Rants. So Many Rants
Jul. 20th, 2014 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Greenwick found. "Transgender welfare board coming up in West Bengal:" http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/transgender-welfare-board-coming-up-in-west-bengal-114071500941_1.html
* "10 Characters Who Ended Up With The Wrong People:" http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/10-characters-who-ended-up-with-the-wrong-people/
* This is problematic in a bunch of ways, but also interesting in a bunch of others. "Caftan Liberation: How an Ancient Fashion Set Modern Women Free:" www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/caftan-liberation/
* It’s kind of funny. For all that certain aspects of Conan the Barbarian are of their time, it holds up remarkably well. Sure, the spirit attack effects are cheesey as is the snake transformation generally, but most of the effects being analog, they really hold up. Sure the plot is cheese, but it’s good cheese. Some of the shots and visual textures are gorgeous, and they do such a good job of creating a sense that there is rich life going on in the world, even if what we are seeing is less than a minute of extras doing whatever. It is grotty in the way a New Hope is grotty. It’s a lived in sort of fantasy.
And yet the sequel is so bad, despite having Grace Jones being awesome all over the scenes she is in. It was incredibly disappointing to be as a child (Except Grace Jones. Seriously, I loved Grace Jones and would watch crap like the Merv Griffin Show if she was going to be on. I still remember her talking about answering the door to missionaries in the nude and taking off her breast plate… she was wearing this amazing deco breast plate in the interview which I coveted… She took off her breastplate to illustrate some point about it to the horror of the host. She was one of a kind amazing). It had this cool cast and this great Grace Jones character, and it was deadly dull and not visually interesting. watching it back to back with the original, the sparseness of it stands out. It’s too clean and glitzy. It lacks the medieval music that was so prominent in the original’s sound track. There’s long stretches of nothing with falls flat comic relief and boring action punctuating it. There is nothing in it that is really fun to watch except the scene with the Grace Jones character and the villagers.
I stand by my original opinion in the ‘80’s that they should have just made a character about the Grace Jones character having adventures and being awesome. hell, I’d pay theater prices to watch that if they made it right now with decades older Grace Jones.
* I periodically watch silent films. My interest is mostly historical/anthropological. Along with the early talkies, they are way problematic in a whole lot of ways as far as racial and gender politics, but they also often talk about class in ways we don't generally and you can watch them in the process of inventing all sorts of techniques and visual vocabulary we take for granted. One of the things I've noticed watching the current batch is the difference between movies they made about themselves vs. the movies we make about them. there is so much physical affection between the men, particularly in movies about the military. They hug, they cuddle, they touch each other casually. We erase that, because to modern eyes that is coded entirely homoerotic, while for them it could mean any kind of affection between men. Sometimes it is pretty clearly platonic. Sometimes, even though the script is hetero-normative, the male leads clearly have waaay more chemistry with each other than with the female leads. Either way, there is something beautiful about that, the affectionate rough housing, the joyful hugging, the casual affection of the men, the way one man might hold another in a death scene like the one in Wings. (Wings kind of blows me away just generally. They had to invent a lot of those camera and special effects techniques. In those pilot close ups? Those are the actual pilots flying real airplanes doing their own camera work. While flying an actual plane. I repeat, flying an actual plane, acting, and doing their own camera work. At once. None of them died, though a stunt pilot got really hurt in one of the crashes they filmed with actual planes. The whole film is like that. They did massive battle scenes with 2-3thousand real soldiers and real explosions. Before this film, aerial photography was barely a thing. They invented all but the most basic technique while trying to figure out how to film this.)
* True Blood Brace for Rant About Appropriation and AIDS and why this is toxic as fuck:
1. "Cover the ones that will be visible." I really don't like the way they are making Hep-V=AIDS. AIDS is a real life horror that stole most of a generation of our men and is currently still devastating communities and whole countries. People are still literally dying, for all the drugs are better if you can afford them, and for all it gets ignored and swept under the rug by the media. There is a similar problem with all the appropriated underground railroad imagery for white people this and last episode. It's why I don't like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer taking the real life horror of slavery and moving it out of the realm of human evil by saying "Vampires did it." Fuck that! It trivializes a terrible thing.
It's related to the problem with "God Hates Fangs." Meanwhile they seldom deal with the fucked up elements of their racial narrative and short the gay and bisexual characters for love and sex scenes (Compare Jason's sex scenes with Lafayette's sex scene for example). They've appropriated the oppression of real minorities for a dangerous fantasy race, while doing an often very shit job when it come to representation of minority characters. It's the same problem with the zombies in the second season of In the Flesh, appropriating both gay oppression and the Holocaust, while framing the oppressed group as zombie terrorists. You see the problem don't you?
2. Jessica is a cheater. She barely talks to her boyfriend. Looks like a double standard to me.
3. Bisexuals exist. No really. Not mythical. Tara was bi. James is bi. Can we stop pretending that it's not a thing?
4. All the black characters were telling home truths today.... Glad they were said? yes. And yet... them not getting taken seriously, makes me think of the ways the tone argument gets used against rl black people all the time. The woman in particular says her piece, they drag her off, and nothing changes.
5. I don't like them reinforcing the pretending to be a woman's friend in the hopes she'll relent and fuck him trope. I am going to be so angry when she gives in and goes back to Bill.
6. I like how they did mourning for Alcide. It was good the way Sookie mourning for her grandmother was good. At the same time? Tara hasn't been mourned, they just reference mourning her. With Grandma, Terry, and Alcide they show mourning. With Tara they just tell. Hmmmm... one of these people is not like the other and surprise! Tara gets short shrift.
Addendum from Tumblr:
Anonymous said: You do realize that the ONLY reason Eric told Pam to cover his veins is because they were going to that party and couldn't be revealed as vampires. They had to play the part of humans. Humans don't get infected with Hep V. If they saw his veins, they'd know he was a vampire. It literally had nothing to do with hiding his sickness. Eric doesn't give a fuck if people know he's sick. If they hadn't been trying to pass off as human, he wouldn't have covered them.
Yes, and People with AIDS had to cover their Kaposi's sarcomas so they would not lose there jobs and thus health insurance. To me as someone who was a teenager in the '80's, this is very much and AIDS reference, as well as a whole lot of other things about Hep-V. The framing of the episode before this with '80's flashbacks also points that way associatively,.
My point is that this whole plotline is a reference to AIDS. The show runners make repeated choices to code the blood borne disease this way, just as they use "coming out of the coffin" and "God Hates Fangs" to appropriate the gay rights struggle on behalf of fantasy monsters who repeatedly kill people while often ignoring or treating LGB characters as lesser, and have said monsters now attacking people and giving them an AIDS coded blood disease against their will. In a lot of states, there are laws that discourage people from getting AIDS tested because they can be imprisoned if someone catches it from them if they know. There was a whole meme about how gay men attacked or tricked people to deliberately give them AIDS that Republicans like Bill Buckley used to argue in favor of forehead tattoos and prison camps.
It's toxic as fuck and it angers me. I get angrier the more I think about it.
Think about that. All those elected officials decided it was way more important to literal jail people with AIDS than take sensible measure to slow the spread of a disease for which there is no cure and was no effective treatment. If they wanted to slow AIDS, shaming and criminalizing people for being honest about their status and getting proactive testing would not still be a part of public policy. (In several states, even if you disclose but the condom broke, you can go to prison.) If they had really wanted to slow the spread of disease, AIDS tests, once invented, would have been free and readily available, rather than expensive and requiring a massive trek to the inner city of a major city to get. I would not still have had a major hassle getting my routine tests in the early '90's because physicians didn't want to give them and you had to just keep arguing until you wore the Doctor down to get the damned blood draw.
* I have already lost patience with how stupid and annoying the people on Leftovers are.
* "10 Characters Who Ended Up With The Wrong People:" http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/10-characters-who-ended-up-with-the-wrong-people/
* This is problematic in a bunch of ways, but also interesting in a bunch of others. "Caftan Liberation: How an Ancient Fashion Set Modern Women Free:" www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/caftan-liberation/
* It’s kind of funny. For all that certain aspects of Conan the Barbarian are of their time, it holds up remarkably well. Sure, the spirit attack effects are cheesey as is the snake transformation generally, but most of the effects being analog, they really hold up. Sure the plot is cheese, but it’s good cheese. Some of the shots and visual textures are gorgeous, and they do such a good job of creating a sense that there is rich life going on in the world, even if what we are seeing is less than a minute of extras doing whatever. It is grotty in the way a New Hope is grotty. It’s a lived in sort of fantasy.
And yet the sequel is so bad, despite having Grace Jones being awesome all over the scenes she is in. It was incredibly disappointing to be as a child (Except Grace Jones. Seriously, I loved Grace Jones and would watch crap like the Merv Griffin Show if she was going to be on. I still remember her talking about answering the door to missionaries in the nude and taking off her breast plate… she was wearing this amazing deco breast plate in the interview which I coveted… She took off her breastplate to illustrate some point about it to the horror of the host. She was one of a kind amazing). It had this cool cast and this great Grace Jones character, and it was deadly dull and not visually interesting. watching it back to back with the original, the sparseness of it stands out. It’s too clean and glitzy. It lacks the medieval music that was so prominent in the original’s sound track. There’s long stretches of nothing with falls flat comic relief and boring action punctuating it. There is nothing in it that is really fun to watch except the scene with the Grace Jones character and the villagers.
I stand by my original opinion in the ‘80’s that they should have just made a character about the Grace Jones character having adventures and being awesome. hell, I’d pay theater prices to watch that if they made it right now with decades older Grace Jones.
* I periodically watch silent films. My interest is mostly historical/anthropological. Along with the early talkies, they are way problematic in a whole lot of ways as far as racial and gender politics, but they also often talk about class in ways we don't generally and you can watch them in the process of inventing all sorts of techniques and visual vocabulary we take for granted. One of the things I've noticed watching the current batch is the difference between movies they made about themselves vs. the movies we make about them. there is so much physical affection between the men, particularly in movies about the military. They hug, they cuddle, they touch each other casually. We erase that, because to modern eyes that is coded entirely homoerotic, while for them it could mean any kind of affection between men. Sometimes it is pretty clearly platonic. Sometimes, even though the script is hetero-normative, the male leads clearly have waaay more chemistry with each other than with the female leads. Either way, there is something beautiful about that, the affectionate rough housing, the joyful hugging, the casual affection of the men, the way one man might hold another in a death scene like the one in Wings. (Wings kind of blows me away just generally. They had to invent a lot of those camera and special effects techniques. In those pilot close ups? Those are the actual pilots flying real airplanes doing their own camera work. While flying an actual plane. I repeat, flying an actual plane, acting, and doing their own camera work. At once. None of them died, though a stunt pilot got really hurt in one of the crashes they filmed with actual planes. The whole film is like that. They did massive battle scenes with 2-3thousand real soldiers and real explosions. Before this film, aerial photography was barely a thing. They invented all but the most basic technique while trying to figure out how to film this.)
* True Blood Brace for Rant About Appropriation and AIDS and why this is toxic as fuck:
1. "Cover the ones that will be visible." I really don't like the way they are making Hep-V=AIDS. AIDS is a real life horror that stole most of a generation of our men and is currently still devastating communities and whole countries. People are still literally dying, for all the drugs are better if you can afford them, and for all it gets ignored and swept under the rug by the media. There is a similar problem with all the appropriated underground railroad imagery for white people this and last episode. It's why I don't like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer taking the real life horror of slavery and moving it out of the realm of human evil by saying "Vampires did it." Fuck that! It trivializes a terrible thing.
It's related to the problem with "God Hates Fangs." Meanwhile they seldom deal with the fucked up elements of their racial narrative and short the gay and bisexual characters for love and sex scenes (Compare Jason's sex scenes with Lafayette's sex scene for example). They've appropriated the oppression of real minorities for a dangerous fantasy race, while doing an often very shit job when it come to representation of minority characters. It's the same problem with the zombies in the second season of In the Flesh, appropriating both gay oppression and the Holocaust, while framing the oppressed group as zombie terrorists. You see the problem don't you?
2. Jessica is a cheater. She barely talks to her boyfriend. Looks like a double standard to me.
3. Bisexuals exist. No really. Not mythical. Tara was bi. James is bi. Can we stop pretending that it's not a thing?
4. All the black characters were telling home truths today.... Glad they were said? yes. And yet... them not getting taken seriously, makes me think of the ways the tone argument gets used against rl black people all the time. The woman in particular says her piece, they drag her off, and nothing changes.
5. I don't like them reinforcing the pretending to be a woman's friend in the hopes she'll relent and fuck him trope. I am going to be so angry when she gives in and goes back to Bill.
6. I like how they did mourning for Alcide. It was good the way Sookie mourning for her grandmother was good. At the same time? Tara hasn't been mourned, they just reference mourning her. With Grandma, Terry, and Alcide they show mourning. With Tara they just tell. Hmmmm... one of these people is not like the other and surprise! Tara gets short shrift.
Addendum from Tumblr:
Anonymous said: You do realize that the ONLY reason Eric told Pam to cover his veins is because they were going to that party and couldn't be revealed as vampires. They had to play the part of humans. Humans don't get infected with Hep V. If they saw his veins, they'd know he was a vampire. It literally had nothing to do with hiding his sickness. Eric doesn't give a fuck if people know he's sick. If they hadn't been trying to pass off as human, he wouldn't have covered them.
Yes, and People with AIDS had to cover their Kaposi's sarcomas so they would not lose there jobs and thus health insurance. To me as someone who was a teenager in the '80's, this is very much and AIDS reference, as well as a whole lot of other things about Hep-V. The framing of the episode before this with '80's flashbacks also points that way associatively,.
My point is that this whole plotline is a reference to AIDS. The show runners make repeated choices to code the blood borne disease this way, just as they use "coming out of the coffin" and "God Hates Fangs" to appropriate the gay rights struggle on behalf of fantasy monsters who repeatedly kill people while often ignoring or treating LGB characters as lesser, and have said monsters now attacking people and giving them an AIDS coded blood disease against their will. In a lot of states, there are laws that discourage people from getting AIDS tested because they can be imprisoned if someone catches it from them if they know. There was a whole meme about how gay men attacked or tricked people to deliberately give them AIDS that Republicans like Bill Buckley used to argue in favor of forehead tattoos and prison camps.
It's toxic as fuck and it angers me. I get angrier the more I think about it.
Think about that. All those elected officials decided it was way more important to literal jail people with AIDS than take sensible measure to slow the spread of a disease for which there is no cure and was no effective treatment. If they wanted to slow AIDS, shaming and criminalizing people for being honest about their status and getting proactive testing would not still be a part of public policy. (In several states, even if you disclose but the condom broke, you can go to prison.) If they had really wanted to slow the spread of disease, AIDS tests, once invented, would have been free and readily available, rather than expensive and requiring a massive trek to the inner city of a major city to get. I would not still have had a major hassle getting my routine tests in the early '90's because physicians didn't want to give them and you had to just keep arguing until you wore the Doctor down to get the damned blood draw.
* I have already lost patience with how stupid and annoying the people on Leftovers are.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-21 07:28 pm (UTC)And as for the home truths - yes I agree with every damn word and cheer them. Except - this is half way through the very last season. The truth is told 5 episodes before the end? After there's any chance to act on any of this?!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-22 02:51 am (UTC)I am furious about the way AIDS is getting referenced here.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-22 10:42 am (UTC)There's nothing they won't steal, not one thing
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-22 01:12 pm (UTC)