BmoreArt

Damn. Voting rights and abortion are under attack again, and a vaccine mandate is (currently) no longer a thing. Highlights: The importance of naming traditions, Joss Whedon, Drakeo the Ruler, Zora Neale Hurston, André Leon Talley, concessions, Tonga, Wordle, and Zillow finds. 

1. The New Quarterly: Butter Tea at Starbucks

Intertwining China’s colonization of Tibet, this story follows Pema, a Tibetan woman who lives in Canada, as she navigates her heritage through the experience of becoming an aunt to the daughter of her sister, Karma. Going against Tibetan naming tradition, Karma names her daughter Sophia Naomi Wilson. Pema and Sophia’s father declares, “[Sophia] must have a Tibetan name or she will have no identity. She will be confused all her life.” In this story, Sharon Bala explores how Pema, Karma, and Sophia navigate their Tibetan heritage.

2. The Believer: What’s not in a name

I’ve never gone by my full first name. When I was born, my parents shortened it into the nickname most people call me, and the name I introduce myself with. In high school, I reverted from the anglicized pronunciation of my last name to its germanic tradition. Once I got to college I dropped my first name altogether (at least online), instead going by my initials A.F. (for various reasons, including “as fuck”). 

My parents were very deliberate in naming me and my sister, often telling us about how they chose “formal names that have nicknames, names you could grow into.” I hated my name when I was younger, and always wanted something shorter, easier to spell (my first name has nine letters), and less old. “Names are choices—just usually not ours,” writes Thu-Huong Ha. “That doesn’t mean our parents are in control either. Whatever atmospheric pressure is in the air when a name is chosen, it may completely shift by the time a person is an adult.” 

Part of “the small but passionate world of name study,” Ha explores the history of naming traditions—specifically as they relate to immigration and Asian American identities—and what is lost in translation. “The name exists as a gate between the private and public. It makes the ineffable self, well, nameable. It sits at the boundary of time, the product of a gestation that could have started nine months before you were born, or decades before, or generations earlier. Like an inheritance, a name in so many ways has nothing to do with us, is a privilege we did nothing to earn, and presents a legal and social burden should we wish to shed it.”

The older I get, the more I’ve come to like my name (and love my initials). With time, I’ve also become critical of how my parents describe naming me and my sister—all of the coded language they use to describe that they wanted a traditional name via white metrics. They named me and my sister names that when on a résumé would not get passed over. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, with no resolution. “For better or worse, we’re given our names, and we figure out how to deal,” Ha writes. “And in the US, some are dealt more, and deal more, than others.”

3. Vulture: The Undoing of Joss Whedon

I am too young to have been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it aired. I tried to watch the series when it hit streaming services, but could never get into it—I’m not even sure if I’ve ever watched a full episode. But Buffy creator Joss Whedon “was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows,” and everyone from teenagers to scholars worshiped him. Viewed as a progressive feminist during the early and mid-2000s, “in recent years, the good-guy image has been tarnished by a series of accusations, each more damaging than the last,” writes Lila Shapiro. 

Allegations (publicly) began in 2017 when “his ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a sensational open letter about him on the movie blog The Wrap. She condemned him as a ‘hypocrite preaching feminist ideals’ and accused him of cheating on her throughout their marriage… Then, beginning in the summer of 2020, the actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, who had starred in a superhero film directed by Whedon, claimed he’d mistreated them, with Fisher describing his behavior as ‘gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.’” 

In another instance, Buffy costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom recalled, “Whedon and [Sarah Michelle] Gellar did not agree on what the Buffy-bot should wear. ‘Sarah was adamant about it being a certain way,’ Bergstrom said. ‘The costume she wanted was a bit grandma-ish — a pleated skirt and high neck. He definitely wanted it to be sexier.’ On the day Gellar tried the different options, Whedon grew frustrated. ‘I was like, ‘Joss, let’s just get her dressed,’ Bergstrom recalled. ‘He grabbed my arm and dug in his fingers until his fingernails imprinted the skin.”

In his interviews with the reporter, Whedon tries to use the rhetoric of therapy to, ostensibly, absolve himself of the multiple allegations against him. Erin Shade, an assistant on the show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., “dated [Whedon] on and off in secret for nearly a year before she slept with him. Not long after, he sent her a brief email telling her he couldn’t have a girlfriend.” Describing Whedon for this profile, Shade said “people like Joss offset their trauma on other people in exchange for their energy, and take their energy to keep going — to keep themselves alive, almost… That’s why he’s so good at the vampire narrative.” Today, the internet knows “Whedon, its progressive hero of yesterday, as a villain and bigot.”

4. Los Angeles Magazine: The Assassination of Drakeo the Ruler

I knew nothing of Drakeo the Ruler before reading this profile—and a firsthand account of his murder—by Jeff Weiss. On December 18, 2021, Drakeo was attacked backstage at a concert, stabbed in a fight that Weiss, a writer and friend of the rapper, witnessed. The rapper succumbed to his wounds the next day at the age of 28. Drakeo and Weiss had a personal relationship and became close during the rapper’s murder trial. “At first, he kept calling in the hopes that I would tell the world about his wrongful persecution,” writes Weiss. “But over hundreds of hours on the phone, the working relationship evolved into a deep friendship. Journalistic responsibilities became secondary to human ones. I’d never witnessed a miscarriage of justice so grave, so intimately.” During his life Drakeo built upon a long lineage of West Coast rappers: “Snoop Dogg liberated the West from the classical strictures and foundational rhythms of East Coast rap. Now Drakeo emerged to liberate the West Coast from the West itself.” 

5. Literary Hub: Zora Neale Hurston on What White Publishers Won’t Print

Every time I read Zora Neale Hurston, I’m struck by how beautiful of an observer she is. Her inclination for watching was no doubt enhanced by her training as an anthropologist, and her astute observations still ring true today. In this excerpt from You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Louis Gates, Hurston provides an exacting analysis of 1950s America. She writes that “for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem. That they are very human and internally, according to natural endowment, are just like everybody else.” 

She wrote of the need for imagination, and how the business of publishing has truncated its literary and artistic promise. She saw literature as a way to get the white majority to “conceive of a Negro or a Jew feeling and reacting inside just as they do.” For Hurston, “National coherence and solidarity is implicit in a thorough understanding of the various groups within a nation, and this lack of knowledge about the internal emotions and behavior of the minorities cannot fail to bar out understanding.”

6. The Washington Post: André Leon Talley became an icon by never losing faith in the glory of fashion

Fashion icon André Leon Talley died on Tuesday. He was 73. Talley was the first—and to this day only—Black creative director at American Vogue, and was known for his “unrelenting belief in the glories and glamour of fashion,” writes Robin Givhan. Talley’s “success was astonishing, not simply because he overcame the hurdle of race in an industry that was overwhelmingly White and Eurocentric, but because he did so by knowing more about European history and its relationship to fashion than the great majority of the gatekeepers who deigned to let him in.” He had a steadfast practice giving opportunities in fashion to Black people, and “Talley knew that he couldn’t open the industry’s doors for everyone. But a welcoming space waited once folks were inside. Talley believed in fashion’s wonder. And he wanted all his children to see it.”

7. Pipe Wrench: Making Concessions

One of the things that I’ve missed most during this pandemic is going to the movies. Specifically, I miss going to action movies—my favorite to see in the theaters. From 2016 until the beginning of the pandemic, my friend and I used to see every Marvel movie together at the theatre. I would always buy three types of candy (usually Milk Duds, sour gummy worms, and peanut M&Ms) beforehand, removing them from their loud packaging and placing them into Ziplock bags. Once inside the theatre, my friend would purchase pop and we would happily munch our way through nearly three hours of action. Our snack ritual was just as much a part of our experience as the movie itself. One time we decided to go to a movie on a whim and went to the store to buy candy. After my friend spent 20 indecisive minutes in the candy aisle of CVS only for me to executively decide that we would get our usual assortment, I understood why I was always in charge of procuring the confectioneries.

Concessions were not always an integral part of the cinematic experience, however. “Before the lobby concession stand became an architectural component of every movie theater in America, going to the movies involved food and beverages purchased outside of the theater, or … did not involve food at all,” writes Marsha Gordon. “As increasingly luxurious theaters tried to class up moviegoing over the course of the 1920s, especially in cities, popcorn, peanuts, and hot dogs were barred. These snacks were associated with ‘low-class’ amusements like fairs, burlesque shows, and circuses.” In the 1930s, “as theaters sought to make money during the sustained financial hardship of the Great Depression, all but a few holdouts began selling inexpensive food for profit, starting a slow but decisive transformation of the movie theater from a place in which to watch a movie into a business that is as much about selling food and beverage as it is about anything else.”

While eating snacks might be counterproductive to watching films due to the loud munching and distracting smells disrupting the suspension of disbelief, “buying concessions — or sneaking them in — is now fully wedded to the act of moviegoing. It’s a presumed part of the experience despite the fact that it’s a distraction from the reason we’re in a theater in the first place.”

This, of course, all shifted with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we might be “witnessing the final teeter in a century-long balancing act, a last gasp from a branch of an industry that is starting to imagine itself as a food purveying business.”

8. Scientific American: Why the Tonga Eruption Was So Violent, and What to Expect Next

An underwater volcano massively erupted in the Kingdom of Tonga on January 15. The volcano “consists of two small uninhabited islands, Hunga-Ha’apai and Hunga-Tonga, poking about 100m above sea level 65km north of Tonga’s capital Nuku‘alofa. But hiding below the waves is a massive volcano, around 1800m high and 20km wide,” which had recently erupted earlier this month and in December of last year. This article is more technical, delving into the science behind why the eruption was so violent, but it doesn’t explore the impact it had on surrounding communities. This could be, in part, because much aid could not reach the surrounding area at the time of writing due to the ash that “spread out almost concentrically over a distance of about 130km from the volcano, creating a plume with a 260km diameter, before it was distorted by the wind.”

9. Vox: Wordle is a deceptively easy game for burnt-out pandemic shut-ins

The online game Wordle has steadily increased in popularity since its release in October 2021, but it seems to have exploded across the internet this past week. In the deceptively simple game, “players get six attempts to guess the correct word, and the site makes it easy to share the results on social media.” Only one word is available each day. In this period of constant change and existential threats, Wordle is proving to be “an easy, low-stress way of generating conversation and achieving a straightforward daily task in an era where even daily tasks and low-key interaction are sometimes strenuous and overwhelming.”

10. Twitter: Today’s Zillow Find

The thing you need to understand about today's Zillow find is that it was built in 2010 in the United States of America. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Rd5JrrsVgr

— Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) January 14, 2022

Zillow is not one of my personal hobbies, but I greatly appreciate those for whom it is a hobby and who share their wild finds. The award-winning novelist Rebecca Makkai is one of those people, and she will occasionally share her finds on Twitter. 

In this thread, Makkai tours us through a 2010 castle built in Connecticut that is currently on the market for $35 million—down from its original $45 million. The story of this castle—known as Chrismark as it was built by and is owned by Christopher Mark—is filled with love, adultery, lawsuits, and Hallmark movies.