Category Archives: Allegory

Working Out Your Own Salvation With Xena: Warrior Princess Or, The Renewing of Ego Ideals in Syndication

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Whodathunk a scholarly paper on Xena: Warrior Princess Xena is watching. And that bitch will cut you!existed? But, knowing that as you now do, is it any surprise it's written by a raving Xeniac?

Author's Note: Watching Xena religiously has helped to keep me relatively sane over the past four years while I have been working towards my Ph.D. in Religion and Personality at Vanderbilt. This paper started life as a term paper on the first season episode TIES THAT BIND (20/120) for a course on Freud and religion in 1996. It was radically condensed and reorganized last Fall (with the help of this fine, on-line publication) in order to be included in a panel on "Women and Religion in Popular Culture" at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on November 21, 1998. Prof. Sheila Briggs did not present her paper on "Xena Crucified: Christology and Post-Colonial Theory" until two days later, so I had the unexpected pleasure of delivering the first Xena research paper at the A.A.R. Since I was writing for Xenite and non-Xenite members of the academy, please forgive those portions that seem to be preaching to the converted, or belaboring the obvious.

Okay, now, to a certain extent I understand the desire to, upon realizing just how many hours you've wasted watching cartoon T&A Sapphic dramady, get something out of it, if only a scholarly paper for Vanderbilt. When I had cancer I'd watch Hercules four times a day, but then the chemo I was on was so strong that, by the time the last episode came on I'd have forgotten I'd seen it at 10 that morning, and enjoyed it all over again in a happy, chemically-induced stupor.

But there's fans and then there's fans. Behold, the horror that is Working Out Your Own Salvation With Xena: Warrior Princess Or, The Renewing of Ego Ideals in Syndication

Introduction (01-05)
A Trojan Horse Opera (06-13)
The Iliad and Theodicy (14-19)
Xena, the Bezerker (20-29)
If You Killed Your Friends and Family, Who Would Bring You Casseroles? (30-31)
Humanizing the Enemy (32-38)
Working Out Your Own Salvation (39-41)
Notes
Bibliography
Biography

Xena Sees You; Xena Sees All!

Classical Criticism: Football Edition

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The OdysseyThere are some few things in this world that remind me of the late Hunter S. Thompson. There are very few things indeed in this world that remind me both of Hunter S. Thompson and Homer's Odyssey. There is only ONE thing in this world that reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson, Homer's Odyssey, and that 300-pound bundle of muscle, fat, tattoos and leather who got on the bus and sat his wide, Harley-ridin' ass down beside my English professor, who happened to be reading The Iliad at the time and expecting the worst from his new seatmate, poked a chubby, dirty finger into my prof's Penguin paperback and chuckled, "Da Iliad! I love dat book! Rumble in Troy! Ah, man, war's all about chicks, eh? Fuckin' chicks, man."

This is that thing.

Carroll apologizes to Poseidon with burnt offering, three flocks of cattle, Reggie Bush shaped golden idol
May 1st, 2006

Los Angeles, Calif. – Taking his cue from Homer's Odyssey, University of Southern California head football coach Pete Carroll attempted to appease the legendary anger of Poseidon with an offer of burnt lamb, approximately seventy heads of cattle and an 8 ft. high statue of USC running back Reggie Bush made entirely from gold…

Few critics, however, are willing to predict what will happen even if Poseidon is satisfied.

"I am of the opinion that Carroll will eventually succeed in metaphorically returning home and triumphing over adversary," Addison said. "Much like [Alfred Lord] Tennyson's Ulysses, I see in him a man whose passion for life and exploration will never allow him full rest – and though he may now appear to be 'an idle king' he will inevitably seek to 'sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars' by recruiting a class of twenty Scout and Rivals rated five star players. It seems obvious even to these British eyes that [Carroll] is a man determined 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'"

"Then again, much like Odysseus, he could opt to shoot everyone who so much as looked at Penelope the wrong way. I would probably expect a mixture of 'one equal temper of heroic hearts' and good old fashioned fairly indiscriminate slaying."

Homer...standup

PSA: May Day

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May Day! May Day! I'm Not Sure What Constitutes a Proper Celebration of Beltane Anymore!In memory of John Kenneth Galbraith, I suggest that everyone wear black on May 1, May Day, International Worker's Day.

If you want to hold ribbons and dance around a maypole too I suppose that's okay, but try to look dour while doing it, all right? And make them black ribbons, grosgrain if you have it, something matte. I'm really feeling the matte. And maybe you could sing something from the Bruce Cockburn songbook? "they call it democracy" would be perfect!

Here are the lyrics, ideal for happy, full-mourning maypole dancing on International Worker's Day, to commemorate the death of John Kenneth Galbraith:

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poorWho rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament —
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon: the greatest obituary ever written!

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HST, the flag, and the convertibleReally, there's nothing like a writer who knows his stuff inside and out, has made the English language his bitch, and refuses to hold back in the name of "impartiality." More evil has been done in the name of impartiality than in the name of passion; just ask Hannah Arendt.

Hunter Thompson never pretended to be anything other than a razor-fanged partisan anarchist. Neither leftist nor rightist, simply Gonzo, he was as horrified by his own fondess for Jimmy Carter as he was by the tame White House press corps that gave Nixon a free ride for so many years. And he opens his coverage of Nixon's funeral with a passage from Revelation, as is only right and proper.

Read it and weep, both for the savagery and for the loss…nobody writes like this anymore. Selah.

HST makes sure Nixon gets on the chopper

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism–which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful…

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern–but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man–evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him–except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship…

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn … pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah…nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.

Welcome to the Blogroll: Manolo’s Shoeblog (of Evil)

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There's just nothing I can add to this that would make it better. It is perfection. And a warning. Beware the Lagerfeld!

What did the world do before fashion journalism was this funny?

The World Gone Mad

Manolo says, the Manolo asks you, perhaps rhetorically, has the entire world gone mad for evil? Does no one but the Manolo see the truth?

It is not as if there is not the evidence.

For the example look at this from the Asian newspaper.

Then a frisson of excitement ripples through the gaggle hovering about the entrance. Lagerfeld is coming! The anticipation is almost schoolgirl-ish.

He comes marching through in boots, lean black trousers, powder-white ponytail and a brocade jacket, like a veteran rock star.
Evil, Right: Toady
Lagerfeld is also gone in a flash, with his black-clad entourage like a dark plume of smoke.

It is the common trope of the diabolical: first anticipation of the celebrity of evil, then the dramatic appearance in dark clothing, accompanied by the phalanx of toadies, and then, suddenly…poof! Vanishment in the cloud of smoke!All that is missing is the strong smell of brimstone.

Brimstone? Perhaps brimstone well masked.

Here is more, this time from the Robin Givhan of the recent Pulitzer.

Before the eyes settle on his attire, the nose takes note. Lagerfeld smells vaguely floral, with a hint of powder. He has spritzed himself with Iris Nobile by Acqua di Parma. It is a woman’s fragrance owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the same company that controls Fendi.

Yes, evil, but flowery feminine evil, the scent of mortal decay covered by the cloying smell of the tube roses.

Such evil, it preens, it struts.

He walks chest forward and with short strides. An observer, who happened to catch one of Lagerfeld’s television appearances, describes his walk as a “Prince meets Ron Wood pimpalicious strut.”

Pimpalicioius?

Vampiricious!

Even those who would toady up to the Lagerfeld are “unsettled” by his mere proximity.

“He’s an authentic genius,” says Peter Marx, president of Saks Jandel, who has known Lagerfeld for 20 years. “There’s something unsettling and special about him.”

Meaning, he gives one the impression that one is being fitted for the shroud.