What Else Will This Change?

Amazon is sold out of toilet paper and the Boston Marathon is postponed.

The president has declared a state of emergency and there are calls to close NYC's schools. The Met is closed--as is the MFA in Boston.

I am about to get an up-close and personal experience of what my dogs lives are like.  

I am glad we* are all taking a proactive approach to the prevention of the spread of Corona Virus. However, I am worried about which measures adopted in crisis may become normal business activities.

Not all of these are bad things—companies adopting paid sick leave policies are long overdue and any steps we take toward providing universal healthcare are also good.

My concern is with other things—crisis measures adopted that ”prove” that whatever services are withheld or replaced were never really necessary. I’m worried about in-person classes. It’s great that we can offer distance learning so that students (from grade school to grad school) do not have their education thoroughly disrupted, but these are not replacements for in-person classes in the same room as the other students and the professor.

Museums and libraries are closing as a way to stop infections—this does not mean that we don’t need museums and libraries.

The City of NY has banned gatherings of more than 500 people. As a stopgap to disease spread this is a great idea, but this does not mean that we do not “need” the ability to gather more than 500 people in one place ever again.

It is a good thing for the moment to allow hospitals to relax rules on where they can treat patients, but in the long run this is a terrible idea—this is why rules about this were set up in the first place.

Working from home—It’s awesome that we are now in a position (technologically) where many of us can work from home. Is it a good thing that this proves that many jobs don’t need in person attendance? I love getting back 3 hours a day because I don’t have to commute, but this plan relies on employees using their own internet service and their owns phones and their own second monitor—there’s a lot of BYOD** in there. I am also worried that this will “prove” to cities and states that they don’t need to invest in infrastructure such as public transit or highways as this crisis proved we all could work from home.

Crises are times when we need to try out new ideas (because the old ones don’t work—see also “Crisis”) some of these innovations are leaps forward  that never would have been possible in normal times (think of all of the surgical advances made during the Civil War.)  Crises are also a chance for the powers that be to erode our civil liberties or present us with reality TV. 

*in this case “we” means our corporate maters

**SAHAUYOD (Stay At Home And Use Your Own Devices)

Bo Rho in 2019

I watched Bohemian Rhapsody a few weeks ago on Amazon. I loved it--I was thoroughly impressed, but partly for reasons I never anticipated.

This film had been in the making for quite a while--with various complications. In 2015/6 someone  (Brian May?) said the best part of the film was halfway through when Freddie died. Which made no sense, for a film that was about Freddie.

Sasha Baron Cohen was going to play Freddie, but then he quit. And no--I don't follow this kind of thing, but I just did a Google Search on "Freddie Dies Halfway Through" and it reminded me of this stuff and served up another page which claims there was never a script where he died half way through the movie.

So yeah, this was a movie that had a bit of a rocky road to screen, apparently.

I was interested, because Queen was not a band I knew much about. I first really noticed Queen when Wayne's World came out my junior year of high school, because the film brought Bohemian Rhapsody back into vogue.*

In many ways it has a lot in common with other music bio-pics--Walk the Line, Velvet Goldmine, Amadeus**, etc. Artist starts in obscurity,  artist makes it,  fame goes to artist's head and he becomes a dick, resolutions afterwards vary.

In one way however this film was different (at least from my perspective). By 2018, everyone has access to youtube, so anyone--even those of us who didn't know Queen existed in 1985--can see Queen's Live Aid performance. This means that when Rami Malek and his and the rest of the cast do the Live Aid concert, they are redoing something that anyone in the audience could have seen. They are not giving their interpretation of the characters-they are reproducing the characters every gesture. I'm guessing this made for an interesting acting experience.

I'm sure the production team was aware of this and played with it--the film starts with a man in a wife-beater  and stone washed wrangler jeans with a studded arm band going on stage (without showing his face). But they don't have to--we all know recognize the outfit.



*While waiting in the East Caf to go on for Sing the song came on the radio and we all--actors, singers, orchestra, techs sung along.

**yes, this is part of the same swim lane as Walk the Line. Don't believe me--consider Freddy playing the piano underneath it/backwards--total hat tip to Amadeus

Not-stalgia

My work life has gotten interesting lately, so I've taken to looking up the videos of 80s and 90s songs on YouTube as a sort of comfort. I looked up Phil Collins's "You Can't Hurry Love" one evening and saw the video below. I was immediately transported back to 1990--my friend Goldie had stayed over for a night at my house. We were supposed to be studying for the Biology Achievement test, but instead we spent the whole night dancing to Phil Collins Greatest Hits. 

It was a happy memory (if a bit embarrassing to admit) but here's the thing. Watching old videos by Phil Collins or Billy Joel or Bananara or Michael Jackson does not make me wish it was 199X again--not one little bit--not even 1998 (the year I lived in Paris after college.)

Why? Because I was miserable for most of that time. I went to a specialized high school and a good college, so I was probably less miserable than I could have been, but I spent an awful lot of my young-adulthood being miserable. Some of this was due to depression,  some of it I suspect is that it sucks being an adolescent.  It also--in my experience--sucks being a recent college grad. Of course, that's my experience only. Judging by the younger folks where I work, it doesn't suck so much if you majored in Business.

Do other people forget the misery of adolescence on purpose? Does high school appeal as a better simpler world, because the pains of having that guy/girl not like you, or passing Math pale compared to the drudgery of work/chores/bill-paying?

I don't know. All I can think is that when anyone near me says "Man I wish I was 21 again." I think of crying about my eviction notice written in Latin.

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying--perhaps it high school and college look especially bad because I've viewing them through the lens of my miserable 20s. I spent some time thinking about this today ( I wrote a sloppy draft of this last night.)

On one hand, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure I had my first bout of adult depression the summer before my senior year of high school That blew normal adolescent anxieties (Math, Drafting, will I ever be asked out by someone I like? Why did I decide to cut my own bangs? etc.) out of the water. That doesn't mean they were all fun.

Frida Kahlo Barbie

Frida Kahlo Barbie

There’s a Frida Kahlo Barbie out now—also an Amelia Earhart Barbie and a Katherine Johnson[1] Barbie. The Frida Kahlo Barbie has two eyebrows, which some people are objecting to[2]. I can see their point. I can also see the point of the people who decided that it would be a good thing for girls to have dolls of daring, famous women.

Speaking as the former owner of a set of Famous Women paper dolls[3], this whole campaign seems well intentioned, but pointless to me. Why? Because it didn’t matter what the short bio said the paper doll was, I used them all for whatever parts the play they fit in the play my brain came up with.  

Maybe I played with toys differently than other kids, but the whole point of a doll (or a set of Legos) was that it was a toy you could make into whatever you decided it should be. To my mind, that’s part of the point of play. If you give a kid a toy and tell them “This is Frida Kahlo” then you are telling them what to do with the toy—are they playing with it wrong if Frida is cast in the part of Morgan Le Fay for the afternoon[4]?

Similarly, (to my mind) if you give a kid a Lego kit and tell them that the kit only makes one thing, then the toy is done (and no longer fun) once they have made the X-Wing Fighter, or the Moon Landing Unit.[5]

I admit I am biased, but if you want girls to know and be inspired by women like Frida Kahlo, buy them books—not just the boring, wholesome/virtuous, scholastic library books (although you may have to start there), but books of her art. Tell them why you think she’s important (don’t wait until your daughter has to do a report for women’s history month—that defeats the purpose.)  If you do this, girls will not need a Frida Kahlo doll—if they want a doll to be Frida, they will make her so.

 

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[1] Mathematician and Physicist. She’s in Hidden Figures, and yes I had to look this up.

[2] Yes, I get why Frida Kahlo Barbie should violate the rules of the Universe—making a Communist into a Barbie is probably a sign of the appocolypse.

[3] They probably came from the Smithsonian. They were to be colored in. Each doll came with one other “outfit” (Amelia’s Earhart’s outfit was her plane.) Each doll had a bio, explaining why this woman was cool.a

[4] I’m sorry to say that My Amelia Earhart paper doll often had to play a dude, because she had short hair and wore pants and a baggy coat and some of my plotlines as a kid called for dudes, but there were (obviously) no male paper dolls in my set of Famous Women paper dolls.

[5] When I first saw these kits, I was horrified. I see them differently now—more like puzzles or model-building kits, but they still don’t encourage creativity the way a giant box of random Legos does.

Favorite Films of Mine take the Bechdel Test*

Amadeus—fails (I’m sure Constanza spoke with her mother—just not on screen.)

Ghostbusters—fails

The Princess Bride—fails

Bram Stoker’s Dracula—passes (Lucy talks to Mina about changing (“I can hear mice in the attic stomping like elephants.”))

Velvet Underground—fails

Dead Man Walking—passes (Sister Helen speaks with fellow sisters.)

Steel Magnolias—passes

The Little Mermaid—nope, but then again Arial can’t speak for most of the movie

The Downfall—passes

Le Comte De Monte Cristo—fails

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—passes

The Great Escape—fails. But it takes place in a POW camp, so maybe it doesn’t count?

Spirited Away—passes

Howl’s Moving Castle—passes (Sophie complains to the Witch of the Waste discuss the curse the Witch has put on Sophie)

Das Boot—Are you high?

Les Adieux à la Reine—passes

The Shadow of the Vampire—fails

All of the Lord of the Rings movies—fail, but that’s Tolkein’s fault

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton version)—passes so long as we count girls as women.

Corpse Bride—passes

The Nightmare Before Christmas—on the fence—do two witches singing together count as “speaking with each other?”

Batman (Tim Burton)--dear me, no

Night Watch—fails

The Seventh Seal—Fails

Topsy Tury—passes. (The Three Little Maids speak with the costume designer.)

Antonia’s Line—passes

9 to 5--passes

Heathers—passes

Never-ending Story—fails

Coraline—passes

Lars and the Real Girl—passes

Amelie—passes

The Imitation Game—passes

The Wizard of Oz—passes

Dead Poet’s Society—why do you even ask?

Scrooge--passes (discussion of bed curtains)

Alien, as we all know,  passes

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test