Pony or penis?

I thought long and hard (npi) about whether or not to sully and stain my beautiful blog with the image of this pony-pulling prat of a PM, and decided that in the interests of the nation, which is naturally hanging on my every word, I would.

This is because I have a theory about "ponytail-gate" that I'd like to share with our great nation of people, most of whom seem ever so slightly confused about what sort of person makes a good leader, or even a good person.

"Ponytail-gate" refers to the recent asinine antics of the right-wing, pawn of the rich PM of NZ who, in his spare time, when out with his wife and bodyguards, likes to tug on the ponytail of the waitress who serves him, not once, but many many times over the course of months, despite the young owner of the ponytail asking, then telling him, please don't! He's a class act our PM. Clearly the best man for the top job.

But my theory about the whole silly sordid affair is that the man's a repressed homosexual, either wanting to prove he's not or confusing the ponytail with a penis in wanting to give it a good - rather, many a good - tug.

This is not to denigrate homosexuality, of course, but to highlight the fact that our so-called Mr Nice Guy PM is a two-faced pony-penis-pulling phoney who needs to be outed, whatever he's hiding. If it is homosexuality, that will be his most dignified skeleton you can be sure.

His wife was with him on his pony-pulling outings, for fuck sake! She even told him to stop, several times, and still he continued. O to be his wife! And between tugs, this first-class phoney presides over the steady demolition of the best welfare state in the world, with cuts in arts funding, state eduction, student allowances, public broadcasting and taxes for the rich. Brilliant! Talk about the second coming.

Where have you been all my life, John! I think it might be time to grow my hair.

     

   

Room with a zoom

The view plays;
the view looks
and sounds
like music

When the wind blows
so the violins and cellos

Thunder falls
so bass drums and cymbals

Piano is scurrying
insects and leaves,
all things
climbing,
creeping,
weeping...

dreams.

Cat crawl
clarinet

Light play
harp

Statues play
silence

Bricks play
time trodden

Piano plays pace

Orchestra plays landscape

Dick flicks

I have posted on Dicklit (March 22) before,
but once more I feel compelled to stick my neck out on the subject of gender in film.

Yesterday, against the passionate opposition of our film-connoisseur 16 year-old, we went to see San Andreas.

There weren't too many surprises. Our hero, the bulky, part Polynesian who looks pure Maori, Dwayne someone, you probably know more than I do, is fairly stock macho, if a little browner. I hate the name Dwayne. He should be Hene, or something like that.

And why isn't his daughter in the film part brown? To me he looks all Maori and his children should be at least part Maori or Polynesian-looking too.

Altogether, having reviewed Mad Max Fury Road on a gender front here:

http://onewomanswo.blogspot.co.nz/2015/06/maxed-out.html

I can now report that COMPARED WITH OTHER ACTION FILMS Fury Road is far far far into the progressive future of gender-blended film than they are. Unlike San Andreas, Fury Road doesn't exaggerate the natural heroism of men, that's the first big difference.

San Andreas can't help but exaggerate male heroism. It almost makes a point of it. Our Dwayne does little wrong and practically saves the world; the scientist guy, with the face for radio, is a hero for forecasting the earthquake, which saves loads of lives; the English guy, who goes back for the daughter and prizes her out of the car just before it collapses on top of her, is a hero, if in a slightly more modest, smaller and Englisher, guise.

There are strong-ish female characters: the wife and daughter. But both have to be rescued in the course of the film, at least once each and both by our all-round hero, Dwayne. They also both have to have big boobs, boobs that are obviously Made in Hollywood.

There are no fake boobs in Fury Road. If anything, our hero, Furiosa, has her boobs strapped down to de-sexualise her.

We need to get Hollywood boobs out of disaster-action films. They couldn't be tackier. Even Dwayne's tattoo is less tacky than the fake boobs. If he were Maori, he could claim it as a tribal marking. But it would still look silly poking out of his shirt.

Tree face

CAN YOU SEE IT? Can you see my face in the tree? It's a bit like Where's Wally. I will reveal the face at the end of the post.

This picture here is the view out my front window. I love it. Most of the foreground I planted, with M's help, except for the two established trees: the bottle brush and banksia. Beyond that there is a 100+ year-old blue bungalow and attendant rusty oak tree. I love the old house and tree. I relish the view altogether. 

Due to the high rainfall lately the view is also ultra lush. I love this too. I am very lucky and today I know it. Hip-hip-hooray!

Fallen star

The leaf is a star...
 

made
to fall
to give shade
to take sun
rain
in

to fade

to feed
to shelter
to fly
to fall.

Fat photos

Okay, so this is not so much "fat photos" as photos of fat. Apologies for anyone mislead, though it was entirely intentional. I find fat in the fridge so much more interesting than fat in the flesh. This is the fat cooked and cooled in the refrigerator overnight from our Sunday night roast chicken dinner of two cage-free chickens. 

I'm not sure if it's a good sign or a bad sign, or a neutral sign, for there to be this much fat drain off. Divide the amount in two and consider it can't be ALL the fat from the two chickens, some must have been eaten with the roast and gravy. That's a whole lot of fat per chicken! 

Not hard to see where the idea for fat-based ice-creams came from.

Maxed out

I don't know about you but I'm a little maxed out by all the RAVE reviews of the latest Mad Max as a feminist frontier film, just between you and me and this spookily sandy skull.

This weekend I was finally dragged out (just kicking, not screaming) to watch the much vaunted Part IV of the Mad Max series and was struck by three things: the number of men in the theatre, the number of men on the screen, and the number of sculls everywhere, sculls that were probably male too, but it's hard to tell - one can only hope.

What is it with men and sculls? I don't get it.

Anyway. Being a little more serious, I will say that apart from the sculls, which always seem to me more spoofy than spooky, I quite enjoyed Fury Road. The scenery/cinematography was striking and the guitar guy kind of cool and kinky in a not-taking-itself-too-seriously sort of way. Perhaps the film is a spoof on the genre of wanky macho action films. I like the idea of that!

But that's not quite what the film is, I don't think. Fury Road is still in that macho genre of male speed, violence and a sculls! Mad Max himself, a typical bulky, grunty sort of hero, bites the head off a live double-headed lizard in the opening scene, for starters. These are heroes men want to see, not women. I prefer my men to stick to eating cooked and headless creatures. Call me old-fashioned.

Still, there is Theron's gutsy (if gorgeous) shaved-headed character, Furiosa, as well as the basic feministy plot centred around abused women making their escape from the male-run world of desperate cruelty and debauchery. The world as it will become if men are left in charge to run things according to their base instincts until there's nothing left but sculls in the sand, so suggests the film.

Obviously this plot borrows heavily from THE REAL WORLD. If you go to many parts of our planet still, and all parts of it once, this is pretty much how it is and was: women systematically used by men as sex/domestic slaves in countries constantly - and unsurprisingly - at war, with their armies and even parliaments of angry, unenlightened, superstitious and sexist men under the sway of psychotic ass-hole tyrants. Why do men follow ass-holes so readily? What are men so afraid of ? God's wrath? But they invented God. Why are men so easily fooled? Why are so many men so incredibly sexist? Why can't they respect and honour women as fellow human beings?

These are questions I want a truly feminist film to ask and try to answer. I'm not sure the 'action' genre can. For me, the problem with the so-called feminism of Fury Road is that we're still mostly watching men fighting and the fighting is mostly productive. Guns and fists - mostly men's fists - still save the day. When the escaping women run out of ammo, Max heads off into the night and returns with a necklace of bullets enough to wipe out the world, as well as the other guy's blood on his face. Classic tough-guy hero.

Meanwhile, Furiosa is mostly a Joan of Arc character working within this basic storyline as a token female warrior in a male dystopian fantasy world. Max is still a macho hero who saves Furiosa's life when all the other women around her can't. Perhaps she saves him too, as the reviews of the film claim, and perhaps this is the feminist message of the film: that men need women to save them, just as women need men. But DO women need men? I'm not sure. How can women ever trust men to save them when they have consistently shown their preference for saving themselves? Are there any male heroes in real life? You can be sure there are none that use their fists.

And female heroes? well that's an entirely different matter. The hundreds of millions of women worldwide who endure lives of constant domestic abuse and domination for the sake of their children, or risk their lives to try and escape their violent partners, again for the sake of their children, as extensive academic studies attest, suggest that the world is full of women heroes. Malala is a powerful present-day example, as was Benazir before her.

Fury Road gives us a sexy female hero who helps save the world, but leaves the ultimate macho fantasy of men as tough-guy heroes who save women and the world mostly unchallenged. The 'feminism' in the film is too thin to provoke any serious rethinking of the basic myth of heroic masculinity that I believe is responsible for the enduring idolisation of males as primary and females as secondary support/servants; the world's governing mythology that underpins its enduring cruel and violent patriarchy.

Feminism - female liberation, equal power and respect between the genders worldwide - is hard; Fury Road makes it look easy, or at least uncomplicated, provided you have plenty of bullets and a big enough truck - and a big strong man on your side.

Still, if the uber macho action films previewed before the main event this weekend are any indication of the alternative in that genre, Fury Road is a step, even a giant leap, in the right direction. If we can get powerful women and anti-macho themes into all action films, then we might just see this deeply conservative genre work to open the eyes of the millions of men who watch these films every year.

For alternative points of view see:
http://time.com/3850323/mad-max-fury-road-eve-ensler-feminist/
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/05/26/how-mad-max-fury-road-turns-your-writing-advice-into-roadkill/