Category Archives: Popular Culture

Popular Culture

My Paparazzi Boycott

I’m starting a paparazzi boycott. I’ve hated them since they killed Princess Di (I’m a bit of a Monarchist) and now they’re harrassing Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton. Already the Prince has pressured papers to stop running paparazzi photos and a few have actually agreed. I think any paparrazi harassment is unacceptable though, for anyone, from royalty to movie stars. I know we ignore it because they’re rich, but I still think it’s sick. So, yes, my paparazzi boycott. It’s going to be hard to follow, but basically I’m not going to watch t.v. programming which uses paparazzi clips, and I’m not buying any magazines or newspapers that feature paparazzi photos. It would be nice if other people did it, but whatever, I just want to have some integrity. It does nothing to decry the attitude of paparazzi and at the same time serve as the market for their photos. I can live without seeing a duchess getting her toes sucked, it really won’t impact my life. And besides, famous people look better when they’re on the red carpet, not when they’re distracted and eating a gyro and giving the finger and accidentally showing pink bits.

Politics, Popular Culture, Race

A Message From AIM Just In Time For Christmas

I’m sleepy, but I wanted to throw this statement from AIM on my blog for something to consider when you go to movies over the holidays. I don’t normally support NOT seeing a movie just because it’s problematic, but in this case I would advise people to wait until it’s on video or tv, just because paying to see it makes the capitalist system justify racism. Yeah, so no Apocalypto.

**************

Holocaust Denial In America
December 19th 2007
David Duke, in a Holocaust conference in Tehran, was big news in America as he accepted an invitation by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Duke’s speech, he said the purpose of the conference was“ to offer free speech for the world’s most repressed idea, Holocaust revisionism…and the condemnation of the shameful imprisonment of European scholars and academics who simply dare to state their opinions of historical events that occurred over 60 years ago.”
Duke went on to say “ I as a former American elected official will be condemned by the Zionist influenced press in America for coming here in peace and friendship to a nation that they hate: the nation of Iran.” Overwhelmingly, the media in America condemned the Tehran gathering and labeled it the “Holocaust Denial Conference” but on the question of the many other Holocausts, the American media remain stunningly silent.
For indigenous people, Holocaust Denial in America is nothing new. Revisionist history is nothing new, but rather it is big business supported and financed by multi-nationals like Walt Disney and Hollywood A-list actors like Mel Gibson. They will not go to jail for distorting history or justifying the slaughter of Mayans. They will make millions of dollars in their revisionist movie, Apocalypto. Mel Gibson’s version of Mayan history is based on the lies of Spanish conquistadors and men like Bishop Diego de Landa, the Franciscan monk who, on July 12, 1562, burned hundreds of Mayan codices and over 5000 Mayan “cult” images. He later tried to justify his crimes, his Inquisition and torture of Mayan people by stating he had found evidence of human sacrifice.
The real savages, the Spanish Conquistadors, hacked off the limbs of Mayans for not bringing in enough gold and silver ransoms. They justified their savage crimes by deliberate lies depicting the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs as sub humans who sacrificed humans to the sun god. In this movie Mel Gibson does the same thing. He depicts the Mayans as sub-human, grotesquely violent, and incapable of compassion. The American Indian Movement condemns Apocalypto as revisionist history, in the same vein as Rambo, John Wayne westerns, and hate inciting movies such as G.I. Jane.

The historical evidence of the slaughter of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps of World War II is irrefutable. Any movie or documentary that denies that evidence should be roundly condemned and censored. No movie should profit from justifying the killing of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps. The American Indian Movement supports the Jewish people in seeking justice for their Holocaust and the recovery of gold and other valuables stolen from the Jewish people during that Holocaust.
The American Indian Movement condemns Walt Disney Inc and Mel Gibson for profiting from the distortion and revisionist history in the Holocaust of the Mayan people. The American Indian Movement urges world governments to initiate recovery of all stolen gold and silver taken from the Mayan, Inca and Aztec people. AIM condemns the piracy of so called “Spanish” doubloons recovered from sunken ships and calls for all recovered gold and silver to be returned to the rightful indigenous owners. AIM further condemns the Catholic Church and its institutions for unrepentant theft of Mayan, Inca and Aztec gold and silver, which is hoarded in Christian idols in Europe.
AIM urges nations worldwide not to stop there, but to demand that the United States restore to the rightful owners the more than $14 billion of gold stolen from the Black Hills in South Dakota, to the Dakota people.
The American Indian Movement acknowledges and thanks the small groups of activists and supporters who have protested the movie Apocalypto and condemns this movie as an act of greedy profiteering, of revisionist history and justification of the slaughter of indigenous peoples.
To our indigenous brothers and sisters in Central and South America who continue to struggle with intense poverty deriving from entrenched colonist policies, we offer our support and apologize for this outrage of a movie which is being pushed, financed and supported by Holocaust Denial in America.

Written by Chief Terrance Nelson, Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation, American Indian Movement Board Member Telephone # 204-782-4827, email chieftnelson@rrafn.com
Approved by American Indian Movement for general distribution

Art, Popular Culture, Theory

*Starstruck*

I always giggle a bit when someone says they never get starstruck no matter who’s around at a particular time. I firmly believe everyone has at least ONE person that makes them amazed and act funny around. I’ve even had people be starstruck around me, which makes me totally shy and embarrassed. The funniest was the morning I was having my usual coffee at the cafe across from my apartment, I liked going there because they had a plethora of magazines to read and enough counterspace to read the Georgia Straight while also eating a panini sandwich. I was minding my own business when a woman suddenly looked at me and said “You’re famous!” I said “No I’m not.” “Yes, you are! I’ve seen you somewhere, where was it?” She might have been referring to the one Georgia Straight article talking about me and several other Vancouver aboriginal filmmakers. Other times I’ve been introduced to people and they’re all “ooh, the famous Thirza Cuthand.” I’m only mildly famous and only with people who go to film festivals. Sometimes I try to pick someone up and then suddenly they hear my name (there aren’t many Thirza’s) and start talking queer film, sigh!
My friend Cease told me a great starstruck story about our friend Paul. It seems they were staying with Fairuza Balk while on their great American road trip. They were taking this whole crashing with a movie star thing in stride until Paul saw a photo on Fairuza’s fridge of her standing next to someone who looked familiar. “Who is that?” he asked Cease. “That’s Shelley Winters.” “Oh my God!”

I was going to put a picture of Shelley Winters here but I have a hard on for Fairuza so to hell with her.

I have been star struck myself on many occasions. The first time was when I skipped Art History Class to go with some friends to Kate Bornstein’s talk at the SFU bookstore. Kate was talking about the destruction of gender and people’s ability to recreate themselves as whatever they wanted and then used my hair and ambiguous gender as an example of what she was talking about. My hair was blue and yellow at the time in my favorite dye pattern that looks like a sunrise. Anyway, I immediatelyturned pink because even though I often had weird hair I preferred being a wallflower. Then she seemed to want to save me by saying it didn’t mean she wanted to sleep with me, which made me go even more pink.

Kate Bornstein: Inspirer of Pinkness

My next starstruck moment has a really boring ending. I saw Annie Sprinkle at the San Francisco queer festival, Frameline, while we were both speaking at a conference. She smiled at me and I was terrified and ran like the wind. I wish I hadn’t done that.

“Brave Sir Thirza ran away.” “I didn’t!” “Bravely ran away, away.”

Just after I got dumped out of the hospital I went to a retrospective of my work down at the University of California at Riverside. A guy was there who looked totally familiar, and he also seemed totally sweet and approachable. I struck up a conversation and discovered I was talking to James Duvall, who played Dark in Nowhere, which happens to be my favorite film. He also got his dick cut off by skinheads in The Doom Generation, was killed in May, and played the role of Frank the Rabbit in Donnie Darko. He was probably the most fun “star” I’ve hung out with, we had beers and joked about different things and talked about the profession of acting and then he offered to be in my movies. He’s a nice guy, I like him. I’d definitely work with him.

James Duvall/Dark being dominated in Nowhere

All of this culminated in my most star struck moment to date. It was my BFA grad and I had to sit through a long boring ceremony EXCEPT Sally Potter was there getting an honorary degree. Sally Potter directed the one film I watched OVER and OVER during high school, Orlando, with Tilda Swinton. In my media studies class I wrote a paper on “The Gaze” in Orlando, which was probably my best paper ever because after that I got lazy. Sally Potter did a great thank you for her degree where she proudly proclaimed that she never went to school and she didn’t think people should feel they had to get an advanced degree.
After the ceremony I was hanging out with my Mom and friends and Mom pushed me towards Sally Potter and told me to tell her how much I liked her film. So I did, I felt very shy, she was most gracious and congratulated me on my film degree.

Sally Potter’s Orlando

Shyness and being starstruck, it goes both ways. One night in Montreal me and two Finnish girls met the beloved Julie Doucet at a group show she was in. She is most well known for her comic Dirty Plotte, which we all loved. I think we just looked like the most unusual tiny fan club and it turns out Julie Doucet is terribly terribly shy.

Which leaves me with my last statement. Celebrities, no matter how they are famous or what they do, have a persona which is completely different from who they really are. I can be all radical and running around with no clothes and talking about sex, but in real life I’m too shy to ask for a kiss, have unwillingly ended up with a career of celibacy, and only run around naked with the blinds drawn unless I’m terribly drunk. So don’t assume anything about a famous person’s character until you meet them, and if they suck, well, you can always watch them on television or read their work.

Body Mods, Popular Culture, Tech

Another Industrial Update and Katamari

Well, I’ve mostly stopped sleeping on it, which I did a few times just because I forgot and was asleep when I flipped over. It doesn’t hurt anymore when it’s not being tormented, and the top of my ear has gone back to having a normal sensation instead of the weird thing it was doing before, alternating between being numb and being crabby and painful. I can wiggle it without hurting, and I can actually slide the barbell back and forth without wincing or drawing blood. I have bonked it a few times when I’m just running my hands through my hair or whatever, a cute girl keeps laughing at me every time we’re hanging out and I squeal after touching my ear, it makes it very hard to look suave.

The only issue I’m having with it now is a bump by the piercing on the edge of my ear. It’s not painful, it’s just a bump, and pretty common with cartilage piercings from what I understand. I want it to go away, just because I don’t want a weird bumpy ear and because I have no idea if those things contribute to ear collapse. I’ve heard I’m supposed to put crushed advil in water on the bump and it will miraculously fade away. So hopefully that will work. Aside from that I think it’s tremendous, and anyone who wants an industrial should get one.

I should also give you my review of We Love Katamari. I went to Futureshop this weekend and bought a Playstation 2, a newer version which is roughly the same size as a composition notebook with the blobby black and white pattern, and only slightly thicker. The playstation was on sale, but the fancy ass vibrating controllers were not, nor was the memory card. I’m not going to tell you how much it cost because I don’t want to be mocked for buying a system I only want to play two games on.

Oh yeah, back to We Love Katamari.

Well, I didn’t have high hopes for it, I guess I was too much in love with Katamari Damacy to expect more genius. But amazingly We Love Katamari exceeds the original in rolling fun. The plot is a little weaker, you don’t have to remake the entire solar system, just throw a few stars and planets in the air to make life nicer. But the graphics are even cooler, the Prince has some wacky cousins that run around, and the music is really good and changes more than in the original depending on what level you’re in. Also the ongoing story when levels are reached is a really cute one about the King of the Cosmos when he was a boy and his adversarial relationship with his father. Plus there’s a two player game, but I haven’t found my second player. I keep running upstairs yelling “Mum! Mum! Come play Katamari with me!” but she never comes.

So I guess I’ll say We Love Katamari is definitely worth it, I’m already starting to get addicted.

I love non-violent video games, I must find more.

Capitalism, Popular Culture, Sex Worker Rights

Pimp My ______

Pimping is the new rage. From what I gather it seems to be shorthand for “I’m going to make this thing ridiculously fancy.” Like cars, computers, and from a link I saw even my own email account. Of course, what pimping really means is running a stable of underprivilleged women doing sex work. I’ve yet to meet a high class well paid sex worker who’s felt that they had the freedom to choose sex work, working under a pimp. I have met a lot of minority women, street involved youth, and child sex workers having a pimp.

I don’t think people really understand what a pimp does. I’m not even going to pretend I know everything a pimp does, but I did get a brief description of working for a pimp from an old roommate. People think it’s just a woman going up to some guy, saying she’ll work for him, and then quitting whenever she feels like it. You can offer to work for a pimp, but if you want to quit you have to save up enough money to buy yourself out, and on the low end of buying yourself out it costs $3000.00. I know they take you shopping for sex worker clothes, and I was at a bus stop when a pimp dropped off his two sex workers who seemed to be doing their first night. I think there might be some protection involved, but not much. Abuse definitely happens between a pimp and a sex worker.

I’ve never seen these blinged out pimps either. A friend saw one with a gold mercedes, but generally they seem to just be average low lifes fuelling drug addictions. I’m sure there’s exceptions like everything.

I guess what I’m wondering is why we’re so set on glorifying the capitalist exploitation of women and comparing it to consumer excess and fancy hub caps. We don’t have shows called things like “Sex Worker My Ride” or links saying “Turn your email account into a sex worker!” I don’t normally say sex workers are exploited by the way, because I don’t really believe that, but working for a pimp is exploitative.

And besides all of that, “pimp” is just a dumb word. It’s bookended by p’s and has an i and an m in between, what a silly silly word.

Ex Girlfriends, Humour, Popular Culture, Survivor Life

We’re all a little Kogepan some days

A girlfriend of mine turned me on to Kogepan, we used to go strolling through Sanrio based stores in Vancouver’s Chinatown so she could buy Kogepan related items. This is Kogepan:

Kogepan was supposed to be a high quality elite red bean bun but got burnt during his birth when he fell back into the oven and was forgotten in there for thirty minutes. Depressed and despondent because no one wanted to buy him, he went on a smoking and drinking binge (milk is like beer to him) until he hit bottom and went back to the bakery of his birth to prostelyze on the meaning of life.

Some of us who have been through some harsh moments in life can completely relate to the feelings of a little burnt bun, especially his struggle to understand his place in the world and deal with a society which has little care for a burnt bean bun. Anyone who has been marked by difference or a traumatic life changing event can understand the life of a Kogepan.

Here is his premiere:

Kogepan meets his drinking buddy, another Burnt Bun:

Kogepan traumatizes young pretty bread and then teaches the meaning of life. Then he gets them drunk:

There are ten Kogepan episodes in total, and probably you can find all of them on YouTube. If you’re having a rough day, watch some Kogepan!

BDSM, Ex Girlfriends, Filmmaking, Popular Culture, Queer, Transphobia

That’s not love! That’s Stockholm Syndrome!

I wanted a really cool blog to go along with this title, but then I started writing a tired ex girlfriend tirade again and felt dumb so I laid it to rest. But I still like the title. It can stand really well on it’s own. And I think everyone can understand the experience of confusing the Stockholm Syndrome with love.

I felt like a dork today. I’ve been searching for a song from the Shortbus soundtrack for the last two days on Gnutella only to find out I’ve had the damn song this whole time. It’s not like I have THAT many songs, only 1455. And I used to have 80 cds but I have no idea what happened to them.

A deadline I missed in October is coming up again already this January, so I’m hoping to have my shit together. At least the screenplay looks sort of normal now. It has more of a flow and dramatic tension and character development. Actually that’s not true, one character is still pathetically 2 dimensional. He’s practically a prop. I’m considering killing him off. I don’t know what to do with him. I think I fucked myself over by trying to put an ensemble of queer identities all together in an intimate drama. And then I further fucked myself over by pressuring myself to do something stupid like present only “positive representations.”

Positive representations. It’s what organizations like GLAAD are all about. It’s some LA femme getting snarky and bashing bulldaggers as negative stereotypes. It’s what gave us a medley of L Word characters who look the same. It’s what makes queers whisper to each other “Actually I really liked Cruising.”

Pacino and Poppers – Good Times Combination

It’s what leads to obnoxious lesbians in Michigan chasing away girls in leather and transgendered women. Fuck positive representation. I know we have a miniscule number of queer characters/movies and out actors, but god, sometimes you just need a queer villain. I’m not talking Put the Lotion in the Fucking Basket villain, but someone nasty and yet complex. That being said, I really love Silence of the Lambs.

Do you still hear the lambs screaming Clarice?

Some queer filmmakers are breathing a sigh of relief already though because we’re not tied to the positive representations shit anymore. God, isn’t Oprah enough of a positive representation for us all to get by on? Now the rest of us can be dramatic fuck ups while she and Ellen improve the daytime living of bored housewives everywhere.

Health, Popular Culture

Poo Cock

I broke my tailbone this morning and my mum laughed at me for five minutes and then took me to work, where I am now. And where I am leaving momentarily. This pain is WAAAAAY too excruciating for me to even contemplate doing any kind of work, and I think I’m just going to go to bed for the next two days. Ow, fuck, I can’t even tell you how much this fucking hurts. Okay.

This is stuff I had been saving up for a blog. I just love French and Saunders that much. I have an intellectual crush on Jennifer Saunders, too bad she’s married. Anyway, here is them looking up innocuous words on the internet.

“Your mother sucks Jelly-Babies in Hell!”
“No she doesn’t.”
A good exorcist spoof to bring you down from Halloween.

CALIGULA!!!
I found this JUST this morning. It’s a trailer for a movie that will never be made. It was originally made for the Venice Biennale. Courtney Love as Caligula? Whatev, it’s sexy. I would rent this movie just for the dildo cocksucking scenes itself. I never understand straight people who don’t realize what girl on girl action involves. Yes, some of us like sucking each other’s cocks. No, it doesn’t have to make someone actually have an orgasm to be fun.
Okay, fuck, my ass hurts. Hope you enjoy.