blurred lines

Hi everyone!

First things first: I mentioned a regular “feature” about books, similar to the Robot Roundup (or the Robot Revolution Roundup, depending on circumstances), but it lacks a name. Send me your suggestions! Everything here at the Fray is named by someone else, because naming things is not where I’m a viking. So you guys think about that, and I will link some links, and after that we’ll talk books.

Second: I’ve said that I don’t go see a lot of movies, but based on this recap, I really really really want to see Jupiter Ascending. It is long and spoileriffic, but begins thusly:

If you have an inner fourteen-year-old, and your inner fourteen-year-old loves SPACE and PRINCESSES and ANGSTY HALF-ALBINO HALF-WOLVES WITHOUT SHIRTS WHO ZOOM AROUND ON SPACE ROLLERSKATES and BEES, then run, do not walk, to the theater right now.

Yeah okay, I’m in. The recap gets increasingly hilarious from there and everyone should read it. Also it is safe to read the comments there, which contain links to other Jupiter Ascending greatness like this:

oscar-nominated actor eddie redmayne plays a simpering and exquisitely coiffeured evil space monarch who looks like the offspring of a lizard and a million rhinestones, delivers all his lines like someone’s pressing hard on his windpipe — and (to quote mark kermode) “with a petite-mort look on his face that suggests he is being fellated by eternity itself”

I mean whatever your thoughts are on teenie fanfic being given a $100 million budget, the writing that’s come out of this movie has been spectacularly entertaining.

Speaking of movies, let’s keep talking about the Oscars! I know, they were DAYS ago, but I’ve never claimed to be current. Patricia Arquette said some stuff about the wage gap and she’s being excoriated for it because it was awful and she’s the worst but maybe everyone should lay off?? There’s a trail from here to Jonathan Chait’s long whine about political correctness and this oddly hilarious response piece about… I don’t know, the Nam? I think he is trying to make a point, maybe, but it’s pretty buried in the rhetoric of I HAVE INHALED THE FUMES OF YOUR PRIVILEGE, I HAVE BUCKLED UNDER THE WEIGHT OF INTERSECTIONAL NAPALM IN THE MORNING, OH THE HUMANITY. What?

Ahem. Another good piece of writing that came at least partially out of the Oscars is this essay on being treated like human beings.

I always have this nervous lump in my throat that I have to swallow before introducing myself to strangers. I know they’re going to mangle my name. I know they’re going to prod, ask where my parents are from, ask if I speak any other languages, and lord, ask me to say something in that other language. I am terrified of being other-ed. I know my name, my skin color has likely played a deciding factor among hiring managers in the kinds of jobs in the magazine industry I’ve sought and never won. Every fourth or fifth match on Tinder always asks me what my ethnicity is, or remarks about how exotic my name sounds.

In newsier news: the Bay was having a sale on men’s underwear that almost led to catastrophic political consequences; the Robin Thicke/Marvin Gaye infringement trial (you remember, the one where his defense is basically “omg I was sooooo wasted”) is underway and living up to expectations of its weirdness; Oklahoma has shot down the AP US history curriculum because it does not represent America as special enough; an 11-year-old girl yelled at DC about female superheroes and they were kind of cool but also kind of patronizing about it; at a wedding in India, the groom got sick and the bride got mad and so she married a guest; and Kim Jong Un’s new haircut looks great on everyone. That’s news, right? Right.

Yikes. I was going to talk about books here but this is very long already, so you guys tell me what to call the book thing and we’ll do it tomorrow.

Until then, I’ll be…

• handling the truth. Someone has done a dialogue-free edit of the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men. It’s been making the rounds and at first I was like “ugh, why” but actually it is hilarious and amazing in every way. That said, it is presumably only hilarious if you spent a long hot summer in the south with a 9" television with a built-in VCR watching your one and only VHS tape on repeat, and that VHS tape was a copy of A Few Good Men. Or, you know, if you learned this scene by heart some other way.
• packing my lunch. I do not currently have any need for a lunchbox, but once I do, I will be getting one of these. So awesome! That said, I do not imagine that having one of these fancy lunchboxes will suddenly turn me into someone who makes sure my fruit is arranged in a stripey fashion and my sandwiches are shaped like squirrels.
• chasing llamas. Me and everyone else. Here you go.
• mourning Aeris. Here is a story about a grown-ass man replaying Final Fantasy VII. I love everything about it, because I am the exact intended audience. That said, if you are into FFVII (or were, 20 years ago), the best thing to do is to put the soundtrack on your portable music-playing device of choice and go to Vancouver, and ride on the SkyTrain and the SeaBus and stay on the lookout for Sephiroth.

We hole up in a hotel room, and my party plies me for information about Sephiroth, who, up until that point, I’ve just clenched up with diarrhea-like rage at the mention of. And so I tell them a story about my hometown, from a time when I still worked alongside Sephiroth. And here the game does something very strange, something I did not remember it doing. It becomes textually denser without altering its surface, like a Haneke film. On-screen I’m controlling the protagonist from the memory, running through the town, but the details of the recollection keep filtering over top, changing what I can do and how I do it. I jog into the old town, past some soldiers, but — “Isn’t that, um?” someone says over top. The soldiers disappear. I’m back in the hotel, arguing, and then I’m back in my hometown. “You may visit your family and friends,” Sephiroth tells me. So I go take pictures, but every time the camera flashes, someone disappears. “Have I come here before?” I ask, and it’s not clear if it’s the young me or the old one asking it. Did I ask it at the time? “I don’t remember,” one of me says.

Yeah, me neither. Be careful out there, everyone!