The DOJ’s Ferguson report is just as horrible as it could possibly be, and I encourage you to follow Wesley Lowery’s Twitter timeline for the kind of intensive drill-down on individual excerpts you won’t get from news articles about it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN GOES FOR IT:
Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?
It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.
To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.
LOL, the Conrad Hilton meltdown piece in GQ is my everything today. The hero, for me, is this sweet British life coach who witnessed the lil turd’s tantrum from economy and really puts the best possible face on it:
If you were on a desert island, Hilton would be the weakest link, wouldn’t he? Let’s face it. He’d be the one about whom everyone would say, “Oh, shit, don’t get him to do anything. He’ll balls it up.” But this could be the making of him. Have you ever seen a movie called Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy? I can’t watch it without bursting into tears. Tracy is this old Portuguese fisherman, and this rich kid falls off the back of an ocean liner and Tracy picks him up. And the spoiled kid does a Conrad Hilton. He says, like, “Do you know who I am??” And Tracy just takes him on and teaches him to be a good person. It’s so touching. You see the transition. It’s beautiful.
Julia Carrie Wong on those stupid stunt journalism things meant to induce empathy (I think Black Like Me was sufficiently ground-breaking at the time not to get lumped in here, but the point stands.)
Emily Books is getting an imprint!
Decider’s “Was It Good For the Gays?” takes on “But I’m a Cheerleader” (it was):
While But I’m a Cheerleader might not be the kind of movie to change any minds — it is, after all, a movie for queer people, about queer people, and by queer people (which is, in fact, one of its merits) — what it does is important: it undeniably preaches an sermon of self-acceptance while poking fun at those who are threatened by the queer community simply because those within it find the self-assurance to live their lives on their own terms by openly rejecting societal norms when it comes to gender performance and sexual desire. When Megan is eventually kicked out the camp after she’s caught in bed with Graham (who, unlike Megan, remains at the camp because of pressure from her parents), she takes refuge with a pair of local gay men who attempt to save the campers from Mary Brown’s domination. When she laments that she doesn’t know “how” to be a lesbian, they reply, “There’s not just one way to be a lesbian. You have to continue to be who you are.”
A reader sent this fascinating article about looted WWII art, and also pointed out the weirdness of this quote from the MFA director, bc Rothschilds losing some fancy art and making it safely out of Vienna is prob NOT one of “the saddest stories” of the war:
“It’s a complete transformation” of some of the MFA’s collections, said MFA director Malcolm Rogers, adding that the gift gives the Rothschilds a dramatic new presence in the museum. What makes the gift unique, however, is its back story: “This gift allows us to tell, in a very moving way, one of the saddest stories of the second World War, and then the story of Bettina’s mother and her lifelong pilgrimage to set history right.”
I mean, maybe he meant the Holocaust was one of the saddest stories of WWII? Also a weird thing to say!
Trading Spaces‘ Hildi Santo-Tomas as unlikely gay icon:
The cast featured several eccentric designers in its rotation, but there was one whose reputation as a provocateur towered above the rest. Her name was Hildi Santo-Tomas. Viewers hated this woman, and I bore witness to it. A teenager at the time, I was obsessed with the show and joined several message boards where I could waste hours doing postmortems of the weekly episodes, discussing with fellow devotees the fine points of slip covers and bolster pillows. On these message boards, people talked a lot of smack about Hildi. And I spent a lot of time passionately defending her.
Six 20-something San Francisco dykes you meet on OkCupid, with truly excellent illustrations:
Look mami, I’m as pissed as you are about the invisibility of lesbians in this city. Believe me, I am. In an effort to better navigate the OkCupid Industrial Complex here are SOME dykes you may find in OkCupid:
As with everything lesbian related here’s The Disclaimer: before you go all who-does-this-third-world-dyke-think-she-is on me, this is in no way representative of the queer women community. I’m being reductive on purpose, etc.
