Ms. Hurley begins her article with a wonderful and arresting image:
I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves—lemming-like—over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there.
She then goes on to talk about how difficult it would be, if all the books and movies and television shows had scaly, cannibalistic lemming-like llamas, to accurately observe llamas and to tell (or listen to) stories about real llamas, even you had accurately observed them. The point being that when we hear that women are timid domestic souls more naturally inclined to be the angel in the house than the fearsome foe, it’s like hearing that llamas have scales: you hear it enough, and you start to think that the fuzzy llamas you have seen are anomalies.
It’s a powerful image and a terrific way of telling the story. Of course, it’s not exactly accurate—analogies are not about accuracy. And the thing is that some women are, I think, inclined to the domestic virtues rather than the martial ones. Some men are as well. It’s not that we are told that llamas are scaly, it’s that we’re told that all apples are red.
And we are, aren’t we? We practically define apples as red fruit, and red as the color of apples. A is for apple, and there’s the apple, and it’s red. There’s one green leaf hanging off the stem, and the apple is red. It’s in the ABC books, it’s in the coloring books, it’s a plush toy, it’s on the bib or the onesie. Apples are red. And, here’s the thing: lots of apples are red! And lots are green! And some are yellow! And some are red in places and green in places! We can have all the experience we like with actual apples—galas and fujis and macs and granny smiths and honeycrunches and macouns and braeburns and baldwins and bountifuls and, yes, Pink Ladies—and we will still think of apples as red. A kindergartener may have a big old green apple for snack and then grab the red crayon to color the apple, because apples are red. Red apples are red.
And I think that’s important to add to (not, I want to be clear, take away from or deprecate) the experience of reading Ms. Hurley’s article. The knowledge that while we culturally have been erasing women’s experience systematically for centuries should be tempered as well with the knowledge that some women are great cooks, too.
This is where Mr. Berlatsky is attempting to go in his article, I think:
Merida is a different kind of princess in part because she doesn’t want much to do with traditional femininity—and her story is exhilarating for that. But still, it seems like it maybe leaves out a fair number of girls who like princesses because of the femininity, not despite it.
and later:
The point isn’t to create a single perfect role model, be it Merida or Wonder Woman or Cimorene or Cinderella. The point is to give girls, and for that matter boys, the chance to see femininity not solely as a prison to inhabit or escape, but as a story that can be told in lots of ways. As Cimorene’s friend Princess Arabella tells her at the end of the novel [Dealing With Dragons], “I wouldn’t like being princess for the King of the Dragons, but it will suit you down to the ground.”
I’m going to edge out a bit ahead of what Mr. Belatsky actually writes, here, because I think it’s the logical extension he doesn’t quite get to. He talks about Cimorene liking adventure and swordplay and cooking; her rejection of the Princess Lifestyle (if you will) is not a rejection of all domestic virtues. In fact, Cimorene becomes more or less a traditional domestic wife and homemaker for the dragon. And that’s a fine choice. For her. For a while. It changes in the later books, although I don’t think that the domestic virtues are ever actually denigrated. Similarly, in Dragon Slippers, our heroine is brave and clever and really good at sewing and weaving.
And what he doesn’t get to, and maybe I’m getting too far ahead of him here, is that—look, it’s great to be heroic, it’s great to be strong and brave, resourceful and resolute, combative and fierce. And then do the laundry. Because after the villain is vanquished, there will still be laundry to be washed.
What we don’t want is a bunch of kids who believe that if they get any satisfaction from cleaning the house, washing the dishes or dressing the baby they are falling into the Disney Princess stereotype that is Keeping Women Down by enforcing femininity. Girls or Boys—it’s a greater risk for boys, of course, because for generations we were told that cleaning and cooking and nurturing is essentially feminine, and thus beneath us. That’s a despicable lie, and we were all hurt by it. It will be a despicable lie if we tell it to girls, too.
Because of course women have always fought—and there was always laundry to be done after the fighting was over. Women went to sea, and there were babies to be changed. Women were doctors and lawyers and governors, and there were still dirty dishes, too. Just like when men were sailors and generals and Great Men, and there was still mending and cleaning and cooking to do. When we break out of the conceptual trap of the scaly llama—and that’s really important, breaking out of the trap, because it really is hurting people—there will still be mending and cleaning and cooking and nurturing and weaving and all. The domestic virtues will still be virtues. Whether they are feminine or masculine or human or just, just, well, just necessary, they will still be virtues.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
]]>
A fellow named Tevis Thompson wrote about The Endless Shopper on Grantland about a month ago (I’m a little behindhand on my blogging), and it’s a pretty good article. About Temple Run, anyway—I don’t play the other ones. I particularly took the point that the game is designed to make your scores improve (and your games last longer) whether you get better at the game play or not. You can’t help achieving the early objectives, and even most of the later objectives are simply a matter of continuing to play, rather than doing anything you would not otherwise do. So your multiplier increases, and your scores increase. If you buy anything with the coins you almost can’t help collecting, your gameplay improves—as Mr. Thompson says, even if you never actually got much better and your scores go up some more. You feel like you are improving, but are you?
This became more obvious to me recently, as I have achieved (almost) all the objectives and have purchased (almost) everything there is to purchase. I’ll talk about the exceptions in a bit, but my point at the moment is that there I have stopped improving my game play through upgrades and objectives, and the game has become dull. Of course, I have played the game five hundred times, so perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect it to stay interesting. Still, I have pretty much run myself out of the endless runner.
I find the whole current economy of video games perplexing and disorienting, as it happens. I understand it, but it doesn’t feel right: you can play the game for free, but it takes money to win. That’s not entirely accurate, of course, but the general idea is there.
When it works, for me, in gameplay, it works as part of a multiple-layer MFQ strategy, perhaps with a variety of kinds of victories available. Or in a game with system that compels the player has to balance goals within a run—in a launch game, for instance, you may need to level up by achieving height benchmarks, but gain money by long-distance launches, and also have power-ups valuable for later launches that are more frequently found higher, or lower, or close or further away. In system like that, even if it is well-designed (and some of them are), you could find yourself in need of half-a-dozen launches’ worth of pure money-grubbing, and the ability to save yourself the effort by spending an actual buck or two doesn’t detract from the game. I don’t spend the dollar, but I don’t mind that it’s an option. It doesn’t unbalance the game.
For that to work, though, there has to be a really delicate balance of goals. In Buster Bash, for instance, it doesn’t work at all—it seems like it ought to work, but it doesn’t. In that game, you are essentially trying to hit as many home runs as you can, and hit them as far as you can, while along the way collecting sunflower seeds for hitting targets. The sunflower seeds can be exchanged for equipment that will help you hit the ball farther and more accurately, which of course helps you with both goals as well as helping you replenish your seeds. But I simply can’t collect enough sunflower seeds to trade in for whatever it is will help me bash the ball further. I could buy them, and not for very much money, either, but I am not going to. I’m just going to stop playing.
Fruit Ninja, on the other hand, seems to be two different games: a free one and a paid one. I haven’t played the paid one, so I don’t know how it is, but the free one is pretty much a solid free game. You can in theory pay for stuff, but there isn’t any point to it; there’s nothing to achieve that the starfruit currency will get for you. So when I play (not often) I don’t generally even think about the possibility of paying.
Which is the issue, really. From my perspective, I don’t want to think about the possibility of in-game purchases at all. I’m not going to make any, and the more I have to think about them, the less I am going to enjoy the game. From the game company’s perspective, of course, they want players to think about in-game purchases a lot. And if that makes the game less enjoyable for me, well, I’m not giving them any money, now, am I? That’s a bit harsh—all else being equal, they would rather I enjoy the free game, as my word of mouth (or blog or whatever) is potentially helpful. But the game is for people who make the purchases, and that’s got to be their priority. And I’m never going to be that person.
Where does that leave me? On level 8, with only two objectives left: one million coins, and ten million meters. Another five hundred games to achieve those, I’m thinking, and having said that, it makes me want to find some other game to play.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
The trust’s editorial complaints unit agreed, saying the phrase was “not articulated clearly enough and could easily have been misheard for the offensive word ‘cocksuckers’ by the majority of the audience”.
It said it was “highly likely to have been misheard by a significant part of the audience as ‘cocksuckers’”, many of whom might have been children because it was broadcast at 4.15pm when parents were doing the school run.
It is difficult to imagine the New York Times being able to report on the story at all.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
And whose dysfunction?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
]]>
Anyway, they both seemed to enjoy it, but were vague on specifics: they didn’t say they liked any particular aspect of it particularly. This may have been an attempt at tact (an unwillingness to tell me that their favorite bits were not those with me in them) or more likely one instance of the more general tween uncommunicativeness. At any rate, on the drive home, they talked about other things. And I realized, afterward, that I didn’t talk to my PN-R’s friend about Love and Shakespeare.
I gave my daughter the talk after Twelfth Night, because she said that the fellow playing Orsino had done a great job of playing somebody who was in love—meaning with Olivia, at the beginning, with the sighing and the poetry and the leaping of all civil bounds. And I said: Orsino sure thinks he’s in love. He thinks that’s how you act when you’re in love. But he’s wrong. And Shakespeare is making fun of Orsino for thinking that. So if somebody comes all sheep’s-eyed to you, with the poetry and the harassment (says I to my ten-year-old daughter), don’t you believe in that love for a minute. That’s not real love, that’s Orsino’s love for Olivia. And even Orsino understands, in the end, that it’s Cesario that he really loves.
In AYLI, Phoebe falls in love with the young man Ganymede, bad poetry and all. We laugh at her along with Shakespeare because we know what she doesn’t: Ganymede doesn’t exist. There is no such person. Ganymede is Rosalind in disguise. When the disguise is lifted at the end of the play, Phoebe is shocked and appalled, and we laugh at her all over again. She fell in love with her own imagination. But she isn’t the only one.
Sylvius, another buffoon, claims that no man has ever loved the way that he loves Phoebe—he’s so blinded with his love for her that he can’t see her at all. His Phoebe, the object of his affection, doesn’t exist any more than Ganymede does. And I think it’s clear—well, I think it’s clear—that Shakespeare punishes him for his idiocy by marrying him to the real Phoebe, who will make his life a misery. All the more a misery for the remembered dream of bliss with the imaginary Phoebe he so desperately loved with that false passion. As she is haunted by Ganymede, who never existed at all.
But what about Orlando? He is as big a goon as Sylvius, yes? With carving into the treebark love songs about the fair, the chaste and unexpressive She. Here’s the whole heart of the play, as far as I’m concerned. He falls in Orsino-love with his imagined Rosalind on one meeting with the real one. He can’t speak to her. He writes bad poetry. He swears by her white hand. He’s got it bad, and that ain’t good. But—and here’s the trick of it—he meets and spends time with Ganymede and falls in love with him. Not the Orsino-love, the pining and the poetry and the puppy eyes. No, he just likes to spend time with Ganymede, talk to him (her), do things together. He falls in love with Ganymede, but stays in love with Rosalind, and he wins! Because Ganymede is Rosalind. Orlando may be a role model for entering into a romantic relationship, but it’s totally inadvertent. He falls in love with a Rosalind of his own imagination, and it’s just his luck that he also falls in love with the real Rosalind—who doesn’t exist either, really.
Anyway, the thing I ought to have told my daughter’s friend is that Shakespeare is making fun of people who fall in love with an imaginary ideal, by having it explicit that the object of the love doesn’t even exist. And it’s easy to fall in love with an imaginary ideal. And maybe when someone falls in love with you, it won’t be with you at all—not the you that exists but the Ganymede-you—and that’s not so easy. But if you’re lucky, maybe you get some Forest of Arden time to figure it all out.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
This in fact was discussed quite a bit in Queer Blogovia, where feelings about the Big Dog are decidedly mixed. Yes, he was about as good an LGBT ally as you could imagine having been elected president in 1992. That’s a condition, though, that meant he was a disappointment in many, many ways. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a compromise that it’s possible he could have improved on, although it’s not exactly clear how much. DOMA is a worse case—whatever might or might not have been passed, his explicit personal opposition to marriage equality defined the limits of the compromise. It’s fair for Mr. Kirchik to wonder how GLAAD demands so little of elected officials.
On the other hand, it’s fair to discuss the accomplishments. Particularly, as President, Mr. Clinton nominated many LGBT people to posts within the administration and in the judiciary. I remember the James Hormel and Roberta Achtenberg nomination fights, but there are a lot more that I don’t remember. Deborah Batts, for instance. Elaine Kaplan, who is now Acting Director of the OPM. John Berry, who was the last Director of the OPM. Fred Hochberg, who is now head of the Export-Import Bank. Sean Patrick Maloney, who is now the US Representative from NY 18th. And a dozen more, most of whom became lobbyists and consultants—and I feel disappointed that they did, but hey, that’s equality for you: without somebody having appointed some LGBT folk back in the twentieth century, they would not have had the chance to cash in come the twenty-first.
Still and all: is this award-worthiness?
The reason I’m writing about it, though, is that GLAAD is giving its Corporate Leader award to a major entertainment company that I have a particular interest in: The San Francisco Giants. What have they done to deserve it? Well, the press release talks about holding fundraising (mostly for HIV/AIDS) at a couple of games a year, and the It Gets Better video, and Matt Cain’s NoH8 photo. And… that’s pretty much it.
That’s award-worthy?
I mean, I’m proud of my Gigantes and all, but that’s… kinda… sparse.
But here’s the thing: they are a major-league sports team, and they are, however tepidly, an LGBT ally. That is award-worthy in 2013. It was award-worthy in 1994. They have for twenty years consistently been just a tiny bit better than all the other teams—not just the baseball teams but the football teams and the basketball teams. Even (until recently) the hockey teams. And while it’s frustrating to hand out an award to something that’s just a bit better than the others—not good, just a bit better—that’s what GLAAD is really for, isn’t it? Giving an award to Fried Green Tomatoes and Frankie and Johnny, because they are just a bit better than the other ones?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
Now, oddly enough, as I was getting that linky link up there, I discovered through my mad internet search skills that Saturday Night Live did a Psychic Awards 2012 sketch that aired five months before. I watched the SNL one, and didn’t laugh even a little. So I thought I would write up the similarities and differences, and why (I think) I found one funny and the other not.
First of all, I don’t really think that Them from that Thing copied the skit from SNL. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were written first— SNL certainly used to write their shows in the actual week of the show. Them was a filmed show with, like, production values and stuff (more on that later), and probably used material built up over some time. Not to mention that they both work from a pretty obvious premise. I usually attribute this sort of thing to the general zeitgeist; if a thing is a cultural Big Deal, then parodies and skits around the thing will happen. In this case, I kinda thought that psychics were ten-years-ago rather than being current, but on the other hand, I don’t watch TV, so what do I know?
Anyway. The similarities: The topic, of course: psychic award show. That dictates the format: Them had a single hostess, while SNL had a host and hostess. The main gag was about predicting the deaths of the psychics, and then as they work through that premise, both versions have the deaths take place at the awards ceremony as predicted. That’s the obvious payoff, of course, and it’s not a surprise that they both use it.
So. Why did I find one much funnier than the other?
First, the aspects that have nothing to do with the actual sketches as aired. I saw the British one first, so that wasn’t fair to the second one. I’m a pathetic Anglophile, so that wasn’t fair to the American one. I am an old fogey who remembers when SNL was good, which is really really unfair to any recent SNL skit. I had seen fifteen minutes or so of Them leading up to that skit, and I saw the SNL version cold, and that isn’t fair either. And then, of course, I only saw the SNL one when it came up as a potential issue with the version I liked, which is not at all fair. All of that contributes to my mood, which is going to be at least as strong an influence on my finding anything funny as any inherent property in the thing itself.
In addition, I should keep in mind that (as I mentioned before) the SNL version is part of a show where they have to come up with something like 45 minutes of skit comedy a week for half the year. They don’t have time to refine the writing. It’s also live, or much of it is, so they can’t keep running takes until they get the rhythm right—or the special effect. The smoke bomb gag failed because the smoke bombs failed; the other show didn’t have to deal with that. In addition, SNL has to use their guest star, who that week was the not-funny-at-all Lindsay Lohan. And finally, SNL has these days an absurdly large cast of fourteen or so, all of them (according to what I hear) jockeying for screen time, so there’s a temptation to use as many of them as possible, which isn’t necessarily good for the comedy.
That’s the problem, really, with the SNL version of the skit: too many people, not enough focus. First they have the Best Foreign Psychic Award (which isn’t actually intrinsically funny) with four cast members. Five including the wife. Then they have one of those memorial montages, only of the people who would die in the next year rather than the last, which is a very funny idea—but they do five more cast members and a dog before getting to the punch line. The dog wasn’t funny. I mean, at that point, your only choice is to make a joke of going over the top with the list, but still: the dog wasn’t funny.
The Them version had one award and three nominees, and that was it. One host, one spouse, one line for the bear wrangler. That’s it. This gives them time and space to add in a rivalry between two of the psychics, which raises the stakes and makes the award show funnier. Mostly, though, it just clears out the not-funny bits and focuses on the funny. We go from A to B to C, and then back to A, to B, to C and back to A for the end, and that’s it. You get the repetition of each prediction, which is always good, and the payoff of each one, and that’s good, too. I was going to write about it as an excellent model for a comic sketch specifically because of that clarity and focus: one, two, three. They didn’t go wider with the joke, they went further. Their version was sharp and the other one was blunt, and that’s why theirs was funnier.
Also, as far as I can tell from those three minutes or so, the cast of SNL are illiterate gurning halfwits. So there’s that, too.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
My own childhood experience of Patriots Day, growing up in the desert, was restricted then to the flag and the awareness of the anniversary of the Shot Heard ’Round the World. I identified with the little guy, with the hat over his eyes.
My first Patriots Day in Boston was in 1995, I think, and my last (so far) was in 2003. My recollection is that I went to the ballgame twice, possibly three times. At least one of those was with David S. Bernstein, walking over from my Fenway apartment and meeting him in the street by the vendor. They stopped the game and showed the finish on the big screen, and we all cheered—we weren’t cheering for anybody, you understand, just… well, just cheering. Cheering for the Marathon, for the existence of it, for the existence of people crazy enough to run home from Hopkinton. Nobody knew the names of anybody who might win, you know. Except that German woman, we knew her name. Can’t remember it now, of course. The people we knew—and most years, we knew somebody who was running, or somebody who had a cousin who was running or something—were hoping to come in at four hours or so. Or just to finish, honestly.
That’s the thing that always moved me about the Marathon. There were, oh, I’ll call it three races. I tell a lie, it’s four races, as the wheelchair athletes go first. Then the elite runners, the ones that are trying to win; those are over by 2:30 or so. Then the next group, the ones who are trying to finish within four hours, or within four and a half, or within the top half of finishers, or whatever their goals are. Runners with tremendous ability, almost unthinkable tenacity and drive—and no chance to beat the professionals. I know a few of those people, and they are amazing.
But it’s the fourth and final race that I really liked, the one for the people who are just trying to finish. The stragglers, six or seven hours after the start, when the cheering crowd has thinned out to a handful. Those people are just going to finish the damned marathon, they are—nobody but them cares whether they do or not, and they know that, and they're going to finish it anyway. There’s something so wonderfully pointless about it, and marvelously ridiculous, and movingly meaningless. What’s the big deal about 26.2 miles? Isn’t twenty miles an achievement? But it’s not just going 26.2 miles on foot, it’s the third Monday in April, and it’s the Boston Marathon. So I would usually take a little time, usually as I passed through Kenmore Square after work (when I went to work on Patriots Day (observed) that is) anyway, and cheer for those stragglers, who were still at that point in the day running faster than I could sustain for a mile.
And it’s those visions in my head that have been making me weep today. Not the images of the maimed, which I have mostly been able to avoid, both through my eyes and in my imagination, but the stragglers being stopped at the twenty-fourth mile. And also those descriptions of people just walking through the town. Not even on past Patriots Days, just people enjoying that neighborhood of Boston. Picnicking in Copley Plaza. Taking the bad-weather route through the Westin to the Pru. The Old South Church on the corner that isn’t the one-if-by-land church. Coming out of the BPL into horizontal sleet.
There was an image that went around Facebook, a drawing of the four Boston major league mascots (including an improbable cartoon Green Monster) saying You fucked with the wrong city. It seemed like the wrong response to me—would it have been smarter to fuck with Indianapolis? Would Melbourne have exhibited any less unity or courage? Would the people of Warsaw fail to provide support and succor in their hours of need? No, whoever it was did not fuck with the wrong city, except in the sense that all cities are wrong cities in which to murder and maim. And yet… and yet, and yet, they didn’t just fuck with Boston, they fucked with Boston on Patriots Day.
They fucked with my city, is what they did.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
You know who else deserves respect? Larry Doby. #14, Larry Doby, of the Cleveland Indians. Because he also had to put up with a whole hell of a lot of racism, and came through it to play in the major leagues. Jackie Robinson was not magic, any more than Rosa Parks was magic, or Martin Luther King, Junior for that matter. The people who came after them still had to put up with shit, and they don’t deserve to be forgotten. Larry Doby was a Hall of Famer who broke the color barrier along with Jackie Robinson, and to have everybody in baseball wear 42 and nobody wear 14—well, that’s just wrong.
You know who else doesn’t deserve to be forgotten? Hank Thompson. Wore #7 for the Saint Louis Browns ninety days after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Do you think he put up with any less shit than Jackie? Hank Thompson was no Hall of Famer, just a good, solid third baseman, mostly for the Giants (where he wore # 16), and no, unlike Jackie Robinson, who as everybody knows was selected because of his nobility and self-control, Hank Thompson was a drunk who would kick your ass as soon as look at you. And he was a black man who played Major League Baseball in 1947. And his team-mate in St. Louis, Willard Brown, played only twenty-one games in MLB, wore # 15. Wasn’t Willard Brown a hero, too?
Sam Jethroe wore #5 for the Boston Braves in 1950, as the only black man to play for a Boston team. Think he had to put up with much? Bob Trice wore #23 with the Athletics in 1953, the only black man to play for a Philadelphia team. Was he not a hero?
Look, it’s great that Jackie Robinson was Jackie Robinson, and I have no problem with MLB having a Jackie Robinson Day. What I object to is the deliberate effort to erase every other African-American player in the early years of integrated baseball. The story we tell ourselves about the integration of baseball in 1947 is that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. That’s the story we imply about the lack of integration in 1946: that we needed a Jackie Robinson to integrate baseball. We needed his nobility, his outstanding talent, his self-control and self-sacrifice. And I’m glad, really, that it was Jackie Robinson. But what if the St. Louis Browns had give a Hank Thompson or a Willard Brown a chance to put their uniform on in September of 1946? Sure, it would have been a failure—there might have been a brawl, and maybe even some serious injuries. And they would have played. And then somebody else would have come up next—maybe Jackie Robinson or Larry Doby or someone else—and then someone else and someone else. The reason Hank Thompson didn’t break the color barrier is not because he wasn’t good enough, or noble enough, or sober enough. It’s that no white team let him. It’s because of irrational prejudice, discrimination and hate.
The story we tell ourselves about the Civil Rights movement is that Rosa Parks just suddenly refused to move to the back of the bus, and then Martin Luther King had a dream, and then suddenly everybody realized that segregation was wrong. What’s wrong with that story has nothing to do with the greatness of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. It has to do with erasing everybody else, and all the work that a whole movement put in for decades. It has to do with erasing our own history—our history as white people, as black people, as Hispanics, as Jews, as Northerners or Southerners or Midwesterners, what we were doing at the time, and for years and years before and after.
Jackie Robinson was first, yes, and a hero, and a great American. The story we have started telling ourselves about him, though, can’t be a great story—a true story, a story about ourselves that isn’t just a lie to ourselves—if we want all the players to wear that 42 and to erase #14 and #7 and #15 and #5 and all the other numbers.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
Well, the correct answer is throw the bats at them. What the head coach and the manager and the captain did, however, was ask the players to think very seriously about what they had done. And, well, turn in some homework. Not sure what for that took, but essentially, the players were required to turn in an essay detailing what they had learned from the ignominious defeats they had suffered. And, well, not all of them did. Most of them did! More than half! Thirteen out of seventeen of the players who were in India for the tour, I believe. That’s, let me see, more than seventy-five percent!
OK, so. Now, what’s a coach to do about the four who blew off the whole thing?
Bench ’em? Oh, yeah. Bench the fuckers.
And if one of them is an aging superstar?
Bench his ass so hard it bounces.
Bench his ass, in point of fact, so hard that the man threatens to retire from Test Cricket altogether.
Now, the lesson here, in my arrogant one, is that you should really decide what the punishment is before you start throwing the bats at them. All us parents know this, yes? You can’t threaten just vaguely threaten the regret, because you will eventually have to show them that you mean business, and then that’ll suck for everyone. And now the team has got into the situation where it will have to play two Tests with a partial squad, making it likely it will suffer embarrassing losses in those as well. So a good deal of the problem lies with the coach.
On the other hand, props to the man for following through, right? Curious what GRs who teach (or coach, I suppose) think about this.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
But then, I was born in the summer. People born in the Daylight actually do get an hour free that first autumn of their lives. They give it back before the year is up, sure. But then they get another one! And they keep going like that, borrowing an hour from their future every fall and giving it back every spring.
Winter babies, though, lose the hour the first time they spring forward. And, yes, they get it back in the fall, but that just makes them even again, back where they started. As the summer children keep going ahead and then even, the winter children lose ground and catch up; they never quite match. When the summers get a free hour, the winters are just getting back to even. When the winters are having their hour stolen whilst they sleep, the summers are (reluctantly) returning their bonus. Year after year. Of course, the older folks of April and May may have been winters; the younger ones will be summers. This will be very confusing for those persons trying to determine whether to become optimists or pessimists; their hourglass is only half-full.
As I was musing, though, I remembered that I stayed on the Lord’s time until I was eighteen. Arizona folk respect the sun, but we don’t try to get more of it. I experienced the clock-meddling as something that other people did—a phone call to California would involve an hour difference in the winter but not the summer. An East Coast call would travel across three hours in the summer, but only two in the winter. I think I remember that this affected television schedules, but in those days the summer was all reruns anyway. No, my first extended experience of Daylight Saving was in the Pennsylvania autumn, which as it happens was my first extended experience of autumn, and my first real experience of the days getting significantly shorter. Perhaps, then, my pro-clock-meddling philosophy is more accurately attributed to… er… yeah.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.
But what about reconnaissance drones? Does the President have the authority to grab the little x-box controller and plow a reconnaissance drone right into some bastard’s chest? Is that totally out of line? No?
What about an M1A1 flamethrower? Can we strap that mother right onto the President’s back and open up hell on some suspected terrorist-abetter without benefit of trial? I know, a pole-axe: does the President have the authority to fuck-up an American with a poleaxe on American soil? I mean, an American not engaged in combat—until the President goes all proverbial on his backside. Then the fucker’d be in combat, you betcha. In slow motion.
No, no weaponized drones for that purpose. OK, how about this one: an XM25 grenade launcher. That is just one constitutional-looking semi-automatic airburst system, ain’t it? Whaddya think? Does the President have the authority to use one of those on Americans at home? Think of the justice. Think of the message we would send. Surely, if being the city on the hill, the last bastion of freedom and the beacon of democracy means anything, it means that the duly elected President—Our Only President to coin a phrase—can just pull the fucking trigger on a grenade launcher whenever he feels the need.
What the hell is it with drones? Why on earth would anyone feel the need to ask that question, and why in the name of fuck did it take so long to answer?
Here’s a hint: if it’s not legal with one weapon, it’s not legal with a different weapon. If it’s not legal to shoot someone with a pistol, it’s not legal to strap the pistol to a toy helicopter and then fly it over their house and shoot the guy from twenty feet in the air. And if we can order extra-judicial killings with impunity, then the President can just walk up behind someone and garrotte him. Or attach the ends of the garrotte to two toy helicopters and order someone to work the wii. Either way, OK? The issue is not drones. The issue is not drones. The issue is not drones.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
On the other hand, there are certain… problems with pathetic anglophilia, or at least with combining pathetic anglophilia with a modern liberal view of the universe and cultural whatnot. And it’s not just that some works are inherently and artfully troubling. But this Sowei mask, while a little goofy to my eyes, isn’t inherently troubling. Well, but then I love the interaction between cultures, the friction between them sparking off new alloy-art. So the awesomeness of the top hat totally outweighs the troublingness for me as far as the artwork itself goes.
It’s the context, of course. Remember about the looting? This was looted—scientifically looted, but looted—in the late nineteenth century by a fellow named Thomas J. Alldridge, who was first a trading agent and then an administrator for the British colonial government. That career path in itself is so unremarkable and so telling that all the items brought back should be assumed to be problematic. And the British Museum knows this, they know it better than anybody. They have the fucking Elgin Marbles, for the love of proverbial, so they do have an understanding of what’s so problematic about this ritual object sitting in their museum.
So what do they do? Here’s the thing that is so beautifully and tragically British about it. They know that they have the thing in the first place because of colonial looting, not just of this work but of the natural resources of the whole region that brought the looters in the first place. They also know that they aren’t going to do anything foolish like give it away—they are the British Museum, they are obviously the best place for a valuable item like that. It’s the burden desire of the British after all to protect lesser peoples and their pretense to culture provide world class facilities for visitors and researchers taking conservation, scientific research and collection management to a new level of excellence. Er, that last bit is from the press materials, obviously.
So they work with the local Sierra Leonean community to validate their hold on the item. The ritual and ceremony appear to have been beautiful: read, as they say, the whole thing, as well as watching what I hope to successfully embed below.
So why is Your Humble Blogger so troubled? It’s this: they worked closely with Sierra Leoneans who had resettled in England. This is not a representative sample of the Old Country. In dealing with the specific question of their relationship to the postcolonial white guys, I’m thinking that they have, let’s say, come to terms with the British legacy. So when the British Museum is coming to terms with its legacy of Sierra Leonean loot, it strikes me as absolutely cheating to work with those people who have already come to terms with the British. And—in the year twenty thirteen, is it not so utterly British to consult with those Sierra Leoneans who happen to be in London?
Now, there’s something endearing about that magnificent Anglo-arrogance. Well, endearing to me. That’s how we can watch Downton Abbey without throwing up, right? And I do want to emphasize that the British Museum is a world-class facility for objects of that kind, and that it’s true that way more people will see the thing and learn about the culture than if it were back in Sierra Leone, and they really put a lot of effort into contacting and working with people, when they totally could have just put the thing in a box and focused a light on it. They, you know, Did the Right Thing. And that’s what is so beautifully and tragically British about it, innit?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
You could do the play just fine without my part at all, really. The plot ignores him. What do you need for the plot? The two cousins, of course, and the brothers they eventually marry. The two fathers. You need, I think, the shepherdess and her swain. You need the clown that accompanies the cousins, and then you need the country wench that he marries, to make up the four couples at the end. The others are presumably dispensable, although I suppose you really do need someone to bring in the messages. You can have the wrestling offstage, though, right?
My point (if I have one) is that Jaques floats above the plot, or behind it, or beneath it, which gives a production a tremendous latitude in how to present him. Actually, the play as a whole admits of a terrible range of possible interpretations, but Jaques in particular is untethered. I’ve read that he stands between the audience and the play, preferably as a bridge rather than a wall. A recent production put Jaques in the prop trunk at the end, which I think speaks to a somewhat different level of respect. He can be played for laughs or for pathos, as the ultimate wit or the ultimate twit, as a man of mystery or as the butt of the cosmic joke.
For me, as I’ve been reading and rereading it, there’s one Big Question, though: is Jaques really one of the Duke’s men? Well, and he is an outsider to some extent, of course, but how much so? Is he a beloved mascot? Is he a tolerated freak? Is he a distrusted Duke’s pet? Does he, in turn trust that they aren’t laughing at him—or that they are laughing at him with love, anyway? When he launches into one of his bits, can he expect cheers and applause? Groans and eye-rolls? Blank bewilderment? Indifference? Snickers?
This is tied up with, but not entirely dependent on, a bigger question about the production: is the banished Duke the leader of a magical court in a magical forest, or of a desperate insurgency? Over the last few decades there seems to have been a trend to emphasize the usurpation of the Duchy as a civil war, and thus the Forest of Arden as a dangerous place, wild and unsettling. This goes along with an undertone of danger in the wooing—Orlando and Rosalind, Orlando and Ganymede, Aliena and Ganymede, Celia and Rosalind, the possibilities of love and hope amid very real terrors of exposure and death. In such a production, I might well play Jaques as a complete outsider, hesitant and fearful of his own exposure and death, even as his uncontrollable wit further alienates him from each companion.
And in the text as I read it, there’s this: When Jaques finds something sad (or funny) he finds it much much sadder (or funnier) than anyone else around him. He has tremendous difficulty matching his tone to the people around him (expressed as verse/prose issues among other things). He appears cold and disdainful most of the time. He is given to long stretches of silence, and then bursts into seemingly endless monologues. His enthusiasms extremely focused and are totally incomprehensible to anyone else. All of these seem to me consistent with Asperger syndrome. I don’t know if an actor and a production could pull off an actual Asperger Jaques, but there could certainly be some of that sense of outsider alienation and bewilderment on both sides.
Or not. Jaques can also be just a witty guy, getting off zingers in the magical dream forest and play-acting the Seven Ages with an appreciative band of brothers. That would work, too. It’s not my choice—and it’s not really a choice about Jaques, either.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]>
