sundries

[rm]

Now that Patty has posted it, I can tell you that she passed her comps.

Less than one week until Europe.

Yesterday we essentially finished the recording for Inception: The Musical, although there will be lots of intensive work (that's not mine!) to make all the files neat and clean and shareable on the Internets.

We also solved a couple of small but pivotal Dogboy & Justine (Kickstarter currently at $1,055) problems and went to the NYMF closing party.

By and large, as much as I HATE initiating conversations with strangers, if they come to me, I'm pretty good. We explained the show cogently most of the time, and were able to ascertain quickly what was and wasn't working as pitch content.

1. People love that it's a show about dominatrices and see dollar signs right away.
2. People either confess their own interactions with or knowledge of sex-work or make uncomfortable jokes -- I am personally good with the first and tolerant of the second.
3. As we're two women doing a show, there's a certain immediate "do the children know what they are doing?" vibe in some conversations. This is unavoidable, and deeply unpleasant to me.
4. If I dressed masculine-ly for such soirees, I suspect we'd get less of item 3, but more of "if your show is about lesbians, they better be hot lesbians" -- an item that came up because there was some butch lesbian content in the festival this year.
5. People DO NOT want to know that I was ever a dominatrix. This actually annoys me, not because I give a shit one way or another if people know, but because of the horrible, bullshit answers I'm going to have to give to the "Why dominatrixes?" question, which from now on will be a reiteration of "I really love that musical theater trope of backstage stories, but I wanted to go with an environment that was less familiar.... blah blah blah blah." Still, I'm not keeping the secret, because I'd never be able to manage to; but I'm now going to side-step the dare that that question is -- because yeah, that's what the question is, and then when you take people up on it, they get all spiky.

So were we perfect? No. Was it better than "more hits than you can possibly imagine!"¹ -- I keep telling myself, reluctantly, uncertainly, yes. Clearly, among other things, we need to take a media training approach to disciplining the social aspects of this endeavor. And proceed with a constant awareness of how much creative control two women aren't expected to want -- the whole experience was both really positive and put up a lot of blinking warning signs for me, both on factors external and internal.

But hey, business cards and follow-up emails.

As an Afghan-German filmmaker's student thesis is thrust into the spotlight he deals publicly with what it means to be perceived as a foreigner at home.

Women kicked out of mall for kissing, because, as usual, it's different when gay people do it.

Tea Party candidate Ken Buck compared being gay to alcoholism.

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¹ There's this story buried somewhere on the Romeo + Juliet DVD about a disastrous pitch meeting Luhrmann had for it, when he'd been given advice not to mention that it would be using Shakespeare's original language. It's pretty funny, and is also a nice baseline for "Did you make more sense than that? If so, you live to fight another day."

Comments

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

Not really, I'm afraid. At least not in any sort of functional way. It used to drive me crazy when I was living there; the things that would come out of the mouths of the young, educated, liberal Germans I was living with at the time were completely appalling. And I had a student in a class of tenth graders (who in Germany are usually 16-17 years old) tell me in total seriousness during a discussion I was running about the Civil War and the legacy of slavery in the U.S. that "there is no racism in Germany."

There isn't even much academic discourse about race in Germany, which is why you get a lot of Germans coming to the U.S. to do their PhD's on topics like Turkish-German literature (one of my own subfields). Any courses about race or ethnicity get relegated to the English department (along with anything related the slightest bit to gender). A lot of German academics seem to consider critical race theory something that's been forced upon them by the Anglophone academic community.

This is not to say, of course, that there aren't Germans who are interested in trying to build a multicultural society, but it's hard when there's so little discourse; when people lack a functional vocabulary related to the topic even in academia, it becomes hard to picture what something like that would look like. And then you have German politicians like Merkel saying what she did to pander to the Christian right and other politicians going around talking about Leitkultur (basically, hegemonic "German" culture - as though "Germanness" didn't have a hundred regional variations itself) and . . . yeah. It's a mess.