Raccoon Eden

We've got a family of raccoons living in our back yard - a mother and three mid-sized juveniles. I'd seen the mother run through a few times (in broad daylight! What?!), but last night was the first time any of us realized she had brought her babies over. They ran right across our back patio while we were eating dinner, stopped dead center, stared at us for about a minute, and then ran off and climbed up the grapefruit tree.

They haven't figured out how to get into our trash cans yet, and our dog doesn't spend time unattended outdoors, so we figure there's no harm in letting them be. While most people consider them pests, they haven't caused us any trouble so far and they're a native species. Maybe if we had a family of Nutrias or Armadillos in our back yard it would be different, but Raccoons don't burrow and they don't chew through wood and when you think about it, fifty years ago when no humans lived out in this part of the city... they were here first.

I can see why they'd like our back yard, though. It's shady, we have a metric ton of fruit trees, and the dog doesn't go poking his nose around where it doesn't belong. So for now, the raccoons get to stay and have their little slice of paradise. :)

Old dogs

This is Barney and he is twelve and a half years old. He is exceedingly fluffy, he smells terrible, does nothing but sleep, and he snores incredibly loudly. He has the kind of life that makes me think it's pretty good to be a housepet. But he's really clearly getting old - just over the last few months I've noticed that he's developed a paranoia about heights. He used to take flying leaps into the back of my mom's mini-SUV, and now he won't even climb into the back of my minivan when it's pulled up to the curb, and that's not a very high climb. He had a kind of rough fall one time when he tried it and now he insists on being carried. Which is only okay because he's only about 35 lbs and it's not very far.

But I love him, and that's why he gets a blog post with two photos today. Because isn't he pretty?

Yes?

I thought so.

Je voudrais aller a Paris, je pense...

For being a proudly Jewish dramatic writing major, I'd never in the past managed to make myself into a fan of Woody Allen. Maybe it's his persistent nebbishness: I never actively disliked him - I just wasn't a fan. I was perfectly ambivalent about Woody Allen movies, as strange as that may be.

And then I went to go see Midnight in Paris tonight, and it was brilliant, and oh, my goodness, you need to go and see this movie. Tomorrow. Do it. Because it is great. I mean, it's not a secret that I love literary inside jokes and time travel and magical realism, and this movie has all of them in droves. And it's lovingly shot. It's a love letter to the city. I want to go to Paris and try to speak what measure of French I have managed to retain. (Un peur, je suppose. Si j'arrete imaginer des mots, un peur plus...?)

Anyway, it's a great movie, and I'm not just saying that because I'm really fond of Owen Wilson.

I also within the last day finished reading Robert Sapolsky's book A Primate's Memoir about his work with baboons in Kenya, and it was fascinating right up to and including the point when all of the baboons got TB and died (although that was also really tragic and terrible). It was a nice change of pace after reading Sarah Gruen's Ape House, a novel which by all means should have been good (acclaimed author, interesting premise) but which was, in reality, just plain terrible.

Swimming Lizards

I went to the zoo yesterday and was wandering around the reptile house when this guy came over and started posing for me, right at the water line in his habitat. He was such a ham! I just had to take a picture!

And then once we got out of the reptile house we got caught in a torrential rainstorm and there were screaming children everywhere and I did not get to see the Bonobos like I wanted to but it was still a blast, because the Jacksonville Zoo is amazing. I mean, it's easily one of the best zoos in the southeast - it makes me wonder why it's not more well known! 

Hidden treasure, I guess! 

Just a quick plug and then I'll shut up~

My friend Abi has started a blog! She is seriously one of the smartest, funniest people I know and people should read her because she's awesome. And because I want her to share her Summer Quinoa Salad recipe with me because it looks delicious. And because she works somewhere that seriously looks like it's part of the set of an X-Men movie (hello radio telescope).

And, uh, this, because it is relevant.

I didn't know what this blog post would be about when I started typing it and I still don't.

So, I'm not really riled up about anything at the moment so this post is going to be more a logging of miscellany. As much as I'd love to do part two of last time's conversation ("Having minority characters does not make you diverse"), I'm going to hold off on it because I had a really good conversation about it in private and... unlike complaining about female characters, when I start talking about race people start looking at me like "You're white, shut up." So it's going to wait. Along with a discussion on why claiming certain people don't have the "right" to write certain character types is bullshit. All that and more... in another post.

I'm kind of amused that, two weeks later, most of my pageviews are still coming from links posted on fansites... but also mildly weirded out. Are you guys reading the rest of my posts? Or are you just looking at that same post, OVER AND OVER AND OVER again??? Because, um, if you're just using that link to get back to the blog so you can read other stuff... I have two separate methods of following in my sidebar that don't involve inflating the pagecounts on one post. And if you are just reading that post over and over again... is it really that fascinating???

I finally actually started to do some serious revision work on Like a Dog in Space yesterday, figuring out where I can add things back in and what I need to do to get it back to somewhere around its original length. Because I cut so many characters, I've got significantly less to work with in general, and changing the structure for the better means my opening moves faster - but also that I've just got stuff that used to take fifteen pages to happen happening in about seven. Which is good, because it gives me more time to mess around once that does happen... I just have to think of things to put there! Ivan and Valeri can only have so many awkward conversations, and the biggest thing I need to bulk up is their connection... which I actually think I need to build up before Ivan even comes to life.

The other thing I can do to take it back out to full length and put some coherency and world background in is add some of Mister Papers's long speeches back in, but that's easy. He likes to talk and even if I had to start over from scratch, he'd be easy. I could write that character forever. He'll probably turn up in another play given enough time. He can do that.

(Sometimes I try to think about how any of my plays would be connected/in the same universe. But there's no overlap between Florida and an unspecified town in New England, so it's like... even if Other People's Garden Gnomes and Allan Chang is a Totally Bogus Ghost were in the same universe... who would ever know?)

Anyways, I'm planning to do a more work on that today (Lies. When I don't have deadlines, nothing gets done.) and also figure out what kind of cool adventure we're going to have on Friday. I've wanted to go down to the Space Center for a long time, but I went in fifth grade and after looking at their website I'm not so sure if it's worth it... it kind of looks like it has't changed much since 2002. I think they're even still playing the same IMAX movies. But the price has gone up! So... maybe it'll be the Alligator Farm again. We haven't been there in a while. Or perhaps the Zoo.

Unless anyone has any suggestions about adventures? :)

Also this amuses me.

Having female characters does not make you a feminist.

Watch out, I'm about to make another misguided post about feminism and Hollywood gender standards. Also, we might start talking about superheroes and race, because, you know what? When I was a little kid, The Green Lantern was a black dude. I know that the Hal Jordan is the "original" character to hold the title, but John Stewart is the guy I watched on Justice League when I was a wee little nerdling.

SO, LET'S TALK ABOUT SUPERHERO MOVIES.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT, LEEZ?

LET'S TALK ABOUT X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

So, in general, X-Men as a franchise is pretty good about providing interesting, strong female characters. I mean, this is the series that brought us Rogue and Jean Grey and Storm and Kitty Pryde. Which is nothing to laugh at, because they're badass, but they're not in this movie. First Class has four main female characters, which is already more than most superhero films which will typically just have a love interest (we'll talk about that when we talk about Green Lantern. We're getting there.) And it passes the Bechdel Test, which is something not many superhero movies do.

So, is it feminist?

Let's look at the four female characters we get:

Angel: stripper.
Emma Frost: High-end stripper, like for governors and stuff.
Moira: FBI agent (masquerades as a stripper).
Raven/Mystique: Hero's sister, ends up naked by the end of the movie, may or may not sleep with Magneto, who may or may not grow up to be Sir Ian McKellen, who may or may not have played the character as militantly, metaphorically homosexual. (But probably did.)

So Angel is a stripper who defects to the bad guys at the soonest sign of a fight. She's not a very deep character and that's okay because she's mostly around to wear skimpy outfits and provide a bit of color to our otherwise pretty damn anglo-looking cast.

Emma Frost is a villainess, who runs around in her underwear, who gets chained to a bed, whose main power is turning herself into an incredibly cheesy diamond effect. Frankly I think January Jones is a really boring actress and the character was really flat beyond just hanging out and being eye candy for Kevin Bacon.

Moira... is in her underwear within five minutes of her first appearance. She is reasonably useful in a fight, but she shoots Charles in the spine and she winds up the butt of a joke that seems like it's trying to emulate Mad Men but the rest of the movie is so unapologetically modern that the 1960s setting feels like an afterthought, like they needed a reason to point nukes at each other.

Raven/Mystique is probably the most interesting female character, but she gets reduced as the plot goes on until she is A) naked and B) sleeps with Erik C) to distract from the fact that he and Charles are basically having the most epic bromance since Kirk and Spock. Or something. Actually, why the fuck did she sleep with him? Because he thinks its sexy that she's blue and Hank just rejected her, so her standards are lowered? I mean, not that Erik isn't good looking or anything, but there's something weird going on in the character motivations there and it seems to cheapen the character.

So what have we got here?

• A token.
• Fan service.
• A woman in a man's job, ultimately proven inferior and susceptible to emotions.
• A teenaged girl who isn't making rational decisions because the boy she liked called her ugly.

Bechdel test passing or not, this isn't actually looking all that good. We've basically got a bunch of stereotypes, and they're not really doing anyone any favors except maybe the fanboys. But at the same time, most stories don't work if you just switch the genders, because then they become all about the gender. Like, a story about a prince who goes on a quest during which he learns all kinds of things about himself and at the end rescues a princess can be about all the things he learns along the way. But if you switch it and make it about a princess who rescues a prince, all anyone is going to focus on is that it's now about a girl.

But moving on to Green Lantern.

I am not going to call this a great movie, but it's a fun movie and it was raining today.

Green Lantern has, like, two female characters. Maybe three because they made one of the masters of the universe a woman. I'm going to zero in on the love interest because, let's face it - here is a compelling character setup... who is of absolutely no relevance to the plot past the midpoint.

The character Carroll is a test pilot. The first time we see her, she's chewing out Hal for being late, and she's already suited up and ready to go. Awesome. She puts in some good moves out in the planes, but she doesn't win the day. But that's because this is character setup - Carroll plays by the rules, Hal showboats. Fair enough. And then she's a business genius - awesome! Good for her!

And then she nearly gets crushed by a bandstand, kidnapped by the villain, and is just totally absent from the final conflict. Wow. Did the writers just forget she existed? At least Mary Jane got to dangle over the Hudson. So, basically, this is a character who just kind of became useless and went away. And she had a promising setup, too.

There's kind of this line between "extraneous love interest" and "female character who happens to love," and Caroll hits the "extraneous" side hard. She serves no purpose to the plot. Her role at the beginning could just as well have been played by another male fighter pilot and it wouldn't have made a difference.

At the same time, though, it's stupid to take two characters who for the duration of the film have had little to no chemistry and throw them together for some misdirected moment of character development. Erik and Mystique? I mean I understood why she would go to him, but their conversation felt rushed and didn't come to any kind of character-appropriate conclusion. First he tells her she's too young, then he tells her he prefers her blue, and then he has sex with her. MAGNETO, TAKING ADVANTAGE OF EMOTIONALLY DISTRESSED YOUNG WOMEN SINCE 1962. Congratulations, you're a lech. The logical end to this scene would actually be him talking her out of his bed, instead of her talking him into it, but apparently when a girl sneaks into your bedroom and she's naked and she's blue and she wants someone to tell her she's pretty, the appropriate response is to have sex with her. Yes. Of course. And even though she's had interactions with Erik prior to this and they do have some sexual tension, he's never really built up as a viable romantic rival to Hank and asdfghjk this just really bugs me.

Superheroes and race will have to wait for another day because I wound up having a three-hour discussion about it with Lydia while I was typing up this post and it really does not fit here, but we basically figured out why making Peter Parker in to Peter Park doesn't work but rebuilding Spider-Man from scratch does.