Asia Extreme Film thread

Okay, which of you maniacs likes Asia Extreme Cinema? I've only seen a few of these, but I'm not up for too much of this stuff! Aiyee!

I must admit, I enjoy the deliberate subversion of the "passive" Asian female stereotype, particularly in AUDITION, which is like something on LSD. (They even replay conversations two ways, like, how the two different people *heard* it.) A man is supposedly "auditioning" actresses for a movie, but in actuality, he is looking for a proper submissive wife, the "old-fashioned" type. He thinks he's found her, and well, he's in for a major shock. HAHAHAHA, serves him right!

I've seen others, but had to turn off SUICIDE CLUB because that roll-of-skin thing was just too gross for me. I'm a vegetarian!

Do you have recommendations? Go easy on me, please!

Stay out the way of the southern thing

Left: Kudzu (from The Fruit Fly)

I am from a southern mother, and like Rita Mae Brown, I repatriated as an adult. Moving south was like coming home, only it wasn't.


Being an ethnically-displaced person is strange and oddly transcendent. I think of VS Naipaul, an Indian and Hindu, born in Trinidad. No one else makes India more real to me. He loves India as an insider and outsider, and in his writing, he shapes-shifts, back and forth, inside and out.

I never felt like a yankee. My family was looked down on and called hillbillies, but I had never actually lived in the "hills" at all; I grew up in the city. To me, "hillbilly" meant that my family played in a country-and-western band, and we ate certain foods like cornbread and pinto beans. My grandfather said "shit fire!" which shocked my young yankee schoolmates--one of them asked: what is 'shit fire'? (I had to admit I didn't know, but it was reserved for situations that nowadays would call for a response like "Fuck me!") So I was never a proper yankee, but when I first got here, could not in any way feel like a southerner either. I remember being in tears when I couldn't understand about half of my neighbors, so deep were their accents.

After over 20 years of marriage into a deeply-southern family, I feel that I finally belong.

I can still remember when I first saw kudzu, covering everything like a thick, lush, wavy, symmetrical, emerald-green blanket. Upon my arrival in Columbia, SC, I even took photos of it. I have photos of kudzu snaking up telephone poles and electrical wires; enveloping houses, abandoned gas stations and shotgun shacks, turning everything beautiful, as snow does. Transforming the whole world into green leaves. But there are snakes and other varmints in there. Kudzu chokes other plants and kills them. Southerners cuss the kudzu, and here I was, in my neo-southern repatriated ignorance, wanting to plant more.

Kudzu hides things, as southerners tend to hide things. How fitting that it has traditionally been used in herbal medicine as an alcoholism remedy and to detoxify drug addicts; conditions that thrive on what is hidden.

Some people go to war with the kudzu: goddamn shit is gettin outta my yard if it's the last thing I do! And other people resign themselves to it: you can't kill it. Surrender Dorothy! As an herbalist, I am dedicated to understanding the kudzu, but I daresay, it is the way we once tried to "understand" the Soviets. Shades of "we will bury you!" come to mind. Does the kudzu want to co-exist? Or will it take over?

It's indestructible, and will survive the nuclear war, they tell me, just like cockroaches. Probably.

But I can't help it: I love survivors. Particularly southern ones.

Corporate take-overs of everyday life

From LuckyMom at the wonderful PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY CHRONICLES, comes this post:

A new study has revealed that children surveyed at a Head Start center in California prefered the taste of food wrapped in the McDonalds logo over the exact same food unwrapped. Some of the foods were common-place snacks like carrots and milk.

Researchers are balking at the overly successful effects of McDonalds strategic marketing toward children. Psychologists are lining-up against MickyDs while others choose to blame the parents.

I am always in the market for another reason to hate McDonalds. But seriously, this is alarming. LuckyMom wonders if all children would have this positive reaction to fast-food wrappings, or is it more likely among poor children and/or children who watch a lot of television. What do you think?

Meanwhile, the evil WalMart is coming to my neighborhood. Like, two buildings away. I'm sick over it.

I had been overly-confident that (see article) the rich people in Thornblade, the hyper-affluent golf-course neighborhood adjacent to my apartment complex, would be able to keep out WalMart. They COULDN'T. And they spent several million dollars trying. What hope is there for the rest of us?

We are contemplating moving. Then again, will rents decrease? That might not be so bad. But there is a REASON rent will decrease, if you know what I mean. The traffic around here (intersection of Pelham and I-85) is horrendous as it is. What are they trying to DO to us????

--thoroughly disgusted with runaway monopoly capitalism--

Graphic from Eadon.com. Warning, politically incorrect, sometimes sexist cartoons, etc etc.

The Male vs Female Gaze

At left: Girl before a mirror by Pablo Picasso.

When I first saw the Picasso painting, I didn't know squat about art or cubism, but I remember thinking, "She doesn't like what she sees." (Rorschach test, anyone?)

In the discussion over my last post (about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival), a related issue came up: Do we feel our appearance is judged more harshly by women or by men?

Maggie Jochild wrote:

I was not visibly disabled the first time I went to Michigan in 1977, but I was fat. Very fat. And it was the first place in my life where I ever went naked in public -- even with my lovers, I'd not shown my body. Michigan created enough safety for that to occur. It was also where I learned that women have beards, have mustaches, have flat chests, have enlarged clitorises, have mastectomy scars, have unimaginable scars (like I now have), have every kind of body type you can imagine, -- that women often look like what our culture calls "men" -- because bodies are on full view and it's just not voyeuristic. We come out of our mothers this way. It was tremendously validating and educational.

[...]

I am now really fond of nudism, and have often gone to events where clothing is optional. And the fact is, at venues where men are present (even or sometimes especially leftie/gay men), I get snickered at. Always by a man. NEVER by women. I do believe this is conditioning -- and what I refer to as ideology is conditioning, not hard-wired into any brain -- but it's so entrenched and laid in so early, the only way around it is a complete re-do of identity. NOT appearance.

Others immediately disagreed. Bint commented:

I have often had my body ridiculed by women. I remember when I was going through radiation and the skin on my back was burned to a crisp. It wasn't a bit contagious or oozing, just charred. I was engaged and had gone to try on wedding gowns. Of the people who saw me in that store, daring to show my non-conforming body, feel free to guess the gender of the person I could see sneering at me when I turned around to face them. I could give even more accounts of situations like this. The idea that men are conditioned to be less accepting to variations on body types is a joke to me and many other women of color and women with disabilities.

Octagalore has also felt more *judgment* from women:

Bint: I too think what you said was very reasonable, especially the above. Most of my friends are women -- I'm not someone who claims "women don't get me" -- in fact, women usually get me better. But I've also gotten the most heartbreak from them.

I was horribly unpopular in grade school through high school. Although I became identifiably conventionally attractive during this period, I was very "different" in religion, how my parents dressed me (awful crocheted ponchos, "interesting" ethnic outfits) and in other ways. New boys would come to the school, hang out with me, then inevitably a girl would tell them how weird and oddly-dressed and outcast-y I was and they'd back off. High school was more of the same.

How about you? More nasty comments from men or women? Has that changed since you have aged vs when you were young?

If you agree with Bint and Octagalore, do you think women's negative judgments are due to oppression and rivalry, or is this just because we are also so hard on ourselves? After staring at ourselves in the mirror a long time, it seems likely we have developed a hypersensitive awareness of physical appearance, which we then turn on each other.

On the other hand, men have this way of humiliating women that, for me, far exceeds anything women do. It just feels different. The misogyny? Aggressive language? The tone of voice? I'm not sure why. Is there a possibly-physical threat present in men's statements, that is not present in women's?

As a child, were you ever picked on for looking different? Did this come from boys or girls, mostly?

On a related note: Do lesbians have more positive experiences with other girls, regarding personal appearance, than hetero girls? I'd be curious to know if lesbians ever wanted to tell their friends they were pretty, but refrained from doing so. Or did you go ahead? As a child, I had a friend who always told me I was "pretty like a doll" (I wasn't, but I loved hearing it), and I have always wondered if she grew up to be a lesbian or was just being a nice friend.

Say Yes to Michigan

Just for the record, I am not the one who tried to comment on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (herein known as Michfest), over at Women's Space/Margins. It wasn't me! Besides, Heart is once again shilling for plane fare, and damned if I will interfere with her reindeer games. But I decided to start a Michfest thread, seeing as how we are in countdown mode! ONE WEEK TILL FESTIVAL!!! Par-tay!!!

For those living in Antarctica and unaware, Michfest is for women only. I have been there and it is fun, but that was a very long time ago. I don't really know what the festival is like now. I don't know exactly when the controversy started, and it depends on which account you read, but I didn't hear about it until the 90s. The controversy is about the phrase "women-born women" and what that means. The festival is for "women born women only." Camp Trans, for transgendered women, was set up to counter Michfest, as an alternative for everyone. But keep in mind, many transfolks, both transwomen and transmen, have attended the festival since it's inception.

One of my initial problems with Camp Trans was the fact that there are many, many places and institutions that are unapologetically closed off to transpeople, such as the military, Miss World, Miss USA, the priesthood, the convent, the FBI, and so on. Yes, they all do panty-checks at some point. I wondered: Why weren't people concentrating on protesting THOSE institutions? Why attack feminists? This seemed plenty suspect to me. In some ways, it still does.

And then, I realized: If *I* were a transwomen, I wouldn't want to go any of those places, I'd want to go to Michfest. This is a feminist gathering, or at least it began that way. It is women's culture, and many feminist women go to Michfest at least once. You might say it is like the feminist Mecca or Rome; it's like a pilgrimage. Once I thought about it that way, I thought it made sense that feminist transwomen would want to attend.

Some background on the issue:

Official Michfest website.

Wikipedia on Michfest Contains an excellent account of the history of the festival, as well as Camp Trans. Great links and resources.

Dykes to watch out for-Episode 495: Last year's Michfest thread with 350 comments! (bonus: a great comic!)

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival sets the record straight Women's Space/Margins (8-22-2006)

Camp Trans (although it says CAMP TRANS 2006 at the top, information applies to 2007, too.)

Your opinion?

Please try to respect the concept of an all-women's festival in your reply. And transwomen are welcome to give their opinions, of course: Are you interested in actually attending? Or has this just become a symbolic thing, as I often suspect it is?

I'd certainly be interested in comments from any transwomen who have managed to attend anyway, and if you felt "at risk" or if anyone actually seemed to care? (some think this is mostly a "management" opinion, and the festival attendees themselves actually don't care as much)

You are welcome to comment anonymously as long as you are NICE. This is a SOUTHERN blog, and we try to be polite as we reload. :) (old joke, don't get upset!)

Thanks in advance.