March 23rd, 2012Top Story You Are a Ball of White Light and Other Lies They Tell You in the Cult of Hypnobirthing By Tracie Egan Morrissey Hypnobirthing — in which hypnosis is used for pain management during childbirth — has been gaining popularity in recent years. Dedicated to my drug-free birth plan, I dragged my husband to an eight-hour comprehensive one-day class so he could learn how to hypnotize me, trusting that he would use these powers for good and not just to get more blow jobs out of me. Hypnobirthing is used as an alternative to other natural childbirth techniques such as the old standbys of Lamaze and the Bradley Method. In fact, last year hypnobirthing was incorporated into the services of many NHS hospitals in the U.K. Many women swear by it. I don't know if it was the hormones, or the peer pressure I felt after watching Ricki Lake's documentary The Business of Being Born, but for some reason I decided that I was going to get all hippie-ish, all-natural and drug-free for my birth. It was so out of character for me. I don't like anything "natural." I prefer concrete to grass, Lucite to wood, mascara to inner-beauty. If I'm "crunchy" it's because of Doritos, not granola. And "drug-free"? Please. One time I took two Vicodin because my new shoes had given me a blister. I hate any feeling that deviates even the slightest from complete comfort. Nevertheless, I signed up to deliver, drug-free, at a birthing center for which one of the requirements was to take a birthing technique class. As someone who wore Skidz in the '90s and jeans that were so low-cut that the fly was about half-an-inch long in the '00s, I've never been one to shy away from inane trends. So I signed up for hypnobirthing. How bad could it be? The class was held in a conference room of the hospital that was home to the birthing center. It was filled with about a dozen other couples, who were similarly college-educated thirthysomethings having their first kid. (I'm pretty certain, though, that my husband and I were the only ones who didn't bring our own BPA-free reusable water bottles.) But basically everyone there was willing to try this relatively new method that promised to help provide us with the Best. Birth. Ever. As I looked around the room at all these other happy pregnant women I realized that I wasn't nearly as optimistic as they were. What are they smiling about? Why are we speaking so casually about getting our pussies torn inside out? And that was part of my problem with hypnobirthing. I think you have to really believe in what you're doing in order for it to work. Because it takes an incredible amount of concentration. They give you and your partner this "script" that, when properly utilized, will take you out of your physical situation and into some la la land in your head. It involves a lot of breathing and mental scene-setting. You're expected to practice it everyday until you give birth to really get into the moment. It's basically like method acting. My husband's no Lee Strasberg and I'm no Marlon Brando. (Although I did kind of look like him in his later years by the end of my third trimester.) It was evident pretty early on in the class that we would fail. For example, my husband was required to say this, in a relaxing, soothing tone, multiple times during the script: Take a large, slow, deep abdominal breath and exhale it to your belly, to your uterus, to your baby, and out your rectum and your vagina. That's a fart and a queef. We weren't mature enough to not laugh every single time. The rest of the script was about setting up this relaxing place somewhere in the wilderness. I wasn't aware that there was such a thing. People in my class were all talking about walking out into a forest and feeling cool dirt between their toes and twigs snapping under their feet. Ugh! I'd rather give birth than go camping! Since the script dictated that we were supposed to submerge ourselves into a warm pool of water via a staircase that we find in this weird netherworld we'd happened upon in our brains, I decided to make my happy place a giant marble room with a tub. Sort of like Teresa Giudice's bathroom, but all white instead of onyx.The script goes on: Now begin to project way out into the universe, a big ball of crimson red light. As you look at the light, it comes closer and closer until it fades away, leaving you looking once again into your third eye. …violet light… …emerald green light… …orange light… …yellow light… Now you project way out into the universe, a big ball of blue light. This ball is different from the others. As it comes close to you, it bursts into a magnificent, warm, healing white light, much like the healing soothing rays of the sun. The white light begins to surround you, envelop you and soothe you even more. You feel caressed by it. All of this talk about the universe kept making me thing of Scientology and FLDS celestial marriages and Heaven's Gate and then about cults in general. I thought about Jim Jones and Kool-Aid and how I could really go for a glass of Kool-Aid and then I was like, Oh my God, I want to drink the Kool-Aid. Am I being indoctrinated into a cult right now? A cult of psycho people who want women to embrace pain? I opened my eyes and looked around at the couples swaying against one another and making loud vowel sounds. Yeah, pretty much. "You are so fucked," my husband said as he drank the dregs of his BBQ potato chip bag. He was in direct violation of rules No. 4 and No. 20. (Shown left.) Then we had to practice a script that we were supposed to recite to our unborn child: Your head is down, your face towards my sacrum. You will begin your journey that day, easily, flowingly, descending down the stem of a flower. As you travel down the stem the chord flows freely, upright and unencumbered—like a vertical line from from your belly button to the placenta. It flows loosely about you as you descend. A golden oil makes your descent easy—the oil lubricates your path and helps the flower to open and pen, easily—hugely wide. I don't know. I just felt silly saying it. I was pretty sure that my baby didn't know English. Later, we had to "draw our emotions" using crayons. This was right before our lunch break and I was hungry so I just wanted to get it over with. I grabbed a black colored pencil and pooped something out in 20 seconds while everyone else literally took nearly 20 minutes, like they were all fucking Rembrandt or something. In comparison to their colorful images of babies and rainbows and grassy knolls, my black and white sketch of a stick figure pregnant woman staring at an empty crib looked like it was drawn by an abused child. Toward the end of the day, we went around the room and shared our biggest anxieties about giving birth. Most people said they were concerned about "staying in the moment" and not succumbing to the pain. Liars, I thought. When the instructor got to me I blurted out, "I don't want to shit in front of my husband!" Things got super awkward at that moment. Everyone went silent and no one would make eye contact with me. I guess my concerns were too base for them? I mean, we just spent an entire day together, trying to psych ourselves into thinking that our vaginas are "hugely wide, pliable and translucent flowers that are the path into the garden of love." Why was poop too gross but "hugely wide" vaginas were totally cool? I guess I just wasn't evolved enough. I was left hanging and felt so petty and alone with my ignoble concern. "I have the same exact fear," my husband said, reminding me that I'm not alone. We will always be horrible people together, forever. We went home and never practiced our script, although every once in a while he would lean over and whisper in my ear, "Breathe out through your rectum." It didn't matter, anyway. I got disqualified from the birthing center because my baby measured too big. I got another size assessment just before my water broke and I was told I had a 12-pound baby in there. After I got to the hospital I told my midwife that I wanted a C-section. She was all, "I believe in you and your pelvis. You can do this!" And I was like, "Look, I'm not interested in being your anecdote." I got the C-section. My baby was 11 lbs. 5 oz. and I'm really glad my "flower" didn't get that "hugely wide." I'm sure hypnobirthing works for some people. The kind that are very focused and don't get bored after three minutes on the elliptical. But I came to terms with who I am. I am a person who knows her limits and has her feet planted on the ground. I'm not floating around in a technicolor universe of exploding lights. Unless I'm tripping. And when it comes to giving birth, you need to get real and stop tripping.

You Are a Ball of White Light and Other Lies They Tell You in the Cult of Hypnobirthing Attention, Women: The World's Most Annoying Blowhard Is Coming to Steal Your Boyfriend According to Rihanna, Getting Your Boobs Out is a Great Way to Feel Better About Your Body Can't Remember What Happened Last on Mad Men? Here's a Quick Character-By-Character Refresher A Brief History of 'Dehydration,' the Go-To Celebrity Alibi March Madness: Holy Shit, an Upset in the Sex Vs. Chocolate Tourney! Mom Puts 7-Year-Old on a Diet in the Worst Vogue Article Ever More Stories on Jezebel »

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March 23rd, 2012Top Story The Hunger Games Will Ruin You By Charlie Jane Anders The Hunger Games movie will punch you in the gut. The saga of Katniss, teenage dystopian gladiator, turns out to be just as addictive in movie form as it was in the books. The combination of insane spectacle and surprisingly brutal violence makes this movie exhilarating, and a little exhausting, to watch. You can't help being drawn into the messed up, heart-breaking land of Panem. Spoilers ahead... The Hunger Games was a tough book to adapt into a movie — not least because it's such a powerful emotional storyline, and a lot of stuff goes on in Katniss' head that isn't really reflected in her outward behavior. This movie needs to sell us on a whole dystopian world, and it needs to make us care about Katniss and her attempts to survive both death-matches and media stardom. The good news is, they pulled it off. I was totally pulled in to the story, and I absolutely rooted for Katniss to win, to survive. (To a lesser extent, I also rooted for Peeta, her fake boyfriend.) Even though I'd read the book a couple times and knew more or less what was coming, I was still held in suspense and found myself believing, on some level, that Katniss could get snuffed at any moment. And there were a few moments in there that really did wreck me, emotionally. So as far as I'm concerned, that's an unequivocal victory. (I have definitely talked to a few people who didn't like the movie as much as I did, and I've read a few less-enthusiastic reviews here and there. So I'm aware that not everybody was as swept up in this movie as I was.) In The Hunger Games, it's hundreds of years in the future, and the United States is now a shithole called Panem. The decadent, corrupt Capitol rules with an iron fist, and once a year the Capitol holds a televised tournament in which teens from the Districts fight to the death. This is held to commemorate the unsuccessful rebellion that the Districts launched 74 years earlier. Young Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the Games to replace her younger sister — and finds that surviving has as much to do with being a people person as with being a good murderer. Brutal Where It Counts Most of the time when you see future dystopias in movies, they tend to look a few different ways. There's the gray, totalitarian future full of ugly tower blocks, spy cameras and pictures of a white guy scowling over a message in all caps. There's the shiny false utopia where everybody lives in the Apple Store and has drug-fueled orgies. There's the "inner city decay" future, where everybody lives in Detroit. And so on. What most cinematic dystopias have in common is a sense of despair, or overwhelming oppression, or maybe campy sterility. But Hunger Games takes a different approach to selling us on its future dystopia. It shows us the division between dustbowl bleakness in the Districts and glam-rock decadence in the Capitol — but more than anything, it shows us bloody intense death and freaked-out teenagers fighting each other to survive, while cynical adults turn their deaths into a commodity. So the slaughter has to be dirty and ugly and intense — and here's where the movie really triumphs. It has several really great teenage-massacre moments. The pacing is pretty relentless, one area where the movie might actually have a slight advantage over the book. By the time you get to the climax of the Games, where Katniss faces an impossible choice, you're already pretty wiped out from all the nonstop horror and danger. (Which is just as well, since the climax falls a little flat.) We never stop believing that Katniss is being pushed to do whatever it takes — even selling pieces of her soul — to be able to care for her mom and sister. And that's really what makes someplace a dystopia, rather than just a nasty spot: the stuff it makes you do to survive, and the ways it changes you. I believed in the world of The Hunger Games because I believed in Katniss Everdeen. Jennifer Lawrence Cannot Believe This Shit One bold choice this film makes: Keeping the focus really tight on Katniss. Most screenwriters and directors would have taken advantage of the "third person omniscient" POV that movies naturally offer. There's a ton of stuff going on at every point in this movie, so why not pull back and show us what Effie thinks about it all? Or Haymitch? Or what the other Tributes are up to, in the Arena? The film does occasionally cut away to a short scene featuring Haymitch or President Snow that isn't in the book — more on that below — but for the most part, it's incredibly disciplined about following Katniss closely. We see almost everything from her POV, and things that surprise her also surprise us. This turns out to be a winning strategy, mostly because Jennifer Lawrence owns this movie. She never loses the look of deep pain in her eyes. You always feel that Katniss has been making hard choices her whole life, and this is just one more set of hard choices. When she smiles, which she hardly ever does, it's only with her mouth. When she kisses Peeta to help win over the all-important Sponsors who can send life-saving supplies, she is simply carrying out another task. Jennifer Lawrence has a quality that I'm not used to seeing in movie heroines, especially teenage ones. I think it's called "dignity." She simply cannot believe this shit. Not in a "Simple Life, spoiled teenager getting her hands dirty" way, but more like in a "person who has already experienced loss and grown-up responsibility being pushed into a situation that's both foolish and murderous" way. Part of why you root so hard for Katniss is that Jennifer Lawrence sells the notion that there's a part of her that none of this stuff will ever tarnish. Even as Peeta loudly proclaims that he wants to prove "they don't own me" and Katniss says she can't afford to think that way, she's much more honorable and unbending than Peeta. (He's the master of disguise, he's the one who fakes an alliance with the bullies, he's much more willing to play the media games.) Katniss is the still center of a movie that's otherwise whirling at crazy speeds. Television-style Filming, Retro Design Another choice that Gary Ross and his crew made that I really appreciated: they didn't overdo the "reality TV" elements. You could easily imagine a Hunger Games movie that overdosed on all the cliches of Jersey Shore or American Idol or whatever. Cutting away to commentators or pre-taped interviews with the Tributes, giving us infographics, whatever. The movie does almost none of that. Instead, Ross conveys the sense of a television show with camerawork. We switch between two types: 1) There are static shots, in which one or two people are in frame and the camera just films them unobtrusively. Sometimes instead of zooming in or out, we switch instantly to a second camera that's also static but a different level of zoom. 2) Handheld cameras, which follow the actors during action scenes and a lot of the Arena sequences. (Although at times, the shaky-cam gets way, way too much, and you probably don't want to see this movie on a full stomach.) The mix of these two types of camera work feels very televisual but also super-intimate during a lot of the emotional scenes. The other thing that really works to sell this movie's world-building is the design, which is relentlessly retro. Ross, of course, is the King of Retro, with movies like Seabiscuit and Pleasantville exploring the mid-20th Century. Here, he mines the past for different elements in different places. Districts 11 and 12 look like Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photos, especially in shots of the coal miners coming out of the Seam. A lot of the sets are dripping with Art Deco, including the train that takes our heroes to the Capitol. And then when we see the Capitol's high society at its most frivolous, it's suddenly the 1970s and we're at a Gary Glitter concert. (Plus the Peacekeepers are sort of the disco cops.) What It Means to be a Dystopian TV Star The Hunger Games really feels like a saga that's made for the times we're living in. A time where young people from the poorest parts of the country really are being shipped off to kill or be killed. Our celebrity culture has gotten dehumanizing and drenched in fake "realness," in ways that would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago. And the economic gap between the "Capitol" and the "Districts" in real life has become like unto a caste system. The true genius of this story is that it makes a lot of these points, without ever seeming preachy or overtly political. If anything, the movie is even more political than the first book, and yet it's also more subtle, because a lot of the politics are embedded in the spectacle of the country girl going to the city and then entering the deadly arena. (And, as some have complained, there definitely is a lot less overt talk about how much everyone in District 12 is starving.) But also, as usual, you can say a lot of stuff by using mutated creatures and fictional dystopias that you couldn't say with a story set in the here and now. But the politics are definitely there — and there are a few scenes that hit hard. Like when Katniss mourns the fallen Rue and raises three fingers in a salute, and then we see the explosive reaction in District 11, where Rue came from. You can definitely see the roots of Katniss becoming a political figure as well as just a celebrity. Also, some of the newly added Katniss-less scenes include more of Donald Sutherland as President Snow, who absolutely makes the most of a few sardonic moments. One scene in particular, where he talks about the downtrodden outer Districts, will stick in your memory. President Snow drily observes that Districts 11 and 12 are full of underdogs, and he doesn't really like underdogs. We also glimpse more of the games master, Seneca Crane, desperately trying to keep the games from going off the rails, as he's caught between the need to put on a good show and the imperative to avoid fueling political unrest. Crane's struggles are recognizable from every backstage drama and every political drama you've ever seen, only transplanted to this strange, deadly world. In the end, that's a huge part of why the world of The Hunger Games feels so compelling: Because it's really our world, just reflected through a jagged mirror shard. And that's really the highest accomplishment that any dystopia can hope for.

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March 23rd, 2012Top Story Today I Learned Buick Created A Website Before There Was Even A Web By Jason Torchinsky The other day I was looking through a box of old Apple II diskettes (I was trying to find this, to explain to my wife who Dr.J is) when I found something I had forgotten all about: a 1986 disk from Buick that is, essentially, a website that predates the web. I loaded the 26 year old disk into my old Apple //c, and, after a few tries, it booted. What I found was simply amazing. I remember getting this disk in the mail when I was a kid; ostensibly, it must have been addressed to my dad (I wasn't really liquid enough for a new Riviera at the time) but, like most dads off the mid-80s, any floppy disks received in the mail went immediately to the kids. I'm guessing he was on a mailing list for these because we had been car shopping last in 1980, when he replaced his old '68 Beetle with a '80 Honda Accord. I was pushing for an AMC Pacer, but I don't think my opinion counted for much. Upon looking at this thing now, it's amazing to see how far ahead of its time it was. Essentially, the disk is an electronic catalog of Buick's '86 lineup, complete with detailed technical descriptions (some animated and even a little interactive), comparisons with other makes (Rivera vs. BMW? Ok, Buick.), a way to print the car's window sticker, a loan calculator, printable dealer invite. Click to view It was, essentially, all the stuff you'd find on an automaker's site today. And this was three years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his 1989 proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. And it was all done in 286K (the disk is 143K per side), and on a screen that measures 280x192 pixels. Compare that to a lowest possible average screen today of 1024x768. Oh, and with about 15,999,994 colors less than what most computers have today. Let's think about that a little more: just by chance, the JPG that makes up the splash image on this post happens to be exactly the same size, 143K, as what each side of that disk could hold; that's one image. And the size of the screen — it's less than a quarter of what you have on your phone. And, all this ran on a computer that was just over 1Mhz; a factor of a thousand less than what you're likely reading this on now. We lived like animals back then. I made a gallery with a bunch of screenshots of this because I think it's so amazing. It's sort of like finding a missing link between pre-web and web-era computing. This had a Mac-like user interface (all custom-coded, as the Apple II didn't really have a set GUI toolbox at this point, and even the text engine had to be custom made, since you couldn't really mix text and graphics normally on an Apple II) that actually works pretty well. View Full Photo Gallery » I love the crude 8-bit graphics, the color bleed, and the liberal use of a grid to show something's "technical". What's really remarkable is how well it actually works; I could see it being useful if I was seriously looking for a car back in 1986. I have no idea how many of these Buick actually sent out (they do seem to have made an updated one for the Mac in 1990), or if any other manufacturers did this. It makes sense Buick would have tried it; we forget, after years of thinking of Buicks as septuagenarian Cracker Barrel-shuttles, but in the mid 80s Buick was playing with some advanced tech, like the grandfather of all the touch screens in modern cars, the CRT touch screen in the Riviera. It's no secret I'm profoundly geeky, but now that we're all geeks, I think we can all appreciate the magic of a proto-website, sent over a network of mail Jeeps and shoe leather. Now please geek out with me.

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