allthebest20

[allthebest20]

I’ve read so many great books lately. I wish I had been writing reviews, but I just kept running to the next! The reviews really do take a minute to write sometimes, especially if I have to quote things and such.

Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan

9/10 - I absolutely loved this book, and I tried to get everyone around me to read it. The uniqueness of each story line, the accuracy of the emotions, and the realness of each character. It did a great job of blending fantasy and realism.

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters

8.5/10 - the trans it book of 2021. A interesting story that doesn't try to take on more than it can chew. A great exploration of gender: things I've thought clumisily that I didn't know could be written about with such ease. A beautiful look at family. I was dissatisfied with the ending, but I suppose it had to go that way. Not super plot based, but still an enjoyable read.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson

7/10 - A nonfiction book that reads just like someone's doctoral thesis. Not necessarily inaccessible, but it certainly could have been shorter without loosing it's effect. The book covers plenty of background information on the Black Panther Party, and does a great job of putting currently medical discrimination and mistreatment in context. It had me understanding the greater injustice of having to sit in a waiting room for 4 hours. People often mistake the Civil Rights Movement as distant history, but it was only in the last 40 years that black doctors and nurse were welcome in national medical associations, among other inequalities. It really is amazing what the Black Panthers were able to accomplish. I wish we were able to organize like that now.

#queer #fruit bodies #nature #9/10 #7/10 #8.5/10 #fantasy #short stories #fiction #nonfiction #medical #civil rights #trans #family

[allthebest20]

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

8/10 - I liked this book a lot, although sometimes I found it difficult to read. A lot of characters share similar names, and their narratives weave in and out of chronological order. The book tells a whirlwind story that starts with a couple and their young sons and ends 5 generations later. While much of what happens in the book sounds roughly historically accurate, many aspects also contain an element of magic. Characters see ghosts and predict the future, mysterious plagues hit the town, and some events can only be explained through the supposively impossible.

We've only recently entered a reality where we expected most things to make sense, to be explainable by science. Yet, most of our ancestors lived in a far more fantastical reality, and Marquez does a beautiful job capturing this. As time passes in the novel, less magic seems to occur, so that by the end, they may have well been living in the banal reality of the late twentieth century. I don't know much about the history of northern South America -- although the book never specifies a global location, based on Marquez's background, I think it's safe to say that the fictional town of Macando is set in Columbia -- I felt like this book gave a glimpse into how life has changed in the last 150 years in the area.

The story starts with Jose Arcadio Sr. and his wife Ursula. Although it follows the Buendia name, if the story is about any one individual character, it would be Ursula, the strong matriarch who holds the family together. (Spoiler) It is after her death that the family really starts to fall apart and reach their ruin. It is Ursula who ties her husband to the tree when he goes mad, who raises the kids, grand-kids, great-grand-kids and beyond, who earns money for the family and keeps the house in good shape. She is the only one who can speak reason or spark fear in her unruly descendants, in turn giving her a great deal of power over how the town is governed. During her lifetime, the house and family are joyous because of her hard-work and spirit. J.A. Sr. (and Ursula) are the founders of Macondo, the town where all events of the book take place. After a fight that ends in the other man's death, Jose Arcadio and a group of men set out to establish a new town. After much wandering, they start Macondo, a very happy place where, under Jose Arcadio's leadership, everything is fair.

It seems as though both Jose and Ursula have some sort of family history in their old town, although they distinguish themselves from the Indians, so they are not fully indigenous. They speak Spanish, so they are likely descendants of colonizers who have been living in South America for at least a few generations. Their European heritage is never mentioned. Later in the novel, more colonists, this time English speakers, come to Macondo to set up banana plantations. There is also some mentions of dwindling, suffering, and resisting Indigenous populations, but they are mostly spoken about like second class citizens. There are two Indigenous characters that work as servants, maybe slaves, for the Buendia's, before they even become very wealthy. They arrive of their own free will, looking to escape their village which is over run with a horrible plague (historically accurate) that causes insomnia and eventually delirium (probably not historically accurate). One of these characters stays until their death, serving the family, utterly devoted, very one-dimensional. In another part of the book, an Indigenous military leader is killed because Aureliano I, Ursala's son, thinks he is too fearless, too savage, too much of a natural leader, who might divert power from himself. The Buendia's are both colonizers and colonized. They show no awareness of this -- no sympathy for or affinity with the Indigenous people. If they have indigenous roots, they do never acknowledge it.

When the banana company moves into town, there is very little concern about it at first. The banana company is an obvious colonizer: they set up their own village, separate from Macondo, with an imported design. They establish a stricter government and they over work their employees. However, none of the Buendia's work for the company, so the working conditions are not of big concern to the narrative. Ursula's great-great-grandchild, Meme, is friends with the daughters of the banana company executives, so she spends time over in their posh village. It isn't until Aureliano I, the retired revolutionary, starts talking a big game against the banana company, that the family is really pulled in. Of his 17 sons, born across the country to different women, all of whom were hoping to birth a military leader as great as Aureliano, all but one are killed by the government to prevent an uprising. Jose Arcadio Segundo (who is actually the third Jose Arcadio), Ursula's great-grandchild, also tries to stand up to the banana company by helping to organize strikes. The way the banana company saga ends, though, is interesting and a little puzzling to me. The banana company gathers all the strikers together in the town center, closes all the exists, and massacres every single one of the workers and their families. Segundo wakes up in a train full of dead bodies, the only survivor, and escapes, only to find that no one has heard of the massacre. Years later, the massacre becomes a wild myth, erased from all textbooks and the common memory. The banana company promises to resume production right after the rain finishes. However, the rain continues for years, and the banana company quickly abandons the site. The narrator claims that the banana company can control the weather, and purposefully causes the years of rain. This makes me think that the banana company murdered the strikers because their organized power was too much to handled, but they also couldn't risk news of a successful strike spreading. They had to abandon the town because the sudden lack of workers would have been suspicious, so the executive caused the rain to create an excuse to leave, to plunge the town into such soggy disparity that no one would question the absences of so many people. I don't know why Marquez would give the banana company power over the weather, since by this time, less and less magic is happening in Macondo. Perhaps it is just a metaphor for the overarching power that capitalist colonizer exercise over an area. Their plantations often have huge environmental effects, although typically these fall short of changing the rain.

The town never fully recovers from this colonization, although, years later, people blame the town's trouble on the banana company leaving, not it's arrival, the massacre, the changing government, or the rain. This, of course, is a classic way to misremember history. Only those of us with a bird's eye view can be certain of what happened and why, and even I remain unsure in this case.

If I was to read this book again, I would highlight every time Marquez uses the word solitude. At the end of the book, I am still wondering who spent a hundred years in solitude. It is hard to track time in this story, but it may be 100 years from when Melquíades writes the prophecy of the Buendia family and when Aureliano IV, Ursula's great-great-great grandchild, final deciphers it. Perhaps it is Aureliano I, the revolutionary war leader, the father who out lives his 18 sons, the introvert, late bloomer, alchemist and gold-fish maker, who lives in the most solitude. Or perhaps it's Ursula, cursed to watch her descendants repeat the same mistakes. Or maybe it's the first Jose Arcadio, who fluctuates between a responsible and fair leader and a self-important mad scientist, who goes mad and must be tied to a tree behind the house. There he ultimately dies, but his ghost lives on in the house. Many of his descendants are similar: flipping between greatness and obsession, responsibility and madness. Spending years serving the community and then years locked away. Still, it is Ursula who I feel the most for: she's the only steady one, always working for her family, always caring about others. Alone in her true sense of responsibility to the family.

The book also has a lot of weird incest things. From the gate, we learn that Ursula and Jose Arcadio are cousins. For months after their marriage, Ursula wears chastity underwear to prevent her husband raping her in fear that their child will have the tale of a pig. The book often puts women in this role of protecting themselves from the desires of the men in their life. No one is safe from lust. Twice, nephews fall in love with their aunts, who worry that the boys will rape them in the night. Amaranta, Ursula's daughter, practically raises Aureliano Jose, Aureliano I's illegitimate son, and he becomes obsessed with her. The narrator implies he develops these feelings because of Amaranta's carelessness: she is often naked in front of him as he gets older, and she lets him cuddle her, enjoying the way it feels to be touched by a warm body. Llittle Aureliano II develops deeply sexual feelings for Amaranta, who rejects them strictly and dies a virgin. Amaranta's lack of romantic companionship is a self-designed punishment for the suicide of a lover who she rejected harshly, despite leading him on and developing affection for him. This is one of many examples of women being punished for their relationship with sex, something I will come back to soon. Three generations later, the same thing happens between Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano IV. Amaranta II, a free-wheeling young women who loves having sex with her older, wealthy European husband, ultimately chooses to be with her cousin. Their passionate sex leads to the last Buendia: a little boy who is born with a pig-tail, just like Ursula worried about all those years ago. Amaranta II dies in child birth, and Aureliano IV, loses himself in grief. The new born is neglected and eaten by ants, just before Aureliano is killed in his ancestral home by a wind storm. This is how the book ends, as Aureliano IV translates Melquíades' prophecy: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants. It is unclear, apparently, if Amaranta and Aureliano know they are related. Although Amaranta always grew up with little Aureliano around, his origins are unknown, because Amaranta's sister birthed him in a nunnery and her mother, Fernanda, kept his origins a secret because of the shame of his illegitimacy. However, he has the family name and the resemblance, so I don't believe they truly didn't know.

Now, to talk about the misogyny in the book. Ursula ultimately allows Jose Arcadio to have sex with her because she worries that with out that outlet, Jose Arcadio is prone to recklessness. She does not have sex because she desires him. Amaranta II at first rejects Aureliano IV, but one night he sneaks into her room, and at first she fights him off, but then she lets the fighting become sex. The scene is framed as consensual, because Amaranta's husband is the other room, so at any time, if she had made any noise of distress, he could have come to her rescue. We are left to assume that she secretly wants it. She is one of a few female characters in the book who enjoys sex, and she is ultimately punished for it: she loses her husbands, has a son with a pig tail in a dilapidated house, and then shortly thereafter dies. The other sex lovers include Pilar Ternera, the old prostitute who bears a child by both Aureliano I and Jose Arcadio II. While she lives a decent life, she works hard, never finds love, and neither Buendia boy knows her as their mother. Petra Cotes is another: she is refered to as Aureliano Segundo's -- truly Aurelieno III, Ursula's great-grandson, Amaranta II's father -- concubine. She is dark-skinned, perhaps why she does not become his wife, and the love of his life. Even after he marries Fernanda, Amaranta II's mother, he spends the majority of his time with Petra. Their passionate sex is a key part of their relationship, but Petra never bears a child. Later in life, when they have lost most of their wealth in the rains, Petra and Aureliano often go hungry to afford fine meals and objects for Fernanda and the children. After her lover dies, Petra continues to care for Fernanda until her death, because despite their mutual diastase for each other and Petra's poverty, Petra feels obligated to care for what Aureliano III loved. Perhaps the most depressing example, however, is of Meme, Amarana II's older sister and the mother of Aureliano IV. She falls in love with a man who works at the banana company, and they enjoy sex together. When her mother, Fernanda finds out, she locks Amaranta away in the house, but every day, her lover sneaks in and they have sex in the bathroom. When Fernanda finds out, she has a guard keep watch and they shot the man when he enters the property. Amaranta is send away to a nunnery, and she never says another word, lost so deep in grief that not even the birth of her son can make her speak.

Unfinished, but publishing anyways

#Gabriel García Márquez #one hundred years of solitude #novel #multi generational #magical realism #south america #colonialism #indigenous #misogyny #unfinished

[allthebest20]

Movies I've Watched Recently

League of Their Own (1992) - 6.5/10, enjoyed it enough, but will probably never watch it again. The characters and plot are cute, but it's all very surface level. No lesbians either :( It's got a lot of famous people, tho: Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell.

Tell Me Who I Am (2019) - 6/10, a fascinating story, but only vaguely visually interesting. I almost want to read the book they wrote. It's an incredible documentary that captures two grown men finally discussing their secret childhood trauma. The film suggests that the men have never talked about this before. They start by discussing their lives, starting at age 18, when one of the twins is in a serious motorcycle accident and suffers total amnesia. He knows only one thing; he doesn't even know his own name, but he knows his brother. So the brother helps his twin to re-learn about the world, re-introduces him to his family and friends, tells him anything he wants to know. However, when they start talking about their childhood, the remembering twin decides to paint it in a much more pleasant light, lying about their happiness and their family bond. There are some strange things about their family, but the amnesiac does not recognize them as weird, because he has no frame of reference. When the twins are 32, both of their parents are dead, and the men are finally allowed free range of their mansion (the family is British, with an aristocratic background). In there they find all sorts of weird things: lots of sex toys, years worth of Christmas gifts from family members never delivered to them, and a headless, naked picture of the two twins. The remembering twin admits that their mother sexually abused them, but refuses to say anymore. This obviously sends the amnesiac into a tale spin: what happened? What else is a lie? Can he trust any of the things his brother told him when he was so vulnerable and fresh-faced? The documentary flashes forward twenty years or so, to the men now, in their 50s, finally facing the truth. The amnesiac twin has deduced some of their history, but the other brother records a video and explains what he remembers: their mother sexually abused both of them together from a young age, and then later sent them to be abused by paying pedophiles. At the age of 14, he had escaped one of the pedophiles apartment and goes home early. After that, the prostitution stops. The brother admits he kept this a secret all those years because he wanted to protect his brother from the pain, and by re-remembering a better childhood, he could partially sever himself from the trauma as well. It brought up a lot of thoughts about true love, memory, sacrifice, trust. The remember-er says that if it was the reverse, he would want his twin to do the same for him, and he would be mad if he didn't.

It also made me think that specific memory loss could be a great treatment for trauma. I'm talking about Eternal Sunshine technology, but not for silly break-ups or government mind-control: for deleting memories of rape, childhood abuse, only. They say we hold trauma in our bodies: I wonder if the amnesiac had any bodily symptoms of trauma, like panic attacks, physical responses to triggers, weird flashbacks. There also must be some overlap in the long term symptoms of brain damage and emotional trauma.

Their bond is also fascinating. To wake up, and not know yourself, but to know another person? That is untouchable love. I can't believe that they ever really grew distant, even with the secrecy between them. The amnesiac twin must have understood why his brother did it, on some level.

#movies #6/10 #documentary #woman #baseball #a league of their own #classics #wwii #historical #madonna #twins #brothers #memory #memory loss #abuse #childhood trauma #90s #tom hanks #lori petty #geena davis #rosie o'donnell #kid friendly

[allthebest20]

Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)

6/10 - As I write this, I have not yet finished the series. While the later seasons are funnier, I would say this show is not worth watching unless you are sufficiently bored and have moved through the other good TV. In a lot of ways, it's a classic sitcom, with it's plot holes and shaky character development, all coming together to dish out a couple of funny lines here and there. The more you watch it, the more the characters grow on you and the more you find yourself laughing at the stupid things that they say. The writers do a good job of avoiding the more cringe-y, over done sitcom tropes, but most episodes have pretty predictable plots.

The show star Eugene and Dan Levy, as father John and son David, as well as Catharine O'Hara and Annie Murphy, as mother Moira and daughter Alexis. Eugene Levy's character is boring: rarely says or does anything interesting, but his facial expressions and reactions can be quite funny. John is often the butt of the kids' jokes, and he plays the clueless, but proud and well-meaning father very well. Catherine O'Hara's Moira is a funny character: for the first season, I found her to be a boring caricature of a rich old lady, relying too much on a funny accent and silly wigs. However, as I warmed up to her, her bit started genuinely making me laugh. I'm not sure if the show got better, or if O'Hara's charm just won me over. By the 6th season, she is easily the funniest.

I can't help but love Dan Levy. He plays a character that we don't get to see very often: a funny, anxious gay man who is well dressed, but far from anyone's fabulous GBF. He's not a gay stereotype, if anything he's a rich kid stereotype who also happens to be gay. In the first/second season, he has a little fling with his best (and only) friend in Schitt's Creek, Stevie, a women. Although I was hoping to see some gay action for him, it was a nice moment to explain pansexuality. It made sense, because Stevie is very similar to David, and despite her long hair and model-face, she is more masculine than him, and I could see why they would be attracted to each other.

There was one plot line that really annoyed me: David and Stevie fall are crushing on the same man, who is seeing them both. The trope in itself does not bother me: what bothers me is the total lack of chemistry between the man and David. When it's with Stevie, things are fine, passable, whatever, but with David... It's obvious that Dan Levy is trying, but the dude is just not gay, and he seems to not really be making an effort to genuinely act. It's almost like when the camera cuts, he yells out "no homo" real quick, just so everyone knows. It just frustrates me, because, like, they couldn't just hire a gay actor?

Ultimately, David does find love, and it's cute. I mean his business is entirely unrealistic in a small town like that. They need an actual general store, not a store just for expensive lotions.

The side characters also do a great job. I think it's funny how Levy's actual daughter/sister is on the show as well, playing the waitress.

People love this show, and I'm not really sure why. I guess it makes decent background TV, and it can produce a few genuine laughs an episode.

#tv #tv show #schitt's creek #2015 #2020 #6/10 #drama #sitcom #catherine o'hara #dan levy #eugene levy #annie murphy #rural #small town #queer #gay man

[allthebest20]

Special (2019-2021)

6.5/10 - I liked this show, the second season more so than the first. There were some funny moments, some moments that made me think. I hate the way he treats his mom, but I don't think it was unrealistic or even bad writing. I have to wonder, tho, is this an accurate portrayal of someone with CP?

Before I started writing this review, I wanted to read what people with CP though of it, so I went to Medium. One person - Grant, a straight (?), 30 year old man with CP - finds not just Special, the TV show, but Ryan O'Connell himself to be a detriment to the disabled community, which I think is pretty harsh. Ryan O'Connell is the writer, creator, and star of Special, a semi-autobiographical story. In real life, O'Connell also identifies as a gay man with mild CP. He also came out when he was 17 to supportive family. He was also hit by a car right before making a major life change and then lied to his new friends, claiming his limp was from the car accident. O'Connell was a blogger too, who eventually used that medium to come out of the disabled closet - be warned: his writing style is pretty annoying, but at least it's brief. However, the difference between the character - Ryan Hayes - and O'Connell is the timeline. O'Connell claims he lost his virginity at the age of 17. O'Connell was 20 when he was hit by a car, right before he moved to NYC. Unlike Hayes, he moved away from home at 18, to go to college, and got a job as a writer, starting at Thought Catalog, when he was 24. He lied about his disability for years, before going public with it at the age of 29. At that point, he was living in LA, writing for a popular tv show (Awkward), and soon after, he published his memoir, which Special is based on. Hayes, on the other hand, is 27 when the show starts, and he has never lived alone, never had a "real job," and never had sex. Grant, the writer I mentioned earlier, thinks this is partial representation: the media will only let a man with CP be a main character if the storyline demeans him, therefor ascertaining society's stereotypes of disabled people as weak and childish. Hayes, is, in many ways, childish. I wouldn't call him weak or stupid, but one has to wonder: what was such a highly functioning young man doing for so many years living, unemployed and single with his mother and apparently no friends? What was the character supposed to be doing all day? I've been partially unemployed for a year now and it's driving me crazy, but at least I'm having sex and living away from my parents.

O'Connell does say he struggled to get networks excited about the idea of a gay, disabled main character, so maybe he was forced to write the character as more childish than himself. Apparently, he only decided to be the actor who played Hayes because of budget constraints. I think it's also likely that he saved Hayes' firsts until he was 27 so he could fit them all into one neat season. Maybe Hayes had to be 27 so that 32 year old O'Connell could play him. I'm not sure. It seems like this would all be more realistic if Hayes was 24, just like O'Connell was when he got a job at Thought Catalog.

I found another article, by a gay man with CP, who wrote positively about the show, enjoying that O'Connell mentioned his insecurity around his surgery scars. He didn't have much else to say about the show, except that he hopes it gets better for Hayes, so this neither confirms or denies suspicions about the point of the delayed timeline. I don't want to invalidate anyone who had sex late in life, either, by saying that Ryan should have had sex before 27. I mean, it's hard to have sex when you live with your mom, right? I also know that being disabled -- getting and recovering from surgeries, doing physical therapy, going to doctors -- can feel like a full time job, leaving someone totally drained. However, there's really no allusions to that in the show, so, again, I'm not sure why he couldn't work like at all.

Hayes does begin to show some growth in season 2, but it's still so cringe-y to see the way he treats his mom, a hardworking nurse who has cared for him alone his whole life. She has sacrificed too much, worked too hard, for him to critique her. She stills tries to cater to his every need, although she does loose patience a few times. All their conflicts are eventually solved with a mutual "oh, we both fucked up, we could both grow from this" instead of Hayes actually reflecting on his mother's experience and taking some responsibility.

It was also great queer representation, and I loved the gay sex scenes. There was even one where Ryan tops for the first time and gets shit on his dick and freaks out, acting like kind of a jerk to his partner (Tanner -- who is kind of a dick as well, tbh). There's a scene where he hires a prostitute to help him lose his virginity, which I've heard of other late blooming disabled and neurodivergent people doing. In another scene, Ryan is fetishized for his disability. Although there are red flags, Ryan doesn't realize he's being fetishized until he's in bed with the man, and they end up having sex anyways. Afterwards, Ryan feels really dirty -- this scene made me cry, but I'll also cry at anything.

I'm glad to see the representation, even if it's not perfect, because it's much more interesting than the typical hetero normative crap TV. All in all, it's a good show, even though it can be very LA-blogger culture. Like is that really the way people talk? Couldn't be me. Still, I hope it gets another season, because I would watch it.

#tv #tv show #special #disability #queer #gay man #ryan o'connell #la #virginity #journalism #millenials #comedy #2019 #2021 #6/10 #6.5/10 #mother relationship

[allthebest20]

How to Fix A Drug Scandal (2020)

6/10 - Interesting enough that I watched the whole thing, but not so much that I'd recommend it. The actual documentary is okay and they do a good job, but the story really got me thinking about what makes a drug addict, the powerful role addiction plays in our society, and white privilege.

How to Fix a Drug Scandal is a documentary, done in 4 parts, following two consecutive incidences of misconduct that occurred seperately, in Massachusetts' two evidence-processing drug labs. The primary story is about a young women, Sonja Farak, a great student and athlete with a promising future and a happy family, who graduates UMass with a degree in chemistry. She gets a job working at the state's drug lab in Boston right out of college. She enjoys the job, but hates the cost of living, so she is happy when she is approved to be transferred to the state's other, smaller lab out in Amherst, which processes all the drug evidence for Western Mass. In the Amherst lab, things are much more laid back. There are only a handful of people who work there, and the chemists are mostly unsupervised. One time, when she is alone in the lab, Farak decides to try a little bit of the pure methamphetamine that the chemist use as a standard. In her confession, she says she does it because, as an undergraduate, she had been depressed and had done a lot of research into recreational drugs. Farak thought back then, if she could try any drug, it would be meth, so when the opportunity arose, Farak thought it couldn't hurt to try.

I think now it is appropriate to mention that Farak is gay. She is visibility butch in appearance, an athlete type, and the documentary mentions she has a long term girlfriend from college who moved with her to Amherst. Perhaps the queerness of the area was another reason she was happy to go to Amherst. Perhaps she also hoped for less supervision, a chance alone with the drugs. It's funny how we can have so much: intelligence, an education, physical health, family support, a partner, a job; and still be so sad. It's true of all people, but especially with queers. A lot of modern white queers, and white women, live their lives in resentment of the privilege they thought they were promised, but fell they never fully obtain. This is partially because the world is changing: white millennials and zoomers are not inheriting the economy their parents had, they're getting something much different. As a young white women raised in a liberal Massachusetts town, just like Farak, I was told I could use my intelligence and girl boss energy to get anything I wanted, but that's actually not true. As queer people, especially queer women, it becomes even harder to catch the privilege that comes off the coat tails of cishet white men. As white people, we often act very immature because of this angst. Many white cis gays are so ready to throw black people, trans women and gnc lesbians out of their community if it means more privilege for them. Closeted, passing gay men have been doing this in Western society for centuries. Many white lesbians are ready to forget about black and indigenous people and trans folks in order to advance their ideas of feminism.

We never learn about what happened between Farak and her girlfriend. Was it trouble at home that drove her to try the drugs? Her family is interviewed for the piece, and they seem very ordinary, supportive, and compassionate for Farak. The girlfriend is not interviewed. How long did they live together before she found out about Farak's drug usage? Was she using too? Did she try to make it work or did she leave immediately? I respect her decision not to talk -- I wouldn't either -- but I am still curious. Perhaps, simply a life of feeling like you don't belong manifested as a deep depression, something that drove Farak to drugs. Perhaps it had nothing to do with her queerness.

Farak moves from meth to other standards, and eventually she starts taking drugs from large evidence hauls. At first, she claims the drugs helped her do the menial task of testings, helped keep her hyper-focused and moving fast. Eventually, she was leaving the lab multiple times a day to smoke crack, and she had long ago gotten sloppy and started doing suspicious things. Obviously, she looked horrible, but she claimed she was having health problems.

When they find her crack pipe, law enforcement attempt to bring justice down quickly. She signs a plea deal and gets a relatively short sentence. A couple of months worth of cases are thrown out, but some defense lawyers are suspicious. They believe more cases should be thrown out, since it was likely that Farak had been using for several years - she has, and eventually evidence that police tried to hide, shows this. The documentary spends a lot of time exploring this and what it means for the justice system as a whole. Farak doesn't believe she messed up all the cases. In fact, she believes in the justice system pretty full and naively (more evidence that queer =/= progressive). She claims that if evidence was sent to her, it was probably really drugs, and if she messed up a test, the accused should know and request a retest. There's a little truth in this: yes, most of the samples sent to the drug lab were probably real drugs, but police also make mistakes and are corrupt, so definitely not all the samples were illegal. It should be obvious that the drug labs are a line of defense to help people remain innocent until proven guilty, and it's so selfish and privileged of Farak to care so little about the lives of people who are targeted by the police. She shows no empathy for fellow addicts or families torn apart by carceral justice, poverty, and addiction.

The state had Farak sign a plea deal, hoping to brush the extent of her misconduct under the rug as to limit the repercussion for the prosecutors, who would have to re-try all the cases Farak was involved in without the drug lab evidence. Without that evidence, tens of thousands of people could be set free -- and eventually, 24,000 were. On top of this scandal, the state was just recovering from a scandal that happened in the Boston drug lab only a few months prior. A star chemist there, Dookhan, who had for years been churning out more tests than any other employee, was found to have been faking results to get ahead in her career and forge relationships with the prosecution. The documentary doesn't talk much about Dookhan. She doesn't have a drug problem. She came to America at a young age, graduated UMass Boston with a B.S., and was divorced with a son. She chronically lied about her resume and her personal life. Her misconduct led to the release of over 20,000 offenders. Apparently her supervisors had ignored many red flags, like frequent simple mistakes and impossible speed. Her co-workers had been complaining about her for a while before a probe was launched that ultimately uncovered her wrong-doings.

Farak's case was similar: there were red flags, although smaller, that were ignored. At the Amherst lab, however, people were less concerned with Farak's work. The lab was underfunded, in disrepair, and inundated with cases. No one cared what Farak did as long as her work got done. There was no one to supervise her and no one that objected to her working her own hours. Perhaps then, it wasn't her queerness that pushed her to drug addiction, but the tediousness of a job that pays poorly but demands specialty, carefulness, and long hours. Perhaps it was merely a crime of opportunity: she should never have been alone in that lab, it was totally against protocol, but still, a common occurrence.

The documentary, obviously, never, as it cannot, identifies the reason why Farak became a drug addict. It could be anything: relationship troubles, alienation related to queerness, capitalism, or simply genetics. All we know is that Farak was sad and vulnerable when she first took those drugs, and the problem snowballed. Neither, can we diagnose Dookhan with a personality disorder that caused her to be a compulsive liar with little empathy, although it is likely linked to trauma and genetics, just like Farak. We could make reccomendations to fix the justice system, but the problems are way bigger than two drug labs in Massachusetts. The justice system is shaped by white supremacy (ex. majority white judges and high carceral rates for black and brown communities) and capitalism (ex. prison industrial complex), the same forces that allowed for the scandals to go on for so long and that pushed these people into addiction and other mental health issues. The same forces pushed the state to cover up the extent of this misconduct.

In a lot of ways the story goes full circle, and in that way, it is a very interesting case. As I grew up in Massachusetts, I am interested in stories that are based there and how they are shaped by social norms there and in turn, shape social norms there. This story really highlights the class difference in Mass, the divide between the professionals and the criminals, is not a moral one, not an issue of intelligence, assiduousness, or hard work.

#how to fix a drug scandal #tv #tv show #doc #documentary #non fiction #drug #drugs #addiction #mental health #mental illness #queer #lesbian #justice system #whiteness #capitialism #massachusetts #boston #amherst

[allthebest20]

Hm

6/1/2021 - I watch so much TV it's embarrassing. I go on kicks where I'll read a bunch, but then I'll get depressed, and I stop. Recently, Mer and I just turn on the TV at 5 and watch straight until we fall asleep, be that 10pm or 2am, her usually earlier than me. It's hard to establish healthy patterns when I am unemployed and most often listless. Everything is changing: the environment, society, our relationship, me.

Most of it's crap. God, no one can make a decent movie anymore. Most things worth watching are 10 years old or TV or both. I find it comforting to re-watch shit I know will be good, like 30 Rock or Weeds or the Devil Wears Prada. Even if it is good, the sheer monotony of watching a screen typically has me compulsively on my phone, playing a dumb game or scrolling instagram while I halfheartedly listen to the TV going in the background. I know that's exactly what the capitalist elite want, but it's hard to break out of this vicious cycle. Hopefully, as our current state of emergency lifts slightly, I can reestablish better habits, bolster my self image, and decrease the amount of time I spend in a bad mood doing self destructive things.

[allthebest20]

The Magus (1977) by John Fowler

I will not give this book a rating because I did not finish it. I did, however, read nearly 400 pages before giving up. For a novel of 700 pages that captures only a few months of plot, I should have been expecting drawn-out descriptions and a plot that creeps along. I had only done a little bit of research into this book, choosing it mainly because of a stranger's recommendation. I had expected fantasy, mystery, suspense but instead was served a pompous colonial surrealism. The main character is very typical of most twentieth century masc novels: British, well-educated, easily dis-likable, narcissistic and also self-hating, distanced from family, slime-ly sexual, gender-roles-loving, blandly artistic. Nick makes me hate all men, because Fowler makes me feel like all men identify with him. Over 50 years has passed since this book was published, so hopefully this no longer rings true for most men, but I can't quite forget the gross feeling of it all.

Still, I persevered through more than half of this book, thinking the plot would make up for it. Around page 300, I began thinking, "well it must pick up now," and then I began really questioning why I was reading it. Yes, it makes me think, but the thoughts are far from new or unique. I worry that I could finish the book, only to realize the point to be made it not interesting to me. I know some people (cough, men) love it, and maybe some day I'll return to it. I hate giving up on books, especially when I have read so much of it and am genuinely interested to know the ending, but I just wasn't enjoying the read.

#book #books #the magus #john fowler #english #british #Greece #masc #unfinished #mythology #acting

[allthebest20]

Giovanni's Room (1956) by James Baldwin

10/10. This is the best book I've read in a long time. I love it. I have immediate plans to read the rest of his work, and I think I may even purchase myself a copy of this book to read over and over again (even though I don't have the space). It's books like these that make me almost regret I got a B.S. I mean, I went to college for 4 years and took only one English class, even though those were some of my favorites when I was younger. Now, I barely know of James Baldwin -- obviously one of the greatest American authors. At the same time, it's almost exciting to know that I have my whole life ahead of me to study the written word. There are so many amazing books in my future. It's not like opening Netflix and settling for the whatever slightly-problematic comedy or mostly-accurate doc you can find. I am high writing this right now, can you tell? Anyways. I was surprised when I started the book and realized that the narrator is white (and in fact so are all the main characters). If James Baldwin's face hadn't been printed on the cover of my copy, I probably would have forgotten that the author was black. I'm not sure what this says about Baldwin: I know he often tried to escape the label of "Black Author" and the limitations he felt came with that. I, however, am a firm believer that writers cannot escape their identities. We can only write well about what we know well -- it's why Fannie Flagg writing about a dark skin black boy's inner thoughts sounds so stale. Yet, Giovanni's Room is far from an identity escape. It felt so raw, so real. After I read it, I obsessed over Baldwin's Wikipedia page, then google, before getting pay-walled out of a juicy New Yorker article -- all trying to find out more about Baldwin's love life, knowing that Giovanni and David's relationship must have been based on a real person. From what I've read, Lucien Happersberger was a Swiss bisexual man who was 8 years younger than Baldwin. A few years after meeting Baldwin, Lucien married a women, and this reportedly broke Baldwin's heart. After their marriage ended, Baldwin and Lucien remained close until Baldwin's death. Although the narrator David is the American trying to escape, he also has a slight bisexual side -- I believe he does love his fiancee -- and he attempts to leave his gay lover for a hetero marriage that ultimately fails, like Lucien. Apparently Baldwin often got this kind of treatment in real life, because he has a taste for straight and bi men. I cannot help but think that Baldwin identifies more with Giovanni, the sensitive man who longs for love, justice, domestic bliss, but is denied it because of prejudice, ultimately driven to madness and then violence by the unfairness of the world. Of course, he is both men. Like David, he knows what it's like to try and hide from yourself. Most queer people can relate to David's youthful exploration of his sexuality. The initial denial, so deep you don't even feel it; the build-up, played off innocently; the moment when the act is committed, perhaps even just the thought of wanting to commit the act and not knowing whether to run but really wanting to stay; the immediate aftermath, the running, the hiding, the rethinking how important that feeling really was, the feeling that made you want to stay before; and finally the fall-out, the period of time where you teeter on the edge, trying to push yourself towards hetero, but always swinging back more forcefully toward homo. This book made me realize that I have probably never read a good gay book in my entire life. They all pale in comparison to everything this book does. I feel like I understand gay men, gay history, and myself better. The narrator is a pretty despicable person, if one can be blamed for their trauma in that way. He is entirely emotionally closed off, constantly lying and looking down on others, selfish, alcoholic, lost, without love or purpose. He drifts through Paris in the 1950s on the generosity of rich non-sexual daddies and his literal father. He is disgusted by most of the older

gay men in the community, even his friend, Jacques, although they are so obviously his future. They are men who no longer have any interest in love, only wanting to playing with the pretty young men as long as they hold their interest. It's not so much that they don't want love, but that they have long given up on it, long learned the feeling and probability of heartbreak. Their open sexuality, unashamed desire and femininity, is very distasteful to David, who works so hard to keep his shuttered. It is so sad to read about his love for Giovanni, which is barely visible over the layers of shame and the confusing messages of masculinity. You can see them living a beautiful life in 2020, but in 1950s, it is all but doomed, if not physically, then emotionally. David will never be able to open himself up enough to truly love Giovanni. Giovanni knows this about David before they even meet, and that seems to be why he is so unhinged and depressed. SPOILERS: Giovanni says he left his village when his son died, and knowing Catholics, I know he must have felt it was God punishing him for his gay sins. After the death of a child, he must have felt like there was nothing left for him to lose. No reason to pretend to be hetero, no reason to be connected with his family, for with that was the potential to cause them pain with his "sins". Giovanni's Room is the most true story of star-crossed lovers imaginable. I also loved the way David spoke about his love for his fiancee, and how that added extra confusion for him. I can identify so much with the feelings of "I can make this hetero thing work, I do love this person," but it is not the love you want. It is not true. There's something missing, a closeness you can never have with that person. Finally, I won't write about it here, but I thought the ending was amazing. Totally did not see it coming, yet it fit with the plot seamlessly. So few books can provide the level of emotions, truth, written beauty, and plot strength that this novel does. It's a true work of art.

#book #10/10 #james baldwin #giovanni's room #queer #historical #1950s #paris #france

[allthebest20]

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

6/10, I enjoyed it and I would recommend for a nice, light but slightly longer read.  My copy was 395 pages, but it’s broken up into tiny bite sized chapters and the font is rather large.  It is a book narrated by many different voices, and although the story primarily follows one women, it ultimately tells a very heartfelt tale about the experiences of several women living in Alabama in the twentieth century.

One of the main character is Mrs. Evelyn Couch, who lives in 1986 Birmingham, Alabama, a year before the book was published.  Evelyn meets Mrs. Ninny Threadegoode at the Rose Terrace Nursing Home when taking a break from her mother-in-law, and quickly becomes fascinated with Ninny’s stories of life back in Whistle Stop, Alabama.  Through these stories, “the Weem’s Weekly,” and other people’s perspectives, the biography of Idgie Threadegoode is unveiled.  There are parts from different newsletters and newspapers, but the Weems Weekly -- run by Mrs. Dot Weems in Whistle Stop for decades -- is the most common.

Idgie Threadegoode was born in the early 1900s.  Although no one ever let her forget her assigned gender, Idgie was obviously a man.  How do you speak about a trans man in a historically correct way?  I think it would be misleading for me to refer to Idgie as he/man tho, because Idgie never identified that way, and it’s simply not my place. The Idgie character never seems upset that they are called a women, Aunt, or she.  But Idgie does everything that a man would do at the time: wore pants, hunted and fished, loved women.  Idgie’s barely even socialized as a women, since they declare their masculinity from a young age, and the family takes it in stride.  No one in their small town seems to object either.

In many ways, the book does not explore Idgie’s emotional life.  We cannot know whether or not being misgendered bothered her, because the author does not explore this.  Fannie Flagg is a lesbian, but a feminine one, so perhaps she was not truly qualified to write this book.  At the same time, the book would likely not have had such success had it been more openly queer or romantic.

The biggest problem I have with the book is the way the black characters are portrayed.  I don’t know exactly what I didn’t like about it, but I just tend to think that white people write poorly from the black perspective.  The characters aren’t one dimensional stereotypes, but they fail to be fully three dimensional at the same time.  I suppose many of the characters fail to reach a certain realness because Flagg never gets too close emotionally.  Like any classic southern novel, the anti-racism is snuck in mostly through irony.  In the twenty-first century, her attempts fall flat, but perhaps back in 1986, it could have been eye opening for some readers, I’m not sure.  Generally, Flagg’s black characters are stereotypes that have been fleshed out only moderately: Sipsey, an old black women who loves the white people and helps raise their children, Big George, the big dark one, Artis and Jasper, the twins who are dark and light skinned.  Flagg was obviously supposed to be making references to colorism in society with the twins, but sometimes, when Artis is cast in a particularly bad light, it’s hard to remember that.

One of the most impactful parts of the book is actually Evelyn’s story.  Through talking with Ninny, she begins to question her own relationship with race and men.  I think if anything was eye opening in 1987, it was Evelyn’s perspective. I feel for Evelyn, a 48 year old women who has spent her life in fear, always doing what she was told and not wanting to offend anyone, and then suddenly realizing she has been mislead. She knows nothing about her own health, which is a sad reality for many women, especially in that time period.  Ninny, even as she slips closer to death, is able to be a powerful, female role model for Evelyn.  As women, it can be really hard to age.  It’s always great to be reminded that we will still be worthwhile at 50 or even 80.

SPOILER: I also cannot believe that they tried to casually pass off human cannibalism.  Well, actually, I can, because I almost forgot to mention it.  When I read that part, my brain was just like “wait, what? okay...”  Like I actually think that might be racist, suggesting that Sipsey killed a white man and then Big George cooked him and served him to customers.  Did Idgie know?  Did the family eat some of Frank Bennett? That’s really pretty gross, and I wish they hadn’t included that.

It was a cute story, but also pretty sad.  Idgie lived this great life: she had the Dill Pickle Club, a women she loved, a family, and a successful business.  Meanwhile, Evelyn’s miserable, Ruth was abused and raped for several years before she left Frank Bennett, and Ninny was never even around for the good parts of the story.  Even the women who lived good lives, seem limited compared to what Idgie was able to do: a reminder that life as a women is hard work.  It’s caring for the men and children in your life for your entire life.  It’s staying home and being afraid. The book ends with Idgie still single, living with her brother.  Ruth and Idgie only live together for 20 years, and Idgie spends the next 40 without a lover I suppose.  Meredith says that how it’s like for a lot of queers down south.

Still, Evelyn’s story is supposed to be the glimmer of hope.  After meeting Ninny, she becomes a star Mary Kaye cosmetics dealer and goes to a retreat in L.A. to lose weight, where she makes a bunch of friends.  She gets to live her life, and she gets to be feminine.

#book #tried green tomatoes #at the whistlestop cafe #novel #south #alabama #georgia #queer #historical fiction #feminism #race #6/10

[allthebest20]

Bad Trip (2020)

Directed by Kitao Sakurai,

Written/story by Eric Andre, Kitao Sakurai, Dan Curry, and Andrew Barchilon

Starring Eric Andre, Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel Howery, and Michaela Conlin

Rating 8/10, probably won’t watch it again for a few years, but it was hilarious and clever.  At times, it could be a little cringe-y, but it’s also one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

There isn’t much to say about this movie, as I have no real criticism of it.  I read on social media that it took 7 years to make, which is truly impressive.  Filmed in a similar style to Borat, the 3 main characters act out dangerous, rude, and silly scenes in front of unsuspecting people and capture it all on a hidden camera.  The people are hilarious.  It’s obvious from the beginning that they are too genuine to be actors.  Everyone is real looking, real talking.

I suppose I do have a problem with public spaces becoming more and more of a stage for viral content, but when it’s this funny, it’s hard to complain.  I wonder when it was filmed: I didn’t see any masks, so probably pre-pandemic.  We used to hear about flash mobs in the early 2010s, but now, even in my small rural city, I’ve seen people in public recording tik toks.  I bet in big cities it’s becoming a second epidemic, but people have to entertain themselves (and their followers) somehow.  I don’t hate it, but I also don’t love it.  I’d love it if we put more funding into making our public spaces accessible for everyone, but it seems like this kind of stuff fuels anti-homeless infrastructure and the police state.  Anyways, I’’m getting off topic.  This movie does not do that.  This movie was funny.

Sometimes when they were filming, I think at least some people had to know something was going on.  I would have loved to see more bloopers and cut bits.  I lot of the people behave heroically in times a crisis: a women trying to talk Haddish out of dropping Andre off a two story building, a young man trying to mediate a fight between Andre and Howery before the police come, a nurse in a bar trying to help Andre as he projectile vomits, a man trying to not to snitch on Haddish as an escaped inmate, cleaning ladies comforting the character Maria after her gallery is destroyed.  I might be pissed if I thought I was talking a lady out of murder and then found out it was a joke, but they show Tiffany breaking character and talking to the crowd after that scene, and they all seemed to take it pretty well.  It just goes to show that a lot of people are good.  People want to help.  Some people have a better bullshit detector then others.

This movie was a refreshing change from all the negativity about strangers, the sterilized and lonely existence I’ve been living in the pandemic, and from the general boring lines given to extras. I would highly recommend if you need a good laugh.

#movie #bad trip #hidden camera #reality #Kitao Sakurai #eric andre #tiffany haddish #dan curry #Lil Rel Howery #Michaela Conlin #Andrew Barchilon #2020 #positive #comedy

[allthebest20]

Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi

8/10.  A joy to read and a great debut novel. I think the author has even better work ahead of her.  The characters are complex and unique, and the book explores modernity, pain, and generational spirituality in a very readable style.  I couldn’t help but make assumptions about the author as I read the book: definitely Nigerian, definitely a cook, definitely spent time in London and Canada, definitely queer, definitely raised in the Church, but also definitely spiritual.  The authenticity with which she writes, especially in regards to being queer in the modern world and the cultures of different places, is what makes this book great.  The story dances between the gruesome details of reality in the twenty-first century and romanticized views of youth and love. It raises a lot of questions in me about the international class system, wealth, and privilege.  

The only real complaint that I have is around one of the main plot points: the rape of Kehinde when she is 12.  While this is a turning point in all their lives, I feel as though it is also simultaneously underappreciated, as if the author choose this event simply because it was one of the worst things she could think of.  I think this is a common pit fall for authors.  A lot of traumatic things happen to this family: Kambi, the mother, is very mental ill, Banji, the twin’s beloved father, is murdered, Taiye, the queer twin, struggles with her own mental health.  Yet, the rape is regarded as the primary Bad Thing and all the other traumatic events are hardly discussed.  I appreciate how the author takes some time, maybe 1 chapter, to discuss Kehinde’s relationship to sex and her body.  Yet, Kehinde’s life seems to be mostly unaffected by this event, except in the way she punishes her family with her silence.  She is in a healthy relationship.  She does not abuse alcohol or drugs.  She has a successful career.  Ultimately, it’s not a book about overcoming childhood sexual abuse.  It’s a book about mending a family after years of pain, resentment, distance, and silence.  I almost feel as though the book could have been stronger if it focused more on the effects of Banji’s death and Kambi’s violence and depression on the twins.  Ultimately, though, sexual abuse is just a thing that happens to a lot of kids, and perhaps it serves a purpose to write a book where it happens, it’s horrible, but it doesn’t need to be put under a magnifying glass.  It just reverberates.

This book could have been about a lot of things.  When I picked it off the shelf at the library, I barely read the entire description, immediately caught by the spiritual nature of Kambi’s being and the brief mention of “reckless hedonism.”  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Taiye was a lesbian, and I saw a lot of myself in her: the serial string of intense relationships, always slated to go nowhere, the indulgence in food and weed and dancing and occasionally other drugs, the loneliness and missing family but not being able to connect with them, the exploration of religion and spirituality and non-monogamy, seeing and feeling things you don’t know are real.  I feel like a lot of modern young adults live like Taiye does, unsure what to look for except comfort.  I love how the author mentioned the chaotic draw of dating apps.  I love how Taiye is a stoner.  I love how Taiye loves organic butter and fair trade chocolate and cooking extravagant meals for anyone who will eat it.  I LOVE how the author includes recipes for what Taiye is cooking.  Although I probably won’t use those recipes, I did want to cook what Taiye was cooking, and it reads just like my brain reads when I am absorbed in a culinary project.  This book could have been more about what it means to be a lesbian, but it only barely describes her formative romantic and sexual experiences.  The author details the first time Taiye calls her self gay out loud and has queer sex, but this is long after she has had gay feelings and gay experiences.  The author does not explore Taiye’s inner turmoil, and it is unclear if Taiye struggles at all with her sexuality in the long term.

I also like how the book explores mental illness.  It doesn’t shy away from both the good and the bad parts.  It doesn’t shame medication use.  It explores the spiritual powers of those who’s brains work differently.  Kambi’s voice explores suicide in an interesting way: both from the frequent pull of the voices, asking Kambi to escape the pain of living, and Kambi’s own knowledge that she wants to remain here with her family.  Although I have perhaps 0 hard examples of mental illness being spiritual, I still want to believe that those who hear voices, who see things, who feel things, are connected to the spiritual in a way that those who live entirely in reality are not.  This book explores one such case.  I also found it interesting how Taiye inherits some of Kambi’s crazy (struggles to speak as a young child, depressed, sleep walks) and some of Kambi’s magic (draws people to her, sees and hears beyond).  This make Taiye feel closer to her mom as she ages, while Kehinde remains unsure.  This book could have been more about generational mental illness and the pain and distance it causes, but instead the author focuses on the magic of it all.  It asks, quietly, if the girls should be mad at their mother, can they be mad at her?  From the outside, Kehinde knows that Kambi is respoinsible for the scar on Taiye’s face, but yet we, the audience, know that Kambi had to do this to prevent Taiye from killing the rapist, Uncle Earnest.  Does Kehinde know this?  How can she understand?  In a family, we have no choice but to forgive and let live if we cannot understand, or else remain alienated.  This is the underlying message of the book.

The book has a complicated timeline: the main story line follows the events of a six month period in which the three main characters are united again in Lagos, after over a decade apart.  Slowly, in tangents, the three characters’ backstory is explained.

The book features a few key locations:

Nigeria (specifically Abeokuta, where Kambirinachi is born, Ife, where she spends her youth, and Lagos, where she raises her family),

London (where the twins were born and where Taiye lived for 9 years during and after university),

and Canada (Kehinde lives in Montreal since attending university there and Taiye lives in Halifax after London). 

I’ve never been to Nigeria or London, but I love the way the author writes the dialogue and the characters from each place.  I cannot say if they are accurate, but they have a clear and unique voice, not homogeneous but also representative of those place-based qualities that unite an area.  The characters give me a glimpse into what it feels like to be Nigerian abroad vs. Nigerian at home.  She rarely writes about interpersonal incidents of racism: the characters are mostly well liked, treated nicely by the people in their life, given opportunities.  I think that contributes to the feeling of romanticism in the story.  Racism is discussed on a more systematic level: they have problems at the airport, Taiye learns about the history of racism in Canada. As someone who has been to Canada, knows about the history of Canada, and lives very close to Canada, I enjoyed hearing about Taiye learning about Canada’s dark side, something that is so rarely discussed by the general public.  However, for those of us who are interested, the evidence is everywhere.  The history is just waiting to be explored by anyone who is interested in looking just slightly beyond the state-issued textbooks.  I thought the way the author wrote about Canada was really authentic, which convinces me that the way she writes about London and Nigeria must also be accurate.  What it must be like to be Ekwuyasi, so intimately familiar with places so far apart.

There was one line in the book that really stuck with me: as Taiye is traveling home, she passes through the busy streets of Lagos, crowded with street children, and she is reminded of her privilege in a very visual way, something she doesn’t get in Canada or London.  This is the view the West wants us to have of Africa: a whole continent made of dirty huts and begging children on busy urban roads.  Yes, poverty looks different in Nigeria than it does in Canada, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in Nigeria is somehow poorer.  In fact, this family has a beautiful compound and a trust fund.  Despite having a trust fund, Taiye still makes decisions on a strict budget and denies herself luxuries to save money, the way I do.  I don’t really know a lot of people with trust funds, so I can’t tell if this is an international thing or if there are American kids who act like this.  It kind of annoyed me when Taiye wrote to the culinary program saying she didn’t have enough to pay for the program, when in reality she just didn’t want to dip into her trust fund.  I don’t know if there were limited spots/funds available for people who couldn’t afford to pay full price, but I hate when rich people forget what it means to actually not have money.  Being cheap and being poor are two different things, often way more opposing than people think.  Rich people are often the ones who know how to exploit the system to get what they want for less, while the poor are left with less connections and less time to work it.

Still, I refrain from delivering too harsh judgement on Taiye. I do not know the size of the trust fund.  I know their family home was a gift, so perhaps the fund is to be saved for medical emergencies and property taxes.  I’m not sure how insurance or taxes work in Nigeria, although I know the government is very unstable.  How did they pay for international university?  Did that come from the trust fund?  The whole plot line has me thinking a lot about wealth and class on  an international level.  While I grew up comfortably, I often felt like my family was poor because of how rich everyone in our town was.  I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a compound and see homeless children often, but also ingest international media that cast your entire country as poor and to know your government is unstable.

All in all, the book touches on many of the central issues of modern life  While it only brushes the surfaces of these topics, it had me thinking for days and wanting to know more.  Perhaps I will search out an some Nigerian autobiographies / memoirs in the future.

#book #fiction #francesca ekwuyasi #butter honey pig bread #cooking #nigeria #lagos #canada #london #halifax #twins #queer #family #spiritual #religion #wealth #class #mental illness #mental health

[allthebest20]

Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing food without a yard by Acadia Tucker

I would give this book 6/10.  While it was helpful, it was not what I was looking for.  It’s far from a complete guide, and the information could be better organized.

Ideally, I want my gardening books to be place-based, written by an aged gardener, and to have excessive detail.  I don’t want to know just what is known, but also what is suspected and what is not known, ya know??  While Tucker is based in Maine, with gardening experience in the PNW, she does not commit to including details about growing in cold climates.  There are a few mentions, but it’s not consistent, which is a common theme of this book.  For every helpful thing I learned, there’s two questions I have to google. 

Another example: although she mentions growing peppers through out the book, there is no crop profile for peppers.  The crop profiles are generally a little lacking.  She forgoes bullet points to write short, vague paragraphs under each sub heading, so I have to dig through to remember names of container friendly cultivars or how much water it needs.  It gives you a good overview, but if you are actually going to grow these things, you’ll need to go elsewhere for details.  Maybe a more experienced garden would get more out of this section.

Tucker also gives a few container garden recipes, which were cute, but there was much less dedicated to how to design your own garden or how to maximize production in containers.  The recipes are designed to be pollinator-magnets and visually pleasing.  These are not my priorities.  I mean, the book is called Tiny Victory Gardens: shouldn’t it be more production focused? 

There are a few section in the book that seem unnecessary: the part on pots, the drawings of garden tools, the entire chapter on planting.  I like the book.  I want to like it more, but it was just lacking.  It seems like Tucker wrote the book too soon, probably because the pandemic brought this issue to the surface for many people.  Perhaps if she had included research from other books it would have been more encompassing.

There were things about the book that I liked: the stuff on soil (although my local garden store does not stock pumice), the container recipes, the companion planting guide, and some of the other tables.  The crop profiles gave taught me about some crops I didn’t know you could grow so easily inside, like avocados and lemons -- Although I do not know how she chose the crops to profile. 

Overall, a good book to get from the library.

#tiny victory gardens #growing food without a yard #acadia tucker #container gardening #nonfiction #book #maine #gardening #vegetables #agriculture

[allthebest20]

Podcasts I Recently Listened To

The Clearing (2019): 5/10, not sure if I would recommend it.  The preface is very interesting: April, the daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, gives a tip that helps police arrest her father for a double murder that happened 30 years ago, when she was just a kid.  Edwards is subsequently definitively linked to 3 other murders and potentially involved in several others.  Some conspiracy theorists even think he could have been the Zodiac Killer and committed many famous murders of the later 20th century.  However, the podcast itself only reviews the evidence for the 5 murders he was convicted of, and the other potential murders only lead to dead ends.  April’s memory is shaky but ultimately surprisingly solid, as she had a pretty tumultuous and often traumatizing childhood.  The host, Josh Dean, seems totally unprepared to help her or even support her as she relives her trauma, and often asks her things or makes comments that I think are very insensitive.  In my opinions, he talks way too much.  I wish we had explored April’s timeline more, explored Edwards mental health and motives more, and elaborated on the implications of all of the details.  Like, Edwards was likely not the Zodiac Killer, but he seemed to know who it was? They spent like 5 minutes talking about the actually facts of the Zodiac Killer, but barely anymore.  It’s like obviously there’s a network of serial killers in the United States: do they know each other? do they communicate? Or do they just watch and learn from a distance? What does this mean for reporting on serial killers?  Why did Edwards kill?  Why did he start? It’s disappointing, because they obviously put a lot of time and work into this podcast, but I felt like they missed all the important questions.

Chameleon: Hollywood Con Quee‪n (2020): 8/10, would highly recommend.  A great podcast for those who like true crime, but want to avoid hearing about murder and/or rape.  Also a true crime podcast that gets result!  Yes, you heard right: they catch the guy in the end!  It’s just a great story, well-produced and extremely well-investigated.  Riveting, twisted, unusual.  It explores ideas around Hollywood, the gig economy, success, mental illness, insecurity, sexual harassment, sexism, homophobia, and more.  Hosted by Vanessa Grigoriadis and Josh Dean, although he greatly redeems himself in this one, two investigative reporters.

#josh dean #podcast #2019 #murder #serial killer #memory #trauma #ed wayne edwards #police #true crime #scam #the clearing #Chameleon: Hollywood Con Quee‪n #Vanessa Grigoriadis #indonesia #jakarta #gig economy #hollywood #con #sexual harassment #sexism #homophobia #5/10 #8/10 #insecurity #mental illness #investigation

[allthebest20]

Search Party: S1 (2016)

Created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, Michael Showalter

Starring  Alia Shawkat and John Reynolds

This show was funny, enjoyable, and clever.  I would give it a 6/10. I think Shawkat is a great actor, but she always plays characters that are, like, annoyingly realistic.  Actually, in this show, they are all annoying realistic.  Each of the four main characters remind me of real people I know and dislike.  This is one of the things that makes it so good, tho!  I have two complaints about the plot:

Warning: Spoilers

1. New York City has over 8 million people in it, so it’s just not realistic that they keep running into people they know over this two week period.  I feel like they should have set the show in a slightly smaller city.  I mean most cities could meet all the plot requirements: a market for weird demi-sexual performances, P.I.s, families with a ridiculous amounts of money, culty art stores, opportunities for actors and self-promoting non-profits.

2. why doesn’t Agnes Cho tell Chantal’s family about where she is?  I mean, maybe she thought Chantal needed protection, but how can you watch someone’s family grieve like that and say nothing?  It’s obvious that Agnes wants money too, and she could have collected the reward of a quarter of a million.

It was the character comedy that made the show enjoyable tho, and the season finale is very realistic and unexpected.

John Early plays the amoral white cis gay man we all know.  The way he conducts himself in conversation is so on point. Unlike a narcissistic straight dude who typically talks only about himself, Early’s character Elliott does a great job at pretending like he cares about what you’re saying, but is actually judging you and manipulating the conversation to get something he wants.  His whole cancer lie is funny, but a side plot I didn’t personally care that much about.  I mean, it doesn’t really make sense (he has no contacts from high school anymore? what about social media? photos?), but it is funny how he bounces back so effortlessly.  It seems to be a critique of cancel culture, especially how even when he’s briefly “cancelled,” he doesn’t actually feel any shame or change in anyway.  As a rich, white man, he still has a network willing to prop him up with a book deal, and he ultimately pays no consequences.  Of course, all this sets him up as the perfect little psychopath to help cover up a murder.  It also sets up a lot of funny moments. 

Portia, played by the super hot Meredith Hagner, is the theater kid who you didn’t really like, even though she was really nice, and now she’s going on to have a successful acting career on top of her family’s wealth.  Like most Americans, I want my actors (and artists in general) to be poor and struggling before they make it big, but that’s rarely the case.  I like how her character isn’t just dumb, sweet, or spoiled.  She’s sometimes also clever, cold, and sad.  She plays the insecure, image-obsessed millennial well.  It’s almost easier for her to be a narcissist than Elliot, because we expect hot blonde actors to be narcissists, so she doesn’t have to play a role the same way he does.  Of course, her character also fits into the plot perfectly: the hot lady who men drool over and everyone underestimates, who can also use her acting skills to lie and manipulate people.

John Reynolds’ character, Drew, is your classic boring-ass white man.  He wants things to be normal and mundane so bad.  He has boring friends, he says boring things, he has a boring job.  He’s a good guy, a cutie, but dam, if he isn’t somewhere below average.  I love how Drew is an UNPAID intern, and Dory and him live in a beautiful one bedroom apartment.  It just screams “My parents pay my bills, but I don’t like to talk about it.”

Alia Shawkat plays the lead, Dory.  I love the way they use music to show how she is creating this runaway mystery in her head, but it’s often ruined by outsiders dialogue.  As a young millennial trying to find a satisfying career, I can identify with the mania she’s feeling, and it’s shown well. She’s constantly thinking “Is this a sign?” and “What should I be doing with my life?”  Her character is really hard to read in the first season: why does she want to find Chantal?  Is she trying too hard to create a dark mystery because she hates her own boring life? By the end of the season, I was beginning to think that maybe Chantal wasn’t in real trouble, but TV-bias did have me thinking something twisted was going to happen.  I’m also not sure why Dory couldn’t go to Montreal alone or just with Drew, when it was clear her friends weren’t that into it.  I do understand wanting desperately to know the truth.

The next two season’s explore Dory’s motives more, but I honestly wouldn’t strongly recommend them.  Season two and three were both kind of anxiety producing: four cocky idiots trying to get a way with a murder in which they left behind a mountain of evidence, resulting in (SPOILER) Dory stupidly refusing to plead guilty and claim it was self-defense.  It’s like despite everything, she still thinks she’ll get away with it OR (more likely) she just can’t come to terms with herself as a murderer.

They obviously should have called the cops after they killed Keith.  As two educated white kids, they could have gotten away with it, even lied about the altercation to make it seem like Keith was more violent than he was.  Elliot makes her second guess whether is was self-defense or not, even though Keith had been acting extremely sketchily towards her.  Obviously, he didn’t deserve to die, but someone had to do something to get him off her.  Ultimately, they all decide they are above the justice system, but I think Elliot is a little more to blame.  The justice system is fucked, but not necessarily against them.  If they had called the police immediately, they might have had to spend a few years (research tells me 0 to 12 before parole, average 3 to 5) in Canadian prison, but a man is dead, so maybe that’s okay.

It’s also worth mentioning Clare McNulty, although she’s really only in the last episode.  Her character, Chantal, is hilariously normal: that girl who is so average looking and untalented, you think, well she must at least be friendly and humble, but astonishingly, she’s neither of those things.  So often, TV shows only portray special characters, but like most of the characters in this show, Chantal is annoyingly normal and familiar.  Her very existence reminds me of the assumptions we (or is it just me?) make about women’s confidence and morality levels.

It’s a funny show, relatable, realistic, and entertaining.  I would recommend the first season, and the next 2 only if you are bored and have low-anxiety.  I also just learned that Bowen Yang does a podcast about the show? I love him, so obviously I’ll give it a listen, though I can’t possible imagine what he could be saying about it.

#Alia Shawkat #John Reynolds #John Early #Meredith Hagner #Brandon Micheal Hall #Ron Livingston #Parker Posey #Sarah-Violet Bliss #Charles Rogers #Michael Showalter #murder #mystery #millenials #nyc #montreal #gay #search party #s1 #2016 #s2 #s3 #Clare McNulty #narcissism #realistic #runaway #tv #tvshow

[allthebest20]

Save Yourselves! (2020)

Written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson.

This movie was cute and enjoyable.  I had no problems with it. 6/10.

Although it was written before the pandemic, the beginning of the movie felt very relatable: their apartment keeps them physically close but their phones keep them apart, Jack is making sourdough bread and Su is working at home.  They seem bored, but surrounded by all the wonders of New York, they are reluctant to go out.  They desperately need to get away from the city.  However, when they do go out to a party at a bar, you are reminded that it is in fact you who is stuck at home indefinitely, while the characters are simply caught up in the monotony of a now-distance lifestyle that once was similarly tiring to you and is now deeply enviable.

Anyways, the main characters, a cute young couple, Su and Jack, are at their friend’s cabin upstate, trying to be totally unplugged, when the rest of the world descends into an alien apocalypse apparently orchestrated by fuzzy pouffes with super long tongues who eat ethanol and easily kill people when annoyed.  The first part of the movie focuses on Su and Jack’s attempts to closen their relationship, while the audience picks up on subtle clues about the aliens.  Su wants to do a list she found online, which is relatable.  In this weird time, it can be difficult to get close to people, and many people (woman especially) crave a confident to be vulnerable with but are unsure how to healthfully create that relationship.  They want the kind of relationship they had with their best friends, but with a man they love, and men are confusing.  Jack is at first very closed minded to the idea of following a list and/or opening up, but comes around to the idea.  He finally energetically confides in Su that he feels like an inferior man because he’s not good at the traditional masculine skills, like fixing and building things, but he’s also not good at the neo-masculine skills, like cooking and being emotionally vulnerable.  This is in fact a reoccurring theme in the movie: that both these urban millennials have no “real” skills.  Before they leave for their vacation, Su loses her job as a personal assistant for some bitch and she is feeling like she doesn’t know where she’s going in her life (relatable).  Su cannot help but compare herself to her mother, who at age 30 already had more than 1 kid.  There’s actually a meme going around, not from this movie, that compares whatever shit 30 year olds are doing now, with what their parents were doing at 30 (usually owning a house, having kids, seeing career success, and generally acting like an adult).  Our modern lives feel so listless in comparison, but the economy and society are different now.  What are real skills?  Being able to use the internet to thoroughly research any subject? Chopping wood? Fixing pipes?  It all depends on your situation.  Modern life has equipped us to survive in only a very specific setting with very specific tools.  Without those tools, we are useless... right?

As Su and Jack begin to understand the enormity of the pouffe situation, they show several times that they have real skills.  Su discovers how the Pouffe feeds, they prepare go-bags, Jack comes up with the idea to use wine as a distraction, Su injects them with epi-pens when they are hallucination (dying) from pouffe gas, they take care of a baby, Su kills a pouffe attacking Jack.  Sure, the movie also show how they are incompetent in other ways: Jack can’t chop wood or use a gun (in fact they are both terrified of guns), neither can drive stick shift, they let themselves get distracted and forget to watch their surroundings several times, they lose the car, neither of them know what epinephrine is, they get high off Pouffe gas and lose a baby briefly.  Both struggling with staying calm and rationaly during high-stress moments, but Su does a slightly better job and guides them.

The movie ends with Su and Jack find something odd in the woods.  Su realizes they have cell service, and they both quickly become absorbed in the news on her phone.  They don’t even notice the odd thing in the woods become an large clear egg, with the main characters trapped inside.  The egg carries them into the sky, where they can see other eggs doing the same across the plant.  The egg gives them oxygen and carries them away into space, with Jack and Su believing they’ve been saved.

The audience must wonder: is what awaits them safety? Or more horror?  Were they chosen or trapped?  It seems like the object was offering cell service because it knew that would distract the humans, and in this way, it seems like the egg was designed to trap them, not reward them.  However, if they were chosen, it must be because they saved Baby Jack. Earlier in the movie, as they are driving away from their cabin in their apparently diesel fueled truck, they see a pouffe murder two people and drink their car’s gas.  They try to drive past, but they hear a baby in the fuel-less truck, and they decide they can’t leave it there.  When they are trying to get the baby out of the car, someone hiding in the bed of the truck jumps out, holds them up at gun point, and steals their car.  So they walk out into the woods with the baby, almost lose it when they are hallucinating, and soon after, get abducted by the egg.

#movie #sundance #save yourselves #apocalypse #aliens #2020 #Alex Huston Fischer #Eleanor Wilson #Sunita Mani #John Reynolds

[allthebest20]

A Simple Favor (2018)

This movie was surprisingly good?  I’d give it a 6 or 7 out of 10.  To be honest, I already wrote a review for this that I liked, but it didn’t save, so I partly want to recreate those thoughts, and I partly want to give up.  I thought the plot was decently smart and interesting, the characters believable and funny, the dialogue natural enough, the ending satisfying.

It is a very trendy plot: encapsulating the hot-lady-murder-mystery trope, the single-white-female trope, and the hot-lady-narcissist-psychopath trope.  I mean, as a young white lady, I don’t dislike these tropes.  I love watching hot woman, like Blake Lively, just doing mundane stuff or, even better, being cunning and mean to people.  I mean, that’s why we watched Gossip Girl, right?  It’s definitely why I watched Pretty Little Liars.  More and more it feels like directors just pick hot people to do the job of actors, and that frustrates me.  However, here, Lively isn’t just hot, she actually does a pretty good job.  Herself a rich mother with a celebrity husband, I can see why she does so well playing the wealthy narcissist working mother with the troubled background.  It’s also easy to imagine that the narcissist-psychopath character is not a difficult character to create.  This is because 1. most actors (and most people) are a bit narcissistic and 2. writers rarely give these characters complex thought processes.  Sure, there’s usually trauma there, but that fades into being blindly motivated by self-interested and anger.  Unlike “regular people,” these characters do not often their options or consider factors outside themselves.  In that way, they are not very complicated.  I’ve never met anyone who truly follows this trope, but I’ve also never met a serial killer.  It’s almost like Hollywood’s current obsession with those two plot lines (serial killers and hot lady psychopaths) is a way to take about gendered evils.  Almost as if these psychopaths are the female equivalent of a serial killer, and, at least in this case, Lively’s character does have a body count.  However, the victims she leaves dead, her sister and her father, arguably deserved it.  Her lovers, who she uses, do not, but she does not kill either of the two featured.  Real life male serial killers are sometimes thought to kill family members, but mostly, they kill their intimate partners.  So, I would argue that there is no female equivalent of the serial killer phenomenon.  I also don’t mean to imply here that all narcissists are psychopaths, because there are a lot of people with NPD who are just trying to manage their systems, deal with their trauma, and live a healthy life in our fucked up society.  But hot women with compromised morality are a big threat to cishet white men, who don’t have to worry about serial killers, date rape, or hate crimes, so I”m sure that plays into the commonality of the trope and the demonizing of people with NPD.  It’s not to say that I have not heard about dangerous lady psychopaths, but they aren’t usually serial killers.  They are con-artists and domestic abusers.  Of course, Hollywood has no interest in showing what a real domestic abuse situation perpetrated by a women looks like.  No one wants to talk about people being hit and emotionally abused by their female partners.  Lively’s character is a domestic abuser who seems to manipulate and emotionally tear down her husband, played by cutie Henry Golding, but this is mostly alluded to, not displayed.  There is one scene where Lively pulls a gun on him in a restaurant and forces him to say bad things about Kendrick’s character, but that’s more fantasy than reality.

What separates this movie from others of lesser quality, besides the acting and the dialogue, is the way the plot unfolds and the character’s motivating forces.  If Lively had nothing on Kendrick or if Kendrick was really as goody-two-shoes as she makes herself out to be, then nothing would make sense.  Kendrick’s secret though is perfectly believable and well-aligned with her character: sleeping with her long lost half-brother after her beloved father’s funeral. I like how Kendrick tries to play it cool, tries to pretend like they only made out, her desire to finally share her darkest secret tied with her sensibility to keep it hidden from this mysterious stranger. I love the way their relationship and their backgrounds are slowly unfurled to the audience. The way the director splices together scenes of the two leading characters revealing their secrets and their flaws, is simply enthralling.  The woman are both very alike (haunted by personal past mistakes and dead/dying family members), but while Kendrick takes steps to make things better for the people around her, Lively does the opposite.  Kendricks biggest mistake was her first ones: sleeping with her half-brother (ew), carrying his baby to term (um?), and not telling her husband (sigh... understandable, but side note: were they married before she slept with her brother or did they get married quickly after because she got pregnant? why wasn’t he at her father’s funeral?This alludes to either her sleeping with him more than once OR the baby isn’t the brother’s but she still feels responsible for her husband thinking it could be).  However, it isn’t her fault that they both die, it’s her crazy husband who drove them off the road.  He seemed like not a nice guy, even though she said that he was great.  Finally, her last sin, of sleeping with Golding, who she thought was a widower, and moving into Lively’s life.  Not ideal, sure, but there was something between them, and they thought Lively (the bitch) was dead.  Everything else she does is to find out the truth. 

Lively, on the other hand, starts by helping her sister kill her abusive father (I can get behind tbh), then exploits a hard working artist (:/), lies and cons her husband (:( ), kills her addict sister (she is blackmailing her but... :( ), and finally tries to kill both Kendrick and Golding (:(( ).

The only other thing I have to comment on is the use of bisexuality.  It seems like a lot of narcissist/psychopaths/liars in Hollywood are bisexual, which is not great representation.  It’s supposed to show how the psychopath does not view sex and attraction as an intimidate thing, but a tool to get what they want from a person of any gender.  Did Lively secretly love Kendrick? Maybe a little bit in the beginning?  Besides that kiss, there’s little to no evidence of that.  The kiss is what makes it so single-white-female-y, shows how desperate Kendrick is to make a connection, to be known and loved.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it.

#movie #a simple favor #simple favor #2018 #anna kendrick #blake lively #paul feig #darcey bell #jessica sharzer #henry golding #7/10 #6/10 #npd #hot-lady-murder-mystery #single-white-female #hot-lady-narcissist-psychopath #bisexual #wlw #amazon #amazon prime