Oh, and newsprint justice.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-07-post-reporter-calls-out-will/

The Freelancing Life, and Kal Penn

I just submitted the first long freelance article I've done in a long time. Felt good. It's meh, but that's besides the point. To work is dignity, and I feel dignified. To not work sucks, as Bruce Springsteen will tell you in five different ways in every single one of his albums.

In the meantime, I've been freelance researching, which has been surprisingly fun. Being Inspector Clusoe on the Web feels Willow-BTVS badass. Or Cloe-24 badass. And charging by the hour also feels badass. In fact, I might switch from saying "I charge XX dollars an hour" to "I bill XX dollars an hour."

Also, tomorrow I'm going to the National Press Club, one of those insufferable Washington institution's with a checkered past but that can serve a useful purpose when used right, I guess. It's a shindig related to a PBS/ Frontline documentary I worked on the last few months about the poisoning of North America's two great estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay and the Puget Sound, and how we can stop it. (Key component: how we can stop it. Second key component: buy an industrial strength water filter immediately.)Obama's current EPA administrator'll be there and the nation's very first EPA administrator (under Nixon!) will be there too. I will report what happens.

I have so much more swimming in my brain -- Obama's relentless bombing of northern Pakistan (to what end, exactly?), the nasty fucker rhetoric calling for war with Iran, the Obama DOJ following --and expanding upon--the Bush DOJ's constitutiona-burning claims to secrecy, and how I really really want to start gardening. Not because of Michelle Obama, though it was nice to see here getting gardeny.

That was kind of a brain dump for me. I will avoid it in the future.

Oh, wait, I buried the lede. Which is: KAL PENN IS LEAVING TO WORK WITH THE WHITE HOUSE PUBLIC LIAISON OFFICE. I have no words for this.

Cause it's my blog and I'll do what I want with it

Why I should never say words, Part Two.

Remember this? Here's part two.

So I'm in my office and hear my coworker talking on the phone in German. It's her birthday, so she's been on the phone throughout the day taking birthday calls. At some point, though, her tone and pitch change and it sounds like she's talking to someone different -- she talks higher and slower. It sounds like she's talking to a child -- in German.

Context: At some point I got it into my head that she had a son. She's never said that though.

Me: I go and wish her a happy birthday. We small talk about birthdays and other stuff. Then I run out of conversation. So I say:

"So, who was the child you were talking to earlier on the phone?"

Her: [Blank, then puzzled look on her face.]

"What?" [Another coworker overhearing us begins to laugh.] What do you mean?"

Me: Oh nothing, I just though you were talking...your voice just sounded...you know what, I'm an idiot...never--

Her: "A child? [Coworker laughing harder.] I don't understand."

I try to clear it up, but there's no way to clear it up without insulting her, or insulting the person she was talking to. I might as well have asked her if she was pregnant. Luckily we are interrupted while our other coworker nearly falls under her desk.

Conclusion: I'm an ass.

I'll be back, after these messages...

Sorry for the absence, Porcupiners. I've been busier than usual, taking a documentary filmmaking class, watching a lot of this guy and surprising creations like this diamond in the rough and spending all my other days helping other people make worthy films (for a small fee, for which I am indescribably grateful.) I'm also freelancing and doing part-time work when I can. In short, Donna Summer is somewhere and is proud.

Signing off for now.

Femintastic speech

http://www.feministing.com/archives/013806.html

I really wish better statistics were out there, though.

Slumdog Millionaire, gah.

So I've been wondering why I've felt so much unease about "Slumdog Millionaire" these past few months and the awards-orgy here is keeping it in front of my mind so I will forthwith address it, so that people can know my completely irrelevant opinion about "Slumdog Millionaire." Let us begin!

So as it sits on Oscar-watch there's all kindsa chatter about it, what with its unlikely breakout success in the West and its amibivalent reception in the East.

My conclusion is this: I agree about the Western poverty fetish (I just was introduced to a gross term known as "poverty porn." Ugh. Sometimes words damage.) But anyhow, I agree that the awards-hype is more about that fetish than about the intrinsic story of the movie. Because the movie is, to me, a plainly Charles Dickens feelgood story. Almost escapist.

So the remarkable part is this: the awards-orgy-fetishizing has enabled the craziest heights of dissonance. It's meta-meta. It's meta-squared. It's meta at a geometric rate. I mean, it's being celebrated in the gleaming hallways and spiffy carpets of Hollywood and -- of all the most perverse juxtapositions-- in the fenced-in tiled Mumbai getaways that sit next to the very slums it portrays, next to the the millions that aspire to $millions. And the conversations about slumdwellers that take place during these gatherings are what make it so painful. The way people are making this movie something more than it is - as if it is something more than an escapist fantasy.

Which brings me to what prompted this too-wordy post: Katherine Boo's amazing, fiction-like article about Mumbai in this week's New Yorker magazine, called "Opening Night: The scene from the airport slum." The woman writes like nobody's business. Like she knows history before it happens.

Here, she talks about the large fences, including concertina wire that separate lavish hotels from slum dwellers:

"The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton's ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear."

"...This was the marvel of many great twenty-first-century cities, including New York and Washington, whose levels of inequality now match those of Abidjan and Nairobi. Maybe they should have looked like [violent video game] Metal Slug 3. Instead, ingenious social constructions--democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences--were keeping things more or less in order."

Hope: a social construction. Man.

CNBC Anchors are Jackasses

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846&play=1

So divorced-from-reality are these talking heads that they persistently, crassly and with a remarkable amount of tone-deafness refuse to listen to anything their guests have to say.
And when they don't get the quickie investment advice they seek, one of the anchors resorts to calling Taleb a "prophet of doom." Nice.

Nice

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Proposition 8's civil-rights-violating passage into law provides pretty combustion to the gay civil rights movement nationwide. It's getting gay people and their straight friends to reach out to people in meaningful ways. So, in short, blessing in disguise. There's of course a lot more to be done, but, in my view, there's a hell of a lot to proud of here, and more to look forward to...

I need strength

Like literally, healthy calories, in the form of protein, green vegetables, iron-rich foods etc. I would like to live in world where healthy meals showed up on my doorstep every four hours and I'd just eat. (To my astonishment, such a thing exists on a fairly grand scale.)I recognize this would flout the joys of cooking.

As it stands, I've had a hard time negotiating some tastiness out of that stubborn broccoli. Yes, I steam it, yes I add salt and pepper and a bit of cheese, but it's kind of an unyielding vegetable. And it doesn't feel right to drown it in something to cover up the taste altogether. And then there's spinach. For chrissake, how unlikable is spinach?

Awesome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY

Lasantha Wickramatunga

http://www.thesundayleader.lk/20090111/editorial-.htm

"It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government's sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me."

--Lasantha Wickramatunga, killed January 22nd.

Three days and I have a headache

So Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th president of the United States...a relief after the collective gulag that was Bush. Obama, true to promises, has taken the first step by requesting a 120-day halt to the torture-allowing trials at Guantanamo Bay. He has reaffirmed his commitment to end torture overall. And he has expressed solidarity with peace loving people anywhere.

Then, today, he bombs at least five people at the Afghan-Pakistani border.

This is a continuation of a Bush policy of "rooting out terrorists" on the border of those two countries, supposedly where bin Laden and his friends hang. It is a policy that has suffered little or no public debate, no thought to consequences or, in military terms, effectiveness.

I hate to ruin the collective post-coital/inaugural cigarette inhale, but from what I've heard, Pakistan (and therefore Afghanistan) -- more than Iraq, North Korea, Iran and your mom -- pose the single greatest threats to long-term global security. The deprivation and the poverty, combined with the lack of infrastructure, the 70+percent illiteracy statistics, lawlessness and, um, nuclear weapons makes these places very important. Not only to rid the world of genuine terror, but to make way for stability for everyone there and here.

Can we at least talk about this Mr. Obama? I'd like to know if these missile strikes are necessary. I would like to know why American generals are so concerned about America invading Pakistani sovereignty and inflaming and radicalizing people, yet within a few days of your presidency, your continuation of this Bush policy has not even been subject to explanation or, better yet, debate.

It is already hitting CNN, albeit with little fanfare or surprise. Now that we're lying cozy in bed together, can we talk about this please?

Indians and gays

From Pam's House Blend:

A Tennessee man said Thursday that he was weighing his legal options after being fired from a Nashville-area hotel specifically for being gay.

"They literally said to me that because of my orientation and my 'alternative lifestyle' that I was not a fit for the hotel," said David Hill, formerly the director of human resources for the former Brentwood Holiday Inn (currently doing business as ARTE' Hotel, with no connection to the Holiday Inn chain). "[Tarun Surti, the hotel's owner] said, 'I don't give a damn. They can sue me. I will not have any of 'the gay leadership role' in my hotel.' And that's a quote."

Mr. Hill has filed complaints with the EEOC and Department of Labor, and is currently in talks with the ACLU, Tennessee Equality Project and the Tennessee Labor Board about pursuing legal action.

"The owner, Mr. Surti, comes from a culture that is not very tolerant to the gay lifestyle," added assistant general manager Leonard Stoddard, who was ordered to dismiss Hill, "and therefore he felt it necessary to have him removed from the workforce at the property."

Now, I'm guessing that Mr. Tarun Surti is Indian. Just an unconfirmed guess based on his name and, well, yeah, the fact that he owns a hotel and a reference to his homophobic culture.

Which brings to light another fact in many hidden and not-so-hidden quarters in the Indiascape: bigotry. Bigotry towards gays, blacks, dark browns, and, of course, women. (With all the requisite qualifications against generality.)

Now I don't know the details of the case. Maybe something was bothering Uncle that day. But it sounds to me as if this fella was laid off simply because of his sexual orientation. Which is wrong. But more troubling is that there is no legal recourse for this fellow.

I am not familiar with gay right's laws, but according to Pam's House Blend, there's not a damn thing this guy can do under current law. Which is why the law must change.