Displaced

Last night was the pre-opening night of the Sonoma Film Festival and the only movie slated was Favela Rising. I can’t tell if it’s an endorsement to have your movie show all by itself or a slight to have it run before the festival’s even opened. Despite the Festival’s recommendation that we queue up an hour in advance due to the popularity of the documentary, we showed up about fifteen minutes before showtime and easily got seats in the half-empty theater. Seems the management had over-estimated the popularity of the subject matter – Rio’s slums and hard-driving Afro-Reggae music. Basic demographic analysis could have told them that: the average age of the passholders, as far as I can tell, is about fifty. Guns and drugs and rap don’t seem high on their list.

I’m probably more the target of the film – young, liberal, susceptible to drumbeats – but I didn’t love it either. Favela Rising is a documentary about Anderson Sa, a founder of the Afro Reggae movement in the crime and drug-infested slums, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro. Following a retaliatory police massacre of twenty-one innocent people, including his brother, in the early 90’s Sa turned to non-violent protest via a drum, rap and dance movement he and his fellow reformers dubbed Afro Reggae. The movement has drawn some 2000 kids away from the drug trade and into its schools and performance groups. Compelling social upheaval subject matter. I wish they’d stuck with that.

I can’t tell if the filmmakers a.) didn’t have enough footage, b.) lacked imagination, or c.) suck at editing. Whichever it is, they did their film a disservice by focusing on Sa like he’s Jesus. Instead of painting a broader picture of Rio and its obvious and violent class issues, which would have leant substance to the picture, they follow Sa’s personal ups and downs more and more closely as the film goes on. Gradually, this anecdotal approach undermines the potency of the story.

I have no reason to disagree with their belief that Sa is a living saint, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting film: lots of mini climaxes, repeated usage of the same inspiring shots, and very little substantial information about the history, present and future prospects for the favelas and Rio. By the end, much as I admired Sa’s work, I felt manipulated and annoyed rather than galvanized. The filmmakers should take a lesson from other, more excellent documentaries (see review of Pursuit of Equality) and use the individuals’ stories in service of the bigger story, not vice versa.

Brilliant idea. Go wild.

More from the album… I was going to post a set of photos with the corresponding bruises but isn’t part of the magic how you can’t tell how much it hurts? Of course it is.

Beats	Straddle Balance	Pike
Flag	Forward Arabesque	Cross
Beats	Hanging Out

Gazelle

Straddle Split

I do love me some toast but this is ridiculous.

And I thought I was distractable. Could be worse.

R. came by the gym last week and took some photos of me training on the static trapeze. With his super shutter speed, he took about 400 pictures, a lot of which look great as flipbook images. Some days, I love technology. (Some days, less so.)

I am, quite literally, afraid of my office. I have been unable to write anything coherent for a couple of weeks and the last place I tried was in my office. Hence, fear of office. As if the office was causal. I flinch when I think of it.

I came anyway this afternoon, trying to break the connection, cross the streams, disrupt the force or whatever less geek-like references you can think of. No luck. I’m going home to see if I left my bag of words under the desk there.

Send cookies.

There is nothing not creepy about Walken. Even his high-riding pants are creepy. But who doesn’t love a dancin’ man?

As far as I’m concerned, this is the best video ever.

Of course, I don’t really watch videos anymore since they’re damn hard to find, even on video networks, but I can’t imagine any of them getting better than Walken hoofing around a hotel to the strains of techno. The man can work it.

I have two notes for the day.

One, if you aren’t in the mood, avoid Safeway. It is, I’m not kidding, a forest of heart-shaped balloons.

Two is a short story from my past. When I was in high school, if someone sent you flowers, they were delivered to the main office and you were summoned over the general intercom to pick them up. Valentine’s Day summons were like a stamp in your approval passport. Everyone knew and everyone was jealous.

I was not the kind of girl who got summoned. I wasn’t a band geek or an outcast – even they inter-mated and sent each other flowers. I was generally liked but not specifically liked and specificity is essential to flower giving and receiving. I was too removed (read: busy, moderately arrogant) to be adored by the anonymous masses, too smart for my sports crew and too disdainful for the smart kids. I just wasn’t a real prospect for the average scared adolescent boy. This fact provided me with both satisfaction (mission accomplished) and loneliness (flowers are nice).

There was a girl in our group who was the daughter of a local doctor. She was smart but not in a rebellious way, well-groomed but not in an intimidating way. She was a good, non-scary prospect, and she generally had a tepid, well-behaved, flower-sending boyfriend. One winter evening in the yearbook room, we discussed the absence of flowers in my history. I assume I was funny about it. She was probably sincere. On Valentine’s Day, I was called to the office. I had gotten flowers. It was a small arrangement of roses from the girl. We never got to be the friends that it seemed like we should have been – she was younger and I was focused on getting the hell out of Dodge – but I’ve never forgotten those flowers. What a charming gesture. People should do things like that for each other year round (especially in high school, which sucks).

So Happy Valentine’s Day everybody – do something nice for someone in your life to mark the occasion!

I don’t like the word “boyfriend.” I like the word “partner” even less. The former makes me think of making out in high school hallways and the latter makes me think of corporate mergers. Since I live with my boyfriend/partner of four years, “boyfriend” seems too cute and casual. And even though we are legally “domestic partners,” I feel pompous (not to mention like a lesbian) when I refer to him as my “partner.”

“Partner,” is one of those modern words that had a perfectly good specific definition but was appropriated to fill a need – a word to describe the “non-married beyond boyfriend (gay or straight)” – and now has a non-specific definition. Imprecision annoys me. You can’t tell if I’m talking about a man or a woman. You don’t know if it’s someone I met last weekend or someone with whom I have a child.

Why couldn’t we have just come up with something original. Like “bf supreme” or “house man” or just “stud”? I’d call Tim Robbins “stud” if he lived here. No problem.

Perhaps the non-specificity is intentional, like “Ms.” which also obscures personal information about marital status and, by extension, sexual preference. I get that in professional, potentially discriminatory settings but the personal realm remains parched for a more precise alternate word, an equivalent to “Mrs.” or “Miss.” (Speaking of which, I might start a campaign to reintroduce “Master” as the non-married male signifier just to even things out.)

I’ve heard “lover” a couple of times. There is no age (chronological or historical) when that doesn’t make you sound like an a**hole of the first water.

Other titles I’ve considered and rejected:

Suitor
Better Half
Daddy-O
Co-Habitator
BMOC
Muffin

Please send suggestions via Comments link below.

I’m just back from hearing the boyfriend give a keynote address at Stanford’s Biomedical Informatics retreat at Asilomar, a national park retreat down by Monterey, CA.

I’ll get into the whole informatics thing some other time: first things first, I don’t recommend vacationing in a state park. Customer service in California is terrible but I thought that, having reluctantly accepted that fact (or at least mostly shut up about it over the dinner table), I didn’t think it could get much worse. I was wrong. Turns out that there’s a sub-category. And by “sub-” I do indeed mean beneath. California State Parks, you are the new winner.

My favorite kind of awful customer service is the kind where you ask a reasonable question and get total incomprehension, usually in the form of a blank stare, followed by resentment. Because this requires both personal obliviousness to the surrounding world (laws of reason, readily verifiable facts, and so on) as well as specific obliviousness to the task at hand (helping customers), I am usually stunned into a silent stare myself for a moment. As I would be if, say, an earthquake and a tornado hit at the same moment. OK, you’re right: it’s not that bad. A very small earthquake and a mini tornado.

So there we are, at the check-in desk, two people very apparently ready to check in and an oddly-shaped enormously heavy person wearing a navy blue tie with cartoon penguin/snowmen splashed across it. He codes a card key and hands it to R.

I ask for a second key (for me).
He says, “No.”

He was already staring (possibly a sign of a pre-existing condition). I begin my earthquake/tornado stare.
We stare.

I break the silence with a wince and a tentative, “Why?” I am bracing myself for another blow to logic.
“We don’t give out two keys.”

Ah. Well, that explains it then. I try to picture these people – him and his unlikely twin who has just turned up, a woman equally heavy but with an even smaller head – running a tight ship, a high security establishment where only one key is allowed per room, the grounds are patrolled constantly and all violators are prosecuted.
I fail.

After a couple more equally obscure offerings from their side, it turns out that the news of my coming has not filtered down to the room level. A simple mistake and easily corrected had they been able to make the logical leap from, “another key,” to “another person.” The leap from, “another key,” to, “felon,” was apparently much smaller.

The address, by the way, was a big success.