Don’t let the Asians fool you either…
You little Jim Jones kool-aid drinkin’ motherfuckers…
Via @selfedge.
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Medicine for Melancholy is a film directed by Barry Jenkins and features Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Higgins as two people who recover from a one-night stand, only to follow-up with a day of exploration through various parts of San Francisco while reflecting the dichotomy between the city and their identities as black Americans.
Micah is a preternaturally chill native San Franciscan who feels increasingly alienated as the city rapidly gentrifies. “Imagine the Lower Haight filled with nothing but black folk and white artists,” he tells Jo, his would-be lover, about his long-gone San Fran. (It’s become the least black of America’s major cities.) Jo, wary at first but charming over time, is a transplant who doesn’t see the world in Micah’s specifically racialized terms, and it’s implied by the relative sizes of their living spaces that she occupies a higher position in the economic food chain. Both though, are black people partaking in a social milieu where Negroes are rarities. None of this tension is anywhere near as didactic as it may sound; these issues come up intermittently in the course of the pair walking and biking around, making each other laugh and generally feeling each other out.
I have always yearned for some poetic reflection on the state of San Francisco, the city I grew up in, as it has grown and morphed into a somewhat placated upper middle class of families. As a result, what has been born is a group of tweens, teens, and young adults, all searching for something greater in a city that seems to be innoculated with the rising cost of quaint comfort. Searching for identity, love, and reason may just be as hard to find in San Francisco as it is finding a decent and affordable place to live.
Via Racialicious.
Thea Lim does a doubletake on last Friday’s series premiere of Joss Whedon’s new Fox television series, Dollhouse.
After screening several episodes where – apart from being space cowboys and quasi-anarchists – the cast of the show wear kimonos, carry paper parasols, and talk about making pau, I started to get more and more annoyed. But was I just being a jerk? What was so wrong with the array of East Asian symbols and decor on the set of Firefly? Was I preventing myself from enjoying a perfectly good TV show by being some sort of yellow fever watchdog
The allusions to East Asia reflect some new age Orientalism, where the synthesis of Asian culture and history find it’s way as a backdrop to the large unknown mega corporation that runs the Dollhouse. Beyond the subtleties are more blatant rips, as observed by a commenter from the article:
There’s a scene you didn’t even mention that leaped out at me: When Echo is being brought back to the base, she passes another active dressed as a geisha getting loaded into another van (we only see her from behind, so no way to tell if she is Japanese).
I get that there’s a parallel he’s drawing between geisha and the “dolls” – but I also had a knee-jerk reaction of “Really? Is that where this is going?”
While I think that television shows shouldn’t be taken for face value in light of entertainment, race has always been a murky topic. It could be that I’m Asian myself, but this discussion of the pilot episode sheds some light on my dissapointment in the show’s premiere. It might be that the introduction to the plot has given viewers the parralel to the Dollhouse being an underground brothel in Chinatown and there is a lone cop in search of the bad guys who are running the joint. Sure, Whedon seems to be imposing the notion of ambiguity in whether or not what these ‘dolls’ do are beneficial to society as per their jobs to each particular client, but I’m waiting to see if it puts any spin on the ‘otherness’ motif that seems overused and pervasive when it comes to anything Asian in mainstream media.
Despite not being a huge fan of Chris Rock, this is a very good five minute monologue.
Via clusterflock via Five Whys.
President replaces the N word
Nothing rhymes with President, you know what I mean? It’s multi-syllabic…
Via President Please.