Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy.
It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a brothel representative] said. ‘If we owned a Dairy Queen we would be giving away free ice cream…'”
is not another film by Lars von Trier ;-). Salon.com’s Amy Benfer reports about what may be the first heterosexual dark room in the world –
“Finally, someone has figured out a way to use night-vision goggles to make love not war”.
Not surprisingly though, it is located on the Island of Manhattan, and run by some French expats…
Following on Sen. Santorum’s recent intervention concerning the legal status of homosexuals’ privacy in the US,
“President Bush is proud to introduce an ambitious new phase in the fight to preserve all that is decent in America. Conceived and championed by the revered Republican think tank Americans for Purity, ‘Operation Infinite Purity‘ is dedicated to the complete eradication of masturbation from American soil by the year 2005.”
From the Whitehouse.org
When German singer Udo Juergens once had a huge hit singing about the joys of retirement (“with 66 years, your life begins”) he probably thought about long strolls in the mountains rather than Sex and the Single Senior.
From the NYTimes.
Norman Mailer writes in the London Times that, in his opinion, the US went to war because of tv – but above all, because of women – American feminists, to be precise.
“We understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was. Sanitised but terrific … There were, however, even better reasons for using our military skills, but these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the past 30 years. For better or worse, the women?s movement had had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego had withered in the glare.”
You have probably heard about US Senator Santorum’s fashistoid remarks about homosexuals having no right to privacy for their alleged attempt to destroy “healthy family values”. Himself being gay, Bruce Bawer, an American poet and literary critic living in Olso, does not exactly agree with the Senator here – but being a proud American he is nonetheless grateful for this wake-up call:
“Santorum’s remarks betray an utter indifference to the idea of American liberty. He has spit in the face of every coalition soldier who went to Iraq to fight for freedom, and at every Eastern European who reveres America as the symbolic antithesis of Soviet-era tyranny. And he has confirmed, to a depressing extent, the condescending cartoon version of America that has repeatedly been on display in the European media these past months — the America that is not about freedom at all but about power, pure and simple.”
Harsh, but true, words. Salon.com has got the rest of them.
Spiegel Online tells us that German guys prefer Charlotte over the other three SATC girls while American blokes prefer Carrie. And all are intimidated by Samantha. I suppose that’s because she tried to speak German in one of the series 4 episodes…
Remember Derek Zoolander, the hyper-intelligent male supermodel that cannot turn right on the catwalk? The Guardian reports that Onur Güntürkün, a professor of biopsychology at the University of the Ruhr, in Bochum, Germany, has just published a short article in Nature concerning Derek’s problem, the subject of “turning right” – albeit paying more attention to kissing than to catwalks.
See? Even these days, there is important news concerned with making love, rather than making war.
I have to say, Goethe does sound much better in German. The only useful English translation of this eternally famous quote from Goethe’s Faust I Google had knowledge of is – The Eternally Female Draws Us Onward.
As with most translations, the one at hand is far from perfect, but it does give you rough idea of what Goethe is talking about: the eternal attraction-repulsion trap that evolution had in mind to make life difficult for men and women alike. As he was very much a guy, Goethe’s poetry tends to concentrate on the dynamics of the male’s attraction to the female.
While it will be hard to refute the theory that most men are attracted to most women, and despite Goethe’s allusions to the destructive, seemingly magic force this attraction can sometimes set free, there are luckily not too many cultures remaining in which it is commonly held that female seductive prowess is indeed some sort of witchcraft drawing innocent males onward into doom. It’s luckily been a while since the last autodafé in my home town.
Afghanistan is one of the unfortunate places where this kind of thought is still prevalent – apparently prevalent to an extent I would not have thought possible until I read the following story in a book about the “New Great Game” recently published by Lutz Kleveman (in German).
You may have heard about the death of Marjan, the blind lion in Kabul’s zoo, in January last year. But Kleveman tells a far more interesting story concerning the death of a lioness, who had died a year earlier under tragic circumstances.
A visit in Kabul’s Zoo was usually one of the rare occasions for non-lethal entertainment in the No-Fun Islamic Republic’s capital. But things became lethal even there on a tragic day in 2000 when a little boy jumped over the lions’ cage’s fence to pet Marjan, the one-eyed lion. And he did. The lion did not move until the boy attempted to pet a female. It was then that Marjan tore the poor toddler apart. A true tragedy – which was not yet over.
The next day, the boy’s mourning older brother, a Taleban soldier, visited the lions to take revenge. Using a grenade he tore the lioness apart. When later asked why he did not kill Marjan, he replied that the male was not responsible for his brother’s death.
It was the female’s insidious seductive prowess that drew his brother onward into doom.
Last week I saw the film “Kissing Jessics Stein” (aka “Kissing Jessica” in Germany – note: German film distributors often use parts of the original title instead of a) coming up with something useful in German or using the entire English title. You think this is weird? You are right).
“Kissing Jessica Stein” is a postmodern romantic comedy about a woman, Jessica, in her late 20s who is exploring her sexual horizon by replying to a classified ad by lesbian Helen.
The film depicts in an extremely witty way how she gets involved deeper and deeper in the relationship, eventually comes out as a lesbian to her conservative family and moves in with Helen. In the end, however, she realises that Helen is much more of a friend than lover. Helen, of course, feels the same way and so they split as a couple but remain close friends.
While I really liked the film it made me think about two things. The first of which is the production budget, or rather, the entire history of its making. The two protagonists not only wrote the script while in acting school and later performed it in an off-Broadway theatre. They were actually involved in financing the film’s budget of unbelievable 1m USD. Distributed by Fox Searchlight pictures, the film has grossed about 7m so far in the US alone.
That is a return on investment which should silence all those who bought tech stocks back in october 1999, even if the production budget probably doesn’t account for marketing expenses. Interestingly, I (and no one of those I know who have seen the film) remarked anything negative with respect to its technical perfection. The minimal budget for professionally looking dialogue-based films without stars has apparently come down to about 1m USD thanks to technological advances. This heralds great things for films from smaller markets than the US – even if they won’t be able to keep up with Jessica’s ROI, for most of those films will lack the support of Fox Searchlight’s international marketing clout.
The second thing Jessica made me think about was the amount of estrogene the late nineties and early post millenium years have shed on the screens. The entire Western hemisphere has been familiarised with the most intimate feelings of the likes of Ally McBeal, Carrie Bradshaw, or now, Jessica Stein. We have indulged in their post-post-modern feminism and realised that today’s tv-heroines will tell everybody exactly what they want – even if everybody is no longer interested.
There is a direct line from Sally “having a salad” after meeting Harry to Jessica Stein’s lesbian exercises. I can’t really tell you why, but seeing Jessica Stein trying to convince herself that she can be a lesbian, too, made me realise that the days of estrogene on the screen are likely to end rather sooner than later. All that had to be said has been said by now.
So my bet is a return of testosterone on the screens. But in 2 years we will definitely know more…
