Y2/D307...MLK Holiday, Whedon, etc...
Jan. 17th, 2022 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatDone nothing to celebrate it. It's been a drab, gloomy day, and all attempts to do laundry were thwarted. (Ah, what I wouldn't give some days for my own washer/dryer. When and if I retire - I'm retiring to a place where I have them or at the very least a reliable service.)
Slept poorly, and I've been fending off the January uglies - which seem to be a combination of depression/anxiety or general malaise. Not helped by hot flashes.
Anyhow, bought/ordered KN95 masks for mother. About 50 of them, for about $83 via Amazon. Two boxes worth. I swear - I think I've spent close to $500 on masks in the last two years if not more. I also have lots of the cheap and free useless ones in my desk at work and at home.
Mercury is in retrograde, or so I'm told, so it may be best to take a social media hiatus. (Of course I'm ignoring that advice.) Instead I wandered about in Twitter, and found this...interesting, if mildly disturbing and slightly unsettling one about Joss Whedon, whereupon he responds to the allegations against him by playing the victim. For once, it would be nice for someone to take accountability for it.
Joss Whedon Breaks his Silence on the Allegations Against Him
It's worth reading if you are interested in the history of the Buffy fandom, Whedon's perspective on it, and interacted with it online. Since it delves into that history - and that surprised me. Starts out talking about the Whedon Studies Association - almost as if the writer is making fandom somewhat complicit in Whedon's rise and downfall, and perhaps fandom is? I don't know any longer.
In the fall of 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group — theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors — and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover.
If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, the “avatar” of a new religion, the “founder of a new faith.” Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship. As Lavery would write in the introduction to a book he co-authored on the series, Whedon had not simply composed a narrative about a struggle against the “forces of darkness — vampires, demons, monsters of all varieties”; he had taken a stand against a panoply of oppressive “social forces,” most obviously the “forces of gender stereotyping.” According to the prevailing rules of Hollywood horror at the time, Whedon’s protagonist, a hot blonde with a dumb name, should have died within the opening scenes, but Whedon had flipped the genre on its head, endowing her with superhuman powers and a hero’s journey.
It wasn’t just scholars who worshipped him in those days. He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows. In 2005, the comic-book artist Scott R. Kurtz designed a T-shirt that gestured at Whedon’s stature in popular culture at the time: JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW. Marvel later put him in charge of its biggest franchise, hiring him to write and direct 2012’s The Avengers and its sequel Age of Ultron, two of the highest-grossing films of all time. His fans thought of him as a feminist ally, an impression bolstered by his fund-raising efforts for progressive causes. But in recent years, the good-guy image has been tarnished by a series of accusations, each more damaging than the last. In 2017, his ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a sensational open letter about him on the movie blog The Wrap. She condemned him as a “hypocrite preaching feminist ideals” and accused him of cheating on her throughout their marriage, including with actresses on the set of Buffy. Then, beginning in the summer of 2020, the actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, who had starred in a superhero film directed by Whedon, claimed he’d mistreated them, with Fisher describing his behavior as “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.”
They were soon joined by Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia on Buffy and its spinoff series, Angel. In a long Twitter post, she wrote that Whedon had a “history of being casually cruel.” After she became pregnant, heading into Angel’s fourth season, he called her “fat” to colleagues and summoned her into his office to ask, as she recalled, if she was “going to keep it.” She claimed he had mocked her religious beliefs, accused her of sabotaging the show, and fired her a season later, once she had given birth. All the joy of new motherhood had been “sucked right out,” she wrote. “And Joss was the vampire.”
Carpenter’s comments threw the fandom into a crisis. Fan organizations debated changing their names; people on discussion sites wrote anguished posts as Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the titular Slayer, and other Buffy stars offered words of support for Carpenter online. The community’s sense of shock and betrayal could be seen in part as an indictment of the culture of fandom itself. “As fans, we have a bad habit of deifying those whose work we respect,” Kurtz, the comic-book artist, told me. “When you build these people up so big they have nowhere to go but down, I don’t know why we’re surprised when they turn out to be fallible humans who fall.”
This past spring, Whedon invited me to spend a couple of afternoons with him at his home in Los Angeles. By then, I had spoken with dozens of people who knew him; after months of agonizing over whether to grant my request for an interview, he had decided to talk, too. Whedon, 57, lives in Santa Monica, 13 blocks from the ocean, on a street lined with magnolia trees and $5 million homes. His house is open, airy, modern. [Basically he lives in a beautiful home near the beach.] He sat hunched over on a black leather couch, his fingers clicking together, the thumbs tapping each of the other digits in quick succession whenever the conversation shifted toward his recent troubles. Pale and angular with bags under his eyes, he no longer much resembled the plump-cheeked Puck who once impishly urged a profile writer to describe him as “doughy” and “jowly.” It was a perfect day in Santa Monica, as almost every day in Santa Monica is. But Whedon wanted to stay inside. Gazing through a wall of glass at his lush backyard, he announced in his quiet rumble of a voice that he was thinking of getting curtains. “The sun is my enemy,” he said.
There's a bit of a disconnect in these stories...because what you have is a very wealthy, privileged family, who has never had to worry about money. Who lives in splendor. And got work easily. And you have a show that many identified with - but their perception of it wasn't what was inside the creator's head completely. Also there's a kind of disconnect between how fans viewed the cast and crew and creator's relationships on and off screen, and what it actually was.
In those early days of the internet, before nerd culture swallowed the world, fans flocked to a message board set up by the WB to analyze Buffy with the obsessive zeal of Talmudic scholars. Whedon knew how to talk to these people — he was one of them. He would visit the board at all hours to complain about his grueling schedule or to argue with fans about their interpretations of his work. Back then, as he pointed out to me, the internet was “a friendly place,” and he, the quick-witted prince of nerds, “had the advantage of it.” At one point, fans became convinced Buffy and another Slayer, Faith, were romantically entwined. After Whedon shot down the theory, accusing its proponents of seeing a “lesbian subtext behind every corner,” one of the posters (Buffynerd) sent him a link to her website, where she had published a meticulous exegesis of the relationship. He returned to the message board to applaud her, sort of. “By God, I think she’s right!” he declared. Dropping the facetious tone, he conceded she had made some good points. “I say B.Y.O. Subtext,” he proclaimed, coining a phrase that fans would recite like scripture.
Occasionally, some of the Buffy stars and writers would gather at Whedon’s house to watch episodes. They’d huddle around his computer, log on to the board, and chat. Once, Alyson Hannigan, who played Buffy’s friend Willow, posted her number to the site — she was moving to a new apartment the next day but planned to keep her old landline connected to an answering machine so posters could leave her messages. One fan called so quickly he caught her before she had a chance to set up the machine.
Every year, the regular posters would hold an IRL party where Whedon would make an appearance. Bryan Bonner, one of the organizers, recalled running into him outside one of these events. Bonner suggested he use the VIP entrance, but Whedon shook his head. “He said, ‘No, I’m good. It’s fine,’” Bonner recalled. “He was always this approachable, down-to-earth guy.” Another organizer, Allyson Beatrice, who wrote a book about Buffy fandom, described the annual gathering as a sort of family reunion. Many found their closest friends through the fan community. One of the most appealing ideas in the show was that a group of social outcasts could come together to form a chosen family. When we meet Buffy, her father is absent, her mother is distracted by work, and she is isolated by the lies she has to tell to cover up her life as a Slayer. At school, she falls in with a gang of nerdy friends who know who she really is. Together, they take on evil teachers, bad boyfriends, and goat-horned demons, saving the world, and one another, again and again.
Fans believed Whedon had found his chosen family, too, behind the scenes of the show they all loved so much. But chosen families are not necessarily spared the strife that can plague any family. “I felt very conflicted with the fans,” one Buffy actress told me. “I didn’t have the same feeling about the show, but I also know sometimes people don’t want your truth.” She believed people hadn’t been ready to hear about what Whedon was really like on the set. “There was a cult of silence around that sort of behavior,” she said.
I've become increasingly aware of this disconnect between what we want to be real and what actually is. Reality is far more complicated than what most perceive, and yet also far simpler. I think having a father who seems to be slipping in and out of various realities inside his head has made me more aware of this - of how reality in of itself can be little more than a construct of our own minds and perceptions of things.
There's new a game out entitled Wordl. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's all over social media. I tried it. I suck at it. I suck at word games, my father does too - even though we are both wordsmiths. But that's not a requirement of this sort of game. It's a spacial counting game with letter and word configurations. Plays havoc on anyone with dyslexia or spatial issues. I kept getting the number of letters I needed in each word wrong, and the squares confused me, as did the letter set up. Also I kept flipping everything around.
But the internet assumes anyone can do it, and everyone loves it, and it is the game we "all" need right now - emphasis on all. Why do we do this? Assume that what works for a few people or even several hundred, works for everyone? What's up with that?
I think sometimes this is the flaw in all of it. This assumption that we live in a one-size fits all world, and I've become increasingly aware that we don't. We can't be completely communal, no matter how much we may want to be, we are unique organisms, with unique gifts, perceptions, and ways of thinking - we cannot be treated the same.
**
I'm tired. And in a kind of malaise. Mercury is in retrograde or so they say. It's Martin Luther King Day - and depending on your perspective, we've either come a long way towards the kind of world King envisioned or hardly moved at all. Hard to know how King himself would view it. When he died, the world appeared to be in chaos, and yet it is also in chaos now. Is it better or worse than it was in 1968? I honestly do not know. I was one years old and have no memory of it.
I know in some ways we've advanced further than I thought possible, but others, we still seem to be hopelessly stalled. There are too many bigoted fools in the world and I dearly wish there were less - either culled from the population by a virus and natural means, or having changed their minds.
But alas, neither seems to be happening - and that frustrates me. But I'm also not surrounded by them - or near them or really know many, so maybe, I'm wrong about that.
Unlike Whedon, in the excerpts above, the sun is very much my friend. And I wish I could be sitting in his sun drenched house, just a few blocks from the beach. Without him or his artist girlfriend. Just trade abodes for a few minutes. Or hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Where he can work looking out on a gray, drab, colorless world or a cubicle wall in a office with no windows...going to and from work in the dark, with the days slowly getting longer, but no where fast enough, and the sun seems at times to have taken an interminable holiday. And I can work in sun-drenched splendor, in an airy home.
I don't want anything else from his life though, just the home so briefly described in the article. I want the sun. I want to bath in it daily as I did in Hilton Head, for the sun is the enemy of the virus and all that comes with it. But then, I am not a vampire.
Random Photo of the Night...
Slept poorly, and I've been fending off the January uglies - which seem to be a combination of depression/anxiety or general malaise. Not helped by hot flashes.
Anyhow, bought/ordered KN95 masks for mother. About 50 of them, for about $83 via Amazon. Two boxes worth. I swear - I think I've spent close to $500 on masks in the last two years if not more. I also have lots of the cheap and free useless ones in my desk at work and at home.
Mercury is in retrograde, or so I'm told, so it may be best to take a social media hiatus. (Of course I'm ignoring that advice.) Instead I wandered about in Twitter, and found this...interesting, if mildly disturbing and slightly unsettling one about Joss Whedon, whereupon he responds to the allegations against him by playing the victim. For once, it would be nice for someone to take accountability for it.
Joss Whedon Breaks his Silence on the Allegations Against Him
It's worth reading if you are interested in the history of the Buffy fandom, Whedon's perspective on it, and interacted with it online. Since it delves into that history - and that surprised me. Starts out talking about the Whedon Studies Association - almost as if the writer is making fandom somewhat complicit in Whedon's rise and downfall, and perhaps fandom is? I don't know any longer.
In the fall of 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group — theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors — and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover.
If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, the “avatar” of a new religion, the “founder of a new faith.” Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship. As Lavery would write in the introduction to a book he co-authored on the series, Whedon had not simply composed a narrative about a struggle against the “forces of darkness — vampires, demons, monsters of all varieties”; he had taken a stand against a panoply of oppressive “social forces,” most obviously the “forces of gender stereotyping.” According to the prevailing rules of Hollywood horror at the time, Whedon’s protagonist, a hot blonde with a dumb name, should have died within the opening scenes, but Whedon had flipped the genre on its head, endowing her with superhuman powers and a hero’s journey.
It wasn’t just scholars who worshipped him in those days. He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows. In 2005, the comic-book artist Scott R. Kurtz designed a T-shirt that gestured at Whedon’s stature in popular culture at the time: JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW. Marvel later put him in charge of its biggest franchise, hiring him to write and direct 2012’s The Avengers and its sequel Age of Ultron, two of the highest-grossing films of all time. His fans thought of him as a feminist ally, an impression bolstered by his fund-raising efforts for progressive causes. But in recent years, the good-guy image has been tarnished by a series of accusations, each more damaging than the last. In 2017, his ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a sensational open letter about him on the movie blog The Wrap. She condemned him as a “hypocrite preaching feminist ideals” and accused him of cheating on her throughout their marriage, including with actresses on the set of Buffy. Then, beginning in the summer of 2020, the actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, who had starred in a superhero film directed by Whedon, claimed he’d mistreated them, with Fisher describing his behavior as “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.”
They were soon joined by Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia on Buffy and its spinoff series, Angel. In a long Twitter post, she wrote that Whedon had a “history of being casually cruel.” After she became pregnant, heading into Angel’s fourth season, he called her “fat” to colleagues and summoned her into his office to ask, as she recalled, if she was “going to keep it.” She claimed he had mocked her religious beliefs, accused her of sabotaging the show, and fired her a season later, once she had given birth. All the joy of new motherhood had been “sucked right out,” she wrote. “And Joss was the vampire.”
Carpenter’s comments threw the fandom into a crisis. Fan organizations debated changing their names; people on discussion sites wrote anguished posts as Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the titular Slayer, and other Buffy stars offered words of support for Carpenter online. The community’s sense of shock and betrayal could be seen in part as an indictment of the culture of fandom itself. “As fans, we have a bad habit of deifying those whose work we respect,” Kurtz, the comic-book artist, told me. “When you build these people up so big they have nowhere to go but down, I don’t know why we’re surprised when they turn out to be fallible humans who fall.”
This past spring, Whedon invited me to spend a couple of afternoons with him at his home in Los Angeles. By then, I had spoken with dozens of people who knew him; after months of agonizing over whether to grant my request for an interview, he had decided to talk, too. Whedon, 57, lives in Santa Monica, 13 blocks from the ocean, on a street lined with magnolia trees and $5 million homes. His house is open, airy, modern. [Basically he lives in a beautiful home near the beach.] He sat hunched over on a black leather couch, his fingers clicking together, the thumbs tapping each of the other digits in quick succession whenever the conversation shifted toward his recent troubles. Pale and angular with bags under his eyes, he no longer much resembled the plump-cheeked Puck who once impishly urged a profile writer to describe him as “doughy” and “jowly.” It was a perfect day in Santa Monica, as almost every day in Santa Monica is. But Whedon wanted to stay inside. Gazing through a wall of glass at his lush backyard, he announced in his quiet rumble of a voice that he was thinking of getting curtains. “The sun is my enemy,” he said.
There's a bit of a disconnect in these stories...because what you have is a very wealthy, privileged family, who has never had to worry about money. Who lives in splendor. And got work easily. And you have a show that many identified with - but their perception of it wasn't what was inside the creator's head completely. Also there's a kind of disconnect between how fans viewed the cast and crew and creator's relationships on and off screen, and what it actually was.
In those early days of the internet, before nerd culture swallowed the world, fans flocked to a message board set up by the WB to analyze Buffy with the obsessive zeal of Talmudic scholars. Whedon knew how to talk to these people — he was one of them. He would visit the board at all hours to complain about his grueling schedule or to argue with fans about their interpretations of his work. Back then, as he pointed out to me, the internet was “a friendly place,” and he, the quick-witted prince of nerds, “had the advantage of it.” At one point, fans became convinced Buffy and another Slayer, Faith, were romantically entwined. After Whedon shot down the theory, accusing its proponents of seeing a “lesbian subtext behind every corner,” one of the posters (Buffynerd) sent him a link to her website, where she had published a meticulous exegesis of the relationship. He returned to the message board to applaud her, sort of. “By God, I think she’s right!” he declared. Dropping the facetious tone, he conceded she had made some good points. “I say B.Y.O. Subtext,” he proclaimed, coining a phrase that fans would recite like scripture.
Occasionally, some of the Buffy stars and writers would gather at Whedon’s house to watch episodes. They’d huddle around his computer, log on to the board, and chat. Once, Alyson Hannigan, who played Buffy’s friend Willow, posted her number to the site — she was moving to a new apartment the next day but planned to keep her old landline connected to an answering machine so posters could leave her messages. One fan called so quickly he caught her before she had a chance to set up the machine.
Every year, the regular posters would hold an IRL party where Whedon would make an appearance. Bryan Bonner, one of the organizers, recalled running into him outside one of these events. Bonner suggested he use the VIP entrance, but Whedon shook his head. “He said, ‘No, I’m good. It’s fine,’” Bonner recalled. “He was always this approachable, down-to-earth guy.” Another organizer, Allyson Beatrice, who wrote a book about Buffy fandom, described the annual gathering as a sort of family reunion. Many found their closest friends through the fan community. One of the most appealing ideas in the show was that a group of social outcasts could come together to form a chosen family. When we meet Buffy, her father is absent, her mother is distracted by work, and she is isolated by the lies she has to tell to cover up her life as a Slayer. At school, she falls in with a gang of nerdy friends who know who she really is. Together, they take on evil teachers, bad boyfriends, and goat-horned demons, saving the world, and one another, again and again.
Fans believed Whedon had found his chosen family, too, behind the scenes of the show they all loved so much. But chosen families are not necessarily spared the strife that can plague any family. “I felt very conflicted with the fans,” one Buffy actress told me. “I didn’t have the same feeling about the show, but I also know sometimes people don’t want your truth.” She believed people hadn’t been ready to hear about what Whedon was really like on the set. “There was a cult of silence around that sort of behavior,” she said.
I've become increasingly aware of this disconnect between what we want to be real and what actually is. Reality is far more complicated than what most perceive, and yet also far simpler. I think having a father who seems to be slipping in and out of various realities inside his head has made me more aware of this - of how reality in of itself can be little more than a construct of our own minds and perceptions of things.
There's new a game out entitled Wordl. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's all over social media. I tried it. I suck at it. I suck at word games, my father does too - even though we are both wordsmiths. But that's not a requirement of this sort of game. It's a spacial counting game with letter and word configurations. Plays havoc on anyone with dyslexia or spatial issues. I kept getting the number of letters I needed in each word wrong, and the squares confused me, as did the letter set up. Also I kept flipping everything around.
But the internet assumes anyone can do it, and everyone loves it, and it is the game we "all" need right now - emphasis on all. Why do we do this? Assume that what works for a few people or even several hundred, works for everyone? What's up with that?
I think sometimes this is the flaw in all of it. This assumption that we live in a one-size fits all world, and I've become increasingly aware that we don't. We can't be completely communal, no matter how much we may want to be, we are unique organisms, with unique gifts, perceptions, and ways of thinking - we cannot be treated the same.
**
I'm tired. And in a kind of malaise. Mercury is in retrograde or so they say. It's Martin Luther King Day - and depending on your perspective, we've either come a long way towards the kind of world King envisioned or hardly moved at all. Hard to know how King himself would view it. When he died, the world appeared to be in chaos, and yet it is also in chaos now. Is it better or worse than it was in 1968? I honestly do not know. I was one years old and have no memory of it.
I know in some ways we've advanced further than I thought possible, but others, we still seem to be hopelessly stalled. There are too many bigoted fools in the world and I dearly wish there were less - either culled from the population by a virus and natural means, or having changed their minds.
But alas, neither seems to be happening - and that frustrates me. But I'm also not surrounded by them - or near them or really know many, so maybe, I'm wrong about that.
Unlike Whedon, in the excerpts above, the sun is very much my friend. And I wish I could be sitting in his sun drenched house, just a few blocks from the beach. Without him or his artist girlfriend. Just trade abodes for a few minutes. Or hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Where he can work looking out on a gray, drab, colorless world or a cubicle wall in a office with no windows...going to and from work in the dark, with the days slowly getting longer, but no where fast enough, and the sun seems at times to have taken an interminable holiday. And I can work in sun-drenched splendor, in an airy home.
I don't want anything else from his life though, just the home so briefly described in the article. I want the sun. I want to bath in it daily as I did in Hilton Head, for the sun is the enemy of the virus and all that comes with it. But then, I am not a vampire.
Random Photo of the Night...
no subject
Date: 2022-01-18 12:22 am (UTC)It's typical of the news media. If something is popular in their circles it becomes the new talked about thing. Even by the numbers there's only 2 million or so people around the world playing it. That's a pretty insignificant number for a big hit.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-18 02:52 am (UTC)Me: Trains are safer than buses.
Friend: No one believes that.
Me: Did you take a poll when I wasn't looking?
Just because a bunch of people on Twitter do or like something - doesn't mean everyone is. There's not that many people on Twitter - but Twitter seems to be weirdly oblivious to this fact or the media that is promoting itself relentlessly on Twitter is oblivious to it? It's actually the reason - I do not want to have a lot of followers or be popular on Twitter, and barely tweet on it - the media is camped out on it. I'm afraid of it. It's fickle and rather unpredictable. And there's evil marketing people in charge.
Twitter is interesting - apparently "stans" means fan of something or "ships". They use stan instead of ship. I've no clue how it came about.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-18 02:33 am (UTC)I too didn't do a lot for MLK Day. From a holiday point of view, I allowed myself a little: I cooked fried egg and cheese on toast for breakfast, and had a ready meal for lunch. From an MLK point of view, about the closest I got was watching Jai Bhim on Amazon so, right kind of thing, but I didn't feel up for Selma or similar. (I should mention more of this on my own journal, perhaps!)
If it's of any use, I think one can charge masks to HSAs and the like.
Related to our experience of reality, lately I've been dipping half a toe into phenomenology.