Author Archives: doscats

About doscats

Social crirtic and writer. Ph.D. University of Minnesota (American Studies)

(It’s not) Jennifer’s Body

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Today I watched Jennifer’s Body, the popular rendering of a kind of succubus myth that also serves as the star vehicle for the teen-something generation’s Angelina Jolie-like superstar with a hot, kick-ass body, Megan Fox.

(I’ve heard that because she’s slightly tattooed and got an independent streak, of sorts, even without the accompanying vial of a lover’s blood on her person, that she merits Jolie-like comparisons. Whatever…)

As a horror, teen/chick flick with male revenge fantasy components—hot urban alternative band visits hickish town hoping to supposedly make it with wide-eyed innocent rural, small-town girls, but is really there to find and sacrifice a virgin using an internet researched satanic ritual in order to cast a success spell on their band, but the spell backfires in the end for them (more on this later, maybe) and in the meantime on the community of Jennifer (the one of “body”) and the narrator and movie’s protagonist, Needy (really, not kidding!)—it probably succeeds for many a younger, mainstream film-goer. Continue reading →

The Fence II

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My little fence repair project is finished. I stained it this afternoon. I like it given that I kept the posts that were already in place, one of them–the big rough-looking post–being, as my brother reminded me, originally part of barbed-wire fence that bordered a wonderful horse pasture. It enclosed what would now be considered a wetland. Back then we called it a swamp because it had a ditch running east to west through the middle of it and it was soft and gooey and full of life. Continue reading →

Soulless Embodiment

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“The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage 2nd ed. 1991), p. 11. Continue reading →

Temperament: Obama’s American Vision

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It’s become official: pragmatically, reasonably, thoughtfully, cautiously, carefully, open-minded, with consensus and coalition-building and mature foresight apparent above all, our former candidate, now president, of hope and fundamental change of the way things are done in Washington and the way America is imagined has nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States an intellectual, political, bureaucratic kindred spirit.

This nominee is someone who embodies the intelligence and craftiness not to have ever developed a clear ideological position, always and apparently playing it close to the vest, rarely passionately making oral or written commitments on issues that matter most to people regardless of ideological position. How best to encapsulate Obama and his pick, Elena Kagan, to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens who retires at the end of the court’s summer session this year? Continue reading →

“It is what it is.” (?)

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As someone with an on again, off again dedication to the sport of golf, Buddhist thought and meditation, and the politics and contradictions of culture writ large and small, I have been interested to listen to Tiger Woods’ recent post-tournament comments in light of his fall from the iconic cultural graces of pop culture celebrity after his “crash” late last November and current struggles on the golf course since he returned to play in the Masters golf tournament about a month ago.

I am especially interested in speculating on his rhetorical recommitment to Buddhist practice that he made during his statement of apology back in February which he said he had abandoned and which, fundamentally, he asserted had led to his disastrous extramarital deviance and likely divorce from Elin Nordegren. Continue reading →

The Fence

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So much work that can and should be done around the yard and house, but I try to do one thing at a time within a limited time frame so I don’t get bored and the work doesn’t get tedious. So this afternoon my project was fence repair on two sections of the front yard section of the east fence. I included a couple of “before” photos where I happened to catch the dilapidated, sad east sections. After a few hours of work with some help from Domingo–el viejo alcanza a los noventa y dos años el 26 de este mes– holding the slats while I pounded nails, I was finished by 7:00 pm. Now neither of us can stop looking at the two sections of happy, lovely, renewed cedar fence. We both like the beauty of the natural cedar slats so much we’re tempted to simply apply a clear stain and eventually replace all the older painted slats with new, wider slats like the 5 1/2 inch ones we installed today and simply stain them clear. (BTW. Not bad for a renegade scholar, social critic, and trouble maker, eh?) Continue reading →

Talking to pets and the individual sacred

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While eating my egg and cheese sandwich/coffee breakfast this morning, I perused the paper and discovered that for some married folks pets are better listeners than their spouses.

While I can’t verify any of that from personal experience since I’ve never married, I have listened to plenty of talk from espoused male friends about their communicative challenges with their wives, usually, I think, with a certain masculine hyperbole attached that plays on gendered stereotypes of often puzzled and clueless male tolerance of female chattering.

(Why this or any poll focuses on the marriage class other than the cultural bias toward and privileging of that specific cultural institution despite it’s common dissolution continually befuddles me. It goes to the problematic of polls generally, their design flaws including and starting with the questions that are asked and their format. Most of them are ridiculously flawed!) Continue reading →

On Woods and Ochoa

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When I read that Lorena Ochoa, one of the best contemporary women professional golfers who would have been a shoe-in for the LPGA Hall of Fame if she’d only played two more years on the tour, announced her retirement from golf to pursue personal/family goals (including having children with her husband of a few years) and devoting more time to charitable work, I couldn’t help but think of the contrast with Tiger Wood’s brief “retirement” after being caught by his wife and the media living a lie.

Based on what I’ve read and witnessed from a distance it’s clear to me that the two examples of living with extreme talent and fortune, albeit in fundamentally different performance spheres, exhibit starkly different levels of mindfulness (that ability to live in the moment with sensitivity and openness to one’s surroundings while maintaining the focus on the task at hand) and character (that sense of one’s humanity that respects in a mindful way one’s spiritual and physical relationship to one’s environment and to the reciprocal desires and obligations for living life fully engaged). Continue reading →

A Code for Dating (?)

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On the continuum of thinking that we are rational, self-controlled beings to acting like instinctual evolutionary creatures, I think we are deluded about thinking we are the former and clueless about how much we are indeed the latter.

My assertion rises from a newspaper article this morning about contemporary dating doldrums and about the ongoing failure of social conventions and their regularly updated “rules” to get us past the normal dating confusion and challenges and onto the path of successful, healthy, long-term connubial bliss.

I suppose there have always been cultural schema for initiating and developing long-lasting intimate reproductive relations: Continue reading →