The Antisocial Socialist

Went to see OperaQ's reimagining of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Dido and Belinda, with chickenfeet last night, and I need to tell you about it, because there is now a queer opera company in Toronto, and they did a genderswapped Dido and Aeneas focusing on Belinda's POV, set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic future, in a chapel. And it was everything that I hoped it would be. The singers filled the space (which is apparently usually a difficult space to work in, since it's long and narrow, but they made it work for the production), the costume and makeup design was fantastic, and they managed to somehow get humour into what rather a dark story about a melodramatic emo queen committing suicide. I was wondering how they would manage the singing, since gender is a social construct but voice pitch and range are not, but it really worked, even (especially, in the case of the sorcerer), where it was transposed.

I'm pretty excited about this company. We were comparing it to Opera Atelier's production of the same opera, which made the inexplicable choice to write a very condescending prologue since "no one reads the Aeneid anymore." Despite the fact that no one in this production looked like they were out of high school, they pulled off a much more mature, sophisticated interpretation, modernizing it for a contemporary crowd while still respecting said crowd's intelligence. I'd have done away with some of the voiceovers because I felt that the music and staging spoke for itself, but beyond that, really impressive stuff, and I can't wait to see what they do next.

 Today, some of the many things that outraged me:

Venezuela had a coup, which is not too surprising given how things were heading there. Now, Maduro is an asshat, to be sure, but he is an elected asshat (albeit in sketchy circumstances, but no sketchier than the US electoral college). What is shameful here is that Canada is among the countries following America's lead and recognizing the un-elected opposition over the elected government. Sure, it's not going to actually change facts on the ground because it's not like we could have stopped the US doing a coup in Latin America—that's kind of what they do—but you don't need to encourage that sort of behaviour.

After a stacked vote that nevertheless narrowly affirmed Pride's ban on paid, uniformed cops marching in the parade, confirmed heterosexual John Tory decided to opine anyway. Why the straightest walking sweater vest to ever exclusively be attracted to women gets to speak publicly about who marches in Pride is probably a question best left to Pride sponsor TD Bank, I guess.

Finally, closer to home, our loathsome regime, having destroyed student unions in a test case to see if they could ban unions altogether, is now talking about eliminating the already ridiculously high class caps on kindergarten and primary school classes. Small people can be stacked horizontally to fit more of them in a room.

While I don't, personally, have tons of people in my social circle who have horrid ideas, if you expand to friends-of-friends, I encounter a ton of people with horrid ideas on a shockingly frequent basis.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to convince a friend of mine, who is PoC and an academic at one of the most progressive institutions in North America, that he is underestimating the influence and popularity of white supremacy, among other reasons, because he cannot by definition hear what white people say when they talk amongst themselves. I can, and do, and trust me, it's pretty gross. The BLM action on Sunday unleashed a geyser of bile, like a burst pimple, amongst Well Meaning Concerned Straight White Folks Who Are Just Concerned About Sending the Right Message, and I'm still scraping the pus off this morning. The highlight was arguing with a (presumably Jewish, by the name) fellow who posted a Milo Yiannopoulous video about BLM and seemed unaware that he was parroting the beliefs of a misogynistic shitstain who would happily herd him—and me—to the gas chamber and then get in right after us.

It's not far under the surface, festering there. That's why the overt eruptions—PEGIDA, Trump, the alt-right, and so on—are more significant than their actual numbers imply. The vast majority of all humans can't logic worth a damn, and all it takes is the right vile viral idea for them to latch on.

Why the right has been more successful than the left on this is outside the scope of my little rant, but it has been. The fact that it's been able to infiltrate this far into my carefully cultivated echo chamber is proof of just how easy it is to slip into reactionary thinking.

So the Fords held a completely illegal propaganda fest—sorry, a barbecue in which they bribed poor people with free food to score votes, during a municipal campaign, which is in no way political—last night. There's a sentence in that article about a skirmish between queer activists who came out to remind people that the Honourable Wife-Beater is a homophobic douchecanoe. Ford Nation people—who had nothing to do with the official campaign, of course, or the Laughable Bumblefuck's sustained attacks against queer people in this city—attacked the demonstrators, grabbed their signs, stomped on them, and even choked a guy:



While, you know, the immediate Ford family did not engage in personally bashing any queers, I checked the Star just now to see if there was any kind of statement disapproving of the actions of their supporters, and—nada. One can only conclude that they approve.

As you know, Bob, there is some sort of minor sporting event being held in an increasingly fascist country that has just passed some draconian anti-gay legislation. Our fine city has elected to—in a minor show of solidarity with the persecuted queer folks in Russia whose declining civil liberties and right to existence are being trampled so that pampered athletes can move very quickly and put balls in holes, and foreign journalists can complain about having to throw toilet paper in the wastebasket*—fly the rainbow flag over City Hall.

Okay, great! You'd have to be a real douchecanoe to object to that.

You don't even need to click to see what this link is about, do you?

Our paragon of upstanding morality and virtue states: “This about the Olympics, this about being patriotic to your country." Naturally, his handful of supporters leapt to declare him Not Homophobic despite his many, many homophobic statements and the fact that he's still not planning on attending World Pride when it arrives this summer to shower upon our fair city a shit-ton of money, tourists, and TD Bank-branded condoms**.

As always, the money quotes go to Brother Doug, who objects to the presence of buck-naked middle-aged men with potbellies (the fact that he clearly never looks in a mirror explains a lot, actually) and:

“He’s not homophobic, he has friends that are gay, he just chooses not to go.

I bet he has a lot of black fri—oh wait.

I for one would like to thank all of the potbellied, buck-naked middle-aged men out there for keeping these two bigoted wankers and their scumtastic drug-addled family away from World Pride. Pride should be classy, dammit.

In other news, rumour had it that late yesterday afternoon, two cops were seen entering Ford's office from the back door,† but I can find no confirmation of this online. Investigations into his myriad criminal activities are ongoing.

* Seriously? Travel to Not North America sometime. Though I did like the "dangerous face water" tweet.

** Look, a free condom is a free condom.

† Not a euphemism!

I finally finished reading Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, a.k.a. the rather large brick that’s taken up residency on my nightstand for the past few months. With some caveats, I’d say that it was worth slogging through and that some of you might want to read it (though I think that the handful of people on my friends list who would want to read it most already have).

I’m going to put all my other thoughts under the cut. I don’t believe in trigger warnings and don’t generally employ them on LJ, but if you’re triggered by something, it’s probably somewhere in this book.

( keep reading? )

Hat-tip to nihilistic_kid for sending me a copy since for some reason it wasn't at the library. You can read his much more detailed review here. Jo Walton's is also worth reading.

Oh you guys, you guys. I am so enjoying the explosion of pure nerd rage that has accompanied Chris Sprouse's decision to quit Adventures of Superman over the Orson Scott Card controversy. (You can read some of the butthurt* in the comments there and also in the BoingBoing post about it.

Now, Sprouse's actions, if you read his statement, are not particularly heroic—he's not quitting because OSC is a terrible human being with terrible views; he's quitting because of the "controversy" surrounding OSC's hiring. Hell, even if he quit over OSC's terrible views, it's hardly praiseworthy to not want to work for an actual bigot who plans to overthrow the government if gays get too many human rights. That's kind of called "baseline human decency." But in the white, male, straight-dominated world of mainstream comics, I'll take what I can get, and Sprouse has done right by deed, if not by word, making him far better of a person than the bigwigs at DC.

But to hear the nerds tell it, Sprouse, and the folks calling for a boycott of OSC's Superman run and/or the new Ender's Game movie are one step away from throwing all of the conservatives in gulags and forcing their political opponents to choose between death and mandatory butt sex. I keep seeing neckbeards screeching about freedom of speech, and how OSC's has somehow been denied.

Nerdy liberals are not helping much by pointing out that the problem is not that OSC has reprehensible beliefs, but that he sits on the board for the National Organization for Marriage and every penny you give him ends up benefiting an organization that has, as its sole raison d'être, the denial of civil liberties to gay people. I think this is because no one's read his recent books. One of my friends, who is approximately as nerdy as I am, didn't even know about his politics. I've read—well, parts of his recent books; to be honest, they're pretty unreadable—and the dude has an agenda that he can't keep out of his writing and that should be kept well away from Superman's spandex-clad buttocks, trust me. (He can't write a riff off Hamlet without working in ass-fucking.) So the issue is not just economic; it also has to do with OSC as a person and an artist. You shouldn't give him your money because he's awful.

The most hilarious bit is when the neckbeards compare the boycott campaign to McCarthyism (because OSC probably would argue that communists and fellow travellers ought to be shot in the face), suggesting that we, the nerd community, have an obligation to buy his media so that he can earn a living in the style to which he has become accustomed. Freedom, apparently, means an compulsory copy of Ender's Game and its sequels in every household. (Hey neckbeards who take this line: I'm a geek too! You are hereby obligated to help me maintain my paid LJ account; otherwise you're censoring me.)

Which—no. In a capitalist system, you are not guaranteed the right to earn a living in the profession of your choosing, even if you wrote a book a gazillion years ago that people liked a a lot. If you think this is unfair, let's talk! But unless you're proposing something revolutionary, OSC has no inherent right to not have his career destroyed over his repellent worldview.

Nor is he being "censored." OSC has every right to peddle his hateful shit on a soapbox, literally or metaphorically, without the government stepping in to jail him on charges of Aggravated Asshaberdashery. He's got a right to put his poisonous ideas down on paper without every copy of said paper getting burned or pulped. He even has the right to try and sell his raving bollocks to any publisher who will have him—but said publishers are just as free to say, "No, we do not believe your raving bollocks will sell," and we, as media consumers, are also free to say, "No, we will not buy your raving bollocks because we don't want our money going to NOM, and also because your writing sucks now." This is not censorship.

Let's briefly touch on the other argument I'm seeing a lot of, which is that an artist is separate from his political beliefs. As previously mentioned, OSC is not—both financially and in his inability to keep attacks on queers and leftists** out of his books. But let's just say he was not on the board of NOM and he was only writing books about little boys being unaware that they were committing genocide. I would still argue that his political beliefs are relevant. Look, I like all kinds of problematic art—my two favourite musical genres being opera and neo-folk—but the distinction between a geek-as-active-participant-in-media and a passive consumer at least ought to be, to some degree, critical engagement with said art. I can love Wagner, or T.S. Eliot, or Frank Miller†, or James Bond movies, or Chronicles of Narnia, despite the anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia, or misogyny, or blatant support for British imperialism inherent in the authors and/or work while still criticizing the politics they represent. If you feel a need to mindlessly defend an artist because you like their work, you are officially too dumb to play in geekdom.

Finally, to address the last defence I'm seeing, which is that anything he wrote is actually good. I'm going to piss a bunch of people off and say that, unless you're a bullied adolescent, Ender's Game is actually a bit crap, and if you're over the age of 16, you ought to see OSC for the naked emperor that he is. He's kind of a crap writer. Even if he was the greatest guy, I still wouldn't buy his books or comics because they're not that good. That's not a boycott or anything—it's just taste. If Ender's Game came out now you'd probably roll your eyes. Admit it.

I actually kind of feel sorry for OSC as a person, because I think his bigotry goes beyond simple bigotry well into the realm of mental illness. But that doesn't mean that anyone ought to indulge his delusions. He's got issues, but unfortunately those issues resonate with many theoretically sane, fascist-minded people hell-bent on oppressing anyone who's not like them, and he's got money and more of a platform to be heard than most spluttering lunatics do. For this reason, you should actually torrent Ender's Game rather than pay money to see it, if you feel the need to torture yourself by watching it, and you should totally boycott his run on Superman if it goes ahead. There are enough bigots in the world without you funding their bigotry.

* Probably a bad choice of words.

** See Empire. Or don't. It's awful; I got about 50 pages in before deciding it was too bad to even parody.

† Well, before he went to actual shit.

Awesome show tonight: the premiere of Kids on TV's newest album/videos, Pantheon, at Harbourfront HATCH artists-in-residence series. I am going to make you all buy this album when it comes out in September because it is fantastic. I do love it when I can shamelessly plug my friends' music.

Here's their first single, "Bobby," about the secret love affair between Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In addition to being catchy, this song also taught me something I didn't know about art history.



But anyway. Just wait until the Dazzler one comes out. And the cover of "Cloudbusting" by way of the Magnetic Fields. Incidentally, I didn't know what "Cloudbusting" was about before either, though I really should have.

It is! Time for the Annual Pride Controversy. The opening volley is yet another attempt to get the Honourable Wife-Beater to attend.

It's an unfortunate situation because, obviously, no one wants him there. I mean, you don't invite white supremacists to Caribana, or MRAs to International Women's Day. The Honourable Wife-Beater is a rampant homophobe who, quite literally, hates and fears gay people. It's one thing to have had Miller there, because he was a decent, normal human being who actually cared about the city, or Lastman, who was mainly just corrupt and quite a bit slow but not actually actively evil, but including someone in the parade, in a prominent position no less, who despises your very existence is, well, awkward.

But he's mayor, and it's part of his job to attend big events in the city, particularly events like Pride that bring in a lot of income and are popular with everyone except homophobes, claustrophobes, and people who actually live at Church and Wellesley and want to go to sleep at some point that weekend. So Pride is stuck with holding its nose and holding out an olive branch to ask the Honourable Wife-Beater to please do his job.

Apparently they even need to bribe him by relating it somehow to hockey, like he's a little kid who otherwise won't go near it for fear of getting gay germs on him or something. I can't wait to see what happens this year.

In related news, Wildrose is actually a thing? I really didn't think anyone took them seriously. Maybe it's just a slow news day in Alberta.

After the sobfest that was the last episode, you’ll be happy to know that this one’s a little more cheerful. There’s only a miscarriage, an assassination, the complete loss of all innocence, and lots and lots of dead Russians.

( Mawwiage )