Every Friday we bring you a chat about the media we’ve been consuming. This week, Wheel of Time, Try Guys, and (what a surprise) classical music. Enjoy!
Adam Writes:
The Wheel of Time
So. I’m about halfway through book ten of the fourteen book series. I find it fits surprisingly well into my day. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I finish. Pick another series? Revert to a different one of my loves?
Don’t get me wrong. I still have a bout three thousand pages left.
Anyway, let’s talk gender politics. The Wheel of Time is considered one of the bridges between older fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King) and more modern stuff (Brandon Sanderson, Fables, The Broken Earth, Children of Blood and Bone). One of the ways it differs from earlier stuff is that it’s not a frigging boys’ club. Another is that it’s not all about white people. Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Lord of the Rings. I love me some Once and Future King. They’re perhaps two of my favorite books. But as with anything you love, they can be so unremittingly frustrating.
Even when I was 12, it was weird that there’s basically only one female character in the Lord of the Rings (Eowyn). And in The Once and Future King the female characters are beautifully fleshed out but they tend to serve mostly as antagonists to the male characters. They have their own desires but they revolve much more around the male characters–as antagonists, as love interests, and so on.
Gender Roles
So is Wheel of Time hopelessly mired in cliches of the male-female binary? I actually don’t think so. The characters are, to be sure. But the writing? My favorite thing about the series is actually that the male-female binaries are fungible. Matt Cauthon spends several of the middle novels wearing tight pants and a short coat so that the queen whose concubine he is can see his bottom as he walks. The powerful women in the novel complain endlessly about what gossips men are. The leaders of nations are more likely to be women than men.
Now you might think: ok, that means that they just switched the roles. But that’s not really what happened. The soldiers are still far more likely to be men, as are the generals. It’s just that there was an event that happened in the distant past that made men seem less trustworthy with certain types of power.
I think that’s the point. A book with different gender-roles would still be a book with gender-roles. In this book, the gender roles are rigidly upheld by the characters but frequently the narrative undercuts those roles through ironic transpositions.
Anyway. Screw you. Let me have my candy. You all read Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer and I didn’t say anything (okay, yes I did loudly and often but I am trying to curb that impulse.
Music
Anyway. I’m listening to a lot of cello music lately. I don’t know what it is about the cello but I’ve been listening to Schumann’s Cello concerto,
Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello,
and Brahms Sonata for Cello and Piano.
Not a whole lot to say except that Jacqueline Du Pré was pretty amazing.
I also listened to a bit of Alanis Morissette. It’s been a while. Again, not much to say except: “Wow.” She really captured that phase in adolescence to early adulthood where anger really does cloud out your other emotions, even to the point where you have angry sex and that turns into an angry sleepover and then, I don’t know, you angrily make omelettes the next morning.
Anyway, I did not have an Alanis Morissette phase when I was younger. Which now strikes me as odd. Because I did have a too-angry-to-think phase. Most neuro-atypicals do and it usually lasts from about age 8 until they figure out their stuff enough to live in the world. For me that end-date was probably 34. So really my whole life should by all rights have been one long Alanis Morissette phase, but it wasn’t. Probably not least because I was self-conscious about listening to anything that could be described as chick-rock.
TV
So I just finished a rewatch of The Magicians. Part of me wonders what people who are more conservative than I would think about it. The refrain I keep hearing when a Hispanic Spiderman comes out, or a female Thor is: Why don’t you just come up with new characters. As if Thor was a new character to begin with. So that’s what Lev Grossman and the other people involved with the book and the show did. They came up with new characters. And they’re surprisingly well written. And maybe one or two of them are straight. Maybe.
I really like the show. Sure, I sympathize with a lot of the characters. I like how good at shrieking and growling Olivia Taylor Dudley is. I like that they brought back J. August Richards, albeit for far too short a run. He was excellent on Angel some 15-20 years ago. I like the whole thing.
But I’m not curious enough to find out, because the internet is a cess-pit and frankly I don’t need to get that dirty in pursuit of knowledge. Sometimes you just have to enjoy what you enjoy and say “to hell with it” to the rest. Like this scene where a guy is playing a card game and is using magic to change the results. “But he’s cheating!” No, the point of the card game is to see which player is better at using magic, not cards.
Erika Writes:
The Solo Aventures of Little Cat
I had expected this to be a fairly typical kind of week. And then, while doing a routine task (bringing in groceries), Little Cat decided to take off on an adventure. He’s home and safe now, but his wandering spirit has left me exhausted and recovering this week. Extra tired, extra sore, and with a shorter attention span than usual. Still, in between long naps, there’s been time for a little bit of media.
And while pain is only one part of my experience, one of the things I did watch this week was Anthony Padilla’s video, I Spent a Day with Chronic Pain Sufferers. I was curious about how it captured my experience. And, while the video has good information in it, it’s not quite what I experience. If you’re not a chronic illness- or pain-sufferer, if you take one thing away from the video, what Zach says at the end about listening to disabled people is it. And if you’ve got questions about what I deal with, I’ll do my best to answer.
Ali Wong
Ali Wong’s new special Don Wong premiered this week and it was high on my list of things to watch. She was still raunchy, still poked uncomfortably at the right places, and still made me laugh. It was just the kind of thing I needed.
The Try Guys
I’ve been watching some of the Try Guys videos this week. Some of them are just silly. Some really show the way the guys push back so hard against things like toxic masculinity. “No queerbaiting in my videos” was heard quite often in the recent episodes I’ve seen. I don’t recall what made me start binging on Try Guys this week. I’ve watched occasional videos of theirs since I first saw their labor pains video ages ago. Their knitting video was a hit among my friends a few years ago, too. I ended up doing a much deeper dive into Eugene Lee Yang’s work.
Okay, One of the Try Guys in Particular
Again, his videos that take on stereotypes and culture have wandered across my social media feeds in the past, but with this week’s short attention span, YouTube videos are about the right length to keep me going. Finding your voice, finding your identity, those are themes I often touch on in my writing, along with the influence of culture, and to view these things through the eyes of another artist in a different medium was really good for me.
His coming out video, “I’m Gay,” is such a powerful piece of visual storytelling. I’m very glad to have had a chance to get a behind the scenes look at the video too, in “Why I’m Coming Out as Gay,” where Eugene talks about how he’d said he was part of the LGBT community and used words like “queer” to describe himself, but in this video he talks a little about the power of language, and why labels matter and his choice to use the word gay. It was also really touching to see how much support he had from the rest of the Try Guys as he made the video. And to see how the Try Guys were willing to participate in it. If you enjoy the storytelling, Eugene’s video “100 Years of Gay Icons” is also a lot of fun.
Essex Hemphill
Somewhere early in the week, Essex Hemphill came up in a discussion online. I’ve read his poetry many times in the past, but another read through some favorites is never a bad choice.
Boyfriends
I’ve been reading the webtoon Boyfriends this week, too. I go through phases with comics I think. Years ago I was really into Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and I’m looking forward with trepidation to the Netflix series,) and Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. It’s been a while since I’ve really wanted to read a comic from beginning to end, and fortunately Boyfriends isn’t too long, so I’ll be able to catch up quickly and be ready for the new ones.
Mozart Blows
Mostly Mozart this week. I heard Horn Concerto No 4 in E flat Major in the background of some video I was watching, and I had to listen to it all the way through. And since I was in a Mozart mood and watching Two Set Violin videos, I watched Chloe Chua playing Violin Concerto No 2 as well. All of the Mozart sent me looking for my Beethoven’s Wig CDs, in particular, Beethoven’s Wig 3: Many More Singalong Symphonies
When I first heard Richard Perlmutter/Beethoven’s Wig, I was on my way home from work, listening to NPR. As I listened to the story, I was laughing so hard I almost pulled over to listen without the distraction of driving. I loved the music from the first time I heard it. It was exactly how I had learned to listen to classical music and how to play with emotion. To find the stories in the music and to make the instrument tell the stories. That idea of storytelling through the music is something I shared with my own kids.
It wasn’t just Mozart–I did go for some Beethoven, too. Beethoven usually isn’t the first thing I put on, but I love the mandolin Sonatina in C.
Button Poetry
I’m ending the week with another viewing of the Button Poetry runners up video though–-the first poem in the video, a poem by Raquel Perry, had me gasping and gave me chills. As hard as that can be to listen to, or watch or read, I’m so glad there’s writing out there that does that. It reminds me of how much life our words have and how lucky I am to be able to breathe life into words on a page that other people can read.
Here’s hoping that next week I’m feeling better…or at least less exhausted.
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