Lady Business

A few year ago, there was this great skit on SNL called, Lady Business. The bit, written by Tina Fey and staring the best female cast members of that year (actually, of any year) - Kristen Wiig, Amy Pohler, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch- was a spoof of this Brook Shields vehicle that NBC was pushing heavily in their schedule. The Shields' show claimed to be a sexy, yet celebratory, insider look at women in the business world but was such a ludicrous, one dimensional view of women everywhere that it tanked after only a few episodes. That left it ripe for the picking and the SNL ladies nailed calling it by writing a skit that called it out in a way that only great comedians can do: by reducing it to a line that you can kick like a dead horse. Awesome.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpZ4Cv7eomc

Of course, ever after every time there was some weirdness that pertained to women, whether positive or negative, I chalked it up to "lady business". My daughter has a disagreement with a friend at school: Lady Business! The old man at Sobey's pats me on the derriere? Lady Business! A friend is sick and tired of doing laundry and shoots it all on the front lawn for her family to do for themselves? Lady Business! 

If you want to see Lady Business at its finest, however, you need to haul your ass over to the comments section of Amazon where a little product called,The Bic Pen for Her, is getting a heavy dose of action Lady Business-style. Have you heard about this product? The re-boot of the Bic Pen only this time, made entirely for Ladies? If it weren't real, it would make me cry. Instead, the snarkiest members of the internet have seized upon it as an opportunity to let the corporate world know how stupid and reductive the've been by bombarding it with sarcastic reviews from women and men alike. The aim, of course, is to undermine what some have called a sexist marketing endeavour and the comments on the most highly trafficked sites are genius. Comedy Gold of the Highest Order, seriously. Here are some examples:

        Finally! For years I've had to rely on pencils, or at worst, a twig and some drops of my feminine blood to write down recipes (the only thing a lady should be writing ever). I had despaired of ever being able to write down said recipes in a permanent matter, though my men-folk assured me that I "shouldn't worry yer pretty little head". But, AT LAST! Bic, the great liberator, has released a womanly pen that my gentle baby hands can use without fear of unlady-like calluses and bruises. Thank you, Bic!" - Breemeup

        "The normal black pen casings are just so hard on the eyes. It was like a breath of fresh air to see lady colored pens. For once, I don't have to grip a giant, man-sized pen just to sign receipts at Saks. And the ink just hits the paper so smoothly, not at all like the rough, gritty man ink in Bic's normal pens. My only complaint is that they are a bit finicky. When I was copying down recipes from my neighbour, it worked just fine, but as soon as I sat down with the bills, nothing. It wouldn't work! But that's okay, my woman brain gets all muddled trying to figure out finances anyway." - Virginia

Rather than piling on either five-star or one-star reviews, the BIC for Her also attracted dire warnings for anyone too manly to hold the pens deemed "essentially for women."

        "I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day's tree-felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks."

Oh, Bic! You've just run into some Lady Business!

Putting the B in Oscar

I would like you to meet Mystery Critic.

Besides being a wise, fantastic and generally hilarious person, he has been blessed with an incredible skill. 

What is it, you ask?

He can sum up a film in a few simple sentences. 

And his predictions: Spot on.

Suck on that Mayans!

Let me just show you a hint of his prowess by way of example. Here are his observations on one of my current obsessions, Downton Abbey:

Mystery Critic: Whose that lady and why is she making you cry?

Me: Her name is Lavinia and she's dying.

Mystery Critic: What's she dying of? Boredom.

End scene. 

Skills like these shouldn't go to waste, so I asked him to weigh in on the Oscar films. But let me be clear: Mystery Critic's time is incredibly limited. He has zombies and aliens to slay in his basement and math test to pretend to study for, so some of the films he simply refused to screen. This was understandable, of course, but incredibly frustrating as a film fan thirsty for a fast one-take on each film. When I could get him to comment, however, it was well worth the wait.  Here are his simple but erudite predictions:

Mystery Critic on Beasts Of the Southern Wild - The people in this movie are eating shrimps right out of the shell. I didn't know you could do that?! Why don't you let me do that? Wow. Their table manners are pretty bad, huh? Wait, wait, wait: Is that guy driving a boat-made-out-of-the-back-part-of-a-truck? AWESOME!!

Mystery Critic on Argo- This movie was pretty good but The Town was waaaay better. Anything with Renner is better.

Mystery Critic on Zero Dark Thirty- So I can't see this because there are some torture scenes in it? That's lame. I play Black Ops, all the time! And why is Jessica Chastain in everything?

Mystery Critic on Lincoln- Is this about a dead president? Ugh. I'm out.

Mystery Critic on Life of Pi - This movie made me think about life. Alot. But not about pie. I prefer cake.

Mystery Critic on Silver Linings Playbook - No. Way.

Mystery Critic on Les Miserables - They got the title right, anyway.

Mystery Critic on Django Unchained - Why did you go to that without me? That is so unfair.

Mystery Critic on Amour - I have to listen to French all day at school. My brain needs a break from that language.

Peace out and enjoy Oscar Night! Or as we refer to it at our house The Female Super Bowl.

There Will Be Blood

It is two years before the Civil War in the American South and an itinerant German dentist (Christoph Waltz) frees a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx). The dentist and the newly freed slave make an arrangement: together they will form a bounty-hunting team that brings in wanted men dead or alive. It's a "flesh for cash business," the dentist explains to his new partner, an ironic and slightly pointless statement when you consider that Django has spent his entire life in bondage. No matter, because Django proposes a more daunting task: the two men will find and rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who had been captured by a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Easy-Peasy/Lemon-Squeezy, right? And so the two men set out on horseback to accomplish this very thing leaving a few laughs, more than a few uncomfortable moral quandaries and buckets of blood in their wake. 

As most of you know, the above is the set up for the film, Django Unchained, the latest opus from Quentin Tarentino, the man-child director who brought us Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Inglorious Bastards. What you may also know is that the film has already won the director a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, has received numerous accolades from the critics and a ton of criticism for its possibly-wanton use of the N-word. It is also has a great, star-studded cast - Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson - ripe dialogue and easily one of the funniest scenes involving the Klu Klux Klan ever written. Here's what you don't know, though, I suspect:  no horses were hurt in the film's making. Do you want to know how I know that? There is a statement to that effect at the end of this almost 3 hour-long (!) film and the reason I noticed it was because I had kept my eyes  closed for most the last 20 minutes of it. When I finally gathered the courage to open them again, I saw that statement and laughed and laughed and laughed. Perhaps a disclaimer warning that our sensibilities and imaginations might also be in danger might have been better suited. But I'm getting ahead of myself....

Anyone who has ever sat through a Tarentino film would know only too well that what he finds consistently exciting are people being murdered, people screaming in pain, people begging for mercy and in this, Django doesn’t disappoint. But the film is so self-indulgent that tension eventually dissipates. There’s an entire 10-minute sequence (with the Australian cowboys) that could’ve been omitted, or at least rewritten that adds so little that you begin to suspect that it only made the final cut because it stars QT himself, making a lamentable attempt at an Aussie accent. The first half is picaresque and essentially irrelevant, though things do improve once we get to the plantation (‘Candyland’) only to degenerate again in the mindless final bloodbath.

Don't get me wrong: the film isn't all bad. The main asset here are the performances. Leo plays has Candie, a bored libertine who lives for “a good bit of fun” with a decadent gleam in his eye. Samuel L. Jackson is initially clownish and finally chilling as his grotesque, Uncle Tom-ish retainer and I promise you, you won't look at him the same way again. Waltz has the juiciest role, though,  (he won a Golden Globe last week) from a story-moving point of view. He embodies the hypocrisy, or just complexity, of a man whose heart bleeds for the “poor slaves” yet who also has no compunction killing people labelled ‘bad’ by the system (even if they’ve turned over a new leaf. His dentist would make for a great character study – I also expected him to be called on the fact that he offers Django a third (not half) of the bounty money, making him a sidekick as opposed to an equal partner – but in fact Tarantino is unwilling, or unable, to accommodate such moral shadings. He points out the contradiction, but does nothing more with it. 
   
When Inglourious Basterds re-wrote history by having Hitler shot in a movie theatre – just like that! – it made an exhilarating point about cinema’s ability to improve on real life. But Django takes a trickier subject and offers less, not more. An attempt is made to make a complex moral issue that been tackled a million times by filmmakers more engaging but, ultimately, the drama lacks richness. This is a film made in broad stokes in which you are either black or white or bathed in blood.     

The Best Books of 2012 (According to Me Only, Of Course!)

I love it when books take centre stage and there is a great scene in David O. Russell's wildly exhilarating and heart-felt new movie, Silver Linings Playbook, where a book makes a fantastic cameo appearance. In the film, Bradley Cooper plays, Pat, a man with bipolar disorder who is struggling to  see past the shards of his broken marriage. In one of many unhinged attempts to woo back his wife, a high school English teacher, Pat decides to connect with her by reading her entire syllabus. He starts with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The better part of a day and most of a night are spent sinking into the tomb and by day's end - 4 in the morning to be exact - Pat is done. How do we know he's done? He takes the book and flings it so violently across the room that it promptly smashes through window, shattering it and waking up the entire neighbourhood. I know I should have been slightly horrified but I could barely sustain my glee. Who hasn't wanted to do this, I thought to myself? And how many times did I almost do that very thing this year? Hello, 50 Shades of Grey. I'm looking at you.

This year's Black By Popular Demand annual book report - my list of the books that I read and thought were the best distractions of the year -  contains no "Flingers". There isn't a single book on this list that you would even contemplate throwing out a window. It should be noted that this year, I was down on  my book count and if I am to believe the list I update to your right, I only read 45 or so books in 2012. I was off my game for several reasons: writing my own stuff, watching Homeland and eating come to mind. Mostly, though, I seemed to have been drawn to some big-ass books this year. Four were over 700 pages. Odd. Why was I drawn to bricks, I wonder? Unknown. But I will tell you this? None of them hit anyone the head but me. And I mean that in a good way.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

This was my favourite read by far this year. I blogged about it, I pushed it on others, I forced my mother-in-law's book club to read it. Phenomenal. The plot is anything but simple: Nick Dunne's wife disappears on their fifth anniversary and though at first he seems like the ideal husband, things start to .....turn. Turns out she's no peach, either. The twists, the turns, the twisted! It doesn't get much better than this. Read it.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Some of the best reads nowadays can be found on the YA shelf. Why is that, you ask? Because kids aren't afraid to confront sadness the way adults do. In this one, a 16-year-old girl falls in love while coping with terminal cancer. Sounds like fun, huh? As gut wrenchingly sad as Stars can be, it finds it's joy in the unlikeliest places. Smart, clever, wise, it's a must read.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I am a bit of a freak when it comes to books that deal with nature but if you aren't drawn to the outdoors it won't matter. This book isn't just a memoir about one woman solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. It's about survival off the trail. Finding your strength after coming through a divorce, the death of your mother and heroine abuse. Oh, and there are also rattlesnakes, dehydration, bears and sex in tents. It is called Wild, after all. The book offers the best life lesson of all: putting one foot ahead of the other will always get you to where you want to be. Even when your toe nails are falling off.

Are You my Mother by Alison Bechdel

In this amazing follow-up to her first brilliant graphic novel, Fun Home, artist and writer Alison Bechdel thrillingly takes on her mother - voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor - but also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood. Poignantly and hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf and it's a richly layered search that leads readers from psycho-therapy to Dr. Seuss to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother and real-time truce that will move and astonish all adult children.

The Laura Tax

For a few weeks last month, I donned my Special Events hat and headed out into the big, bad working world for a few weeks to help the Toronto Argonauts organization deal with a little show they put on called, The Grey Cup. Luckily, my presence on their staff did not prevent people from showing up and we were able to put on a great show. Success!


 The job they asked me to do was a slightly daunting one as it meant interfacing with and organizing roughly 1000 volunteers per day over 10 long, difficult days. My job, in a nutshell, was telling them what to wear, where to show up and how to act once they were there. One would think that doing this at home with two children uniquely qualifies me for this task but, unlike my offspring, these people had willingly signed up for the job. It would be safe to assume, then, that tasking them to hand out giant foam fingers to eager fans or help direct drunk, giant-sized tourist from Edmonton towards the CN Tower would be not too taxing.

You thought wrong.

What I didn't prepare for was the complaining. The constant, constant, constant, complaining from what I've come to call the "un-silent minority", that small group within the larger, happy majority who, like their silent brethren, had also willingly given their time and efforts to the Grey Cup cause but who had made it their mission to grind me down like a nub with their constant kvetching. The Laura-tax, I believe it is now called.

To be fair, I know that every workplace has them - the people for whom the weather is always too warm or too cold, the boss is a jerk, the food is lousy and … you can see where I'm going with this. No matter how good things get they still only see the bad - and will go to huge lengths to point it out to everyone around them. Lucky for me, I got not only to see them in person every day but I also got to speak with them on the phone. And the phone is this small groups favourite method of communicating their demands - and they will use like a cudgel on a daily basis to let you know how things could be better for them and others. Somedays, it was like the Globe and Mail comments sections come to life.

The first few days, I took it like a champ. I started out strong: I listened to their complaints, took them in and tried to solve their problems on the spot with efficiency techniques I'd learned from years of dealing with screaming toddlers. I ducked and weaved through every problem - or so I thought - but like Rocky in round 6, I started to fade. The jacket you gave me is a size too big, can I get another? I don't like the area I signed up for can I go elsewhere? Do you have a few minutes to hear my improvements for Grey Cups in year's to come? And my favourite, how did you get this job because it seems like anybody could do it. (Yes. Someone did say this to me AND I didn't punch them in the face.) I was against the ropes, people, and I didn't think was I was gonna make it without someone getting a razor blade and cutting the blood out of my eyes so I could see past the punches. (Come on, Rock!!)

Then it came to me: my perfect strategy. And, no, it wasn't alcohol, my usual fallback position in times of trouble. It was very simple but also very effective and with the right guidance (MINE!), you, too, can get yourself to the other side of sanity with a chronic complainer.  Here's how it works:


First, listen to the complainer. Look into their eyes and try not to think about that great episode of Homeland that you watched last night. Then, when they are done with deep sympathy in your voice, say the following: “You know, that sounds terrible. I don’t know how you deal with all of these problems.” The answer will often be "Well..., it’s not that bad!” This approach works because it gives the complainer what he’s really after: Empathy. Not cheering up, not solutions, not egging-on. Just understanding of what is, for him, a difficult situation.

Next - And this is important! - don’t be sarcastic when you say it. Be sincere. You don’t have to agree that these are huge problems. Even if everything the complainer says sounds trivial to you, remember that it feels like a huge problem to him or her wouldn’t go on about it. What seems trivial to one person can be a huge problem for others. So you’re not saying “Yes, I agree that’s a huge problem”. And you’re certainly not saying “Oh, poor poor you” in a sarcastic voice, even though you want to. You really, really want to. You’re just acknowledging the fact that this is a huge problem for that person. Which undeniably it is, right? Right?!!

Finally, after work, find someone that makes you laugh and drink, and drink and drink with them. But not too MUCH! You need to be fresh for the next time. And the next. And the next. And the next.

ADRIENNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Life. It's Flashing Before Your Very Eyes

Many years ago, when I was a university-aged student, I attended a show at the behest of a friend. It was at the beginning of my "art as exploration" stage and, like now, I was trying to open myself to the myriad of ways in which art, and artistry, could change people's perception of their world. It should be noted that the artist whose show we attended, Annie Sprinkle, had an eclectic aesthetic: she was a performance artist who used to be a porn star. Sprinkle's goal, we were told in the program we were given before the show, was to "use the vast frontiers of sexuality to explore, share and document my experiences and findings with explicit films, photography, writing and performance." The art world, she went on to tell us, was a refuge, where, surprisingly, she was made to feel quite welcome. "There was much more creative freedom, less censorship, and more legal protection." Who knew, I thought, to myself as I settled to watch the show.

(SPOILER ALERT! From this part forth, those of you who are squeamish or may want to skip forward to the next paragraph. It ain't pretty!)

Halfway through her performance, Miss Sprinkle inserted a speculum and invited the audience members to line up and each individually have a look with the aid of a flashlight. Although, I was enjoying the show, I decided to decline. (I was 19 and from a small town outside of Sudbury, for Christ's sake! Baby steps, right?) This was followed up with a beautiful ‘sacred sex magic, masturbation ritual’ that included, a board in which giant dildos were attached. Miss Sprinkle went on to show us the best ways to... AGH! You get it, right? I was shocked but, by the end of the show, felt that I had experienced something that was shocking, yes, but artfully executed. It also dawned on me that if we had attended this show 25 years previous, we probably would have quickly found ourselves arrested, found guilty of breaking about half-a-dozen obscenity laws and possibly have gone to jail. Success!

As we exited the theatre, I was enervated. I turned to my friend in order to gage how he had enjoyed the show. He was white as a sheet and looked incredibly disturbed. Are you all right, I asked him. He nodded in the affirmative and then told me, with a worried expression spilling over his face, that he was  afraid that one day - when he died - that the image of Annie Sprinkle's cervix was gonna pop in to his brain and that, no matter how hard he tried,  he would not be able to banish the image from his psyche. I assured him that such images did not, as far as I knew, come to us on our death beds. It took myself and several of our other art-loving friends the better part of an evening and several pitchers of cheap beer to get him to switch his thinking otherwise.

But the theory has stayed with me ever since. Is it possible that images that leave us disturbed or confused could pop up randomly to us on our death beds? And, if so, is there some way to counteract it? Was there a way in which we could hedge bets and find a way to seek out good images that might outweigh the bad? And so, this is what I have done. Over the years, I have made a mental list of images that I can conjure up when needed. The hope is that one of these might, when the time comes, help stave off, or at least outweigh, the image of a porn-star-turned-performance artist going down on a board of pleasure implements.  I wanna suggest you do the same because you never know, right?

Here are a few examples:

• The sparkle in my son's eye when he's telling me a funny story
• Sunset at my cottage
• My father's handwriting
• Seeing my friend, Dave Brown, try to water ski off the dock from a standing position and too much lead rope. 
• A raspberry
• My first bike
• A clean kitchen floor
• My husband rocking my kids to sleep
• Seeing the Rockies from an airplane
• The look my sister gets on her face when she's exasperated
• Water moving swiftly over a rock
• Poppies in bloom

Time to start your own......

Happy Thanksgiving, Mofo.

cat with dead mice, a photo by pyl213 on Flickr.

Oh! Good Morning, Cat.

Sheesh! I didn't see you there, five inches from my face. Nice to see you.

And what's this you're trying to place on my bed where my husband has only just left his peaceful slumber? A dead mouse? Lovely. And thank you for removing the head for me. I always find that to be such a nuisance to do on my own. Maybe I'll save it for later.

Oh! And please do not take my screams of terror as a sign that I'm not grateful! Maybe I've seen The Godfather one too many times but I am pleased that you thought to bring me something as interesting and useful as a dead mouse. Really! I know you enjoy eating them and leaving them all over our property for my bare feet and lawn mower to enjoy so I should be grateful. Plus, it's food, right? And a present, correct? I love both of those. Plus, I give you store-food, water, and affection, and this your way of returning the favour.

So, thanks.

Oh! Hello, again, cat. What is it that you find so interesting with our bathroom sink? How endearing it is to be heading towards this area with the hope of washing the sleep out of my eyes only to find you staring into the drain as if it contained the answers to the mysteries of the universe. You are a thoughtful one. To avoid disrupting your peaceful meditations, I will wash my face in kitchen sink instead. Carry on!

Oh, Hello again, Cat-Who-Lives-In-My-House-And-May-Soon-Sleep-With-the-Fishes! What is this crazy thing you are doing with your water bowl? Slapping, slapping, slapping the water and spreading it all over the floor for every- and anyone who passes by? There is no sea creature in that shallow bowl, you silly beast! No animal, vegetable or mineral in there that will clog your throat passage and keep you from swallowing yet another mouse's innards. Drink it up, you scamp! Oh, and don't you worry a moment about these cashmere socks! They will shrink in no time from the water you left everywhere.

And why are you scratching near this bowl where we keep your store-bought grub? Are you trying to bury it beneath the linoleum? There is no need! It will be here like it is every day. Same place. Same time. Remember yesterday? And the 1200 days before that? Not gonna change, Mofo. Not gonna change.

What is this? Why are lying peacefully in my lap sharing your warmth with me as I try to avoid watching a cooking competition show? Again. Is it that you see that I was contemplating your death after you spilled my wine onto the carpet? No, you purr in response. It's because I love you and I want give you my thanks in the only way I know how.

Sigh. All, right, God dammit! I give.

Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.