The Glamorous Life

Here's yet another iTunes meme, via Gwenda. Yes, they're annoying, but I loves 'em. You're it!

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My Life in Itunes

RULES

1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.

2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.

3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.

4&5. Deleted the part about tagging people, so just do it if you like.

6. Have Fun!

IF SOMEONE SAYS 'ARE YOU OKAY' YOU SAY?

Warm Air Cooling JUDAH JOHNSON

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF

Bootie Intro EARWORM

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?

Let's Take a Ride JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?

Don't Stop Believin' in Planet Rock A PLUS D

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?

Bleeding Love LEONA LEWIS

WHAT'S YOUR MOTTO?

Bhangra Fever MIDIVAL PUNDITZ

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?

Si Me Prueba No Me Olvidas SAMY Y SANDRA

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?

Brrrlak! ZAP MAMA

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?

The Space Between ROXY MUSIC

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?

Alagemo THE MOUNTAIN GOATS

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?

Lizard Brain THE INVISIBLE CITIES

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?

Better Together JACK JOHNSON

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?

In a State UNKLE

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?

Din Din ZAP MAMA

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?

Wish Someone Would Care IRMA THOMAS

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?

Mercury KATHLEEN EDWARDS

WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW?

Constellations JACK JOHNSON

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?

One for the Head M.I.A.

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?

The Glamorous Life SHEILA E.

Favorite Book Trailers?

Yay, this is my 600th post!

Can you guys recommend good book trailers on YouTube?

And are any of you moved by book trailers to buy books when you otherwise wouldn't buy them?

Thanks!

Nobble Update

Things looking up!

I printed draft 2 out and am reading it through and put it down because I was so bored. Yes, BORED!

This is good news because Orwell said that:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Which I feel to be true in my case to a certain extent (minus a little hyperbole.) I've been working on da nobble for 6.5 years now and I've felt actually possessed by a demon which is essentially the spirit of the nobble. The "horrible" part was the year I spent NOT working on it ... but still being possessed by it, and stung, and taunted, and told I was worthless by it because I wasn't paying it its due attention.

The possession feels like infatuation or love, and very easily turns into hatred, contempt, loathing. So my boredom with the (boring parts of the) MS is like a light at the end of the tunnel. My infatuation wanes! I see a way out! All I have to do is cut away the chaff and preen up the rest and I'll be free of this ... thing.

And free to be possessed by the next thing. Sigh.

Note To Self

Am close to finishing Jonathan Lethem's collection of essays The Disappointment Artist, but may forget to note it because I've been working on it so long.

An Appeal To The Anti-racist Hive Mind ...

... and especially my POC out there.

I'm working with someone who is my superior (I'm freelance, so pretty much everyone is my superior). This is a regular arts writing gig and I'm the only person of color who writes there regularly. All the other writers are white, and most are male. So the writing that gets done here covers primarily white artists. No, not primarily ... almost exclusively. Most of the writing about artists of color comes from me (it's about 75% of what I write.

And let me just say here that I don't mind writing mostly about artists of color. I don't feel like I'm missing out on some essential experience by not writing about white artists. But I resent like hell being the only one.)

It's Black History Month--it's more than half over, in fact--and the only piece on black artists so far is mine. In fact, all of the other pieces so far this month are on white artists, with one exception: an Asian American artist who collaborates with a white artist. I've already had an email exchange with this superior about how we're not covering enough black artists in Black History Month, but he chose to misunderstand me, saying I could switch out one of my assignments to cover a black artist if I want to.

So it's time for me to write him a serious email about how he needs to diversify ALL the stuff that everyone writes and that effort needs to come from him--being the superior. He needs to request more pitches about artists of color from the other writers, and to hold them accountable if they don't do it. But before he can do that, he needs to change his own attitudes.

Other details: our communication is by email. I've had an exchange with him about this before and thought he heard me, but he seems to think now that because I'm the only person who seems to care about this, that I'm the only one responsible for bringing diversity to this situation.

So are there any POC out there who've been in a similar situation and have SUCCESSFULLY advocated for greater diversity? Especially if it was with a superior who was reluctant and had a bad or laissez faire attitude at first but ended up changing their mind and doing it? Any success stories out there you tell me that will give me a model for how to approach this guy?

BSG Natter (with spoilers)

Good episode tonight. I love Ellen and always have. Not cool to turn Anders into a vegetable, but there was some good material in there.

But, so help me oG, if they reveal that Starbuck used to be Daniel and "John" just messed with her DNA to turn him into a her, I'm gonna kill somebody.

Teh Awesome (Obama Swearing Edition)

Via Badgerbag, this post with clips of Obama reading profane dialogue on the audiobook of "Dreams From My Father."

Crap TV

I just watched the premiere of "XIII," which kinda sucks. It sucks all the more because it doesn't REALLY suck, it just kinda sucks, which means I could get drawn into watching it again if there's nothing else on.

It's three parts Bourne trilogy, two parts "24," and one part "oh, we have a liberal administration and legislature now, we can't be on the side of the torturers anymore." A dude wakes up with some bullet wounds and doesn't remember who he is. But he can kill people with his little finger. Blah blah. Then he finds out that he's the prime suspect in the assassination of the country's first female president. The two-hour pilot basically told us everything except who was behind the assassination. I'm pretty sure I don't want to get involved in all the twists and turns and machinations that'll get us to that answer.

But: what else to watch? I can't watch "Lost" or "Ugly Betty" because the ABC player sucks and they're not on Hulu. I can't watch "Heroes" 'cause I didn't bother to watch the beginning of the season and I'm not going to pick it up now. And there are at least two episodes of BSG sitting around waiting for me, but I can't bring myself to watch them, the show has been so bad.

I just saw season two of "Dexter" and it was awesome ... except that the second season didn't pass the Bechdel test. Why? The first season passed it, not easily, but naturally. Deb's career was an issue that she debated with LaGuerda. This season it's all about the men that done them wrong and women's fragility or evil bitchiness. Deb and Rita the Captain are fragile, Rita's mom and Lila are evil witches, and LaGuerda -- easily the kickassinest woman character on the show, is alternately fragile and bitchy. I will definitely watch season three, but on sufferance, ya know?

I think it's notable, by the way, that the top rated and most highly praised one-hour dramas in the past decade ALL pass the Bechdel test: Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Lost, etc. Don't you?

ETA: okay I just went and watched the two episodes of BSG I hadn't seen. ARGH! (spoilers follow)

I got all excited because we finally had some action, after all that wallowing and suicide and shit. But the action was stupid! It was just these people going here and those people going there, and then everybody going elsewhere, and Adama sacrificing himself for NO REASON, and Roslyn getting all hysterical over HER MAN, and we don't even know what happened to Anders.

It could have been so good. Two seasons ago, it WOULD have been so good. We wouldn't have gone from taking over a ship to SHOOTING THE ENTIRE QUORUM OF TWELVE IN COLD BLOOD with no escalation in between and then shrugging of the shoulders and saying "that's what happens in a coup." If this had been drawn out over three episodes, or at least done well, we could have followed Gaeta's POV the whole time and gotten on board with him and been pulled slowly over to the dark side as he was.

But as it is, I still have NO IDEA what sent Gaeta over the edge, NO IDEA why he has it in for Adama. And the fleetwide agonizing over How Much We Hate The Toasters TM has NOT BEEN WORKED OVER. We just haven't seen it. So to have all these people suddenly rise up all haterish doesn't make emotional sense. And the beauty of Tom Zarek was that he was a nemesis who was POLITICALLY KORREKT. That is, we knew he was in it for personal power, but his politics were always right, he always had a good point, and he had a conscience in his Machiavellian soul. It was impossible to like him or trust him, but impossible to condemn him as well. So to have him just jump over to the evil side all of a sudden was ... cheap. And lazy.

But this whole show has gotten lazy. Lazy lazy lazy. Sigh.

But I'm excited about the premiere of "Dollhouse." It better be good.

Relief to Gaza

Obama is sending $20 mil to Palestinian Gaza refugees. I am. I am drinking his Kool Aid.

ETA: Oh, that's following this, by the way. Now all he has to do is stop saying Israel is a victim of Hamas.

Armisen Fauxbama Go Away

Oh, I have to agree 100%. It's like he just gave up completely. What's the point?

The Thing About BSG This Season

is that it's hopelessly dark, as always, but without the greatness. It's not the darkness itself that made it a good show. It was a combination of things: great writing, acting, directing, art direction, music, and just a general commitment to the world and the piece as a whole by everyone involved.

Now, pieces have been falling off for two seasons and it's pretty much JUST dark, no longer good. It's like the people who created the characters and situations were body-snatched by aliens who have access to their memories but no inherent understanding of human nature or of nuance. Take Roslyn and Adama. Their bond was romantic, certainly, but not literally romantic, as in I-want-to-date-you romantic. In turning their relationship into an ordinary sexual one, the writers have pretty much destroyed what we loved about each of them separately and together. They were two sides of the same lonely-at-the-top archetype, and now ... they're just a couple.

(They could salvage it by turning them into a real archetype -- like maybe Isis and Osiris, where Adama would get symbolically chopped up and distributed around the galaxy and Roslyn would have to collect his pieces. Or something. --- Oo! Adama should try to jump in a shuttle and the shuttle blows up and Roslyn goes around obsessively collecting the shuttle pieces from where they've been strewn all around by the screwed up jump. The last piece is a sealed part of the cabin with air in it and she finds him still alive. Or something. See? I can do this better than they can now. --- I know they're supposed to be Adam and Eve, barred from Eden, but that's worn thin, and the whole point of Adam and Eve is original sin and fertility, and Adama and Roslyn aren't really fitting into either of those plays.)

The same thing happened in season three with Starbuck and Apollo. They were the classic, archetypal, hopeless unrequited love scenario, and oh ... so well done. They pulled in all kinds of mythical issues. Like the classic Judaic one: do I marry my dead brother's widow? or the Greco/Roman unrequited incest issue with twins Apollo and Diana. But now, they're just characters that had a tawdry affair.

(And hey, what's with the men getting the mythical names and the women not so much? Thrace is a place of little significance and Roslyn?)

Who's making this show now, anyway? And what did they do with the geniuses who did the first two seasons?

Readin' Update

I've been waiting until I had time/wanted to review these books, but that may never happen and they're piling up, so here goes:

Midnight Brunch Marta Acosta (2nd Casa Dracula novel)
Bride of Casa Dracula Marta Acosta (3rd Casa Dracula novel)
About Face James Calder (2nd Bill Damen mystery)
In A Family Way James Calder (3rd Bill Damen mystery)
The Plain Janes Cecil Castelucci and Jim Rugg

I'm loving the Marta Acosta Casa Dracula nobbles. Most chick lit can't keep my interest, just as most vampire genre stuff starts to lose me eventually too, and I'm much on the record being extremely bored with how racial issues are dealt with in "serious" literature. But this is shopping and fucking and drinking blood and being mysterious and investigating and being captured/chased and nailing ethnicity issues and class differences and then shopping and fucking and drinking cocktails again. She moves fast and doesn't dwell on any of these but just grabs them and integrates them into the story so you don't have time to get bored. Plus, the whole thing is pretty funny. She's working on a fourth one now. Yay!

I'm liking the Bill Damen San Francisco/Silicon Valley mysteries, which border on science fiction (in fact, the last one -- hands down the best one so far -- has scientists doing stuff that real scientists haven't QUITE done yet, although they probably could. So it IS sci fi). But the technical descriptions lose me, and they're not always necessary to the story or interesting in themselves. And Bill Damen is SUCH a Mary Sue. But I guess all detectives are.

The Plain Janes was cute, but stopped really abruptly, like they ran out of time. The artwork is fine, but uninspired. I like the unusual premise and the main character, who WANTS to be an outcast. I wish that was explored more.