#the contemporary climate and internet culture which seems like a great way to revisit it beyond just

[anotherbeastarsblog]

Do I hate myself enough to reread all of Homestuck?

[newstechreviews]

If you find it hard to believe that three whole decades have passed since 1990, I suggest cracking open a Baby-sitters Club book. In Ann M. Martin’s sprawling middle-grade series about girls in junior high who start their own baby-sitting service, the phones have cords, the sitters keep records in bubbly cursive, all shopping takes place at the mall and “a pink sweatshirt with sequins and a large purple parrot on the front” is the pinnacle of sophistication. Each novel is a time capsule of preadolescence untouched by social media or smartphones or Fortnite or the constant specter of school shootings. It was a more innocent time, one to which Martin (and the ghostwriters who authored later volumes) added an extra dose of sugary sweetness for the benefit of elementary schoolers eager to read about slightly older kids.

The Baby-sitters Club doesn’t seem like a franchise that could survive these cataclysmic times, when the President calls people mean names on Twitter as young people face threats from racist policing to climate crisis—and, since March, the COVID-19 pandemic has turned even friendly bedroom communities like the BSC’s fictional Stoneybrook, Conn. into ghost towns. So it’s a wonderful surprise that the new Baby-sitters Club, a 10-episode Netflix series due out July 3, isn’t an anachronism so much as a tonic. Helmed by first-generation fans Rachel Shukert (Glow) and Lucia Aniello (Broad City), who honed their voices telling lighthearted stories about women who have each other’s backs, the show strikes a shrewd balance between earnestness and humor, freshness and nostalgia, fidelity to Martin’s beloved characters and awareness of how much has changed since her books dominated girl culture at the end of the 20th century.

Unlike earlier adaptations—a short-lived 1990 HBO series and a 1995 movie, neither of which has aged well—the new Baby-sitters is a proper reboot, with an origin story millions of women in their 30s and 40s probably remember in detail but their daughters might not know. It all begins when seventh grader Kristy Thomas’ (Sophie Grace) single mom Elizabeth (Alicia Silverstone, lip-bitingly funny as ever) can’t find anyone to watch her youngest son. Teen sitters never pick up their cellphones. Internet-based babysitting services charge exorbitant fees. “Why is this so hard?” Elizabeth whines, adorably. “When I was a kid, my mother would just call some girl in the neighborhood on a landline. And she would answer, because it was part of the social contract.”

Soon, Kristy—a sporty tomboy whose ingenuity, bossiness, self-absorption and inexplicable fondness for turtlenecks make her a prototypical mini-entrepreneur—is pitching her best friend Mary Anne Spier (Malia Baker) on what will go down in BSC lore as “Kristy’s great idea.” What if parents actually could call one phone number at a predetermined time, reach a whole roomful of responsible young women and nail down a sitter on the spot? It’s a smart way of justifying the seemingly obsolete conceit without which the show could not exist: club meetings, several evenings a week, where the girls cluster around a good old-fashioned landline to set up appointments, compare notes on clients and help each other through growing pains of all kinds.

Liane Hentscher/Netflix

Shukert and Aniello manage to update the characters without sacrificing their essences. While fuming over Elizabeth’s relationship with a rich guy, Kristy leans into #girlboss feminism. Mary Anne is still shy, with an overprotective single dad, but now she’s also biracial. Their neighbor and perennial BSC meeting host Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada) retains her artistic talents, academic struggles, secret sweet tooth and multigenerational household, complete with hilariously condescending older sister and adoring grandma; this time around, her Japanese-American heritage comes to the fore. While New York City expat Stacey McGill (Shay Rudolph) still looks perfect, has secrets and obsesses over boys, her storyline now addresses the contemporary scourge of cyberbullying. Once a blonde treehugger, California transplant Dawn Schafer (Xochitl Gomez) is now Latinx and knows how to wield terms like socioeconomic stratification. (Never mind that every family in Stoneybrook seems to have the money for sleep-away camp.)

This may all sound painstakingly woke on paper, but nothing feels forced about these updates. The main cast is spirited and authentic—Tamada and Grace are especially great—and they look like real tweens, not aspirational Barbies. Stoneybrook gains a thoroughly modern population, from the little trans girl who forms a bond with Mary Anne to an out-and-proud witch (though she prefers the title spiritual practitioner) who leads workshops in her backyard, without losing the tree-lined streets and stately Colonial homes that have always marked it as an all-American town. A standout episode scripted by The Wangs vs. the World author Jade Chang, in which Claudia enters an art contest and learns about her ailing grandmother’s childhood in a Japanese internment camp, develops into a moving representation of a young artist finding her creative voice.

The creators still find space to acknowledge the timeless middle-school growing pains for which the books have prepared so many younger kids: strict parents and absent parents and divorced parents, first kisses and first jobs and first periods. And they bring the same playful wit to these rites of passage that made their past projects so irresistible. Revisiting the older adaptations that I devoured as a kid—particularly the TV version—I was surprised at the extent to which saccharine dialogue and uneven performances rendered them unwatchable as an adult. Yet once I started the Netflix reboot, I found it hard to stop watching (in no small part because the familiar characters and cheerful tone felt so soothing at a time when comfort was in short supply). Shukert and Aniello have said that they want the show to have “multi-generational” appeal, and their referential comedy accomplishes it. There are Handmaid’s Tale jokes. In one scene, Kristy prepares to take out a rival baby-sitting service by reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. (The wearying trend of Netflix shows promoting other Netflix shows did, however, ruin any enjoyment I might’ve gotten out of a montage where the girls redecorate a room as a cover of the Queer Eye theme plays.)

Not every artifact of girlhoods past deserves to be resurrected for the current generation. Good riddance, Twilight trilogy, with your super-retrograde take on supernatural romance (but thanks for giving us Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart). Check your privilege with the doorman, upcoming HBO Max reboot of Gossip Girl. If the Sweet Valley High twins—a virgin/whore binary with long blonde tresses and size 6 figures—never give another imperfect reader a complex again, it’ll be no great loss. The Baby-sitters Club takes place in a younger, gentler universe, one ruled by friendship, responsibility and inclusion, not materialism or popularity politics. Though the some of the sitters may love clothes and boys, it’s their “big ideas” and special talents that really distinguish the BSC members. The characters’ appeal endures not in spite of their purity, but because of it.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 10/25/2018

Orange tulips fill a dilapidated room, surrounding a chair that faces a window with an AC unit in it. Sunlight streams in and the tulips seem to glow. Part of Anna Schuleit's public art installation, "Bloom", where she filled the Massachusetts Mental Health Center building with thousands of flowers. Source.

Internet Fascists

[CW: Nazis] From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled”: “The vast majority of domestic terror attacks in the U.S. are carried out by white supremacist organizations. Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi death squad with five killings to their name, is probably the deadliest fascist group to have arisen since 2016. [...] The media collective Unicorn Riot has archived hundreds of thousands of posts from these Discord servers. Their database includes dozens of conversations where fascists discuss how they were converted to their extremist beliefs. In an effort to understand that process, Bellingcat collected “red-pilling” stories from seventy-five fascist activists.”

[CW: Nazis] Where Are All These Fascists Coming From? A List: “The goal of this list is to collect and document as many individual stories of conversion to fascism as possible.” Interesting to note the extent to which alt-right internet personalities are a key step towards radicalization.

A silhouette of someone praying, stars and constellations within their darkened form. Words are written on top: "Dear Survivor, You are not defined by the violence that happened to you. The Earth is not defined by the asteroid that struck it but by the million years of life that came after." In the lower left is the hashtag #SurvivorLoveLetter. Source.

This Is America

PBS Docuseries Revisits Richness of Pre-Columbian 'Native America': The four-part series uses Indigenous oral traditions, archeological evidence and 3-D mapping to explore the cultures that flourished before colonization. "The series also connects this past to the present-day lives of Native Americans fighting to keep these traditions alive. For instance, former Hopi Cultural Preservation Office director Leigh Kuwanwisiwma helped Glassman’s crew access and film Hopi tribal elders as they conducted a sacred smoking ritual. Contemporary cultural and political leaders like Kuwanwisiwma, Sid Hill (Onondaga) and Jhane Myers (Comanche/Blackfeet) discuss their connections to their ancestors throughout 'Native America.'"

America’s Relentless Suppression of Black Voters: Republican attempts to exclude African Americans from the polls echoes efforts by Southern whites that enabled the Jim Crow era. "In July 2017, Kemp’s office purged nearly 600,000 people, or 8 percent of the state’s registered voters, from the rolls; an estimated 107,000 of them were cut simply because they hadn’t voted in recent elections. This year, Kemp has blocked the registration of 53,000 state residents, 70 percent of whom are African-American and therefore could be reasonably expected to vote for Abrams."

How Trump Is Warping the Debate on Trans Rights: "It is not at all clear that the substance of the memo will be enacted in any form; that it was leaked by the White House suggests it is a provocation designed to inflame and divide voters in advance of the midterms. But there are two aspects to the document that reveal the utter bad faith in which the Trump administration, and Republicans more broadly, are engaging in the issue of gender. The first is very simple. HHS proposes to pin down sex as a matter of biological certainty that can trump a person’s claimed gender. But the concept of two 'biological sexes' is inaccurate. […] That mistake is the core piece of misinformation spread by the HHS memo. But there’s a second, more conceptual element to the memo’s perniciousness. It frames gender—a complex phenomenon that evolves through time and varies according to individual—as something basic and biological."

Women in the U.S. Can Now Get Safe Abortions by Mail: "Women on Web has never worked with American women because Gomperts worried that the American anti-abortion movement would try to close down the organization. In an interview, she told me she still has that fear, but she was being inundated with requests from women in countries such as the United States, where abortion is technically legal but growing more difficult to access."

A silhouetted profile of someone, hair blowing in the wind and stars and constellations within their darkened form. Words are written on top: "Dear Survivor, Even when there is no one else, there is always you, the wind, the sun, to hold you, forever." In the lower right is the hashtag #SurvivorLoveLetter. Source.

Games

See how grotesque Jeff Bezos’ fortune is in this choose-your-own-adventure game: ‘You Are Jeff Bezos’ is a game that illustrates in detail the truly appalling amount of wealth people are allowed to amass and then just keep to themselves.

Well Played: Video games reproduce the worker’s capacity to continue working. "The main task of mass culture is to create, reproduce, and manage particular kinds of subjects — workers, consumers, individuals, citizens —required for current conditions. To perpetuate their own existence, mass media must succeed at representing the violent coercion of capitalist systems as natural laws: Of course you have to pay rent to live inside; of course you have to buy food to eat; of course you have to work if you want to survive. The production of a fungible, disposable and migratory working class requires the alienation and atomization of communities into individuals, which involves destroying the village, kinship structures, indigeneity, and many other previous forms of meaning-producing structures, leaving a gap which ideology must fill."

Against a vivid sunset over the ocean, a cluster of transparent food takeout containers float through the air like a living organism. Photograph by Thomas Jackson. Source.

Issues

[CW: sexual assault] Demons of Disaster: Why the foreign-aid world attracts sexual abusers. "The point is a crucial one: while sexual exploitation is the underlying crisis that’s ushered in a climate of covering up and complicity in the global aid world, the behavior of colonial sexual conquest is embedded within a far more imposing and still largely unchallenged system of political supremacy. The 'neutral' and 'savior' stance of aid-giving organizations belies, in many cases, the complicity of donors and donor nations in the disasters to which they are called and to which they contribute. And this unacknowledged complicity rules out, almost by definition, any substantive effort to directly address how global domination insures the persistence of global poverty and the very conditions that the aid industrial complex is ostensibly working to eliminate."

The Palace and the Storm: "Above and beyond enriching the world or furthering the scope and lineage of a great art, the purpose of architecture is to reliably shelter us. And what has become clear is that when the stakes get this high, normal, everyday, affordable ways of building are not up to that task. That’s what the architecture of the lone house on Mexico Beach represents. It’s not a beacon of human resilience or a symbol of the power of well-designed architecture as a solution to our climate problems. It is an urgent architectural warning to all of us that the wealthy will survive a Category 5 hurricane. The rest will be left to stare down devastation, realizing perhaps too late that climate change is class war."

Abler Website Guide: An archived site "about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more."

Direct Action Item

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