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.