You aren't supposed to think, you're supposed to follow protocol!

So said King Compton to his [grudging] subject Pam in S4E4 I'm Alive and On Fire
This quote speaks well to a major theme I detected in that episode: hierarchical, authoritarian power & control

IN THE FAMILY

Joe Lee has a choke hold on Tommy and Melinda Mickens 

IN THE COMMUNITY

Crystal: "I'm big mama kitty now, finally. Everyone gonna do what I say"

AND IN THE NATION

the newly crowned vampire king of Louisiana

How is such autocratic rule achieved? How is it maintained? Is it legitimate? Effective? Do we have any alternatives? How can we throw it off?

If we are to organize ourselves and act to get out from under oppressive rule, we've got to be able to determine who's really in charge.

For example, Bill looks rather more presidential than kingly here, no?

In countries where there are both royalty and systems of representative government, the royals are generally seen more as figure heads than politicians; that label being reserved for those in elected office. Interestingly, Bill is being portrayed as the later. 

And he certainly seems to be more involved with matters of state than the two other vampire monarchs we have met thus far on True Blood,  Russell & Sophie-Ann, ever were. Yet, it seems someone else is really in charge.

Now, we all know that at least in this country, there is [supposed to be] balance of power. The executive branch of government is not omnipotent; the president must answer to the congress, etc.

On the surface, at least, this appears not be the case in the vampire nation.

So far this season, King Bill's power seems rather absolute and iron-fisted. Pam's telling him she wouldn't risk lying about Eric's whereabouts because word of Bill's ruthlessness as king has travelled far and wide is seemingly evidence of that. And then there's his condemning the vampire caught on YouTube feeding on a human to the true death without benefit of a trial (I want to take this case to the Authority!" Bill: "I am the Authority, you idiot !"). S4E3 If you Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'

But in this week's episode, we found out that things aren't so simple.

With Bill cast as somewhat of Nan's puppet - his distaste for power wielded unilaterally & unjustly made clear by his sarcasm when she inquird about the execution - could this be a critique of the U.S. system of government? Is True Blood suggesting that our elected officials from the school board to the Commander-In-Chief aren't really holding the reigns, the [fill in the blank - multinational corporations, shadowy interest groups, others in government, etc.] are?

Hhmmm...

Thoughts? Please share below.

~ Rachel

It's Still the Month of Love...For All!

All over town today I saw St. Patrick's Day flags flying; it's an encouraging sign of spring but it's too soon...don't get me wrong, I want to see the patches of snow here and there along with their larger, more imposing dirty pile counterparts dotting the neighborhood melt away as much as the next girl, but...it's still the month of love!

I can't bring myself to put out the greens until the first day of March, and while that's right around the corner, let's stay in the present -  like it or not, February is for Valentines.

Valentine's Day

I know that V-day (pun intended!!!) has both supporters and detractors, but it can't be denied that the month of cupid, chocolate and flowers kicks our culture into overdrive for the ideal of romantic love; an ideal that is usually represented in a manner consistent with heteronormativity.

That's where GLAAD comes in...

You may know that True Blood has been nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in the category of Outstanding Drama Series. YAY TB!

Put on by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) (a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote understanding, increase acceptance and advance equality by amplifying the voice of the LGBT community, empowering real people to share their stories, holding the media accountable for the words and images they present, and helping grassroots organizations communicate effectively) the GLAAD Media Awards are  - according to the organization - the largest, most visible LGBT gala in the nation. And this year, GLAAD is celebrating it's 25th Anniversary with awards shows held in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco bringing 5,000 attendees, corporate partners and celebrities together to recognize outstanding representations of the LGBT community in the media and GLAAD's vital work to achieve full equality.

While I was checking out GLAAD's website for information on the New York awards show (who knows, the PPT may have to make an appearance on the scene ;-) I discovered a timely piece on Valentine's Day; it's a resource kit for crafting V-Day coverage that integrates LGBT couples' romantic celebrations. While aimed at the media, I think it's such a great resource for everyone - a real awareness and sensitivity raiser - that I've pasted some of it below; click here for the whole thing, plus links to local and national organizations and resources for marriage, marriage equality, civil unions, and commitment ceremonies:

Valentine's Day Media Resource Kit
BACKGROUND

Valentine's Day receives a great deal of media attention. Print and electronic press outlets nationwide share stories of couples proclaiming their love and commitment for one another. However, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) couples are often excluded from Valentine's Day media coverage—and LGBT couples of color receive even less attention in both mainstream and people of color media. GLAAD hopes that the following resources will help you produce Valentine's Day stories that reflect the true diversity of our society by including LGBT couples in the coverage of this romantic holiday.

LANGUAGE

LGBT people and relationships are often excluded by the kinds of language media professionals choose to use. Consider the language used to describe couples in general: Does it assume that all couples are heterosexual? Does it allow for non-traditional families? Does it subtly endorse opposite-sex relationships while marginalizing same-sex commitments? GLAAD encourages media to use words and descriptions that can be universally applied to all couples – gay and straight – and that respect the significance of their commitments.

LGBT people use a variety of terms to describe their relationships and significant others, including: partner, spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, lover, husband/wife, companion, same gender loving couples (for couples from communities of African descent), marriage, partnership and family, among others. We encourage you to ask people which term they would like you to use. Also, please do not put quotation marks around the description, as this implies the described relationship is somehow illegitimate.

GLAAD'S Media Reference Guide contains a comprehensive glossary of LGBT-related terminology.

NEWSPAPERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY RECOGNIZE SAME-SEX UNIONS

A growing number of newspapers are committed to reporting on weddings, civil unions and commitment ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples. In 2008, six years after persuading The New York Times to open its Weddings/Celebrations pages to same-sex couples and launching its Announcing Equality campaign, GLAAD now reports that 1,049 newspapers – nearly 72 percent of all daily newspapers in the United States – now accept wedding and/or commitment ceremony announcements for gay and lesbian couples. In late 2002, only 70 newspapers said they would print such announcements.

DIVERSITY

In reporting on LGBT couples, please also remember that they are as diverse as the rest of society, crossing lines of gender, race, age, income, class, family structure, religion, geography and political affiliation. We encourage you to reflect this diversity in your coverage.

STORY POSSIBILITIES

Please consider integrating LGBT couples into your Valentine's Day feature story. You might cover topics such as:

- Couples looking back at how they met

- Valentine's Day weddings and anniversaries

- Dating trends (meeting online, dating services, blind dates, etc.)

- Anniversaries of marriage equality legislation: Massachusetts (2004), Connecticut (2008), Iowa (2009), Vermont (2009), Washington, D.C. (2009) and New Hampshire (2009)

- Valentine's Day events for singles

- Long-distance relationships

- Surprise marriage proposals on Valentine's Day

- Retired couples re-igniting romance

- Planning a Valentine's Day getaway

- Couples' favorite poems, songs, vacation spots, etc.

- Choosing the perfect Valentine's Day gift

- High school sweethearts

- Celebrity couples and break-ups

- Wedding-day successes and disasters

- Balancing romance and family obligations

- Workplace romances

- Bi-national couples’ stories

- Making Valentine’s Day dinner reservations – especially at the last minute

-Finding a babysitter on Valentine’s Day

Also:

- Include romantic lesbian/gay-owned restaurants in your area in your list of Valentines Day dating recommendations.

- Include lesbian/gay-themed comedies or dramas in your list of all-time most romantic movies.

- List relationship development books for same-sex couples in features about keeping romance alive.

- Talk to local jewelry stores, wedding planners, bakeries, florists and other companies that offer services and products for same-sex couples' commitment ceremonies.

- Talk to pastors who conduct same-sex ceremonies at inclusive churches, particularly in communities of color.

So I'm thinkin', in our current media and cultural climate, how might True Blood couples like...



Lafayette and Jesus

Russell and Talbot

Sophie-Ann and Hadley

...negotiate the joys and pitfalls of Valentine's Day? Would there be venues for their tales of couplehood to be heard, validated, celebrated?

I make no judgement on these relationship in the sense that I'm neither lifting them up as model unions nor denouncing them for their flaws; these are not perfect relationships (if there were such a thing) but I have singled these couples out for a reason.

Sure, hooking up is fun and who am I to say that recreational sex is bad (I wouldn't say that, but that's neither here nor there) whether you're gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, queer, or...Pamsexual (OK, OK, a silly play on words - I mean pansexual which is the way Kristin Bauer van Straten describes her character Pam). But for the purposes of this post, hook-ups aren't what I'm talking about... 



Pam and Yvetta

Nor am I referring to vampire blood-induced homoerotic dream sequences played out for comic impact:



Bill and Sam...saved by the cell!

 The reason I chose to highlight Russell & Talbot, Sophie-Ann & Hadley and Lafayette & Jesus is that despite the problems of representation that we see in some homosexual couples and couplings (i.e. the camera cuts away from love scenes with Lafayette & Jesus just before, as Nelsan likes to say, they "do the do" yet the camera stays fixed as Eric, posing as a gay man, graphically "seduces" and stakes Talbot, etc.), in each of these couples, Alan Ball and the writers have allowed us to see moments of true caring and connection and moments of tenderness - physical and otherwise. Evil as he is, Russell's pain and grief at Talbot's death is palpable. As it turns out, Hadley really is the closest person to Sophie-Ann, human, vampire, or otherwise. Lafayette may just be willing to get out of the player game for Jesus.

We don't often see complex and nuanced homosexual relationships on TV, but that's changing. Back in October fellow TB blogger sunnynala posted on True Blood Underground, True Blood found to be the most inclusive television program of LGBT characters. That piece also draws from GLAAD - as mine does - and gives good stats on LGBT characters on broadcast and cable TV plus a good discussion in the comments section  on the topic.  

Even Sookie and Bill - who at the end of S2, were it not for the no-good-rapscallion-V-head weres kidnapping the groom-to-be would have been celebrating a very special engagement, since human-vampire marriage does not yet enjoy universal marriage equality in the world of True Blood - bring issues of injustice that are relevant to the LGBT community to the fore...



.reinforcing for me that, as Alan Ball says, while the vampires are not stand-ins for the LGBT community per se; the show is conveying a broader message more like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Injustice anywhere (and to anyone) is a threat to justice everywhere (and to everyone)". [parenthetical phrases are mine, but I think are in MLK's spirit].

On that note, nighty-night all!

~ Rachel

WHO IS SHE WHO MUNCHES THE DEAD?

O nether and nocturnal, and infernal
Goddess of the dark, grimly, silently
Munching the dead,
Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity
Hard to escape are you...you're Moira and
Erinys, torment, Justice and Destroyer,
And you keep Kerberos in chains, with scales
Of serpents are you dark, O you with hair
Of serpents, serpent girded, who drink blood
Who bring death and destruction, and who feast
On hearts, flesh eater who devour the dead
Untimely, and you who make grief resound...

~ Papyri Graecae Magicae, a 2nd century C.E.
Hymn to Hekate

I found this darkly intriguing verse in a fascinating book titled, "Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess". Author Tim Ward opens his chapter on Hekate - a primal torch-bearing Goddess of transitions who, by the time of Classical Greece, had degenerated into a vessel for the terrible, destructive aspect of the feminine divine - with this hymn.

Not unlike the Goddess Kali in India, to the ancient Greeks Hekate was a drinker of blood, a muncher of the dead...she was, as Ward writes, The Rotting Goddess.



Kali




Hekate

For Tim Ward, writing his chapter on Hekate was part of his way of processing his admitted :"fear of the feminine" (pg. 149). Let's stay with this theme for a moment...

The images you see above of Kali and Hekate above are probably NOT the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Goddesses, right? The word "goddess" probably conjures mostly positive vibes; images  connected to life, love, maybe sex, fertility, the earth, children and childbirth, etc. Goddesses are lovers, mothers, virginal maidens with flowers in their hair...but reapers? Bringers of darkness and death? No...

But here's the thing - death is part of life. It's not the opposite of life - and our most distant ancestors in dimmest history knew that. We need Kali, Hecate, and other dark Goddesses to re-inject the reality of the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - we can't have everlasting youth and life without chopping down and composting the old and decaying back into this ever repeating cycle. But in our society we deny death. We are viscerally repelled by death and aging; we fight them kicking and screaming. We demonize the death aspect because we reject and fear it.

We've splintered the feminine principle into myriad diminished forms. Where once She embodied the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - she's now scattered, her aspects most terrifying to our modern sensibilities relegated to a remote, lower place where her sharp blades and tearing teeth can't touch us.

It wasn't always so, but this mindset has been deeply ingrained in our collective psyche for such a long time that it seems the dark Goddess, the horrific feminine, still skulks in the shadows to menace us because we are not fully ready to accept her particular kind magic as part of our world.

Only now her wardrobe is a bit more fabulous...



Lorena

 

Maryann

 



Sophie-Ann



Diane

Richard Rudgley, author of "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" wrote that Ward's deeply personal encounters with the goddesses' statues, frescos, temples and sacred sites he visited while researching "Savage Breast" remind us that "these artifacts are not sterile stones but the touchstones to a still living world of human experience".

Honestly, I am blown away by how a few of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood do the same; at least for me, they exhume and reanimate Hekate in our contemporary culture. Sure, they may not look like Hekate 1.0; the hideous hag or flesh-eating ghoul of the later Greek imagination - her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud (Ward, 2006) - but they certainly do resemble her in ways that run more than skin deep...

...if you're wondering how just take a look at the bolded words in the poem above for some hints!

I intentionally chose images representing some of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood at their very darkest, so to speak, because while there are other female vampires (Pam, Jessica) and assorted supes who have had their menacing moments (Debbie, Daphne)...
Lorena,

Maryann,

Diane,

          
and Sophie-Ann seem to really project the "fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, p. 152) that Hekate became the repository of millenia ago.

What psychological need do these ultimate bad girls fulfill for us today?

Tim Ward writes that he gets "a flicker of something vile" when he contemplates the image of the Rotting Goddess. "She viscerally repels me, yet draws me, as if she holds a secret for me inside her fetid mouth, a flicker of truth about men's revulsion towards feminine flesh" (p. 155). In this vein, he recalls when, in his 20's, during his his travels through Thailand and India he learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire. He was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth, and internal organs, or to...

..."visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit" (p. 155).

  
"Feel desire for that"? Ward writes; "Thus men learn what it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us" (p. 155).

Unlike the Hekate of Classical Greece our True Blood dark ladies are beautiful to be sure, but look at what they're reduced to - burned or boiled down to quite literally - in death. Violent death. Sophie-Ann hasn't met her end yet, but we'll see what fate has in store for her, possibly at the hands of Bill Compton. Of course, male vampires and weres have met similarly erupting, oozing and bloody deaths on TB. Still, there's something about the glee with which many watched the demise of two of these ladies in particular - Lorena and Maryann - that feels quite telling.

Did they - do they - play Hekate's role as death aspects of the Goddess for whom our culture collectively feels a fusion of need and fear?

For some insight, let's briefly consider a motif from a crucible of civilization of the the deepest past that might help us understand the strange push-and-pull the deathly and deadly feminine exerts upon us: Catal Huyuk.

Between 7500 and 5500 B.C.E. about seven thousand or so people lived together in an unprecedented massing of humans the world would not see again until the city-states of Mesopotamia 3,000 years later. Wall paintings and other art work have been unearthed at this site that open a window on the ritual life and belief systems of the people of Catal Huyuk; for instance:



vultures feeding on human corpse and head atop elaborate burial platforms

 Ward writes that vultures - carrion eaters that were well suited for the excarnation mode of burial they likely practiced at Catal Huyuk - seemed intimately connected with birth.


vultures, mother and child



Look at the peculiar symbolic pattern in the wall painting to the right that hints at the meaning of their rites - double rows of vultures face each other wingtip to wingtip; inside each diamond is the body of a woman, and inside the belly of the woman is the dark outline of a child.

In this art the people of Catal Huyuk expressed their belief not in a gruesome death cult, but in a cycle of regeneration in which the vulture would munch the bodies of the dead back into the circle of life, to be re-birthed by the mothers of the community.

Ward describes aspects of the shrines discovered at Catal Huyuk that some experts (I would add, experts looking at relics of a bygone worldview through the lens of today) find sinister and disturbing: molded breast-like shapes protruding from the walls. Some resemble anatomically correct breasts, others contain the skull of a vulture with the beak sticking out in place of the nipple, or the jaws of a jackal (another scavenger). 

Whereas Michael Rice, author of "The Power of the Bull" views these breast-shaped protrusions as evidence that, for the people of Catal Huyuk, "the Mother's breasts do not deliver life sustaining milk but are rather agents of death..." (Ward, 2006, p. 161) archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in these artifacts symbols of regeneration.

Lorena and Maryann are, in many ways, cast as what Ward calls the "cannibal mother". Lorena is Bill's maker/lover/mother and Maryann took in/seduced the much younger Sam; in the act of drinking his blood and giving him hers Lorena birthed Bill into his vampire life thereby ending his human one, and Maryann sought to sacrifice Sam to reap his heart for her God Who Comes.

Here's a striking excerpt from "Savage Breast"; Ward is imagining what it would have been like to enter the ancient world of Catal Huyuk within which people experienced death not in the abstract, but as viscera, exposed and eaten.

Picturing himself going down a ladder into a dark shrine with painted black vulture wings spanning the walls, he writes:

I search for the clay breast, take it in both my hands and out the vulture-beak nipple to my lips. As I suck I feel the beak in it tear at my tongue, the flesh inside my cheeks. White milk gushes into my mouth and my red blood flows back into the beak. No way to escape the longing I have for that breast. Though it wounds me I go to her as a child, my cannibal mother, bleeding into her and clinging to her. It's little comfort that she eats back the living when I'm the one that she's gnawing on. It's too real, this fusion of need and fear. (p. 162) 

Do parts of Ward's imagining evoke a "turning" for you?

Will we in the 21st century be able to embrace the cannibal mother; she who gives us life, nurtures us, and - at the time of our death - welcomes us back into the cocoon of her womb-tomb as the 2nd century Greeks did: Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity?

Lot's of questions, huh?

What do you think?

Don't be shy, please let us know!

Until next time...

~ Rachel