I plan on blogspotting regularly now.

I made cookies today just so I could make a cookie ice cream sundae.  Success!

I'm amazing.

Let's Get Nerdy: Or, Why Jon Law would make amazing films you would pay full price and sneak in cheap snacks from the Chinese supermarket to see

So, they're making a Warcraft film.  The first thing is that they told Uwe Boll that he wasn't making it, which is kinda amazing.  I do not know why people allow him to touch their video game franchises; it's like looking at that kid who just finished wiping his hands on his feces-fouled shirt and thinking, "Hey, I can trust him to hold onto my sandwich."

You cannot.

The other thing about this film is that they are setting it between WarCraft III and World of Warcraft and they are telling it from the Alliance's point of view.  The former makes sense because WoW's story is already being told in the game and has been well-traveled by the game's nations' worth of players and I don't feel like it needs to be transposed to the screen.  It's a rich world and other stories can be told!  The latter irks me because I have a strong urge to cheer on the underdogs, the Horde, and would like a fantasy film that really tells the story from the side of the monstrous folk that are easily marginalized by the self-righteous Alliance.  (Not that portraying the Alliance as the stereotypical straw racists would be preferable either.)  But it makes sense because telling the story from the Alliance's side allows them to use mainly human characters, i.e., not spend as much time and money on heavy makeup and CGI.

To get to my main point: This Warcraft film is telling a previously untold story that takes place on Azeroth featuring new characters.  The characters are completely open.  The story itself is relatively open.  So what does this mean?  We are probably going to get another film about white dudes with beards and swords spouting clichés in English accents and maybe there will be a dwarf with a Scottish accent.  Women will be significant in relation to the main characters and expose a lot of skin.  I will probably go to see it and I will probably come back to complain a lot.

So, instead, here is the Warcraft film I want to see: I only played WoW on and off for about a year, but play it I did and my first main character is Fariath, a black woman paladin.  So, I don't want her specifically in the film, seeing as I don't roleplay so she has no personality.  But imagine a film where the protagonist was a black woman who kicked ass.

I'm imagining Gina Torres plays her.

In platemail, wielding a giant warhammer.

There is a method beneath all this besides thinking Gina Torres is hot and amazing as all get out and she needs to be cast in more things now.

The Bechdel Test posits a very simple standard for films: It portrays 1. two women who 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something besides men.

Seems simple and obvious: I am sure any woman reading this can give an example of how she had one—just one!—conversation with another woman and talked about something besides men.  But if you think about it, so few films and television shows pass this test.  Because women appear in media almost exclusively for the male gaze, meaning they exist for the purposes of straight men, meaning they are sexualized in ways male characters are not and they have no real interests outside of men.

Which is why so many women characters in romantic comedies could have their job be replaced by any other job and the film would not be impacted much at all.  Because a woman's life outside of her romantic relationships is no more significant than the choice of frame for the picture on her desk.

I suspect that this is why so many women in romantic comedies are writers (seriously, think about it), because being a "writer" in the collective imagination of audiences is such a nebulous occupation that it presents almost no pressure and represents no force in a woman's life, freeing up all her time to pursue her lead, or rather, the lead man.  At best, a woman's career that actually means something is also an obstacle to the woman's love life and she needs to discover love.

(One reason why The Devil Wears Prada is amazing is that Anne Hathaway SPOILERS chooses to leave her job not for love but because she realized she wasn't who she wanted to be or where she wanted to be anymore.  When she meets up with her ex-boyfriend, she does not expect or demand him back.  She changed (back) for herself and her ex recognizing that and loving her is a side bonus.)

So, Gina Torres' character would have a woman best friend who was also a Knight of the Silver Hand.  Maybe the best friend would be focused on the healing arts in contrast to the combat-focused Gina Torres (holy paladin versus ret/prot paladin for WoW players).  And most importantly, they never talk about men.  They don't have to dish about the men in their life.  They can talk about slaying the Undead Scourge and debate the founding of Orgrimmar.

They will fight in boots with no height to the heel, at all.

I just really want a fantasy film that does not involve white dudes who get more realistic armor and women only get to cast spells or fire arrows in midriff-baring armor.  I want a film where women can be something not auxiliary to men.

The problem is that it is not just that nobody is writing stories that pass the Bechdel Test; it's that the film industry does not want to pass the Bechdel Test.  And it does not even make sense because action and speculative fiction films that star strong woman characters that are not there for men do well.

And men in the industry persist in dismissing the truth, labeling solid films that profit with strong women as "exceptions" and continue to produce shit films with more of the same actors that look like the people with the most money and power in the industry (i.e., white and male).  All to deny that flat-out sexism (and racism) that motivates the decision-making process here.

Silent Hill, which has mixed and mostly poor reviews, is a horror film based on a video game, which was surprisingly well done in my opinion.  It captures the spirit of the games and, interestingly, passes the Bechdel Test.  Because the main characters are two women and a girl, and both of these women are badass.  The father-husband character was even only included because of corporate pressure to include a male character.

When I showed my casting choices (including Ruth Negga, the Ethiopian-Irish woman actor in Breakfast on Pluto, and Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress probably best known in the US for Memoirs of a Geisha, and Vin Diesel because what is a WoW film without the man) for this Warcraft film to someone online, they answered that this would not be a WoW film anymore.  Which is sad and true.  What is WoW without its night elf women in bikini armor?  Without its extremely exaggerated musculature for male characters?  What is a WoW film without the male gaze, basically?

In my mind, something amazing.

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now.  We've got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn't matter with me now.  Because I've been to the mountaintop.  And I don't mind."

Martin Luther King, Jr. said these words the day before he was assassinated.  I had read his last speech for the first time a couple weeks ago, and this quote continues to haunt me to this night.  It feels like a sturdy hand on a shoulder, a last smile before a fade to white, a last promise to us, a last request we must keep.

Sometimes, it feels like all great people become prescient of their deaths a little.  Maybe it is simply mundane movements that, through hindsight, transforms into strange prophecies.

I think these simple sentences, with simple meaning but also depth of meaning.  It's Neruda's "Eso es todo," or Danticat's "Dye mon, gen mon."  It is final and sad and beautiful and sorta hurtful, in a kind way.

I read a heartbreaking poem not long after I read that speech, John Updike's "Dog's Death.  I suggest never reading it because you will die and I do not need that drama, but take my word when I say that the words "Good dog" are the saddest things you will ever read.

I think these are my favorite works, and it is why I prefer vignettes, short stories, poems to novels.  There is an intimacy.  There is something weirdly honest and true.  Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a, perhaps surprisingly, amazing film.  In a shallow glance, it is a period romantic comedy, but there is depth in this simple film.  Right outside of a party of the London's youth, on the edge of the Second World War, an older man tells an older woman, "I don't think I can bear it again."

One of my favorite scenes in The History Boys is a quiet one: Hector, the English teacher of "General Studies", and Posner, the student who remembered all the songs, sit and talk about Thomas Hardy's "Drummer Hodge".  Hector explains to Posner,

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

For me, I think it is something different.  There is that moment, in those unadorned words, these characters, these personae, these voices flare up in fierce softness and they are more alive than me.

Think of it as personality dialysis!

So, while I was reading Kristin Chenoweth's response to Ramin Setoodeh's idiotic piece, I was completely imagining that Kristin Chenoweth was complaining to me, personally, as I nod along and snap at the appropriate moments.

"Mm-hm, Kristin Chenoweth, that is so spot-on.  Come, let this heterosexist news magazine filth clutter our minds no more.  While we wait for our delicious fruit pies to finish cooling, we shall ride our bikes to the park while singing!"

And at the park, there would be birds and frogs and boys, and I don't even care because I'll be hanging out and singing with my BFF.

And yes, the entire time, I call Kristin Chenoweth by Kristin Chenoweth's full name.

For the Horde!: The Various Ineptitudes of Allies

Yes, it's a stupid WoW joke, shut up.

Months ago, I was standing in a kitchen and watching as one friend, R., was surprised by another, H., declaring that she was not a feminist and hated feminists.  R. and H. continued talking about it, and A., standing next to me, turned to me and grinned, "Well, we're not feminists, are we, Jonathan?"

I still do not know what that means or how to respond.  My instinct, beyond feeling awkward and not saying anything, is to say, "Actually, yes, I am."  If I felt like A. was making that assertion on the basis that he felt that he, as a man, could not be a feminist because he had no capacity to understand what sexism fully means and thus felt that he should not represent himself in a way that would co-opt the movement(s) from women's experiences.  If I felt like this was the angle he was coming from, I would have had no problem agreeing and then entering a discussing with A. about the topic.

But no, it was pretty clear that, somehow, feminism was laughable or at least male participation in feminism.  I have, customarily, identified as a "feminist" to indicate my dedication to anti-sexism efforts.  Less so recently, due to reading about the issue mentioned above, and I am fine if some people hold that I cannot be a feminist as a male-identified, male-assigned person.  I am not invested in wearing the term "feminist" like a badge; it is a shortcut for me to say that I believe that there is a patriarchy, that there is continuous and varied sexism in the world that acts to oppress women, that I am willing to and have participated in anti-sexism activism, but it is not not a vital identification.  I do not need to be able to call myself a "feminist" to believe or do those things, and it is never my prerogative to preempt someone else's definition of feminism and what a feminist is.

But I feel like if I simply replied, "Maybe not, but I am against sexism," it would be meaningless.  Not many people would say they are for sexism and most would say that they are against it, but there is an unspoken second part of that sentence.  I could be saying, "I am against sexism, which is something that persists to this day that we all participate in and, as men, benefit from in any number of ways," while he agrees, "Yeah, I am against sexism too, and good thing it doesn't exist anymore."

It is the same in any other conversation.  "I am against racism, which is a persistent and complex system in our world that continues to affect and effect everything we do and say and all the outcomes of various processes, regardless of intention," versus "I am against racism, which was totally eliminated by white people working with Santa Luther, who knew his place and how to be nice and appeasing and non-confrontational enough."

It is possible for one to just straight-out say the former, but not everybody (read: me) has that in-person articulation.  It is easier for me to just say, "Yes, I am a feminist," but does that ease in a passing conversation override the problematic aspects of me making that statement?

In a related topic, I had also been reading about the problematic aspect of the word "ally".  Like the idea of "male feminists", as I understand it, there are two issues:

1. People who take on these labels use them as shields to defend and excuse their privilege.*
2. People who take on these labels use them as permission to co-opt the movement from actual women/POC/queer people/etc.

Honestly, I am not ready to personally disavow the term "ally", like I am not ready to personally reject "feminism" as inadequate due to its history of transphobia, of racism, of classism.  (Though I would also feel appropriative taking to womanism or anything like that, as I have never and can never find that feminism does not represent or fight for me as a woman.  Because I'm not a woman.  For me, I find it better to understand people in those two categories as Doing It Wrong.  I can recognize that the idea of "allies" can build coalitions and empower persons who may feel it would be otherwise appropriative for them to participate in anti-oppression causes due to their privilege, while remaining aware of the possibility of and critical of unexamined privilege.

As before, I am not going to assert that people have to accept my understanding or to accept my identification as an "ally" if I were to ever adopt it.

I'm not sure what I am trying to say here.  I think I am just trying to put together how I feel about something I've been reading and thinking about.  I think I am more optimistic because I feel like I have seen that there are anti-racist queer activists and Marxist feminist activists and queer disability rights activists and people able to navigate all these issues.  I know people who could easily be the stereotypically clueless feminists but instead are constantly willing to read and listen and learn.  I have seen my own transformations, slowly absorbing anti-oppression works around me and learning to be aware enough to see all this around me.  I have friends who listened to me stumble my way through explaining what I feel are problematic aspects of things and they were able to appreciate my attempts without demanding I kowtow to their own sense of pride and progressivism.

I just feel good about it, even when I am pissed about it.  Maybe I'm just still young.

*This is an article focused on the first in feminism, but I dislike how it attempts to negate someone's sexual identity, even if that person is a complete ass.

How Lady Gaga Ruined My Life

Monday night, I slept for twelve hours.  Rather, I slept from ten at night to about five in the morning and then from seven to two in the afternoon Tuesday.  This was after several days of almost no sleep.  And then I slept for just four hours Wednesday morning. This is unusually little sleep even for me.  And what have I been doing instead of sleeping?

Rah rah ah-ah-ah!  Roma-romamah!  Ga-ga ooh-la-la!

Want your bad romance!

Yes.  I lay in bed, staring into the dark and sing to myself, 'I want your horror, I want your design. 'Cause you're a criminal as long as you're mine.'  I realize I am the second-to-last gay man to fall in line, and I think I am being punished for it.  I've been stricken with Lady Gaga.  I've been mauled by the Fame Monster.  My fingers unconsciously curling into the Claw.  I wake up in the morning to find my hair has tied itself into a bow.  Diamonds cascade around me spontaneously and suspend in midair.

(Also really good is Dangerous Muse's remix.)

Though I was watching that crazy-hot vampire 'Teeth' video weeks ago, the affliction really began this past Friday, when I went out with some people who were meeting with Queen Margaret University students visiting for the night.  At the first bar, FHQ, I found myself singing along and moving in my seat to 'Bad Romance' while I downed a rum and coke (the manliest drink I had all night; it was followed by a Woo Woo).  Hours later, I was in the middle of a crowd, dancing badly to 'Bad Romance'.  And the song has stayed in my head ever since.

I listened to it (and 'Womanizer' and 'Maneater' and 'Crazy in Love') as I braved the fluffy snow (a 'blizzard' to the Scots and laughable to me) today to get to the saddest Chinese supermarket I have ever seen.  I danced in place as I soaked rice noodles in water and watched my cheap pan pop out of shape as the soy sauce sizzled.

My iPod is going at it as I rush through the kitchen door, down the stairs, and out the building's back door to the Adam Smith building for my classes.  I am mouthing it to myself as I wait for my e-tickets to Nice to finish printing in the library (and miss my overloud printer-scanner at home).  I am embarrassingly admitting to it to my flatmates as we eat dinner around the table (and me with my scrambled egg sandwich dinner on a lazy Sunday).  I am stepping to the beat as I walk through the chilly streets of the West End to my friends' place to make fajitas.  I am imagining everyone suddenly breaking into choreographed dancing on the subway as I near the Buchanan Street stop.

The other day, as I walked to 'Walk walk fashion baby,' I watched this car make a turn and start up Great George's, the short road from the stores up the hill to my flat.  I briefly thought, 'That car is really close to the right,' before I caught myself, 'No, they drive on the other side here.'  And then a second car started coming down, and the first shifted left back into its own lane.  I realized that I had adjusted to the roads here without realizing and even actually tried to correct myself.

Increasingly, I do not know where I am.  I do not feel like returning to school.  Not in that I want to stay in Glasgow forever, but rather, I am questioning this path I had made out for myself which has since been thrown off.  I was trying to adjust the path to only detour and then go back to the previously decided destination, but now I am thinking about how I don't need to.  I've never been an ends person; I've always done things because I wanted to do them not because they'll lead me to somewhere else.  And I am not sure I want to be getting a double degree in sociology and social work anymore; I do not know if I want a university degree anymore.

I do not know where my life really is now, and I blame Lady Gaga.  It's easier that way.  See, she made me stay up to 2 AM writing about 'Bad Romance'.

I want your love and I want your revenge.  You and me could write a bad romance.

And then they go on to tell these stories to you

"Between the Pool and the Gardenias" was unlike the other stories we were taught in tenth grade. Marie, half-mad from the grief of multiple miscarriages, had run away to Port-au-Prince to escape a resentful and faithless husband and an unsympathetic village. She finds the body of an abandoned infant in the street and adopts it; she tells "Rose" the stories of her life as she tries to wash away the growing stink of rot with stolen perfume.

This short story was written by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American writer born in Port-au-Prince who had emigrated to Brooklyn at twelve. I fell in love with her mythic language. Like the poetry of Pablo Neruda, her words read like pure earth to me, elemental in their ache of loss and desire. I felt the prose down to my bones. I ended up writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the use of myths and superstitions in the short stories. I wrote about black butterflies and sleep talking and deye mon gen mon and mermaids singing in Latin at a Catholic Mass in an underwater heaven, watched over by the sea lwa Agwé.

Marie's story is from the collection Krik? Krak! The title refers to a call and response style of Haitian storytelling. "Krik?" "Krak!" "I have many stories I could tell you."

There were many nights when I saw some old women leaning over my bed.

"That there is Marie," my mother would say. "She is now the last one of us left."

Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Défile who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.

In rereading "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" within this collection, this simple section takes on greater intensity. These women, these passing references, are characters in the collection's other short stories. These short stories all intertwine, a technique more explicitly done in her other collection, The Dew-Breaker. Sometimes, the connections are a little more subtle, but my interpretation is simple: There is more to the story.

There is more behind it all. There is a greater context. By excising this story out, our English teachers decontextualized the story in this instance, but one of the greatest things I took away from IB English was learning about the writer. It is so easily missed but I feel like it is too often that a creative work is divorced from its creator. Place a work of literature in the context of not just the entire body of work, but in the context of the writer, of the writer's experiences, of the writer's time and place. How the writer's identities, gender, sexuality, skin color, how it all comes to intersect with each other and with greater contexts, histories, cultures, systems. It is utterly enriching to see the veins of history pulsing through what was a simple story.

In fact, it is too often that we divorce stories in all their forms from their contexts and histories. We see it often in the discussion of the nations of people of color. How often have we heard people advocate simply dismissing the Middle East or Africa (reduced from vast regions of different cultures and nations to singular geopolitical identities) as doomed? Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie in the TEDTalks "The danger of a single story" explains, "Start the story of with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story" (10:40, but watch the whole thing).

We see the single story again in discussions about Haiti as it becomes worthy of humanitarian aid again due to the 12 January earthquake (and its subsequent fifty-two aftershocks). It is a failed nation. It is a nation of corrupt governments. It is a nation of unbelievable poverty, and it is a nation of tragedy. And we do love connecting it to HIV. We see this story used in pleas for help for this pitiful nation ("No possibility of feelings more complex than pity.") and in callous dismissals and calls to simply abandon Haiti.

But: Why does this matter? Yes, it is incorrect to believe these single stories, and we are taught—to some extent—that it is not "politically correct" to repeat these stereotypes. Why don't we focus on real problems? Real racism? Or how Haitians need help now, regardless of history or politics?

Because our actions are informed by the stories we have been told and have told ourselves. This is the very essence of socialization and cultural learning. When we have thoroughly mired ourselves in these mythic narratives, we know no better than to live and form judgements and make decisions and act by these narratives. Por eso, educations are so fundamental for any government, whether it is wholesale prohibition of literacy for black slaves, the revisionist calenders of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, the deletion of the Taino people from our American history books when we celebrate Christopher Columbus Day?

How did Ronald Reagan transform American attitudes towards public assistance programs? By making shit up. He told absolute lies about welfare queens. And so, we have this narrative where there are these (black) persons who are really able to work are sucking on the government teat and draining taxpayer money, and this narrative is more powerful than facts. Despite the studies demonstrating otherwise, we can still hear people giving anecdata about the outrageous welfare abuse. By this narrative, we told ourselves we had to "reform" the welfare system into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act under Clinton. (Look at that name, could you throw in anymore Reagan buzzwords?) We told ourselves that it makes sense to submit welfare recipients to drug tests, that, somehow, we have the right to the lives of these people receiving one particular kind of public assistance—as opposed to, say, public assistance to students (scholarships) or to the wealthy (work expense tax breaks and business stimuli). It is clear how narratives inform policy.

Consider the stories about the dangerous riots everywhere in Haiti immediately following the disasters. Because of these conditions, this chaos, this violence, we had to delay aid and move in military personnel. As ABC News have reported, we block up airports with soldiers, obstructing planes with medical equipment and supplies. We make these vital decisions of balancing security and aid based on this story of violence. And this story is untrue. This is not just sensationalist news and hype; this is a narrative used to justify moving soldiers instead of medicine.

And look at how abduction is transformed into adoption in the narrative. Americans trafficking children under the delusion of being saviors. There is much hullabaloo about this particular case, but leading up to it, the common narrative was we as foreigners need to save those Haitian babies. From the earthquake, from poverty, from suffering, from those riots that don't exist, from death, from lack of families, from their families, from being Haitian. We have Catholic leaders in Miami who want airlifts for children who "appear to be orphaned [emphasis mine]". And this narrative is backed up by prologues long as novels, where we feel that we not only have a moral imperative but a right to another nation's children. Is it any surprise these missionaries believed they were doing God's work? Is anyone really shocked at these missionaries' audacity?

Krik? Krak! was one of the books I had brought along to Glasgow with me. I recently reread it before slowly working on this blog entry (and then losing half of it to a stupid copy-paste error), and, as always, it made me cry. Not just for the characters' pains and tragedies, but in exultation of their hopes. I shared in their common humanity, their blazing dignity, their impossible faith, their love as endless as the sea. Their arguments with mothers about choice of partners. Deye mon gen mon: Behind the mountains are more mountains.

I don't know what I was trying to gain from reading Danticat again. I just knew I wanted to do so much, but it is even illegal for me to volunteer in this country. I knew I was frustrated with the lack of respect for this nation, born of the third successful republic revolution. Ever. This nation whose freedom afforded the United States the Louisiana Purchase because the Haitian Revolution taught Napoleon that the Americans were just too much trouble, only for the U.S. to completely ignore it (because they don't their own slaves getting any ideas) and deem it doomed (because they had to tell themselves it will collapse).

I was sick of people talking about the corrupt governments of Haiti without mentioning the American participation in and manipulation of the government. I was sickened by how Bill Clinton was given any capacity to "help" Haiti, and I was outraged that he foresaw the commodification of yet another Caribbean nation for foreign consumption and foreign profit as a "fix" to the Haitian economy.

This is a poor substitute for tangible help, but that is all I can give for now: A request that you listen. Adichie defines power as "the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person." We have held onto that ability for far too long. And it is not that we must empower Haitians to tell their own stories. We cannot prop ourselves as the heroic enablers of the Haitians, because that is still our story. But rather, we must simply learn to listen better. Because people, they have always been telling their own stories.