Tonight to celebrate Halloween, the husband and I stayed in and watched Carrie. Ironically, it isn’t that scary until the very end.  I read the novel in high school and loved the movie.  It seemed like the right kind of  creepy film to watch to mark a lowkey Halloween this year.

There is a LOT of interesting religious gender representation going on in this film!

For now, I’ll leave you with…

SCARY! PIGS BLOOD!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 

It’s been a year since I first started blogging here. I thought about doing a recap of the last year but I think I’ll save that for another time.

Instead, I want to write about a movie I saw this weekend, My Super Ex-Girlfriend. From the beginning of this film, I started tot think about the representations of female super heroes we have in Western culture. There is Super Woman, Bat Woman, Wonder Woman, Shera Princess of Power and a few others. All of these super hero(ines) are seen in short skirts and high-heeled boots.

While these images are not realistic, neither is the idea of a super hero. My Super Ex-Girlfriend doesn’t disappoint in the unrealistic department. The film was funny in moments but what I found disturbing was the story behind the transformation of a normal adolescent to a super powered heroine. Uma Thurman plays G-Girl, a young woman who gained super powers when an asteroid hit the Earth. During the flashback of G-Girl gaining her power, she goes from thin, ungainly brunette to a busty, curvy blonde. That’s right as soon as you become a super hero, you get a sexier body. Or at least “sexy” as defined by Western traditions.

My first thought was how “sexist and typical” but then I started to think about how many young women go through that alteration every day by changing their looks through a bottle of dye or surgery. There are a lot of TV shows that revolve around these sorts of transformations. Are they sexist? Probably. But is also natural to doubt one’s appearance and wish to change it. It seems to be the means one goes through to change one’s appearance that defines whether the change is extreme. Is there a major distinction between a young woman getting highlights or getting a new set of breasts? Yes, I believe there is but I don’t think the thinking process behind the action is that different.

In the movie, Uma Thurman plays a neurotic woman looking to hold on to her man. What is funny about this film is that it abandons past stereotypes about super heroes being pillars of the society and using their powers for good only. Unfortunately, G-Girl uses her powers to scare her ex boyfriend after he broke up with her. She is also written as a crazy sex fiend who likes to use her super powers in the bedroom which in turn emasculates her boyfriend. This emasculation is, of course, used for laughs in the film. But it gets old when once the viewer realizes it’s a plot device that been used before.

As far as your average Luke Wilson romantic comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend is standard. What I don’t get is why Uma Thurman would agree to be in this. She usually makes pretty smart movies. It does bring up some valid issues about the unfortunate ways women and their desires are portrayed.

I hope the next film that features a super heroine is more intelligent and does not rely on old tricks and gender conventions and stereotypes to tell its story.

This weekend, I decided to head to the New York Public Library, Mid Manhattan branch. I usually dread going here with a specific book in mind, as I can never find what I’m looking for. Even if the website claims to have it in stock, its just…not…there. The library in NYC is like a huge, labyrinthine abyss that things just disappear into and never emerge from.

HOWEVER, this time I used worldcat.org to look up some of the books and authors I wanted to read. I was secretly hoping some of the books would be at my beloved Brooklyn Public Library, but, alas, they weren’t there. But they were at the NYPL. One of the books was at the research library, which in all my years of living in NYC, I have never used. So, I decided to go for it and headed to the library on Saturday.

Lo and behold, all three books I wanted to check out from the Mid Manhattan branch were there. I was shocked.

Then I walked across the street to the main research branch and after a few bureaucratic twists and turns, I was reading what I came for.

Yeah! I think the next time I decided to go to the main NYPL branch, I will definitely be using worldcat!

The books I checked out:

The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie
Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape edited by Robert Orsi

In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s by Michael Sherry

Tracy Press asks the tough questions.

The advantages of conversion in politics versus non-conversion.

Catholics in Utah before the Mormons…what!

Mormon.org is where its at when it comes to conversion.

Auditions for the Choir…the ONLY CHOIR!

Fast Food Nation author disappointed in Utah.

Mountain Meadows lot OPEN for new development!

Romney ain’t no puppet!

Fired Mormon lawyer didn’t appreciate bawdy, locker-room talk.

“I discovered how empowered women in early Mormonism were — to heal, speak and make decisions.”

Mormon history dominates Utah history.

Better than Fema!

MORMONISM, FEMINISM AND ACTIVISM: My head will explode!

LDS scholar Richard Lyman Bushman will start a Mormon studies program at the Claremont Graduate School in California.

Three part series about fundamentalism in Southern Utah.

The term “Mormon” is commonly used in reference to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, “Mormon” can more broadly describe a variety of groups derived from the church founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1830, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The largest of these groups is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - at more than 13 million members - followed by the Community of Christ, formerly The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - at more than 250,000 members - and a variety of fundamentalist groups - with about 20,000 adherents collectively - according to www.lds.org, www.cofchrist.org and Marianne Watson, a self-employed historian and Lehi resident who specializes in fundamentalist topics.

There are about 30 groups, as well as large, independent families, practicing plural marriage under the banner of Mormonism, Watson said.

on saturday, I came across these two stories:

1. The use of the word vajayjay to describe vagina or vulva. Ever since it was uttered on Grey’s Anatomy back in 2006, it has been getting more and more popular. This is mostly because Oprah thinks it sounds like a “nice word.” Yeah.
2. Elizabeth Wurtzel goes to law school and we care enough to write a whole article about it because….?!?!?! I think its cool and all that shes starting a new chapter of her career but I’m failing to see how this warrants a NYTimes article. Her book More Now Again did really move me when I read it after attempting to read Bitch. And I certainly did like it more than Prozac Nation. Whether she likes it or not, she is one of the leading founders of the confessional chick lit movement in literature/memoir. With that, it would be intriguing to see if she does decided to write about the law school experince as a returning student at age forty. Now that would have been a worthy article.

In September, I read The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A by Lisa Fine. The book is about the old Reo plant in Lansing, MI, a place very close to my heart because its in the vicinity of where I grew up and where my family continues to live to this day.

Fine did an apt job of painting the picture of what is was like to work at Reo in the early twentieth century until the plant closed in the 1970s. What really moved me about this was how she addressed race and class right away by referencing a Malcolm X quote about the difficulties of growing up in Lansing.

Furthermore, Fine was not afraid to really go after the good stuff here and deliver a sometimes-chilling portrayal of inherent racism in a mostly Caucasian blue-collar workplace. Her depiction of masculinity via describing the different activities “Reo Joes” engaged in as part of the plant was revealing about larger trends toward women and men’s separate spheres. In the world of gender history, it is rare to find a study that so closely examines masculinity in the same way that women’s history is looked upon, naturally and deserving of attention. I definitely think this is a must read for anyone interested in labor history, the Midwest and auto history. I look forward to reading more of her work.

1. Whenever I sign onto amazon, there is a recommendation for the OJ Simpson book, If I did it. Ummm why? I clicked on “why this was recommended for you” button and it said because I had bought two books about polygamy…yeah…failing to see the connections beyond on an assumption of polygamy equaling abused wives.
2. Sweetest Day: OK this hallmark holiday is all about chocolate. Why am I concerned with this? It seems as though only people in my home state in the Midwest seem to celebrate it. I never got the point of it as it seems like a watered down version of Valentine’s Day. As wikipedia states, “Sweetest Day is an observance celebrated primarily in the Great Lakes region and parts of the Northeast United States on the third Saturday in October^[1]. It is described by Retail Confectioners International, as “much more important for candymakers in some regions than in others (Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo being the biggest Sweetest Day cities)” It never seemed to catch on in NYC.
3. Andy Cooper over there at CNN is sick of the planet being in peril because he’s bored of it. Poor Andy.

Old Mission Santa Barbara

I am a Democrat because I am a Mormon.

Six hundred images of child pornography or what one Tabernacle Choir member does for fun!

Jesus + America = what makes Mormons different.

Mormons and Amish evading American laws.

Of marriage and massacre: He’ll go home to Utah, go to college, find a career and a girl to marry.

Mormon and South Carolina don’t mix.

Poor Mormon boyz!

Using Mormons for their genealogical services.

Romney! Romney! Romney!

Link of the week:

Just as Day did for Catholics, Van Wagenen would like to awaken Mormons to the “virtually forgotten radical elements” of their doctrine and history - namely, the mandate to “have no poor among you.”
To that end, the 29-year-old Salt Lake City stockbroker and several friends have just published the first edition of The Mormon Worker, a bimonthly newspaper devoted to “promoting Mormonism, anarchism and pacifism.”

I’m over the serial comma.  Just completely over it.  I am trying to get rid of unnecessary things in my life, and I believe that the serial comma is one of those things.

Too much: I love peanut butter, jelly, and bread.

Just right: I love peanut butter, jelly and bread.

The one problem is that I am currently editing a lot of my old work in which I regularly use all those commas! Oh dear.

I hope I used punctuation correctly during this post…EEK!