Feminism – Salt Sweet Bitter

Friday Fave: Dirty Dancing

This week in oh hell I feel old now: Dirty Dancing celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in a scene from the film ‘Dirty Dancing’, 1987. (Photo by Vestron/Getty Images)

Are there any women who have seen this film and don’t like it? I don’t think I’ve met them. There used to be a time when I was certain that a few of my friends wouldn’t like it, so I never asked; I later found that they did like it, very much so. There are very few films of which this is true–maybe The Princess Bride and Labyrinth? (Which also both turn 30 this year, as does Some Kind of Wonderful. 1987 was a hella good year for films.)

I was nine when the film came out, but I don’t think I was allowed to see it until I was 11; I spent a few weeks in England with family that summer, and remember practicing dance steps on a short brick wall in my grandparents’ garden, in imitation of the scene where they dance on the tree that had fallen across the river. (It may have been that I just hadn’t had the chance to see it until then–I can’t remember when we got our first VHS player, and it was usually 18 months between a film appearing in the theatre and being shown on tv back then.)

I will never get bored of this film. It’s an awesome love story, but for a simple storyline there’s so much more going on. I love that as a coming-of-age story, Baby spends very little time agonizing over her choices; she has her moral convictions and they stand her in good stead. As a love story it is in some ways the quintessential fairy tale romance, but it abandons the usual narrative of one partner on an active campaign to win the other’s heart. Baby is smitten the moment she sees Johnny, but she does not set out on a campaign to win his heart, first being convinced that she doesn’t have a chance and second because, having found a cause that she can help, she’s too busy learning to dance. In between being refreshingly, honestly awkward. It is Johnny whom we get to see falling in love, a la Pride and Prejudice but with the social roles reversed, with a woman who irritates the hell out of him until he recognizes that she isn’t just another spoiled brat who thinks she can have whatever she sets her eyes on.

I think the quality of the acting in much of the film is stellar, and often overlooked because it isn’t a heavy drama. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze had worked together on a film before, and weren’t overly impressed with one another; halfway through filming Dirty Dancing, they were finding it so hard to work together that the director had to sit them down and show them their screen tests to make them see what they were capable of. The only hint of this evident in the finished film fits perfectly to the characters’ personalities and frustrations when Baby is trying to master the Mambo to exhibition level–there is no trace of it in the last third of the film. Their chemistry is electric all the way through. Jane Brucker also deserves notice for playing Baby’s jealous, shallow older sister Lisa to perfection.

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The politics in the film remain relevant, thirty years on. It focuses on class divisions that U.S. public discourse has often preferred to pretend don’t exist, and portrays female sexuality and the consequences of making abortion illegal without shaming Baby and Penny for their actions. I particularly like that a story dealing with themes that are as serious as it gets, particularly in today’s political climate, ends with sheer, uncomplicated joy. Baby’s father apologizes to Johnny and reaffirms his love for Baby, Baby’s mother demonstrates that she does indeed get both her talent and her good sense from her, and Baby and Johnny get to walk, if not ride, off into the sunset. I have often wondered if Johnny would have moved down to Massachusetts to stay close to her, and if Baby would have given up joining the Peace Corps for him. Or convinced him to go with her.

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The thought of doing remakes of films like this usually fills me with dread–surely there are new stories to be told without wasting the money on rehashing a story that has already been told to perfection. The sequel (prequel? companion piece? almost entirely unrelated film about dancing that they just tacked the name on to and gave Patrick Swayze a cameo in?) they did about ten years ago was entirely forgettable, which is quite an achievement for a film starring Diego Luna and Romola Garai. In this case, however, I would honestly like to see an updated version of the story, focusing on race and/or LGBTQ equality in addition to class issues, particularly given the current attempts to reverse Roe v Wade. It would be interesting to hear how many people would decry a classic film being “politicized”.

The Moral High Ground

Politics has always been a matter of morality to me. I know politicians lie: I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one who doesn’t. Victories are exaggerated, the nature of or reasons for defeat manipulated, everyone is begging for money all the time but no one wants to admit it. I would like to live in a United States where the amount of money legally permitted to be spent on an election was severely limited and campaigns could only last for a certain amount of time, but our reality being what it is, I’ll take Elizabeth Warren identifying herself as being of Native American descent based on family lore over Aaron Schock using his government expense account to recreate Downton Abbey in his senate office and to go to the CMA ceremony any day.

Probably due to having grown up in the South, for a long time I had the distinct impression that the Republicans were the party of morals and family values, while the Democrats were self-aggrandizing, their fondness for money second only to their thirst for power. When I was about five I came home from school and recited the pledge of allegiance for my parents, altering one key phrase–I managed to change “and to the Republic, for which it stands” to “and to the Republicans, for where they stand.” My mother, despite still being a conservative at that point–at least as far as U.S. politics were concerned–had a fit; she did not forbid me to continue making the pledge at school when required, but she made very sure I understood what it was I was saying and that the Republicans were in no way synonymous with the Republic.

This perspective started to shift during the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. I could understand finding him repellent for his inability to keep it in his pants; I could understand, and did myself, question bitterly his leadership skills when he launched airstrikes against Iraq, as I personally was convinced that he did so as a distraction from the allegations about his womanizing. What I couldn’t understand were the complaints that he was unfit to lead because of his womanizing. I’ve always been fascinated by histories of monarchies, particularly that of the British royal family, and as a teenager branched out to biographies of more recent political and military leaders. Many of the most revered of these men had affairs by the dozen. Horatio Nelson. FDR. Douglas MacArthur and possibly George Patton (with his niece, ugh). Churchill was known to have had at least one affair (very likely more), but I’ve yet to hear anyone fault his leadership on that score. You can desecrate your marriage vows and still be a good leader.

It isn’t so much that I think moral relativism is necessary in a political context; it’s that I don’t see how it can be avoided if we are to make useful choices, given the scope of the choices we have to make when we vote in an election. I believe that Bill Clinton used his position to persuade women to indulge his sexual proclivities, and I find that repellent, but in terms of scale it doesn’t match the vicious, degrading, and often physical harassment that Donald Trump has bragged about, let alone the credible claims of rape that have come from several women, including his ex-wife and another woman who was a child at the time of the alleged assault. Could Hillary have granted greater access to the President in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation, the proceeds of which she did not personally benefit from? Possibly, but I haven’t heard any convincing evidence that she did so (if you disagree, please feel free to enlighten me), and if the story is true, in no way does it compare to Trump’s refusal to divest himself from his businesses and the numerous ways his hotel empire opens him up to direct violations of the emoluments clause. If Hillary had won the electoral college as well as the popular vote, there would have been no immediate drastic change in the situations in Syria or the Ukraine, there would have been no quick fix for the military and moral quagmires that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 set off, innocent people would have continued to die. If she had won, however, Putin would not have immediately intensified its assistance of Assad and attacks on Ukraine. Fewer people would have died. As I heard someone else point out recently on Twitter, I would far rather have spent the next four years arguing and wishing and voting to push Hillary further to the left than waking up every morning wondering if WWIII has started and if we still live in a republic rather than a dictatorship.

The U.S. has never truly had an inviolate moral high ground. The extermination of the native inhabitants of North America, slavery and later Jim Crow, the imperialistic acquisition of Hawaii, the voyage of the St Louis, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq–we’ve never had a spotless record. What we did have was a government that didn’t silence people who spoke out against it; dissent has always been present and loud, whether it attracted only a handful of listeners or grew to such influence that it started the Civil War. Now I and the millions of other people who voted for Clinton are genuinely scared we are going to lose this. Putting aside all questions of financial corruption, climate change, women’s reproductive rights, and creationism being taught in school, if Trump’s refusal to denounce Duterte and his open admiration of Vladimir Putin doesn’t scare you, either you are not paying attention or you lack any shred of moral integrity, full stop. Even disregarding the allegations against Putin that are supported only by circumstantial evidence–the blowing up of apartment buildings, the manipulation of Russian state oil companies, the fifteen or so journalists he is suspected of having had killed–we have plenty of evidence that he’s an authoritarian dictator with no interest in preserving freedom of speech and no respect for the concept of innocent lives. He was not troubled by the distraught relative of one of the sailors lost in the Kursk disaster being involuntarily drugged live on television as she demanded answers from the then deputy prime minister; he has demonstrated that he is quite willing to kill hostages along with terrorists in the event of a crisis, as happened in the Dubrovka Theatre crisis and the Beslan school siege. If we have to work with Russia because it is better not to have the country as an enemy, because there are people who depend on the oil and gas that Russia sells to European countries, because the citizens of a country should not be conflated with its leader(s), that is one thing. It is quite another to hold up Putin as a leader to be admired and even emulated, as Trump has done.

In the months since the election I’ve started to separate Trump supporters from conservatives and Republicans as a collective group. There are plenty of Republicans–not least a number of the party’s most prominent leaders–who would not vote for Trump, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to support Clinton either. There are those who supported Trump and started to regret it as soon as two weeks after the election; there is the celebration on the part of the stridently anti-semitic, xenophobic, neo-Nazi demographic, of whom I expected no better. What troubles me most are those who have watched the actions Trump has taken in the weeks since his election, the steady stream of lies, deflections, and misinformation coming out of the White House and across Twitter, and yet continue to argue that all this is acceptable because of “the conservative agenda,” believing that said agenda is morally desirable and benefits everyone. I have often wondered what this conservative agenda is–the rise of Trump has proven that it is not in fact about fiscal conservatism, an admiration of honesty and marital fidelity, or a disdain for corruption and authoritarianism. The only thing it seems to be nowadays is the privileging of private (corporate) profit over the collective good, respect for personal autonomy, and human life itself. If the U.S. is to preserve the Constitution, let alone any shred of moral integrity, it’s a damn good thing the people are rising up against Trump’s Putinesque, Bannon-directed “conservative” agenda.

Marching against a mirage

This past Saturday, I was one of ~150,000 people who swarmed the Boston Common–the largest demonstration in Boston in decades. We represented only a tiny fraction of the millions of women and men who took to the streets worldwide, responding to the threat posed by the newly-minted 45th President of the United States.

Women's March protest sign in Boston Determining the extent of that threat is still in progress. Fighting it will be the work of many coming years. We know that his administration poses a serious threat to the health, safety, and agency of women (the gestalt of these protests); to the very life of people of color; to the health of most Americans, but especially the poor ones; to the longevity of human habitat on Earth; to the pursuit of science; to a free press; to truth; and to the American experiment itself.

The most frequently-heard chant at Boston’s rally was to that latter point. Call (from a few throats): “Tell me what democracy looks like!” Response (from many throats, deafening): “This is what democracy looks like!” And it is–or at least, one of its most attractive faces. The vibe in Boston was downright joyful. There was drumming, dancing, laughter everywhere, waves of applause. There was a sense that we were there to be uplifted and damn it, we would be uplifted.

But this was just one day. And democracy for a day, as was made abundantly clear on November 8, 2016, is not enough democracy to make this thing work. Our participation in politics must become consistent, passionate, and supremely well-organized for the resistance to stand a chance against the empire.

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I don’t have the slightest idea how to do this. I’ve been an armchair American for a long time. Fortunately, some thoughtful organizers out there have made it easy for those of us with occasional-democracy syndrome to take some baby steps out into the world of action.

10 Actions / 100 Days: The babiest of baby steps! The first one is sending a postcard with a nice note on it. (I can do this!)

The Big Hundred: Just a few days in, these actions to counter Trumpism seem geared to approachable, be kind to others-type things. Don’t be a jerk! (I can probably do this.)

Call Them In: I don’t even call people I love on the phone. Why would I call people I don’t even know? To save the world? Yes, okay, good reason. But I can’t just…like…do it. So these lovely folks have made it incredibly easy. I don’t even have to pick my own words. So easy. So democratic. (I will work up to this.)

Swing Left: This might be my favorite. Results-oriented planning FTW! These folks want us to take back the House in 2018. Without it, we just can’t have nice things–such as checks and balances! Or an impeachment! Find out where your nearest swing district is and get to work. I get overwhelmed by how much there is to be done; I like that this is not only clear but scope-constrained. (I look forward to doing this.)

And yes, obviously, find some way to support groups like the SPLC and the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Defense Fund, groups that have been fighting this fight for a long time and know what they’re doing.

I’ve seen numerous sources point out that yeah, this whole Trump thing is a disgrace and a catastrophe, but without it, would millions of us have taken to the streets to raise our voices for women, for people of color, for indigenous rights, for gay rights, for immigration justice, for environmental justice, for a better America? Would we have finally realized that a better America means all that other stuff, all at once? (Um. No. In case you were wondering.) Yet these issues have been taking their toll–on real human lives–not just throughout our country’s sordid history, but during the past eight years.

We’ve had a President we could be proud of for the past two terms. He was classy and smart, handsome and charming. He had his heart mostly in the right place most of the time, and plus he had Michelle and Joe Biden backing him up, so, yeah, we swooned. Now we have a President we’re ashamed of–but truly, there was a lot to be ashamed of all along. Our love affair with Barack Obama just made us overlook the flaws.

This is a serious lesson in silver linings. We’re being forced to decide what we want this country to be. We can choose to make this a country to be proud of, which will take an unthinkable amount of hard work and coming together and action and love, or we can choose to wake up from the American dream once and for all.

If the moral universe does indeed have an arc, then justice is the horizon. This weekend’s march made me view what’s happening right now across the world–the regression towards xenophobia and insularity, the desperate last gasp of the reign of the white man–as merely a fata morgana. That’s when our eyes get tricked into perceiving something on the horizon as bigger than it actually is, and unreachable: ships that seem to float above the ocean, or cities in the clouds. But America is not a city in the clouds. We can reach its heart, and lay siege to it, and take it back.

Queen Girls

I’ve been hearing pronouncements and dire warnings about printed books and literacy itself dying out for–decades? Most of my life? A really long time. I was going through old books recently and found an ad from an advocacy group at the back of one from the early 80s warning that by the year 2000, it was estimated that only 20% of adults would be able to read. (Commas and apostrophes may be under threat, but whoever came up with that dark future plainly underestimated the popularity of computers and mobile phones.)

We have a variety of new and newly popular means of reading and listening to books, but the form isn’t going anywhere. People haven’t ceased reading and writing books; there are more than ever. While this has produced some markedly disappointing trends (*cough* Fifty Shades *cough*), it has been a joy to watch people take advantage of these new formats to find books that speak to their personal experience so much more easily, and the number of independent presses and self-published works that have taken off–particularly in YA and children’s literature.

One such effort I came across recently is a new publishing venture called Queen Girls, a currently small outfit that produces children’s books featuring real-life women who were heroes of their time. Their first book is Bessie, Queen of the Sky, about Bessie Coleman, the first woman of African- and Native-American descent to earn a pilot’s license, in 1921.

The kickstarter campaign for this first book is proving wildly successful, and there are plans for further titles in the future. The women running the imprint are focused not only on telling women’s stories, but on the achievements of women from a variety of backgrounds–stories that still aren’t being told as often as they should, because they come from other cultures, other classes, or just periods of the past that aren’t in fashion, so to speak, and are thus neglected. The illustrations are also lovely, which is a definite plus for attracting younger readers.

The books are designed for reading ages 4 to 8, and are available in e-format in English and in Spanish. The publisher is also partnering with literacy organizations here in the U.S. and internationally: For every book that is sold, another copy will be donated, in the interest of encouraging literacy and empowering girls. A limited edition hardback copy of Bessie, Queen of the Sky is available here, for those who prefer paper books. I find the book wholly charming, and look forward to seeing more titles in the series.

Right Here, Right Now

I had plans for Tuesday night. I had a bottle of decent prosecco chilling in the fridge and a bottle of very nice single malt, a lovely gift from some friends, ready to celebrate. The day itself turned out stressful for other reasons, and by the time it was 5 pm I was extremely on edge and feeling unaccountably panicky. By 10 pm I was feeling quite sick. I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, and then on Wednesday morning I woke up to find myself a part of American Horror Story: Politics.

I believed the polls to the extent that the 25 to 35 percent chance of a Trump win bothered me; for those of you dismissing Nate Silver’s calculations as inaccurate, at no point did he discount a substantial possibility of Trump winning, even if it was never more than 50 percent. What I couldn’t believe as the vote came in was that so many women would tolerate a man such as Trump has shown himself to be–on camera, on the record, unfiltered–as president. I knew there were women who supported Trump, I saw them on television just like everyone else, I know a few personally, but I thought we had reached a stage as a country, as a culture, where a flat-out majority of women, regardless of race or ethnicity, had more respect for themselves than that. I have never been so bitterly disappointed to be wrong.

I don’t blame the Democratic party. I don’t think they’ve done a great job, I think Debbie Wasserman Schultz has done plenty of harm, but to believe that Bernie Sanders would have won where Hillary Clinton failed is to discount the common voiced again and again by conservative media and the conservatives I’ve spoken to personally that there is no daylight between socialist policies and Stalinism; that if we have universal, single-payer healthcare and repair our infrastructure and improve education, the next step is pogroms and gulags. You know, like they have in Denmark and the UK. It is also to discount the poisonous anti-Semitism that came out into the open during the months of Trump’s campaign. Having Sanders as a candidate wouldn’t have eliminated any of that.

I do blame the media, to an extent; I blame the thousands of hours given to obsession over emails that revealed very little more shocking than John Podesta’s recipe for creamy risotto and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Huma Abedin having a weakness for creme brulee. Clinton had already faced Congress a number of times over what happened in Benghazi, and then over the server; none of the recent so-called “revelations” brought to light anything substantial that wasn’t already known. Little time on television media platforms was given to covering each candidate’s policy proposals and actual political experience, and how these things would impact our lives in a practical sense. They could have done so much better. The thing is that we don’t force them to do better; we’re abandoning print media ostensibly because the online versions are cheaper and more convenient, but we don’t seem to be reading much of anything that delves deeply into facts. The problem isn’t that CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc., are feeding us poison; the problem is that they’ve become the ‘circus’ part of bread and circuses, alongside reality TV. There are still voices on each of the cable political stations worth listening to–Shep Smith, Rachel Maddow, Christiane Amanpour, Sally Kohn, Joy Reid–but no one hour of news coverage or commentary per day is going to be sufficient to present a full picture. The television news media found that we preferred name calling, demonstrations of shock and outrage, and fuzzy human interest stories to confronting uncomfortable facts and searching for constructive ways to resolve problems, and by god have they given it to us. Enough of it to drown a democracy. So yes, they may be to blame, but so are we every time we discount a story of what’s actually happening in favour of watching Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews spluttering in outrage over their offended sensibilities. It’s all well and good to remember how nice it was to grow up as white boys in places where most women stayed home and minorities were barely visible (if present at all), and secure jobs that paid enough to support a family were available the day after you graduated high school, for those who didn’t want to go to college. The constant indulgence in nostalgia for those experiences discounts everyone else whose opportunities were denied in order to make that life possible, and it doesn’t do a damn thing in the way of confronting the fact that technology has moved on, demographics have changed, the pressures and dangers we face now are wildly different, and people are no longer content to be pushed aside and suppressed so that straight white men can continue to dictate the terms of everyone’s existence. We don’t live in that world any more, and this desperate pretense that we can somehow go back there is causing us very real harm.

I cried a lot on Tuesday night and most of the day on Wednesday. I’ve had a few breakdowns since then. I argued with friends who tried to tell me that it’s not as bad as it looks, that Trump’s supporters want at heart the same things that I want–safety and security, and the freedom to live in peace. I argued because I’ve been watching for months as his supporters have targeted journalists who spoke out against Trump with anti-semitic attacks, images of their faces, their children’s faces, superimposed on images of gas chambers with Trump flicking the switch. Threats of rape, beatings, lynchings. Children being told by classmates that they’re going to be deported once Trump wins. The LGBTQ community now has a vice president who believes that their respective sexualities can be tortured out of them, and the fear that their right to marry, so recently and so hard won, may be taken away from them. Trump has threatened to repeal libel laws so that he can sue those who criticize him, and on Wednesday implied that he would require all Muslims to register with the government (because that’s never gone wrong before…). In my worst moments, I wonder about the prospect of violence and what could happen where I live, a predominately conservative neighbourhood in a predominately liberal city in what was, as of last Tuesday, an almost evenly divided state, if the voting reflects the state as a whole. The rest of the time I am worried mostly for my friends who are part of the LBGTQ community, who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, who are people of color. I am a heterosexual white woman; I’m not an obvious target to the people I fear, at least not yet. It is up to me, then, and the other women and men like me, to support those who are targets–to put ourselves between the people who are the targets of the bigotry Trump’s campaign has enabled and those who seek to do them harm. I’d like to think it would be enough for this shielding will take the form of arguments, protests, votes, and petitions, but given the people Trump is appointing to his transition team–including Peter Thiel, a man who has publicly expressed admiration for Apartheid–I wonder how soon we’re going to have to act as human shields.

By mid-Wednesday I started to feel better. Anxiety and grief take a very real physical toll on me; I find it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to sit still at times, and my body has a knack for producing physiological reactions to my emotions. I can’t afford any of that right now. I started to play more energetic songs that I liked, even if I didn’t feel like listening to them, and I started to map out what viable options are left to protect what I value in the face of a government that appears entirely committed to taking most of that away. I will renew my second passport, as that remains legal for now, but I have no intention of leaving at the moment. This is my home; moving our household overseas is not an appealing prospect for myself or my father, even if it remains an option. I believe that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, although I worry about how long it is going to be. I believe the rise of these nationalist governments is the death throes of a white, male-centered supremacy that sheer force of numbers is in the process of overwhelming; the question is how many people will it take with it before it dies out.

The media has now by and large taken the tone that as Trump is president-elect, we must accept and learn to work with him. I refuse to accept this in the sense of treating any of the policies he has threatened to impose on us as normal, as a simple conservative alternative to the progressive policies President Obama pursued. It drove my mother mad for years that the conservatives she knew refused to treat the president with the respect he was due as holder of the office because he was black, because he was liberal, because of his education; I am not willing to engage in similar hypocrisy. When Trump is inaugurated as President, I will be willing to call him such; I don’t think it’s of much use to dispute the legitimacy of the electoral college at this point, however little I like it. I will not engage in violent protest, and I will not condone or connive in others committing violent acts against Trump or his supporters. I will, however, continue to protest, in whatever ways I can. I will write letters. I will donate to causes supporting the rights that the GOP is threatening to take away from us. I will not stand silent if I witness someone being attacked for their faith or their sexuality or the color of their skin. If I can get to a protest or a march, I will participate, as I have done before. If any conservatives happen to be reading this (unlikely as that is)–to those who are mocking and insulting liberals for questioning whether they want to stay in the U.S., for wondering if our rights are going to be taken away, for fearing the worst is coming–if you’re wondering what hypocrisy looks like, take a long look in the mirror. Conservatives have been whining for years about Obama was coming for their guns, which never happened, and there were plenty of conservative media figures who *promised* they would leave when Obama was elected but didn’t. We’ve already witnessed reproductive rights being rolled back, by some of the same people Trump is bringing into his administration. We already have evidence that our fears our justified.

Things will get better. In two years we have a chance at taking back either the House or the Senate, if not both; in four years, if Medicare is privatized, Roe v. Wade overturned, the ACA repealed, gay marriage once again prohibited, journalists are silenced, if we’re in a trade war with China and NAFTA is repealed, all of which Trump and/or other Republican leaders have promised in the last months and weeks, I hope that the combination of those of us who are angry enough now and those who will have buyer’s remorse over voting for Trump will make a Democratic victory a certainty. The party does need work, but we have a number of strong candidates rising through the ranks. The problem is it will not get better in time for the women who are going to die or be left severely ill from botched abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. For the people who are going to die all over the world as a result of accelerating climate change, from worsening economic inequality and the other financial consequences of lowering the U.S.’ tax rates across the board, from losing their health insurance, from any wars that Trump escalates or instigates. For the people who are going to die of their injuries after attacks by people who now believe that anyone they look down on is now fair game, as happened to a Saudi Arabian college student a couple of days ago.

This is the song that kept running through my mind on Tuesday morning, and I was so looking forward to posting it again and again, any excuse I could find, on Wednesday, instead of being unable to shake the lyrics of “This is not America”. This is the first political song I understood in political terms, being old enough to have a grasp, if not a full understanding, of the events that inspired it. I played it again and again back in 2008 following Barack Obama’s election, and I hope that I will get to irritate all and sundry with it the day after election day 2020, along with a clip of Daveed Diggs shouting “We Won We Won We Won We Won.” Because we will. I hope we will all be there to witness it.

Friday Fave: Thandie Newton

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I had been planning on watching Westworld in the way I’ve planned on watching most of the new shows that HBO and Showtime have rolled out over the last three years or so–just barely remembering to set the DVR, not paying attention to who the leads are until the opening credits. I know the shows will feature compelling visuals and fine acting; I also have faith that they almost invariably feature strong writing. (Although season two of True Detective severely tested that faith. Severely.) I never question if these shows will be good; it is always a matter of whether the story will appeal to me. Even with the shows that I like, though, I tend to be lackadaisical about getting around to watching them; I only have an hour or two a day to pay attention to a TV show on weekdays, and I find that they often benefit from being watched in longer chunks than an hour at a time, so I save them up for weekends when I do the ironing.

Shows that I like so much that I simply lack the patience to save up several episodes for a mini-marathon are increasingly rare–there was The Killing, the first couple of seasons of Downton Abbey, Borgen, season 1 of Rogue, last year’s Deustchland 83, and now Westworld. I read a few conflicting reviews, one focused on Evan Rachel Wood and another, more critical, claiming that the show “starts off with a bang but then falls down a rabbit hole of Lost-style strangeness.” I disagree particularly with this last, as much as I usually like Vox’s reviews–my impression was the show’s writers and producers know exactly what they want it to be, there is one central mystery of which all the “disconnected” mysteries are threads, and if the rest of the season measures up to this first episode it will be a fine and particularly creepy exploration of our fear of AI. Just because it’s subtle doesn’t mean it’s a mess–there is no bad here, as far as episode 1 goes.

And there is this cast, this amazing how-did-they-cram-so-many-awesome-people-into-one-show cast. Jeffrey Wright, Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Sidse Babette Knudsen, Evan Rachel Wood, Jimmi Simpson, Ben Barnes, and most of all Thandie Newton, who was the heart of the aforementioned Rogue until she left it and it was ruined.

I’ve loved Thandie Newton’s work since I saw Flirting on TV one afternoon, years and years ago. It was one of my favourite films for a long time, until I read about the director John Duigan’s abusive relationship with her; I haven’t been able to watch it since. In some cases I can separate what is on screen from what happened off-screen, but this is not one of them.

Fortunately there is a wealth of other excellent work Newton has done since, in addition to being an outspoken women’s rights activist and having, from all indications, an enviable family life. She’s never fallen into the trap of being typecast, doing comedy, drama, and action–she’s as adept at costume drama as she is at being a total badass, on screen and off. This will serve especially well in her role in Westworld, which, if the hints in episode one pan out, will be far more complex than simply an android sex worker. I find it a bit frustrating that all the articles I’ve read on the series thus far have been either breathless or cross in discussing the presentation of sex in the show (and most of them refusing to acknowledge that there is a difference between portraying sexual violence with the aim of highlighting its negative effects and doing so gratuitously), but only a few have mentioned the questioning of the nature of free will that the show explores, and none at all have even touched on the matters of consciousness and identity that made this first episode so compelling to me. I’m thrilled that Newton has a new role as promising as Grace in Rogue was, and I look forward to seeing where she takes Maeve.

Further reading on some of the activism Newton is involved with, and her own blog:

One Billion Rising

V-Day

TED Talk: Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself

ThandieKay

Friday Fave: Marley Dias

Stretching out on a pile of books this large was one of my childhood fantasies. Unfortunately I didn’t own this many until I was in my late teens, by which time it was less appealing as a physical activity.

Marley Dias is one of my heroes. Her story started spreading over the Internet at the beginning of this year, when she founded the #1000blackgirlbooks movement. I loved books every bit this much when I was eleven; I had approximately 0% of her social awareness, discipline, or self-confidence. Over twenty-five years later, I have some of her social awareness and a tiny bit of her discipline, maybe a little more self-confidence than I started with, but I’m still lagging waaay behind. I still 100% hate being in front of a camera. Forget just being a role model for kids; a lot of grown-ups could learn a thing or two from her.

In addition to her ongoing book campaign,–she has hit her target, but why quit when you’re ahead?–and BAM, a related project/website she runs with her friends Briana and Amina, the magazine Elle recently invited her to edit a special edition ‘zine called Marley Mag. (I’m not entirely sure how a ‘zine is different from a magazine; is this a new thing, or just shorthand for the same thing we pick up next to the grocery-store check-out?) She is self-possessed when meeting the likes of Oprah and Ellen, and not a little photogenic; that she finds time to do all this and still attend school on a regular basis–and still read books–amazes me. I get a little tired just thinking about how much energy that must take.
I’d put money on her becoming the Lin-Manuel Miranda or Misty Copeland of the publishing world by the time she’s 30 20, at the rate she’s going.

I might have mentioned a time or twenty that I’m an avid reader; I also work in the publishing industry, and am a writer myself. I hear and read a great deal about how literacy is dying, people aren’t learning handwriting any more, everyone’s reading e-books and computers instead of printed books, and thus not absorbing as much of what they read. Insofar as that is true–and I agree that it is, at least in part, although all the dire warnings from the 1980s that by the year 2000 only a fraction of the population might be able to read proved wildly overstated, and I suspect that the predictions of the extinction of the printed page will prove similarly exaggerated–it is on us to keep that from happening. There are severe problems with the educational system, to be sure, and they do need fixing, but no one is going to enjoy reading if they only do it in the schoolroom and then in the workplace. Bemoaning the loss of literacy and writing skills makes no sense when as a nation we take such brief notice of people like Marley and other kids with similar, if less revolutionary, aims, such as Blake Ansari, Tyler Fugett, Evan Feldberg-Bannatyne, and Kirstin Shipp. I love that someone this young, with a bit of star quality and a ton of ambition, has made the celebration of reading and a demand for greater diversity in literature her mission in life. This is how we can save our literary culture. More power to her, and all those who have decided to emulate her.

Friday Fave: Christine and the Queens

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Pop music that isn’t sung in English rarely gets much of a listen among U.S. audiences. once in a while a song, usually associated with an insanely popular film, that includes a verse–or a phrase or two–in a second language will be really popular, but for the most part it’s English all the way. I wonder at times if French pop is met with particularly studied rejection after the brief rage for Jordy’s “Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe” back in 1992 (apologies to all who had successfully blocked that memory. I think I remember buying the single when it came out, but mostly I remember a few instances of singing the lyrics along with a few classmates to torture our French teacher, who was remarkably patient and good-natured but hated the song. It does grate on the nerves after about 10 seconds.)

Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe (and the somewhat alarming image of family life portrayed in its video) aside, the general distaste for foreign pop and rock music is a pity on many scores. I’ve always found it particularly odd when a singer or a group makes the charts in several other countries, or all over the world, and remains virtually unknown in the U.S. As with so many things–particularly football/soccer–this feels like a sort of willful denial on our part, and a bit immature. As though we are covering our ears, scrunching up our faces and muttering “unh-uh” while a the rest of the world holds out a glass of good champagne and a plate of chocolate truffles to us, insisting that we’ll like it if we only give it a chance.

I stopped paying attention to music television and radio when I was finishing high school, save for a brief spell in 2001 when my otherwise tight-fisted landlord gave us free cable television for six months (so he could hike the rent on the next tenants) and there were a couple of music stations that still played music videos. Since then, I’ve relied on reviews, word of mouth, and television shows to hear new stuff. The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert have proved particularly useful in this regard–they don’t have musical guests on all that often, but those they do have are usually acts I find worth listening to. Or, in case of The National, find myself a week later trying to buy up their complete back catalogue.

The only other act from TDS I’ve really fallen for is Christine and the Queens, otherwise known as Héloïse Letissier offstage. She was one of Trevor Noah’s first few musical guests, if not the first, and I think I enjoyed Noah’s complete loss for words at how to respond to her performance as I did the music itself. She and her dancers/band are one of the few rock/pop acts that make live music an actual performance, not by adding a lightshow and other special effects, but by making dance and a number of cultural references an integral part of the show along with the singing. She also uses every song she sings to question and break down gender and sexual normativity, which a lot of people still find threatening; as I watched Trevor Noah’s brief interview with her, I wondered if he had bothered to listen to any of her music before the show.

I didn’t rush to iTunes for the album immediately, but when I did get to it a few weeks later I wished I had. I played it pretty much non-stop for a month, and it was one of the things that got me through last December without losing my mind. She has a lovely voice, and does 80s-style synth-pop better than they did in the 80s. (Granted, she probably has better equipment than was available 25-30 years ago.) She does sing in French, but she re-recorded the album for international release with some of the lyrics translated into English. It sounds like an odd proposition, and I’m sure in some cases it would produced questionable results, but she makes it work beautifully.

She seems to be making waves everywhere but here, which is a pity; we’re missing out. Of course the language barrier isn’t the only obstacle to her popularity over here–we may be making strides in terms of breaking down prejudice against the cishet status quo, but there’s a ways to go yet. Letissier just isn’t interested in waiting, or diluting her style to make it more palatable for the general population: she does what makes her happy. I’m sure it would make a great many more people here happy too, if they had a listen.

Friday Fave: Halt and Catch Fire

When Halt and Catch Fire started three years ago, my sole reason for watching it was Lee Pace, who is all kinds of awesome and I couldn’t understand why his shows kept getting cancelled. (If you haven’t seen Wonderfalls or Pushing Daisies, go hunt them up on Netflix or YouTube or wherever, stat. You have been missing out for years. Also, boo, Fox and ABC respectively, boo.) I was mildly interested that it was filmed in Atlanta, but mostly it was to watch Lee Pace. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I had an idea that it would be a bit like Mad Men, but set in Silicon Valley. Not knocking Mad Men, which was great, but I was getting a bit bored with the white-male-mid-life crisis angst and tragedy. It has been the primary focus of quite a bit of truly brilliant television in recent years–Breaking Bad being another example–and said television has featured some women and even (rarely) central characters who aren’t white, but brilliant television always inspired dozens of not-as-great imitations, usually with less imagination and even less effort at representation.

Mad Men this is not. Corporate culture certainly has a presence in the story, but this time it holds no allure or glamour; it is a world that is stifling, threatening, something that three of the four, if not all, of the main characters are fighting to overthrow, not to conquer. They are not a part of of it and they have no wish to be. Neither is this a male-dominated show, which has been glossed over or gotten lost in some of the advertising. It is about two men, two women, and the rise of the home computer industry. The acting is excellent.

Underneath that, of course, it is about so much more. It is about two couples: one pair who constantly have to negotiate their way between a desire for the stereotypical suburban home and 2.5 children and making the most of their considerable talent for engineering and mathematics, and the other whose relationship is pretty much just a hot mess. It is about two women who decide that they don’t want to be relegated to support roles in the lives of the men they work for and live with, and how they struggle with suddenly being seen as a threat by those same men, consciously and otherwise. It is a close comparison of the intersections between work and home life change when you have a family and all that that entails.

It isn’t a perfect television series–some episodes are better than others, and some of the subplots are at times more compelling than the central story. It could do better in terms of representation, although it’s doing better than some shows in this regard. I’m also finding that the effort to cover all the major leaps in the evolution of the computing world are feeling a bit strained. I know just enough about coding and hacking to have found that aspect of The Honourable Woman a constant irritation in watching the last few episodes of show, but not enough to be distracted by any errors present in this one. What does bother me is that, in the world of the story, these four people seem to responsible for most, if not all of the major innovations that we now take for granted–the initial Apple vs. Microsoft fight was substantial enough, but some six years later they’ve also created the seeds of e-bay, online multi-player games, and it looks like someone might be about to invent a thinly-disguised Sirius radio. With the sheer number of people who were and are drawn to this industry–something that is reflected in the show, whenever a scene takes place in public or business setting–it feels disingenuous to present this quartet of characters as the only really imaginative innovators in the field, and placing so much of the burden of that innovation on those four characters takes away from the parts of the story that make the show compelling.

The thing I love best about the show is that it has two fully developed female leads who work and live in what is still a male-dominated industry, but beyond that I love that the writers decided to maintain their focus on these four characters, and the development of the story constantly realigns their alliances and allegiances enough to keep their interactions interesting but not so much that all four come off as sociopaths who have no real grasp of what fidelity is. (Joe is a sociopath, but he’s written that way; the other three are sane, if damaged to varying degrees.) I also really like that the show’s title is an integral metaphor for the shared tendency of the characters to self-sabotage their emotional and professional relationships; titles are important when it comes to stories, but televisions shows are usually just named for their character or a setting. It’s unusual to have such an apt title continue to reflect an important aspect of the story, and I think a lot of the reviewers who dismissed the show in its first two seasons didn’t make that connection–I’ve only ever seen it mentioned in order to explain the term’s meaning as a coding command.

I don’t tend to read a lot of reviews for any one show, and the few I’ve read over the past three years for this one have always made me feel like the decision to renew it must be balanced on a knife-edge; it has always been highly rated by calculators such as Rotten Tomatoes, but it seemed to suffer from a lack of interest rather than negative opinion. Renewals for the second and third season were thus pleasant surprises. (Most of those reviews I have read have complained about the show’s lack of substance, to the point that I wonder if they actually watched the thing. It has substance in plenty; it is just that you can only take the drama of literally creating code and machinery so far. After that the human elements of egotism and jealousy and fecklessness and just plain wanting something from another person have to take over, otherwise you have no story.)

Season three seems to be attracting more attention, and more positive reviews, than the first two, so I’m finally allowing myself to hope for season four. Season three is currently airing Tuesday nights on AMC in the U.S.; in the UK it is available on Amazon Prime.

Friday Fave: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

This is one of those albums for which I’ve started avoiding looking at the year it was released, because it makes me feel old. (It turns 22 this year. Probably gets played on those oldies stations that I also avoid listening to because a friend told me a few years ago that Blind Melon’s “No Rain” is officially an oldie now and how can that be &*%^$ possible?)

I discovered the single “Possession” on a flight from Atlanta to Miami when I was 15: It was on a list of maybe eight tracks the airline had compiled of rock and pop music on the in-flight “radio” station. I listened to that channel for the entire flight, sitting through the other entirely forgettable songs just to hear “Possession” maybe three times. I got the album as soon as it came out, and I have never stopped listening.

I still listen to a lot of the music I loved when I was a teenager, but most of it is still dear to me out of a sense of nostalgia: I am not the person I was when I fell in love with those songs, and in a lot of cases my taste has changed to the extent that some of it now sounds shallow and hackneyed–the lyrics capture a glimmer of how I felt at the time, but the songs aren’t strikingly inventive in any way. Fumbling towards Ecstasy is one of the exceptions. Every song on it is still as compelling to me as they were the day I brought the album home, particularly “Possession,” “Ice,” and the titular “Fumbling toward Ecstasy.”

While there’s plenty to be said about originality and inventiveness in popular music, a large part of what I’ve always valued in rock and other short-form songs is the use of lyrics–without the imagery and expression, the greater part of the artistry in rock stems from using existing melodies and rhythms in new ways. She captures something of Romanticism in its original literary sense, and a lot of the imagery she uses in her songs subverts and questions the representations of women ingrained in our culture, particularly those of Christian iconography. Most of the songs on her first four albums aren’t about love at all, and those that are are not about winning the guy but about struggling to keep one’s sense of personal identity from being subsumed by obsession, about questioning whether love and passion are the same thing, about whether overwhelming physical passion is ever a truly healthy thing.

A lot of television and film reviews these days discuss the idea of the male gaze, and how more and more directors are creating love scenes and other interactions on screen to present such exchanges from the woman’s perspective, and to appeal to the tastes of female viewers. This is something that McLachlan does in her music that few other musicians were doing at the time–she uses the female perspective in ways that weren’t often heard on popular radio stations back in 1994. Most pop love songs sung from the woman’s perspective even now are limited to celebrating a particular ideal man, questioning what a man wants from a woman, or occasionally rejecting that in favour of another man (or preferring being alone). Before Sarah McLachlan and her support of women artists via the Lilith Fair, there wasn’t a lot of pop music making it onto the charts that asked not just was this man or that man worth it, would he treat you well, but what do you really want in a lover and a partner? (Regardless of that partner’s gender.) She also cast the woman in a relationship in the role of the protector and the provider–and, in “Possession”, as the stalker. (Everyone always brings up “Every Breath You Take” as the quintessential example of a really creepy song being misunderstood as a glorious love song, but when you look at the lyrics of “Possession”, which were in fact inspired by things that two stalkers wrote to McLachlan in the early years of her career. It isn’t as airily romantic as her voice implies; the words are more evocative of paranoid delusion than they are of sane, if melodramatic, love.)

She wasn’t alone–there was Aimee Mann, the Indigo Girls, P. J. Harvey, Melissa Etheridge, Salt n’ Pepa, and a few others active at the same time–but she was a rarity, and she has used her fame to promote other women in music and music education in general. This album is still the best of McLachlan’s work and, together with its bookends Solace and Surfacing, still sounds vital and a little different from anything else around.