oh my god
Hi livejournal
I'm not dead
I've been really, really busy. I work like, full time now! And on the weekends with Kaplan too! Every time I talk to my family they say "what have you been up to!" and I say "nothing but work!" and they say "Wow you must be rolling in it!" and I say "NO!" I am saving money, but not as much as you think I would be!
Welcome to the exploited American workforce Jenny! I will continue to make my bosses rich while I stay just far enough ahead of the poverty line to consistently fear it!
Anyway, I feel super terrible about going this long without an update. Even when livejournal started slipping from its place as top internet social station in lieu of twitter and, I don't know, reddit? I promised myself I'd update at least once a month. I mean, to be fair, I haven't had much to say that wouldn't fit in a tweet lately. There was one thing, essay, series of thoughts in my head, I don't know, that I wanted to write about, but it required like **GROAN** historical research. I got really into nuclear power disasters there for a second, and I watched some documentaries about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and I was struck at how the response to each disaster in the USSR and USA respectively differed, and it was like, wow, I kind-of-sort-of get the first world/second world distinction now.
But then I thought I couldn't write that without coming off at least a little jingoistic and uninformed so I SCRAPPED IT
but now I have a new idea for a post/essay/series of thoughts in my head
and all it requires of me is watching youtube videos
so here we go
A couple of days ago on Buzzfeed, which, like, goddamn, that's how long it's been since I updated my LJ regularly, I don't think I've ever mentioned or linked anything from Buzzfeed but I digress
Buzzfeed posted this collection of the best Tony performances of all time and I spent basically all Friday night watching it. That is my social life right now, in a nutshell.
Their number one pick was Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls, which obviously I was fine with.
so I don't know, I spent all this time watching these videos, and thinking about Broadway and the Tonys, and how unfair it is that these performances are the only exposure pretty much all of middle America gets to musical theater unless they shell out hundreds of dollars to drive to the closest metropolitan area and see some traveling version of these shows that is a fraction of how bombastic they are on Broadway, and how unfortunate it is that musical theater is such a remote, impenetrable art form for such a huge portion of the population, because it's fucking amazing.
And I feel like if you ask the average person if they like musical theater, they probably have this impression of it as being really gay and ostentation and over the top, like huge staircases with women in feather fans and some guy with a smile containing 10,000 teeth at a white baby grand piano. Like, it's super gay and scary and uncomfortable
and like, that's not completely wrong, but it is really wrong too, and I thought about this some more, and just how important that is, and just how unique that MADE Broadway in the context of all American and really ANY art forms
even though the shows themselves are not as gay as the stereotype, Broadway is super, SUPER gay.
And I think it's the only high-stakes artistic institution, that at its core, in its HEART, is not made by straight, white, probably old men.
I mean, think about trying to make a movie. You have an idea for a movie, you write a script, you maybe get some friends and your parents to write you some checks, some other friends agree to star in it. And maybe you make that movie. But it's going to be incredibly low budget, it's going to be nearly impossible to distribute, and without a crazy lottery-ticket stroke of luck like being accepted at Sundance or WINNING Sundance or something, probably no one is going to see it.
If you want to make a movie that people see, you have to go through the appropriate channels. Studios, producers, agents, and other moneyed, elite people that run that shit.
And who are most of those people?
Straight, white, old men.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Tyler Perry runs a media empire and he is neither white nor particularly old. But he is a man. It's hard to get away from needing the approval of a man in any art form unfortunately.
And the fact that straight, white, old men sign the checks, approve the projects, and ostensibly hold the keys to the entire movie industry is hugely, vastly important to determining what kinds of movies we see in the theater.
Sure, some of the more radical ones accept that their tastes are ultimately irrelevant, and will make movies that appeal to demographics they probably never see or deal with, but for the most part, the conventional wisdoms of the movie industry are so clearly the product of straight, white, old male brains that they may as well be trailing like fishing lines straight from their ears.
A woman protagonist can't open a movie. Black men can't be action stars except Will Smith. People like super rich, attractive, intelligent super heroes like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. Violence wins out over other forms of conflict resolution. Blowing shit up is cool. Having sex with a woman is what determines a man's worth. Etc. etc. etc. Overall, Hollywood movies seem to basically be about how individual straight, white men overcome other individual straight, white men. When you're at the very top of society, the only thing standing in your way ARE other individuals who are ALSO at the top of society.
It's like the entire moral framework of modern Hollywood is exactly what a straight white man would think is important. Like, the only thing I may be overlooking is that there is a strong Jewish contingent in Hollywood, and look how many movies there are about the Holocaust, and how many Nazis are straight-up evil bad guys with no redeeming qualities. Has there been, or will there ever be, a movie about a sympathetic Nazi? Besides Schindler's List, which had to include a sociopathic monster to assure you that Nazis were indeed the worst things ever.
Like I don't want to defend Nazis, I just want to make the suggestion, and perhaps it's unthinkable, that Nazis are SO UNAMBIGUOUSLY THE WORST THING EVER because of how much effort our culture has put into portraying them that way. Imagine how different our movies would be if Muslims ran things instead.
It's a dumb point, and not even the main one. My main point is that the people in charge of art and culture do have a hand in controlling how certain things are understood and valued by the society they pander to. I'm not making a judgment, and I mean, I don't want to jump off a deep end and claim that this is having any effect on actual American culture vis a vis all these fucking mass shootings and whatever (though they probably are)
I just want to talk about how fucking amazing Broadway is in comparison.
I think there's a reason that men run shit and women don't. And I don't mean like, men should be in charge, I just mean like, there were so very few exceptions to men being in charge of things before very recently. It's hard for a woman to fake being a man, you know? For all of human culture for the last several thousand years (I'm exaggerating, but this is surely true for western culture, which is basically what all of our current art derives from), women were domestic and men were public, right? Women stayed at home, cooked, raised the kids, etc.; were basically mistresses of the domestic sphere, while men ruled the public sphere. And if a woman wanted to rule the public sphere, there were plenty of barriers to entry, most importantly that she looked like a woman and women belong in the home.
It's a really bummer fact. It bums me out a lot, all of that wasted talent lost to the ages. I think about all those amazingly talented, intelligent people who just lived their lives and died and contributed nothing they could have if not for our bonkers social structure. The letters Ben Franklin's sister wrote to him just break my heart.
Anyway, this is true of women, and was true basically for all of time until about thirty years ago. There was a really convincing article I read about how when we look back on the whole feminist movement, the important event was not necessarily Title IX or any legal revolution, but the invention of hormonal birth control. Shit got FUCKED in the best way possible once women could determine their own reproductive destinies with a huge degree of efficacy, and shit will never really be the same, and seeing how that one variable changes culture over the next few hundred years is going to be fucking SICKLY AMAZING.
The point is, the fact that women and men do have sexual dimorphism is what fucked women over when it came to actually doing something besides frying bacon and breastfeeding.
This fact, however, is not true of gay men.
Gay men suffer a different kind of oppression than women do. It is much harder for a woman to hide her womanness than for a gay man to hide his gayness. Think about how much effort and time trans people have to put into passing, and how history has done so much to emphasize and exaggerate the differences between men and women, putting men into tailored suits and squeezing women into girdles, rubbing arsenic make-up on their faces, convincing them they need invasive surgery to prove and extentuate their femininity. I guess that makes sense that men don't have to change much about themselves but women have to take on the burden of proving their deviation from the masculine in very often self-destructive ways. sorry, let's call that a feminist solar flare.
ANYWAY, a trans person "passing" as the other gender takes so much more effort than a gay man "passing" as straight. What do you have to do, not fuck guys and marry a woman? I mean, I am completely undermining the struggle of being in the closet, and certainly the high degree of self-awareness and self-policing and even self-hatred that goes into passing as straight, but I think it's pretty fair to say that passing as straight takes no where NEAR the amount of effort as passing as another gender, and can usually be done with a higher degree of success.
It is still oppression, though. It does still cause damage, and it separates gay men from straight men.
So you get these talented, perhaps moneyed gay men. Come from good families, get good educations, for all intents and purposes are members of the elite, ruling classes that have more power and control over culture than anyone else.
However, they are not the top of the pyramid. They are deeply aware of their deviancy, their "brokenness," their deviation from the norm. They suffer as any oppressed or subaltern group suffers.
But they do it invisibly. They walk among the groups in power as one of their own, and they suffer in silence.
And, somewhere along the way, they find each other. I wish I knew more about like, opera, or vaudeville, or whatever came before the Broadway musical, because I'm sure this stuff has very historic roots.
But they find each other, and they build their own American institution. They build huge theaters, and somehow, they all form their own moral code the way Hollywood industrialists did.
And the fact that they are oppressed, that they are broken, that they do not fit into that narrow pinnacle of society, that fake and destructive and narrow view of what it means to be HUMAN because only straight white men were allowed to discuss what being HUMAN ever meant, and they know it, changes this moral code in the most beautiful way and I want to CELEBRATE IT
Think about pretty much any Broadway musical. I mean, I have to admit that part of the reason I'm writing this is because I'm sure I'm forgetting one very popular musical that is going to destroy this whole argument
But think of any Broadway musical
Who or what is it about?
I'm going to do a few:
West Side Story is about poor, uneducated gangs of both white and hispanic descent, and both are portrayed as equally valid and moral groups.
Wicked is about an outsider who is also a WOMAN. And she's green. I don't know if that technically makes her another race or not.
Gypsy is about an old woman with adult daughters, and is often considered the greatest role older actresses can play.
Like, even just going down the list of that buzzfeed article:
idk Urinetown
You're a Good Man Charlie Brown is about...Charlie Brown, but he's played by a black man in that video and his sister is white and NO ONE CARES
Cats is about...Cats, but the cat that wins the Jellicle Ball is an aged, past-her-prime glamour cat mourning her glory days, and she gets a fucking SOLO
Sweeney Todd is about a man, but his accomplice is one of the most delightfully fucked up female characters ever
Annie is about an orphan
Cabaret is about a dingy German bar
Caroline or Change is about the Civil Rights Movement
Hairspray is about racial integration and stars a young fat woman
Ragtime is about three different social groups in the early 20th century, and from what I remember, focuses a lot on the black group
Spring Awakening is about white kids, okay. BUT THEY ARE GERMAN!
Grey Gardens, like, honestly I DID NOT even know it was a musical, but OF COURSE the Edies would be gay icons. OF COURSE THEY WOULD BE. This single show, hell, this single performance almost perfectly illustrates my point. WHEN WOULD YOU EVER SEE THAT IN A BIG-BUDGET HOLLYWOOD MOVIE??
Sunday in the Park with George is about Georges Seurat but it stars Mandy Patinkin so it gets a pass
Rent is about people with AIDS
Next to Normal is about a middle-aged woman with mental illness
Anything Goes is old as shit but it stars a woman.
Evita is about a woman AND a socialist revolution
Chicago is about women muderesses
And to top it off, just that Jennifer Holliday performance again.
When on Earth would a Hollywood movie give a solo like that to a black woman at all, let alone on who wasn't a size 0?
There was a time when Hollywood told more unconventional stories, when Hollywood celebrated the margins of society, when little guys were heroes taking down big, unfair institutions. Those days are over.
But they live on in Broadway. The institution of Broadway seems to be not about big ostentatious gay numbers, but about telling stories about marginal groups in society, letting them scream and wail and sing their pain to a limited audience, letting them SPEAK when no one else will listen. Of course they scream at the top of their lungs, they're not going to miss the opportunity to be heard!
I can't think of one Broadway musical that's about how awesome it is to be a straight white man besides like, Les Miserables which is TECHNICALLY about an ex-con, and The Book of Mormon, which was made by two straight guys. SO I MEAN
I don't know. I think it's really cool. Novels and other art forms tell all sorts of diverse stories too, but they have small budgets, simpler methods of distribution, and they're much easier to ignore. Broadway musicals are the only art form I can think of that take time, money, cooperation, playing along with the institutional powers that be, and still tell so many stories about so many different kinds of people.
In short, thank God for the gays.
I'm not dead
I've been really, really busy. I work like, full time now! And on the weekends with Kaplan too! Every time I talk to my family they say "what have you been up to!" and I say "nothing but work!" and they say "Wow you must be rolling in it!" and I say "NO!" I am saving money, but not as much as you think I would be!
Welcome to the exploited American workforce Jenny! I will continue to make my bosses rich while I stay just far enough ahead of the poverty line to consistently fear it!
Anyway, I feel super terrible about going this long without an update. Even when livejournal started slipping from its place as top internet social station in lieu of twitter and, I don't know, reddit? I promised myself I'd update at least once a month. I mean, to be fair, I haven't had much to say that wouldn't fit in a tweet lately. There was one thing, essay, series of thoughts in my head, I don't know, that I wanted to write about, but it required like **GROAN** historical research. I got really into nuclear power disasters there for a second, and I watched some documentaries about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and I was struck at how the response to each disaster in the USSR and USA respectively differed, and it was like, wow, I kind-of-sort-of get the first world/second world distinction now.
But then I thought I couldn't write that without coming off at least a little jingoistic and uninformed so I SCRAPPED IT
but now I have a new idea for a post/essay/series of thoughts in my head
and all it requires of me is watching youtube videos
so here we go
A couple of days ago on Buzzfeed, which, like, goddamn, that's how long it's been since I updated my LJ regularly, I don't think I've ever mentioned or linked anything from Buzzfeed but I digress
Buzzfeed posted this collection of the best Tony performances of all time and I spent basically all Friday night watching it. That is my social life right now, in a nutshell.
Their number one pick was Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls, which obviously I was fine with.
so I don't know, I spent all this time watching these videos, and thinking about Broadway and the Tonys, and how unfair it is that these performances are the only exposure pretty much all of middle America gets to musical theater unless they shell out hundreds of dollars to drive to the closest metropolitan area and see some traveling version of these shows that is a fraction of how bombastic they are on Broadway, and how unfortunate it is that musical theater is such a remote, impenetrable art form for such a huge portion of the population, because it's fucking amazing.
And I feel like if you ask the average person if they like musical theater, they probably have this impression of it as being really gay and ostentation and over the top, like huge staircases with women in feather fans and some guy with a smile containing 10,000 teeth at a white baby grand piano. Like, it's super gay and scary and uncomfortable
and like, that's not completely wrong, but it is really wrong too, and I thought about this some more, and just how important that is, and just how unique that MADE Broadway in the context of all American and really ANY art forms
even though the shows themselves are not as gay as the stereotype, Broadway is super, SUPER gay.
And I think it's the only high-stakes artistic institution, that at its core, in its HEART, is not made by straight, white, probably old men.
I mean, think about trying to make a movie. You have an idea for a movie, you write a script, you maybe get some friends and your parents to write you some checks, some other friends agree to star in it. And maybe you make that movie. But it's going to be incredibly low budget, it's going to be nearly impossible to distribute, and without a crazy lottery-ticket stroke of luck like being accepted at Sundance or WINNING Sundance or something, probably no one is going to see it.
If you want to make a movie that people see, you have to go through the appropriate channels. Studios, producers, agents, and other moneyed, elite people that run that shit.
And who are most of those people?
Straight, white, old men.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Tyler Perry runs a media empire and he is neither white nor particularly old. But he is a man. It's hard to get away from needing the approval of a man in any art form unfortunately.
And the fact that straight, white, old men sign the checks, approve the projects, and ostensibly hold the keys to the entire movie industry is hugely, vastly important to determining what kinds of movies we see in the theater.
Sure, some of the more radical ones accept that their tastes are ultimately irrelevant, and will make movies that appeal to demographics they probably never see or deal with, but for the most part, the conventional wisdoms of the movie industry are so clearly the product of straight, white, old male brains that they may as well be trailing like fishing lines straight from their ears.
A woman protagonist can't open a movie. Black men can't be action stars except Will Smith. People like super rich, attractive, intelligent super heroes like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. Violence wins out over other forms of conflict resolution. Blowing shit up is cool. Having sex with a woman is what determines a man's worth. Etc. etc. etc. Overall, Hollywood movies seem to basically be about how individual straight, white men overcome other individual straight, white men. When you're at the very top of society, the only thing standing in your way ARE other individuals who are ALSO at the top of society.
It's like the entire moral framework of modern Hollywood is exactly what a straight white man would think is important. Like, the only thing I may be overlooking is that there is a strong Jewish contingent in Hollywood, and look how many movies there are about the Holocaust, and how many Nazis are straight-up evil bad guys with no redeeming qualities. Has there been, or will there ever be, a movie about a sympathetic Nazi? Besides Schindler's List, which had to include a sociopathic monster to assure you that Nazis were indeed the worst things ever.
Like I don't want to defend Nazis, I just want to make the suggestion, and perhaps it's unthinkable, that Nazis are SO UNAMBIGUOUSLY THE WORST THING EVER because of how much effort our culture has put into portraying them that way. Imagine how different our movies would be if Muslims ran things instead.
It's a dumb point, and not even the main one. My main point is that the people in charge of art and culture do have a hand in controlling how certain things are understood and valued by the society they pander to. I'm not making a judgment, and I mean, I don't want to jump off a deep end and claim that this is having any effect on actual American culture vis a vis all these fucking mass shootings and whatever (though they probably are)
I just want to talk about how fucking amazing Broadway is in comparison.
I think there's a reason that men run shit and women don't. And I don't mean like, men should be in charge, I just mean like, there were so very few exceptions to men being in charge of things before very recently. It's hard for a woman to fake being a man, you know? For all of human culture for the last several thousand years (I'm exaggerating, but this is surely true for western culture, which is basically what all of our current art derives from), women were domestic and men were public, right? Women stayed at home, cooked, raised the kids, etc.; were basically mistresses of the domestic sphere, while men ruled the public sphere. And if a woman wanted to rule the public sphere, there were plenty of barriers to entry, most importantly that she looked like a woman and women belong in the home.
It's a really bummer fact. It bums me out a lot, all of that wasted talent lost to the ages. I think about all those amazingly talented, intelligent people who just lived their lives and died and contributed nothing they could have if not for our bonkers social structure. The letters Ben Franklin's sister wrote to him just break my heart.
Anyway, this is true of women, and was true basically for all of time until about thirty years ago. There was a really convincing article I read about how when we look back on the whole feminist movement, the important event was not necessarily Title IX or any legal revolution, but the invention of hormonal birth control. Shit got FUCKED in the best way possible once women could determine their own reproductive destinies with a huge degree of efficacy, and shit will never really be the same, and seeing how that one variable changes culture over the next few hundred years is going to be fucking SICKLY AMAZING.
The point is, the fact that women and men do have sexual dimorphism is what fucked women over when it came to actually doing something besides frying bacon and breastfeeding.
This fact, however, is not true of gay men.
Gay men suffer a different kind of oppression than women do. It is much harder for a woman to hide her womanness than for a gay man to hide his gayness. Think about how much effort and time trans people have to put into passing, and how history has done so much to emphasize and exaggerate the differences between men and women, putting men into tailored suits and squeezing women into girdles, rubbing arsenic make-up on their faces, convincing them they need invasive surgery to prove and extentuate their femininity. I guess that makes sense that men don't have to change much about themselves but women have to take on the burden of proving their deviation from the masculine in very often self-destructive ways. sorry, let's call that a feminist solar flare.
ANYWAY, a trans person "passing" as the other gender takes so much more effort than a gay man "passing" as straight. What do you have to do, not fuck guys and marry a woman? I mean, I am completely undermining the struggle of being in the closet, and certainly the high degree of self-awareness and self-policing and even self-hatred that goes into passing as straight, but I think it's pretty fair to say that passing as straight takes no where NEAR the amount of effort as passing as another gender, and can usually be done with a higher degree of success.
It is still oppression, though. It does still cause damage, and it separates gay men from straight men.
So you get these talented, perhaps moneyed gay men. Come from good families, get good educations, for all intents and purposes are members of the elite, ruling classes that have more power and control over culture than anyone else.
However, they are not the top of the pyramid. They are deeply aware of their deviancy, their "brokenness," their deviation from the norm. They suffer as any oppressed or subaltern group suffers.
But they do it invisibly. They walk among the groups in power as one of their own, and they suffer in silence.
And, somewhere along the way, they find each other. I wish I knew more about like, opera, or vaudeville, or whatever came before the Broadway musical, because I'm sure this stuff has very historic roots.
But they find each other, and they build their own American institution. They build huge theaters, and somehow, they all form their own moral code the way Hollywood industrialists did.
And the fact that they are oppressed, that they are broken, that they do not fit into that narrow pinnacle of society, that fake and destructive and narrow view of what it means to be HUMAN because only straight white men were allowed to discuss what being HUMAN ever meant, and they know it, changes this moral code in the most beautiful way and I want to CELEBRATE IT
Think about pretty much any Broadway musical. I mean, I have to admit that part of the reason I'm writing this is because I'm sure I'm forgetting one very popular musical that is going to destroy this whole argument
But think of any Broadway musical
Who or what is it about?
I'm going to do a few:
West Side Story is about poor, uneducated gangs of both white and hispanic descent, and both are portrayed as equally valid and moral groups.
Wicked is about an outsider who is also a WOMAN. And she's green. I don't know if that technically makes her another race or not.
Gypsy is about an old woman with adult daughters, and is often considered the greatest role older actresses can play.
Like, even just going down the list of that buzzfeed article:
idk Urinetown
You're a Good Man Charlie Brown is about...Charlie Brown, but he's played by a black man in that video and his sister is white and NO ONE CARES
Cats is about...Cats, but the cat that wins the Jellicle Ball is an aged, past-her-prime glamour cat mourning her glory days, and she gets a fucking SOLO
Sweeney Todd is about a man, but his accomplice is one of the most delightfully fucked up female characters ever
Annie is about an orphan
Cabaret is about a dingy German bar
Caroline or Change is about the Civil Rights Movement
Hairspray is about racial integration and stars a young fat woman
Ragtime is about three different social groups in the early 20th century, and from what I remember, focuses a lot on the black group
Spring Awakening is about white kids, okay. BUT THEY ARE GERMAN!
Grey Gardens, like, honestly I DID NOT even know it was a musical, but OF COURSE the Edies would be gay icons. OF COURSE THEY WOULD BE. This single show, hell, this single performance almost perfectly illustrates my point. WHEN WOULD YOU EVER SEE THAT IN A BIG-BUDGET HOLLYWOOD MOVIE??
Sunday in the Park with George is about Georges Seurat but it stars Mandy Patinkin so it gets a pass
Rent is about people with AIDS
Next to Normal is about a middle-aged woman with mental illness
Anything Goes is old as shit but it stars a woman.
Evita is about a woman AND a socialist revolution
Chicago is about women muderesses
And to top it off, just that Jennifer Holliday performance again.
When on Earth would a Hollywood movie give a solo like that to a black woman at all, let alone on who wasn't a size 0?
There was a time when Hollywood told more unconventional stories, when Hollywood celebrated the margins of society, when little guys were heroes taking down big, unfair institutions. Those days are over.
But they live on in Broadway. The institution of Broadway seems to be not about big ostentatious gay numbers, but about telling stories about marginal groups in society, letting them scream and wail and sing their pain to a limited audience, letting them SPEAK when no one else will listen. Of course they scream at the top of their lungs, they're not going to miss the opportunity to be heard!
I can't think of one Broadway musical that's about how awesome it is to be a straight white man besides like, Les Miserables which is TECHNICALLY about an ex-con, and The Book of Mormon, which was made by two straight guys. SO I MEAN
I don't know. I think it's really cool. Novels and other art forms tell all sorts of diverse stories too, but they have small budgets, simpler methods of distribution, and they're much easier to ignore. Broadway musicals are the only art form I can think of that take time, money, cooperation, playing along with the institutional powers that be, and still tell so many stories about so many different kinds of people.
In short, thank God for the gays.