiful and charming city of Kyoto!

I was lukewarm towards the whole thing until the part about being a princess in a beautiful and charming city of Kyoto. I’ve probably already missed the boat on being young and beautiful, but I’m definitely a fucking princess. For prices starting at ¥300,000 (about €2.000, £1,650 or $2,500) you can get a wedding dress or kimono, professional photos, flowers and whatnot. The previous sentence ending in “whatnot” perhaps gives you a clue that I’m not particularly au fait with weddings, but even I know it’s exciting that you can additionally hire a “Japanese man for image partner during the photo shoot… from ¥54,000 (clothing included).” I like them specifying that it’s a Japanese man. No way of knowing if he just happens to be the fellow who’s willing and available, or if they know their market and even the Russians or the English speakers want to pretend-marry a Japanese man.

In any case, just paying the Japanese man and sending him home is a great idea. His clothes are included. What more could you want? Much better than all the tedious stuff that comes after a real wedding, like having to live with him for years and years, and all that domestic shit. Ooh, your husband looks so handsome in the wedding photos. WHAT, WHO? NO, I DON’T EVEN KNOW THAT GUY. It might be worth the money and the effort just to mess with the heads of those smug couple-type people who never stop boring the shit out of you by talking about whatever banal thing their horrible kids have done recently. Pro tip: nobody cares, especially not other parents because they all just want to blather about their own children.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Kyoto and it really is beautiful and charming, at least in places. Not so much around the train station, but that’s true of most cities. Would it be out of order for me to set up a Kickstarter page so I can go back to Kyoto in 2015 and fulfil my dream of being a princess in a gorgeous bridal kimono?

I know I’m making fun of this thing, and it is (delightfully) daft. It’s probably not as daft as the aforementioned smugly coupled people might think, though. By 2015 33% of Japanese households will consist of a single person. The same more or less holds true throughout the developed world and has done for some time, although one wouldn’t think so based upon the relentless nuclear family or couple-orientation of everything around us: hotels and holidays, consumer products, insurance and financial products, film and television, advertising, government policy, societal attitudes and the thoughtless comments and ill-founded assumptions people make, the unaffordability and unavailability of homes for one person, the deprioritisation of homeless or vulnerably housed single people, ad infinitum. In 2012, 29% of the UK’s households consisted of a single person. According to the charity Age UK, about one million elderly people in Britain regularly go for at least a month without talking to another human being in any significant way, if at all. A recent BBC study showed that 7% of its respondents similarly expected to spend the winter holiday period completely alone, rising to 10% for over 65s. 28% of all the adults said they were lonely.

Of course not everyone who lives alone is lonely or doesn’t have a partner, because obviously you can be with somebody and not marry them or live with them. To suggest so is just another part of the whole outdated framework of assumptions that makes some people feel so desperately lonely at those times when there’s overwhelming pressure to be (or pretend to be) part of society’s groupthink. We could call it the Eleanor Rigby Fallacy, that an introverted or single person is ergo a lonely person. Thanks for another blot on the collective psyche, McCartney.

Likewise, you can also not be with anybody, not get married, not get partnered or raise a family in any way and still be perfectly happy; if that’s what a person wants then it’s nobody else’s business and nobody needs to make comments, conjectures or insinuations about it. Especially during the darkest part of the winter and the new year/Christmas holidays, it would still be nice if people who aren’t alone had a bit more consideration – or indeed any consideration whatsoever– for those who are. If a person either by choice or circumstance is single but wants to do things that couples or families do, then why shouldn’t they? In short: fuck it, marry yourself if you want and good luck to you. Offer yourself an opportunity.

The Babadook: an advertisement for contraception

NB: I don’t care about spoilers, in fact I really don’t care hard about spoilers… but even if you do there aren’t any here that you won’t find in the trailers and publicity for The Babadook.

My alternative title for writer-director Jennifer Kent’s new low-budget Oz horror film is Parenthood: It’s a Fucking Nightmare That Never Ends. In The Babadook, widowed mother Amelia– suffering from unresolved grief and what could be construed as an open-ended form of postnatal depression– is either being driven mad by her son’s antisocial acting out, or perhaps vice versa and her descent into madness is destroying him. It’s this negative domestic energy that seems to open the door to the storybook character so unnervingly introduced in a Struwwelpeter-esque tome that shows up in their house in advance of Mister Babadook himself.

It’s quite an old school (and distinctly non-American) horror film in the sense that it smoulders incredibly slowly and Kent is scrupulous about neither confirming nor denying whether we’re seeing a potentially lethal folie á deux played out between a mother and son, or something truly supernatural. There are a few missteps: one is the house where most of the action takes place. In a more garish or expressionistic film (like the Mario Bava effort seen fleetingly on TV) it might make sense for a bereaved woman to decide it looks nice and helps the grieving process if you paint all your walls and doors battleship grey, or that it’s healthy to let her emo, disturbed 6 year old play with his dead father’s stuff that she keeps easily accessible down in the cellar. Ooh, symbolism. In a film that’s grounded in psychological realism and successfully extracts a sort of kitchen sink dread from all too recognisable family tensions, the house is already blatantly, ridiculously spooky before the Babadook even comes knocking. Doubly so when you lampshade it by making the protagonist’s sister say she doesn’t like visiting because it’s depressing. It’s like Amelia was having some kind of Borgesian interior decor metacrisis where she realised she was not really a person but only a character in a horror film. There are flashes of deliberate wit and warmth that really work, but seeing The Babadook with a largish audience also confirmed I wasn’t the only one who found some of its very, very wrong parenting unintentionally camp and funny instead of harrowing, in a sort of Joan Crawford Mommy Dearest NO WIRE HANGERRRRS EVAH kind of way. Nowhere near that bad, but definitely on the spectrum; enough to raise a few titters.

‘Mommy Dearest’, starring Faye Dunaway as Kabuki Wicked Witch Jack Torrance Joan Crawford.

Furthermore, for something that’s overtly being hyped as a horror film it’s foreboding but negligibly scary; it’s obviously intended more as a metaphorical exploration of the resentment or anger all parents occasionally feel towards their own children, and the guilt that ensues. In fact it’s almost like a walkthrough of psychoanalyst/paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s theories of child rearing, which were focused on getting past parent-child fears and resentments. This alone should make it clear that Jennifer Kent is not trying to compete with hack bullshit like Insidious or to make another slashers in the house flick. She deserves a huge amount of credit for that, and it’s great to see a labour of love like this getting wide distribution. It’s intelligent, gripping, it looks great and Kent is defiantly uninterested in playing out the ghost train jump scares, clichéd story beats, exhausted tropes and carnographic splatter that constitute the majority of Hollywood’s current horror repertoire. The film’s own publicity namechecks Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and Let the Right One In among others. It only bears the most passing resemblance to the first of these (mainly in its structure and is it a monster or is she mental? ambiguity) and absolutely none whatsoever to any of the remainder. The Omen in particular is a vastly inferior movie to both The Babadook and Let the Right One In, because The Omen is one of the daftest, most instantly dated and least disturbing horror films ever made. It has a few indelible (but also still daft) images; that’s all. The Babadook has much more in common with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water, or the glacial haunted house film The Others by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, in all of which single mothers find out the hard way that being able to grit your teeth and pretend everything’s OK doesn’t make anything really OK, either for the parent or for the child.

There’s also a lot of good stuff in the film about how callous and selfish all of us can sometimes be– unintentionally or otherwise– towards people who are obviously struggling to comply with the demands of society. It’s not going to obliterate the ghost train jump scare movie, but it’s certainly a pleasing alternative for those of us who still think horror films can have a brain in them without that brain being splashed across a wall.

Scarlett Johansson’s murder van

… and how she was punished for it.

It’s been out a while, but I only just got around to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, the enigmatic, glacial barely-horror film in which an alien (Scarlett Johansson) drives around in a white Transit van and preys upon lone men in Scotland. I’ve not read the novel by Michel Faber, upon which the film was based, so this discussion is purely about the latter. There’ll be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film and you’re one of those big babies there’s plenty of other things to read on this blog.

You know some bad news is coming, because I’ll start with the good. The film captures the bleak beauty and grey light of Scotland perfectly. It looks like the most grimly lush Radiohead video ever, if Radiohead singles were ever nearly two hours long. The score by Mica Levi puts many a mainstream horror soundtrack to shame with its angular, insectoid weirdness. Over the past year or so I’d say that only Cristabal Tapia De Veer’s peculiar score for Channel 4’s Utopia was better, more inventive or more crucial to the production’s atmosphere. Johansson seems to pick her acting roles at random out of a hat, and in the wrong film she can be stiff as a board and half as interesting. Given the chance, though, she can do great work. Making one of Sofia Coppola’s dreary chorus line of autobiographical Poor Little Rich Girl non-characters sympathetic (Lost in Translation) is quite an achievement, even when Bill Murray brings his full chemistry set. In Her, Spike Jonze and Joaquin Phoenix trowel on the protagonist’s lonely, nerdy life as a sadsack spod so thickly that we don’t doubt he’d take up all manner of hikikomori activities. It’s Johansson, however, whose voice performance really sells the concept of an incorporeal artificial intelligence product that loves and is lovable while at the same time never really anybody’s at all.

Conversely in Under the Skin, Johansson barely speaks through the whole film, but watch the extraordinary and chilling way her amoral, calculating character performs feminine charm and accommodation then a split second later looks like a dead cod lying on a bed of ice at the fishmonger’s. The only character comparison that immediately comes to mind is Daryl Hannah as Pris and Joanna Cassidy as Zhora in Blade Runner, inhuman humans who know exactly which male buttons to press but would snuff any man, woman or child without blinking. Hannah and Cassidy never got as much to do in Blade Runner as Johansson does here.

One, two, you’re coming for Freddy

Mr. Krueger’s got two new weapons

If you ever watched horror films in the 1980s or 1990s and thought to yourself “Freddy Krueger’s OK, but what this keloid-deformed, ultraviolent, serial killing child molester really needs is fishnet stockings and a massive rack”, then today you have finally hit the jackpot, my friend. A Japanese company is now offering this bishoujo Freddy statue, or “stuatue” as they have it on their site. I know by now it almost goes without saying that if we discover a highly inappropriate item has been sexualised, then somebody Japanese will probably be responsible. I take a glass-half-full attitude towards this fact, though. These figures are very, very wrong but bless your filthy, weird, perverted Japanese minds.

Bishoujo or bishōjo (美少女) means “beautiful young girl”, and is usually taken to mean a woman younger than university age. Given the obvious intent behind this item, it’s reasonable to translate the figure’s Japanese name into English as Barely Legal Freddy Krueger. Their tagline plays on the Krueger playground rhyme heard in the films (i.e. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…”): 1つ、2つ、フレディが来るよ・・・美少女になって！ My Japanese isn’t great, but I think this could be translated idiomatically as “One, two, Freddy’s coming… and becoming a girl!”

They also point out that she’s standing in a pool of blood– which is always good fun, isn’t it?– and furthermore she has a “nice chest” and a “thigh gap”, i.e. the tops of her inner thighs wouldn’t touch each other even when she’s standing with her feet together. For those fortunate enough not to know already, it is my sad duty to report that this latter fetish item is the most recent body dysmorphic, mostly impossible beauty ideal being pushed by the fashion world and its related fucking-with-the-minds-of-women and normality-pathologising industries. It’s also worth noting that Freddy has used her trademark murder weapons to cut herself on the shoulder and thigh, because there’s nothing sexier than self-harming anorexic teenage girls, right?

Jailbait Jason Voorhees (from the interminable Friday the 13th series) is also available, and she too seems to have experienced some difficulty in dressing herself sensibly. Doesn’t she get chilly dressed like this, hiding in the bushes and spending ages inside cupboards or under floorboards preparing for that perfect kill? This relentless, remorseless killing machine has an axe, a machete, the iconic hockey mask, “powerful sixpack abs” and, most crucially of all, large breasts.

Oh, Japan.

Delta of Venus

(CC licensed image by Boaz Ng, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ng_b/8320933204)

The standard story is that the carnivorous Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) plant’s name refers to the Roman goddess of love, without going into too much detail. Muscipula actually means mousetrap, not flytrap, but that’s not important right now (to quote Airplane! for no apparent reason).

Dionaea means “daughter of Dione”, i.e. Aphrodite, Venus’ Greek counterpart. This fixation on love goddesses gives some clue as to the real reason for the name; the filthy minds and sniggering schoolboy humour of 18th century naturalists. To them it was equally salient that it trapped and digested unsuspecting visitors (hence, flytrap) and that it had two touch sensitive, reddish lobes surrounded by hair… i.e. it reminded them of female genitalia. That link isn’t at all obscene, by the way, it just gives some more background information on the perpetrators of this Linnean lewdness.

I admit that I’m no gynaecologist, but I think it’s highly unlikely that any of their wives were harbouring anything like this down below…

… although apparently sex is what came to the minds of those mixed-up pervs when they saw an inviting Flytrap squeeze the life out of whatever foolish creature blundered into Venus’ clutches.

Sigmund Freud: “Please step into my office, gentlemen.”

I suspect this information may add a certain je ne sais quois to future Little Shop of Horrors viewings.

Gay Pride March of the Penguins

The final post inspired by Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Penguins and their gayness hardly need an introduction given the ubiquity of “on the lighter side” news reports about male Penguin couples in zoos. Wild Humboldt Penguins live in groups of 10-60 individuals, but King Penguin communities can consist of up to 300,000 pairs. Lifelong homosexual pair bonds develop between male Humboldts. They usually live together in a nest they’ve built. They also both take part in the magnificently named “ecstatic display” in which the male stretches out his head and neck, flapping his flippers and emitting a loud braying sound.

Males in heterosexual pairs also sometimes court and copulate with other heterosexually paired males and with females other than their own mate. In zoo populations of Humboldts, at least 5% of all pairs are exclusively homosexual. Other males are bisexual, pairing with males after losing a female partner.

Homosexual relationships between King Penguins are less durable, often ending in divorce after about a year. Like Humboldts, some King Penguins never show any interest in heterosexual relationships.

There are other variations on the monogamous pair and the nuclear family. About a quarter of heterosexual pairings end in divorce, often with the female leaving the male. About 6% of chicks are raised by single parents. Like the Hooded Warblers mentioned last time, Penguins occasionally (about 5% of the time) form trios. Non breeding females may join a breeding pair as a kind of nanny. Kidnap of eggs or chicks by chickless penguins occurs sometimes. It’s like a Penguin soap opera. 

Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Courtship, Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding, Parenting Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time… something not about gay animals!

Original Penguin image from Wikipedia Commons.

Songbird divorces

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Hooded Warblers are small yellow, green and black songbirds who spend the summer in North America and winters in Mexico and Central America.

These birds take part in all manner of homosexual and alternate-heterosexual family arrangements. Heterosexual pairs rarely build nests, but when two males get together they build one together. Sometimes they raise eggs that have been parasitically laid in their nest by a Cowbird. Male pairs also adopt eggs that have been abandoned by a female Warbler, or they shack up with another male after the female leaves; up to 50% of heterosexual pairings lead to this kind of “divorce”. There are also three-way partnerships in addition to pairs, but despite this superficial monogamy (or binogamy) over a third of Hooded Warbler young were fathered by males playing away from their partners. Single parenting is also common.

Plumage transvestism (i.e. females having some degree of male plumage and therefore a transgendered appearance) is also very frequent. This ranges from having a few black feathers on the head like a male to being visually indistinguishable from a male. In this species males are mostly the only ones who sing, but some of the transvestite females are able to sing as well.

Hooded Warbler (Wilsonia citrina)

Homosexuality: Male Transgender: Transvestism Behaviours: Pair-bonding, Parenting Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… gay pride march of the Penguins

Original Hooded Warbler image from Wikipedia Commons.

You catch more Flycatchers with honey…

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Ocher-Bellied Flycatchers are small, long-tailed, olive green birds who live in lowland forests between Mexico and the Amazon.

These Flycatchers have a complex social organisation and three distinct types of male. About 42% are territorial, defending “courts” in the foliage within which they perform courtship displays. Sometimes groups of these territorials form an area of several nearby display courts, also known as a lek. 10% of males are satellites who associate with territorials but do not display. This could be regarded as a form of apprenticeship, since they often inherit the territory when the owner retires. 48% of males are itinerant and have no territory either of their own or in waiting.

The aim of the male leks is to attract a female mate, but territorial males will also court other males who visit. These visiting males will adopt the behaviour of females in every detail and be courted as if they really were female. Most interestingly of all, it appears that the courting males only realise that their mate is male when they reach the point of mating with them. At this point they will usually chase away the behaviourally “transvestite” male. The itinerant males, conversely, must be well aware that they are being courted by another male. There have been observations of apparently bisexual territorial males who court females in their own territory, but then go as a visitor in search of same-sex action in the territories of other males.

Ocher-Bellied Flycatcher (Mionectes oleagineus dyscola)

Homosexuality: Male Transgender: Transvestism Behaviours: Courtship Ranking: Incidental Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… more tiny avian transvestites!

Say yes I will yes to Bloomsday

Even his lapels are filthy.

Today, the 16th of June, is Bloomsday: the annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce in general, and of his landmark Modernist novel Ulysses in particular. It’s a landmark in the literary sense and also in the geographical sense, a dauntingly huge and dense wodge of cellulose. If ever a book was better read weightlessly as an e-book, Ulysses is it. June 16th 1904 is the Dublin day described in hyperreal detail by the book’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, and re-enacted by Joyce fanatics every year since 1954.

The 16th of June was also significant as the date of Joyce’s first outing with the woman who would become his beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. So why don’t you celebrate Bloomsday by starting on Ulysses if you haven’t already? To be honest you might regret it and give up in frustration as many have done before, but you definitely won’t regret trying. But first, how about this:

IT’S ONLY THE BEST COMPLETEST MOST BROWNSEXFUL PAGE OF SHEER FILTH WRITTEN BY JAMES JOYCE TO HIS WIFE ON THE WHOLE BLOODY INTERNET.

https://adoxoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/fμckbird-and-jim-james-joyces-letters-to-nora-barnacle

It’s been linked from Tumblr, Reddit and even by those depraved little naughty farties at The Telegraph. The readership counts for the page are already predictably massive, as they are every year on this day.

And of course there’s also Kate Bush’s magnificent and typically loopy-sexy tribute to Ulysses: The Sensual World. A few years ago she finally released the song as originally intended, with quotes from Joyce. These had been forbidden by the Joyce estate in the late 80s. But I still prefer this version, if only because I don’t think there are enough pastiches of Joycean prose in the world. I think it’s more fun and more in the spirit of Joyce to make it up– as Bush was forced to– than to just quote it.

Look! Kate’s raided the costume box at the local amateur dramatic society again, now she’s sashaying through a forest fire and hopping around like a scary crow and being all sexy and whatnot. Not pictured: police search team and duty psychiatrist.

Happy Bloomsday my hot little boys and girls, you brownarsed blackguards, you whores of the hedge.

Update: Here’s a reading of the original Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses, to which Kate Bush was referring.