Georgia O'Keeffe, reduced to a lifetime movie.

I finally finished watching that docudrama about Georgia O'Keeffe (it was on Lifetime, which should have been a warning label, but I like dramas based on biographies generally, *sigh*.)

Bleah.

Not only did it highlight the kind of behavior that makes O'Keeffe's artwork seem rather repulsive in context, but it was a bad movie.

It is impossible to understand, from what was shown, why O'Keeffe had any interest in that loser. It's impossible to understand why, once her friends realized what was going on, anyone let her interact with him ever again.

Overall, this movie made O'Keeffe look pathetic. If she cannot manage her life and feelings to the point where she does not allow someone worthless to crush her, then I don't think I want to be drawn into her art. (I'm not keen on Van Gogh either, so this isn't purely sexist.) I liked her paintings when I saw them on exhibit in the early 90s, but that was a subset of her work focusing on variety. It appears she painted flower pictures for decades. The movie didn't show her being directly influenced by Warhol, and I doubt most people would equate flowers with mass-manufactured containers, but I didn't like the idea. I took it, from the movie, that women paint flowers.

Watching this was both a waste of my time because it was poorly dramatized and badly sequenced, and because it only detracts from my pleasure of seeing famous art.

Highly dis-recommended. Except for one line, after she marries the asshole, the officiant congratulates her as "Mrs. Asshole" and she says, "Miss O'Keeffe". Too bad she couldn't keep her identity in anything more than name.

Shadow of a what A Child of a Rainless Year could have been.

One of my first favorite authors, Jane Lindskold, (who herself has odd parallels with O'Keeffe due to the whole New Mexico plus bad relationship driving her there business) wrote a book I hadn't noticed but found at the library.

Child of a Rainless year

Now, Lindskold had been writing this series about a girl raised by wolves. Which was pretty decent as long as she focused on that aspect of it, but when it drifted off into stuff that was unrelated and political and the good guys failed to kill someone they knew was unredeemably evil... well, I was less whelmed but I did still wonder why it took her forever between each book.

It turns out she was making time with another publisher. And because publishers never list another publisher's books, it wasn't possible to tell she'd written something else when I saw the new book in the regular series.

This was, honestly, one of the worst books I have read that was not also an unedited mess or written by someone non-fluent in English. It is, for 85% of the book this story about a girl who lived in New Mexico, was orphaned, went to live in Ohio, and then 50 years later, went back to New Mexico when she discovered her inheritance included a house there. It is boring, banal, and as completely pointless as any non-genre fiction book. (I'm still unclear on why genre-less fiction doesn't need a plot, but stories where the author has had to create an entire world and show it to us... that's the story that needs a war and a plague and a love story and nineteen other conflicts and fifteen dozen characters... but that's how it goes, ALWAYS.) It is, for 85% of the book, a book about the here and now exactly as the world is. Where nothing happens. Where nothing is different than how you could see it out your window. Even New Mexico manages to look just like here most of the time (because the characters spend their time indoors.)

The last 15% of the book has some sort of LSD trip. The house is alive. There are imaginary servants. The woman isn't really human, she really is just her mother's shadow. Her mother didn't really die but really was trying to kill her. It's all been presaged by the "science fiction" sticker on the spine of the book from the library and by the heavy, heavy hand the author used to pour in foreshadowing. And it really is just and exactly what was foreshadowed in the beginning. It just took hundreds of pages to get to exactly where we were expecting to be. The only difference is that when I imagined that story from the foreshadowing, it was interesting and vibrant and real, but when we actually got there, it was a postcard picture of what I had imagined. It was flat and less vivid than the sketch at the onset had been.

The whole book is carried on the back of this one character, Mira. And I don't like her. I didn't care about her. And I didn't feel like she cared about anyone else. She was so distant from everyone whenever we saw her having feelings and she didn't seem to feel anything even when the world was shaken up beyond recognition. She already acted so unhuman that there is no way I could identify with her.

The last 15% of the book where it had to get weird so Lindskold could reach her genre-tied audience, including me, was awful. Discordant. Did not fit with the rest of the story at all. The author clearly wanted to write a non-genre, plain, fiction book, the kind of book that is like looking out your window instead of going outside yourself. I feel like I wasted my time reading it.

Choosing the correct operative word makes the understanding different.

On my LJ flist, there was a post saying there's going to be an evolution discussion in a church in Berkeley. The comments are all about hey look how tolerant churches really are but how scientists and academics are all bitchy and intolerant of religion!

Um. No.

Phelps. Heard anyone naysay him who actually goes to church? Nope. Never happens because Christians believe anyone who says they believe in Jesus is a Christian and it's not up to them to complain.

Heard about Texas and Kansas public schools?

Scopes Monkey Trial.

Teaching evolution is illegal in some places of 2009 America.

Evolution is a fact. There is molecular proof. We can watch evolution happen (in microscopic creatures). Want to know where antibiotic resistance comes from? It's fucking evolution. Scientists have hosed themselves by calling it a "theory". But GRAVITY is a theory and even the most god-ridden folks cannot fly. Theory is one of those words which means something different within the scientific community than it does in the vernacular and scientists really should choose another word that means "Our current best explanation as to why this demonstrable event happens." Evolution HAPPENS. All the time. It is not some sort of mythology.

Christianity, is, however, some sort of mythology. It's a currently popular mythology. But if anyone stands on a college campus and says they think we should sacrifice a bull to Zeus, they get laughed at and jeered and people think they're crazy. Belief in Jesus Christ as some sort of savior is the same thing. Christianity didn't start as a religion until after Jesus was dead and it's not about worshipping Jesus, it's about spreading hatred of people who don't worship Jesus. It's the Amway of religions.

So being in a place where study and investigation and experimentation has taught us how to find our place in the world and how to understand something that actually happens... that should treat someone who spouts off about mythology as fact as if they need help for their mental illness.

As for why a Berkeley church is hosting this evolution discussion, I think the functional part of that is the adjective. It's Berkeley, not church, and I think it's awesome that there are churches who remember the reason they get tax breaks is because they are supposed to be meeting places for the community. Churches which refuse to allow community groups to host respectful-of-property meetings should have their property tax bye stripped. The state can use the money.

Finally. I agree that scientists and academics are sometimes disrespectful of religion, but I think 95% of the country being overtly religious needs an active sort of rebellion in order not to swamp everyone in its tide of unthinking hate-mongering. I do think it would have been a lot more polite if the evolution discussion did not take place in a church because churches are supposed to be safe places for religious people to feed their delusions. As much as I appreciate the irony, I do think it's mean.

I would much much much rather the country be that everywhere is safe to discuss evolution, schools, workplaces, stores, parks, restaurants, beaches; and the only safe places to discuss Christianity are in secret enclaves hidden from the public view. But in practice, knowing several people who have been beaten by Christians for their belief in evolution, having seen people's cars demolished for footed-fish logos, and never having seen a school actually ban Christian-focused events (until the courts step in) despite the amended Constitution of the country, having watched the courts say that public schoolchildren can be required to pray (Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God")... I don't think Christianity needs any defense. I think it is the defacto and dejure standard by which all Americans are judged and I think it should not be any surprise that there is violence between citizens since the scriptures require it.