#it is one of the most obviously performative obnoxious bullshit moves i’ve seen in a while and it’s making me feel insane

[wormsdyke]

i know i said i’m not election posting but i’m going insane because white liberals are posting about how to show people they’re “one of the good ones” who voted blue and proposing wearing a blue bracelet to signal allyship, which i’ve got to be honest is so unbelievably pretentious and performative and straight up fucking stupid.

the only people who benefit from this are cishet passing white folks with a bruised ego who clearly don’t give a shit about the marginalized they claim to support. you have got to get out of your god damn head and care about someone other than yourself. i cannot stress enough that if you have the mindset you need to shut the fuck up immediately. do literally anything else to materially support oppressed people.

i have great news for people so desperate to not be mistaken for an evil republican by wearing something immediately recognizable: wear a fucking mask. its the first thing people will notice when they see you and i guarantee people won’t think you voted for trump.

and here’s the kicker - it actually helps real fucking people other than yourself. disabled and immunocompromised people have been begging y’all for years to do the easiest god damn thing and just wear a mask in public and you can’t do that when it quite literally saves lives but you can wear a bracelet to feel better about yourself? get a fucking grip. why the fuck should i trust you if you can’t do the simplest thing to actually protect your community? a bracelet means nothing.

donate the $5 you would have spent on a bracelet to the palestinian children’s relief fund, or your local abortion funds, or your local food banks, or fucking anything other than protecting your god damn ego

[the-desolated-quill]

Knock Knock - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Holy moly, do I love this episode! XD

Now yes, Knock Knock isn’t perfect and I will be talking about some of the flaws, but it honestly doesn’t matter to me one jot! I LOVE this episode! Wholeheartedly and unashamedly!

I must confess I was a bit worried when it started. You’ve got Bill moving in with quite possibly the world’s thickest bunch of housemates, renting a creepy old house from a mysterious old guy they’ve only just met and know next to nothing about. Talk about gullible. And the housemates themselves are a bit of an obnoxious bunch. I think the only significant thing we ever learn about them is that some of them like Little Mix and the rest don’t. But once night falls and the shit hits the fan, I was completely hooked.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been properly frightened of Doctor Who, so kudos to writer Mike Bartlett for being able to scare the living bejesus out of me. It’s the traditional haunted house setup with creaking floorboards and everything, but it’s the execution that really sells it. The use of sound in particular really helps ratchet up the tension dramatically and I love how minimalist everything is during the first half. Admittedly the horror is weakened slightly by the fact that I don’t give a shit about any of the victims, but from a purely conceptual standpoint, it’s extremely solid. Wooden doors and shutters that seal themselves, David Suchet’s creepy landlord character, that grinning wooden woman and OMG, there are alien cockroaches coming out of the walls! This is really macabre stuff. By the time we got to the bit where the cockroaches started swarming over people and devouring them, I was cowering behind a cushion.

What I especially love about it is how intimate and small scale it is. Recently I’ve grown accustomed to these big, bombastic threats and one dimensionally evil characters from Moffat era stories nowadays, so to have a very human villain with a very human motivation at the centre of it all really elevates the material. David Suchet is a truly phenomenal actor and gives a very strong performance here. He’s immensely creepy as the Landlord, but it’s not too in your face or pantomime-esque. This is a very nuanced character with relatable motivations and goals. He’s feeding people to the alien cockroaches so that they can keep his ‘daughter’ alive. You can tell that he takes no pleasure from the deaths and after 70 years he seems to have started trying to find ways of justifying what he’s doing to make it rest easier on his conscience. All this talk of how his victims have become immortalised and preserved has the clear whiff of bullshit about it, but it comes from a place of real guilt. That instantly makes him much more complex and interesting than the generic evil capitalist from Thin Ice or the Emojibots from Smile.

Equally as good is Mariah Gale as Eliza. The creepy wooden woman/daughter and later revealed to be the Landlord’s mother. The scene where both she and the Landlord confront each other over the terrible things he’s done to keep her alive has got to be one of the most heartbreaking and moving moments I think I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who. It’s dark and twisted, but also tragic and strangely touching. Suchet runs the full gambit of emotions from threatening to vulnerable, and Gale is able to match him equally with her breathtaking performance, portraying her character’s innocence and confusion before transitioning to strength and resolve when she realises what she must do. It’s a captivating and powerful scene that moved me near to tears. Despite everything that’s happened and all the horrible things he’s done, you do actually feel genuinely sorry for the Landlord, and I found myself caring for both him and Eliza much more than I ever did for any other character in the Moffat era.

This scene also contains something that has been largely absent from New Who. Subtlety! I’ve already spoken about the performances of Suchet and Gale, but there’s also the way in which this whole story connects to Bill. At one point the Landlord asks if the Doctor and Bill would go as far as he did to save someone they loved. Obviously one of the big details we know about Bill is that her mum is dead, and if this were a Moffat penned script, we’d most probably have gotten flashbacks of Bill staring lovingly at her mother’s photo while an oh so poetic tear trickles down her face just to ram the point home. Instead the camera just lingers on Bill for a moment after he asks the question. Pearl Mackie’s understated facial expressions said more than a flashback or 10 page monologue ever could. I’d almost forgotten that there was a time when Doctor Who actually respected the intelligence of its audience and didn’t feel the need to spell everything out in 50 foot high neon lettering.

I have to say Bill is really starting to grow on me. Now that the obnoxious oohing and aahing has been toned down, Bill is starting to feel like a fully realised person, and Knock Knock gives us a chance to explore other aspects of her character. She’s excited about travelling with the Doctor, but she seems reluctant to have her student life and TARDIS life mix. She wants to make a good impression for her gormless housemates, and someone as eccentric as the Doctor could jeopardise that. What I especially like about this is that she doesn’t have that same smug, bossy attitude that Clara had. She’s not the typical Moffat dominatrix who expects the Doctor’s life to revolve entirely around her. She’s simply a normal person trying to compartmentalise her life and priorities as best she can. Same goes for the bit where she works out how to find the secret entrance to the tower room or when she deduces that the Landlord can’t be Eliza’s father because of the age factor. If it were Clara, there would have been a lot of insufferable showing off. With Bill, it’s just presented matter of factly. We can revel in the fact that Bill is clever without the show trying to rub our noses in it.

Peter Capaldi is also impressive as the Doctor. In fact I feel this is the kind of story where this Doctor works best in. In large scale stories like Death In Heaven and Hell Bent, Twelve is required to act in a much more bombastic manner and ends up falling flat on his face because, as I’ve said loads of times now, that simply doesn’t work for this kind of Doctor. But with stories like Knock Knock, Into The Dalek and Mummy On The Orient Express, where the stories are much smaller and more self contained, Capaldi seems to be very much in his element. This kind of story just suits Twelve much more than the grand sweeping epics Moffat often tries (and fails) to write.

Now as I said, Knock Knock isn’t perfect, and there are some teeny tiny plot holes here and there. If the cockroaches feed on people every 20 years, why are they attacking people now? Why were they keeping Eliza alive? Why not just eat her? Why was that guy stuck in the wall when the record player was playing? How come Bill and co haven’t heard of this creepy old house where people keeping disappearing from? This has been occurring for 70 years. Surely it must have built up a reputation. If the cockroaches ate all the housemates, how did they bring them back to life at the end? Why didn’t they bring all the other victims back to life? Why did the house collapse at the end? But honestly, these are just minor nitpicks. They certainly didn’t affect my enjoyment of the episode whatsoever.

For me, Knock Knock is a special little gem of an episode. Is it flawless? No. Will it go down as a classic? Probably not. But to me, it serves as a stark reminder of what I feel has been missing from Doctor Who ever since Moffat took over back in 2010. In my less than humble opinion, the show could do with a lot more episodes like this going forward.

[blackbird-brewster]

I had two profound experiences today, extremely unrelated in context but both thought provoking after the fact. The first experience had to do with me getting my first library card in 18 years and how I was very anxious to go into the library for any reason other than to print something.  I will detail this experience in a different post but long story short, all of the embarrassment and shame I felt because of my learning disability melted away and I ended up spending nearly two hours just browsing books. I left feeling to included and happy, I actually cried tears of joy.  Fast forward to the second notable experience of my day. Tonight I went on a date with my flat mate to “Naked Girls Reading: The Feminist Propaganda Edition”. Naked Girls Reading is apparently a sort of “brand”, started in the US as a protest against the ways women’s bodies are usually sexualized when naked. The theory is exactly what it sounds like, performers are completely nude and read aloud to the audience.  I had never heard of this amazing concept, so I jumped at the invitation. ESPECIALLY since tonight’s theme was feminism. I figured naked women reading feminist works sounded AUHMAZING.  [Rest behind a cut for length and transphobia]

The event was hosted by a popular personality in the New Zealand LGBTQPIA scene. They are a self labeled transvestite that MC’s events as their drag king persona, Hugo Grrrl. I assumed, if it was hosted by a gender diverse person it was going to be fairly inclusive.  Welp, you know what they say about assuming. 

Things started promising as Hugo opened their monologue with my favorite greeting “Guys, gals and nonbinary pals”. Hugo then went on to talk about some of the topics of the night including body positivity, body hair, porn, sex work, sex positivity, etc. It sounded really exciting and inter-sectional, I was pumped.

Within the ten minute monologue there was also the disclaimer that “Although this is called “Naked Girls Reading”, gender is a spectrum and the binary is bullshit.” (woo, yeah!!) ”...We only call it that because it was started in America and we didn’t come up with the name.” (Wait, what?)

Ok... but you could literally just call it “Naked People Reading” or “Naked Folx Reading” or ANYTHING else if you want to TRULY be inclusionary. I wasn’t even concerned about the title UNTIL Hugo made the point to say gender binary is bullshit... but then to say “meh, we didn’t come up with the title we’re just being complacent in it” Was sort of shitty.  If you are trying to include people, then INCLUDE them. Don’t say “Hey I’m not transphobic, BUT....” There was no point of this disclaimer other than to point out you recognized a problem but would rather go along with it than change one word of the title of the show.  Things only went down hill from there. A few minutes later as Hugo was wrapping up the monologue they wanted to get the crowd pumped before introducing the performers for the evening. To do this, Hugo had “all the women cheer!” (which they did) then followed by “now all the men!” (which they did). It turned out it was just a set up to make the men a punchline of a very stereotypical “feminist hate men” joke. These jokes are always obnoxious and yes, I recognize Hugo was trying to connect to the large feminist audience so we could all laugh at how society views us...but again, we were back at only acknowledging the gender binary. 

Now I realize many people right now will think I’m being extremely cynical. “Kit, you can’t say someone is being trans exclusionary if they are a queer that self identifies as a transvestite!” But I can because they were.  If you are going to mention nonbinary people. If you are going to make a point of talking about how the binary is bullshit. If you want to have a disclaimer that gender is a spectrum. It’s ALL or nothing.  Inclusion isn’t “I acknowledged you, you should be happy” it’s “I acknowledged you AND included you with everyone else as if we’re all the same.

The monologue is over, I am properly uncomfortable and agitated, the performers come out. From the promises of topics, I expected diversity. Again, that nasty assuming sure got the better of me.

Instead I get two skinny women and one average sized woman. They all appear to be white (although one was painted head to toe in blue and pink body paint as a My Little Pony...and later I learned she isn’t actually white.) They’re naked. So I can tell body hair isn’t really happening. A bit of bush but perfectly smooth everywhere else. All have shoulder length or longer hair and present very feminine.  Idk, again, maybe I was just so cynical by this point that I let my critic get away with me. I just wonder how hard it would be to find a more diverse cast? Am I just too deep in tumblr culture to expect to see different size bodies at a feminist reading? Or people with actual body hair, especially since there was a point of mentioning it in the monologue? Tattoos? Scars? Short hair? Disabilities? More racial diversity? (Again, the one woc was painted blue. And I feel shitty for thinking she was white but they could have included dark skinned people too.)  Introductions are done. The de-robing has happened. We now have three naked women sitting on a couch. Let’s read “feminist propaganda”! Some pretty typical stuff, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, big names of the feminist movement. There was a reading of an MRA’s post from some MRA website. (Why are we giving MRA’s an audience at a FEMINIST reading?!) Intermission.  During intermission, I got up the courage to go speak to Hugo and mention why I was peeved at the start of the show with the women/men division of the audience. They shrugged and said “well it was a set up to a punch line” I smiled and replied, “I realize that but don’t you think trans folks are the punch line enough?” They tried to back track but it got awkward and I walked away. Hugo does some “feminist” trivia during the break. Throwing prize bags of tampons and chocolate to whoever shouts the correct answer. 

One question asks what does “SWERF” stand for. A woman yells the answer and Hugo repeats it back to the audience and says “Sex work exclusionary feminism isn’t feminism. Sex work is real work!” It would have been so easy to also educate about TERFs. They don’t. The irony is not lost on me. 

More trivia. I win one. I’m told, “Here enjoy these tampons!” I catch it and yell back, “Not all women have vaginas” I turn to the women at our table and say, “Hello, I don’t need tampons and I hate chocolate. Enjoy” They gladly accept. Back to the readings... A dramatic reading of Spice Girl lyrics. Some very heteronormative erotica. A reading of a radfem manifesto of the 70s (that included very acephobic commentary) And then, the woman painted as a MLP says she’s going to read Ivan E Coyote.  Now, for those of you who haven’t been blessed with reading their works or seeing Ivan perform (I just saw them again last week!), they are a trans writer from Canada. Very well known in LGBTQPIA circles. AMAZINGLY pure and moving stories and poems and “literary Doritos”. They are an amazing human being and have quickly become one of my favorite queer authors.  SO I AM STOKED!! This night has been so cishet heavy and I’m crank, I am READY to end it with Ivan. Ivan has written four of five books, has mountains of published poetry and she chooses to read a piece that is so personal to me. She prefaces this with a quick word about Ivan being an LGBTQ author. But fails to mention they’re a trans masculine person who identifies as a Tom Boy.  The piece starts out as a love letter to femmes who are often erased from Queer culture because they are “assumed” to be straight. But then turns to Ivan’s journey through figuring out they were trans and how they became jealous of femmes sometimes and how they will never be seen as who they are. How they will always be coming out of the closet over and over and over. Because their identity isn’t “visibly recognized” because it’s outside the binary.  I sob every time I hear this poem because it is so personal to me. The first time I heard it was when Ivan performed in Chch last August. I was in the midst of struggling with how the world saw me and this poem touched a part of me I thought no one would <i>ever</i> understand.  I sobbed again tonight. My flat mate patted my hand. She sobbed too for the same reasons. The journey to figuring out your identity can be so isolating, terrifying and lonely. But when you hear your story being told by someone who is on a stage, with an audience, talking as if your journey was the most normal and natural experience....it’s an emotional time.  After she finished, the performer stated “As a cis woman, I obviously do not identity with the narrator. I do however think this poem speaks to me as a femme. Because we are often overlooked.” (This gets cheers from the audience) I feel sick inside. This cis woman just spoke the very personal words of a trans person bearing their soul and claimed it as a poem for her.  No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to bend it to your whim. If you want to include poetry or stories about the trans experience, YOU FUCKING INCLUDE TRANS PERFORMERS.  Thank god the night was over.  My flat mate and I are sitting at our table deciding how to make our own event called “Naked Queers Reading” and how much better it would be. We’re minding our own business when out of the corner of my eye I see a crowd around the stage area.  Of course. There’s a man who has taken off his shirt to pose with the naked women so he can get his buddy to take his picture. Of fucking course there is. That’s when we left.  I don’t know if I am just lucky to live in such a comfortable Queer circle of friends that I’ve become blind to the world of heternormative, patriarchal bullshit or if I am truly too fucking cynical to go out in public...but fuck was I disappointed with tonight.  Anyway, if you made it through this entire post, thank you. I promise I’ll post a really lovely story about the library tomorrow. Right now I want to watch Ivan E Coyote performances on YouTube and drink my tea from my Unicorn Elixer mug.