Prose seems to fall short in conveying my adoration for and identification with Aunt Jackie, Roseanne’s much-maligned younger sister from the pioneering blue-collar, feminist sitcom “Roseanne.” Thankfully the profound simplicity of the haiku poetic form captures the essence of my emotions, and acts as the perfect balm to Jackie Harris’s frazzled disposition.

Aunt Jackie was brilliantly brought to life by actress Laurie Metcalf (formerly of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago), who earned three consecutive Emmy awards for her glorious performance. Where Roseanne is always in control — the large-and-in-charge domestic goddess with a knowing quip always at the ready — gangly Jackie was a volatile bundle of neuroses, barely able to keep it all together. Known for her striking outfits and her persistent relationship and occupational troubles, Jackie mirrored the delirious mess we each carry within us (better hidden perhaps but not any tidier than hers). With her crying jags and wiry physicality, Jackie cut a potent tragicomic figure.

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

Plastics factory

Cop, trucker, restaurateur

Who are you today?

*

The men in your life

Booker, Fisher, Fred, Andy

Love is not enough

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

Sixty guys or so

“I didn’t know all of them”

Doomed to spinsterhood

*

Bruises on your back

Very special episode

Domestic violence

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

They dominate you

Vulnerable, unstable

Youngest sister’s lot

*

There to do laundry

All you want is some respect

Get lecture instead

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

Navajo sweater

Fringed jackets, jumpsuits, mom jeans

A fashion icon

*

Neck muscles straining

No one does hysterical

Quite like you do, friend

Roseanne Barr, “Roseanne” (1988-97)

36 years old

Flabby arm, pelican neck

And no one loves me

Roseanne Barr, “Thats Our Rosey (The Best of Jackie) Volume 1″ (2010)

“Roseanne” is available on YouTube and on DVD. Jackie highlights include “Little Sister” and “Why Jackie Becomes a Trucker.”

- Jon Davies

Performed live by Jon Davies and Sholem Krishtalka during Ryeberg Live Toronto.

“How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son” (2010)

SHOLEM KRISHTALKA: A couple of our gossip-loving friends have a keen fondness for psychologically revealing party games (sort of like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” only a tad more casual) with titles like “Exclusive Secrets” and “Would You Rather?” One of their favourites, adapted from turns on the therapy couch, is “Root”: everyone in the room has to take their turn and divulge the root of their homosexuality.

Of course, this game depends on a fairly thorough recall of one’s early life. I’ve never been able to firmly identify my own root (although I have narrowed it down to a few possibilities). The young gentleman in this video, should he one day be called upon to make such public confessions, will have no such trouble.

loswhit, “Single Ladies Devastation” (2010)

Here it is, clear as day, laid out for all to see. The title of the clip is “Single Ladies Devastation,” but it could more aptly be called “Young Boy Gets His First Taste of the Social Disapproval of His Own Difference.”

Losiah, the young boy in question, is thrilled by the song (who isn’t thrilled by this song?), empowered by the bouncing rhythm, by the energetic strength of Beyoncé’s commanding delivery, by the kinship he feels with his sisters. But his father feels the need to assert some heteronormativity, and the declaration, while delivered jovially, comes like a crushing blow: “YOU ARE NOT A SINGLE LADY!”

You can see it all happen in roughly two seconds. His face is still while the gears move and all the pieces of anxiety and self-doubt arrange themselves in his mind: “I want to be a Single Lady; I thought I was a Single Lady; The Father has told me I am not a Single Lady; The Father has told me that I do not and cannot belong to this club; The Father has revoked my membership, and therefore told me that wanting to belong to this club is wrong.” And all of those pieces then lock into place, and the seismic shock of this realization is too much for his 3-year-old mind to bear. He weeps for all he has lost: security, belonging, acceptance, fun.

The Father’s guilty backpedalling begins, but it’s already happened; he set off this psychological tremor, and he can’t take it back.

When this child eventually comes out to his parents, his surest ally will be his sister: the one seated next to him, in the middle of the backseat. Her look to the iPhone camera says it all: “What the fuck did you have to go and do that for?”

“Beyonce Single Ladies Little Kid Dance” (2010)

JON DAVIES: The critic Wayne Koestenbaum refers to Andy Warhol in his biography of the artist as “the proscenium for traumatic theater” and we find ourselves drawn to the trauma of queer childhood that plays itself out on YouTube – the faggy boy-children dancing, but just as often, crying, sometimes in the same video. Shame is arguably foundational to queer identity, a structuring fact.

For gay or proto-gay boys, being overly invested in femininity was and continues to be taboo. Identifying with female stars represents a kind of survival strategy in our young minds, an uplift from humiliating or merely banal day-to-day life into glamour and power. Loving and wanting to be like female stars from Maria Montez or Elizabeth Taylor to Madonna or Beyoncé is a sign of trouble. Being too musical or too artistic, moving too gracefully (or even wanting to move one’s body in rhythm at all), too conscious of aesthetics and beauty, were all qualities heavily policed by parents, school officials, doctors, church. Expert speech therapists were airlifted in at the hint of a lisp, at least at my elementary school (but I guess the benefit was that I got to leave class for an hour each week).

On the home front, my parents basically didn’t have bodies, at least ones that moved freely and without shame. I don’t dance because that would require a suspension of inherited bodily self-consciousness that I’m basically incapable of.

Another hindrance to being able to loosen up was an incident at a day-camp in my suburban neighbourhood in Montreal when I was about 5, and “the boys” (which for some reason included me) were forced to perform the song “Greased Lightning” from the musical “Grease,” on stage, dressed up.

When they forcibly slicked my hair back, I completely lost it and broke down in messy gay tears. Any possibility of a life lived comfortably on the stage was shattered at that moment, and the road to my current small-scale karaoke superstardom has been a long and arduous one.

“Lil Boy Dancing To Rihanna Rude Boy” (2010)

SHOLEM KRISHTALKA: There are precisely two moments (at least that spring easily to my mind) of my own self-conscious self-determination. Both happened when I was 12. One was Darlene, during the season of “Roseanne” that she became a goth. I said to myself, “her. I want to be like her.” The second was Madonna. I remember, clear as day and sharp as lightning, seeing the videos for “Express Yourself,” and “Vogue” (both directed by David Fincher, by the by) on MuchMusic, and thinking to myself, “her. I want to be like her.”

And so I tried. I sat in front of my TV religiously, watching MuchMusic, waiting for the Vogue video to appear, and every time it did, I studied with an intensity that I never ever applied to my schooling.

That year saw the emergence, at least in my elementary school, of “the social.” I have no idea how this term came about, but it achieved metonymic status in my school: “are you going to Lisa’s social? Is Avi having a social this week?” They were lavish dance parties, basically rehearsals for the following year’s Bar- and Bat-Mitzvahs. My friends hired DJs and had them in their basements (I went to a private Jewish elementary school; I had rich friends with large basements).

So having rehearsed the Vogue dance time and time again in the privacy of my bedroom, I went to these socials, and when Vogue came on, I went proto-gay apeshit. I struck a pose; I vogued down like the fiercest, shadiest bitch a white, middle-class 12 year old Jew could be; I did the dance from the video. My female friends made a ring around me and clapped; the boys in my class stood on the sidelines and yelled “FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT!” for the 4 minute, 51 second duration of the song. But still, I danced.

If my parents had ever caught me by surprise, though, I would have screamed, cried, and fallen down in terror and shame.

nizzy1115x2, “Mom Scares Gay Out Of Kid” (2007)

JON DAVIES: Shame is also a potentially transformative creative force as all that trauma and bad feelings can be harnessed into something potent, the blazon that comes from intense self-revelation. Shame becomes performance and the stage of the theatre or the webcam becomes a place where the interior can be turned outward and extreme self-exposure can connect you with others rather than keep you apart and isolated from them.

Watching — and listening — to this video, which has logged over 23 million views just on YouTube, I know that this 12-year-old kid from Oklahoma has experienced fame and glory after the fact, and of course we hear applause at the end.

But I can’t help projecting onto the wall of girls’ faces in the background a shift in their attitudes from bored and dismissive to stunned, enraptured and tearful, but this could all be my fantasy that jaded tweens can be affected by a skinny little boy at a piano, that his extreme theatricality and naked, embarrassing display of emotion (on behalf of a pre-fab pop song, no less) can actually transform those on the receiving end.

Greyson Chance, “Paparazzi” (April, 2010)

- Jon Davies & Sholem Krishtalka

Bad romance…

“Kid Singing and Dancing to Lady Gaga Bad Romance” (2010)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972)

The message read: “Do not ever watch your torture porn in my house again.” Sitting in my living room, watching Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” with a friend, I received the enraged text from my boyfriend, glowering at the kitchen table.

A couple weeks previous we were in this same conflicted configuration—on opposite sides of the house—as I watched the first two episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980).

Fassbinder and von Trier are my boyfriend’s oft-cited examples of the kind of soul-destroying filmmaking he thinks I am exclusively—nay, pathologically—interested in, nothing but pure emotional cruelty or, to borrow from his colorful text message, “torture porn.”

Lars Von Trier, “Dogville” (2003)

Less than a year into our relationship, we went through a similar showdown after attending the Montreal premiere of von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in 2000. Arriving early to get prime seats, I ecstatically endured—foolishly, with boyfriend in tow—its sacrifice of poor, cute, blind Björk (as Selma) on the alter of von Trier’s small-town American life, a steel trap where the weak destroy the weak and “simple” values engender the greatest monstrosities.

The packed theater was wracked with tears by film’s end, following possibly one of the most gruesome scenes in cinema: Selma’s hanging.

Lars von Trier, “Dancer in the Dark” (2000)

Deeply satisfied with the gut-wrenching piece of cinematic brilliance I’d just witnessed, I gathered my coat and bag and left the auditorium. Boyfriend, however, was immobile: crippled by sobs, weeping openly in a messy, messy way.

The story goes that I looked at him with great disgust, and asked incredulously, “are you ok?!” The ugly crying continued down the street to the Metro station and, combined with my stoic WASP discomfort, created a volatile context for a heated discussion about emotional investment in cinema.

I should note that this heated debate flared up again a week later, when I very stupidly dragged boyfriend to see “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), chosen by Empire as the #1 most depressing film of all time. He stormed out of the theater during the memorably nauseating climax that cross-cuts shots of amputation, electroshock and degradation. Oops.

Ensconced in a haze of self-satisfied superiority, I pride myself on my capacity to both be sincerely emotionally affected by a film and maintain a cold, intellectual gaze on it at the same time. This is partly the spoils of several years of academic film studies, where one learns that no matter how disturbing or debased a film may be, each is an object worthy of critical engagement.

While a practicing art critic, my boyfriend is incapable of watching any film about the Holocaust—even the comedies—or any film that is overly upsetting, particularly unflinching portrayals of physical or emotional abuse (with the exception of Hollywood blockbusters: the famed cock-and-ball-torture scene of “Casino Royale” (2006) for example is A-OK).

A recent, particularly vicious fight over “Synecdoche, New York” (2008)—which boyfriend defined as “pure misery” and I found mesmerizing—seemed to get us closer to the heart of the matter. My defense was that the film’s formal experimentation was so dazzling and labyrinthine that it transcended the incredible despair suffered by all the characters. Basically, in my mind if the on-screen suffering is for some sort of greater good—an aesthetic achievement or ethical provocation—it is worth enduring.

I think that Fassbinder and von Trier seem like the worst of the worst to boyfriend because they stylize human misery to extreme degrees and to allegorical ends. They both advocate for emotional cruelty as revelatory and potentially curative, with the image of one individual soul tormenting or destroying another the most visceral metaphor for greater political or existential conflicts.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, interviewed by Peter W. Jansen (1978)

Somehow I can’t accept that his feelings are facts (why else, gentle Ryeberg readers, would I be forcing you to read about our private spats in this very post?). Maybe despite my proclaimed atheism, I’m still carrying Catholic baggage that sees suffering as somehow redemptive. Maybe I get off on my righteous highbrow outrage at his over-sensitivity. Maybe I’m just more of a masochist than he is…

- Jon Davies

CBS News Steve Hartman, “Female Dog Mothers Kittens” (Iowa Humane Society, 2008)

Where to begin writing about a subject that has haunted me for years, spinning out into countless harebrained theories and subsequent heated conversations with both indulgent strangers and obliging loved ones alike? It wouldn’t seem to be a subject of grave importance, yet I’m obsessed: what is responsible for the explosion of interest in cases of interspecies friendship, nurturing and solidarity on the interwebs since September 11, 2001?

For each story of platonic camaraderie and benevolence, there are numerous others detailing selfless new mothers generously nursing abandoned animals from other species. (Dogs seem to be particularly prone to maternal miscegenation, nursing anything they can get their paws on, apparently, as we can see here and here.)

The examples of world-famous interspecies bonds are endless, ranging from Owen and Mzee, the baby hippo and elderly tortoise that formed an intense trans-generational bond after being thrown together by the 2004 Tsunami, to the infamously counter-intuitive “tiger piglets.”

ITN, “Mother Tiger Adopts Piglets” (Sriracha Tiger Zoo, 2007)

Some might argue the proliferation of these stories, pictures and videos is simply a product of the rise of blogs and other social media dedicated to the subculture of cuteness. Others might see it as a crude marketing ploy by desperate zoos and animal welfare orgs who know that the sight of interspecies nuzzling and rescuing will attract much-needed attention and donations. Still others could ascribe it to the awesome power of the mother instinct, which drives animals to take care of other living creatures across species lines, or perhaps simply to confusion or ignorance among the parties involved. My theory proposes something far more sinister: These animals are involved in a propaganda campaign eerily coinciding with the War on Terror initiated after the 9/11 attacks.

A key element of the interspecies friendship genre—whether unstated or explicit—is a plea for tolerance, which (at best) takes a similar form to a Jerry Springer “Final Thought.” Basically it goes that if a cat and a crow – to take my favourite example – can become the best of friends, then surely we rational and civilized human beings can overcome our own differences and all “just get along.” As one fellow puts it, “Different species, getting along, cats and dogs, kittens and hamsters, paw in paw, living in perfect harmony, y’know?”

We are urged to find a valuable moral lesson for our own deeply flawed species in these kinships. The dangerous assumption is that, like these animal friends, it is merely differences of appearance that divide us human cultures—aren’t we all fauna, after all?—and not differences of culture, class and belief, which are arguably far more insurmountable.

By misleading us about the supposed ease of intercultural harmony while ignoring the knotty complexities of human history and its attendant systemic political and economic injustices, these animal friendship anecdotes could in fact be held responsible for worsening relations between human societies. (Keep in mind that the popularity of these stories has skyrocketed since the inauguration of the post-9/11 War on Terror…).

Whether the animals themselves are mere pawns or are actually the architects of this devious campaign is a subject for further investigation. Certainly they would benefit in the long-term from civilizational collapse, as the decimation of the human population would presumably decelerate the destruction of the Earth’s fragile ecosystems. That we in North America have a particularly sentimental relationship to animals would make them the idea Trojan Horses (if you will) for a potent, nay debilitating, misinformation program.

I therefore urge you to take heed and approach these ostensibly cute tales with the greatest caution.

ION Television, “Crow And Kitten Are Friends” (”Miracle Pets” 1999)

- Jon Davies

Jean-Luc Godard, “Trailer for Le Mepris” (1963)

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the few directors I can think of who has used the humble format of the movie trailer as an open field for formal and dramatic experimentation. He fruitfully innovated what is possible to communicate with these negligible cinematic bits — usually regarded as mere publicity devices — as exuberantly as he did feature filmmaking, particularly in his heyday of the 1960s.

Godard’s trailers — highlights available on YouTube include “Pierrot le fou” (1965), “Une Femme est une femme” (1961) and “La Chinoise” (1967) – boast many of the trademarks of his groundbreaking feature films, but condensed into a single jewel-like, soul-stirring minute (or two if you are lucky). (I should note that I’m assuming he directed these trailers — there is very little information about them out there — because they match his signature style.)

We have the pervasive sense of irony about narrative cinema with an attendant playful disregard for the stultifying conventions of his craft; a dark, mournful wit about the seemingly endless capacity for human folly; a delirious montage of competing fragments with images, voices, music and text dynamically juxtaposed, producing unexpected feelings and meanings like sparks from banging together rocks. In addition to piquing your excitement about the forthcoming Godard picture “bientôt sur cet écran,” they thoroughly satirize not only the clichés of the format, but the lavish silver screen dreams of glorious Technicolor tragedy and comedy that we have come to expect from le cinéma as well.

1963’s “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”), which Godard refers to in this dazzling trailer as a “traditional” film — big budget, exotic locale, stars, sex, etc., produced by Carlo Ponti — is one of my favourites. The trailer is anchored by the instantly recognizable, haunting motif of the film’s score, which I would happily take as the soundtrack to my own life were such a thing possible. The trailer’s co-ed narration is abbreviated, the man and woman’s voices over-melodramatically enthusiastic, hyping a list of the film’s winning ingredients in promotional blasts. Taking turns twice each and then speaking in unison, they maintain their mannered rhythm throughout:

“La femme”
“L’homme”
“L’Italie!”
“le cinéma!”
“Avec Brigitte Bardot et Michel Piccoli!”

Savouring every syllable, the couple’s sensual litany of nouns is illustrated with brief fragments of the film, while the title’s flashing in different hues recalls the film’s notoriously saturated colour palette.

What is so affecting is that no matter how earnestly and bombastically the couple’s words oversell the film, their passion is justified, true. I have nearly succumbed to tears just by hearing the man’s zesty delivery of “le cinema!” or the sight of legendary director Fritz Lang as “le vieil homme.”

Jean-Luc Godard, “Trailer for Mouchette” (1967)

Godard’s trailer for Robert Bresson’s shattering “Mouchette” (1967) is even more radical. It begins with Mouchette’s various tormentors calling out the poor young lass’s name, and then segues into her singing a heartbreaking song. Her lament cuts out to silence whenever Godard’s clever, poetic intertitles punctuate scenes from the film: They beautifully describe “Mouchette” as, “A mass in colour…black and white colours – and sung by [novelist] Georges Bernanos and [director] Robert Bresson about the rape of a young girl, in short a film Christian and sadistic.”

Godard concisely captures the glorious quality of the sacred in the cinema of one of his idols. (And remember that Bresson’s 1966 long-suffering donkey picture/ Christ allegory “Au Hasard Balthazar” brought Godard together with the young Anne Wiazemsky, whom he would soon marry.)

Godard does give Bresson’s much-maligned heroine a chance to speak at trailer’s end, concluding with a moment of hope: “You can count on me. I hate them. I’ll stand up to them,” she threatens, speaking of no one and everyone, before we close with the chorus of name-calling with which we began.

- Jon Davies

Harry Harlow, “Monkey Love Experiments” (1963)

I first saw Dr. Harry Harlow (1905-1981) and his experiments on infant Rhesus monkeys in veteran American experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs‘ five-decades-in-the-making epic “Star Spangled to Death.” As the title would suggest, Jacobs’ chef d’oeuvre chronicles the horrors of American culture; he does it by approximating an entire day spent watching TV. Entire TV episodes, lengthy movies excerpts, commercials and other mass-media detritus spanning the entire century were stolen and assembled together in a marathon, brain-melting portrait of America as cesspit of pop culture abjection, feeble-minded militarism, and intolerance and violence of every stripe. (By contrast, a suitably hyperactive Jack Smith flounces around as the embodiment of all that is good in the world.)

The half-hour or so of the film featuring Harlow’s monkey experiments remain branded on my brain, long after the rest of Jacobs’ other atrocities have faded from memory. There is something so devastating about Harlow’s quest to quantify that most abstract of qualities: love.

Much of his research focused on whether an infant monkey would choose a barren but soft cloth mother (”contact comfort”) over a milk-supplying but cold wire mother (sustenance). He found that the monkeys spent much more time with the cloth mothers than with the wires, whom they pretty much visited just to load up on milk: “An instinctive need to cling to another body — soft and warm.” He announces that “[contact comfort] completely overwhelmed and overshadowed all other variables, including those of nursing.” What Harlow sought to measure was this sense of security, his definition of “love.”

Harry Harlow, “Monkey Love Experiments” (1963)

One can’t help but imagine Harlow as a child himself: was his mother wire or cloth? Did she provide him with nutrients but not with hugs? Or just the opposite? I also try to put myself into the place of the infant monkey and imagine what it’s like to live in a tiny cage and cling, terrified, to my inanimate “mother” as the big upright primates torment me day in and day out.

Harlow enjoys himself too much, it strikes us as unprofessional. His intonation is too folksy, his vocabulary cuts too close to the bone in its refusal of jargon. If Wikipedia is to be believed, “Harlow was well known for refusing to use conventional terminology, and instead chose deliberately outrageous terms for the experimental apparatus he devised.” Wiki continues, “The tendency arose from an early conflict with the conventional psychological establishment in which Harlow used the term ‘love’ in place of the popular and archaically correct term, ‘attachment.’

Such terms and respective devices included a forced-mating device he called the ‘rape rack,’ tormenting surrogate mother devices he called ‘Iron maidens,’ and an isolation chamber he called the ‘pit of despair‘…” (Harlow also enjoyed spending time psychologically destroying monkeys through extreme deprivation experiments.)

Harlow’s choice of words for the set-up of one of his experiments — the “diabolical” robot with characteristics “designed to frighten a monkey” unleashed on the “peaceful, resting baby” — drips with perverse pleasure.

Harry Harlow, “Monkey Love Experiments” (1963)

Raised in isolation with no physical contact, the tenacity with which the infant monkeys hold onto the inanimate cloth and wire “mothers” — those cute, mocking plastic “faces” on them the only vaguely life-like trace — is heartbreaking. I love the moments in the videos where science is ruptured by the misbehaving little babies, when one runs away from the moms and back into the arms of the joyless female lab technician, for example, or where one of them insistently kisses its “mother” on her impassive plastic face.

These cruelly abstracted “mothers” have now become iconic of the particularly insidious way that science distorts its objects in the quest for knowledge.

- Jon Davies