(no subject)
Apr. 25th, 2012 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* The Syrian government murdered more than a hundred people today, focusing particularly on killing anyone who spoke to UN inspectors. The UN continues to do nothing as both Russia and China remain in favour of the genocide.
* Despite the Ryan Budget existing on paper and a large variety of republican quotes being condescending and insulting quotes from various republican politicians about working and middle class people who rely on student loans for college, republicans are now pretending they didn't hold those positions as recently as Tuesday. They are now saying they want to pass a one year extension on lower student loan rates, only instead of the democratic plan to pay for it by closing a corporate tax loophole, they want to take away funding for preventative care for the poor. After all, why make the tax code more fair when you can make health care more expensive and less effective for the working poor. Charming.
* Romney's saying a bunch of contradictory stuff some of which seems to be strongly pro-papers please and some of it saying that he never said the stuff he just said and that he both believes and doesn't believe all the nasty, vaguely racist stuff he's said about Latinos in general and Sonia Sotomayor in particular. It's too complicated for me to parse tonight. Hell, judging how tangled, lie filled, and contradictory it seems to be, I'm thinking it may not be parsable at all.
* Newt's out of the race to no one's surprise.
* They have traced the BSE infected dairy cow to it's home farm. They think it was a random mutation rather than infected feed. There remains some question as to whether there is enough testing to reliably catch cases. Again, I'm so glad I don't eat meat.
* Hector stole most of the sleep today. I see signs of improvement though. 1. After I made it clear I was not having any, he came and sat on me for pettins instead of spending another three hours howling inconsolably. 2. He got out of the bed instead of puking on me. It turns out I don't need to start from scratch on his training; it's just he was too crazy to follow it for a while there. 3. I found a package in the mail that looks suspiciously like the feliway system Squirrel gave in and ordered after Hector took to going into his room and howling at him while he slept when Hector was giving me a break. (An hour spent howling at Squirrel is an hour in which I can get a nap). UPdate: Yep, it was the feliway and I've sprayed key areas. Hector hates it.
* I have next to nothing left between the sleep shortage and errands. On the up side, Squirrel was kind enough to give me a ticket to the Cabin in the Woods and I am full of thoughts. 1. As a deconstruction of the modern horror genre and archetypes, it was clever enough. Grimly funny, and making way more sense than many of the films it's talking about. I loved the little nods to all sorts of ionic things, the clever ways it makes sense out of what is often nonsense. 2. I think it's fascinating that it is exploitative in the ways it's talking about other films being, and even though it was to a point unlike a lot of this stuff (I'm looking at you slasher films and torture porn in particular), it still made me uncomfortable and I'm not sure how I feel about it in retrospect. I need to poke more at the problematic stuff, but I'm not up to it tonight. 3. I liked that a lot of the violence was moved out of frame or partially out of frame, done through sound effects, or memorably toward the end with literal buckets of gore obscuring the glass so that most is imagined rather than explicit. 4. I rather liked them turning the sidekick into the lead, when twisting the archetypes. I guessed where they were going with him, but I didn't particularly mind. 5. And most important: I kept thinking about something Seanan McGuire said about The Crazies specifically and by extension other movies like Rec/Quarantine and 28 weeks Later: So many of our films glorify defying the Quarantine and that it's really dangerous for our society out in the real world. We love cheering for scrappy survivors sticking it to the man by escaping quarantine and potentially infecting the rest of the population. We get so invested in them as heroes, we forget how deadly selfish it is for everyone else. Sometimes the best thing we can do is sacrifice or risk sacrificing ourselves. I fundamentally believe that whether it's the real life heroes in Eyam in Derbyshire during the 1665 Plague outbreak who chose to save the neighboring village by keeping quarantine, or fictional ones. I fundamentally believe that if your chance at survival will likely doom everyone, the heroic thing is sometimes to stay and die. It's what I mean when I say "I support the quarantine." I think this film is at heart about that choice, that contradiction inherent in a lot of books and films, that tension between wanting to cheer for the under dog and duty to the whole rest of the human race, between human scale ethics and the greater good.
And damn, that's a lot of complicated and uncomfortable thinky thoughts to embed in something marketed as simple horror. It's anything but simple and worth poking at in a more lengthy format and with more intelligence and articulateness than I can bring to bear tonight. I like art that makes me think, so I'm going to keep poking at it, at least in my own head, but I think you could just ignore all that stuff about deconstructing and illuminating all sorts of tension in the American zeitgeist and surf the surface for fun. It happened to play into a whole bunch of my personal interests and hot buttons, but if you are less inclined to that sort of thing, it works perfectly well as horror if you are better at ignoring all that.
* I decided West wing was unwatchable and moved on to Season 2 of Glee, which I am promised is better and more up my ally. So far I want to smack nearly everyone except Kurt and maybe Emma. I have so had it with Shu, Finn, and Rachel already and I'm only at Grilled Cheesus. I saw about half of this episode last Christmas and if anything I'm angrier at Mercedes and most of the rest of them inflicting their Christianity on Kurt when he's already dealing with his father's illness. I know how infuriating it was for me in a similar situation and I'm much older and have a lot more emotional cushion. Weirdly, I think I may be liking Puck for the first time, though I'm sure it won't last. I have no opinion on same yet beyond noticing that he has a surprising amount of sexual chemistry with Finn in particular, but also Puck a little bit. For the record, while I'm happy they are doing more with Brittany and Santana, I really don't like Brittany Spears, having started teaching Middle School the year "Hit Me Baby, one More time" hit. I had to spend most of my lunches that spring listening to that song over and over while the girls worked on it for the talent show, and her songs were ubiquitous in middle school classrooms for way to long. If I never have to hear her "sing" it will be too soon. As a resut, the episode was really hard for me to watch and I can't tell if it is objectively any good what with me trying not to throw things at the TV.
* Despite the Ryan Budget existing on paper and a large variety of republican quotes being condescending and insulting quotes from various republican politicians about working and middle class people who rely on student loans for college, republicans are now pretending they didn't hold those positions as recently as Tuesday. They are now saying they want to pass a one year extension on lower student loan rates, only instead of the democratic plan to pay for it by closing a corporate tax loophole, they want to take away funding for preventative care for the poor. After all, why make the tax code more fair when you can make health care more expensive and less effective for the working poor. Charming.
* Romney's saying a bunch of contradictory stuff some of which seems to be strongly pro-papers please and some of it saying that he never said the stuff he just said and that he both believes and doesn't believe all the nasty, vaguely racist stuff he's said about Latinos in general and Sonia Sotomayor in particular. It's too complicated for me to parse tonight. Hell, judging how tangled, lie filled, and contradictory it seems to be, I'm thinking it may not be parsable at all.
* Newt's out of the race to no one's surprise.
* They have traced the BSE infected dairy cow to it's home farm. They think it was a random mutation rather than infected feed. There remains some question as to whether there is enough testing to reliably catch cases. Again, I'm so glad I don't eat meat.
* Hector stole most of the sleep today. I see signs of improvement though. 1. After I made it clear I was not having any, he came and sat on me for pettins instead of spending another three hours howling inconsolably. 2. He got out of the bed instead of puking on me. It turns out I don't need to start from scratch on his training; it's just he was too crazy to follow it for a while there. 3. I found a package in the mail that looks suspiciously like the feliway system Squirrel gave in and ordered after Hector took to going into his room and howling at him while he slept when Hector was giving me a break. (An hour spent howling at Squirrel is an hour in which I can get a nap). UPdate: Yep, it was the feliway and I've sprayed key areas. Hector hates it.
* I have next to nothing left between the sleep shortage and errands. On the up side, Squirrel was kind enough to give me a ticket to the Cabin in the Woods and I am full of thoughts. 1. As a deconstruction of the modern horror genre and archetypes, it was clever enough. Grimly funny, and making way more sense than many of the films it's talking about. I loved the little nods to all sorts of ionic things, the clever ways it makes sense out of what is often nonsense. 2. I think it's fascinating that it is exploitative in the ways it's talking about other films being, and even though it was to a point unlike a lot of this stuff (I'm looking at you slasher films and torture porn in particular), it still made me uncomfortable and I'm not sure how I feel about it in retrospect. I need to poke more at the problematic stuff, but I'm not up to it tonight. 3. I liked that a lot of the violence was moved out of frame or partially out of frame, done through sound effects, or memorably toward the end with literal buckets of gore obscuring the glass so that most is imagined rather than explicit. 4. I rather liked them turning the sidekick into the lead, when twisting the archetypes. I guessed where they were going with him, but I didn't particularly mind. 5. And most important: I kept thinking about something Seanan McGuire said about The Crazies specifically and by extension other movies like Rec/Quarantine and 28 weeks Later: So many of our films glorify defying the Quarantine and that it's really dangerous for our society out in the real world. We love cheering for scrappy survivors sticking it to the man by escaping quarantine and potentially infecting the rest of the population. We get so invested in them as heroes, we forget how deadly selfish it is for everyone else. Sometimes the best thing we can do is sacrifice or risk sacrificing ourselves. I fundamentally believe that whether it's the real life heroes in Eyam in Derbyshire during the 1665 Plague outbreak who chose to save the neighboring village by keeping quarantine, or fictional ones. I fundamentally believe that if your chance at survival will likely doom everyone, the heroic thing is sometimes to stay and die. It's what I mean when I say "I support the quarantine." I think this film is at heart about that choice, that contradiction inherent in a lot of books and films, that tension between wanting to cheer for the under dog and duty to the whole rest of the human race, between human scale ethics and the greater good.
And damn, that's a lot of complicated and uncomfortable thinky thoughts to embed in something marketed as simple horror. It's anything but simple and worth poking at in a more lengthy format and with more intelligence and articulateness than I can bring to bear tonight. I like art that makes me think, so I'm going to keep poking at it, at least in my own head, but I think you could just ignore all that stuff about deconstructing and illuminating all sorts of tension in the American zeitgeist and surf the surface for fun. It happened to play into a whole bunch of my personal interests and hot buttons, but if you are less inclined to that sort of thing, it works perfectly well as horror if you are better at ignoring all that.
* I decided West wing was unwatchable and moved on to Season 2 of Glee, which I am promised is better and more up my ally. So far I want to smack nearly everyone except Kurt and maybe Emma. I have so had it with Shu, Finn, and Rachel already and I'm only at Grilled Cheesus. I saw about half of this episode last Christmas and if anything I'm angrier at Mercedes and most of the rest of them inflicting their Christianity on Kurt when he's already dealing with his father's illness. I know how infuriating it was for me in a similar situation and I'm much older and have a lot more emotional cushion. Weirdly, I think I may be liking Puck for the first time, though I'm sure it won't last. I have no opinion on same yet beyond noticing that he has a surprising amount of sexual chemistry with Finn in particular, but also Puck a little bit. For the record, while I'm happy they are doing more with Brittany and Santana, I really don't like Brittany Spears, having started teaching Middle School the year "Hit Me Baby, one More time" hit. I had to spend most of my lunches that spring listening to that song over and over while the girls worked on it for the talent show, and her songs were ubiquitous in middle school classrooms for way to long. If I never have to hear her "sing" it will be too soon. As a resut, the episode was really hard for me to watch and I can't tell if it is objectively any good what with me trying not to throw things at the TV.