Sam Downing

Since climbing up on my gay high horse yesterday, I figure I might as well stay here for a bit longer.

In the last week or so a lot of my friends have shared the same-sex version of Taylor Swift’s ‘You Belong With Me’ clip. If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin: recreation of the music video, but with two dudes instead of a girl and a dude. Check it:

The verdict generally seems to be that it’s the cutest little video ever. And it is cute. But it’s also totally overrated, because the guys don’t kiss at the end.

Taylor’s original incarnation of the clip ends with her pashing Lucas Till. The same-sex version just… fades to black. That’s kind of a boring finish, but it also robs the clip of any conviction to its message. It becomes merely “Boys have crushes on boys, and that’s fine, but eeeeew we don’t want to see them kissing!”. Which is a shame, because it started so well.

This isn’t about me wanting to see two cute guys locking lips – it’s about me getting peeved that the creators of the same-sex remake kinda pussed out on a great idea.

(Also, the wicked girlfriend should totally have been played by the cute nerd in drag, and not by an actual girl.)

(Also, my absolute favourite bit of ‘You Belong With Me’ is about 22 seconds into the song, when there’s this little snare bit that reminds me of ‘Kitty Cat Dance’, aka the internet’s greatest song about cats.)

I’m super-mega-psyched about the return of Glee next month (and desperately hoping the four-month hiatus won’t have killed the show somehow). However, this spoiler bothers me:

Kurt will concoct a Parent Trap-like plan by setting up his dad with Finn’s mother. But true love isn’t actually on his agenda – Kurt just wants to bunk up with his beloved jock.

This isn’t the first time Kurt has attempted to seduce Finn, and the storyline is just as annoying as it was the first go around. The “gay dude tricks his way into straight dude’s pants, hur hur” plot is lazy at best, and dangerous at worst, if you’ll pardon the hysteria. Straight guys get uncomfortable if they think gay guys are plotting to get hold of their junk, while gays get irritated at straights who assume they’re homo-catnip simply by virtue of having a penis.

It staggers me that Glee, a popular show with a strong gay sensibility and a large gay fanbase, would stoop to a plot like this – especially since series co-creator Ryan Murphy is a proudly gay man who says he was a proudly gay teen. I want the show to do better than this, because I know it can. Maybe, fingers crossed, there’s more to this story than that one-line spoiler indicates. I hope so.

(Not that I blame Kurt for wanting to get it awn with Finn. Cory Monteith is way cute.)

Okay, I’m now officially a fan of The Laws of Magic. Blaze of Glory (my review is here) was a fun read, but Heart of Gold is a ripper.

So in this instalment – the second in the series – our hero Aubrey Fitzwilliam and his chum George Doyle leave “Albion” on a trip to “Lutetia”, the beautiful capital city of “Gallia”. (Laws is set in an alternate universe where a) magic is real, and b) everywhere has a different name, so England is “Albion” and Paris is “Lutetia”. It even has its own “Exposition Tower”. Hee.)

Aubrey reunites with the beautiful Caroline Hepworth – who’s kind of like Hermione Granger, if Hermione were all aloof and kick-ass – and discovers a plot to destroy Lutetia and spark war across the Continent.

The right word is “rollicking”. In Gold author Michael Pryor expands the world he created in Blaze, crafting an adventure that’s immensely captivating (even in the bits where the plot feels like it’s treading water).

Pryor is not only a writer who makes me want to read, he’s a writer who makes me want to write. And now on to book three, Word of Honour!

If you look really hard, you can spot an Orc in this photo!

Here are some things I noticed during my recent stay in New Zealand:

1. It is fucking beautiful. Like, there is a reason that Lord of the Rings and several other fantasy movies have been shot there.

2. Kiwis are super-nice. (Either that, or Kiwis are just a regular level of nice, and everyone in Sydney is a super-jerk. This is a distinct possibility.) Everyone I encountered was unfailingly polite and friendly, even people who didn’t work in the tourism industry. The only rude minge I encountered (who wasn’t even Kiwi – I think she was German or something) was a waitress at a restaurant in Christchurch, who snapped that we couldn’t eat dinner there because she was expecting two large groups, which I guess was my fault or something.

3. The accent… um. I will say this: New Zealanders are very well-spoken. For example. Where an Australian will say something that sounds like “bedda siddy” for “better city”, a Kiwi will actually pronounce the Ts. Unfortunately the vowels will be rendered into something like “butter sitty”, which is hilarious. New Zealand, I hereby offer an apology for my constant stifled sniggers at your amusing ickcent.

When I was a kid I loved pretty much everything Enid Blyton wrote, with a couple of exceptions. First among these was Noddy (that little prat). Second was Fatty, the so-called “hero” of the Five Find-Outers series. Fatty was a rich, boastful boor (who was obsessed with “slimming”, though he never seemed to lose any weight), and his adventures left me with a long-running distaste for tales of the English upper-class.

The Laws of Magic novels, of which Blaze of Glory is part one, are about Aubrey Fitzwilliam – a very rich, very clever, very absurdly named English toff who attends a posh boarding school and is the son of a prominent politician. By rights I should hate him. But I don’t, and I think it’s because Michael Pryor is playing with the conventions of a genre I once loathed.

And doing an awfully good job of it. For example: Aubrey’s best chum George constantly calls him “old man”. And at one stage he dresses himself up as a street urchin called Tommy Sparks. Tommy Sparks! Brilliant.

Superficially, Laws of Magic is a lot like Harry Potter: both are about slight, dark-haired, magically gifted teenagers with a knack for landing themselves in the thick of mysterious events. But Blaze of Glory is rife with a political intrigue that’s absent from the Potter novels (from the early ones, at least): it’s set in an alternate universe in the early 20th century, as “Albion” is on the verge of war with “Holmland” (stand-ins for England and Germany, respectively).

Aubrey and George are invited to a shooting weekend at the Crown Prince’s palatial country estate, joined by politicians, aristocrats and foreign diplomats. Aubrey foils an attempt on the Prince’s life when he discovers a golem sent on an assassination mission – but who sent the golem, and why? Read the rest of this entry »

Do I really need to explain why the lifeguards are my favourite part of the parade? Image: pinched from News.com.au

While I was watching the Mardi Gras last night (on TV – watching it in person inevitably means battling sweaty crowds comprised of either loud bogans or screaming gays or loud screaming gay bogans), it occured to me that those homophobes are right when they insist that being gay is a choice.

They’re right, but not for the reason they think they’re right.

Being gay is not in itself a choice. No one chooses to be gay (or lesbian or bi or queer, or whatever; for simplicity’s sake I’m bundling them all up under “gay”); that’s decided by the genetic lottery. But every gay person chooses to live a gay lifestyle.

After all, no gay person has to live as an out gay person. You could acknowledge you’re gay but spend your entire life living in the closet. Or you could suppress your homosexuality altogether – get married, have kids, settle down into a life of permanently suppressing your true identity.

But both of these choices are deplorable, and it’s really sad that thousands of people believe it’s the best path for them, or worse, that they’re forced down that path by the people around them.

Sometimes I hear people questioning gay pride. “Why would you be proud of being gay?” they ask (and I’ve heard this from both gay and straight people). “It’s like being proud of having brown eyes.”

But gay pride isn’t merely about taking pride in being gay. It’s taking pride in choosing to live a gay lifestyle – choosing to live as yourself in defiance of all those hateful fuckwits who believe homosexuality is evil and wrong, or in defiance of the many people out there who “merely” have a dull, low-level scorn for men who kiss men.

The Mardi Gras, for all its ridiculous flamboyance, is a pretty great way of expressing that pride. What’s not to be proud of?

Hungry Beast, an Australian TV show featuring a bunch of smug undergraduate types waxing lyrical about current affairs, ran a report in its most recent episode titled “Things we think might be bullshit: Adults reading kids’ books”:

Harry Potter, Twilight and other novels are deemed books for “children”, and adults (so the reasoning goes) need to grow up and presumably start reading “adult books” lest they develop a creepy Peter Pan vibe akin to Michael Jackson’s. Why, if adults continue reading “kids’” books, one day Spot Goes to School might be taught in universities – because after all, there’s no difference whatsoever between a book for preschoolers and a book for older teens!

Adults reading children’s books, we’re informed, is like owning golliwogs: “a bit wrong, but mostly just embarrassing”.

STFU, Hungry Beast. First of all, do your research: children’s books are very different from the genre known an “young adult” (note the use of “adult“). And guess what? There are loads and loads of YA books that aren’t Harry Potter or Twilight! (Shock!)

Why is it weird when adults read books about teenagers, given that adults were all once (another shock!) teenagers too? Is it also “weird” for senior citizens to read books about twenty- or thirtysomething characters?

Lastly, and most importantly, why are stories about young people automatically “childish”, and/or valued below stories about adults?

If I actually bothered to one day jot down a list of my favourite authors, Jasper Fforde would be somewhere right up the top. The man’s imagination is ridiculous. His wit is crackling. His prose is… er, very good too.

Shades of Grey, the first entry in a new trilogy, is a bit of a departure from Fforde’s previous series, Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes. They were both rampantly silly (and I use the word in the best possible way), and while Shades doesn’t lack any of their inventiveness, something about the tone feels a little more mature. If you can even say that about a book with such a wild premise:

The novel is set in a future where society is divided by colour. Not race – literally colour. Citizens are sorted into classes based on what spectrum they best perceive: examples include the supercilious Yellows,  bossy Greens and unlucky Greys, who can’t perceive much colour at all and lumped at the bottom of the social order. A rigid hierarchy of Prefects and rules forms a society that’s reminiscent of a more colourful, decidedly English version of Airstrip One.

Our hero is 20-year-old Red Eddie Russett – everyone’s surnames are dictacted by their colour – an affable, dopey goody-goody who’s banished to the outer fringes to complete a chair census after he dares to suggest a more efficient method of queueing. (This kind of deadpan silliness is Fforde’s hallmark.) In his new home of East Carmine, Eddie meets Jane, a hot-tempered grey with a retrousse noise who reveals the ugly underbelly of society. She also has him eaten by a giant carnivorous plant, but you’ll have to read the book to find out why.

Shades of Grey is a blast (I’m a Fforde fanboy. Can you tell?), but be warned: the story takes an extremely long time to get started – the first half of the book is devoted mostly to worldbuilding, which is fascinating but occasionally frustrating. And avoid if you’re not a fan of books that are transparently set-up for a sequel, because the ending of Shades will just tick you off.

I’ve known a lot of boys who are obsessive Simpsons fans – and “obsessive” usually manifests itself as “able to drop a random Simpsons line into pretty much any conversation¹”. These boys have seen every episode of The Simpsons a million times, or at least season every episode from The Simpsons‘ golden age (which roughly encompasses seasons three to nine) a million times. And will happily watch these episodes again and again and again and again, probably until they are very old men. I count myself among these girls.

I haven’t met many girls like this.

That’s not to say they don’t exist. I’ve known obsessive female fans of The Simpsons, and I’m sure there’s plenty of them out there. Just not as many as there are male fans.

I wonder why this is. Is there something about The Simpsons that appeals more to male psyches than to female ones? Its irreverence, its mix of the high and lowbrow? The fact that the focus has always been more on Homer and Bart than Marge, Lisa and Maggie? The fact that it’s a cartoon?

Theories? Refutations?

1. Thus proving the maxim that there really is a Simpsons quote for every occasion [↩]

Will (his website is here) is a pal of mine, so I don’t want to rave too much about his book because it’ll give him a(n even) big(ger) head. But when I finished reading it, this is what I texted him:

“Equal parts fun and funny… William Kostakis is an evil genius.” Is what I’d say if I’d been asked to write the cover blurb.

It’s true. I like my LOLs witty and cruel, and Loathing Lola is loaded with both. You know you’re onto something when you can make a funeral scene hilarious.