Monthly Archives: February 2011

A comparison between Lolita and American Beauty

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Some reading on the film.

Lester Burnham, aged forty-two years, underage love fascination named Angela Hayes. Humbert Humber, estimated age forty-five years, underage love fixation named Dolores Haze. The two male figures named above are from American Beauty and Lolita respectively. They are both the main characters throughout their respective genre’s, and both project what they think is the apex of beauty, youth, and sexuality onto girls under the legal statute. While Humbert never quite gets over his fixation of this projected idea of “love”, Lester does.

The similarities between the film American Beauty and Lolita are numerous, from the names of the last names of the “nymphets”[1] to the broken marriages both lead characters suffer at some point or another. It would seem that one of the primary influences for American Beauty might have been Lolita, and thus makes for very interesting comparison between the evolution of love in both.

Read more here.

A letter to Christchurch

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Paul Holmes has written a letter to Christchurch in response to the recent earthquake. Here’s a little from the NZ Herald site –

Dear Christchurch,

 

I’m writing to you as an Aucklander, to my Christchurch cousins and brother and sister Kiwis. And I just want you to know how much we’re all thinking of you and how much we love you and how much we feel for you in these impossible days.

 

Your city is on its knees. Our eyes fill with tears at the sight of it. We watch the TV and listen to the radio all day and we hear your emptiness, your loss, your dismay, your shock, your disbelief. We see that ubiquitous bloody silt from the liquefaction, that weird up-thrust of clag that fills your back yards and covers your roads and buries your cars.

Read the rest here.

 

The day the earth roared

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A very moving and personal account of the earthquake by Press reporter Vicki Anderson

With no warning the earth roared and shook us ferociously. Like my colleagues in the features department of Christchurch newspaper The Press, I dived under my desk.

 

I’m a music critic and as we shook and my mind’s eye flashed images of my four children I was pelted with CDs including, ironically, an Underworld album.

 

The same thing happened to me on September 4, I was even hit by the exact same CD, but this was completely different and a much more visceral and potently deadly quake.

 

Halfway through the 6.3 quake I wanted to see if my colleagues were OK so stupidly stuck my head out from under my desk only to be hit by a piece of roof. I said “F**k!” at the top of my lungs and it was drowned out by the sound of our building falling down around us.

Across the room from under their desk someone was yelling “yahoo” like it was a fun ride.

 

I was certain we were all going to die. Things seemed to be happening slowly but quickly at the same time.

 

I had a fight over something stupid with my partner before I left for work.

 

Just a few short hours later all I hoped was that I would have the opportunity to see him and hold him again.

 

Running late, I had given my children a quick peck before leaving. I wondered if it would be my last memory of them.

Read the rest here.

Win a Sudanese slave could be radio’s next tasteless laugh

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Joe Bennett comments on The Rock’s ‘win a wife competition’ – here’s a taste:

The days have long since passed when marriage was universally regarded as a sacred institution. Divorce, separation, adultery and remarriage have become staples of the gossip magazines; assault and murder staples of the court pages.

Radio station The Rock’s “win a wife competition” is an irreverent attempt to cash in on the mood of the times by amusing its blokish audience and tweaking the noses of the politically correct. “If you’re interested in holy matrimony with a potentially hot foreign chick, fill it out to the best of your ability,” the competition entry form reads. Reaction from its listeners and the left of the political spectrum suggests the competition is succeeding on both accounts.

The station has been inundated with entries from potential grooms and damned by former Green firebrand Sue Bradford and Labour’s women’s affairs spokeswoman Carol Beaumont for commercialising human relationships and promoting stereotypical attitudes towards women.

 

Read the rest here.

Why does nobody want to feel like a natural woman anymore?

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In this column Suzanne Moore discusses why she believes that we now have a new aesthetic of femininity where everything is meant to be as fake as possible.

Falsies have become my preoccupation. But clearly not just mine. I could buy a mascara called Falsies to give myself “the ultimate false lash glam look”. But why do that when I could just wear enormous false eyelashes? Or, better still, spend a small fortune on lash extensions, which hopefully wouldn’t fall off for a few weeks if tended lovingly. It all seems a lot of time and energy, really.

On the train or at the supermarket I see many young girls with long, spidery, glittery lashes, even when in their uniforms. I quite like this overalls-and-drag-queen look. I like the lack of pretence that this is real. But how did we get here, I wonder – to this new aesthetic of femininity where everything is meant to look as fake as possible? Hair, nails, tan, teeth, tits. Sure, I know the rules: that we are born naked, and “the rest is just drag”. Sure, I get the hyper-femininity of the big queens and the game old birds such as Dolly Parton and Cher. What is strange is that a parody of femininity is now what many ordinary women are aspiring to.

There was time when falsies were the pads shoved down your bra to make your breasts seem bigger, a kind of comedy stuffing. Now the stuffing is put directly inside the flesh, in the form of silicon implants. While not as cheap as chips, false breasts are certainly becoming as common as them.

Read the rest at The Guardian.