It’s all President Obama’s fault. Last week he made his speech in which he finally openly supported gay marriage, and really, that was pretty amazing. I mean, yes, most of the people who won’t vote for him because of that one issue probably wouldn’t have voted for him anyhow, but still, wrap your head around the enormity of it: the first Black president of the United States, in his first term of office and coming up on what will likely be a tight election, had the balls to stand up and say, ALL people should be treated equally. ALL people should have the right to marry the person they love. Yes.
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A brief housekeeping note: I’ve taken lately to engaging more in conversations on Twitter and Facebook lately, and only bringing them over here if it’s something that stimulates my interest enough that I feel it’s worth expending the energy on writing a full blog post and continuing to talk about it over here. This is partly due to the immediacy of back-and-forth I can engage in in those forums, but it’s more to do with time, and the reality I’ve come to face that I can neither slow time down nor create more of it, and I am juggling too many balls at once. I still use this space for reviews and curating interesting things I happen upon and occasionally longer posts about art, social issues, politics, religion, or whatever else I feel like writing about, but the day-to-day conversations are tending to happen more over there. You can find me on Twitter under @kimvoynar, and on Facebook under my full name, if you’re so inclined.

On paper, it must have sounded good. Dark Shadows, the 1966-71 supernatural soap opera, while dark, was also melodramatic and campy, and who better to mine that material for a new generation than that master of melodramatic camp, Tim Burton, working with frequent Burton flyer Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins? It must have seemed like a dream project. Unfortunately, this is just not a good movie. I don’t know how you take this source material, with the budget they had to work with and the overall level of talent involved in this project, and still manage not to make something good, but somehow they’ve pulled it off. By the time Alice Cooper shows up, it’s like the band bravely playing on as the Titanic plunges into the icy ocean. Maybe it’s time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to take a long break from each other, or perhaps Burton just seriously needs to consider surrounding himself with more people who will be honest and call him out when his emperor has no clothes.
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A friend posted on Facebook this morning that he’d just seen the Miss USA contestants on the Today Show and he can’t believe such an “archaic, demeaning and supremely sexist” thing still exists. Predictably, the men were quick to chime in with comments like, “It will exist as long as men enjoy watching beautiful women…and women enjoyed being watched” and “no body (sic) forces these ladies to be in these things. They want to do it. It is their freedom of choice.”

Perhaps equally predictably, I chimed in with: “Kinda like how nobody “forces” a woman to work as a prostitute/have sex on camera in pornographic films/stay in a abusive relationship, right? So long as men enjoy exploiting women … and women enjoy being exploited by them. Not demeaning or misogynistic at all, nope. Right-o.”

Because goddammit, I hate beauty pageants. No matter how much emphasis they try to put on scholarship and being smart and thoughtfully answering serious questions about world problems, there’s just no getting away from the fact that beauty pageants are first and foremost about putting the bodies of young women on display for men to judge as beautiful, or not. The fact that many of these young women have been training for tiaras since toddlerhood, honing and shaping themselves into some bullshit testosterone-driven sexual fantasy of the perfect Barbie doll woman, that they actually take this competition seriously and try to posit it as anything more than the purely misogynistic, hyper-sexualizing of the female body that it is, makes it that much worse. Why do we let beauty pageant standards define how our daughters have to look in order to be thought (or to think of themselves as) beautiful?

On the other hand, I admit that I don’t tend to feel the same about burlesque, in part because burlesque tends to celebrate a much wider spectrum of what constitutes female beauty, and in part because when I watch a burlesque show, it feels like watching women who are in active control of their sexuality, whereas beauty pageants seem to be just about passively offering female bodies up for display and ogling. I guess other folks might disagree, though, and find burlesque to be more exploitative because it’s inherently more sexual in nature than just parading around in a pageant.

This needs to be edited about in half, but that aside, it’s still pretty awesome.

Happy Monday!

Very excited to share the news that my good friend John Wildman, formerly director of PR for the Dallas Independent Film Fest and current Senior Publicist at Film Society Lincoln Center, is finally getting his long-gestating “post-feminist” horror-thriller project, Stripped, off the ground. Initially planned to film in 2010, the film stalled out for a while over funding concerns but is finally getting made. I read a version of the script, which was co-written by Justina Walford, a couple years ago, and I’ve been hoping ever since to finally see it get made. Stripped will film in and around Dallas in June; you can read the complete press release right here.

I hate words like “gone” or “departed” or even “passed on” for someone who’s died. Adam Yauch’s physical body may have expired too damn young, but his spirit and legacy live on through his contributions to the worlds of music and film. And isn’t that sort of immortality, that desire to create something that will exist long after our physical bodies give out, at least a part of why we struggle and work to create art to begin with?

Yauch was an inspiration. Let’s not wallow in tears at his death, but celebrate the life he lived and what he did with it. And then get off our asses and go lay down that album or paint that canvas, or finish that script and shoot that film, because this physical life is short, and time’s wasting.

Why couldn’t we have had vocabulary lists like this back when I was in school? In honor of this weekend’s opening of hotly-anticipated-by-comic-nerds-everywhere The Avengers, Wordnik has culled together a list of Marvel vocabulary words. The cool thing about homeschooling my kids is that they get to have cool spelling and vocabulary words like this because their mom is a geek. See how many of these you can work casually into your own conversations this week, and whether people who don’t know what they mean nod knowingly as if they do.

Here’s a sampling of Wordnik’s Marvel Vocabulary list, the full list can be found over here.

1. Adamantium

Use it in a sentence: “Hugh Jackman reprises the role that made him a superstar, as the fierce fighting machine who possesses amazing healing powers, adamantium claws, and a primal fury known as berserker rage.” (“Wolverine Movie Extended Synopsis,” Comic Book Movie, April 16, 2009)

Definition: Adamantium is, according to the Marvel Universe Wiki, “an artificially-created alloy of iron that is the most impervious substance known on Earth.” The term first appeared in July 1969 in Avengers #66, and may be a play on the noun form of adamant, “a name applied with more or less indefiniteness to various real or imaginary metals or minerals characterized by extreme hardness.” Adamant comes from the Greek adamas, “unconquerable, hard steel, diamond.”

2. flame on

Use it in a sentence: “Instead of giving them terrible illnesses [the cosmic radiation storm] of course turns them into Übermenschen of various sorts, though only Johnny’s new abilities are an unmixed blessing: by shouting “Flame on!” he converts himself into a flying ball of fire.” (Peter Bradshaw, “Fantastic Four,” The Guardian, July 21, 2005)

Definition: Flame on is the catchphrase of Johnny Storm, also known as the Human Torch. Storm first appeared in 1961 in The Fantastic Four #1.

3. Legacy Virus

Use it in a sentence: “In the well-established and often convoluted ‘X-Men’ lore found within the Marvel comic’s continuity, Pyro was a rambunctious villain with the ability to control fire who was a onetime ally of Mystique. He eventually succumbed to the Legacy Virus, a mutant-only disease that posed a danger to all of the series’ main characters.” (Ryan J. Downey, “New Mutants Added to X-Men 2,” MTV.com, May 30, 2002)

Definition: The Legacy Virus is “a deadly disease that attacked the mutant gene, causing its host’s powers to flare out of control before death.” The virus was “based on one that was used 2000 years in the future.”

4. mandroid

Use it in a sentence: “Hammer created the Mandroids with the assistance of the evil genius Ivan Vanko, aka Whiplash (Mickey Rourke), and plans to mass produce them for the military.” (“New Iron Man 2 Stills, Viral Mystery, and Interactive Content,” Reelz, May 4, 2010)

Definition: The mandroid is “battle armor designed by Tony Stark [Iron Man] for use by S.H.I.E.L.D.,” and is a blend of man and android. The mandroid first appeared in December 1971 in Avengers #94. The word android, “an automaton resembling a human being in shape and motions,” was coined in 1847, and comes from the Greek andro, “human,” and edies, “form, shape.” The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that android was “listed as ‘rare’ in [Oxford English Dictionary] 1st edition (1879),” and was popularized around 1951 by science fiction writers.

5. Spidey-sense

Use it in a sentence: “Spider-Man, you will recall, has a ‘spidey-sense‘, which alerts him to impending disaster and gives him time to react suitably.” (Giles Coren, “I had my Spider-Man moment. And I failed,” The Times, May 29, 2010)

Definition: Spidey-sense refers to Spider-Man’s ability to sense danger before it occurs. It “manifests in a tingling feeling at the base of his skull, alerting him to personal danger in proportion to the severity of that danger.” Spidey-sense also refers to intuition or instinct in general.