Blackout Poetry

A popular thing to do on Tumblr is to make blackout poetry from single pages of books by blacking out with a marker or something all the words except for the ones you want to have, thus creating a poem from existent text. Book lovers often decry this as needless destroying of books. I kinda agree with them, but the result is often quite beautiful. Some of my favorite poems are blackout poetry. I think as long as they're old books that are going to be destroyed or thrown away anyway it's ok, but people shouldn't do that to perfectly good books. It's probably best not to think about where the sausage comes from. Anyway, I rediscovered a copy of That Hideous Strength that I had bought for like a quarter at a yard sale but had to replace with a similarly priced copy (with the same cover, of course) because the first 86 pages are missing and the rest are starting to fall out. It is an old book, from the seventies, and paperbacks are not very long-lived, especially if they are read a lot. I didn't have the heart to recycle it as I love C.S. Lewis and that is one of my favorite books, and I thought maybe I could make some book craft with the pages (the cover is this garish hideous '70s sci-fi thing that doesn't lend itself to lovingly created book art simply because it is too ugly). I wasn't quite sure what until I discovered blackout poetry. I decided to try my hand on it with the first remaining page.

Page from a paperback book, black colored pencil, black crayon

This one is actually three short poems since I couldn't think of a longer one. lol They are not connected. They read as follows:

the pale edges of

silence

seemed to be calling

~

the anachronism

met

the person in

her

~

things read and wrote 

were the substance;

to write

and

believe in the reality of

things not seen.

I'm kind of proud of it. The second one (the other side of the page) isn't quite as good, but I still like it, although my coloring job was like a million times more sloppy. Hazards include tearing the page and accidentally coloring over the word I wanted to keep.

Page from a paperback book, black crayon

 

This one is one poem. It's way less colored in/neatly since I was afraid the page might tear if I used the black colored pencil on both sides, so I just used black crayon. Poem is as follows:

a place

of

sunlight,–

of laughter and

wonder

and

better things

Not bad for my first try at it. I've already tried to do the next page but so far I'm not seeing anything. I could have been distracted by the Christmas music I'm listening to.

Pop Music Through the Ages with someone who knows little about either pop music or the ages

I've been toying with the idea that the pop music from different decades is characterized by its influences or flavors. I can't really examine this with pop music from before I was born since I'm not familiar with it, but I think this theory sort of holds up:
The 1990s: R&B-flavored pop (lots of vocal trills, ballads, etc.)
The 2000s: rock-flavored pop (idk, like Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson or whatever)
The 2010s: electronic music (the stuff they play in clubs, like house or dubstep or whatever. I don't know music terms)-flavored pop. Perhaps as a reaction, folk-flavored alternative music seems to be growing in popularity as well (Mumford & Sons). I am not doing a list like this for alternative music because I know even less about that than I do about pop music.
Also, retro-flavored pop (stuff that sounds like Motown or other music from the 1960s, e.g. Amy Winehouse and Adele) became A Thing in the mid-2000s to the present, as well.

I don't know music well enough to be as certain about pop music earlier than that (as if I'm even sure about the pop music in my own lifetime), but I think it's tentatively like this:
1980s: electronic-flavored pop (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince. This kind of electronic means synthesizers [?] rather than the clubbing/remix-music sound popular today)
1970s: folk (Peter, Paul and Mary; Bread, etc.) and rock (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc.)
1960s: rock 'n' roll- (Elvis?) and soul/blues-flavored (Motown, Aretha Franklin etc.)
1950s: idk, rock 'n' roll also? Getting over big band (Elvis?)
1940s: big band
1930s: possibly jazz, medium band, folk (I don't know. All my knowledge of '30s music comes from O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
1920s: jazz, stuff that sounds like classical music to us now
1910s and before: Ragtime?, stuff that is classical music now

At some point Mozart was popular music, dude. Sixteen year old girls probably stayed up at night crying over Felix Mendelssohn.

Michelangelo's paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

On this day, November 1, 1512, Pope Julius II unveiled Michelangelo Buonarroti's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome for the first time. It took Michelangelo four years to paint them, and he hated it. He wrote this poem about it, which I love because it's one long complaint:

To Giovanni da Pistoia
"When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel"

I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.
Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

Not a painter! I love him. I went to the Sistine Chapel when I was in Italy, and it was glorious. Absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking. I'm sad he was forced to do it and that he suffered, but I think it was worth it because of the beautiful legacy he left to the world. Think of all the people who have been uplifted by its beauty.

You can read all of Michelangelo's poems here
The text of the poem is from this Slate article, which is excellent and you should totally read it
Image source
History info is from The Writer's Almanac's enewsletter for today

Halloween 2012

welp

Go On and Community comparison

So I've added Go On (plot synopsis: Chandler's wife died and he has to go to a support group full of loveable weirdos to cope and ends up befriending them) to my shows that I watch, and I've realized the reason I like it so much is because it reminds me of Community.

Chandler Bing Ryan King: Jeff Winger, obvs
Lauren (the group leader): a combination of Britta and Annie. Like Britta, she is the girl the sarcastic main character is totally going/supposed to end up with, and is a fake therapist who wants to help people. Like Annie, she has gorgeous brown shiny hair and adorable clothes I want to steal, and she wants him to be a better person (wait, Britta does too. And Annie is also cute together with Jeff).
Anne: much like Britta as well. She's angry, blonde, and constantly calling Ryan out on his ish. Also a recurring joke on Community is that Britta is lesbian and Anne actually is (her wife also died, like Ryan's).
Yolanda: Shirley! Also Annie, the overachieving, sweater-wearing, persnickety prude version of her.
Owen: A combo of Abed and Troy? idk.
Mr. K: Pierce, obvs. Also Abed. And Chang but not malevolent. And Dean Pelton? Like if you put the Dean and Pierce and some Abed and Chang together. Yeah this makes no sense.
Sonia: Britta (blonde single cat owner) but also some Annie and Shirley?
Fausta: Pierce? I have no idea. They don't have a Hispanic stereotype on Community (yet).
Danny: No idea. A bit Abed-ish.
George: Pierce because of the oldness. He's not been on lately.
Carrie: Annie-ish but not really anything.
Steven: No idea.

Yeah, that ended up being less clear-cut than I thought. Oh, I just remembered that Jeff is always being compared to Ryan Seacrest and Ryan King is always being mistaken for Rachel Maddow. So that's funny.

Disney's First Hispanic/Latina Princess?

All right, finally found something to blog about! I have no idea how I missed reading about this earlier, but apparently Disney is going to have its first Latina princess. Her name is Sofia and she becomes a princess because her mom marries the king of Enchancia (yeah, I know). Read this article and this one too. What I find weird is this:

• while Sofia's mom is clearly Latina (she is voiced by Sara Ramirez from Grey's Anatomy, while Modern Family's Ariel Winter voices Sofia) and has dark brown hair and eyes and brown/tan skin, Sofia has auburn hair, blue eyes and basically just looks white, and
• Sofia is going to be in a computer animated Disney Juniors television show, not in a full-length feature film like any of the other Disney Princesses.

Being Latin@ is an ethnicity, not a race, so obviously there is a great deal of physical variation among Latin@s or Hispanics (Latin@ [the @ is used as a combination 'o' and 'a' symbol; in Spanish males' words end in o and females' words end in a, so this way both genders are included] is a newer term that roughly means the same thing as Hispanic, but the latter is a word applied to our ethnic group by the US government [aka white people] to classify us, so many Latin@s prefer this word. It's roughly the same to me, although I grew up using Hispanic because my parents do). I myself am a 'white' Latina; my dad is Mexican and my mom is of Cuban descent, but there is so much Spanish blood (my dad's family were land owners and he had a French whoknowshowmany-great-grandfather, while my mom's family are Cubans who also pretty much directly descended from Spaniards) that my immediate family pretty much all pass for white (my sister is blond, even). You don't have to dig very far in this blog to find pictures of me; I do have dark brown hair but I also have white skin and blue eyes. I'm whiter than most white people. Obviously, just because someone has light skin, hair and eyes does not mean they can't be Latin@.
The problem is that this is Disney's first Latina princess. This is a big deal. I think this is just about the only ethnic group the Disney movies haven't covered. Quick rundown of Disney Princesses: Snow White (come on. It's in the name/fairy tale), Cinderella (blonde/blue-eyed), Aurora (ditto), Ariel (first redhead! still white even though she is a mermaid), Belle (brunette and brown-eyed, French), Jasmine (first non-white princess! Arabian? Clearly Middle-Eastern. Agrabah is not I think a real place), Pocahontas (Native American, an actual person but she was so not like that), Mulan (Chinese, what I said about Pocahontas although technically she is not a princess since her dude wasn't a prince), Tiana (first Black princess! also from a real place, New Orleans, and is African American), and Rapunzel (after all that diversity I guess we needed to return to a blonde, white princess. She has green eyes, though). Oh, and Pixar's Merida (Scottish; red, crazy curly hair; blue eyes. Love her). These are the official Disney Princesses™, although Giselle (played by strawberry blonde Amy Adams), Kida (Atlantean princess with tan/brown skin, white hair and blue eyes who is all *~exotic~*), Ariel's daughter Melody (also white and has black hair like her dad Prince Eric), and Eilonwy (princess from The Black Cauldron. She's your basic blonde/white/blue-eyed princess but in her defense TBC is based on a book that was heavily influenced by your typical European fairytales) also exist. There has been no Latina princess, though, so it's rather disappointing that this one looks like your basic white girl. Yes, white-looking Latina girls like me exist (obviously), but we already have enough princesses to look up to or hold up as being or looking like me (Belle 4eva). What about the brown-skinned girls? There's just Pocahontas, Jasmine and Tiana for them, but none of these are Latina.
I think it's been a long enough time since the only two Hispanic-adjacent movies in this vein that we can do another movie set in pre-Columbus America about Mesoamerican peoples. The Road to El Dorado (which was made by DreamWorks but was clearly trying to mimic Disney's movies/success) was about two bumbling conquistadores trying to find/steal from a city of gold with a wily Mayan babe's help (can't remember if she's royal but I doubt it), while The Emperor's New Groove (set loosely in the Incan empire in Peru) does not have Emperor Kuzco actually get married (his wife would be an empress, though) since it is an odd-couple buddy movie. Despite Tumblr's lovingly referring to Kuzco as the best Disney princess, he does not actually count (although he is entertaining). It would be really neat to have an Aztec or Mayan princess, but it would be just as neat to have a standard princess with the dress and tiara and everything who just happened to have brown skin and dark hair/eyes. The Disney representative mentioned as the source of this information in one of the articles linked to above said that they're not flouting her ethnic background, just treating it matter-of-factly, which I think is fine. It would be nice if a brown-skinned princess were treated as normal.
This is especially a bummer since Sofia's show is set in Enchancia (ugh), a made-up country. The people there could look like anything you want (although at least it does seem rather diverse, judging from the trailer), and you have that girl and the ruling family looking white? Disappointing. I'm definitely not saying I want a sombrero-wearing stereotype or a story you can't watch without 'Cielito Lindo' constantly being played (I'm looking at you, From Prada to Nada), but why would you say a character, especially one you're trying to market as a Disney Princess, is Latina but then not have their culture be anything relevant? As the EW article says, "Sofia is half-Enchancian and half-Galdizian. The two kingdoms are in a world where a few real countries like France exist, but they’re still fictional, making words like Latina and Hispanic less clearly applicable." Some of the light-skinned Latin@s talking about Sofia on Facebook (link from the Mashable article) are angry that other people think she's too white, pointing out that skin color doesn't determine Latin@-ness (which is true) and that the white princesses and famous people don't share our culture and experiences. However, it's not like we light-skinned Latin@s are finally getting representation either; the child's from made-up lands. How does that count as Latin@? It doesn't, in my book. It feels like Disney's trying to seem diverse without really being so. Dora the Explorer's better than this. We're getting the short end of the stick, representation-wise.
I also think it's weird that Sofia is from a (pretty basic-sounding) TV show for young children. All of the 'real' Disney Princesses were at least in their teens, of marriageable (for their medieval/fantasy settings, anyway) age, and this one is clearly a little girl. This is Disney's first Latina princess, and she doesn't even get her own movie? That plus her age makes her not really count as a Disney Princess; it makes her not very important. I just barely heard about her today, and the show starts next month. Maybe they will do a real, brown-skinned Latina princess with her own movie in the future. Who knows. It feels like we still have a ways to go.

Image from Mashable. Note Sofia's mom, fourth little box from left.

From Prada to Nada

The sister on the left never dresses like that. She is in cute but comfy clothes in the whole movie, except for the obligatory makeover montage (which doesn't take). And the sister on the right never works, for shoes or otherwise.

I watched From Prada to Nada with my parents a couple days ago, just in time for Mexico's Independence Day. It's a romcom retelling of Sense & Sensibility, which I didn't know and which made me happy because I love retellings of my favorite books (as long as they're good) and because I had been feeling meh about the movie (my dad talked me into watching it). Really, the title is groan-worthy and riches-to-rags stories with shopaholic girls are so done, but this movie was actually surprisingly good. The representations of the Hispanics/Latinos in the movie were real. Usually it's somewhat cringeworthy, but these were real Latino people saying things Latina aunts or whatever would totally say. This is because the director and the script writers were Hispanic, which pleased me. About 70% of what happened with the two main characters (the Elinor ["Nora"] and Marianne ["Mary"] characters) was just as lame/cringeworthy as you'd think, but overall it wasn't half bad. Was it predictable? Yes. I mean, if you've read S&S you know what's going to happen, obviously. And you could probably go through this movie with a Latino movie cliché checklist (cholas? check. La Migra joke? check. And so on). What I found interesting (besides the rather genuine portrayals of Latinos) was the stuff they added to the sisters' characters. Besides making Mary be all swept up in lurve with Willoughby/Rodrigo, they added the dimension that she wanted to go back to her old way of life in Beverly Hills and get out of East LA/the barrio, making her love of the hot TA more gold-digger-y/mercenary and less romantic. And Nora, instead of secretly loving Edward and then finding out he was engaged the whole time, went the standard "we banter! He likes me but I am scared and Turn My Back on Love!" and you know what happens next. It's interesting how they didn't want Elinor to be the boring perfect one and so they made her storyline more standard romcom. In S&S, Elinor really does nothing wrong while the only thing Marianne does wrong is love recklessly without thinking of propriety or consequences (well, she is quite rude and self-centered too). However, it's like for the movie they didn't want the girls to be that blameless, so they made Mary a gold digger and Nora all obsessed with her 10 year plan. idk. Overall I did like the movie and it made me sad I don't have like twelve Spanish names I can trot out at the drop of a hat (at most I have four but only two are Spanish) or a family that throws huge block parties with salsa music for El Grito where I can dress like Frida Kahlo (but I am always wanting to do that anyway. It's a pity I'm so white-looking). Overall I liked this movie, which you can watch for free on Amazon Prime. 3.5 out of 5 tacos.

Elinor: Uptight Career Woman Who Don't Need No Man (law student version). Can't speak Spanish but tries to learn. Played by a half-Brazilian actress (I was worried for a bit that they cast a white actress until I looked the movie up on IMDb).
Marianne: slutty shopaholic party girl with gold digger tendencies. Can't speak Spanish and tries to deny her Mexican heritage. Played by a half-Venezuelan actress (Carmen from Spy Kids!).
Mrs. Dashwood: dead, obviously was just like Marianne/Mary. Represented by painting.
Margaret Dashwood: axed (not necessary to story)
Mr. Dashwood: Gabriel Sr. models his mustache after Pedro Infante's, dies within the first 8 minutes of movie. Represented by topiary.
Edward Ferrars: Edward Ferris, hot lawyer. White but looks more Mexican than Nora does for some reason (played by Italian actor). Speaks Spanish badly.
John Willoughby: Rodrigo something, hot Mexican TA who turns out to be married and was just using Mary. Well, at least he got her to read a book.
Colonel Brandon: Wilmer Valderrama, hot thuggy vato who is secretly an artist/carpenter with a heart of gold. The above two actually speak Spanish well.
Sir John Middleton: actually became the girls' tia, an awesome lady who with her two comadres is also Mrs. Jennings.
John Dashwood: Gabriel Jr., who turns out to be Gabriel Sr.'s illegitimate son and has daddy issues because his father never acknowledged him, wanting to save his marriage to the girls' mom. A pushover and super wimpy, lets his wife control him, so just like the book.
Fanny Dashwood: forgot her name but she is a right bitch, just like in the book. Blonde WASP.
Lucy Steele: Bitch-in-law's bestie, is set up with Edward and he's engaged to her like immediately. Also white, but interestingly she does no scheming, just passively does whatever "Fanny" says. Is only relevant as an obstacle to Edward and Nora getting together.
Setting: Beverly Hills, East LA
Recurring themes: cultural heritage, importance of family (obvs, that's in every movie with more than one Latino person), Cielito Lindo song

On Habakkuk 2: 18-19

by Doug Groothius

This glamorous gusto for godlets;
this voracious volition for vacuity;
this incessant insistence for idols.

Grasping a fistful of falsehood.
Consuming a stomach-ful of stupidity.
Filling a mind full of maddening mush.

Perform! Oh, you purveyors of nothingness.
Entertain our eyes, fill our years.
Enthrall our ears.
Give life to our living, and
deal the death blow to death.

We made you,
Now re-make us.