sundries

[rm]

Hey, when I say don't be assholes the correct response is not ignoring people's boundaries and/or making DIAF remarks. I am not happy.

Fuck Yeah, Skeksis!

I find the idea of "Things That Are Not Like Guns" weirdly hilarious. Last night Patty and I had a long discussion about to what degree sharks are, or are not, like guns. Sharks are, for the record, not like guns.

HPOA girl likely fake. Some iteration of just that thing shows up every couple of years, and the story is always too perfect -- pretty chick (you side with her), industry people love to hate (Wall Street now, Internet start-ups then), with lots of expected sexism (it could be an after-school special!), culminating with an attack on some Internet phenomenon that annoys the fuck out of a lot of people (Farmville).

The flight attendant story is still real though.

And so is that of the guy who took his bus on a 1,300 mile detour.

Interesting story about the legality of 66 marriage licenses issues to same sex couples in New Mexico in 2004. They stand.

Mexico City same-sex marriages must be recognized as legal throughout Mexico.

And Costa Rica has ruled against a referendum that would take a vote on recognizing same-sex unions. The courts says such a vote would put LGBT at a disadvantage.

Is that your baby? About being mistake for the nanny in multi-racial families.

Patty sent this to me yesterday as "Horrifying Inception Find." There's really little more I can add, but I'll warn you it's a screen-shot of a Craigslist casual encounters ad, the language is NSFW, and it's in the category of dirty, dirty cosplay sex. I share because I care.

Rules for hats flumox hipsters: I don't care if your fedora cost $80, when you're inside, you take it off.

I hate this fucking Jack/Auggie fic. Okay, I've finally got Auggie's voice, and I know where it's going and what is already ridiculously wrong with the whole thing and faily and needs to be fixed. But increasingly, I feel like I can't write this fic without making a mess. Every online conversation I see about Auggie on blogs related to disabiity issues has about six different sides. Which is to say, I don't think it's possible to produce this story without being really offensive to multiple someones.

That said, I'm still beating my head against the thing, because I think the pairing and the story make sense and that it should be possible to tell a good story that isn't faily. So, if you're tuned in to Covert Affairs, and particularly if you're viewing it from a living with disabilities perspective, and have a comment about what they are doing right or wrong with Auggie (aside from the actor not actually being blind, since that's a perfectly reasonable topic for conversation, but one that won't help me solve this story) that you'd like to share, I am so all ears. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Speaking of Covert Affairs -- how great was this week's episode? Jai suddenly gets interesting and isn't just the bad guy. I don't hate the idea of a possible Jai, Auggie, Annie love triangle (oh god, someone write me that threesome). The gossipy relationship premise of the show is feeling more organic even if it's still too straight for my taste. The women kick ass. And pretty much everything is awesome except for the whole thng with Annie's former beau that I just don't care about at all.

Which brings us to White Collar -- now that was an episode. And Peter is just so effortlessly the boss of Neal, it's kinda hilarious. And I loved the high-class repoman chick. And Neal's look of being nauseated in the face of handling a gun, and pretty much the whole thing which felt like a very New York episode. Much love. I still don't care about Kate though, even if the part of the story about the FAA tapes was actually well done.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've seen some discussion of that, and I don't necessarily find it as problematic as a lot of people do. For example, The Prestige comes from source material not Nolan's own (although he did choose the project sure) and all directors have obsessions, that usually feel pretty gross because they are obsessions (Baz Luhrmann and Peter Jackson both come through on this point over and over again). While I think the "tragic dead girl drives plot" thing blows, I don't think Nolan's work gets off on or sexualizes killing women, which would be where I would have a problem with things.

I think Nolan, like lots of creators of both genders, view women as disposable items that kick the plot along when shit happens to them. But this is largely an artifact of our making films mostly about men, and therefore the love interests bite it (see: Ianto Jones, dead dead dead) -- in a hteronormative film-making climate, that's a lot of dead chicks.

It sucks, and we need more films about women that aren't women's films, but I don't particularly feel that Nolan deserves singling out on this point or is more creepy than other directors for being a product of the box-office and studio climate.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I once told someone that Strictly Ballroom was my favorite Luhrmann film because (1) "Sparkly!" and (2) "The girl lives!"

I don't think Nolan is worse than the average director when it comes to gender issues, but he's really high-profile right now.

[rm.livejournal.com]

All of Luhrmann's movies are actually about prostitution though. It's rarely the women. But that's the theme. Always.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

(Sorry, thread-crashing here.) Yeah, i've been thinking about this. I think it's more that Nolan is interested in the psychology of loss, and his main characters are all men. It's this very masculine world where the symbolic "missing thing" is always feminine - but at least he isn't asking us to take voyeuristic pleasure in the deaths of these women, and they are often traumatic in a way that goes beyond a mere means of generating angst for main character - i.e. the story is often about this loss, it doesn't just use the loss to get us somewhere else. (Except for "The Dark Knight" which totally does.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yes. All of this. Which is why I like his work so much.