culture consumed (April, 2019)

[hermionesviolin]

books

• The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multi-Racial and Multi-Cultural Congregations by Jacqueline J. Lewis
  
• Raven Strategem and Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee (sci-fi, 2nd and 3rd books in a trilogy)
  
• The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine
  
• Resipiscence 2019: A Lenten Devotional on Dismantling White Supremacy eds. Vahisha Hasan & Nichola Torbett

tv

• baby's first episode of The L Word -- the one where Tina has her baby, so the Season 2 finale, 2.13 "Lacuna" -- only episode #26 and it was a lot, but honestly my impression is that any episode of The L Word is a lot
  
  Friends I was staying with were rewatching it, and I knew I'd never seen it in part because we didn't have cable, but I had assumed I was also a little too young for it whereas arguably I'm a little too old for it, as it began airing my junior year of college (I had also forgotten that Grey's Anatomy premiered the following year -- I knew friends younger than me watched it at college, but I also had in my head that it had started before I got to college)

live theatre

• [ASP/Lyric Stage] Twelfth Night
  
• black odyssey boston

movies

• [fannish movie night] The Fate of the Furious
  
• Stumped (climbing docu-short about Maureen Beck, who only has one hand -- and which fully rejects inspiration porn) [siebdar: bookmarking rydra_wong's adaptive climbing linkspam]

music

• [NPR] First Listen: Rhiannon Giddens, 'There Is No Other'
  
• Songs of Our Native Daughters by Our Native Daughters (Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell) [on Spotify, but from this review]

podcasts

• Working Class History E20 The Exotic Dancers Union

Comments

[jjhunter]

You saw 'black odyssey boston' too? :D

What did you think of it?

[hermionesviolin]

I wanted to like it more than I did.

I really liked the idea of it, but it felt really scattered -- which maybe was semi-intentional? I haven't read The Odyssey in ages, but I recently read The Aeneid, and I know in that the characters are constantly telling flashback stories. So maybe it was trying to mimic that style?

Anyway, I didn't feel like Ulysses got to have a real progression in his journey. Like, I wasn't entirely sold on the premise that he didn't have sufficient connection to his history/ancestors (I mean, I bought it as a premise, but nothing beyond the fact that he was an orphan who grew up in foster care made me really feel it for him specifically), but even leaving that aside, I didn't feel a progression in him.

On reflection, I wonder if the play was trying to do too much by trying to have the story of how you need to connect with your past in order to build your future AND telling the story of Ulysses learning to face the truth about his actions in the Middle East, and him and Paw Sidon finding their way to something other than a continuing cycle of retributive justice (which I was particularly interested in, having been in a lot of prison abolition spaces recently where folks have talked about how it's not just about abolishing incarceration and police and surveillance, but about abolishing the whole retributive/punitive mentality).

Because he definitely did wrestle and grew in the scenes about shooting Paw Sidon's son -- but the scenes about Black history felt more like set pieces. The Circe scene was great, and worth the price of admission. And the ~Katrina scene was heartbreaking at times. But the Tiresias/Scylla+Charybdis scene was just an excuse for a 1970s/80s throwback -- which I obviously wasn't the target audience for. (I was also bummed that they didn't do anything with Tiresias' canonical gender stuff. Especially since it was a very heterosexual play. My personal investment in Pallas Athene was such that I didn't love the characterization of her in this play, but I know everyone makes the classics their own, and so I mostly didn't hold that against them.)

It was an interesting choice to do a very Homeric-feeling lengthy listing of metro Boston areas (complete with some puns). It didn't entirely work for me, but I think that was in part that that was one of the sections that could have been improved with a different actor doing the delivery.

I loved Malachi, and while some of the character shifts felt like they happened too fast (because they had to cram a lot of story in to not a lot of time), I did appreciate how it lifted up the struggle of a young Black man who's really smart but gets shit from his white classmates, who knows his rights and attempts to demand that police officers do their jobs properly, who's still a teenager and makes impulsive decisions and sasses his mom. Given the constraints of the quick scene progressions, he got to be a fairly complex character.

And I did appreciate how the play made much more real the grief of one's child being killed than one often feels in reading The Odyssey -- Polyphemus is a monster in The Odyssey, but he's still somebody's son, and while I sometimes roll my eyes in the epics when the gods talk about their favorites, and I still don't have ~family~ feelings like many people do, Paw Sidon's grudge against Odysseus felt more understandable here than I sometimes experience it as.

What did you think?

[stultiloquentia]

Oh hey, what did you think of Black Odyssey? I saw it on Sunday.

ETA: Hahaha I commented without noticing jj's comment. We went together.

[hermionesviolin]

See my comment to jj above :)

I went with a friend on Friday.