Trailer for *Dark Shadows*

You can see the trailer for Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, opening May 11. Plus the wonderful Michelle Pfeiffer. Also, though alas, the ever more weird, and not in a good way, Helena Bonham Carter.


The re-creation of Dark Shadows as a disco era vamp flick, i.e. (the television series began in 1972), now long ago history, is quite inspired, leading as naturally as it does into spoof and satire, as an 18th century vamp meets 1972 USA. This could be fun.

Or, not ....

Do You Even Have the Patience to Laugh at Atlas Shrugged Part I ?

It is so off-the-wall, yet so very bad. So boring, yet not even unintentionally comic. So dumb they don't even know what year they're in.

Surely, not even the most ardent Rand kool-aid drinkers can stand to watch this without falling asleep.

It streams now, on netflix.

I wanted to hang on until Armin Shimerman (Principal Snyder from Buffy) showed up, but I couldn't.

In the meantime I'll be watching the last two episodes of Boardwalk Empire's season one (2010). This one wins without challenge the award for the best television series watching in these last four weeks: Justified, Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire. Except for Treme, which is in a class all its own, it's also the best series I've watched in the last two or three years. Downton Abbey was ridiculous and very bad. I never could get beyond season 2 of The Vampire Diaries. Sons of Anarchy stalled out (needed to clean its carbs maybe?). Hell on Wheels, with that tired old wife and kids in the refrigerator of the Confederate Hero lone blahblahblah, black side kick -- argh. The Young Sherlock Holms -- well Jeremy Brett's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes still has all my Holmes love. I still love The Good Wife, particularly for its timely issue court cases. I still love White Collar, for its escapist fluff, bantering, non-angsty love songs to New York City. Perhaps Good Christian Bitches, er, Belles, as it was renamed, if it calms down some, might come in for regular watching.

But Boardwalk Empire has them all down on the mat in comparison, from directing, to dialog, to acting, to mise en scene, to costumes, to stories, to history. Additionally the big boardwalk stage set is in Red Hook and I've walked it. :)

It's International Women's Day. It's the Full Moon. It's A Massive Solar Flare

Is it the Full Moon? Is it A Massive Solar Flare? Why is this country so insane?


It's barely March and:

[ ... 430 abortion restrictions ... have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group that focuses on health and reproductive rights. ]

These are the latest:

[ The Texas Tribune/New York Times: Women In Texas Losing Options For Health Care In Abortion Fight

The cuts, which left many low-income women with inconvenient or costly options, grew out of the effort to eliminate state support for Planned Parenthood. Although the cuts also forced clinics that were not affiliated with the agency to close -- and none of them, even the ones run by Planned Parenthood, performed abortions -- supporters of the cutbacks said they were motivated by the fight against abortion (Belluck and Ramshaw, 3/7).

And lawmakers in New Hampshire and Georgia pass legislation that exempts religious institutions from having to provide contraception coverage in their health plans --

Reuters: New Hampshire House Passes Birth Control Exemption

New Hampshire's Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to exempt religious institutions from having to include contraceptive coverage in health insurance plans. The move was the latest in a national effort by Republicans opposed to provisions of President Obama's 2010 national health care reform law that would require all insurance plans -- even those sponsored by religious institutions -- to provide coverage for birth control pills and other contraception for women (McClure, 3/8).

Many San Carlos patients struggle to reach Edinburg from their homes in

impoverished neighborhoods called colonias. Maria Romero, a housecleaner with four children, who had a lump in her breast discovered at the San Carlos clinic, has no way to get there.

Ms. Parra, 33, the mother of five, managed to borrow a car to get to Edinburg after a pap smear at the San Carlos clinic indicated she might have cervical cancer. Further tests showed she was cancer-free.

Both women worry about getting birth control pills; the clinic may now have to charge them up to $20 for a month’s supply.

“I will have to go without,” Ms. Parra said as she left an English class at a community center and was walking to pick up her two youngest children from a Head Start program. “If I get pregnant again, God forbid.” ]

This is a very bad country to live in if you're female, a child and / or poor.

Yet some faux naif will write articles wondering why women don't get really good agency roles in superhero flix.

The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke

This is the title of a well-written, carefully thought out essay on the ZunguZungo website. Here is the heart of "The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke":


[ " This is a small point, but still worth making: Rush Limbaugh didn’t attack Sandra Fluke because of her or anyone else’s sexual behavior. Given his personal history — and his more general ideological proclivities — it’s fair to say that he is vigorously protective of behaviors which are, as a function of what they are, fundamentally dependent on women who behave precisely in the manner of the straw-woman he is attacking. That’s not what this is about. Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” because she asserted her right to speak publicly about and make publicly thinkable a set of experiences and problems that he has a very direct and personal interest in excluding from public space



The broader ideological question which Congress was ostensibly discussing — the question of whether a religious institution can object to covering forms of medical care on the basis of religious belief — is also a red herring. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity neither know, nor care, about the intricate and unstable conjunction of government, insurance, and medicine that might make this a tricky debate if grown-ups were ever to debate it. And the fact that Limbaugh doesn’t even understand how female contraception works doesn’t diminish his rhetorical position a whit. On the contrary, he is defending precisely his right not to know how it works (or what things like Ovarian Cysts are), and the right of those for and to whom he speaks to be similarly ignorant. He is defending his right for that to be a woman’s problem, one which he (and a “we” constituted in his image, as his public) doesn’t need to be concerned. And so he needs to attack Sandra Fluke, personally, all the more because she wasn’t even going to talk about herself. By speaking on behalf of “women,” she threatened to render “women” a member of the body politic. Slut-shaming her — making it about her, personally — changes the subject from a generalizable woman’s public concern to a specific set of personal desires (which he can then moralize about, and use to silence her


Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, in short, because her voice threatens to reconstitute the nature of the American public: if she were heard — if the specificity of woman’s health were publicly speakable in the hallowed halls of Congress — then we could no longer pretend that this is simply an abstract and legalistic question of “religion,” “government,” and “medicine.” It would suddenly be apparent that the female public and the male public actually have different interests and concerns when it comes to issues like sex and contraception, that contraception means something different to people with different reproductive organs. The fact that (heterosexual) men’s enjoyment of consequence-free sex is dependent on the privilege of those consequences being borne by someone else might become thinkable, if those “someone else’s” had a public platform to speak about it. " ]

This post, "Won't Anyone Think of the SexBots?!" from Athena Andreadis's Astrogator's Logs, illuminates these issues even more brightly. It's a long essay too, and the discussion that follows must also be read.
Athena Andreadis, a molecular biologist, is very concerned with women as writers and protagonists and characters in Science Fiction. She points out in the response - discussion section about blaming women for the decline of science in Science Fiction, this, which is also how the southern states managed to keep the poor(er) whites aligned with the minority slaveowning wealthy power elite, despite the visible harm this economy did to the poor(er) white worker:
[ " As Francesca points out, the persistence of Michael Flynn, the transhumorists, MRAs and other suchlike on patently self-serving definitions of feminism speaks to a deep-seated and abiding fear of losing unearned perks awarded automatically and collectively to the gender based solely on visual inspection of primary genitalia. If even the worst man (by whatever definition, including resemblance to the local tribal god) is assumed to be better than even the best woman, it’s easy to see why that would be hard to give up. " ]

And then there's this, "Male Hysteria: A Comprehensive Handbook," on the I Am Aware of My Own Hypocrisy blog. The (male) author begins with this:

[ " Caveat: The following PSA can’t be considered sexist or biased against men in any way, shape of form. My male slave said it isn’t sexist*, so it can’t be. Charges and accusations thereof will be ignored or laughed at.


*Granted, I had to adjust the nipple clamps and use the whip a few more times, but he said it. I win!

Hysteria has for centuries been proclaimed a condition that affects only women, but a male version does exist and it is not only a lot more virulent and a lot more common, but also a lot more dangerous. Its correct name is testeria.

CAMaB = coercively assigned male at birth.

Testeria. n. Medical condition that affects only CAMaB, but disproportionately white CAMaB among the 12-48 age group. It involves estrogen levels dropping drastically. As a result, without nothing to stop it, cortisol levels go up. To prevent irreparable damage to the nervous system, the body creates antibodies. These antibodies are so aggressive that they eat brain cells, causing the patient to say and do things that defy common logic and, more often than not, endanger the patient and those around him.

Physical symptoms: excessive sweat, trembling hands, dialted pupils, flustered face, clenched teeth.


Psychological symptoms: persecution complexes, tendency to get defensive, diminished capacity of reasoning, verbosity, tendency to repeat oneself, persistent self-aggrandization, tendency to see the world at large in terms of black and white, solipsism. For some reason, which remains still unexplained, this condition affects disproportionately CAMaB in developed countries. " ]

Does this not describe to the nth degree figures such as Breitbart, Limbaugh, etc.? Not to mention the Apostles of Disunion ....

"Treason (1860 - 1861)", Chapter VII of *The Education of Henry Adams*

During the last phase years of South Carolina's increasing hysterical frenzy about the North, the Republicans, Lincoln et al., Henry Adams was at Harvard. After graduation he departed to Europe via the justification of studying Civil Law in Berlin -- though he baldly declares he knew no more what Civil Law was then than he does now (the now of writing The Education), nor why Germany was a place to study it. Neither did he study it, or anything else, other than some German. As far as the growing sectional crisis back home, he says little, other than he spent time with Charles Sumner when the Senator passed through Germany at a late period of his recovery after his severe beating (1856) at the hands of Preston Brooks in the Senate.


In the last part of this European period Adams fell in love with both Italy and France, though for different reasons. When he returned home, with a heavy heart he started reading law with a prestigious firm in Boston, a city for which Adams had no more affection at this time than earlier. However, within weeks, in November, 1860, his father, Charles (one of the founders of the Free Soil party), took him off to D.C. His father's call was to lobby the Southern senators to keep Virginia in the Union through, and hopefully after, Lincoln's inauguration; Henry was his father's private secretary. Thus he spent a great deal of time in the company of such figures as Governor Seward, who, like Sumner, was an old family friend.

This is how Henry Adams describes this time:

[ " ... Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination, -- haunted by suspicion, by idée fixes, by violent morbid excitement, but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil to flame. They showed the young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.

This might be a commonplace of 1900 but in 1860 it was a paradox. The southern statesmen were regarded as standards of statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's chief offense was his insistence on southern ignorance, and he stood a living proof of it ....


None learned a useful lesson from the Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton-planters, from whom one could learning nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker and treason." ]

My goodness, doesn't this look familiar?

Soon after the war was declared, Lincoln sent Charles Adams to England as head of the mission to ensure Britain didn't recognize the CSA as a nation. Again, the young Henry went with his father as his private secretary -- a long family tradition going back to Henry's great-great-grandfather, John Adams, and John Quincy, his grandfather.

Thus Henry Adams, like Henry James, never came close to sniffing a battlefield. It's pointless, but one wonders how things might have progressed with Henry Adams if he'd been in the Union army. We do know that Henry James forever felt a certain shame and guilt, an inferiority, that he did not.

ETA: I've been reading deeply in Adams these last weeks, from his fiction, to his histories, the Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and The Education. Though there is ample display of unconscious, aristocratic ignorance and arrogance, so far nothing that smacks of anti-semitism. Maybe these sentiments were expressed in the private circulation of the manuscripts before publication, and taken out of the published versions?

Reading Female Fury

Women's anger is condemned, denigrated, laughed at, punished. Yet, there it is, women are angry.

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

In Corners - till a Day  ...  Emily Dickinson

Reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel, Lolly Willowes, by Sarah Waters:

Again looking forward to Virginia Woolf, the novel asserts the absolute necessity of "a room of one's own", and Laura gains a clear-sighted understanding of the combined financial and cultural interests that serve to keep women in domestic, dependent roles: "Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament . . . the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilisation" have robbed her of her freedom just as effectively as have her patronising London relatives. It is this analysis that informs her conversation with Satan near the end of the novel, in which she unfolds her memorable vision of women as sticks of dynamite, "long[ing] for the concussion that may justify them". If women, Townsend Warner implies, are denied access to power through legitimate means, they will turn instead to illegitimate methods – in this case to Satan himself, who pays them the compliment of pursuing them and then, having bagged them, performs the even more valuable service of leaving them alone.

Let us now take a deep breath in honor of Jamaica Kincaid, whose ouvre is a single, multiply modulated, expression of fury. This is a woman who is a willing slayer of daffodils.

Do not be shocked and outraged what women are thinking of doing to the unspeakable manwhore abcessing, stinking, rectum of the world.

Recipients of 2012 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion

USC Annenberg Announces Recipients of 2012 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion
Released: 3/1/2012 2:00 PM EST
Source: University of Southern California

Newswise — March 1, 2012 – The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism announced today the recipients of the 2012 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion. Seven American journalists were chosen to receive stipends from $5,000 to $20,000 to report on religion around the world.

“The number and quality of the proposals we received demonstrate the variety of important stories that can be told about global religion,” said Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC Annenberg. “We identified projects that illustrate the impact of religion worldwide, from the political to the personal, and can be posted, printed, broadcast and published across media platforms.”

Stipends will support the following projects:
• Ned Sublette will travel to Angola and Haiti to report on the traditional religions of Kongo/Ngola as reflected in music. Sublette has made over a hundred radio documentaries about African-diaspora music for PRI’s Afropop Worldwide and Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep. He is the author of three books, including The World That Made New Orleans and Cuba and Its Music, and his reporting has appeared in DownBeat, American Legacy, Bomb, The Nation, and Smithsonian

• Damaso Reyes will investigate the growth of European Pentecostalism led by immigrants from former European colonies. Reporting from Spain, England and Ukraine, Reyes will examine how Charismatic faiths are growing while traditional European Christian religious observance continues to decline. Reyes is a photographer and writer whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, and The Christian Science Monitor.

• Outlawed by Mao Tse-tung during the Cultural Revolution, religious expression is now legally tolerated in China. Peter Manseau will report on the variety of spiritual traditions flourishing there, including their opportunities and challenges. A visiting fellow at Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and writer, Manseau’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and on NPR’s All Things Considered.

• Hillary Brenhouse will report on the return of the Hindu Pandits to their ancestral homeland in the Kashmir Valley. Scattered to urban centers and refugee camps in the wake of a Muslim insurgency and anti-Hindu violence in 1990, many Pandits are now returning to rebuild their shrines and resurrect their faith. Brenhouse will investigate the revival’s social and political implications in India. Her work has appeared in TIME, Slate and The International Herald Tribune.

• Sarah Stillman will profile Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, a Catholic priest based in Ixtepec, Mexico, and the shelter he has established to safeguard Central American migrants who are routinely assaulted, kidnapped, and robbed by drug cartels while en route to the United States. Stillman’s award-winning international and domestic reporting has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Nation.

• Daniel Lovering will report on American missionaries who lead teams of relief workers into the war zones of Myanmar, also known as Burma, to provide medical supplies to civilians trapped by local fighting. Among the volunteers who support this new breed of missionaries are dentists, Iraq war veterans, and students from US Christian colleges. Lovering is a contributor to Reuters and The New York Times.

• Caitlan Carroll will explore Georgians’ attempts to revive sacred music that was muted during Soviet rule. Since gaining their independence, Georgian scholars, musicians, and patriotic young people have sought to revive the sacred songs of Orthodox Christianity. Carroll, along with photographer Andreas Reeg, will visit Georgia to explore the role of religious music in the area’s spiritual life. Based in Germany, Carroll’s work has been heard on American Public Media’s Marketplace, Public Radio International and Deutsche Welle.

Within the nine-month period of their fellowship this year, fellows will report and develop stories for delivery on multiple platforms. At the completion of their projects, one or two fellows will be in residence at USC to present their work, hold master classes for journalism students and give public lectures.


The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of TIME Inc., to honor his parents who were missionary educators in China. The Foundation builds upon the vision and values of four generations of the Luce family: broadening knowledge and encouraging the highest standards of service and leadership. The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to bring important ideas to the center of American life, strengthen international understanding, and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities. The Luce Foundation pursues its mission today through a variety of grant-making programs; among these is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The Knight Chair in Media and Religion, established in 2002 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, participates in a wide range of activities, including the organization of conferences for working journalists and the sponsorship of events for the local community. Dr. Winston addresses a host of issues surrounding religion and media through her writing and public speaking, as well as her development of coursework and symposiums. Through these outreach activities, USC Annenberg has begun to emerge as a hub for re-visioning how the press—and society itself—thinks about and reports on religion.
About the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Located in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (annenberg.usc.edu) is a national leader in education and scholarship in the fields of communication, journalism, public diplomacy and public relations. With an enrollment of more than 2,200 students, USC Annenberg offers doctoral, master's and bachelor's degree programs, as well as continuing development programs for working professionals, across a broad scope of academic inquiry. The school’s comprehensive curriculum emphasizes the core skills of leadership, innovation, service and entrepreneurship and draws upon the resources of a networked university located in the media capital of the world.