Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature.

Book Review: The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon

July 8, 2019

I just finished this incredible novel, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. It’s a powerful novel about this woman named Heather Reilly who studied conflict resolution in college and ends up working at the Pentagon because of an academic fellowship opportunity that came up there. At first, she is assigned to develop a peace plan for Afghanistan, but due to budget cuts the peace plan gets put on the back burner and she is reassigned to a stressful job in another department, one having to do with military coalitions. Not only that, but Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (aka her boss) Ariane Fletcher, is tough on her and the rest of the team, and not even the toughest generals can out-tough her. Moreover Heather is struggling with the loss of her brother, Jon, in combat, and her sister-in-law, Amanda, is also dealing with the pain of losing Jon, who is her husband. Oh, and one more thing: Ryan, Heather’s fiance, isn’t interesting anymore to her and he can’t afford to pay off his student loans (she, too, has student loans she is struggling to pay off.) However, even though Heather deals with issues on a personal and work level, she remains tenacious and eventually gains the approval of her colleagues (and even her boss) through her persistent hard work.

This book was a combination of movies: Late Night, Legally Blonde, and The Devil Wears Prada. It reminded me of these three films because all of them, like The Heart of War, feature young female protagonists who lack experience in the fields they pursue but nevertheless conquer this knowledge and surpass their peers in their work. In Late Night, Molly Patel has little experience writing for late night TV even with her experience in stand-up comedy. But when her boss, Katherine, finds out she’s actually really funny, she starts to see Molly’s stand-up talent as an asset rather than as a lack of expertise. Also, Molly puts in the work of writing the jokes because if she kept criticizing Katherine’s way of running the show, then Katherine was going to fire her. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs thinks all the hype around fashion at Runway magazine is overrated, but Miranda Priestly, her boss, tells her she can accept the culture at Runway or leave for good. When Andy cries, Nigel, Miranda’s art director, tells Andy to snap out of it and just do her job because Miranda is doing hers. When Andy changes her outlook on her job, she dresses like everyone at the magazine and even takes on the behaviors of the people at Runway. Now, of course, while Andy did change her attitude, her job as Miranda’s assistant still consumed her life and she lost that work-life balance that was so essential to helping her be her best self. She ended up losing her friends and touch with herself. However, the film taught me that while you shouldn’t let people talk down to you, it’s also important to be willing to learn new things, even if they’re things you don’t care much about. And in the end, Andy’s time as Miranda’s assistant landed her a new and better job, and the guy who interviews her says that working for Miranda Priestly is tough and that he would be “an idiot” if he didn’t hire Andy because of the hell she endured working as, in Miranda’s words, “her worst assistant.”

In Legally Blonde, there is a similar theme. Elle Woods is this cheerful fashionable woman from Los Angeles whose jerk boyfriend, Warner, breaks up with her before he leaves for Harvard. Warner tells her she’s not smart enough for Harvard Law School and she proves him wrong. At the beginning when she is first in class, the professor doesn’t take Elle’s ambition seriously just because she writes with a fluffy pink pen and wears cheery attire, but when Elle meets Warren at a party and he once again tells her she’s never going to be good enough for Harvard and that he’s gotten back with his ex-girlfriend, Vivian, she realizes that Warner is a waste of her time and studies hard so she can excel in her classes, and proves to her professors and peers that she belongs at Harvard and that wearing pink and smiling doesn’t mean anything is wrong with her.

In The Heart of War, Heather wonders for the longest time why Fletcher is so hard on her. Fletcher in the book later explains to her that she was so tough on Heather because she herself had that tough kind of training and wouldn’t have been so good at her job if her bosses hadn’t been so hard on her, but that because women are held to different standards than men are, and while her being a female boss was seen as overbearing, male bosses would never be told that being aggressive was bad or intimidating. Like Fletcher’s colleagues, Miranda Priestly’s colleagues (and the general public) saw her as this evil ice queen because she was tough to her employees and had no time for shenanigans. Like Fletcher, Katherine in Late Night was a hard boss to work with, but she was hard on her team because she wanted them to do great work, and she was hard on Molly because she herself struggled as one of the few women working in the comedy profession, and wanted to let Molly know that she had to have a thick skin to deal with her male colleagues’ attempts to make her feel like she’d be better off bringing them coffee and cupcakes and not sitting at the writer’s table doing the work she set out to do in the first place. Heather grew from her experiences dealing with Fletcher and realizes that she is actually interested in the kind of policy work she is doing. When her old fiance, Ryan, tries to win her back, Heather reveals she’s been promoted, and Ryan, like Warner in Legally Blonde, tries to talk her out of doing such work because he thinks it’s a waste of her time to try and go for something challenging. But like Elle Woods, Heather understands that if she were to go back to her life with Ryan, she would probably not have the chance to do this kind of interesting work again. Also, her (Heather’s) brother, Jon, died, and Heather’s mission is to serve her country because of the impending likelihood of war between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

The book also reminded me of the film Arrival because of the theme of diplomacy and international relations. Communication and language is a central theme in Arrival; Louise Banks is a linguistics professor who actually goes to communicate with aliens after a series of mysterious spacecrafts are seen hovering in different places on Earth. At first the communication is shaky and the extraterrestrials’ message doesn’t get across to Louise and her party, prompting nations around the world to cut off communication with the aliens. Louise then goes by herself and the aliens finally communicate that they didn’t arrive on Earth to start a war, but instead to foster a mutual friendship with human beings. Instead of using weapons that can kill people, they want to use the weapon of communication to restore peace to Earth. Louise’s willingness to meet people face to face with the heptapods shows how, although dialogue isn’t the only method for effective diplomacy and, in the end, world peace, it should serve as the foundation for the process of establishing bonds of trust between countries.

Similarly, communication is at the heart of The Heart of War. It’s not just a story about a woman who gets any old job working for the government and falls in love along the way. It gets knee deep in foreign policy matters, and for good reason (otherwise, why would they put such a genius spin on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War?) Heather, despite not having much military experience, uses her studies in conflict resolution to come up with a military strategy that is more nuanced and more thought-out than simply invading someone’s country and blowing up their citizens. When the peace plan for Afghanistan gets cuts at the beginning of the book, Heather asks Voight, one of her colleagues, why they would do that, and he tells her that it’s because the war in Afghanistan is over and the U.S. is withdrawing most, if not all, of its troops, so they don’t need many people in that department. Even when Heather tells him there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan, which is all the more reason for the U.S. to take up the peace plan again, Voight tells her to drop the issue if she wants to get on even just an inch of good footing with Ariane. When Ariane assigns her team to Moldova and drops the Afghanistan peace plan, Heather asks why she’s not focusing on Afghanistan. Ariane tells her that the Islamic State doesn’t present any threats to the U.S. or its allies, but Russia does, and, moreover, the Moldovan Minister of Defense wanted Ariane to protect Moldova from Russian influence since they were so close and Russia so powerful. Heather tries to reason with Ariane that she can use her experience studying about conflict resolution in Afghanistan to help the team, but Ariane simply doesn’t care.

However, after Heather writes out a thorough, well-thought-out memo detailing the strategy that the team should use for dealing with Moldova, the senior leaders (aka the guys at the main table, the guys who make the big decisions and do all the big talking, the guys that Ariane doesn’t want Heather sitting with and talking about these issues with because she doesn’t think Heather has the experience necessary to do so) begin to rely on Heather for information about the strategies they should use for drafting out the strategy, and eventually she ends up sitting with the guys at the big table, hashing out the most complex strategies with them. Even when Ariane tries to make it seem like Heather did something wrong by speaking up about the issue and not just sitting at her desk and carrying out Ariane’s orders, Heather refused to back down and that is what earned her respect later from Ariane and her later promotion to the peace plan for Afghanistan. Because the team had been so focused on Maldova, they let the issue with Afghanistan drop, but the impending threat of terrorism didn’t go away and the Islamic State of Khorasan in Afghanistian claimed responsibility for the attacks they made on several American schools around the world. When Amanda and Heather watch this news, Amanda tells her that even though Fletcher chewed her out for wanting to focus on the peace plan for Afghanistan, it’s all on Heather to bring this to the generals’ attention because of her prior knowledge of negotiating peace with Afghanistan. When Heather meets with the top leaders, she voices her disagreements with their opinions and instead calls for an approach that involves being aware of what’s going on in the region and also communicating directly with the Islamic State. Because the U.S. government left civilians in Afghanistan to fend for themselves and got distracted with the Moldova-Russia situation, the terrorists in the country took over and dismantled all of the efforts that the U.S. put in before to establish peace in the country.

Heather finds herself conflicted when the generals talk about letting Afghanistan deal with the war on its own because she remembers how Jon died fighting to end the mess that terrorists were causing in Afghanistan, and how, even if the U.S. were to pull out of the country and not risk anymore of its soldiers losing their lives, it would just further strengthen the threat of terrorism in the Middle East, which, as the attacks showed, isn’t just Afghanistan’s problem but the entire world’s problem, showing how we are interconnected even though we live in different parts of the world, and that one place’s actions can have a severe impact on other places. Heather calls for the U.S. government to rebuild the Afghans’ trust so that we wouldn’t repeat how we dealt with the Middle East after 9/11, which brought about several negative consequences. Her strategy for Afghanistan requires thinking long-term rather than focusing on short-term wins for the U.S. When a general at the table asks her if this means she doesn’t want the U.S. to go to war, she answers that it’s more complex than just a yes or no matter, and involves working with Afghanistan’s government. He thinks she is ridiculous for wanting to talk to terrorists, but she tells him that they can’t assume they are all terrorists and that stabilizing the region means working together with the people in that region. Similar to Heather, Louise in Arrival takes the initiative to go by herself to communicate with the heptapods even when other people think her doing so is too risky. Her desire to communicate with them openly allows the heptapods to establish trust with her even when the rest of the world sees them as a threat. Both Arrival and The Heart of War taught me that when talking about peace or diplomacy, careful consideration and the desire to communicate without pretense or assumptions is crucial if we want to get anywhere putting our peace proposals in action.

Excellent novel that I highly recommend you read.

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. 371 pp.

Book Review: Up in the Air by Walter Kirn

July 1, 2019

Categories: books, movies

This morning I woke up bright and early and finished Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. It at first moved kind of slowly but it gradually picked up pace.

The book is about a successful businessman named Ryan Bingham who works as a career transition counselor (CTC), which involves, at its core, assisting companies in downsizing their staff. He racks up all these frequent flier miles, gets first class on all the flights, and sleeps with all these beautiful women he meets (okay, I might be exaggerating, but he doesn’t want to get married or settle because he loves living the high life.) He meets this woman named Alex on a flight and they hit it off, but he’s wondering if she’s the one. Meanwhile, his family is worried for him because he’s rarely at home since he’s traveling all the time. However, Ryan still seems justified in keeping up his lifestyle.

This novel is a work of psychological fiction, so we only get to really witness what happens in the book from Ryan’s point of view, no matter how pessimistic it is. I didn’t hate the book of course, I thought it was well written. I just wish I read it before seeing the movie, then I would have noticed what was different from the novel. For one thing, while George Clooney plays Ryan just as he was in the novel, the book seems to focus more on Ryan’s relationship to his sisters than it does in the movie. In the novel, Julie, Ryan’s sister, goes with him to the airport and we see how she worries about his constant traveling and how it exhausts her when for him, it’s just a part of his job. The film adaptation, from what I can remember (I saw it more than a year ago), focuses on Ryan’s business relationship with Natalie, his new hire, and how she is trying to digitize the career transition process.

The film will stick with me for the longest time because it made me understand that even though I have a great job, I need to save money in case something happens. Layoffs are a reality; I don’t care how good of an employee one is. The economy now is getting shakier even though people are divided on whether we’re going into a recession or not, and not everyone can afford to save money for emergencies because they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. But in those situations, it really does help to have money saved up. The film also showed how the job market is different and it’s rare nowadays for one person to hold the same job for 20-30 years like it was in the past. You have people job-hopping, you have people getting fired, and more people are turning to freelancing and working from home so that they don’t have to go into an office every day. Skills are becoming more technologized, and just having a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough anymore; one has to major in something lucrative nowadays in order to make a six figure income (although it does help to be good in your craft if you want to become successful, even if that craft doesn’t always get a good rap in the job market. Speaking as a musician here.)

The novel reminded me that job hunting is no fun and games. It can be a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and rejection after rejection. In the novel, Ryan explains CTC to Julie, and after his long explanation she tells him he is trying to paint this job description as some sunshine-and-rainbows gig when it’s, at its core, talking idealistic nonsense to people who got fired. According to Ryan, CTC folks don’t do the actual firing and they don’t find them new jobs. Instead, CTC means “coaching” them through the process of unemployment because, as Ryan describes, job hunting is a job in and of itself. I agree with that, because I got rejected by seventy different jobs while searching for one after college, and not having a job took the life and self-esteem out of me (of course, had I been smarter, I would have driven up to that pancake house right after I graduated to see if they were hiring. Darn it.) Job searching requires patience, it truly does, Ryan isn’t lying about that. Doing self-assessments about your skill set and qualifications can be draining, too, because you are constantly having to look at yourself, at both your strengths and weaknesses.

However, in the film we don’t get to see how these people go through that process, only that they are depressed when they find out they are being let go. One lady tells Ryan and Natalie that she will jump off a cliff because she no longer has a job, and it’s revealed that she ended up doing so. I found the film dark, but the book was actually a lot darker. It’s almost like a corporate version of Catcher in the Rye; the protagonist sees life in a dark way, and it consumes him, affecting his relationships with everyone around him.

This book also made me think about what home and rootedness really means. Ryan thinks that everyone else doesn’t have a strong sense of themselves when they travel, but that he has a strong sense of who he is even when he doesn’t have a home of his own. A guy in the book tells him he should own a home, and Ryan doesn’t take much interest in having a home or being settled because he’s used to the life that he has traveling and flying in first class. He doesn’t want to be rooted because to Ryan, that means he has lost his freedom. But like the characters in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, who have all this success but have these unhappy lives, Ryan still suffers because he is chained to his ego. He won’t let go of this idea that somehow he has to rack up the most miles to feel the most important, he’s holding onto this idea that he is the best at everything and pities everyone else. In the film, he tries to get Alex back, but finds out she is married with kids.

I’m too tired to finish this review, but the book was good. And the movie was great.

Up in the Air: A Novel by Walter Kirn. 2001. 303 pp.

Movie Review: Jackie

January 26, 2020

Categories: movies

Jackie was truly an excellent film. At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it, but it definitely was intense and left me holding my breath for a really long time (seeing as how it was produced by Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky, this isn’t surprising in the least.) It takes place in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and is centered on the trauma that his wife, Jacqueline (“Jackie”), dealt with. The movie opens up with her talking to a journalist (played by Billy Crudup of Big Fish) who is writing about her perspective on JFK’s assassination. The movie is so brilliant because it focuses on Jackie telling her side of the story and how she is actually quite knowledgeable about the field of journalism, having once been a reporter. She tells the journalist that as someone with experience as a reporter, she knows that the press expects someone like her to try and tell a story that the public wants to eat up. However, as a private person, Jackie was caught in a bind because these people wanted her to share these intimate details of the assassination with them. As she is recounting the details of the assassination, however, you can only feel her pain at having to remember these details, just as anyone who has ever experienced any kind of trauma will feel when people who never went through what they did expect them to simply just tell their side of the story without feeling any kind of emotional exhaustion or pain whatsoever. Not only did she have to figure out how to maintain her confidentiality, but she also had to prepare for her husband’s funeral, she had to tell her children about the assassination, and she had to leave so that Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson could move in as the new President and First Lady.

If Jackie taught me anything, it’s this: the events in history themselves often get warped when people put their own interpretations on them. Bias in telling history is inevitable. As Jackie says toward the end of the film, people love to believe in fairy tales. However, Jackie and John’s marriage wasn’t some perfect fairy tale. They had relationship issues and problems just like everyone else (not to mention the numerous extramarital affairs JFK apparently had behind Jackie’s back. No one taught me this in history class.) They were human beings who just happened to be the President and First Lady of the United States. And Jackie knew that JFK wasn’t perfect and that he slept with these women behind her back. However, that didn’t change the fact that his assassination was going to traumatize her for a very long time. Just a few hours after JFK’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife are sworn in as President and First Lady. While we don’t get as much detail into the rapport between Lyndon and John, or Lady Bird and Jackie, the movie focuses on how stressful the rapid transition was for Jackie. Probably one of the scariest scenes of all (besides the scene where JFK gets assassinated) is when Jackie is walking in the Oval Office with her clothes bloodied. She walks around with this numbness that gave me goosebumps. When she describes to the reporter the assassination in great detail I literally felt my heart go heavy. After seeing the film, looking at the poster for Jackie gave me chills in the same way that looking at the poster for Black Swan gave me chills after seeing the film.

Another thing I loved about the film was the score (courtesy of Micachu, or Mica Levi, who I had little knowledge of before seeing the film.) It has these slides in the strings at the beginning that gives the film its unsettling character, and there is one scene in particular that will stick with me for a while, and that is when Pablo Casals is performing at the White House, and as he is performing, the camera cuts to Jackie sitting in the center seat and front row of the audience, staring in awe and contemplation as Pablo performs. It is a deeply chilling moment because it is one of the memories she shared with her husband before his assassination. The music is rich with strings, and while I’m sad it didn’t win for Best Original Score at the Oscars (La La Land won) it is still an amazing score.

Another lesson that Jackie taught me was that you need to see history from more than one perspective. When I was in AP US History we went so quickly through out 1960s unit that some of the historical events covered in Jackie I didn’t know until I saw the movie. In one scene (this article articulates the scene better than I ever would), Jackie is coping with her husband’s death by drinking several bottles of alcohol and taking medications while the song “Camelot” is playing in the background (she tells the journalist that she and John would listen to the Broadway musical Camelot before bed.) This scene gave me the chills because it’s this super upbeat song but then later in the film Jackie keeps saying that while she and her husband lived a Camelot-like life when he was alive, there is no longer a Camelot now that John is dead. The upbeat song, juxtaposed with her trying on various dresses and sitting at the Oval desk and replaying the trauma over and over again in her mind, forced me to sit back and really think about how deeply the assassination of her husband messed up this young woman’s life.

Before watching Jackie, I would always pass by the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza and never paid much mind to it, and I thought for a second “Hmmmm this is kind of morbid. Everyone’s snapping pictures at the place where JFK got shot.” But after seeing this film I don’t think I’ll ever look at this grassy knoll the same way again. In fact, thinking about that knoll reminds me of the emotional, psychological and spiritual toll that JFK’s assassination had on Jackie. But of course, the history books, especially in a place like Texas, won’t tell you all that. That’s why I recommend they show this film in high school history classes during the 1960s unit, and yes, the shooting of JFK is shown in pretty vivid detail, but the film is so important because I don’t even remember my history teachers even giving us Jackie’s perspective on the assassination. Kids need to know the perspective of Jacqueline Kennedy on her husband’s death because it will show them how important it is to look at history from different perspectives, especially if the figure, such as Jackie herself, was a private person who wanted to maintain control of the narrative that other people wanted to impose on her. Critical thinking is so important, and when you watch films like Jackie, it teaches you how to digest history in a way that encourages students to ask questions and have discussions about the material. Overall, I think this film is important to watch, and Natalie Portman’s haunting and poignant portrayal of Jackie Kennedy will stay in my brain for quite a long time.

Jackie. 2016. Directed by Pablo Larrain. 1 hr 40 min. Rated R for brief strong violence and some language.

Eclectic Playlist of the Week

November 28, 2019

  • “Spontaneous”- Lindsey Stirling
  • “Deed I Do”- Lena Horne
  • “Just Like You”- Three Days Grace
  • “Maybe Not”- Cat Power
  • “Besame Mucho”-Chantal Chamberland
  • “Turn It On Again”- Genesis
  • “This Head I Hold”- Electric Guest
  • “Staralfur”- Sigur Ros
  • Enigma Variations– Edward Elgar
  • “I’m Not Afraid”- Jill Scott
  • “Comatose”- Skillet
  • “I Will Not Bow”- Breaking Benjamin
  • “Help”- Papa Roach
  • “lovely”- Billie Eilish and Khalid
  • “Down”-Marian Hill
  • “Like That”- Bea Miller
  • “everything i wanted”- Billie Eilish

Movie Review: Girls Trip

November 28, 2019

I wasn’t sure how I would like this movie, but I knew many people who saw it and enjoyed it, so I finally got around to watching it, and I must say, it is one of the best movies I have seen. It’s about four friends (played by Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall and Tiffany Haddish) who reunite at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. For those who don’t know about the festival (I haven’t been yet), it is held to celebrate the publication of Essence magazine, which is geared towards empowering young Black women. After watching this movie, I now really want to go to this festival.

The movie also has some really good life lessons about friendship, telling the truth and challenges the idea that women, particularly Black women, are these superheroes who can do everything and fix everything for people. The problem with this stereotype is that it hasn’t allowed for women (in this context I am talking about Black women) to take care of their own needs since they are so busy taking care of other people’s needs. To be honest, I haven’t seen many friendship films where Black women are the protagonists; usually they are the side friend or the comic relief with, like, two lines. Girls Trip is one of the few movies I have seen (and as far as I can remember, the only, with the exception of the film adaptation of For Colored Girls) where the focus is on friendships between Black women. It wouldn’t even do justice to compare this movie to Bridesmaids; it was an initial thought, but as I think about it, Maya Rudolph was the only Black woman in the friend group in Bridesmaids (of course, that’s not taking a dig at the film as a whole, I loved Bridesmaids. It was just a little detail that I didn’t pay much attention to while watching the film, but now notice after watching a film like Girls Trip, where all of the friends are Black women.)

Girls Trip. 2017. Rated R for crude and sexual content, brief graphic nudity, drug material and pervasive language.

The movie I want to see as soon as I can stream it (or if I’m willing to go to a theater to see it after a year of not going to one)

I saw the trailer for Zola a few months ago, and as a fan of A24 films I was pretty excited because this is an A24 film. Also I really loved Taylour Paige in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom so I was excited to see her in this. To be honest I haven’t seen many of Riley Keough’s movies but am excited to see her acting in this one.

CW: contains strong language

My Thoughts on The Squid and the Whale

April 11, 2020

Categories: uncategorized

I just finished watching The Squid and the Whale, a 2005 film written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson. I really like Noah Baumbach’s other films Frances Ha and While We’re Young because I really like independent films and these films are independent films. I also really like Wes Anderson’s movies. The only ones I’ve seen by him so far are Moonrise Kingdom and The Grant Budapest Hotel (The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou is sitting on my bookshelf, calling my name. Now that I have this time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic I can watch more movies and thus, write more reviews. I haven’t written any reviews for a month, let alone anything at all on this blog, because I was overwhelmed with everything going on in this time in society, and while it’s a lousy excuse for me to not write, I was just trying to figure out how to deal with it all. I forgot until now, when I already feel a beautiful kind of catharsis just by typing these words freely, how awesome writing makes me feel. Even if my writing isn’t worthy of The Atlantic or Rolling Stone (due to my incoherent rambling stream of consciousness), it’s my voice and I have this platform (e.g. blogging) through which I can express my frustrations and all the feelings that come with being a human being during a time of uncertainty.

Anyway. So yes, I finished watching The Squid and the Whale, and I must say it was a really good movie. It came out when I was younger but of course I was too young to see it (it’s rated R for a lot of swearing) but I know it got good reviews, so I decided to watch it since it was a good price to rent online and I was in the mood for a movie. Not going to the theaters is of course just part of what we have to do now in order to survive COVID-19, but like many people, I love a good matinee with popcorn and a Sprite every now and then. I should have used the AMC card my friend gave me three years ago, darn. Hopefully in the distant future, as we still need to socially distance to not only keep ourselves well, but most importantly keep the ushers, ticket folks and other people working at the movies healthy, too.

Honestly, watching The Squid and the Whale during the COVID-19 pandemic was really interesting. It may seem like “It’s just a movie, why bring COVID-19 into this?” But the theme of communication and language in the film is so important, especially how the novel coronavirus and mandated social distancing have forced us to depend on the Internet to work and interact with one another (of course, people still love a good old-fashioned phone call now and then, and we also have tools like FaceTime, Skype, Zoom and WebEx to see each other even when we may not be in the same room with one another.) The film takes place in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1986, a time when the only modes of communication were writing letters, calling on the landline and talking face to face. Bernard and Joan Berkman, played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney respectively, have two sons named Walt and Frank. Bernard and Joan are separating after Bernard finds out that Joan is having an affair with Ivan, Frank’s tennis instructor. They leave Walt and Frank to figure out how to cope with the divorce on their own. Frank, who is younger than Walt, doesn’t have Snapchat, Instagram or texting to entertain himself and escape from the issue of his parents’ separation, so he drinks his parents’ alcohol and masturbates in private at school. Side note, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Walt Berkman, is pretty dang cute. I found myself almost blushing throughout the film because he is so attractive. But again, I find myself digressing.

So yes, Frank doesn’t have all the apps that many of us use every day (because of course none of these were invented until later) and Walt is figuring out his relationship with Sophie, a girl with whom he bonds over Franz Kafka one day during class. He is also figuring out how to deal with his attraction to Lili, one of his dad’s students (it took me a minute to recognize that Lili is played by Anna Paquin, and I remembered that this film was made fifteen years ago, so quite a bit of time passed between this film and True Blood.) It’s complicated because Lili is also attracted to Bernard. Moreover, Walt, like Frank, is dealing with his parents’ separation. His relationship with Sophie gets worse as he takes his frustration out on her.

I’ve lately been thinking about this topic of communication as it relates to my personal experiences, and this film really made me think about the ways in which people communicated back then and how we communicate now, especially when it comes to the topic of divorce and separation. I personally don’t have expertise in this subject, but I have been reading a lot of reports lately about how the stay-at-home orders right now are impacting couples who want to file for divorce. Right now, lawyers are backlogged with requests to file divorce, but filing divorce petitions is expensive, and the process of finalizing a divorce is now being done over videoconferencing because the courthouses are closed unless their is an emergency. According to a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek by Sheridan Prasso, in China there have been a lot of domestic violence cases and divorce filings after the government mandated stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of COVID-19, even though the government expected couples to bond more and have kids since they would be stuck at home. The stay-at-home orders made it hard for the women in these marriages to seek help since they would have had to go see someone in person to file the divorce, and

“police were so busy enforcing quarantines that they were sometimes unable to respond to emergency calls from battery victims, women experiencing violence were not able to leave, and courts that normally issued orders of protection were closed.”

Feng Yuan, co-founder of Equality, Beijing NGO focused on gender-based violence. Source: “China Divorce Spike is a Warning to the Rest of Locked-Down World” by Sheridan Prasso

I’m not saying the characters were in any way privileged for going outside or meeting each other face to face to work out conflict (or in Walt’s case, running out of Mount Sinai Hospital to visit an old relic of his childhood at the Museum of Natural History.) That’s how people had to communicate during the day: you couldn’t text someone an apology, you couldn’t tweet something snarky, you couldn’t send a middle-finger emoji to your mom if she said something you didn’t like. You had to call on the phone or talk to them in person, so it was hard watching Walt insult Sophie on the street corner and ridicule her for wanting to have sex too soon. Nowadays, if he had a smartphone he probably would have found her on Tinder and if she seemed too much for him, he could just ghost her and ignore her text messages and calls. He wouldn’t have to talk out his frustration with her, and it’s not like they walked away feeling good about their relationship (they break up), but they talked about it. Face to face, tears and awkward silences galore, something that you can’t communicate in a text message or group chat. The movie would have been totally different if the characters used the methods of communication we use today. Many couples use texting to communicate, and while texting is good for communicating short non-intrusive messages when people are busy at work or dropping kids off at school, the way we communicate our words matters, and texting omits 93 percent of the cues for effective communication. I don’t care if you pepper your message with eggplant emojis, cute smiley icons or digital middle fingers. It doesn’t convey everything you are thinking, and so your partner may be keeping something from you and hiding the thing in the text message without honestly talking about it. I honestly cannot envision Joan and Bernard communicating through text. The in-person conversations between them, Walt and Frank were already filled with pain, tears and anger; why complicate it through texting? Imagine if Walt talked out his memory of his mother with his therapist and him sharing this beautiful bond before the divorce, through text with his therapist. At first, Walt doesn’t open up, but since he doesn’t have a phone to look down at during his therapy session, he has to look the therapist in the eye and be honest with both him and himself. Soon, Walt finds himself recalling a particularly beautiful moment when he and his mother go to The Natural History Museum and see a diorama of a squid and a whale and what that diorama meant for him as a child. It’s hard to be honest in person sometimes, especially when you’re going through what Walt is going through, but it frees you to a certain extent because you don’t feel you have to bottle up your pain all the time when you talk it out with someone in person or over the phone.

Also, the movie would be just boring if communication was like that. Through movies, we develop a sense of empathy for the characters and what they are going through when we see their tears, their silent steely expressions. None of that comes through in a text message. I’m not against texting and admit that I do text quite a bit, but this has been on my mind for quite some time, so what better way to address it than a long blog post rant? I wonder how this movie would have been if it took place here in 2020…

Overall, this was an excellent film.

Movie Review: In the Heights

This past weekend I watched In the Heights. When I first saw the trailer I was super excited for the film because I had seen Hamilton on Disney + (which I will be eternally grateful for because I have yet to see the Broadway in person.) I was also excited because Stephanie Beatriz is in the movie, and I love her as Rosa Diaz in the sitcom Brooklyn 99.

So last night I watched it, and the dancing and singing were absolutely amazing. My friends and I found ourselves bobbing our heads and snapping to the music, and my heart warmed when I watched how Usnavi and Vanessa’s love for each other develops through the film. Even though I myself am not Latinx, I have friends with similar stories to Nina’s. In the film there is a character named Nina who went to Stanford and dropped out because she encountered racist microaggressions from people at the university and was made to feel like she didn’t belong there. When Nina is at a restaurant with her dad she tells him that at an event she attended a lady thought Nina was one of the servers and handed her a dish to take back to the kitchen. This is a common microaggression against students of color who are at predominantly white universities and in predominantly white spaces. In the film Nina performs a number called “Breathe,” and in this number she talks about how everyone in her community has big hopes for her and tells her she will go far in life, but after burning out from the racism and stress she encountered in college, she feels like she let everyone in her community down. It honestly gave me chills, but it’s an all too common experience for first-generation BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students. I also learned a lot listening to my undocumented peers and it encouraged me to read more books by authors who are undocumented immigrants and/ or authors who write about the experiences of undocumented immigrants.

I really loved the film, especially Anthony Ramos’ portrayal of Usnavi, and the beautiful choreography and rapping (I also had forgotten that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote In the Heights before he wrote Hamilton, I thought he had written Hamilton and then In the Heights. My bad.) I also love how Usnavi learns that he can create value right in the Washington Heights community where he’s at even though he has big dreams at the beginning to leave for Puerto Rico.

And at the same time, I want to acknowledge the problem of colorism in the film. Before I watched the film I heard a little bit about the backlash against the film, but it wasn’t until after I watched it that I started reading up more on it. In a Vox piece by Jasmine Haywood titled “In the Heights exemplified the ugly colorism I’ve experienced in Latinx communities”, she explains that while the film was lauded at the beginning for portraying Latinx actors in leading roles, it did a bad job of showing the actual diversity within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, particularly of the Afro-Latinx communities who reside there. In the film most of the Latinx actors who play main characters are light-skinned and white-passing, while the Afro-Latinx people who have dark skin in the film play background roles such as dancers and hair salon workers. Jasmine, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and from New York state, further explains that the film does not adequately portray the diversity of Washington Heights. In reality, Washington Heights is historically a Dominican community and nearly half of the residents of Washington Heights are Dominican. Moreover, many Dominican people identify as Black Latinx, and as Haywood adds, much of Dominican culture has its roots in the African diaspora.

Haywood then gives historical context about why a lot of Afro-Latinx folks encounter discrimination within the Latinx community, and it goes back to European colonization and slavery, which touted that phenotypic features of white European people–fair skin, straight hair, narrow nose, or light eyes–are superior and should be privileged over Afro-centric features. This has led over many years to dark-skinned people lightening their skin with skin lightening creams and using other methods to alter their bodies, and this deeply toxic systemic colorism has manifested over the years in cinema with dark-skinned BIPOC folks being passed over for crucial roles and light-skinned BIPOC folks getting those roles. A key example of this is the film West Side Story. Natalie Wood was a white actress playing the leading role, a Puerto Rican woman named Maria. Rita Moreno, who is actually Puerto Rican, plays Anita, a supporting role. Another example is when Zoe Saldana, a light-skinned Black actress, had to darken her skin to play Nina Simone in the 2016 biographical film Nina. These are just a few examples though. Haywood also points out (which I didn’t know until reading her piece) that the film omits a scene in the original stage play in which Nina’s father expresses prejudice against her boyfriend Benny because he is Black. Omitting this scene left out room for a discussion around the complicated anti-Blackness within Latino families. Haywood also points out that John M. Chu, who directed the film, did the same thing when he directed Crazy Rich Asians; Singapore is more racially diverse than the film depicts it to be, and in the movie most of the East Asian actors in leading roles are lighter-skinned. At the end of her piece, Haywood concludes that while she was glad to see the music, culture and food of Latinx communities being well represented, she was disappointed that the film did not take the opportunity it had to represent Afro-Latinx folks within the Latinx communities of Washington Heights, and that more needs to be done particularly in the wake of more recent awareness of anti-Blackness. Monica Castillo, in a review of the film for NPR, recognizes that while she loved the film and resonated strongly with the characters, she is a white Latina and hasn’t experienced the same kind of erasure that Afro Latinx and Indigenous folks have faced, and recognizes that this erasure of Afro Latinx folks has been going on for far too long and should be better addressed.

Right after the backlash, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized, explaining that he wrote In the Heights because he didn’t see Latinx folks like himself being represented on screen, but he had also been listening to people and keeping up with conversations around the lack of Afro-Latinx representation in the film. He apologized to everyone on Twitter and thanked everyone for having these conversations about the film’s colorism, and promised to keep learning and doing better in his future projects to honor the diversity of the Latinx community. The full apology can be found in this NPR article.

While I can’t say much more on this topic, like Lin-Manuel Miranda I have learned a lot from the conversations around colorism in In the Heights, and I am also going to keep learning from these conversations. Lin’s sensitivity and awareness of the issue of colorism, and his willingness to do better, also encouraged me as someone who is interested in social justice conversations and is always figuring out how I can do better.

Here is the In the Heights trailer:

In the Heights. 2021. Directed by Jon M. Chu. Based on the stage musical of the same name by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes. Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.

What Happened When I Stopped Calling Myself a Perfectionist Today

I attended an LGBTQIA+ Buddhist meeting on Zoom and in the meeting we talked about individuality and being true to ourselves and how chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helps us tap into our own inner mission. I thought about this because I was struggling with perfectionism this morning: I needed to find the perfect apartment, the perfect job, the perfect salary, the perfect place to live. And I ended up burning out as I always do. When I wanted to publish my poetry book on Amazon, I just couldn’t do it. I just felt this voice in my head telling me, Your poetry stinks. Don’t publish it. I searched on the Internet, scouring pages for people to affirm that yes, I should publish, or no I should wait it out. Browsing the Web for people to tell me what I should and should not do was not only silly, it was also toxic because I was feeding my ego, my insecurities. I was depending on others to validate whether I was worthy or not. So I asked myself in that moment, what do I really want to do? Do I want to keep going down this rabbit hole of job searching? Do I want to sleep and beat myself up and cry about how I supposedly haven’t measured up to anyone’s expectations of me (expectations that, in retrospect, I have made up for the past twenty something odd years)? Or do I just want to write on my blog and write in my most authentic voice? So I did. I finished my review of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but felt Oh what if I write more? What if I’m not finished? Then I panicked because my cello lesson was coming up and I thought, Oh crap I haven’t worked on this piece enough, what is wrong with me, oh gosh I’m gonna bomb it. I spent the whole morning writing in what the notes were on the music because it’s a scordatura piece that requires you to tune down the A string to a G, and I panicked because I didn’t want to miss any notes when I played for my teacher. I wanted it to be a note perfect performance.

And I was running late because I kept working on the piece, kept getting frustrated with myself. So finally I did a sonorous gongyo (a morning and evening prayer that involves reading the 2nd and 16th chapters of a Mahayana Buddhist teaching called The Lotus Sutra) to have the best lesson I could. As I gathered my things, I thought about the RuPaul quote on self-love that goes: if you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? I realized that if I couldn’t love myself, then I couldn’t love the person in front of me, no matter how hard I tried. But how would I put that self-love into practice?

The clock neared 6:30 and I was running late. I stopped at the red light and panicked inside. But suddenly a voice said, “you’re not a perfectionist.” And with that I repeated that mantra in my mind as I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while driving, and it helped me calm down. It also made me realize that my teacher is a human being, too, and that they make mistakes sometimes, too, just like I do, so there was nothing to beat myself up about. So I arrived and set up, and when I played for them, I repeated this same mantra to myself: you’re not a perfectionist. A few things I learned when I did that: I let go of labeling myself as a perfectionist because I realized right then and there that perfectionism truly does not define who I am, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself of this lie. I also realized that when I dropped the perfectionist label and stopped calling myself a perfectionist, I was more okay with making mistakes, and I was also more open to feedback from my teacher on how to better express the piece. I also was less worried about playing the notes wrong, and was able to just play from my heart straight through the piece.

I also was able to treat every piece of feedback like it was a nugget of wisdom rather than as a way of throwing me off my get it perfect, my way or the highway routine of practicing. I realized the reason I got so frustrated with myself during my past cello lessons was because I was holding myself to some pretty unrealistic standards. In the July issue of the magazine Living Buddhism, there’s this excellent article about the Buddhist view of perfectionism. In the article there is a quote by Daisaku Ikeda where he encourages young people to recognize that they are not perfect, and that failures and obstacles are opportunities to grow as a person, so young people should stay true to themselves and continue to carry out their unique mission in life. Moreover, when I told myself I wasn’t a perfectionist, I lightened up and stopped worrying so much about what my teacher was thinking about me as I played. I appreciated that moment the feedback they gave me and ways I could improve the piece. Letting go of my former perfectionist identity let me ride home in peace, remembering that I did my best and played and worked with the other person in the most authentic way that I could. I also stopped thinking so much about the person I have a crush on. I had tried to create this perfect image of them, but I realized that unless I let go of being a perfectionist, of calling myself a perfectionist, I was always going to hold unrealistic expectations for the person and people I love in my life, and when I let go of that label I was able to embrace the actual person and not just the idea of them. I was also able to focus on my writing rather than just think about the perfect ideal of us together.

My Thoughts on After You, The Sequel to Me Before You (CW: suicide)

March 15, 2020

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So first before I write this review: if you haven’t seen Me Before You (the book is After You), then make sure you read it before reading my take on it. Because like any review about a series book (like let’s say, Harry Potter) if you don’t know what’s going on with the characters’ backstories, then it’s going to be hard to catch up. Also, who likes spoilers? I don’t know many people who care for them, unless they just are absolutely certain they will not read the book or watch the movie. So I’ll leave some spaces here before you scroll any further…

Ready? Ok, let’s do this thing. So the book After You carries off after Will Traynor’s assisted suicide (Dignitas) and Louisa is trying her hardest to cope, but ends up falling from her apartment building. Her family tells her to come back home, so she does and gets a job at an airport working at a coffeeshop/ bar. Her boss, Richard, is a pain to work with, constantly micromanaging her and forcing her to wear an outfit she doesn’t like. On top of that, she is also trying to stay away from people who think of her as the girl who encouraged Will’s suicide. And big surprise: neither we nor the reader nor Louisa knows that Will has a daughter, but lo and behold Lily shows up at Louisa’s apartment one night because she found out Louisa knew Will. Louisa’s parents also send her to a grief support group, and while at first Louisa doesn’t want to be there, she meets Sam, who is a relative of one of the support group members. Louisa must make a lot of hard decisions in this book: should she accept her newfound relationship with Sam, or not go for it because Will wouldn’t have wanted it? Should she accept a new job offer in a different city or stay put at her day job? Should she let Lily stay at her apartment or risk hurting her feelings by kicking her out?

The book was great, although I am aware of the criticisms surrounding it. There was a lot of backlash from the disabled communities because Me Before You suggests that living as a disabled person is useless and disabled people should opt for ending their lives instead of living. I am honestly glad I read the criticisms because I was crying during Me Before You and After You, and I knew I was frustrated with the ending of Me Before You, but I just couldn’t put my tongue on it. I thought at the end, Did Will just have to go through with suicide? Why couldn’t he and Louisa just grow old together? Why did the key to Louisa’s happiness have to be in another able-bodied person (Sam) in the sequel? Then I read reviews about the film by disability activists and was relieved to know my growing discomfort with the novel’s ending was valid.

Also, from a Nichiren Buddhist perspective, we believe everyone has a mission in life and that mission is to give other people hope when we overcome challenges. We also believe that there is a type of happiness called absolute happiness, where, even if you are going through the worst of times, when you chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, you awaken to your own inner potential (which we all have inside of us) to overcome any obstacle and achieve your goals, so even going through challenges is itself a joy. By the end, I kind of wished Will and Louisa were real so that I could tell them about Nam-myoho-renge-kyo; I’m not saying it would have made Will’s problems go away, but it would have given him hope that he could keep going in life. I cannot speak for disabled people since I am able-bodied, but I know a lot of people who are physically disabled but they keep on living despite the challenges and discrimination they may face as disabled people. I am aware that suicide is a touchy topic and that my views do not reflect other people’s perspectives. As much as I loved Me Before You and its sequel at first, I am trying to become more aware of the ways in which a lack of accurate representation of disabled people does more harm than good.