The New York Times continues to think that the trend towards dressing up is their hot new over the last couple of years. The New York Times is increasingly the last to know about anything, but I'll take what I can get. This one is very much an outgrowth of the Mad Men phenomenon, but it pretty high on my "mmmm, yes, but no" list.
Get ready for the sound of me screaming. I haven't read it yet, but nothing titled, "Can Anybody Make a Movie for Women?" is gong to result in anything but my fury.
I feel like a bit of an asshole linking this one as it's unavoidably full of "look at those wacky Japanese" and "geeks are losers" tropes, but Tokyo man weds video game character.
Jude Law 'in love' with 'Sherlock Holmes' co-star Robert Downey Jr. That's the headline exactly as CNN gives it to you, and I'm interested in it both as marketing strategy in terms of sound-bites on Sherlock Holmes and also because of the whole implied giggly/awkwardness of the headline in the rest of the article. I find this shit amusing on the surface and then quaint and irritating when I think about it, to be frank. Because CNN would _never_ use that headline in reference to men who were, you know, actually romantically/sexually in love with each other. That's the problem.
Speaking of Holmes: originally the two bits of Holmes hilarity coming out in the next couple of months (the one mentioned above and the sucktacular thing GDL is in) were just going to be odd campy amusements to me. But now I'm having to read all the Holmes stuff for my Bristol paper, so hey... I might be informed on the OMGWTFBBQ factor of these projects.
An origami crane folded by Sadako Sasaki is part of 9/11 memorial. My fellow children of the 80s, were you traumatized by 1,001 Cranes along with me? I can't believe that there used to be a whole genre of children's books, both fiction and non-, about nuclear war. Ah, the Regan years.
Patty has been keeping me up to date on the epically weird demise of the Washington Times, DC's bizarreo-land Moonie-run paper. If you haven't been following it, you can catch up here.
The odds of my book being in-stock again from a major e-tailer before the deadline for Christmas shipping delivery is pretty low. I'm making a post office run on Saturday. If you want one $14 to me via paypal and I'll get it out then. Books will be in stock again soon, just not in time for Christmas delivery.
I don't think I read The Thousand Paper Cranes until I was eleven, but when I did, I wasn't traumatized. Amazingly enough, however, it made me cry. NOTHING made me cry back then. After that, I actually delved into many of those fictional books about the bombings, though I can't remember many of them now. One of them was about the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, though, which stood out to me because all of the others seemed to be written about Hiroshima. It was pretty good. I can't remember the name for the life of me, though.
That article about Nancy Meyers ("Can Anybody Make a Movie For Women?") was not quite as bad as I expected from reading the title. True, it seems that both the director and the author of the article are fixated on the gender binary and heteronormative ways of viewing the world, but a good deal of first three pages (which was all I read) focuses on how Meyers' targeting the middle-aged female demographic has been accompanied by her efforts to turn audiences away from their tendency to think of older women as "dry," "threatening," "un-sexed," or "past their prime" and instead give the older female audience an outlet for their ideas and wishes of romance later in life while giving them a sort of self-esteem boost. At least she's trying. Unfortunately, this approach does incorporate other stereotypes about the older female crowd that may still put them under the scrutiny of other demographics.
What I disliked about the article was the tone of surprise the author used when describing Meyers' persona--how she could be dressed in subtle women's professional clothing, looking like a lawyer, and yet turn out to be one of the most meticulous film directors in the industry, or like lauding her soft command because while she doesn't bark out orders to people or treat them like crap like some directors, she's firm and she knows how to get what she wants. It's kind of like the author is congratulating her for retaining so-called femininity when authority and a sense of command are considered "unfeminine," I guess...at least by this author, or by the people the author thinks are reading the article. Like you can't really be admired as a woman if you yell at people or push people so you can get your way, even though "most men" do it all the time, or like femininity is still something all professional women should aspire to. Great for Meyers if she likes that sort of thing, but others shouldn't be judged by the same qualifiers.
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Date: 2009-12-17 04:52 pm (UTC)That article about Nancy Meyers ("Can Anybody Make a Movie For Women?") was not quite as bad as I expected from reading the title. True, it seems that both the director and the author of the article are fixated on the gender binary and heteronormative ways of viewing the world, but a good deal of first three pages (which was all I read) focuses on how Meyers' targeting the middle-aged female demographic has been accompanied by her efforts to turn audiences away from their tendency to think of older women as "dry," "threatening," "un-sexed," or "past their prime" and instead give the older female audience an outlet for their ideas and wishes of romance later in life while giving them a sort of self-esteem boost. At least she's trying. Unfortunately, this approach does incorporate other stereotypes about the older female crowd that may still put them under the scrutiny of other demographics.
What I disliked about the article was the tone of surprise the author used when describing Meyers' persona--how she could be dressed in subtle women's professional clothing, looking like a lawyer, and yet turn out to be one of the most meticulous film directors in the industry, or like lauding her soft command because while she doesn't bark out orders to people or treat them like crap like some directors, she's firm and she knows how to get what she wants. It's kind of like the author is congratulating her for retaining so-called femininity when authority and a sense of command are considered "unfeminine," I guess...at least by this author, or by the people the author thinks are reading the article. Like you can't really be admired as a woman if you yell at people or push people so you can get your way, even though "most men" do it all the time, or like femininity is still something all professional women should aspire to. Great for Meyers if she likes that sort of thing, but others shouldn't be judged by the same qualifiers.