New Era? Well, we're working on it.
Jan. 22nd, 2009 03:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterfly1. Our teacher let us take a long break on Tuesday so that we could watch Obama's Inaugural speech, which was awesome (okay, one instance that I heard of him using 'man' to mean 'people' but he was mostly really good about being inclusive -- 'non-believers' even got a mention, which I think is a first from a presidential speech). There were a couple of places where I may have teared up a bit. The part about his father not being able to get a meal in some restaurants 60 years ago part was one of those. On a slightly different note, I'm thrilled that he's already started the first steps to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also that Rahm Emanuel ordered that all the Bush policies pending get frozen for review.
2. Saw the Chinese New Year Spectacular that the Divine Performing Arts put on for Portland (they're traveling to the New York area for the actual New Year, I believe). Gorgeous music and dancing and four very talented singers (two tenors, a soprano, and a contralto). Each section was introduced in a tag-team Chinese-English effort (at first, they just translated, but later on, they actually had short conversations that were half-Chinese and half-English and expected us to follow along, which was cool). There was a wide variety of outfits because they covered several different Chinese ethnic groups and time periods over the course of the two-and-a-half hours. The dresses that stand out the most in my memory are the colorful skirts used in the dance of the people of Yi. Another very memorable piece was the story of Mulan (the presenters joked around about the Disney version of the story).
3. On the more depressing side of things,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wong has been posting links about a recent frustrating series of conversations that started with the author Elizabeth Bear posting about 'Writing the Other', Avalon's Willow saying that a book of Bear's that she'd read had some frustrating racial dynamics, Bear conceding the point, and then Bear's friends jumping in to defend her (and hitting a lot of 'silencing the discussion' buttons in the process). It gets worse from there. Highlights include someone saying that noticing and pointing out the existence of racism in something makes you racist. I'll just let the stupidity of that stand by itself for a while. Anyway, it's all in rydra_wong's links and since there are quite a lot of very smart people talking about racism, it's worth it to read through, even though a lot of Bear's friends made me want to throw things against the wall. Possibly my own head included.
2. Saw the Chinese New Year Spectacular that the Divine Performing Arts put on for Portland (they're traveling to the New York area for the actual New Year, I believe). Gorgeous music and dancing and four very talented singers (two tenors, a soprano, and a contralto). Each section was introduced in a tag-team Chinese-English effort (at first, they just translated, but later on, they actually had short conversations that were half-Chinese and half-English and expected us to follow along, which was cool). There was a wide variety of outfits because they covered several different Chinese ethnic groups and time periods over the course of the two-and-a-half hours. The dresses that stand out the most in my memory are the colorful skirts used in the dance of the people of Yi. Another very memorable piece was the story of Mulan (the presenters joked around about the Disney version of the story).
3. On the more depressing side of things,
rydra_wong has been posting links about a recent frustrating series of conversations that started with the author Elizabeth Bear posting about 'Writing the Other', Avalon's Willow saying that a book of Bear's that she'd read had some frustrating racial dynamics, Bear conceding the point, and then Bear's friends jumping in to defend her (and hitting a lot of 'silencing the discussion' buttons in the process). It gets worse from there. Highlights include someone saying that noticing and pointing out the existence of racism in something makes you racist. I'll just let the stupidity of that stand by itself for a while. Anyway, it's all in rydra_wong's links and since there are quite a lot of very smart people talking about racism, it's worth it to read through, even though a lot of Bear's friends made me want to throw things against the wall. Possibly my own head included.