Alice Liddell, the "Alice" in Alice in Wonderland, photographed by C.L. Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll).

Two new essays, both pegged on Tim Burton's Alice, each taking subtly different (though hardly contrariwise!) angles of analytical attack.

In the Las Vegas Weekly, I've published "What's inside the hatter? The surprising significance of the top hat, in Alice and other wonderlands." It's a meditation on the deeper meanings of the Mad Hatter and his hat, featuring a lengthy digression on the social history of the top hat.

Teaser:

Consciously or not, Tim Burton hints that the Mad Hatter is [Alice author C.L.] Dodgson's funhouse-mirror reflection. His Hatter has CGI doll-eyes, larger than life and slightly cockeyed for that zany effect; Dodgson's eyes were asymmetrical. And he always wore a top hat. Depp reads his character as "hypersensitive"; Dodgson was painfully sensitive in social situations, grateful for any little kindness, acutely conscious of slights. Depp's Hatter needs "to travel into another state, another personality, to be able to survive," the actor says. Dodgson, too, lived a double life. He was chloroform in the classroom, a humorless bore tripped up by his stutter. In the company of the beautiful "little misses" he worshipped as icons of innocence, however, his stammering vanished and he morphed "into another state, another personality," transforming into a charming joke-teller and talespinner of endless ingenuity. His dean's daughter Alice Liddell was one such girl; for her, he free-associated the story that would later become Alice in Wonderland, dreaming it out loud as they rowed along the river on a drowsy summer's day.

Over at True/Slant, I've posted "Coming of Age in Wonderland: Burton's Alice, Depp's Hatter, Carroll's Dreamchild," a related, yet far from redundant, essay, theorizing Depp's Hatter as one of the "beautiful boys" (bishonen) in Japanese manga (graphic novels) for teenage girls, and tying that analytical thread around the tweenage-girl cult that worships Johnny Depp and Carroll's own obsession with 10-year-old girls such as Alice Liddell.

Teaser:

"Tarted up with bruise-purple eyeshadow and grenadine-red lipstick,
Depp's Hatter is an emo-punk dream of adorable weirdness, packaged for the Hot Topic shopper. He'd totally let you give him a celebrity makeover, and when he looks at Alice with those lost-puppy eyes and says, "Why is it you're always too small or too tall?," you just know he's talking to you. That's why Avril Lavigne---and every tweenage girl in the audience---wants to have tea with him (as Lavigne does in the video for her song "Alice"), not Wasikowska's palely loitering Alice."

Reeling and writhing, HERE and HERE.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll.

"I'm closer to the Golden Dawn/ immersed in Crowley's uniform of imagery..." Left, Aleister Crowley, celebrity spokesmodel of the hermetic magick order, the Golden Dawn. Right, D.B. in his Queen-of-the-Nile Phase. Later, he would complete the intertextual circuit by embracing Elizabeth "Cleopatra" Taylor as his mother confessor, during the Lost Hollywood Years ('75-'76). Found online.

The latest installation of my epic personal essay-cum-cultural critique-cum-religious studies doctoral dissertation on religious imagery in David Bowie's music, Bowie fandom as a Warholian mystery cult (whatever that means), the Deeper Meanings of Ziggy, and the historical backdraft from the Jesus Freak movement that swept America (including this Young American) in the '70s, is LIVE, NOW, over at Religion Dispatches. READ IT HERE.

Photo: Mick Rock. Copyright Mick Rock; all rights reserved.

Every Friday, Religion Dispatches, an online magazine of cultural commentary on religion, is running excerpts from my essay on Bowie's flirtations with Buddhism, Nietzchean atheism, Crowleyite magick, Christianity, and Kabbala; the religious subtext in Bowie's lyrics; the christological symbolism in Ziggy Stardust; and, on a more personal note, my '70s transition from evangelical true believer to devout Bowiephile.

Short Version: It's about Bowie and religion, and Bowie AS religion.

Read the first installment HERE.

((UPDATE: Okay, so most readers took one look at that 5,000-word behemoth of a post (on True/Slant, blogged below) and fled in puckered terror. A Teachable Moment. Happily, in these post-Gutenbergian times, the writer is able to wade back in with a scythe and clear a wider path to the finish line. Which I did, weed-whacking this thing from 5k down to, like, 3k-something. Not exactly a Tweet, I'll grant you, but more manageable by far. Second chance?))

Just rolled out the sequel to my earlier TRUE/SLANT post on the gender politics of the Super Bowl and the fine line between homosociality and homosexuality in jock culture. (Part I is HERE.)

Read "A Locker-Room Rap with Coach Chomsky: The Politics of Sports, Part II," HERE.

Mother of Cthulhu, this thing is GINORMOUS. I've GOT to get the hang of blogging shorter. This essay started off reasonably enough, but ended up looking like Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis's idea of a doctoral dissertation---5,098 words, FFS. Now I'm petrified no one will read the misbegotten thing. (If you do, bring bottled oxygen.) Anyway, my apologies in advance. If you are foolhardy enough to wade into this thing, please feel free to pelt me with batteries and beer bottles from the comment thread. That's what it's for.

For the time-starved, here's the nut graf:

In their rippingly readable Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire, an instant classic of gonzo ethnography, the husband-and-wife team of cultural critics Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew stand Chomsky's critique of the social role of sports on its head. Penetrating to the silver-and-black heart of Raider Nation, Miller and Mayhew reveal it, through Studs Terkel-style oral histories and first-person storytelling, as mostly (though not entirely) working-class, surprisingly multiracial and multi-ethnic, and more politically diverse than the stereotypical image of the right-wing lumpendude bellowing "USA! Number One!" during the Super Bowl's fighter-plane flyover would have us believe.

Luc Sante, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Verse Chorus Verse/Yeti).

Read my essay "Ghostcards," on Luc Sante's new book, Folk Photography, on the Las Vegas Weekly website, HERE.

Nut graf:

To Sante, these [early 20th century] postcards constitute a "ghost telegraph," as he told a radio interviewer. In Folk Photography, he writes, "The real-photo card was typically a product of the small town, particularly the small town isolated on the plains, whose newspaper did not have the capacity to reproduce half-tones, and whose lonely citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with absent friends, distant in those days even if they lived only three stops down the railroad line." Like the blues, field hollers, chain-gang songs and other folkways of Old Weird America, real-photo postcards served as a social network, a kind of Basement Tapes of the backwoods unconscious, reporting local news, memorializing personal tragedies, scrapbooking sentimental moments.

[R]eal-photo cards...captured throwaway personal moments: two nattily bowtied little boys, a girl, and a pup straight from the Little Rascals casting call, seated on a lawn, framed by the shoes of the guy taking their portrait from a prostrate position. Or moments fixed in agony: an iron-faced woman, her jaw set in resignation, her baby---dead, by all appearances---limp on her lap. (Postmortem portraits were part of the American way of death well into the 20th century.)

Some of the cards in Folk Photography freeze-frame tableaux whose backstories have been misplaced, enigmatic scenes in search of a plot, like the---abandoned? ransacked?---office, its walls stripped bare, detritus heaped on the floor. Or the skin-pricklingly creepy photo of two pathetic grotesques, tarred and feathered and captured for posterity by the camera's implacable gaze. In the background, a blurry figure hides his face with his hands.

Luc Sante, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Verse Chorus Verse/Yeti).

More, HERE.