So here’s the latest facet of American culture that I’ve been pondering: cross-dressing. Specifically, cross-dressing as either a comedic or non-comedic element of movies and television. While watching a comedy sketch in which a man was playing a female character, Jim and I got to discussing the popularity of men playing women in comedy sketches and the relative unpopularity of women playing men.

Certainly this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the disproportionately high number of men in comedy groups – when you’re using your entire female cast in a sketch and still need another female character, or when your entire cast is male, the obvious solution is to have one of the male cast members dress up as a woman. But this can’t be the sole explanation, since there have been plenty of times on SNL when a man has played a female character and there was no shortage of available female cast members. Furthermore, when a man dresses up as a woman for a sketch, he is rarely simply playing a woman; he is mugging for the camera, playing a grotesque caricature.

The fact is, there is something intrinsically funny (at least to most Americans) about a man dressing up as a woman, but the same is not true of a woman who dresses up as a man. If this statement doesn’t seem intuitively correct to you, I think I can demonstrate it by cataloguing some of the more popular instances of cross-dressing in films.

Continue reading Dressing Up, Dressing Down…

I’ve been looking forward to the New York Times review of the movie Bratz for the past five weeks, which is to say ever since I first saw the trailer before Ratatouille, turned to Melissa with my mouth agape, and said “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Alas, the review came out today, and it seems that the grey lady saw fit to devote only three paragraphs to this cesspool of popular culture. I was hoping A.O. Scott would heap abuse upon the movie and all that it signifies for a good two or three pages — especially given the Times’ time-honored “Kids today!” tradition — but instead we have the same predictable criticism that could have been levied against any other movie intended for preteen girls: the movie promotes an ultimate ideal of physical attractiveness; the diversity of the cast is belied by an underlying reliance on stereotypes; the movie promotes the very materialistic paradigm it pretends to question; the script is dull and unoriginal.

I’m unsatisfied with the three-paragraph treatment. I loathe Bratz dolls (which I see as a sign of the impending apocalypse if ever there was one), but more than that I loathe the laziness that seems to accompany modern preteen cultural production, where “Why bother cooking dinner when they’ll eat stale pork rinds?” seems to be the reigning motto. So I think Bratz deserves a more thorough takedown, one that impugns not only the quality of the movie but of the cultural beliefs that inform its success.

To that effect, let’s begin with a breakdown of the trailer. I’d recommend you watch the trailer first, if only so you can see how much it resembles an SNL skit. So go ahead, watch it. When you’re done banging your head against the wall, come back here.

Continue reading Why Bratz makes me say “omg!”…

So, until the summer begins and I’m able to start posting regularly again (again? Perhaps for the first time), I figured I’d post a list of my favorite Daily Sun articles so that visitors have a chance to actually read something that might convince them to come back in the summer when said updates are taking place. That said, here is the list:

Burn This Book
Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That
I Want Candy
On the Other Hand
Choose Your Own Election
Greetings From Earth
Notes from the Interstate
Are You Pro-Choice?

This moment from my childhood brought to you by my father, who finally digitized the audiotape recorded in May of 1986. (MP3, 1.8 MB)

As you can probably tell, the new version of this website is currently under construction. Once Systems is no longer running my life, I’ll be able to make this actually function. In the meantime, please stand by…

It was a cold, damp April afternoon — the kind that settles slowly into your body, chilling you to the bone. The sky was a mottled gray, and I was standing in the muddy grass, face to face with the enemy. He leveled his eyes at me; I stared right back at him, as if to say, Carlos, you’re going down.

Yes, that would be the associate editor of this newspaper. No, it wasn’t a bizarre new kind of editing wherein the editor and writer mud-wrestle over grammar disagreements, although I could get behind that idea. It was intramural softball, and last Monday I found myself in the strange situation of playing against the Cornell Dairy Sluggers (an athletics official made a typo).

I was on the Kitsch Magazine team. Imagine the match-up: a small features magazine facing off against a newspaper that could draw its team from over 200 members, including a sports board. Plus, they had Per Ostman, and that guy’s like eight feet tall. My five-foot-two self was understandably intimidated.

But somehow we won. Somehow, despite the fact that our opponents were a hard-boiled conglomeration of athletes and Mexicans while we were a ragtag team of English majors and gay men, despite the fact that our team shirts were an oh-so-intimidating shade of baby blue, despite the fact that at one point we had two runners on third base at the same time, we won. It was like an after-school special.

Continue reading Summer Breeze, Winter Freeze…

Hey, remember me? I’m not a new columnist; I just took a brief hiatus from my column so that I could finish my thesis. As of four hours ago, when I turned in my mammoth of a paper, I’m back and ready to continue writing for The Sun… for two more weeks. That would make this my second-to-last column, and since the last column is traditionally wasted on a bunch of goodbyes, thank-yous and other sentimental hooey, this is effectively my last column.

Which puts me in a bit of a tricky situation. I’ve got 950 — now, 850 — words left to say all of the things I haven’t gotten to say, so I need to choose carefully. In the past two and a half years I’ve written about 50 columns, and I probably could have written 10 or so more if I had never bagged. Some of the times I bagged it was because I didn’t have the time to write, but most of the time it was because I couldn’t think of anything to write about; I’d start with some raw idea and attempt to bake it into a column, but (to continue the metaphor) then I’d discover that I didn’t have any butter, so I’d replace it with half margarine and half shortening, and then I’d realize I was out of baking soda, so I’d double the baking powder, and… well, let’s just say the fire department wasn’t too pleased.

Damn, there go another 150.

Continue reading Liquidation Sale…

The month of March is host to many significant events: the mailing of graduate school decisions, Saint Patrick’s Day and, of course, madness. What many people don’t know, and what I just found out this afternoon, is that March is also National Women’s History Month (WHM). I knew my uterus felt funny when I woke up this morning.

I got pretty excited when I found out about WHM, partially because I’m interested in women’s history but mostly because it occurred to me that my column would be a perfect platform for proclaiming some other month, perhaps June, to be National Elise Kramer Appreciation Month. I began dreaming up the ways in which NEKAM would be commemorated: posters, dramatic public readings of my articles, Take Your Daughter to Elise Kramer Day. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be; apparently, in order for a month to be declared the National Month of Anything, a resolution needs to be passed by Congress.

So I’ll just have to be satisfied with WHM, which shows how far our country has come. Whereas women couldn’t even vote a century ago, now we get an entire twelfth of the year! Well, we don’t get the entire twelfth of the year — that would just be greedy. We share our month with many other important issues, such as: Play the Recorder Month, National Frozen Food Month and National Umbrella Month. For too long, Americans have wandered around in the rain, getting sopping wet and thinking, “If only there were some kind of portable dome made out of waterproof material that I could hold over my head when it rained! And why does it take so gosh-darned long to make mashed potatoes?”

Continue reading Our History, Ourselves…

(My half of a Vs. in The Cornell Daily Sun. Josh Dugan’s opposing piece can be found at the Sun’s website.)

The term “hate crime” has always struck me as slightly bizarre. It implies that only a small subcategory of crimes stem from hate — that the remaining crimes are the result of, what, confusion? “Oh, dear, I seem to have bludgeoned you repeatedly with a blunt object. I do apologize.” Every violent crime is motivated by hate on some level, and to separate crimes based on type of hate is not only impossible but undesirable and counterproductive. Anyone who ties someone to a fence post, beats and pistol-whips him, and then leaves him for dead deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail with no parole — regardless of whether his victim, as Matthew Shepard was, is gay. I wish there were a magical balm that could cure society’s wounds, but hate crime legislation is no panacea.

First, there is the difficulty in establishing what, precisely, constitutes a hate crime. This difficulty exists on two levels: obviously it’s extremely hard to determine motive beyond reasonable doubt (without the aid of a foolproof lie detector), but more significantly, it’s extremely unclear which kinds of “hate” fall under the purview of “hate crimes” and how direct the connection between the hate and the crime needs to be.

Continue reading Hate Crimes: Should They Carry Stiffer Penalties?…

Like many college students, most of my knowledge of current events is gleaned from the headlines on the New York Times website, the first ten minutes of the Daily Show and, of course, NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics (newsflash: despite the fact that the women wear next to nothing and are often thrown bodily onto the ice by their bumbling partners, ice dancing is really boring!). For those of you who are as behind on the news as I am, a recap of some recent stories: the Vice President of the United States has gunned down an elderly man in an apparent effort to compensate for his lack of military service, the Danish butter cookie industry has been dealt a crippling blow by a Muslim boycott (their loss — who doesn’t love Danish butter cookies?), and everyone’s favorite no-nonsense talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, has been leading a campaign against James Frey for publishing a largely fabricated memoir.

I can understand peppering 78-year-old men in the face with birdshot and burning down consulates to protest accusations of being violent, but, frankly, Oprah’s one-blowhard crusade has left me scratching my head. Memoirs aren’t exactly a genre known for their accuracy, nor should they be; who wants to read about a person’s actual, mundane life, replete with poor comedic timing, esprit d’escalier, small dreams and big disappointments? The “true” anecdotes we share with others would, without a bit of poetic license, be boring beyond belief. In the retelling, the situation becomes just a little more dramatic; we become just a little wittier; ensuing hijinks become just a little zanier. As David Sedaris, the queen of the entertaining memoir, once said, “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough.”
So I don’t really care that Frey lied about the veracity of his novel — in fact, I wish more authors would follow suit. I don’t have a problem with people making things up and claiming they happened; I have a problem with people making things up and claiming they didn’t happen.

Continue reading Tell Me Sweet Little Lies…