#Californication

         It has been many a year since I have been this drawn into a show of fictional characters.  It was like finishing a great Russian novel. Full of great stories with twists and turns and more characters than you can keep up with. Miss an episode (or a chapter) and miss out on the development.
      Great writers, actors, and pop stars made appearances or were referenced. I believe my favorite was the reference to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina near the end of the series, or when Hank was compared to "a poor man's" Bukowski or directly titled "Bukowski" himself by the mother of his child. (Though some will say Hank's character is the the main character from most of Bukowski's novels.)
          I could relate all too well with Hank Moody.  He was a former rocker who became a writer. He had a beautiful and intelligent daughter (Becca) that seemed to teach him more than he let himself be open to; & he had an odd, and usually astringed, relationship with Becca's mother Karen. One could always tell that Hank had good intentions but they never worked out for him.  Karen was always seeing Hank caught up in messes he really wasn't interested in, but looked bad as Karen walked in on him. No matter what he said or tried to do, he was always a snare away from disaster.
         Becca's character was always a blast.  Well behaved and always wanting to learn. A great touch to the series was when her Thanksgiving Prayer. A Satanic Prayer of gratitude to the meal where the bravest of the family Hailed, Satan with her.  She was also shown in an episode reading the Satanic Bible by Anton Levay showing that she wanted to be well informed and study life for herself. (Too bad she wasn't shown reading his Satanic Witch.  But that may have been lost in the less Church of Satan savvy watchers.) As the series progressed one sees her become a young adult living life on her own and took what was given to her while finding her own existentialist freedom.
         Each season was well acted and well written. I really felt they just kept getting better as they progressed. Sue Collini (played by Kathleen Turner) is a riot of a character that is only more humorous when one remembers her preference as "Serial Mom". The fact that the character Krull really was a member the Sex Pistols. Plus the battles of the Runkle family seem to hit home for anyone who has wanted adventure in life and just didn't know how to do it without damage.
         Some will say that the series ended with too much left unfinished. But I feel this added to the main theme that the main character was a writer who rarely was able to write. He couldn't finish what he started on paper, or in his own life. It also goes back to my reference of 1800's Russian Novels. Too much was going on to wrap up every little piece of the story.  It lets the viewer's imagination take over and that is where the best forms of art leave off, "Where the audience can take it with them and still find happiness and enjoyment".
For any parts that I missed, and the interesting relationships of the members of the acting staff:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californication_(TV_series)

Pornography. And this time I'm not talking about the album by The Cure.

Porn. Yes porn. We have all watched it. Maybe you were perturbed by it or maybe you enjoyed it. Whatever the reaction was, we did watch it and there is a lot of it. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but one still cannot go online without having to maneuver around it. I remember being in a school library and going to a web site that was in the banner bar of my browser (MarilynManson.com) thinking I was going to take me to a recording artist’s web page. Although I had never heard a song by this artist (not sung by a classmate), I was curious about what all the hype surrounding this guy was and I clicked the page. Before I had a clue what I was seeing, my browser and at least five new ones popped up with a barrage of pornographic film and images.

The teacher of this course pulled up a chair next to me and called me a pervert. He didn’t know how to get rid of all the open windows any better than I (without making more pop up) so he put me at another computer and had the lab assistant come and fix what I had done.
I was not even trying to find it. It found me. But this should not be about the clutter on the internet… NEAH. That is not the direction we need to be taking because there are so many people who have already opened discussions about this topic and progress has been made in that direction. What we need to realize, is the need and reason behind these images.

Foucault wrote and lectured that sexuality is the ultimate expression of the self. But I do not see how watching others engaging in types of sex, which are truly craved by these watching individuals, truly alleviate this longing. As a point of conjecture I feel that it would actually make the longing for this thing (which one is not, in reality, getting experienced) much stronger in these individuals. One could say that they are getting to experience it vicariously, but vicarious experiences only work well some times.

Someone may wish to be a soldier but does not have it in them to see real carnage or want to risk their own lives so they watch a war based movie. Another may want to be a famous singer but gets horrible stage fright so they are a manager. Another one is of a non-athletic person, but they have a child who is athletic, and supports that child's drive at their own athleticism. But I do not feel that this works when it comes to sex.

I see that sex is too primal of a drive and too ingrained into who the person is to be able to get adequate amounts of satisfaction from only seeing others engaging in desired sexual interactions. Wouldn’t this just make someone want to strive harder to experiences these pleasures that they are not really taking part in? This can also be dangerous.

We all read in shock and horror about the man who went into a gym and shot it up because he was unable to hook up with a young woman to fulfill his sexual desires. Could watching young woman have all the kinds of sex, in pornography, assisted in his decisions to do what he did…? He was known to have read books about being a middle aged man getting women much younger to be with them. But he did not find success as that writer claimed to have.

This could bring up the argument that seeing sexually explicit material can help one not fear sexual interactions and limit inhibitions. Without proper sex education this could easily result in sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies. Of course there are legal constraints to the viewing of pornographic images but anyone knows that a simple click of a mouse will allow even a young child to witness these images without limit. And with the age of sexual experimentation continually getting younger and younger; many will contest that this is due to pornographic movies being easier to come into contact with than ever before. But I will state the even lower level parental guidance movies have more and more sexual interactions in them than used to be found.

Europe has always been known for very sexually explicit movies thought out the history of cinema and the age of sexual experimentation in rather low compared to the United States but youth pregnancy is not the problem it is in the United Stated because of strong sex education programs and openness through ground breaking writings by amazing thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

I believe it really comes down to the individual. If they can know that porn is simply fantasy and not real they can be okay to view it. But it is alarming to see how few people really realize that it is no more real than an action movie where super heroes are flying and doing extra-human feats. That is what happens in porn; few guys are endowed like that and most women do not have figures with that amount of curve after college. Maybe a disclaimer is needed not only to say that everyone in the movie is 18 but also that this is a work of fantasy and should be viewed by the world only as a simple work of fiction.