The Cultural Gutter

we've seen things you people wouldn't believe

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

The Many Faces Of Man. Or Rather, Men.

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Alex’s excellent article last week prompted Gutter Overlord Carol to suggest we each use this month to write about masculinity in our own particular capacity. Having been by odd coincidence right in the middle of reading The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine (a fascinating look at the physical and hormonal characteristics unique to, um, the [...]

The Measure Of Success

I’ve been thinking about heroes and archetypes again (which is not actually news: story archetype is a sandbox in which I happily spend a lot of time). Feels like it’s everywhere these days.  A few weeks back I was on a panel at the World Fantasy Convention that discussed love and monsters. Alex and Carol [...]

But What I Really Want to do is Direct

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There are lots of great modern romance novels out there. And there are plenty of wonderfully romantic movies. Oddly enough, the latter aren’t usually based on the former (modern romance novels; in this one instance, Jane Austen doesn’t count). Which is not to say there aren’t any at all, but Twilight aside, most of them [...]

Squeeze Play

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Romance and sports don’t mix. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. It’s one of those weird rules, hidden and unarticulated, that seem to underly any given genre. It’s a tenet that gets passed down to new writers, not as gospel so much as in the form of a mild warning. It’s not that books about athletes [...]

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  • Of Note Elsewhere

    The Hollywood Reporter interviews director Takashi Miike about his new film, Shield of Straw: ” In Japan now, films are very safe. When I was young and went to old cinemas, they had a distinctive feel, an adult smell about them. As you got in your seat and the lights went down, there was a feeling of excitement: What if the film is scarier than I thought it’s going to be? You’re taken into that world. Nowadays, you can sit in the theater and know it’s going to be safe. That’s good for business, but not for filmmaking.”

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    The Atlantic profiles Spectral Motion, creators of monsters, “effects, and other mechanical grotesqueries that have since become household nightmares, if not names.”

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    A novelist takes revenge on writers he doesn’t like via wikipedia. Slate has the story. “Qworty’s edits undermine our trust in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.”

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    Diane Dooley writes about Mars’ need for women and ways to subvert it.

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    “[T]he mainstreaming of Jane Eyre as a vanilla romance, or even as an exploration of a woman’s pure, uncompromising, and uncomplicated (and religious! and feminist!) integrity, says all kinds of things about our inability to speak honestly about violence and sex.” More on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, consent, sex and submission, here. (via K.A. Laity)

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    Comic Book Attic talks about comics about comics, with plenty of pages from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s The Newsboy Legion for your enjoyment.

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