http://jezebel.com/5802289/the-seven-dea…

Artist Chris Hill takes seven Disney figures and turns them into allegories of evil.  Snow White succumbs to gluttony when she reaches for that apple; greedy Ariel is never satisfied and gives new meaning to upward mobility; and Belle, with her fabled beauty, personifies vanity.  Tinker Bell is also included: Here’s Tink, not a princess but the most suitable character to represent the battle with Envy. Tink’s envy of Wendy and Peter’s relationship causes her to do some pretty mean things, but in the end she overcomes her envy and grows to be the sassy fairy we all know and love.

In Off with Their Heads, I wrote about fairy-tale Daughters of Eve and their seven sins and, now, in retrospect I wish I had included a section on these Disney heroines. JK

The image comes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and shows Freder’s hallucinatory encounter with the seven sins.

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court overturned California’s effort to regulate access to violent video games. Scalia wrote the majority opinion and declared that video games deserve the full protection of the First Amendment.

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

He added: “Certainly the books we give children to read–or read to them when they are younger–contain no shortage of gore.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.  As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ’till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy.’ . . .  Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. . . .  And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.”

(I was amused by the fact that the clerks wrote “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” rather than “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”  That does not detract from a sound opinion that recognizes that parents must be responsible for regulating content, even if not all parents are responsible.  The opinion can be found at the following link:  http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28s… –for further reading.

And for the other side of the argument:

 http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/02/22…

In his dissent, Justice Breyer asked the right question: “What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”

Today’s NYT has a wonderfully eloquent defense of fairy tales. Valerie Gribben charts her love affair with fairy tales, describes how she discarded them when she grew up and went to medical school, and how she returned to them in her third year of medical school during her rotations.

Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.

So I now find comfort in fairy tales. They remind me that happy endings are possible. With a few days of rest and proper medication, the bewildered princess left relaxed and smiling, with a set of goals and a new job in sight. The endoscopy on my cross-eyed confidante showed she was cancer-free.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01gribben.html?_r=1

I just ordered her Fairytale Trilogy, which she wrote when she was sixteen.  She also has a blog: https://valeriegribben.wordpress.com/

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies, reflects on her childhood reading and writing in the latest issue of the New Yorker. Most of the books she read as the daughter of an immigrant family had characters with whom she could not identify, as she points out below.  In my book Enchanted Hunters, I tried to make the case that children rarely identify with the misfits, rebels, runaways, truants and orphans they encounter in the books they read.  Instead, child readers are drawn into the excitement of  adventurous lives and become “more like witnesses who watch events unfold and read the minds of the characters experiencing them.”

Here’s Jhumpa Lahiri:

I was aware that I did not belong to the worlds I was reading about: that my family’s life was different, that different food graced our table, that different holidays were celebrated, that my family cared and fretted about different things. And yet when a book was in my possession, and as I read it, this didn’t matter. I entered into a pure relationship with the story and its characters, encountering fictional worlds as if physically, inhabiting them fully, at once immersed and invisible.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#

Stieg Larsson modelled Lisbeth Salander in his Millennium-Trilogy on Pippi Longstocking.  My bet is that he too did not identify with Astrid Lundgren’s character and instead entered into a relationship with her and her world, “immersed and invisible.”

Fashion model Natalia Vodianova is raising money to build children’s playgrounds in Russia.  Her Cinderella story is told in today’s New York Times.  And now she is playing fairy godmother.  Note the concerning plan to meld the “beautiful and glamorous” with the “childlike.”

Yet Ms. Vodianova, with a steely character behind the sweet face and child-like body, still believes in Russian fairy tales and fables, with their complex dragons and firebirds.

To mirror that magical reality, the model asked 40 designers to each create a dress for the White Fairy Tale Love Ball, a Russian-inspired fund-raiser that will take place near Paris during the July haute couture season at the Wideville chateau of Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti.

Being still a Russian little girl inside, I wanted to create something around my love of fairy tales,” said Ms. Vodianova, who called on her fashion choreographer friend Alex de Betak to design a winter’s tale set.

“The idea is to create a Doctor Zhivago version of a beautiful and glamorous, but quite a childlike, fairy tale,” said Mr. de Betak, who has worked on the project for two years.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/fashio…

Harvard’s Commencement is today, and the sun is shining on the Class of 2011.  Here’s my Harvard Crimson valedictory for a wonderful group of seniors.

 http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5…

Two Snow White films are scheduled for release in June 2012.  Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame stars in Snow White and the Huntsman, with Charlize Theron as her mother and Chris Hemsworth as a hunter, distraught by the death of his wife.  Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortensen, and Hugh Jackman all turned down the role of the huntsman.

My bet is with The Brothers Grimm: Snow White, directed by Tarsem Singh.  Nathan Lane and Robert Emms have just joined Julia Roberts and Armie Hammer (he played the Winklevoss twins in Social Network) for this re-imagining of the class fairy tale, but another critic has already cast his vote with Snow White and the Huntsman.

From the Indie Movie Guide:

The Story: Comedy vs. Kick Ass!
Relativity’s Snow White—which is supposedly about Snow and her dwarfy pals violently reclaiming the kingdom—is described as a “spirited adventure comedy” (tho sources close to the picture tell us the laughs are kinda few and far between), while Universal’s Huntsman takes a much more serious, kickass approach to the series. If you’re looking for serious fight sequences and the chance of some steamy scenes between Hemsworth and Stewart, your best bet is the latter.

NBC’s Grimm is filming its pilot episode in Portland, Oregon, and has made it into the fall 2011 schedule.  In the trailer we hear a voice-over: “This is no fairy tale–the stories are real–what they wrote about really happened.  You are one of the last Grimms.  We have the ability to see what no one else can.”

A detective learns that he is descended from the Brothers Grimm and therefore has the ability to identify the monsters and ogres that once menaced the innocent heroes and heroines of fairy tales.  It looks like the first episode will, surprise, surprise, take “Little Red Riding Hood” as its point of departure.

Here’s more from DreadCentral.com:

Detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) thought he was ready for the grim reality of working homicide in Portland, Oregon. That is, until he started to see things…things he couldn’t quite explain. Like a gorgeous woman suddenly transforming into a hideous hag or an average Joe turning into a vicious troll. Then, after a panicked visit from his only living relative, Nick discovers the truth about his visions: He’s not like everyone else; he’s a descendant of an elite group of hunters known as “Grimms” who are charged with stopping the proliferation of supernatural creatures in the world. And so begins his new life journey – albeit a reluctant one at first – as he solves crimes with his partner who knows something about Nick has radically changed but can’t quite put his finger on it. Along the way, Nick finds himself unexpectedly getting help on some of the more difficult cases from Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), a guy who seems normal at first but is soon revealed to be what you might call a “big bad wolf.” Literally!

Freud tells us that jokes are never really innocent and that they are designed to serve aggressive or self-defensive purposes.  There’s a little bit of both in Adam Mansbach’s bedtime story for adults trying to get children to sleep.

Samantha Murphy writes: TechNewsDaily spoke with Mansbach and illustrator Ricardo Cortes about how social media shot “Go the F**k to Sleep” (Akashic Books, 2011) to No. 1 on Amazon’s best seller list a month ahead of its publication and how the book’s message has captured the hearts of parents with a sense of humor everywhere.

 http://www.technewsdaily.com/social-medi…

Here’s a sample verse:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f**k sleep.

Shades of “Down will come baby, cradle, and all.”  In a study of lullabies, Nicholas Tucker concluded that some of the melodies sung to children over the centuries were “exercises in controlled hatred.”  One British lullaby warns a “squalling baby” that Bonaparte will “beat you, beat you, beat you, / And he’ll beat you all to pap. / And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you / Every morsel snap, snap, snap.”

Why does the word “desperate” come up so often when parents describe the experience of reading their children to sleep?

Does life imitate art?  Not exactly.  But clever swapping of hair and dress/uniform colors is uncomfortably close to reality.