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Some things you just know. I (and thank goodness I have back-up on this one) knew I was having a baby girl. At 19 weeks, the sonographer scratched her head and said, “Huh. I thought it was a girl too,” but printed out a picture that said “It’s a boy!” And off we went to announce to everyone that mama’s intuition is a myth and that we better buy some Vikings baby gear. I was confused by the news that disproved both my gut feelings and a beautiful dream that Joe had of his long-haired daughter chatting him up, but I didn’t want to act like i didn’t want a boy. I would love a boy. So I started trying to love my “boy.” But every now and then we’d ask each other, “What if the ultrasound technician was wrong? What if all these blue clothes are for a little girl?”
“As long as the baby’s healthy” is one of the cliches mocked in the song “Pregnant Women are Smug.” Of course, I found myself saying it today, since this was the sonogram that I mentioned in my last post, to determine if the baby was too small. And no, not too small. Not too big. Just not a boy. One of my best friends flew in to visit within an hour of the appointment and was able to join us in the doctor’s office. To her credit, she said to our new ultrasound technician, “I still think it’s a girl” moments before we learned that she was. We all saw clear as day that the baby due to arrive in one week is a GIRL. I’d post a sonogram picture for you, but when I say clear as day, I mean it. And I don’t think that’s how she should make her first appearance on the Web.
Dear Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Marc Webb, Eric Steelberg, the producers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and everyone else involved in making the movie (500) Days of Summer,
I’ve been subconsciously writing this letter for four months, since I first saw your movie at SXSW. I wrote on this site about my screening experience, but looking back, my post seems flippant and doesn’t indicate the depth to which your story delighted me. My husband wasn’t with me at the SXSW screening, which was unfortunate, because as soon as the credits rolled, I knew he would see himself on that screen. (As will many, many men my age.) Last night, I took him to see the movie at another screening in town.
I loved the movie again, maybe even more this time. You have created a masterful film that captures countless desperately honest moments. It was a visceral pleasure to watch. And I want to articulate some of the reasons why it has touched me so significantly.
I’ll cut here so I can spill lots of spoilers below. (Crucial Minutiae readers, if you’re going to see this movie, bookmark this post and come back once you’ve seen it. I don’t want to ruin your viewing experience.)
Last Wednesday, I stood at the back of a cafetorium while 100+ teens clustered around the B-boy City Dance Crew, who showed off their moves to Busta Rhymes. The crew called for dancers from the audience, and a group of girls near me nudged and shoved their friend toward the stage. She waved her hands frantically and shook her head, not willing to single herself out. (She later did go up and show off her dance moves, along with another girl who sang an impromptu solo for us.)
We were all there for the iChoose: Real Talk on Sexual Health Teen Summit (I was a volunteer). This one-day workshop for teens provides real information and education about healthy sexuality, with an emphasis on each teen’s opportunity to choose what’s best for them. Over 100 Austin-area teens came out on a summer weekday for over 13 sessions, including “Sexuality & the Law,” “Healthy Masculinity,” and “Birth Control Methods.” I learned about very cool organizations like Men Rally for Change and Love Is Respect: National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline.
This week, I got an exciting e-mail from my friend and fellow 2006 REAL Hot 100 winner, Deanna Zandt. She’s a media technologist and a leading expert in women and technology, and she’s about to add “first-time author” to her resume.
She’s signed with the Berrett-Koehler publishing group to write a book about “the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action.” Women, people of color, queer people, and many more have too often been left in the dust of technological advances (see film, TV, and radio in their formative years). Deanna will use her experience in the feminist community and bring in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare, and more, to assemble strategies for widening the diversity of voices in social media.
Deanna is a sharp, compassionate, thoughtful person, and her book is going to help women and other sidelined communities release their fear and take advantage of the new technologies. The last thing we need is another place where the dominant culture creates uncontested content that blocks out all other perspectives.
If you’re interested in technology and social justice, you should be reading Deanna’s blog. Also, the publisher doesn’t offer advances, so Deanna is fundraising for living expenses this summer while she writes the book in 4 short months. Even if you have $10 to spare, visit her Feed The Author page and join supporters like the Hightower Lowdown, and Don Hazen and Doug Kreeger (editor and board member of AlterNet). It’s a fantastic project in which to invest.
Her full fundraising letter below the cut.
via Ekwa MO and Melissa Silverstein
Ela Thier, a director and filmmaker for 20 years, wrote this letter about her experience in the film industry as a woman. It’s four pages of pure passion, focused specifically on fundraising for her new project, but it speaks to so much more than simple donation dollars. For example:
After years of learning, practicing, and teaching, after years of query letters, phone calls, meetings, film markets, panels, classes, LA trips, networking, more networking, even more networking, my scripts – those ones that this market reader liked better than the 150 scripts she read that summer – those scripts sit on a shelf. After years of trying and falling and getting up and trying, something finally dawned on me: maybe I’m not the most unlucky bastard that ever lived. Maybe I’m female.
There is no petition to draft. There is no policy to fight. Yet, of the 250 top-grossing films in any given year, 6% are directed by women; of the 50 top-grossing movies each year, roughly 5 star or focus on women. In 80 years of Oscar history, with roughly 250 directors receiving a nomination for best director, 3 nominations went to female directors. No woman director ever received an Oscar.
It would be so much easier if someone would just flat out say it: “You’re not a director. You’re a girl.”
As a screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker with my own taste of the industry, I often fight feelings of defeat and depression when I read statistics like this. It would be simplistic to blame all of the slow movement or rejections in my career on my being a woman; I know it’s more complicated than that. But I do wonder, what if I’d put the name “J. Gandin Le” or “J.G. Le” on the title pages of my scripts instead of “Jennifer”? And I’m a young, white, straight, middle-class woman who’s worked with a legendary filmmaker. I melt into a useless puddle when when I think of the challenges or downright refusals that women of color, transgendered people, lesbians, or poor women must face.
So I give major applause to Ela Thier for resisting that instinct to lose hope, for fighting, for putting her anger and frustration into such eloquent words, and for vowing to work 20 times harder if it means her work will make it into the world.
Read the full letter below the cut.
As more information about the torture memos becomes public this week, it’s important to note that there is also a thrilling news story related, in a way, to torture. Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined, a story about women in the Congo who have been systemically raped and tortured. I haven’t had the privilege of seeing the play, but everyone in the Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts has been buzzing about this play for months, especially about the way it takes a hard look at something awful, yet leaves the audience with great catharsis and hope.
The show has been extended through May 10th, so go get your tickets!
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood has a great write-up about why awards matter, for the individual artist being honored and for the larger community of women and people of color who are making great work.
Thank you, Ms. Nottage, for creating more space for future artists, for bringing Americans’ attention to horrors we must face as fellow human beings, and for using the powerful medium of live performance to convey hope even in the middle of hopelessness.
Interview with Nottage at Manhattan Theatre Club’s website.
Playbill’s coverage of the honor
P.S. Emily, you totally called it.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
My friend, Geoff, with Shoot the Messenger Productions, shot this Very Serious response to the National Organization for Marriage “Gathering Storm” video. (That’s his handsome fake-moustachioed mug in the screencap below.) It’s going to be aired on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight.
My favorite is: “If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, we will have no choice but to switch to digital TV.”
So, what’s the appropriate greeting today: “Happy April Fools’”? I hope you haven’t been tricked too severely. (My long-time favorite resource for verifying questionable information is Snopes.com, by the way. For future reference.)
I’ve been thinking about fools and sacred clowns today, appropriately enough. One of the movies I saw at SXSW was The Yes Men Fix The World, a documentary about the culture jamming activists called the Yes Men. This group uses inventive mischief and deceit to expose the wrongdoing of powerful corporations and governmental offices. The movie features Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, but they’re only two members of the larger group.
The Yes Men have created politically-charged hijinks like:
Crossposted at feministing.
It was not only the second year anniversary of the truly awesome Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on Saturday, but the “coming out party” for Unfinished Business, an intergenerational clan of diverse women who have been meeting privately but are now going public. They’re hope is that they can inspire other “UB pods” of women from varied backgrounds, experiences, and ages to get together and talk about the vast range of issues that feminists care about. The event was inventive–starting with a keynote by C. Nicole Mason, activist and researcher, and transitioning into a short Q&A with Esther Broner and Ai-jen Poo (moderated by the always dynamic and refreshing Laura Flanders), that evolved into an audience-involved speak out of sorts.
The event invoked some serious overwhelm in me and I’ve been trying to process just why ever since. First and foremost, there were so many important issues brought up in this two hour span–everything from domestic workers’ rights to Hollywood’s inadequate portraits of women, from socialism to corporate accountability, from child development to the dearth of female artists’ work in major museums and galleries. I suppose one is bound to feel a little paralyzed hearing about this vast range of problems and challenges.
But there’s something more subtle that I’m trying to unpack. Read more…
In February, as news about the Chris Brown and Rihanna Fenty situation spread through the internet, Jay Smooth over at Ill Doctrine consulted with Elizabeth Mendez Berry, who wrote an article in 2005 called Love Hurts in Vibe Magazine, about domestic violence within (and without) hip-hop. (Here’s a link to the video of that interview, originally published on February 14th.)
Last week, Elizabeth Mendez Berry published a powerful follow-up commentary about the issue over at Ill Doctrine. Her piece begins in a “gang awareness” meeting with fifteen Bronx teenagers, discussing domestic violence. The conversation lands on this “bottom line: sometimes you’ve got to teach a woman a lesson if she gets out of line.” Until this moment:
In the midst of the rationalizing, one usually talkative young man stood up and walked out. When he returned twenty minutes later, he quietly told the group that his aunt had recently been murdered by her abusive boyfriend. It was no longer a hypothetical conversation. The jokes stopped. Young men who were significantly invested in their inner gangsters gave them time off, and started talking about how domestic violence had affected their lives–and it had affected most of them. The young woman, who minutes before had been arguing in favor of beating females who didn’t know their place, talked about how despite the rules, male gang members beat up on female gang members. Behind her swagger, she seemed anxious.
The rest of the article is as beautiful and honest as this excerpt — I highly recommend reading the whole thing. She’s a sharp reporter and writer, and this issue is a matter of life or death for too many women.
There was a moment in the middle of Sissyboy, a short and sweet documentary about a raucous, grotesque, gender-bending performance troupe in Portland, OR, when my heart suddenly felt warm.
As I listened to these men’s stories of love, loss, family, art, and how much the troupe had changed their lives for the better, I felt proud to live in a country where places exist for these men to feel at home, welcomed. Even though there are still many battles to be fought and won, I felt amazed and grateful as I watched them go on tour, getting hugs from passers-by, performing in clubs and cities to full audiences, and moving through city crowds — all without harassment. I’m sure some of that was due to the film’s editing, but even if that’s the case, I appreciated it. To me, the main focus of the film wasn’t the trouble that these men face in the world; it was about how they transform their monsters into art, and find community with each other.
As Jeffrey (stage name Fannie Mae) says in the movie, “I never thought in a million years — I don’t think anyone of us did — that we would ever find a group of people that would make you not feel like you are weird and wrong, and actually makes you feel like you are fine.”
That reminds me of one of my favorite poems, by Raymond Carver:
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~ ~ ~
May each of us feel ourselves beloved on the earth.
—–
Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
That’s right, folks, I watched six movies in twelve hours today. I think it’s my personal record. Even more surprising than the sheer amount of movies is the fact that they were all good — in fact, four were excellent, moving films.
In the interest of my bedtime and ability to do this again tomorrow, here are my top four, in the order I saw them, and with high recommendations that you see all of them if you get the chance:
1) Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
This movie follows Youssou Ndour, Grammy Award-winning Senegalese singer and hero, over two years as he releases “Egypt,” an ambitious and controversial album on which he sings about his beloved Islam. (Western listeners not familiar with his name will certainly recognize his voice — he sang backing vocals on Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”)
Ndour’s story and the movie’s telling of it brought me to tears several times; from the sheer power of his voice in performance, to the scenes with his grandmother, the film was beautiful and I want to see it again.
Trailer, and three more stellar films after the jump.
_____
Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
Courtney on The O’Reilly Factor:
At the end of the segment, Bill promises to apologize to Courtney if she can show she publicly defended Sarah Palin. It turns out, our equal-opportunity feminist did. Email Bill if you want to hear an apology.
I’m not talking about sports teams. I’m talking men and women. A fascinating description of gender on the streets came up in my last session at the homeless shelter. A man was describing the culture around the burning barrel, the community there. “It’s an oath,” he said, that men take. “I got your back. You got mine.” At this point, the woman I mentioned before compared the men who hang around the barrel to a pack of wolves.
“Do the women have a place to meet?”
“No.” She shook her head. “We’re panthers.”
I’m trying out a new segment called ON THE COUCH WITH KIMMI. Today, I’m on the couch with Ms. Courtney Martin talking about self-esteem. (Rated R for extreme language and some sexual references.)
P.S. Check out Courtney’s post about the self-esteem bubble, just in case you missed it.
P.S.S. I’m taking a two-week break for the holidays. Wishing you all love, peace and joy! See you back in ‘09!
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
For my first Crucial Minutiae post, I looked at the lack of young women in public office across the United States, and the reasons women tend to wait until later in life to enter the political arena. For my final (better late than never?) post, I thought it would be interesting to dig a little deeper into all of this and ask young women for their opinions. I tried to cast as wide a net as possible, and got a lot of great feedback. The responses definitely bear out what the experts say: Young women often need a push from a mentor or a personal connection to an issue to motivate them to run. And they are frequently hesitant to run in their twenties or early thirties because of family responsibilities, or simply because they feel unprepared.
Two additional points: A lot of the women I talked to were really turned off by the nastiness of elections. Likewise, they weren’t into the need for capitulation that so often goes hand-in-hand with governing, but instead felt that their goals could be better accomplished through more direct action. (Is this unwillingness to compromise specific to women or just young idealistic people in general?) Here’s a sampling of quotes from the respondents to my little survey:
She’s a hypnotist collector
You are a walking antique
– Bob Dylan, “She Belongs to Me”
I had the great fortune to watch “Who Does She Think She Is?” several weeks ago, just before it premiered in New York City at the Angelika Film Center. The movie, directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll (who co-executive produced the 2004 critically acclaimed “Born into Brothels”), opens the lives of five women who refuse to choose between being mothers and being artists.
The movie unfurls some crazy statistics: 80 percent of all art school students are female, but a tiny number of artists whose works are in major museums are female. In an awkward and telling moment, the filmmakers interview people on the street and ask them to name several female artists. Even a couple who have just emerged from the Metropolitan Museum of Art can name no female artists.
