Sacha Jones's Blog, page 4

Woman on a wire

Enough said.

Almost.

A quick apology to my younger son - and possibly all the sons - for using the Zeke filter; apparently it's the height of uncool. But I am out on a limb here, walking on a wire in boots and it's not easy to know how to achieve the right look and perfect balance when you're out on a wire in boots, especially when you're a woman. Wait, the explanation for that sweeping statement about it being harder for women follows.

A while back I searched images for 'analyst' wanting to develop an analysty logo for a new project I'm working on and every single person featured in the numerous images offered was a generic man in form and attire, which is why my 'woman' on a wire looks, shall we say, a little metro-sexual (if we can still use that slightly outmoded term), wearing a kick-out skirt over trousers, which is not an outfit I'd ever recommend or wear, nor is it an outfit suggestive of a particularly sharp analytical (or artistic) mind, especially the eyelashes, which kind of got away from me, possibly due to a subconscious menopausal hankering for the return of my younger lashes.

Though I do quite like 'her' all the same. Sometimes you can like people more for their flaws than their strengths, so the eyelashes that could be mistaken for eye fingers are kind of growing on me (if only they would!). And I think she's gutsy too for walking out on a wire in knee-high boots. I bet that Frenchman who needs a bloody great pole for balance (in addition to his other, rather shorter pole) when he walks out on a wire, couldn't do it in boots. In fact I have it on good authority that he wears special wire-walking shoes. Hmph! Men. They're always getting a leg up, or at least a shoe up.

Speaking of the French, I was reading earlier this morning about this remarkable French woman who had her head removed for advancing ideas of equality between people of all races and genders, as well as capital tax, social welfare and various other political reforms that came to pass eventually in some degree, if they are yet to be realised in full anywhere, two-hundred-plus years after she advanced them in 1791. Off with her head! Nasty woman.

So inspired by this 'nasty woman', who wrote possibly the first feminist treatise, which has been all but lost to history till quite recently, I decided this morning to add an 'e' to my 'overanalyst', which makes no difference to the spellchecker that rejects the word either way, and probably makes no difference to anything else, though it does change the pronunciation of the final syllable from list to leest, which I prefer, for my own reasons that are difficult to explain in brief, and we've run out of time.

Indeed I am partly calling myself an overanalyste in an attempt to recognise a slight personal flaw and work through that flaw by thinking and writing more concisely, as if I were indeed walking on a wire, without a pole of any length, or special shoes to help me, and having to focus on just one thing: namely, not falling. And getting to the other side. And wondering if I should have tied my hair up in a ponytail to look less like a transvestite and reduce wind resistance. So three things. And...   

Kave men

Enough said. 

Googling myself

Now normally I'm FAR too busy to waste time googling myself, but...


this afternoon, after a virtuous morning, I happened to have a spare moment or two and decided to treat myself to myself, as it were, and found this little line-up of ladies, one of whom, I won't say which (she's a different colour) is not me.

I think possibly the confusion came in because this other Sacha Jones has a fringe, though you can't necessarily see it in this picture, and I searched for my name with fringe, as you can see, even though in one of the pictures that is me I don't have a fringe. Confusing. But life can be confusing. 

Anyway, I just thought I'd explain that, as far as possible, for the record.

As you were.

Jane: In no man's shadow

If you didn't see Jane, the 2017 documentary film on Jane Goodall's pioneering research on chimpanzees at the cinema, then do not fret, because Netflix have picked it up. And it's a must see, a film for our times indeed , though the footage for much of it, previously unseen, was taken in 1965.

Jane's research was the first to challenge the notion that only man (men) possess the capacity for rational thought, by documenting  chimpanzees fashioning tools to procure food.

Jane discovered this by immersing herself in the environment of the chimpanzees in the wild and observing them closely and patiently, the first human to take that much trouble and to be fearless and humble enough to open her mind to the possibility that these animals might be able to teach us something about ourselves, and in the process to check our unfettered arrogance.

After many years of observing the same community of chimpanzees living in harmony with each other and their environment, Jane observed something less well publicised at the time about how this male-dominated species live. When the matriarch of the extended family finally died, her grown son in his grief stopped eating and within three weeks also died, and a part of the extended family broke away from the group, and were then hunted down and viciously killed for their defection.

So, it seems, chimp tribes are ostensibly led by a dominant male, but it is the strongest female that binds them together, apparently with something more meaningful than the fear-based dominance that typifies male power in all the primates, a quieter, more compassionate strength that keeps the males from killing each other and from losing the will to live.

We can learn from this.   

Tiny diplomat

A mighty miniature MsFrom Last Blood to First Baby, which is also a first blood situation, if not THE first blood situation, never mind the movie.

I don't think this UN ID for the youngest diplomat ever is real, as in actually required for access to the UN, the 'Ms' suggests something other than official bureaucratic business at work (alas), but that matters not.

For Ms Neve Te Aroha, New Zealand's first First Baby born while her mother was the Prime Minister, is also the first baby to attend the UN and with both of her parents, her mother addressing the general assembly and her father as her primary caregiver, and that shit couldn't be more REAL.

It is also no doubt working some international diplomacy of revolutionary proportions in a less than united world that has for so long justified the exclusion of women from the corridors of political power, decision making and diplomacy on the basis of our designated separate (and lesser) role as mothers and primary caregivers of children.

But that undiplomatic, divide and conquer, control and corrupt approach hasn't worked out too well for the world. On the contrary, while women have made babies in the political wilderness behind doors that only opened for men, those men have made wars and laws that have brought misery and fear to the lives of the majority of those babies, female and male alike.

And so that misery making will continue if those doors are not opened widely to women and their babies so that men, as well as women, but especially men, can be reminded where the first, and last, blood really comes from.

It's a girl! 

The First Mum's speech to the UN General Assembly      

Last Blood

Today a strange man I just met asked when my last period was. Quite forward he was. I replied anyway, these are forward times and you’ve got to keep up with them or drown. Go with the flow. "I’m on it. It’s now. It’s happening, as we speak", I said, in a challenging tone, matching his forwardness and raising it some. If you can’t beat ‘em... 
His ruddy, bull-frog face stiffened momentarily before the professional behind the frog re-emerged to ask: ‘How many days ago did it start?’ A forward frog indeed. I couldn’t remember precisely.  
He was, of course, a doctor with a professional interest in my blood work, we didn’t just meet on the street or over coffee. No. He was about to get down deep and dirty with my blood, as he duly informed me, not in so many words. He intimated that it would be in his hands – I didn’t look – that I was about to put my bleeding uterus and vagina.
Prior to this last-minute pre-surgical consultation out of which I could not get without unwinding at least five months of preparation and another year of procrastination before that, I had been led to believe the operation would be performed by a female doctor by the name of Abir. 
Now this frogman stood, well sat, in her place. I can’t recall his name, given quickly, and no explanation for this substitution, other than a small box at the bottom of a long form to be checked by me that waved my right to elect a specific doctor or even species of doctor to perform my procedure. I checked it, but with a perceptible grumble.
Why do men get into gynaecology?  My mind could not help but wonder and the answers it came up with as I signed my life away did not reassure. Priests and choir boys came to mind and then frogs, I thought, might have additional motives. Perhaps a spell has been cast that only baptism by vaginal blood could undo and prince he can become once more. Stranger things have happened. The fact that I would be asleep during the procedure only added to my concerns. The strangest things happen while we’re asleep and don’t I know it.
But what choice did I have? You don’t want to be a prude. So a frog is replacing a woman as my vaginal surgeon, what’s your problem bitch? It happens every day. They came out of us, they spend most of their life wanting to go back in and resenting us for it. Live with it. I also used to collect tadpoles as a child, so I suppose I owe a frog or two. Perhaps he’s come to collect on the debt. 
He hopped away, left me to change into my sexy backless hospital smock and shower cap and to think, always to think, about the man-woman thing and how this situation kind of symbolises the complex divide between us. Here this would-be man was telling me he was going to stick his froggy hand things up inside me and be paid handsomely for it while I am there, the last to know, carrying the burden of not showing prudish concern while having to sign the check for part of it, all the while far from assured that my insides are in safe hands.
Admittedly my insides are all but useless to me now so I guess a frog might as well get something out of them if he can. In fact he asked if I wanted the removed tissue returned. No, thank you. You keep it, I said. You might be able to clone it to make another whole woman of your own to do what you want with then and leave the rest of us alone. I didn’t say that last bit. But who keeps their tissue? Jesus, I’ve got enough junk in the attic as it is.  
Reminded me of comedian Bill Burr’s bit on mothering, saying that if you can do it in your pyjamas it’s not work.  This guy is sticking his hands up my vag to collect my tissue all but against my will, quite possibly with a stiffy hidden under his smock that is not unlike bed wear, and we call that work, no problem. Moreover Bill, just btw, you can give a blow job in your pyjamas, and that is definitely work, the clue’s in the name. 
Ribbit. Ribbit.
Post-op update: Alive. All but intact. Not yet hopping about. Taking that as a good sign. Frogman wasn’t there when I woke up so no update on whether he emerged in human form or still hybrid. Stay tuned.
Apparently he is quite the expert. They have to say that. 

Thinking about Aretha

You really can't pay tribute to a singer like Aretha Franklin in pictures. Pictures might speak a thousand words but they can't sing a single note. Although you can almost hear Aretha in this picture, in the smile squeezed into her tight shut eyes as she opens her mouth to release a note of song so joyous that it speaks a thousand smiles and all who hear it are stunned speechless by the wonder of such a smooth smiling soulful sister sound.

Clearly words are inadequate to the task of tribute too, and maybe that's how it should be.

As for the furore over her funeral service  which by most accounts failed to pay fitting tribute to the Queen of Soul, partly because men hogged the mic and did not show the RESPECT Aretha commanded and demanded from men on behalf of women, that is another example of how we struggle to pay tribute to such a woman. Although there we might aspire to do better. And so we will.

RIP Aretha, long live the Queen!




 

The perfect norm (for National Poetry Day)

The perfect norm
tofu and marshmallow
                              are indistinguishable
in the regurgitation
                frothy and cream white
                                                 like teeth
        dissolved in the dream
                                   of the clean
                 good life
like cloud
            before it darkens
                                     portending storm
each becomes the other
                                           the perfect norm
      good and bad 
                              undone
                                       in my vegan vomit
                                                                       all is one
                                                                                                                                     
                                                             

"Stewbridge" the consummate comedy couple (and me)

I'm not normally into couples...

Stewbridge"Brangelina" never passed my lips (either set), nor did "Posh and Becks" ever push my buttons -- and not for want of trying on their parts, I can assure you. Oh yes. But threesomes have never really been my thing. Call me old-fashioned.

But then I met (in print) Stewart Lee  and Bridget Christie -- or "Stewbridge", as they might be called if they were A-list actors, sportspeople or singing fashion designers, rather than alternative Aish-list comedian writers -- and all that changed...

Unfortunately, Stewbridge is quite exclusive and reclusive, not even appearing as a twosome in public; the above photo-shopped image being the closest they get to public coupledom, which is a shame -- for me -- and for US, as I really think we could have had some wholesome threesome fun, us being comedians and all.

Still, it was kind of like we were all three together getting off on each other's wits, instead of tits, when I read recently (better late than never) their comedy memoirs back to back and laughed loud --especially with Bridget. They are yet to read my funny memoir, but it's only a matter of time. I am not going anywhere.

I had previously met Bridget, watching her Netflix special "Stand Up for Her" in 2017 -- the first comedy Netflix special by a British woman -- and blogging about it 
But it is Bridget's A Book For Her that shows us, like no other comedian has done, I think, what a genuine feminist laughs like, mingling substantive feminist insights and politics into a properly funny narrative and comedic life. Stew is a lucky man.

And I am a lucky woman to have found such a kindred comic spirit at a time when the women in my local community of new and pro comedians, most of whom call themselves feminists, have expressed their opposition to my discrimination complaint with an aggression and condescension far outstripping that expressed by the men in that community. Interestingly, Bridget says her fiercest public critics have been women.

Being a funny feminist is not for the fainthearted, indeed, but Bridget shows us that it can, and must, be done. And it will be.

“There is something unique about the social determination to keep women from being publicly funny. The persistence of all-male comedy panels, the comperes who introduce female comedians as if they’re something between a freak show and a child’s tap dance... this is distinct from what a female scientist might experience. Standup is an act of profound self-exposure, and laughter is the ultimate gesture of acceptance: I think it’s actually easier for society to concede that a woman might be good at physics than it is to countenance the sight of her being unguarded and shameless, and to approve of that.”Zoe Williams, July 20, 2015
Guardianreview of Bridget Christie’s A Book for Her


   

Painfully Rich

So we all know - and don't really believe - that being rich doesn't make you happy, unless, that is, we have been stinking, filthy, "painfully rich" as the condition is described by the the author of the book on the Getty family, on which the 2017 film All the Money in the World is partly based. Only then, it would seem, do we know, especially if we are the heirs to such painful riches, as J.Paul Getty's children and grandchildren were.

But now, with the production at last of this painfully real 'truth inspired' film of the 1973 kidnapping of one of Getty's grandchildren, we, the not painfully stinking, can finally see for ourselves just what BIG money can do to a man and his family.

And so I urge all to see this film, as I have just done, for that reason if no other. Although you won't only come away thinking how much better you feel about not being rich. For the story of how the grandfather, at the time the richest man in the world, refused to pay the ransom money for the safe return of his grandson, and as a result the grandson was kept in near squalor and fear for his life for five months and eventually had his right ear cut off, an ordeal that he never recovered from psychologically and died prematurely no doubt partly as a result of, will also shock you to the core, as seeing is believing - almost - to learn just how ruthlessly arrogant and heartless an insanely money-obsessed man can actually be, as if we needed any more evidence of this, which we don't really.

But the film is also illuminating on a gender front, as the mother of the kidnapped boy, who was just 16 at the time, fights such a valiant and tireless battle against this ruthlessness on behalf of her son, having asked Getty for no money to raise her three children when she was divorced from her husband, Paul Getty Jr, that her lack of greed, humanity and strength, which in the end sees her son finally returned to her, albeit scarred for life, provides a salient and reassuring counter to the man's corrupt, callous heart.

I feel reassured at least. And I wonder how many gender stories of this sort remain out there still untold, it took long enough to tell this one, though it is totally made for film.

When Getty senior died he left not one penny in his will for the kidnapped grandson (though he himself had inherited a business worth 10 million from his father). What a fucking arsehole, even if, in theory at least, he might have been doing the boy a favour. Alas, it was too late for that.