True Blood: RIP Lorena Krasiki

"I do miss the 1930s. Such style, elegance. People knew how to behave, knew what was expected of them. Knew how to avoid creating tragedies for the people they loved." -Lorena

All the True Blood fans out there know that Season 3 is pulling out the big guns. Secrets and sexy characters keep coming and dying. Vampires commit spinal carnage out on the national news. Sookie Stackhouse is a FIARY [jealous]. I think I speak for us all when I say, True Blood, thank you for not losing your moxie.

But I'd like to take a Little Kia, Big Planet moment of silence for one particular act in the True Blood Season 3 parade of plot  upheavals---the death of Lorena Krasiki, the fiercest, most stylish bitch on television.


I should've known that Lorena was next up for the slaughter the moment I started to like her. It's been the pattern of all female, villain characters on True Blood. Take the beautiful, stylish, and pure evil Maryann Forrester for example. As the main antagonist in Season 2, I don't think any of us had seen such an evil bitch on TV at the time. She manipulated pure hearts with drugs and pleasures of the flesh. She used her bewitching powers to make innocents rage, kill, and turn against each other--all in the name of getting exactly what she wanted. 


I was right there with everyone not waiting until the moment when she would inevitably be killed dead in the worst way. But when that episode came, and she ran around Sookie's mangled house in a wedding dress crying over the arrival of her bull-god, I saw a little bit of myself in Maryann's crazy-ass. I admired her cosmic delusions and eerie willingness to give herself up to her believed deity. But alas, it all ended with a hoax as Sam, in shape-shifting form, skewered her with his bull horn and ripped out her black heart. A pretty epic death for such an epic female.


Lorena was portrayed in a similar way to Maryann. You could do nothing but hate her. She was shown as a heartless, vindictive force driven mad by her selfish, undying love for Bill Compton. Maybe she was all that, but I always saw her as much more.


Lorena is one of the greatest examples of the tragic femme fatale, lost in her doomed love for Bill. She lost all her shame and all her pride all in the pursuit of his love, and received nothing but humiliation and heartbreak in return. But despite it all, she kept her head held high in the finest fashions, never giving up on winning her love's hand.


All the True Blood audience really saw of Bill and Lorena's relationship was his disgust and hate for her and her foolish, wicked attempts to ensnare him once again. But in the episode "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues", Bill sheds light onto Lorena by revealing feelings he still has for her.


Lorena plays music from the 30s as she prepares to slice Bill up, the decade where they once experienced joy as a couple together in vampirial, carnal bliss. She reels on about her suffering as she places her blood into his open wound so that she  may be inside him in true death, not Sookie. Bill admits that enjoyed the times they had together of world travel, decadent parties, and luring humans into their bed to feed upon and make love in their remains. He looks up to her with sincerity as he tells her

"I wish I had known you before you were made. Before you turned hard. I would like to have seen you smile with light in your eyes, instead of darkness. That would've been something." -Bill

Maryann and Lorena may never be known for anything more than their seductive, evil ways, but it was just that that made them such stand-out characters alongside the good-girls and righteous men. I know I'm not alone when I say I miss their impeccable style, their murderess class, and their alluring composure despite being disturbed, crazy bitches.

Besides, who remembers the well-behaved girls anyway? ;)

Love and Lolita

I always knew I'd fall in love with Vladimir Nabokov's controversial masterpiece Lolita. As a long time lover of fucked up literature [check out White Oleander, Fight Club, Disco Bloodbath] , I always thought of Lolita as the queen bee.

Last summer, I finally got around to ordering a copy of my long-awaited scandal novel, but didn't start reading it until around fall. It took me far too long to finish Lolita, much longer than the pace I had read books throughout the summer. A lot of that has to do with Nabokov's masterful writing style. He writes so richly, and ornately that I often went back and read passages several times over.
But this language also kept me caught in a trance. I would hang on to every word as I flipped through pages of devious, fantastical, and wildly passionate scenes.

The thing about Lolita is that while the relationship between main character Humbert Humbert and fantasy girl-child Dolores Haze (Lolita) is universally wrong and disturbing, make no doubt about it that this is a love story. Vanity Fair calls it "The only convincing love story of our century". And the deeper you fall into the story, the more you realize just how true it is.

Many passages struck my heart to the core.

• "Sometimes, while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride--and literally crawl on my knees to your chair my Lolita! You would give me one look--a gray furry question mark of a look: "Oh no, not again"; for you never deigned to believe that I could ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling!"

• "...there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was, hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.--and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am going to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else."

Reading passages like these affected me even physically. Towards the end of Lolita, whenever I read in public I could feel the emotional toll the words were taking on my facial expressions and body language. I would feel like crying. Often, people in the streets would stop and ask me what was wrong or what I was reading.

I believe Nabokov really achieved something extraordinary. It's hard enough to write about love, but to make it so convincing that the words take a real, emotional toll on the reader takes magic. And he created this magic between a pedophile and a young girl.

Through all his passion, obsession, hopelessness, and insanity, the reader knows clearly of the love that Humbert Humbert has for little Lolita. The reader knows it, and they feel it. And most importantly, they believe it. How strange that one could read a novel with such a torrid, disturbed relationship and leave wishing that someone might one day feel the same way about them?

I am Jack's hard-on.

It's been almost three years.

We weren't even in a relationship back in the time we lived in the SCAD bubble with all the other freshmen. We had amazing sexual chemistry. You gave me everything I ever wanted from a man. You made me feel the way I'd always wanted to in bed--we were perfect together. In spite of, or perhaps because of our amazing sexual compatibility, we had connection. I knew it. You knew it. But you wouldn't accept it. You wanted to look cool to your friends over having me as your partner. You treated me like shit in public to save face. You did everything you could to reject me and make me feel beneath you. You passed me up. We could've been something great together.

A year and a half later I fell in love. I no longer had to pine for you because I found someone else to fulfill my fantasies--someone who wasn't afraid to take on all the thrill and abstraction that is me. I replaced you. I moved on. I want no one else but him. Everything I have his is alone.

In the year and a half we've been together, you still won't leave me alone. I know how much you regret what you did, and I do too. I've thought about the past, and at times I do miss you. But after all that you've done I just want you to go away.

You call me late at night telling me that I'm the perfect woman. I'm the most beautiful, amazing woman you've ever been with. You tell me you fantasize about me everyday. You tell me how sorry you are for choosing your friends over me, friends you don't even have anymore. There's desperation in your voice as you tell me you'd do anything and everything to satisfy me. "No one will worship you the way I will".

I told my boyfriend about the calls. I blocked you on Facebook. I've done everything I can to break our ties forever. I won't have you getting off to thoughts of what could be again.

Today I sat down in the computer lab and worked on a computer that already had someone signed into it. After printing out my document I went to log out of the computer, and I saw your ID displayed on the log in screen.

I couldn't believe it. After all this time of trying to erase our ties to each other, we are still connected. I still find traces of you wherever I go.

Why won't this connection go away? Why are you still here after all this time?

Go away. You're history to me.