Don’t Forget to Floss!
Category Archives: Pop Culture
sharks in movies, magazines, memes, etc.
Elephant or Ghost Shark
This shark is not to be confused with the shark in the upcoming movie “Ghost Shark” which judging from the trailer seems to be a wraith-like great white.
TAMPAX TERROR
I love how this ad shamelessly and hilariously exploits the weird embarrassing “don’t swim when you’ve got your period” advice. The other one I remember is “Don’t swim with a yellow or other bright-colored bathing suit,” don’t swim at dawn or dusk, etc. I wish the U.S.of A had the guts to run such ads.
Day 34 7/29/2013: The Ghost of Jack Webb & Me
I felt the ghost of Jack Webb working through me today. In the morning, I showed my international students the documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” which uses movies to explore L.A.’s identity crisis. Multiple shots of city hall stirred up some heavy “Dragnet” nostalgia. The spirit of Sgt. Joe Friday sparkled in the bright badges of the LAPD officers I spoke with about the horror in Chinatown. As I dropped by PETA’s fancy office in Echo Park, I imagined Jack Webb reborn as an animal rights crusader. In another era, he could have broken up backyard dogfighting rings, or brought down poachers with the same relentless moral superiority that he used to lecture acid-addled hippies. I hope PETA can help me with the turtle-pet store crisis. Stay tuned.
As for sharks, besides buying a 6-pack of Great White beer that features a slick, glossy and too-manic shark clutching a mug of froth and a chewed up surfboard, (I just had to buy it, I hope it’s not horrible), I’m reminding everyone to send comments asking the National Marine Fisheries Service not to undermine the Shark Conservation Act with loopholes and exceptions.
I also want to finish dividing “Jaws” into readable “chunks.” I hate that word. It evokes chewed up humans. Chunks of human flesh remind me that although I did succumb to using the word “Sharktastic” yesterday, I’m trying to outlaw cute shark language here–no “bite-sized” monologues, for example. Even the Great White beer package doesn’t resort to cutesy words, although I just noticed that the shark mascot stands on a sandy shore littered with a shell, a starfish and a bloody human hand, a kind of nautical crime scene.
Proud to be an American
7/24/2013: Day 29: A Shark Miscellany
Things I would blog about if I wasn’t overwhelmed with fatigue:
1. The shark attack in Brazil captured on video
2. Reflections on a shark’s mouth being a gateway to another world (with much credit and admiration given to Joseph Campbell).
3. The complex emotions aroused in me by a shark attack
4.This line from Neil Shubin’s book “Your Inner Fish”: “Basically, we’re all modified sharks.”
5. How Shubin explains that divergent forms of the bones that support the upper and lower jaws in sharks, help us swallow and hear. The muscles and nerves that we use to talk and swallow move the gills in sharks and other fish.
6. The otherness and fear evoked by a shark attack juxtaposed with the fact that way back deep in the mystery of all things, sharks and people were sort of one
7. How a great white hijacked a whale watching expedition and how much I wish I had been onboard.
8. My action today: 8 signatures on the epic Shark Defenders petition.
Day 26: July 21, 2013: Dirty, Sexy “Jaws”
I’m writing a blog entry for Sharksavers about the Jaws charity event.
My original copy of “Jaws” is so old and well-loved, the spine is nearly demolished. I keep trying to locate key moments like Alex Kintner being yanked off his raft, but the ravaged paperback, as if possessed by an X-rated daemon flips open to a lurid sex passage.
On page 104, Benchley gives a description of Ellen Brody’s nipple-revealing “diaphanous nightgown” and tells us that her husband (Roy Scheider in the movie) returns from the bathroom “tumescent.” Ellen, however has taken a sleeping pill. She drifts off as Brody grumbles “I’m not very big on screwing corpses.” The rather poetic “tumescence” (the “tomb” sound underscoring Brody’s doomed chances) becomes a frank and embarrassing “dwindling erection.”
When I read this book as a pre-adolescent kid, (at least a dozen times between 1975 and 1976) the sex scenes were as disturbing to me as the shark attacks. Sometimes as with Brody’s “screwing corpses” comment, the two themes merged. A memorable and lengthy description of Brody urinating recalled the shark “spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower,” as he chomped on poor Chrissie in the opening chapter.
Castro saw “Jaws” as a critique of capitalism, but maybe the novel with all its adultery and frustration, is an even better allegory for all-consuming desire, and the awkwardness of bodily love, gross fluids and all.
GHOST SHARK!
I like all the repurposed “Jaws” imagery and dialogue. I hope that as this great white is a ghost shark, it cannot be killed by the end of the movie.
FEAR IT
TICKLISH
Shark Dreams 