Legolas!!!

I have been a huge fan of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings since I was a little kid. In many ways I had a crush on all of the Fellowship (well, except Boromir) as well as Eomer and Eowyn. However, my crush on most of them was pretty platonic - I simply would have loved to have hung out with them, gone adventuring with them. (One of the biggest problems with LOTR is its lack of kickass female characters, although Eowyn is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. I also have to admit that I didn't fully understand her until I was 19 and went through my first serious case of heartbreak. And really, what was Aragorn thinking?) But when it comes to fantasy crushes, I must admit that I have always been rather obsessed with elves. And not the type of elves that hang out with Santa (those are more like Tolkien's dwarves), but the tall, androgynous, other-wordly beings of Middle Earth. (There are certainly other fantasy writers who have depicted elves in a similar fashion, but none with the beauty and elegance of Tolkien's. After all, in the Tolkien mythos, elves were the first of Eru's (er, "god's") flesh and blood creations. I'd had quite a dreamy crush on Legolas, as the elven representative in the Fellowship, and when I first heard that Peter Jackson was going to film the LOTR trilogy, my first thought was a worry that Legolas would be presented in a way that would simply kill my longterm crush. Luckily for me, Jackson's choice was perfect:

And speaking of hotties with bows and arrows, I know I mentioned a while back that I quite enjoyed Season One of the BBC's latest incarnation of Robin Hood, and am avidly awaiting Season Two. Anyway, I have crushed on Robin Hood pretty much all of my life, although I must say that the choice of Jonas Armstrong was most excellent.

And, of course, this is my original crush right here.

Now, something I should probably mention... I've also had a bit of a thing for The Bad Guy over the years. When I was a kid, watching Star Wars for the first time, I totally thought that Leia should get with Darth Vader and turn him from the Dark Side. That was, of course, before I saw Return of the Jedi and learned that Vader was her father. Whoops. Believe me, that fantasy went away right then and there.

Since I frequently imagined myself as a tenth member of the Fellowship when I read LOTR, I also managed to create a Sauron-converting fantasy. It wasn't a particularly long-lasting fantasy though.

Now I wouldn't really call this a fantasy, but the dude is hot and his character - despite being an evil bastard - actually has depth and I found myself feeling rather a bit sorry for him. I can totally understand fantasizing about changing him... although luckily for me, I've grown out of that phase. Dating one "bad guy" in real life was enough for me.

I still think he's pretty damn attractive though!

Then there's Gaius Baltar of Battlestar Galactica. I don't hate him, per say, but I strongly dislike and wholeheartedly despise the self-serving little shit.

Frack you, Gaius.

Mary Jane (she's mah main thang)

Welll howdy doody gals and gents,

I think I'm just gonna make it a short one today considering I have already blown my perverbial wad in the comments section, but I cannot believe that no one has yet mentioned Mary Jane!!!

Although I was not as much into comics as a lot of you might have been, I was quite a spiderman junkie back in the day, and I can remember a number of VERY anatomicaly correct drawings of mary jane in her seemingly endless collection of revealing nighties that led me to my first ever character crush. She was HOT!

And whats more, she was smart, strong, and was married to spiderman. How cool is that? (Its pretty damn cool).

As far as Fictional characters that I despised, (and this is taking it waaaaaaay back) I'd say I really hated Cruella Deville. A puppy skin coat?!? COME ON!!!

That bitch was crazy.

And lets see.... man crushes... Well, I can't say that this really qualifies as a "crush" persay, but I thought Goliath from Gargoyles was pretty awesome. Intelligent, stoic, able to fly, a veritable master of whoopass, and capable of turning to stone in order to foil his enemies... pretty much exactly how I saw myself in the future. And I'm pleased to say, I'm not that far off.

Have a good week. Talk to yas next time.

MagDef

My First Movie Husband

In the wild hope that he will once again don his karate uniform, wax my car and croon Chicago's "You're The Inspiration" to me every night, I have carried a torch for Ralph Macchio since I was five years old.

It must have been that endearing, squeaky-wheel of a voice, but there was something very hot about that kid in 1986. I remember telling my parents that I would marry him. Oh, how they laughed. But they never realized the full extent of my love. And I would still have him, even without his preadolescent good looks, the bonzai tree and the crane kick that would have cost him in a real martial arts tournament. In twenty years my love has never wavered.

Well, that is not exactly true.

A few years after I swore fidelity to Daniel LaRusso, in swaggered Han Solo. I always did find him more appealing than Luke Skywalker, which was strange, considering the similarities between Vader's son (oops, I didn't give it away, did I?) and Mr. Miyagi's own dark apprentice. But who would a deny a guy with a sweet ride like the Millennium Falcon?

As you could probably imagine, my feelings for both the Karate Kid and Mr. Princess Leia left me quite conflicted as a child. What if they confronted me and demanded a decision? Would they have a duel, and if so, did Daniel-san know how to fire a laser gun? I imagine the recoil would bruise him a bit.

And most important, who would make prettier babies?

Now, as an adult, I still don't know who I would choose. No, actually, I would probably take Han Solo, who has remained foxy in his silver years and stuck with Leia throughout their trilogy. In comparison, Daniel-san got pudgy, went through three chicks and didn't even score with Jessica Andrews in the end. (Dude. She left him for Ohio.)

However, this realization is not without its own debate: Han Solo or Indiana Jones? Lord. I'm fairly certain this new dilemma will secure my future as an old maid.

Yes, Uhura. Everybody could probably guess that one.

I don't really know if I can say a whole lot about this topic and have it stay interesting. Obviously, I'm a big fat Star Trek fan. Maybe you don't know that about me, but it's true. So ever since I was a kid I have had a crush on Uhura. When I was 9 and Star Trek 5 came out, she had this scene in which she did a fan dance while supposedly naked. I really thought that was totally hot, even though in retrospect Nichelle Nichols was probably like 60 or something. Plus those Original Series miniskirts? Yowza!


[She can open my hailing frequencies anytime]

Anyway, that's boring for everybody. I have a few poet crushes. For instance, Jane Hirshfield is a big poet crush of mine. Mostly it has to do with how much I love her work, but she's pretty cute for a 54 year old hippie. If I wasn't lazy, I would link a picture. But you guys can do a google search probably. (Ok, I'm not that lazy. I did this on an edit).


[Kind of cute, right?]

And she's probably my favorite living poet. I just got done reading Sarah Fox's book "Because Why," and it was pretty terrific, and she also looks cute. So maybe if her second book comes out and is great then I will develop a full blown poet-crush on her, too. Well, I just looked up Sarah Fox to find a picture to link, and it turns out she's not really that cute in any picture other than her book photo.


[Cute book photo]

Poets are really fickle about their book photos. Carolyn Forche, who is a great poet, is using a twenty-five year old photo for her jackets. Ridiculous. Also, once in poetry workshop class with another older poet I mentioned that Louise Gluck looks pretty hot for a woman her age, and the professor got all indignant and said "That's called airbrushing, hon." Oh, I have a crush on Sylvia Plath, but she's dead. Oh, if we could have been a pair! I'd like to think that I wouldn't have driven her to put her head in an oven like ole Teddy, but then if she had been happy she wouldn't have written all those great angry poems. So it's good that Ted Hughes drove her into being a suicidal wreck. Nobody's favorite book by her is The Colossus, after all.

I've already mentioned my comic book habit on this blog, but reading comics during the Rob Liefeld heyday of the 1990s I was exposed to images of many women with meter long breasts. (I'm really not joking. That guy can't draw at all, but we all though he was great for some stupid reason.) Anyway, comics were in bad shape in the 1990s, so I guess I didn't really get a specific crush on any particular comic book woman. They were all written in pretty much the same way, and the drawings were virtually indistinguishable. Although I really liked Domino, because she carried cool guns. The mind of a 13 year old is pretty shallow.

Anyway, as far as real people that I have baseless love and hate for (poets are actually fictional characters), I guess I really hate Jack White. Well, I know everybody probably hates me now, which is fine, but I determined I hated Jack White long before I'd even heard a White Stripes album. Everybody kept talking about what a genius he was, and every time I heard him interviewed he seemed like a gigantic douchebag. And so I decided I wouldn't like any White Stripes album I would ever hear. Which worked out ok, since the only album I've ever heard by them, Elephant, really did suck. Also, the White Stripes segment in Coffee and Cigarettes was fucking terrible.

Man crushes? I guess Captain Kirk. Maybe Clive Owen. Oh, man, what if they got Clive Owen to play Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek movie? That would probably blow my wad. I mean mind! I meant mind, not wad!

My Rage Keeps Me Alive

I can't say that I share everyone's Ben Affleck obsession. At all. He comes off as some kind of doofus and his buddy Matt Damon (say that like in Team America, please) just looks like a little boy...still. However, Johnnny Depp was a crush of mine growing up and now he's the crush of a new generation of girls. On the one hand, that's really kind of cool. On the other (unwashed, malodorous) hand, it's kind of wrong.

But the topic this week is love/hatred for FICTIONAL characters. I think all of us have had assigned reading in high school and uni -- probably way too much of it -- and I have always turned a bad read into a hate fest, so I thought I'd share a few examples:

1) What the fuck is up with Charles fucking Dickens? What an asshole! I have only read one of his novels (one was more than enough), but the characterization was so lame as to make it unreadable. I speak, of course, of the worst of books: A Tale of Two Cities. I hate every character in that damn thing, except that guy who died at the end. If that's what Chuck was going for, then maybe he really was a genius.

2) Musicals ruin everything. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy the MUSIC of "Les Mis," but I also really hate the fact that suddenly, when it's sung to catchy tunes and involves jazz hands, that excellent book becomes a love story. Les Misérables is about hating Cosette and Marius, not about cheering them on! Hello! You're supposed to sympathize with Javert, marvel at Valjean, and get the hots for Enjolras. In other words, you're supposed to be just like me. Curiosity started me on that book, and my hatred for Cosette and that wussy boyfriend of hers kept me going through 1300 pages.

3) Death in Venice. It should just be called Death, because, if there is a hell (let's assume I am going to it), it probably feels like reading that novella. This isn't hatred, really. It's mind-numbing apathy. That stupid book was assigned to me three times, in three different courses, at the same university. And I never finished it. Because I just didn't care.

As for LOVE, I have to confess to this as well. I'm not the angry person I seem to be.

1) Darcy. That is all.

2) Special Agent Pendergast. If you like scifi (I don't), the supernatural (we know all the original SuperGroupers do!), and "thrillers," the novels of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are for you. Pendergast is American aristocracy from New Orleans in the form of a consummate weirdo: genteel, mysterious, practically asexual, ridiculously talented at everything. He's the world's geekiest superhero. And I think I love him.

3) Will Ladislaw. Oh my goodness. Politically engaged, artistically gifted, prone to yelling...he's some kind of 1970's cult leader god, but from the nineteenth century. You should really read Middlemarch.

4) Dalgliesh. Ok, so he's like in his 60s now, but when PD James first started on her long career as a crime writer, more than 40 years ago, he was just a youngster. The poet policeman: tragically widowed, emotionally unavailable, and not at all your stereotypical, vice-addled, asshole fictional British detective. (Incidentally, good old PD wrote the novel Children of Men, made into the movie starring dreamy Clive Owens.)

And...I'll leave it there. Girl crush? Becky Sharp.

hatred/crushes

I have to comment on something nick said... about falling for a character rather than the actor (or 'tress). i experienced a similar thing in high school drama. yes, it was a long time ago, but hear me out.
the play was "bye-bye birdie" and the character was albert peterson, the english teacher wannabe. i was about 14 and the guy who played albert (his name is raul) was "so great". the thing is, the albert role rubbed off into real life just enough that i almost transferred the crush to raul himself, even though his real personality was not what i was into. then i noticed that whatever theater role i was playing would rub off into my life - which was kind of fun when i was "wench #2" (once upon a mattress), but not so hot when i was marian the librarian (the music man). it defiinitely made a differnce in who i dated during each play. so i don't think i'm the only one who fell for a character back then.

as far as celebrities are concerned:
i can't stand affleck (sorry). there's this song on the team america soundtrack with a few lines that say: "i need you like ben affleck needs acting school; he was terrible in that film. i need you like cuba gooding needed a bigger part; he's way better than ben affleck."
i love team america. i guess one could say that i have a puppet-crush on chris. that foul mouth just does something for me... shoot, if i was single i'd probably go for trey parker - hilarious, decent looking, and he cracks a lot of great mormon jokes (for the record, i am officially a mormon myself. don't tell anybody).
i'll admit to woman-crushes on, oh say jennifer garner (which goes great with my not being able to stand her husband... i hope they break up). i might be "into" gwen stefani too - i'm still deciding. the pink hair was a low point, but she seems to have gotten past that.
i really have a problem with michelle pfeiffer. i have no idea why. shoot, i don't know why people have these weird love/hate things. my best guess has something to do with an experience i had back in the day. so, in high school (yeah, i get a lot of stories from there) there was a girl who i could not stand. i really hated her. now, i was not the type to get in trouble - i was an honor student, national honor society blah blah blah, and we got in a fight in the hallway once - i got clawed and she got punched, but it broke up pretty fast. so then i found out that the soccer team opposing her soccer team needed more players, and that it was the kind of soccer where no blood = no foul. so i had some fun slamming her into walls and such until the coach said i had to stop or i couldn't play any more... but i digress. the point is, she was a total bitch and drove me up the wall. so, years later, in a differnt country, i meet a co-worker who could pass as her twin. i am not kidding. the co-worker was nice enough, but i found it literally impossible to like her. i had a pretty hard time just being civil, just because of what she looked like (and no, i am not racist or anything like that - this was a single incident).
so maybe us non-famous types latch on to the famous types because we like their looks, or because we want to be like them (maybe just be them). seemingly that would make all self-esteem issues just dissappear - "man, if i were as cool as so-and-so, i'd have it made..."

So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

I can't say I've ever truly hated someone based solely on their body of work. I mean, I could name celebrities that I disdain (it might be easier for me to name those that I don't). Tom Cruise comes immediately to mind; but that's not based on his films per se, of which, arguably, there have been one or two decent ones (the only one I would count as such is Magnolia, and if anyone has seen his character in that movie, there's a reason probably why that one is good). John Travolta also comes to mind, but mostly for being an idiot, besides doing crappy movies. But Pauly Shore comes to mind (don't ask me why) as having done really bad movies that I have just absolutely hated, but he seems like a decent enough guy. Brendan Frasier is someone whose name used to make me recoil, but I'd probably argue he redeemed himself with Gods and Monsters (and, especially, with The Quiet American). But I can't say I really dislike people that I don't know based on their entertainment work alone. Usually the celebrities that I dislike, like a Paris Hilton or whatever, I dislike because of their "real-life" persona.

That mindset seems to extend somewhat into having crushes on actresses. I mean, sure, when I'm watching a movie, I might fall for the character in the movie, like Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Ann in My Life Without Me, or Charlotte in Lost In Translation, or, on TV, Donna on The West Wing or Juliet on Lost, but that ends when the credits roll, or shortly thereafter. Because why would I have a crush on Kate Winslet or Sarah Polley or Scarlet Johannsen in "real life?" That's just attributable to the storytelling of the movie or the actresses portraying a roll. But I will admit to having very much "fallen" for those aforementioned characters as I was watching the movie or TV show, which could tell you something about me I guess. The closest I've come is having a very slight infatuation with the actress/singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, though that's more attributable to her music appealing to me so much, rather than her looks (she's not very physically attractive). Oh, I remember when I was little- does anyone remember that Nickolodeon show Salute Your Shorts? When I was young, I had a pretty big crush on the hippie girl on that show (I will be heading over to Wikipedia to look that up!).

I'd like to introduce a sort of sub-topic here: the man-crush. I know all of the males who post here are secure enough in their heterosexuality to admit to having had or still harboring man-crushes. I'll admit my biggest is probably John Cusack. I'll watch anything he's in- and he mostly picks good movies, I'd argue. I've also always for some reason been drawn to Ben Affleck- though he, in contrast to Cuscak, usually seems to pick shit movies to act in. Or, for the females, maybe there are some woman-crushes here? I think that might be more commonplace among women, at least for them to admit it. I think any Star Trek fan probably has or had a man-crush on Captain Kirk (or, for those Next Gen fans, Picard). That seemed to have been the whole thing beneath the surface of the movie Free Enterprise, if anyone here besides Glenn has ever seen that.

Also, has anyone ever fallen for a character in a book? Or a cartoon character? (Jessica Rabbit, anyone?) That'd be interesting to me; I mostly read non-fiction, but I would wonder if someone has read a book and fallen for a character in the book; it'd be interesting to know why, and how someone constructs a character in their mind based solely on reading words on paper-- I'm sure I have, but I'd have to think about that one a bit.

Fictional Love and Unconditional Hate

This week's topic is inspired not only by a conversation we've had in the comments of this very blog, but also by a conversation I had earlier this week. (Or maybe last week - the days are blurring together). It's fictional love and hate, or to expand the topic somewhat, inexplicable love or hate for someone you don't know and have never met. Need examples?

Well as far as hate for someone I've never known or met, mine is Jaime Pressly. Some of you may argue that you hate Ann Coulter even though you don't know her, and have never met her, but you DO know some of her values (or claimed values), and can justly despise her for them. I know nothing about Jaime Pressly, but have had this weird hatred of her for awhile. It's only remedy has been My Name is Earl - she is perfect in the role of a white-trash bitch, and its hilarious.

Another example would be that my former roommate Lindsey refused to watch The Cell because J-Lo was in it. (Hopefully she's changed her mind and watched it, as it's a fantastic movie)

The flip side of this is being in love with or having a crush on someone you've never met, though specifically what comes to mind are fictional characters. I was having a conversation with some of my fellow costars (Midsummer Night's Dream) about the Harry Potter movies and series, when I said that I had a crush on the Weasley twins - and Lupin. Danielle pipes up, "Me too! But only Fred, not George, though I have no idea why." This later led to a conversation about other fictional characters we had crushes on at some point in time. I said something about Darien from Sailor Moon. (But there's also Gambit from Xmen and Trent from Daria). The conversation then moved to anthropomorphic characters. I brought up Disney's Robin Hood, and I think every girl agreed that he was a "fox" (ha ha).

Danielle then mentioned a guy friend of hers had said something about having a crush on the girl dog from Balto, but she was grossed about because it was a dog - not even really anthropomorphic - all that was different was she could talk - still walked on four legs, didn't wear clothes. Maybe it's just one step away from beastiality.

There are other fictional characters I've fallen in love with - which may say something as to why I am single (other than the fact that I am choosy, and possibly elitist) - but to keep this brief, and to keep from making myself seem like an even bigger freak, I'll just leave it to the list I've already named.

So that's the topic, do with it what you will, and forgive me if it's not something you want to write about. (Note: I said something you want to write about - you're a liar if you say you haven't done either of these things)