Okay, this is why file sharing programs rule. I decided I must have every Stevie Wonder cover version ever. I already have spent obscene sums buying vinyl and CDs containing some of the best versions of Stevie’s works, including the Wonder of Stevie series. But only through the miracle of P2P could I have found the “Stevie Wonder Medley” from the Osmonds’ 1975 live album. It’s pretty much what you’d expect — bursting with energy and super-grinny — except that they introduce their band halfway through. Did you know the Osmonds’ backing band was called The American Underground? This makes my head explode. And now I want to track down the rest of this album, since it seems to be nothing but medleys. I want to hear the 1950s medley and the long-haired liverpool love medley. Heck, I would pay big bux to hear the Osmonds do a goth-industrial medley.

Other magazine contributor Gina Kamentsky has created Teddy, a “kinetic sculpture” featuring a recording of the voice of Teddy Roosevelt. Must be seen to be believed, including the video.

Wow. Heather Mallick takes on Harper’s editor Roger D. Hodge, whose very name actually screams STODGY GIT, over the fact that Harper’s never has female contributors. Not seldom, pretty much never. Hodge mumbles about how he just prints the best writing regardless of gender, and how he doesn’t want to pander to minorities who “can give birth.”

Along the way, Mallick provides some chilling statistics:

Last year, an American website, www.WomenTK.com, began tracking the ratio of male to female writers in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The NYT Magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Arguably, the ratio should be more or less one to one because that’s what life is like. As it turned out:

• Vanity Fair 2.7:1.
• The New Yorker 4.1:1.
• The Atlantic 3.6:1.
• Harper’s 6.9:1 (118 male bylines, only 17 female). Fully six of its 12 issues from September ‘05 to August ‘06 had one or no female writers.

And, as Mallick points out, these magazines are boring. They’re not intellectual or in-depth or clever. They’re just dull and self-satisfied. The last time I read either Harper’s or the Atlantic (I forget which) it was serializing a novel by J. Robert Lennon that featured mangled prose, one-note characters and a flimsy premise. Do you think there could be some connection between the boringness and the fact that they’re edited by someone whose name is literally Stodgy Git?

There are times, yes, times when I’m embarrassed to be Asian.

Like, for example, whenever I see an AsianWeek distribution stand. This weekly tabloid—long brought to us by the same Fang family (even Asians pronounce “Fang” like tooth) that embarrassed the entire Bay Area with their transparently whorish version of the Examiner—is the adult equivalent of a midwestern suburban teenager’s identity-angst zine, only without the freshness and honesty.

The writing is horrifyingly bad, their stories are six months behind the times—Hyphen, a tri-annual magazine, consistently scoops them—and their occasional shameful shows of community support—fobbed off on 18-year-old interns, or at least reading as if they were—do nothing to counteract their constant flow of vitriol toward Asian American writers, journalists, and cultural workers more savvy and successful than they.

When we started the self-same Hyphen magazine that kicks their ass every morning for breakfast (and twice on Sunday, for brunch) before it even prints a word, AsianWeek’s first, and pretty much only, response was to sic on us Emil Guillermo (the only nominally competent staff writer, and that I say only because he manages to stick to the rules of grammar). In his column “Emil Amok”, Guillermo, after admitting that he hadn’t yet seen the magazine, proceeded to attempt to tear us a new asshole because our editor in chief, Melissa Hung, had said in an interview that Hyphen wasn’t going to do Asian American Studies 101. Guillermo, naturally, didn’t bother to call Hung and clarify, ’cause he’s not really a journalist, and Hyphen remains of the single-asshole persuasion.

The middle-aged Guillermo took exception to that statement, presumably, because he works for a publication that phones it in, week after week, on that very syllabus. He hadn’t moved past it, so why should we? That’s when I stopped even attempting to read AsianWeek. Because either Guillermo’s editors had read his column and supported his low journalistic standards and ignorant opinion, or because they didn’t support it but were too lazy or chickenshit to say so, or because they hadn’t bothered to read it in the first place. Whatever. None of those are publications I actually want to read.

So I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that AsianWeek is now publishing some of the most blatantly racist, not to mention poorly executed, dingleberries passing for writing on the internet today. And that’s saying a lot.

As Hyphen’s staff blog reports today, they’ve acquired a new columnist recently named Kenneth Eng. He’s been producing extremely short columns with titles such as “Why I Hate Asians,” “Proof that Whites Inherently Hate Us,” and, most recently, a savvy piece of marketing entitled “Why I Hate Blacks.” Being an irony-steeped Gen-Xer, I hear titles like this and think, “What a great opportunity for Swiftian satire!” But alas, we’re talking about AsianWeek, and if these buttcrusts were intended as satire, Eng is too shitty a writer to get that across.

I’d link to some examples of his excrescences, but I’m too damn lazy or something. Follow the links in the Hyphen article if you want it. There’s also a petition, which is only a good idea because somebody needs to let teh blacks and teh whites know that most Asian Americans have never even heard of AsianWeek, much less agree with its “editorial” “decisionmaking”. As for me, I can’t even be bothered to sign it. Let AsianWeek sink into its own mire. It has proven again and again unworthy of Asian American support. Let it die. I’d rather have no As Am newspaper at all than this piece of shit.

We just saw Ghost Rider, and it was possibly the MOST AWESOME movie in the history of cinema. Everything from Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet up to Pan’s Labyrinth has been leading up to this one cinematic achievement. The narrative arc! The pathos! The introspection! The flaming appendages!

So afterwards Annalee and I were trying to figure out: what made Ghost Rider such an instant classic and Catwoman such total drek. They both shared so many elements:

• a loopy, illogical plot involving nebulous fantasy elements
• an “A list” actor slumming in a “B list” superhero role
• hero must choose between vacant love interest and superhero career
• dialogue that you want to get tattooed on the scriptwriter’s ass as punishment for writing it

And yet — Ghost Rider will make you feel as though you are living in the greatest era in human culture. Catwoman will make you feel as though you have stuffed live ants under your eyelids and snorted rat poison. Why?! Why why why?

OK, I have a few theories. One is that Halle Berry just doesn’t know how to do that thing Nicolas Cage does, where he says lines like, “I feel so much better knowing I’m the devil’s bounty hunter,” with a mixture of total sincerity and total irony. He really believes he’s the devil’s bounty hunter. Whereas when Berry says things like “This is a Purrrrfect crime” or whatever, she sounds as though she’s just really trying to sell that line. She’s selling like a telemarketer who’s five hours behind on her quota and it’s culling day in cubicle-land. And to be fair, Halle Berry has been in art movies, whereas even Nic Cage’s good movies have been things like Adaptation and, I dunno, Face/Off.

Okay, crucial difference number two. In Catwoman, Sharon Stone wants to sell a face cream that makes your skin break out if you stop using it. In other words, she wants to sell regular face cream. In Ghost Rider, the no-name bad guy wants to, like, eat an army of evil souls who escaped from a Jonah Hex comic, and then he wants to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Sell face cream, or TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Which is more flame-tastic? Something to ponder.

But mostly, Ghost Rider is just a million times more fun. It has EVERYTHING. Hard-assed Hells Angels who get trashed? A formative tragedy involving motorcycles AND fatal illness? Peter Fonda’s enormous forehead? Helecopter wrangling? Cop cars breaking in half? In other words, it’s the perfect movie.

Oh, and Catwoman has a CGI ass. (Really.) But at one point in Ghost Rider, Nic Cage takes his shirt off, and his entire chest musculature is ALL CGI. His naked torso is  a special effect. DOOB.

Here’s the official list of trans/gender-switching movies we haven’t yet got short review/summaries for. Remember, snarkier is better! (more…)

In his Feb. 17 New York Times column, “Human Nature Redux,” David Brooks argues that belief in human goodness is nearly extinct–and that science is responsible:

Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.

This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state. It is only corrupt institutions that make them venal…

This belief had gigantic ramifications over the years. It led, first of all, to the belief that bourgeois social conventions are repressive and soul-destroying… It led people to hit the road, do drugs, form communes and explore free love in order to unleash their authentic selves…

Let’s pause here and ask ourselves if what Brooks writes is true.

Perhaps belief in goodness led people to hit the road and launch communes, but drugs? Does a belief in human goodness compel the believer to take drugs? Are crack addicts and pot smokers united in their faith that men and women are born good?

I wasn’t able to find an empirical study (I looked) that says so, and I doubt very much that Brooks found one. Most of the studies I found pointed to histories of abuse, stress, and so on that fuel patterns of addiction–I didn’t see anything about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mr. Brooks continues:

In the realm of foreign policy, it led to a sort of global doctrine of the noble savage — the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower.

Whose belief? When? Obviously Brooks is referring to the anticolonial struggles of the middle of the twentieth century, when European empires collapsed under their own weight and the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America gained some degree of independence–leading, in many cases, to wars and civil wars, dictatorships, and border disputes. To be sure, such struggles produced armies of disappointed idealists, few of whom, I think it’s safe to say, saw themselves as “noble savages.”

But more seriously, it is false to claim that simple belief in human goodness is what lifted “the chains of their oppression.” If only that had been the case. No, I think if Brooks bothered to research the anticolonial struggles of the era, he’d find that it was a combination of economic failure and guerrilla warfare that drove Europeans out of their colonies. In the end, they didn’t have much choice in the matter.

Brooks continues:

Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded.

The past 30 years? Here’s a quote I found from a 1932 issue of Time Magazine: “Simple human goodness is out of style. To modern eyes it appears too simple to be good, too good to be true.” And so it seems that for newspaper and magazine columnists, simple human goodness is continuously going out of style; for the rest of us, however, it somehow persists. This lack of perspective does not stop him from continuing:

It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

Did progressive education fail? I will put that question aside; it’s beyond the scope of a single blog entry. Instead I am going to focus on the alleged “big blow” science delivered to belief in human goodness. Writes Brooks:

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists…

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups…

Where to begin? On nearly every point, Brooks proves himself to be wrong or ill-informed or out-of-date.

Far from believing that “human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules,” today neuroscientists (and scientists in many other disciplines) are discovering that brain structures are more “plastic”–that is, “subject to changes brought about by environmental input”–than previously supposed. “Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest,” writes UC Berkeley Social Psychologist (and Greater Good editor) Dacher Keltner. “These studies support a view of emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive–a view which has its origins in Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated.”

In his introduction to Douglas P. Fry’s new book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, demolishes the case Brooks tries to make in his column. Sapolsky is worth quoting at length:

One of the truly well-entrenched realms of It-Is-Inevitable-That is that it is inevitable that humans will be violent and that human societies will wage warfare… Anyone noticing the blood-drenched world we live in would have to take that idea seriously. And academics of various stripes have as well.

Students of primatology and human evolution sure thought this. The 1960s saw the rise of the Robert Ardrey / man-the-territorial-hunter / big-cojones school of human evolution. Drawing upon the social system of the savanna baboon as a surrogate for our formative history in the savanna, the conclusion was that we are by nature a violent, stratified, male-dominated species…

[Meanwhile, the] game theorists were awash in the inevitability of violence and noncooperation as well… Neuroendocrinolosts weighed in also. Testosterone increases aggression, as it increases the excitability of parts of the brain relevant to aggression…

And, naturally, none of this is true.

Even those violent chimps and baboons can reconcile after fights, have cooperative, altruistic relationships, can even establish and transmit cultures of low aggression. Then there are the bonobo chimps, a separate species that is as genetically related to us as are chimps, a species that is female-dominated, has remarkably low rates of aggression, and solves every conceivable social problem with every conceivable type of sex. The game theorists, meanwhile, have spent recent years revealing the numerous circumstances that select for cooperation rather than competition even in competitive games…And normal levels of testosterone turn out not to cause aggression as much as exaggerate preexisting social tendencies…

Thus Brooks is quite wrong to write that science has dealt “a big blow” to belief in human goodness. The opposite is true. If his column proves anything, it’s that belief that humans are born evil goes hand in hand with shoddy and superficial thinking.

[Cross-posted with the Greater Good blog.]

Other magazine is still looking for one- or two-sentence review/summaries of gender-switching movies. These could be movies where someone changes gender during the movie, or movies that feature a transgender character. We need to have them collected by Monday at the latest. So far, we have writeups of: Just One Of The Guys, Tales From The City, The Crying Game, The Hot Chick, Orlando, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dragonslayer, The Year Of Living Dangerously, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Q&A, Transamerica, Silence Of The Lambs, Iron Pussy, Violence Jack: Evil Town. NEW: we just got awesome writeups of En Soap, Breakfast on Pluto, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tootsie, Boys Don’t Cry, Victor/Victoria, Stage Beauty, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, Yentl, M. Butterfly, Farewell My Concubine, Ma Vie En Rose, To Wong Foo, Rocky Horror, Some Like It Hot and She’s The Man as well.

We’ve been promised write-ups of Switch and Dead Again, but haven’t gotten them yet.

If there’s a movie you’d like to write about that isn’t on either of those lists, please drop me a line at gendermovies@othermag.org. Write-ups can be literally just a few words, or as long as a couple sentences. Feel free to forward this to others!

I’ve been hearing good things about Matthew Sharpe’s new novel Jamestown from people who have advance review copies. According to a new interview in Poets & Writers, paperback publisher Harcourt advanced some money to hardcover publisher Soft Skull to get the book out on time in spite of the PGW bankruptcy. (Speaking of which, I’m surprised more bloggers aren’t tearing their hair out that the judge chose Perseus’ offer over the apparently superior one from NBN. What gives?)

Anyway, Jamestown sounds really fascinating: a blend of the 1607 settling of Virginia with present-day events and a future apocalypse. I’m pretty jazzed to read it. Although I don’t know what to think about the fact that Soft Skull set up a Myspace page for Pocahontas “in another act of small-press innovation,” the P&W article says. Has guerilla book marketing finally gone too far? Although it’s pretty great that Pocohontas gets testimonials like “Oh, Pocahontas, your story meant so much to me. I laughed, I cried, I vomited. All telepathically.”

Oh, the snottiness! Norah Vincent’s review of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics in the NYT Book Review substitutes snark for real criticisms. (Disclaimer: I haven’t yet read Look Both Ways.) The best criticism Vincent can come up with for the book’s celebration of bisexuality as a political force and manifestation of feminism is to poke fun at Ani Difranco.

But my favorite part of the review is the end, where Vincent, who is a lesbian for a living (in other words, if she was straight she’d be out of a job) says:

I take issue with Baumgardner’s emphasis on the political all-importance of who is sleeping with whom, which resembles the religious right’s equally absurd obsession with the genitalia of people who want to wed. Less, not more, is what’s called for. We will have won the battle against puritanism in America not when sexuality is run up the flag pole, but when it is irrelevant.

Yes, by all means, let’s render sexuality irrelevant. As long as it’s yours and not mine.