#like louis is there but she's having an experience at the intersection of blackness and womanhood in public that is specific and meanwhile

[breha]

i'm reading crescent city girls: the lives of young black women in segregated new orleans by lakisha michelle simmons and one detail in it is about how although the french quarter during the first half of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly white, a black order of nuns owned a building there, at what's currently the site of the bourbon orleans hotel, from 1881 to 1965. they lived there and ran an orphanage and a school for girls (the order and the school still exist, just in a different neighborhood). i think it's an affecting image that 1132 royale street was so close (a 7-minute walk, just down the street and around the corner) to a high school claudia was pointedly not attending. she probably walked by the building hundreds of times, at night when it was shuttered and quiet. she walked by it when she was 14, 15, 16, 17, just like the girls who studied there, but she was fundamentally separated from them forever. she could go there, even slip into the classrooms or the dormitory where the nuns slept, but she could never get there, across the veil to the place it was during the day. and at first she didn't really grasp what any of this meant because it was novel, even a little exciting, it made her feel special – "i've gotta go to bed when the rest of the world wakes up, so there's less kids to play with..." – but you know it sank in eventually. as the students moved from grade to grade, graduated, grew up, and were replaced by new girls, claudia stayed the same. her and the building, its balconies, its arched windows, the cross against the night sky, unchanging. singular. forever. fuck!!!!!!!!

[theroseandthebeast]

Yuletide 2022 Recs, Batch Three

13 recs for Fairy Tales/The Six Swans, Fallen London, House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, Jane Eyre, Jennifer’s Body, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 

tongue-tied i took her in

The Six Swans - Mädchen | Girl/Des Mädchens Gemahl | Girl's Husband (Die sechs Schwäne) - What if it’s all a cruel trick? she wants to ask the eldest — she’s a young girl again, a child, and she desperately wants her big brother to tell her that everything’s going to be alright.

What if it’s all a lie? What if I spend years on this and finish all of them and nothing happens?

(Character study for the sister from the Six Swans / Wild Swans fairytale, with an examination of her relationship with her brothers and her eventual husband.)

roses and sentiments, drowning in the sea of clouds

The Six Swans - Jüngster Bruder | Youngest Brother (Die sechs Schwäne), Mädchen | Girl (Die sechs Schwäne), Des Mädchens Gemahl | Girl's Husband (Die sechs Schwäne) - At first he never leaves his sister’s side.

(Or; the youngest brother and the years of his curse.)

the sound of silent wings

The Six Swans - Mädchen | Girl/Des Mädchens Gemahl | Girl's Husband (Die sechs Schwäne) - The King has his reasons for taking in a wordless girl from the woods.

Parallel Tracks

Mr. Transport - Mr. Transport has lived an exciting and varied life. Or possibly more than one.

like the darkest waves at night

Harwin Strong/Daemon Targaryen/Rhaenyra Targaryen/Laena Velaryon, Rhaenyra Targaryen/Laenor Velaryon, Qarl Correy/Laenor Velaryon - A year after her marriage, King Viserys disinherited his daughter. Rhaenyra did not take it as easily as he might have hoped.

Discretion and Expertise

Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac - 

At Sunset three days hence, Monsieur de Lioncourt and Companion will visit your Establishment.

Ensure that no other patrons are present at that time. Monsieur expects to be waited on Privately. You will be Handsomely Compensated for your Discretion and Expertise.

when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed

Jane Eyre/Edward Rochester - “No doubt you have been very wicked in the past,” I said, trying to lighten my tone. “But I do not see why I should not benefit from your experience in our marriage bed.”

Give Me My Name

Jane Eyre/Edward Rochester - “Jane, accept me quickly.  Say, Edward—give me my name—Edward—I will marry you.”

Three scenes. Three times she used his name.

Never Lost That Easy

Jennifer Check/Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, Chip Dove/Anita "Needy" Lesnicki - Eight years after Needy kills her best friend, she finds herself thousands of miles from Devil's Kettle—haunted by loss and a hunger that she doesn't allow herself to indulge in too often.

Thistledown

Monty Don (Gardeners' World), Carol Klein (Gardeners' World), The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair - Hello and welcome to Gardeners' World. Today we'll be taking a closer look at some thistledown hair.

The stones shall make a throne for me

Stephen Black, John Uskglass | The Raven King - The new king of Lost-hope is not like the last.

King's Progress

Stephen Black, John Uskglass | The Raven King - The man once Stephen Black, as the new King of Lost-Hope, decides to make a Royal Progress through his demesne on the advice of a raven after realizing how little he knows how to rule a fae court. He meets the Raven King himself with surprizing consequences for both.

When Once We Are Buried, You Think We Are Dead

John Uskglass | The Raven King, Catherine of Winchester, Martin Pale, John Childermass - The great Cathedral at Winchester seems as near timeless as any work of man in England. But time and magic can intersect...oddly.

[nalyra-dreaming]

GenX Anne rice fan here and I so appreciate your insight to the series. I’m so excited this fandom has a following after all these years. So do you have any opinions about Louis being a reflection of Anne’s ongoing battle with being old school New Orleans Catholic? I am born and raised in New Orleans as Anne was and it seems a lot of fans think “Christian” when talking about Anne but that’s not the same as being Catholic. The guilt and responsibility that Louis feels for his family very much reflects that upbringing. I always related to Anne’s writing through her lush depiction of New Orleans and her depiction of the mysterious and mystical part of Catholic faith that she was raised in…the otherworldly. I guess it’s a New Orleans thing just as much as understanding the complexity of being Creole in New Orleans. I have a twisted reaction when Louis is described as black and not Creole because it’s two different things or maybe three different things depending on your heritage and background in New Orleans. News Orleans was established before it was part of the USA and many concepts like free people’s of color were a thing before the Americans came along so it’s very complicated and I guess I’m on a tangent now sorry….

Hey! *waves* Yes, isn't it exciting that this show has "hit"?! It's so weird for me to be a fan for so long and now... get that. :))

To your question (I think while I am aware of the creole/black/american historical intersections I may not be the best equipped to dig into that properly. I invite anyone who wants to, to add to this!):

For me... when reading the Chronicles, it always felt as if Anne projected her own struggles with the catholic faith onto Louis and Lestat.

Louis the sufferer, Lestat the defiant.

I am not catholic, however I went to a monastery school (heyho Lestat^^^^), and various family members are, from "leisurely" to full-blown "the Virgin Mary will save me from hell if I pray to her for 8h a day on my knees in front of my shrine at home". I've... experienced things.

Louis in the show strikes me as even more deep-rooted in the guilt aspects of his "raised religion" than the one in the books, tbh.

And Lestat spelled it out quite clearly that he thinks God "nonexistent", which is also a more extreme take than in the books, I'd argue.

I think it already sets up the themes for later, if they should probably manage to get to Memnoch, or parts of Memnoch, and it also provides more... "focus", more friction with the Catholicism aspect, now that they made Armand a Muslim. You know? By making Louis more anchored there are avenues in storytelling opening for later...

But I digress a bit.

I think the battle Anne fought with her faith can be watched/read/witnessed over the books - but for me it is more fought by Lestat. Louis was too much a state of mind connected to her daughter to "fight". He carries the guilt, yes, but not the challenge. He has to "die" eventually, to let her go - and to let that guilt go.

And Lestat has to meet the Devil and God to realize that he will not "bow" to their game (to put it simply)... that his search for answers will only end in madness, because there are none to be had.

Anne left her faith behind, battled it for years and years, and then returned to it. If her books are any indication, she did so with open eyes though, in contrast to the "blind" faith that one is often raised in. I mean no judgement here. But having grown up within that mindset, these rules are enforced and indoctrinated... but actual belief is hard to come by.

Belief is, imho, a much purer state of mind, than forced, guilty religiousness.

And I think the books, so Louis, Lestat, the others... echoed that journey.

And they reached their own (vampiric) belief system in the last books. With a bloody communion.

So these are some of my thoughts on this *laughs* OBVIOUSLY my own and personal, and shaped by my own experiences. It would be lovely to hear your thoughts on this, nonny?! :)

[zachbaynham]

Multimedia Blog 3 - taylorcassidyj

Taylor Cassidy (@taylorcassidyj on TikTok and Instagram) is a social media content creator and advocate with over 2 million followers on TikTok and over 200K on Instagram. Her content is centered around teaching Black history and spreading Black joy through engaging videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. She joined TikTok in 2019 where she began a series called “Fast Black History,” 1-minute videos about African American historical figures. Her following quickly grew amassing over 69 million likes on TikTok. Along with the “Fast Black History” series, she created the “Black Girl Magic Minute,” uplifting influential Black creatives. Cassidy has accomplished so much at the age of 20. She is from St. Louis, MO, where I am from! Growing up, we were in the Little Mermaid Musical together which inspired me to write about her. Cassidy is truly an influential figure of our generation and plans to take her advocacy on screen in films/TV.

In Cassidy’s “Black Girl Magic Minute” TikTok series, she celebrates Black creatives. Cassidy started this segment “to not only give credit back to these Black creators, but to uplift them and let people – even people who aren’t Black – discover new creatives and new, amazing people to follow and support” (Novato). In one discussion we focused on Judy Baca, a muralist who uses digital technology to create designs. She uses these designs to create murals in LA whose purpose goes beyond artistic value. They have social influence and are used as a political tool by representing most of the population who are usually voiceless. Cassidy and Baca are similar in giving a voice to the voiceless through different forms of media. Baca bases her art on people and uses digital technology to turn these ideas into reality, while Cassidy uses technology in a different form to convey her message. By uplifting Black creators, their platform can grow, and they can continue to grow doing what they love. Cassidy hopes to make “Black Girl Magic Minute” into a podcast to dive further into the subject.

As mentioned in our readings and discussions, the Harlem Renaissance was an influential moment in history for African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was centered around Black pride, like Taylor Cassidy’s content. Post emancipation, many Black people in the south became sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In this position, they were in debt to white “landlords” and therefore in “economic bondage” despite being free (Takaki). Because of this, many Black people were eager to leave the south and find work up north. After a mass influx of Black people from the south, a sense of Black pride was formed in Harlem. Known as “the greatest Negro city in the world,” droves of Black people came from everywhere to experience the culture found in Harlem (Takaki). Black educational and economic success spread throughout the community. This is a typical topic Cassidy would create a “Fast Black History” video on. One of her TikTok videos mentions Glady Bentley, an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. In the video, Cassidy dresses up as Bentley making it entertaining and educational. As mentioned in the video, “it was argued that [Bentley] was a drag king, but it was more that she dressed more masc to get jobs in Harlem night clubs during the Harlem Renaissance” (Taylor Cassidy). Bentley used her intersecting identities to her advantage so she could showcase her talents. The Harlem Renaissance was an opportunity for African Americans to express and create, similar to Cassidy’s social media content creation.

Works Cited

“Best of Fast Black History TikToks (Black Music, Pop Culture, and More!) | Taylor Cassidy.” YouTube, uploaded by Taylor Cassidy, 26 March 2021, https://youtu.be/1OZcOMwk5B0.

“Black Girl Magic Minute | Official Trailer | Taylor Cassidy.” YouTube, uploaded by Taylor Cassidy, 24 April 2021, https://youtube.com/shorts/YX9Vkp8dlh8?feature=share.

Campano, Leah. “Taylor Cassidy Makes Black History Accessible to Millions with a Viral TikTok Series.” Seventeen, 27 Feb. 2023, www.seventeen.com/life/a43050504/taylor-cassidy-voices-of-change/.

“Judy Baca.” California State University, Northridge, 15 Oct. 2015, www.csun.edu/mike-curb-arts-media-communication/judy-baca.

Novato, Olivia. “Taylor Cassidy: The Educator on Teaching Black History, 'Black Girl Magic Minute', and More.” Taylor Cassidy | The Educator on Teaching Black History, 'Black Girl Magic Minute', and More., flaunt.com/blog/taylor-cassidy.

Staff, Teen Vogue. “Teen Vogue's 21 Under 21 2021: The Young People Shaping Tomorrow.” Teen Vogue, Teen Vogue, 14 Dec. 2021, www.teenvogue.com/gallery/teen-vogues-21-under-21-2021.

Takaki, Ronald T., 1939-2009. A Different Mirror : a History of Multicultural America. Boston :Little, Brown & Co., 1993.

Taylor Cassidy [@taylorcassidyj]. “learn more about Gladys Bentley in my bio!” TikTok, 27 July 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorcassidyj/video/7125167391683743022?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7156437192771192366.

@tamarakjohnston

[northernstories]

African American Literature Suggestions from NMU English Department

The English Department at Northern Michigan University has prepared this list of several dozen suggested readings in African American literature, with some materials also addressing Native American history and culture. The first section contains books that will help provide a context for the Black Lives Matter movement. It includes books that will help readers examine their own privilege and act more effectively for the greater good. Following that list is another featuring many African American authors and books. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does provide readers a place to start. Almost all of these books are readily available in bookstores and public and university libraries.

Northern Michigan University’s English Department offers at least one course on African American literature every semester, at least one course on Native American literature every semester, and at least one additional course on non-western world literatures every semester. Department faculty also incorporate diverse material in many other courses. For more information, contact the department at english@nmu.edu. Nonfiction, primarily addressing current events, along with some classic texts: Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, editors. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. This classic collection of scholarly articles, essays, and interviews explores the links between social inequalities and unequal distribution of environmental risk. Attention is focused on the US context, but authors also consider global impacts. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A clear-eyed explication of how mass incarceration has created a new racial caste system obscured by the ideology of color-blindness. Essential reading for understanding our criminal justice system in relation to the histories of slavery and segregation. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. A very well-written but disturbing and direct analysis of the history of structural and institutionalized racism in the United States. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldua writes about the complexity of life on multiple borders, both literal (the border between the US/Mexico) and conceptual (the borders among languages, sexual identity, and gender). Anzaldua also crosses generic borders, moving among essay, story, history, and poetry. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. A classic indictment of white supremacy expressed in a searing, prophetic voice that is, simply, unmatched. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. A combination of personal narrative in the form of the author’s letter to his son, historical analysis, and contemporary reportage. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? In this succinct and carefully researched book, Davis exposes the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. This is a must-read for folks new to conversations about prison (and police) abolition. Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean To Be White? The author facilitates white people unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression through a variety of methods and extensive research. Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarshnha, editors. Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement. The book attempts to solve problems of violence at a grassroots level in minority communities, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The most well-known narrative written by one of the most well-known and accomplished enslaved persons in the United States. First published in 1845 when Douglass was approximately 28 years old. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. Collection of essays in which Dubois famously prophesied that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Must reading, a beautifully written, scholarly, and accessible discussion of American history from Reconstruction to the beginnings of the Jim Crow era. Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. In an attempt to locate relatives in Ghana, the author journeyed along the route her ancestors would have taken as they became enslaved in the United States. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. A collection of essays that analyze how white supremacy is systemically maintained through, among other activities, popular culture. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Narrative of a woman who escaped slavery by hiding in an attic for seven years. This book offers unique insights into the sexually predatory behavior of slave masters. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A detailed history not only of racist events in American history, but of the racist thinking that permitted and continues to permit these events. This excellent and readable book traces this thinking from the colonial period through the presidency of Barack Obama. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life Any of LaDuke's works belong on this list. This particular text explores the stories of several Indigenous communities as they struggle with environmental and cultural degradation. An incredible resource. Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir. An intense book that questions American myths of individual success written by a man who is able to situate his own life within a much larger whole. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color This foundational text brings together work by writers, scholars, and activists such as Audre Lorde, Chrystos, Barbara Smith, Norma Alarcon, Nellie Wong, and many others. The book has been called a manifesto and a call to action and remains just as important and relevant as when it was published nearly 40 years ago. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard. An invaluable collection of essays and speeches from the only black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Throughout her oeuvre, Morrison calls us to take "personal responsibility for alleviating social harm," an ethic she identified with Martin Luther King. Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity. Ore scrutinizes the history of lynching in America and contemporary manifestations of lynching, drawing upon the murder of Trayvon Martin and other contemporary manifestations of police brutality. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. A description and discussion of racial aggression and micro-aggression in contemporary America. The book was selected for NMU’s Diversity Common Reader Program in 2016. Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy. The author facilitates white people in unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression, while also helping them understand key critical social justice terminology. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, Alana Yu-lan Price, editors. Who do you Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. The essays examine "police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures." What are alternative measures to keep marginalized communities safe? Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? The authors, in very easy to read and engaging language, facilitate readers in understanding the ---isms (racism, sexism, ableism etc.) and how they intersect, helping readers see their positionality and how privilege and oppression work to perpetuate the status quo. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. An analysis of America’s criminal justice system by the lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. While upsetting, the book is also hopeful. Wendy S. Walters, Multiply / Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. In this collection of essays, Walters analyzes the racial psyche of several major American cities, emphasizing the ways bias can endanger entire communities. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery. Autobiography of the founder of Tuskegee Institute. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid. From the surgical experiments performed on enslaved black women to the contemporary recruitment of prison populations for medical research, Washington illuminates how American medicine has been--and continues to be shaped--by anti-black racism. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Autobiography of civil rights leader that traces his evolution as a thinker, speaker, and writer.

If you would like to enhance your knowledge of the rich tradition of African American literature, here are several of the most popular books and authors within that tradition, focused especially on the 20thand 21st centuries. Novels and Short Stories James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Passing Nella Larsen, Quicksand Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison, Beloved Richard Wright, Native Son Drama Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf August Wilson, Fences August Wilson, The Piano Lesson Poetry A good place to begin is an anthology, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton. It includes work by poets from the 18th century to the present, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claude McKay, Phillis Wheatley, and many others. Here are some more recent collections: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis Tyehimba Jess, Olio Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead

[newstechreviews]

In a slightly different world, Fargo season 4 might never have happened. After the FX anthology drama ended its third season, creator Noah Hawley admitted that he didn’t have an idea for a follow-up. And, he figured, “the only reason to do another Fargo is if the creative is there.” So, if there was to be a sequel, Hawley estimated it would take three years. That was in June 2017.

Thirty-nine months later (it would have been 34 had COVID not temporarily halted production), the show has reemerged with a story whose timeliness is obvious. It marks a significant departure from the earliest seasons of Fargo, which pitted good and evil archetypes against each other in arch, violent crime capers that ultimately erred on the side of optimism. Season 3 flirted with topicality, from an opening scene that hinged on Soviet kompromat to a hauntingly inconclusive final showdown between the latest iterations of pure good—represented by Carrie Coon’s embattled police chief Gloria Burgle—and primordial evil (David Thewlis’ terrifying V.M. Varga). Five months into Donald Trump’s presidency, that ending simultaneously reflected many Americans’ fears for the future and suggested that the battle for the human soul would be an eternal one. You can imagine why Hawley might have considered it a hard act to follow.

Instead of trying to top the high-flown allegory of its predecessor, the fascinating but uneven new episodes tackle conflicts of a more earthly nature: race, structural inequality, American identity. To that end, Fargo season 4 ventures farther south and deeper into history than it has gone before, to Kansas City, Mo. in 1950. For half a century, ethnic gangs have battled over the midsize metropolis. The Irish took out the Jews. The Italians took out the Irish. Finally, just a few years after a brutal World War in which fascist Italy numbered among the United States’ enemies, the Great Migration has brought the descendants of slaves north to this Midwestern city whose complicity in American racism dates back to the Missouri Compromise.

This upstart syndicate is led by one Loy Cannon (Chris Rock in a rare dramatic role), a brilliant, self-possessed power broker who doesn’t relish violence but is determined to exact reparations from this country, on behalf of his beloved family, by any means necessary. Loy’s deputy and closest friend is a learned older man by the name of Doctor Senator (the great Glynn Turman, all quiet dignity). In an early episode, the two men walk into a bank to pitch its white owner on an idea they’ve been testing out through less-than-legal means in the Black community: credit cards. (“Every average Joe wants one thing: to seem rich,” Loy explains to the banker.) He turns them down, of course, convinced that his clientele would have no interest in purchasing things they couldn’t afford. We’re left wondering how the ensuing saga might’ve been different if Loy and Doctor Senator had been allowed to channel their considerable intelligence into a legit business.

Elizabeth Morris/FXSalvatore Esposito and Jason Schwartzman in ‘Fargo’

The Italians, meanwhile, are starting to enjoy the rewards of their newfound whiteness—a largely invisible transformation marked in The Godfather by Michael Corleone’s relationship with naive WASP Kay Adams. (In keeping with previous seasons’ allusive style, Fargo often playfully evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy.) In the wake of their capo father Donatello’s (Tommaso Ragno) death, two brothers battle for control of the Fadda clan—a crime family that has Italian-accented patriarchalism written into its very name. Crafty, spoiled, crypto-corporate Josto (Jason Schwartzman, doing a scrappier, cannier take on his Louis XVI character in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette) has long been Donatello’s right hand. But his younger brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito, imported from Sky Italia’s acclaimed organized-crime drama Gomorrah), a brawny brute who came up in Sardinia busting heads for Mussolini, stands between Josto and the consolidation of power.

Generations-old tradition dictates that if two syndicates are to share turf in Kansas City, their leaders must raise each other’s sons. These exchanges are supposed to be a sort of insurance policy against betrayal; never mind that they never work out as planned. So Loy very reluctantly trades his scion Satchel (Rodney Jones) for Donatello’s youngest (Jameson Braccioforte). The boy finds a protector in the Faddas’ solemn older ward, Patrick “The Rabbi” Milligan (Ben Whishaw, humane as always), who double-crossed his own Irish family in an earlier transaction.

Ethelrida Pearl Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield from History’s 2016 Roots remake) is the show’s other innocent youth, a bright and insightful Black teenager whose parents (Anji White and indie rocker Andrew Bird) own the poignantly named King of Tears funeral home. Every Fargo season needs a personification of goodness, and in this one it’s Ethelrida. Not that her virtuousness makes her life any easier. In a voiceover montage that opens the season premiere, she tells us that she learned early on that, as far as white authority figures were concerned, “the only thing worse than a disreputable Negro was an upstanding one.” Her inscrutable foil is Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), a white nurse neighbor whose patients tend to die before they can experience too much pain. Oraetta’s quaint Minnesota accent (another Fargo staple) belies the racist views she politely but unapologetically espouses; she seems fixated on making Ethelrida her maid.

Elizabeth Morris/FXE’myri Crutchfield in ‘Fargo’

It’s fitting that Oraetta is both the most tangible link to Fargo’s home turf and the first character who ties together the mobster’s story with that of the Smutny family. As her loaded last name suggests, she seems to embody a particular form of evil that has been a constant in American life since the colonial period: white supremacy. Oraetta harms, kills and plunders with minimal consequences. No wonder she has eyes for Josto, the first Fadda who knows how to wield his white identity, building alliances with government and law enforcement that would be impossible for the Cannon syndicate. (Josto’s version of Kay Adams is the homely daughter of a politician.) “I can take all the money and pussy I want and still run for President,” he boasts at one point.

The reference to our current President’s briefly scandalous Access Hollywood tape is so flagrant as to elicit an involuntary groan. It’s lines like this that expose the limitations of Hawley’s attempt to fuse the topical and the elemental. Fargo still creates an absorbing, cinematic viewing experience, with painterly framing, pointedly deployed split-screen and arcane yet evocative needle drops. A not-at-all-gratuitous black-and-white episode could almost stand on its own as a movie. And, as in past seasons, the show gives us many remarkable performances: Rock may seem an odd pick for a gangster role, but the same shrewdness and indignation that fuel his stand-up persona also simmer beneath Loy’s measured surface. The pain Whishaw’s character carries around in his body goes far beyond what can be conveyed in dialogue. Bird broke my heart as a meek, loving dad. But in his eagerness to make a legible, potent political statement, Hawley struggles to find the right tone and keep the season’s many intersecting themes straight.

Elizabeth Morris/FXJessie Buckley in ‘Fargo’

The show is simply trying to do too much within a limited framework. Fargo wouldn’t be Fargo without some eccentric law enforcement, so an already-huge cast expands to fit a crooked local detective with OCD (Jack Huston) and Timothy Olyphant—whose roles on Deadwood and Justified made him prestige TV’s quintessential cop—as a smarmy, Mormon U.S. Mashal who snacks on carefully wrapped bundles of carrot sticks. Yet Hawley also realized that he needed to break from previous seasons that, like the Coens’ film, cast a white police officer as the avatar of goodness; hence Ethelrida, whose investigation into her city’s criminal underworld takes the form of a school assignment, and whose soul is stained by neither corruption nor white privilege. She’s a wonderful character, but her and Oraetta’s story line can feel peripheral to the gang war.

With such a crowded plot, it’s no wonder the show can’t maintain a consistent tone. Each season of Fargo creates a hermetically sealed moral universe, doling out divine and definitive justice to each character according to their position on the spectrum spanning from good to evil. In the past, its archness has served as a self-aware counterbalance to the sanctimony inherent in such a project. And there’s still plenty of irreverence in season 4, particularly when it comes to Hawley’s depiction of the Faddas, Oraetta and the other white characters. But there’s nothing funny about the oppression and discrimination that Loy, Doctor Senator and Ethelrida face. Each of their fates is shaped at least as much by a society that is hostile to people who look like them as it is by the moral choices they make as individuals. So the scripts give them the dignity they deserve at the expense of inflicting earnestness—along with frequent reminders, such as Schwartzman’s Trump line, that the story’s themes remain relevant today—on a format that isn’t built for it. Realistic characters and absurd ones awkwardly mingle.

Hawley’s attempt to correct his show’s political blind spots is laudable, and some pieces of the allegory work well; the ritual of ethnic gangs trying—and failing—to work together by raising each other’s sons makes an inspired metaphor for America’s fragile social contract. Even so, Fargo seems fundamentally ill-equipped to address systemic inequality. Though that failing may well render future seasons similarly flawed, if not impossible, in our current political climate, it doesn’t negate the pleasures or insights of what remains one of TV’s most ambitious shows. Like this nation, the new season is a beautiful and ugly, inspiring and infuriating, a tragic and sometimes darkly hilarious mess. As frustrating as it often was to watch, I couldn’t look away.

[onestowatch]

Why Virtual Reality May Be Our New Reality | Music and Its Digital Past, Present, and Future

Pre-quarantine predictions about the music industry painted a picture of one its best years yet. Such predictions were overflowing with promising new releases, sold out tours, and unique marriages of music and technology just beyond horizon. While coronavirus has shifted many a release schedule and left tours and festivals in a state of indefinite hiatus, alliances between music and technology remain increasingly vital, both in the name of technological progress, and, more recently, as a supplement to the live experience industry inhibited by the ongoing pandemic. 

Discussions of technology in relation to music range from video games to virtual reality. Travis Scott and Marshmello both held concerts in Fortnite, Paul McCartney had a hand in the Destiny soundtrack, and Ariana Grande had both a song and a playable character in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Billie Eilish, Panic! At The Disco, Imagine Dragons and many others have also made their concerts available to stream in virtual reality. But there is another game changing intersection between the music and digital world that challenges not only how we experience music, but also how music is created. It’s called the vocaloid.

Early versions of software designed to synthesize human speech have existed since the late 1930s. Fast forward about two decades, the earliest form of synthesized singing had arrived. The IBM 7094, installed in 1962, was the first “computer to sing,” singing a song called “Daisy Bell” by Harry Dacre (the technological advancement would go on to inspire a similar scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Since then, vocal synthesis has come a long way, and has also been marked by a different name. 

The year was 2000. The place was Barcelona, Spain. Hideki Kenmochi developed the vocaloid, a voice synthesis software short for vocal android, which was designed to emulate singing. Commercially adapted by Yamaha and distributed by Crytpon Future Media in 2004, the company launched the first Vocaloid and initially called it “Daisy,” after IBM 7094, but due to copyright issues, settled on “Vocaloid 1.” This is where the game changing begins.

Using this first iteration of the software, Yamaha created Meiko, an animated persona designed to serve as the face to the sampled voice of singer Meiko Haigō, with both English and Japanese vocals. Meiko was followed by the release of Kaito, a male vocaloid, two years later. As time went on, the software became increasingly realistic. 

In 2007, Yamaha launched Vocaloid 2, which Crypton Future Media used to bring us Hatsune Miku, a vocaloid persona that quickly went from software to stardom. With long turquoise hair and a heavily anime-inspired look, Miku was sampled from voice actress Saki Fujita, and her Japanese name fittingly translates to “the first sound of the future.”

Hatsune Miku is the first vocaloid to top the charts, has been involved in countless advertisement campaigns, such as those with Google Chrome, Toyota and Louis Vuitton, and opened for Lady Gaga’s ArtPop Tour in 2014. And if it were not for COVID-19, 2020 would have seen her make her Coachella debut. Though other vocaloids have since been created, none have reached the full cultural immersion achieved by Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku is now not only the face of vocaloid but also one of Japan’s most recognizable pop stars. Though Miku’s virtual existence isn’t palpable, her real-life fandom and influence certainly are. So much so that in 2018, Akihiko Kondo formally “married” the vocaloid, making for the ultimate ultramodern love story.

But it doesn’t stop there. In 2016, a transmedia startup co-founded by Trevor McFedries called Brud created Miquela Sousa, the first computer-generated social media influencer, programmed as a half-Brazilian, half-Spanish bisexual 19-year-old from LA. With 2.4 million Instagram followers, the mysteriously charming avatar is an ideal fit for advertisers. Miquela did an Instagram takeover for Prada and a Calvin Klein ad with Bella Hadid, in which Hadid, too, was animated, prompting a fascinating elusiveness. 

Miquela is also openly progressive, showing support for Black Lives Matter and other movements. Her creators have noted their intention to help promote social justice through their pioneering of virtual personalities–and talented ones, at that. Miquela is not only an influencer with multiple brand partnerships but also a musician who has collaborated with Lauv and Baauer and is now signed to CAA.

McFedries, Miquela’s manager and one of her creators, is not new to the music industry, having been a DJ, radio show host, director and manager himself. He also created two other virtual personas, Blawko and Bermuda, who are friends with Miquela and whose frequent dramas are created and conveyed through their social media and Youtube vlogs, like a relatable, sympathy-inducing reality show. The three unique virtual influencers portray an obvious self-awareness that they are not human, addressing themselves as robots. Despite not having a true pulse, the self-awareness of these bots certainly shows they have a pulse for the culture, for humor and for connection. So much so that Miquela was listed as one of Time Magazine’s “Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2018, alongside Rihanna and, unfortunately, President Trump.

The creation of both Hatsune Miku and Miquela sparked a paradigm shift in the role of technology in music, an intersection that will lay the foundation for the potential digital future. But this article taps only the tip of the iceberg. From self-driving cars to self-writing songs, the potentially unpredictable nature of innovation sparks anxiety in some and optimism in others.  

Unlocking new worlds of music technology can equip new levels of human creativity. But some may wonder, where the line is drawn when humans are not the only ones making art? Technology is meant to be a resource for the artist, not a replacement. On the other hand, who is to say an artificial collaborator is not a tool? Who is to say the creators and drivers of these vocaloids or virtual artists are not artists themselves? 

Perhaps the increased role of technology will bring a heightened appreciation for the human elements. Perhaps all this live streaming via social media will create a heightened appreciation for the physically live experience while also giving us new tools to reach people around the world. Similarly, while vocaloid hologram performances allow us to experience music in a new way, perhaps this will reinforce an appreciation for the live, human performer.

Fear is an inevitable part of progress, as people before us feared the advent of trains, television, and the internet. Technological progress does not exist in a vacuum, as we have witnessed its challenges but also its immense rewards. Ultimately, we are veterans in experiencing the result of groundbreaking technologies sewing their way into our everyday lives, and adapting accordingly. As technology expands exponentially, we are still only at the cusp. (If you don’t believe me, just google the quantum computer IBM has sitting in their refrigerated basement).

Though the future can be daunting, it is also exciting. Having Miquela in a Calvin Klein ad in which Bella Hadid, a familiar face, was also animated is like opening a portal between the virtual and real world (like the princess in Enchanted jumping out of the sewer, morphing from cartoon to human). Bonding with artificial characters is not new. But this portal allows virtual influencers to become a notable real part of our reality as they themselves claim to be part of it, whether via music, fashion or fandom (or marriage, in the case of Miku’s now supposed husband, Akihiko Kondo).

The newest Miku update is Vocaloid 5, launched in 2018 and now more adaptable across formats and also available in Chinese, Spanish and Korean. As she shared on her instagram, Miquela dropped two singles this year and is still seeing her friends Blawko and Bermuda.

With coronavirus still very much a reality, the longing for a return to normal is absolutely understandable; however, with so much of our world changing, our world may never return to its pre-pandemic state. Instead, it is likely to return to a new normal, in which live streaming and virtual reality are not supplements for the live experience but directly part of it. Whether virtual musicians like Hatsune Miku or Miquela are a momentary fascination of our present or a glimpse into a very real future, one thing remains certain. Our potential digital future is much closer than we think. 

[corneliahall]

My dreams that night were more than enough to scare me. After sharing a silent, awkward dinner with my mother, I went straight to bed and let Cameron's silky fur comfort me through the disturbing images my brain was processing. Memories of my childhood oddities and, of course, the generated ones that I might encounter in the future. I woke up to the sound of my phone's alarm, reminding me that everything else around me was normal. Everything beyond my house did not change at all. I got up, showered, and did all the mundane things my body required. It felt weird to stare at the mirror after the strange talk with my teacher and Mr. Ryder last night. Still, my choppy, curly red hair was normal. My blue eyes were still normal. My skin, although rimmed with darkness around the eyes from last night's lack of sleep, was more or less normal with its impertinent pinkish glow and the rust-colored freckles. Goth ginger. Giselle the Goth ginger is what they called me because of my wardrobe consisting of dark-colored clothes. Mostly deep blues, purples, violets and tinges of neon. Purists at my school would argue I was not a proper one since I don't exactly follow the entire lifestyle. In truth, dark colors just make me feel safer. You would never guess my favorite color is white. My mom went out early due to the store's start-of-season sale. Her mini beauty store, the pompously-named Margaret's Beauty Choice, allowed me to have my own variety of lipsticks and eyeshadow palettes. We are both make-up junkies. While she used to do make-up for small-time models in New York, my earliest experience was putting on a Ruby Woo lipstick on my eight-year-old lips. I caught up to the school bus just right on time and decided to sit further back than usual. Alyssa's pretty face was still healing when I heard about it yesterday and she might appear today in school to get some counseling. Hah. Like she would ever listen to anyone. Just then I noticed something out of the ordinary. Someone. Normally, Lilly Saint-Louis was the one who took this seat of the school bus. Lilly was not there; a new kid was. I've studied at Sheffield since last year—the longest standing school since I was six and that's an achievement—and not once have I seen the guy. He looked like he was brooding over something, with his eyebrows knitted over his dark eyes. He was obviously of Asian descent; his eyes were single-lidded slanting towards the inner corners. He had black hair trimmed like those I read in Japanese comics. He was handsome but I would not give him the chance to see me acknowledging such a fact. My eyebrow arched up almost automatically but I just sat next to him. He acknowledged my presence once and went back to staring at the world outside the school bus. "So... new kid?" I could not help it. I wouldn't want an awkward start if he were a new student. He did not answer me and just looked at his phone while he was shuffling to find something in his pocket. Thankfully it was not a knife but a pair of earpods. I would have to praise him later for not misplacing that. "Nah. Just a stowaway. I snuck inside here last night. Typical rendezvous from the world, don't you think?" His accent was still evident. Though he must have been some kind of a rich kid since he knew big words that no normal American teen would use, unless in an essay. It was hard to tell if he was joking but from his deadpan face, he seemed pretty serious. "How did you get past the bus camera?" I was completely mystified. Sheffield had the best bus cameras in Minneapolis. Heck, I could not even sneak back inside to get my bag whenever I forgot it. He shuffled in his bag again to show me a dislocated pair of vehicle cameras. "I took it out. It's pretty easy to do if you have god-given talent as I have," he flashed his pearly whites briefly and then reverted to his brooding face. "We're going to Sheffield, right? Is it cool? You do know your school buses ain't parked in your own lot at night, right?" He must have snuck inside the school lot downtown. I shrugged. "Yeah, it's one of the weird things I do not understand at Sheffield but... I think it makes sense since we are a small school." Pfft. Wow. We. As if I was ever genuinely a part of this school. "What about life in Minnesota?" "Great. If you mean great as dead, boring winter nights. Plus, nothing is really that good here. We just have cool frozen lakes." He sighed and scratched his head, "New York and Cali never gave me a break so I guess I'd love a quiet place," he murmured and bent backward to stretch, the thinness of his lanky frame showing slightly. Underneath, he was wearing an orange shirt with weird markings too good for my poor reading skills. "New York, huh? Ever heard of a camp?" He frowned. "Camp? There are tons of camps in New York. Camp Crystal Lake. Yeah, Crystal Lake is a thing. Camp Eisenhower. Lazo Jersey Camp. A whole lot of camping sites upstate. Well, I was not really from New York but I camped a lot for some time. Pretty cool for hiking and canoeing, too." Hiking and canoeing seemed way better than staying at Walmart as a cashier. "Oh, if those things were boring, you might have been looking for more difficult challenges, huh?" "I'm looking for a quiet life. Away from the go—Goths. I mean, Goths." "Goths?" I almost snorted a laugh. "You don't look like a Goth to me, Miss Ginger." He looked at me up and down before he went back to staring at the crumpled love letter lodged in between our seats. Not one of us read it. I shuffled my ankles. "I am Giselle, by the way. Giselle Blair." "Too much information, Giselle. Can I call you Gee?" "That's a no." Though Mom does call me Gee sometimes. "You sound like the late Simon Cowell, bless his soul." I did not know who Simon was but it turned the light chat into a long, awkward silence. "Haruto," he said as the bus took a turn from the intersection. "What?" He looked around as if he was being watched before carefully placing his lips next to my ear. "Call me Haru. My name is... Haruto." A blush rose to my cheeks. "You know you could just tell me your name without getting too close, right?" Haruto chuckled. "Don't be such a priss. I don't like ginger girls anyway. I was just being—ahh... never mind me." He began to look again at the scenery outside. We were almost at Sheffield but this time, something strange happened. The moment we entered the tunnel leading to the school gates, the bus began to act up, as if it was being pulled in all directions. Dark liquid began to creep up our windows like anti-gravity crude oil and all of the students began to scream. Even the bus driver screamed curses at what was happening. Only Haruto seemed to know what was happening. He hissed but it was as if he knew this was going to happen. "Stupid me. They know I am here!" He growled, running towards the bus door and slamming it open. A scrawny kid knocking down pneumatic bus doors? That was fascinating... if we ignore the fact that we were not attacked by a giant shadow sludge. The bus driver tried to gather us all up at the back of the bus but I knew in me that it was wrong. Instincts drove me to the edge, letting me slash my way outside the bus. "Haruto!" I screamed around while the bus was slowly swallowed by the dark sludge. For a second I was about to be convinced Haruto was just an imaginary friend my mind created for the sake of coping from yesterday's mysteries. The shadows seemed to leave the bus alone, as they receded from the shuddering vehicle and unfortunately came at me. I knew I should have been a huge ginger slush right there at the gates of Sheffield if not for the spine-tingling explosion over me. The exploding rocks were about to shower down on me if not for Haruto, who suddenly rolled into the scene and led me out to safety. Son of Zeus! You still have not learned from your mistakes in Anaheim! A voice made from a thousand ones grittily scolded Haruto. It seemed that it was coming from the dark mass of shadows around us. Haruto just looked at the shadows with utmost distaste. "A dark shadow... attacking a school at 08:00 in the morning. Clearly, you guys are just desperate!" The swirling mass of shadows and fog seemed to solidify into a shape of a large, muscular man. Its eyes were as bright as the stars on a clear night. Though his intense stare at me made them look like headlights about to send a doe to deer heaven. Bah, you are not what I am here for. I will finish you before I get my hands on the girl! Haruto gave me a sideways glance but I was totally clueless at the moment. I was sure that maybe one of the girls in our school had summoned a shadow demon and the experiment went wrong. Now, the shadow demon wanted to seek vengeance and he probably mistook me as the one who summoned him. There were at least three people in school with red hair. Boy, was I all wrong.

Excerpt from The Night’s Call

[lesbianherstorian]

hey! could you explain some of the history behind the stud identity?

stud is a black lesbian identity, much like AG (aggressive). though it is similar to butch in describing female masculinity, and stud/fem often mirrors butch/femme roles — it illustrates their unique relationship to womanhood by recognizing the specific ways in which they are subjected to, and impacted by, racism, homophobia, and misogyny due to historical constructions of black gender roles and perceptions of black female masculinity.

some historical information and excerpts about the meaning and evolution of stud identity:

in 1965, ethel sawyer conducted “a study of a public lesbian community” in st. louis, missouri. this was the earliest known sociological study of a black lesbian community anywhere in the united states. in this fieldwork, sawyer found that masculine black lesbians in the midwest referred to themselves as studs.

anita cornwell writes “the butch, who in all black gay circles that i have ever encountered is labeled ‘stud’” (from “a black lesbian is a woman is a woman…”, published in the los angeles free press, november 1972)

lorraine bethel references “the black bulldyke stud” in her poem “what chou mean we, white girl? or: the cullud lesbian feminist declaration of independence (dedicated to the proposition that all women are equal, i.e. identical/ly oppressed)”. (published in bethel & smith, 1979)

susan, in an interview about female prisoners, uses the term “stud broad” to explain “women who from physical appearance might easily be mistaken for men … contrary to the images in homophobic research and media … they are often unusually quiet and gentle … [she] sometimes won’t allow herself to be touched.” (from “sex is always the headliner”, published in sinister wisdom no. 16, 1981)

oshen t. explains “i identify as stud but, growing up, i didn’t know that there was a word, ‘stud.’ what was more common was butch, but at some point, like in my mid to late teens, i noticed that butches were usually white women, and even though i did see some black butches … at some point it got really irritating and didn’t fit me. i don’t feel butch, and i don’t like that word, even saying it. stud came out of me and my peers having a conversation, and i held onto that word stud. we younger studs from east oakland started to gravitate toward that. butch was white and older, and as young kids, we were studs. there was some age stuff, race and class. all the books were about stone cold butches … just white people. we were like, nah, that’s not us.“ (quoted in “masculine of centre, seeks her refined femme” by b. cole, published in persistence: all ways butch and femme, 2011)

b. cole writes “unlike white female masculinity, female masculinity for womyn of colour is based on sites of power and systemic oppression — through masculinities of colour. the assumption that they can be resignified with equal subversive and revolutionary actions against white manhood is false. the ability to access masculinity pivots upon the ways in which gender intersects with race, and these gaps have been filled with new ways of naming ourselves. in the last decade, the explosion of young masculine-of-centre womyn has created a demographic shift on the butch landscape, giving way to terms like ‘stud’, ‘boi’, ‘tom’, and ‘macha’ in california and the south, ‘dom’ within the d.c., maryland and virginia region, and ‘aggressive’ or ‘AGs’ in new york.these identities represent a redefined female masculinity that is rooted in the experiences of womyn of color and is more genderqueer than historical interpretations of butch……the emergence of this new language would not have happened were it not for the ways in which masculine-of-centre womyn of colour live their female masculinity through the lens of race. our identity has socially transformative powers and there are still nuances to our identities — masculine-of-centre mothering, social mobility, and historical racial oppression — which shape masculinity in ways that have yet to be fully explored…*womyn here is used to reflect that, for many of us, as masculine of centre, our gendered identity is not accurately reflected in the term women.” (reprinted in outside the XY: black and brown queer masculinity, 2016)

nneka onuorah said “black women don’t have a voice — black ‘AG’ [aggressive] lesbians don’t have a voice. i wanted to tell a story of my own for people who look like me.” (from an interview with NBC news about her film the same difference, 2015)

some films of interest:

the aggressives, directed by daniel peddle, 2005

pariah, directed by dee rees, 2011 (netflix)

stud life, directed by campbell x, 2012 (amazon)

the same difference: gender roles in the black lesbian community, directed by nneka onuorah, 2015 (kanopy)

[shesgottawatchit]

Eve’s Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons

The 1990’s saw a transition in African American filmmaking when Black Female Directors started to emerge in the industry.  One Director in particular, Kasi Lemmons, rose to critical acclaim with her directorial debut Eve’s Bayou (1997) which met to extremely positive reviews and remains an important and influential text concerning themes of race and black feminist ideologies.

When examining feminist texts within African American Cinema, it is crucial to study the representations of Black Womanhood throughout the history of Black filmmaking, especially texts derived from female directors.  Early representations portray the black female through the use of stereotypes (discussed previously) in the form of the Mammy, the Mulatto, the Jezebel or Sapphire.  The black female identity is often linked to the body, presented as exotically intriguing or erotic; she is hyper-sexualised which contrasts the more passive white female character.  Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou manages to connect these ideologies of Black Womanhood, while simultaneously subverting them to approach such concepts on a feminist level, discussing the mistreatment and misrepresentations of Black Womanhood on the big screen.

Born February 24, 1961 in St. Louis, Missouri US, Kasi Lemmons made her acting debut in television movie 11th victim (1979).  She went on to star in Hollywood hits such as Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) and Academy Award winning The Silence of the Lambs(1991).  In 1997, she emerged in the industry when she wrote and directed her first feature length film Eve’s Bayou, starring renowned actor Samuel L. Jackson and upcoming actresses Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Meagan Good.  Eve’s Bayou centralised on Black family life, narrated through the main character Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family.  Bayou delivers themes of adultery, sensual eroticism, supernaturalism and witch craft, all of which are tied together in black ancestry and history; depicting the more social and family oriented problems faced by middle class Blacks, situated in 1960’s Louisiana.

Eve’s Bayou

Lemmons’s opening party scene immediately sets up an idealised Black middle class life and emphasises the centrality of Bayou’s female led cast.  Matty Mereaux is dancing with her husband Lenny Mereaux, close up shots of him groping her buttocks are shown; her body parts are immediately fetishized.  Moments later she dances seductively with Roz’s husband Louis Batiste; she pulls up her dress to reveal her stockings and places her head around Louis’s groin area.  This sultry depiction of Matty’s character becomes problematic when applying Laura Mulvey’s work: Visual and Other Pleasures of ‘The Male Gaze’ to the text.  Here, Matty is seemingly objectified by the male viewer to be offered as none other than a placement of sexual desire for the male viewer.  However, Bell hooks, a pioneer of  her work on Black spectatorship, in particular Black female spectatorship, challenges and attempts to deconstruct Mulvey’s theory of ‘the gaze’ stating Black audiences can “both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see”.  Black female spectators have thus since been able to adopt anoppositional gaze, placing white womanhood in the eye of the phallocentric gaze, enabling them to not “identify with either the victim or the perpetrator” (hooks, 1992)

Not only does this opening scene construct themes of erotica and woman as objectified beings.  Lemmons’s overall set up, choreography and mise-en-scene is a huge movement away from previous African American depictions, seen in early 20th century texts.  Here, the Batiste family, are portrayed as a well-mannered, well-spoken middle class family, with lavish clothing and a large country home.  A huge contrast to the savage and uncivilised representations of tribal African Americans portrayed in early Black Cinema.  As the majority of the cast is formed of Black actors and actresses, this idyllic family unit provides the ability for white audiences to identify more closely with Lemmons’s characters.

“the representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character”

                                                                       Laura Mulvey, 1975/1989, p. 354

Mulvey theorises that male characters play a dominant, powerful role within the narration, while the female characters must submit to a more passive, powerless position in cinema.  Mulvey argues that the audience adopt ‘the gaze’ as we constantly view texts through the dominated male lens of the industry, although “the power of the gaze is not invested in all men, but in White men, and the object of the gaze is not all women, but White women” (Hollinger, 2012, p. 194).

Roz comforts her three children after Mozelle’s vision of a child being hit

One way Lemmons subverts this idea is to centralise her female characters.  Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family and her adolescent sister Cicely play a vital role in the progression of the narrative and it is they who hold the power over there adulterous Father Louis.  Alongside their Mother Roz and Aunt Mozelle, together provide a primary example of female solidarity.  Mother Roz is shown to empower the family unit, unlike Louis, whose Fatherly absence only heightens Roz’s empowered status.  hooks states that “once black folk had gained greater access to jobs, revolutionary feminism was dismissed by mainstream reformist feminism when women, primarily well-educated white women with class privilege, began to achieve equal access to class power with their male counterparts”  (2000, p. 101).  Black women and black feminist ideologies were pushed aside once White females started to benefit from feminist movements – “working class white females were more visible than black females of all class in feminist movement”.  However Black women were the voice of experience, “they knew what it was like to move from the bottom up” (hooks, 2000, pp. 103-104).

White women primarily benefited economically from the reformist feminist gains in the workforce, “it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing”

                                                                           bell hooks, 2000, p. 107

Although she is subject to notions of patriarchy, (she stays home while Louis works to keep their home) this is quickly dismissed by the audience due to Louis’s controversial actions of adultery against his wife.  His affair with Matty (stereotyped as the Jezebel) interwoven in the plot, highlights mistreated stereotypes of Black Woman.

Cicely is slapped by her Father after she attempt to kiss him

Although these women initially appear empowered in Bayou,it is needless to say that Lemmons still intersects themes and ideas already imposed on black women in film.  Firstly Eve adopts the role of the maid, who does the family chores and cleans the house; several of her costumes reflect this and she is even seen with a feather duster cleaning.  Alongside this, Matty is presented as the whore, who endeavours in a relationship with Louis.  Despite the period setting, for such a contemporary text, these representations still manage to surface in contemporary Black Cinema as a constant reminder of the painful history of Black colonisation and slavery in early 20th century America.  Another character devise that Lemmons utilises to explore Black history and the mistreatment of female slaves is through character Cicely, who we believe is abused by her Father.  It is not until the end of the film that we are told it is her who instigated an incestuous relationship with her Father.  “The elusive qualities of truth are given attention in the film… Lemmons provides two sequences of the same event, each bearing the narration by a different character…  both Eve and the audience have to deal with two versions of a truth that each character professes” (Donalson, 2003, p. 190)  From her actions, she is muted throughout the film; powerless and unable to reveal what really happened.  Cicely’s powerless state can be seen as symbolic of the mass rape that occurred on plantations to multiple slaves across America.  In narrative form, this becomes complex due to Cicely’s initial confession and the film’s final twist.  Either way, the audience is still partial to the implied rape of an adolescent by her Father.  The final shot we see of her as she leaves the Batiste family home is her signalling to Eve to keep quiet.  This can be seen to parallel the voiceless African American Slaves, especially the abused woman who could not fight for their rights as slaves, let alone their civil rights amongst a prominent  patriarchal society.

[hola-mundo-adios]

Kamala Harris

With her inauguration, Vice President Kamala Harris has made history: She’s the first woman — and first Black and South Asian person — to serve in the role, and now the highest-ranking woman in US government.

But beyond these firsts, Harris is poised to have a vice presidency unlike few others, in large part because of the singular role she’s expected to take on.

Harris will be one of just a handful of vice presidents to preside over a 50-50 Senate, making her a pivotal tiebreaker in the upper chamber. And given her expertise as a lawmaker, she’s set to be an impactful voice as the US continues to combat ongoing public health and economic crises. President Joe Biden has also said Harris will be his top adviser — “the last person in the room” — with the ability to strongly influence White House policy.

“The way she’s approaching the vice presidency is very similar to the way Joe Biden approached the vice presidency with Barack Obama,” Harris press secretary Sabrina Singh previously told USA Today. “She’s walking into this office as a full governing partner to Joe Biden and is completely aligned and supportive of his priorities.”

In the Senate, Harris’s 51st vote could be a key one: On everything from resolutions rolling back Trump-era rules to confirmations for Cabinet nominees to legislation that’s approved via budget reconciliation, her vote may well be needed to reach a simple majority. And while breaking tie votes is nothing new for vice presidents — Mike Pence did it 13 times during his tenure — it’s typically less common, with Democrats’ incredibly narrow margins suggesting that Harris could be doing it a lot more often.

“Vice President Harris will be in a relatively unique role among modern vice presidents,” Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and expert on the vice presidency, tells Vox. “The even division of the Senate, the polarization of the parties, and the demise of the filibuster regarding appointments means that she may have occasion to cast some important tiebreaking votes.”

Harris could be a major tiebreaker on key votes

Prior to this term, Dick Cheney was the last vice president to preside over a 50-50 Senate — though that split only lasted for a few months in 2001 before Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-VT) decided to switch parties.

At the time, Cheney only broke two ties while the Senate was divided in this way — both of which were on budget amendments.

Harris could have to do the same much more frequently, both because the Senate has grown more partisan since then and because the threshold for approving Cabinet nominees and most judges has been reduced to a simple majority.

“If there’s going to be a tie vote, it could easily come during nominations,” says George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder.

And though Pence never presided over an evenly divided Senate, his tiebreakers could provide a glimpse into the subjects Harris may have to step in on: His vote helped confirm now-former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, advanced multiple judges, and allowed Republicans to roll back Obama-era regulations that enabled abortion providers to receive federal grants.

In general, Harris could potentially break ties on a few types of votes:

Cabinet nominees and judges: These nominees require 51 votes to be confirmed, and depending on how much GOP support they garner, they could need a tiebreaker to move forward.

Congressional Review Act votes: Using the Congressional Review Act, Senate Democrats are able to undo agency rules made within the last 60 legislative days if they have 51 votes to do so, and support in the House. Democrats could take this route to roll back Trump-era regulations, including changes to environmental protections.

Budget resolution: A budget resolution, which could be used to pass more ambitious legislation, including more Covid-19 relief, only needs a simple majority of votes to pass — rather than 60 votes, the threshold most legislation must clear. The process for approving this measure is known as reconciliation.

Just how many times Harris may have to use this power will depend on the opposition Senate Republicans put forth on issues like Cabinet picks and efforts to use the Congressional Review Act to undo the policies of the Trump administration. One factor is how united Democrats stay across legislative priorities and nominees: Because of the Senate numbers, every Democrat in the caucus will be needed to approve pretty much anything that requires a simple majority for it to be successful.

“The two variables are the reaction of the Republicans and whether the measures on the floor can garner [moderate support],” says Binder. If Democrats can consistently hold their caucus together and peel off one or more moderate Republicans, tiebreaking may be less necessary, for instance.

And while this procedural role is one that vice presidents have long held, Democrats’ bare majority in the Senate — and the expansive goals they’d like to achieve under the Biden administration — could put a spotlight on Harris.

“It certainly underscores the importance that she brings to the legislative agenda and will showcase her role,” former Sen. Tom Daschle, who served as minority leader in the last 50-50 Senate, told Vox.

As a tiebreaker, the vice president’s focus is more to aid the party to get to a particular vote threshold than to shape the legislation itself — though Harris could potentially also take on the latter job.

Harris, in a recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, said she would embrace this responsibility but urged lawmakers to find common ground. “Since our nation’s founding, only 268 tie-breaking votes have been cast by a vice president. I intend to work tirelessly as your vice president, including, if necessary, fulfilling this Constitutional duty,” she wrote.

There are different policy areas that Harris could prioritize

Much of the role of the vice presidency will depend on how Biden and Harris opt to structure their partnership, and his comments so far suggest that she could be quite influential.

“Different presidents structure the responsibilities of the vice president in different ways,” former Democratic Senate staffer Jim Manley told Vox. “Both Joe Biden and Al Gore had a seat at the table for every major decision.”

Biden has spoken about being how important it was for him to be the “last person in the room” when Obama made key decisions on everything from the Recovery Act to troop withdrawals in Iraq, and he’s committed to having the same type of relationship with Harris.

“I told him I wanted to be the last person in the room before he made important decisions. That’s what I asked Kamala. I asked Kamala to be the last voice in the room,” Biden has said. Harris, too, said she looks forward to being a “full partner” to the president.

“Vice presidents are only as powerful as their presidents let them be,” says Jody Baumgartner, a political science professor at Eastern Carolina University and expert on the vice presidency. This means the dynamic between the two leaders is often a deciding factor in how they coordinate governance responsibilities.

Exactly how Biden and Harris will share labor isn’t yet clear. But given Harris’s work as a senator — and her position as a tiebreaker — one role she could fill is as the administration’s liaison to Congress. When he was vice president, since he’d served in the body for decades at that point, Biden worked heavily with legislators. “Whenever [then-Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid had a problem with Republicans, one of his phone calls he would make would be with the vice president, who had good relationships with Capitol Hill,” says Manley.

Because of Biden’s background in Congress, this could be a continued focus for him as well. Harris has extensive experience she will bring on the legislative front and on specific issues. She was a leading author of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the Senate’s anti-lynching measure, and the LIFT Act, which would expand tax credits for middle-class households.

During her four years as a senator, Harris served on the judiciary and intelligence committees. Before that, she spent more than two decades as a California prosecutor, both as the state’s attorney general and as San Francisco district attorney.

She comes into her new role with deep expertise and a broad skill set. And as the first Black woman and first South Asian woman in this role, she’ll also be in a position to elevate the voices of women of color on different policy subjects.

“I am interested to see whether and how her identity shapes her approach to this partnership,” Howard University political science professor Keneshia Grant told Vox. “I am hopeful that she is able to translate her lived experience at the intersection of race and gender into policies that are sensitive to the lives of everyday people.”

With her background in criminal justice reform, this could be among the areas that Harris continues to focus on, with progressives likely to keep pressuring the administration on their stances.

Spokesperson Symone Sanders previously told the Associated Press that the Biden administration hopes to take advantage of Harris’s wide-ranging expertise by having her be involved in every major issue the administration tackles. The four pillars the new administration has laid out so far to focus on are Covid-19, economic recovery, racial justice, and climate change.

“She has a voice in all of those. She has an opinion in all those areas. And it will probably get to a point where she is concentrating on some of the areas more specifically,” Sanders said. “But right now, I think what we’re faced with in this country is so big, it’s all hands on deck.”

[aion-rsa]

Enola Holmes Review: Millie Bobby Brown’s Revolution Lacks Revelation

https://ift.tt/3iTajDr

Sherlock… Mycroft… and Enola! The Holmes siblings—we’re looking for a mind at work! It is easy to insert the names of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective and his brother—and their baby sister, Nancy Springer’s relatively recent creation—to the tune of “The Schuyler Sisters” from Hamilton. It’s just the sort of playful, futzing-with-lore vibe given off by Enola Holmes, Netflix’s feminist riff on Doyle’s canon. But unlike Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, the Netflix movie won’t stick in your memory beyond the credits. Still, it’s diverting fun with a valuable message for both its Victorian era women and contemporary young adult viewers.

Sixteen-year-old Enola Holmes (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown) grows up being told that she can do anything that she puts her mind to. And why not? Her sole role model is her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), a brilliant artist and cryptographer who knows how to guard secrets with codes and her fists, and who rears Enola in the same interdisciplinary manner. Sequestered away from society in their family’s downtrodden country home with a limited and loyal staff, the two women enjoy their own bubble of safety and learning for learning’s sake.

It’s only when Eudoria disappears on Enola’s birthday, leaving behind a cryptic message, that the bubble pops. In come Enola’s older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin), the latter to take her on as his ward and send her to a stultifying finishing school to catch up on all of the ladylike traits she (gasp) never inherited. Instead Enola wants to follow in Sherlock Holmes‘ footsteps, putting their considerable intellects together to locate Eudoria in London, but while the detective is sympathetic to her hurt and fear about their mother’s whereabouts, he does little to help her.

And so Enola is reminded of Eudoria’s seemingly cruel trick in giving her an anagram of a name that spelled backwards means alone. Not that it lasts long since Enola’s escape to London to find her mother soon intersects with the path of Viscount Lord Tewskbury, Marquess of Basilwether (Louis Patridge), and yet another mystery to solve arises with gunmen in pursuit. Try as she might to not get caught up in more intrigue, Enola nonetheless has danger literally stalking her just out of frame for all the times she offers droll asides to the camera.

Director Harry Bradbeer, who helmed almost every single episode of Fleabag, brings that series’ iconic fourth-wall break to Enola’s story, providing the loner girl with the closest thing to friends in an audience she engages with directly. Yet the device isn’t nearly as effective as when Phoebe Waller-Bridge does it, not least because Enola’s asides hardly ever shock. Despite being a fledgling detective, she’s surprisingly candid about her intentions to most everyone she meets, so when she makes eye contact with the camera, she’s rarely imparting new and shocking information or a drastically different read on a situation.

Enola shares her brother’s knack for disguises, shrewdly moving throughout London and the surrounding area in a variety of personas; an especially amusing recurring joke is when she frequently offers to trade outfits with random boys (sneakier than showing her face in a garment shop, and cheaper too). This code-switching across society allows her to convincingly occupy every role from newspaper boy to black-swathed widow, without any of them defining her. Because the real Enola is a patchwork of all of these identities.

While Enola clearly inherited the Holmes family’s wits, she lacks the real-world experience that hones such deductive skills, and winds up reacting just as much as anticipating new contacts and clues. It’s a refreshing change from mysteries in which Sherlock has all the answers, allowing the viewer to follow along with Enola as she explores Eudoria’s network of fellow revolutionary women and their ties to the suffragette movement. Yet once she uncovers signs of a greater conspiracy, Enola begins to wonder at her mother’s capacity for violence in the name of changing the world order.

By adapting the first of Springer’s popular YA novels and combining it with the period-appropriate conflict of women’s suffrage, Enola Holmes makes lofty pronouncements about changing long-established systems to make space for women and people of color. And some of it feels like terribly unsubtle lip service, at least to more cynical audiences, but one exchange stands out: Eudoria’s friend Edith (Susie Wokoma), who runs a tea shop and teaches jiu jitsu to young women on the top floor, challenges Sherlock that his apathy for helping his sister or mother is because the world as-is perfectly suits him—and he has the grace to look abashed.

This movie had the amusing unintentional PR boon of getting sued by the Conan Doyle estate for depicting Sherlock as having (dear me) emotions—a trait that does not exist in the public domain because the stories that did delve into his feelings are still under copyright for a few more years. Yet Cavill’s Sherlock arguably has a pretty limited character arc that could best be described as “begrudgingly affectionate,” while Claflin’s Mycroft is a delightful dandy who gets to sputter a few times but is mostly ineffectual. Both brothers could do with more screen time, but because this is Enola’s coming-of-age story, they are mostly relegated to a few obligatory scenes.

Read more

Movies

Over the Moon Release Date and Trailers Tease Netflix’s Optimistic Animated Feature

By Joseph Baxter

Movies

Kajillionaire: How the Evan Rachel Wood Movie Explores the ‘Mini-Cult’ of Family

By Natalie Zutter

Enola’s trail doesn’t lead her anywhere near Baker Street, probably because at this point in the story Sherlock is famously a solo detective and couldn’t possibly work with a partner; even his little sister spends the entire film convincing him of her mettle. While one might expect a sly Watson meet-cute by the end of the movie, it would seem that the filmmakers are saving that canonical touchpoint for potential future installments. It certainly would be amusing to see an Enola Holmes franchise in which Sherlock and Watson have cameos as their cases intersect with Enola’s, and in which Mycroft gets to be more of an obstacle to her fledgling career.

It takes the movie a noticeably long time to build to the interesting notion that a world-changing mystery is rooted in a seemingly mundane case. The movie zigzags so much between its two branching plots that by the time it sets up for its big showdown, viewers might feel a little out of step and not fully appreciate the payoff. That’s partly why even though Enola has her very own Captain Marvel “fall three times, get up four” moment, it lacks the emotional punch of Carol Danvers’ win over the patriarchy.

Like a sloppy cypher, Enola Holmes crams a few too many elements into one narrative, jumbling it in parts and lessening its overall effectiveness. But if this is just the first installment, then it is a promising beginning. There will always be a need for stories that carve out spaces in history for people other than white men, and a plucky girl detective who knows her way around a corset and a cryptograph is herself a much-needed role model.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Enola Holmes is available on Sept. 23 on Netflix.

The post Enola Holmes Review: Millie Bobby Brown’s Revolution Lacks Revelation appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3mLmHHZ

[popthiscollective]

Great podcasts by Black women and non-binary people

Strategem: the Podcast

https://www.welcometostratagem.com/podcast

Stratagem: The Podcast is an audio party hosted by your favourite femmes where we discuss all things equity, inclusion and social justice. This podcast is part of a larger digital resource and virtual conference that you can find at http://welcometostratagem.com, brought to you by professional social justice warriors at Cicely Blain Consulting.

@cicelybelle

Secret Life of Canada

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/secretlifeofcanada

The Secret Life of Canada highlights the people, places and stories that probably didn't make it into your high school textbook. Join hosts Leah and Falen as they explore the unauthorized history of a complicated country.

@secretlifeofCAD

Seen

https://audioboom.com/channels/4997581

Black and brown women have not been allowed to exist in the world as the fullest expressions of who we are and who we can be. Violence, deprivation, and oppression have ruptured our connections with our bodies, our spirits, and each other. But healing and liberation are possible. We feel this possibility when we’re together - just us.

Through the eyes of Black and brown queer women, Seen explores how we choose to live at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation work. Nic and Lala co-create space where healing becomes possible. Where we see ourselves through our own eyes. Where we learn what freedom feels like. Where we look inward for our paths forward.

https://www.facebook.com/seenthepodcast/

Undisclosed: The Killing of Freddie Gray

https://undisclosed-podcast.com/episodes/miniseries-2/

Dr. Chatelain (@DrMChatelain) was a co-host for a 16-episode arc about the killing of Freddie Gray in April 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland. She provides the historical context for this nationally renowned criminal justice podcast. This podcast debuted in March 2017. http://undisclosed-podcast.com/

The Waves

https://slate.com/podcasts/the-waves

The Waves is a biweekly conversation about news and culture examined through the lens of gender and feminism. Every other Thursday, join the hosts—including Slate’s June Thomas, Slate staff writer Christina Cauterucci, Marcia Chatelain of Georgetown University, and Thirst Aid Kit’s Nichole Perkins—for frank discussions about the ways gender shapes everything. Our new name reflects generations of women from the various waves of feminism, the sound waves that carry us to your ears, and the waves we intend to make.

Code Switch

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/

What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for! Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race head-on. We explore how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and everything in between. This podcast makes ALL OF US part of the conversation — because we're all part of the story.

@NPRCodeSwitch

Still Processing

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/still-processing/id1151436460?mt=2

Step inside the confession booth of Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, two culture writers for The New York Times. They devour TV, movies, art, music and the internet to find the things that move them — to tears, awe and anger. Still Processing is where they try to understand the pleasures and pathologies of America in 2020.

@jennydeluxe and @Wesley_Morris

Yo, Is This Racist?

https://yoisthisracist.com/

Yo, Is This Racist?, hosted by Andrew Ti, creator of the popular blog of the same name, is now a weekly podcast! Every Wednesday, Ti, co-host Tawny Newsome, and their guests answer questions from fan-submitted voicemails and emails about whether or not something is, in fact, racist. @yoisthisracist

Call Your Girlfriend

https://www.callyourgirlfriend.com/

Call Your Girlfriend is a podcast for long-distance besties everywhere co-hosted by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, and produced by Gina Delvac. Every week, Aminatou and Ann call each other to discuss the intricacies of pop culture and the latest in politics. Since launching in 2014, we’ve built an audience of hundreds of thousands of listeners per episode. We’re highbrow and lowbrow, fiercely opinionated, and not afraid to realtalk each other about everything from menstrual cycles and body shaming to the Cheeto in Chief and workplace drama. We highlight women who are agents, creators, movers, and shakers who have smart, interesting things to say. We also care deeply about the lived experiences of non-famous women who are just trying to get through the week. We’re here for every facet of women’s humanity.

@callyrgf

And for a pop culture fix:

Thirst Aid Kit

https://thirstaidkitpodcast.tumblr.com/

Join Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins as they dig deep into the various ways women express their thirst, asking: Why do we desire who we desire? At a time when men are Not Doing Great, Bim and Nichole want to keep asking questions about Hollywood inclusion and opportunity, through illuminating and hilarious conversations with special guests, original fan fic designed to make you sit up, and of course [REDACTED]. Bring a straw… and come thirst with us.

@thirstaidkit 

The Read 

http://thisistheread.com/

Join Kid Fury and Crissle for their weekly podcast covering hip-hop and pop culture's most trying stars. Throwing shade and spilling tea with a flippant and humorous attitude, no star is safe from Fury and Crissle unless their name is Beyoncé. (Or Blue Ivy.)

@ThisIsTheRead

Keep It

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/keep-it/ 

Each week, Ira Madison III, Louis Virtel, and Aida Osman are joined by comedians, journalists, actors, musicians, activists, politicians and more to discuss the latest ways pop culture and entertainment are intersecting with politics and society. Expect accents (is that Catherine Deneuve?!), Oscars trivia, and endless amounts of shade. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Waiting to X-hale 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/waiting-to-x-hale/id1472529148

A Gen X-themed show with podcast veterans Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh and Karen Tongson (Pop Rocket). W2X revisits the pop culture & social issues that defined Generation X from a (queer) woman-of-color perspective in a way that sheds new light on the pop culture from both then, and now.

@waiting2xhalepd

Comedy and Life:

Why Won’t You Date Me

https://headgum.com/why-wont-you-date-me

Nicole Byer is single and has been for decades. She’s smart, funny, has a fat ass and loves giving blow jobs. So the question is why is she perpetually single? This podcast is a quest to find that answer. Every week, Nicole invites a comedian, friend, or ex-fling to interview their dating life and figure out her own.

@nicolebyer

Best Friends Podcast

https://www.earwolf.com/show/best-friends-with-nicole-byer-and-sasheer-zamata/

Gayle & Oprah. Bonnie & Clyde. Nicole & Sasheer. Enter the pantheon of best friendship. When you’re forced to change your number, are sick of being single, or want to take a pole-dancing class, you’re going to need a best friend…and if you don’t, you can still have this podcast.

[readincolour]

New Books Coming Your Way, January 30, 2018

The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips 432 p.; Fiction/African-American Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences? The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory 320 p.; Fiction/Romance Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn’t normally do. But there’s something about Drew Nichols that’s too hard to resist. On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend… After Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa heads home to Berkeley, where she’s the mayor’s chief of staff. Too bad they can’t stop thinking about the other… They’re just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century—or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want… This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins 272 p.; Essays Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to “be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans. Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large. Whether she’s writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color”; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the “Black Girl Magic” movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory. All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom edited by Deborah Santana 336 p.; Essays All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world. Sixty-nine authors — African American, Asian American, Chicana, Native American, Cameroonian, South African, Korean, LGBTQI — lend their voices to broaden cross-cultural understanding and to build bridges to each other’s histories and daily experiences of life. America Ferrera’s essay is from her powerful speech at the Women’s March in Washington D.C.; Natalie Baszile writes about her travels to Louisiana to research Queen Sugar and finding the “painful truths” her father experienced in the “belly of segregation;” Porochista Khakpour tells us what it is like to fly across America under the Muslim travel ban; Lalita Tademy writes about her transition from top executive at Sun Microsystems to NY Times bestselling author. This anthology is monumental and timely as human rights and justice are being challenged around the world. It is a watershed title, not only written, but produced entirely by women of color, including the publishing, editing, process management, book cover design, and promotions. Our vision is to empower underrepresented voices and to impact the world of publishing in America — particularly important in a time when 80% of people who work in publishing self-identify as white (as found recently in a study by Lee & Low Books, and reported on NPR). Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker 432 p.; History Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson—and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey—and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak. Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills 320 p.; History While Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith are among the estimated 35,000 black millionaires in the nation today, these famous celebrities were not the first blacks to reach the storied one percent. Between the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of smart, tenacious, and daring men and women broke new ground to attain the highest levels of financial success. Black Fortunes is an intriguing look at these remarkable individuals, including Napoleon Bonaparte Drew—author Shomari Wills’ great-great-great-grandfather—the first black man in Powhatan County (contemporary Richmond) to own property in post-Civil War Virginia. His achievements were matched by five other unknown black entrepreneurs including:

Mary Ellen Pleasant, who used her Gold Rush wealth to further the cause of abolitionist John Brown;

Robert Reed Church, who became the largest landowner in Tennessee;

Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, who used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem;

Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, who developed the first national brand of hair care products;

Madam C. J Walker, Turnbo-Malone’s employee who would earn the nickname America’s “first female black millionaire;”

Mississippi school teacher O. W. Gurley, who developed a piece of Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a “town” for wealthy black professionals and craftsmen” that would become known as “the Black Wall Street.”

A fresh, little-known chapter in the nation’s story—A blend of Hidden Figures, Titan, and The Tycoons—Black Fortunes illuminates the birth of the black business titan and the emergence of the black marketplace in America as never before. amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0"; amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "lisarbobbitt-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "785121bfbf478d195d0518a076e99b57"; amzn_assoc_asins = "1616958723,0399587667,0062666150,0997296216,0062437593,1501122398"; amzn_assoc_title = ""; amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true"; January 26, 2018 at 11:00AM from ReadInColour.com http://ift.tt/2DPL2sd

[next-genpotterweasleys]

Hi, I really enjoy your take on the next generation personalities) I have a question for you. What are the next gen kids' opinions on feminism or other movements? Which are the ones particularly invested in it?

Ok, so I really think that each next gen kid is a hardcore feminist and I refuse to believe otherwise! :) I just feel like their parents instilled the need for equality in all of them you know? For both the boys and the girls because of course feminism is not only for women. I have another ask about this so I’ll go more in depth in a second post, but below I‘ll answer what other movements the kids are invested in. I’m going to use Muggle issues

Teddy: LGBTQ Rights// Teddy is very invested in the oppression of members of the LGBTQ community and fights very hard to enact change and tolerance in his community. Love is love and no one should be mistreated because of who they are and who they love.

Vic: Anti-War Movement// Vic is as close to a pacifist as she can get. She thinks war causes too much pain and suffering and wants to see it end. Diplomacy should come first, not the use of weapons.

Dom: Pro-Choice// Dom is a strict advocate for a woman’s right to choose. She’s appalled that men think they have the right to control such a personal matter and can’t quite believe that people are ignorant enough to try and put a stop to it. They are only succeeding in banning safe abortions, not all abortions. It’s her body and it’s her choice.

Louis: Free Love// He believes people should accept all forms of love in any way or shape. He doesn’t see the need for lots of regulation and wishes things were simple and easy for everyone.

Molly: Environmental Conservation// She doesn’t understand why there is a debate over protecting the Earth and wishes people would just get their heads out of their asses. Silly little trifles won’t matter if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Lucy: Animal Rights// She’s an animal lover right to the core and weeps at the conditions of some shelters and the abuse many animals see and are exposed to. She wishes more laws were passed to enact change.

Fred: Prison Reform// He’s appalled at the way prisoners are treated and he loathes institutionalized racism. He thinks it’s an incredibly corrupt system and he believes it plays into the cyclical nature that prisoners feel forced into. He believes in rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.

Roxanne: Black Lives Matter// The amount of black lives unfairly taken and no justice being carried out fires Roxanne up like nothing else. The amount of bloodshed is sickening and the court system is not doing its job. Black Lives Matter, even if many don’t deem it so.

Rose: Equal Education// It pains her that in many regions of the world girls aren’t given the same opportunities to be educated like their male counterparts. Malala Yousafzai is her hero and she wishes that the joys of education could be experienced by all.

Hugo: Environmental Conservation// He too wants to protect and conserve the environment. He finds it to be so necessary and it scares him that more people don’t feel this way.

James: Black Lives Matter// He feels the same way as Roxanne and is angered by the blatant disregard for black lives. He doesn’t see why there’s a debate and finds that the presence of one goes to show how little, people actually care.

Albus: Gun Control// Guns. Need. To. Be. Regulated. So many people have been brutally murdered by the use of guns by crazy individuals and the fact that this could be easily avoided by smart legislation boggles his mind (I recognize that this a very American issue but it really makes me furious, I had to add it)

Lily: Intersectional Feminism// She not only advocates for the rights of white women, but the rights of women of color, LGBTQ women, women with disabilities, and women who may not follow the conventional standard of beauty. Not all women have the same experience so all perspectives of life need to be viewed and appreciated.

Scorpius: Prison Reform// He and Fred are on the same page. He believes the system sets up people for failure and it unfairly discriminates against minorities. Prisons don’t want their inmates to change, they want them to come back and this is completely wrong.

All of these issues are close to my heart and I matched them up to our beloved next gen characters. I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of them :)

[womenofcolor15]

Leave It To The POSE Cast To Slay The Red Carpet At The 2019 EMMY Awards

The “POSE” cast was front-and-center for the 71st EMMY Awards. Yep, their hit FX series was nominated for all the things and they came to represent. See the sauce they dripped on the red carpet inside…

  Dance. Vogue. Walk. POSE Bish!

NYC’s Ball Scene was brought to the 2019 EMMY Awards as the cast of the hit series “POSE” worked their way down the carpet inside the Microsoft Theater to let the world know: They aren’t going anywhere. Ok?

Lead star/Broadway actor Billy Porter loves making a dramatic entrance when he hits the red carpet. The ball judge totally served up a fashion moment. The “POSE” star worked the carpet in a sparkling Michael Kors couture suit topped with a Stephen Jones Millinery hat and “a Rick Owens platform situation” on his feet.

The 49-year-old actor is the first openly gay black man to receive an Emmy nomination in the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series category.

“All of my dreams are coming true right now,” he said on the red carpet. “I’m grateful that I’ve lived long enough to see the day where I can stand inside of my authenticity and have it be perceived this way. It’s gorgeous and it’s a blessing.”

          View this post on Instagram

                  THE MOMENT HAS ARRIVED HUNTIES! #ad With my @KetelOne_US martini in hand, taking a moment to reflect on dreaming the impossible and making it a reality. Growing up, there was never representation of someone who looked like me… So to live in my truth, be loved for being who I am and standing proud as the first openly gay, black man to walk the #EmmyAwards red carpet as a Lead Actor Drama nominee… Y’all just don’t know what this moment means to me. Here’s to celebrating 50 years of life, 30 years of hard work and learning to embrace the JOY! This isn’t for me… It’s for US! Now let’s go shut this thing down ya’ll! DrinkMarvelously #EmmyAwards #KetelOne #Beanexample by @santiagraphy / @gettyimages Style by @sammyratelle Grooming by @heyannabee Wearing custom @michaelkors collection Custom Hat by @stephenjonesmillinery Fine Jewels by @oscarheyman Nails by @cndworld @nailzbyvee

A post shared by Billy Porter (@theebillyporter) on Sep 22, 2019 at 4:21pm PDT

  Peep his red carpet interview below: 

  "POSE" star MJ Rodriguez said she wanted to POP on the red carpet and that's exactly what she did in this custom Jason Wu gown. Gorge. On the capet, she talked being able to help others in the LGBTQ community and how the show changed her life.

          View this post on Instagram

                  @enews turned this #Glambot out! Thank you

A post shared by Mj Rodriguez (@mjrodriguez7) on Sep 22, 2019 at 7:18pm PDT

  Peep the clip below:

PUSH THROUGH!

Break out "POSE" star Indya Moore was a vision in white, slaying this custom Louis Vuitton gown that featured a corset and super high slits. UGH. She's fierce.

The 24-year-old - who just rocked the cover of ELLE earlier this year - opened up about the importance of transgender representation in fashion & entertainment. Check it below:

          View this post on Instagram

                  @Enews #PoseFX but make it @LouisVuitton Face @elysethoms Hair @eclectichairdesigns Style @IanCogneato Nails @erierilady Everything I'm wearing @LouisVuitton

A post shared by IAM (@indyamoore) on Sep 22, 2019 at 6:14pm PDT

Indya - who is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent - chopped it up with Remezcla about indentifying as Afro-Taino. On the red carpet, they (preferred pronoun) explained what the term means and how it feels being in this community.

“I think we definitely need to come to a place where the African diaspora needs to understand that the African diaspora is the African diaspora,” they said. “Black Latinos don’t necessarily have the same experience as Latinos who are not Black. I, personally, do not identify as Latino because Latino means Latin and Latin, it means white. And I’m not white, so I just call myself Afro-Taíno ’cause that’s what I am.”

*applause*

They continued:

“When I watch Telemundo, yes, I’m here for Spanish content,” they said. “But I just see only white Spanish people on Telemundo. I don’t really see Black Hispanic people because Black people are also Hispanic. I think Intersectional inclusivity is important because inclusivity affirms that you belong, and I think that’s something we should be pushing for in the media that we create, in all forms. For Afro-Taínos, for everybody. Everybody that’s marginalized.”

Beautiful and WOKE.

Make way for the house mother!

"POSE starlet" Dominique Jackson served up golden goddess vibes in a custom Jeffrey Dodd gown with a cape and custom Stuart Weitzman heels. She snapped a cute video with her co-stars in the audience:

          View this post on Instagram

                  @indyamoore @hailiesahar @mjrodriguez7 @angelicaross @dyllonburnside @ryanjamaalswain Hair MY EXISTENCE MAKEUP @jmua26 Dress @jeffreydodd #respect #inclusivity #inmytruth #iknowexactlywhoiam #touchtheskin #ifyouwantsomethingworkforit #makeaplanandsticktoit #livehonestly #liveauthentic #islandgyal #trinbagonian #dominiquetarjackson #dominiquejackson #ageless #instabeauty #instabeautiful #girlslikeus #erasethehate #transisbeautiful #fulltimefancy #leadwithkindness

A post shared by Dominique T.A.R Jackson (@dominiquet.a.r.jackson) on Sep 22, 2019 at 5:08pm PDT

  LGBTQ activist Janet Mock - the series' writer, director, and producer - became the the first black trans producer to ever be nominated in the Outstanding Drama Series category. And sis looked amazing, per usual, for her big night. She hit the carpet in Valentino haute couture.

FX's "POSE" made history with a groundbreaking six Emmy nominations (yes, six) in several categories, including Outstanding Drama Series. Congrats!

Photos: Getty

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2019/09/22/leave-it-to-the-pose-cast-to-slay-the-red-carpet-at-the-2019-emmy-awards