On Capitalischm...and Race

I recently watched the Dardenne brothers' Two Days, One Night, which is as straight-up a critique of capitalism as I've ever seen in a film (note: I haven't seen that many films in my life, so maybe that's not saying all that much?).  It was the first film I've ever seen by those two and if it is any indication of their work as a whole, I'm hungry for more.  There are few things that get to me more than old French Marxists, with their shocks of white hair and their solid, insouciant belief in the primacy of class.

The movie is about a woman, Sandra, played by Marion Cotillard, who is on leave from her factory job (I know, I know...as I said to my friend, "What kind of factory is this? A babe factory?!") (it turns out to be a factory making solar panels), because of her depression.  In her absence, the company finds that they can get the work done with one less body, as business is decreasing due to cheaper solar panels from...wait for it...you guessed it...China.  They take a vote, and her colleagues choose to eliminate her position so that they can split her wage in the form of a bonus instead.  Discovering this information on Friday, Sandra scrambles and the foreman agrees to re-take the vote on Monday.  The malaise of her depression threatens to make Sandra submit to her proscribed fate, but at her husband's urging, she spends the weekend methodically contacting each of her colleagues to convince them to change their vote.

This kind of story, where, as Junot Diaz says the "meta" or the "machinery" is hidden, is totally up my alley.  Sandra's depression standing in for the malaise of the prototypical factory worker under capitalism is an incredibly apt device. The "choice" her fellow workers are given, to prioritize their own material circumstances over hers, is one that capitalism asks of us, on a near-constant basis.  In fact, that choice might be intrinsic to the very construction of right-leaning capitalism.  The conflation of capitalism with democracy (the individual "vote" as the foundation for our subjectivity) is also bang-on.  As the film progresses, we meet her colleagues and understand why some of them made the choice that they did.  Some succumbed to group-think; some are seemingly amoral; some were able to make the choice in her absence, when she was an abstract construct versus when she stands before them in her subjectivity; many are in dire financial straits and the bonus is necessary - they too face difficult day-to-day choices - the Dardenne brothers understand and deftly illustrate the difficult decisions we face under this system.

Many agree to change their votes and when the final vote comes, we see Sandra emerge from her depression, smiling, proud of the "good work" she put in with her husband.  I'm not going to spoil the outcome of the vote, but the film is so smart - by actively taking a hand in her direct material reality, by taking up her agency, she is emboldened and alive.  In those two days and one night, her labour was her own.

Guys, I'm getting goosebumps just  thinking about that.  I love the power and clarity of that metaphor.  I like how tight the story is.  I love how effective the film is.

Shortly after that, the Dotytron and I went to see Zizek speak at the TIFF theatre, as part of this conference that York U (of course!) put on, called Coming to Terms With Film-Philosophy.  Not for nothing guys, but York U conferences are THE S**T.  This is who I've seen courtesy of York University: Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Sontag, and now Zizek.  U of T has given me Bruno Latour, which was cool...but C'MON.  Zizek is a Lacanian Marxist...and well, you know how I am about such things.  I AM HERE FOR IT.  He gave this long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness, very Zizek-ian talk on film that talked about "capitalischm" (as he pronounces it) directly and indirectly.  He talked about Children of Men, a favorite of his and mine, and how he loves it because it is not about sexual productivity, there is no romance, and he lampooned the Michael Caine character for being the ideal of an aging, bourgeois, white, hippie liberal...and well, you should ALSO know how I save my most special disdain for white bourgeois liberals.  He talked about how his nightmare would be a world in which freedom is found through collectivist, democratic action.  How he would hate nothing more than to be forced to vote on everything all the time, like in a co-op, and how his dream scenario would be a world in which an invisible state apparatus took care of those mundane decisions and allowed him the time to do what he does best: write, talk, think, explore things at his leisure.

It was as you would expect a Zizek talk to be.  A little difficult to find the thread, but full of bon mots that speak to me and my praxis.

Finally, you might have noticed that I've been sour on white people lately.  I mean, I've been sour on white people (not individual white people, but white people, The Franchise...does that even have to be said?  If it does...I mean, I probably can't help you and you should likely be reading something else?) probably my whole life, but I've become more vocal about it of late.  It feels good.  There is nothing I love more than the groundswell that is destabilizing and decentering white, heteronormative hegemony.  It feels GOOD.  Let me tell you why it feels good.

Because, now, yt pipo are finally getting a taste of what it feels like to be EVERYONE ELSE, for a hot minute.  To know, however fleetingly, what it feels like to grow up as the child of immigrants, to have people stumble over your "weird" name, to feel a little uncertain that everyone doesn't celebrate Christmas, or camp, or get birthday parties, or know how to skate, or give a flying F**K about the Tragically Hip or whatever.  To know what it feels like to have your existence questioned.  Back to Junot Diaz (and have you listened to that talk yet?  If not, you should!  You really, really should), I'm glad that white people are getting a taste of their own medicine.  "I am white and therefore I am human.  You are not white and therefore I'm not sure that you are human."  To have your existence questioned.  To know the burden of POC who have to know about stupid Franchise s**t AND their own cultural idiosyncrasies at the same time.  

I spent the bulk of my life feeling like not the norm.  In retrospect, that was a gift and has made me who I am, but when I didn't think I could be attractive, when I didn't think I was seen...it was hard, man.  Ultimately, those experiences allowed me to cultivate the perspicacity that allows me to revel in the weird and the stuff that's a little outside the norm.  That makes my friends the very best people in the world.  That allows me to find my kindred spirits and love them for their ability to know what it's like to not be that.  

It's just good for the Franchise to get a taste of its own medicine, ya know?  

Basically what I'm saying is: I never need to see a white kid dabbing.  It's gross.  Please stop.

P.S. Lots of catch-up writing happening this week at the cottage!  Keep scrolling because I'm hoping to have a lot of new content up.

Fin.

The Scatterbrained Booky

I think I fulfilled my non fiction quota for the next five years by reading this book.  Coates won the National Book Award for this, deservedly so.  This is the most powerful writing I've read in a long time.  Written in the spirit of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (which I haven't read), this is a powerful treatise on being black in America, written by one of the foremost writers on the topic today.  The book takes the form of a letter to Coates' teenage son, and it is deeply personal and universal, the writing dense and rich and so intimate, that it automatically posits the reader as an outsider, regardless of your racial identification.  It is a brilliant structural device to tackle these issues.  Coates reflects on his youth growing up in Baltimore, his awakening at Howard University, and how the American state, upheld by "those who think themselves white," brutalizes and systematically destroys black bodies, regardless of class.  Coates realization that not even class can protect black bodies was a sucker punch.  He talks about his classmate, Prince getting shot in a case of mistaken identity.  He talks about how these bodies represent so many hours of investment and love and hope - so many hours spent driving back and forth to soccer practice, supervising sleepovers.  That line just wrecked me.  You'd think this book is hopeless, and yet, somehow, the very act of writing means that it's not.  It's a warning, a parenting memoir, a treatise on race, all rolled up into one.  I can't recommend this enough. 

 went on a bit of a tear for a bit, and my brain was all the better for it.  I can't believe I slept on Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.  This collection of essays from a self-proclaimed "bad feminist" is everything.  You can see her Ted Talk below.  Gay is a relatable, self-critical, pop-culture-savvy, conflicted feminist, which means that we are kindred spirits.  She is smart, and funny, and while I don't agree with everything she says, I like that she's thinking about these things.  Her essay on being a competitive Scrabble player is quite possibly my favorite in the whole collection.  I love her, I love her Twitter presence, and I can't wait to read her forthcoming book about being fat.

From there, I flipped to Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (I told you I was on a tear). Solnit is known for coining the term "mansplaining" which, let's be real gyals, we've ALL experienced.  I've had to call the Dotytron on it, when he does that.  There were times when we'd be talking about smoking (food), and he'd jump in and start talking about the process like he was the one who smoked the meat in our house and I'd have to jump in and shut it down.  Anyway, this series of essays was rage-inducing.  The essay on sexual assault, in particular.  When she talks about how much money the government is willing to expend to combat terrorism but how we do nothing to fix sexual assault but put the burden on women...I was so mad!  Reading Bad Feminist and Men Explain Things to Me back to back lead to many arguments in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld household.  I had my hackles locked in the UP position.

My book club picked Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts as a read, two reads ago.  This is a semi-autobiographical loose collection about Nelson's relationship with trans artist Harry Dodge.  The book opens with him f**king her from behind, bent over something concrete, if I recall.  I'm not familiar with Nelson's work but I know she's popular amongst the intelligentsia.  She's a poet?  Anyway, to me, the book read kind of smugly progressive.  Like, "look how cool I am in how this is so not an issue."  Which, look, I totally get!  I'm on board!  But I she just seems kind of humble-braggy about it?  I don't know how else to put it.  I kind of wanted to know more about Dodge, and his perspective.  There's one point when Dodge makes a statement that he's not "on his way anywhere" in reaction to the term "transitioning."  I only really felt like I was getting at the "real" Nelson when she was talking about being pregnant and giving birth to her child with Dodge - all the affectations and airs seemed to fall away as she gloried in this embodiment, which is at odds, whether conscious or not, with the tone of the rest of the book.  I'm glad I read it, because this is a buzzy, in-the-moment book, but I didn't love it.

So this gets me slightly back on track, even though I have like, thirty more books to review.  

This was your International Women's Day-themed book review compendium.

Fin.

Formation

By now, everyone and their mother has seen Beyoncé's Formation video.  The think piece cottage industry has dutifully performed its reactionary function with assiduous alacrity, SNL has done a spoof, we've almost (but not quite) gotten to the inevitable backlash.

My immediate reaction to the video was a deep understanding of why black social media was so enthusiastically embracing this recognition from their self-anointed Queen coupled with a healthy dose of skepticism about Beyoncé's sudden political awakening.  I had an in-depth conversation with Dr. Rei about it, where we discussed whether this piece was "for" a non-black audience and who gets to say whether Bey is "authentic" or not, and I've had some time to marinate in this and absorb some thoughts from people much smarter than I, enough to formulate a tenuous, hopefully reflexive response, with the caveat that, as regular and faithful readers of this blurg now, I have not now, or ever been a member of the Bey-hive.

1) I made peace with the authenticity of Bey's strategically timed-political awakening (the timing, not necessarily the authenticity as a whole).  If she wants to get overtly political in her work now, then she's a grown a** woman, making her way in a workaday world, so if she wants to address this head-on now, then by all means, go for it.  And if it makes her basic white girl fans take a minute to contemplate the larger issues and systemic oppression of black bodies in contemporary North American society, all the better for it.

2) I would argue that the imagery of the video, the aestheticization of the black experience and the signifiers of southern blackness that she/the director (and for the purposes of this writing, Bey herself will stand in for the choices of the director) are invoking, the heavy hand with which these are put into play, diminishes the affect and meaning.  There are real bodies that drowned in New Orleans.  Creating that stylized aesthetic distance is somewhat problematic, but I'm not sure where I stand on that, only that I have misgivings.

And because I am now, and forever more rooted in a Marxist understanding of class and cultural studies, I would argue that the substitution of Bey's body for those real people, is a semiotic leap I cannot, in good faith, take.  The class privileges afforded to Bey separate her from those bodies.  Those people drowned not just because they were black, but perhaps moreso because they were poor, and the collusion between those two lines is impossible to untangle.  If Bey was actually in Katrina, there is no way that George W. Bush himself wouldn't have sent Air Force One to lift her out.

I get what she's getting at, but despite her southern black roots, I feel like the association has been severed.  You can't be BFFs with Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, possibly the personification of clueless white/class privilege and then think that your black female body can be inserted into that symbolic narrative.

Or can you?  I don't think so.  I am also suspect of the invocation of Katrina, over 10 years after the fact.  But who am I to say?  Am I allowed to talk about this?  Do identity politics and resistance necessarily entail a zero-sum game where we have to pick which of our identities we privilege - why does Bey have to choose whether shes' identifying as a woman, black, or rich?

Post-colonial studies taught me about strategic essentialism as a tool for working around the homogenizing effects of global capitalism.  Is that what Bey is doing?

3) I think it's important to divorce the reception of the video and read that as a separate thing.  There's the video itself, the audience, the constructs that make the production of such a video possible (music industry), the author of the video, and meaning is constructed in the spaces between all of these forces/actors.  I think the fact that for the most part, black social media lauded the video and wanted to see this mass-market representation of a particular black experience reflected is in itself, a worthy by-product and its own discussion.  Who is the audience for this video?  Is it white America?  Is it black America?  Is it a primer for white America to understand black America?  Does this hunger for reflection trump the more problematic, perhaps (and I say, perhaps) exploitative elements of the imagery?

I haven't come to a conclusion on this, but these considerations, this nuance, is all a necessary part of the conversation.

Less controversial - Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau's cringe-inducing number at an MLK event:

I showed this to Academic Book Club last week.  When I showed it to the Dotytron, I was like, "Isn't this the worst?!" and he's like, "Totally, she white-lines it through 9 different key changes in that last line!" which I think misses the point, but is so endearingly Dotytron.

Pretty low-key weekend up ahead for us, for which I am extremely grateful.

Fin.

Reading Rainbow

My grey matter has been hyperactive, of late.  I've been getting a lot of mental inspiration from stuff I've been reading/seeing/thinking about and my pistons are firing (in case you couldn't tell from the last post).

Further to that, I was at a dinner party last weekend and when the talk about white people being racist came up, a smug white person (is there any other kind?) of the mansplaining variety said, "but aren't we all racist?" and I was like, okay, yeah, fine.  And then this other mansplainer jumped in, and to his credit, talked about racism being a structural thing, so everyone is bigoted (or can be), but not all people possess the structural power to exclude others.  He said something along the lines of, "I'm sure there might be some cultures where whiteness isn't dominant" at which point I was just about to interject that I don't believe that to be true, when my dear friend gave an example of "racism" when she was singled out and treated differently when she was a white woman living in Japan for a year.

Keep in mind: I was the only person of colour at the table.  The Dotytron had left for another engagement.  In that context, among those people, I consider the Dotytron a person of colour, because he's really the closest thing to it.  He's considered "black-ish" by his colleagues at school.  I tried to make a point that Japanese men fetishizing her whiteness is still a privileging of white skin (although a twisted articulation of it), but it got swallowed up in the din of whiteness and mansplaining (a lethal combination).

It was very difficult to sit at that table and listen to that conversation unspool as it did.  I didn't speak up because I'm not very deft when it comes to doing that.  I would have gone full-bore FRANZ FANON this! and bell hooks THAT! And probably gone berserk with post-colonial, can-the-subaltern-speak talk.

Here's the thing: some of those people are wannabe public policy wanksters.  They're not, because they're the kind of oily political staffers that I see prancing around my work, in shrunken suits, who don't actually know how to do anything but play the "game" of politics, but the point is: they FANCY themselves to be the "right" people to make those decisions.

You've heard me go on and on about the myopic nature of the left and how entrenched positions never yield fruitful conversations.  This was a table full of that.  Big voices from people who don't know anything beyond their own narrow slice of urban smugness.

I'm sorry, but you don't have to go very far to get a sense of the discourse on white privilege and racism.  Like, it got played out in the Taylor Swift-Nicki Minaj beef on Twitter.  It's on Scandal, like, every 5th episode.  It's kind of everywhere?  IF you take a minute to step outside the narrow confines of a limited peer group.  It's weird how rarefied your world can become.  I'm sometimes shocked by how much otherwise intelligent, smart, thinking people I know don't know about stuff.  Maybe this is what happens when you only get a CBC/NPR view of the world?  What is that world even like?

Thankfully, I'll never have to know.

Edit: I love my best friend because I have been working on this post all week and then we went to lunch and basically hashed out all of the above.  She's a glorious, brilliant, magical, inspiring creature who makes me a better person.

This week I saw Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a talk organized by my friend JT.  It was awesome.  Yes, please smart Asian-Canadian women who are feminists and think about girlhood and coming-of-age, and narrative reliability and are kick-a** illustrators.  Yes, please.

This One Summer is their latest work (they also write independently of each other, although Jillian does illustration whereas Mariko doesn't).  This won a Prinz and a Caldecott, kind of a big deal.  It's covers a summer spent at the cottage with two friends, Windy and Rose, both who are on the cusp of early-adulthood, and who are experiencing that transition and the shifting of their identities in different ways that strain and balance their friendship.  There are confusing things afoot with the adults in their lives, and with the townie teenagers the two spy on.  I love Jillian Tamaki's illustration style.  I just love it.  I couldn't love it more.  It is the perfect balance between clear and expressive and referencing traditional cartooning.  The story is fragmented and the telling of the narrative evokes summer itself - how some days are long and languid and some seem to flash by in a blur.  There is a lot that isn't said through text, leaning all the more on Jillian Tamaki's wondrous illustrations to add the nuance and shading and subtext.  It perfectly captured the confusing miasma of fraught female friendships at a tumultuous time.  

This was OBVIOUSLY an Academic Book Club pick.  I don't know from Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I didn't read The Way the Crow Flies or Fall On Your Knees because I suspected white lady problems and I wasn't up for it then, and I'm rarely up for it now.  This is about a character, not-Ann-Marie who lives a very similar life to Ann-Marie but isn't her, okay?  Even though they are both lesbians living in the Annex with similar professions for their spouses and raising kids and blah blah blah.  I didn't finish reading this to be honest because it was about how she was feeling suffocated by stifling domesticity.  It's a Talking Heads, is this my beautiful wife? Is this my beautiful car? type of book and I'm sorry, but from rich white ladies who are all, "how do I find myself here?" I'm like, figure it out! I don't care!  I couldn't get into her "problems" and I didn't want to try.

The Girl on the Train was last year's answer to Gone Girl but not as good and without the feminism.  An alcoholic woman named Rachel pieces together a mystery from the glimpses of a house she passes by on her train commute every day.  Secrets abound, blah blah.  It's a page turner but I didn't really like any of the characters and the writing wasn't all that great and the twist ending wasn't all that surprising, so the end result is that it was perfect for that time in my life (I read this over a year ago...I think when the twins were quite wee and my life was punctuated with tandem breastfeeds every 3 hours).

All YA books are set up to be like, "The next Fault in Our Stars" or "The next Eleanor and Park."  This was marketed like this but it's quite different.  It's about a Hasidic Jewish girl and a West Indian boy who cross over their respective communities' boundaries in Brooklyn and meet in a hospital elevator during a hurricane.  Their families disapprove, their burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret.  For the most part, the book defies easy stereotypes - Jaxon, the boy, is a high-achieving nerdy student and the book ends with melodramatic elements, but a more realistic ending than most.  I liked this book - it was sweetly touching.

Saga.  You guys.  Brian K. Vaughan is obviously a hero in the comics world.  I love his writing.  But Fiona Staples?!?  Where have you BEEN all my comic-reading life?  Look at those drawings!  The drawings are incredible.  This is about two members of alien races, at war for generations, who fall in love and defect to raise their child, on the run from bounty hunters and government forces.  Brian K. Vaughan's writing is always slyly political, but funny, and very wry.  I love this and can't wait for the next installments.  Again, the illustrations, guys!  The worlds that are created!  

SMcKay recently questioned me because I got midnight screening tickets (thanks, Bruce Wayne!) for the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film.  I was like, dude, I'm a nerd.  And she said, "I'm a nerd, too..." and I was like, whoa whoa whoa.  I am a real, deal nerd.  Like, an old skool 90s alt-Asian girl nerd.  I like Star Trek: TNG, Star Wars, comics, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, Autechre, Aphex Twin, all the rest of that stuff.  You want to talk Brian K. Vaughan?  Let's talk Brian K. Vaughan.  This is real comics, not the Seth/Adrian Tomine, graphic novel stuff.  It is a brilliant series though...you have to take my word for it.  

Allie Brosh's web comics (and maybe some original material?  I'm not sure) were collected in this book, Hyperbole and a Half.  There is something about her naive (but assuredly time-consuming) MS Paint illustrations that are the best.  In particular, her series on her own depression and wanting to die, is one of the things that has best crystallized for me, what it must be like for someone to be going through those mental health issues.  It's strange, but her writing on her depression is one of the first times I've actually understood what it must be like.  It made that expression of mental illness accessible in a way that it hadn't before, and in so doing, made me able to empathize with people with mental illness on a much more intuitive level.  

I mean really, isn't this like, me all the damn time?!

I know, I'm so behind on book reviews that you read and digested and loaned this to your friend already.  Allow me to join the chorus of voices who loved Amy Poehler's book.  I love this woman.  I was told by people that some of her reactions to situations as detailed in the book reminded them of me, and by that I mean I think Amy Poehler and I share the propensity to be small, smart women who are cocksure and as a general rule, DON'T TAKE S**T LYING DOWN.  I am generally honoured by the comparison.  

I loved this book.  The essays were by turns funny, true, heartening, and revealing.  This is the kind of book that as a woman, you sometimes clutch it to your breast and just breath, "yes."  I get that.  This woman gets me.  Women getting other women is a magical gift and is not to be trifled with.  I enjoyed this more than Bossypants because as a whole, I find Poehler less guarded.  Tina Fey comes off very cerebral and her smart can be distancing, whereas Poehler allows you in a bit more.  Whatever, they're both brilliant, funny, amazing women and there is room for both of them and a whole lot more.

I suggested this for Academic Book Club.  It generated a s**t tonne of discussion but I had major issues with this book.  I think Lena Dunham is a creative, gifted, incredibly accomplished woman who has her heart in the right place.  I think the video advice series that she developed to promote the book was brilliant and funny and I loved it.  The actual book however, I do have notes about.  She's...just not that great a writer, guys.  She's a voracious reader and she's been around a highly educated, artistic milieu her whole life (what comes through loud and clear in this book is how much she idolizes her artist parents), and I've heard her speak and she's articulate and insightful...but it doesn't translate as much to the written word.  

I've subscribed to her Lenny newsletter that she does with Jenni Konner and I'd say the same thing.  She's not a great interviewer and the writing just doesn't equal the sum of the inputs.  She is an oversharer with some things, but then when the time comes to discuss her relationship with Jack Antonoff, she gets weirdly shy and reticent and all, "that's private!" and obviously I get that everyone gets to choose what's private for them, but it just seemed incongruous and kind of juvenile.  There are ways to talk about your boyfriend/partner/significant other, whathaveyou, without giving it all away and feeling like you sold yourself (see: Amy Poehler above).  It was worthwhile reading because this book generated a lot of mainstream interest and was zeitgeisty, and as we all know, even though I'm a nerd, I stay on top of the zeitgeist like it's my full time job.

That's it for book reviews today.  Stay tuned for Halloween wrap-up, more musings on parenthood, what I've made for dinner lately, and more!

Fin.

This is a Rant

They see me rantin', I'm ravin'...

Very much not into this ^^^ lately

The Dotytron has some extended family members who are...how do I put this delicately...ummm...RACISTS?!?  They are "old stock" Canadians and lately, I'm like, done with that shiz.  An uncle referred to a musician at a Jamaican resort he didn't care for as a "Rasta piece of crap" (you are surprised that your musician in JAMAICA was [might] have been Rastafarian?!).  That same uncle also believes President Obama is a Muslim, and furthermore, THINKS THERE'S SOMETHING INHERENTLY WRONG ABOUT THAT.  A groomsman at a wedding that I (thankfully) didn't go to, used the N-word IN THE RACIST, NON-REAPPROPRIATING WAY.  An Aunt re-posted a picture of the twin towers with accompanying text to the effect of: "this image is going to offend some people [emphasis mine] that our government is too PC to fight back against but I don't care (blah blah blah insert nationalistic - American! - jingoism here)..." In the run-up to this past federal election, the only people on my Facebook wall who have been posting scare-mongering stuff about how Justin Trudeau is going to run up a giant deficit or op-ed pieces from the Toronto Sun (!), about how stellar Harper's record has been are from his aunts and uncles with accompanying entreaties that we should read their posts and "think before we vote!"  These are people who get their "news" and political information from memes.

I also made the mistake of clicking on the comments from provincial PC leader Patrick Brown's Facebook message wishing Muslims a happy Eid.  It was, as you could imagine, filled with racist vitriol and the linchpin issue for scared white bread old stock everywhere, how you CAN'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS ANYMORE AND YOU HAVE TO SAY "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" AND WHAT A TRAVESTY THAT IS AND A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION, etc., etc.

At a Dotytron family xmas event a couple of years ago, an aunt mad an off-hand snide remark that someone better watch what they say to me, because "otherwise she'll be posting about you [on social media] with the things she doesn't like" and just the mere memory of that makes me so. damn. mad.  I am filled with a howling, chomping, rage that rises in me and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I'm sorry, am I too smart, critical, and outspoken for you?  What's the role of a good woman in your books?  That I should be making shortbread cookies and planning my wedding and taking my partner's last name and accept mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Dotytron"?  HOW ABOUT YOU TAKE SOME OF MY BRILL OPINIONS and sit down and quietly be spoon fed them the way disenfranchised people are forced to quietly be spoon fed your white privilege since time immemorial?  

These are opinions that family by marriage (only - thank goodness), think it's okay to share PUBLICLY.  So I think to myself...why do I want to be around that?  What do I get out of descending into that intellectual decrepitude?  What must they think of me?  What must they think of my beautiful biracial children?  

You know what this is?  This is white privilege folks.  The kind of myopic, "convenient theories for me" narrative that means that women, women of colour, women who don't fit the box that is convenient for us to be place in by the constructs of the dominant hegemony, have to behave in a certain way, lest we be designated as too "loud" or "opinionated" or "untoward."

BE UNTOWARD.

I chose Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for the next Book Club I'm hosting.  We had just read (or in my case, hate-read and then dropped 1/10th of the way through), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and I was looking at options and I was like, you know what?  I'm tired of reading about white women!  I haven't finished this, but the review is forthcoming.

Last night we finished watching Fruitvale Station, starring the hotness that is Michael B. Jordan. I suggested the film as an accompaniment to the reading for Book Club. After the last few years where the black community has become increasingly visibly radicalized in the face of systemic and visible murder by entrenched racism and the demonization of black masculinity, the film enraged me.  Oscar's story happens all the freakin' time.  We have a confluence of entrenched racism in the United States, lack of class mobility, segregation, disempowerment, a heady gun culture, and the simultaneous fetishization and demonization of black masculinity contributing to black bodies being treated as disposable.

Then you read reports about how something was "disrupted" by Black Lives Matter advocates.  You see news reports that fix the rioting in Ferguson in a fetishisitic gaze while simultaneously moralizing and wagging a finger at our collective entrancement with the activities images of black bodies "acting out."

Why do we hold oppressed people to a higher standard?  Why do we grind people under our heels and then expect them to be "good corporate citizens" or to protest in a way that we deem acceptable and not give in to that rage?

All my life I've been told that I'm too angry, too outspoken, not basic enough for this world.  I was born with a surfeit of confidence and the privilege of an upper-middle class upbringing in a developed nation to back it up, but still, rage is

Can you imagine what it must be like to be black in America?  To be Hispanic in America?  To be First Nations in Canada?  To be Muslim around the Dotytron's extended family (lol!)?  

I just finished reading Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.  It is a collection of Gay's essays.  This was good stuff, folks.  She talks about how we have to stop lobbying accusations of privilege, how it feels being a feminist but still liking questionable pop music (e.g. "Blurred Lines") in spite of yourself, what it means to be a "bad feminist."  I loved this collection, even if I didn't agree with all her points.  There was an essay about the N-word and I gotta say, as someone who has studied language and writing and meaning,   Surprisingly, my favorite essay is about Gay's entré into the world of competitive Scrabble playing.  She balances the line between anger, indignation, reflexivity, passion...I can't believe I'm only discovering her now, but I'm so glad I did.  It's nice to have a woman of colour be represented in mainstream feminist discourse, especially one as funny, self-aware, critical, and whip smart as Gay.

I saw Straight Outta Compton a few weeks ago with a friend.  Dotytron had gone right when it was released with his Record Club homies.  I saw it after ingesting all the information that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the movie's release about how Dre has a history of beating up women. I don't know much about rap history or about NWA, other than the hits from that era that everyone knows.  It was definitely an entertaining movie and the performances are almost all uniformly good, especially Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube.  In particular, Jackson Jr. is incredible.  It helps that in a film where the actor's likeness to the character they played could be tenuous at best (I'm looking at you, the guy who played Snoop), Jackson Jr. looks EXACTLY like his dad and the mannerisms were perfect.  The guy who plays Dre, Corey Hawkins, got daps but he relies too much on the squinty eyes (admittedly, so does Dr. Dre in real life).  All that aside, there is no denying that the movie is very entertaining.  However, there is no denying that the guys who comes off the worst in the film are a) the guy who is dead (Eazy-E) and b) the guy who is a known psychopath (Suge Knight).  Dre and Cube come off as angels, and as I linked above, we know that is certainly not the case.  It could be because Cube co-wrote the film?  Who knows.  I did like the fact that Eazy-E's widow is one of the executive producers.  The other thing is that the film trades on a LOT of misogynistic depictions of women and quite frankly, I don't have the stomach for that anymore.  The film also glosses over the fact that the fetishization of young black male inner city culture was packaged to a white audience to sell it.  In fact, I think the film does the same thing, and trades on it to sell this film to a mass white audience (the film did remarkable box office).  Once again, you have the Narcos phenomena of the simultaneous glorification of the violence, and misogyny and the vague finger-wagging happening in the sub-sub-subtext.  We glorify the exploits of this disenfranchised black masculinity as a means of selling movie tickets.

Rant over.

Fin.

Identity

I have been mildly stressed lately by the following:
1) How few pie baking days there are in the summer (pie season) in relation to how very many pies I want to bake (and eat), not even considering ones that I would like to make multiple times
2) How many New York Times articles I want to read
3) How meagre my many vacation days seem in light of the fact that I had TWO SUMMERS OF MATERNITY LEAVE (TWO!). Summer babies are the best, guys. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

So the whole Rachel Dolezal thing burning up the “news.” It’s not really what I would consider to be “news” but it is the current hot button issue for getting the talking heads a’ talkin’.

Let me contextualize my take with this preamble. When Pingy and the Roomie were over, we had a big conversation about transgender issues (kick-started by the big Caitlyn Jenner reveal that had happened the day before the dinner). Pingy had taught a girl who identified as a “cisgender polyromantic woman” and Pingy, bless her patrician heart, was all like, “What does that even mean?!” So we parsed it out (short story – I think poly-romantic means that the person felt they could fall in love with anyone, a distinction that’s made against the body-parts oriented context of identifying as “homosexual” or “bisexual” or “straight.” I was a little bit weirded out that Caitlyn chose to reveal herself in ye classic exploitive, sex bomb fashion and it kind of offended me as a feminist. The Roomie made the point that since she’s now a woman, she could be objectified like women are. Errr…is that progress?

Then I read this: What Makes A Woman, and the author identifies some of the ways that I situate the transgender movement. If, like me, you consider binary gender distinctions a total social construction (and I do), then I feel like the transgender movement is a temporary way station en route to the total negation of social gender constructions. We are moving towards a point when you won’t “feel” like you were born in the “wrong body” in a way that’s related to gender. Maybe you’ll want a penis, that’ll be cool – it will just be like wanting to wear coloured contact lenses. It won’t be about gender. You won’t feel like you’re in the wrong body, because being in any body won’t MEAN anything in particular, insofar as your gender is concerned. Great. We get that. We’re all on board, right?

So when Rachel Dolezal identifies as “black” but isn’t “black” per se – why can’t we apply the same logic? Being black isn’t a quantifiable thing, it is arbitrary and sloppy language for having more melatonin than (what? What’s our baseline here?) than others. There is no genetic underpinning for race – it’s even more of a social/cultural construct than the concept of gender. Before it came out that she might not be the greatest person (suing Howard for discrimination, possibly making up claims of harassment and discrimination), then if she wanted to identify as black, then why not? What’s the big deal? People accused her of trading on the oppressed while still having the security of her white privilege. Yet, people don’t accuse women, who transition into being men, of trying to hop on the tails of patriarchal privilege. No way. If you did suggest that, then you, like the author of the New York Times article above, is accused of being transphobic. I think there’s a gap in my understanding here that I would like someone who does consider the New York Times article transphobic, to illuminate for me, because as of right now, I’m not getting it. I think it’s because I do so believe in the social construction of race, but this quote from this Washington Post  article gave me pause:

“Race is a social construct. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real as a lived experience in America, and it wasn’t constructed out of thin air. On this broken foundation, African Americans led, created communities and built a movement that transformed, and strives to further transform, America for the better.” 

I think I do have a tendency to jump forward to the world that exists in my head, and assume that this is the norm (or should be) for everyone. This is a classic problem for me. My mum has told me since I was a kid that I have a problem seeing things from other people’s perspectives. Her working theory is that I was delivered by forceps (I was a breach baby with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck – which in earlier days would have had me killed for being a witch), and that the forceps crushed the empathy part of my brain. The Dotytron and the Roomie generally endorse this theory. LOL!

Anyway, yes, race is a lived experience with real results, but even knowing that, while I don’t want to avoid questioning and problematizing Rachel Dolezal’s motives and privilege, I’m curious about why, as a theoretical exercise, a white woman choosing to live her experience as a black woman is substantively different than a woman choosing to live her experience as a man. Insert your thoughts here.

[edit: in light of the horrifying, racist, terrorist murders of Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59; I would like to further underline my solidarity with people who are living the lived experience of race and the very real, deathly implications of it.]

When I read the profiles of the people who were shot, I cried and it makes my heart hurt. I’m also angry. I am enraged by the entrenched, institutionalized racism that infects the world generally and the United States in a particularly acute fashion. I am sickened by the “friends” of the shooter who blithely passed off his racism (the unspoken subtext of the articles reporting their comments is that they themselves share his views, if not the desire to act on them?) and are quoted as saying things like, “He was racist, but I don’t judge.” Probably because you’re a white supremacist bigot yourself.

The other night we watched the documentary After Tiller, which is about the last 4 doctors in the United States who still perform late-term (past 20 weeks) abortions after the murder of Dr. Tiller at his church by a pro-life fanatic. It was admittedly, a sympathetic portrayal of these doctors, feminists all, and the women who seek their assistance. The doctors seemingly didn’t undertake the task lightly and neither did the women – very often there were compelling medical reasons (fetal abnormalities that would grossly impact their child’s quality of life, shortened life expectancies) and social reasons (rape). To see these people put their lives on the line to offer a legally protected right to women was inspiring. To see the lengths that people are willing to go to out of misogynistic ideology was repellant. The film doesn’t really tell you anything you don’t already know or suspect, but it is an important voice in the diminishing conversation for women’s reproductive and bodily rights.

Now on to more mundane matters. Last weekend we celebrated the twins birthday for the fourth or fifth time, with Momma D and Ehmdo and the Dotytron’s Nany (the kids’ Great Nany D). I love me some Great Nany D. She is a treat. She is mostly well of body and very sound of mind and I just GET her. She’s so practical and prosaic and her parenting advice is almost always sound. She’s a very relaxed, non-intensive mother parent who has been through 4 kids and consequently, just gets it, ya know? She doesn’t get fussed if the kids are loud or misbehave and has a generally “eh, so what” attitude about little ones that I love. I picked her up from her place in the west end as she shouldn’t be driving anymore and she kept up a steady stream of companionable, interesting chatter. Aside from some mild racism (the old person kind) and social conservatism she’s the greatest. Momma D made corn on the cob and I gave each baby half an ear. Nany wanted to know if it was buttered. I said, no. Momma D said, “they don’t need butter.” Nany: “Well of course they need butter, it makes it taste better.” I said, “Well, we don’t give them butter on their corn so they get used to eating it without, and then when they’re older and they already like the taste of corn, we can add butter and it will be even better.” Nany stopped, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “That makes no sense.” LOL!!! I about died laughing. So good.

The Big Yam’s best friend at school, F, is like a negative version of the Big Yam. They share similar wide, closed mouthed smiles and eyes that disappear into crescent moon squints. “F has white hair” the Big Yam told me, early on in the school year. He is a white-blonde kid and has a similar bowl cut. It’s a little sad because F goes away to Europe all summer. “F’s going to Plogg, soon” the Big Yam informed us the other night. Need I also mention that F has a million allergies and always speaks with a stuffed up voice?

I spent the bulk of the one beautiful day we had last weekend driving across town to grab Nany and so this weekend I’m trying to make it so that I actually have time to savour my weekend. I want to take the kids to a picnic at the Scarborough bluffs or on the beach, for a long bike ride, for a garden putter. We have plans to eat dinner with MHui and her family and for Father’s Day, I’m fulfilling the Dotytron’s greatest wish and making ourselves scarce for a big chunk of the day.

The muumuu and America's Next Top Model posing beside me so smyze-ing his heart out.

Here’s what we’ve been eating lately:

Moco loco for dinner!  Spam, fried eggs, gravy on rice!

Lamb rogan josh and muttar paneer

I am going to talk about this dinner at length because it was so delicious and because it came to me in a dream and I executed it and it was “the stuff that dreams are made of” (when you read that line you actually have to sing it out loud in your best Carly Simon voice, which I know you have in your back pocket, at the ready, just in case. THAT IS VERY WISE OF YOU). 

Here’s the thing about Cobb salad: it’s like, fake salad. Minus the blue cheese, which I’ve become less enamored of as I get older (being less tolerant of strong blue cheeses and having to wear bike shorts under my skirts are two of the harbingers of old age that I’m the most bummed about), it’s basically like a breakfast sandwich, minus the bun. What’s NOT to like about bacon, chopped hard boiled egg, avocado, and tomatoes and chicken? Sauced in a creamy, mayo-based dressing (or in my case, a buttermilk dill dressing) and with some chopped romaine to avoid a talking-to from My Fitness Pal, you’re good to go. Here’s where my dream came in, though. In my dream, I had replaced the standard cubes of cold, chicken breast in the classic Cobb salad with buffalo fried chicken. *Pulls record back on turntable*. 

Yes. Genius! I took boneless, skinless chicken thighs, the existence of which, in quantity, is but one of many reasons why I will never give up my Costco membership (seriously, like, 5lbs of boneless, skinless chicken thighs for $20?! Get outta here!), soaked them in a buttermilk brine, tossed them in some seasoned flour jacked up with some cornstarch and a bit of baking powder, and then fried them in lard. Once they were crisp I took them out, let them drain on paper towel, and then dragged each one through a mix of equal parts butter and Frank’s Red Hot (which, spoiler alert: IS BUFFALO SAUCE. You don’t have to buy it pre-made!), before arranging them lovingly on the salad. The resulting dinner salad was spicy, cool, crunchy, substantive, and each bite was different, which is generally one of my salad prerequisites. I will definitely put this on the rotation again (which means we’re lucky if I get to it before summer is up).

Strawberry shortcake made with Claudia Fleming's genius shortcake recipe.  It is so good, guys.  The perfect sweet biscuit.  Crisp edged and so, short, almost like a shortbread crossed with a biscuit.  Sturdy enough to soak up copious macerated strawberry juices and absolutely lugubrious with softly whipped cream.  

Shrimp and tofu pad thai

Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake is delicious.  It's also Quincess' platonic ideal of a vehicle for vegetable consumption.  That kid loves a quiche/cake/vegetable patty/fritter like no one else.

Fin.