sartato

I havent seen anyone talk about this yet so im making a post. 

Fans: you're gonna mess up The Batman

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

When I was a kid, I thought those pillars went down to the sea floor.

“Utsav belongs to the genre of courtesan films that plays on the nostalgia for an ancient erotic Indian past. The narrative follows Vasantsena (played by Bollywood icon Rekha), a fourth-century prostitute, as she falls in love with a young Brahmin merchant named Charudutt. Halfway through the film, Charudutt is temporarily shunted out of the narrative by a growing friendship between Vasantsena and his wife Aditi. In a telling scene, Vasantsena and Aditi sing to each other after exchanging clothes and jewelry. This act of making oneself desirable, of dressing and undressing, donning and discarding saris and jewelry in particular, is a sexually loaded trope in popular Indian cinema, having connotations of wedding nights and signifying a prelude to heterosexual sex. Utsav reworks the typical love triangle of popular film where two women compete for the man’s attention; here, it is Charudutt who is sidelined while the two women play erotically together. Interestingly, some feminist analyses of the film have critiqued this scene as merely ‘‘playing out the ultimate male fantasy,’’ whereby female bonding between the wife and the courtesan enable the man to ‘‘move without guilt between a nurturing wife and a glamourous mistress.’’ Clearly such an interpretation misses the more nuanced eroticism between the two women that a queer reading makes apparent. A queer reading might also allow for the possibility of triangulated desire that does not solidify into ‘‘lesbian’’ or ‘‘heterosexual,’’ but rather opens up a third space where both hetero- and homoerotic relations coexist simultaneously. The relation between the two women also hints at the histories of female homoerotic relations that mark the space of the tawai’if (courtesan) household, as Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s ethnography of courtesans in 1970s Lucknow, North India, documents.”