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stalinqrad · 2 years ago

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Tell me about your favorite film!

This ask made me realise how much I am Not a movie person. My instinctual response to "what's your favourite film" would be "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which is sort of like being invited to a gastronomy conference and loudly announcing your favourite food is sausage pizza.

In any case, I will talk about a Selection of four movies I've liked, Monty Python included. (long-ish rant ahead)

1. Sense and Sensibility (1995):

Starting with Sense and Sensibility as it is my favourite Austen adaptation! It happens to star many of my favourite actors so I am biased in my judgement but I find it to be so marvelously entertaining. I like that it doesn't feel too sprawling and grand, it has this sort of restrained yet delicate feel to it. Like an old chest filled with handmade lace tablecloths. I enjoyed how the differences between Elinor and Marianne were accentuated yet both of them were treated with the outmost love by the narrative. I enjoyed their dynamic a lot!

2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): I won’t offer any analysis on this but I will simply express how much I love it. I will also say that I am so glad (almost) everyone likes this movie because it deserves all the appreciation in the universe. It will Never be overrated. Even if every single person in the world watches it ten times a day and quotes it from morning to night, it won’t be over-appreciated. I think it’s such a classic silly movie, a comedy staple! The acting is, of course, excellent (especially my beloved Graham Chapman), the gags, the costumes, the music, the concept!! Everything is a colourful, hilarious bombastic Arthuriana parody and it’s simply perfection. It has influenced so many other movies and shows and it will always be one of my top comfort movies ever.

3. A Man with a Movie Camera (1928): OKAY SO, this one has been on my favourite film list ever since I had a constructivist phase like a year and a half ago. It technically doesn’t have a plot but I find it very interesting how it shows a progressive narrative, sort of like the “life cycle” of the cities it depicts. It portrays the city sort of like a living organism, being born and waking up, breathing, moving, dying etc. It doesn’t use any actors just actual footage from various cities and the director used so many cool and creative and very new techniques for his time (which I find very interesting). I also like seeing industrialism being explored in art in general (so it was definitely relevant to my interests).

4. Little Women (1994): I watched this rather recently and I was blown away! The actors did a marvelous job at portraying family relations so full of tenderness and love, especially Winona Ryder and Trini Alvarado. The performances had this incredible authentic feel to them and the atmosphere of the movie was that of a Christmas feast and a cozy living room. Having watched the 2019 little women movie, I believe that this one truly managed to explore in depth Jo and Meg as characters (Florence’s Amy will always be my favourite though). Winona’s performance encapsulated this, raucous and fearful pain of adolescence and the overwhelming chaos in the face of all the unknown possibilities, alongside intense determination fuelled by love and the desire to live as widely as possible. Loved this version of Jo March she was great!

Bonus - so-bad-it's-good movie: Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948)

Do you like hammy acting? Bad costumes? Drawn-out plots? Obviously fake scenery? Idealised portrayals of historical figures? If your answer to the above is “yes”, then Bonnie Prince Charlie is the movie for you! A dramatised depiction of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, it’s objectively Baaaaaad at being a serious historical drama. However, if you forget it’s meant to be serious and just watch it as a comedy it suddenly becomes so entertaining. It does have a lot of comedic elements, see: the washerwoman disguise, and ~zee obnoxiously fake German accents of George II und zee Duke of Cumberland~ but other than that it is a pretty entertaining movie in general. The lead actor absolutely despised filming it, and it’s rather obvious which makes it even funnier. It does have some pretty good scenes but trust me, if I ever recommend it, it’s not for its quality.

#asks #answered #Honourable mentions: the Michael Strogoff movies with Curd Jürgens #mine

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agentlereckoning · 5 years ago

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What I think about Alison Roman

Any Gen-Z’er with a Twitter account has probably seen the latest Gen-Z Icon Controversy, i.e. the one involving Alison Roman. In case you’re not caught up on its details, the tl;dr is that The New Consumer (which appears to be a one-white-man show of an online publication steered by a former Vox and Business Insider employee named Dan Frommer) published an interview with Alison last Thursday — an interview where Alison, when asked about the difference between “consumption and pollution” (as if there even is a material difference), said:

“I think that’s why I really enjoy what I do. Because you’re making something, but it goes away.

Like the idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you… I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like ‘you should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!’

....

Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.”

This is the quote that most people who’ve followed this drama have latched onto, and I’ll come back to discussing it in a moment. I’m really not sure why the interview was published at all, other than for a publicity or financial boost during these times, because I don’t think anything worth hearing was uttered by either the interviewer or interviewee. Moments in the interview seemed either tone-deaf or trivial to the point where I wondered why they were included at all. Early on, for example, Alison laments that she hasn’t been making enough money during this pandemic. (She does not live in want of money.) Later she half-jokingly complains that her public persona has been reduced to “anchovy girl”, ostensibly because she often uses them in her cooking. (She does, and often proudly owns that fact, which makes this complaint pretty uninteresting.) But the point of this interview was meant to be, I think, a rumination on how Alison would turn her belief that she “isn’t like the other girls” into practice.

It’s a common thing to desire, I think — this ingenuity balanced with relatability, and I think seeking this balance is what propels so many people my age. Few things are more embarrassing to us than unoriginality, than being a carbon copy of someone else, yet few things are scarier than social rejection. We don’t want to like the same things as everybody else, but we want at least some people to like the things that we like. I think it’s what drives certain subcultures to exist in the first place, the way that subsections of people can congregate around something or someone, reveling in each other’s presence but also in knowing that they are, in fact, just a subsection of the greater population.

This mentality is, admittedly, sort of what drove me to like Alison Roman in the first place. For background: the first time I cooked a recipe of hers happened unwittingly; in December 2018, I saw the recipe for the salted chocolate chip shortbread cookies that became known as #TheCookies (Alison’s virality can be encapsulated by the fact that all of her most famous recipes have been hashtagged, e.g., #TheStew, #TheStew2, #ShallotPasta or #ThePasta), but I made them without knowing that Alison was the person behind the recipe. The cookies were good (though I think any recipe with over two sticks of butter and a pound of dark chocolate is bound to be good.) At some point about a year later, I watched a YouTube video published by NYT Cooking where she made her white bean-harissa-kale stew, and I thought she was funny and really pretty and, like me (I think), had a fastidious yet chaotic energy that I always thought made me awkward but made her seem endearing. Alison’s recipes taste good, they come together really easily, and you don’t need special equipment or a lot of kitchen space to execute them. It’s why I’ve committed at least three of them to memory, just by virtue of making them so often. I liked her recipes so much that, for over three months, one of my Instagram handles was inspired by one. But I also liked her, or wanted to be like her, or some combination fo both. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be her friend, or that I didn’t aspire to her lifestyle of Rachel Comey clothes, glistening brass hoop earrings that cost 1/4 of my rent, regular trips to downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope farmers’ markets or small butcher shops where the purveyors all knew her name, an always-perfect red gel manicure, the capacity to eat and drink luxuriously and seemingly endlessly and to have the money for a yoga studio membership to help her stay slim anyways.

Of course all of those things are signifiers of social class more than anything else. But in oligarchical, consumerist societies, what is expensive and what is good become two overlapped Venn diagram circles, and I have not yet reached a level of enlightenment to be able to fully tease the two apart. And while I would never drop $425 on a jumpsuit, no matter how pretty I think it is, I could crisp up some chickpeas, stir in vegetable stock and coconut milk, and wilt in some greens, and act like my shit was together. I liked Alison because when I first started liking her, she hadn’t yet risen to the astronomical level of digital fame that she enjoys now, and by making her recipes, some part of me believed that I would be inducted into a small group of her fans who, by serving up her dishes, telegraphed good taste.

This idea of “good taste” is a complicated and racially charged one. Alison is white; she lives in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (maybe even all of New York City); her recipes cater to a decidedly young, white audience. I think another reason why her dishes hold so much Gen-Z appeal, beyond their simplicity and deliciousness, is because they sit at the perfect intersection of healthy-but-not-too-healthy and international-but-not-too-international. Her chickpea stew, for example, borrows from South and Southeast Asian cooking flavors, but you wouldn’t need to step foot into an ethnic grocery store or, god forbid, leave Trader Joe’s, to get the ingredients for it. The shallot pasta recipe calls for an entire tin of anchovies, and you get to feel cool and edgy putting a somewhat polarizing food into a sauce that white people will still, ultimately, visually register as “tomato sauce and pasta” and digest easily. All of the recipes in her cookbook, Nothing Fancy (which I received as a gift!), are like this. She doesn’t push the envelope into more foreign territory, probably because she doesn’t have the culinary experience for it (which is totally fine — I never expected her to be an expert in anything except white people food), and probably also because if she did push the envelope any further, her book, with its tie-dyed pages and saturated, pop-art aerial shots, wouldn’t have been as marketable.

That’s what’s unfortunate — that white people and white-domineered food publications have been the arbiters of culinary taste in the U.S. for centuries. I’m thinking about Julia Child, about bananas foster being flambéed tableside and served under a silver domed dish cover, about the omnipresent red-and-white-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, about Guy Fieri and Eric Ripert and Ina Garten and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. I’m thinking about how white women have long been the societally accepted public face of domestic labor when it was often Black women who actually did that labor. It’s Mother’s Day today, and I’m thinking about how, in middle school, I’d sometimes conceal my packed lunch of my favorite dishes my mom made — glass noodles stir-fried with bok choy, cloud ear mushrooms, carrots, and thinly sliced and marinated pork; fish braised in a chili-spiced broth — so that my white friends wouldn’t be grossed out, and so that I wouldn’t have to do the labor of explaining what my food was.

And I’m thinking of that now-notorious Alison Roman quote. To be fair, Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen do have large consumer and media empires, which have become profitable and which require huge teams of people to sustain. Both of them probably do have large amounts of money at their disposals. What’s weird to me is that Alison accuses both Marie and Chrissy of “selling out” because they each branded their own lines of purchasable home goods, yet Alison herself said in that very same interview that she had also done that very thing. It’s just that Chrissy’s line is sold at Target, while Alison’s, according to her, is a “capsule collection. It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere — vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.” I suppose it’s not “selling out” if it caters to the pétite bourgeoisie. I don’t know if Alison is explicitly racist, since I don’t know if she called out two women of color simply because they are women of color, or if she genuinely just so happened to select two of them. But that she feels like she has the license to define things as “selling out” based on who the “selling-out” behavior caters to reeks of white entitlement.

There’s also an air of superiority with which she describes how she would market her product line:

That would have to be done in such a specific way under very intense standards. And I would not ever want to put anything out into the world that I wouldn’t be so excited to use myself.

She says this right before talking about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, accusing them of being lackadaisical and unthoughtful (”okay, slap my name on it! I don’t give a shit!”; “people running a content farm for her”) when she likely has no idea what the inner workings of either of their business models are. To be sure, it could very well be true that Marie and Chrissy have handed off these aspects of their brands to other people. But for Alison to assume that they have, and that her own business management style would, by default, be better because she would retain control, is egotistical.

Alison ends the interview by proclaiming that her ultimate goal is to be different from her contemporaries. She says,

To me, the only way that I can continue to differentiate myself from the pod of people that write recipes, or cookbooks or whatever, is by doing a different thing. And so I have to figure out what that is. And I think that I haven’t ultimately nailed that. And I’m in the process of figuring it out right now.

I expect that her path to “differentiation” will contain riffs on the same iterations of preserved lemons, anchovies, canned beans, and fresh herbs that she’s always relied on. I expect people will still think she’s cool, because that’s easy to achieve when her recipes and aesthetic are a series of easy-to-swallow-pills, when she tells the cameraman not to cut the footage of her accidentally over-baking her galette, and when being a white creative and working among mostly white colleagues means that she’ll get a lot of latitude. I expect she’ll continue to sell out, which is completely fine, so long as she’ll be candid with herself and actually call it selling out.

And I want to learn recipes from a chef who looks like me, and I want that chef to be “marketable” enough to achieve Alison’s level of fame. I want people of color to get to decide what recipes deserve their own hashtag. I want Alison Roman to be emotionally okay, because Twitter backlash can be vicious. And I kinda want to buy Marie Kondo’s drawer organizers now.

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taylermsmith · 7 years ago

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reema eqab <3

Reema Eqab is a 20-year-old artist studying in Pensacola, Florida. She focuses on expressing human emotion through vibrant visuals. This interview was recorded in October of 2017.

How long you have you called yourself an artist and felt secure with that title? What does an artist look like to you? Who do you admire artistically?

Ever since I could remember, I’ve had a big interest in art making, but I actually started to believe in my abilities when I started high school. This is also when I became more serious about it and felt comfortable and confident in calling myself an artist. To me, an artist is one who feels as though they absolutely need to create. A true artist buries themselves into their work, and feels the need to make art like it is dependent on their health and well being. If I’m not making art, then I’m thinking about it, or familiarizing myself with other artists and their work. Some of the artists that I admire include Rita Gomes, Shanna Van Maurik, Joy Miessi, Julia Rothman, and Kindah Khalidy.

Did your ethnic background and you being an artist conflict? Explain an instance. Are there any other artists in your family?

The two didn’t conflict until I graduated high school and decided to try to make a career out of art. I received endless feedback and advice from my family; Mainly from the men. My uncles commend my strong will, because not many women have it, but advise me to pursue a career that would benefit my “future family.” Having kids has never been my interest, so hearing them say that over and over again made me even more headstrong. There is definitely a creative gene in my family, but there are no other artists. In my opinion, most of my family limit themselves by doing exactly what everyone else does/tells them to do.

Have you felt stifled by your family’s traditional ideas of what it means to be a woman? Or their idea of femininity?

This has always been a predominant struggle with my family. To them, a woman is delicate and pure, and her main purpose is to marry, reproduce, and serve the family. I’ve always felt the need to fight this portrayal, and did so by being as unconventional as possible to the people that think this way. For example, I never dress like I’m “put together” or prim, and growing up I would work at my dad’s convenience store, unlike the other girl cousins my age. I hate for anyone to think that I’m weak or there for show; This is not how I see women.

Do you feel like you will have true peace with yourself and your art when you have been ingrained with their ideas for so long? Is there hope for other artists who feel this? What piece of advice would you offer them?

I don’t think that I will ever be fully at peace with their beliefs and ideals constantly clawing at the back of my head, but I use this discordance to my advantage by feeding it directly into my art. I think that the only way for similar artists to succeed through this is for them to hang on to their passions and have a strong, undying will. Without this, there is little hope.

How do you perceive yourself? Is this perception altered when you create?

As well as being strong, passionate, and kind, I am sad and anxious. When I make art, I try to show these emotions, but sometimes I feel like the passion may come off too strong and be perceived as mean or aggressive. I feel that especially when I include feelings of heartbreak or anything political, but I think that in the end everything balances out. I let other eyes see my work, and the response normally matches what I originally intended.

When starting a new piece, do you find yourself repeating any themes? If so, what are they?

Some of the underlying themes in my works include repression, depression, feminism, and heartbreak. I definitely find myself incorporating these themes into most of my art, along with how I deal with them. Art is like my therapy, so everything I feel is let loose in my work.

What do you wish to explore/expose with your art?

In my current state of mind, I wish to make aware certain issues regarding feminism and human decency. I like to show how I believe humans should treat each other, as well as make art that people can relate to. I love helping people, so I hope to help by sharing experiences/thoughts and how I handle problems. In the future, I plan on trying to show more political themes, because most people seem to be under a blind spell and I believe that being aware is extremely important. Maybe my lively and colorful art will soften the informational blow?

What is your struggle with art and society? Art and family? Art and yourself?

I don’t like to rely on people, but art seems to be heavily dependent on acceptance. In order to make money, people have to like your work, and that makes me feel constrained and controlled. A struggle I have with my family and my art is that I feel like I have to hide most of it from them, because certain thoughts or images are ones that differ from their beliefs. Some of my work includes images of the nude female figure, and in order to not receive judgment, I don’t display these pieces, or I’ll turn them around if either of my parents try to enter my room. When I had first started college, my mom was heavily involved in my course schedule and school, and didn’t allow me to take the nude figure portion of my drawing 2 class. My relationship with art is much more comfortable than it used to be, despite the problems that I receive from my family and society’s interpretation of my art. I am able to be this way because I allow myself to be completely vulnerable in my work.

Your work has very pigmented pinks, and are overall very colorful. Yet your text indicates an instance of the male gaze/expectations others project on you. Is this a conscious juxtaposition of subject matter with color or do you just enjoy pink?

It makes me happy to see that someone else notices this! It is definitely intentional, and I’ve always thought that this pairing mirrors the way that I see myself. A glance or a quick overlook of my work implies that it’s very positive and happy, but when looked at more closely, one could see that it’s most likely different from what they thought it was. I also have a true admiration for color, especially very vibrant color, and recently started using pink because I never had before, and I discovered that I really enjoy it. Pink is typically perceived as a “girly” color, so I incorporate it to kind of support femininity in a way.

Do you think art can ever encapsulate the feeling of heartache or the depths of any human emotion? Should it?

There are so many different kinds of heartaches and types of people and ways to handle heartache, so I don’t think that there could ever be a way for art to fully grasp these feelings. Heartache is the main topic in my sketchbooks and more private work, and I follow a lot of pages on Instagram that also include this theme. These people are always able to conjure up a grouping of words in a way that fully describes a feeling I might have in a way that I would have never thought. If art were able to fully encompass this feeling or any other feeling, I wouldn’t be able to see much of a point in making it.

In an age of social media, do you find yourself validating one piece over another due to how many “likes” it received?

Social media is an integral part in the success of an artist. Although I do pay attention to likes, I no longer use this as a factor for judging my work because I am confident enough in myself to know whether or not a work of mine is successful or not. If I was able to learn something from a work that I created, then it is successful.

You also do some work with fabric and embroidery, is this medium more challenging? What do you enjoy about it?

For me this is definitely more challenging. It’s tedious and detail-oriented, whereas, with my other work, I can let loose and produce quicker results. I like making this type of art because anything wearable is typically more likely to be purchased, and it gives me a way to express myself with my appearance. I’ve also learned that it’s a great way to advertise myself. Dressing artistically/wacky makes people compliment or make a verbal note of it, which allows me to claim that I created it, and then most people will ask for my Instagram so that they can purchase or see more.

What song do you think mimics your art/ what song makes you feel an emotion you want to translate as intensely into your art?

There isn’t really just one song that I can refer to, but artists such as Lianne La Havas, Beach House, Lykke Li, and Tame Impala create music that generates relatable feelings that I like to show in my art. I made a triptych print at the beginning of the year called “Sadness, Depression, Anxiety” that contained three quotes from three songs, and I remember admiring the way that those artists were able to creatively construct their words into phrases that perfectly portrayed how I was feeling at the time. This ultimately led to me putting more words and phrases into my own work. I am not so great with words, but I try to be by analyzing music, and following artists on Instagram that make their artwork around their words, such as the artist Joy Miessi. Arabic was my first language, so there are some words that I feel only really and perfectly have their effect when said in Arabic, and this can be a pain because I don’t know how to successfully apply English words as meaningfully. My private Instagram account dedicated to my sketchbook pages helps me acknowledge quotes that I find, and also helps me try to make art out of my own words because this is a big interest of mine.

Thanks for reading and you can find Reema’s artwork on her Instagram: @reemae

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