In Lieu of a Sunday Poem

Here are the lyrics to "Total Eclipse of the Heart"*

Every now and then
I get a little bit lonely
and you're never coming around

Every now and then
I get a little bit tired
of listening to the sound of my tears

Every now and then
I get a little bit nervous
that the best of all the years have gone by

Every now and then
I get a little bit terrified
and then I see the look in your eyes

Every now and then I fall apart
Every now and then I fall apart

Every now and then I get a little bit restless
and I dream of something wild

Every now and then I get a little bit helpless
and I'm lying like a child in your arms

Every now and then I get a little bit angry
and I know I have to get out and cry

Every now and then I get a little bit terrified
but then I see the look in your eyes

Every now and then I fall apart
Every now and then I fall apart

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever

And we'll only be making it right
Cause we'll never be wrong together
We can take it to the end of the line

Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks
I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart
Once upon a time there was light in my life
But now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart

Every now and then I know
You'll never be the boy you always you wanted to be
Every now and then I know
You'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am

Every now and then I know
There's no one in the universe as magical and wonderous as you
Every now and then I know
There's nothing any better and there's nothing I just wouldn't do

Every now and then I fall apart
Every now and then I fall apart

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever

And we'll only be making it right
Cause we'll never be wrong together
We can take it to the end of the line

Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks
I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
Nothing I can say
Total eclipse of the heart

*Why? Because tonight while doing karaoke I realized; not only are these lyrics ridiculous to the point of being sublime, but I'm pretty sure Twilight is actually based on this song.

Which I guess could explain the Hair Issues I was discussing the other day, because Seriously:

Moving!

All afternoon, I've been packing my crap and loading it into my dad's car while he sits on my patio reading his Kindle.

Just wanted the whole internet to know about that.

In other news, my friend referred me to a BBC series called "Being Human" which is about a vampire, werewolf and ghost who live together and try to blend in with normal society. Based on the few episodes I was able to (TOTALLY LEGALLY) watch online, it is campy fun on the Torchwood level.

However, I have one strong objection. See if you can guess what it is based on this picture:


Dear Producers of Vampire-Related Media,

Despite what Twilight may have lead you to believe, vampires are allowed to comb and wash their fucking hair.

Observe:

Dracula


Barnabas Collins*


David Bowie!

Even in the 80s, vampires managed to have decent hair (Kiefer Sutherland's mullet in The Lost Boys totally worked in context**)!

Remember when Gary Oldman played Dracula, and he had a butt on his head? I once thought that was the low point in the history of vampire hair. But, thank you, Twilight, you have proved me wrong.

In conclusion, stop ruining vampires!***

I am too old to switch my allegiance to another preternatural species!

Love,
Kitty Pimms

*By the way, I discovered the other night that the cheesetacular 1990s revival of "Dark Shadows" is available to watch instantly on Netflix. It was the first TV show I ever watched ironically, learning sarcasm at the feet of the great Momma Pimms.

**IT TOTALLY DID

***The True Blood creative team is exempt. If you watch that show, I'm sure you know why they have a hair-related lifetime pass.

An Open Letter

Dear Giles from Buffy,*

What the crap are you doing in this Merlin abomination? I just tried to watch it and literally could not stand it for five minutes.

I mean, come on, man. You're Giles! Surely there's something British and classy that needs doing... Isn't there some Dickens adaptation you could be staring in?

You know what? I'm not even angry. I'm just disappointed.

And why, in this sort of production, do the grungy little marketplaces outside the castle always have a stand selling oddly shaped baskets? Were weird baskets really in such high demand among the peasants of pseudo-historical Britain? They don't seem to be useful for anything other than decor... Are these stands like the Ye Olde Pier One? And if so, how do they make any money, when the people are all starving and oppressed?

Seriously. Get it together, man.

Love,
Kitty Pimms

*Yes, I know you have a real name. Shut up.

Erm... So, I Guess this is Now the Blog of I Hate Twilight

I was at the mall today, performing scenes in the kiddie section of Barnes & Noble (stardom!), and so of course I had to do a little mall wandering afterwords.

And everywhere I frickin' went were posters of frickin' Robert Pattinson giving me the creep eye.*

There was the old classic:


This questionable sequel:


And the solo version:


I am really, really skeeved out by this guy. It's as though they did market research in order to find the only actor on earth who could make me more grossed out by Edward than I already was. As though they sent each other memos like "Yeah, he's good, but will the mere sight of him make Kitty Pimms feel like she needs to take a decontamination shower? Let's get the kid who never washes his hair in to read again..."

Watching him lurk behind his co-presenter at the Oscars, eyes firmly fixed on her cleavage, I wrote to a friend: "Robert Pattinson is still playing that stupid vampire! Why’s he gotta leer at every body? Get a new facial expression, Edward!"

I mean really:


God. I say it again. Get a new expression!



Eeeew. On second thought, just keep your face out of my sight altogether.



Just...

Just...

I give up.


*And he just did it again, because I went googling for pictures to illustrate my point

I Have Not Words...

...to describe how awesome this is:



I'll just quote Jezebel's intro, because seriously. I have not words.

"In this brilliantly edited clip by Rebellious Pixels, Edward shows up at Sunnydale High and tries to put the moves on Buffy Summers, who sees right through his sparkly bs, shutting him down at every opportunity"

Some highlights:*

In the cafeteria part, there is a brief glimpse of Alice (from Twilight) and she totally has the same hair as Willow. It's fitting since Alice is the only Twilight character I mildly approve of.

The use of one of my all-time favorite Buffy quotes: "What are you doing? Here? At this table, talking to me, like we're some kind of talking buddies?" Oh, the many times have I wanted to say that (substituting "table" for "any place I go in my life").

The "Are you sure this isn't some fanboy thing?" line from "Buffy vs. Dracula": especially great because, had that episode happened within the last year or so, she totally would have said "Edward" instead of "Lestat"

And that reminds me: Some one in an A.V. Club discussion of the latest episode of True Blood** pointed out how the now-classic "brooding dark haired vampire+fun blonde vampire=good homoerotic times" was clearly at work, and attributed that convention to Buffy (Angle/Spike). Had I not been a good five days late to the discussion (having just totally legally watched that episode online), I would have had to point out in the most pompous manner possible that Angel and Spike are so obviously ripped off from Louis and Lestat... something that used to bug the crap out of me when Buffy first aired.

Aaaaaaand I'm going to just stop right there, because this may be the nerdiest post I've ever written. Which is an achievement.

*Perhaps the only downside is that I could identify which episode almost every one of those Buffy clips was from.

**Which was also pretty great... the vampires are really hitting it out of the park this week. UPDATE: The trend continues at Go Fug Yourself, where they say of Kristen Bell's outfit "That is saucy. I feel like this might be the uniform they put the waitresses in over at Twilight McLestat's Vampire Bar and Grille" and of Eva Green's "BLAAAAAAH. This woman is not particularly interested in draining the blood of the innocent, or interrupting the sleep of the just, or disturbing the dinner of the holy, or stealing the mail of the virgins, or trimming the bangs of the uptight, or anything even REMOTELY sexy and vampiric. And ergo, I have no use for her."

Oh, I'm Just Sitting Here in the Dark, Thinking About Vampires

Why is it so hard to get things done in the rain?

I had big plans for today. BIG PLANS!

But now, I'm just curled up on the couch with a cup of tea, staring into space and thinking, "In that episode of Buffy where the evil vampire Willow showed up, after they knocked out Evil Willow and decided that Good Willow should take her place, who actually switched the clothes? Because they totally went all out and even put Good Willow's pink tights on Evil Willow which is... intimate. Did Giles and Xander leave the room for this? I hope so."

EDITED TO ADD: The A.V. Club just got around to reviewing this episode, and there is an entire comment thread discussing the issue of whether or not one should put pink tights on unconscious vampires.

And also, "I read somewhere that the writers always knew that either Willow or Xander was going to be gay, but weren't sure which one, so when they did the episode with evil vampire versions of everyone, they gave both Evil Willow and Evil Xander gay 'tendencies' to keep their options open, which is interesting. I mean, everyone knows those slutty vampires will get it on with anyone because they transcend human concepts of sexual preference. But I'm interested in the writer's implicit assumption that vampire teenagers 'figure out' they're gay before human teenagers. And I wonder if there is a way to relate that to my own sexual figuring out, in which vampire literature played a large role. It both helped me to understand the concept of 'otherness' as something to be embraced, even desired (rather than hidden or avoided), and to understand sexuality as something more varied and complicated than 'his thing goes in your ladyparts, the end' which was pretty much all I'd gotten so far."

So now I'm thinking, "What will become of all the gay, goth teenagers out there, with Twilight all the rage?* What would I have turned out like, if at 13 my imaginary vampire love affair had been with Edward, rather than Lestat? Perhaps miserably married to my emotionally unstable high school boyfriend, since obviously love means never having a moment to yourself or making an independent desicion. Perhaps I would have spent my college years in a sort of premature spinsterhood, believing that I was in love with my best guy friend and unwilling to make a move lest it 'ruin the friendship,' all the while secretly fantasizing about the cool girl across the hall.** I hope those Twilight kids graduate quickly to Anne Rice, is all I'm saying."

Now my tea is cold.

*I sort of already posted about this.

**Perhaps I would have read any other books, ever? Yes, yes. Hyperbole for the sake of making a point!

Best Thing Ever?

I think so...



From The Hope Chest, which posts scans of old newspaper articles. Vampires seems to be a recurring theme. Also a lot of the articles seem to be from the Chicago Tribune. Represent.

(Ignore the site's comments about Chicago drivers. We are the only people in this country who know how to drive. Everyone else is wrong).

Why My Car Is Awesome

I totally thought the new season of True Blood started this weekend, but alas, it does not.

However, on the HBO website there are many vampire-themed ads, including this one for my car:*



Mini Coopers: So cool, vampires would totally buy them.

In other things from my life randomly featured on the internet, this LOLcat:



Is hanging out in a Crèche that looks exactly like the one my family has trotted out every December since time immemorial.

Here's the way we like to trick it out, daycare-style:



*Okay, mine's not a convertible. In fact, I think Mini convertibles look really, really stupid with their tops up, and in Chicago there are an average of four days a year when it's not too hot, too cold or too rainy to have one's top down. Plus, when I open up my windows and sunroof it's practically a convertible. Also, they didn't make the convertible yet when I bought mine. Also, the Clubman is totally bullshit, with it's cute little half-door. I'm pretty sure all the really cool vampires drive 2003 Minis. Probably red with black tops. That smell like cigarettes and vegetable korma. 'Cause I got Indian food tonight and left it in my car for a couple of hours. I can't believe I'm still writing this footnote. I've gotta go to bed.

Top Five Things I will Pay to See in a Movie

1. Dinosaurs
2. Immaculately Stylized Quirkiness
3. Adaptations of Shakespeare
4. Vampires
5. Magical Otherealms

List-making. Is there anything more satisfying?

I feel like the stuff mentioned yesterday ("Catholic-themed creepiness" "Edwardian costumes" "people trapped on a spaceship with mysterious evil") would fall around #15 on the list... and in between somewhere there'd have to be space for Musicals set in the 19th Century, Knights, Ireland, Witty But Slightly Inept Criminals, Moody Loners in Northern Climes, Self-Destructive Yet Brilliant Artists, Zombies...

Honestly, there really isn't a lot I wouldn't pay to see in a movie... that list would probably consist mostly of actors I hate.

Anyway, there was going to be a point to this, but I'm distracted by how awesome a movie featuring all five of those things would be.

Perhaps Wes Anderson could direct a film, loosely based on The Tempest, in which a shipwreck lands our plucky heroine in a mysterious world of vampires and dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs

This is adapted from a couple of old posts.

Here’s the thing about dinosaurs.

They should be imaginary. Everything else that cool from childhood turns out to be fake; fairies and dragons and hobbits and trolls and magic and unicorns and elves and so on.

Or they should be a lie, which only you find out later in school, and then you feel kind of sad and stupid for having loved them so naively. Like racist cowboys and commodified princesses and disease-ridden pirates. Maybe you learn to ironically embrace the myth of them, but the reality is always there, reminding you that nothing is ever wholly good.

Except dinosaurs! Because they were real, and you never learn that they weren’t as awesome as they appear. No bearded, pony-tailed high school sociology teacher ever sits on his desk and breaks the news that, despite what The Man would have you believe, they were really three feet tall and lived on tofu.

In fact, they are so cool that crazy people try to deny their existence. They claim it is because of the Bible, but really it is because they know that dinosaurs are so cool, they’re cooler than God himself (which is probably why God got rid of them and replaced them with humans).

Also note that, while the internet has ruined such formerly awesome things as zombies, vampires,* ninjas and Trogodor, dinosaurs have, if anything, been enhanced by internet attention.

The only way dinosaurs disappoint us is by no longer being alive. And that is mostly a problem for today's children, I think. Until their first trip to the natural history museum, they imagine that the dinosaurs there walking around in zoo-type habitats. The girl pictured above was wildly unimpressed to find the dinosaurs at the Field Museum didn't have their skin on, but when I was little, I thought of dinosaurs as skeletons first, and only later learned that they were once fully-fleshed creatures. I blame the Discovery Channel and their CGI dinosaur programing.

Luckily, there is a super-cool and adorable solution to this problem.

Dinosaur Robots.

*Actually, Twilight ruined vampires.**

**Actually, nothing can ever ruin vampires, at least not for me.

Haircut (posted 3-7-09)

I got my hair cut today (Update: It's been barely three weeks and this haircut has already grown out to look exactly like my old haircut. Berg.) and I didn’t get any guff for cutting my own bangs. Is this because I am so brilliantly good at it she couldn’t tell, or was she sympathetic to DIY haircuttery because of These Tough Economic Times?

I always get nervous about getting my hair cut, not because I’m worried I’ll end up with bad hair, but because there is something about having my body (or its parts) in the hands of a professional authority figure that makes me feel sure I’m going to be criticised.**

There was the check-up I had right before starting middle school, when the doctor asked how much excersise I got. I told him that I liked to swim and play soccer and ride my bike a lot, and he looked me up and down and said “Well, that can’t possibly be true.”

There was the gyno who insisted that I stay on birth control after I told her I was gay (she was the first person I told) because I might “change my mind.”

So, it’s pretty obvious where I got this fear from. But it really, really bothers me that I can’t get over it.

If some one came up to me on the street and said “Your hair sucks!” I could easily respond with “Well, I like it, so the hell with you, sir!” or perhaps “Why yes, it does suck today! Humidity makes fools of us all!”

Yet when a stylist says that I really shouldn’t die my own hair, or trim my own bangs, or wax my own eyebrows, even though I know that most of those comments are financially motivated, I get all tongue-tied and apologetic. Even when I end up hating the cut, which has happened once or twice, I’ve never had the temerity to ask for a refund, or even for it to be fixed, because it feels like my fault for not being, I don’t know, better at having hair.

Today, however, I got none of that cringe inducing “Who dyes your hair/cuts your nags/waxes your eyebrows ?” lead up to a “Well you really shouldn’t!”

I didn’t even get asked what kind of products I used, and therefore endured no speech about why those are the worst ones I could use and I really need to buy these.

I suspect I have the TET (Tough Economic Times) to thank for that. If so, I will be able to tell my children that one good thing came out of the Bush presidency.

*The light in my room is apparently too dim for my computer’s camera (the iSight, Apple’s best-ever use of the “i” prefix), so all my pictures come out weird, and often, with a little editing, weirdly awesome. I like the totally-accidentally-achieved oil painting look on this one.

**The only exception to this rule is the dentist. And that is only because, since I knocked out my two front teeth playing baseball with a bunch of oddly-dressed vampires (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!), I’ve already had my most embarrassing dentist visit ever and they can only go up hill from there.

And Another Thing... (originally posted 3/1/09)

Allow me to clear something up.

When I listed “vampire-themed romance” as a guilty pleasure, I was emphatically not referring to the Twilight series. Though I’ve read all four books and seen the movie, I don’t so much like them as I am intrigued, confused and mildly disgusted by them. In fact, one might say I appreciate them ironically, in that I appreciate them in a way that is contrary to their literal intention (assuming that their literal intention is to tell a romantic story about a teenager and her vampire boyfriend, rather than to brainwash a generation of young women into subservient baby-making machines, that is...)

Here’s what I don’t get. How can there be so many girls (and not a few women) out there who think there’s something romantic about a patronising stalker who physically prevents his girlfriend from doing anything he disapproves of? Or a manipulative bully of a “nice guy” who believes that being in love with a woman is a license to take advantage of her friendship in order to try to force himself on her or trick her into physical intimacy (I actually disliked Jacob a lot more than Edward. Bella at least agrees to participate in Edward’s bullshit, but Jacob persists despite her repeatedly telling him to stop)? I can understand the teenagers, a bit, as when I was one myself I was actually in that relationship I didn’t see anything wrong with it until much later. But shouldn’t grown up ladies know better? And shouldn’t grown up lady authors think twice about publishing a book that indicates fucked up asshole love is true love?

In fact, there were times when I got the distinct impression that the characters had motivations that the author herself didn’t understand (unless we’re meant to see Bella as an unreliable narrator, which would make Stephanie Meyer a way more sneaky and subtle writer than seems possible). It was pretty obvious to me that Edward resisted making Bella a vampire because it would mean giving up a significant amount of control over her. It’s a move right out of the creepy boyfriend play book, but its pretty clear Meyer meant us believe his stated motivation (some claptrap about her eternal soul).

This is why I actually liked the movie a bit more than the book. With most of Bella’s internal monologue stripped away, the audience had to view the characters’ behaviour with a certain amount of detachment (the cheesy special effects, I think, inadvertently enhanced this), which made their general fuckeduppitude more obvious. I also liked how Edward, who in the book is presented as utterly flawless, came off as just as much of a freaked-out adolescent basket case as Bella. It made the relationship seem less accidentally-creepy-cause-it’s-suppose-to-be-sweet and more deliberately-creepy-to-make-a-point-about-obsessive-teen-love (this was possibly aided by the fact that I am fully grossed out by Robert Pattinson, both in the movie and in real life).

I’m also interested in (and troubled by) what the success of Twilight means for vampire fiction as a whole. It has always been about the subversion of repressive sexual norms, gender roles, religion, “traditional morality,” but now the genre’s hottest commodity is a vehicle for preaching abstinence and heteronormativity, with plenty of casual sexism and a soupçon of anti-choice rhetoric tossed in for good measure.

How sad is it that in a series about a sexy vampire and a sexy werewolf there are only a couple of instances of entirely accidental homoeroticism?

Very. Very sad indeed.