I feel like it’s the end of an era or something.
Archive for Uncategorized
Menace to America
C’mon: you can’t tell me this isn’t funny.
I boughts an Art
I bought this last month, but I only just now got my hands on the actual picture because it was part of a gallery showing that recently ended.
I’ve been following Michael Cho‘s blog for a while, and have quite enjoyed his “back alleys of Toronto” series of paintings. I got a print at TCAF a year and a half ago. But now I own an original. w00t!
Consulting Defective
In my entire career as an IT consultant, I’ve never known anything that compares to the sick, sinking feeling that I get when I realize that my customers want to buy zombo.com.
I haven’t been called upon to do this in a while, but there was a time in my career when I was often asked to sit through product demos to provide a technical assessment of each offering. I’d sit in a room with a bunch of people whose job it was to assess proposals against a Request For Proposal (RFP). One after another, I’d watch a group of product companies come in a pitch their solutions.
The Government has no business Data Mining the Bedrooms of the Nation
There’s a minor kerfuffle going on in the press that gave me a ponder. Specifically, it gave me a ponder about the stuff that I reasonably expect the Canadian media to report on in contrast to what I expect the blogosphere (or, rather, the parts of the blogosphere that interest me) to talk about.
Here’s the kerfuffle: recently, the office of our Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, sent out an email to QUILTBAG and QUILTBAG-friendly folks. Here’s most of the text of that of that email:
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Hit and Miss
So I finally caught the series, Hit and Miss. In it, Chloe Sevigny plays Mia, a pre-op trans woman who happens to be a professional killer. So we’re automatically in trope territory (trans people are PSYCHO KILLERS!) But, hey, I’m willing to give any show that has a trans main character a bit of leeway.
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, first. Our trans main character isn’t played by an actual trans person. We’re still not there. And the killer trope. I confess that I have a fondness for stories involving professional killers (Leon and La Femme Nikita and Colombiana and The Mechanic and Grosse Pointe Blank, to name but a few). Mia isn’t Buffalo Bill or Myra Breckenridge or “Bobbi” — she’s not psychopathic. For her, it’s a job. Which, admittedly, requires deadened empathy, but whatever. I was willing to just roll with that part of the show, despite the trope.
(In contrast, I recently watched the series, Wallander, and they’ve got an evil killer trans woman story, and I was totally not willing to roll with that one.)
Film Festival Film #10: How to Make Money Selling Drugs
According the the TIFF Programming person who introduced this film, How to Make Money Selling Drugs was the first film at the festival to go off-sale. She said, “it shows you the power of a catchy title.” My showing was at the very end of the last day of the festival. Another TIFF has come and gone.
Film Festival Film #9: The Great Kilapy
The Great Kilapy is an Angolan film — a period piece with surprisingly good production values. It takes place in the final years of the Portuguese rule of Angola, and the costumes, locations and vehicles do a great job of transporting us to the mid-sixties. The film has a framing sequence that takes place in the present day where an older Portuguese man tells the story of “The Great Kilapy” to his children (“kilapy” is a Kimbundu word for “fraud” or “swindle”).
João Fraga is a mixed-race Angolan man living in Lisbon in 1965 at the start of the film. He has a suave demeanor and knows how to make women fall for him. He’s also good at financial legerdemain — some of his friends call him “Mr. Engineer” because he knows how to engineer a scheme or two. Lisbon is good to him: he enjoys the party life, and his primary lover is the daughter of a Minister who slips him a respectable stipend and keeps him attired in tailored suits. He really only has two big problems in his life. First, he’s not “a one-woman man” (and poly doesn’t seem to have been invented yet) which inevitably leads to broken hearts and angry break-ups. Second, a large number of his friends and former schoolmates have fallen in with the MPLA and the Security Police are confident that he’s also involved. For his part, João is sympathetic to the pro-independence MPLA but is too busy womanizing and funding his big-spending lifestyle to be politically active.
Film Festival Film #8: Burn it up Djassa
I’m getting behind of my film blogging. Thursday night’s film was a shorter film called Burn it up Djassa. It’s a film from the Ivory Coast about young people in a rough neighbourhood. Tony is a young, street-smart cigarette hawker who works Princess Street’s active night life area of Abidjan. At some level, he’s a bit bitter that his brother, Mike, got formal education before their mother died, and thus Mike has a good job with the police. Mike financially helps both Tony and their sister, Ange, but the financial inequities often grate. As does the Mike’s expectation of being able to lecture his younger siblings on how they should live their lives.
Ange, for her part, resents her own job in a hair salon, and has been trying her hand at prostitution as an income stream. Tony’s heard rumours that this might be so, but it really comes to a head when a john gets into a heated argument with Ange about someone stealing his cell phone. Tony knifes the guy, and takes off with Ange; he later hears that the guy died and is torn up about having become a murderer. But! Guess who gets to investigate the murder?
