I haven’t posted one of these in a while (or maybe it was a few days ago, I don’t even remember, I listen to too much music to even care). So here it goes, more music from my many Pandora stations.
“If You Want It”: Tuxedo
“Volcano”: Damien Rice
“Qui est cette felle?”: Yelle
“A Walk to Remember”: Vulfpeck
“Special Affair”: The Internet
“Date La Vuelva”: Luis Fonsi, Sebastian Yatra and Nicky Jam
“Mob Ties”: Drake
“Cooties”: from the musical Hairspray
“Conversation Pt. 1”: Mac Miller
“Is It Love?”: Thundercat
“my boy”: Billie Eilish
“Every Teardrop is a Waterfall”: Coldplay
“Sleep Alone”: Bat for Lashes
“Play Dead”: Bjork
“So Doggone Lonesome”: Johnny Cash
“Pioneers”: Bloc Party
“Newborn Friend”: Seal
“The Call”: Regina Spektor
“Boy with Luv (ft. Halsey)”: BTS
“Private Eyes” (orig. by Hall and Oates): The Bird and the Bee
“Zi-Zi’s Journey”: Lindsey Stirling
“Survie”: Youssou N’Dour
“Decatur, or Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!”: Sufjan Stevens
I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted all of my tear ducts. Yesterday I went and saw A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and it was truly one of the most moving films I have seen. Most movies nowadays have a lot of stimuli and frenetic action, and much of this action can desensitize us. So that’s why watching Tom Hanks develop a meaningful bond with a cynical reporter gave me the kind of warm-hearted vibes (and caused the same river of tears to form in my eyes) I felt when I watched the movie Big Fish.
If you haven’t seen Big Fish, it is about a man named Will who seems to have the perfect life: he works a full-time job, he has a beautiful wife named Josephine who is pregnant with their first child. But he has to deal with strained relations with his dad, who likes to recount tales of his life as a boy and teenager, stories that the son thinks are just a bunch of embarrassing lies. When his dad is dying, Will goes home to take care of him, and his dad recounts his entire life to him and Josephine. Will at first doesn’t want to listen to his dad tell the stories to him since he’s told them many times already, and he worries that his own child will grow up to hear these stories himself and assume they are all true events. But as his dad gets closer to death, he starts to appreciate his dad and the life he led. Albert Finney, who plays Will’s dad Edward Bloom, died in February of this year, and whenever I think about him, I think about his profoundly touching role in Big Fish. While I won’t spoil the end, one of the scenes toward the end conveys how deeply Edward Bloom touched the countless strangers and loved ones during his lifetime.
I felt this while I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I can safely assume that my friends and I were not the only ones reaching for tissues during this film. Lloyd Vogler is a magazine writer in the 1990s whose boss gives him a special assignment: to interview Fred Rogers. For those unfamiliar with Fred Rogers, he starred on a show called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that appealed to kids and adults alike because of his willingness to encourage kids to get in touch with their emotions. One of the emotions he talks about is anger and he uses an adorable puppet named Daniel, who talks to a lady about how angry he is, and she encourages him to use his anger constructively rather than take it out on others. When Lloyd asks Fred how he manages anger and stress in his personal life, Fred tells him that we all get angry, but there are ways to manage that anger rather than take it out on other people, such as banging the keys of a piano in frustration or taking time to take care of yourself. As adults, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in our own problems that we forget that our inner child calls to us each day for us to play with him/her/they even just for five minutes, and instead of pretending that inner kid doesn’t exist, we should embrace our silliness sometimes and not take ourselves too seriously. Yes, life and goals are important, and also it’s important to make time for art, walks outside, music, prayer, reading, playing with puppets, or even, as Mr. Rogers illustrated during his life, encouraging someone through a tough time. When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway, some kids recognize Fred and start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and then pretty soon, Fred, the kids and everyone on the subway sings the song together. This is one of many scenes that brought me to tears because it made me think about how Mr. Rogers touched each person’s life and made them feel like they had a reason to keep on living.
He even addresses the matter of death in one scene, and the way he addresses it reminds me so much of what educator and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda says about life and death. Even though Mr. Ikeda come from different faiths (Mr. Ikeda is a Buddhist and Mr. Rogers is a Christian), they share a healthy perspective on death that encourages us to live our lives without regret and treasure each moment we share with the person in front of us, rather than fear death. As many know, Mr. Rogers died in 2003, but more than a decade later his legacy remains unforgotten. Like Mr. Ikeda, Mr. Rogers, by living his life in service to others, has given me a deeper meaning on the importance of encouraging others and how doing so makes not only the other person feel better but also helps us feel better, too.
He also reminded me of Mr. Ikeda because he saw the wisdom, courage, and compassion in each person he encountered. Daisaku Ikeda, when meeting with the steeliest world leaders, has used dialogue as a means of forming a human-to-human connection with the person in front of him. Even when meeting with world leaders who didn’t agree with his views, he respected them as human beings and continued to engage in dialogue with them rather than close himself off. In the past he met with people such as Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks, the British academic Arnold Toynbee and Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, and discussed topics such as the importance of art and culture in fostering a more peaceful society, as well as the role of religion in today’s world. His meetings are always out of respect for the other person’s humanity. In the film Mr. Rogers sees Lloyd as a human being, not just as some journalist interviewing him. On the contrary, Lloyd at first saw Mr. Rogers as just being the interviewee who was going to help Lloyd do his job, and when Mr. Rogers doesn’t want to treat the interview as a one-sided matter, Lloyd got frustrated at first. But then there is a scene where they are sitting in a restaurant and Mr. Rogers tells Lloyd to close his eyes and think about someone in his life who helped him in some way. The entire restaurant seems to go quiet as everyone closes their eyes and reflects on someone in their life who helped them. Lloyd starts crying after thinking about his mother before she passed away because she loved him for who he was.
This movie made me appreciate the people in my life who have helped me deal with my emotions and supported me through my ups, downs and in-betweens. Tom Hanks embodied Mr. Rogers warm and sincere personality so well, and the film score is absolutely beautiful, rich with cello and piano (it makes me want to practice my cello harder so I can get an opportunity to play on a film score.) The music gave the film its sweet touch. I would love to see this film again, although I would still probably get choked up if I were to see it again. Like a lot of people, I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on TV and so watching the film made me nostalgic for those episodes of the show.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 2019. Rated PG for some strong, thematic material, a brief fight and some mild language.
A few years ago, in my philosophy course on Animal Rights, our professor had us read and discuss Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s exploration of factory farming and the ethical dilemma he found (and still finds) himself in with regards to cutting meat 100 percent out of his diet. From what I can remember (I’d probably have to go back and read the book despite reading it several times in that one course.) Eating Animals mainly talks about the ethical implications of factory farming and how factory farming puts these animals in cruel conditions. In We Are the Weather, published this very year, it goes to another level to talk about the impact of factory farming on the planet. This book attracted me because he forces us to sit back and reflect not just on factory farming and global warming, but on the deeper meanings behind our actions, like Part 2 he gives these disturbing statistics about climate change and the average carbon footprint, and the ways in which factory farming contributes to increased greenhouse gas production and, in turn, higher climate temperatures. He also talks earlier in the book about the film An Inconvenient Truth (the film that inspired me to go on a save-the-planet movement when I was in middle school.) But then in Part 3, “Only Home,” he talks about the concept of home and how it relates to the ways we treat the planet. In one of the chapters of Part 3, called “Mortgaging the Home,” he talks about how his family was just one of many American families with the “American dream” mindset, where his grandparents’ house was larger than his parents’ house, and how his house is larger than his parents’ house. The “American Dream” dictates that one’s lifestyle should be more expansive than that of one’s parents, but now that climate change is worsening and people are using more resources than the planet can provide, we have to ask ourselves: is The American Dream sustainable? What do we have to lose by sacrificing it? Foer talks about the debt that many Americans have: credit card, student loans, car debt, mortgages, but he takes it to another level by forcing us to think about the debt we owe to our only real home, Planet Earth. He says in the beginning of the chapter that we will need four planets to sustain the average American lifestyle for all 7.5 billion and counting people on the planet, while in other countries that are less affluent, we would only need one planet or so to do that.
I have lately been reading about lifestyle inflation and never thought that our planet would live long enough to still sustain the kind of lifestyles that the American Dream pressures us to pursue. I am fine living below my means, but I can’t speak for everyone since everyone has different goals and situations. But this book left me with this bittersweet feeling, of, like, I am hopeful that we will mitigate what we’ve done to the planet, and at the same time I think about all the species that have gone extinct and the communities that have to deal with the worsening effects of climate change (coastal places mainly.) I am a vegan, but I also drive a car to work, I keep my phone on every day, and I have flown a lot in the past on planes and still crave that spirit of travel. I also try to compost and not waste too much food, since I watched the documentary Wasted and realized that being vegan by itself wasn’t going to cut down on greenhouse gases if all the food I ate was being thrown away in the trash so it could go and rot in a landfill and emit even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Part of me wants to start a composting program at my workplace, but since I have composted before, I can tell you that it attracts a lot of critters and that wouldn’t necessarily be good for the firm’s business. Still, I get sad when our office manager has to throw out all this uneaten fruit at the end of the day, and no matter how much fruit I try to take home I know it won’t fit in my Pyrex container. So you can only do so much.
I guess I gelled with Foer’s book because in Buddhism, we talk about karma, and how it means that we create karma through our thoughts, actions and words each day, but from Nichiren Buddhism, yes, our karma is deep but we don’t have to be fatalistic and think it’s the end of the world. We can transform this karma not just through chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo but also through taking actions in our daily lives to transform the effects of this karma. In a way, as a collective of individuals we have created a social karma through setting up these institutions and systems that perpetuate discrimination and consumerism. And Foer recognizes that people who say we should stop eating meat and flying aren’t being super practical, and also that this perspective might as well be saying that we should become “air-a-tarians” and abstain from having fun altogether. But he also recognizes that the far end of the perspective, aka cynicism, won’t help. He writes a lot about hopelessness and suicide in the past part of his book, and suicide being one of the leading causes of death, but that we need to still have hope even at a time when we don’t know how we’ll adapt to global warming. He says that we can’t just sit back and pray for stuff to happen, but instead we can take action:
“by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, digging up messages from the future, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer.”
Foer, We Are the Weather, page 224
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Jonathan Safran Foer. 272 pp. 2019.
What kind of world am I going to live in a year from now?
What kind of world do I want?
In 2030, do I want melted polar ice caps
To see skeletons of polar bears, penguins and sea lions
That the rising temperatures murdered long ago?
Do I want dying coral reefs
And extinct species?
I know I can't do justice through a poem
But at least I'm getting my voice heard.
I may not be the loudest with my voice
But I am the loudest with my pen
And I speak truth to power
With my written words.
I want to live in a future
Where greed, anger and foolishness
Don't get in the way of people's happiness
I want to live in a future
Where flora and fauna can coexist with humans
And everyone recognizes the interdependence
Of everyone and everything on this earth?
Every time I eat outside during my lunch break
I hear beauty all around me
Even the insects seem beautiful even though
They talk a lot, rather too close to my ears.
The trees speak amongst themselves
As I munch on my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cookie
I hear the birds chirping merrily amongst themselves
And the lively squirrels chasing each other up trees
Even if climate change were to never happen
The planet is our rented apartment
It is a mortgage that we don't own
We have to pay back our debts every month
Or else we fall behind on our credit
And go into even worse debts
We still need to take care of our home
Even if climate change never existed.
And sadly, I can't do more than I can do now.
I eat vegan, I turn off the lights, I try to take shorter showers
But I still eat fruit bars wrapped in material that I can't compost
I drive my car everywhere
I am writing this blog on a computer, which uses electricity, which produces
greenhouse gases
And I always have my phone on
But what has helped me on my journey
As one of seven billion renters of planet Earth
Is awareness.
Awareness that I can make a difference
Awareness of the different issues going on.
Awareness of how important these issues are and why they matter
Awareness of efforts that people are already making
Awareness of how corporations can sometimes do good, and then sometimes do
bad by sending misinformation.
Awareness of differing perspectives on the issue
And awareness that global warming is a fact and not an opinion at this point
Ignorance can no longer be bliss
I have to know the truth
So I can continue my survival
In this apartment I am renting
Each day I must express appreciation
From the bottom of my heart
To my gracious landlord, Earth, who
Allowed me to stay even when I had (and still have)
Debts to pay.
In this interview on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah talks with Jameela Jamil, actress on The Good Place, about her social activism. One thing that really stuck with me about the interview was Jameela’s ability to take criticism when it came to having discussions about injustice. When people told her she didn’t include a certain marginalized group in her activism or corrected her on things she has said as an activist, she accepts it and then strives to do better. Trevor asks her if it gets tiring to have this happen, and Jameela says that no, it’s not tiring because activism is about progress, not being perfect. And I think it’s important to remind ourselves of this when we do activism. I’m an activist, too, but not a perfect activist. I have said some pretty ignorant things in the past about race, class and gender, and many times when people would call me out on it, I would shut myself away and feel guilty about it. One time I said something racist, and I had made this racist joke in the past, and my friend corrected me on it later in life, and then I made the joke a second time even though they had told me it was wrong. Finally they unpacked for me why my joke was racist, and afterwards I took it personally and dwelled on it, like “Wow, I am so racist, so ignorant, no one is going to talk to me now.” But after a while, I had to realize that what’s in the past is in the past, and the only solution was to watch what I say next time and educate myself better. I appreciate the classes I took on philosophy and Africana Studies so I could educate myself and also learn from other people’s perspectives. Even though at the time I didn’t like being corrected or called out for saying something incorrect, looking back, I appreciate the opportunities I had to have these discussions.
And it reminded me of a conversation I was having with a white acquaintance of mine, and they was recounting all of these stories about anti-Black racism, and we were in the lunch line and they recounted this awful experience their Black friend had to go through. They recounted the story word for word, even verbalizing the slur that the guy called their friend. Of course, I got tense when they used that slur (the n-word) because it has such a loaded history and even when people aren’t directly calling you that and are just quoting something someone said, it still freaks me out a little when I hear that word, which is why I don’t say it. But then the friend went on about how they felt so bad, so guilty, so terrible for being white, and sucking in my cheeks and trying to remain calm, I asked them, “How will you constructively process this white guilt you feel?” And from there, our conversation got better and I guess I lifted the burden off their shoulders. Now, of course, this friend would continue to ask me to educate them on my experiences with encountering racism, and I could have told them to talk about something else (like, “Let’s lift this white guilt burden off your shoulders and talk about, let’s say, the new show on HBO that’s coming out.”) But their white guilt taught me that as an ally, even from a marginalized group myself, I need to own my class privilege. What am I going to do when I talk to my friends from low-income backgrounds, just ruminate about guilty I feel for having class privilege? How is that even productive? Whenever I said something classist, I felt guilty at first and would often not talk to my friends for fear I would say something ignorant again, but as time went on, I realized that I’m not perfect and no one else is either. Like Jameela said, you need to own your mistake and move on. Cancelling someone doesn’t give people the chance to have dialogue. Then again, if someone repeatedly does stuff that is racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, or transphobic (I’m leaving out a lot of other -ics and -ists, so please forgive me) you have to wonder if their apologies are actually genuine or they are just not wanting to have an honest conversation about their ignorance.
This is one of the few times I have heard someone talk about how no one is perfect in activism and we are all improving. Cancel culture is very real, but after I watched the interview I reflected on how it has affected opportunities to have dialogue with one another. I have learned to be more careful about what I say, but also to not take comments personally if I say the wrong thing or mess up. I am still working on how I react when I mess up in these social activism conversations, but I’m glad I am working on it because it’s part of the process and instead of feeling guilty about what I said, I should appreciate the opportunity I have to learn from the other person, to do better. I should also appreciate opportunities I have to speak up when someone says something offensive because many people of color in history have had to fight hard so people like me could have the platforms for speaking out against injustice.
If you have not seen Booksmart yet, I recommend it. It is an incredibly fun and brilliant movie, and two of the ladies behind it are Olivia Wilde (the director) and Sarah Haskins. I haven’t seen Olivia Wilde’s other films, but I was just happy that she was directing this movie, and I know Sarah Haskins because she did these really funny parodies of products directed at women called Target Women, in which she gives fun and informative commentaries about things like yogurt commercials marketed towards middle-aged women and the portrayal of women in movies with Disney princesses. I haven’t seen any new videos from Sarah in a long time since I watched Target Women ages ago, but I was so glad to see her in action with this movie!
Although I couldn’t 100 percent relate to Amy and Molly, I felt for them so much when it came to their social consciousness and their nerdiness (and their love of the library.) Like Amy and Molly, I was a feminist and studied a lot, but Molly also worried about her class rank and where other people were going to college. I didn’t even bother getting in line with all the other students during that lunch period to check my class rank, and when a fellow student came up to me and asked what my class rank was, all I told him was “I don’t know” because I didn’t care enough to check it. Even in my high school orchestra class, where most of the kids were gunning for the top ten percent of their class, my teacher gave a ten-minute speech on why looking at your class rank was pointless. The teacher’s idea, which I completely agreed with and still agree with, is that no one cares about your class rank when you leave school (of course, this might depend on which people you happen to be around, because there are grown adults who care about class rank and GPA. And of course, if you go to grad school, you definitely need your GPA from undergrad. But again, depends on what the situation is) and, moreover, your class rank says nothing about who you are as a person. And frankly, the teacher was right. Not once in college did anyone ask me about my class rank. No one at work has asked me about my class rank. Not my friends. Not my family. Most, if not all, people could care less what your class rank is.
To add to his point, I was more interested in learning for the sake of learning, not so I could beat everyone else in my school year. Which is why after all these standardized exams I got burned out and tired. There’s this film called Race to Nowhere, and I saw it during my last year of high school because I was fed up with everyone’s focus on class rank and GPA and standardized exams. It is a documentary about how messed up the U.S. education system was (and still kind of is) and at the beginning of the film a song by The Weepies called “Nobody Knows Me At All” plays as we see kids going to their classes and the visible stress they feel about their work and their extracurricular activities. The students interviewed say that they have to cram in all this information before they take their exams but after it’s done they can’t remember any of it. This is because the teachers, having to follow a set curriculum and deadlines, don’t have time to teach their students more than just what’s in the textbook. In my environmental science class, I was so frustrated because I wanted to delve more into the ethics part of environmental science, ask the hard questions that one couldn’t find by just looking at the textbook. Working on a project about invasive species brought me peace as I listened to Seal’s “Dreaming in Metaphors.” But of course, the teacher, being already stressed out enough as it was, told me each time, “It’s in your textbook.” “It’s in your textbook.” “It’s in your textbook.” I almost gave up on asking so many questions because I didn’t want to bother the teacher, but I couldn’t, because I have loved environmental activism since middle school, so it made no sense for me to back down just because it seemed as if the other students didn’t care about the material.
Although I definitely see the point of a movie like Booksmart, because the film’s message was that while it’s important to take your work seriously, it’s important to not take yourself too seriously. In other words, it’s ok to let loose a little, although in my opinion, everyone has their own definition of letting loose. And the film isn’t the stereotypical high school party movie because the film gives the studious characters more dimension and personality. Molly and Amy aren’t side characters who go to the party and get laid; they are the central protagonists of the film who prove that they can have some fun even though they study a lot. I remember carrying the same study habits I had in high school to college (aka study hard and don’t party. The only high school party I went to was my senior year prom, but there wasn’t any alcohol there and I went with a few friends who were also studious like me) and I got burned out. So burned out that one of the seniors had to remind me at least a million times (more like the entire school year to be more accurate) to make time for myself to have fun. After the student’s senior banquet (which I didn’t go to, well, because #studies) they dropped a gift by my door (they called them “wills” since it was their last year of college.) It was a planner/calendar for me to balance my commitments and schedule some time for self-care, because, in their words, “it’s not just about the classes.” That whole year I poo-poohed her advice, and this carried on into senior year (although I did go to a few parties that year.) It wasn’t until after college that I learned to take care of myself, and my definition of self-care has evolved to include doing my laundry, taking a shower, eating right, and blogging about movies like Booksmart without caring about my bad grammar skills or trying to sound like Roger Ebert or Peter Travers (because let’s face it, they have their own unique style of writing and, well, I have mine.)
Other awesome things about this film? The frequent references to influential women figures. At the beginning of the film, we see, as Molly meditates to the motivational voice of Maya Rudolph, posters with slogans such as “We Should All Be Feminists” (I’m sure it’s a reference to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book), photos of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Michelle Obama, and a pro-choice poster with the words “My Body, My Choice.” Molly and Amy use a code word before they go to the party because Amy is thinking of backing out of the party, and Molly just says “Malala” to remind her that they are friends and stick together at all times (they are referring to Malala Yousafzai, a young woman in Pakistan who is an activist for women’s education.) Like Molly and Amy, I was a hard core feminist and I told people in school I was going to a women’s college because I was a feminist (there were of course other reasons for going to the school but that’s for another time.) However, I lacked the knowledge that Molly and Amy did about feminism, because the feminists I idolized happened to be a white women named Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who as Adam Grant explains in great detail in his book Originals, didn’t care about all women, and by that I mean Black women. It wasn’t until I got to college that I had the opportunity to expand my knowledge of women’s rights and the history of the feminist movement to include women of color. Amy and Molly were advocating for Malala before I even heard about this young woman getting shot in 2012 ( I was in college in then.) They had more posters about feminism and reproductive rights than I ever did (in high school, me, a single poster? Nope.)
The movie also sends a positive message about how it’s okay to be yourself. Even though Jared, one of Molly’s classmates, seems to have slept with his supposed girlfriend, Gigi, and even though he rolls up in a fancy car, and, on the night of Nick’s party, had a yacht where there are giftbags with his name on it and fancy hors d’ouevres (sad truth: no one attends his party other than Gigi, Molly and Amy.) However, he later tells Molly, when they’re at Nick’s party together, that he is a nerd like her and contrary to popular belief, hasn’t slept with Gigi or anyone. He also tells her that he likes airplanes and theatre and wants to do that after college. Earlier in the film, there is a group of popular kids who talk poorly about Molly while she is in the bathroom stall, and Molly tells them that she worked harder than them and is going to a good college because she worked hard. But each of them tells her that they are going to pursue higher education like her, and one of them says that he’s going to work at Google over the summer. The film showed me that while hard work is fine, it’s also okay to spend time with people and not just bury your face your textbooks (also I am incredibly appreciative of my K-12 education and college education and that I had time in college to study and learn about philosophy and social activism.) There are also two students who are passionate about theater, but the film, unlike a lot of films, doesn’t portray them as outcasts. They are embraced, too, in the film, and really everyone in the high school (the movie takes place in Los Angeles and was filmed in Los Angeles) is a nerd in some way.
The film reminded me of the film Dope. Although, of course, there were differences in the storylines (Dope was about three nerdy Black and Latino students who sell cocaine on the black market after someone they meet at a party puts it in one of the kids’ backpacks. Booksmart is about two young white women who spend their last night before graduation partying instead of hitting the books so they can make a good impression on their peers), the films have one main similarity, and that is that both of them transcend the traditional white male nerd archetype. Historically in Hollywood, nerds were often straight, cis-gendered white men who were standoffish and incredibly misogynistic. It’s why The Big Bang Theory rubbed me the wrong way during the first few episodes (no shade, but I couldn’t finish it.) All except one of the main characters was a straight white man, and the one person of color in their friend group didn’t speak much during these few episodes I watched. I don’t know, maybe I am completely wrong and that I should have finished the show. But after reading and watching some many films and TV shows with LGBTQ+, POC and female protagonists who tell their own stories without following society’s standards on what viewpoint they should have, I didn’t want to watch The Big Bang Theory anymore.
Other characters make the story unique: the principal, Jordan Brown, played by SNL’s Jason Sudeikis (I just found out that he’s the spouse of the actress who directed the film, Olivia Wilde), turns out to be a Lyft driver because he has to supplement his income (the movie makes a brief but brilliant commentary about teacher’s salaries in U.S. schools) and is writing a novel about a pregnant female detective who fetus kicks every time she finds a clue (I have no idea why these writers are so creative. In no movie have I heard a school principal writing a novel with such a random storyline.) The teacher Miss Fine (played by Jessica James), an African-American woman who doesn’t play a major role in the film but relates to Amy and Molly very well because she used to study a lot in school and not party and she tried to make it up by being wild in her 20s (she mentions she is not allowed in Jamba Juice anymore because of her behavior.) The tall girl in Amy’s class who makes snarky comments and hangs out in the bathroom alone and smokes during Nick’s party (she plays a key role later in the film.) And Mike O’Brien, also from Saturday Night Live, who plays a pizza delivery driver. Overall, the film was amazing, and absolutely hilarious! The first time I saw Beanie Feldstein was in her film with Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird, another, albeit more serious, coming-of-age story. The two actors play friends, but Lady Bird’s story is at the center, while her friend Julie is there to provide support for Lady Bird. The main characters of Lady Bird are Lady Bird and her mother (played brilliantly by Laurie Metcalf.) In Booksmart, however, the friendship between Molly and Amy is at the core of the film. Julie is a good polite student like Molly, but any other development of her character stops there. In Booksmart, Molly curses, talks about masturbation and drinks Heineken (the only other out-there thing Julie does is eat the communion wafers and chat with Lady Bird after school. The nun calls them out on it soon after.)
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching Booksmart again. And like I said, if you haven’t seen it, it is a great film. It got more than 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and I believe it deserved that rating. I felt like I wanted these characters in the film to be real. I wanted Molly and Amy to be my friends so we could talk about feminism together. I also felt for Amy because she is a lesbian, and as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I felt for her. Also, Amy isn’t an outcast because she is gay; there are a lot of films that make the characters outcasts because they are gay. But Amy is an outcast because she studies a lot and doesn’t engage in the silly games her classmates do. This is the thing that makes her stand out, not her sexual orientation. The film embraces Amy’s sexual orientation and that’s what keeps Amy and Molly’s friendship so tight.
Anyway, I have to go to sleep, but watch this movie when you have time. I wish I had seen it in theaters when it came out, but I’m glad I got to watch it period. Also, like the soundtrack for the film Dope, the soundtrack for this movie had me grooving, especially at Lizzo’s “Boys” and Leikeli47’s “Money.”
Booksmart. 2019. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, drug use and drinking–all involving teens.
I just finished this amazing dialogue between Soka Gakkai International president Daisaku Ikeda and Stuart Rees, who is the former director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Sydney. This dialogue was published just last year and we need dialogues like it more than ever.
I needed to read this dialogue because there is so much happening in the world. The trade war between the U.S. and China, Britain threatening to leave the E.U. and recent mass shootings, as well as the damage that has been done to the planet and is just getting worse. But then I read Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind, and I can honestly say how empowered I feel to be part of a movement to foster a more just and peaceful society. What I love about this dialogue is that Professor Rees and President Ikeda go deeper than the surface-level definition of peace, which usually means no more war. Because, as Ikeda and Rees agree upon, the discussion around peace and justice is more complicated than just stopping wars. It involves bringing peace and justice studies into our schools’ curriculums, finding ways to take care of the planet and giving voices to marginalized individuals. They also emphasize in the dialogue the need for more discussion around the history of settler colonial countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, where Indigenous populations faced genocide and greed at the hands of white European settlers. Climate justice should involve Indigenous voices because this was their land first. Indigenous communities still face a ton of injustice today at the hands of the state, and while the communities of persons have fought so hard and so long for their sovereignty to the land’s resources, and while individuals in the U.S. and Canadian and Australian governments have spoken out against this injustice, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
That is the thing, I guess, about social justice. You have to keep talking about it. It’s not something you talk about and then all the problems of the world are gone. And more people are aware of this reality. In Nichiren Buddhism, if you want to understand what is happening in the present, you need to look at the past, and in order to understand what will happen in the future, you need to look at the present. Individuals create karma throughout their lives, and so this collective karma that we have with settler colonialism, global warming, the trade war, gun violence, injustice against immigrants and poverty, is because certain individuals created the cause of abusing their power and after many years, the effects have shown themselves in ugly ways. Which is why art is so important. It’s why I painted a picture of an elephant and a polar bear standing on melting polar ice caps and sweating while the sun, which has a hole in its ozone layer, beats down on them. I was angry with the status quo and wanted to do something about it, and watching how Greta Thunberg fought hard to address climate change showed me that even as an introverted person, I can still speak up about these issues through creative means. Rees, in the dialogue, says that “artists break down the walls of habitual practice and promote visions of world citizenship. In this way, they touch the hearts and minds of so many people.” (p. 59 of Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind) As an artist, I need to speak out. And as a human, I need to be willing to have the tough conversations. I need to also use my art and my pen to create art that will move the human spirit, inspire a dialogue about the tough stuff.
Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind: Conversations on the Path of Nonviolence. Stuart Rees and Daisaku Ikeda. 2018. 218 pp.
Last night I watched an incredibly harrowing film called Elephant. Although the film came out in 2003 (aka more than a decade ago) it is still very much relevant today, especially in the wake of the recent mass shootings across the U.S. Elephant takes place at a high school in Oregon on a typical day, showing the events leading up to a brutal school shooting on campus. What is interesting about this film is that it is not just from one perspective but from the perspectives of both the survivors and the shooters. There also isn’t much dialogue in the film, so the silences give the film its unsettling quality, and also force the audience to deeply reflect on the meaning of the film. It reminded me of this PSA that Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about gun violence and the toll it can take on people (in 2012, a gunman named Adam Lanza murdered several children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut.) The PSA features several students showing off their back-to-school supplies and using the supplies to protect themselves from an active shooter in the school. At the end there is a chilling scene where a girl is hiding in a bathroom stall and texts her mom “I love you” before the shooter enters. Honestly I have seen some scary PSAs but this one seemed to say “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. Our kids shouldn’t have to fear going back to school.”
I wish I could write a more coherent review of the film, but I am honestly still processing it. At the beginning I wasn’t sure how I would like it, but by the end I had to stop and think and reflect, and this is what the film wants you to do. If I gave away a lot of plot summary it would ruin the film, to be honest. All I can say is, it is a moving film even if it doesn’t have a lot of gratuitous violence. The violence is hard to watch toward the end of the film (if you need a warning, it’s the last 15 minutes). I think the fact that Gus Van Sant had the film be from multiple perspectives makes it a scary film. Ironically I can’t watch slasher films like Chucky and Saw, and yet I can sit through harrowing films like this and 12 Years a Slave and not be scathed. It is scary because it happens in real life, and after hearing about the El Paso shooting, the Odessa shooting, and a number of other mass shootings, I had to go to my keyboard and write how I felt about this issue. Because it had been an elephant in the room for the longest time, this senseless violence, and it was time for me to speak up about it through my writing.
I had a talk about world peace and nonviolence in a philosophy group yesterday, and I brought up one scene in the movie that stuck with me for a while. One of the two shooters in the school is threatening to kill one of the teachers, and the teacher asks why he decided to do such a thing (aka kill innocent people) and the student told the teacher that he didn’t feel like him or any of his teachers listened to him or supported him in any way. This shows how violence isn’t random; it is caused by a series of events leading up over time to one huge brutal event (aka the violence.) At the beginning we see some kids in class throw spitballs at one of the kids who becomes a shooter at the school, and we see this kid go through the cafeteria and plot something on a pad of paper (which we later find out is his plan to blow up and shoot everyone at the school.) There is also a scene where the two shooters are at one of their houses, and one is a playing a Beethoven piece on piano (which would have been beautiful, except for the fact that while the kid was playing Beethoven, the other kid was playing a computer game where he shot various people and plotted their plan to kill everyone at the school) and then we see them watching a movie about Hitler and looking for guns online (there was actually a shooting that happened a couple of years after the movie came out and people blamed it on the fact that the shooter watched Elephant. So of course, some people might be prone to watching this movie and imitating what the characters did. But there were probably other factors in the shooting, too, so it probably wasn’t just the fact that they saw this movie and suddenly wanted to kill people. I saw this film because I wanted to contribute to the conversation on nonviolence.) This film also makes a commentary in a way that most of the shooters who have committed these murders are young white men who feel like no one respects them in society. In The New York Times yesterday, there was an article on the front page that talked about the mass shootings that happened this summer and mentioned that young white men committed most of these shootings. The film avoids coddling the young men, while a lot of real life reports tend to say things like “This guy was just an innocent kid, really nice, really sweet,” but it still doesn’t forgive the fact that these guys who kill people in these shootings are dealing with an anger that goes much deeper than surface-level early childhood memories. Like I said, violence isn’t something random; it builds up over time, and it’s why, during the discussion, I mentioned the scene where the shooter says he didn’t feel listened to, and everybody said they agreed that schools and homes should be places where youth feel like they can communicate honestly with their families and teachers.
Elephant. 2003. 81 minutes. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Rated R for disturbing violent content, language, brief sexuality and drug use–all involving teens.
The Imitation Game is a period drama film based on the real life of Alan Turing, British mathematician who cracked the code of the Enigma, a machine that was so unbreakable that no one during World War II could solve it. German forces made the Enigma so difficult to solve, but that didn’t stop Alan Turing from working long hours to solve it.
At first, Alan doesn’t want to work with his teammates, and they find it hard to work with him because he is closed off from them. He fires most of the people on the team, but then recruits new people by putting out a difficult crossword puzzle in the local newspaper (sort of like fliers for talent show auditions) to recruit anyone to join the Enigma-cracking team. Joan Clarke, played brilliantly by Keira Knightley, is the only woman in a room full of men, taking the test for recruitment. When she first walks in, a gentleman at the door tells her she should join the other women in another room (women at the time were secretaries) and that she shouldn’t be here. But then Alan tells her to stay so that he can go on with the test without interruptions. At first, Joan looks at the test while everyone has their heads down and is lost, but then she works hard at it and finishes under the six minute mark. She is the first to turn in her test, and the only woman to make the team.
When I first saw Joan, I was like “Yesss! Women are killing it in tech!” But then, soon after, Alan goes to Joan’s house, where she lives with her parents and doesn’t have a husband, and she tells him she doesn’t think she can be around so many men when she is the only woman on the team. However, he tells her that he doesn’t care if she is breaking social norms. What he cares about is that she helps him Enigma code because he is short of team members. Joan’s role as one of the code breakers really showed me how important it is to have women on a team, and moreover, how important it is to encourage women to pursue tech. Before watching the film, I was skeptical about whether I would ever pursue JavaScript again, but then I just decided to resume my Codecademy learning and just pace myself. I found that not being hard on myself and not giving up was what got me through the first lesson of JavaScript, because before that I said I would continue coding, but then thought about how it seemed everyone was more qualified than me. In a later scene, Alan gets frustrated because he is being spied on and pursued (homophobia was prevalent at the time, and Alan Turing, as a gay man, faced serious discrimination and married Joan just so they could continue working on the team together and so that her parents wouldn’t make her come back home to them and quit the project.) He comes out to Joan and tells her that she doesn’t have to be on the team anymore because in his mind, he’s thinking she doesn’t want to work with him because he’s gay. She then slaps him and tells him that it is preposterous he would try to get her off the team, telling him that she worked incredibly hard with him and the rest of the team to break the Enigma code, and that she was not ever going to leave the team.
While of course Joan’s story isn’t the same as Katherine Johnson’s story in Hidden Figures, her determination reminded me of when Katherine has to run back and forth between classes because the science buildings at NASA are separated by gender. Even when dealing with the worst kind of sexism and racism, Katherine and her fellow Black female programmers never gave up on themselves and continued to persevere, paving the way for so many young women of color in tech. Of course, sexism and racism are still a reality in the tech world, and women and people of color in these programming industries still endure a lot of prejudice and often feel like they don’t belong. But that’s why we need movies such as Hidden Figures and The Imitation Game to remind us of how women’s involvement in computer programming shaped the course of history. In several scenes of The Imitation Game we see women in naval computer offices punching out code like it’s nobody’s business; seeing this was so cool 🙂 It reminded me of the incredible legacy of Grace Hopper and her service to the Navy as well as her service to computers. Joan’s legacy isn’t often talked about much but I wish our history teachers in school included her in the textbooks (this brief but fascinating bio gives some background about her role as an Enigma code-breaker.)
This film is also important when we think about the legacy of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the field of technology. This film is unique from other films about men in tech because Alan, while he was a white male, was gay. Hollywood movies about men in tech often feature straight white men who treated women like props and spent all day doing computer and video games. Alan’s sexuality plays a huge role in the film because LGBTQIA+ people faced severe discrimination during the 20th century and often faced severe punishment at the hands of homophobic government officials. We flash back to Alan’s childhood, him being severely bullied by his straight male classmates, and Alan making friends with a guy who rescues him from being trapped under the floorboard. Alan falls in love with the guy, but he is called to the principal’s office and told that his lover died of a serious illness (bovine tuberculosis.) We then flash forward, and Alan’s fellow team member, John Cairncross, threatens to tell everyone Alan is gay if he tells everyone that Cairncross was a spy for the USSR. He also tells Alan that he can’t come out to Joan because it is illegal for him to be openly gay. When Alan comes out, the government forces him to shut down the project and gave him two equally brutal options: time in prison or chemical castration. At just 41 years old, Alan committed suicide after enduring an entire tortuous year of government-mandated hormonal therapy. The movie also reveals that from 1885 to 1967, gay men were convicted of “gross indecency” under British law. I literally had to stop the film and just sit and cry for five minutes. p 215
Even though Silicon Valley is known for perpetuating a straight white male “bro” culture that often excludes LGBTQIA+ people, there are several resources and programs for individuals in tech who identify as LGBTQIA+, such as Lesbians Who Tech, and several prominent LGBTQIA+ people working in tech, such as Apple’s Tim Cook. The chairman of Linux Professional Institute, Jon “maddog” Hall, for instance, came out as gay in 2012 in honor of what would have been Alan Turing’s 100th birthday, saying that
“most of the people in my world of electronics and computers were like the mathematicians of Alan Turing’s time, highly educated and not really caring whether their compatriots were homosexual or not, or at least looking beyond the sexuality and seeing the rest of the person.” (“The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech”, Business Insider)
Indeed, in the film, Alan’s fellow coders remain with him until the end of his life even when he faced anti-gay discrimination because he showed them how hard work and perseverance really pay off in the end and helped them crack the Enigma code and thus save many lives during the war. Overall, this film taught me about perseverance and to find creative ways to express myself when working in tech, such as finding ways to incorporate my tech learning with my musical learning.
Overall, incredible film that I highly recommend seeing.
The Imitation Game. 2014. 1 hr 54 mins. Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking.
The Arts Are Life 