sundries

[rm]

Oh, no wonder I feel like total shit. Menstruation. You'd think I'd stop being surprised at some point.

We still really, REALLY need to book England.

Buffy! We now are one episode away from finishing S3. God help me, I like Wesley/Cordelia. Willow is the most awesome thing ever, and I cried when Buffy got her umbrella award. Meanwhile: Jesus fucking Christ can the Buffy/Angel plotline just end already?

Russell Tovey was at WhoYork last night. He was delightful, smart, and hasn't yet hit a stage with these sorts of events where he has stock answers. So it was lovely, and he was smart about theater and funny about Doctor Who (both when the rumour started going around that he was going to be Eleven, and in regards to The End of Time scene, the huge significance of which to the fandom he had not realized at the time). In person, he was taller and cuter than I'd expected. The ears though, exactly the same. Anyway, he's a doll. And he has good boundaries! Sort of wacky and amazing.

As such, I missed most of the Oscars (as did Patty who had lots of work for school). I will note that what I saw of the ceremony was uniquely terrible. I also can't fathom how Sandra Bullock won. Additionally, even the briefest clips of Avatar made me cringe.

But the really big news, of course, is Kathryn Bigelow. I'm not sure to what extent people not in the biz grasp how big a deal it is that a woman won best director for a war movie is. It's still conventional wisdom in many, if not most, big movie-making circles that a woman just doesn't have the force of will to direct a film. And when film's go haywire (see Across the Universe) when female directors are at the helm, people will whisper that it's about her, and not the studio. People will talk about female hormones and whether she can be calm on the set (like the men are?) and about how there's no crying in baseball. If you're a woman and you want to be a big league director, you have a big, hard fucking wall staring at you, especially if you don't want to be making women's pictures. I won't say Bigelow just changed all of that, because she hasn't, not quite. But she makes it much easier for all the women I know and love in this business to say "fuck you, shut up" when the bullshit starts and have people shut up now.

The Jewish Papal Knight.

Kid banned from Catholic pre-school because she has two moms.

Last night Patty alerted me to The Gatehouse Gazette and its current issue that features quite a bit of content on "orientalism" and what people are now calling "Victorientalism" and the whole thing struck the both of us as rather jaw-droppingly not okay. dmp says it better.

Comments

[firinel.livejournal.com]

*nods* That's the way I've always heard it used as well - like someone who very much would NOT use the word Oriental *would* use the word "Orientalism" to comment on the disrespectful way Westerners picked up/aped/appropriated and bastardised East Asian dress/aesthetic, etc. This means that, as dmp's included quotes seems to suggest, that "Asian Look" doesn't work, because it does not convey enough information.

Something can be asian styled. Saying that does not carry the weight, or even necessarily the same meaning, of saying something is Orientalistic.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

As a concrete example of this, I visited China as part of a trade mission in 2000. The guy in charge gave us briefings about what to expect which diverged by about 45% from what we actually did experience, and yet in a debriefing he persisted in describing what we'd experienced it the same terms he'd used before we'd gone - just as an example, the way he described the traffic chaos in Bejing suggested that it would be qualitatively different from other large city traffic chaos in rush hour, which, largely, it wasn't (quantitatively - that, yes). I turned to one of my companions of the trip and expressed bafflement that he had apparently not seen the same China - modern, industrial China - that we had seen, and Petris shrugged, and said, "He's an Orientalist." Which explained exactly what the disconnect was - like slash goggles, but with countries - and has nothing to do with "Asian style".