Archives for September 2017

Examples of these higher standards abound.

Critics of men who sport “The Future is Female” T-shirts also maintain that some are using the word “feminist” inappropriately. The preferred term, they argue, is “feminist allies.” The rationale is that white people who fight against racism wouldn’t call themselves “black,” just as straight people who rally for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights wouldn’t call themselves “transgender.”

BuzzFeed recently published “17 Types of Male ‘Feminists’ That Need to Be Stopped,” an illustrated list that included a new father who suddenly becomes a feminist after he has a daughter, and a male manager who congratulates himself for hiring a female employee.

“It’s something I encounter all the time, but that man Robbie Tripp was the real kick in the pants in inspiring the post,” said Loryn Brantz, who wrote and illustrated the article and is also the author of the book “Feminist Baby.”

Mr. Tripp is the San Francisco man who became an internet sensation this summer when he posted a gushing ode to his wife’s “curvy body” on Instagram. People were divided on his seemingly self-congratulatory realization that “the media marginalizes women,” and his appreciation of his wife’s “thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll.” Some cooed and said “Ah”; others sneered and said “Ew.”

“Good Morning America” interviewed the couple in a segment titled “Hero Husband or Fake Feminist?” The culture site Refinery29 dismissed Mr. Tripp’s paean as “the worst type of ‘male feminism.’”

Celebrities also weighed in. Melanie Lynskey, who will star in the TV series “Castle Rock,” said on Twitter: “Public announcements of devotion are very sexy to me,” she said. “What isn’t sexy is acting as though you’re one of the few men on earth who could possibly love a woman who looks like that.”

Dr. Peretz has coined a term, “the Pedestal Effect,” to describe how men are given special treatment for small acts of gender equality, like changing a diaper or Mr. Tripp’s love letter. “It is basically when guys get a whole lot of bonus points just for being nominal feminists,” he said.

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Mr. Whedon’s agent did not respond to requests for comment, but a representative released a statement to The Wrap that read: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife.”

Mr. Whedon did, however, give an interview to BuzzFeed in 2015 that seems to have foreshadowed the current hubbub.

“When you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically,” he said in an article about why he deleted his Twitter account (he has since returned). “Because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do — for example, in my case, feminism. If you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist,” he added. “It circles directly back upon you.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/style/male-feminists-joss-whedon-snl.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Republican candidate for mayor in New York, Nicole Malliotakis, an assemblywoman from Staten Island, is struggling to get the attention of voters in a heavily Democratic city, with a little more than five weeks before the Nov. 7 election. Ms. Malliotakis just received a payment of $1.5 million in public matching funds from the Campaign Finance Board, giving her campaign a needed boost and making a large advertising purchase possible.

With this ad, called “Subway Nightmare,” she appeals to New Yorkers’ frustration with deteriorating subway service, an issue that may resonate with voters regardless of party — even though Mayor Bill de Blasio does not control the transit system.

PRODUCER BrabenderCox

THE SCRIPT Ms. Malliotakis says: “What’s it like riding the subway under Bill de Blasio? A lot like this. A nightmare. Three quarters of subway lines are now plagued by delays. That’s over 70,000 delays a month. People are packed in like sardines. And subway sex crimes are up over 50 percent. While we deal with this, Bill de Blasio is being chauffeured to his gym miles away. New Yorkers deserve better and I’m going to fight everyday to make sure they get it.”

ON SCREEN The ad shows an elevated subway train rattling by at night, with the Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State Building, in the background. It cuts to Ms. Malliotakis standing inside an empty subway car, speaking to the camera. The lights go out and the screen stays dark briefly until she flicks on a cigarette lighter that partly illuminates her face in close-up. Images follow of crowded platforms surrounded by darkness, and jammed subway cars. A steady drumbeat plays in the background.

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Next up is a still image of a scowling Mr. de Blasio superimposed on video of a black sport utility vehicle, like the one the mayor uses, crossing a bridge. We see Ms. Malliotakis inside the subway car again, and then the ad closes with a shot of a subway train seen from outside, this time against the backdrop of a golden sky at either sunrise or sunset. It is an N train.

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ACCURACY It is true that subway service has deteriorated, with increases in delays and crowding that have been widely characterized as symptoms of a crisis. However, the subways are operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose chairman is appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has great influence within the authority. The mayor appoints four members on a board with a total of 14 votes.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/nyregion/nicole-malliotakis-subway-ad-de-blasio.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“They are, after all, in this together,” she wrote. “Hunter and hunted. Instrument and destiny, for every great pursuit demands the cooperation of both parties. For every Jean Valjean there is a Javert and if either died the other would be desolate. Imagine Ahmed and Rushdie, the perfection of pursuit and flight. Neither exists without the other.”

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Ms. Reed saw herself as a writer of speculative fiction who trafficked not in aliens or flying saucers but in quirky, fantastic and tough-minded leaps from the realities of contemporary culture. In one novel, “Thinner Than Thou” (2004), she satirizes a modern preoccupation with body image; in “The Night Children” (2008), runaway children live in a shopping mall and come out only at night.

Rather than feel bound to science fiction, Ms. Reed saw herself as part of a group of imaginative writers that included Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell.

“For me,” she told The Hartford Courant in 2011, “it’s a great big literary ballpark.”

In Ms. Reed’s first published story, “The Wait” (1958) — which evokes Shirley Jackson as well as Stephen King — a mother falls ill in a small Southern town, leaving her teenage daughter, Miriam, to become part of a bizarre ritual involving 18-year-old virgins.

“When they came to the field,” Ms. Reed wrote, “Miriam first thought the women were still busy at a late harvest, but she saw that the maidens, scores of them, were just sitting on little boxes at intervals in the seemingly endless field.” When the frightened Miriam asked why she was there, a woman tells her little more than “Remember, the man must be a stranger.”

One of her more famous stories, “The Attack of the Giant Baby” (1976), follows the misadventures of Leonard Freibourg, a 14-month-old who accidentally swallows a culture in his father’s laboratory, turning him into a giant who terrorizes New York City. Similarities between her tale and the plot of the 1992 Disney film “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” the sequel to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” led Ms. Reed to sue the Walt Disney Company. In a settlement, she received a “special recognition” credit.

Kit Reed was born Lillian Hyde Craig in San Diego on June 7, 1932, and was known as Kitten from a young age. Her father, John R. Craig, was the commanding officer of the Grampus, a submarine that is believed to have been sunk by the Japanese in early 1943. Her mother, the former Lillian Hyde, was a schoolteacher. Before she could read, young Kit’s father read her L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

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At age 7, she read “Beowulf” in her bathroom “because it was the only way the babysitter would let me stay up,” Ms. Reed told The Los Angeles Review of Books. By 12, she had written a series of books about a stand-up bunny rabbit. At the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (now Notre Dame of Maryland University), nuns let her write short stories instead of a research paper for her senior thesis, allowing her to avoid the research she hated.

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For five years Ms. Reed was a reporter, first for The St. Petersburg Times in Florida and then for The New Haven Register, where she won awards for a series of articles about juvenile courts in Connecticut. Reporter characters would later turn up occasionally in her fiction, like the one in the novel “Son of Destruction” (2013) who investigates three cases of spontaneous human combustion in his mother’s hometown.

Writing for the online Weird Fiction Review in 2013, Adam Mills praised Ms. Reed’s mind-set. He described her “weirdness of perspective, a knack for finding the strangest, most faithful way for inhabiting a character’s head and plumbing the depths for the things that are both surprising and compelling, things we wouldn’t think to look for without Reed pointing them out.”

Her final story, “Disturbance in the Produce Aisle,” was published this month in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Ms. Reed is survived by her husband, Joseph; her daughter, Kate Maruyama, also an author; her sons, Mack and John; and four grandchildren.

Ms. Reed, who was a professor and resident writer at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for decades and wrote a few thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig, had an unconventional, no-holds-barred personality. On Facebook, Mack Reed wrote of his mother: “She loved like a child, worked like a stevedore, cursed like a sailor and sampled the world with Twainian zest.”

And Jen Gunnels, her editor at Tor Books, said in an interview that Ms. Reed had a “lusciously warped mind.” One day, she said, Ms. Reed described to her a new story she had written about a woman’s nightmarish relationship with parrots.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re really sick,’ ” Ms. Gunnels said. “But that was part of her charm.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/obituaries/kit-reed-dead-author-of-darkly-humorous-fiction.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The pool of first-time television directors has grown more diverse, according to a new industry report, but not everyone is convinced of the findings.

The Directors Guild of America announced this week that, according to a study it conducted, women and “ethnic minorities” — a term the group used but did not define — are being hired as first-time directors at significantly higher rates than they were in 2009.

For the 2016-17 season, “ethnic minorities” made up 24.9 percent of new hires, up from 12.1 percent for the 2009-10 season, when the study began. The number of first-time female directors rose at an even greater rate, to 32.4 percent in 2016, from 11.1 percent in 2009, according to the report.

“After years of our efforts to educate the industry, hold employers accountable through our contracts and push them to do better, we’re seeing signs of meaningful improvement,” Thomas Schlamme, the guild’s president, said in a statement. The guild, which has over 16,000 members, represents directors working in film, television, news and new media.

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Not everyone shares the guild’s interpretation of the report.

“The D.G.A. is trying to say all things are wonderful,” said Jennifer Warren, chairwoman and founder of the Alliance of Women Directors. “They’re much better, but are they wonderful? No. Have all the improvements happened because of what the D.G.A. has been doing? No.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/arts/television/study-finds-more-diversity-among-first-time-tv-directors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

For a Bob Dylan song, the app shows vintage photographs of Greenwich Village, news clippings and links to related artists (like Martin Scorsese, who directed the Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home”). The goal is to present fans with a web of educational “rabbit holes” to explore.

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“We’re going through the prism of music,” Mr. Roswell said, “but it’s film, it’s fashion, it’s art, it’s news, it’s comedy — it’s everything that created that scene.”

The company has deals with publishers like Genesis Publications and Rock’s Backpages, a decades-deep archive of music journalism, as well as rock photographers like Jay Blakesberg; TunesMap receives a cut of any sales made through the app. (TunesMap also shows articles from The New York Times by using the paper’s programming interface.)

During its long gestation, the company secured two patents for its navigation system and raised $4.75 million from entertainment-industry veterans like Andy Summers, the guitarist for the Police, and Jerry Moss, one of the founders of AM Records, and from the Visionary Private Equity Group.

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“I produced a Hank Williams film with Tom Hiddleston that took 10 years to put together,” Mr. Roswell said, referring to the 2015 biopic “I Saw the Light.” “I wouldn’t know any other way to do it. I just never let the vision die.”

The app is free, and it works when a user plays songs on Sonos from Spotify, Apple Music and other major streaming services. But in many ways, TunesMap runs counter to the trends of digital music consumption, which are moving toward simple mobile displays and programmed playlists.

Equipment costs are another potential barrier. The cheapest Sonos and Apple TV systems cost a total of $350. TunesMap said a minimal mobile version would also be available.

Reimagining liner notes for the digital age is a guiding concept, but Mr. Loyer, TunesMap’s director of user experience, said the company has tried to avoid the nostalgia of “Oh, remember when we had liner notes.”

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“The real question,” Mr. Loyer said, “is how do we design the systems in such a way that values the real output of all the culture that surrounds a piece of music.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/business/media/tunesmap-liner-notes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss