Everything’s fine here.
I am going to assume you watched Lemonade. Lemonade was phenomenal. Please share your favourite parts of Lemonade and your favourite pieces about Lemonade and your favourite tweets about Lemonade.
b) WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK WOULD YOU EVER BOO THE NEWS YOU’LL BE HEARING AN UNDERSTUDY WHERE IS YOUR HEART?
c) I saw an understudy play “The Man In the Chair” at The Drowsy Chaperone and he was so great and he had no chill (perfect for the character) and we gave him a standing ovation too
This was beautiful and lovely and everything, also if you are an old dude and find love with a much much younger dude, you should just enjoy it, see also Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor:
For our three children and me, Clare was at the heart of our family. When I told her, “You’re my best friend,” she would reply, “and your best critic.” And when I said, “You’re my best critic,” she responded, “and your best friend.”
We were both about to turn 70 when she died. I assumed that I was too old to seek or expect another romance. But five years later, standing on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., I sensed a creative hour and did not want to miss it.
It was afternoon, and the tanning beachgoers faced west, toward the wall of concrete buildings lining the boulevard, to catch the sun, ignoring the beautiful sea. I swam alone in the water, attracting the attention of two bystanders near the shore. They came over to say hello, which is how I met Matthew Charlton.
The death of a teenage girl in that bathroom fight in Delaware is incredibly tragic and awful:
The victim was a 10th-grader from New Castle, Del., who had gotten involved in a confrontation with two other students at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, spokeswoman Kathy K. Demarest said in a statement. She said no weapons were involved. Police are questioning the other students, Demarest said.
This piece on suicide in Greenland is wrenching and thorough:
By 1985, suicide was killing more people than cancer. That year, at least 50 people killed themselves in Greenland. The total population was only 53,000. In the U.S., it would be as if in one year, the entire population of say, Lincoln, Neb. — more than 250,000 people — killed themselves. And no one acknowledged it; it didn’t make the papers.
At that time, almost no one was studying suicide in Greenland. There were a few psychologists, but they were Danish, so it was impossible for Inuit people to get help in their native language. In therapy, each word matters. Plus, the stigma around suicide was intense. It was shameful. People who had lost children to suicide weren’t even acknowledging that fact to each other, it was so taboo.
Nguyen was adamant from the beginning that his novel would not fall into the “typical maneuvers of minority literature written for a majority audience”. He refused to translate his culture – for example, writing “Vietnamese New Year” instead of “Tet” – or have the book’s themes affirm American ideals and American exceptionalism. Had The Sympathizer been written for a white audience, the “ending would be radically different”. His narrator never rejects communism, for example. “I wrote as if I had all the privilege of a majority writer, and majority writers never have to translate or pander,” Nguyen said.
(*very Mallory Is Great voice*) Mallory is great:
Dear Prudence,
I’m a bisexual man in a happy, monogamous relationship. My wife is fine with my sexuality but does not want me to talk about it with other people. She especially does not want me talking about it around her friends, many of whom are gay men, for fear that they would start hitting on me. (I think maybe she also worries that they would make fun of me—although we all get along great.) She also does not want me to contact an ex-lover, who was also my best friend for a long time (although admittedly this was years ago). I’m not particularly bothered by these “conditions,” but I would like to speak to this guy at least once again in my life, and it might be nice to have people with whom I could openly discuss my sexuality.
—She’s Honestly Fine With It
I disagree that your wife is “fine” with your sexuality. If she wants you to keep your sexuality a secret and thinks any gay man who learned of it would be unable to keep from either mocking or trying to seduce you, I think she is in fact deeply uncomfortable with and resentful of your sexuality, which is a shame. It’s one thing for her not to want you to get in touch with an ex, which is understandable if high-handed; it’s quite another for her to forbid you from even talking about the fact that you’re bisexual. If she thinks the only thing keeping your friends from trying to destroy your marriage is a mistaken belief in your heterosexuality, then she has insufficient faith in both your marriage and the character of your friends. Tell your wife that you’re not going to hide who you are from those close to you simply to keep her comfortable. Her version of protection and support looks an awful lot like a closet to me.
my pastor went all in on smug white evangelicals who think that saying “we are all brothers and sisters in Christ so we are post-racial” is chill and I was HERE FOR IT and I quoted some stuff:
LEMONADE LEMONADE OH MY GOD Y’ALL HOW DOES SHE DO THIS LEMONADE OH MY GOD
I’ve only managed to see the preview because no Tidal or HBO 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁
I have seen it is supposed to be on Itunes now, though I have not checked, since Beyonce convinced me to give Tidal a try. (So far, I’m liking Tidal more than I expected, I may well pay for it).
It is on Itunes now! It is WELL worth whatever it costs, I just clicked purchase without looking at the price I think??
I’m sooo tempted….but also I’m currently in a country and staying in a place with really iffy internet and bandwidth limits so I’m weighing the possible awfulness of either it just refusing to download, or me having deathly slow internet for the rest of the month if I do. argh.
Eighteen dollars, for those playing along at home.
Lemonade is stunning and I can’t get over it. I watched it three times, listened to the tracks three more times, and I cried my eyes out at “All Night Long” twice. Looking forward to getting it from iTunes and just absorbing it for a long time to come. And the variety in sound and music styles, while all being so great, is just astonishing.
Visually there’s so much, but far better people than I are busy breaking it down. All I have is: Beyonce swinging the baseball bat is everything.
This!!! And Serena.
Swinging the bat in that yellow dress. I die.
THE BAT THAT IS CALLED HOT SAUCE
I’ve only seen clips and listened to the whole album but my frail mortal body almost can’t deal with how much swag Bey has in it.
And already, people are whining about being told that it is not *for* them if they aren’t Black women.
Seen today on FB: “If she didn’t want me to relate to it, maybe she shouldn’t have made it public. People often (if not nearly always) misinterpret art. Once it’s out there, the artist loses control of how people take it/ understand it/feel about it.”
I was like, dude, no one is saying you can’t like it or find ways of relating to it. It’s just that it isn’t *for* you. It wasn’t written *for* you. It wasn’t filmed *for* you.
Just because you aren’t the intended audience doesn’t mean you don’t get to be *an* audience. But it does mean that perhaps you could take a seat for a bit about claiming some sort of ownership over it. Okay?
Argh, people. I’m a white lady, and as a LADY found some stuff to relate to. But I know a lot of the stuff isn’t for me, and it’s cool, because it is still art and wonderful to see. We don’t have to weigh-in with our opinions on everything, Internet!
This is how I further explained it to this dude:
An important thing to note: something doesn’t have to be *for* you for you to enjoy and appreciate it.
To use an analogy (possibly a goof one, IDK), imagine a birthday party. The party is *for* the birthday girl. The cards and present and cake all have her name on it. The hugs and kisses and balloons are all for her. There is a song that everyone stops and sings for her. That doesn’t mean that the party guests aren’t allowed to enjoy it. They can have some cake and ice cream. They can play with a balloon. Maybe they even get to take home a goody bag. But the party is not *for* them.
Lemonade was that birthday party, and it was for Black women.
I like that analogy!
fantastic analogy!
and how about this also — maybe folks who aren’t black ladies can *learn something* from listening to it and watching it.
great art can take you inside the artist’s head and heart. you get to look out of their eyes for a bit. that’s what makes it great.
so, maybe just listen? watch? walk around inside this beautiful piece of art and see what you get out of it? let it crack you open and see what happens. that’s what art is *for.* you don’t have to plant your flag in it.
Follow-up to a link from one of last week’s roundups: Vermont is kind of the farm-to-table motherland, so a piece that one of the local papers ran makes an interesting companion to the coverage of deceptive marketing in the restaurant industry. They talk about the financial difficulties that come with committing to the whole farm-to-table thing (one of the restaurant owners describes himself with, “I’m obviously not in the business of making money,”), the compromises consumers have to be willing to make for this system to survive, and what steps may keep farm-to-table dining feasible, both in terms of business solvency and accountability/transparency, since Vermont has actually implemented programs to verify local sourcing claims.
While I obviously would have guessed that working entirely or mostly with local, seasonal materials was more expensive than traditional purchasing I wouldn’t have guessed that it drops the restaurants’ profit margins as much as it seems to. Makes it understandable (if clearly not excusable) that restaurants in the Florida article started exaggerating their farm-to-table claims.
That’s fascinating. It’s a reminder of why it’s so hard to make money in that industry when you’re doing all the ethical things. I’m glad at least some of them are making it work though.
It’s hard to make money in restaurants even when you’re not doing all (or most, or some, or any) of the ethical things. There’s just no room for error at all.
Oh I know, that’s their excuse for paying peanuts and skimping on other important things. I can’t imagine what eating out would cost if all the costs were truly met and the restaurant made money.
Yeah, frankly I’ve always been side-eyeing the whole farm-to-table movement (at least when restaurants try to do it 100% for their ingredients) as something that belongs strictly in Portlandia (the fictional universe, I mean). Sometimes globalization is okay! Especially when it doesn’t make financial sense for a struggling business. I’m not usually on capitalism’s side, but if it’s just not sustainable, well, I think some long-distance farmers could use your business too.
I call this one Chiaroscuro P. Taters.
Due to horrible family drama my dad, his partner, and my sister’s kids that they are taking care of got kicked out of the house they were living in and turned up on my doorstep (I’m renting his partner’s upstairs suite that they were formerly living in). Anyway, long story short, I’m living at my mom’s for a month and my potato and I have been CRUELLY SEPARATED. We didn’t see each other for TWO WHOLE DAYS. It was the worst.
Today I am babysitting while my dad and his partner go to court in Calgary, so we will be happy together for like twelve hours at least.
HELLO POTATO
I love you and I hope that you and ChloeKEvil are unseparated for all time very soon!
Me too. I missed him SO MUCH and I will miss him again when I go home. Visiting him isn’t the saaaame.
Cripes, bb, I hope the family stuff smooths out soon.
Cripes is the exact emotion I’m feeling about all of this.
At least they will have CPH to comfort them, I imagine he is great at comforting.
He is! Having a ball of floof that overflows your lap and does its best to be licking your face at all times is incredibly soothing.
Chiaroscuro taters are the best taters, obvi.
I like the “hurtling himself at me like a rocket launcher every time he sees me now” kind too!
Oh, how rough for you and your family and your lovely pile of mash. I hope for quick, good resolutions for you all, and lots of spud snuggles in the meantime.
Internet hugs for you, if you’d like them!
Perhaps in your despair you did not realize that I announced my having had a dream of your tuber, and request for photos Friday. I declare Charlie Potato Hashbrowns to be the official Toast dream visitant, and I am proud to have hosted his apparitionness since it may prevent my being shunned by the commentariat for being neither queer nor a librarian. Thank you for your time.
But really, aren’t we all queer librarians in our hearts?
In the middle school cafeteria that is life, you bet your bippy I would be sitting at the queer librarians’ table.
spreadsheet!
I also had a CPH dream! Wild!
Oh noes! :(((( I hope this separation goes by as quickly as possible.
Do I have to pick a favorite part of Lemonade? Can it be the part where I coincidentally had invited my favorite friends over for snacks and a pitcher of boozy lemonade for the afternoon and we watched it twice (and then I watched it again when they left)?
“Drowsy Chaperone” is the only high school musical I ever did that turned out right, and it’s all because we had the perfect Man In Chair. I mean, our Chaperone was aces and Aldolfo killed it and somebody from the company legit got into NYU later, but without Man In Chair it would never have mattered. You need the right sort of person to pull off that “yes, i have a woman” bit without going into either straight insecurity or a caricature of campiness.
The bird who got weighed by getting stuffed head first into an old Kodak film cannister certainly drew the short straw.
My favorite thing about this topic is that when I went to see even more birds on scales (apparently the film canister thing is surprisingly popular!) google’s first search prompt when you type “birds being” is “birds being jerks.”
I’m not surprised. I pay pretty close attention to all the birds around my backyard while I let me dogs out. They’re kind of jerks. Especially blue jays.
“let me dogs out”
Apparently I’m a pirate.
God those jays. One chased my obese beagle halfway home yesterday, dive bombing the whole way. It was like a cartoon watching her try to hustle away, acting all chastened with her eyes on the ground pretending like there wasn’t a bird pecking her ass every 4 seconds.
Here’s a joke I made on Twitter last week in honor of a blue jay that landed outside my window and woke me up.
Buncha birds in a harmony circle
Sparrow: *tweet* *birds nod*
Robin: 🎶 *birds nod*
Cardinal: 🎶🎼 *birds nod jealously*
Blue Jay: Skrank!
This is accurate. Angry blue jays sound like a rusty see-saw.
Yes, after it woke me I realized the singing of the other birds just becomes kind of a nice background noise. No sooner had I formed that thought before the blue jay again bellowed out, “Skrank!”
I didn’t know until a couple weeks ago that blue jays are corvids, which in retrospect makes so much sense. Corvids just delight in being jerks and its awesome.
…everything makes sense now
All becomes clear!
I just started listening to the podcast Criminal and the first episode talks about owl-related injuries and deaths. DEATHS. Because some owl was like, “Hmm, human head. Yes, I will just go claw right into that shit for no other reason but because I am a PREDATOR.”
Makes me feel nervous about the picture of the owl getting weighed in wrapping paper. Get something sturdier, people! It has talons of death!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnyKanYxIjE
Speaking of owl deaths: last month I watched The Staircase, the documentary about Michael Peterson’s travesty of a trial where he was convicted for his wife’s very probably accidental death, and then I googled it to see if there had been any good news since the documentary was made (spoiler: no) and found that apparently the current prevailing theory was that she was attacked by an owl! It sounds so insane but also kind of plausible and it is just horrifying to imagine that if you happen to be the wrong kind of person (bisexual in North Carolina, for instance) you can go to jail if something unlikely happens and no one was there to see it.
I am pretty sure that the Michael Peterson owl death is the same one that is discussed in the Criminal podcast. (Either that, or owl murder is more prevalent than anyone realized.)
I read that theory! It’s totally bizarre, but there have been weirder stories. However, even if this guy might be innocent, I’m sticking to my theory that ladies should avoid men named Peterson (Scott Peterson, Drew Peterson).
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an owl without its feathers, but it’s basically just a vulture.
Not sure if I regret googling that or if my newfound knowledge on the evil of owls will save my life one day…
And if you try to interrogate one it’s like a damn Abbott and Costello routine.
“Don’t ask who! You know damn well who I’m asking about! The victim!”
“Hoo?” *owl winks*
I saw a vulture in the woods last week. It was a surprisingly elegant bird, hopping from forest floor to tree limb and back again.
In middle school, one of my teachers would include the phrase “killer owls” as an option in some way at least once in every test and quiz she gave us. I don’t think I realized this had basis in reality.
I am a teacher and will now be adding “killer owl” to all teaching materials. Best is I told all my kids about the story so they know it’s a real thing.
Owl burrito is furious, adorable.
Oh wow, the sky really does need to calm down of birds.
That bird is essentially a metaphor for all dimensions of my life: dating, career, money…
This has nothing to do with anything here but here is a really interesting article about pantsuits and fashion and working women and a bunch of other stuff for your Monday. http://www.vice.com/read/the-history-of-the-pants…
They also did a great article on the Hillary store in Kosovo. Pantsuits galore! https://www.vice.com/read/kosovo-dressing-like-hi…
Here for it. Pantsuits are hella sexy.
I still cannot get over the fact that no woman in the Senate had ever worn pants to work until 1993.
My first job out of college I worked for a lawyer who came of age in the early 70s, and was very proud of the fact that she hadn’t worn a skirt to work since 1980, when California law started requiring that employers allow women to wear pants to work. (She was also proud of never having learned to touch type, thus never having to do male lawyers’ typing. Also she adamantly vowed to never switch from WordPerfect to Word, which I suppose wasn’t really a feminist stance but had the same degree of principled vehemence.)
Can we talk about how we also lost Doris Roberts and Chyna last week? Prince was the cherry on the shit sundae of celebrity deaths. Doris Roberts – completely bad ass take no prisoners actor. Chyna – completely bad ass take no prisoners wrestler. Both broke through so many barriers in their respective industries.
I’m not a huge wrestling fan, but Mick Foley’s response to Chyna’s death absolutely gutted me. I was in tears.
The fact that I’m not a wrestling fan and I still knew who Chyna was really says something, I think, about her fame and her influence. So sad that she’s gone.
I posted about Chyna’s death right before Prince’s was confirmed. Both women were given the short end of the grieving stick last week.
Mildred Krebs!
The best tweets about Lemonade, hands down, were Tracy Clayton’s commentary regarding how Eliza Schuyler could’ve written it.
This one made me laugh the most: https://twitter.com/brokeymcpoverty/status/724379…
The Jay-Z “I survived but I paid for it” tweet made me literally LOL.
Friends *I* saw the Game of Thrones premier last night, even though I am not incredibly enthusiastic about it as a show, apparently it’s a thing that we’re now doing to “hang out with friends”. If you would like to read my opinions about it, I have some here.
1. I am glad that the writers realized that they do not, in fact, need to have a bunch of naked tits jiggling in the background in order for the audience to pay attention to a speech that lasts for more than thirty seconds.
2. I am glad to see Brienne of Tarth wreck a bunch of motherfuckers, but would have preferred if she had wrecked 20-30% more in that scene.
3. the reveal about Mellisandre I think is very telling about certain kinds of attitudes towards women because, like, it doesn’t actually reveal anything — we already knew that she was untrustworthy and had an agenda and as kind of maybe evil — except that dudes want to have sex with her but in reality she is an OLD LADY OHHHHH GOD CAN YOU IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE HORRIBLE THAN DISCOVERING RETROACTIVELY THAT THE HOT BABE YOU BONED WAS UGLY?!?!!?
Re: #2 – while my usual inclination is for women (and Brienne in particular) to do as much of the wrecking as possible, I think I was actually relieved for her sake when Pod took down his man.
I mean, their usual plan is “I’ll take this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, and you distract that one until I’m done and I’ll take him.” It’s a good plan, but by the old gods and the new, does she have to do everything around here?
Also, I’m not sure how Theon and Sansa could survive getting neck-deep in a stream in winter. That seems like a direct train to hypothermiaville. And it’s not like they got to the other side and were met with hot chocolate and blankets.
Yeah there is no way that they should survive, and then also ,”let’s hide in the hollow made by this tree”? Yeah, man, and THEN what? It’s the middle of fucking winter, sitting around in a hole in the shade while you’re covered with ice-water is not a strategy for life.
I like that Pod was doing some good work, but I think actually Theon took that guy down, which was nice, I am okay with that, I am just saying if there were like two or three more guys there total for Brienne to wreck I’d have liked that.
Yeah! I mean, it’s not that I want the total number of confirmed kills for Brienne to be any lower, it’s just that I want the percentage of bad guys killed by her team to be slightly less lopsided. For her sake, really, so that she can trust Pod’s got her back or left flank or whatever.
But yeah, while I like the conclusion, the escape sequence was weirdly brief and relatively easy. Neither of them was hurt from their leap of a three-story building, neither of them is experiencing any hypothermia, and neither of them seems to care. Like, I’d understand if they jumped fully expecting to die of exposure, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, either.
I guess I got a problem whenever one guy gets momentarily up on her? I think that might be the problem I had with that fight — I understand that there are times when she needs to seem to be in trouble so that the fight can have tension, but in my opinion Brienne should never be losing to fewer than three opponents at a time.
Yeah she’s beaten the Hound and Jaime Lannister* so she should be essentially unstoppable.
And Loris Tyrell! All of the indications seem to be that one-on-one she is in the top class of knightly badasses, and they’re definitely sending Ser Jorah around wrecking a hundred dudes in the gladitorial arena, they definitely sent Ser…Old Guy…in to fight with twenty dudes during that brawl with the unsullied in Mereen. I keep getting the feeling that the show is shortchanging Brienne of Tarth.
Well, Barristan was absolutely the top class of knightly badasses, but yeah, Brienne has gotta be the most formidable fighter on the continent now. I think you’re right that she’s being shortchanged in order to build tension in fight scenes, but dang, GAME OF THRONES, sometimes we just wanna see some well-earned ownage.
Brienne strikes me as a kind of chaotic fighter. Loras, Barristan, Jaime, etc. all fight very elegantly. They’ve been trained by the best-of-the-best, and after all, the vast majority of their experience is in tournaments and other events where they’re putting on a show first, and fighting second.
Brienne didn’t have those tutors. She’s largely self-taught, and battle-tested. She storms into battle, howling and swinging wildly. It’s effective, but it also gives her more moments of vulnerability, almost by design, because she’s always going for killing blows.
Brienne of Tarth is a binary killing machine: either she’s asleep, or you’re probably dead by now.
Sansa’s a northern girl so maybe she has some kind of semi-magical resistance to cold, as Dany has to fire?
Or it could just be bad writing.
Or furry undies! I read somewhere, no idea where or when, about a group of modern adventurers who wore authentic Viking gear down to the skin and found it much more effective for staying warm in icy wet conditions than modern fabrics.
it’s nearly winter here and i would love nothing so much as furry knickers. this idea is the only pleasing thing to come out of watching GoT for me tbh, so bless you.
Yeah – I guess you can kind of eventually explain it all, if absolutely necessary, but it seems to require more work than if they had made a few different narrative choices.
Like, cross the river on a slippery log, rather than just jumping in.
The hypothermia thing bugged me to no end. They would have maybe 30 minutes in their wet clothes before being mostly debilitated. And the dogs caught up again pretty quickly so it seems like a really strange thing to write in.
man I’ve waded through icewater before, and when you’re tired — frankly I’m surprised they even made it across the river before someone’s legs gave out.
Dragons? Fine. White walkers? Fine. Unrealistic escape scenes? TOO FAR!
It’s weird but this is true — I can accept that a dragon or a white walker is a supernatural entity outside the boundaries of normal physics, but I expect everything within the boundaries of normal physics to behave like it.
YES. This bothered me beyond belief for exactly that reason. Human bodies have proven themselves to be human bodies throughout the series (minus magic like that bit at the end). They should act like normal human bodies and get weak/die when a normal person would!
Certainly George R.R. Martin strives for this. It’s one reason magic is relatively hidden in the series in general. Also, while I am pro-Brienne of Tarth, I didn’t love that scene because generally in Game of Thrones, 3 on 1 sword fights are supposed to go badly for the 1, barring extreme extenuating circumstances (The Mountain against not very skilled fighters).
I stand by my assertion; if Syrio Forel can last for two minutes with just a wooden sword against three punk suckers, Brienne of Tarth should be able to wreck any single opponent.
And in Brienne’s defense, they underestimate her because she is a woman, and then as you say, she is only fighting any one at a time. The show is not nearly as consistent on this point as the books, witness Jon Snow, Action Hero!
I mean, the thing about this is that, for one: a genuinely historically-accurate fight between a couple armored dudes is very boring, basically two guys rolling around in the mud until someone manages to knife the other one in the eye, or else early on someone gets their shin bone fucking pulverized by a warhammer or some shit and screams on the ground until someone else caves his head in.
It’s brutal, but also dull, like almost everything about Olde Time Dayes! And the thing is, the books are not particularly better about this — they’re more realistic, but they’re not actually realistic, just somewhat less fanciful.
So if I’m going to watch a show with some fights in it like this, the fights aren’t documentarian representations of medieval combat, they’re basically character signifiers. And I got a hard time with this because I feel like this show has been largely unwilling to concede that Brienne of Tarth is even a particularly good knight, much less the best knight, and this is especially highlighted when she’s in a fight and she gets knocked off her horse and kicked around by a regular dude and it’s only good luck that gets her sword into her hands in the nick of time.
….Huh. I wonder if someday we will get a Brienne vs. Zombie Mountain fight.
YES PLEASE
I am completely on board with it just because it’s Brienne. She fought the Hound and won, so I believe that she can take out three normal guys.
I think Sansa and Theon were willing to die when they went into the stream, though — I forget the dialogue exactly, but Theon said something like “I’ve seen what those dogs do to people, this is better.” So they were willing to freeze to death over being sent back to the Boltons to be tortured further.
yeah I understand why they were willing to die of hypothermia, I’m just not clear why they didn’t.
Yeah, Pod being competent for once sounds good to me and I’m all for Brienne kicking ass. I find Pod really grating on the show and this might make him less annoying.
I can’t believe they used the Melisandre thing as the BIG EPISODE-ENDING EVENT! If anything, that scene is just a “Yeah, that seems about right” moment. Ending on the Dorne regicide spree would have made a lot more sense. That was the only genuinely exciting part of the episode to me!
Right? It’s like that happened and I felt like, “hold on, did we not already know this?”
I agree the Dorne Regicide was both more unexpected and a bigger deal, that’s what I would have ended on.
But then again, the Dorne plotline was so extraneous last season, and none of the characters down there feel fully drawn, so the coup didn’t really hit very hard. It was just kind of a throat-clearing, we’re-catching-you-up kind of episode.
Even though it was only going on for one season it did kind of feel like Ellaria had been making angry faces at Doran for like 12 years to me. Maybe because I had the season 5 marathon on in the background of stuff all day yesterday but when the killing spree happened it was a relief because finally something was actually happening. I do hope the Sand Snakes get a little more characterization though because right now they are basically Gerudo pirates from Ocarina of Time.
That’s who they are! I’ve been trying to figure out who they remind me of since last season, it’s the Gerudo pirates. (God that’s a great game.) And yeah, I really hope this season that they get a better story and actually do something. I had such high hopes for them last year, but they were the worst. The “you need a bad pussy” line the one said to Bronn made me throw a pillow at the TV.
I would also be fine with their throwing out the baby with the bathwater at this point and just abandoning Dorne altogether.
I feel like the showrunners have NO IDEA what to do with Dorne, and they’ve deviated so drastically from the Dorne plotline in the books, that they decided, “welp, I don’t know where we go from here, I guess kill ’em.”
My entire response to that scene was “Someone should gif this and caption it ‘me taking my bra off after a long day'”
TOO TRUE
But the Melisandre thing affects BONERS, and we all know that BONERS are most important, not sudden regicide.
I mean, Tits and Dragons.
I actually disagree about the Melisandre thing. Don’t throw things at me yet! Hear me out. Yes obviously she’s ~eeeevviillll~ blah blah, but she was also Dedicated to her faith. It’s what drove her through all these shenanigans in the first place. The Red God said so, so I’m going to take out this entire continent if I have to in order to see his Will done. *commence shadow baby, lotsa murder, lotsa fire, lotsa sex*. It all had a purpose in her head, it was all for a greater (if shady) good.
NOW, now she’s seen her entire agenda crumble into (ironically) ash. Stannis is toast. Killing a LOT of people (still not over Shireen, never will be) was for nothing. Jon Snow is toast (as far as anyone knows). She is shattered. She’s clearly been at all this for centuries – she’s been serving the Red God without question, without hesitation, and with success, for a really long time. And now? Now she’s probably feeling just as old as she looks. She’s frail. She’s worn out. And I think, and this could just be me projecting, I think she’s starting to question her faith. That monument of faith that’s been in her life for so long is suddenly starting to tip over, and it looks like it’s going to crush *her* instead of her enemies.
So. TL;DR I think that scene was an important reveal into Melisandre’s psyche and I don’t think it was a throwaway about her sexuality.
maybe
I def agree with this and honestly, the scene confirmed for me (as a book reader) the whole “her looks are just a facade, she’s really a very old magic user” thing that many of us have been speculating!
I interpreted it that way as well, from a character perspective. But the way it was filmed, especially pre-aging, seemed to emphasize “here is this sexy lady, everyone look at how sexy she is” at least as much as the actual character stuff that was happening. And honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the psyche stuff was completely the actress, and not the intention of the writers/director…
Yeah, I think the way it was filmed botched it, because HBO was careful to let you see her young, hot, and naked before you see her old, withered, and naked.
I think it would have worked better if you only see her old once she takes her robe off.
yeah okay this is what i was thinking but I don’t know enough about filming to be able to say, but yeah the thing that made me think this is that there are a lot of ways to show a person’s naked body, and this one seems to have been purposefully shot the same way the camera ogles Mellisandre’s usually naked body, as though to purposefully juxtapose sexy/old, as opposed to powerful/frail.
and also like, she takes off her robe in a sexy way and everything, right? It’s not like she’s just taking her robe off to get ready to go to bed the way a normal person does, she stands in front of the mirror and is like, “behold, my nudity!” and lets her cloak drop to the ground and then just leaves it on the floor!!!
I read that as a difficult decision with the result of “I’m about to drop this super effective glamor, so I’m going to enjoy the hell out of being YoungSexy just now.”
I don’t know, I guess that would seem more plausible to me if it were possible to actually see anything in that mirror.
I totally agree! Plus, it reminded me of the scene a few seasons ago when she met Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion. That’s the only other time we’ve seen her uncertain about her power, since she obviously can’t do what Thoros does. So I feel like seeing her completely vulnerable like that is going to lead to her crisis (which will resolve by her bringing Jon back, probably after some encouragement from Davos, who is the best.)
Davos really is just the best. <3 u Davos
I absolutely took it as her feeling tired and lost after misinterpreting the flames and what she was supposed to be doing. She was so weary when she came to see Jon. I don’t even think she is evil, I think she believe this is what is needed to defeat darkness.
I also wondered if she has decided to die? A life for a life for Jon Snow? But I am basically forcing everything into a resurrection plot by my own agenda.
I don’t know, man, I think it was so GoT could fill its tit quota. Hand to God, I was watching and said to my friend “hey, maybe we’ll get through a whole episode without boobs!” and then this happened. Spoke too soon, man. SPOKE TOO SOON.
Although at least this tit reveal was relevant to the plot? Like, not just background tits??
GoT focused more on the woman’s stories for this premier, which was nice. But the show doesn’t understand that what we need is the equal to the baths-and-whorehouses stories—background dick!! Woman and men talking about something TOTALLY UNRELATED, and then just like partially-erect naked dudes hanging out. Big dicks, little dicks. Just hanging out. Just some good ole background dick.
all right I been thinking about this and I have come around, I think you’re right and maybe the problem is that I was misreading it because I have still got a bad tendency to look at women primarily through the lens of the Male Gaze first. Even if I am trying to consciously reject it, I am still inadvertently letting it define my perspective.
SO. Okay, well done, a point well-considered, I will bear this in mind for the future.
re: 3 I kind of disagree–I thought that was less a revelation than a character moment (I mean, we already know she’s real old I thought.) She’s losing faith that her magic means anything and her god is real–catching sight of herself in the mirror, she realizes that even her face is just another shitty illusion that isn’t representative of real power. It’s more a “ahhh the person Davos etc are depending on is giving up” moment than a WHOA “she’s old and tricked everyone” moment. LOL I’ve never written anything on the internet about Game of Thrones before!!!
Well, maybe. Maybe this is possible.
I agree. I also thought the Melisandre thing was supposed to be a reminder to the viewers that Melisandre can Do Shit – sort of underscoring Davos’s earlier point that he’s seen her do incredible things. It’s a reminder that even though she’s fucked up for seasons now and misread the flames, she is ultimately magical/powerful and she should be able pull something out of the fire.
Have you read the books? I am so sad about Dorne. So, so sad. THEY KILLED ALEXANDER SIDDIG WHYYY. Also , I was really hoping the Sand Snakes would be this variety of awesome and unique women and instead they’re perfectly fine actresses who are being wasted in shitty scenes.
ETA: but def really enjoyed the Deus Ex Brienne and Sansa accepting Brienne as her night. More Brienne, all the time, forever. Also, I’m generally liking Show!Brienne over Book!Brienne, because the latter’s internal dialogue has waay too much (read: any thoughts) about her being sad that she isn’t pretty and ladylike.
I’m really rooting for Sansa as daQueenindaNorf here.
I read up to…the one before the Dragons. My recollection is that I only heard about the Sand Snakes by reputation, I don’t remember them actually appearing in the books before that.
They’re a collection of Oberyn’s half daughters who take being sisters/Oberyn’s daughters and kicking ass pretty seriously; they all look pretty different (body type, hair color, etc), have different strengths beyond “this is my fav weapon, lololol” and one of them is a POC because her mom is a Summer Islander.
This all could’ve been better, is what I’m saying. I think you may have missed one of Doran’s awesome speeches too.
one thing that Game of Thrones the show clearly indicates is how hampered they are by having to have to tie everything together to the main arc of the show. Why can’t there just be like six prestige HBO dramas and one of them is just the Sand Snakes, going about their business in Dorne? I dunno.
I would truly love an array of Game of Thrones-related shows, including:
-The Sand Snakes!
-Tyrion and Varys (ideally Tyion, Varys, and Bronn) Explore the World!
-Arya and Gendry Roam Westeros
-Queen of Thorns’ History of Westeros
-Sansa and Brienne’s Awesome Revenge Spree Through the North
I want a spinoff that’s just a sitcom centered around Loras and Renly as the classic bickering married couple who also happen to be in charge of Westeros (though of course Margaery does most of the work).
Would you consider changing Arya and Gendry to Arya and Gendry and Syrio and the Hound?
of course! I had forgotten how delightful those interactions were.
Sand Snakes are A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE’S Boba Fett. They don’t actually appear that much or really do anything (yet), but fans love them because they are sketched out really well as super badasses and it’s fun to imagine their adventures.
Ahh you are too right!
More than one of them is probably a POC. The particular one you’re referring to is probably black (though she’s not in Dorne when they’re introduced) but there’s no other indication that the others are all white.
I would say that probably Tyene is White–I think she’s described as blonde/fair-skinend/blue eyed, but I think you’re right, the rest of them could be POC. It’s been awhile since I’ve read the books. The one I’m referring to is def Black, possibly biracial.
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing how weird it feels to be writing about our racial descriptors for a fictional world, but the flipside is to ignore them completely and have film/tv adaptations cast everyone as white so… *sigh*
I have to say I am really glad they nixed the whole “Quentyn Martell goes to Meereen to marry Daenerys but gets incinerated by dragons because he is the dumbest” but I wish they would take the extra space that frees up in the narrative to give the Sand Snakes distinct personalities instead of “Three murderous bitches, one of whom is horny.” Also I kind of miss the whole “In Dorne, ladies can rule so really Myrcella should be queen” thing because that made me actually like Dorne a little bit.
Right? I feel like “let’s stage a coup and put a lady on the throne” is a much more compelling subplot than “eh, let’s do more murders.”
Also, Quentyn is the worst and I do not miss him.
TBH I mostly wanted Doran’s “Fire and Blood” speech and yeah, the “Myrcella should be queen, we have ruling queens in Dorne” subplot. I’m pretty meh about Quentyn as well.
What a waste of Alexander Siddig, for real.
Also, how the hell did Obara and Nymeria get on the boat when they were just on the dock? Is Trystane on Myrcella’s boat or his own? So Jamie’s got TWO dead bodies to deal with? Why didn’t they kill Jamie if they just dgaf?
I ALSO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS
This did not occur to me while actually watching the episode, but now it is bothering me SO MUCH.
I chose to believe that Trystane was hanging out on a boat off the shore of Dorne for funsies but that wouldn’t explain why he’s painting Myrcella’s death eyes so.. I have no idea.
I also don’t get how they got on the boat, but maybe it turned around and went back? I don’t have any better ideas.
Waiting to kill Trystane until later totally makes sense, though – Ellaria wants war. She kills Myrcella in Dorne, then gets the heir Trystane out of the way in King’s Landing so that she can accuse the Lannisters of the murder.
Sad to see Siddig go, but it made my Trekkie heart glad that people are writing that Dr. Bashir died.
I was really about to write “NOOO YOU KILLED JULIAN BASHIR” until I finally remembered Siddig’s name. ^^;
I always have to take a moment to remind myself that he’s Alexander Siddig, because I engraved the cast list on my memory in the early seasons where he was still listed as Siddig el Fadil.
I don’t like her character much, and every time she was on screen I wanted to turn to my husband and say “what’s she going to have to do that’s going to necessitate her getting naked” and lo and behold she starts undoing the dress…
My husband says “I didn’t order up a crone!” and I just laughed and laughed.
Re: #1 I haven’t watched it but I’m not convinced. I remember thinking this exact same thing after watching the first episode of at least two seasons before. I’ll be waiting for your thoughts next week in case you’re right.
Idk I definitely cried when Brienne swore fealty to Sansa (and Sansa accepted it, which I hear did not happen last season)
Sansa struggling with her half of the oath! My heart!
and Pod right there to help, on the short list of Reliable Good Dudes with Ser Davos.
Yeah, it’s a short list. Hodor, I guess. Sam Tarly, although he’s kind of “eh” on reliable, if what you’re relying on him to do is fight. Jon Snow was fairly good and reliable, but who knows how he’ll react to resurrection/wolfification.
Hot Pie!
yeah, there was definitely a tear or two. it was the one part of the episode that I was wholeheartedly on board with.
IKR? I can tell you the moment that the show really grabbed me: near the beginning of the second season when Brienne took off her helmet at Renly’s tourney.
I so so appreciate how Mallory consistently hits it out of the park on bisexual issues! I didn’t realise how much biphobia I encounter daily until I read Mallory’s responses and am surprised to hear kindness where I would expect vitriol.
We’re running a cool interview this week with my friend Eliel Cruz, who is a bi dude and the new director of #faithfullylgbt, get excited.
!!! This is me excited!!!
YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!
She does it so well! I was not happy to read the Slate comments and see all kinds of people proclaiming that bisexuals have literally no reason to reveal they’re bisexual unless they’re talking about being attracted to a specific individual, which only a monster would do in front of their partner/in a relationship at all.
The comment on any article mentioning bisexuality even in passing are best avoided. People HATE bisexuals.
But we’re so cuddly! And extrapolating from the Toast commentariat, well-read, fascinating, and possessed of extremely good taste in all things.
We are indeed! Maybe they’re just jealous?
Terrible feelings of inadequacy. It’s very sad, really.
Lemonade is a gift to the world but a TREASURE to black women. My heart is so full this morning.
Favorite part of Lemonade was the night stage with the bowls of fire and Bey and Michaela DePrince surrounded by the beautiful women in white, including the mothers of the lost boys. The visual itself brought tears to my eyes and then the woman Mardi Gras Indian casting some sort of magic over the empty place settings just made me lose it.
My favourite part of Lemonade is definitely the monster truck at the end of “Hold Up.”
Me too! And the internet has brought me no gifs of it thus far, which is a major oversight on the internet’s part.
The mothers with the photos is where I started to cry, and it was off and on for the remainder, like during the shots of Bey & family, the playing around on the football field, etc.
She looked *so* much like Tina in that scene. Which felt important.
1. I have seen so many shows with understudies
I have seen so many shows with AMAZING understudies
WHY WOULD YOU BOO THEM THEY ARE GIVING YOU THEIR BEST SO YOU WILL HAVE A GREAT EXPERIENCE
Ugh I hope those people who walked out are EATING CROW I FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT THIS
2. (and OT): I have sent off postcards to my Toast Posties! Except for the international one, because that requires special stamps. But I’ll get that out this week. So excited!
I remember a friend of mine from high school being so confused as to why people walked out of the production of Gypsy she had tickets for because there was an understudy for Bernadette Peters — because it’s still Broadway, the understudy will be phenomenal!
No kidding! Like in the case of Hamilton, I practically want to see everyone. I’d be disappointed not to see an OBC member but then so freaking happy to see Andrew Chappelle or Alysha Deslorieux or Austin Smith… You know? It would be AMAZING and special in a completely different way.
I saw Andrew Chappelle! (Anthony Ramos was still in hospital, this was August ’15.) AND HE WAS BRILLIANT. And if I had seen Javier Munoz or Jon Rua as Hamilton, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN BRILLIANT. Etcetera.
I just don’t get walking out.
I saw Jon Rua when LMM was out sick a couple of days the week before Christmas, and yes, HE WAS BRILLIANT. I was a teeny bit sad not to see LMM, but we got to see everyone else from the original cast, Rua was wonderful, and having the understudy did not detract from the show one little bit. I was still in tears for…well, way too much of it, and delighted for all of it.
We saw Alysha D playing Angelica and she was frickin’ amazing!
We saw her as Eliza. What a talent!
Recently I saw a production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which is about a pair of theater critics, one of whom is the second-string critic for his paper. He has a bunch of woeful speeches about being someone else’s replacement, about how everywhere he goes everyone asks “Where’s Higgs?”, about how some nights he dreams of revolution. The night I saw it, this role WAS PLAYED BY AN UNDERSTUDY. I was delighted.
The vast majority of the shows I’ve seen have been traveling productions and most of them have had at least one or two understudies performing. These shows have been almost uniformly great, and I wouldn’t’ve known any of the actors were understudies if not for the signs in the lobby.
Well, I am with you on all that, and I would never boo, that’s just horrible, but I do know people who want to see this new show 100% for Audra McDonald and zero% because they think the show sounds interesting. And the tickets are extremely expensive. So for them it’s more as if you bought a $200 ticket to a Springsteen concert and he sent out another highly qualified vocalist that night, but did not perform himself.
Shuffle Along? That show has ALL the most amazing talent in it, those folks should watch some Brian Stokes Mitchell videos on YouTube. Walking out of that because Audra McDonald was out sick would be like going to see an amazing band and then walking out because one person was missing: yeah, it’s a shame that you’re not getting the full cohort, but look at who is still here!
STOKES! Is he actually the handsomest man in the world? Probably, right? Personally I’d pay more to see him than her, plus he is a surer bet– at the moment I’m in no position to buy that ticket, alas.
You’ve seen his “This Nearly Was Mine,” right? Probably, but I can’t not mention it! They’re both so preternaturally gifted, I almost fainted when I learned they were doing a show together, not that there’s any real chance I’ll get to see it.
And what do they even expect to happen? It’s not like booing will magically bring the original actor back; it just makes you look like a dick.
You guys r/relationships just offered up a wonderful new candidate for The Actual Worst
https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4…
Oh god I just read the TITLE of the post and had to come back here to *rub hands together with glee* I’m pulling my blanket up over me more tightly and biting into my apple just like Bastian in The Neverending Story.
ETA oh yes thank you, this is just what my morning needed.
He uses his newspaper horoscope to get out of doing chores. I mean… I’m almost impressed? That’s some dedication to fuckery right there.
I mean, I have used a LOT of excuses to get out of chores in my day. If only I had known I could just use a horoscope!
You have to put in the initial effort of getting pretty into astronomy and reading it daily, so, maybe not worth it?
(Oh god, I just remembered there was a whole Calvin & Hobbes story arc about this exact thing. Don’t date Calvin!)
THANK YOU for that walk down memory lane THANK YOU
“Here comes your mom and it looks like she has a bone to pick with the moon.”
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2012/04/1…
This was perfect, thank you for the link!
The ironic thing is that he’s kinda right about them not being astrologically compatible, in this case, but it’s his fault. Cancer is a water sign and Aries is a fire sign, and he seems to be a literal wet blanket who is putting out her fire.
I do not live my life by astrology and have never consulted my horoscope when making decisions, but I do get a kick out of it and find a lot of uncanny coincidences when it comes to personality traits. I get a particular kick out of the Darkside Zodiac books which snarkily describe all of the signs based on all of their terrible traits.
Quote from Darkside Zodiac about Cancer:
“On the Darkside, this makes you a grumpy, secretive, passive-aggressive grudge-hoarder, with bipolar mood swings and a positive genius for pointless worrying”
JIM, IS THAT YOU?
My great-aunt literally wrote a book about relationships and astrology and I’m 99% sure she would still have told this dude to stop being a drip. (Rest in peace, Aunt Helen.)
A coworker of mine is a professional astrologer (on top of being a bookkeeper; I do not understand). I’m 99.9% sure that she’d tell him to get his head out of his ass and stop pretending astrology was why he was a bad boyfriend.
I am also a cancer and, yes, IT ME
I especially relate to that part about pointless worrying. Moon children, unite.
These book sound amazing and terrifyingly accurate.
Coming in late to the party to profess my sincere love for Darkside Zodiac. It’s such a great book on so many levels, and it IS terrifying in its accuracy.
Oh gee what a coincidence, he follows his horoscope slavishly when he wants to avoid chores or commitments, but no sign of him paying attention to them telling him to do shit.
Top comment though: ‘Everything about your relationship is excellent, except for the fact that you’ve got a sustained and continued difficulty in getting him to act like an adult.’ Bam, yes, that’s it right there.
Oh lord oh lord. To me that is one of two things: mental illness manifesting as a need for control, OR (what I think is more likely), a guy who is realizing he doesn’t want to be in this relationship and is using astrology as a crutch to back out and perform a Now She Will Break Up With Me gambit.
Right. He doesn’t want to have to go to the trouble of breaking up with her himself, so he’s just going to make life miserable until she cracks.
Oh my gosh.
Just break up with him and say sorry, my horoscope said there was a far better person in my future who is actually worthy of me. Bye!
Don’t you wish you could get away with saying “I’m sorry but I can’t do [tedious chore] today, or tomorrow, or really not until September. Horoscope, you know.”
Also, the problem isn’t that she’s Aries and he’s Cancer. It’s that she’s an adult and he’s a child.
Oh my god, this is bananas. I love it.
He’s in his 20s and has recently become increasingly convinced that there is an external force that rules his life and that he has found a particular system to work with that force. His motivation and drive have fallen way off and he’s having serious communication trouble in his relationship. To me that sounds like it could absolutely be the onset of schizophrenia.
I feel like there should be a Brain Ed course taught in high school where people can learn, “hey, if someone important to you starts acting really weird all of a sudden, that might be a sign of an illness which can and should be addressed, and here are some resources in case you’re ever in that position,” but then we as a society haven’t even figured out that it’s a good idea to show kids how to put a condom on so I won’t hold my breath.
O wow, this is a really great point. I was struggling to reconcile the described pre-and post- behaviour, and this is an excellent explanation.
Your next point is also excellent. Both are harrowing. Well done.
That… is a great point. Especially since the “science minded” guy she describes him being does not track with this obsession with astrology at all.
I would bet a lot of money that “science minded” was how the dude described himself to the letter writer. Frequently. As a way to underline that she’s so “emotional.”
I’m cringing because this is so likely to be exactly what happened.
They always, always do.
Yep, I see “logical” now and expect a woman who has internalized some manchild’s veto of her emotional reality. Haven’t been wrong yet.
Yes, that little bit in there at the beginning about how she knows she’s so emotional and that affects her interactions. . . sounds an awful lot like regurgitation of a script he’s written about her.
Especially with all of her apologizing for getting angry at him, “I’m not proud to say that I shouted quite a bit at him, being tired and angry” – like, lady, YOU ARE JUSTIFIED IN BEING ANGRY AT HIM, HE TRASHED YOUR HOME.
Oh, man, yes.
Can we create this? Brain Ed seems like just such a necessary thing, and I’m not a subject matter expert but I know how to create distance learning courses and websites and stuff!
It’s not online, but these sorts of things do exist! Mental Health First Aid: http://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/0,5885,7-339-71550_…
This is exactly how it manifested in my ex, so I am 100% on board with this interpretation.
I don’t know if anyone here has seen “The Trouble with Harry,” but when I read that I wanted to tell her to hit him on the head with a milk bottle and move away at once.
I forgot about that movie! So fun.
I. just. If you are a Cancer and yet generally a calm and rational person, THAT RIGHT THERE should keep you from fully buying into astrology, because we Cancers are not generally renowned for our even-temperedness (I am sorry, YOU try being a water sign ruled by the moon, okay?)
ALSO Cancers are supposed to be the most domestic of the signs, so he needs to do the fucking dishes (advice I should follow myself)
r/relationships is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
I blame Nicole for the fact that I literally read it daily now. Sometimes twice daily or more.
My favorite so far is the lady whose boyfriend was literally gaslighting her [original post], and when she figured it out, she had him over for a movie and made him watch Gaslight. [update]
I remember that one! It was amazing. Truly the internet at its best.
OMG THAT FINAL UPDATE THO (it’s at the bottom of the OP)
yeah terrible 🙁 lucky she already had plans to go overseas!
This is amazing, and it warms my heart to see how much knowledge about abuse tactics and red flags has just seeped into popular understanding, so that more and more people can avoid abusers before they get really entangled with them. Good job internet.
All the comments were “whoa, actual literal gaslighting” which, yeah, but if she knew what that was, she wouldn’t have asked?
I’m beginning to think that they should just rename it /r/trainwreck. (I guess that there used to be a community with that name that was banned; not sure I wanna know the story behind that.)
That is amazing. I love reading it because it makes me feel INFINITELY better about every relationship I’ve ever had. Even the shitty ones. Though actually I was with so many awful, awful men that now my kneejerk reaction is always, always DTMFA.
I feel SO OLD but can someone please explain this Tidal thing to me? Do I really have to give them my money? I cannot just purchase the Lemonade I desire?
Oh hello fellow Old, I have so many questions about this brave new internet music thing.
Hopefully some sprightly young person will come along to hold our hands and explain it to us.
I have gone back to school so I am surrounded by Youths. I was talking to one of them about Hamilton, and she asked me if I would like her to send me the bootleg.
At that moment, I realized it was official – I AM AN OLD. There was a point in time where I would have been ALL OVER that. I would have torrented it the second it came out. But instead I just felt mild horror. A bootleg? Of Hamilton?! No thank you. So unfair to the actors.
With regard to Hamilton, and other Broadway shows, bootlegs are the only way they develop a following. There’s no way Hamilton would be getting the coverage it is if it had only been seen by folks who could afford to get to NYC and buy tickets. When you don’t live in the US (or New York), and/or you can’t afford the $$$ ticket price but you want to understand the huge cultural conversation it spurred what else can you do? Most people bootlegging the show are also buying the soundtrack on iTunes, and the Hamiltome and will buy tickets to the inevitable regional tours when they arrive. I know that bootlegs/the internet got me into both Wicked and Avenue Q back in the day, and I have since paid for tickets to multiple productions as well as iTunes versions of a bunch of songs, so I feel fine about watching a few streams (usually not of the whole show anyway).
According to the news it is going to come out on iTunes, Google Music, etc. It’s just a matter of when. Everyone was saying midnight last night, but I don’t see it yet so??? Tidal doesn’t have the EXCLUSIVE, anyway, just the first shot.
Yes, help please! What’s Tidal? Can I watch anywhere else? I want to seeee but not to figure out some new thing.
You can watch it on HBOGO if you have access to that (through yourself or a friend) or if you have actual HBO on your TV, it’s On Demand there!
I have Czech HBOGO…
Somehow the idea of Beyonce subtitled into Czech is deeply entertaining to me.
Tidal is the music service owned by Jay Z, Beyonce, Kanye, etc etc. The group of them that own/participate in it tend to release their music only there for a certain length of time and then release it elsewhere. Thankfully, Beyonce only made hers Tidal exclusive for a couple days. It’s up now on iTunes and Amazon Music, if you buy the album online there, I believe you get the hour long special, too.
… I watched it on tumblr last night; I was going to link you but it seems to have been taken down, unsurprisingly.
you can buy it on itunes!
Praise!!
It’s out on iTunes as of this morning! (I had the same questions yesterday.)
Ahhh follow up old person question – is this the videos, or the music?
The iTunes track listing is for the songs + the 1-hour Lemonade movie, so it looks like the videos aren’t available individually.
Because I, too, am old, I just waited the two weeks for Rihanna’s ANTI to come out on disc while everyone else got from/off/whatever Tidal. And then I ordered it from my locally-owned record store because I live in a town that still has hippy-dippy shit like locally owned record stores.
Lemonade will be available on CD May6…
Locally-owned record stores are _the best_. My current fav is the one that is run by the grumpiest old dude ever who a) stocks his record store exclusively with Music You Haven’t Heard Of (but because he has great taste there’s like a 99% chance you’ll wind up with excellent music anyway) b) talks shit about kids who come in and ask “have you heard of blah out of whatever scene”? No, kid, I have not, because there is way too much music in the world for me to notice it all and c) will actively Not Help people who wander into his shop with “my niece is into the Doors and I would like to help her branch out, any recommendations?”
As a lover of many types of music, I get grumpy myself with people who are judgy about music. And refusing to help someone with recommendations seems…well, his store so I suppose he can be rude if he likes!
My local record store is pretty alternative and hipster but the owner loves that I regularly order pop music from him. If you’re on Tumblr and you’ve ever seen this post with the kitty sleeping in the row of CDs? That’s my local store!
The best part of that is that he regularly complains that he doesn’t make rent and I am like “John, I know why this is. Let’s talk about that Tori record that I actively tried to shove money at you instead of Amazon to get and IT STILL ISN’T HERE. Or about the dozen or so regulars that hang in your space and drink beer and stop talking when strangers walk in the door. Or your inability to be pleasant to strangers who want to shove money at you”. But instead I just giggle about it with another regular who is also my friend and make plans to take over the shop when he retires.
THAT CAT THO. ♥
I *want* to own this as a physical thing. However, I am still wrestling with the stuff that I/we own and the space that I/we have to keep it all.
Konmari in the fall. Then I start buying books and CDs again.
Oh, you can just buy the album on Tidal! (I did.) You can also buy it from a bunch of other places too now. But you can *also* get a subscription to Tidal, which is like Spotify but with just a few select artists.
Tidal offers lossless format music, which matters to some people. Their lack of videocasting support for Android is a deal-breaker for me though.
Let me translate what I read here:
Tidal offers (words words) music, which matters to some people (but obviously not you, waka). Their lack of (something about streaming video maybe? Or that periscope things the Youth do?) support for (that kind of phone that the Youths have) is a deal-breaker for (this Youth who understands these things) though.
Good grief.
Also Toast, I was in Denver this wkd and had the best time, best wkd of 2016. Why did no one tell me about Denver?!
Tell me what was good – I think we may be going there in a month or so.
I went down to the “LoDo” hipster enclave and had a great massage in the morning, and by the time I emerged all of these breweries on the st had opened up! It was DIVINE. I was exploring alone, sat at the bar at TWO dif drinking establishments and everyone I met and talked to was warm and fantastic and friendly, and not gross. I didnt have to push off creepers. A whole cadre of dudes was partying on the patio and I didnt overhear anything gross or abhorrent. There are also chic diners and bars in Uptown. And The Tattered Cover book store by Union Station is basically what I want my home to become.
Nice! I know that the presence of beer is going to make this an easy sell for my husband, and I am a sucker for a great bookstore.
I moved to Boulder a few months ago and most people are sooooo nice. I think it’s because everyone gets like 5x the needed Vitamin D and, like, hikes and drinks beer all day.
(There is a sizable entitled rich white butthole contingent as well, but, you get that most everywhere these days.)
Is everyone tired of talking about Prince? Good, because I’m not either. Here is an article about Prince and ballet.
And here is Toast Goddess Misty Copeland dancing in Prince’s cover of Crimson and Clover.
*skidding tire noise* Did someone say “Prince and ballet”?
Whooaaaaa, that music video was WAY trippier than I expected.
Thank you for posting this. This morning I was all, “I don’t think I’m done grieving Prince yet” and headed here to see if anyone else wasn’t done.
Never done grieving! I watched “Under the Cherry Moon” on Saturday night – I had forgotten how exquisite (and odd) that movie is! Definitely going to try to catch “Purple Rain” in a theater this week. My love for the man is stronger than ever <3
The endless challenge of preaching to white church: convincing them that structural sins like poverty and racism are as important as the life destroying problems of saying fuck sometimes, enjoying a gin and tonic, and looking at porn every now and again.
My bible study group of white people (including our head pastor) is reading Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. The levels of “I never knew/thought of/considered that” are just off the charts. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring these messages to the larger church body, but I’m not sure how yet.
There is a church in my neighborhood that I sometimes feel I “should” be going to. It’s only a block away from me, and I really value what their pastor has to say. The congregation as a whole appears to value a lot of the things that I value. It’s a natural fit except….
It’s an overwhelmingly white congregation (I am also white) and, just as an example, I walked past yesterday during services (the windows were open) and they were all singing like a gospel choir. Like there’s a kind of self-congratulatory acceptance in this crowd. Like they’ve solved their own racism.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m better or more woke than these folks, but I do feel uncomfortable with this celebration of multiculturalism when there is no actual multiplicity of cultures within the group.
The ongoing separation of the white and black churches in the US is so inextricably linked to the white church being SO COLOSSALLY WRONG about civil rights that attempts to blend congregations are doomed to fail and possibly even wrong-headed without some incredible repentance and reconciliation on the part of the white church. It is really complicated. (None of this is to disagree with your post, by the way.)
Yes. My congregation went through a twenty-year process of working on how to be sister churches with a black congregation and there was a lot of learning how to respect what the black church really wanted, which as it turned out was totally not a lot of white lawyers volunteering to teach parenting classes.
What we ended up with: shared social events with potluck food a couple of times a year, some shared youth activities, occasional pastor exchange Sundays, and shared after-school tutoring.
The black church didn’t want to be helped. They REALLY didn’t want to be taught and guided. They want to be heard and respected.
It shouldn’t have been so hard to figure this out, but it was.
This issue is totally not funny, but the notion of a lot of white lawyers volunteering to teach parenting classes is going to be my high-bar LOL for today. Oh man.
As a white lawyer, I did an involuntary full-body cringe
I know! The complications really get to me and I feel uncomfortable in spaces where people are not acknowledging the complications. I know it’s easy for me to feel complacent and comfortable and church is the LAST place I want to feel complacent and comfortable (well…. that particular kind of comfortable).
So colossally wrong about slavery too. It’s why there is the African Methodist Episcopal Church and AME-Zion that are not part of the main Methodist Church, and why the Southern Baptists are called Southern. They exist because northern and southern Baptists split over whether or not it was Christian to own people. White American Christians got some serious shit to reckon with, and they by and large don’t.
THIS
Or maybe there’s a lingering issue that we call us the “main Methodist Church.” (Said in love by a fellow UMCer.)
As I’ve mentioned previously, I spent over two years working at the local Catholic diocese, as an event planner. The leadership in the chancery was constantly bemoaning the lack of minorities in the church, but every single suggestion I made to reach out to those groups was met with absolute refusal, usually along the lines of “well, we just don’t do that kind of thing.” Spanish language talks for young adults, offering confessions in Spanish at events, even finding a speaker of color were all just flat out shut down. And then they would all go back to wondering why they are failing to attract and retain people of color. ::smdh::
Absolutely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J0jYmfeRCY
I’ve been attending a Quaker meeting on and off, and right now it’s mostly off due largely to consistent TOTAL TONE-DEAFNESS about race and class issues.
A few months ago a guest at the meeting, a white woman, spoke to us about the play she had written about female genital mutilation, the triumphant conclusion of which involved the main character literally tearing off “the hat of tradition” and stomping on it. White feminism, y’all!
I’m in a committee working on this at my Quaker meeting. Much as I love our un-pastored structure, it makes it complicated to introduce ministry on this subject, or any other subject. Equality is a central, crucial Quaker testimony, but we can’t have someone give a sermon about that, so we rely on people to show up to stuff before or after meeting for worship, or on weeknights. There’s also a lot of assumptions being made about how well we’re already doing. We’re proud of the Quaker abolitionists but in denial about how much racism persisted in the Society of Friends at that time, let alone what our track record has looked like since then. We’ve really got to start noticing how we’re falling down in order to start improving.
My local meeting is entirely, embarrassingly white, which makes it especially cringey when, for example, our charity drive of the month is “send your cast-off tools and gardening equipment to Africa!” Like come on dudes, 1. Africa is a fucking CONTINENT, can you be a little more specific and 2. I’m not sure paying to ship some blunted secateurs there is a good use of charitably intended money.
Arghh. Anyway. Thank you for the work you’re doing.
I love comments like this that articulate the problem so simply and completely.
And then there are those uber white churches that don’t recognize that poverty and racism are structural sins, or that all forms of structural bigotry are strongholds that need to be broken/pulled down. (I attend one of those churches, unfortunately. I should note there are a few black and biracial attendees, but the congregation is overwhelmingly white. Getting out and finding another church isn’t exactly in the cards for me for various reasons.)
I did not watch it in full (as it was rather long) but there were some really interesting bits about this kind of repentance and reconciliation during an event called Azusa Now that happened quite recently. I believe that it is available on youtube and I may make my way through bits of it at a time.
I haven’t finished Lemonade yet (Pesach this weekend, was busy) but I’m completely blown away.
Also, that owl is plotting the painful demise of the person weighing it. And probably of the rest of us as well.
This makes me think that Peter’s most recent incarnation is this dude I went on a terrible date with who at one point said *condenscending voice* “there’s like…this guy who writes a lot about racism you should check out? You may have heard of him? His name is like Coates or something?”
He also incorrectly explained back to me the plot of a book I brought up. And was the final nail in the coffin of me attempting to date men.
Peter is, like, the straight man of the Gospels. Both the clueless straight man kind and the one who feeds the hero setups for his wham lines.
Martha and Mary should have been the ones left in charge of the church. Mary could preach inspiring sermons and Martha could make sure the meetings were safe and run outreach to people who were hungry or cold or imprisoned.
Thank you so much for this awesome characterization of the strengths and talents that Martha and Mary would each bring to the table in a space not commandeered by dudes. #notalldudes
Badass early women-who-didn’t-call-themselves-Christians-yet!
Mary Magdalene would do the teaching and research and Mary Cleophas would show up for the difficult but necessary tasks.
And let’s not forget who was paying for everything! Wealthy women of yore.
The more things change, really.
My parents read through the New Testament, aloud, together, a few years ago and my mom was struck by how frequently Paul’s letters have a bit in them about please just send some more money.
If women had been running things Sapphira & Ananias probs wouldn’t have needed to be struck dead. They could have worked something out.
Here in Brooklyn it is like a badge of white boy honor to read Coates. I see at least one dude every day on the train holding Between the World and Me with the cover facing outwards. They are never reading it, just holding it.
Big Fluffy Dog Rescue just posted a tiny* Sansa-looking puppy** to their facebook!
*relatively speaking
**in that all dogs are puppies
Oh! You probably want to see this dog. And all the dogs.
https://www.facebook.com/bigfluffydogrescue/photo…
hopefully that is the right link, I feel like fb keeps changing what I need to do to successfully share a photo.
Edit: OK, it seems that no matter what I do I can’t get it to link RIGHT TO THE PICTURE but it’s the first one in the album that looks like Sansa.
Pretty sure this is the picture you want.
Yes!
She looks like a mix between an African Wild Dog and a direwolf. I love her immediately.
WHY AM I NOT FRIENDS WITH THIS DOG? 🙁
^How I feel about most pictures of cute animals on the internet.
Feeling very stop-the-planet-I-want-to-get-off having read this article about mentally ill prisoners being tortured in Florida. What the HELL is wrong with us as a species?
Not even going to touch that this morning, but based on your description, I too, would like to disembark with you.
I shouldn’t have touched it, but my superpower is reading depressing news stories even when I don’t really want to because I won’t be able to do anything about the problems they describe.
The sad thing is they probably need to do equally thorough mental health evaluations for the guards and prisoners, but that’s never going to happen.
Yesterday I discovered that the black skinny jeans I got at Winners the other day are from Rachel Roy’s brand, can I still wear them?
In off-topic news, today is my boss’ last day in the office before she leaves for 3 weeks and I have to be acting on her behalf. I know realistically this just means I’ll be attending a lot more meetings to discuss work other people will be doing, but it’s hard not to panic at the thought.
You’re gonna be great!
You’ve already spent the money. Does your ass look good in the jeans? Wear them.
I have a dress from the Ivanka Trump brand that i bought in TKmaxx. Its really pretty and fits amazing and I can’t bare to not wear it, but seeing Trump on the label does make me feel a bit sick at times.
Wear it, feel hot, don’t tell people where you got it.
Cut off the label, perhaps? I mean, if you can.
And then, if possible, make a donation to your favorite charity that actively campaigns against one of his shit-brained ideas?
I have a pair of beautiful and comfortable Ivanka Trump shoes that I paid full price for a few years ago. I didn’t wear them all last year and then decided that I already spent the money and its not the shoes fault. I shouldn’t blame them.
So, nothing makes me feel quite as white as learning all this new slang when things like Lemonade are released. “What do you mean her name isn’t Becky? Why call somebody out but give them a fake name? Is Beyonce calling Jay-Z out and still protecting him by not letting this woman’s name out? Does me saying ‘side chick’ sound as weird as I think it does?”
Then I started reading and found out what “Becky” actually means and realised that yes, “side chick” sounds as weird coming from me as “mate” did when I was in the UK.
Ha, I am not only having that problem, I had basically no idea until looking it up just now what Lemonade even was (I got very out of the habit of keeping up with new music when I went to university, and never really started again), so things like this are doubly incomprehensible to me. (“So, there was a music … video? And Beyonce said something about Jay-Z?”)
I’m not going to lie, I had to find annotated lyrics to Formation when it came out to really understand all the references. Beyonce is speaking beautifully and powerfully to an experience that is not mine, and I love it, but I have to study it to really see what she’s doing. It’s like the best part of college all over again. Luckily for my super-not-with-it self, her music and the way she releases things mean they make a HUGE splash when they come out so there are tons of articles and I get to learn a bunch of stuff. Then I go back and watch it and I can appreciate what’s being done.
Exactly why I’m looking forward to *certain* think pieces about Lemonade. I know there are nuances I’m totally missing.
I’m used to being from a culture that isn’t reflected online (its getting better, but for a long time I hung out in online spaces dominated by North American people and occasionally British people), so I’ve developed a habit of ignoring all slang/memes that come my way because inevitably I haven’t seen the source material. Occasionally I can gather a meaning from context and get a bit of a chuckle out of it, but generally I exsist in a online space of ‘Not Getting It.’
Thought process over the weekend: Hey Beyonce released a new song, cool. Oh no wait, its an album? that’s cool, I’ll listen to that at some point. Which song is the video everyone’s talking about from? The whole album is a video? That’s a baller move, can’t be bothered watching it, I’m in the middle of an Orphan Black re-watch. Why are they all talking about the Taylor Swift Becky meme again, didn’t that die? … Who cheats on Beyonce, that its a stupid move dude, she’s gonna crush you. … heh Lemonade. I get it. And that’s as far as I have gotten.
…ohhh, like, when life hands you lemons…
Wow, I just got that. I feel smart.
Beyonce is so good at taking these cliches like “making lemonade out of lemons” and fleshing them out, deepening them, and bringing them into reality.
She is such a freakin genius and “Freedom” makes me stand about 5 inches taller.
Toasties I had such a lovely, relaxing, sun-soaked weekend and now I’m starting the Most Intense Week ever, in which I move apartments and put in my last week of work at my job before I start my new one the following Monday, all while working 12-hour days with no time to run errands in the evenings. Encouragement appreciated!
::ENCOURAGEMENT::
You’ll make it! Try to schedule a “nap day” the earliest you can in your schedule. Just a day when you say no to all invitations, and make no plans. And you allow yourself the time and space you need.
Three years ago I did a very similar move apartments /job change all at once and it was exhausting but in the end worked out great. You can do this!
One word of advice – get plenty of vitamin C/fruits/hydration /whatever you use to prevent illness while moving . I got a nasty cold once everything settled down and of course had to work through it because my pto hadn’t kicked in yet. I also advise planning a chill out do nothing weekend asap once you are settled and a real vacation as soon as you can get time off at the new job (I overbooked myself and didn’t take more than a long weekend for 13 months – bad bad bad idea.)
Congratulations – it will be all done before you know it!
YOU CAN DO IT!!!
SAME. I’m starting an internship next week, and there’s so much left to do. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be when you’re simultaneously moving apartments. But we can do it! It’s this week of horrors, and then it’ll be easier.
I’ll be thinking of you while I run my own errands. Good luck with everything!
Honestly I only just got to watch Lemonade last night and tbh I still can’t even put into words anything about it except that after, I was like, who even am I anymore???
(Also, that country song got me hard. AND the one with Zendaya, Amandla, Chloe/Halle, the mothers of Trayvon/Eric/etc, oh my GOD.)
Seth Stewart, Daveed Digg’s understudy, was on stage for the Hamilton I saw and he was fantastic. I am glad those people walked out of the Sunset Boulevard show. They didn’t deserve to see Ria Jones’s performance.
If idiots want to throw out their money, I’m cool with it.
And of COURSE they were the losers who just cared about seeing a Hollywood actor in person.
I had understudies for Laurens/Philip and Peggy/Maria. And they were great.
New Doctor Who companion!
What do you think?? I watched an interview with her, and she’s seems really nice and is very excited to work on Doctor Who! As for her character, I’ll wait for the new episodes (in 2017, sob) to form an opinion, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to like her.
Edit: Ugh, can’t embed the gif.
I have a thing for women with masculine names so I am here for Bill.
I found myself being so torn between being 100% HERE FOR PEARL MACKIE who is AMAZING and I ALREADY LOVE HER/BILL, but then also I absolutely hate Moffat!Who and didn’t even watch the whole last season, so, do I want to watch this for her and then just be disappointed???
Then again, this IS gonna be Moffat’s last season, so I may watch it just knowing he’ll be gone at the end and it’s the last I’ll have to endure of his casual sexism, plot holes, repetitive writing, and juvenile humor, lol.
Ugh, Moffat. Regarding Pearl Mackie and Bill, he said something like “This is where the story really starts”. So, um, what about everything that happened these last years? Will the Doctor wake up and realise it was all a dream? Did none of this Moffat crap actually happen?
I really hope Bill is so awesome she makes us forget the terrible things that happen around her.
I mean that sounds like a super typical Moffat thing to say. And considering his plot holes, the fact that he considers a new season (heck sometimes even a new episode) a brand new start would not surprise me.
SAME though. And that she and maybe even 12 stick around for a new showrunner.
I am so sick of the way Moffat keeps saying stuff like that – “Here is the most important person in the world! This is the moment when the Doctor will finally face his own mortality! You’ve never seen anything as momentous as this!” It has lost its effectiveness after being used over and over again, and sometimes I don’t want massive epic story arcs with he fate of the very universe hanging in the balance – I just want to see some friends flying around and having adventures.
Right? You don’t have to save the universe, show, or even the world; you could just save these folks over here (remember when the show was all about saving These Folks Over Here?), or maybe romp around and explore some stuff.
Exactly! I’m gonna scream if Bill is, once again, an “ordinary girl” who devotes/sacrifices her life to/for the Doctor.
She sounds awesome, but I’ve found that I really can’t tell anything about Doctor Who companions based on the way they’re initially presented to us. Like, I was super excited for Martha, and I thought she was great in her first episode, but then they decided her only characteristic was going to be pining after the Doctor in a really obvious, embarrassing way. And I thought Catherine Tate was going to be awful based on her first episode, and then they toned her down and she became my favorite of the new series companions.
As someone who watched most of the classic series, though, I have to say that I think casting is one area where the new series really shines. I frequently hate the writing and a lot of the choices the showrunners make, and I will always think of the Tom Baker era as Real Doctor Who, but there’s so much of the classic series that’s pretty much unwatchable because of a nails-on-a-chalkboard companion (or Doctor), and that hasn’t happened to the new series so far.
First thought: Yes, she looks awesome!
Second thought: She’d look even more awesome as The Doctor.
I would LOVE the Doctor to regenerate as a woman (especially if she’s a WOC), but only after Moffat leaves. Because he would handle it HORRIBLY. (See: The Master/Missy/I can’t even get into it tbh.)
Uggggggh, true.
I definitely was like this! Yay, companion who is a woman of color! Oof, Moffat will probably f that up. Oh, well it’s his last season and he’s not the only writer, maybe there will be something good? I dunno, but at least it shouldn’t be romantic with Capaldi there, thank God.
I’m actually not sure Moffat wouldn’t invent a romantic connection between them.
ew ew ew yeah
He would LOVE to, I’m sure, but when Peter Capaldi signed on he put his foot down about his character flirting with Jenna Coleman’s. (Moffat compensated the only way he knows how: by having the Doctor constantly insult her physical appearance instead.) Pearl Mackie is even younger, so hopefully we’re safe?
Oh, I didn’t know that! Thank God for Peter Capaldi.
I mean that’s good he didn’t want to flirt, but not sure why he was okay with insulting her. Maybe it’s meant to be overcompensating because he find her pretty?
IDC actually, this was the season I quit Doctor Who. I’ll always come back for Xmas specials though.
I mean, the Doctr insults everybody, so maybe that was why he was ok with it?
I can’t remember if icky Moffat wrote any eps while Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) was Ten’s companion, but at least he wasn’t showrunner during that time.
Even so: Protect Pearl Mackie 2016.
He wrote Blink, which luckily was pretty light on both the Doctor and Martha, and Sally was pretty good. It actually holds up pretty well, though it’s got some of the same problematic beats as *everything* involving Moffat and women do, so I kind of cringe in hindsight.
This is me! I completely stopped watching after Moffat completely killed my enthusiasm for the show (I just… forgot to watch and care around Let’s Kill Hitler, and then didn’t even care that I wasn’t watching), so I am super torn on whether I want to start watching it again or not, even with this great casting.
My husband and I are slowly making our way through the most recent season. I just can’t sit through more than two Moffat era episodes in a row, and I often keep finding other things I’d rather do.
I understand this on a deep level. For me, it was that feeling of relief that at least the sexism in Let’s Kill Hitler was just light and frothy and obvious (River commenting on her own weight! great.), rather than a fundamental part of the plot structure. I should not be relieved that no one is being used as an incubator. My interest was pretty much gone after that.
(Also, as a Jew, I just felt really uncomfortable with that episode. Which is part and parcel of Moffat’s inability to thoughtfully write about anything outside of his own very narrow life experience, but more episode-specific than his other issues, at least.)
“this IS gonna be Moffat’s last season”
I apparently once saw Nick Offerman as an understudy off-broadway. This was pre-Parks and Rec and I didn’t remember it at all – I just found the insert when looking through old playbills!
Last year I took my niece to see Cinderella at Gammage in Tempe and heard some people complaining that there was an understudy notice up in the lobby. I couldn’t get close enough to see it before the show but didn’t really care, I wasn’t familiar with anyone in the show and the average age of the audience was 6 years old.
It wasn’t an understudy notice. Fran Drescher was playing the step-mother. It was amazing.
When I was a kid I went to see Thoroughly Modern Millie at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, and when we got there we found out we would be seeing the understudy as Millie. The understudy was AMAZING. A few weeks later she was cast as the main Millie on Broadway because she was SUTTON FOSTER and that was her big break. My dad freaked out and still talks about it to this day and whenever we see anything about her anywhere he retells the story that we saw her right before she “became a star” (which she is, I just love that my dad uses those words).
So, just, you know, be aware of any understudies you see so you can feel like you had a hand in their success someday in case they’re actually Sutton Foster about to get her first starring role on Broadway.
Heh, I saw Sutton Foster’s understudy in Anything Goes on Broadway, and she was just fantastic. I mean, I’m sorry I didn’t see Sutton Foster, but I’d absolutely see the understudy in something again.
Lemonade blew my mind. I’m into the whole Southern Gothic aesthetic and I love that Beyonce made it her own. LOVE.
The best tweet, and a good reminder for me, was this, from @antoniaterrazas: https://twitter.com/antoniaterrazas/status/724087…
“#LEMONADE is for black women. The rest of us are very lucky eavesdroppers at best.
Behave accordingly. (Which probably means, hush).”
YES. That is exactly how I feel about it. I’m totally eavesdropping and I get really irritated when people are like “Oh, this is for everybody, it’s about female empowerment.” No. Let’s just sit in the back row and listen while people who know what is going on speak.
Oh, absolutely. Can we just not try to steal something from black women for five minutes? And we are so lucky to get to eavesdrop on this amazing art, so maybe we could let the people it’s about talk about it first.
I was just thinking this! I feel the same about all of the recent Beyonce stuff (Formation, Super Bowl etc), I have huge respect for her, and I can appreciate the art, but this work is definitely not for me, and I am 100% ok with that.
In fact I recently had the experience of watching something that was 100% made for me/my people and I cried so much it was insane, I don’t want to be the person that takes that feeling away from someone else by whining ‘what about meeeeee, the poor, forgotten white person’ (yick. Don’t be that guy, guys.)
YES! Like, it’s dumb, but Rey in Star Wars made me cry. Why would we take that away from people, why wouldn’t we find ways to GIVE IT to people?
I’d never really appreciated before because I’ve never really had it; I’m so used to watching American TV/Movies and feeling disconnected (still enjoying it, but I don’t have the same familiarity), Its so rare to see Ireland/Irish people on TV/in movies, and when you do its hacky stereotypes with appalling accents, so when Netflix did a series about the Irish Rebellion in 1916*, I was prepared for it to be terrible, and its not, in fact its brilliant, but its also home, that’s my city, those are my people, their accents are real and their humour is so familiar, I’ve been to most of the places in the show, I’ve met those people. There are bits where I cried so much, because its was all so real to me, is that how white Americans feel when they watch movies?
(*Its called Rebellion, check it out, it follows 3 women through the week of the Rising and would be an amazing watch for anyone, but in particular if you’re Irish/Irish decent and are familiar with the history)
oh crap how did I not know about this???
same! Glad I know about it now and plan on watching it.
I know right! It appeared out of nowhere Easter weekend. I don’t know if its on US netflix, but it should be since its an original.
It also features some of the best Irish actors currently working, including the Other Gleeson son (the one that didn’t make Star Wars), who I keep seeing in things and forgetting who he is, he’s a fabulously subtle actor.
It is not on US Netflix because Netflix hates us for some reason. *pout*
Guess I’ll just have to watch The Wind That Shakes the Barley again.
What the shit Netflix.
Its not like the largest population of Irish diaspora would enjoy it or anything.
If it’s this http://www.rte.ie/drama/tv/featured/rebellion/abo…
It was an RTÉ original miniseries not a Netflix original that aired in January here (Ireland). Just want to give credit to RTÉ where it is due.
Ah I was wondering who produced it! It looks so great, if only RTE could do this all the time!
I love this way of phrasing it! Honestly I think I like seeing love and praise and “omg she gets us” for Beyonce more than I actually like Beyonce’s music. Getting that feeling vicariously is really, really cool!
Yup yup yup, imma sit my ass down and stay in my lane. And somehow I think I will survive being irrelevant for once.
I think this is one of the big reasons why I haven’t watched it – I mean, I understand and appreciate and respect Beyonce for it 5000%, but it is most definitely not For Me (in any iteration of the phrase, really) and that is okay!!!!
Yes indeed, this is how I feel. A lucky eavesdropper. Still amazed.
Today, I have lady business/general checkup doctor. Tomorrow Neuropsych. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, conference, and Saturday my mom’s going to be in Chicago to visit the grandparents so I might head out that a way. And I double booked this weekend with a race and a conference and next weekend, mother’s day and a half marathon.
*headdesk*
I just repeated that *headdesk* when I read your post, panicked, checked the calendar, and realized that May 8 is Mother’s Day and I need to get gift ordered ASAP. Thank you — otherwise, I would have been blissfully ignorant until it was too late!
Glad my stress can be of service!
I loved 150% all of Lemonade, but one of my favorite things about it might be that Bey wrote a song based on a Ezra Koenig tweet from 2011 https://twitter.com/arzE/status/12752099256527257… which is based on a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, and gave both him and Karen O writing credits for it. What a generous, internet savvy kween.
Animal Collective also get a credit because there’s a line in one of the songs which was accidentally taken from My Girls (sort of). http://pitchfork.com/news/65028-beyonce-producer-…
I couldn’t figure out why that line was familiar. AND IT WAS BOTHERING ME. It’s because I listened to that Yeah Yeah Yeahs song on loop for a certain period of time way back when. Why could I not recall this on my own? Sheesh.
Also Soulja Boy for “hop up out my bed, turn my swag on, take a look in the mirror, say what’s up”!!! A lesser-known Soulja Boy track (LOL) that will always remind me of dancing in the Lambda Chi Alpha house at my university.
Anyway Lemonade is FANTASTIC and I LOVE IT
The only part of Lemonade I saw was Don’t Hurt Yourself because it was on Youtube and I am Tidal-less but God. God. I am so angry at all men now, and masculinity in general, and we should just dump them all. #banmen
The whole thing’s on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Beyonceup/
Nicole, I would love to hear the sermon series on racial reconciliation. Can you share a link to the church or their podcast or something? (Or if you don’t want to share where you go to church, I get that too.)
Oh, sure! No, I’m happy to. Missio Dei SLC, and you can download the sermons for free on iTunes, this was the most recent one. I love my church.
Oh, and here is the stand-alone website for the series, which has great interviews with parishioners of color.
Thank you so much! I’m excited to listen.
Did anyone else have a weird two minutes yesterday where you thought everyone somehow started liking SOPHIE?
I was very glad to be wrong – that was a confusing two minutes.
I am pretty sure I didn’t? Mostly because I’m missing something here.
I don’t know why I find joy in finding and listening to the weirdest garbage music genres, but here we are. Lemonade is a one of the more popular songs in “Bubblegum Bass”.
I’m like, reluctant to even put this link here, on this day we should be celebrating Beyonce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdLvp630plc
Ah!
Carvell Wallace, you guys, is swiftly becoming my favourite writer on all of the internets ever. Thank you, lovely Toast editors, for introducing me and also for making sure I keep up to date ♥
I observed a somewhat harrowing display while having breakfast on Saturday morning that also served to dampen my enthusiasm for crows 🙁
A crow swooped down on a nest of thrushes outside the kitchen window that I had been observing all week, and grabbed a chick and like gobbled the nestling up on our lawn in only a few minutes.
Meanwhile the parents, as well as a blackbird that happened to be around divebombed the crow — which remained unimpressed. It then flew up to the nest and took the second nestling as well.
Stupid nature — I was close to intervening. Would you?
No, because crows never forget a face and I would not want to be marked for death by something that eats nestlings.
Poor baby birds, I feel like they get the brunt of nature’s stupidity.
What intervention would be possible? If you scare the crow away, it’ll be back five minutes after you leave. You can’t take the chick away frpm the crow–being grabbed by a crow is not a survivable injury. The only intervention would be to kill the crow and then you still have a dead bird, probably with a nest of its own.
The best way to watch birds is not too closely, so you don’t have to think about what they’re doing.
Truth. I watched the Attenborough series “life of birds,” and it was just fucking awful. Pelicans eating other seabirds’ chicks is not something I’ll forget about any time soon.
(Because of their big pouchy mouths, you could see the chick flailing around in there before they swallowed them whole. Fucking Christ.)
One of the pelicans in St James’s Park ate a pigeon once, in view of horrified tourists; apparently it kept it flailing around in its beak for ages.
Eurgh. And let’s not forget about the bird species whose chicks literally starve one or more of ther siblings or just straight up push them out of the nest. I mean, you expect that kind of shit from sharks, but birds are all elegant and have the gift of flight and have neat feathers and all that. And it’s actually all just a front to keep people from finding out how horrifying they really are. See also: Dolphins.
I wouldn’t be surprised if “Birds: The Horrifying Truth” is already a Discovery Channel special.
Somebody’s missing the vast untapped potential of Bird Week….
I have seen a video of this! It was horrific. D-:
Pelicans are badass though. I’m with Lauren Bacall who appreciated them because they have character.
Yes. A couple eaglets recently hatched in DC and there is a live feed of the nest. It has a warning at the bottom that this is nature and you might see something horrifying.
I wish they printed that at the bottom of all windows, too
Yeah, I think there was an osprey nest a year or so ago where one of the parents was torturing and/or starving the chick(s) and the webcam viewers were losing their shit and calling and demanding local DNR people intervene. Watch nature at your own risk, folks!!
It is grim. Thankfully I haven’t seen anything horrifying yet, but I know there is always a chance of it, because that is how nature works.
Birds have not forgotten that they used to be velociraptors, and are best appreciated as such.
I had a male chimpanzee attack one of my baby monkeys last year after it was the victim of an infanticide attempt. When it was just shrieking on the forest floor, I was considering intervening because being eaten by ants would be an excruciating way to go, but after the chimp showed up, there wasn’t much to be done. Chimps are scary and I wasn’t going to take away his toy.
The baby died, anyway.
🙁
That blackbird who had nothing to do with it but was about to divebomb the crow did not give any fucks. He’s like that roguish, cool friend of your parents.
I would have intervened because I would want that blackbird’s approval and because I love baby birds
Lemonade is obviously everything, but I’m constantly impressed by how fucking AMBITIOUS Beyoncé is in her art. She’s not just going to create this incredibly personal album, she’s going to work in multiple styles that are typically not considered “hers” (I am now waiting for the Beyoncé bluegrass album) AND create an hour-long, thematically deep and aesthetically consistent visual piece celebrating black women AND she’s going to bring in a ton of other amazing black women and girls to do it with her. We are just now worthy of this level of artistry.
Right? I feel like there’s music that’s great to listen to, and Beyonce’s is always that, but then there’s just true ART – and this is it, at every level.
Beyonce/Darius cover of “Islands In The Stream” rn plz
I want to see Beyonce’s collab with Carolina Chocolate Drops and Alabama Shakes (both of whom I kind of expected to see in Lemonade,actually)
Oh, God, now you’ve said this and it’s all that I want.
How did you find such a baller pastor? I’m looking for a church in Chicago and am very overwhelmed by all the options/levels of God-ness.
Otis Moss III at Trinity United Church of Christ is an incredible preacher.
ty! i’m gonna try and get down there one of these weekends.
Have breakfast first! I visited Trinity in the late 1990s and left wobbly hungry prior to the sermon, so I *missed* the preaching I was there for.
So, if you actually enjoy having a liturgy (many people don’t! no judgement) I might suggest checking out a Reconciling Lutheran church? There are a bunch in Chicago.
Of course there is no guarantee, but these are churches that have committed to being welcoming to people of all genders/sexualities/races etc. I find that it’s a good place to start.
So I’m Quaker and I think liturgy could be very cool, but it’s also something I don’t have a ton of experience with and I guess I’m worried it’ll be all bible verses and prayers and less thought-provoking pastors and great community. I don’t have a car so getting down to Evanston/Hyde Park for meeting is tough, but I miss the spiritual guidance of Quakerism and the community that came from my meeting at home.
I’ve never commented before, but wanted to let you know that yes! There are tons of options here in Chicago which can be overwhelming, but we’re very fortunate to have some good ones!
For many years, I’ve found my home at LaSalle Street Church, which has a wonderful, socially conscious congregation. Church of the Atonement is a very LGBT-friendly Episcopal option on the northside. And a lot of my friends attend River City in Humboldt Park (although that may lean a bit more conservative).
Maybe none of these are up your alley, and you’re looking for something totally different – but I hope that you find a church that is fulfilling and a good fit.
I’m at MissioDei Chicago and I love it. But yeah, there are lots of good options.
I would also encourage you to seek out a United Church of Christ O&A (Open and Affirming) congregation. No guarantee that they’ll be 100% on point, but identifying as O&A is a long, congregation-driven process that means the community pledges to welcome and support diversity, mainly as it applies to LGBT individuals, couples, and families. Might be a useful barometer for openness to frank discussion about race and class also.
SILICON VALLEY
jared is still my favorite i love him sfm
I forgot how stressful it is to watch all of Richard’s bad decisions. Ahhh. Granted, he was having a bad time of it, but come on, Richard.
That guy fucks!
Jared is such a wonderful mother hen to Richard.
I love them all, but literally the first time we see Erlich on screen, my husband and I titter like fools. I love this show.
I love Jared so much, he is precious, but I live for Dinesh and Guillefoyle’s arguing.
Got home from a seder on Saturday night, was like “oh, hey, let’s take a quick look at this Beyoncé thing and then maybe watch something else.”
WE WERE THE MOST WRONG.
Favorite parts – the interstitial poetry, Don’t Hurt Yourself, how most of this isn’t for me but parts are still so legible to me, and the HUGE bass when you play the album on good speakers. Woah.
Same here, except instead of seder it was a trip to the local whiskey bar; we watched it twice in a row and then immediately subscribed to Tidal. My wife said, “I don’t understand it all, but nothing will ever be the same again” with a huge smile on her face. So amazing.
LOL re: Peter. Galatians is why Paul is the MOST FUN to read. He’s so *mad*, you guys.
“Just freaking castrate yourselves already you imbeciles” LOLOL
Paul is also soooo passive aggressive. He’s like, I only made myself a slave and destroyed my body for Christ so that you bastards can get your salvation and I count it as nothing except that I am totally telling you about it now.
I love how much space Mallory gives to queer issues.
Thank you for reminding me that I need to read The Sympathizer. I heard an interview with Nguyen a while ago and completely forgot about it, but I love the attitude he takes and I am really interested to read his work.
If you’re into audiobooks at all, this is a great one – narrated by François Chau, who masters the nuances.
The best piece on Lemonade I’ve read so far: http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2016/04/lemonade-b…
I love her generally, and she was definitely one of the few people I definitely wanted to hear from re: Lemonade.
“Shutting the fuck up is always free” is great advice, and also the reason I delete half my comments before posting. Thanks for sharing this.
Omg guys, I’ve been going to a new church. And it has been awesome so far (it feels really welcoming, there is a large refugee community, open prayer for ends to racism and inequality). This Sunday, the pastor gave this scorching sermon about how we, as christians, need to embody radical love and hospitality and there is no excuse for excluding people based on race, sexuality, or gender expression. She was using the passage “what God has made cleansed let know man call unclean,” and there was a point in the sermon where she was like “but maybe you are thinking these people aren’t cleansed, and you are DEAD WRONG because Jesus died for everyone so suck it” (obv I am paraphrasing).
I wanted to stand up and cheer. I hate, hate how Christians have (rightfully) become a symbol of intolerance. I wish more of us could embody the love and service that I truly think is the whole freaking point.
Isn’t it awesome that there are IRL churches that let pastors say that kind of thing?! I was spiritually wasting away at a church that was Not Like This two years ago, hating everything, losing my faith, dying a slow spiritual death
and then I walked current!church one Sunday and heard them preaching about radical welcome and openly naming social sins like homophobia, racism, etc. and it was just this moment of, oh, my faith’s not dying, this other church is just killing my spirit
and I have not once been back to that old church.
Which is all to say congrats on your new church!! and may more churches be like this someday.
UGH breaking in to say this week is going to be crap, I’m still fighting the same Landsat imagery I was fighting last Thursday (and fought all weekend the whole weekend did nothing else needed that time for my exams) and I don’t have anything to show my advisor. Who of course is having a huge Cambodia thing this week every day and every evening (have I mentioned I go to school an hour away from my house?) and I have to start dropping things like going to work, skipping a night or two of coaching, and, oh yeah, did I mention I have two final projects and one final exam and two papers to do, this week? One including 3-D printing? One including 13 Landsat 3 images?
Let me point out that Great Bisexual in American History Harris Wofford is also the former president of Bryn Mawr College.
BTW, I after reading the Chernow bio I came away with the strong impression that A.Ham also falls into this category.
I may have even said this before, but I SO wish we had a Toast special called What Mallory is ACTUALLY Thinking While Answering Some of These Prudie Letters.
She’s always so polite and fair even with the extreme crazies/assholes — but I always want to know what that mental monologue is saying…because WOW SOME OF THESE.
Mallory’s Twitter isn’t terrible for that. She tends to quote the bits of her responses where the, “c’mon, you have GOT to be kidding” veneer is the thinnest, and sometimes it’s a teensy bit translucent.
I was listening to the Met Opera radio broadcast of “Otello” this weekend, and they had some understudy drama. The lead singer playing Otello couldn’t finish the show due to health problems, and his understudy came on right at the end for the final scene. He knocked it out of the park, and got a HUUUUGE ovation afterwards.
I can’t imagine people booing!! What is wrong with them?!
It was basically karaoke, with the lead continuing to emote and mouth the words while the understudy sang IN JEANS AND A T-SHIRT: http://nypost.com/2016/04/25/tenor-makes-metropol…
Are there other people still waiting for their Toast Post matches? I’m not sure if I should be worried that I haven’t gotten mine or not.
I just got mine on Saturday, so don’t worry!
ditto!
I’m still waiting too! Though I did get a lovely letter last week from someone who’d been matched with me.
Still waiting as well!
I missed OT on Friday due to work being completely over the top busy, so am sharing here rather than waiting again. I had my ultrasound last Monday, and the technician found a) an ovarian cyst, and b) 7 small fibroids. So now I’m waiting to see my GP next week so she can discuss whatever I’m supposed to do from here. The tech said not to worry, fibroids are so common, all the women she’d scanned so far that day had them. I mean generally they’re not really an issue unless they are sizeable but it’s still more than I was expecting, you know? On the one hand I feel vindicated for asking for testing, but on the other, I didn’t expect there to genuinely be anything there?
Have any of you had them? Did you have any treatment for them, or just monitoring?
I’ve had both, and both ended up resolving on their own, which I believe is the most common course. Good for you advocating for yourself to get tested, and good luck with your next appointments.
Resolving on their own would be good. I suppose we’re going to have a discussion of my birth control rx, because they’re protecting me slightly from ovarian-related things (what with the not ovulating), but have that tiny increased risk of promoting the growth of other things (like breast cancer and fibroids). So we’ll see.
I haven’t had fibroids but I feeeeeel youuu on that feeling where you push to get tested because something seems off and then erk they find stuff. For me, they found a couple of endometrial polyps which were removed last week (along with a d&c and general looksie with a hysteroscope, my uterus is now sometimes punching me softly from the inside).
Whatever the necessary course of action is, your doc will hopefully be a good resource for taking care of them. If your doc wants to do watchful waiting, nail down what would make them want to switch to surgery/whatever. Length of time without change, symptom change, etc. Nail down what the progression of intervention would look like. Then you have something to refer back to if necessary, to help stay on track.
And uh if you do need surgery, listen when they say take it easy. Otherwise one can become very sore.
I’m not expecting her to want to do a surgical intervention, as everything I read over the last week says if you’re prone to developing them, removing the current ones isn’t going to stop you from developing more. I imagine she’ll want to just do another scan in x-months to make sure nothing is getting bigger. At least, that’s what I’m assuming right now.
From what I understand, surgery only gets on the table if they are really severe yeah. I’m just one of those folks who plans for every contingency. I hope everything goes well though!
You may not even need to have further scans, unless you start having symptoms later on.
I had them, and eventually they got really bad, plus I also had a condition called adenomyosis, which ended up meaning that I had a hysterectomy in 2000. It was fine, I had had all the children I wanted to have, and I was in pretty much constant pain and the periods were unbelievably heavy by that time. So really getting that mess out of there was a blessed relief. They were able to leave my overies, so I could go through menopause naturally. But I think I had had fibroids for about 15 years by that time.
Oh that sounds terrible (the constant pain/heaviness)! Glad you were able to have it dealt with!
Fibroids are indeed very common and generally benign. Unless they’re causing symptoms that bother you (e.g., severe cramps or bleeding, etc.), you probably don’t need to do anything about them. Lots of women have them and never have any problems.
Mine are a huge pain and are causing me godawful cramps, so I’m hoping to have surgery once I can save up enough money and vacation time.
Personal news relevant to The Toast:
* I just bought a condo that faces the waterfront in a town north of Boston. The view out my living room window this time of year: moored boats 10 feet away. When they take the boats out in the summer, I’ll see the water and nearby coastline. My life has been one long slow progression to the sea.
* I wasn’t a Beyonce fan… Until Saturday night. OH MY GOD. I now have a kickass seat for her show in Foxborough June 3.
Congrats on the new place. That sounds amazing.
Fellow Boston Toastie also going to Foxborough. Yay! I have zero idea how I am getting there, though. I wonder if there is *any* chance of the train running to the stadium for this?
I forgot to say: My kick-ass sister in law made her living as an “understudy” on Broadway. She’s been in some big movies lately and my brother still works on Broadway. 1.She always calls it “swing” –as in you can swing into whatever role they need you for that night. IDK if that’s only musicals or if that translates across the board. 2. Damn right, understudies (whatever you call them) kill it and work really really hard for the entire production and ought to be properly acknowledged.
I think many shows have both understudies and swings. An understudy plays a smaller role and fills in as needed for a large one, while a swing might not be in the first-string cast but is ready to step in for a handful of different roles.
Yes, swings and understudies are slightly different. A swing is basically an understudy for the ensemble and/or secondary roles. Large/main roles will often have a dedicated understudy just for the one role. Also, there’s a difference between understudy and standby – an understudy will usually have a smaller/ensemble role when not covering the lead, but a standby has no other role in the show when not replacing the lead actor who is out.
My plan for this weekend included going to church on Sunday. (My new church is a half hour drive away, so I only go once a month.) Instead, I stayed up waaaaaay to late on Saturday night watching Lemonade over and over. I feel that this was an okay trade.
I haven’t yet watched Lemonade, but my understanding is that it is church? So you should probably be OK, church-wise.
This is something I would really love to see: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/theater…
I’m not sure how well the format is going to turn out, but it sounds fascinating.
Holy crap, y’all, I just ovaried up and sent an email to my (older, male) boss to report that an (older, male) guy who came in for a meeting made some inappropriate comments/compliments to me, fully aware that women who report things like this are frequently ignored or gaslighted and just hoping and hoping that my boss is the decent guy I like to think of him as, and
MY BOSS IS BACKING ME UP.
HALLELLUGHUASHHSJKS>J
HE DOESN’T EXPECT THIS GUY TO BE BACK SO I CAN BE AS RUDE AS I WANT IF I NEED TO AND HE’S GOING TO ADDRESS IT WITH HIM BEFORE HE LEAVES TODAY.
#NOTALLMEN FOR REALSIES.
Oh my GOD your pastor. High five, preacher man, high five. I mean yes, smug white Evangelicals (and everybody else; I’m not letting you off the hook, Episcopal Church), we should be brothers and sisters in Christ, and treat race as merely another aspect of the rich tapestry of human existence, but we’re really bad at that.
Also, little bird burritos!
I know this is horrendously off-topic, BUT I GOT THE SCHOLARSHIP I APPLIED FOR!!!! YAY!!!!!! IF I GET THAT GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIP THEN I HAVE 25 TO HALF MY TUITION PLUS $500 TAKEN OFF, HALLELUJAH!
Honestly, Ria Jones’s face looks a lot more like Gloria Swanson’s than Glenn Close does.
of course! I had forgotten how delightful those interactions were.
I would say that probably Tyene is White–I think she's described as blonde/fair-skinend/blue eyed, but I think you're right, the rest of them could be POC. It's been awhile since I've read the books. The one I'm referring to is def Black, possibly biracial.
As I'm writing this, I'm realizing how weird it feels to be writing about our racial descriptors for a fictional world, but the flipside is to ignore them completely and have film/tv adaptations cast everyone as white so… *sigh*
Re birds getting weighed: Burritowl!
all right I been thinking about this and I have come around, I think you're right and maybe the problem is that I was misreading it because I have still got a bad tendency to look at women primarily through the lens of the Male Gaze first. Even if I am trying to consciously reject it, I am still inadvertently letting it define my perspective.
SO. Okay, well done, a point well-considered, I will bear this in mind for the future.