je ne sais pas

and it’s three am on a school night, yeah, so i’m looking out my window at the sky, and i’m thinking, i am so used to not wanting to be alive. but i did want to be alive, right then, and so i thought, why is that? when and how did i get to that point?

so i wrote it down, and i posted it, because my therapist told me that i should share more of my work, even if i think its points are hackneyed and its details are messy. and then, people liked it. which is so fucking weird. and kind. and good. and fucking weird.

You’re the person who got arrested the night before graduation!

Incredible installation artwork by Ron Mueck

I’ve spent the past… five? Let’s say five - the past five years analyzing the structure of Disney Musicals as part of the process to write my own/a parody of them, and the thing is that all the modern ones have roughly the same number of songs - except Mulan.

Mulan has about half, because after AGWFF ends with that unresolved final phrase, there are no more songs until the end credits, which isn’t even sung in-universe.

Mulan wasn’t even the REALM of fucking around - when they arrive at that village, when the true horrors of war are brought into the story, not only does it interrupt THAT song, it breaks the entire fucking mold - the movie’s damn genre changes; it is no longer a musical.

And the Huns represent this from the start - Jafar and Hades are notable for not having proper villain songs, but Jafar does get his Prince Ali refrain and Hades and his plan get sung ABOUT by the muses. No scene with the Huns has any singing, they are mentioned once in song (the second line of Man, natch), and they of all Disney Villains are probably the most serious - no jokes, no witty asides, no sassy delivery of dry humor. The Huns are an invading army who plan to straight up kill a fuckton of people, including children, and AGWFF’s sudden end is the moment when our happy go lucky MUSICAL protagonists finally come in contact with them and their work directly - and it breaks them. Because shit like the Huns cannot exist in happy go lucky musical world. They just exist in our world. The real world. And you can’t sing your problems away here.

Everyone:

I don’t care if you think “this is just how Degeneres/Kimmel does comedy”, I don’t care if they did it for laughs. The overall tone of their segment is to show their reaction; to show how ridiculous and childish they find the KonMari method. We get it, white liberals don’t have time for wishy-washy Japanese mindfulness woo-woo and their enlightened views make them too rational to take seriously any other cultures that are based in spirituality and animism

Kimmel made a long, over-winded joke that deliberately put both Marie and her translator into an embarrassing situation, deliberately highlighting and mocking Marie’s lack of English, and then mocked the Shinto cultural background that Marie’s methods come from. Ellen’s writer acted as if Marie was going to overturn his office, then shoves Kim Kardashian’s ass into Marie’s face, then admit that he’s going “put everything back anyway” after Maries leaves. Both of them act as if her “greeting ritual” was some form of Weird Hokey Japanese Gimmick. 

White “progressive liberal voices” are turning non-white cultures either into a commodity or into a joke without any self-reflection or foresight into the damage they’re potentially doing. They take no care in the hurt that they as white comedians are sowing; in turning Marie’s traditional Japanese cultural values and contexts into a joke, they’re making the act of othering and disrespecting non-white cultures more normative and easier to do. Their activism and political commentary is nothing but performative white bullshit.

“From the first fleet to the last raindrop, we will fight.”

On the 26th of January 1788 the First Fleet arrived in Australia on what is now known as NSW. 26th of January is the very first day of a genocide that lasted 100’s and 100’s of years. Men, women and children were being brutally murdered, shot at with guns. Aboriginal men and women were sold into slavery. Children were being captured and sent to missions where they were forced to learn the western ways.

To begin with there were over 500 Aboriginal dialects, stories were passed down from generation to generation to help birth Aboriginal children into strong assets of their tribe, everything had its purpose. And when white men came to this country they declared it “Terra Nullius” or “Nobodies Land” however someone did live on this land. This land was cherished by the Aboriginal and Torres Straite Islander peoples for hundreds of thousands of years.

To this day more than half of the dialects and stories are gone, lost. These stories and these languages were stolen from our people. Our ancestors were stolen from this land far too soon. Our children were taken from us and forced into white families where they suffered extreme brutalities, raped and tortured.

Up until 50 years ago Aboriginal people were still under the flora or fauna act, in more simpler words we were considered dogs. We weren’t considered humans.

The worst part about all of this is, people think that the Stolen Generation officially ended. It did not. The Stolen Generation is still happening to this day. Children are still being taken away from their homes yet, it is called something different. Aboriginal men are being targeted by police. Police brutality is still a thing and people are still discriminating against us.