Is anyone else quite as intensely irritated by all those Christmas luxury car and jewelry ads? And do people actually *give* luxury vehicles and significant pieces of jewelry for Christmas?
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Archive for the 'The Teevee' Category
Go visit Terrance for a commercial from New Zealand that brings the double entendres.
All I can say is, I’m not surprised a gay guy had to look up “beef curtains.” 
From his takedown of a review of Californication:
The sex romps are setups for Hank’s kissoff lines and parting shots, some of which are so nasty they’re like being spat upon. “Consider yourself defiled,” he says to one babe as he brings their session to a premature close, and he tells the wife of a producer he’s just laid (who had the nerve to insult him that the movie adaptation of Hank’s novel was better than the novel itself), “Not only are you a cadaverous lay, you have shitty taste in movies.” “Have you ever heard someone refer to a lover as a ‘cadaverous lay’? I doubt it,” beams Doug Elfman* in the Chicago Sun Times. “That’s a mark of clever, original writing.”
No, it’s not, it’s the hoofprint of misogyny, the same half-quip, half-sneer of hip misogyny knocking around in so many Hollywood comedies about manchildren with low metabolisms. I feel sorry for the actresses cast in Californication, who not only perform nude scenes–something many actresses are wary about, knowing those clips will be pasted forever on the internet–but then have their characters dispatched with a crude insult that adds a special spicy dash of indignity for the drive home. Yes, they knew what they were getting into, but even so–Shampoo didn’t rubbish its actresses that way. That Hank gets his comeuppance now and then doesn’t dispel the smog of contempt that permeates the pores of nearly everybody on this show for the crime of not living up to the ideals Hank supposedly possessed before the sin of selling out turned him into a husk of a writer attached to a roving penis.
Swoon!
Thank you! Contempt for women for the crime of having sex is not adult at all — it’s a sniggering adolescent’s conception of what adults do when they’re having sex, a fantasy of revenge against all those girls who dared have their own preferences when the writers were back in high school trying to score.
What would be really revolutionary, really adult — and frankly, in our present social climate, really transgressive — would be a show about amoral people who have sex or don’t, as the spirit moves them, but don’t get tangled up in bitterness, reproachfulness or recriminations. Or guilt.
The closest TV ever came to that recently was Samantha on SATC, and it was clear that she was a cartoon, who eventually got her comeuppance for her years of unapologetic sportfucking by contracting cancer and having to endure the guilt-tripping of her sex-columnist friend.
While I was sad when Kat von D got fired from Miami Ink in a really shitty way, I was happy that I no longer had any reason to watch the show, since Ami James annoyed me so much. And I was even happier when I found out that Kat’s got a new show of her own, LA Ink.
She’s a phenomenally talented artist, and a success in a male-dominated field. So it was very happy-making for me to see that the crew she assembled for her new shop is mostly female, and deliberately so.
Even better, they talk about being women in a male-dominated field, and at least one of the artists, Hannah Aitchison, talked about pin-ups being an ironic acknowledgement of women’s traditional roles that can be enjoyed because we no longer are so tightly bound to them.
That’s not to say it’s perfect — Kat spoke of Corey Miller, a veteran tattoo artist and the only man on the crew, being a good influence if the women are “all PMSing,” for example — but just hearing the word “empowering” coming from a woman on TV, non-ironically, is an amazing thing. Especially on a network that’s pitching a lot of its programming to men by being as macho as possible, and featuring women, if at all, as self-sacrificing mothers or freaks-of-the-week.
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