Living in the 21st Century
[Visual description: People sit in a cafe while using laptops.]
Computers have become part of mainstream culture. In the late 90s, people thought that the Internet was a fad, but very few people today still think that the Internet is a fad.
In 1994, spending time playing in MUDs, chatting on IRC, and even writing emails were all activities that a fairly small fringe of society participated in. Nowadays, it is the rare person who does not have a Facebook; not having an e-mail address is unthinkable.
However, some people that I've encountered are not happy with this state of affairs. They yearn for a time in which we didn't have all of these Facespace or Myface websites but instead talked to each other in real life. They yearn for a time when we didn't have our creativity stifled by staring at the screen for hours on end.
Okay, I agree that the Internet is not perfect. Not everyone has equal access to the Internet, and there are inequalities online. This is an issue that I care about. However, most of the critiques that I hear don't engage these points; instead, they yearn for a "better" time that is long gone.
Honestly, one thing that I really don't understand about these critiques? When Hearing people talk about being chained to the Internet and feeling like it's a weak mirror of "actual" social life, it's not an experience that I can relate to at all.
The thing is, not all of us have the same experience with the Internet. I have spoken before about growing up on the Internet, a space where I was able to understand others for the first time. Later on, when I was trying to figure out my own identity as a queer individual, the Internet was a great resource for meeting others.
In other words, the Internet connects some of us; it doesn't isolate us.
Plus, these criticisms seem to be about ten years late to the party - people have been talking to each other on the Internet for a long time, and they've been using computers for even longer.
Getting back to what I said earlier about inequalities online? Yeah, I think that those are important to talk about. Personally, though, I think that the solution is more integration of the Internet into everybody's life, not less. But I am open to being wrong on this point - let me know what you think.
“Have you always known?”
Sorry for the silence. I've been in the left coast for the week. I was in VACATION YEAH! mode and did not want to sit at the computer for more than two seconds.
So, I was out at the gay bar last weekend, chatting with a new friend. She asked me, "Have you always known you were gay?"
Complicated question, especially when you've both just had a few drinks. But, since I've been asked this question before, I already had an answer. "Well, I always knew I was different, but I thought it was because I was deaf."
Honestly, though? It's true.
So let's start at the beginning. As I've said in this blog before, I was mainstreamed. As a child, I didn't care so much that I was different - as long as I could play with my sister and toys and the giant 10 foot mounds of snow in my backyard, I was cool. I wasn't even really aware of being different because people tended to treat it as a non-issue (except for a few bigots or ignorant fools).
Later on, around the time I hit puberty, I began to be more aware that I was different. I didn't seem to fit in with my straight peers. They were talking about all these things that were totally foreign to me. Even if I understood what they were saying on a physical level (eg, I lipread them successfully), I just couldn't relate to the content of their conversations.
Well, in middle school, I kept on figuring that I was different because I had grown up deaf and I therefore had different experiences than my peers. So, logically, they would have different things to talk about, like the inherent hotness of the opposite sex. Totally makes sense, right?
Needless to say, that illusion didn't last for very long. I came out as gay at age 15.
Since I had very little access to an actual gay community, I completely immersed myself in the books and films. I could never really identify with the characters, though. I explained this away as being due to... you guessed it, deafness. I didn't fit in with the gay community because they were hearing and I was deaf. Totally logical, right?
When I went to college, I moved to a major metropolis and, for the first time in my life, met more gay people than I could count on my hands. Some of them were even deaf! Suddenly, I couldn't explain away all of my differences as being due to deafness. The fact was, I simply did not fit in for deeper reasons than the fact that I'm deaf.
So, five years after coming out as gay, I came out to my parents yet again and began to redirect my life in a more appropriate path. To make a long story short, they were super-upset at first, but now they are among the most supportive people in my life.
Do I still feel different? Heck yeah. Am I at home in my own skin now? Oh, yes. Here's the thing. I'm more comfortable saying "I am a deaf bisexual man" than what I used to identify as because that label is accurate, whereas the previous label never quite fit properly. That makes me a lot more at ease with my difference than before.
CD Mixes & Talking About Music Theory
First of all: I just updated my "About Me" and "About This Blog" page. Go check those out.
Okay, on with the post.
One of my hobbies is making CD mixes. I work pretty hard on my CD mixes. Now, I've known people who just throw random songs into a playlist and then call it "done." No offense to those people - it works for them, after all - but I tend to be more obsessive about making the songs all fit with each other. For example, I wouldn't put a quiet, serious, acoustic song about atheism next to some sort of crazy techno party dance music. I also like to make themed CDs - for example, one of my current CD mixes is named DRIVE FASTER!!! and it has all sorts of really fast-tempo songs.
One issue that I've encountered, though, is that I feel like I lack a lot of musical vocabulary. When I was in high school, I studied music theory for Academic Decathlon, but none of it stuck.
Part of it was that, although I liked some music in high school, I wasn't super-interested in music until recently.
Most of it was just the way that AcaDec presents its information in general: they give you a pile of extremely dense text to read, then tell you to memorize it for the competitions in test-taking. Seriously, this stuff may not have as many big words like "semiotics" or "ontology" as I've encountered in college, but it is really really freakin' dense nonetheless.
Basically, AcaDec threw me into the ocean in the middle of a stormy night. Not exactly a great way to learn how to swim. I definitely feel like I could have used some "Music Appreciation 101" texts. Stuff like "major key songs are usually happy" is a lot more useful for a beginner than "Newton believed that the diatonic scale corresponded to the seven colors of the rainbow." Especially when you don't even know what the fuck an octave is. (I'm sorry if this last fact about Newton is incorrect, by the way - after five years, I've forgotten the music theory I learned in AcaDec.)
Incidentally, one thing I've found really helpful in the intervening years? Don't laugh, but - last.fm. Its tags are like a freakin' goldmine of knowledge that explain musical history and the key features of certain genres very well. From last.fm, I've learned the definitions of dreampop vs trip-hop, hardcore vs metalcore, etc. Yeah, some genres are totally made up by the listeners - just look at "lolicore," if you dare - but even trash can be educational. All in all, it's a much better way for me to learn about music than "Please memorize these key facts about Beethoven's symphonies, then answer A, B, C, D, or E." Also, bugging my hearing friends who are music geeks (or who just really like music a lot) has helped. Thanks, hearing friends, for putting up with my questions!
What's that? Oh, how does this relate to CD mixes, you ask?
Well, right now, I usually end up saying, "This is good enough - I'm gonna burn it and go for a drive with this CD now." (I really like listening to music in a car, especially one equipped with strong speakers with good bass, but that's another post altogether.) I have fun making CD mixes - I just listen to everything and try to fit it all together by ear. But I wonder, what if I could say, "Hey, so, this song has jargon jargon jargon and is in the minor scale; it'd go just wonderfully with this song that is also in the minor scale but is jargon blah jargon etc"? If I could identify what is going on in the songs, would I be able to make more precisely matched mixes?
Or is it better that I don't know the vocabulary? After all, "This slow and serious song about atheism would go well before this song that starts out slowly, then builds up to something louder and faster - then I'll put the crazy party techno song after that" works pretty well for me at this point.
I think that, in the end, I'd like to learn more vocabulary so as to better identify what kind of mix I'm making. But, when it comes down to it, the thing that really helped me to enjoy music was saying "Screw this, I don't care what hearing people say, I'll enjoy it on my own terms." I mean, this is just a hobby - I don't have any career aspirations to become a professional DJ or anything like that, so having fun making CDs is more important to me in the end than making 100% perfect CDs.
Educating Others
I've been thinking recently about my experiences with educating others when growing up. As some people have pointed out, if somebody says, "Educate me, please," it's packed with several privileged assumptions. A particularly good example I recently read was "Marginalization as Labor On Demand and the Tone Argument" by Lisa Harney at Questioning Transphobia.
Throughout my life, people have definitely asked me to educate them about queer issues, but more people have asked me to educate them about deaf issues. This led me to ask: why did I experience this discrepancy?
Part of it is simple arithmetic - I've been deaf since birth but I've only been visibly queer & out for approximately 7 years. But a far more important component is the fact that I was encouraged to stay quiet about being queer ("don't flaunt it") whereas I was encouraged to speak up about being deaf. Where I grew up, being queer was seen as somehow "wrong," whereas being deaf was just one of those mysterious "God's will" events.
It's really interesting to look back on my life and realize just how much educating I've done, though. For example, I began lecturing classmates about the anatomy of the inner ear when I was in third or fourth grade. (That is, eight or nine years old.) My usual method was to print out a transparent diagram of the inner ear and project the diagram onto the wall. Then I'd sketch out the path that the sound waves took. Then I would explain how the cochlear implant works by sketching in the magnet and so forth. I lectured to students as young as four years old and as old as thirteen years old. Imagine that - an eight year old child lecturing a classroom of thirteen-year-old children.
I guess I'm lucky in that I enjoy talking about myself and I enjoy teaching others, so I didn't entirely resent having to educate others. However, at times, I did get tired of educating others. I couldn't really articulate it as a kid, but sometimes I got fed up with how stupid adults could be, asking the same old questions about how such a young child could have possibly become deaf. Why couldn't they all be as smart as my parents, who had researched deafness themselves? This was before the advent of search engines, but books and encyclopedias existed! Also, sometimes people would ask me questions about my personal experience that I thought were absolutely ridiculous like, "Do you ever wish that you were born hearing?"
As a result, I came up with a strategy: I would ask hearing people questions... About everything! And I do mean everything. I figured, "Everybody asks me so many stupid questions, why not ask them questions?" ...Yeah, I was a smartass kid. End result: Some adults would become absolutely exasperated when I continued to pester them with far more questions than even the average child. (Which is saying a lot - have you ever been on the receiving end of a child's questions? They ask a lot of questions.) This helped me feel like I was getting some sort of revenge for having to put up with so many annoying questions.
Most of the people closest to me quickly saw through this tactic and figured out how to turn this tendency to their advantage. They developed the habit of asking me, "Do you know the answer to this already?" So, for example, let's say that I asked, "What are black holes?" They would ask me if I really wanted to know the answer to that, or if I already knew it. I would say, "Oh! Black holes are highly dense spots in space with strong gravitational pulls, blah blah blah."
Later I learned that this wasn't always a reliable tactic - if it backfired, it played into the stereotype that deaf people lack the same intellectual capacity as hearing people and/or are less educated. So I began to ask more elaborate questions. To this day, sometimes I have to fight to keep from asking people really basic things that I already know the answer to.
Over time I've discovered that what makes me happiest is an equal exchange of ideas. I'm fine with talking about myself if it's respectful. You ask me stuff, I ask you stuff. You ask me something, I don't want to answer - leave it there. I'll extend the same courtesy to you.
I do want to note that most of the people I've encountered are very apologetic when they ask a question about deaf issues, but this isn't really my experience with queer issues. For example: "I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but... Do you like music?" versus simply blurting out, "How do you have sex?" I think that this difference is pretty important to note.
Hiatus
Hello, I'm going on a temporary hiatus for the week - I have to write a research paper for one of my summer classes.
This is my usual method when writing a film studies paper: Choose a film that illustrates a social or historical trend. Watch the movie. Take careful notes. Then do the research: Go on JSTOR and look for any relevant scholars to agree or disagree with. Go to the library and check out books on the film and books on the social/historical topic, such as the representation of race in cinema or the male gaze or constructivism in Soviet cinema, that I also am addressing. Then find a nice, quiet place with a television where I can view the movie while writing about scenes - it's amazing how easily one can forget small details, so I like to rewatch scenes as I write about them.
How about you, readers? Are any of you film studies students? Care to share your methods?
If not - please feel free to leave comments here for future blog posts that you want to see. I always appreciate input concerning stuff that people want to read about :)
Why I Don’t Have An Online Dating Profile Anymore
Once, I was really bored and new to town. So I created an account on a fairly popular dating website. (I'm embarrassed, but, hey, we've all done it once, right?) I figured that I could take all the fun quizzes to waste time and maybe meet interesting people nearby. When I was filling out my profile, I mentioned that I was deaf.
Boom, I soon got messages from creepsters. They said things like:
40/m/LivesAnHourAway
hey i saw on ur profile that ur deaf. i know asl, i took a class on it once. it is such a beautiful language. want to meet? my asl is rusty but i would love to practice more!
[Translation: "I took one semester of ASL 20 years ago, and the only word that I remember how to say is 'shit.' Also, because I know ASL, this is a really brilliant excuse to justify hitting on a guy half my age!"]
35/m/NextStateOver
Hello, my name is [full name] and I live in [very specific neighborhood]. [Blah, blah, blah... 500+ words about himself and how wonderful he is]. By the way, I looked at your profile and noticed that you are deaf. I am interested in meeting all sorts of different people. Do you want to come to my apartment sometime and talk about your experiences as a deaf person? I have never met a deaf person before, and it is so fascinating to me. I love the diversity of human experiences out there.
[Translation: "I clearly am a special and unique man who will render you mindless with pleasure, duh. By the way, do you want to come to my apartment so that I can add you to my harem (literally) of special and diverse partners so that I can brag about having screwed a deaf guy?"]
...etc.
Don't get me wrong - I also got creepy non-deaf related messages. Regardless, I would say that 90% of the creepy messages that I got mentioned deafness. In many cases, there were multiple things that were offputting about these people, like the fact that many of them were messaging somebody 10+ years younger than them (ew), but their focus on deafness really stood out to me.
Here's the problem with these people: They, in typical creepazoid fashion, were seeing me not as a whole and complete person, but as an object. I'm not an ASL textbook; if that's what you really want, go to the damn library and check out one. Likewise, I'm not a "Deaf Culture 101" book - I'm willing to share my experiences with others, but not if that's the only basis of our friendship. Curiosity is natural, but it is not okay to dehumanize somebody by making assumptions about them and demanding that they educate you every hour of every day.
This is a pretty universal complaint about creeps, though: they objectify. So here are some things that bother me about creeps who specifically target deaf people.
It is not possible to learn ASL overnight from one semester of lessons - in fact, I find it borderline insulting that people seem to think that ASL is so simple. We do not just "mime" our words or anything like that; we communicate in a syntactically complex language.
On one hand, this tendency to claim fluency in another language is not uncommon - I have seen people say "I know Spanish!" when they only took three semesters of it in high school and can't say anything more complicated than "My name is ___" and "How are you?" True fluency comes from being able to read books and hold nuanced conversations, not from being able to pass a standardized vocabulary test. So, to some degree, the "I know ASL!" phenomenon is also seen in other languages.
On the other hand, ASL has had a difficult history: it was not even considered a language for a very long time. (It still is not, in some circles.) Early oralists said that using ASL slowed the student's acquisition of English - according to their logic, this was undesirable because English is a true language whereas ASL is nothing more than filler. Hence, deaf people were not allowed to communicate in ASL for a very long time and were actually, in some cases, punished when they tried to do so.
So that is why, when somebody claims to know ASL despite the fact that he or she has taken only a few classes in it, I can't help but wonder if they truly consider ASL a language or if they only see it as a silly amusement. Sadly, a lot of hearing people tend to see it as a novelty, not a language.
Sure, it's really sweet when somebody meets me, then tries to learn some signs so that we can communicate more fluently. I appreciate this in friends and romantic partners alike. The key difference, though, is that they have first met me and decided that they like me as a whole person. Creeps, on the other hand, obsessively focus on one aspect of me - my deafness.
Another assumption that these creepsters made was that, because I am deaf, I therefore know ASL. Because, you know all deaf people are born knowing ASL.
Okay, first of all, I have met plenty of people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and don't know ASL. Just because somebody can't hear doesn't automatically mean that they consider themselves a member of the Deaf community or that they can sign.
In my case, it is true that I know some ASL - but the key word here is "some." I know enough ASL to get by, but I'm not fluent anymore. I grew up signing, but I haven't interacted with other Deaf people in such a long time that I have become super rusty. In fact, other Deaf people tend to ask me, "Are you hearing?" upon seeing my accent. I'm pretty sure that, if I lived among Deaf people again, I would regain fluency, but I'm just not at that point right now.
That's another blog post for another day, though. The point here is that I did not come out of my mother's womb signing ASL fluently. I worked to learn the ASL that I do know, and I am not 100% fluent. Even if I were fluent, though, the obsessive focus on deafness and ASL is creepy.
Unfortunately, this isn't a problem that's restricted to online dating websites. I've encountered it in real life too, albeit not as frequently. Online, the solution is easy: delete the person's message. In real life, though, it's not that easy. Thankfully, there's enough awesome people in my life to outweigh the yucky creeps of the world.
Super Deaf Woman
It is the early 1990s. I am young, hyperactive, and already in love with moving images. I pop in the VHS tape and hit PLAY.
Even as a small child, I can tell that the aesthetics aren't as polished as my favorite movie at the time, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It looks as if it were filmed in a studio on videotape: the backdrops appear to be cut from construction paper, there are only a few pieces of furniture, the fluorescent light washes out everybody's features, and that faint blue tint that you see in films shot on videotape hangs over everything. But none of this matters because Super Deaf Woman's is out to save the world!
The plot revolves around the plight of people who are struggling to find a language to express themselves. There are multiple storylines, but this is the only storyline that I remember clearly today: A man fingerspells G-R-O-W to his plant in a futile attempt to make it grow. He tries over and over again, but the plant just won't grow. Never fear! Here comes Super Deaf Woman! She swoops into the frame and teaches the man how to sign "grow." He tentatively signs it and she gives him an encouraging nod. He signs it again, more fluently this time. She smiles, seeing that he has learned the sign by heart, then flies away. The man turns his full attention back to the plant and signs "grow" to it - and it immediately blossoms into a beautiful flower.
-~-~-~
People talk about how some pieces of art change them forever, how they carry art inside them for a long time. Well, Super Deaf Woman stayed inside me for a long time. She showed me how much language matters: if you have the right words, you can bring beauty to the world and/or you can cause a profound change to occur. At the same time, she showed me that ASL is a beautiful and worthy language with meaning of its own, not an inferior shadow to English. In fact, in this film, English is almost inferior to ASL. How can a fingerspelled English word like "grow" fully convey the image of a plant growing?
Personally, I also found inspiration from the simple fact that the superhero was female. In a world where most of the other superheros on TV were male, she was a strong woman, a positive role model. In a similar manner, I internalized the film's message of how men should act: instead of discounting what a woman has to say, a man should listen. (And it's okay for them to grow flowers for the sake of nothing more than bringing beauty to the world.)
I remember being a deaf child inside of a hearing world. I looked around me, and everybody that I loved was hearing. (Exception: my younger sister, who is hard of hearing.) I have heard horror stories about deaf children whose parents tell them, "You are the only one like this." Thankfully, my parents had enough foresight to let me interact with Deaf people, even though that meant traveling an hour to the nearest city so that we could converse in a language that my parents didn't speak. I count myself as very fortunate. But when I wasn't around those role models, where did I turn? Books and movies, including Super Deaf Woman.
Now, in spite of Super Deaf Woman, I did manage to internalize a lot of bullshit about the Deaf community. For example, I used to think that Gallaudet was a waste of time and money because it was "inferior" to hearing schools. Today, I see that that's not true; this notion comes from the misconception that an absence of English, an absence of hearing, automatically signifies inferiority.
But what if I had not had access to positive portrayals of deafness like Super Deaf Woman? I shudder to imagine how much more bullshit I would have managed to internalize. I feel for the countless children out there who, in the absence of positive deaf role models, think that being deaf is somehow wrong and deficient and makes them less worthy of respect than their hearing counterparts. That's just one of many reasons why media and the representation of minorities matters to me: Children and grown-ups alike internalize the roles of minorities in the media that they consume. What if my first image of a deaf person had been negative?
One final thing: Today, I can't remember the name of this video. I've been searching for it for years to no avail. Do any of you know what I'm talking about? If you do, please let me know!
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait indeed
As I explained in a prior entry, I am having trouble reconciling Diane Arbus's body of work with my ethics. So I've been consuming as much information about her as I possibly can. Ergo, I rented Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.
Quick description of my expectations: I figured that the film was not going to be accurate - very few biopics are. I thought that, at the very least, the film would be an entertaining perspective on Arbus's life - and that I'd get to see how the Rolleiflex camera works.
Well, as it turns out, I was wrong on both counts.
Disclaimer: Spoilers lie below.
[Visual description: Nicole Kidman, a white woman with blue eyes and brown hair, wears an old-fashioned blue dress and a Rolleiflex camera. She gazes up at the viewer.]
Like Secretary, which was also directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, Fur starts with a single visually arresting scene from the story's end, then cuts back to the beginning and gradually winds its way to the ending. In this case: Diane Arbus enters a nudist camp with a camera and, just as she is about to disrobe, the screen cuts to black and an intertitle reads: "Three Months Earlier."
Things start out middlingly enough. One by one, a different component of Diane's life is introduced. Her parents work in the fur industry, her husband is a fashion photographer, and she is an unhappy housewife who has no purpose in life. Okay, these details are from real life, kind of. Her parents were furriers. She worked with her husband on fashion photography, but in the film, her role is minimized in an offensive way: she is an "assistant" whose only apparent job is to bring the models tea and cookies and occasionally tell her husband, "Yeah, that photo looks great." In real life, she was the freakin' art director of the Arbus studio. As for the depression, Diane had a history of depressive episodes, but it seems to me as if they were more biological than situational - she wasn't just an "unhappy housewife," she had a mental illness.
So already the truth has been stretched a little bit in troubling ways. Nonetheless, we gradually gain sympathy for Diane, albeit as a fairly generic character that we've already seen a million times. It's a retread for Nicole Kidman because she's played this exact same character in films like The Hours and it's a retread for the director and screenwriter because the main character in Secretary is very similar.
But then the film takes a sudden sharp turn and stops representing reality altogether. By the way, Diane likes to flash her neighbors! Then, BAM, the male lead is introduced!: a fictional character named Lionel who is covered from head to toe in hair.
From here on, Diane Arbus's biography goes out of the window and a fictional story, written by somebody who apparently has a Chewbacca fetish, takes over.
[Visual description: A man with hair on virtually every visible part of his face and long, wavy hair on top of his head wears a navy-blue jacket, black gloves, and a ring with a large red stone. In the few patches of skin that we can see, he is white. He holds a clear teacup with a fancy silver base and handle. Out of focus, a white woman with a blue dress is at the right of the frame. The subtitles say: "How could you tell?"]
Let me emphasize one thing: Lionel did not exist in real life. He is 100% fiction. This is a film that is supposed to give us some insight into an actual artist that lived in the 20th century. Yet the most important character in this film, second only perhaps to Diane Arbus herself, never actually existed. Plus, he's her romantic interest. Diane must be rolling over in her grave now.
Back to the film. Lionel gradually seduces Diane. Again, the parallels to Secretary are quite strong. So strong, in fact, that I had to make sure that I was still watching Fur and that I hadn't accidentally switched to Secretary. Lionel asks a series of provocative questions in a flirtatious tone. Personally, if somebody had asked me these questions, I would have been very unsettled and offended, but Diane flirts right back and admits to being a naughty little girl who harbors a deep desire to be an unbridled exhibitionist.
As the film progresses, Diane spends less time with Mr. Arbus and her two daughters and begins to spend more time with Lionel. Life goes on more or less as it did before: Diane's absences are tolerated without a word and the only move that Mr. Arbus makes is to grow a beard in an apparent attempt to recapture his wife's attention from her hairy lover.
In the meantime, Lionel introduces Diane to a scandalous underworld: Midgets are singing and playing piano! That woman without arms is playing the cello with her feet! That transsexual is putting on makeup before her show! (Sidenote: the transsexual woman is played by a man and, in the credits, the character is named "transvestite." Way to show that trans people are human beings and not just character types or plot devices!) The point of the view of the whole film is from a nauseatingly privileged "normal" person - look, people on the bus are staring at us! What a wild and thrilling experience!
Gradually, Diane is accepted into Lionel's circle of friends as an honorary "freak." Throughout her oh-so-marvelous journey, Diane looks upon Lionel's world in absolute rapture - but we only see her use her camera once or twice throughout the entire film. In fact, Lionel frequently urges her to not carry the camera with her. Unlike the actual artist, this character is not an active agent who transforms the world around her into photographs but is a mere spectator who is content to look mutely around herself in wonder. When she speaks, it is either to flirt with Lionel or to tell him more about her background as a child of a wealthy family. In real life, Diane had a reputation for being sharply intelligent and was praised for having a unique eye. This character possesses neither of those characteristics.
Eventually, the tentative peace between Mr. and Mrs. Arbus shatters. From there on, the film further dissolves in a series of awkward metaphors.
It rather suddenly turns out that Lionel is going to die in a matter of months due to some unspecified lung condition. Logically, Diane shaves off all of Lionel's hair (at his request) so that he can "swim further." Yeah, because that totally makes sense. This is a rather thinly veiled excuse for a sex scene: make the "freak" palatable enough for "normal" audiences to feel more turned on than unnerved.
At the same time, Mr. Arbus finds Diane's countless rolls of film and develops them, then shaves off his beard when he discovers what is in the pictures in an overwrought metaphor for having given up on recapturing his wife's affection. It's a mystery that Diane managed to fill up dozens of rolls of film because, like I said, we have seen her take only one or two pictures throughout the entire film, but there you have it. Also, the photographs shown do not resemble the actual artist's work in the slightest.
That's it. Lionel, the fictional character, is dead. Mr. and Mrs. Arbus's relationship is shattered.
[Visual Description: A white woman's hand holds a scrapbook open. It is blank except for a small placard that says: "Plate Two: 'Untitled' By Diane Arbus."]
But here comes the denouement that puts a cherry on the top of this trainwreck of a film. At a funeral party for Lionel, somebody gives Diane a thick photo album and tells her that Lionel wanted her to have it. She opens it. It is a blank photo album and all of the pages are already labelled in Lionel's handwriting: "Plate [Number], Untitled, by Diane Arbus." Then the film cuts back to the nudist camp, where Diane asks a woman if she can take her photograph. The end.
Final message: A fictional man enabled Diane Arbus to evolve and move forward as an artist.
Okay, this is super offensive. Most films about female artists explore a tired old plot: "How did this woman overcome sexism to become a great artist?" [Personally, I think that asking "Why are there no great women artists?" is the wrong question - the correct question is, "Why don't we teach about the great women artists that actually did exist?" - but that's another post altogether.]
In this case? In real life, Diane Arbus was independent and needed no man. Solution: the filmmakers made up a man out of thin air to help her blossom as an artist! Ouch. Diane Arbus is rolling over in her grave right now.
But wait! Here come the end credits!
[White text on a black background. Transcript: "This film is intended as a tribute to the life of Diane Arbus and her extraordinary photographic career. Although it was inspired by the biography of Patricia Bosworth, which provided invaluable information, as indicated by the title, this film is not a historical biography. Indeed, many of the characters and all of the events, including the character of Lionel and the scenes involving members of Diane's family, are fictional."]
A tribute? Okay, Diane Arbus isn't just rolling over in her grave right now - she has actually broken free from her coffin and is currently hitchhiking to LA, hungry for the filmmakers' blood.
Let me reiterate: this film bears no relationship at all to the actual artist. If it had been presented as an original story with a lead character named Jane Smith, I highly doubt that anybody, even the most hardcore Arbus fan, would have been able to look at it and say, "Hey, that kind of reminds me of that photographer Diane Arbus." If anything, people would have been reminded of Secretary because Fur is more than a spiritual sequel - it's a near copy in some parts.
The fact that the team behind Fur felt the need to piggyback the film to the actual figure of Diane Arbus is incomprehensible. Honestly, it would have been better if it hadn't been. It wouldn't have helped much - the film is standard kitschy melodrama that's trying too hard to present an "edgy" story that, in reality, we've seen a million times. But at least it wouldn't have been an offensive affront on an actual woman's life.
Ashley Fiolek: a deaf motocross racer
I usually dislike any sport that does not take place on snow or ice, but the summer X games are an exception. I've been watching it all weekend, especially the skateboarding and BMX events.
Today, I watched the final womens motocross race. I was about to fast-forward through it - I dislike motocross and I dislike racing, so it's not a great combo. But then I noticed that someone was signing, so I hit "play."
Turns out that the woman who was signing is named Ashley Fiolek. She is a deaf 19-year old who has won gold in the past. The segment that I'd seen was one of those special segments where they take a prominent athlete - usually somebody who is looking to repeat a previous victory - and interview her or him. In this case, they asked Ashley how she got involved in motocross and so forth. She communicates in ASL and uses an interpreter. (According to her bio on Wikipedia, she actually went to a deaf school as a child.)
It was really interesting for me to see how the producers of the interview handled her. They did mention that Ashley had managed to "overcome" her deafness, which is a really annoying trope. But the invocation of this trope was extremely low, especially if one compares how the media handles somebody like Amy Winters, a runner who has a prosthetic leg. Actually, I think the narrator only said the word "overcome" once when discussing Ashley.
Instead, they emphasized the fact that she couldn't hear her dirtbike and instead relied on her sense of touch. Now, I don't know much about motocross, but I was puzzled. I thought to myself, "Isn't that what everyone does?" I'm still a little puzzled, honestly, as to how hearing could possibly be an advantage in a motocross race.
In fact, Ashley said that she saw her deafness as an asset because it enabled her to focus better on her race. I had to smile - I've said the exact same thing before. (Okay, it was about an academic competition, not a motocross race, but still.) It was awesome to see somebody going on television and saying that deafness is a positive quality, not just a neutral quality.
Overall, I thought it was a nice representation of a deaf female athlete with a minimum of tokenization. Personally, most of the athletes that I admire happen to be women (like the snowboarder Hannah Teter), but female athletes are far from being given equal respect as male athletes. This is especially noticable at the X games. Plus, Ashley is deaf. So it's nice for me to see this positive portrayal of a strong deaf woman that doesn't invite pity.
Also, remember how I said I dislike racing events? Well... I'm just gonna say this: Check out the race if you can because it's actually pretty exciting.
Growing Up On the Internet
When I explain the role that the Internet played in my life, I usually say, "The first online community that I ever joined was a Lord of the Rings messageboard, even though I've never liked Tolkien in my life." Contradictory, right? Well, let me explain.
In middle school, everybody I knew suddenly became absolutely obsessed with the first Lord of the Rings movie. For months on end, it was the only topic of conversation, and I do mean the only topic. As annoying as this would have been under normal circumstances, it was worse for me because I couldn't participate in any of the discussions: the movie wasn't subtitled, so I couldn't go watch it. I've described in a previous entry how miserable I was throughout this whole affair.
Since I couldn't watch the movie, I tried another angle: reading the series. I figured, "I love to read. All my friends are talking about the movie based upon this series. I'll read it so that I can at least know who all these elves or dwarves or whatever are." Well, as it turned out, those books were just too damn boring! Obviously, the only logical conclusion was that the movie must have been a million times more exciting than the books.
Thanks to this failed effort, I continued to feel like an outsider. But one day, everything changed when one of my best friends joined a Lord of the Rings messageboard and invited everybody else to do so as well.
[Visual description: A messageboard with a blue background. Categories: General, The Books, The Movies. Red folders are depicted next to the subcategories.]
It was a tiny messageboard with approximately 75 registered users total. The whole atmosphere was super laid back - people liked Lord of the Rings, but they weren't rabid fans by any means. Most people were there to chill and hang out. We talked about random things, like how cool the marquee HTML tag was or how hot Orlando Bloom was as Legolas. In short, it was the perfect place for a kid who wanted some way, no matter how superficial, to take part in this topic of discussion that had dominated every aspect of his friends' lives for the past few months. But, as it turned out, it was more than that.
I continued to frequent this messageboard and other Tolkien-centric messageboards even after my friends finally tired of Lord of the Rings and moved onto other things. Why? One very simple reason: At long last, I had finally found a place where communication wasn't a total chore!
Here's the thing about a lot of Hearing people, especially when you're going to a middle school full of them. They have a tendency to congregate in large groups where it becomes difficult to lipread anybody - worse, they won't repeat anything because "it's not important."
On the Internet, that never was the case: someone typed something and I instantly understood what they said. Conversely, people didn't have to ask me to repeat myself a million times because it didn't matter how well I spoke: I typed something, they understood it.
And that is that the story of how I ended up making my first online friends on a Lord of the Rings messageboard even though I've never liked Lord of the Rings.