Gina Harris's Blog, page 120

Band Review: Dreamer & Son

Dreamer & Son is a Boston-based band that describes themselves as nostalgic dream-rock.
While I am not sure I recognize any elements of nostalgia, I cannot deny a dream-like quality to their music. This is especially true on "Cheat", their single released in February. Using hints of echoes and a soft touch on the instrumentation, the overall mood can well be described as dreamy. The intro to "Tension" approaches it differently, but still has similar results. There are lovely musical accents on "Sweep".
I do find Dreamer & Son difficult to categorize, so perhaps new vocabulary is a reasonable response. In any event, I enjoyed listening. They make a good contribution.
http://www.dreamerandson.com/
https://www.facebook.com/dreamerandson/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsi5SiSQk9EmdA3X3IkyuFQ
https://twitter.com/dreamerandson

Assignments again

As I work on this list of things I need to do, I never really thought that there would never be any other steps. Often my big step is reading more, but sometimes as the knowledge accumulates, a task of some kind takes form.
This was somewhat easier with one of the more recent books.
Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women by Renee Engeln, Harper Collins 2017.
The currency of it is really refreshing; I don't read books in their publication year that often. Even though a lot of the concepts aren't completely unfamiliar, some of the examples are really recent and fresh in memory, which is kind of cool.
Engeln is aware of the general familiarity, and it influenced the book in her desire to not simply do more hand-wringing. There is information on techniques that are working better, from something as simple as aerobics instructors focusing on strength and function instead of appearance when they are leading their classes.
There are also some interesting ideas from research by Eric Stice at the Oregon Research Institute on intervening with cognitive dissonance. In an attempt to help someone else struggling with body image, participants explain the dangers and costs and impossibility of trying to meet these ideals. That makes it harder for the participants to fall into that same thinking, because of the sense of hypocrisy.
I believe that looking out for others can do a lot to help us see ourselves more accurately, but I also know it is completely possible to somehow retain the thought that everyone is worthy of love and understanding except you. Those ideas are interesting, but not something I am working with now.
I am going to write a self-compassionate letter to my body. You can learn more about this at self-compassion.org
I will also be going through two questions: "What kind of person do you want to be?" and "How do you want this world to be different when you leave it?"
I will also be taking a beauty inventory. That means going over the time and money that I spend on beauty. Often this is a situation where someone might decide that certain practices are not worth the cost. I may decide to do a little more, just based on not doing much already.
For some of the other suggestions, I am not sure how to apply them.
·         Be gentle with yourself - I can try and remember that more. There are certainly times when I am worse than others, but I don't have a concrete idea in mind for how to achieve it. Sometimes the more abstract concepts get applied as I work on other things, so that is not a worry yet.·         Move toward thinking about your body as something that does instead of something that appears - There could be another journal session here. Actually, even just after reading I remember correcting some things my sisters were saying, because we do have some good physical abilities, regardless of size. That goes along with...·         Watch your words - I have already gotten a lot better at this.·         Mind your media - I feel like I do pretty well here. I know that a lot of it is subliminal, but I do limit my media intake and I have a lot of awareness because of what I have read.·         Vote with your wallet - An empty wallet could seem like an obstacle here, but I am generally low consumption and unaware of advertising, making me the worst person to speak via boycott. That may be an area for change, but it doesn't feel like a priority at this time.
Anyway, those are some of the things that I am working on.
There is also a vague feeling that someday a crucial step will be trying dating again, and I hope if that does arrive I can feel something more enthusiastic than "Oh, barf."

Emo update

Yesterday was so heavy that I need to not be heavy today, so I thought I would catch up on my Emo listening, where I listen to all of the bands and songs mentioned in Andy Greenwald's Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo.
For my first-time through listening, I am on Chapter 13. For finishing the entire book, there are 39 bands left, including Judas Priest who is playing right now. No, they are not emo, but I always used to think "Highway to Hell" was them; it's AC/DC. I have heard their song "You've Got Another Thing Coming", but I never thought much about whom it was by. I am learning non-emo things too.
Once I have finished those, I will go through the twelve bands listed in an Alternative Press article, as well as listening to Ash and The Saddest Landscape. They have come up with some of the other bands, and I'm not sure how relevant they are, but I like to be thorough.
At some point I will also be listening to a bunch of bands who at one point were very important to my various teen friends. Some of them don't seem that important anymore, and I don't know if that's because they have broken up, or their fans aged out of freaking out over bands, or if some of the fans have aged out of Twitter. It's probably a combination. It was just that I noticed a level of passion that seemed similar to how the fans of the emo bands felt.
The other thing is that I have been keeping a tally of the bands that I think I like, and I will listen to them again to see if I want to do a full review. That list is currently 22 bands long (mostly emo, but also Nelly and The Hives), so that would almost double my recommended list.
On the other side, for posting daily songs from what I have already listened to, I am working on Chapters 9 and 10. I think it will go through to almost the end of summer, and then I will probably have about two months' worth of songs from reviewed bands.
Chapter 8 took the longest to get through, both on the original listen and for doing daily songs. That is because it was in Chapter 8 that Greenwald briefly mentions Deep Elm's series The Emo Diaries and Drive-Thru's Welcome to the Familysamplers. I doubt Greenwald has listened to them all, but I have.
In general I found Deep Elm's offerings more interesting. There was definitely more variety. Drive-Thru repeated bands a lot, whereas it appears that Deep Elm didn't need to. That being said, Drive-Thru had Finch, New Found Glory, Allister, Something Corporate, and The Starting Line, which is not a bad roster.
Still, Emo Diaries 10: The Hope I Hide Inside was pretty good. I listened to it again. That being said, it was sandwiched between the two worst ones, following Sad Songs Remind Me and followed by Taking Back What's Ours. It's weird that a genre based so much on emotional openness over musical skill could produce such uneven results.
The worst obstacle was knowing I would need to delve into Dashboard Confessional and just dreading it. Early mentions would involve some listening, but then Chapter 12 is such a love song to Chris Carrabba that it was going to take more. I finally decided to methodically go through each album from Further Seems Forever (Carrabba's other band) and Dashboard Confessional chronologically, doing one a day. I survived, but I did start wondering if he ever got into some kind of therapy. He's touring again, so it would be interesting if he could do that without being so anguished.
The most annoying thing is that delving deeper I am more aware when Greenwald misses something, and some of this is really interesting. I wish there was a better book.
Maybe I will write it.

Weak

I have gone through rough periods in my life before where I was stripped of things I had taken for granted.
Once upon a time I had always been able to earn decent money. I was never rich, but I could do things I liked, and it allowed me to help other people. Then I lost my job, and had a really hard time finding a new one. Even once I did, I never really regained my old footing. Things have never been financially comfortable since. A lot of reexamination went along with that.
Some time before that, I fell into a deep well of pain. I had been carrying it around with me, and I thought I was successfully holding it at bay, until I wasn't anymore. That cheerful disposition that had been the core of my personality was gone for a long time. What came back was worth having, but the struggle in between was really hard.
It appears to be time for another round of loss.
When I first got back from Italy - especially after the trip home - I was really tired, and having a hard time shaking it off. I attributed that to the extra strain of looking out for Mom under unusual circumstances, without any real breaks. I figured it would just take some time to catch up.
I can go for longer than three hours now, but "normal" does not seem to be in sight. And normal for me always meant strong.
It was one of the consolations for being fat, that at least that solidity came with some toughness. People have called me a rock. I have thought of myself as a workhorse. Maybe those aren't the qualities that make you the heroine in a romantic comedy, but they were practical assets and they would come in really handy in times like these.
I am always so tired and low now.
There is an emotional toll to being a caretaker that I haven't been giving enough credit. I mean, I've heard that it's hard, and known that it's hard, but I am only starting to realize how much it is draining me, and how much I am not overcoming it.
There are so many things that I should be doing to try and bring in some money, because I am out. There are also so many things I should be doing to provide enrichment for my mother and make sure she has good quality of life. There is all of this fear and this grief and they drain, but then there comes the sense of guilt and lack of accomplishment too.
As I recognize it, I am trying to honor it. Okay, I am only getting about a fifth of the things that I think I should do done; can I give myself credit for that? Maybe, but the mortgage payment is still due in five days and I don't have it.
That may be going about it the wrong way; in my previous examples I don't think I really learned anything from the experiences until it was all hindsight. Perhaps I should just struggle and keep beating up on myself now, as if I had never learned anything from struggling before, but it would take so much effort.
So it's just limbo - an uncomfortable, miserable limbo - but something has to happen sooner or later, and even terrible changes could remove some burdens, maybe. It's a rough spot to be in.
And the only smile in all of it is a sardonic one at how unfair it is that I should be feeling so delicate without at least having turned slender and pretty.

Band Review: Jaiz

Jaiz is the hip hop persona of Jeremy Gentile.
His most traditional hip hop track is probably "Attention Whore". Other tracks are frequently driven more by melody than beat. "My Brother" is more sung than spoken, though there is more traditional rapping in the bridge. That might be a nice change for hip hop fans who are looking for something different.
The best track may be "Break Free", featuring Ashleigh Munn, but overall the music did not make a strong impression.
http://jaizmusic.com/
https://soundcloud.com/JaizMusic
https://www.reverbnation.com/jaiz
https://twitter.com/JaizMusic

Band Review: Scarlet Kill

When you first go to Scarlet Kill's main page, there are three videos, one of which ("My Dear") shows the lead singer with his face covered in blood. Between that and the name I assumed that it would be some sort of metal or hard core band.
Instead, the video for "My Dear" follows the crash that ends the video for "Don't Wake Up", where a young couple had been driving along blissfully right up until the blaze of lights and shattering glass.
That immediately reminded me of Brand New's video for "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows", but also many '60s ballads of young love being cut short by death. Those seemingly disparate musical moments have intersected before, like when Pearl Jam covered "Last Kiss".
Scarlett Kill falls a little closer to the 60s sound, though it does not appear that all of their songs have fatal themes. It still tends to be more melodic and earnest than punk (without sounding quite emo, either).  Bands they cover include Ed Sheeran, Goo Goo Dolls, and Green Day, so still going back and forth between sentimental and punk.
Songs are well performed and the band (composed of friends and brothers) appears to be having a good time. They may still need to dig a little deeper to find their own unique sound.
http://scarletkill.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ScarletKill
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg2sQ8cENGhA3AiKFLN2bCw
https://twitter.com/scarletkill

Representation

Recently the Decider polled LGBTQ entertainment professionals to create a list of the 50 Most Important LGBTQ TV Characters of All-Time. Decider staffer Brett White tweeted his own top 25, which has helpfully been gathered as a moment:
https://twitter.com/i/moments/872560796257189939
http://decider.com/2017/06/07/deciders-50-most-important-lgbtq-tv-characters-of-all-time/
Brett's list included guest characters, and he referenced Jean from the "Isn't It Romantic" episode of The Golden Girls. That is an excellent episode.
I never saw it back then (1986), but I have seen it many times now. They do a beautiful job of handling the issue sensitively and balancing it with humor and playing to the characters' strengths. Someone being homosexual was often a punch line back then, in general and even sometimes on The Golden Girls, but not that episode.
(When I watch "Sick and Tired" where they address Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and think maybe they shouldn't have bothered trying to address special issues ever, "Isn't It Romantic" and "Have Yourself A Very Little Christmas" remind me that it can be done.)
It started me thinking about when I had first seen LGBT characters on television. It was the "Big Disease With a Little Name" episode of 21 Jump Street (1988).
I have only seen it once, but I remembered it as being well done. Hanson's assignment was to protect a teen with hemophilia who had contracted AIDS and who people did not want at school because of their fear of the disease. Naturally, other students assumed Harley was gay, and so that when Hanson was hanging out with Harley that they were dating, and you saw a lot of prejudice. Later we learned that Harley was gay; his parents made him blame it on hemophilia because they wanted to avoid the judgment that came with that. (That didn't really pan out.)
Looking back I am sure that there were things that weren't portrayed accurately. Harley died during the episode, not long after he had been attending school and riding his motorcycle. I'm just not sure it would have happened that fast. At the same time, the treatment that he faced (surely inspired by Ryan White), the fear to be open about his sexuality, Hanson's reluctance to drink from an unopened milk carton that Harley had touched (and how much that hurt Harley), and Harley thinking about killing himself instead of letting the disease take its course all felt pretty real. In the last scene, when Harley's mother called Hanson to tell him that Harley had died, and that Harley had said to tell him it was okay about the milk, that was pretty devastating.
I started wondering if other people had remembered it and been affected. I did find one post on it, but the writer spent a lot of time on the prejudice people with hemophilia face. A commenter asked whether she'd missed that he was gay, and the writer was really mad about that. She thought they took the easy way out.
https://rubyslife.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/21-jump-street-aids-episode-rant/
I disagree with her characterization of it as the easy way out, but it only reinforces the point about representation. It had meant something to her to see parts of her struggle there, and then it felt like they took it away. It has become somewhat easier for LGBTQ people to find their stories, but it's still not that easy. I left off the IA because there is not much representation for them at all. That doesn't mean that if you are straight but have a dangerous disease or disability that the straightness is enough to feel included.
That goes back to what I wrote yesterday about needing many different movies with many different stories being told. It's important for us to see stories that are not like ours to have empathy, but it is also important to see stories that are like ours to know that we are not alone. It's not even necessarily representation for a small group, because what if there are lots of people who have the same struggle but they are all scared to talk about it? Or can't get anyone to listen?
Let me take one more side trip, and then I am going to circle back to Monday's post too, with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Recently on The Talk they were talking about Shonda Rhimes, regarding her recent weight loss and her saying she was invisible before.
http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2017/06/28/scandal-creator-shonda-rhimes-says-no-one-saw-her-as-a-person-until-after-she-lost-weight/
Guest host Carnie Wilson kind of contradicted her. Even though she admitted that people treat you differently when you are fat, Carnie said she has always had boyfriends and men interested in her. It kind of seemed that she wanted to make sure that was known. And yes, that is true, there are men who don't worry about that, or like it, or are at least willing to consider it, though certainly having a famous parent and some amount of fame helps.
Back to the ride. I am a straight white woman, and I am also fat. Fat women are used as a punch line a lot. The original version has a fat woman being auctioned off. Although the more conventionally attractive women are scared or sad, the fat women appears to be good with it. Still, none of the pirates want to bid on her, so when the other women are running away from pirates she is chasing one who is scared of her.
That was just one more reminder that I could never be sexually desirable. Plenty of other entertainment messages backed that up, so I closed myself off to that. It was not always effective, and there were some ways in which it was freeing, but there was damage from it.
It was also not the only possible true story, as Carnie Wilson and others have pointed out, but it was the most common and I bought it.
What we see has an effect on what we can imagine and how we feel. We should be making room for everyone in that.
Related posts:
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/07/reading-diverse-characters-and-authors.htmlhttp://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/03/being-strong-female-character.html

Thoughts on Moana

Recently I mentioned paying a compliment late, and that directly related to Moana.
I had read many complaints about how the culture is represented in Moana, and problems people had with it. This made me reluctant to see it, but then someone I follow who has some Polynesian ancestry tweeted about it, and some of the things that she liked about it. It reminded me that there can be multiple views. Going back to yesterday, we can both appreciate and be critical of things. We should.
It was a good reminder for me that even when you are trying to do better you will make mistakes. That doesn't completely eliminate the value of the effort. There is some comfort in that.
If you are interested in more about the controversy, this is a pretty good article:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-story-moana-and-maui-holds-against-cultural-truths-180961258/
This does not include all of the complaints I have seen, and am going to go over a few. It can be okay to disagree with any of them, but it is important to listen, and not automatically discount something just because it didn't bother you.
The ocean is an important part of the movie, and it will be polluted with highly disposable merchandising from the movie. That is true. That is more about a need to step away from conspicuous consumption than any one individual movie, but Disney is a big part of that.
The movie does what it wants with what for some people is sacred religion. I had not thought of that. I think of those stories as a mythology, and one that has developed a little differently among the different islands, which I would think of as a reason for being able to assume some liberties. However, it not being sacred to me doesn't mean that it can't matter to anyone else, nor that their reverence should not matter to others. There may be a need for more sensitivity there.
These movies are always about casting off tradition and breaking with the past. There is a point to that, though that happens with European-centric characters too. Of course, in this case Moana was going against the rules of her father to go back to an even earlier tradition.
Another point was made about romance being de-emphasized with heroines of color that ended up leading to a pretty interesting discussion. Beauty standards are often held against non-white women, and it does affect who gets love scenes across a wide spectrum of entertainment. However, there has also been a tendency to counter sexist tropes by having current princesses get rescued less and be less about the prince.
That of course is a reminder that you can't represent everything in a single movie. We need to have many movies, and they need to not all be the same movie so that we can see many different things and understand many different situations better. Representation itself will be the main topic tomorrow.
For now, I have finally seen Moana and I really liked it. I ended up being more taken with the environmental aspects. If you remove the heart from great power, and the power to create, that can become both a source of violent danger and something that will slowly poison all life. It can easily happen due not to any bad intent, but simply due to a quest for glory (or money) that doesn't get well thought out. That there is hope for restoration, and how beautiful that restoration was, is again something that was a hopeful sign for me.

Disney is right to change the Pirates of the Caribbean ride

I realize this is a controversial opinion. Still, for those who haven't already heard of it and started gnashing their teeth, here is a brief overview.
http://micechat.com/165272-breaking-news-final-auction-coming-soon-pirates-caribbean-disneyland-magic-kingdom/
I had to search a little to find an article that didn't make a lot of disparaging references to Disney being politically correct. Now, some of you could very reasonably be thinking that of course Gina, with her bleeding heart liberal ways, is in support of this politically correct move. That would be an oversimplification anyway, but also this news dropped at an interesting time.
I have been reading a little about pirates. It was because of a book, Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics by Jason Porath. There were more women pirates than I suspected.
I always knew about Mary Reade and Ann Bonney - they are depicted on the walls for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride queue. They weren't even in this book. I knew about Ching Shih (who was in the book) from a Feminist Frequency video, but there were so many others I had never heard of: Alfhild, Grace O'Malley, and Sayyida al Hurra, (as well as some seafaring women who were not pirates) until I was wondering exactly how common it was to be a pirate and a woman.
That is hard to answer, because you really only get known if you were a captain, but there are estimates that it was as many as 1% during the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1650 - 1730). This at least makes the "redhead" being a pirate reasonable enough.
That led to me thinking about the question of historical accuracy in general. Even if wench auctions were common, there could be valid reasons for not depicting them in a ride that is taken for fun and does not delve into the issues of what is being represented. However, the more I read, the less likely a wench auction seems.
This is not a testament to the chastity of pirates; they used brothels all the time. Knowing how some people respond to fleet week even now, you know, I'm sure they could get company. However, it appears that they were much more likely to loot a ship than a town (completely logical), and at least during the Golden Age if the ship surrendered they just took the goods without killing anyone. If it didn't surrender and they fought they were likely to kill a lot of them, with captive most likely to be pressed into service on the ship or sold as slaves, and predominantly men. None of this is making pirates good people, but it's still not coming up with a lot of raping and treating women as chattel.
This means that if you are sold on historical accuracy the entire ride needs to be changed. If you are just sold on women being property, existing solely for the use of men, I would like to hear your cogent arguments for why Disney should continue that legacy.
Not long ago I wrote how the women of Hidden Figures should have been around in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, but there are people who would argue that the inclusion of women (especially Black women) there would have been political correctness gone wild. In actuality that would have only been honesty and giving of proper credit.
I know there are people who resent the imposition of modern values on something classic, but I'm not sure that's what this is. First of all, if something that was once widely accepted is clearly wrong, we not only can say it, we must say it. The rise of neo-Nazis and slavery apologists makes that more necessary, not less.
In addition, there are times when it seems like 1960s America was more sexist than the 18th-century New Orleans. Granted, that's not a full picture either, but it's at least worth thinking about.
Remember, the 1960s came not long after World War II. Magazines and products were trying to push women away from factories and military positions back into the home, to have no other aspirations than being good wives, mothers, and shoppers in a way that had not been the case before the war. In addition, Freudian psychologists had fled Europe and brought all of their stupid ideas about penis envy and icebox mothers here. Men from that time period were quite capable of getting it wrong. We can move past that and still have a good time, I promise.
Back to Feminist Frequency, one thing Anita Sarkeesian regularly points out is that you can appreciate something while still being critical of it. That is worth keeping in mind. I'm glad if you have had fun on the old ride, I have too.
That being said, if no longer having images of women in a coffle - some weeping, some scared - with no control over their fate unless they can escape... if that being gone ruins it for you, why is that? That's worth thinking about. If it's just a knee-jerk reaction to any change, even one for the better, that's worth thinking about too. Those thought patterns will come up again and again.
Related posts:
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/09/ableist-language.html
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2017/05/asian-pacific-american-heritage-month.html

Band Review: Russ Still & the Moonshiners

Russ Still is a musician with many years experience, currently playing with the Moonshiners. The band appears to be a family affair, with two other Stills (Cam on piano and Ben on guitar) in the mix.
They self-describe as bridging the ground between country, Southern, and classic rock, which seems fair. The first thing to come to mind is that the music is country, but you can hear other influences and it is not alienating for those who do not care for country.
Individual songs did not stick out for me, but that includes that nothing made a negative impression. I suspect that they are a band best enjoyed live; a show on a sunny day with cold drinks feels like it would be a good time.
http://russstill.com/
https://www.facebook.com/RussStillandtheMoonshiners/
https://www.youtube.com/user/therussstill
https://twitter.com/rbstill2