Jeanette Bonds calls the above NSFW short film, Good Grief, a “uniquely pleasant dark comedy about death and grieving”:
Molly receives a voice mail from her seemingly emotionally vacant father informing her that her mother has passed away. Immediately following we see Molly at her father’s house reading a ‘Grieving for Dummies’ book while her father is sleeping in a tent in his backyard. Molly tries to go into her mother’s bedroom when she sees a lock on the door, tries to enter, but fails. While on the toilet talking to her brother on the phone, as one does, she hears her father entering her mother’s locked room. She rushes out of the toilet to get into the room and her father makes every effort to prevent her from entering but she fights through. Upon entering the room Molly is surprised with a colorful display of her mother’s dildos, whips, chains, and an array of pornographic polaroids of her mother plus various men and women. …
Despite explicitly dirty pictures of naked women with their legs spread open, the film itself leaves a lot to the imagination. The toys and images we see trigger an archive of images we’ve seen (or at least some of us have seen) in movies and television. In some ways we look at the toys and think to ourselves exactly what Molly is thinking, “what on earth was she doing with all those things?”, yet in reality, we know exactly what was up.
A new documentary from Jeff Krulik, whose 1986 film Heavy Metal Parking Lot remains a cult classic, turns the camera on a concert that may never have happened:
It’s Jan. 20, 1969, the day of President Nixon’s inauguration. At a suburban Maryland gymnasium, a band starts playing to a crowd of about 50 teens. That group’s name: Led Zeppelin. This story is just too crazy to be true, right?
Maybe not. In his new documentary, Led Zeppelin Played Here, director Jeff Krulik tries to get to the bottom of this legend by talking to some musicians, writers and local fans who don’t believe the concert happened … and others who swear they saw them.
What I loved about Krulik’s charming, low key film is that the whole mystery of this did-it-or-did-it-not occur spur of the moment Led Zeppelin show is something that he uncovered while making a film about something else entirely. The Rashomon-like onscreen narrative becomes quite intriguing as the viewer goes along with the filmmaker on his fact finding mission, Krulik serving as a dogged rock snob gumshoe on the trail of this elusive and either legendary—or apocryphal—Led Zeppelin show. In the end, we’re left to decide for ourselves if this concert actually took place or not, his Columbo with a MOJO subscription sleuthing having provided no definitive answers.
What Krulik had to say while working on the film in 2011:
I do hope to present a strong case [that] the concert happened. It’s a mystery worth solving/explaining. And I personally believe it did happen. We just live in such a proof driven/conspiracy theory/immediate info society now that people doubt these unbelievable claims unless there’s concrete example, i.e. ticket stub, photo, diary entry. Nothing has turned up yet, and will likely not turn up. This was a hastily assembled concert on an off night, a rainy, cold Monday in January ‘69, and the band was new and hoofing it, taking whatever gig they could.
Watch Krulik’s 30-minute Heavy Metal Parking Lot below:
Brittany Driver is a legal-weed-smoking mom who uses the substance to soothe an irritated stomach. She fields some common questions about her habit:
“Does your child see you when you are stoned?”
If I’m being real here, most people see me when I’m stoned — or medicated, rather. I smoke as a natural way to settle my normally irritated tummy and to give me an appetite, which I usually just don’t have. (And it’s not a thyroid thing — I’ve checked.) I don’t smoke excessively while I’m taking care of my son. Certainly don’t infer that I’m sitting on the couch barely conscious or stoned to the point of recklessness. It is the same as taking any medication, and I always put the safety of my child first. But if I don’t smoke at all then I don’t eat. And if I don’t eat, I don’t feel well or have any energy. I know that I can’t parent that way and, luckily, I don’t have to. …
“Does it help with your parenting?”
This one is a double-edged sword.
I know marijuana helps me medically. And so when I smoke it, I shouldn’t hear a tiny voice that says, “You’re doing drugs,” “This isn’t good for your kid,” and “Go get a real job, ya hippie!” But sometimes I do. Sometimes that D.A.R.E. officer’s rhetoric in elementary school comes back to haunt me.
Because of the (unproven) stigmas drilled into my head over a lifetime, there is sometimes a feeling of guilt. It’s a guilt I know has no real legs to stand on, but even so, it pops up here and there. But I think that’s normal. A conscious parent knows that what they do affects and shapes their child. And a conscious parent is going to question their actions, hopefully often, to make sure they’re on the right path.
Does smoking a bowl help me relax and make dancing with my son a little more fun? Sure, it does. But that’s not why I’m doing it. I could have fun with my guy even if all the cannabis in the world was eradicated. (Truth, but please no.) I smoke because I need to, and my son is better off having a mommy who is stoned and eating and living life than a mommy who is wasting away. Just sayin’.
I guess we have our Zoolander Award winner! Steven Heller reports on some new efforts to reclaim the swastika as a fashion symbol:
[Sinjun] Wessin, a native of Joplin, Missouri, who attended The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, has been creating fashion since he was in high school 15 years ago, starting with a clothing line called Hybrid Imagery—a fusion of spiritual designs and streetwear with “positive messages.” Currently, he designs for a company creating graphics for t-shirts, leggings, tops, hoodies, etc. “I’ve always been fascinated with t-shirt graphics as they can be a blank canvas for unlimited creativity,” he says.
His goal in using the swastika in a lighthearted way is to tap into its ancient meaning. He hopes that his “donut swazi,” a graphic creation that is related to an Indian pastry in the shape of a swastika, inspires people to learn more about the history as a symbol of good luck and happy eternity. The donut design is an amalgam of swastikas from Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Greek, and other global iterations.
“If the hate is taken away from the symbol by energizing its positive side, then we take away power from the people who want to use it in a hateful way,” Wessin says. “If we don’t do anything and just leave it as negative, then we still let hate win.”
Haters are, no doubt, gonna hate. But is it really so terrible if that hatred is directed at swastikas? At provoca-hipsters wearing swastika sweatshirts? That’s also Heller’s own stance: “In my own book …, Swastika, Symbol Beyond Redemption?, I challenge the view that it can or even should be entirely reclaimed.” While I have not written a book on why it’s maybe not the best idea to hit the gym in swastika leggings, I did once write a blog post about the inadvisability of swastika earrings. One does not need to have deeply investigated this issue to see why such a look is textbook hipster racism. It’s sartorial equivalent of a certain recently-mentioned Thought Catalog essay. (Super adorbs, nein?, that the release party for this swastika fashion was, according to the above YouTube video, held somewhere called “Haus of Love.”)
And before someone jumps in with the obvious: Clearly this is not a discussion of uses of swastikas/swastika-like symbols in other cultures. When I was in Japan, I didn’t become outraged upon seeing the Japanese map symbol for a temple. Clearly the question refers to parts of the world where its immediate association is with Nazism.
When it comes to reclaiming highly-charged negative words, symbols, anything, this sort of has to come from the victimized party. If Jews, along with gays, Roma, and others for whom Nazism was an extra-unpleasant interlude, decided, en masse, that the time had come, fine. If, however, this is a ‘movement’ consisting of a handful of people trying to make a few dollars off offensiveness chic, it’s a bit of a joke that this is about reclaiming anything.
Samantha Pugsley doesn’t recommend it. When she was 10, she took a pledge at her church to remain a virgin until marriage – a pledge she kept, and ultimately found damaging:
Ten-year-old girls want to believe in fairy tales. Take this pledge and God will love you so much and be so proud of you, they told me. If you wait to have sex until marriage, God will bring you a wonderful Christian husband and you’ll get married and live happily ever after, they said. Waiting didn’t give me a happily ever after. Instead, it controlled my identity for over a decade, landed me in therapy, and left me a stranger in my own skin. I was so completely ashamed of my body and my sexuality that it made having sex a demoralizing experience.
I don’t go to church anymore, nor am I religious. As I started to heal, I realized that I couldn’t figure out how to be both religious and sexual at the same time. I chose sex. Every single day is a battle to remember that my body belongs to me and not to the church of my childhood. I have to constantly remind myself that a pledge I took when I was only 10 doesn’t define who I am today. When I have sex with my husband, I make sure it’s because I have a sexual need and not because I feel I’m required to fulfill his desires.
For so many male readers, [Thomas] is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over: the young Dylan, with his off-the-peg Bohemianism, his obscure, symbolically coded resentments, his wild and frustrated sexuality, can look, to the literary (male) adult, like the fearful caricature of a half-forgotten self. …
Which is where Hilly Janes’s book comes as a welcome refreshment. No one is likely to publish a biography of Thomas demonstrating that he was a monogamous and placid soul who could hold his drink and manage his money. But Janes simply sets him in the context of a group of variously gifted Welsh friends and gives some sense of how and why – exasperating as he undoubtedly was – he retained their love and (intermittently) tolerance. The remarkable circle that met in Swansea’s Kardomah Café in the late 1930s was in no sense an echo chamber for Thomas’s ego. These men – Fred Janes (as Alfred was known to family and friends), Daniel Jones, Vernon Watkins, among others – were deeply serious artists, prolific, thoughtful, and self-critical. … In other words, here is Dylan Thomas in conversation with those he thought of as peers.
It seems fitting to feature a story about depression this week, and few wrote about what it feels like with more acuity than David Foster Wallace. Here’s the opening paragraph of his “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing” (pdf), published in 1984 in The Amherst Review:
I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.
Read the rest here. Check out another story of his we highlighted, “The Depressed Person,” here. Previous SSFSs here.
Surveying the last decade’s plethora of dystopian sci-fi narratives, Michael Solana urges writers to chill out and embrace tech as an ally rather than enemy:
Certainly dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses in the pages of what was once our true north; we have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague. Ever more disturbing than the critique of technology in these stories is the casual assault on the nature of Man himself. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was people walking through a black and white hellscape eating each other for 287 pages and it won the Pulitzer. Oprah loved it. Where the ethos of punk is rooted in its subversion of the mainstream, famed cyberpunk William Gibson’s Neuromancer is no longer the flagbearer of gritty, edgy, counter-cultural fiction; ‘life will suck and then we’ll die’ is now a truism, and we have thousands of authors prophesying our doom with attitude….
Our fears are demons in our fiction placing our utopia at risk, but we must not run from them. We must stand up and defeat them. Artificial intelligence, longevity therapy, biotechnology, nuclear energy — it is in our power to create a brilliant world, but we must tell ourselves a story where our tools empower us to do it. To every young writer out there obsessed with genre, consider our slowly coalescing counterculture, and wonder what side of this you’re standing on. Luddites have challenged progress at every crux point in human history. The only thing new is now they’re in vogue, and all our icons are iconoclasts. So it follows here that optimism is the new subversion. It’s daring to care. The time is fit for us to dream again.
For her series Male Sport, Sophie Kirchner photographed female players of traditionally “masculine” sports like water polo, ice hockey and rugby:
Kirchner photographs her subjects right after a game. The women’s pupils are wide open, the adrenaline is still pumping dramatically in their blood. The images seem to cater to expected clichés. But one should be careful, because the photographer’s intention is exactly the opposite. These are portraits of athletes who love their sport and play it with passion. She is not working with a specious emancipatory agenda and she does not want to simply provoke. Her work is all about showing people who do what they love. Nothing more, but also nothing less. With her expressive portraits she simply points out that these women are not marginal, but that society is marginalizing them.
The Dish 