S and M

I dreamt there was a club of members who were paid to do s and m and they were complaining about how little they were being paid. And when I awoke I remembered a documentary I watched entitled, Pleasure for Sale (2008), about prostitutes in a legal brothel, nicknamed the Chicken Ranch in Nevada.

The approach is sympathetic, intimate and revealing, telling the stories of new and veteran, broken or comfortable working women in the ranch.

Chyna's inner conflict strikes me in particular as she tries to reconcile her dignity and autonomy with the extremes of her trade. It explores perhaps the oldest of conflicts; whether in destroying ourselves, we are at our most free. Chyna allows herself to be spanked so hard she can't sit, she hangs herself by the skin of her back to a hook and justifies the experience with reclaiming herself. Retaliating from having been gang raped does she reclaim herself by going the furthest she can in self-punishment/experiment? Or is it all a loss if the most part of it is attributable to the rape at all?

Angelina Jolie in an interview on the Actor's Studio said this about self-destruction. That never again would she think of it after having seen so much of the suffering in the world. "I thought I knew pain."

I think this is always the simplest of remedies when faced with the option of self-destruction; to see a life more wrecked, a life more bleak.

Genre: documentary
Directors: Harry and Joe Gantz

[For a film treatise of sado-masochism, watch Ma Mere (2004)]

Easy Virtue

Freedom is a common theme in art, whether from the reigns of society or from our own personal bondage.

A woman's freedom is my story and two films speak to me on this; Subira (2008) a short film by Ravneet Chadha and Easy Virtue (2008) starring Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth.

They label the heroine, naughty or avante-garde for being how men can freely be.

Easy Virtue however was able to explore more issues, being a full-feature film. It touched on the ghosts of soldier survivors, the loss or capture of youth in marriage, the absoluteness of love. I like these themes. They aren't so common. But they are just as pertinent.

On freedom, maybe it is the quest for it that allows us to find ourselves, allows us to taste in the end the satisfaction of our toil. The greater the struggle, the more glorious the triumph, they say. Maybe there could be no other way. Maybe there should have always been another way.

what it means to be free, one poet put it, what it really means to be free, is to be me.

But even freedom isn't absolute. And wars are won and lost. So if women are to triumph, pray, what would have been lost?

don't cha...

sounds, not scents, take me back - to moments in time - when either their lyrics or their beats identified with me. so when they play again, they play pregnant with memories.

and when another song is created and when we identify again, i think on how much has changed between songs; the lovers, the places, our belongings and lives...

and i miss them. not so much the items themselves (because there is always a reason for change), but the feelings, the freedoms, the innocence.

excerpts from toni morrison's speech at the PEN/borders literary service award 2008

"truth is trouble...

the alarm, the disquiet writers raise is instructive because it is open, vulnerable. because if unpoliced, it is threatening...

when chaos resists, either by reforming itself or rebelling against imposed order violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, the wanton, the incorrigible. rational responses may be sanctured, incarceration in holding camps, prisons or death, sanely or in war...

writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured and must be protected. and it is right that such protection be initiated by other writers. and it is imperative not only to save the beseeched writers but to save ourselves...

certain kinds of trauma visted on people are so deep, so cruel that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, the rights or the goodwill of others, writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination...

a writer's life and work are not gift to mankind. a writer's life and work are its necessity...

escape

there exists a need to be confronted
by a vastness
a beauty
another world
that brings release
unshackles you