good:
Women protest completely male line-up of directors at Cannes.
[video]
Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford (Slate)
Slate: One of the striking things about your more recent material is how you engage with questions of mental health in a way that’s serious and thoughtful as well as really funny. There’s so much misunderstanding and ignorance about mental illness, so it strikes me as a really difficult topic to handle in a thoughtful way that still makes people laugh.
Bamford: People get really irritated by mental illness. “Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!” I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, “You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.”
It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, “Oh, you’re just an attention getter.” Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice.
Slate: Or a weakness.
Bamford: Yeah. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. “Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.” Or: “I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?”
Slate: Right. And then people who suffer from mental illness feel ashamed, making it even harder for them to talk about it with other people—where if you had a “regular” illness, people would speak much more openly about it.
Bamford: Yeah, it’d be like, “Let’s pink-ribbon it up!”
(via novazembla)
I scanned a few of the chapters from this for those who wanted to read and can’t afford to buy it/don’t have an awesome library nearby.
* Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order - Gayle Wald
* Too much of something is bad enough: Success and Excess in Spice World - Cynthia Fuchs
* ‘Til Death Do Us Part: Identity and Friendship in Heavenly Creatures - Corinn Columpar
* The Nerdly Girl and Her Beautiful Sister - Timothy Shary
* Maternity, Murder and Monsters: Legends of Babysitter Horror - Miriam Forman-Brunell
* Pleasures and Problems of the “Angry Girl” - Kimberley Roberts
* Pretty In Pink? John Hughes Reinscribes Daddy’s Girl in Homes and Schools - Ann De Vaney
* Maiden Voyage: From Edwardian Girl to Millennial Woman in Titanic - Lori Liggett
I think I have quotes from that Forman-Brunell piece floating around in a draft somewhere, along with some De Vaney stuff.
(via novazembla)
“When I was in school I took a class with Cornel West, who’s this amazing African-American Studies professor, and he would say that in America there’s this sort of racism against Asians where they say, “Oh, you know, they all look alike.” He believed the reason is that Americans don’t take enough time to look. Yet that’s actually proved beneficial because you can play someone who’s Japanese, as you do in Memoirs of a Geisha.” —
Natalie Portman to Zhang Ziyi (x)
sophisticated FF commentary:
O_O
(Source: cheryl-tunt, via bowfolk)
drvy:
“Me love you long time” came into prominence with Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” (from 1987) as a Vietnamese prostitute tries to pick up Matthew Modine’s character with broken English. The phrase was then popularly picked up by 2 Live Crew in the song “Me So Horny.”
“It’s so many different kinds of slurs in one,” comedian Margaret Cho said. “It’s instantly putting you in the position of being a foreigner, an outsider and a sexual stereotype. It’s an all-in-one combo.”~naturallaw for yahoo questions
The popularization by Mariah Carey’s ‘Love You Long Time,’ Fergie’s ‘London Bridge,’ and Nicki Minaj’s ““Muahhhh me love you long time like I’m asian” demonstrates how this exotification of Asian/A.American women is constantly recycled in the media, perpetuated by celebrities to obtain the hyper-sexualized image needed to make it big, especially if you ain’t got the talent.
I would get started on Nicki’s whole hyper-sexualized, Japanese dolled up shit, but racialious says it best. Well researched: here http://www.racialicious.com/2010/11/01/the-orientalism-of-nicki-minaj/
You can degrade yourself, but no, my sisters and I will NOT love you long time.
I’m sure we’ve posted about this before, but it always bears repeating.
(via fuckyeahfeminists)
bajo-el-mar asked: Didn't you know that by acknowledging the problem they are completely absolved of any responsibility?
they probably won’t hire a black snl cast member for another ten years because of this. let’s all pat them on the back.
[video]
so happy
USEFUL.
![theatlantic:
Marnie on ‘Girls’: TV’s Latest Beautiful Control Freak
Two weeks into the new HBO series Girls, one character has emerged as the most divisive: Marnie, the gorgeous, uptight roommate of the show’s heroine, Hannah. In a discussion about the most recent episode, Slate’s L.V. Anderson asked, “Does she have any redeeming qualities?”Vanity Fair’s Julie Weiner echoed the sentiment, calling Marnie “a gallerina with overbearing mothering tendencies.”
Marnie is not TV’s first beautiful control freak: She fits squarely into a character type formed by Mad Men’s Betty and Sex and the City’s Charlotte, two stunning women with deep neuroses. Marnie, Betty, and Charlotte highlight a strange trend in highbrow television: With beauty comes a desire for control—which the character ultimately must lose in humiliating fashion.
Most television characters are physically attractive, of course, andGirls is no exception. But the other women on Girls have qualities that blunt their beauty in some way and make them seem “realer.” Jessa has her ridiculously bohemian outfits and tough attitude; Shoshanna her laughably dated Juicy jumpsuits and tense, eager-to-please smile; and Hannah her well-documented arm and tummy fat. Marnie, however, is basically physically flawless. She has beautiful hair, clear skin, and a long lean frame, and she wears classically fashionable clothes that fit her well. She has no obvious outward flaw to signal to the audience that she’s “just like us.” […]
This combination of beauty and obsessive self-control is toxic. Countless articles and video montages decry Betty’s poor parenting skills,self-pity, and all-around annoyingness. Charlotte didn’t inspire the same amount of vitriol as Betty, but still had her detractors. Over the course of the Sex and the City’s six-year run she was dismissed as “dopey,” “prudish,” and “conventional.” After just two episodes, Marnie is getting the same treatment: Good magazine wonders why Hannah would ever be friends with her; Vanity Fair calls her the show’s “most polarizing character.” Even her defenders couch their approval in apology: A male reviewer at Mother Jones says, “I fully understand the kind of guff I’m inviting by reserving praise exclusively for the hot one.”
Read more. [Images: HBO, AMC]
I don’t know how to feel about this at all, but it’s an interesting look into the construction of “the hot one.” How do we humanize her? By making her “toxic,” of course!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m31x9tcNJZ1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Marnie on ‘Girls’: TV’s Latest Beautiful Control Freak
Two weeks into the new HBO series Girls, one character has emerged as the most divisive: Marnie, the gorgeous, uptight roommate of the show’s heroine, Hannah. In a discussion about the most recent episode, Slate’s L.V. Anderson asked, “Does she have any redeeming qualities?”Vanity Fair’s Julie Weiner echoed the sentiment, calling Marnie “a gallerina with overbearing mothering tendencies.”
Marnie is not TV’s first beautiful control freak: She fits squarely into a character type formed by Mad Men’s Betty and Sex and the City’s Charlotte, two stunning women with deep neuroses. Marnie, Betty, and Charlotte highlight a strange trend in highbrow television: With beauty comes a desire for control—which the character ultimately must lose in humiliating fashion.
Most television characters are physically attractive, of course, andGirls is no exception. But the other women on Girls have qualities that blunt their beauty in some way and make them seem “realer.” Jessa has her ridiculously bohemian outfits and tough attitude; Shoshanna her laughably dated Juicy jumpsuits and tense, eager-to-please smile; and Hannah her well-documented arm and tummy fat. Marnie, however, is basically physically flawless. She has beautiful hair, clear skin, and a long lean frame, and she wears classically fashionable clothes that fit her well. She has no obvious outward flaw to signal to the audience that she’s “just like us.” […]
This combination of beauty and obsessive self-control is toxic. Countless articles and video montages decry Betty’s poor parenting skills,self-pity, and all-around annoyingness. Charlotte didn’t inspire the same amount of vitriol as Betty, but still had her detractors. Over the course of the Sex and the City’s six-year run she was dismissed as “dopey,” “prudish,” and “conventional.” After just two episodes, Marnie is getting the same treatment: Good magazine wonders why Hannah would ever be friends with her; Vanity Fair calls her the show’s “most polarizing character.” Even her defenders couch their approval in apology: A male reviewer at Mother Jones says, “I fully understand the kind of guff I’m inviting by reserving praise exclusively for the hot one.”
Read more. [Images: HBO, AMC]
I don’t know how to feel about this at all, but it’s an interesting look into the construction of “the hot one.” How do we humanize her? By making her “toxic,” of course!
