sundries: boys, girls, dogs, mermen, and movie directors

[rm]

This morning I listened to two young men at my subway station have the following discussion:

#1: So yeah, there was this guy, like, like, like Brad Pitt, and he had hair like her [pointing at me], and he was wearing this really tight pink dress shirt, like a woman's shirt and short short, like woman's shorts.
#2: Brad Pitt!
#1: Fucking faggot.
#2: Yeah, yeah. What did you do?
#1: It was ugly, man, fucking faggot!

Gender-normative privilege means never having to be viscerally relieved you look like you conform at a given moment.

Do we really want a .gay Internet suffix? The article doesn't address it, but I wonder. On one hand, super convenient when I'm planning travel in a world that's still not always friendly. On another, the Internet is great because there's no gay ghetto. The gay is here and people just have to deal with it. If there's a .gay all sorts of harmful filtering gets a lot easier. I don't know. I'm troubled.

kproche! It turns out I have a friend in the accessories industry. You might get your cut-rate tacky mermen Christmas tree ornaments after all. She's going to look at the next trade show, and if she succeeds I'll bring them to Gally.

Meanwhile, I enjoy being a girl! I get my own hotel room for the Zurich trip. The men I work with are all in a suite together.

I am deeply troubled by this review of Mira Nair's Amelia, which contains the line "The director Mira Nair, whose only qualification appears to be that she’s a woman who has made others films about and with women (“Mississippi Masala,” “Vanity Fair”), keeps a tidy screen — it’s all very neat and carefully scrubbed. I don’t recall a single dented automobile or a fissure of real feeling etched into a face.".

Why?

I don't recall reading a movie review in which a male director's credentials are questioned in this manner. No one would expect a male director of a biopic to be a pilot or a fighter or a sea captain or whatever the subject of the film was about. Nair, whose films tend to be interesting failures, has taken on a pretty broad array of subjects in her films, and there's always this undertone in reviews of her work that's "why is the Indian woman making movies about things that aren't Indian?" which, you know, also makes me want to punch people in the face. Additionally, even assuming directors are required to stick to subjects of personal relevance to them (something that only seems to be asked of PoC and female directors), anyone who doesn't get why an Indian woman has a great deal to say about the lot of a woman in the Regency-era (Nair directed Vanity Fair a couple of years back), doesn't know the period. Or India.

Also, "she keeps a tidy screen"? Really? Nice to know Nair can handle cinematic housework. Or something. When we review men, this comment is usually "the film is workman-like" and that would have been an appropriate way to level the criticism that seems to be being made. Alas, no. Girls are tidy!

Additionally, a fascination with a sanitized and gleaming past should hardly be laid at Nair's doorstep in general or because she's a woman. It's a film-affliction in general, and one that I might argue is a valid creative choice in a film presumably meant to feel like it's about the future even as it's about the past.

The whole review is riddled with sexism both about Nair and Earhart (who is, historically, actually considered to be a mediocre pilot, although I don't know enough about the reality of planes of that period or flying them to say whether this assessment is fair -- luck was such a large part of the game back then), including the Times's assertion that the letter Earhart wrote to her husband before their wedding was remarkable. It read: "I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play." OMG! A woman wanting something other than "traditional" fidelity! How can it be?!

The whole review is appalling.

Then there's For every 100 women enrolled in college, only 77 men are, in which the gender gap in higher-education is discussed and no one asks why if women are better educated why we're still paid less or considers the possibility that we all go to college because we need more credentials to have even an uneven chance of success. Additionally, I really think we need to stop expecting so little of men in so many ways. Yuck.

As an aside, I do wish Lars von Trier would go away.

Shouting is the new spanking, but mostly I'm linking to this piece for the single phrase "pregnancy-flaunting." I've mentioned in the past that even in my childhood (30 years ago), visible signs of pregnancy were hidden and not discussed in the world that I lived in, because even the acknowledgment that married people fucked and the results thereof was not okay. However, as a throwaway phrase without explanation, "pregnancy-flaunting" is pretty wacky and unclear, even if I am sick of the whole "people with kids are better than people without kids" thing you get in certain segments of New York society. Anyway, pregnancy flaunting?!?!?! Mostly though, it's just another New York Times article on first world neuroses.

How many types of scary is this? First, sounds like the pilots fell asleep, which is the stuff of nightmare enough. But then, they had the flight make unnecessary maneuvers so that folks on the ground could be sure the plane hadn't been hijacked and there were fighter jets standing by.

Soupy Sales died. I doubt anyone younger than me even knows what I'm talking about.

Last night I dreamed we were in London and I got drafted to play a grave digger at the Globe, but then the script was formatted strangely, and I couldn't figure it out.

That cats, which exist to emit hair, poo and love, dragged a bag of cookies out of Patty's book bag, riped the plastic bag opened, ate some and left a big mess for me to clean up this morning.

The tiny mew mew we saw on the stairs yesterday seems to have gone back to wherever is home. There was no sign of it last night. I hope the little guy is okay.

rollick gives us a HILARIOUS (and illustrated in a way that might be marginally NSFW) post about sexy Halloween costumes and dogs and why the two really, really don't make for sexy matching adorable holiday fun.

Alarming family conversations, part 1 - My mom: "How big are Patty's hands?"

Alarming family conversations, part 2 - Patty's mom: "What size underwear does Racheline wear?"

(It is worth noting that her mother gave me pajamas for Christmas last year that three different people have remarked, apropos of thing, "OMG, did Jack steal those from the Doctor or what?")

I have acquired my flights to Gallifrey One. February 25th, 8pm, LA Airport Marriott bar, pink drinks and gossip. If you're not there, we're talking about you.

Tonight we are seeing Songs of Ascension at BAM.

This song makes me cry. Every. Single. Time.

Comments

[firinel.livejournal.com]

I wondered if you saw, and if so what your take was on, the news report about the "beautiful younger cheerleader who was heart-brokenly stricken with a terrible affliction because of the flu vaccine". http://bit.ly/i5hzY

The report smacked so much of "it's a shame because she was beautiful and thus had potential (we really wouldn't have cared if she was fat and/or ugly)" to me.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I hate "Pretty girls are good girls." Hadn't seen this. Will check it out.

just wondering

[1-mad-squirrel.livejournal.com]

The "ch" in your name, is it hard like "church" or soft like "champagne"?

Re: just wondering

[rm.livejournal.com]

Like champagne.

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

Soupy Sales died. I doubt anyone younger than me even knows what I'm talking about.

I am older than you, and I doubted that anyone younger than me would remember.

[dvanulya.livejournal.com]

Same here.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Those kind of conversations, which I hear far too often, scare the shit out of me. I've reached that point in my looks in which I'm invisible - and sometimes that's okay.

Sexist, racist, Western/American-centric and other stuff that get shat onto people who aren't "the default". Gross!

The script may have looked odd because dream state (in almost all people) happens in portions of the brain in which reading comprehension doesn't exist.

[rm.livejournal.com]

What's funny, is that I can remember the script exactly, but there were lines that had to be delivered over other lines others were speaking and it was notated more like a music score and int he dream I couldn't figure it out.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Wow - you can tell I live in a fantasy world, I was thinking that subway encounter was going to end up as a compliment.

Quite a movie review... complaining about Hilary Swank having great teeth?

Soupy Sales! I don't remember him very much - my dad was a fan - but his sons were all over rock in the 80s.

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

Wow - you can tell I live in a fantasy world, I was thinking that subway encounter was going to end up as a compliment.

Me, too. And now I'm a little squicked because the sad fact of it is that I was lulled into that expectation because I'm heteronormative and white and middle class and INVISIBLE.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I honestly think Manohla Dargis is trying harder and harder to be AO Scott and Anthony Lane at their most ascerbic while lacking their sardonic charm. :/

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

THIS.

She also has some, shall we say, interesting issues with other women.

[dvanulya.livejournal.com]

A quick comment voting "no" on the .gay suffix, because that would make it ever-so-easy for governments who block sites based on their definition of objectionable content to block those sites. And they would be thrilled if it were made easier.

(I'm still amazed every time I'm allowed to read afterelton, or afterellen, or pinknews, etc., shhh...)

[gallo-de-pelea.livejournal.com]

That was actually my first thought when I heard of the push for .gay domain designations. :/

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Last night I dreamed we were in London and I got drafted to play a grave digger at the Globe, but then the script was formatted strangely, and I couldn't figure it out.

Sounds like a sort of intersection between Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett's Play. Weird, as you say.

[ex-adarog.livejournal.com]

I remember Soupy. Wasn't he a regular on the game show To Tell the Truth?

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

I caught the tail end of another "faggot" heavy conversation with shouting and laughing on the street yesterday. Sigh.

As for .gay, I'm against on the basis that I can just see the expectation being that anything queer should be hemmed in to the .gay ghetto, leaving the rest of the Internet nice and tidy and safe for Regular Upstanding Citizens. Yeah, no thanks.

I was unaware of that Earhart letter. Scandalized newspapers aside, I dig the sentiment, and like that she's someone else one can point to when it comes to a history of people in differently negotiated relationships.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Also, you know Warren Buffet is poly, right?

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say that I love your sundries posts. =)

And that I love Mira Nair and don't think all of her films are 'interesting failures'. If you mean in the US box offices-- then yes, technically they are...but as films I find them to be very risky and enlightening.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I really struggle with her work. From a critical standpoint I can always find a tremendous amount with her work (pacing, wrapping up all the themes she introduces, etc), but the risks she takes are interesting and more than make up for it (I much prefer ambitious, imperfect films as a rule). She's making relatively mainstream pictures in very subtly not mainstream ways, and there's really no other voice out there I would compare her to.

As much as Vanity Fair drags in the middle and there was a lot of noise about the way she changed the book, I thought it was quite compelling for its ideas if nothing else.

So the random dismissal of Amelia, which I'm sure is probably interesting on some level, because Nair isn't a white guy directing it just leaves me shaking with rage.

(and thank you! I always feel like the mishmash is too random, but it keeps me from posting 100 times a day, and hey, something for everyone!)

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I know who Soupy Sales is. Of course, I also know who Jack Benny and Fred Allen are. Your mileage may vary.

I wish the critical establishment would get over their obnoxious no-girls-allowed crap, which was old when Molly Haskel excoriated it in 1974. I think a lot of cinema critical studies is still too indebted to the Cahiers du cinema crowd and their studied contempt for women and "women's pictures" (which, one must note, was Hollywood's bread and butter in the days before Jaws and Star Wars).

[pin-drop.livejournal.com]

Well. There's something telling in the fact that I interpreted the "spanking" as having to do with sexual kink, and not with parenting strategies. (I was reading very quickly.) Do you think this kink will become less common now that most young parents think it's Way Uncool to spank their kids?

It may soothe you to know that I knew who Soupy was before I read this post. And I'm 22.

Also: polyamourous celebrities make me very giddy, and I didn't know about either of those! Thank you.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well. There's something telling in the fact that I interpreted the "spanking" as having to do with sexual kink, and not with parenting strategies. (I was reading very quickly.) Do you think this kink will become less common now that most young parents think it's Way Uncool to spank their kids?

If anything, I suspect the kink may become more common, but what a great question. I hope someone somewhere decides to study _that_.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

Speaking as somebody who, for a number of tiresome medical reasons mostly having to do with my really crappy DNA, will not have kids, I find "pregnancy-flaunting" horridly offensive. As well as the writer's characterization of current parenthood.

My coworker is pregnant with her second child. The only way in which she could possibly "flaunt" this is the fact that she's due in about 7 weeks, so is All Belly right now.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

All the reviews of Amelia I've seen have been super-weird. The last one I read opened with the bizarre assertion that what we really should be examining is what happened to her on that last flight, like some kind of weird conspiracy theorist.

The rest of their criticism might or might not be accurate, I haven't seen the film, but if you open your review by saying you don't think a biopic should focus on the person's actual life...

My dog is TOTALLY appropriate!

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Calvin Pimp Calvin dressed as a pimp

[delle.livejournal.com]

pregnancy-flouting? as in, how DARE those pregnant women leave their homes? how dare they show their bellies?

W.T.F.

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

More like "Why are they acting so smugly righteous in that they did not actually invent pregnancy nor perform astounding feats of derring-do* to accomplish it". There's a set of folks that treat pregnancy like a luxe accessory.

Even from my perch here as a very happy parent I can see how the term "breeders" can seem attractive.


*assumption

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

why is the Indian woman making movies about things that aren't Indian?

Nobody said anything like that when Attenborough made Cry Freedom, or Zwick made Glory...

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

Mazola is one of the worst of the increasingly few high-profile reviewers, IMO. I can pretty much always count on being bored or squicked by any film she really likes. I think that, in the American crit community at any rate, the handful of top-level women tend to try to be 'one of the boys'.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, pregnancy flaunting is ALL OVER the book I am reading. Well, in Guinevere's warped little mind, at least. I quote you:

"And Elaine would not gloat and triumph over her again. [...] It is always so with women... those women who have sons think every they are the betters of any women who is barren. The wife of the swineherd, in her childbed, no doubt thinks with scorn and pity of the Queen who cannot give her lord so much as a single son."

And so on, and so. Clearly NY times = spoiled teenage Queen!

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. When and where am I fetching you for the theater tonight?

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

I am curious to know if Gurinder Chadha got similar comments for Bend it Like Beckham or Bride and Prejudice.

Or is it OK if the director is Indian raised in the UK because, < sarcasm >you know, that's where they all go anyway. < /sarcasm >

The only way in which Dargis serves as any sort of accurate metric as to whether or not I will like a film is that if she hates it, I will love it. Make of that what you will.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

As an aside, I do wish Lars von Trier would go away. shrivel up and die?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I deeply fear the "sexy" dog costumes.

Also, "she keeps a tidy screen" - that sounds like a line I would have expected from a male reviewer about a female director 25 years ago.

[idunn.livejournal.com]

Sorry to admit I hadn't heard of Soupy Sales until today. (I was born in '83, so he was before my time.) But I heard a new story from my father tonight regarding an old family friend. J had worked for years in radio and TV and had friends all over the place, and it turns out she'd worked with Soupy Sales on and off over the years. She always insisted that the guy was great but totally loopy.

One day, Dad's hanging out over J's when her phone rings. J picks up. Without even saying hello or identifying himself, Soupy Sales asks her, "What do Cher and Seattle Washington have in common?"

J replies, "Uh, I don't know?"

"Neither one of 'em fuckin' sunny." And he hung up on her.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard Soupy Sales had died. I suddenly feel like I should call my mom and reminisce with her, but she's gone too.