Week 39 (4)

Eudæmonism.
Saturday, 07:32

Hey! I have a new philosophy. (Wasn’t that easy.) —Actually, it’s more a new name for an old idea:

eu•dæ•mo•nism or eu•dai•mo•nism n. [Greek eudaimonia happiness, fr. eudaimon having a good attendant spirit, happy, fr. eu- + daimon spirit] (1827): a theory that the highest ethical goal is happiness and personal well-being.

(Always keeping in mind, of course, that grim little prefix that so frequently gets conveniently forgotten when people quote Crowley, that old fakir: An thou hurt none—)

September.
Friday, 21:49

Always an odd month. I used to really like the first day of school—don’t look at me like that. We moved. A lot. The first day of school was more often than not a brand new place, brand new people, brand new opportunities. A brand new chance to remake myself—not that I ever really figured that out until pretty much the last move we made. Next-to-last, I guess. But September was always like New Year’s, to me. Still is, in some respects. It’s the unofficial beginning of the back-end of the year, the chunk-chunk-chunk as you climb the hill towards those last few months and the sudden giddy falling rush of all those holidays, blam blam blam. Not really a time of harvest and contemplation and resting at all; not for me. Freshly minted colors. The chill that lets me put on jackets again. Energy forgotten or lost in the lethargy of heat suddenly regained with a bite of crisp air. School supplies (now office supplies): new pens, new paper, new organizational filing schemes never wholly enacted. But also curling up on the couch with the Spouse, under a blanket, a good book, a stupid movie, coffee, chai, tea; cats. New television shows. Rain.

—I live in the Pacific Northwest, now. The only thing I miss more than the snow is the foliage. And thunderstorms, every now and then.

September’s over and done; passed by rather quickly, this year. Always seems to have seemed to have done so, or so it seems at the moment. Perhaps it hasn’t really, in the past.

up so floating many bells down.
Friday, 14:34 [posted 21:49]

There’s a Bartlett’s on the desk at the Day Job, which is something to browse through when the day drags, as it usually does somewhere around 2:00 or so. Odd to see all these writers’ words yanked harshly out of context—rather, placed within a context which assumes the reader (ca. 1968, for this particular coffee-stained edition) is familiar with and can supply on their own the original context which made the quote so popular, so familiar, so meaningful. I myself, for instance, have no idea what Mae West meant when she said “Beulah, peel me a grape.” But there it is, one of the Eminently Quotable Things She’s Said; the other being “Come up and see me some time.” Diamond Lil. 1932. A footnote: “The play was later made into a movie, She Done Him Wrong.”

And I don’t think I’d like Vladimir Mayakovsky—at least, judging from the two excerpts given from his poem, “Conversations with a Tax Collector about Poetry,” 1926:

and:

But is that really all he had to say worth repeating? (Aside from “If you wish,/I shall be irreproachably tender:/Not a man, but a cloud in pants!”)

And Dorothy Parker is not remembered for asking Norman Mailer if he were, indeed, the young man who didn’t know how to spell “fuck.”

And Groucho Marx is only remembered for saying “I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll make an exception.”

And Hans Fallada, or Rudolf Ditzen, has only the title of a book to recall him: Little Man, What Now?

And Daniel Decatur Emmett’s to blame for Dixie, it seems: “I wish I was in de land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten.” Sic, it should go without saying. They can keep it.

At least the important bit of Graves’s invocation is (mostly) intact: “The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.” (We are then directed—rather unhelpfully—to cf. Sophocles: “It made our hair stand up in panic-fear.” Yes? And?) (It’s from Oedipus at Colonus, of which I used to have the gospel soundtrack. Pretty cool.)

But I’m losing track of why I started making this note in the first place. See, I’d forgotten Cummings. (cummings? Cummings. “The terror of typesetters, an enigma to book reviewers, and the special target of all the world’s literary philistines.”)

Not forgotten forgotten. I mean, you could have walked up to me a week ago and said “Buffalo Bill’s defunct, who used to...” and I would have blinked and suddenly, out of the blue, the words would have flowed—

But I never would have brought it up on my own.

I’d forgotten him. Forgotten the video we’d made for English class in high school for “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” aiming the camera aimlessly at my best friend pretending just to, you know, have a conversation with my other best friend in the car across the street (Kraig, Craig? Chris? Crap). Forgotten learning Buffalo Bill because I’d liked the—what? “watersmooth silver”? the defiant snerk at the end? Forgotten that fucking little lame balloonman, whistling far and wee, the invisible hand of spring, the sweet small clumsy feet of April, Olaf glad and big, the breakfast food of freedom, we doctors know a helpless case if—listen, ignorance tobogganing into know. I’d forgotten the staggered euphony, the stark, deceptive simplicity sitting there on empty white pages in slim little volumes, the little smile so joyous, hidden so far away, the fact that the Classicist’s mother had done one of the first term papers on him—she’s older than she looks, and for a while there, he was Unpopular. (Even though Vespertine ’s got a song based on a poem by him, I hadn’t dredged him up; had skated past the name without stopping to think; had been at the bookstore just three days before nosing around for Millay and Sappho and Auden and never thought once to stop and run my fingers along the Cs.)

I’d forgotten writing “no one, not even the rain, has such small hands” to the Freshman Year Crush, who did indeed have small hands, and one of those necks whose fragile grace surprises you every time her hair is lifted up and away. It looks too thin to support all that tangled weight. —And did you write it before or after Michael Caine quoted it to Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters? Well. Since you saw Hannah in high school, it must have been after, right? Yes, you knew the poem before, but still—when you wrote it to the Freshman Year Crush, what were you thinking of? Who sparked it? The poem itself, or the delicately silly adultery, dreamed up in the Strand, made somehow—predestined, important, thus necessary, by those words? —Cummings, or Caine?

Stupid pop culture.

Stupid context.

Beulah? Peel me a grape, would you?

“The street today is full of girls, if you haven’t noticed.”

—Eileen Myles

Subtext, take two.
Wednesday, 23:18

See, I’m still kicking Xena around. Not in the bizarro Illuminatiesque conspiracy-think sense; no. In the (and how it pains me to phrase it this way) Dr. John Gray Mars-Venus sense. To wit:

Why didn’t Hercules and Iolaus have any subtext?

I mean, they had subtext, yes. But not Suuubtext. (Imagine me sitting across the table from you, at the Horse Brass, to pluck a locale from thin air—though the smoke is rather thick, come to think of it; at least the stout is as warm as God intended. I lean forward, plant my elbows on either side of the plate full of half-eaten vegetable pastie, hold my hands up, spread a little, fingers open, thumbs up, and wiggle them a little for emphasis, like hefting something a tad suspicious. “Subtext,” I say, hitting that first syllable, punching the capital letter. You nod thoughtfully and wonder what the fuck you’re doing here.) Not balls-to-the-wall life-or-death soulmates-forever-(even-if-Ted-Raimi’s-playing-you) subtext. Not the kind of subtext that leads to shimmering, shiveringly sublime moments that come close to expressing some ineffable union of love and camaraderie, need and devotion, romance and adventure, trouble and desire. (Also to many, many other moments of clunky, unutterably sincere dialogue and earnestly embarrassing excess. Still. Can’t have the one without the risk of the other.) The boys just get the run-of-the-mill, ambiguous, hard-to-find subtext we had back in the day, when you had to walk ten miles uphill both ways through snowdrifts as high as your armpits to read Something More into a brief exchange between characters of the same gender.

So: to draw some admittedly gross generalizations from skimpy specifics: why, exactly, do the girls get to play with these toys, but the boys, for the most part, don’t?

—Keep in mind we’re talking about pop culture representations here, which, like all art, simultaneously have nothing much to do with everyday life as it’s lived, even as they have a profound effect on how we perceive that everyday life that we live. Tot up all the various homoerotic (and homoaffectionate) relationships throughout pop culture for the past few years—everything from fleeting blink-and-you’ll-miss-it did-they-mean-that moments to Very Special Sweeps-Week Kisses to epic, intentional character arcs, and you’re going to end up with a lot more in the female column than the male. Why is that, exactly?

A number of reasons, of course, all interacting in complex ways. But, in an attempt to tease a few out and peer at them for a moment or three:

First, of course, there’s the fact that we (in the general, pop-cultural, stereotypical, royal sense of “we”; you and me, of course, are too smart ever to fall into such reductive traps) are much more comfortable—still—with the idea of women as sexual objects; men, not so much. (Though we are working on that.) It’s easier to inject a level of sexual subtext into a relationship between women, for the nonce; it’s easier, on the whole, for “us” to imagine a woman finding another woman attractive, than it is to imagine a man finding another man so; it “seems” more “normal” (enough with the air quotes. Just remember in what sense we’re talking about this stuff and keep your detachment handy); call it the lesbian chic factor. (Compare Ally McBeal’s promotions for their sweeps-week Sapphic smacker with Dawson’s Creek’s gay boys at the prom, to pluck a couple of examples from the æther.) —An interesting correlation is the profound split evident in pornography and erotica, where the boundaries are more extremely drawn, and thus more clearly visible: while there is a separatist subset of women’s (and lesbian-for-lesbians, as opposed to, say, lezbo) porn and erotica, on the whole women—straight, gay, and bi—and (mostly) straight men tend to mix it up in the general discussion boards, the general purpose story forums like alt.sex.stories.moderated, and general audience sex-themed magazines; gay men, on the other hand, tend to be left to their own devices. (With more women in the audience than some would care to admit, perhaps, but hey.)

But there’s also the fact that while female characters across the pop culture spectrum are racing to appropriate masculine roles, strength, masculine opportunities and power—kicking ass and slaying vampires, working the two-gun mojo, drinking beer and belching to varying degrees of success—a complementary rush in the other direction is hard to find. Men appropriating feminine roles? Feminine strengths? Feminine opportunities and power? (Interrupting again to remind you in what sense we’re dealing with all this: the words “what are traditionally considered to be” should be inserted in front of every appearance of the words “masculine” and “feminine.” Or you could mentally tick off more air quotes around each. Your choice.)

Granted, it does happen. ( Will and Grace , for one glaring instance.) But it’s not trumpeted, touted or celebrated in at all the same way. And the reasons for this are many and varied and interact in their own complex ways—in the broad view, for instance, women are seen in general as taking (or taking back) power and opportunities that have been denied them over the years; men are seen as having, well, done the denying. The one is rather more easy to celebrate than the other. —Plus, there’s the fact that feminine roles, powers and strengths are traditionally denigrated as weak or negative in the face of stronger, more positive, masculine powers and strengths; it’s much easier to make a sexy cover for TV Guide out of strong, ass-kicking women than compassionate, nurturing men. (Compare Lucy Lawless’s reception with, say, Alan Alda’s.) Point (for my purposes) being: it’s again much easier to inject a romantic or sexual subtext into a relationship between women than between men, since women are generally already seen to possess these qualities; it is (again) less of a step for them to take than for men, who are generally seen as taking on something feminine, something alien, when they take on the qualities necessary to inject this level of subtext into a relationship with another man. And male characters who do take on feminine characteristics are more often than not played for laughs, for satire, for shock value; jeering, jesting outsiders rather than courageous underdogs—bitchy, funny, snarky, mean, nasty, rambunctious, sometimes even tragic, but rarely if ever cool. (Jack is many things, most of them wonderful; one thing he isn’t is cool.)

And also: there’s the power dynamic to consider. In these sorts of relationships between female characters, the dynamic is a fluid one—neither character dominates the other, or if one is for some reason set over the other, that dominance is constantly subverted, and some of the charge, some of those shiveringly sublime moments, come precisely when the dynamic shifts; when the control is subverted, or reversed. (Think of everything Xena has to learn from Gabrielle; think of how Willow’s raw power compares with Tara’s experience—in witchery, and in how that serves as a subtext for their explicit relationship.) By contrast, relationships between men which are open or available to this sort of reading tend to be more rigidly delineated: you never doubt who’s in control between Hercules and Iolaus, to bring us back to our original question. That hierarchy might be joked with, tickled, teased—but never willfully subverted or called into question.

Of course, this whole time we’ve been talking about characters; figments, ghosts, reflections fleetingly glimpsed in TV screens, movie theaters, comic books; our interpretations of others’ interpretations of how we interpret the world. People playing at playing the roles we play. And even within the monolith of American pop culture, there are more than enough exceptions to prove the rules I’ve been splashing about here, and find them all wanting. (The male characters on Gilmore Girls , say, who’ve all quietly, stoically, one might even say “manfully” taken on in one way or another this or that traditionally feminine characteristic with no especial fuss made about it—the only sort of post-feminism I’d ever want any truck with. Gilmore Girls is about the girliest show on television right now, and I mean that in the best of all possible ways. Or Farscape . You are watching Farscape , aren’t you? [If not, now’s the time to get caught up.] And even though Paramount’s refusing to confirm it, the rumor mill’s a-buzz with the possibility that Lt. Malcolm Reed will be the character to break Star Trek’s apparent 30-year moratorium on gay characters; we’ll see. —To name but a few.)

But even though none of this has anything really to do with real people, real relationships, real life, real love—whoops; left out the air quotes around “real”—or even real attempts to reflect these in art, in any sort of art, it is nonetheless terribly important: I’m trying to wrap my metaphorical hands around those big generalizations, those chunks of the current state of the Zeitgeist, those (for want of a better word) memes that shape and sculpt how we qua we read popular culture, and generate new bits of it (even as those memes are shaped and formed by the popular culture and our responses to it); that distort how we see this, and get in the way of how we might otherwise have said that. —Boys don’t cry. Girls are sexy. These statements have nothing at all to do with how boys and girls really are, and everything to do with how we see boys, and how we see girls; how we construct fictional boys and girls; what boys and girls end up thinking they have to be, and live up to.

Female characters in pop culture, genre entertainment generally speaking have a broader range of relationships available, with a greater depth and latitude of emotions; more possibilities. Male characters in pop culture, genre entertainment are more limited and more restricted in the roles they can play; the emotions they can express.

Why is this?

(To put it bluntly, perhaps: fanboys like to see sexy girls get it on; fanboys are repulsed by the very idea of boys as sexy, much less sexy boys getting it on; the production apparatus, mostly ex-fanboys themselves, or attuned to the fanboy segment of the audience, cater to these sensibilities out of all proportion to their actual numbers and importance. Everyone else gets by and makes do.)

Is it possible to imagine a relationship between two male characters in pop culture, genre entertainment with the depth and breadth—the subtext—of Xena’s and Gabrielle’s relationship? (Even with all the inept, maudlin excess?) What would it look like? How would it work? Could you pull it off and still strike a chord with the Zeitgeist?

Cult hits and superheroes don’t count.

Nymming the monosyllable(s).
Wednesday, 07:42

Okay, I’d had something else in mind, but the computer crashed last night, wiping out a couple of hours of work for Ruthie and a nascent essaylette on subtext, and I got pissed and annoyed and did dishes in a mighty huff and went to sleep. So I’m sort of recycling a post from alt.sex.stories.d, mostly because I found a couple of amusing links. So sue me.

So.

It all started with pondering the proper spelling of “cooze” (suggestions included “coos,” “coose,” and “cooz,” but it’s “cooze,” insofar as anyone’s agreed on a standardized spelling), which reminded me of one of the more impressive renderings I’d seen in the sorts of magazines which have reason to refer to that particular part of the body with that particular sort of terminology: “snizz-flaps.” (The context, in case you care, has stuck rather thoroughly in my brain: “I got tired of picking her bubble-gum out of my snizz-flaps.” Is rather memorable, isn’t it?)

At the time, I’d noted that “snizz-flaps” seemed almost sui generis; I had this rather romantic notion of an ink-smeared, scraggly hack pondering the captions to be crafted to go along with the photographs, pink and blond and wet and blue-eyed, glaring out at him (or her) from the computer screen (if she [or he] is working on the computer, then why is he [or she] ink-smeared? Hush. It’s my notion, okay?); the magazine has already blown its first deadline, and the hack is blocked, trying to think of yet another way to refer to what Cap’n Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulger Tongue so charmingly refers to as “the monosyllable” (“cunt,” it seems, could be spoken all you liked back then, but never written down; ah, the power of text)—balking at yet another rendition of “twat” or “squack” or “gash” or “mound of love,” she (or he) suddenly sits up straight, a tired smile lighting his (or her) face, as fingers flicker across the keyboard, and a new term is born: “snizz-flaps.” Simultaneously euphemistic and blunt, dismissive and powerful, almost onomatopoetic in its affected contempt, ripe for ironic reappropriation—an impressive achievement.

A little digging, however, turns up the fact that “snizz” has been around a bit, as a nym for (among other things) the monosyllable (Cap’n Grose also refers to it as a woman’s “commodity,” which is rather more depressing); from there, “snizz-flaps” is, well. Disappointingly self-evident.

A link then, to an impressive catalogue of euphemisms for the monosyllable. I feel, obscurely, that I should apologize for the terribly cheesy graphics, even though I had nothing to do with them; still. They are cheesy. But it is impressively comprehensive, and international, to boot.

The masculine monosyllable, of course, has its own long and colorful history of euphemisms.

Post scriptum: If you, you know, like the site, you can, like, click more than once. You could click as often as once a day, or once every time you read it, or once every time you see it’s been updated. You know. If you wanted to. I’m just saying.

Streets, dancing in.
Monday, 23:27

It seems silly to chastise myself for mission creep when I’ve already ditched the ostensible purpose of this journal cum diary cum blog-like thing (to explore one particular pornographer’s approach to the problems of trouble and desire, to put it into today’s nutshell) to write about, um, clearing the backyard and rant (ineptly) about Ann Coulter; still. Feels a bit odd to recommend a comic book hereabouts.

Nonetheless: I bring to your attention one Atlas , by Dylan Horrocks.

See, he did Pickle , which was one of the best comics going at the end of the 20th century, but it never really ended, until he published Hicksville a couple of years ago, which sort of ended things by smashing together all the various disparate strands of Pickle into the big story that, granted, had been there all along, but it kind of lost something in translation. But I go to the comic book store, see, and there, on the racks: the first issue of Atlas, A Life of Emil Kopen , by Dylan Horrocks, from Drawn & Quarterly, which will be a thousand pages of comics when all is said and done, and right from the start confirms that it’s forging off into the territory Hicksville left unfinished, and I’m telling you, I got shivers reading this thing, so yeah, you bet, there should damn well be dancing in the streets—

Okay; you either get it or you don’t. But it’s actually not too far off from the mission statement, hereabouts: Horrocks did do one of the best strips by far in Fantagraphic’s Dirty Comics anthology, and he’s working on expanding that idea into a novel-length piece (scroll down till you see the listing for Dirty Comics, and then keep going down till you see the listing for Lost Girls, to see what Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie are up to; what I saw of it in Taboo in the early ’90s was—interesting; to stray off-topic, keep an eye on that Craig Thomas—what do you mean, you haven’t read Good-Bye, Chunky Rice ?). Certainly, looking at the brief precis of Atlas and Dirty Comics, the overlaps are notable and startling; it will be interesting to note how the two work with each other, react to each other, bounce and play with and mirror each other. Love; sex; maps; comics; art—what’s not to love?

—Extra special bonus comics link: Bruno . She’s tragic, articulate, funny, fucked up, in over her head, and updated daily. Plus: she has sex. What more could you ask? (Poke around; those archives go back, like, five years.)

...and in my hands I felt her come with a pleasure that was mine as well, even before she knelt down at my feet and stroked me, stroked us, locking her eyes in mine, allowing me to reach ecstasy for the first time without looking at myself but rather at the person who was fucking me, and then she made me lie down, on my back, so she could lie on top of me, pressing her pelvis against mine, rocking lightly, unhurriedly, until we reached the point at which our bodies moved in perfect tandem, and not for the last time. It was incredible—that light contact was all we needed, and the entire surface of my skin had become a limitless cunt, penetrated in every single pore at the same time, and penetrating Marina to the tiniest corner of her body...

Magical thought, or, For fuck’s sake, it’s only a TV show.
Sunday, 20:23

Well, certainly, the moment you bring Japanese ghost stories into it, you know it’s not going to end well. Still. Finally saw the Xena finale last night, and was not too terribly impressed. Not that the show ever had much of a coherent whole (part of its charm, really), but it still managed to do impressive damage to itself and its central conceits in order to rig its thrilling conclusion. —How many times does someone have to be utterly and irrevocably redeemed through death, anyway?

Though the image of Gabrielle travelling the world doing good, smiting wickedness, and talking to herself all the while is pretty funny.

(See, they had the whole thing set up for Akemi to play the jealous lover, bound and determined to thwart Gaby’s attempts to resurrect Xena at the very end there on Mount Fuji, so Akemi could keep Xena in death. It was all in place: that ending would have achieved the same basic goal—nice tragic finish, with no possibility of movie sequels from an inexplicably cash-strapped production company; plus it would have hit the infamous subtext much harder and more tellingly than the Water of Strength mouth-to-mouth. And it would have been less unsatisfying. But hindsight’s usually 20/20, isn’t it.)

So if Falwell and Robertson can so famously prove themselves to have less of an idea of how the world works than an ignorant backwoods Siberian shaman (sigh: ig•nor•ant adj. characterized by a lack of knowledge, cf. “stupid”; back•woods n.pl. 1. remote, uncleared forest land. 2. any remote or sparsely inhabited region; Si•be•ri•a. Vast geographical region of the Asian continent stretching from the Urals in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east and from the Arctic Ocean south to the Mongolian border. About two-fifths of the region is covered in forest; sha•man n. a priest of shamanism, the religious practices of certain peoples of northern Asia who believe that good and evil spirits pervade the world and can be summoned or heard through inspired priests acting as mediums. [German Schamane, from Russian shaman, from Tungus saman, from Tocharian samane, from Prakit samana, from Sanskrit sramanás, “ascetic”]; and much as I may enjoy the metaphorical play of shamanistic myths, and their admittedly potent ability to play Jungesque games in the sordid romantic psychodramas of leisured liberals and grad students, as an intellectual model for grasping even the basics of international affairs, shamanism is ham-handed at best. So I stand by my comparison: Robertson and Falwell = ignorant backwoods Siberian shaman. Set aside any paternalistic myths of the noble savage living wisely and well, attuned to nature and the needs of his tribe; think, instead, of the charismatic, sociopathic schizophrenic, head swathed in a foul pelt from which jut two crazed antlers, pointing one long skinny arm towards the dark black forest as he shrieks and screams that the poor girl whose husband died in a hunting accident must be driven from the tribe to appease the spirits, because she is bad, she is evil, she is unlucky, she looked at him funny once, and pissed him off), I don’t see why we shouldn’t play our own games with magical thought, sussing out something of what’s happened, and where we’re headed, by trying to read the entrails of popular culture. It’s of mild interest, for instance, to note:

—the death of Xena and the death of Buffy—both explicitly sacrificial; these two standard-bearers of complex reappropriations and recontextualisations of traditional masculine power into (somewhat) more humanistic icons, killed off in their respective finales last May and June;

—the incessant hyping throughout May and June of a simplistic, jingoistic film that hearkened back to a potent and archetypical myth of traditional masculine power that’s also an important and defining myth in the traditional history of America;

—the annual issue of TV Guide released a couple of weeks ago outlining the new shows for the upcoming season, whose cover announces “Tough women rule. As if you wanted it any other way,” without noting that the tough women featured on the cover are—rather than anarchically julienning Bulfinch’s like a Ginsu on speed, or deftly hybridizing notoriously tricky genres like horror, gothic romance, teen angst, and broad physical comedy from episode to episode or even moment to moment—these tough women are trapped in, constrained by (re-reappropriated into?) traditional, traditionally masculine genres: medical examiner/cop show (“She’s like Quincy, but she’s hot!”), courtroom drama, spy thriller (“What’s a co-ed Mata Hari to do?”)...

It’s so tantalizingly easy to read it all as symptoms of the shift in power from the heir apparent of Clinton’s regime to the heir presumptive of Bush père’s; a return to the mad old bad old days and ways, sacrificing two of pop culture’s most potent icons of a kinder, gentler, less unilateral approach and replacing them with a brazen blast of starkly macho posturing (even as the shadowy men in smoke-filled rooms take up roles left off eight years before), then trying to cement it all by ceremonially binding the Strong Female Character in traditional genre roles with only the most cosmetic of twists—only to have it all blown up by “our” Pearl Harbor on S11, summoned forth by all this monkeying around with cultural vectors—

Eh. Hogwash. Hogwash and baloney. For one thing, Buffy’s coming back. For another, read properly, Xena’s death was a fitting end for the season, if not the show; throughout the episodes I’ve seen of season six, there’s been a strong subtext of Xena teaching Gabrielle what she needs to know to fill her heroic shoes; the proper end of such an arc, of course, is the death (symbolic or otherwise) of the master to allow the student room to take the last step into her own. Pearl Harbor tanked at the box office, and the three shows I’m unfairly picking on ( Crossing Jordan , Philly, Alias) are hardly the first attempt to capitalize on the immediately graspable aspects of what makes Buffy or Xena such strong, iconic characters without understanding the rest of it’s important, too. (To those who consider Dark Angel to be in the same “feminist fu” mold: I respectfully submit that you have not been paying attention. Yes, Cameron gave us Sarah Connor—when he was under the influence of Gale Anne Hurd. And he inherited Ripley. On his own, he’s given us Jamie Lee Curtis in that Room in True Lies , a scene whose taste I have yet to clear from my mouth.)

Maybe this is why I’m not a magician: I haven’t the spleen for it. —But at least it’s funnier than blaming the liberals and the homos and the abortionists. And easily as valid.

(Still. Spooky, that Xena and Buffy both die in the same year, the first year of Bush’s reactionary presidency. Spooky that Pearl Harbor, which apparently had that girl from Alias in it, blats itself all over the screen mere months before—

(Stop it. Just stop it.)

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