This morning, Leslie complained that the dude cast to play Gale in the Hunger Games looks really… “big”. Gale isn’t buff and beefy! In our eyes anyway, he’s lanky and brooding. Then we further complained about how the boy heros in Twilight are either man-like or all hunked-out. Melissa told me once that she was traumatized by the hunky “man” cast as her beau on Little House, when she was sweet 16 and still interested in “boys”. As a tween viewer, I was equally alarmed. Almonzo scared me. Laura and I…we were still “girls”. He was a man.
Tween idols are a uniquely female rite of passage, the birth of romantic fantasy, and can have a profound affect on women’s psychosexual development. It’s a phenomenon that began before there even were teenagers as we know them, with “Byromania,” a term coined by the woman who would become the Lord Byron’s ex-wife. These are not just movie-star crushes, they are actually a girl’s boyfriend….. before a real boyfriend.
My sister and I were apeshit over a teeny, snub-nosed Brit named Jack Wild. He was more moppet than man, with an impish face and adorable accent. He got an oscar nomination for playing the scrappy Artful Dodger in Oliver!, but it was as the marooned boy with a creepy, talking flute in “H.R. Pufnstuf” that made Jack a star. He was probably 16 or 17 at the time, but looked 12. Despite never topping 5′ tall and seemingly devoid of a single muscle other than a brain, Jack Wild was an indisuptable teen heartthrob.
Mourners at Sid Hatfield's Funeral.
This nation has a sketchy history of dealing with the rights of its workers. Some might say, brutal acts of aggression against American workers have been a cornerstone of our Democracy! Unlike better known bellwethers of the labor movement like the 1911 Triangle Factory fire, and the Writers Guild Strike of 2008, the battle of Blair Mountain goes completely without mention in history books. Less than 100 years ago, in the West Virginia cole town of Matewan, then police chief Sid Hatfield – a staunch protector of the rights of coal miners against the coal company thugs – was murdered. The coal companies were tired of Hatfield constantly noodling with their intimidatory tactics, so they hired “security agents” (union busting mercenaries), to kill him and his deputy, on the steps of the courthouse. (aside: the same “security agents”, also at the behest of the coal operators, had previously spearheaded the Ludlow, Colorado massacre in 1914, burning women and children alive in their tents, and murdering twenty people).
In August of 1921, after years of violent confrontations with mine operators, miners from across West Virginia answered a call from United Mine Workers of America leaders to march on Logan County, hoping to gather support to free miners unfairly imprisoned by state authorities, and unionize exploited workers living in dire poverty in company towns.
For those of you who have not read the Hunger Games trilogy, or fallen prey to the crime of the movie casting rollout, skip ahead, nothing for you here.
Cinna is the new Capitol recruit assigned to style the Tribute from the lowly District 12, the gifted artist who creates the costumes that give advantage to Katniss. Unlike the absurdly coiffed, surgically altered members of the Capitol – Tigris’s “semi-feline mask” face, the “freakish” Caesar Flickerman in his lightbulb suit, Octavia’s pea green skin and face etched in gold tattoos – Cinna is the contrary of expectations. He is surgically unaltered, dresses in black, has natural dark hair, and uses gold metallic eyeliner to accentuate the goldflecks in his glittering green eyes.
Everything about Cinna is calm and subdued except for his wildly original artistry, into which he channels all his emotions. His designs are inflammatory (literally and figuratively), creating Katniss as a revolutionary vehicle, coveting her as invaluable symbolic property for the revolution. By writing image-stories with his designs, he sends his message. Beneath his inexperienced, fragile exterior, Cinna is subversively committed to keeping Katniss alive and to defying the Capitol. He sets the stage for Katniss’ and Peeta’s sacrificial choices in the Arena by mesmerizing the audience into sympathy and support for the doomed lovers caught in a nightmare world of brutality and death.
Cinna’s designs are chimerically fantastic and insidious, from the star making “girl on fire”, to an incendiary “orange frock patterned with autumn leaves,” and headband of metallic gold, the orange red of burning coal and glowing embers, to a demure shift the color of candelight, intended to convey mercy-evoking innocence, to a wedding gown of gothic proportions, heavy with pearls, which, when Katniss spins, catches on fire, burning off the gown’s top layer to reveal The Mockingjay of black pearls and feathers (for which Cinna is beaten to a bloody pulp).
A revolutionary artist, an alchemical mercury, who better to portray the young Capitol stylist than the brilliantly theatrical, incandescent figure skater? Acutely balanced on that thin edge between artiste and athlete, the lithe, angel-faced boy is an Artist, on the ice, where he transcends all others, and on land, where he is an accomplished creator of chimeric costumes and frocks. Behind his achingly ethereal beauty – a complexion of milk, jet hair and eyes like sparkly emeralds – Johnny Weir is sweet as kittens, with a feather dusting of gravitas and a talent that crackles like burning embers.
Scott Adams defends his self-congratulatory commenting and weighs in on the Obama chimp controversy. Make it stop.
From Salon, April 19, 2011, by By Mary Elizabeth Williams
AP/Jose SanchezWhen commenters on MetaFilter started ragging on a recent Wall Street Journal story by Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator and sexist jackass who last month opined that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently,” one user, “plannedchaos,” leapt to his defense. “He has a certified genius I.Q., and that’s hard to hide,” noted plannedchaos, who went on to ask, “Is it Adams’ enormous success at self-promotion that makes you jealous and angry?”
Mr. Chaos has apparently long been a fan of Adams; Gawker noted Monday that early this year, he was posting on Reddit that “It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying. And he’s a certified genius.” How fortunate for Adams there are people in the world not “too dumb” to understand the certified genius. It just happens that they’re all Scott Adams. On Friday, the cartoonistadmitted on MetaFilter that he and plannedchaos are one and the same. My tie! It’s curving upward in astonishment!
In TOMORROW’S election, well-funded, well-connected Jewish Democrat Scott Svonkin faces off against poorly-financed Tea Party-ite and acknowledged social conservative, Lydia Gutierrez. You’d think that the race for a vacant seat on the Los Angeles Community College Board on the ballot TOMORROW would be a slam dunk for the standing Svonkin. But, record low voter turnout (In most communities, the seat No 5 is the only office on the ballot), could score his right-wing, evangelical Christian lunatic opponent an upset victory.
Recent reports on the candidates have the LA Weekly and Frontiers trading charges of political hackery, with the Weekly making characterizations depicting Mr. Svonkin as a temperamental, boorish lout, a borderline psychotic. Frontiers weighed in on Ms. Gutierrez’s vigorous campaigning to pass Prop 8, and her stand against Svonkin’s proposal to mandate that new buildings are built by union.
Ms. Gutierrez strongly supported Proposition 8. She is a right-wing zealot with a record of supporting the Tea party agenda and discriminatory policies to a public education governing board. Last year she worked to defeat the Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth bill (SB 543). The bill, now law, enables youth to receive counseling without parental consent. Svonkin – residing over the embattled San Gabriel Unified School District Governing board, which has seen more than its share of malfeasance and mismanagement – has been a staunch supporter of full equality for LGBT Californians. As Senior Advisor to Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, he was instrumental in working to publicly oppose Prop 8 and other anti-LGBT initiatives.
After Mr. Svonkin related the religious basis for his political belief system, a reporter (from WeHo News), asked Ms. Gutierrez about her own formative beliefs. Her response to the question, “What religious practice do you follow?” was, “I voted for Prop 8.” When asked the question six more times in six different ways, she gave precisely the same answer – “I voted for Prop 8”. Six times. On Prop 8, she denied having any more to do with it than voting for it, repeating when asked about her other activities in support of the measure such as her campaign’s paying for lawn signs only the phrase, “I voted for Prop 8.” Four times in the interview.
Head’s up, Los Angeles voters. Right-wing conservatives have been attempting to clandestinely win seats on the Community College District Board of Trustees for years, running campaigns that evade mention of their conservative and radical views. With evangelical, Christian minority populations supporting Ms. Gutierrez, a church-based get out the vote drive could swing an election with small turnouts. And an upset of a heavily-favored Democratic Party-backed candidate would provide the Tea Party with its first inroad to elected office in Southern California. Rarely has there been such a clear choice between candidates in a low turn-out election as this one. Please vote tomorrow.
Michigan’s own Scrooge McDuck, lumber baron Wellington Burt, wasn’t stupid – he knew he couldn’t take his millions with him to the grave! But he could torture his descendants for generations, from behind the 15 foot high marble walls of the mausoleum where he lay entombed! Once among America’s eight wealthiest men, Burt left explicit instructions in his will that his bequest should be frozen until 21 years after the death of the last grandchild born in his lifetime. He called it his “golden egg”, and for 92 years it has been sitting under a duck’s ass in a trust fund in Burt’s hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.
But next week, that golden egg will be cracked and out will pour $110 million. See, the last of Burt Wellington’s grandchildren – alive when he died in 1919 – passed away in 1989, thus commencing the 21-year countdown that ended last November. A judge in charge of the trust fund has been poring over applications from folks eager to share in the spoils. 12 descendants, strangers to Wellington and spread out across the US, will receive sums varying from $2.9m to $16m (under a formula agreed upon between family lawyers).
When he died in 1919 at 87, Burt was expected to provide handsomely for his immediate family. But his six children, seven grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and 11 great-great grandchildren saw a relative mere pittance from his estate, (he left most of his children an annual sum of $1000), or nothing, if they died while the “golden egg” lay dormant. Generation skipping in estate planning is not a new concept, but Burt Wellington’s will takes kid-skipping to a new, punitive level. Who knows, maybe his kids and grand-kids were monsters, or maybe they were better off for the lack of inheritance. But the weird bequest created a wildly dysfunctional extended family playing their own death pool and just waiting –waiting – WAITING – for the death of grannie, the last of Burt Wellington’s grandkids? Then the death pool after the death pool started, because in the 21 years that followed, the original heir to the fortune died, then the secondary heir to the fortune died! Pretty sick stuff!
In his twilight years, Burt lived alone in his brick mansion, with failing eyesight and hearing, cared for by servants. He bequeathed his secretary $4,000 annually (more than most of his children) and a cook, housekeeper, coachman and chauffeur $1,000. Due to his isolation from his family in later years, Burt was known as “The Lone Pine of Michigan”.