Solving Racism, One Six Pack At a Time

A few weeks ago, I read a little item on The Onion's AV Club about 2 Broke Girls. After being accused of racism due to the half-dimensionality of the girls' Korean boss, 2 Broke Girls would add a "hot Asian guy" to make everything better. Since then, the idea of solving all problems of racism, power and privilege with a liberal application of Preparation S(exy) has made me think. What if other famous examples of racism could be hot-washed this way?

For example, in Gone with the Wind, hire Zoe Saldana to shoot some extra scenes, where she gets in a sexy catfight with Scarlett O'Hara. Petticoats will be torn!!! George Lucas can bring the same technology he used to add scenes to the Star Wars trilogy for those special editions, except this time he'll be using it for marginally less pointless reasons.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, all scenes featuring Mickey Rooney's yellowface could be re-edited, with the video replaced by an intern shaking a picture of Takeshi Kaneshiro, freshly torn from a Japanese fashion magazine, at the camera.

Disney's Song of the South: Digitally insert a shirtless Shemar Moore into every scene.

Maybe now Disney will let this one out of the vault!

In 300, you could find some sexy Persian and... really, 300 has reached ab saturation, and any attempt to add more attractive men would not only leave the movie as anti-Iranian as ever, but also cause some kind of rift in the space-time continuum, creating a wormhole which smells strongly of body oil.

Paperback Hater: My Reply to Emily Keeler

Have book covers become too pretty? Look at books like The Eat-Clean Diet: Fast Fat-loss That Lasts Forever! and you might say no, but that doesn't stop Emily Keeler from saying yes in a recent article for the Toronto Standard. Two series in particular are too sexy for her bookshelf: Jillian Tamaki's Threads collection, and Coralie Bickford-Smith's redesigned Fitzgeralds, both produced for Penguin. I read the article reluctantly, ready to be offended. If you're a longtime reader of my blog (I think there may be six of you by now!) you probably know that I like book covers. I like them a lot. I'll point out ones I think are particularly pretty on a semi-regular basis, and Bickford-Smith's work has appeared twice. So I tried to strain the petty bitterness out of any meaningful critique I could offer on Keeler's piece, but by the end my most coherent thought was still "GIRL, PLEASE." Time has cooled my ire, though, and allowed me to expand on that emotion.

My first issue is Keeler's apparent belief that the book as design object, or even a marker of taste, dates to Penguin hiring Tamaki. But the book as fetish object has a longer history than the book as utilitarian good. The latter needed several factors to appear and collide for it to become a phenomenon. Mass production, greater literacy and more disposable income, among others. Before, people who learned to read, then found time to do so regularly were generally either religious or rather rich. Sometimes, they even farmed out the pages to professional bookbinders, who returned beautifully tooled and gilded pieces of art. This process persisted even past the automation of bookbinding. If Keeler believes The Last Tycoon is overdesigned, she may want to avert her eyes from this pyrotechnic book cover, circa 1900. And when it comes to taste, as Bourdieu said, "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." He also said this in 1984, 27 years before the "beautiful books" which Keeler sees as becoming "consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly, tastefully, displays them" were getting laid out in InDesign.

I'm also not sure that "The lush redesigns fetishize these books, render them décor rather than literature." Do they? Really? Are publishers the new authors, back when it was assumed that the author packed meaning into the text, which readers then decoded to find the One True Interpretation? A company may say a book's collectible in the copy, but that doesn't guarantee that it will never be read. Books are multi-functional that way. They'll always be "literature" if they can be opened, contain words, and if you're not using the highest-browed meaning of the term. The only guaranteed way of turning books from literature to décor is to strip the covers and sew the pages together in a stack, which is exactly what Restoration Hardware did in 2010, but isn't what Penguin did here. Michael Maranda might know a little something about décor though. Keeler likes his work on Selected Business Correspondence, where a "whole sheaf of letters is bound and placed in an embossed manilla folder." That sounds like an object guaranteed to become décor, if only because once you've spent $40 on it, you'll want to limit your chances of bending the letters or tearing the envelope as you stuff them back in. Perhaps it's better just to click through the free PDF online.

For the record, each of the Fitzgerald redesigns costs less than $30, and all of them will survive a few readings out here in the physical world.

RIP Whitney Houston

As I'm sure Twitter/Facebook/news crawls have informed you, Whitney Houston died today. And so I'm drinking while watching her sing "I Have Nothing" over and over again. Why the sadness? Whitney was a joke for most of my life. The infamous Barbara Walters interview aired when I was 15, and I was raised to despise oversung, overproduced R and B. But when I heard Whitney's songs, they cut through all of my pretension, and even through her own melodramatic production. That voice had a direct line to my soul. Maybe not the best parts of me, but at least to every cell that cried too much, or fell in love with the wrong guy, or wanted to dance with somebody (when the loneliness calls.) It's powerful and sad, running almost to excess. That's not a criticism. That's the whole point.

Domestic Lateday: Mustard Hat, Rousse Beer

Yes, many days have passed since my last post, and it's only now that I've managed to get the crochet hook out and finish putting on my Thorpe's border. I have no excuse. Oh wait, I gave blood, which would only really explain about an hour and a half of yesterday's procrastination, but never mind. I'm going to ride that excuse for months. "Oh, you're mad that I'm late? Well, I was too busy saving people with the GIFT OF LIFE." And then that person will probably be a paramedic, and I will feel like an asshole. The hat keeps my head warm, but it also makes my face look particularly moony. As with my Habs toque, I have to make sure to have a curl of my hair out for show, so that everybody knows I'm a lady. It's the tonsorial equivalent of putting a bow on the head of a girl baby.

This week's beer came down from Baysville, ON - cottage country - to spend its last days in the far-less scenic Toronto country of my fridge. It's Lake of Bays Brewing's Rousse Red Ale. I had a vague recollection of drinking Boréale Rousse by the pitcher at McGill, but at those quantities, I could have been drinking Colt .45 and still only remembered that it tasted like drunk. So I'm not entirely sure how this compares to the so-called "Québec classic" rousse. As far as I can gather, anyway, that's a style based more or less on an Irish red ale, perhaps even popularized by that same Boréale which caused me so many regrets throughout my undergrad. This one is a fine outing in its class, I suppose, a good choice to buy for any friends you're trying to wean off their 50. Kind of malty, a little spicy, but less hoppy than the packaging had lead me to expect. I hate to sound so equivocal about this beer, but maybe I'm spoiled for subtler flavours. Or perhaps I'm just disappointed because I liked their Mocha Porter so very much.

Domestic Super Bowl Sunday: Hats and Beer to Stay Warm

Somehow, both of my handknit hats have disappeared over the past few weeks. I had been reduced to wearing either a black polar fleece hat with a ridiculous tassle... or a black polar fleece hat with a ridiculous Andean brim. Both were so tragic I braved frostbite rather than wear them. Then I remembered that I knew how to knit, so I could solve the problem without a trip to the mall with my debit card. It could be solved with a trip to the yarn store. With my credit card. Completely different. Definitely more respectable. One hilariously oversized ball (250g!!!) of Cascade's Eco Wool later, we almost have an earflap hat, knit according to the Thorpe pattern. Tassels and border to come.

And now, the beer. This week's option is Grand River Brewing's Russian Gun Imperial Stout. I'm drinking this against my better judgment, following a Beerfest at the Danforth's Only Café. I tried way too many beers there, including at least one other imperial stout (from Nickel Brook, if memory serves.) Imperial stouts have one of the more convoluted origin stories in beer-dom. It's a style originally brewed by a British brewery for export to the Russian court of the Prussian-born Catherine the Great. So, they're only a fraction as Russian as those clever craft brew names would have you think. But brewers are only human, and nobody can resist a good Communist pun. Imperial stouts are usually dark, rich and high in alcohol. This one is all that, with a taste like molasses and a hint of something smoky, like charcoal. It's a beer you could survive on, whether that means getting to the weekend or reading to the end of The Brothers Karamazov.

Haywire: Punch, Kick, Choke - Repeat!

Does Haywire welcome Gina Carano to the illustrious pantheon of Van Damme, Norris and Segal, or is it just The Girlfriend Experience with fists? Carano, an ex-MMA fighter and American Gladiatrix, is Mallory Kane, a highly competent private contractor. And as anyone who's seen an action movie in the past forty years, or even read the news, knows what happens to the competent. They get set up. So, from the opening scene, when Mallory sits down in a roadside diner, we know things will go wrong. Coffee cups will be smashed. Arms will be broken. And more, as Mallory choke-holds her way to the truth. This involves tenderizing such illustrious co-stars as Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas. Carano might not be able to match their acting. The further out she is from imminent physical contact, the flatter her vocal delivery becomes, until she starts to sound like Sasha Grey. But she tops them in the action. Soderbergh keeps the camera fairly steady during all of the fights, so the chain of cause and effect between motion and outcome is always clear, and the natural ability of Carano's body can be appreciated. It's worth it for those scenes, even if the story seems slight and the retro-genre-fantastic score overstates the case.

A few random notes: First, I appreciated the scene where Mallory took off her ridiculous formal heels in order to fight. Second, I didn't realize how few actresses this movie had, apart from its female star, until I started to list her co-stars. Apart from some random extras in some scenes, Mallory/Gina Carano is the only woman in this movie. She works with men, under a man, who is hired by two other men. She hijacks a car from a male hostage, and she has no mother, just a father. Perhaps the key to all this is what her boss says in an important scene - that it would be a mistake to think of Mallory as a woman. Whatever her sex, the movie shows a world in which she's somehow gendered as male, for all of her conventional female attractiveness. Finally, in a post on Haywire's trailer, a friend told me that Gina Carano is the Danica Patrick of the MMA world. Ouch. I'll concede that she may be. After all, I don't watch MMA and won't start until either the end times come or I start caring about baseball. However, even if she's not the most-skilled fighter out there, she still seems strong enough, flexible enough and muscular enough to do what she does in this movie.

Video Bin: Black Sheep

I have a phobia of zombies. So you would think the zombie trend, still shuffling on despite its advanced age, would bother me. Instead, I view it as a repulsive, terrifying opportunity. Here's my reasoning. If I watch or read as much zombie media as possible, I won't be scared of them anymore. Or, at worst, I'll still be scared, but at least I'll also know what to do (aim for the head!) when the dead rise. All of this explains why I picked up a used copy of 2006's Black Sheep a few month's ago. It was a dollar. There were zombies. Rarely has research seemed so frugal. Having finally watched it, I can say that my appreciation for Shaun of the Dead is even stronger. Black Sheep is about genetically-modified sheep who turn into flesh-craving ghouls. That this movie is from New Zealand should explain the object of its obsession. And that it's about zombie sheep should also indicate that it's not a straight horror movie. It's a comedy/horror hybrid, like Shaun or Zombieland or Splice. Unfortunately, in spite of some amusing scenes of gore, Black Sheep misses something crucial. Nothing is ever seriously at stake in this film. Not even the dogs, who, having barked their orders for too many years, would be the expected early victims of a woolly vengeance. Horror comedies need to balance the humour with genuine threat. Every laugh should start out as a scream, or else they'll never be as enjoyable.

The Back-Up Plan

If the rest of my life doesn't pan out, my backup plan is to open a dive bar. Not an ironically divey bar, where plaid-shirted types of a certain name - rhymes with tipster - can find their own kind.  Nope, the decor will strictly be wagon wheels and promotional beer coasters. There shall be no bourbon cocktails. Actually, if you ask for anything but a rum and coke - even a gin and tonic - you'll be shit out of luck, son. Beer options will include some good ones (Tankhouse) and Molson Export, as a tribute to the bar near one of my Montreal apartments that seemed to only serve Ex. In bottles. With the decor and drinks taken care of, only the question of music and food remains. The food: I may be prevailed upon to offer you pickled eggs, or even stale nachos made in a toaster oven, but only if I like your face. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy sneaking in rotis from down the street when I'm not looking. Music will be a medley of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn songs, because it isn't a dive bar until you can cry at the bar, shamelessly.

Look forward to Protagitron's, opening in 2014 at a questionable street corner near you!

A Thursday of Packing and High Anxiety

Although this is a personal blog, a medium mostly conceived for the airing of woes, I generally try to keep my fine whine in the cellar and off my site. Today, I'm making an exception. So stop here and appreciate the cute dog if whinging gives you hives. Don't worry, crafts and beer will return next week.

This Thursday is pretty domestic, but not in a crafty way. Instead, events in my life are forcing me to contemplate what it is, exactly, that would make yet another furnished apartment feel like home. Specifically, how many books it would take. I have a desert island mentality when it comes to packing. Even if I'm just taking the VIA into Montréal, I'm convinced that I'll end up stranded in the middle of the ocean. And then I'll really regret taking that fourth book out of my suitcase, when I'm barely 50 pages into my first. And let's not forget a second knitting project. And some wine gums. I'll need sustenance on my island.

At least fixating on how many books I'm packing, and whether they'll be enough, keeps me from thinking about my real anxiety. I'm worried that I'm making another mistake. In the past two and a half years, I've made two serious decisions about where to move and where to live. And they've both turned out to be duds on the balance. I know that doesn't sound self-help book approved, and la-dee-dah-another-door-opens-when-one-closes etc etc etc, but sometimes it's just an error in judgment, straight up. Sorry that doesn't look as uplifting in raised type on a cheap paperback. That shitty track record is why I'm not feeling very confident right now. Am I making the right decision? I hope so. I hope six books will be enough for the next few weeks. Because the box is full, and I need to go.

Running Up That Hill Times Three

My love for Running Up That Hill is a love without end. It's the song that I would skate to if I ever had to come up with an emergency figure skating routine for the Olympics. It's also the song I would dance to if I was ever auditioning, against all odds, for a place in the American Ballet Company, though both my toe shoes and I came from the wrong side of the tracks. Much like the rest of Kate Bush's oeuvre, it lends itself well to dramatic hand gestures, is what I'm saying. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that I usually have three versions on my iPod.

Original Recipe Kate Bush:


This Placebo Version, Which I Feel Used to End Up on TV Shows A Lot:


And The Chromatics, A Band Also seen on the Drive Soundtrack:


If I have to choose one - Really, I can't just keep two, and throw the Placebo cover overboard? No? - I suppose I'll go with the divine La Bush. I like The Chromatics now, but I know that Ruth Radelat's breathy vocals will fade away. However, I'll always be a drama kid adrift in the city, with Kate Bush's wailing to call me home. So why bother to keep the other versions? I know some people hate covers furiously, but if I liked the original then I'll usually appreciate the cover. Even if it doesn't replace the definitive version, sometimes it shifts things just enough that I'll find something I missed. And it stops me from getting bored with my favourite songs.