
On a fury scale from 1-10, I’d give the bizarre literary media conversation this week about the optimal number of children to writing success ratio for women writers a 25. WTF? Do you even hear yourselves, people starting these conversations? Do you? No one ever worries about male writers and…
For most of America, Psy is a funny name, a funny face, and a funny personality. He doesn’t sing in English and most people just don’t get it leaving most of them to not take him seriously. It’s easy to strip the significance behind “Gangnam Style” down if you don’t know what it means and solely find entertainment in the Asian guy shaking his hips. But what most people don’t realize is that Psy doesn’t take himself seriously. He’s a satirist and political dissident. “Gangnam Style” was a commentary, not just a fun pop tune with a silly dance.
Gangnam is Seoul’s wealthiest and flashiest neighborhood. For South Koreans, Gangnam represents the ideal life of excess and consumerism. Psy’s character in the video is a wannabe Gangnamite. He dreams he’s living the flashy, excessive lifestyle while he’s really just like everyone else, swimming in a public pool and riding the subway. But never in the video does it seem that Psy’s character is unhappy. He’s content to play in a children’s playground and meet the girl of his dreams in the subway. “Gangnam Style” is much more that we have made it, but that’s not surprising considering Psy’s background and how little we know about it.
In America, it seems like “Gangnam Style” was Psy’s big break when in fact the song had been released on his sixth studio album and his music career hadn’t been about making flashy and catchy songs. He believes music is the key to overcoming the intolerance embedded in his country’s political systems. Throughout his career, his songs have been banned for inappropriate content and have been surrounded by controversy, not to mention the fact that he fought his mandatory military draft.
Psy is a voice for his people. He’s fighting the oppression and intolerance he sees in his culture through his music. And by ignoring his worth and his value, we’re reducing the culture of South Korea into a short man with funny pants doing a ridiculous dance.
—Opinion: American media chooses to undervalue artists like Psy from “Gangnam Style” (via kpop-confessions)
T H A N K S
(via fuckme-bradtollman)
Love this.
(via athenagcsuti)(via athenagcsuti)
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
—At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.
(via kdhart)
I was saying to myself, “It’s not THAT bad ALL the time, though, right?” but then I realized that a) most of the mainstream films I can think of that feature women prominently are romantic comedies, which I don’t even like and aren’t always from the woman’s perspective, and b) it’s going to be a long wait for the next Hunger Games.
Well DAMN.
Dudes on Film
(via dictura)
Darla is very dismayed about the Marineland situation in Toronto.
As an animal welfare organization, Fauna Foundation asks that people NOT support parks of any kind that keep animals in unhealthy conditions. When you are planning your vacation this summer, please reconsider places like Marineland.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/08/15/marineland_animals_suffering_former_staffers_say.html?app=noRedirect
Do not love Marineland

“He’s twenty years old. I try to take him outside whenever I can so that he can have some new experiences before, you know…”

