false canoe

done

either this song is a sensitive attempt to address the issue of statutory rape, or it's a crass excuse for me to sing the line "babe, i can't wait until your panties drop".

yikes!

i dunno. if you saw this poster outside a local restaurant would it function as some kind of incentive to get you in? or would you be creeped out by "gyro lady/jersey housewife-possible tranny" here and run, RUN GODDAMMIT! to some other establishment?

maybe it's a cultural thing. i see this poster in the window of a gyro joint near me every day and the weirdness of it never ceases to unsettle. why? i have no idea. it's not like there're human fingers in her gyro (i've checked). she's just fuckin' creepy.

teadoust has a dream!

i rarely remember my dreams. months, even years go by without the slightest memory of what takes place in my head at night. this morning, i actually remembered something i dreamt and decided to write it out...

i'm working in a large office space with many individual cubicles. there are potted plants hanging all over the place and some larger ones on the floor as well.
i'm chatting with a few people at a cubicle when a dumpy looking woman walks by and i insult her, which seems to be a regular routine for me.
"hey, why don't you try shoplifting your clothes from someplace besides goodwill?" i ask her as my coworkers laugh.
she calmly reaches into one of the hanging plant pots, pulls out a knife and attempts to stab me with it.
i manage to wrestle the knife away from her.
she then walks over to one of the larger floor plants, from which she produces what appears to be a samurai sword.
"i've got weapons stashed all over the place" she says coldly, "and i'm going to kill you."
"why?" i ask.
"because you've been insulting me from the minute you were hired!" she says, lunging at me with the sword.
"that's ridiculous!" i yell back at her as i run for an exit, "i was working here for at least 3 hours before we even met!"


that's all i remember. funny, no?

adults should know better...

one of the more depressing things about the internet is the free reign it gives to people's worst instincts, especially men.

there's an interesting article up on the av club site this week about overly distracting actors in movies. naturally, the nerds who congregate there were glad for an opportunity to let off steam about any number of supposedly insufferable performers. as expected, julia roberts came under heavy fire. disclaimer here: i like roberts a lot. whatever constitutes a "movie star", julia roberts has that quality in spades as far as i'm concerned. that doesn't necessarily mean i think she should be universally appealing. but the degree of invective the woman inspires in certain circles amazes me. i may not be the biggest audrey hepburn fan on the planet, yet i don't have trouble being objective and seeing what others might respond to with her. there's precious little of that on the av club site regarding anybody though and the stuff people casually write about roberts is just... weird.


*Rupert Giles

Somehow I totally missed Ocean's Eleven's release, and first caught it on TV, having heard nothing of the casting (I know, I must have been living in a freakin' cave), except Clooney & Pitt. When they waited by the grand stairs for Tess to descend, and the camera slowly panned up from her feet for the reveal, I was dumbstruck. Julia fucking Roberts?!? The ONLY WOMAN IN THE MOVIE, the glamorous prize, the object of studly men's fawning and drooling, and that's who they chose? I actually gasped out loud. Most overrated magazine-cover celebrity in history, with a bizarre giant mouth.

*Everybody here calls me Vicky

I used to find Julia Roberts charming until it became evident that the whole leaving-Keifer-at-the-altar thing wasn't just a product of youthful nerves and that she is in fact a megabitch who thinks the sun shines out of her ass.

I still think she's extraordinarily attractive, especially considering how horsey her features could be when taken separately (see Nancy Kerrigan for an example of those same features NOT working well), but the vulnerable, forehead-veiny thing she does so well can no longer fool me, and I wish people would stop inviting her to awards shows because she cannot shut the fuck up about herself.

how does one get to be an adult and write such craziness with such a disarming lack of self-consciousness? i'm not a particularly big nic cage fan, but other than casually tossing "i wish he'd go the fuck away" into a post where i was discussing him, i can't muster anything resembling the kind of personal animosity these julia roberts haters manage to tap into. cage's recent embarrassing problems with bankruptcy don't matter to me and even if i wanted to have a laugh at his expense, it'd be pretty hollow considering that the guy's comic book collection is worth more than i've earned in my entire life.

the posts above were pretty polite compared to this though:

*Unregistered Asshole #1446387

Julia Roberts was tolerable enough in "Pretty Woman," but after that her "shit don't stink" personna turned me off for good. I didn't care too much for Cameron Diaz back in the day, but the way Roberts' character sabotaged her in "My Best Friend's Wedding" made me like Diaz in that movie much more than her, because I know they wrote Roberts' role to fit her personality. Ashamed to admit, but I almost cheered to her character getting raped by her husband in "Sleeping With The Enemy." And how much more fun do you think "Conspiracy Theory" would have been if Mel Gibson had demanded a BJ from her?

note that homeboy has no problem with using mel "you should get raped by a pack of n*****s" gibson to help make his point about JR. how do adults reach a point where it makes sense to express sentiments like these in public? how do other adults tolerate such things? it's part of what makes the av club such a fascinating place. most of the people who post there are genuinely intelligent, yet many of them see the 'net as nothing more than a vehicle to express feelings otherwise unacceptable in the real world. i felt compelled to answer.

*teadoust

isn't it great that roberts exists though? she gives you an outlet for your rather obvious misogyny. it's amazing that people like you can post offensive tripe like this on a regular basis and not feel embarrassed about it. that's why i find posting here so funny: in the av club court of public opinion, what you wrote is actually acceptable. fucking astonishing. if you had any common sense you'd contact the av club editors and ask them to delete your post for the offensive misogynist garbage it is. if they had an ounce of decency that's what they'd do without your even asking.

nobody will pay much attention to that. the offensive comment won't be deleted. and likely as not, somebody will come along later and call me "teadouche" for posting it.

gwyneth paltrow also comes under fire a lot on the av club boards. bet you didn't know that every day millions of people are FORCED to visit paltrow's lifestyle site "goop" did you? i didn't either, but it must be so because there's no reason for anyone to get upset about anything paltrow does when she isn't making movies, right? ok, if "goop" was devoted to disseminating white supremacist propaganda, or if there was evidence floating around that paltrow spent hours each day physically torturing her children i'd completely understand rejecting her as an actress. but she runs a goofy lifestyle website and says dopey things in interviews? those are deal-breakers for you? get a fucking life already, freak.

*Maliah

Ugh, I haven't been able to stand Gwyneth Paltrow since she was a whiny, self important reporter in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Remember that one? I remember seeing her in an interview saying that she was interested in the part (which was terrible) because it was closer to being an art film than to an action movie. She drives me nuts.

Although so does Katherine Heigle, so perhaps I just hate tall blondes with classically pretty features and annoying voices.

not so bad, right? don't worry, it gets worse.

*Annoying Tall Blondes? Big Surprise...

They both confuse my penis, because it would like to penetrate them both, but somehow my brain is capable of overpowering this natural urge by reminding me of the stupid shit that comes out of their mouths in real life.

Think somebody said it best on this site a while ago: if nothing intelligent is going to come OUT of your mouth...

Great tits, though. I'll give her that.

haha! i get it, bro! stuff a COCK in that mouth! FUCK YEAH!

crap like that is why so many people have an idea that the majority of men who post things on the internet are frustrated perpetual loners with serious issues regarding women and intimacy.

oh, i have referred to nic cage as "a fucking idiot" several times on the av club boards. however, cage is a man and i'm not being entirely serious when i call him names anyway, as opposed to the rather obvious hostility some of these people are expressing towards women. i understand that some may see me as a hypocrite though.

fun on ebay!

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racism and empathy

the screen shot below is from the user account page for a fellow who used to post on the av club under the name mantan moreland. if you like old movies, you probably know mantan moreland, a black actor from the 30s and 40s who worked in a style that has become extremely embarrassing to blacks nowadays. a shuffling, eye-popping, mumbling, malapropism-spouting racist cliche of the most egregious kind. why would anybody want to post under that name, you might ask? mostly to engage in the kind of snarky, pseudo-racist "look how UN-pc i can be!" bullshit that occasionally soils the av club comments boards. blacks seem to be the most frequent targets of this stuff. and though common sense would dictate that this sort of "humor" would likely offend many blacks, it persists. mantan's posts generally consisted of half-assed jokes written in a loose approximation of the original mantan moreland's speech patterns. yes, in 2010 this is what some idiot thought would be funny. and the big surprise is that most of my fellow av clubbers didn't find him offensive. certainly very few registered any open complaints on the site.

personally, i don't have a problem with someone posting stuff that is openly racist, because it can be called out for what it is. but the mantan moreland character bothers me. it strikes me as a deliberate attempt to smear racist content across public boards in a way that seems cowardly and almost passive-aggressive. i don't understand the compulsion that makes some whites engage in this kind of behavior and why so many on the av club site are so blase about it. i attempted to address this by creating a character myself, stepin fetchit. i followed mantan moreland around for a while, adding on to his posts with some fairly heavy-handed commentary and criticism, written in a deliberately grating approximation of the original stepin fetchit's speech patterns. surprisingly, i received more complaints for doing this than mantan moreland ever received for his schtick. a few posters suggested that whatever the intent, "mantan" and "stepit" were both simply boring. one rather jaded person came right out and said that explicit racism was no problem in their opinion, we just weren't funny. for lots of post-pc people, that's an important point, i guess. it's okay to be obnoxious as long as one isn't boringly sincere about anything like racism, because the av club is a pop culture site and nobody's interested in tiresome discussions of racism and morality. many take the position that those issues can't be settled, so there's no purpose in arguing them. many of these same people are more than happy to engage in long arguments about which quentin tarantino movie is the best. they rarely convince anyone else, but it'd be a waste of time trying to make them see the futility of their actions, because the only topics worth arguing are the ones they select.

anyway. i don't know exactly what effect i expected my stepin fetchit posts to have but after about a day and a half, i ran out of things to say in that guise and my nemesis was still going strong. i decided to switch tactics, based on two things: a letter i'd received from an av club staffer to whom i'd made a complaint about mantan moreland and a short article that appeared on the site which linked to a profile in esquire magazine about film critic roger ebert and the disfigurement he has suffered as a result of his ongoing battle with cancer. the letter i received from staff in regards to mantan moreland was pretty straightforward. they said that they would not be deleting mantan moreland's account, because he was offensive but seemed harmless. i thought about this for a bit and then came up with an idea. the ebert article made it fairly clear that most of the av club staff revere the man. i decided that the best point i could possibly make would be to show the staff something they would find offensive and perhaps they might come to understand that "offensive but harmless" is something of a contradiction in terms. drop dead jawless, a play on the phrase "drop dead gorgeous" and featuring a picture of roger ebert's cancer ravaged face for an id, is what i came up with...

and the account was deleted within a day of its activation. less than 30 comments were posted under this name before some offended staffer pulled the plug. meanwhile, mantan moreland was busily plugging along, having posted well over 100 comments after less than a week and half's activity. what's even funnier is that for the most part, other av clubbers either refused to acknowledge drop dead jawless or they informed me in no uncertain terms that "the joke" was in poor taste. especially dispiriting for me was the non-response of one of my favorite commenters on the site, the intelligent and extremely prolific lone audience of the apocalypse. he ignored drop dead jawless even when i directly addressed him, yet on multiple occasions in the past he'd played along with the mantan moreland gag. i guess he's another of those who thinks that if he isn't offended by something, it simply isn't offensive. in other words: he's a douchebag.

i hadn't yet run out of things to say as drop dead jawless, so i opened another account, this time as drop dead jawless again and immediately posted a direct question to staffer scott tobias as to why my account had been deleted while mantan moreland was still going strong like some damned racist energizer bunny. i got "no idea, wasn't my call" in response. but within an hour of this exchange, drop dead jawless again was deleted by staff. then mantan moreland's account was finally removed as well.

i don't feel as though i've won anything here. i like the av club site articles and a lot of the people who comment on them are smart and funny. but many of them seem to be wholly lacking in empathy for anyone or anything outside their own circle of recognition. maybe they have that peculiar human problem whereby generalized tragedy doesn't affect them, whereas when things are personalized, they respond. but the idea of some unknown number of blacks (and it doesn't seem as though many of them visit the site) being offended just didn't register as being comparable with how personally offended many of them felt when they saw me "making fun" of poor roger ebert's travails. the fallout in the thread above was about what i expected in the long run; one poster who agreed with me but had severe reservations about the way i made my point and a lot of posts that said i was wrong and/or stupid, plus a staffer (not mr. tobias) who suggested that calling attention to an ass by being a bigger ass seemed counter-productive. the older i get, the less i understand people. i made a point in an extremely ugly way after other methods failed. nobody seemed to get the idea that the anger they felt at my seeming contempt towards roger ebert might be exactly what a black person would feel if they saw a mantan moreland post on the site.

many whites who post on the av club site come off as almost enraged by the idea of "political correctness". they see it as an intrusion on their right to free speech and a coddling of minorities which serves no purpose. but if so much "free speech" is spent attacking powerless groups, what's the value? av clubbers spend an inordinate amount of time making jokes at the expense of women and gays and blacks. what's the real agenda there? this isn't about free speech on the internet, it's about an angry majority that doesn't like the constraints imposed by civil society. maybe "political correctness" does go too far, but returning to the "good old days" when whites could (and did) say whatever they wanted about already marginalized groups doesn't strike me as the solution and the never-ending urge of some whites to go back to that time needs to be examined. things are inarguably better (if not perfect) for minorities now. is that what's troubling many whites? i have no answers, really. i wish i did, because these questions scare the fuck out of me sometimes.