Books and Explosions

i’m sorry it isn’t a better poem, but i wrote it for you

I don’t know how to tell you that you’re beautiful (a fact of which you’re probably aware) Or that beauty is a social construct anyway meaningless,  not defining of your value (which – of course – you know already).

That all feels like an awkward pat on your squared defiant shoulders: A nice gesture, perhaps, but so empty in the face of your strength

Inside there’s this little tea table with three chairs, woodstove, minifridge, work table, sewing machines, bolts and bolts of stretch fabrics and maybe some kevlar, and two middle-aged women with matching wedding rings and sketchbooks.

And they invite you to sit down, and give you tea and cookies, and start making sketches of what you want your costume to look like, and you get measured, and told to come back in a week, and there’s your costume, waiting for you.

The first one is free. They tell you the price of subsequent ones, and it’s based on what you can afford. You have no idea how they found out about your financial situation. You try it on, and it fits perfectly, and you have no idea how they managed that without measuring you a whole lot more thoroughly than they did.

They ask you to pose for a picture with them. For their album, they say. The camera is old, big, the sort film camera artists hunt down at antique stores and pay thousands for, and they come pose on either side of you and one of them clicks the camera remotely by way of one of those squeeze-things on a cable that you’ve seen depicted from olden times. That one (the tall one, you think, though she isn’t really, thin and reminiscent of a Greek marble statue) pulls the glass plate from the camera and scurries off to the basement, while the other one (shorter, round, all smiles, her shiny black hair pulled up into a bun) brings out a photo album to show you their work.

Inside it is … everyone. Superheroes. Supervillains. Household names and people you don’t recognize. She flips through pages at random, telling you little bits about the guy in the purple spangly costume, the lady in red and black, the mysterious cloaked figure whose mask reveals one eye. As she pages back, the costumes start looking really convincingly retro, and her descriptions start having references to the Space Race, the Depression, the Great War.

The other lady comes up, holding your picture. You’re sort of surprised to find it’s in color, and then you realize all the others were, too, even the earliest ones. There you are, and you look like a superhero. You look down at yourself, and feel like a superhero. You stand up straighter, and the costume suddenly fits a tiny bit better, and they both smile proudly.

*

The next time you come in, it’s because the person who’s probably going to be your nemesis has shredded your costume. You bring the agreed-upon price, and you bake cupcakes to share with them. There’s a third woman there, and you don’t recognize her, but the way she moves is familiar somehow, and the air seems to sparkle around her, on the edge of frost or the edge of flame. She’s carrying a wrapped brown paper package in her arms, and she smiles at you and moves to depart. You offer her a cupcake for the road.

The two seamstresses go into transports of delight over the cupcakes. You drink tea, and eat cookies and a piece of a pie someone brought around yesterday. They examine your costume and suggest a layer of kevlar around the shoulders and torso, since you’re facing off with someone who uses claws.

They ask you how the costume has worked, contemplate small design changes, make sketches. They tell you a story about their second wedding that has you falling off the chair in tears, laughing so hard your stomach hurts. They were married in 1906, they say, twice. They took turns being the man. They joke about how two one-ring ceremonies make one two-ring ceremony, and figure that they each had one wedding because it only counted when they were the bride. 

They point you at three pictures on the wall. A short round man with an impressive beard grins next to a taller, white-gowned goddess; a thin man in top hat and tails looks adoringly down at a round and beaming bride; two women, in their wedding dresses, clasp each other close and smile dazzlingly at the camera. The other two pictures show the sanctuaries of different churches; this one was clearly taken in this room.

There’s a card next to what’s left of the pie. Elaborate silver curlicues on white, and it originally said “Happy 10th Anniversary,” only someone has taken a Sharpie and shoehorned in an extra 1, so it says “Happy 110th.” The tall one follows your gaze, tells you, morning wedding and evening wedding, same day. She picks up the card and sets it upright; you can see the name signed inside: Magneto.

You notice that scattered on their paperwork desk are many more envelopes and cards, and are glad you decided to bring the cupcakes.

*

When you pick up your costume the next time, it’s wrapped up in paper and string. You don’t need to try it on; there’s no way it won’t be perfect. You drink tea, eat candies like your grandmother used to make when you were small, talk about your nights out superheroing and your nemesis and your calculus homework and how today’s economy compares with the later years of the Depression.

When you leave, you meet a man in the alleyway. He’s big, and he radiates danger, but his eyes shift from you to the package in your arms, and he nods slightly and moves past you. You’re not the slightest bit surprised when he goes into the same door you came out of.

*

The next time you visit, there’s nothing wrong with your costume but you think it might be wise to have a spare. And also, you want to thank them for the kevlar. You bring artisan sodas, the kind you buy in glass bottles, and they give you stir fry, cooked on the wood-burning stove in a wok that looks a century old.

There’s no way they could possibly know that your day job cut your hours, but they give you a discount that suits you perfectly. Halfway through dinner, a cinderblock of a man comes in the door, and the shorter lady brings up an antique-looking bottle of liquor to pour into his tea. You catch a whiff and it makes your eyes water. The tall one sees your face, and grins, and says, Prohibition. 

You’re not sure whether the liquor is that old, or whether they’ve got a still down in the basement with their photography darkroom. Either seems completely plausible. The four of you have a rousing conversation about the merits of various beverages over dinner, and then you leave him to do business with the seamstresses.

*

It’s almost a year later, and you’re on your fifth costume, when you see the gangly teenager chase off a trio of would-be purse-snatchers with a grace of movement that can only be called superhuman.

You take pen and paper from one of your multitude of convenient hidden pockets, and scribble down an address. With your own power and the advantage of practice, it’s easy to catch up with her, and the work of an instant to slip the paper into her hand.

*

A week or so later, you’re drinking tea and comparing Supreme Court Justices past and present when she comes into the shop, and her brow furrows a bit, like she remembers you but can’t figure out from where. The ladies welcome her, and you push the tray of cookies towards her and head out the door.

In the alleyway you meet that same giant menacing man you’ve seen once before. He’s got a bouquet of flowers in one hand, the banner saying Happy Anniversary, and a brown paper bag in the other.

Step 1: Hate everything you ever write ever.

Thanks, JT. :3

Also – this will be the first time he’ll march in Toronto’s pride parade as the Prime Minister.

He’s

been

to

pride

lots

of

times

before.

I’m pulling this out into its own post because…this is actually a big deal, and it’s not weird at all that it’s having a dramatic impact on people. I’ve heard other women say things about how they felt the movie changed how they thought about their own gender too.

I wrote about it a little at the end of this post, but having a female action character who doesn’t have to look pretty when she fights–who looks like she’s actually fighting, not performing a fight for the audience–is a big deal. It’s such a mind-bogglingly simple thing, and yet we hardly ever see it. Just think how much we’re used to seeing something like this:

(I feel like I should apologize to Black Widow at this point…I keep using her as a counterexample, and really, it’s not her fault.)

There’s friggin’ dust on every surface in this shot, there’s an explosion in the background, and she still looks like she just stepped out of the makeup trailer and is doing a destructoporn photo shoot.

At best, we get something like this:

This is what I call the “PG-13 fight” look, in which you can spend half an hour of screen time battling aliens and come out of it with a maximum of two artfully placed face scrapes/blood trickles.

To be fair, I don’t know if either of the above images are a still from the actual film or a promotional image. But promotional images are part of how the studio wants you to perceive the film (if anything, they’re more stage-managed than the actual shoot) so I think they’re fair game for analysis.

This is a promotional image from Fury Road:

Dirt! Neck tendons! Murder face! I mean, she’s got blood on her teeth in this picture. And while she looks slightly less dirty in the hyper-saturated color scheme of the finished film, this is just a very different image than we’re used to seeing when it comes to women in action movies.

And faces…boy does she get to have an amazing range of facial expressions while fighting! Here, I’ve been collecting them.

Actually…these faces are not amazing at all. They are totally the normal range of faces a person who’s fighting for their life might make. We just don’t normally get to watch a woman fight like a person.

It’s like…she has a complete range of emotions…or something.

This shit’s been going on since time immemorial – before movies, it was wives editing and proofing books, sometimes putting in enough work that, had they been male, they would’ve been credited as co-authors.

That’s why having George Miller rhapsodize about how amazing his wife Margaret Sixel is and how important she was to Fury Road was so unusual and important – too often, women’s contributions to their husbands’ creative endeavors are viewed as a sort of marital obligation, not achievements in their own right.

Also, there’s this:

“You can see the huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married,” [Mark] Hamill pointed out in the 2005 interview, in a not-so-subtle dig at the prequels.

Radiant by Karina Sumner-Smith - Fancast 

The first thing buried in a graveyard, so the story goes, has the duty to stand watch over it for eternity and keep the bad things out. It became tradition to bury a black dog before any man or woman was laid to rest, to make sure that no human would be locked out of heaven  (or, for that matter, hell) forever.

They never asked the dogs what they felt about that sort of thing, but then, they were good dogs, and were doing their duty. And would do so for eternity. The black dogs who stood watch were dubbed Grims, though as time passed, no one ever thought they’d be needed. Still, the tradition went on.

When the dead began to rise to attack the living, the Grims were standing watch. Not one walking corpse made it out of a graveyard with a Grim standing guard over it, for dogs know the secrets of burying bones so that they stay buried.

Without the reinforcements of all the dead ever buried, the others who rose that day did not overwhelm the living. And when those living went to find out why, they found the Grims, still standing watch.  The survivors told them that they were good dogs, who had done their duty.  And the Grims were satisfied, and taught the living the trick of making sure bones stayed buried, so no dead would walk again.

One of the things the inspecting committee looked at was wages. Now, we are right smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. The zookeepers make less than almost everyone else in the entire organization. 80% of the keepers live 40+ minutes away, because we can’t afford the rent near our place of work.

Stuff like this is why it’s so hard to get people to vote in the best interests of the poor – the wealthy are capable of totally ignoring the really poor. Meanwhile, it’s easy for Republicans to convince (especially rural) poor people that when Democrats talk about stuff like “taxes on the rich” this is something that could negatively affect them – that they might someday have just enough money and have it taken from them, when in reality the amount of money you would need to be affected by some of these tax increases is incomprehensibly larger than that.

New listings in the store today!

“Pirouettes by the Waterfall Pool” aqua glass, sterling filigree, and crystal earrings

“Leaf me Alone” mother of pearl and peridot earrings

“Faerie Chimes” bead and pearl earrings

Unbeatable savings.