Pics - Sizzling Models at Spring Summer 2012 in Paris

Pics - Sizzling Models at Spring Summer 2012 in Paris:

Pics - Sizzling Models at Spring Summer 2012 in Paris

Brutality Against Women

...unfortunately is not the exclusive province of troglodyte mobs in Islamic countries.
We just have to look at our very own armed forces:

 

Cliff Owen/Associated Press

Kori Cioca, in her lawyer's office on Sunday, described being raped while serving in the Coast Guard. She is one of 17 plaintiffs filing a federal lawsuit against the Department of Defense. 

The suit — brought by 2 men and 15 women, both veterans and active-duty service members — specifically claims that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, “ran institutions in which perpetrators were promoted and where military personnel openly mocked and flouted the modest Congressionally mandated institutional reforms.”
It also says the two defense secretaries failed “to take reasonable steps to prevent plaintiffs from being repeatedly raped, sexually assaulted and sexually harassed by federal military personnel.”

A lot of attention to the plight of Lara Logan, but is anyone reading this?
I think men everywhere (in some countries more than others) are totally oblivious to the pervasive, insidious and deeply ingrained culture against women. It goes pretty much unchallenged in many aspects of our lives. Or if women challenge it, if and when they themselves are aware of it, they are mocked as rabid feminists. Look at that ridiculous satyr Silvio Berlusconi. He is going on trial for underage sex and abuse of power. Women in Italy have had it with his offensive sexism. He offends, undermines and disrespects half the citizens of Italy. But he is still in power.
Everywhere you look, if you look closely, you find instances of the constant demeaning of women, sometimes violent and criminal, but most of the time daily and average.
As many others have pointed out before, this is very transparent in our media and entertainment industries.
For instance, today I read the A. O Scott's review of the new Adam Sandler movie, Just Go with It.  I thought it interesting that the story involves two extremely good looking women, Jennifer Aniston and Brooklyn Decker, whom we are supposed to believe have some sort of romantic attachment to an ugly, childish ball of fat like Adam Sandler.   Aniston plays his receptionist (!) in the movie, but he gets to play the doctor. I have nothing against Adam Sandler (I loved Don't Mess With The Zohan) but we take it for granted that in movies gorgeous women are always falling head over heels in love with older, fatter, balder, uglier men, while it's never the other way around. I'd like to see that, for a change. That is, a dreamboat like Daniel Craig or whatever male star strikes your fancy, having a romantic attachment to a woman his age or older who is not airbrushed, starved and surgically enhanced within an inch of her life. I defy you to give me one example of a movie or TV show where this happens. From A.O Scott:

The sexual politics of “Cactus Flower” are interestingly awkward, looking anxiously back to the ’50s and flinching at the onset of feminism, but this version occasionally lets loose an unacknowledged snarl of regression and resentment. None of the women have professional ambitions or money of their own; their primary asset is “hotness.” Ms. Aniston proudly shows herself off in a bikini — and looks great, it must be said — while Mr. Sandler keeps his shirt on, hanging loosely over his baggy pants. Yes, I know, the double standard is nothing new, but a wittier, less insecure movie might have at least had some fun with it.
But Mr. Sandler is not really willing to risk making fun of himself. He is too much of a bully for that. The infantile hostility that has always been part of his schtick seems increasingly tired, and “Just Go With It” is flecked with mean, lazy gags. There is some cheap homophobia at the end, and a lot of the kind of misogyny that treats the existence of nonthin, nonrich, nonwhite women as a joke in itself.

You would think we'd be past this but no. It goes on.  To maintain this travesty, the media, or whoever is responsible, will also have us believe that these glamorous women look the way they do because of their unearthly genes and nothing but. So actresses always put on a ridiculous and patently suspect show of stuffing their faces with lardy foods for the benefit of the press. Some of them look like they just emerged from a German dieting camp circa 1945, so I find it absurd every time they profess their love of bacon cheeseburgers and pounds of pasta Alfredo. Truth is, to look good in a movie, male or female, you have to starve yourself. But do we expect our leading men to share their love of lard with their fans? What a ridiculous notion. We are far more forgiving of lardiness, wrinkles and other signs of humanity on male actors than on females.
You may think it a stretch to relate sexual abuse to glamorous, anorexic blondes, but my point is that it is all part of the same continuum of lack of respect for women. Rabid feminists call it objectification. And it is so. The inability to see a woman in human terms. The lack of basic respect for her physical, mental and spiritual integrity.

Mork from Ork

I finally finished reading Lawrence Wright's meticulous and extraordinarily damaging exposé of the bizarreness that is Scientology and boy, it gets better as you read along. Nothing new under the sun: Scientology is nothing other than a cult (we knew that). It separates people from their money and from their families and from their common sense. It is based on the loony science fiction ideas of a guy that looks like a Tupperware salesman circa 1950. But I think the reason it has been so successful is that, in contrast to other loony cults, which sometimes idolize charismatic con artists or believe in impossible utopias, this one couches its beliefs in the mumbo jumbo of self-help, a topic dear and inexhaustible to the citizens of this nation. Self-help gurus seem to be a quintessentially American travesty, and Scientology just seems better organized and wealthier than most.  In Germany it is banned and recognized as a cult. Here they should do the same. If the FBI finds evidence, as the article claims, of slave labor and financial shenanigans (it has protected tax status as a church), it should be prosecuted and penalized accordingly. What is amazing is that it has been allowed to thrive mostly unimpeded and this must be because of its shiny aura of success and its connection to celebrities, since as you all know being a celebrity in this country pretty much guarantees you can act outside the law. On the surface, Scientology doesn't seem to be utterly bat-shit like the Branch Davidians, or those people who drank the Kool-Aid. But some of their crazier teachings are hidden for a reason; they are wacky and sinister at the same time. A lot of people think that Scientology is a religion like any other, but one of the important differences between a religion and a cult is that in a religion you are not coerced to believe. You are free to profess your faith in your own personal way without punishment or coercion.
In any case, my advice to you dear readers is that you don't become scientologists.  You will be spending too much money to believe in stuff zanier than a sci-fi comic book.

Wat Is The Wat

Ladies and gentlemen, the truly scary beautiful magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat, Cambodia:

 

The magnificent talents of Magnificent Arepa.

 

Maybe I should let you entertain the fantasy of lonely and daring exploration a la National Geographic.  In truth, in a good moment, before hordes of groups of different nationalities and cameras arrived, it looked something like this:

Still, it is breathtaking. So much so, that I forgot I wanted to see the ruins that Dean Tavoularis designed and built for Apocalypse Now, that apparently are still around. They were going to use the original, but because there were explosions involved, they sensibly decided to build a replica they could blow up in peace.

 Tavoularis at the Cinematheque Francaise with one of his sketches for Apocalypse Now.

Fear is your best friend

Great article in the Times about intuition and how it can save lives in battle.
One would have thought it obvious, but now that they are mapping the brain they can see how this works physically.
I'm reproducing parts of the comment posted by one Tom Colton, an ex-soldier. I don't know if it's true, but it is quite compelling:

Lots of infantry platoons have a guy who can sense an ambush. The keys to knowing if you should rely on him are: Success. Does he keep you alive on a regular basis? And adjustment. Is he squared away, or a neurotic? If the latter, then his senses may be more often than not, skewed...
And something else was noted frequently in Vietnam by those who conducted combat actuarial studies:
In a firefight, Jocks are the first ones usually killed, because they never learned about fear during sports.
Thugs and Gangstas get killed next, because they have an inflated idea of their prowess.
Then the Bullies buy the farm while trying for the first time to move beyond their real cowardice.
And finally: In Combat-The four eyed pencil necked geeks rule, because they work as a team, follow orders, feel responsible for and protective of the other guys in their rifle squad and and most importantly-they paid attention during training. They advance thru their fear, surmount real terror and commit great acts of selfless heroism. And they almost never get a medal.
This country is full of dopey lookin' old guys who once confronted stark terror in extreme danger and carried out great acts of valor and sacrifice against armed enemies engaged with them in a combat zone. Most of these guys are never honored at the time and their families will most likely never know. Instead, we worship phoney war heroes like Bob Kerrey, John Kerry and John McCain who milk their hero status for power, wealth, trophy wives and adulation.
I was never a hero, but I saw regular guys do things that no Bruce Lee, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, nor Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any other phoney Hollywood hero would ever do. Hunches about danger and escaping from it is baloney. Hunches about danger and fighting thru it to complete your mission are what really counts..."I am the Infantry... Queen of Battle...Follow ME!

As I think Mr. Colton is saying, we are the only country on Earth with an inflated and deeply distorted sense of heroism, which among other things is responsible for bullshit like saying "Mission Accomplished" at the beginning of an endless, tragic war. If we were more respectful of fear, perhaps we would not be in this predicament right now. Too much fear can of course be cowardly and paralyzing, but lack of fear is arrogance and hubris.

Major Writer's Block Under Removal

I scan the headlines and I can't be bothered, even if some of them are worth writing about. I have ennui due to over-fragmentation of information. I am also dangerously addicted to facebook in a bad way. I need an intervention or something. I tried twitter and I don't get it. I use facebook as if it was twittter so why bother?

IN OTHER NEWS:

• Obama eases travel restrictions to Cuba. Cool. He should end the embargo tout suite, establish relations and let that paleolithic regime succumb to the forces of greed and money like everywhere else.

• I don't like pirates.

• Yes I saw that poor woman on Britain's Got Talent. So now what? Are people going to take her seriously or they're just going to exploit her weirdness? If I was the ruler of the world, I would ban reality shows. But you are in luck. Or not.

• The other day I went to see a movie which was a master class on what not to do. How not to cast actors, how not to write dialogue, how not to rely on unnecessary, deadly voiceover narration, how not to adapt a novel, how not to take yourself so seriously and be pretentious when you do not know how to do things. It was hard going, but I learned a lot. The Mysteries of Philadelphia, if you must know. Doesn't even approach the mediocre competence of hackwork.

• Let me remind everybody that April in New York is always like this. It's still too cold, it rains too much, the winds are evil and no, you cannot retire your coats just yet. So stop the whining.

• April being the cruellest month, the other day I was thinking of Liz Taylor. She popped into my mind.
I was thinking that she must be very old and, given her poor health history, look very bad nowadays. And I thought that when that happens to formerly gorgeous movie icons, the best thing is either to go into hiding, or embrace your life and aged looks with a vengeance. Having said that, let's be honest: nobody wants to see a current picture of Brigitte Bardot, and nobody didn't jump and almost didn't have a heart attack when they saw Sophia Loren at the Oscars recently. What I'm saying is, being an international beauty icon is not easy, because age stops for no one, regardless of surgeons and treatments. Some stars age with class (Audrey Hepburn, Julie Christie) but it's not easy and I feel sorry for them all. If I, who have always decried the use of plastic surgery, am contemplating my drooping eyelids with something approaching horror and botox with something approaching possibility, well I can't imagine what it must be like when your otherwordly beauty is your identity. Must be a bitch. Which is why I'm glad I'm not that gorgeous.
So I did run into a recent picture of Liz Taylor in one of the cheesier tabloids. Oy. I guess that age is only good to you if you don't fight it.
Youth is fleeting. It makes me feel sad.