Sarah Palin

As promised, here is a link to my WSN editorial:

http://nyunews.com/opinion/columnists/in_picking_sarah_palin%252C_reason_is_misogynistic

I am enjoying the comments a lot, particularly the one that insinuates I am not a woman (and would understand the female commenter’s support of Palin if I were one).

Also, for the sake of it, here is a paragraph that was cut from the final version, because my editors thought (as did I) that people knew these things by now. The second sentence mentions why Palin has been less than successful as governor:

“While speculation abounds regarding McCain’s motives, no one seems to know quite what to say about Palin’s background. In less than two years as Alaskan governor, Palin has racked up a surprising number of concerns, ranging from charges of nepotism to a persisting desire to fund the infamous ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’ She is easily outranked by Obama, who McCain has criticized for his meager three years in the federal government. As Kerry so pointedly reminded us in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, choosing Palin is flip-floppery of the highest order on the part of Senator McCain.”

Get me a Yoplait, stat. I have something we should talk about.

Jezebel often clues me in to good things. Such as:

Sarah Haskins

On my continuing preoccupation with people-besides-me-who-realize-that-there-is-something-horribly-wrong-with-how-the-media-portrays-women, I have been given a new mark for my arrows of approval. (They’re like Cupid’s arrows, but without the prestige and nasty unwilled side effects.) It comes in the form of certain series of videos, available on current.com, entitled “Target Women.”

The star is a woman named Sarah Haskins, who, by all appearances — despite the fact that her only “appearances” to me have been made via computer screen — is a real woman. And by “real,” I mean unafraid to admit a profound enjoyment of the occasional burrito. (Er, I think she did that, but I can’t find which video it was in right now. Maybe I just imagined that. She does say she likes take-out pad thai…)

There are a lot of things for which we, as women, are supposed to blindly develop a fondness. And, I mean, sometimes we do. (Flowers? Okay. Bronzing products? Er…) Sarah Haskins admits that she gets sucked into romantic comedies with the rest of us, even while realizing that it’s sort of, basically, really, a load of tripe. With these running commentaries, she singles out some trends in TV marketing, and asks why, why, we could ever fall for such blatantly ethereal falsehoods.

As she puts it, dryly (and slowly), ”I am just a lady! With a simple lady mind.”

Incidentally, my best friend and I have been wondering what’s up with all these women sitting around on our TV screens and eating yogurt in groups while talking candidly about their periods for years now. I have to say it. Sarah, you can join our yogurt circles any day.

Then we’ll chuck it and order a round of pad thai from the place that thinks my name is Daila. (Seriously, why is that? At this point, it’s all I can do to help the delivery service understand that, yes, I am calling from the same cell phone number, but no, I’m in a different building than I used to be, and if you could please deliver to that one instead…)

a smidgen

So I said this was going to be a photography blog. And… it is! Just not this post.

I’m not proud. It’s true, I’ve gotten further from my photography lately than I intended to– partially due to a lot of crises in my immediate surroundings, which we’ll relegate to description only in the abstract– but lately I’ve been getting closer to figuring out where I want to end up in the world. I have got a plan, even if the details are fuzzy.

A fuzzy detail.

In the meantime… Let’s go for the wide-angle. (Bad pun, bad! Go to your room, pun.)
Photography is still about sharing a perspective, however compact and intrinsically incomplete of a perspective it may actually be. So I want to share a few compact and incomplete observations with you all.

Intriguing Things:

• Blackbook Magazine
  You’d think I was new to this, the way I keep discovering new publications that really aren’t new to most people. But let’s face it, during the school year I’ve historically spent more time studying (or planning to study) than trolling the magazine racks.
  So there it was, on the shelf in Whole Foods. A genderless magazine, albeit with a woman on the cover, sedately titled “Blackbook.” As if it had seen the urge to be red, but moved on… to someplace perhaps a bit cooler, perhaps (speaking predominantly as a matter of temperature).
  I’ve been considering, lately, how the designation of a magazine as a “women’s magazine” managed by women can, in itself, say a lot about the nature of its outlook on gender relations. I’m not positive, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s something vaguely akin to being the little girl who puts up the “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign on the treehouse door.  (And I should know, because I’m pretty sure I was that little girl.) There are a lot of very legitimate reasons she might do it, but let’s face it, divisive bipartisanship with a moat down the center never solved anything.

(Castlefight: An artist's rendition)

• The Thing Itself, by Richard Todd
  I haven’t made it this far through a non-fiction book since I was assigned to read the narrative of Frederick Douglass in high school. (Actually, that’s a complete fabrication. I’ll be telling you all about another one I’m enjoying within the next few weeks. But good grief, I remember disliking that book, and now I can’t even recall why. Oh, how the years fly in my old age…) Anyway, this one threatens wonderfully to blur the very lines of fiction and non-fiction, wielding subjective opinion as alternately the only truth we have, and the source of all falsehood. Todd fearlessly takes on the most challenging questions of reality and a lack thereof, and he does so without resorting to the infamous Matrix Route (although, as with any good meditation on the lack of spoons, it’s in there). Todd reminds us that there’s a very tangible history to the questioning of reality– I can’t do his book justice here, so I’m not going to try to summarize. But I’m glad someone is now on the bookshelves to remind that our own world, and not just those of alternate sci-fi universes or the alternate thinkspace of incorrigible Derrida worshippers, contains more than adequate reason to remain skeptical.

So this has been fun, but right now I have to go rescue my chair from what, without having yet looked out the window, sounds like a sudden onset of the rain-based end of the world.