In Which Our Heroine Is Posed An Unanswerable Riddle

I found the story about Tresa Waggoner (courtesy of alexpgp) disturbing to an extreme. Flip side of the Muslims rioting in faraway places over freedom of the press. (I am also just appalled by the UN Secretary General shuffle & slide response: But of course freedom of speech is never absolute. Well, duh, asshole – absent crying, "Fire!" in the orchestra pit, when you start putting conditions on it, it stops being "freedom." Or are you somehow equating political satire with malicious intent?)

Fundamentalism is everywhere, the dark beast slouching towards Bethlehem, its hour come at last. Again. Welcome to the second round of your favorite show: The Dark Ages! You just keep watching Brokeback Mountain -- ignore those guys moving the heavy artillary into that armory.

Now, I kind of get fundamentalism in the context of the Arab world where religion is a floating, diaphanous burnoose covering economic inequalities. You cannot have a world with those kinds of gaps between the haves and the have-nots, at least not when every television satellite in the sky is busy beaming afternoon reruns of Dynasty to Beitrut and Damascus. When you're flaunting it like that, you're really pushing it.

(And this would be the perfect point to interject my adventures as a beautiful young American in Egypt thirty years ago, how one day in Cairo I had this strange vision in which I saw that this entire culture – these strange hissing men who wore pyjamas in the middle of the day on these hot, bright, shadowless streets – was having an allergic reaction to me. And I got in an instant what it was all about: Western culture was an antigen, a strange, dangerous enzyme under attack.

But that would be boring.)

But in Bennett, Colorado, a suburb of affluent Denver?

You're telling me these kids are being traumatized by Faust? A fat guy in tights singing in French?

I am really worried about the state of the world.

And, of course, when you're worried about the state of the world, there's only one thing to do: drink and watch movies!

So last night we watched Hustle & Flow which I liked inordinately. I liked it that DJaye, the pimp, is a very moral man at heart, barely scraping by, with only enough extra cash in his pocket for smokes and Jeri-Curl. I liked it that his deal with Nola, the snow bunny, was the same deal I used to hear pitched on the phone when I worked for ICM (the world's biggest talent agency, as Jeff Berg never tired of reminding us!) I liked it that Skinny, the superstar, had a mouth full of metal teeth and dropped DJaye's promo tape in the toilet where presumably he shat on it – it was still festooned with a ribbon of wet toilet paper when DJaye fished it out again. I liked seeing Isaac Hayes whom I've missed, goddamit, in the twenty or thirty years since Shaft came out (a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman, John Shaft.)

And I really liked how the only way DJaye could get his music career going was with a violent shoot-out in a roadhouse. You do what you can to get attention and when the vultures descend, they'll peck each other bald for the exclusives.

But all that pales besides how much I love the great unanswerable riddle posed by this movie: Is a pig's pussy pork?

Why, I don't know! Is it?