What happened to graceless homosexualist director Andrew Haigh’s Weekend?

• It was released on DVD in the U.K., presumably without captioning.

• Dating rather outside its league, Weekend will come out here on Criterion. (First-run films on Criterion are rare – the only recent case I can think of is that of Tiny Furniture.) This disc will surely include near-useless all-bottom-centred “captioning” by the dried husk of Captions, Inc.

  Of course I’ll buy a copy. Equally obviously, Criterion would never contemplate issuing a review copy to one of the film’s two known detractors.

Avowed fan of Chris New

In the interim, I have come to appreciate Mr. CHRIS NEW. “A lot of people now see me as an aggressive homosexual after seeing Weekend, which I’m not,” he said. But he is a legitimately out legitimate actor – so far out he is part of the U.K. Equity ad campaign that fruitlessly urges all the other gay actors to come out. (New’s Equity listing.) I respect that sort of thing. But if Russell Tovey (q.v.) can appear in Sherlock, why can’t Chris New?

There is, however, an issue.

I now openly accept that Mr. NEW’s costar, Tom Cullen, is heterosexualist. But he’s the one being groomed for stardom. He’s the one doing fashion shoots and enduring nosebleeds while shooting some kind of science-fiction movie in Jordan.

Of course Cullen is lissome and classically handsome. Is that the real reason why Chris New is stuck doing itinerant plays while Tom Cullen is slowly being assimilated by Hollywood?

Everything I’ve read tells me Mr. NEW’s home is in the theatre. But, given the rare choice between a heterosexualist and a homosexualist male making an equal splash in the same movie, Hollywood picked the straight one.

It’s the entrance to Metro Hall, the PATH, and, soon, St. Andrew station at King and University (145 King St. West).

It’s just an entrance! And it is easily the best-detailed postmodern structure in the city. It’s so postmodern it’s Spy-checklist-compliant.

• Does the building have pilasters or pediments or the same colour scheme as the 1984 Summer Olympics?
• Is it a cube with a peaked roof?
• For a building, is it funny?
• Is it funny but not a Las Vegas Hotel or a fast-food stand in Los Angeles?
• Is it easy to like?

I noticed this vestibule only after it was suddenly surrounded by construction hoardings. This was to become the wheelchair-accessible entrance of the St. Andrew subway station. My heart sank, because the TTC is an organization that literally cannot match tiles on adjoining walls.

What a surprise: The new entrance has the same profile as the many other nested A-frames of the existing structure, but, in true postmodern form, it uses a different colour of granite to call attention to itself.

The only purpose for this structure is as an entrance to an underground complex. It is orders of magnitude better than it needs to be. It is amazeballs.

Page 1, paragraph 1, sentence 1, lines 1 and 2 of Eye 82 start off badly:

After several special issues – on Berlin, music design, the designer–client relationship[,] and our regular typography issues –

So Eye had special issue music design, special issue on Berlin, and special issue our regular typography issues?

Is John L. Walters’s children learning?

[continue with: ‘Eye’ 82 →]

I brought my esteemed colleague to the blind-iPhone meetup and all I got was this blog post. (UPDATE, 2012.06.05: Grubered. See also: Photos from the meeting.)

Duking it out with Faruk for the title of male Web developer most fervently combatting sexism, Tom Morris commits quite a boner. As a facetious excuse not to care about wymmyn in technology, Morris includes:

Wonder why we are all so worried about female participation in software development and not at all worried about the low number of men in nursing. Make no mention of the fact that software development is significantly better paid than nursing.

I believe I have done more research into occupational sorting than Morris (and Faruk) have done. I’ve also read Susan Pinker. And any level of occupational disenfranchisement by women is bound to be lower than that of disabled people, a group I champion.

It is not straightforward or obvious that the position of women in technology is the most important human-resources issue in that field. And it is relevant to discuss the lack of males in female-dominated industries. As Pinker described, activists drew up a list of desirable male-dominated fields and insist women get half of them. Of course there are efforts to increase the prevalence of women in trades, for example, but no one has seriously proposed increasing the number of female roofers or of male nurses and teachers. The former case is compatible with Pinker’s analysis; the latter is due to concerns there are way too many gay males in those fields already. (If Morris were actually interested in the example he described, he would investigate pay equity – almost uniquely a Canadian practice – and what it did to the wages of men in female-dominated industries.)

Also, what would be the reaction of well-intentioned men if all the new female entrants to the industry were lesbians?

I refuse to adopt a simplistic view of a systemic issue. “We need more women in technology” is a simplistic view. This isn’t all about you, the single group you choose to defend, the occupation in which you are solely interested, and the solution you decided on at the outset in the absence of facts.

Urvashi Vaid is still around and is still lecturing us that the fight for gay rights isn’t enough. Refreshingly, what we’re also supposed to be fighting for isn’t transgender rights but basically everything else. Including “economic justice.”

• Things start off badly when Vaid declares that, “30-plus years later, formal equality for women has not removed the glass ceiling for women in top jobs, not transformed women’s role in families, and not produced equal pay for equal work – men still earn $1.22 to every dollar a woman earns.” Any of these points marks the speaker as something other than a serious and informed person, but here we’ve got three half-truths to deal with.

  • Women don’t want or pursue or apply for “top jobs” at anything resembling the rate hetero males do. In part that is because women choose to have children and drop out of the labour force to raise them, which in turn permanently depresses their earnings if and when they go back to work.

    What Vaid describes, in effect, as three strikes against the economic equality of women that were implicitly engineered by men or by some kind of “system” are actually two strikes: Women’s lower greed, ambition, and bloodthirstiness and the biological reality of childbearing and motherhood.

  • Next, the actual female–male wage gap is considerably smaller than 22% and disappears to half that or less once you control for age, education, years of experience, and continuity of work. I have not read a viable explanation for the gap that remains, but it is false to imply that any randomly-selected woman earns 22% less than any randomly-selected man – or even a man doing what seems like the exact same job. (Nor is the gap wholly attributable to illegal discrimination.)

    There actually is no discernible wage gap when gay-male couples and lesbian couples are studied; most research agrees that both kinds of homosexual couples earn similar wages, though there definitely are researchers who disagree.

  Anyone who drops numbers like these is trying to make an emotional argument that things are just terrible for women in economic terms. They are not trying to make anything resembling a factual point.

• Vaid is somewhat less inaccurate in describing gay and lesbian economics:

  [P]overty in the LGBT community is at least as common as poverty in the broader world. Just as in that broader world, it burdens people of colo[u]r disparately.

  Median household income for LGBT people ranges from $35,000 in the poorest states to $65,000 in wealthier ones. LGBT families are twice as likely to live in poverty as are heterosexual families…. African-American people in same-sex couples and same-sex couples who live in rural areas are much more likely to be poor than white or urban same-sex couples.

  Vaid quotes various “think tanks” she obviously approves of, but I have read the research.

  • If for some reason we want to discuss gay money in terms of “poverty,” then Prokos 2010 is the gold standard. And that paper showed that the poorest couples were unmarried heterosexuals.

  • “People of colour” who are gay or lesbian are poorer because they have lower incomes to start with (consistent with Vaid’s implied message). But they are also more likely to have children, a fact she didn’t mention but one that her preferred think tanks have documented.

  • Rural incomes are lower for gays for all the same reasons they are for straights. I just don’t see us at a disadvantage there.

  • Vaid’s claims about median income don’t mean a thing because they aren’t given in comparison to anything else, like cost of living or heterosexual median incomes.

    She can’t get something basic like that right, so the chance she could get the following right is nil: Because of the smaller number of people involved, median and mean incomes for gay males are more readily distorted by high-earners, so for the male side of the discussion her stated numbers are possibly higher than the real numbers. (That’s why the U.S. Department of Census data show enormously higher median incomes for gay and lesbian couples than any other source – outlier millionaires are included there, while they are usually excluded from econometric studies.)

    In effect, median incomes for gay males are surely even lower than the numbers she cites, which are still meaningless because they are given in no context whatsoever.

  • The term “LGBT” is as harmful here as elsewhere. Barely any economics research studied bisexuals, and I am aware of none that studied transgenders the same way lesbians and gays were studied. The entire discussion of lesbian and gay economics is about exactly that, not “LGBT” economics.

Daniel Dale – by reputation, so mild-mannered a reporter he is a Clark Kent manqué – chose to run instead of getting punched in the face by the fat-fuck mayor of the biggest city in Canada. Well, good for him. He lives to fight another day.

But then came the armchair quarterbacking from two wymmyn who I’m sure don’t even like football, Hamutal Dotan and Emma Woolley. The real issue, we were too male to understand without help, was stereotypical notions of masculinity. Whatever might Dale’s story teach us about effeminate gay boys and “transwomen,” Woolley mused? (As I keep telling you, to a certain class of people every issue is really about transgenderism.)

Neither of these writers would ever defend a man who everyone agrees is conventionally masculine. They wouldn’t even be able to pick a guy like that out of a police lineup, which is probably where they think he deserves to end up. They’re personally unfamiliar with that type, just as they are personally unfamiliar with suburbanites or Ford supporters. Men in their social circle are not effeminate but are not conventionally masculine, either. Yes, Dotan’s cherubic bf unit loves baseball, but he’s an intellectual type, as, I surmise, are all the men both these writers know and live with.

Downtown intellectuals are the type of people who talk about “our notions of masculinity” because that’s all masculinity is to them: An idea. Masculinity is something that women and epicene gays of good conscience fight, not something men can actually aspire to and live. But the minute the conversation turns to masculine women, won’t the story change?

Once these writers actually spend some time with masculine guys, they might finally know what the they’re talking about. It’ll be a long wait. Dan Dale was still right to get the fuck out of there.

The short form of expatriate is expat, not ex-pat.

Nobody was formerly a Pat. Nobody is an ex-Pat. It follows that nobody is an ex-pat, either.

Ex here is not a prefix, like ex-copy-editor or ex-journalist or ex-hack, all of which you could remove to reveal the occupational categories that make this mistake promiscuously (copy-editor, journalist, hack). If we accept the Latin root with its variant ending, there are three morphemes in expatriate, none detachable.

The kind of people who commit this “error” fit the “typology” of writer who is so unsure of himself and “afraid” of his own copy that everything has to be set apart at a “distance” lest somebody complain. Surely X and P can’t rub right up against each other? Better put that “dash” in just to be “safe.”

The word is expat. It hasn’t ever been ex-pat and, despite language change, probably never will be.