Daily Batman: Ghost World Half-day — One in every crowd

Thora Birch rocks a Catwoman mask as Enid in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001).

“Give me all your money, bitch!”
“Where did you get that?”
“You won’t believe it. Guess!”
“Where?”
“Anthony’s II!”
“No way. When?”
“Just now! I went with Seymour.”
“Ugh! You cunt.”

All the screencaps for Ghost World Half-Day will come from a combination of sources: heartstopper, augustusgloop, and vodiak on the LJ; Movie Screenshots on the blogger; various imdb caps and old, unsourced still shots. Also I might scan some pictures from the graphic novel since I am right now looking at the spine of it in a pile of books on my desk.

Langston Hughes Month: “To Artina”

I will take your heart.
I will take your soul out of your body
As though I were God.
I will not be satisfied
With the touch of your hand
Nor the sweet of your lips alone.
I will take your heart for mine.
I will take your soul.
I will be God when it comes to you.

(Langston Hughes, “To Artina.”)

Synecdoche and possession in the eye of the male observer — murdering the Object: it is a Thing.




Photographer unknown, picture comes from a vintage Pirelli calendar shoot. Kind of a Jane Birkin Inspiration Station thing happening. I approve.

Talk nerdy to me: Star Wars propaganda edition

“Truth is always the first casualty of war.” — Aeschylus.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.” –Joseph Goebbels.

“[In] Democratic societies … the state can’t control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it’s much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think.” — Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent, 1992.

“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.” — Adolf Hitler.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. ” — Joseph Goebbels.

“Propaganda must confine itself to very few points, and repeat them endlessly.” — Adolf Hitler.

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” — George W. Bush.

“The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.” — H.L. Mencken.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” — Chomsky.

“Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character … Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the state can play.” — Goebbels.

“[The propaganda system] recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.” — Chomsky.

“The truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Goebbels.

“Propaganda must never serve the truth, especially not insofar as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.” — Hitler.

“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” — John F. Kennedy.

Is that so? I think I disagree, but I’ve debated this before, during Sam Haskins month, when I went off on Leni Riefenstahl. It is a damned tangled web, and the propaganda flows from all sides.

Some of those posters are by Cliff Chiang and some by Joe Carroney, and some by unknown others; see, the sources from which I gathered all these images were kind of slipshod in their own sourcing so if you know specifics please do shoot them my way because I am dissatisfied with the low-class credit attribution job I’m turning in on this one so far.

Busy day ahead, but …

This.

via.

Woke up early even despite Spring ahead. Slipped away to a dawn Mass alone instead of dragging kidlet to big old family affair at the usual hour. Had kickass readings in church — Old Testament all David gettin’ chosen king by Samuel over Jesse’s other progeny, New Testament all man-born-blind that Jesus heals. Feeling muscular and zen about this day’s prospects for success. I control the events of my life.

Seaquest Out!

Inspiration Station: Star Wars, “That’s no moon” à la Magritte edition

As seen on the forums of somethingawful.

cf:

“La Trahison des Images/The Treachery of Images” (Magritte, 1928-29), sometimes translated as “The Betrayal of Images.”


Final thought:

Sign on one of the back doors of Vintage Gardens, Modesto, California. I took this at Paolo and Miss D’s wedding and was thinking of Magritte’s pipe the entire time.

Rainy days and Mondays: Inspiration Station and Movie Moment — Wizard of Oz edition

Sheets of rain keep falling here. It’s pretty when a little sun comes through, it makes it look like glass. But otherwise it’s overall a very dingy scene and it bums me out even more than a rainy day normally would (I actually like the rain, mainly) because I am waiting to hear from my husband about his grandmother. She’s not expected to live much longer than the next few days; when she passes away, I will fly to Portland to be with him and the family. I simply can’t let him go through that alone, and I would never disrespect my in-laws by even considering not going, to say nothing of the fact that I would like to say goodbye to a woman in whose home I lived (we rented from them once they moved to a retirement center), whose son I spent a great deal of time with, and to whose grandson I got married. It will be difficult, but it has to be done.

So today, being that it was raining cats and dogs and I think I even saw a ferret, and as kidlet had a school holiday, I wanted to have special bonding time before I travel without her. We are almost never separated, so I’m anxious about that as well.

We decided to make chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches (total rainy day food) and watch us some uplifting movies. First up was The Wizard of Oz, and it started my wheels turning about the books and about the pluses and pitfalls of escapism.

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

L. Frank Baum

Chicago, April, 1900.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Introduction.)

A lovely sentiment, but I find Baum’s assertion as to the lack of nightmares and heartache in the final product of the Oz books — of which I am one of the world’s staunchest and most highly devoted fans — intriguingly debatable. If I have time later this week, I will try to have a movie moment with Return to Oz, which will shed some light on what I mean.

Holly Owens as Dorothy in the Emerald City, for Tarina Tarantino’s “My Pretty” collection.

— Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?
— Uh-huh.
— Jolly old town!

(The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)).

Kate Moss as Dorothy Gale by Francois Nars.

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, then I never really lost it to begin with.”

Did You Know? … two of the images in this post are pictures of my daughter at Christmas. She gets a new pair of ruby slips every year.

Movie Moment: “Inspiration Station,” Blade Runner and influenced detritus edition

Thinking about Daryl Hannah got me thinking about how I keep seeing stuff here and there in the last few years — yes, years, a) the older I get the faster the time goes, and b) that is how long it takes me to accept a pattern and my feelings about it — that reminds me of Blade Runner.

Pris in all her glory. Screencap from the movie via Napalm Jelly on the livejournal.

In case you are like me and consider super-famous-intellectual things that everyone recommends a pretentious, potentially boring burden to actually go look up (nothing raises my hackles like being told by someone I scarcely know that I “should” read or watch something: fuck you, my time is my own) and pursue viewing on your own, I will fill you in a tiny bit, cause this is one that I’m pleased to report I found for me was actually worth chasing down. The 1982 science-fiction/detective noir film is directed by Ridley Scott, and in it the excellent Daryl Hannah debuts in her first screen role as Pris, the acrobatically gifted/full-set-of-clothes-on-both-boobs-and-bajango-challenged Pleasure Replicant (happens to sexbots all the time — the poor girls got no clue how to simultaneously cover the upstairs and the downstairs).

Pris and another Pleasure Replicant. Workin’ it.

Sean Young is also featured in the film. You may remember her as that hot crazy chick who tried way too hard to get Tim Burton to let her play Catwoman in Batman Returns (psh, what kind of silly vintage-loving brunette gets obsessed by Catwoman; what a madcap and unheard of nutball). Now she is on reality tv shows, one was for being a country and western star and I think the other was to cope with her “alcoholism” or some shit — she seemed like fun to me when she was chugging that wine on the first show so whatever. Miss Young, who can scootch on down to my place any ol’ time for Funyuns, chardonnay, and old Julie Newmar episodes of Batman, plays the lead character’s love interest, Rachael in Blade Runner.

Screencap from the movie via Napalm Jelly on the livejournal.

Anyway, turns out the wheels of what I’d been seeing and the echoes I found in them of Blade Runner, which I haven’t seen in many years, may have been turning too slowly for me to notice until recently, but I was subconsciously smart enough to right-click and save a few of the things I saw. For examples:

Supermodel, “it” girl, and Panda Eraser’s second most-fave platinum blonde Agyness Deyn in Stockholm, Sweden, September 21, 2008.

Screencap from game via Julia Segal on the tumblr, around six or eight months ago.

The only “lovely” for now — she knows what she has to do to be billed as “talented” too — Miz Kat Dennings, rather clearly done up like Rachael the Replicant.

“Blast Off” by Peter Christian. Pleasure Replicant styling influence, I think.

… and one more of Kat Dennings from that same photoshoot cause ever since the Cappy brought her to my attention, she is up and coming on my list (don’t pretend like you don’t have a list).

Via No Smoking in the Skull Cave.

I’m not going to tell you that you “should” see Blade Runner. I will only say that I resisted, mainly because I was being stubborn and prejudiced, and when I finally gave in it turned out to be freaking sweet. I’d love for that to happen to someone else, because it’s a good feeling and it opened up my mind to not being such a reverse-discriminatory bitch about people’s “hipster” recommendations of popular esoteric things: turns out sometimes a thing has cool cult popularity because it deserves it, and I don’t need to disdain its countercultural cache. It’s okay to be on the bandwagon from time to time, even the small ones that scarcely anyone knows about and you suspect will be snobby. It’s a convoluted lesson, really, now that I look at it … sorry.