for 19 May 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Casual Dos and Don'ts It wasn't until after reading (and enjoying) your Wall Street Fashion suck that I realized that there was not one female pictured in the whole thing. Whatever shall I do for my fashion needs when I become a mid-career millionaire? Eva <eva@empire.net> I think the basic idea is that no one knows the rules of office fashion for women. They're far too complicated and detailed to be delineated here. Or at least, that's our excuse for not figuring them out. If anyone's got any Female Office Fashion Rules they'd like to fill us in on, that would be swell. But remember, the beauty of becoming a mid-career millionaire is, you can pay someone else to dress you. And feed you. And wipe your bottom. Clad in synthetic girly suits from the Junior's section in Macy's, Sucksters  Hit & Run Sucksters & Sisters, The Brother Rule used to make me pretty uncomfortable. I just couldn't understand where it was coming from. Hollywood is supposed to be part of the leftist media machine, so why are they always killing off the brothers? Surely, its a very complicated phenomenon, but I think I found part of an answer when I took a script-writing course last year at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay. I was also reading HEART OF DARKNESS in a lit class, and the juxtaposition was pretty jarring. In drama, there's something like an arithmetic of personalities. In a traditional storyline, there may be a bunch of characters, but they are all reflections or comments on the 2 central characters; Hamlet & Claudius, Arthur & Guenivere, Beowulf & Grendel, etc. You start out with a whole mess of characters, but over the course of the story, they all get subtracted in a way that reflects on the central pair. Now, many people in the movie business don't tend to think too hard about this - they just match up the tropes, wind up the crank, and let it run. The movie business is Anglocentric - that really isn't anyone's fault. For a long time, they were just the guys who made movies. Action movies are based on tragedies, and so the secondary characters get subtracted in tragic ways. The Black Man in the American psyche is a tragic figure. Ergo, the brother always dies, often because of his loyalty to the White Guy. Also, the leftist psyche would really just like to see the 'problem' of black men in America just go away, like in Forrest Gump. Of course, I agree that The Matrix played a great trump on this tradition - it was a strangely untraditional movie. But what about that movie with Jamie Lee Curtis & The Other Baldwin, where they get chased around the Russian ship by an alien cyborg? The brother was really the hero, and he was the last one to go. Also, he freaked out because he KNEW he was the brother in this tragedy and he had to die. Isn't that trumping the Brother Rule, too, in a way? That's how I felt about it anyway. Thanks for your time, Colin Rankine <crankine@sensenet.com> The contemporary action movie owes a lot more to romances like A Winter's Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre than it does to tragedies. There was a time, mostly in the seventies, when you could pretty much depend on movies to kill off their heroes, or have them come to other sorts of bad ends. But that was long before the development of the summer event picture in its current form. In any event, the action adventure genre is sufficiently developed that we draw comparisons with older dramatic forms at our own risk. But the best-ever variation of the Brother Rule came in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, filmed at a time when the Brother Rule was a relatively new phenomenon in movies. You'll recall that in that movie, the black guy, the only competent and sensible character, outlives all the whiteys and even survives the film's main action, only to be killed in a bitterly ironic denouement. That countless succeeding movies used the Brother Rule in less creative ways merely cements George Romero's status, then and now, as a filmmaker ahead of his time. Sucksters Who lost Suck? Hi, The placement in Hit&Run was incredible, I could barely believe what I was reading. I wish I were 11 like you "suspected" though, and not turning an oldish 20 in 2 weeks... By the way, I read about Terra's plans to buy Lycos. A strange time for Lycos to sell out in exchange for potentially volatile stock, even if Suck.com is part of the deal (Suck is mentioned as part of Lycos around line 200 of a press release). http://suck.hotwired. lycos.terra.com sounds...ok, but it makes Suck's true ownership even more of a mystery wrapped inside a crunchy shell of an enigma with a candy coat of an "undisclosed round of funding" than it already is... Hail Funding! Hail Content! Hail Suck! Thanks again, Humberto <humberto@puck.nether.net> Sadly, the domain name aspiran.com is not available.But we're not worrying too much about the new ownership situation, as we are already completely unfamiliar with the current one. Sucksters Subject: habla espanol? and how DO you translate "suck" into spanish? this won't affect the Suck site..I honestly love your writing, especially when I'm off of my lithium... John Gibbon, Jr. Certified Personal Trainer Cutting Edge Fitness <jgibbjr@flash.net> Thanks for your support, John. When we get orders to move the whole operation to Bilbao, where cutting edge web commentary is as rare as cutting edge personal trainers, you'll be the first to know. Sucksters Hit & Run Please tell me you were joking about Sierra Leone being home of the Spaghetti Western. The sub-genre was called that because they were directed, for the most part, by Sergio Leone, who was Italian. Most were filmed in Spain. http://film.tierranet.com/ directors/s.leone/ sergioleone.html Jason Wood Associate Editor, Offshore <woodj@offshoremag.net> Thanks for writing, Mr. Wood. For future reference, literal-mindedness is probably not the best approach when reading Suck or other high-quality satirical publications. We are great fans of Sierra Leone's westerns, along with the surrealist masterworks of Luis Benin and the sumptuous costume epics of Franco Zimbabwe. Sucksters Hit and Run rules, and so does Humberto Moreira. He really hit on the whole self-referential nature of Filler as if he were Polly's siamese twin surgically separated at birth. A true delight with every mouthful, even if I got a headache squinting at the dialogue balloons. Plus, I always enjoy the geopolitical ramblings in Hit and Run. It's good to finger the ratfinks like DeBeers whenever possible, and none of the big news sources will really go that far (indeed it is good that they don't). Yr pal Cameron <cameron@slip.net> To paraphrase Malcolm X: All praise is due to Moreira; only the mistakes are mine. Humberto's own page designs had excellent layout and readable lettering. The only way to demonstrate with objectivity his considerable pagemaking skills was to scan his letter and size it for a web browser, with the inevitable but regrettable result that the balloon-based dialogue was rendered inelegant, though not entirely illegible. As for DeBeers, well, it's like Harry Lime's cuckoo clock speech. The South African cartel may fund brutal regimes throughout Africa, cheat the Russians out of key mineral resources, and bankrupt American dipshits with their three month's salary "tradition" (a primeval marriage ritual that dates back to about 1993). But think about it: Would a world without the DeBeers Gold Bra really be worth living in? Sucksters Jeez, that interview with 1/3 of those black chicks was so softball she should have been wearing an "H & R Plumbing" jersey. Who asked for that? Who allowed that? I didn't even bother with the rest of Filler, and thanks, but my attention span is doing just fine. Chris <chris.mccall@nbc.com> Chris, we seem to recall your informing us — some time ago and, if memory serves, on more than one occasion — that you have stopped reading Suck. We're disappointed that you have not made good on your promise. That having been said, you're right: We didn't subject Kamal to the grueling line of inquiry that the co-founder of 3 Black Chicks...Review Flicks clearly deserved. For example, we really should have pressed her harder on this matter of temporarily having only two chicks at a site that clearly advertised itself as being by three chicks — a high-level deception in which the real losers were the American people. Sucksters |
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