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winter_groupshot, originally uploaded by ronitbez.
Someday I will have kids and they will be taken to soccer practice in this:
Yes, the movie is totally inaccurate. The bees collecting honey in the
movie are “pollen jocks” that use powerful suction guns to collect
nectar from the flowers. It’s the same prototype of Macho men using
guns to do hard, dangerous work and being glorified for it. The pollen
jocks in the movie are the “babes” that the girl bees fawn all over.
Yeah, it’s sickening.
The movie does have this vague environmentalism theme that I really
appreciated. It is revealed that the bees are necessary for all of the
flowers to bloom and all of our food to be produced. They are the link
that ties it all together. Without the bees, all of the food and all
of the creatures can’t exist. So, at least they got that part right.
As far as portraying the bee society as a matriarchy, I tried to
imagine a bee animation film that accurately told the story of the
bee culture:
The queen is a manipulative single mother that controls all of her
female offspring to keep the hive perfectly maintained and to produce
a maximum amount of food. The males that the queen mates with would be
lazy, unemployed, free-loading males that just have sex and then get
kicked out of the hive for not doing any work. The hardworking
sisterhood worker bees would be glorified for being diligent, smart,
and protective.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that does not recognize hard
working intelligent women, and so we certainly don’t have a
recognizable motherhood or sisterhood stereotype to colorfully portray
on the big screen. Pop culture tells us that women are not tough.
Women are nagging, soft, dumb, pretty little things that exist to
satisfy men. Thus, all of the bees in the bee movie have little curly
antennae, big eyelashes and curvaceous thoraxes. They don’t do any
work, or contribute to the honey production in the movie. Yes, it’s
grossly inaccurate. Once again, women’s power has been stripped and
co-opted as masculine. Ugh.
The movie is a cookie-cutter, shiny, plastic, brightly-colored piece
of crap wrapped up in a big masculine bow- just like every other big
hollywood film. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised!
Not only do we perform the bike salute on Chicago critical mass, we invented it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_hold-up
Read the story about Chicago’s first critical mass:
http://old.chicagocriticalmass.org/ridereports/cmridse7.html
It’s true. The Chicago Reader was really bought by Creative Loafing (a Florida-based media company, bleh).
I didn’t believe it until today when I picked up a copy of the most recent “Reader” in its new format. It looks like the fucking Red Eye. I hate the Red Eye. Even worse, it looks like the Weekly Planet, the so-called independent weekly newspaper published in Sarasota, FL.
Read what other people have to say about it:
As a free-lance Chicago Reader cartoonist for these past 28 years, I can smell my own blood in the water following the Creative Loafing acquisition. I have been fired from virtually every alternative weekly carrying my stuff almost immediately upon takeover. Much like the dailies, cartoonists with alternative weeklies are often first to go. I’m sad to see what is happening to a newspaper that literally made my career and is still going quite well. I owe a lot to so many editors and art directors long gone from purchased papers that have been converted to lifestyle rags, yet retain the label “alternative.”
Peter Mueller
None of the Chicago Reader distribution drivers that I know of are planning to become independent contractors at the newspaper. We’re also distressed about the changes that are happening at the newspaper. While the political coverage at the Reader may not have been as good as that at the Sun-Times, it’s still been quite good, and the cultural coverage is probably the best of any local paper in the country, if not the world. Carrying more syndicated material is a tough one to swallow. The local emphasis is what draws in serious fans of the Reader. It was about us, Chicagoans. And it’s over for us. And the paper. We know it.
The real story here is the crumbling of a number of larger independent media outlets in Chicago. WLUW radio? Gone. Punk Planet magazine? Gone. The Chicago Reader as we once knew it? Gone. It’s damned distressing. That is why we’ve lived here. That’s why we never moved away. How will we stand as an example to others in places where they’ve never had these outlets? Are we still capable of being a world-class city, a beacon to those who came here for the vibrant arts and lively politics. Am I making too much of it? Or not . . . A Chicago Reader driver
The Chicago Reader was started in 1971 by a group of friends. The paper was mostly paid for by extensive classifieds and advertisements. Perhaps we can use the Reader’s success as a boilerplate for a new independent publication.
We had a perfect start to the weekend at this polish restaurant by the Division blue line stop. It’s right where Milwaukee/Ashland/Division all intersect. Something about that intersection feels very urban with the park and fountain in the middle. It’s also a meeting of several different neighborhoods: Wicker Park, Ukrainian village, and West town.
This restaurant was like eating at someone’s house. It has apparently been in its location for more than 30 years, and I don’t think anything has changed about the interior. I also think that their prices haven’t changed since about 1975 because it was soooooo cheap. I couldn’t get over how cheap it was. When I was looking at the menu I thought that the portions were really small and so I ordered several things… to my surprise I ordered a large salad and two entrees! It was way too much food.
I had pierogi z kapusta (dumplings with cabbage), surowka z burakow cwiklowych (beet salad), and placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes). Patrick had zurek (borstch), pierogi ruskie (potato and cheese dumplings), and a polish sausage sandwich. We also each had a Kompot (compote) to drink, which is a dried fruit concentrate sort of thing. It tasted like a mixture of juices without any sugar added. It was refreshing. I definitely recommend this place. They serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It’s already hot as the dickens here in the windy city. And the wind seems to have been on vacation lately. Suddenly, the trees have leaves again and I can walk around outside without a jacket. I need to get some sandals. Unfortunately, wearing sandals in the city is NASTY because you walk around a big dirty city with all its people and things shoved out in the open. The city is like a giant scab, collecting waste and regenerating the new all at the same time.
In other news, I have a phone interview for a campaign job and someone responded to my grant writing internship application. Hooray.
I went to the Cinco de mayo festival in little village last weekend. I bought a wooden bracelet with jesus holograms on it for $2 from a street vendor. Little village has a nice vibe. Maybe because I live in a latino neighborhood, other latino neighborhoods don’t feel as agressive. The city is a cultural land mine- you walk around and blindly enter new cultural territory (see previous post). It is intimidating to enter into this new culture that is unfamiliar. You feel like an outsider, or, in my case, like a stupid white girl. I generally feel like a cultureless moron since I’m from the panhandle of Florida. I will say that moving away from the bible belt has made me more conscious of my own culture. I suppose I would call my culture Southern? Floridian? Some strange mix of the two? I have lost my southern accent, so I feel like I have nothing to prove that I am from the south. Maybe I should get better at southern cooking… I did make macaroni and cheese, cornbread, and corn on the cob at our barbeque last weekend. So, there. I am from the south.
