Day: July 22, 2006

Overheard yesterday at McDonald’s: “There’s not much a nine-year-old girl can do with a G.I. Joe toy.”

There are probably plenty of nine-year-old girls who would beg to differ. Still, judging from the junky Happy Meal toy the gentleman was trying to exchange, I doubt a nine-year-old boy would find it much fun either.

Oh, and there’s a strange irony to reading a book called The Thin Place in McDonald’s.

A meme, stolen from Betty: in your music player, write down the first track that shows up for each letter of the alphabet. Here are mine:

“A Brand New Song” by Brother Machine
“Baba O’Riley” by Jordis Unga
“C’est La Vie” by Bob Seger
“D.U.I.” by the Offspring
“E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)” by Blue Öyster Cult
“Face Down. Feet First.” by Christine Fellows
“Galang” by M.I.A.
“Hale” by Deep Blue Something
“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” by Bob Dylan
“Jaan Pehechaan Ho” by Mohammed Rafi
“Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison
“L.A. Law theme song” from Tee Vee Toons
“M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless)” from Tee Vee Toons
“N.S.U.” by Cream
“O’Oh” by Yoko Ono
“Pablo And Andrea” by Yo La Tengo
“Qu’ran” by Brian Eno and David Byrne
“Rabbit Fur Coat” by Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins
“Sacrifice (From “The Gift”)” by Christophe Beck
“T.B.D.” by Live
“Un Lapin” by Chantal Goya
“Valleri” by the Monkees
“Wacky Tobacky” by NRBQ
“X-Files Theme” by Mark Snow
“Yeat’s Grave” by the Cranberries
“Zombie” by the Cranberries

Does that reveal anything about me? Even if there are quite a few songs on that list I almost never listen to?

Of the apparent racism in the new Pirates of the Carribean movie, Marc Singer writes1:

Maybe we shouldn’t settle for merely identifying racist stereotypes as if we expect everybody to agree that they persist in our popular culture and that they’re a problem–two assumptions we can’t afford. Maybe we need to explain why they’re a problem: in the case of Pirates because they reduce all nonwhites to mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.

Most importantly, maybe we should ask why, in the twenty-first century, we’re still taking such great pleasure from the racist propaganda of the twentieth century, or the nineteenth… or, now that Dead Man’s Chest has bested all competitors, the fifteenth. Maybe we need to mock these caricatures relentlessly wherever we find them.

You know, he’s not wrong. I think the film has a lot of other problems, primarily a thin plot — yet one so thickly applied2) — that assumes you remember and love every character from the original. When, frankly, all that I remember is some lightweight spooky pirating and Johnny Depp’s surprisingly swishy and charming performance.

But Singer’s also right about the film being review-proof. Millions of people just don’t seem to care.

And that’s okay. The film is dumb and overlong and crammed full of uninteresting plot developments clearly designed to set up the next dumb and overlong film in the franchise. But it’s not without its moments of charm, which come mostly from Johnny Depp — who, good or bad, is almost never boring in a role. For all its many faults, it’s the sort of film that’s supposed to do well in the summer blockbuster season, a silly swashbuckler, especially one so starved for a breakout hit as this one.

But, oh, the racism…

It’s a shame that the most blatant example of it — the cannibal island natives — comes in what I think is one of the film’s funnier stretches, and what for me offered the only really laugh-out-loud moment in the entire movie. It’s a shame, too, because it could have been so easily addressed and corrected; there’s no reason for the natives to be disturbing racial caricatures other than lazy writing. There’s no reason for the characters of color to be nothing but “mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.” And that they are is really unacceptable.

1 Via Shaken & Stirred. Also in a roundabout way via Nalo Hopkinson

2 As Ask a Ninja points out, everybody gets a plotline: “It’s a neverending story. But with no Luck Dragon.”

Because, I dunno, maybe some of you don’t read Bookslut’s blog, which quoted exactly the same thing, but — “Tin House, where a writer can dream“:

There’s a brief lull, an opportunity for someone to ask the Burning Question, the one that gets asked in one form or another at every literary event: Where do you get your ideas? Before it can happen, Moore looks up at the sky.

“There are bats up there,” she says casually.

That’s good, says Elissa Schappell, an editor at Tin House magazine. They eat mosquitoes.

“Yeah, the bat lobby wants you to believe that,” Moore replies, not batting an eye.

From The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis:

Is there anyone who watches the sun go down and thinks they’re seeing the world move? Anyone who looks at the night sky and thinks they’re seeing galaxies racing away from the world and from each other, going slower and slower but never stopping, the universe growing colder and darker as the stars burn out one by one?

And:

Songbirds were singing: robins and warblers and phoebes and wrens. The white-throated sparrow. Maybe even a bobolink or meadowlark, though there were fewer of them than before. Theirs is a kind of music that lightens the human heart, and there is no telling what we’ll do to one another when it finally stops.