@chebec: oh, you should watch it, definitely! It’s a very good movie, certainly the best movie on the subject I’ve seen, and it’s not meant to leave you hating life or anything like that. XD; The ending is ultimately hopeful, in an ambiguous way (the ambiguity is the whole point). It just caused me to have a revelation re: how SOCIETY, SOCIETY IS THE PROBLEM I TELL YOU, which, yeah.

Tomboy (2011)

A movie that could never have been made in North America, because it involves a little girl-body that is sometimes naked in the bath. The title is intentionally ambiguous - is Mikael/Laure a tomboy, accidentally stumbling into summer-vacation freedom from gendered social conformity at the age cusp when that bugaboo really starts making itself felt? A baby lesbian? A transsexual? (What pronoun should I use in this review?) Most people would argue trans, I suspect, but the filmmaker’s mode is observational and non-reductive; that of the children she watches, exploratory. There’s a power in the scene where Mikael takes off hir shirt to play football that cis women will grok - a differential there, no matter what, and being a girl who is “good enough to play ball” with the boys only points up the unbridgeability of the gap. At the same time, Mikael-the-putative-boy is sensitive, “different” from the others, prefers the sidelines and the company of women. Lisa is a Wendy Darling, the one girl running with a pack of boys at an age where that makes you slightly superior and mysterious, but the first thing she does when she gets a boyfriend is put makeup on him. (“It looks nice on you,” says the mother, but not with concealed relief; Laure’s tomboyishness is a non-issue; it’s not a family where there’s only one way to be a girl. Emphasis: to be a girl.) As for the pertly adorable little sister, she’s more than just happy to have a big sister who can be a big brother when the occasion requires. There’s a delight in her that’s half putting one over on the grownups, half the discovery that one of the world’s physical rules simply is not. That it’s merely a matter of perspective, like Douglas Adams’ trick to flying.

All of which is to say, I have rarely been more upset by a movie than when the four-year-old’s revealed truth ran up against the world at large, as it inevitably did. More upset than the ending was meant to leave the viewer; upset enough that I had to hold back on a review until I could articulate what got to me so viscerally, as a cis woman who can’t really own the issue. I think, now, that it was the systemic loss of possibility. Bullying and peer pressure are bad; one’s gut reactions as parents don’t always do one credit. But the worst of all is that summer vacation has to end, and when everyone goes back to school you have to put one name down in the government register, and one letter - M or F. Because that is inarguable; that is the fundamental so-called wisdom underlying pre-teens’ knowledge of what is obviously “gross” or not. And it contravenes my fundamental sense of what life is about, which is to become, not to be. Discover who you really are, or become someone you’re not; try, pretend, discard, whatever. Practice. Make a mockery of it. And have the right to disregard, if you want, the doors that labels open as well as those that they close. Untenable idealism, yeah, of course: I can’t “try” not being Asian. But that’s the instinct I have nevertheless. I made an attempt, once, to introduce “Other” as a drop-down menu choice on web sites, expecting to be shot down because - God forbid - it would mess up the marketing research data. What I got was scorn and utter incomprehension. “What, like for people who don’t know their gender? How can anyone not know?” (This from an accessibility advocate, by the by.) Well, and so what if someone doesn’t know? Or doesn’t care to identify? Does that make hir a cretin or a liar? Somewhere between age 4 and 14 we lose the trick of flying; however problematic Barrie may be, he got that one right.

Must-see addendum material to that Mizuki Nana song. (Check out our heroine’s FIRST GLOWSTICK EXPERIENCE!)

Reconnaissance Across The Yangtze (1954)

So it turns out that a surprising number of my grandfather’s movies are on Youtube in their entirety (albeit often in awful quality). This is one of my favourites; it’s totally cheesy wartime fare, and makes me cry every time.

microphoneheartbeats: imathers: oldtobegin: please feel free to get in touch with @marginsbeware on twitter and let him know what you think about THIS piece of shit. Part of me wishes I had the energy to go through this piece of runny diarrhea line-by-line to point out everything wrong with it, part of me wishes I had twitter (for the first time!) so I could say something nasty to this complete and total waste of life and resources, but I somehow hurt my back this morning (while feeding the cats, even!) and I have a million things I have to do and I’m really tired. Just… just go fuck yourself @marginsbeware. Fuck yourself with a rusty butter knife. “Those of us who spent our formative years answering to “Hey Faggot”” should maybe try not to cling to our high-school victimhood as something that defines us completely. And maybe recognize that there are actual women and actual faggots (hi! I’m right here!) who are interested in the same things that you are, and that policing the boundaries of geek-dom (or whatever) as something to be exclusively inhabited by straight white men demonstrates only that you have learned nothing of empathy from your lived experience. “For those of us for whom it was simply never an option to be anything other than who we are” - you mean, like women living in a patriarchal society? and people of colour? and queer people? and other people whose presence is routinely erased from (most) of “geek culture” despite the fact that we are here, kicking and screaming to be heard and seen, only to have to put up with inexcusable crap from books/movies/comics/art that we want to love? like the bullshit racism over an alternate-universe black Spider-Man? or the tokenistic queering of Gaeta in webisodes as the bone thrown to representation in BSG? or hey, let’s talk about why Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney will never get as much adoration as Asimov et al.? Because you know - attractive women are good enough to be objectified as “super hot” but not good enough to share your interests. And ‘faggots’ are simply what you get called for loving computers and comics and MMORPGs - a label to suffer through, and an emblem of your own persecution. Certainly not actual gay people. [/sarcasm] (P.S. There are real lesbians, too! And some of them like science fiction and gaming, also! And they don’t just exist to make out with each other for your benefit.) We all suffer alienation and heartbreak. In our society if your race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, class, etc. etc. etc. are not the dominant one, you cannot change it. You are outside the box and were never allowed inside the box in the first place. You do not get a pass on sexism and homophobia and racism and cissexism and so forth just because you played Magic: The Gathering or can quote Monty Python or could read Quenya and Sindarin in high school. (I did all those things too?) Be human. Grow the fuck up. Stop looking for reasons to feel better than people. Ugh. I don’t usually hateblog but haha this is kind of amazing? I don’t know whether the perfect handwriting makes it more or less likely to be a complete troll.

microphoneheartbeats:

imathers:

oldtobegin:

please feel free to get in touch with @marginsbeware on twitter and let him know what you think about THIS piece of shit.

Part of me wishes I had the energy to go through this piece of runny diarrhea line-by-line to point out everything wrong with it, part of me wishes I had twitter (for the first time!) so I could say something nasty to this complete and total waste of life and resources, but I somehow hurt my back this morning (while feeding the cats, even!) and I have a million things I have to do and I’m really tired.

Just… just go fuck yourself @marginsbeware. Fuck yourself with a rusty butter knife.

“Those of us who spent our formative years answering to “Hey Faggot”” should maybe try not to cling to our high-school victimhood as something that defines us completely. And maybe recognize that there are actual women and actual faggots (hi! I’m right here!) who are interested in the same things that you are, and that policing the boundaries of geek-dom (or whatever) as something to be exclusively inhabited by straight white men demonstrates only that you have learned nothing of empathy from your lived experience.

“For those of us for whom it was simply never an option to be anything other than who we are” - you mean, like women living in a patriarchal society? and people of colour? and queer people? and other people whose presence is routinely erased from (most) of “geek culture” despite the fact that we are here, kicking and screaming to be heard and seen, only to have to put up with inexcusable crap from books/movies/comics/art that we want to love? like the bullshit racism over an alternate-universe black Spider-Man? or the tokenistic queering of Gaeta in webisodes as the bone thrown to representation in BSG? or hey, let’s talk about why Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney will never get as much adoration as Asimov et al.?

Because you know - attractive women are good enough to be objectified as “super hot” but not good enough to share your interests. And ‘faggots’ are simply what you get called for loving computers and comics and MMORPGs - a label to suffer through, and an emblem of your own persecution. Certainly not actual gay people. [/sarcasm] (P.S. There are real lesbians, too! And some of them like science fiction and gaming, also! And they don’t just exist to make out with each other for your benefit.)

We all suffer alienation and heartbreak. In our society if your race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, class, etc. etc. etc. are not the dominant one, you cannot change it. You are outside the box and were never allowed inside the box in the first place.

You do not get a pass on sexism and homophobia and racism and cissexism and so forth just because you played Magic: The Gathering or can quote Monty Python or could read Quenya and Sindarin in high school. (I did all those things too?) Be human. Grow the fuck up. Stop looking for reasons to feel better than people.

Ugh.

I don’t usually hateblog but haha this is kind of amazing? I don’t know whether the perfect handwriting makes it more or less likely to be a complete troll.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

iamyoursexyonnisan:

V. I. P. feat. T-Pain (Album Version)


Speaking of Singles Jukebox, the Koda Kumi album is really good, you guys.

thesinglesjukebox:

LEONARD COHEN - SHOW ME THE PLACE
[6.89]

Not about to go away, damn it…

Jer Fairall: It is as exquisitely executed as it is wholly expected, the sound of an old master addressing spirituality and mortality from his own unique and privileged vantage point. The words avoid blasphemy simply by being so gracefully crafted and delivered; could any other performer render a word as densely loaded as “slave” so free of malice? In fact, it may have have all been so punishingly respectable were it not so flat-out gorgeous, Cohen’s parched Eeyore rasp supported by a gentle cast of Emmylou Harris-like backing vocals, a muted Celtic reel and a piano melody that is less elegiac than it might simply be the very notion of elegy distilled to its purest musical essence.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Cohen’s 2009 tour was a financial coup and an aesthetic coup. Reimagining material in danger of being smothered by cobwebs, Cohen proved a performer of surpassing, surprising vitality. Note I didn’t write “singer.” Husking, blowing, and wheezing this would-be hymn, accompanied by old friend Jennifer Warnes, Cohen projects the granitic splendor of a statue of a Civil War general in the park, such that I can’t tell whether this falls short as a song or whether Cohen can’t coax out its melodic – not to mention conceptual – possibilities.
[7]

Sabina Tang: If other stans rate this qua stan, I’m going to regret rating it as minor Cohen. The Voice(tm) gets in the way of the hymn this time around, and one doesn’t listen to major Cohen while mentally constructing future cover versions by KD Lang, Patrick Wolf, the cast of Glee, and your high school glee club. Nevertheless, because I have the silly bone of a Leonard Cohen fanatic, I find acute comedy in the thought of a po-faced choir singing punchline couplets like “show me the place where the Word became a man / (pause for effect) show me the place where the suffering began.” Whoa, easy on the uplifting religiosity there!
[7]

Brad Shoup: In the ballad game, grizzled troubadours like Cohen, Waits and Zevon always play with house money. Cohen’s twist is to show a old man in quiet, total thrall. This is not the slavery of the Old Testament, but it’s a relationship not unlike Ruth and Naomi (which Cohen has touched on before). Led by a gospel piano progression, the song takes a decided turn into the Appalachian as the strings bleed in and contend mightily with the dreadfully trad backing vocals. The virtues of Cohen alone should be amply evident by now.
[6]

Pete Baran: When considering new material from a titan, you cannot help try to find its place in the entire body of work, as well as in the current landscape of music. So it’s great to hear that this new single, whilst cutting back on the crazy instrumentation, is still exactly what I’d expect from him in 2012.
[7]

John Seroff: My exposure to Leonard Cohen is pretty minimal beyond the best-known work, so although I know just enough to understand his placement among the pantheon, I feel I can listen to “Show Me the Place” without too great a prejudice of expectation. Honestly, it don’t sound like much. Cohen’s voice has mellowed into a less expressive Tom Waits growl, and his spoken-word dirge lacks the pathos of Glen Campbell or the indignation of Gil-Scott Heron. The much-ballyhooed poetry is — and it feels like shibboleth to even think it — not so hot. I suppose it’s possible that I’m just not getting the song, but I’d feel a lot better about copping to ignorance if I heard a whisper of anything I was missing.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: The beauty of Cohen’s work, and all its layers and interpretations is that his throat always supports whichever one sounds best to you as a listener. When he sings of being a slave in this near-spiritual, I don’t know which kind of divine bondage he’s rhapsodising about, but it’s strangely moving and graceful.
[8]

Anthony Easton: I think it was Cohen who wrote in his early 70s, about talking to his Roshi, about when sexuality flows from the body and is replaced with bodily concerns. Roshi at that point a decade or so older, said that he wasn’t sure, that it hadn’t happened yet. Even if it is my faulty memory, and not actually Cohen, I wonder if finally bodily metaphors as sexual metaphors as spiritual metaphors — the triune mystery that he has put his career on, have loosened. Here. “slave” seems to be less of a sadomasochistic desire, and more of a desire for something like the prayer of humble access, or the more abasing koans. For all of his talk of being stripped, of being torn, or being taken, Cohen in his own peculiar way has been a monster of ego. I wonder what Cohen without his mystical cock swinging would look like?
[7]

Michaela Drapes: How can you possibly turn your back upon the profound wisdom of Leonard Cohen? Even as a young-ish man at the beginning of his career, he was preternaturally wise and world-weary; now, nearly eighty, he’s the closest thing we have to collective musical conscience. So as his gritty, sandpappery voice rasps out this love/sex/death story in classic Cohen hymnal style, you know he’s heard and seen everything of which he speaks. Thank goodness he’s still allowing us to listen.
[9]

[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox ]

I guess I should mention here at some point that I’m now writing for The Singles Jukebox. It’s fun! I’m being careful not to force myself to blurb when I don’t have anything to say, and to my surprise that’s not skewing my ratings higher, necessarily (since it eliminates all the songs I can’t even finish playing XD;;;). There’s a nice J-pop/K-pop selection in the mix, which helps.

The Leonard Cohen blurb isn’t my best (what I really wanted to do was review the album track-by-track, and this song isn’t the most interesting one on it), but I also need to put it out there on my Tumblr that there’s a new Leonard Cohen album arriving today, so.

Operation Mincemeat and spycraft in WWII

(by Malcolm Gladwell over at The New Yorker)

I had a paperback book about Operation Mincemeat as a kid! It was written by one of the army blokes involved, can’t remember which one. I think this was the first thing I learnt about WWII that did not come from a Chinese Communist perspective. XD;;;

Durutti Column - Prayer (live)

Went rooting through my records looking for something to play while laid up with broken toe and reading a 70s spy novel. This one is killing it.

Korean Cuisine: Time Saving Tricks

troisroyaumes:

A lot of these tricks are ones I use already (having learned them from my mother) but wrapping the ginger in saran wrap is a great idea.

I really ought to freeze chopped shallots like that - I can’t use up two bunches in a week, but I need to have access to shallots at basically all times. Does it change the texture, one wonders (ginger does freezer burn when sliced, but this is moot when you’re using it for something like slow-cooker turnip soup).

Here is something I’ve always wondered about: the art of tofu maintenance. Like, when you buy fresh tofu that comes water-packed in a plastic container, you have to change the water as soon as you get home, and preferably daily thereafter, or the tofu goes bad with a vengeance. But why is that? The container is pretty much sealed against air, and the water is just water.

(via chebec)

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Themed by: Hunson