It’s no secret that one of the amazing perks of my job (and a major reason why I hesitate to expand my business) is that I work mostly by myself. The miracle of laptops and Netflix and iTunes means that my head is constantly filled with dozens of fascinating podcasts and movies. Unfortunately, it also means that I sometimes have almost no memory of movies I’ve watched, as you can’t exactly chop onions and watch snooty French New Wave cinema unless you’re prepared to suffer in one way or another.

So I often compromise by saving the subtitled films and sumptuous period pieces for that mythical “time off” that ends up happening only once a year (now!!), and I get through the long cooking days with documentaries, sitcoms, and rewatching movies again and again and again until I’ve figure I’ve looked up here and there enough to have caught the drift.

Because of this compulsive re-watching, and because it’s rainy outside, I thought I’d compile this list of favorite feminist movies (my definition of “feminist” here is very wide, encompassing all sorts of interestingnesses that touch on issues of gender/class/race/etc).

I’m sure you know of lots more that I’ve missed, so please fill me in and help to make my cooking days fly by on wings of righteousness!

The idea that baby feminists (either actual babies, or young people, or those just getting into le féminisme) might see this list and work their way down it is giving me all kinds of good tingly feelings. What fun you have in store, my friends. Do you ever get jealous of people who haven’t yet delved into that favorite book or band or TV show of yours? A farmer friend of mine is just starting to read All Over Creation, and I literally can’t wait to hear how she likes it. I think about it maybe five times a day.

(A note about me and movies, just so you know where I’m coming from: I’m a super lightweight. With a few exceptions, if a movie has any violence in it whatsoever [unless it's very fleeting and easy to look away from], even if the violence is a commentary on the dreadful nature of violence itself, I just can’t watch it. It brings me to a terrible place, which is not what I want out of a movie. It’s not that I watch only fluffy chick flicks, I do like to be challenged and provoked and to have my assumptions stretched by my film choices, but I don’t want to turn off the computer feeling so depressed or rageful that the day is ruined. No Dancer in the Dark for me, alas.)

Allons-y!

• Hard Candy: with Teeth, the best movie I’ve seen all year. Have you seen it, do you love it???
• Teeth: with Hard Candy, the best movie I’ve seen all year. Have you seen it, do you love it??? (yes, both of these break my “no violence” rule. But they are both eminently worth it.)
• Daughters of the Dust: Sort of hard to find, but so beautiful.
• I’d never listened to the Dixie Chicks before, but Shut Up And Sing, all about that mess you probably heard involving their comments about Bush, made me put down the truffles I was rolling and cry and cry—not in a bad way, exactly, though the way they were treated (and the stereotypes their treatment reinforced) were sickening, but also in a super cheeseball “hooray for girl power!!!” way. One caveat: If you’re a non-makeup wearing feminist like me, their intensely caked-on makeup (not just stage makeup, also every day makeup!) and girly girl outfits (what I call “girl drag”) is simultaneously fascinating and offputting—a combination that kept me constantly stopping the movie so I could more closely scrutinize their hair styles.
• Dogville: one of those stomachache-causing movies that I’m never sure are worth it or not.
• I know it’s sooo played out, but I totally cried at Juno! How embarrassing!
• Harold and Maude, of course.
• Saving Face
• Breasts: A Documentary
• Foxfire, totally awesome ’90s flick with a Jenny Lewis character that will melt your heart.
• I’m not sure anyone would ever put “Bob Dylan” and “feminist” in the same category (“she breaks just like a little girl,” anyone?) but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more feminist filmmaker than Todd Haines, who conjured up the girlcrush of my dreams in the person of Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There (apparently every December I have to go on about my love for I’m Not There), as well as gave us much to muse on in Safe and Far From Heaven.
• Transamerica
• This Film is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the ratings industry that is just plain brilliant and fascinating, and, in a weird way, is a great primer on why our entire culture is pretty much in the toilet right now.
• Orlando is not only a beautiful, spellbinding book by my girl Virginia Woolf, it’s a movie directed by the always-wonderful Sally Potter starring my other #1 girlcrush (along with Cate Blanchett), Tilda Swinton. Oh my, so much feminist energy concentrated in one movie, I almost can’t stand it.
• Sally Potter also directed Yes–Oh man, I loved this movie. It’s all in iambic pentameter!!! And it’s not at all as annoying as that sounds.
• Boys Don’t Cry (oh, sadness, sadness, sadness)
• 9-5!!!!
• Muriel’s Wedding
• Akeelah and the Bee!
• The Magdalene Sisters
• The Corporation (not feminist per se, but just about the best documentary ever made)
• Persepolis (I liked the books better, though)
• SAVED!!!!!  A MUST SEE! OH GOD! One year I watched that movie like 50 times, and it never got old! Still hilarious!!
• Yentl! I was obsessed with Yentl in high school for some reason. It still holds up!
• Vera Drake
• Anything by John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and, especially Shortbus, is worthy of the feminist film title.
• Monster
• Capote (feminism isn’t just about women, you know! Plus, I love Harper Lee!)
• Before Stonewall
• After Stonewall
• The Celluloid Closet
• Born Into Brothels, so sad.
• My Vie en Rose, so rad!
• Babette’s Feast: the least vegan, and yet, most beautiful and touching, film of alllll tiiiiime
• Go Fish
• The Laramie Project (can you tell yet that Netflix pretty much exclusively recommends “Gay and Lesbian-themed” movies for me?)
• Carrington
• Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
• The Cockettes: FUN!!
• Divine Trash
• Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
• Silent Waters
• Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
• Antonia’s Line: beautiful, so beautiful.
• Frida
• Priscilla Queen of the Desert: Yum! Pure pleasure.
• Erin Brockovich
• Bear Cub
• My Flesh and Blood
• Welcome to the Dollhouse
• Maria Full of Grace: oh my, what a sad one.
• Thirteen
• Bend It Like Beckham
• Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema
• L’Iceberg: so weird. So so weird. See it!
• Small Town Gay Bar
• ************************************Angels in America*******************************My favorite, as you know.
• Magnolia
• Wanda Sykes: Sick & Tired
• Margaret Cho: I’m the One That I Want
• Ellen DeGeneres: The Beginning
• Margaret Cho: Assassin
• Wanda Sykes: Tongue Untied
• Puccini for Beginners: I believe I referred to it as a “delightful romp” when I first saw it.
• Sacco & Vanzetti: not really about feminism, but so interesting, I had to throw it in.
• Quinceañera
• Whale Rider
• Rabbit Proof Fence: another saddie. But worth it.
• The Piano
• Anything Lili Taylor is in, particularly, of course, I Shot Andy Warhol (I wasn’t all that into Casa de los Babys, but OK, I guess that too).
• The Weather Underground
• Kiki’s Delivery Service, all about my job! I hear that everything by Hayao Miyazaki is lovely, but that’s all I’ve seen.
• All those Elizabeth movies, ahhhhhhhhhh CATE!
• Anything and E*V*E*R*Y*T*H*I*N*G John Waters has ever touched. Including random rolling papers, pieces of dog shit, Manic Panic bottles–anything. If JW has so much as let his shadow fall upon it, it’s infused with the best kind of revolutionary energy—case closed.
• Rocky Horror Picture Show–but if there is some horrid anti-feminist message in there, let me know. For some reason it played at my house all the time (along with This is Spinal Tap!) and I haven’t seen it since I was about 12.
• The Hours, though yeah, hardcore Woolfians I know have major problems with it, but whatevs.
• The Queen
• Ghost World
• Triplets of Belleville: which I just couldn’t get that into, but I think that was a flaw of mine related to inattention.
• Pretty in Pink (hi! I’m old!)
• Daughter from Danang: American Experience
• Southern Comfort
• Fur
• Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl
• The Heart of the Game
• Anne of Green Gables yo!!!!!
• Monsoon Wedding
• Caramel: Meh, I dunno. I saw this last week and expected to like it a lot more. I also thought it would be more about food, less about depilation. It was still cute though.
• The Business of Being Born
• Lipstick & Dynamite, about women wrestlers!
• Fat Girls: again, I wanted to like it more than I did. It happens sometimes.
• The Closet: cute, and en français!
• Valley of the Dolls: not so much “feminist,” as, well, explaining the need for feminism.
• Grey Gardens: the original, I haven’t seen the Drew Barrymore one.
• Tout va Bien
• Masculin Féminin
• Boy Culture
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• The Breakfast Club
• Blue Crush: ooh, girl surfers!
• Marie Antoinette: the pink! The sweets! The outfits! It crushes me!
• Iris
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s? If not feminist—and I could honestly argue either way—you can’t say it’s not fun.
• Jane Eyre
• Chisholm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed
• Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
• Thelma and Louise
• Volver, and all Almodovar films!
• Real Women have Curves: I actually think this movie is pretty cheeseball and bad…yet I still liked it. So weird when that happens!

Movies I haven’t (yet) seen, but have a feeling they are good:

• Precious
• The Passion of Joan of Arc
• Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains
• Milk (though I did see a great documentary about Harvey Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk)
• Whip It, sure why not, a good fluffy empowery story is always nice to cook to.
• Itty Bitty Titty Committee
• Mean Girls
• Harlan County, USA

I’ve definitely talked some smack about my mom on this here blog (and she seems to have magically forgotten that it exists–shhh! Though I love her, let’s not remind her, OK? It’s nice to have a mom-free space.), so I thought I’d balance it out a little with this insanely adorable exchange which epitomizes everything awesome about my mom and none of the craziness. Well, some of the craziness, but only the sweetest sort of craziness. It just makes me laugh.

So my (and, most likely, your) pal Brittany and I were chatting about abortion on Facebook, as you do in this day and age. My mom had just joined the Facebookverse a few days prior, and I was nervous and weird about her being in my internet space, but this comment let me know it was going to be more than OK—it was going to be fun. And it has been! I’m shocked.

Is it only insanely hilarious to me how my mother has no compunction at all about hopping onto a discussion about how women should be paid for abortions and exclaiming over her new jeans?

*

In other news: On Being A Bad Vegan, Part Three: BEES!!! will be guest-written by my pal Christy and she is a mama with one newborn and one, um, not-newborn (toddler? What comes after toddler? Walker? Child, I guess.) and about a zillion other fantastic projects and jobs and things happening, so it will arrive when it arrives, and it will blow your mind when it does.

Wow, I can’t hide that I’m more upset than I should be by the ridiculousness below.

I know some of my closest friends disagree with me on trans issues as well as the whole postmodern “third-wave” “pro-sex” feminist thing (also mentioned below). I also know I’m as guilty as anyone of losing my temper and lashing out at people whose positions I disagree with. What scares me, however, is how quickly I’m being painted as a serious enemy by this tiny group of people over at The Vegan Ideal. The inability to have any space whatsoever for people who don’t agree with 100% of what a certain group of people have decided are the “right” positions is…breathtaking.

My friend R. (I’m pretty sure I’ve already told this story on the blog), a long time political vegan, will eat a little bit of cheese or egg at a restaurant if it comes on his plate even when he specified for it to be vegan, because, as he explained it to me, he became vegan in order to not waste lives, and if that food goes in the garbage it will truly be wasted. My friend C, another old school political vegan, is currently musing on the ethics of vegans keeping bees in respectful ways. Many of my friends in this little upstate NY town keep chickens, eating their eggs and providing them with long, happy lives.

My friend B. really believes in the transformative, feminist power of sex work and stripping and burlesque. I pretty much think it’s giving into the patriarchy, instead of challenging it, but I like talking about it with her, I want to hear more about what she thinks—I want to keep hearing different perspectives.

I’m not exactly in the same place as of any of these people (especially the chicken freaks), but I respect them. I respect that they are THINKING. And TRYING. And growing and changing.

I try, as hard as my fucking little wild heart can, to trust that the people I surround myself with—on the internet and in real life—have good intentions. What a slap in the face it is when this trust isn’t returned. I don’t know why this is affecting me so much. It’s a bunch of fascists on the internet—why am I surprised? Because they are vegan fascists? I’ve known insane vegans forever. They burn themselves out after a few years, and it can be fun to watch the show in the meantime. But my god, it hurts when they turn their guns on you.

Yuck.

Happily, I am not a fascist. I’m an anarchist. As such, I honor multifaceted methods of bringing about a better world. For the millionth time, I repeat: to nuance! To learning! To refusing to step in line!

Hey, look, a whole essay about what a horrible person I am! Ya gotta love the internet. And people who take quotes from years-old essays whose positions I’ve moved away from, and/or developed more nuanced ideas about. Ah, life.

Though I don’t have any feminist cred anymore, can I still point out more PETA ridiculousness?

Also, here’s a snippet of a conversation on Carol Adams’ Facebook page that started out being about about the infamous bj Burger King ad and turned into a discussion of PETA:

Someone: What does everyone think of the excuse PETA uses: the feminist ideal that a woman has the right to use her body and/or sexuality to make a point if she so chooses? They use references to Lady Godiva, who used the beauty of her naked body as a metaphor for her cause. I am looking at this for a master’s thesis, and am anxious for feedback.

Carol Adams: MacKinnon is best on this: they assume that the equality we are working for has been achieved; and thus that consent has meaning. But in a world of sexual inequality, consent is a fungible term.

What do you think? (Brittany, I especially want to hear your thoughts, ’cause I know you’ll disagree and you know I like that!) As usual, I think Carol is brilliant, and no one can ever refer people to Catherine MacKinnon fast enough for my taste. But if I said it I would be accused of accusing other women of false consciousness and hated on for the rest of humanity for even breathing the CaMac name. Fuckin’ feminists. You can never win with those bitches.

On a completely different note, why I haven’t been reading the blog of the fiercely feminist farmer Kara over at Wintergreens since day one, I do not know, but I’m happy to be reading it now. Upstate awesomeness, for sure—fresh/fermented/wild/frozen food all winter long!! People, they are MAKING BABY FOOD! Wow.

OK, back to work.

xoxox

L

You know? Totally.

Why, hello there, internet!

Lots to say, as usual, not much time to say it, as usual. But right now I’ve got a Noodle-cat on my lap and some nice honeybush tea on my desk and old, old, old M. Ward on the record player—everything feels just right. Let’s chat a little.

First of all, as someone who watches a fair amount of TV on the computer while working, I was excited about this new Wanda Sykes show. As Jon Stewart put it: “…Wanda Sykes is going to be starting up her own late night talk show—wait, that’s got to be a misprint, she’s not a white man. Well, I guess now we’ve seen everything.”

I had high hopes (my crush on Wanda is long and deep), but it seems to be sort of a Real Time with Bill Maher minus the Bill Maher creep factor plus more cheesiness and with, let’s just admit it, crappier guests. And her rah rah Obamaism was tiring after just one episode, though why I expected anything more from a mainstream talk show I’m not sure.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when a truly interesting figure gets a bit of a handhold in the “real world” and all her quirkiness is completely tamped down…but come on Wanda, I think you can do better. (And if you can’t, I’ll keep watching just because you’re so freaking cute.)

In other feministy zeitgeistey culturey news, I was fascinated to read this Feministing post all about where The Wire gets it wrong when it comes to gender. I don’t completely agree—Kima!—but it is food for thought, for sure.

Speaking of Feministing, a site I’m partial to (and have advertised the Bonbons on), it is currently being boycotted by those who believe that the Feministing crew are horrible transphobic ableist racists.

I dunno. I don’t really buy it.

Some random thoughts on the whole mess which will probably get me in a lot of trouble with very few people and not make much sense to people not intimately familiar with the site (to learn what the hell I’m talking about, click the links mentioned here. Thanks to Facebook friend JC for the heads up, and I hope we can still be pals though we disagree!):

• To be honest, it truly seems like a whole lot of the left punching itself in the eye, which is, of course, our favorite activity. Oh infighting, where would we be without you?
• That said:
• Jessica Valenti, the face of the site (though I know much has been done to change this by bringing in a much more diverse editorial staff) has never, in my eyes, been that interesting or deep. She’s just….fine. She’s the Ms. Magazine of my generation—nice, slightly boring, slightly simplistic, but a good cheerleader to bring intimidated stupid people to the big bad F word. But there is a LOT to Feministing besides her, so if her, like, white middle class privilege worries you, you don’t actually have to read her posts or her books.
• Claims of extreme transphobia and hostility toward trans women on the site: I can’t claim to have read all of the long long long threads that the pages I’ve seen link to (and if you have specific examples of the perceived horrible treatment of trans women on the site, I’d like to see them), but man oh man! Trans issues are complex for a lot of cisgender people, myself included, and I appreciate Feministing’s attempt to work through the more nuanced and complicated aspects in an inclusive way. Also, it seems that most of the problems people are having take place in the comments, and it seems ridiculous to blame the site for that.
• 
• Also, why boycott? Why not hop on the comments thread and make your views known? I know people feel like they have and that the staff isn’t listening, but walking away is a silly way to respond. Isn’t feminism about dialogue? You don’t like the way one of the biggest feminist websites is run? Keep talking about it until it changes, people. My god–what do you do in the real life when you don’t like something, just walk way to a “safe space” where no one disagrees with you? (Yes, that’s what I do, but I’m not the one complaining.)
• And people boycotting because of “their classist “boycott Walmart” post”: HA! Ha! HA! HA!!!!! Wait, let me rephrase: So, let me get this straight. There are people who, as feminists, see nothing wrong with Walmart? There are people who, as feminists, think that it’s CLASSIST to point out problems with WALMART? Could someone please explain this hilarious logic? It’s CLASSIST to say that people should be paid more than minimum wage with no benefits and not locked inside their jobs at night when they are stocking shelves? And is a feminist utopia one in which we all own cheap shit made by largely female sweatshop workers? And…um…who’s calling who a racist? I mean, yes, there are places where literally the only store is Walmart. And there are people who are underpaid and thus must shop there to buy vital things like food. But to say that pointing out the giant problems with Walmart is to deny these facts and somehow hate on people who have no choice but to shop there is, well, just mindblowingly idiotic.
• In short: I don’t get it. Feministing could be more diverse and inclusive, of course, but I truly get the sense that they are trying pretty damn hard. Maybe they fuck up now and then, but don’t we all? I guess I’ve bought into the great Feministing swindle, but I truly think their hearts are in the right place, which is why I’m a loyal reader and occasional advertiser even when I don’t agree 100% with every single post.

OK, time to turn the record over, see ya!

Three points:

1) Sock garters. I want! What are they called, stays or something? They are cool. This is from The Sartorialist, and I can’t figure out how to link to the actual post, so I will just link to the site. How cute is this girl? I sort of have a massive crush on her for some reason today. (Full disclosure: I always have a crush on urban bike grrrls, doesn’t everyone? Do I date myself by using the term “grrrls”? It’s still so apt, I will never let it go! It’s still my ringtone too!!)

2) I was in NYC a bit last week, and I realized I have a pretty major fetish for watching women in high heels (and, preferably, tights and short shorts) climb up out of the subway. I love the back of women’s legs as they climb stairs so much it almost causes me physical pain. The past few days were perfect heels + shorts + tights weather, and I sort of just wanted to sit on a bench and drink it all in for hours. I’m not someone who can pull off or would even want to wear such a combo (well, yeah, shorts and tights, yes. Heels, no.), maybe that’s why it gives me such deep pleasure?

3) I had a mini Facebook fight yesterday (what else is new?) and I wrote a pretty snotty response to someone who responded to my awesome status update of “Oh hey, I’ll be accepting “You were so right, I was so wrong” crow-eating comments anytime about Obama, by the way…I’m waiting…” (which was prompted by this). I was hoping the dude would respond with “that was mean” because I had the BEST RESPONSE: “to non-vegans and dudes, yep. I’ve never found a reason not to be.” (said someone was indeed a non-vegan dude).

And while I was sending him brain waves to write what I wanted,* I realized that I have like four dudes in my life (three on Facebook, one of whom I have never met) who I just can’t not be mean to. How horrible is that? I can just tell, even in the case of the one I’ve never met, exactly the type of dude they are—the kind that needs to be taken down a peg. It’s a horrible trait of mine that I can never not be the taker downer. Fuckin’ dudes. Why can’t they just leave me alone, so I am not forced to insult them?

Where are some nice calves I can look at to calm me down?

____

*There is something SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH MY LIFE. Yes, I know that. I need to get off Facebook, I know that too.

Some rapidly aging links I’ve been hoarding for a while:

In the ideas-change-over-time category, I’d like to publicly state that this article from Feministing has officially changed my mind about Zero Population Growth and the idea that trying to get people (i.e., women) to have less babies (which I still think is a splendid idea) is the very best way to accomplish environmental goals.

*

Sweet seed librarian Ken has a good article all about—what else?—seed saving here at Civil Eats, which is a pretty rad site overall, actually.

*

I didn’t mention this on the blog because it was pretty upsetting, but now things have calmed down a bit, so here we go: my best friends Noel and Selma’s restaurant, Bloodroot, was robbed a few weeks ago. Selma was slightly injured when she confronted the robber because he was stealing her precious knitting bag (which he most likely thought was a purse). Selma and I had a good chat about the whole thing last week, and she seems to be back to her serene, bizarrely-energetic, beloved self. Here’s a piece of our exchange:

“So, anyway, the day after the whole thing we were scheduled to go to our Weavers Guild [which is exactly what it sounds like]…”

[at this point, after Sel has told me the story of how she basically attacked this robber and a serious melee resulted, all I can think is: "Wouldn't you want to just stay in bed the next day?"]

“…and, you know, I figured, what am I going to do, just stay in bed all day? So we went.”

That’s my Selma.

You have to register to read the articles, but you can pretty much get the gist of what happened here and here’s a nice blog post about it (in the end she recovered the knitting bag, can you believe that? A kid apparently found it in the water while fishing!).

*

Ready to be completely blown away by a product that is the absolute epitome, the perfect zenith, the utter apex of that age-old dynamic duo of capitalism + misogyny? I bring you: latisse. Warning: “there is potential for increased brown iris pigmentation which is likely to be permanent.” Um, this shit is gonna stain your eye?

*

And sorry to end on a downer, but have you heard about Condé Nasty ruthlessly murdering Gourmet? I know it’s not vegan (though their “Vegetarian Tonight” column pretty much rocked it), but it’s by far the best food magazine out there…argh, it was. I’m really broken up about it. Now Gourmet subscribers are doing to get stupid idiotic stultifying Bon Appetit—LORD HELP US ALL.

]]> http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/monday-misc-inadequate-eyelashes-friday-edition/feed/ 0 lagusta 20090926-IMG_0747 20090926-IMG_0746 20090926-IMG_0744 http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/in-which-i-officially-admit-to-liking-something-a-dude-did/ http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/in-which-i-officially-admit-to-liking-something-a-dude-did/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:12:52 +0000 lagusta http://lagusta.wordpress.com/?p=3164 ]]>

Happy fall, darlings!

I happen to hate fall, but I take it that apart from me (and blogreader Brittany—to me she is BFF Brittany, but you probably know her as blogreader Brittany) fall is universally beloved, so have at it. It’s pretty, I’ll give you that. And it seems that some people actually like dead things littering every inch of the earth that you have to painstakingly capture and discard, so I hope those weirdos are really living it up (and when you’re done living it up at your place, please feel free to come over to mine and do some raking, for I am already behind).

I’ve been busy cooking and chocolatizing and preparing to have a few friends over this weekend for fried green tomatoes (East Coast peeps: go to any farmer tomorrow and I guarantee they will give you all the green tomatoes you can haul away—go!)  then the Last Supper art show thingie on Saturday–busy week! If you’re in the Brooklyn area be sure to come check it out. I am totally tickled that I am officially an “artist” (because everyone knows that what makes you an artist is being called one online).

I had a bunch of tryouts for the poem I’d be writing in chocolate for the Last Supper event, and finally settled on a Susan Griffin number called “Bread.” It’s pretty, and it fits on a large sheet pan that will fit in the back of my car, which is apparently what I look for in poetry these days. You might remember Susan Griffin as the author of the seminal ecofeminist text Woman and Nature—I had no idea she was a poet until I stumbled across a book of her collected poetry at my friendly local bookshop (discounted to $6 because of a stain on the spine I am resolutely telling myself has to be coffee).

One of the runners-up for the choco poem was pretty much anything by Matthew Dickman, my current poet crush. In the end I had to rule anything of his out because I couldn’t find a suitable poem that was the requisite sheet-tray length, but I’ve been mightily enjoying his one and only book, All-American Poem.

My god, what a giantly sweet mass of cotton candy of a treat this little collection is. You can read it like a novel and it’s just as tasty as if you read each poem slow like an English major, coaxing out all the allusions and flourishes. And it’s magnificently, generously sexy too—as sexy as the author photo on the back, which is saying a lot.

I’ve been walking around for about a week now whispering Matthew Dickman wonderfulness, feeling the special deep-down happiness that only taut lines strung together in surprising and ultra-clever ways can create. My sweetheart, a dude who bore witness to me spending the last two years of college only reading women poets and who didn’t bat an eye when I literally segregated our books by gender and put all the feminist books and poetry in a separate room so they could “breathe,” has been amused by the whole thing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you liked a poem by a guy before,” he said, all bemusedly and shit, the other day. He’s probably right. No one says they like Shakespeare (verily though, I do, and I have the iPhone app that proves it) or T.S. Eliot (do I dare disturb the universe? In truth, though I very much like Eliot, my thoughts about him are mostly in the “I wonder what Virgina Woolf really thought of him?” vein. In truth, I very much wonder what Virginia would think or did think about a great many things in a week…is this weird? To wonder what Woolf would make of Facebook? I would so like to know.) When Jacob’s not home and I can’t sleep I read Rimbaud in French out loud to my cats…and that’s about it. A little Donald Hall here, a dash of Mark Strand there (you know: ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.’)  that one W. S. Merwin book about Hawai’i—done with dudes.

Dudes are usually such fantastically boring poets, you know? But the ladies: my Adrienne Rich first and foremost, then that sad old Plath who will never get out of my head because she does not do you do not do any more black shoe & I’ll probably be mumbling about eating men like air on my deathbed, and Denise Levertov and Joy Harjo, Haunani-Kay Trask and of course the doomed Sexton, my BFFFF Dorothy Parker and her polar opposite,  Emily Dickinson. Audre Lorde Audre Lorde Audre Lorde. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley and yeah, now and then, maybe just a little Katha Pollitt too. Katherine Mansfield and Anais Nin. Be still my heart, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rosetti and Nikki Giovanni and Phyllis Wheatley and even good old Sappho, sure. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Forche and Louise Gluck–even Erica Jong, in high school, under the covers, secretly.

Once you start only reading novels and poetry by women, it’s so easy never to stop, to just forget that whole fucked-up boy world exists. I heard this fucking doucher James Ellroy on NPR the other day, and it reminded me all over again why dudes like him have ruined novels by men for me–seriously!

But, as my 73-year-old BFF Selma is fond of pointing out: men these days are different. Softer. Matthew Dickman is one of them, and, rightfully, his poetry reminds me of that great lesson we’ve been letting poetry teach us forever: how amazing it is to be alive, right now, here.

This book in my hands, these words in my head.

Oh my. Oh, my. Oh…..my. That furrowed brow!

Part Two in my four-part series all about Mad Men! (Read Part One here before you read this).

Hey, please be aware that there are spoilers galore in here. In case you’re not caught up (Mary! Veronica!), you might want to avert your eyes.

That said, let’s get into it!

So, I truly believe that Mad Men is the most feminist show on TV right now, and though I say that without actually owning a TV, I think I Hulu and Netflix enough to know what’s out there, and I’m pretty confident in that statement. Saying that that Mad Men is the most feminist show on TV is not saying much, but it’s saying something, for sure. Right?

The mistake, it seems to me, is thinking that the drinking and smoking and capitalist crap and sexual anxieties the show depicts in are its true point, when in fact the true point is the fragility and deep-down horror of the world the characters inhabit.

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So, let’s start at the beginning, with our broken down anti-hero, our sexy sexy, dead-inside unreliable narrator, our little boy John Galt, our living, breathing Howard Roark, requisite white skin and square jaw and the whole package (double entendre intended): Don [swoon] Draper.

“What you call ‘love,’ men like me invented to sell nylons.” – Don Draper.

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Oh, Don, you and your catchphrases!

Beatnik: “[Ad men are] Perpetuating the lie—how do you sleep at night?”
Don Draper: “On a bed made of money.”

[Oh, speaking of that point: Please be aware that yes, of course this anarcho-feminist believes that advertising executives are scum of the earth. I’m not a capitalist and have a trizillion problems with the advertising-dependent capitalist system. But while capitalism is of course the backdrop to Mad Men and informs its themes and provides much ironic thematic fun (and real money for the network), Mad Men, it seems to me, is primarily about hearts. So I decided not to get into a meta-analysis of how the inherent horribleosities with capitalism problematize all layers of the show. Ya dig?]

So, Don.
Remember my thesis about Mad Men?

“-It’s about feminism.
-It’s about nihilism.

Specifically: how a heartbreaking devotion to the latter held back the former. And: how that changed.”

Thus, Don is our chief nihilist: perpetually pushing away any troubling signs of morality (season two, episode eleven: “Why would you deny yourself something you want?”), mortality, or everyday reality in order to continue to….to, what, exactly?

What is the purpose of Don’s life? We’re all trying to figure it out with him. It certainly isn’t to have the typical late-1950s, early 1960s existence: good job, lovely home, wife, and children, because though his surface charms have easily attracted all these things, he spends most of his days ignoring, destroying, or fleeing from them.

In his most ham-fisted moment, his soliloquy in the pilot episode, Don tells his paramour-to-be, the Jewess (this most un p.c. word so perfectly suits how most other characters think of her) businesswoman Rachel Menken, “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t one.”

Isn’t that nice for him.

It seems to me that most of the male characters share a similar set of values—and if they don’t, and they make the ultimate mistake of caring for something besides their own immediate happiness and material success–they are severely punished (when Kinsey goes down South to register black voters, it is made clear that he is going not because he truly has a political consciousness, but because his girlfriend is black and wants to go, and because he believes it will elevate his status around the office, because to truly believe in civil rights would be to show weakness—a crack in the nihilism aesthetic.).

[One quick overly long bracketed note about that—this incident represents the entirety of racial politics on the show. I hope later seasons will delve into the intense civil rights issues of the era, because right now the racial politics of Mad Men are notable mostly for their absence---which is probably as it should be in a Madison Avenue office building in 1961. I hope that as the civil rights movement heats up, it will spill onto the show.

Hey, while I’m in this bracket o’ marginalization, I should state that (what is now called) GLBTQ issues are quite satisfyingly covered in the personages of Salvatore, a closeted gay guy of the older generation whose world is turn apart when the painfully young (and European) Kurt casually explains to the office that “I make love with the men, not the women.” Around the same time a nice fag hag dynamic is put into place with Peggy and Kurt and things start to look rosy for the younger generation. Not so for Salvatore, however, whose sad attempts to brush off potential d/l lovers as well as nervous assertions of his straightness are truly heartbreaking (see the pilot episode: after lovingly caressing an ad sketch he did of a shirtless man posing with a cigarette and stating that “My neighbor posed for that…he always looks very relaxed.” He {unconvincingly} tells Don that he doesn’t want to go to a bachelor party at a strip club because “If a girl’s going to shake it in my face, I want to be alone so I can do something about it.”)

And now I’m finished offensively sidelining all non-feminist issues!]

One of the reasons I am so in love with Mad Men is that the show refuses to simply explore the world of handsome men destroying the world: it peels back the curtain to show us the wreckage that nihilism leaves behind: the carelessly broken hearts, the dead-eyed stares and ruined homes. It takes what could be the most boring and clichéd topic imaginable and blows the roof off it to show us its horrible guts. In many ways it’s a crime show: we can’t turn away from the wreckage because it is filmed so tenderly and in such detail.

Anyway, by the end of the second season with the dramatic backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, this point (“I’m living like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t one.”) is driven home over and over: the end is near, perpetually. Nothing matters, nothing makes a difference. If it weren’t for the heart-stoppingly gorgeous sets and hairstyles and clothes, the show would be bleak beyond redemption, particularly toward the end of the second season, when everything feels like it’s sliding to a horrid stop.

Let’s back up a little though.

Don. He’s not a total nihilist, he has some sort of decalogue, and the flashes of it that occasionally peek out give us hope and keep him stringing us along and not writing him off as a beautiful, fucked-up-beyond-redemption human being. (For example, when his colleague Freddy Rumsen is so drunk at work that he pisses in his pants, he is angry at the way others in the office ridicule him.)

Particularly toward the end of Season Two, I think the writers’ are trying to show us that he is trying to fumble his way to some sort of authentic life. In season two, episode six, I think we are meant to see that perhaps Don is beginning to have a small awareness of the kind of world he is leaving his daughter—he has left a lover (Bobbie Barrett) tied up in a hotel room (this trope is so played out—I don’t even watch pornos and I can think of like four movies where the old “leaving your lover tied to the hotel bed” — is trotted out, argh.) when she admitted that she had bragged about his sexual prowess to another of his former paramours.

That’s all well and good, I suppose, but I think that he’s not trying that hard—I think he’s just having another set of experiences, still living like there’s no tomorrow. I’m not sure he is capable of becoming, as they would start to say a half-decade or so after the season is set, a fully actualized person. He’s a beautiful manikin, and I just want to watch him woodenly move through the world, with his cigarettes and beautiful clothes.

More than any other character I’ve ever seen on TV, he knows we’re watching, too (appropriately, there is literally a stage in the main office, where all characters must enter and exit.). He does everything he does for us, because he’s incapable of acting in a truly authentic way—because he literally has no authenticity. As his wife, Betty, says at one point when for just a second she lets down the guard she has spent an entire life constructing and decides to tell it like it is: “Stop it Don—nobody’s watching.”

In spite or because of this, Don’s small set of values is meant to mean something to us: whenever we catch a glimpse of whatever tiny heart he has underneath his expensive suits and fake name and entirely false life, it’s meant to sort of devastate us. He’s our protagonist, and we’re supposed to want him to be a good person. When he goes to California toward the end of season two, we’re supposed to see that after watching a presentation on the joys of nuclear annihilation he has a true psychic break. Something (and not just something: The Ultimate Thing, nihilism carried to its logical conclusion: mutually assured destruction of all life on earth) finally scratched the unscratchable surface of Don Draper, and maybe he is on his way to becoming a real human.

Thus, he literally goes toward the light, replacing his pinstriped Manhattan world with sunny California and metaphors of truth and sun. Everything is new in California in the early 1960s: the ultra modern house Don follows a lover (heavy handidly-named Joy) to, Mexican food, which he’s never had before.

“So Don, what’s your story?” one of the characters he meets along the way asks him, and for the first time he answers honestly:

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

Be still my heart!

Over the next week leading up to the Series Three Mad Men premiere, I’ll be posting some thoughts on the sumptuously heartbreaking AMC TV series. Here are just the first few paragraphs.

Start organizing your thoughts on MM so we can have good conversations in the comments, ok, friendos?

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Before we even get into it: I started trying to write a super scholarly treatise on Mad Men, but, almost 10 years after college days spent blissfully analyzing poems and novels to death, I finally realized that I wasn’t writing an essay for WST 205 (Something’s Happening Here: Manifestations of Social Change and Dissonance in 1960s America Through the Lens of “Second Wave” Feminist Theory). Thus, please enjoy my nonacademic rambly thoughts, and please add your own!

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After hearing me heap praise on Mad Men for months, a friend finally started watching the series from the beginning. He called me up after watching the first few episodes.
“I don’t get this show. Why you like it.”
“What?”
“You talked so much about the clothes and the set designs and the characters—I didn’t know it was going to be so dark. And it doesn’t seem like a show you’d be into—the women are so, I don’t know…oppressed.”

Yep!

Just as there are people who do not understand that The Simpsons isn’t a lighthearted cartoon but one of the most bitingly satiric shows ever to air on TV, there are people running around whining about how Mad Men is misogynist. Today seems like as good a day as any for a radical feminist to counter that claptrap by heaping praise on this most radical, most feminist show.

After watching every episode of both seasons three times and taking copious notes (as well as screenshots), my thoughts on Mad Men, can be boiled down to two:

• It’s about feminism.
• It’s about nihilism.

Specifically: how a heartbreaking devotion to the latter held back the former.

And: how that changed.

Tune in next Tuesday or Wednesday for more! BE EXCITED!