Category Archives: media

If You Love Wallace & Gromit

18 Saturday Oct 2008

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Hanna has claimed–entirely appropriately–the finder’s credit for first spotting this rather indescribable artifact of 1960s British television on a Dr. Who episode [Update: Hanna says it’s “The Sea Devils”]–and later coming across a blog post (I’m sorry! I’ve misplaced the link), which led us to this adorable-yet-strange British stop-motion animated series called The Clangers.

This two-series show (which ran from 1968-1972) is made up of ten-minute episodes featuring the Clangers, a race of small pink knitted aliens, and a cast of characters including the Soup Dragon, the Iron Chicken, the Hoots, the (terrifying) Froglets, and the Music Note Trees.

Here is the episode called “The Treasure”:

While the complete series is only available from the UK on Region 2 DVDs, you can view a number of episodes on YouTube:

The Intruder.

Music.

The Pipe Organ.

The Visitor.

And Hanna’s favorite, The Iron Chicken.

They make great study-break or bedtime viewing. Just the thing by which to nod off over a mug of whiskey-laced hot chocolate with vanilla marshmallows.

Teeth: A couple of thoughts

01 Friday Aug 2008

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I finally got around to watching Teeth, last year’s campy horror flick about a teenage girl who discovers during a sexual assault that she has an unusual genital mutation: a toothed vagina (“vagina dentata”) that doesn’t hesitate to defend her by dismembering her attacker. There has been a lot of comment about this film on the feminist blogs I read, and discussion about the movie’s messages about female sexuality, teenage sexuality, and abstinence.

There were some priceless moments. My own favorite scene was Dawn, the main character’s, first pelvic exam, which she schedules after her impulsive break with chastity goes horribly wrong. The (male) gynecologist is bumblingly patronising and when he fails to respond to Dawn’s nervous cues in a respectful manner things get bloody. Dawn is a teen spokesperson for an abstinence program called modeled after such programs as The Silver Ring Thing which allows the film to highlight the hypocrisy of “education” programs that spread ignorance and simplistic fantasies about sexuality. And given its plot, the film makes some particularly well-pitched points about our cultural ignorance about teen and female sexuality.

But overall, I was not impressed. One of the most striking things, to me, was the film’s overall lack of positive male characters, and boys or men who act in a positive way toward Dawn as a sexual being. Her stepfather is kind, but peripheral. All the other boys and men in the story are violent, duplicitous or otherwise creepy. Okay, I know it’s a horror story, but it struck me as particularly unfair that while the film wrestled in a serious way with an (apparently straight) teenage girl’s sexuality, it failed to offer any possibility of non-combative sexual relationships for its main character.

I’m glad a saw it, but it’s not on my list of top-ten feminist faves.

Sondheim’s Assassins

31 Thursday Jul 2008

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Went to see Sondheim’s Assassins last night with a colleague from work and a group of her former roommates at the Boston Center for the Arts. I’d heard bits and pieces of the show over the years, but as is often the case with musicals didn’t have a full grasp of the story until sitting down to watch it end to end. And even now I’m not sure I fully understand it. Like most Sondheim musicals, it’s a musical-cum-dark-comedy, composed largely of vignettes in which presidential assassins and would-be presidential assassins hold forth on their disillusionment and idealism. Bookended in the play by John Wilkes Booth (Lincoln) and Lee Harvey Oswald (Kennedy), and ranging freely through time, it showed me how woefully behind I am in my knowledge of presidential assassination attempts . . . but I enjoyed it in a dark sort of way.

(image nicked from the Boston Globe).

Summer at the Movies

16 Wednesday Jul 2008

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I’ve obviously been delinquent posting to the FFLA this past month. I’m enjoying being able to come home from work at the end of the day and not turn on my computer if I don’t want to. Instead of being on the computer 24/7, Hanna and I have done a lot of walking, cooking, sleeping, ice-cream eating, and movie-watching. In particular, this seems to be the summer for vintage movies. Hanna got a series of vintage science fiction films from the 1950s for her birthday, and this past week we discovered such little-known classics as Warning From Space, a 1956 Japanese film about aliens shaped like starfish who land in Tokyo and The Wasp Woman (1959), about a cosmetics magnate whose quest for eternal youth goes horribly wrong.

One of the advantages of being in a big city is cinemas that play classic movies, foreign films, and documentaries. In the last month, I’ve been able to see Out of Africa at the Coolidge Corner Theater just up the street from our apartment, and on the 4th of July weekend the “final cut” of Bladerunner at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. Last night, I returned to the Brattle with my friend Natalie to see All About Eve, the 1950 Bette Davis film in which Davis plays a stage actress, Margo Channing, who is stalked by a young fan (Eve, played by Anne Baxter) who ingratiates herself into Channing’s life and eventually starts to take it over. It’s a truly creepy movie.

I had also forgotten how openly it wrestles with the question of Women Who Have Careers and whether or not such careers are compatible with romance. Davis’s character has a loving and sexually active relationship with her director, a man several years her junior, whom she ends up marrying in the course of the film. He loves her in no small part because she’s strong-willed, talented, and independent. At one point he rejects Eve’s advances without a second thought because “I’m in love with Margo.” And yet the film still finds it necessarily to give Margo a midlife crisis in which she wonders how she can possibly be “feminine” if she isn’t a housewife.

Oh, and Marilyn Monroe makes a very early appearance as someone’s “dumb blond” dinner date with a vaguely foreign accent and several of the funniest lines in the film!

This weekend, the weather’s supposed to be hot and sticky; we’re going to escape the apartment on Saturday night by attending an open-air production of As You Like It which is being performed free on the Boston Common. As You Like It, being one of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, has all the usual chaos of inconvenient love, exile, disguise, cavorting about in the wood, and reconciliation and marriage at the end. In short, good summer fare.

From the Archives: MHS YouTube Video

16 Friday May 2008

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The Massachusetts Historical Society (where I work, ahem) was involved in the HBO miniseries based on David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. In conjunction with the television show, we are hosting a small exhibition of correspondence from our extensive collection of Adams family papers. As an experiment, some of the staff put together this short YouTube video, hosted by our head librarian Peter Drummey.

Gene Robinson on Fresh Air

17 Thursday Apr 2008

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Mom pointed me toward yesterday’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Bishop Robinson, who was ordained four years ago this spring. Listening to him talk about Christianity and the contention over sexual orientation and identity always makes me want to cry because he’s just so articulate.

The whole interview was interesting, but I was particularly struck by his story about a recent media kerfluffle over a joking remark he made about the civil union he and his long-time partner are planning for this summer in New Hampshire. He told someone he had “always wanted to be a June bride.” Apparently, this got out on the internet and people were quite wound up about it. Anyway, Terry Gross asked him about it, and his response was really striking in its feminist perspective:

I think part of why that [comment] raced around the world in no time flat due to the magic of the internet has to do with misogyny and its connection to homophobia. I think the thing that really irritates the world about refering to myself as a “bride” is that I’m supposed to be privileged because I’m male, not female, and to refer to myself with a feminine word like bride offends the patriarchal system that I think is beginning to come apart–and gay and lesbian people, I believe, are helping to begin the deconstruction of patriarchy [begins at 26:10].

He also had some trenchant thoughts on the way he negotiates living in Christian community with people who are not accepting of homosexuality and other sexual orientations and identities without either walking away from them or compromising himself or the lives of other marginalized people.

Because it’s all I can muster . . .

07 Monday Apr 2008

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As the semester winds down toward May 7th (the date my last assignment is due), I’m fairly sure that the blog entries will slow to a trickle. I had two migraine headaches this week, which was no fun. I also had my first oral history interview with a doula from here in the Boston area who’s been practicing since 1969 as a birth educator and support person for women in labor long before the modern meaning of “doula” was articulated in the 1990s. We talked for over an hour and a half and there was so much more I would have loved to talk with her about. Happily, I’ll be taking her doula training workshop this summer, so will have an opportunity to learn a lot more about the work she and others are doing in the area.

After the interview I was ready to crash, so Hanna and I got together, ate chips, dip, and pocky, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, an episode that lampooned this “horror” film with agonizingly slow pacing, nonexistent plot, lots of sunshine, and lines like “this is where the fish live.” We followed it up with Stranger Than Fiction (which was just as good the second time as the first).

I hear that Spring is finally arriving in Michigan, so I hope all you Third Coasters are enjoying the end of a grueling winter.

More news as soon as the term ends and I settle in to my new apartment in the middle of May (I promise pictures eventually!)

A few reflections on my first WAM! conference

31 Monday Mar 2008

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I’m taking a (probably undeserved) break from writing my paper on White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States to describe a few impressions and reactions from my very first WAM! conference. I don’t have very coherent thoughts at the moment, since my brain power is being sucked away by catching up on academic responsibilities, but a few highlights and a couple of links for those folks who are interested:

  • It was awesome to spend a weekend surrounded by feminist activists from a wide variety of backgrounds, from bloggers to organizers, undergraduates to radical grannies. I had the opportunity to do a lot of feminist star-spotting, since there was a healthy representation of bloggers and writers present at the conference whose blogs I read and books I own.
  • In addition to volunteering at registration, I attended two panels and a screening of the Silent Choices film about African-American women and abortion. Incidentally, the two panels I attended were live-blogged about at feministing.com, one on reproductive justice and one on battling anti-feminist backlash, if you’re interested in a quick synopsis of the discussions.
  • Amanda Marcotte, over at the blog Pandagon, who was one of the speakers at the panel I attended on reproductive justice, wrote about her perspective on the session, and includes a great picture of the Stata Center (designed by Frank Gehry) where the conference was held.
  • In addition to being a blogger, Amanda has just written her first book, It’s a Jungle Out There, which is a hilarious, light-hearted blend of “feminism 101” and humor for those of us who can feel burnt-out by anti-feminist crap. “Why are people so mean to feminists?” she asks in the introduction, “Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule about understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit . . . Many people love their bullshit more than they love their spouses, or at least they’ll defend their bullshit more fiercely.” I picked up a copy at the conference bookstore before they were sold out, and read it all the way home on the T, giggling to myself.

All in all, the conference was an energizing break from my regular routine, and gave me an opportunity to reflect, once again, on how I envision bringing together the sort of research, writing, and practical skills I am developing as a librarian-in-training and student of history with the politically relevant, people-oriented activist work that I find incredibly nourishing to be involved in, even though I have never been comfortable out on the front lines. I realized, sitting in the conference rooms listening to all these articulate, politically engaged women (and yes, a handful of men), that even though I get burnt out sometimes by the amount of work that needs to be done, I virtually never get tired of engaging with feminist ideas and the people who care about discussing them. Now if only I can figure out a way to get paid for doing it!

UPDATE: You can also check out conference coverage at Feministe, where Jill talks about both of the panels I attended, and other stuff as well, and Racialicious, whose regular blogger Carmen was at the (seemingly universally attended) backlash panel.