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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
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heron61
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12:14a
Wonderful story + musings on feminist stories and myths
For the last four years, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) teaotter has taken part in the Yuletide fanfiction exchange, which focuses on rare (or in many cases otherwise completely non-existent) fandoms. This year, there was for some reason a fad for people requesting stories based on songs. Becca requested, and received an amazingly excellent story Will You Bloom Bright And Fierce, based on the well done folks song Disappearing Man written and performed by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. The song has a slightly Arthurian vibe, common to much of their music and a somewhat mythic feel. I’ve seen both fairly frequently in pagan influenced music and fiction, and from a feminist perspective, almost all of both fall into one of two categories – they are either appallingly and unconsciously sexist in some sort of deeply horrid essentialist sense, or at best, the song or story is clearly attempting to be feminist, and mostly does OK, but with some moderate and often annoying problems – the stories of Charles De Lint are an excellent example of this sort of thing. The song > Disappearing Man is better than most in this regard, but not perfect (at least from my PoV).
However, the story is a wonder, not just because it’s excellent, but because it feels like it dropped in from an alternate world where sexism has largely vanished from storytelling. It’s both a very female-focused story, and one which is devoid of sexism. Reading it was much like noticing how light you feel when you suddenly stop carrying a heavy weight. I am again struck by both this, and to an only slightly lesser extent, the excellent film and impressively non-sexist George Clooney film Up in the Air, that we finally live in a time when people can create stories free from sexism, but that doing so is also shockingly & depressingly rare. The rarest thing is finding a story with a strongly mythic feel that nevertheless manages to avoid recapitulating that sexism that lies so deep in all pre-moderns myths.
Most modern stories are not as bad as the musical Young_Frankenstein that my parents spent far too much money to take us all to (which featured among other vileness, a humorous rape scene where the victim falls for her attacker), but for every story, TV show or (rarest of all, US movie) that is most free of sexism or at least of the worst elements of sexism, there are more than fills me with rage or sadness (or both). In any case this very short story is a touch of wonder and hope of the sort that is too rare, but will hopefully become less so. This sort of thing needs to become far more common.
current mood:  impressed
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(2 comments | comment on this) Thursday, December 24th, 2009
(comment on this) Monday, December 21st, 2009
piratepurple
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10:03p
In A Strange Land
I wrote a story for Excessant Christmas ficcage. I've written the story where Spike goes to Africa to find Xander for Excessant Christmas before. I'll probably write it again. This story is a little sad. It does have a happy ending.
( In A Strange Land )
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(20 comments | comment on this) Sunday, December 20th, 2009
heron61
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7:04a
Traveling
Despite the snow in VA, the flight is on time. Hopefully, I can make my wifi router work through my parents brick walls, & get online easily tonight. Once again I'm reminded of how much I loathe flying. Since not visiting my parent would cause me much grief, next year I'll see if I can get them to fly out & see us. If they stayed in a hotel, Becca, Alice, & I could have a far saner holiday.
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(2 comments | comment on this) Friday, December 18th, 2009
heron61
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9:55p
Excellent Film: Men Who Stare At Goats
Now to talk about a movie that I’ve actually seen. I cannot recommend Men Who Stare At Goats enough. Whether or not any of the events in the film are remotely true is irrelevant. What is relevant is that it’s a story about heroism, spiritual searching, and above all hope. In addition to amazing acting by George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, & Kevin Spacey, it was also well written, and in general quite well done. It’s as humane as one expects from recent films that Clooney has been in. Looking around Wikipedia about it, I find that the director, Grant Heslov is Clooney’s business partner and was also the producer and screenwriter of Good Night, and Good Luck.
As for the film itself, it was essentially about hope, dreams, and spirituality, and was one of the few films to clearly show how the best spiritual teachers are often simultaneously, wise, powerful, barking mad, and clever con artists, and the later two don’t negate their power and wisdom. It’s also only a much less direct level about how the optimism & hope of the 1970s became the nastiness of the 1980s, a topic that I’ve discussed before. It’s also a film about positive ideas about masculinity, which is unsurprising given that there are no women in the film, and it also shows some of the ways portrayals of masculinity have changed since then. Best of all, it’s not remotely didactic, it’s a film about a wannt be gonzo journalist and an odd guy who used to work in a government psychic warrior program that contains much brilliance in it.
current mood: pleased
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(3 comments | comment on this)
heron61
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1:44p
Movie Musings on Avatar & Non-Racist Films
I’ve been hearing a great deal about James Cameron’s new film Avatar, it looks visually stunning, but I’m going to wait to see it in a second run theater, because it’s also clearly very disappointing. I looked up various spoilers (the Wikipedia entry on it is full of them) and it is sadly exactly like I expected – The heroic young white guy saves the day, gives rousing speeches to organize & motivate the noble savages, and leads them to victory. In short, yet another Mighty Whitey. Young white man sees massive injustice and oppression, understands the plight of the oppressed and decides to "take-a-stand" was a fine plot for the mid 1970s. Dennis O'Neil did an excellent job with this in his early 1970 Green Lantern/Green Arrow team-up comics. You could even make a case for such a plot being important in the mid 1980s. However, it’s now almost 2010, and that trope is getting pretty darn tired and offensive. The locals can not only not save themselves without help, but the mighty white guy ends up as their leader, because he’s simply better at it then their own people.
So, does this mean that if you’ve making racially sensitive films you can’t have cool action films with wonderful special effects? Not just no, but hell no! Here are two ideas that came swiftly to mind as to how you could make Avatar both a better film and one that avoided this same tired & offensive cliché.
The first idea is to take inspiration from King Mongkut, of Thailand, the Zulu leader, Shaka, Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo, and other third world leaders who were victorious over westerners in diplomacy or war. So, you have our white hero going out in his cool new vat-grown body to see the locals, and he encounters a brilliant native leader who either already realizes that the humans are a threat, or talks to our hero and understands what’s at stake. This leader then recruits the protagonist, learns a great deal about the weaknesses of the human’s technology, and is a heroic general who defeats the humans, with invaluable help from our hero. You could even make this leader the alien romantic lead, who first gets close to the protagonist in order to get information from him, and then falls in love with him. Sappy, silly, rocking cool, and most definitely not mighty whitey.
Alternately, you could keep the focus on the protagonist. Make the protagonist a person of color and make it clear that there’s still racial discrimination in the future. So, the protagonist is recruited to run an avatar body, but he’s also discriminated against, and when he meets the aliens, he sees the threat to them and understands how his own oppression and the threat to the Pandorans has a common source – the oppressive and racist military industrial complex. This is inherently a more complex film than either the actual movie or my first suggestion and recalls Malcolm X and various other people of color who became radicalized. This would be a touchy film in the current political climate, since an obvious analog would be first world Muslims who become radicalized because of their experiences with personal oppression and their observations of wars against Muslim nations, which might make this film impossible to get made in Hollywood, but would be awesome if it was.
However, while the “Malcolm X” option would be touchy, the “Shaka” option would not, and I’d love to see films like either of those, instead of what was actually made.
current mood:  busy
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(18 comments | comment on this) Thursday, December 17th, 2009
piratepurple
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10:50a
I have a paid account, therefore if you would like a $10 off coupon for getting a paid account, let me know.
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(1 comment | comment on this) Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
heron61
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4:24p
Interesting and useful gadget puzzlement
So, today the three of us had a wonderful lunch with bonobo23. I used google maps on my ipod touch for direction to the restaurant, and as expected google maps continued to show the same map and the indicated map when I was out of wifi range of my house. What I did not expect was the continual presence of a little blue pin giving my current location. The ipod touch does not have actual GPS and it was not connected to a wifi signal any of the times that I checked. All I can figure is that it can triangulate from wifi signals that it can actually connect to, which is a very neat trick indeed. Except in specialized circumstances, this is likely to be used well more often than the actual GPS on my phone. In any case, if anyone knows if my idea is the correct explanation for this phenomena or if there is some other reason, I'd be quite interested to hear further data.
In any case, now I definitely want an iphone, the only downside is that I don't like AT&T & also compared to how much I actually use a phone, the cheapest required plan is ludicrously expensive - perhaps in a year or two when the AT&T monopoly on iphones ends.
current mood: impressed
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(7 comments | comment on this)
(comment on this) Monday, December 14th, 2009
heron61
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1:18a
Mostly Harmless – Musings on my social presentation
After seeing The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Aaron and I talked a bit about masculinity. This is of particular interest to Aaron, likely due to some combination of being trans and growing up in Nebraska in the 70s & 80s, where gender seemed even more fraught than on the coasts. As someone with no particular attachment to my sex and even less to my gender, such conversations are always a bit odd. However, we discussed one topic that I rarely talk about, but which is very much at the heart of my social persona – the appearance of harmlessness.
I dress as a fop and a dandy, and tend to come across as significantly non-masculine. In part, this is due to having Jon Pertwee’s wonderful Third Doctor as one of the more important media characters in my childhood, combined with an overall distain for mainstream style and culture. However, there’s well more than that going on. In my late teens, when I first began to become a social being, it became clear to me that traditional masculinity was not merely repellent to me, it very much got in the way of things that I considered to be vitally important. Shortly after I got away from my seriously touch-starved family, I found that I enjoyed hugs, cuddling, and all manner of friendly and positive physical contact with people I like, just as I value people opening up to me emotionally. I also noticed that one of the central masculine dynamics, that’s still present today, was all about threat, fear, power, and dominance.
I have no use for any of that sort of thing. I greatly enjoy having things go the way I want them to, but this is very different from being in charge of a situation or acting as any sort of leader, a state that I’m rarely all that comfortable with, especially if the alternative is someone I like being in charge. I most especially have no interest in anyone feeling afraid of me or being threatened by me, I can see no possible benefit to me from that state and it was also very obvious to me that being that way got in the way of people feeling comfortable with me. Thus, one of my goals has been to come across as a kind and harmless fop, with a strong emphasis on being harmless. Put in the very direct & house-cat-like psychology that is my norm, my underlying impulse is the awareness that individuals who are at all aggressive or dominant are typically not regarded as cuddly, approachable, or safe to talk to. It’s mostly quite easy for me, since I am not a particularly dominant individual and am both disinclined to violence and in fact recoil from much violence, so some of this is perfectly natural behavior, but other bits of the image and behavior set that I normally use were consciously constructed to help set people at ease and to signal to them that I am safe to talk to, spend time with, and touch. All this puts me well outside the bounds of standard US masculinity, and while it is partly a construct, it is my own construct, and all social presentations are inherently constructs. On a related note, I have no idea if most people think as much about their social persona or personas I as I – perhaps it’s due to the fact that in part mine is a conscious construct designed to accomplish certain goals.
current mood:  tired
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(10 comments | comment on this) Sunday, December 13th, 2009
heron61
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2:16a
Musing on Syncretism in the US
Here’s a fascinating poll about spirituality in the US . In addition to religious people more commonly attending more than one type of service, we also have interesting mixtures of beliefs: Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country, significant minorities profess belief in a variety of Eastern or New Age beliefs. For instance, 24% of the public overall and 22% of Christians say they believe in reincarnation -- that people will be reborn in this world again and again. And similar numbers (25% of the public overall, 23% of Christians) believe in astrology. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with someone who has already died, almost one-in-five say they have seen or been in the presence of ghosts, and 15% have consulted a fortuneteller or a psychic.
Nearly half of the public (49%) says they have had a religious or mystical experience, defined as a "moment of sudden religious insight or awakening." This is similar to a survey conducted in 2006 but much higher than in surveys conducted in 1976 and 1994 and more than twice as high as a 1962 Gallup survey (22%). In fact, this year's survey finds that religious and mystical experiences are more common today among those who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (30%) than they were in the 1960s among the public as whole (22%). I find this both interesting and hopeful. I think personal spirituality can be a very good thing, but I distrust organized religion, because it is so often a tool for controlling the thoughts and behaviors of others. What this shows is that many Americans are doing what only makes sense to me – cobbling together their own personal spiritualities out of bits and pieces of other ideas, rather than taking any single set of ideas as their own. I’ve never remotely understood how anyone could follow any existing religion whole-cloth, in large part because it makes far more sense for me to mix together spiritual bits and pieces to better fit my own feelings about the world than to attempt to make my ideas fit into any pre-established path. In any case, it’s also interesting to note that this sort of syncretism is significantly more common among people 49 and younger, but isn’t all that much more common for people under 29 and for people 30-49. Not unexpectedly, liberals are somewhat more average to embrace a mixture of beliefs than conservatives, but mostly such beliefs can be found all across various social and political spectrums. The presence of mystical experiences among people who do not follow any specific religion is also fascinating and hopeful. While I don’t object to non-militant atheism, it’s equally clear that most people are never going to become atheists. However, if personal spirituality and widespread syncretism spread, then religiosity seems far less likely to be a harmful social force.
current mood:  thoughtful
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(13 comments | comment on this)
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cheerful