2011: in which even the animals were all dudes

Sometimes a girl just goes through a week in which none of her posts get finished. Also there was snow, which in this case was very teeny and powdery and sparkly and demanded my full attention as it fell. (There was also cross-country skiing.)

My long, increasingly unmanageable post, still unfinished, is on my La Jefita (the boss!) Awards in which I celebrate women on & off screen — and in the course of writing it has come to my attention that even all the fucking animals this year were gendered male. Not that this is a new thing. (Bambi was male. Bambi! Explain that to me!)

Now, I’m on record as saying that Caesar the chimp (Andy Serkis) should win Best Actor Oscar this year for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and it’s a sign of how stupid the whole farce of the Academy Awards is that he won’t even be nominated. But let’s think back. All those apes, chimps, monkeys and gorillaz were gendered male. The one simian female was Caesar’s mother, who gets killed off immediately. The ones with names are all male — Maurice, Koba, Buck, Rocket. I’ll bet if you asked audiences, they’d say that they assumed  all the rest are dudes, too — especially when they cross the Golden Gate Bridge en masse and overturn cars.

Here’s my radical suggestion: no one will care if you gender some of these animals female instead. Or if you leave their genders ambiguous.

Who’s going to care, for example, whether instead of naming the War Horse Joey, they called it Maggie or Star or Chestnut? I can guarantee that once the horse starts to do noble things, no one’s going to give a shit whether it’s male or female. The one thing I’ll give Tintin — a film I have completely forgotten, it was such a boring sausage-fest of dudes — was that at least the dog’s name was Snowy, even though we all know he was a dude. The most ambiguously ungendered animal onscreen last year was the annoying Paw Paw, the old, sick cat from Miranda July’s The Future. (We never even saw Paw Paw’s face.)

It wasn’t just Snowy: dogs were always male in 2011. There was the lovable Uggie in The Artist, Arthur in Beginners, Hummer in Young Adult, Willie Nelson in Our Idiot Brother. But it was also the ensemble pieces. The only animal in any of the Harry Potter films gendered as female was Hedwig the owl — the rest, Crookshanks, Firenze, Scabbers, Fawkes, even the evil snake Nagini — and anything in the Weasleys’ house, all male.

All male. Why? I don’t get it. What’s so difficult about having a phoenix or a cat be female? What’s so distasteful about having adorable pets that are female? I have two suggestions. First, maybe the concept of male dominance is so crucial to Hollywood that filmmakers cannot imagine having female pets, especially when they’re central to the script like Caesar or Joey the horse.

Or, second, maybe this is connected to the fact that virtually all these films have human male leads and the filmmakers have “reasoned” that men must have male pets/animal counterparts. But if this is the case, I need explanation: please explain to me why it would be problematic for Ewan McGregor’s character to have a female dog. Can it be that filmmakers find it unseemly, somehow sexually inappropriate? Have we sunk that low?

Needless to say, the imaginary animals are also male — aka The Beaver. But at least in that case I can understand that he was Mel Gibson’s alter-ego.

Okay, there are a few ensemble films with some token girls. The Muppets, Winnie the Pooh (but let’s be precise: Kanga is also just a mother to Roo), and even Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked appears to have a girl. Don’t misunderstand me: I haven’t seen that film. What do you take me for?

The most radically gendered ensemble film I can see is Kung Fu Panda 2. That is, both Tigress and Viper are female. Out of about 12 male leads. See what happens when a woman directs a film, like Jennifer Yuh Nelson did in this case? It’s a comparative girl-fest!

Geena Davis started her Institute on Gender in Media because when she started to watch TV with her young daughter, she couldn’t miss the gender disparity. In family films there’s only “one female character for every three male characters. In group scenes, only 17% of the characters are female. The repetitive viewing patterns of children ensure that these negative stereotypes are ingrained and imprinted over and over,” the Institute’s website explains.

As Melissa Silverstein shows us again and again with her brilliant blog Women & Hollywood, children’s media is just the tip of the iceberg. Women appear far less often both on and off screen. Which makes me wonder why Hollywood couldn’t just throw us a bone with a few female pets.

Whichever way you lean — whether we think male dominance is so fundamental to Hollywood that all the animals must be male, or whether we think our male heroes cannot possibly have vital relationships with female animals — I hope you’ll agree with me that this is just really weird.

Meryl Streep and “impersonation”

So I woke up this morning to find it was 1° F outside. (That’s -17° C. Can we say “yikes!”?) Naturally, two things crossed my mind:

1. (Sarcastically.) It’s really too bad the gym is closed and I’ll have to stay inside all day in my pyjamas.
2. (Seriously.) Why is everyone calling Meryl Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady an “impersonation” of Margaret Thatcher?

I know, you’re thinking:

1. What a geek.
2. Yeah, why “impersonation”? Please tell me, Feminéma!
3. It’s just a little cold — put on a few layers and go for a walk already, wimp.

Blogger JustMeMike pointed it out in his review of the film, noting the term’s appearance in virtually every review (just google it and you’ll see). “How come no one referred to Leonardo DiCaprio ‘impersonating’ J. Edgar (Hoover) in the same way?” he asks. Exactly!

Impersonation. It’s one of those terms that skirts between flattery (“an eerie job of inhabiting that real-life personage”) and a backhanded slam against such close attention to accent, appearance, and personal tics as less than true acting (“it’s only a parlor trick”).

It reminds me of the problem of the “uncanny valley” in modern 3D animation (I’m looking at you, Tintin) whereby audiences find themselves revulsed and disturbed when an animated character looks too realistic. Impersonators, after all, are the kinds of low-level entertainers who appear in Vegas or on Saturday Night Live. Impersonators emphasize exactitude rather than artistry. A great impersonation gets all the details right — but can’t go further to impress with real acting skill.

Let’s also remember that there are female impersonators — that category of campy performer who dresses as Liza Minnelli or Dolly Parton in order to get a lot of whoops from a drunken audience. These performers are not associated with manly acting talent.

As near as I can tell, those critics who are also good writers have used the term impersonation not to complain about Streep, but to contrast her strong performance with the utterly disappointing film. Roger Ebert writes, “Streep creates an uncanny impersonation of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but in this film she’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.” A. O. Scott likewise uses his flattery of Streep’s work as a rhetorical pivot to detail the film’s shortcomings. “Ms. Streep provides, once again, a technically flawless impersonation that also seems to reveal the inner essence of a well-known person,” he explains, before complaining about “the film’s vague and cursory treatment of her political career.” In other words, these writers seek to make it clear that Streep did what she could with a lame script.

Since then, however, critics who are less aware of their vocabulary’s connotations have jumped on the impersonation wagon to use it all the time in describing her role. “Meryl Streep’s performance as/ impersonation of Margaret Thatcher had Oscar written all over it,” writes Roger Moore. John O’Sullivan also admiringly notes that Streep’s “uncanny accuracy … goes beyond brilliant impersonation” in his piece for Radio Free Europe. These pieces blur the boundaries between impersonation and acting; yet my actor friends bristle at the notion that they are equivalent or that performing in the role of a real-life person demands impersonation. After all, numerous flattering reviews of My Week With Marilyn state something to the effect of, “Michelle Williams doesn’t so much impersonate Marilyn Monroe as suggest her.” None of these statements seem overtly to associate impersonation with acting that leaves something out. I truly don’t think these writers use the term to complain about Streep (or Williams, right), at least not consciously.

But this returns us to JMM’s question: why don’t these writers use the term impersonation when they discuss Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edgar (or, for that matter, his Howard Hughes from The Aviator)? Why wasn’t Michael Fassbender “impersonating” Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method, or Colin Firth “impersonating” King George V in The King’s Speech, or Jesse Eisenberg “impersonating” Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network?

Here I can only speculate, as I don’t know the inner souls of all these film critics, but I want to suggest that it can be attributed to an unconscious bias in favor of the superlative acting skills of male actors. An enormous percentage of published film critics in the US are male. Combine this with an industry seriously tilted toward male success and you have conditions within which even the most female-friendly critics are less inclined to celebrate an actress’s accomplishment without using terms with complex connotations. (Would a male critic really associate a male actor with the term impersonation so long as there are “female impersonators” out there?) This bias may be unconscious and not intended to express sexism, but we can see its effects nevertheless.

Until I started this blog and educated myself on the issues, I was unaware of the extent to which men dominate filmmaking and film criticism. It’s not just the fact that women appear onscreen less, behind the camera less, as producers less, as writers less — and that they get paid less overall. It’s also the more subtle things — the ways a woman’s subtle performance will get overlooked as male critics fall over themselves to praise her male co-star. The ways that female actors inhabit such a severely limited range of body types — I dare you to come up with the female equivalent of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Paul Giamatti, much less Cedric The Entertainer or Gérard Depardieu.

These critics may not be consciously demeaning Streep’s performance. But the term impersonation is not a wholly flattering description of what she does — if it were, we’d have seen it appear in reviews of men’s biopics.

Now, off for a walk while it’s still a balmy 11° F (-11.6° C).

See this film: “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (2011)

Here’s the thing about teen films that I realized after seeing Easy A last year: there seems to be an unwritten rule that they be perverse. There always seems to be more eccentricity, more sex, more overwrought drama, more whipsmart dialogue, and more true love in teen films than in any actual high school. I’ve always loved this about this genre — who doesn’t want to imagine a world like that in Say Anything, in which John Cusack might be best friends with Lili Taylor, who gets drunk at parties and plays awful, maudlin songs about her ex on the guitar?

But after watching The Myth of the American Sleepover, I feel there’s a sorry predictability, even a pathetic idealism to all that. This movie, in contrast, feels real. I was blown away by its rejection of perversity. This movie, made by first-time director David Robert Mitchell, is kind of perfect.It’s structured like American Graffiti (1973) and Dazed and Confused (1993): it’s an ensemble tale of teenagers during one single night at the end of the summer, roaming the generic suburban streets of Detroit. Some are searching for idealized love; some for a kind of excitement that’ll re-chart their lives, their identities. And like those two other films, which are set in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, this one seems to be set in some kind of nonspecific past during which none of the teens is distracted by cell phones, texting, and computers. They wander those leafy streets by foot, by bike, and sometimes in someone else’s car … in fact, without all the familiar teen dating technologies, the film almost seems nostalgic, even as it’s paced with great emo songs of our own time (including a song by Beirut called Elephant Gun that I’ve got to get).

It’s true that one of the film’s major themes is innocence and experience — familiar ground for fans of the teen film genre. Yet somehow each one of the kids make choices that surprise you. Those choices are especially refreshing because the girls in the film are so beautifully rendered and so elegantly fleshed out by these young actors.

Including the sweet-faced Maggie (Claire Sloma), whose facial piercings beg you to look past the baby fat and see her as a risk-taker. She drags her geeky, bespeckled friend Emma with her all over town as she tries desperately to find a bit of sexual excitement before their freshman year begins. But when she actually spends a little time with that handsome, older lifeguard from the pool, he says something surprising. “They trick you into giving up your childhood for all these promises of adventure,” he says thoughtfully. “By the time you realize what you’ve lost, it’s too late.” I found this film expressive of the kind of yearning I actually felt as a teen. Real teenagerhood is just like this — in love with the wrong people, yearning for the unknown for reasons you don’t understand, wanting to be someone different than you are, experiencing mini-moments of clarity, feeling awkward and doing stupid things you regret, even as you have that one thing you’re good at. Real teens aren’t just barreling forward toward adult joys and disappointments; they’re also pulled backward to innocence and childhood. As the lifeguard articulates, they feel acutely their own in-betweenness. Honestly, this is one of my favorite movies of 2011 — filed alongside the similarly sweet and magical filmic experiences like Midnight in Paris or Beginners or the wonderfully twisted A Somewhat Gentle Man.

Those shots of Maggie and Emma riding their bikes in the summer twilight, with the strains of Elephant Gun as their soundtrack — oh, how it makes me yearn. And I never feel nostalgic for my teenage years. What an accomplishment to have taken the teen film and figured out how to rewrite it. Readers, please: get it now while it’s streaming on Netflix.

Buster Keaton delight for a snowy day

They say our snow will turn to rain later on, but right now it’s perfect — just enough to feel snug and wintery. Enough to make me think that what we all need is 20 minutes of silent comedy — nay, not just any comedy, but the gymnastic antics of Buster Keaton. Top on the list of things to love about One Week (1920, in which he builds a house from a kit alongside his new bride) is the fact that she’s so game to participate in the manic house construction (and gymnastics), too. Cheers to Sybil Seely.

(Is it just me, or do those jaw-dropping scenes make your mouth open wide, and laugh out loud?)

Why doesn’t “Young Adult” (2011) quite work?

I like everything about this plot idea. Beautiful, horrible former high school queen, Mavis (Charlize Theron) is now in her late 30s, living in Minneapolis and ghost writing for a young adult series of novels about high school drama. When she hears her old high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) and his wife have had a baby she decides that he’s The One Who Got Away. She goes back to her small, provincial Minnesota home town to help him escape from what she’s sure is a life in hell. All the while she’s trying to finish writing the last novel for the increasingly unpopular series, which the publishers are about to shelve. Written and directed by the same pair, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, who produced the snappy Juno (2007) and starring the excellent Theron, the only question is: why doesn’t it quite work?

The problem isn’t Theron, that’s for sure. I’ve only seen her be funny once before (in Arrested Development) and she’s good at it. It’s a tricky part, because she’s such a resolute anti-heroine. She’s just incredibly pretty — and let me say that watching her for 90 minutes almost makes you want to drool in spite of yourself — yet her character is a dark, alcoholic, depressive bitch on wheels. As mean as Mavis is, Theron has to make you feel for her, even against all your better judgment. Within the first 20 minutes I realized something about that horrible girl in my high school: being that pretty can make you paranoid such that you imagine envy and death rays coming out of every other woman’s eyes. (Which made her all the meaner.)

In short: this film is made for all of us who weren’t Mavises in high school, and it’s made for one purpose: so we can delight in her misery. Problem: that’s not really a very good plot.

Here’s my theory: the problem with this story is that ultimately we learn more about the screenwriter than we do about the main character. This woman is more eager to punish Mavis than she is to write a tale that works, and she starts by giving her character zero redeeming qualities. Mavis can clean herself up really nice for Big Appearances, but most of the time she’s dragging around in sweats and with her mascara running — if not passed out, face down, on a convenience piece of furniture. Diablo Cody passes up no opportunity to pile on the list of ugly habits and vicious character traits. After a while you start to think that in writing a story about a woman who never become a real adult, Cody has revealed that she just can’t forgive that bitch.

So at some point around the 2/3 mark, you start to feel the story working against itself. You start to feel that no prom queen, however psycho, would have wound up so utterly pathetic as Mavis. And you grow weary of the litany of humiliations she must endure. Especially because it all contrasts so strikingly with the fact that the camera just loves Theron. Sometimes I wondered whether Reitman and Cody were likewise entranced by her; there’s something schizophrenic about watching Theron slit her eyes like the meanest of all mean girls, yet her mouth is so perfectly shaped that you can’t quite concentrate fully on her meanness.

I also like the idea that she would form a weird friendship with Matt (Patton Oswalt), a guy who was so bullied by Mavis and others in high school that he wound up being brutally beaten and left for dead. He still walks with a crutch and tells her freely that his penis was disfigured at the time, too. Turns out, he’s the one person willing to tell Mavis that she’s delusional and self-destructive — not that it helps, or changes anything. Not that the film really convinces you that Mavis would be friends with Matt.

So for all its good ideas, the film winds up stuck in a bunch of old-chestnut tropes that it can’t work its way through:

• you can’t go home again
• small town virtues vs. big city emptiness
• will the shlubby loser wind up being Mr. Right?
• catfight between women
• will damaged anti-heroine heal herself?

Alas. Cody seems to have decided that her ending would avoid the gravitational pull of any of these narratives, and instead offer us something that avoids the sense of an ending at all. It feels, a bit, like she skipped out on us.

I’m looking forward to seeing Theron do more off-kilter parts. But I’m having trouble mustering any enthusiasm for Reitman and Cody. Juno was a spunky little movie — a much better than average, B+/A- kind of flick with an appealing heroine who had lines that were a little bit too good for a high school kid. But they needed more work on the script for Young Adult, a clearer vision for the movie, and less awe of their terrific lead actor. It’s too bad, because they started with a great plot concept.

“Weekend” (2011): a quick note on radicalism

Busy here again, and my post on The Artist is just not writing itself. Apparently if you love something that much, one’s own words about its deliciousness cannot seem but dreary and pedantic. So for today I’m going to tell you to see Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s beautifully brilliant and radical film about two men who encounter each other.

There’s a very sweet story here about their attraction to each other, especially because we see all of it through the eyes of the lovely and perennially self-deprecating Russell (Tom Cullen, above left), who sees in Glen (Chris New) the possibility of something more serious. As much as Russell’s shy, admiring glances almost break your heart for their eagerness and caution, the film’s radicalism comes from its portrayal of a weekend-long gay relationship — sex, drugs, disagreements, personality clashes, and, most of all, their different ways of being gay in a broader culture deeply squeamish with gay sex.

It’s perhaps closest to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004) — that talky and fraught encounter between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke — but Weekend is so much more stunning. It simultaneously takes for granted that two men might wear their political commitments and identities differently, and also brings to the forefront how debates over gay marriage or queer sex speak utterly and pervasively about any given man’s soul and what he wants in an ideal world. It’s spectacular and quiet, and might be my favorite love story of the year.

Early on, Glen asks Russell to retell how they met each other at the bar. Russell can barely lift his eyes as he describes seeing him across the room, and “I thought you were out of my league, or whatever.” What league do you think you’re in? Glen asks. “Third division,” he responds. This exchange somehow breaks my heart even to remember it, and captures that horrible combination of magic and nails-on-chalkboard of those early days of a relationship. Their story is a gay story, not packaged prettily for straight people and not shy about showing you the sex. It’s radical and wonderful and beautiful — spectacular.

A film critic’s guidebook: how to trash “New Year’s Eve” (2011)

From the Guardian‘s podcast, Film Weekly, in a conversation between Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks (I believe their dryness and Englishness come through in the transcription):

JS:    New Year’s Eve was brought to you by the people who gave us Valentine’s Day only last year…

XB:   Yes it was, wasn’t it…

JS:    So successful was that that they thought they’d do it again with another kind of yearly, uh, event. Does it work?

XB:   Well it’s got the ticking time code, hasn’t it, which makes it look like an old-school disaster movie.

JS:    What, the race against the clock?

XB:   The race against the clock, the all-star cast. But what they’re racing up to is the dropping of the ball. The ball drop of New Year’s Eve. They probably should have called this Ball Drop, shouldn’t they? That would’ve been fun. And you’ve got all the intersecting lives, and there are connections that maybe we don’t know about but it’ll turn out that these characters know each other more than we think they do…

JS:    Should we explain for our non-US resident listeners that the ball drop is what happens in Times Square every midnight. I think a big glittery ball seems to drop down on the countdown to midnight. It’s a big deal, apparently.

XB:   It is, and they always have the prior year underneath the ball to get squashed. New York tradition.

JS:    That’d be great, wouldn’t it?

XB:   It would. I’d like to put some of the cast under that as well.

JS:    The whole cast, really, and the director.

XB:   Yeah. It’s sort of Magnolia on Prozac for morons, isn’t it?

JS:    Is it the worst film ever made?

XB:   It’s one of them. I almost think it’s not a film. It’s a hydra-headed beast of corporate evil.

JS:    Isn’t it? Because the product placement is everywhere.

XB:   Everywhere! And it’s a lifestyle commercial in the guise of a festive film full of product placements, full of absolutely empty, vapid characters…

JS:    …and Jon Bon Jovi!

XB:   …and Jon Bon Jovi. Who’s obviously there for the youth kind of audience, isn’t he.

Let’s all race out to see it, shall we?

…in which I thank the music wallahs

I’m pretty certain it was Feminist Music Geek who turned me on to Thao & Mirah‘s album from last spring — and hallelujah for that. Since the end of May I’ve been rubbing new kinds of moisture into the cracked skin/soul I developed in Texas and one of the most important of these is a bunch of new music.

For the first time in years I’ve given myself real time to listen to new stuff, and my skin/soul is slowly losing that angry redness. It’s less prone to bruising, less painful when touched. Hallelujah for the music wallahs. (And strained metaphors.)

“Broken English” (2007): suck this, suckers

Neurotic woman (Parker Posey), late 30s, is desperate for love. She’s so pretty and has such a great wardrobe but she’s just so pathetic. That’s just the way women are in their late 30s, right? desperate and overly high-strung, till they find a guy?

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Also: stop reading if you’re already gagging a bit in your mouth. On Feminéma’s patented Vomit-O-Meter®, this ranks at Red Zone/Full Ralph. Oh yeah, then she meets the Magical Frenchman of the titular Broken English. (Magical Frenchman is not to be confused with the Magical Negro trope; pathetic female protagonists get Magical Men to have sex with and cure all their issues, while troubled male protagonists do not sleep with the Magical Negros who help them discover the true meaning of life. For clarification, thanks to TVtropes.com). Et voilà! Let’s hold hands in the Métro!

You know what I need, folks? Some kind of mental eraser so I will forget that Parker Posey was so much of a sucker as to say yes to a script this lame. Also: some kind of feminist brickbat to use on director Zoe Cassavetes for using such an array of talent (Gena Rowlands! Peter Bogdanovich! Drea de Matteo!) in such an insulting tale.

(Also need: an image of Vomit-O-Meter®. Tried with a Sharpie and a scanner but I now cannot make my computer recognize the scanner. Do any of you have skillz? For a reward, just say Vomit-O-Meter several times in a row and feel the joy!)

Because that’s what this is: an offensive film for female suckers. Isn’t it bad enough that director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Red Riding Hood, etc.) has sold her soul to make that drivel? I’m sorry, but with a film pedigree that might even outdo Sofia Coppola’s, surely Cassavetes can do better. If not then please, Zoe, just turn producer for Dee Rees or Maryam Keshavarz. In the meantime, I’ve got to get this nasty taste out of my mouth.

Versatile blogger award!

Many thanks to the elegant SpanishProf for nominating me for The Versatile Blogger award!

Conditions of the award:

1. Nominate 15 fellow bloggers
2. Inform the bloggers of their nomination
3. Share 7 random things about yourself
4. Thank the blogger who nominated you
5. Post the award badge.

My nominations for fantastic versatile bloggers:

1. Angry Black Bitch. Does any blogger out there have a better blogger voice than Shark-Fu? Not when she’s talking about politics, feminism, and crazy sex scandals, which she’s been doing since 2005. Holy crap — who can do this that long? Only a genius with stamina, baby. See her take on Herman Cain’s scandal here.
2. Comradde PhysioProffe, who holds forth on sports, food, and politics, and very occasionally academia. I drool over his illustrated recipes. And for all of it he uses the motherfucken best, creatively-spelled curse words. Want the best shitte ever? His recipe for chicken chile verde tamales here.
3. The Delphiad, where Dominique Millette offers up on-target, biting and funny commentary on life, politics, feminism, and all the good things that keep blood running through our veins. She puts up with no shit, except when she just pretends to put up with it, like in her take on lingerie football.
4. The Fantom Country. JB there writes about movies in a way that’s above & beyond the typical; his reviews always seem to expand outward in a way that sings to me. See for example his assessment of the movies of 2011.
5. From a Left Wing, where Jennifer Doyle talks about sports, feminism, and the sexual politics that are inevitable when we talk about sports (and yet seem so absent from most sports pages). Here’s a great piece on women’s soccer in the 1920s (who knew?) that’ll give you a taste of this terrific topic.
6. Historiann. Most of the time she offers up a feminist take on history and academia, and sometimes talks about great music from my era (80s, 90s), and always displays a delightful good nature and those great 1940s pinup cowgirls. If you’re an academic, this is a must-see. See here for the horrors of “smokers” at annual meetings.
7. I Blame the Patriarchy. Surely we all read Twisty Faster’s blog while we clean our feminist weapons in the evening, drink a marg, and brush up on our blamer mouth muscles. I just wish I could come play with her animals. Read “My unique style self-expresses who I personally am” and get a taste of what you could be enjoying with more feminism, too.
8. LadyElocutionist, where Sara writes about feminism & popular culture, a woman after my own heart. Her takes are always smart and perceptive — see for example her bit on Bridesmaids.
9. The Lotus Notebooks, where Natasha Rosen discusses living in Turkey, teaching, becoming a mother, and the vignettes of life and memory. Beautiful. Her least serious — and most elegant — posts are stylish images from the 20th-c. past, “Elegantly Dressed Wednesday.”
10. Lycanthropia, who writes so eloquently she takes my breath away; often about the trials and tribulations about life in grad school. What I’ve read 15 times: her poem, Operation Soul Retrieval.
11. MeAndRichard. Now, you may say to yourself, how can an effusive fan blog about Richard Armitage be versatile? Well, friends, you have never read Servetus discuss an actor’s craft and persona. She throws everything into the effort — take, for example, her discussion of Armitage’s interviews, in which she mobilizes the whole critical arsenal from post-structuralist views of authenticity to pragmatic reasoning. Brilliant, silly, and often educational — just like the author.
12. Mirror, the breathtakingly great film blog by Kartina Richardson, whose unexpected takes on the movies always delight me. She’s smart as shit and talks about things I wish I’d noticed. See for example her take on A Dangerous Method in which she talks about how Keira Knightley (unexpectedly) evokes race and the scent of a woman’s actual vagina, which is so clever a take on that early era of psychiatry that I wish the film would @#$%ing show up in my city already. (Richardson also has a nifty companion site showing how much she enjoys beverages. Wish I’d thought of that.)
13. The Ms. Education of Shelby Knox. The center of the amazing documentary The Education of Shelby Knox — about the growing political/feminist consciousness of a high school girl — is in her 20s now and kicking some serious ass as a professional feminist. She’s a brilliant writer and is compiling a “radical women’s history project” to compile information about the feminist past that isn’t just about the white ladies.
14. SisterArts, a blog about gardens, history, and poetry, and sometimes just about beauty. Lisa Moore shows that it’s possible to be an academic — a literature professor, in her case — and also just love her chosen subject of analysis. Look at these gorgeous images from Stourhead, for example.
15. The Solipsistic Me, where Michael Hulshof-Schmidt shows absolutely no hesitation in calling out good and bad behavior during these dark days of incredibly bad public behavior. As a good progressive feminist pro-gay type, I read it every day. I especially liked his Bigot of the Year and Hero of the Year awards.

And seven random things about me:

1. My favorite film of all time: The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed’s amazing, cynical postwar film that shifts all the ground under your feet during the course of watching it. Orson Welles has never been better; Alida Valli virtually never smiles, yet she glows; and the zither music! This is why I watch film so utterly and absolutely.
2. The music that rocked my world (and still does): The Pretenders (1980). The drive, the sexually explicit lyrics, the stance … it’s still the album I turn to for long drives. For a long time, “Mystery Achievement” was the song that ramped me up for tennis matches.
3. My favorite place: Fort Bragg, California. In case I ever make enough money for an expensive vacation/retirement locale. A place for those people like me who can’t choose between mountains and ocean. Nuff said:
4. Some people I would invite to a dream dinner party if I could: Helen Mirren, Dorothy Parker, Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Steve Earle, and all the bloggers abovementioned. (Yes, I know Parker is no longer with us. It’s a dream dinner party, dammit.)
5. What we should all be fighting for in 2012: women’s reproductive rights. Yes, abortion. I have a lot more to say about this — including why I think progressives have let it slip — and will hold forth shortly on the topic here.
6. A random list of things I would eat every single day if I could: roasted brussels sprouts, sushi, kaddo bourani, guacamole, steamed BBQ pork buns, paté, garlic bread, and my sister’s roasted red pepper/walnut/smack spread. In my utopian universe, everything will come in a dumpling/ravioli/empanada/pierogi/cannoli/blintz/crèpe format.
7. My favorite expression: “When I run the world…”, which seems to come up a lot more frequently these days, especially when I serve on university committees. And yet I have no desire to actually run universities (like being a dean or department chair or whatever). Which leads to my motto, which needs to be put on a bronze plaque: Refusing to Drink the Kool-Aid Since April 2005.