Linkpost The First
2010 October 29
tags: god is in the tv, helen mirren, links, muslims wearing things, no more mutants, riot nrrd, shakespeare, the tempest, tiffany daniels
by Jenni
Thank you for flying Air BadRep. Have some Friday links.
- SF author John Scalzi has written a beautiful post about Things I Don’t Have To Think About Today.
- This may be a few months old, but here’s a still-very-readable article by Tiffany Daniels on Women in Music in 2010 with lots of snazzy recommendations. Its parent zine, God Is In The TV, are hoping it’ll scoop a Record Of The Day Best Music Feature award, and if you dig it you can vote for it. And if you like that, there’s more music blogging from Tiffany over at Drunken Werewolf.
- We like comics. We like activism and inclusivity. We like the Riot Nrrd webcomic! (We especially like the Joss Whedon puppy.)
- Muslims Wearing Things – a tongue-in-cheek reply to those tricky discussions about ‘traditional Muslim clothing’.
- It’s not out until December, but Julie Taymor’s directed The Tempest – with Helen Mirren as Prospero. Russell Brand is playing himself again, but this time scripted by Shakespeare. Surely an improvement.
- Peter Tennant writing for Black Static magazine breaks down the statistics regarding women’s writing in recent horror anthologies. Horror author Maura McHugh discusses the findings at her blog.
- No More Mutants – a new column by Andrew Wheeler over on BleedingCool on representation in Marvel Comics. The initial link is #4, or you could start with the first one here.
This linkspost is the first of what’s going to be a regular feature.
Clearly you guys have damn good taste in your reading material if you’re reading BadRep, so if there’s anything you think we should be reading, or any projects in need of a signal boost, mention ’em in the comments and we’ll try and fit them into next week’s linkspam.
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category → Linkposts & Misc
3 Responses leave one →
The Tempest trailer looks AWESOMELY AWESOME and I am very excited at Helen Mirren playing Prospero :)
I watched it a bit ago, and it all moves very fast, but one of my biggest questions about it is actually The Caliban Question. The only non-white person on the cast that I can see on a first viewing is playing Caliban. This makes me wonder where they’re going with Caliban – the colonialism-critique angle’s been done so many times that even if they’re not going there, they surely must expect someone to notice the casting decisions and wonder if they’re going for it.
They’ve done some stuff with the make-up for Caliban that seems to be making quite an assertively “yes, we are self-aware about these questions” statement, though – his face on the poster is half white, with one blue eye. Which may well be intended to serve as a useful constant reminder that Caliban as a character is wholly a white creation of the “other” through white eyes (not that I should be getting in this deep from a TRAILER ALONE, but whatevs). And it looks a bit like they’re definitely trying to signal that they’ve been ruminating on these Caliban Casting Questions, which inevitably come up with the Tempest given its themes and performance history.
Julie Taymor also has a respectable track record with sensitive treatments of race issues on stage and screen as far as I’m aware – she took Disney’s Lion King and sent it through a prism of traditional African storytelling and design, with a predominantly black cast and choir, and beautiful use of textiles in the set designs.
So basically I’m very interested to see how they tackle this play, which is complex beast, even by Shakespeare’s standards.
I really hope Miranda has some force (it’s personal, haha). You can play her pretty fierce and depth-ful – she lives on an island covered in spirits! she’s a shaman’s daughter! – but so many productions I’ve seen had her princessed up to the nines.
More images here: http://twitchfilm.net/news/2010/09/venice-2010-fresh-images-from-julie-taymors-the-tempest.php
OH MY GOD WHAT A LONG COMMENT. I don’t know how that even happened.
Someone wrote about Bechdel in terms of the mechanics of writing. As he points out, he is The Man, but I figured he had some interesting things to say: http://hradzka.livejournal.com/419297.html