I’m seriously disappointed in my hometown paper for this totally boring and reductive review of The Dark Knight as some kind of fantastical rendering of how the world sees the US after 9/11.  And the reviewer has the nerve to try and pin a lack of imagination on Michael Caine!

 

It’s a broody, moody stew of urban chaos that catches and runs with a throwaway comment once made by actor Michael Caine (who reprises his role as Alfred, Batman’s servant and domestic savant). As he put it, Superman is how America sees itself and Batman is how the rest of the world sees America.

If so, and it has that clang of truth, then the world sees the States as a place where:

a) gangsters and terrorists hold cities in a grip of fear;

b) mayors and district attorneys are overwhelmed by the rising crime wave;

c) heroes and villains wear masks, and

d) the public isn’t told the truth.

A grim snapshot of America in the wake of 9/11?

Nolan asks the question in another way: Can the dark and stormy knight (Christian Bale’s Batman) defend Gotham City from Osama Bin Gene Simmons (Heath Ledger’s Joker)?

 

If you want to see this film and its predecessor, Batman Begins, through a post-9/11 lens, perhaps you should take a clue and a page from Susan Faludi’s latest, The Terror Dream.  (Or at least read the interview with her about the book in The Nation here.)  Both films explore the consequences of our culture’s hero complex — but while Batman Begins tries to pin down the origins of its hero, The Dark Knight rejects explanations and focuses on what might result if this masculine ideal were fully realized.  

Before I jump in there with the Men, though, can I just ask something?  In this gory and conflicted study of masculinity — where’s the other side?

Where the hell is Catwoman?*

More to come.

[*And I don't care if Maggie won the hot off -- I reluctantly say won because people still comment on there to say she's hotter -- this movie did nothing for her.]

I Can’t Be Your Girlfriend is a small journal of and about poetry by women that’s hand bound in Providence, RI. ICBYG publishes poetry of any length or stylistic format by woman-identified writers. While ICBYG does not publish traditional fiction or non-fiction writing at this time, I am open to the micro and the non-traditional.

I am interested in unusual, surprising cohesion and organization that deviates from traditional literary journal formats. I might even theme the first issue based on the submissions I receive. Please send poems (3-7 or whatever you see fit) in the body of an e-mail (or attached in a .doc or .pdf file) toicantbeyourgirlfriend@gmail.com. Introduce yourself in the friendly way you see fit.

ICBYG also prints reviews of new and old poetry books, chapbooks, and journals by women. Please send a query to icantbeyourgirlfriend@gmail.comalong with a clip or two of your own writing. I love small presses, strong voices, emotional intelligence, hand bound books, the old and rare, self-published anything, forgotten secrets… 

I also seek illustrations and ephemera for the first issue. Send an e-mail if you have an idea or would like to submit a high resolution image. 

Send all submissions by August 20th, 2008 (or so).

Regrettably, I cannot pay contributors at this time, but if the first issue goes well, I will actively search for funding. Contributors receive a complementary copy of the journal.

Finally, the fine ladies at Switchback Books in Chicago sum up ICBYG’s views on gender nicely when they write about their own press: “Our definition of ‘women’ is broad… It includes transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and female-identified individuals.”

Thanks in advance for your interest, and I look forward to reading your work!

Claire Donato
Providence, RI
July 2008
http://icantbeyourgirlfriend.blogspot.com

The Grackle on the Lawn

She wants the blossom.
She wants the seeds in the grass.

She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.

It’s so simple, she’s like a person.

She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.

She’s like a person, she wants to live
with that beautiful blossom and she wants to eat.

She flies off with the blossom in her beak.

– Eloise Klein Healy

when we fell in love?

Time’s been an interesting commodity for me this year.  When I moved to California I took on a job that recentered my activism from participation in online progressive and radical communities to my all day, every day reality.  It’s been exhilarating and exhausting and completely invaluable.  It’s refined and in some ways refocused my thinking on community and political commitment and the way that American (sure, Western, but especially American) society thinks and values work and career above all else.  Us progressives, we’ve got a big problem with career martyrdom,  in case that slipped by you somehow.  (Who am I kidding?  Most of you know it better than me.)

This space has seen some false starts and I’d hate for this to be another… so I’m not going to make any promises.  Yet.  But there are some things I need a space to think and write about, some people that I need to share that process with again and others who have taken on a lot more since I stepped back.  In a perfect world, here’s some of what I’d like to explore:

• Micro — what’s in the details.  There have been some thoughtful posts on veganism on BFP’s and elle’s blogs — will link directly when I write my own response — that have echoed a lot of my own concerns/questions this year about my eating habits.  I’ve been (unsuccessfully) trying to make the switch from vegetarian to vegan for months now; part of the reason this has failed is because of my own lack of energy and commitment to mindfully living my life when my (12-hour, 14-hour) workday ends.  This also ties into the fact that, since buying my first car at the end of October, I’ve put 23,000 miles on her.  Poor Robot Eagle.  So, in one area of my life I’m fighting so hard for people’s voices to be heard; in others I’m doing as much, if not more, than others to fuck up this planet and further silence the voices of people I’ve never met.
• Personal/political, and where the balance lies.  How to avoid the activist deathtrap of deep depression and burnout?  I haven’t even kept up with my Poetry Mondays!  How do I maintain my love for art and writing and all things restless and creative?  Fuck, how do I maintain my connections to still far away friends and family?  And when do I learn to play the damn banjo already?
• Macro, or the structures I support.  Why does the progressive community insist on replicating the bullshit hierarchies that develop and sustain the injustice we’re supposedly against?  What’s up with the perpetual power-trip?  And how have I played into that, in the past, during this year and even this minute?  How do I get from that structure (in work, in relationships in the broadest sense) to a more collaborative understanding of progress?  I’ve been living mostly out of hotels for the past year.  So basically, I’ve had a fleet of servants making my bed and throwing out my take-out containers.  That’s a relationship I’m in, whether I like it or not. 

Obviously this will all intersect, some of it will be personal and messy, some of it will take the form of cultural analysis, some of it will involve a flurry of blog-linking and commenting as of yore but I don’t know how much, or how often.  Yet.  Like I said.  But I want to be here.

So, apparently, this is my punishment for working so much and getting engaged and neglecting my First Future Husband.  He decided to marry somebody else!  Apparently I’m not the only one mourning; check out ScarJo’s first single from her album of Tom Waits covers, All My Nightmares Are Real, known to everyone else as Anywhere I Lay My Head.  After watching this I would like to revise my previous opinion of the video for ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’ – ‘flash but boring, and why isn’t Justin dancing?’ to ‘the best thing Scarlett Johansson ever did and will do involving music’.

And no, we are not even touching that ‘4 Minutes’ atrocity.  Although I always like to see Justin rock the Scruff McGruff.

May Day

I’ve decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I’ve decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn’t matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I’ve decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

– Phillis Levin

from Bear Stories

When we are in bed and you are on top of me, I think about the painting of the bear hanging over the great stone fireplace. I say to myself, bear, tell me a story about your tooth and your hide, about the three dogs that bare their teeth, and about the one dog that is so brave, he takes your flank in his jaw and hangs from it. Bear, tell me about the time it takes to put a sweater on. I want to know what it means to lie down empty. And bear answers, I have always been ashamed. I put on fish skin. They sometimes call the bear a lonely monk. The bear’s habitat is the gorge, the tree, the cleft of rock. If you open the bear’s stomach, you will find a rubber doll and a piece of canvas. I tap my upper and lower eye-teeth together. I refuse to eat. You laid yourself beside me, and I realized I was cold in my hairless skin. I wear wool in the rain so I will smell like bear, so that she will kiss my shoulder as I kiss the wood of our cabin walls.

-J’Lyn Chapman

Sometimes celebrities creep me out.

As if politicians’ empty platitudes weren’t alienating enough, I get to watch ScarJo recite some of them with her face set to its ‘intense’ setting.  And I am not even touching will.i.am.  May I remind you that this is the man responsible for the song ‘Let’s Get Retarded’?

Okay, it’s only fair for somebody to make a gross Clinton video now so I can ridicule that too. 

For Example, A Flower

We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves.
The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy

covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves.
Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands

washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise.
The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,

the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses
is guarded from us by the hardwood doors,

the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done,
night will come, eagerly, to clean up.

And death will shield us, in time,
from the sun’s megalithic promise:

Tomorrow, the same day.
Tomorrow, the same day.

For example: A flower
is the most beautiful lie.

–Arkaye Kierulf

BFP’s at it again over at La Chola, thinking she can backdoor-bully me into reading Harry Potter by putting some doofus wizard named Dumbledore up against The Bestest Wizard in the History of Time AKA Gandalf from Lord of the Rings.  How embarrassing for her. Stop by, weigh in and check out petit “hoffa” poussin in action.