Dry the Rain

It occurred to me while I was listening to my iPod that Brian Wilson and Michael Jackson had similar lives/career trajectories in a lot of ways. 

no really I’m serious.

• most talented child of a musical family
• musical prodigies at a young age
• abusive father
• started a group with siblings/relatives managed by their father
• quickly identified as main creative force of the group
• increasingly erratic behavior
• preoccupation with childhood/adolescence 
• mental illness and/or drug use (chicken/egg)
• taken advantage of by employees/doctors

Which makes the differences between them all the more striking in the end. One of them is still alive and once again making music and touring, and the other one was hounded until his death. 

I was ready for this trend to be over, but I guess it’s not.

I have always assumed that there’s a cultural explanation for interest in various narratives and in the case of Zombies it’s based on our fears for the future.

Alan Moore said once, and I’ve never relocated the quote so I don’t know it verbatim, but he said that at a certain point Nuclear Armageddon became less of a certainty and we had to face the idea that the End Of The World might not come after all, and that this would bring its own horrors.

I think if we as a culture worry that nothing will ever change, if we are dissatisfied with supercapitalism and the political system and all of that and we simultaneously have no idea how to begin to change it, End Of The World fantasies become very attractive. Everything wiped out, starting it all over. 

Zombies are an even more direct manifestation of that fear than other kinds of apocalypse. They’re undying, unchanging, unstoppable. You never run out of them. They only want to consume. They’re the past eating the future. And unlike most forms of End of the World fantasies we don’t always beat them. 

That’s some serious cultural anxiety there.

are there fat foodies and I just don’t see them? It seems like only skinny folks can get away with calling themselves a “Foodie” because they don’t get shamed for eating.

You remember how months ago I was musing that I’d like for there to be a word that incapsulates the most privileged individual possible, a straight cis fully-abled wealthy US white male, that I could use as a shorthand for all of those things?

I think I’ve decided on that word. It is: “Dubya”. 

Used in a sentence: The Republican party caters only to Dubyas and aspiring Dubyas, and everyone else can GTFO.

tumblr recently is making me think of an ah-ha moment I once had like six years ago with this image. Remember this image?

Basically to make some point about how a woman in the photo was being judged for what she was wearing, somebody else photoshopped in a burqa over her. 

(the woman in question is Jessica Valenti, which is a whole other can of worms that I’m gonna ignore for the purposes of this post)

A hot debate broke out over this picture, between people who said it was inappropriate to appropriate the burqa, something nobody at that website really had any grasp on, to make an unrelated point about US gender relations. Honestly I didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time. I argued in the comments myself that it was totally okay. And one thing I threw out there was this little gem, something like this: if this is wrong, then next you’ll say it’s not okay to refer to US Conservatives as the American Taliban.

I thought this was a huge gotcha point because the answer had to be: well, that’s okay, and I guess if that’s okay then this is ok.

But the answer I got back was: YES. Because it’s not. It’s not okay to use other people’s oppression for your own goals.

And I thought: but that’s such a great rhetorical device to make my points OHHHHHHH

That’s when I realized I was being an asshole.

Because I was pretty thoroughly mired in academia at that time, I thought it through in terms of (god this is embarassing) Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Which is: treat other people as ends in themselves, not as a means to an end. 

I had to reevaluate my thinking on a whole lotta stuff after that.

I don’t even know what I’m clumsily trying to say here. Other than that I at times have been a giant asshole. 

And just that it’s not okay to use people like that. People like me get very lazy with the similies. We can’t just point at other people as though they’re walking illustrations of ideas in this comfortable debate we’re having. We’re making their lives and their struggles less important than the thing we’re trying to say. We’re erasing their humanity. It’s not okay.

The word “Gypsy” is an ethnic slur.

The Romani people or Roma are real people with a long history of persecution and violence that is still being perpetrated today.

It is not a cute way for a white girl to refer to herself to show how new agey and unconventional she is. Not when actual Roma are still living under oppression. and still being chased out and deported from countries all over Europe 

For further information I refer you to Golden Zephyr

• physical attraction (lust, asthetic attractiveness, intimacy)
• emotional attraction (FEELINGS) 
• intellectual attraction (on the same mental wavelength, similar interests)

And these can fluctuate over time, so at some points you could be really connected mentally, and other times you’re more emotionally attached.

A relationship based on one of these probably isn’t going to make it. Over time, that attraction fades.

A relationship with two or three of these has a stronger base to build on. 

(note that physical attraction doesn’t have to be the same as sexual attraction; it could simply be affectionate behavior like cuddling.)(I’m a big fan of sexual attraction as a relationship component myself, but YMMV.)

Yesterday when the racist cake story was traveling around I was hesitating to reblog it. I believe that ugliness should be exposed and criticized, certainly. But there’s a point where it seems harmful to the soul.

Now look: I read all sorts of commentary and saw lots of images of the horribleness from people I follow. It’s not that I was turning away and not wanting to see. But I just didn’t want it on my blog. My tumblr is the stuff I’m broadcasting to the world. Some things I don’t want on it, even if just to point at it and say NO WTF NO.

Chief amongst those things is racist imagery. I am a white person. Even though I find such imagery repulsive, it is not a personal assault on my existence. Even if I’m sickened by something, there’s still that distance that I have due to white privilege. So for me to spread an image like that with some outraged commentary or a clinical critique seems really.. I dunno. I’m not comfortable with it. Not when I think about the people who follow me who are more personally impacted by racist images.

With really ugly misogyny I do sometimes jump in on something and spread it around, just because I do want people to see the reality of some of the things that happen in the world. And I feel more qualified to deal with and comment on that. 

But it’s a judgement call there too. I always kind of imagine my posts showing up on someone’s dashboard and making someone upset. Sometimes it’s important to be upset, it’s true. And sometimes it just seems gratuitous, especially with images. There’s knowing about something and there’s seeing an image of it. Some things you just can’t unsee, and then you have to carry that around in your brain. (Sometime I’ll talk about my inability to deal with really violent movies, which is related to this.) But maybe this is my own perspective talking - words rarely affect me as strongly as images, I’m much more sensitive to them.

I saw later someone I follow saying they couldn’t stand to look at Tumblr anymore because the cake image was everywhere and it was making them physically ill.

So I’m thinking about it today. I think what I’m deciding is hateful imagery that is not targeted at me has no place on my blog even if I’m calling it out. This is sort of what I’ve been doing anyway. It’s not like my commentary is especially needed on some subjects. In a sit down and shut up moment, I should let other people do the talking and applaud them for it.

But, I wonder if this isn’t just avoiding uncomfortable topics and adding to the problem? I don’t know, I really don’t. What are your thoughts on this?

what I find hilarious about radfems is the way they insist that women who disagree with them have “false consciousness” and have been brainwashed by men, and yet they speak fluent academic bullshit. Hey, ya’ll adopted the academic lingo from the male establishment to get respect for your arguments, and you want to criticize other people’s consciousness?

Talking logic circles around people while flinging impenetrable lingo in order to ignore the lived experiences and realities of others, what could possibly be more patriarchal  than that?

rofl hypocrites 

Grown-ass men who date teenagers/young women? 

Can’t handle women their own age. 

(I mean, obviously our culture fetishizes youth and all that, so that’s part of it. BUT)

Grown-ass women are too intimidating for them. These guys are really immature, and women their own age won’t put up with their bullshit. So they pursue younger women. Because it’s easier. Because at first she’ll be flattered by the attention and won’t notice right away that he’s a major loser, as more experienced ladies would figure out immediately.

(This post brought to you by lived experience. Annoying lived experience.)

You mean, as opposed to “real art”?

What makes something Folk Art, wikipedia?

Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic.^[1] Folk Art is characterized by a naive style, in which traditional rules of proportion and perspective are not employed. Closely related terms are Outsider Art, Self-Taught Art and Naïve art.^[2]

Uh-huh.

The whole “primarily utilitarian” thing is a red herring as far as I can tell. How then could a painting be “Folk Art”? And how could pottery be Fine Art? Yet museums seem to make these distinctions with no difficulty.

This seems primarily class-driven to me.

breakthrough-by-design replied to your post: murkytimeistimeschool replied to your post:…

You can’t leave out the director of photography from the equation. He plays just as an important role in the film’s aesthetics and tone.

 aportraitoftheartist-asayoungfan replied to your post: Sometimes I wonder if the auteur theory destroyed American film

Just out of curiosity, who are some auteurs you consider successful?

I dunno. I have a problem with auteur theory in general, because of what breakthrough-by-design mentioned. 

The most successful directors, or people you might consider auteurs, work with really talented DPs and screenwriters. Like the Coen Brothers with Roger Deakins. Scorsese has a whole team of people that he uses for almost every movie, like editor Thelma Schoonmaker or Paul Shrader as the screenwriter. Even a lot of the production and costume designers are the same. 

Some of these newer directors haven’t figured that out yet and seem to want to do everything themselves, or just don’t realize that they need a whole team of really talented people, or don’t want to share the glory with a team like that.

But anyway, just for recent directors I like.. Paul Thomas Anderson is one. And Wes Anderson.

(a whole lot of followers just threw up their hands and stopped taking me seriously, lol)

cesaire replied to your post: Sometimes I wonder if the auteur theory destroyed American film

I think that’s something that I noticed here, and I see France’s cinema is more about images than words. That’s why you won’t see good tv shows in France we don’t know how to write scripts. who are you thinking about?

It seems like, going all the way back, European film is a lot less plot-driven and dialogue-driven than US film. But I don’t know enough about European film to really discuss it.

I bet some US directors would be better off making movies in France.

Meanwhile when guys like Jean-Pierre Jeunet try to make a US-style film like Alien Resurrection, where he wasn’t the writer, it’s a disaster.

I dunno.

Some examples of US directors who shouldn’t write: Oliver Stone, for sure. M Night Shayamalan. Richard Kelly. Tarsem. Michel Gondry. I’m sure more will come to mind.