Sidetracks - February 23, 2017

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

Clare

➝ The only flaw with this wonderful piece about how Jude Law’s career has been impacted by the same tension between beauty and talent as many female ingenues is that it never mentions Wilde, a film built on the beauty and terror of his Bosie.

➝ This is just a really cute comic about an older wlw couple.

➝ A wonderful Trader Joe’s in Atlanta collaborated with the Afrofuturism collective DarkStarr to celebrate black sf writers! I now extra-appreciate every purchase I ever made from this location back in my Atlanta days. <3

➝ I can’t stop playing the @dog_rates game. It is the only pure, good thing in the world right now.

➝ Eva Green and Gemma Arterton will star as Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf in a film about the writers’ love affair.

➝ With the torch being passed from Lily Tomlin to Kate McKinnon, Miss Frizzle is firmly a queer legacy.

Jodie

➝ Stop everything you're doing. Dante Basco, best known for playing Rufio in Hook and Zuko in Avatar, is crowdfunding Bangarang; a Rufio focused prequel to Hook. The project has reached it's initial goal but if it hits $200,000 they'll be able to make a feature film. I really, really want this.

➝ Dev Patel won a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for Lion. I'm so glad he won an award but kind of down that he had to win it in the Best Supporting Actor category when he is the LEAD in this film.

➝ Speaking of unfair playing fields, this year's Carnegie list is #sowhite.

➝ Beverleylove made a short, digital picture book about a girl finding out another girl is her secret admirer.

➝ Veronikellymars is setting up a fun social media/blogging party about feminism in March. Get in touch to find out more.

➝ I've linked to this before but as a straight, single woman I find Laurie Penny's article Maybe You Should Just Be Single especially important in February.

➝ Please sign this petition to protest moving Donald Trump's State Visit to Birmingham (where I work). It's clear that petitions relating to the State Visit have a limited effect, as the UK government has rejected the voices of 1.8 million people who called for this visit to be cancelled entirely. However, if people don't raise their voices the government can say the visit is backed by the British people. The opposition may not always win but it needs to exist.

➝ Not to be alarmist, but Mel Gibson has been approached about directing the sequel (seeeequuuueeeellll) to Suicide Squad. Nope. Nope. Nope. Do not want.

➝ Gonna close out my section with these gorgeous pictures of the Force Awakens crew, which kaytaylorrea boosted into mytimeline the other day.

KJ

➝ Well this is exciting: Neil Gaiman is writing a sequel to Neverwhere. I don't know that Neverwhere is Gaiman's best work, but of his solo prose novels it's certainly my favorite.

➝ One of the few great developments of 2016 was the rise of Teen Vogue as source of political commentary. One of the less great developments was the often dismissive coverage of this story, couched in disbelief that teen girls might actually be interested in the topic. Sady Doyle's piece on the topic is pretty good, going into the history of "women's media" and tying its current political awareness to the rise of the feminist blogosphere in the mid 2000s. But I'm not convinced she goes back far enough -- the so-called "women's magazines" have always included articles about current events and politics, oftentimes with a feminist slant (if usually a very white-feminist, girl-power style feminism). Here's hoping that Teen Vogue and its sister publications keep up the good work, and that we stop thinking of magazines for women as necessarily shallow.

➝ Why DS9 and Voyager May Never Get the HD Remaster They Deserve. It boils down to a bunch of technical details about the history of television production which I didn't know and found fairly interesting, if disappointing (how much would I love a lovingly remastered BluRay set of Deep Space Nine?).

➝ s.e. smith re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley a few years back, and found it much more disturbing than expected. I'd been curious to re-read it myself, but maybe I'll skip it. I suspect The Firebrand, my other favorite MZB novel, wouldn't fare much better.

➝ Rogue One was a mixed bag in many respects (though overall I enjoyed it), but one thing I did appreciate was the strong representation of men of color among the heroes. Here's a piece from Nerds of Color that looks at the ways in which Chirrut, Baze, and Bohdi subvert some of the more common stereotypes of Asian men.

➝ Finally, I highly recommend this interview with Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, the costume designer for Hidden Figures.

Renay

➝ Government by White Nationalism Is Upon Us by Jamelle Bouie was a sobering read, but made me feel a little less nuts. Because I've been watching this slow slide toward white nationalism for awhile where I live.

➝ The Resistance Calender collects all the events going on around the country.

➝ Dog abandoned at petrol station now works at petrol station.

➝ The Alabamafication of America:

The 2016 presidential election looked, more than anything else, like an Alabama election. Donald Trump’s relentless appeals to populist conservative ideas echo decades-long trends in the South. The current worries about Trump’s irresponsible governing style are similar to concerns Alabama commentators have been expressing about their often-demagogic leaders since before the 1940s. To understand the Trump administration, in which Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions will likely serve as attorney general, we should look to Alabama, and the reasons why the state government is teetering toward collapse.

➝ This story about maple syrup thieves is so great. MAPLE SYRUP HEISTS!!

➝ Finally, I have found a resource to fill in all the gaping, rotten holes in my Civics education. There's a podcast! It gives lessons.

Book Acquisitions

Added TBR: Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner, The Red Threads of Fortune by J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang, Monstress, Volume 2 by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda, Double Bind edited by Robin Romm, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine, The Everything American Government Book by Nick Ragone

Comments

[stardreamer]

Clare: All of your links are fubar -- they have the Ladybusiness URL appended to the front, which makes them come up 404. If you mouse-over them you'll see what the problem is.

[helloladies]

Thanks for catching that! It was a coding error, which has been fixed. Our apologies.