Battle Ready: An Ode to Papa Syed

One of my favorite Greek myths is about the origin of Athena- how she skipped the whole being-born-of-woman-thing and broke forth from her father Zeus' head, fully grown and armed for battle. [insert joke about young women being the #1 cause of father headaches]. 

The story of fathers and daughters is complex, but somewhere in the tale of Athena's brain-splitting might spilling out from her father's cranium, we can begin to see a picture of what it really means to be a Daddy's Girl. 

Papa Syed is a perpetual wanderer- a world traveler ever since I can remember- full of big ideas that find him constantly trekking the globe. He always comes back with even bigger stories, and consequently, I've forever been attracted to the pull of international adventure, and the stories to be found outside of ourselves.

Best of Robot Dinosaurs

Last night, I had a pretty rad time with a live reading of a Parks and Rec spec script I wrote for a Comedy Lab course at iO West. (Which by the way, if you are considering taking, you totally should).

It's amazing how much you can learn with actors and an audience. You watch as bits you thought were omg-amazing fall flat, or tossed off moments you thought were just filler end up getting huge laughs.

Prior to our little show, we were supposed to hand out questionnaires to the audience so that they could tell us how much we suck/rule in various aspects of our work. I left the back page of mine blank for additional questions, comments, or doodles of me fighting a robot dinosaur. Below are the best of the results:

How will you capture me with those girlish arms, t-rex??

The position here is one of might and fearlessness. The inclusion of the shield shows safety has certainly been looked into. Bravo, anonymous audience goer, bravo. 

Confessions of a Delinquent

Yikes, I'm super bad at this blog aren't I? Well quality v. quantity and all that jazz.

But I've been blogging on-the-reg over at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles which, if you're in that neck of the woods, is this coming week April 12th-17th @ the ArcLight Hollywood.

Tickets available via Brown Paper Tickets.

Oh and Fan us on Facebook, & Follow us on Twitter.

(What's that picture of you ask? Something I took a bit ago. But I probably won't blog about it. WHOOPS.)

Gulf Greetings; or the Episode in Which I Abandon My Feminism to Avoid a Flogging

It is 117 degrees in Al Madinah, Saudi Arabia- a holy city engulfed in a hellish heat.

It's hard to come away with any meaningful observations that would do the city justice. Surface-wise, it's a difficult place to get to know, looming with an insularity that seems impenetrable to outsiders.

Travel is lonely; despite yourself, you're thrust into the trope of stranger-in-a-strange-land. Saudia is unique in that it requests you submit to the strangeness and change yourself. For someone unaccustomed to the practice, ditching tight jeans and summer skirts for a long black abaya and head scarf is unsettling- by the time you're dressed and ready to go, you don't recognize the person staring back at you from the mirror.

It's then that I realize- we take our clothes for granted. Sartorial trends aside, what we wear is an extension of our identity and our history. It's where we've been and where we want to be. Even the nonchalance of popping on an old t-shirt before heading out the door carries a certain intimacy-the familiar way it fits, the casual ease with which it glides over your body.

A certain strangeness can be good. Disappearing into the desert, I find there's a bit of a socialist strain to the whole affair. This is oil country- yet there really is no outward display of wealth. Stepping into a public bathroom proves there is no shortage of it. As young women congregate around the mirror, lifting their veils to adjust their makeup and attire, they are dripping with gold trinkets; their faces are caked with lipstick and thick gobs of mascara.

So while the adopted uniform forces one to forgo their outward individuality, it forgoes pretense, too. As men and women pass by, each in long robes and headdress, none is particularly distinguishable from the other. You could be passing the heirs to some massive fortune and not know it. There is no posturing or posing- no desperate bids for legitimacy through fabric.

I would think this would also be the dream environment of anyone who just wanted to hide- a brilliant, socially acceptable form of hermit-ism. We've all been there- those groggy, don't-want-to-be-seen days, where you wish you could just get through everything quickly and quietly without anyone acknowledging your existence.

I revel in walking around still wearing my sleeping clothes beneath the black cloak. I'm overcome with a sense of oddly liberating glee- I'm wearing neon colored pajamas under here, and no one's the wiser! In a perfect world I suppose, this would be a great equalizer- no one's staring at your dress or your haircut- there's only you, the actual person left.

It's a bit of a foolish endeavor to dwell on the foreign-ness of it all, to think that you know what it means to be a fish just by diving into the aquarium.The only thing you can really do is accept your position as a guest, as an observer.

So I resign myself to staring out at the desert,sweltering under my black coat, missing the effortless familiarity of old friends and old shirts.

Coming Soon to this Space!

Nina Paley Sings the Blues

 

 *** 2021 UPDATE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN 2009, PRIOR TO THE FILMMAKER'S GENDER CRITICAL STANCE. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. **** 

 The Dubai Film Festival, like all other things coming from the Golden City, is all gilded decadence but no substance. So while everything becomes abuzz with star sightings and lavish red carpet displays, the actual films become lost in the shuffle. That goes double if you're a small foreign indie with no star power. 

I attended the 2008 festival, where I fell in love with a couple of smaller films that never really got any attention. Perhaps last year's festival was especially tough. The opener was Oliver Stone's W and much of the tail end of the December festival was already stricken by Slumdog fever. A brightly animated retelling of an Indian religious folktale, touching on the theme of gender and relationships never really stood a chance with that crowd. 

 So that's what brings me to Sita Sings the Blues by American animator Nina Paley. Outside of the festival circuit, Paley was besot by difficulties in distributing the film- particularly of the copyright variety. Due to the hurdles in getting her film released in any form, Paley eventually took it unto herself and went all "Radiohead" on the distribution process- releasing it online, for free. 

You can stream/download the whole film in various formats here. Paley's copyright even extends to free use in public screenings. 

 So what's it about anyway? Sita is essentially a retelling of a story from the Ramayana. The film is framed by that of a modern day couple, modeled on Paley herself and her ex-husband, whose increasingly rocky relationship parallels the Sita-Rama story arc. The film struck a chord with me not just for its storytelling, but the visual style itself. Narrated by Shadow Puppets with a tendency to talk over one another, Sita's musical monologues, (which are all tunes by 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw), are done in a bright quirky style, as seen above. 

These are undercut by vignettes done in the style of traditional Rajput paintings, and Dr. Katz-esque Squigglevission. My favorite part is a rotoscoped fire dance sequence, which you can see here, at around 6:40. Lovely, ain't it? I don't know if the web format even does it justice; this sequence alone warranted a viewing on the big screen in all it's giant impactful glory. I could describe more of its content to you in detail, but you should really just get on and watch it. And if you end up liking it, pick up a DVD or a Tshirt. Support real independents!

You Call This Capitalism?

I've fallen in love. Well as much in love as one can be with an intangible ideology. The object of my affections is the increasingly popular strain of New new socialist tinged capitalism. [note: the repetitive use of "new" is to distinguish my usage from the right-wing neo-socialists of 1930s France.]
This do-gooder incarnation of industry is a fresh development in an age where all signs point to the ominous lurching death of everyone's favorite greed machine. One of the front-runners of the movement is a shoe company by name of TOMS A wholly for-profit endeavor, TOMS nonetheless ensures that for each shoe sold another goes to a child in need.
It's high time companies realize that giving doesn't subtract from profits. TOMS isn't going out of business anytime soon. Maybe some of that hokey, mystical nonesense is true: you only get back what you give to this world.
The age of the Haliburton-ites and their brethren is ending. The new school-socialism is here, and this time around, the philosophy is more in the vein of "Gain as much wealth as you can so that you can redistribute it as you see fit." I just recently bought a pair of TOMS (the style pictured, actually). I couldn't be happier with them. They look like sweet moon shoes and I feel pretty styling knowing somewhere out there a child will be getting his own pair of shoes soon.
So are we expected to just shut down our spending habits and soley buy from these Social capitalists? Not at all. But it is significant to note how one can enjoy all the perks of free American enterprise, without selling their soul or cascading into shamefully indulgent uses for wealth.

Viva La Revolucion!

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