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

[sushis.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to have any links to this info?

I know that the theory that vaccines sometimes cause autism is supported by only a very small minority of doctors, and that the vast majority of doctors and scientists oppose this theory as scientifically unsound. If there's consensus among doctors that some severe neurological side effects of vaccines are real (albeit rare), it may still be better in general for people to be vaccinated. That is, if the neurological risks are far lower than the risks of dying of the disease that a given vaccine protects against, even a scientifically-verified risk of neurological disease is not generally a good reason not to get vaccinated.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've seen pretty much constant references to about 400 people getting Guillain-Barre as a result of the 1976 flu vaccination program. Lower risk of getting that from the shot than getting flu without it. I also haven't seen a refutation of it.

CDC website acknowledges this, but cites studies showing the risk from later flu vaccines to be really tiny: http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/about/qa/gbs.htm

[cozzene.livejournal.com]

only in so much as my mother, father, and grandmother were all nurses at various times and shared this in conversations. I don't have much time for research these days.