Megan Westerby

factsarenothing:

There was a stretch in the middle of my five season Adventure Time marathon where, despite how much I love this kid’s cartoon for being progressive, subversive, and a home for different voices in the world, it was starting to feel very boy. I mean that in the nicest way, and it’s not like I didn’t expect it, going into a show about a 13-year-old boy and his magical dog best friend. But the gross-out humour and wrestling and sword fights were starting to wear, and I was growing impatient for the next Princess Bubblegum or Marceline episode.

It was the third or fourth time they took a shot at the seduction community (yes, the seduction community) that I realised what I wasn’t seeing. A show where the most powerful leader is a pink bubblegum princess who loves science and where the most annoying villain is a sad, old man chasing after young girls, Adventure Time is teaching boys how to be men. Good men, not Nice Guys.

Finn has a crush on PB, but whenever he starts to get weird (he’s 13; she’s 18), Jake gives him a smack. Jake is a dog, but he’s also Finn’s big brother. When Finn finds a copy of Mind Games by Jay T. Doggzone (a thinly-veiled parody of every PUA manual ever), Jake has to explain that he only keeps it around for laughs. He doesn’t believe in that stuff, and neither should Finn. Jake sets the example for a healthy relationship, with his girlfriend, Lady Rainicorn, the entire span of the series. (They have kids together, too, even if rainicorns age faster than expected.)

Once Bubblegum lets Finn down, he sulks for a few episodes. Then he meets the Flame Princess. She’s 13, too, and though they don’t have a lot in common, and she doesn’t always laugh at his jokes, Finn likes her. They go on picnics (with Jake and Lady as chaperones). Finn takes her to a dungeon. Flame Princess teaches him how to blow stuff up. They’re getting to know each other.

For Finn, the most important thing is to be a hero. He spends his days fighting the Ice King, saving the Candy Kingdom, and inventing new ways to make people laugh. It’s his job. In the Land of Ooo, a 13-year-old boy can do this as a job.

In our world, 13-year-old boys are in their first year of high school. They’re noticing how girls are different. They’re figuring out what they can do as a job. They’re pulling away from their parents and looking up to the big kids in grade 12. There is still a lot of gross-out humour and wrestling and sword fights, but we change in a lot of ways during those four years of high school, and one of those ways is deciding what to pick up and what to leave behind.

I hope the boys growing up and watching Adventure Time right now don’t leave Finn and Jake behind. They’re teaching important lessons about what to do, who to be, and how to treat the world, not only the people you care about, but everyone. I hope the men getting high and watching Adventure Time right now are paying attention, too. There are lessons for them that they maybe didn’t get the first time around.

Be a hero. Save the day. But if a girl doesn’t laugh at your jokes, that’s no reason to run away and hide in the pillow fort. Be a man. And if you can’t be a man, be a boy like Finn. You’ll get there eventually.

One of the reasons to love this show.

Sara Ahmed: Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)

With Updated link.

(via prtejeda)

caz:

beenthinking:

Proud to have this essay featured in the new Bright Wall Dark Room Magazine. Thanks to everyone who has supported this endeavor. And if you haven’t yet, we hope you’ll subscribe today!

brightwalldarkroom:

Editor’s note: As promised, we are making one full essay from our new BW/DR Magazine available to you here on the site. Please enjoy, Erica Cantoni’s thoughts on Mad Men, and consider making our magazine a regular part of your daily reading by subscribing to BW/DR today!

I WON’T HAVE MY HEART BROKEN

by Erica Cantoni

The small tender heart of Mad Men isn’t obvious in the plot lines. It’s not in the divorces or the hasty marriages, the mergers or fledgling reinvented firms—as fun an amuse-bouche as those tasty tangents are.

It’s in this moment:

Ginsberg at his dark office window, typing. Peggy watching him in the reflection of a glass frame, as he chooses ten or fifteen precise words from a coin purse of millions in his mind, and spends them on the Holocaust and outer space. It’s in Peggy listening without breathing or moving or demanding explanation, as he speaks with frustrating, unfulfilling eloquence, of the absurd futility of assimilation. It’s in us glimpsing two percent of Ginsberg and blowing apart in wonder at the unreachable remainder.

It’s in a dozen twilight office conversations like this, patiently garlanded out over five years. So small and telling, you want to lean forward and cup your hands around them. Protect them from the wind and eat them before they blow away.

I’ve never had a good memory. Put less endearingly: I forget almost everything. Not because none of it matters. It’s just that the communal experience does not stitch into me. I value it less than the isolated moments, less than the space I protect in my head for lines of books that call themselves up off a page like an echo and the particular shade of navy blue that a Malaysian mountain sky might be at 3 am. The smell of the feet of cats who have died. (Popcorn, incidentally. That’s what the feet of cats I have put down used to smell like.)

I remmber how you used to clean your bathtub for me, when I would come to stay in your studio apartment. And the light that shone down from the open window above the brick wall, above the water where I sat and read while you were at work. But I do not remember the date of our anniversary or all the movies we have seen together. For so long, I kept forgetting your middle name. But I remember the sound of your voice, the first time we spoke, going an octave lower and quieter when I told you your mean joke hurt my feelings. I remember that you were never so casually rough with me again.

At a work retreat, once, we were instructed to write thank you letters to our favorite teachers. Everyone else addressed theirs confidently, but I hid mine in a purse and spent weeks mouthing variations of her possible surname in the middle of the night, on line at the grocery store, browsing rental videos. Trying to recall. Blenquist? Blumkush? I have used up the space that held her name, but I remember that she introduced me to Anne Sexton to bookmark my Plath, and lent me a book of poems from her personal library, which I never gave back—too enthralled with this implication of equality and the last line of a verse about divorce. I recall her blond bob and the clergy husband and that she told me I could write and she was too smart for me not to believe her. But I can’t find her name.

The collective data and synopsis of life is mostly lost to me. People who fling out movie quotes and historic dates like streamers, like something flimsy and whimsical that they’ve not worked at all to retain, amaze me.

If I hadn’t cheated and read episode guides, I would have forgotten that Peggy actually had the baby. That Kinsey had an African-American girlfriend and once dated Joan, and that Pete’s father died in the airplane crash. That he remained so wholly unflapped that they asked him to attend the airline pitch meeting anyway.

I have forgotten all the major stories, and yet I could carve in bone my memory of a dozen tiny, quiet scenes:

Betty, sitting in a late-day Roman glow, her hair whipped and molded into a European chignon. Looking so modern it was as if she alone dragged in the backdrop change, inventing the ’60s. As if she’d finally shed the kids like a dead skin or a fire and emerged, victoriously golden. Reborn. How the Italian men hit on her and insulted Don when he approached, as a stranger. Which was perfect, right? Because how long had it been since they’d known each other at all? I’d etch in how he fell back in love, madly so, with Betty for two days. With this restored, empowered version of her. All cold upper class beauty, all superiority, all linguistic-flexing power. Too good for him, which is the key to everything.

”” “The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered.”

I’d etch the repose of Roger’s tired face when he calls Joan late at night, with Jane, the regrettable wife, passed out beside him.

Peggy’s hand on Don’s after Anna dies. This single brief touch a complete swelling orchestra composed to explain the depth of their bond and its tenuousness. How vital and still wildly vulnerable this tie is in the possession of a man so accustomed to scorching any tenderness entrusted to him.

Everything encompassed in the moments Don calls Betty “birdie.” The whole rattling film projection of their courtship and marriage and children and infidelities and lies and second tries and reheated dinners. And the end that Betty pretends comes with the bang of Dick Whitman’s betrayal, and not years of whimpers. Every aching sweetness remains in “birdie,” somehow fossilized and surviving but useless as a mate-less bull.

The moments of elegant non-response and suffocated reaction. The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered.

I would like to sit down across from Matthew Weiner and tell him he gets a few thing wrong, just to keep him humble (Don furiously chasing Megan through their apartment to represent “passion” and the embarrassing, unsustainable silliness of Fat Betty), but then declare to him that he may be the world’s greatest master of conveying so much through a nearly wordless dance.

Sometimes, I find myself watching Mad Men through a sort of fantasy lens, as if it were an underwater ballet. A cold, slow-floating drift of Asian dance and sad, silent theater.

It’s hypnotizing.

Leaves me captured and confused, weekly. Not by the chuckle-worthy, antiquated nods to bourbons at noon or unused seatbelts and ashtrays in the boardroom. Not by the adultery or sexism or racism or nepotism or homophobia.

What hooks my mind on a stringer for days is the utter subtlety of the show. The literal restraint of the characters—their buttoned-up loneliness. The moments of elegant non-response and suffocated reaction. The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered. The communicative release they never allow themselves (even as it might be their salvation).

And the writers’ unrivaled ability to tell so many stories while saying so little.

Look at Don Draper. Look at how we understand that the desire that surged in Don for the unbaggaged Betty in Rome is the same spark that went out when Megan quit the ad game years later. Everything we needed to know was never even hinted at, let alone verbalized. It was stuccoed in Don’s disenchanted face when he walked into their Manhattan kitchen and found Megan barefoot and happily cooking.

Mad Men has inherent respect for the intelligence of its audience; no ham-handed narrator barges in to explain that Don loves women masquerading as men. Don himself doesn’t know it—even as he chases an endless line of females with an edge of masculine power. Ambitious, accomplished, smart and clever women who are driven by careers. Midge the bohemian, unrepentant painter. Rachel Menken the retail tycoon. Dr. Faye, triumphant at the top of her innovative industry and mired too deep in the logic of psychology to be beholden to emotions. (Until she isn’t, and then she is cast aside.) Teacher Suzanne, curt and unwanting—a disciplined athlete. Betty, before or away from the kids. Betty, when she is the calculating, educated, un-needing thoroughbred he first bet on. Megan when she aptly finesses and charms Heinz and thinks like Don thinks, before he can. When she is a better version of him. I have known men like this, though it took a therapist to name them. The way Weiner deftly—almost nonchalantly—illustrates Don’s penchant in a dozen separate plot points of light across a five-year sky is extraordinary.

If Weiner is the master of delicacy, his characters are obedient disciples. I could sooner breathe water than relate to their starched self-possession.

Do you remember the scene where Lane Pryce kisses Joan? And she so gently opens the door with her measured movements and perfect posture; as if the cause and effect had no correlation at all. Pivots and resumes their conversation, unacknowledging. Remember Joan—when her fiancé rapes her and she marries him anyway. When Roger disappoints her yet again and she has his baby because it is her own, more so. How she never berates him, how she simply steps right up and over everything he can’t be, and carries on.

If we were establishing a monument to Joan (not the worst idea ever), I’d demand it be two-fold. Half to honor whatever fantastical genetic engineering delivered her impossible physique. And the other half to her strength. There is an inexorable calm and mettle to Joan that makes me want to cry. I am petrified by her unflinching judgment and intoxicated by her ability to graciously deflect everything in which she does not wish to become entangled.

I am confused by her grace, so foreign to my brash, clumsy earnestness. By her ability to lead without recognition and keep afloat on the delicate crust of tactful, unceasingly appropriate professionalism I’ve smashed through always, despite every attempt to be above gossip and provocation and injustice. How she manages the office and the men who pursue her and the women who begrudge her and the husband who fails her and does it all without stooping to tears but once.

For my part, I’ve almost never felt something I did not verbalize. Every emotion has gushed through me in loud roiling riptides and tsunamis. Erupting in howling wails at lovers and tears at work. In depthless anger and longing at parents and in wild, reckless joy at kindred spirits.

And anything I have not yelled, I have written and shared and over-shared. I own absolutely none of Don’s acumen for compartmentalization, none of Joan’s elegant ability to brush aside that which might be uncomfortable to hear. No share of Roger’s almost total irreverence, Anna Draper’s easy forgiveness, Sally’s preternatural calm.

As loudly and plainly as possible, I have presented my laments and talked through them laboriously. After all of which, you can assume: When I am devastated, you will know it. My comfort zone is the cacophony of modern desperation. When we are unhappy—incidentally or profoundly—there are an unbearable number of mediums to broadcast it and no expectation to hide it.

So this is the aspect of Mad Men that scares me most: the implication that every single character is so discreetly and quietly unhappy. Am I the only one that feels almost every last character is (to varying degrees and levels of awareness) desperately, wildly, deeply, paralyzingly unhappy? So unhappy they grapple and tear at and stampede and betray and smother each other in some savage effort to salvage their own lives.

Or maybe I am projecting. It’s impossible to tell if they’re happy, because they speak of the concept so infrequently it’s as though it has never even occurred to them. But I know I have never burned down a version of my life in which I was actually happy. Dumb and selfish and impulsive and impetuous as I have been in my youth, every single time I did the wrongest thing, it was not in an effort to hurt anyone else but solely to save myself (whether I realized it then or later).

And this crew? They are the most proficient of emotional arsons.

Before our talk is done, I want to beg Matthew Weiner, impulsively, not to stop. To write and plot out a dozen more shows, or continue this one forever. To spy on into the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s so that I can remember it all. See it again from people too destroyed or tired or self-centered to belabor it. I want to know how Kennedy’s assassination is something that happens to you, around you, on a Tuesday afternoon in between your kids being brats and your extramarital affairs.

But like the show’s namesakes, I’d still be greedy for more.

I want to line up every character and demand that they tell me how to be satisfied. Or how to live your whole life without satisfaction. I want to know if what they are doing is working. What their back-up plan is.

Let’s be clear: Though I love it, Mad Men is not a show that makes me feel good. I marvel at the artistry and the foreign oddity. Understand that the numbness of three afternoon cocktails was imperative, not luxurious. I judge and begrudge and find grace, but I hardly ever end the show smiling.

When I was a little kid, I watched all the James Bond movies with my father. It seemed some tricky death was always befalling villains in an under-lit nighttime swimming pool. Sharks, inexplicably. Or a simple gunshot to the chest, the victim spinning and dropping backward into the water. Drifting downward in a watercolor blur of blood.

But the death that stuck in my mind for years was the suffocation of a pool-cover sliding across, trapping and drowning its occupants.

More or less, that’s what we’re gathering to watch every Sunday evening on AMC: a beautiful, terrible, slow-motion, desperate rendering of the things people will do to each other when they realize they are fatally trapped and voiceless.

***

This essay originally appeared in the inaugural issue of BW/DR Magazine. Click here to subscribe to BW/DR Magazine and receive that entire issue for free, as well as full access to our June issue as well.

This is beautiful to read.

First stop when we make it up to the cabin in 2 weeks!

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR

The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.

(via kdhart)

Reblogging this again because I want to shout it from the rooftops.

Vanity Fair cover story on Channing Tatum = perfection.

amypop:

drst:

bitchwhoyoukiddin:

danedavenport:

Rob Thomas has been sending out videos of cast members as they are added to the Veronica Mars movie. Ryan Hansen is returning as Dick Casablancas so he made a video too. Everything seems normal until about half a minute in…

Bless these assholes.

OK I haven’t laughed that hard in a while.

this is everything. 

The Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter has consistently been the mostly enthusiastically and tightly executed crowdfunding project I’ve ever seen. Passion and perfection. Love it. 

climateadaptation:

The game must go on. Black Forest Fire, near Colorado Springs, Colorado (via). The wildfire is Colorado’s largest in its history. Two dead, nearly 400 homes destroyed. 

The pine beetle infestation near my family’s cabin near the Rocky Mountain National Park forced the removal of most of the trees on the property.

My family’s had that cabin for generations. Since it was a glorified fishing shack with a well outside and no heat. In 1985 my grandfather wanted off the septic tank and figured if he was doing one big upgrade he might as well do a few more, so now there’s an electric pump on the well and a water heater and two bathrooms and a few more rooms. There are photos of me from when I was 3 months old there. That cabin is the touchstone in my life.

Since the pine beetle infestation most trees in the area have died. Some properties have removed the trees, some haven’t. It’d be impossible to remove all the dead trees in the national parks and forests. The wildfire predictions have sounded more and more severe every year as the runoff reserves get lower and the temperatures get hotter. 

I’m keeping an eye on the reports since I’m going back in a few weeks and taking some friends. There are three large wildfires happening in Colorado right now and my heart is aching for my home state. 

upworthy:

repmarktakano:

michelebachmann:

The House just passed my bipartisan Obamacare repeal bill.

(Oh, and welcome to my new Tumblr!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burn_centers_in_the_United_States

• Season 1
• Season 2
• Season 3
• Season 4
• Season 5
• Season 6
• Season 7

Well there’s my weekend gone!

never trust a band that wouldn’t bleed for you

shananaomi:

blurintofocus:

Audio and a nice little brief on your SXSW panel is up at the site now!

Rae Votta’s (MTV Networks) self-described “obsession with obsession” is at the core of this wonderfully fresh look at the role young women are playing as both consumers and informal promoters of music in today’s industry.

From Beatlemania to Beiber Fever, it’s not news that young women can play a huge role in an artist’s mainstream success, but this panel suggests we can learn a lot from how they share info, tell stories and foster deeper connections with artists - and how that can be respected and utilized by musicians, labels, brands, and more.

Joining Rae are Megan Westerby, VP of Marketing at The Collective Digital Studio, Lindsay Gabler, Social Media Specialist for The Recording Academy, Shana Krochmal, Contributing Editor at OUT Magazine, and Danielle Strle, Director of Product at Tumblr.

A slightly more official (though still audio-only) version of our panel from SXSW is now up! 

yaranyarai:

the lannisters send their regards

chrishealy:

Everyone can go home now. E3 is done.

THIS. 

capaow:

adayattheraces:

bestrafemich21:

adrians:

German guy confused by the meaning of “Party Pooper”.

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I HAVE SEEN ON THIS WEBSITE EVER.

we watched this in my German class a couple semesters ago and my professor died laughing. 

omg but you’re so ADORABLE.

Flula Borg ages like a fine wine.

So much tequila so little time.

shananaomi:

Watch this doc Monday on HBO!

Finallyyyyy! Such a good doc.

bronwen:

Luther: Series 3 Launch Trailer - BBC One (by BBC)