amber can walk

  'the nurse missed / my vein / & dug for it / it was a white light / a tin flame in / the forearm / fluorescent /sick vinyl / what else can i say / i opened / i cried / & the needle / drank' Franny Choi, Turing Test_Empathetic Response  *   Digital video, especially what has been referred to as The Bad Digital Era , exists at an impasse. Used as a cheap alternative to film and retroactively praised for its scrappy, fuzzy aesthetics, it was both a means for conveying an intimacy that a classical Hollywood look wasn't able to convey and also a way to crank out as much miserabilism and mumblecore as possible. There is a certain level of familiarity that is cultivated when a filmmaker is able to shoot in extreme close-up for a long take , allowing the characters to talk in a way that feels unscripted, even if it isn't. More than this, digital video was associated with the home video release , meaning the stories being told felt as though they were meant to be...

  'I am most surely living / In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives / Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf / And from the chaste ewe in the wind. / They go into woods / into bean fields they go / Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me'  - James Dickey, The Sheep Child    'If I made a movie, it would be about hot chicks.' - Howard Stern discussing Vulgar with Bryan Johnson on his show   * In order to reconcile the offensive elements of the exploitation film, one must take them deadly seriously. This is a tricky business when dealing with a clown. The fool, the trickster , the dunce, the masochist. These characters straddle the line of relief and frustration , embodying our most embarrassing traits and yanking them from our hands so we never have to actually experience them ourselves , making them an almost androgynous saviour to all, transgressing the bounds of gender by universalising failure. Furthermore, Donald McManus deta...

We have a tremendous cultural need to understand marital relations as consensual and harmonious, notwithstanding the contrary evidence we confront about the nature of some unions. [...] Never do we hear more about the joys of marital love, trust, and intimacy in a contemporary legal context than when courts, lawmakers, and commentators justify the preservation of a husband's legal right to rape his wife. - Jill Elaine Hasday, Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape   I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper  * American culture in the 1960s signified an in-between stage, a ramp built off the conservatism of the 1950s towards the intense political upheaval of the 1970s. In the book, Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now , Alexander Bloom describes a disillusionment with the system to ensure stab...

Life is unfair Kill yourself, or get over it - Black Box Recorder , Child Psychology (Girls!) To do the dishes, (Girls!) to clean up my room (Girls!) To do the laundry, (Girls!) and in the bathroom (Girls!) That's all I really want is girls     - Beastie Boys , Girls   Women, encouraged to manipulate their appearance and sublimate assertive impulses behind a mask of feminine behaviour, are necessarily involved in everyday duplicitous practices. The emotional, sexual, and social machinations of the dating and marriage market, the self-objectification that presents an appealing facade: these are achieved by employing the trickster tactics of deception, impersonation, disguise, duplicity, and subversion. Because the social practice of femininity is a form of trickery, tricksters in cultural texts resonate with and expose a fundamental tenet of the social relations of the sexes in American culture: the only way for women to survive, given their subordinate position and limite...