Red Riding Hood

Loved Amanda Seyfried as Valerie the little Red Riding Hood. man, I can hear Catherine Hardwicke whispering "savage me..." as she sees her beloved appear in front of her in the woods. oh, and Gary Oldman is just as creepy as all of his other characters... But anyways, I want to copy down the dialog during the dream sequence (sorry about the spoiler)

"What big eyes you have, grandma"
"The better to see you with dear!"
"What big ears you have, grandma"
"The better to hear you with dear!"
"What big teeth you have, grandma"
"The better to eat you with!!"

There is something so titillating about a innocent maiden in presence of absolute evil and threat of certain physical harm. Here's one longer version from here:

"Grandmother, what big arms you have!"
"All the better to hug you with, my dear."
"Grandmother, what big legs you have!"
"All the better to run with, my child."
"Grandmother, what big ears you have!"
"All the better to hear with, my child."
"Grandmother, what big eyes you have!"
"All the better to see with, my child."
"Grandmother, what big teeth you have got!"
"All the better to eat you up with."

I suppose there is reason behind the removal of "Little" from the original fairytale. The movie talks about her falling in love, being engaged but having relationship outside of engagement, witch hunt subplot, love, hate, betrayal, religion, torture, affairs and the products there of, man versus nature,... some very very serious adult themes and scenes. Supposedly the original moral of the story is that young kids should not speak to strangers. (And actually, more gruesome, if you imagine wolf wearing grandma's skin when she asks her these things.) A slight more thoughtful interpretation is that young women should not be talked into sex by man-wolves. But this modern interpretation has the red riding hood already in love with a man eventually becomes the big bad wolf. The father, who is already a big bad wolf, dealing with his human daemons. ugh! this story is so ugly and seems so real. I wonder if the writer, David Johnson, who wrote for another one of my favorite movie: "The Shawnshank Redemption", has experienced such... wolf claws her wife's face, kills the daughter that is not his.. But the wife survives on... Seems like what a stepfather might want to do...

alas, Innocence is corrupted by love, and succumbs to evil, elopes to the mountains and the forests... lovely, but breaks with the whole reason why this story even existed in the first place!!

I feel like I did something bad enjoying this whole thing. It's so wrong, and yet feels so right!!

ugh, the tortures of humanity and beastiality!!!

Google and Anticopyblogism

Google blog announced recently that they downgraded sites that copy other sites.

"""

and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful...

"""

oh shit! Google finally caught on and decided to downgrade my copy blog! :(

Sadly, copy blogs often do serve some purpose. For instance, in my drunken haze I posted to facebook something about "Time is the fire within which we burn"...

If you search the quoted text on google (with or without quotes), you will find half a page full of text none of which leads to Delmore Schwartz's poem Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day, actual text here.(which btw, is also not mentioned on Delmore's Wiki entry) which contains the phrase "...that time is the fire in which we burn." The text is fully reproduced here, just to spite google I guess. hahahaa, man, I feel so pathetic, much like Don Quixote, charging at a large man made giant whose mechanical motion cares nothing about what it is that I'm typing... sigh... maybe, some day, descendant of Watson will laugh at this, standing on human skulls and bones, saying "oh man, I could parse that and figure out those two are basically the same"

"""

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn . . .)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Delmore Schwartz

"""