Not all men are drooling warlike psychopaths, but most drooling warlike psychopaths happen to be male.

Would a World Without Men Really Be So Bad? – Read full article by Tanya Gold.

Obviously war has, at times, been an agent for useful social change: smashing the Nazis, plucking women out of the kitchen and into the workplace, and so forth. But generally speaking, I think most humane humans would agree that wars are a bad thing. And on the whole, women don’t do war. Defensively, maybe, but not for fun, and not to compete with other women, because we know that there are worse things you can do to another person than merely kill them.

Female rulers, I am certain, can and have already done better. Not always – Indira Gandhi suppressed women’s rights and Elizabeth Bathory murdered random virgins and no, I haven’t forgotten Margaret Thatcher – but Elizabeth I practised religious tolerance in England while it was still fashionable to eat Protestants in France. Iceland’s prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurardóttir, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Helen Clark – who has just finished four terms as PM in New Zealand – are all seemingly sane. They stand for fewer insane policies and less mass murder due to feelings of inadequacy. Which I’m in favour of.

Spirituality, you say? Congratulations, boys, on the greatest bullshit ever told.  Without men, attendance at religious services would dramatically decline. We would of course have nothing to pray for.

Public Enemies missed a great opportunity to show us who Dillinger and Billie really were.

A few weeks ago I watched a Johnny Depp movie called Donnie Brasco.  It was a strange choice for me because I don’t like gangster/mafia films.  But I found myself liking it so much that I watched it twice.  I then rented and watched The Libertine, The Man That Cried and Sweeney Todd.  A few nights later I watched Benny and Joon for the second time on Hulu.

After watching these five films in quick succession I realized that Depp has a unique approach to acting.  Rather than playing a part he becomes a receptive channel for a character to emerge. His gentle acceptance of the shadow side of life, along with his fearlessness in portraying it, brings forth fully evolved people to the screen that are unerringly true to their own sense of self and fully present in the expression of that self to the world.

So it was with great excitement that I walked into the theatre recently to see Public Enemies.  I came out, two and half hours later, feeling like I had been suspended in a huge void in which nothing happened.  There were scenes, lots of them, filled with guns, fake blood, cars, and dark clothing; but there was no movie.  None of the scenes had any organic relationship to a larger whole.  And what was worse, the stellar cast was relegated to being nothing more than talking props, animated pieces of the set design that neatly filled in the three stereotypes we expect in a gangster movie — bad guy, good guy and the pretty, vulnerable, young woman the bad guy seduces and screws.  With Depp and Marion Cotillard this movie could have broken new ground in exploring who Dillinger and Billie really were.   Instead, it’s just a re-hash of what everybody already knows.

In a Pirates of the Caribbean interview a few years back, David Letterman joked about the hackneyed “parrot-on-the-shoulder pirate” to which Depp replied, “I decided to avoid that.”  What a shame that he was not given the same opportunity to throw off the props that buried John Dillinger in a gory mess of clichés.  I guess Michael Mann, or perhaps the people financing the film, were not ready to take any risks with the “great American gangster.” cash cow.  Or perhaps, more importantly, not ready to expose gangsters as the wretched souls they truly are, withering away under the dark, brutal mantle of American masculinity.

The Beaches of Agnes – a film that gives you the desire to grow old

Read full story in the NYTimes

Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.

There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.

How to live as a hermit.

Read full story in the Guardian by Rachel Denton

I moved here in January 2002 and started my life as a hermit, naming my house after St Cuthbert, the patron saint of hermitage. On a typical day, I pray between 6am and 8am. After breakfast, I work on my calligraphy business, perhaps on card designs or wedding invitations, until midday. I eat, nap and read until two, then work in the house or garden until five. Over supper, I listen to the radio for an hour, followed by more prayer. In the evenings I may sit and watch the fire, sew and wander around the garden.

I try to live a simple life. I grow my own fruit and vegetables and, on an income of around £8,000, I have to be careful what I spend. I don’t have a television and I allow myself only an hour of radio each day.

I made an official commitment to be a hermit in November 2006, at a special mass. Before you can take your vows in the Catholic church, you have to put together a “rule of life” agreed by the bishop. My vows were poverty, chastity and obedience, which I have interpreted as simplicity, solitude and silence.

An Aries Woman

“Sixty-two years of age, and an impetuous romantic girl of seventeen cannot exceed me in ardent passionate feelings.”

Jane Digby has been called “one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century.” A celebrated beauty, she was married at seventeen to Lord Ellenborough (later Viceroy of India). He was twice her age and within a few years she left him for an Austrian prince resulting in one of England’s most scandalous divorces. When the Prince deserted her she became the mistress and confidante of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, marrying for convenience a German baron who worshiped her. Subsequently she fell in love with a young Greek count who fought her husband in a duel while eloping with her.

After discovering that her Greek husband was unfaithful, and heartbroken at the death of her six-year-old son, she became an inveterate traveller in the Orient. For a time she became the mistress of an Albanian general and was thrilled to share his rough outdoor life as queen of his brigand army, living in caves, riding fiery Arab horses and hunting game in the mountains for food; until she found that he too was unfaithful and left him on the spot.

Middle-aged but still stunningly beautiful, and vowing to renounce men, she headed for Syria where she met and married the love of her life, a Bedouin nobleman, Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab who was twenty years her junior.

During the remainder of her life she adopted for six months of each year the exotic but uniquely harsh existence of a desert nomad living in the famous black goathair tents of Arabia; the remaining months she spent in the splendid palace she built for herself and Medjuel in Damascus. As wife to the Sheikh and mother to his tribe this passionate woman found not only genuine fulfillment but further adventures, all of which she committed each year to her diary.

Read her biography by Mary S Lovell.

Introvert’s Rights Movement – I like you, now please shut up.

Great Article by Johnathan Raush, “Caring for Your Introvert.”

Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

New book about chasity, “Chastened: No More Sex in The City.”

Read full article in Guardian UK by Hephzibah Anderson

The physical withdrawal is acute at times, but it passes. Now I can see that sex was a distraction that allowed me to ignore pretty much everything else in my life that wasn’t quite what it should or could have been. I became fixated on relationships to the exclusion of friendships, family, any sense of where I was headed.

The question I heard least frequently was the only one I’d really been anticipating: why? Plenty of people, I came to realise, have thought about hopping off the sexual merry-go-round. Sex, and its pursuit, seems to have become such a blood sport, its rules so confusing and its standards so exacting, that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it’s worth it. At the same time, sexiness is so ubiquitous it has become a bit of a turn-off.

One of my motivations for embracing chastity was a sense that sex had grown impersonal. Sometimes my decision to have sex seemed to be based more on what was appropriate to the moment than on what was right for me. At a certain point in certain scenarios, a part of me abdicated and gave in to the inevitable. Tipsily noticing that it was after midnight and I was far from home, say, in a dwindling group that happened to include a man I’d found myself in bed with some time before. But whichever bit of me had abdicated, it was never my heart, and I secretly dreaded that I might finally learn to separate sex from emotion.

Kathryn Bigelow – great female director who makes films about men, masculinity, violence and power.

Read full story in the NYTimes

Her latest is “The Hurt Locker,” a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centers on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand day and night disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it opens Friday), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn’t come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had “excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.”

If anything, her refusal to make the types of movies most associated with women suggests that in American movies, at least, genre is destiny, to repurpose a familiar Freud maxim about gender. She’s steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are usually consigned, bypassing the dreaded chick flick for stories and archetypes traditionally if reductively seen as the province of men. She still makes relationship movies, but the relationships evolve both through the chatter at which women are supposed to excel and the contact of bodies, often male, sometimes female, running, surfing, parachuting, living and dying out in the world. She learned from the masters — De Kooning, Peckinpah, Goya, Pasolini, Rembrandt and on and on — in order to become her own woman.

“I have an idea a minute,” Ms. Cowles once said. “I’m a born idea myself.”

From the NYTimes

Fleur Cowles, who rose from modest beginnings in New York to become a well-heeled friend of the powerful and famous and the creator of one of the most extravagant and innovative magazines ever published, died on Friday at a nursing home in Sussex, England. She was 101, and her death was confirmed by her husband, Tom Montague Meyer.

Although there were just 12 issues of Flair, published from February 1950 to January 1951, the magazine caused a sensation and is still admired for its coverage of fashion, décor, travel, art, literature and other enthusiasms of Ms. Cowles’s. It was part of the Cowles publishing empire, which included newspapers in the Midwest and, most notably, Look magazine, of which Ms. Cowles had been an influential editor.

But Flair, incorporating cutouts, fold-outs, pop-ups, removable reproductions of artworks and a variety of paperstocks of different sizes and textures, was simply too expensive to produce, even though it sold for 50 cents a copy when Time and Life were selling for 20 cents.

The preview issue, in September 1949, reflected Ms. Cowles’s passion for the arts and boasted a two-layer cover. The outside was embossed with a basket-weave pattern and punctuated with a hole, through which could be seen a picture of a man and woman embracing. The inside cover showed the couple as part of a wall layered with a collage of shredded posters.

A spring issue featured the rose, a flower Ms. Cowles painted and extolled until her death. The issue was suffused with a rose fragrance, some four decades before scent strips became ubiquitous. Housed within it, bound as a booklet, was a tribute to the rose by Katherine Anne Porter. The magazine itself had a rose named after it — Flair rose — and there is a Fleur Cowles rose as well.

Women at the center of their own story.

In the theater women can act their age.

The stage has other lures as well. For one, it is the ultimate proving ground for actors. Allison Janney, 49, best known as C. J. Cregg, the brainy, wisecracking White House staffer in “The West Wing” on television, has been nominated for a Tony for “9 to 5: The Musical.” Theater “demands a lot more of me,” she said. “It requires a different skill set: singing, accents, physical comedy.”

Harriet Walter explained that “to carry the audience with you all through an evening, it’s recognized that you need a certain developed technique and experience.” Consider a romantic moment in “real life,” she said, bending her fingers into quotation marks; “you would be whispering and mumbling to each other.”

Onstage “you have to preserve that intimacy while knowing that the person at the back of the orchestra can see you and hear you, and identify with you more importantly, and imagine they are in the room with you,” she said. “That isn’t something you can just get up and do.” The stage requires a kind of “mental agility,” she said, an “awareness of the whole arc of the evening, and you’re in charge.”

That control is irresistible for an artist, Susan Sarandon said. Over a pot of mint tea she recalled a recent film (she won’t say which) in which the essential qualities of the character that had prompted her to accept the role were edited out, something she did not discover until the film was finished. “The first time I saw it was with an audience,” she said.

Theater is kinder to mature women in other ways. “Theater is a much more forgiving medium,” said Ms. Sarandon, who has been nominated for Oscars five times and won once. Onstage there are no camera close-ups, and an actress can lose or gain 20 years depending on the lighting. “When you’re doing film, you’re not necessarily their priority,” she said, referring to directors of photography.