ROUND-UP AUGUST 10-18, 2017

Hello all! I've decided to start doing weekly-ish round-up posts of all of the writing I've done in that given week to make sure that the people who only follow this site still get to read my writing when it's fresh!

Enjoy!

• "'This Beautiful Fantastic' Does A Messy Dance With The Manic Pixie Dream Girl." BUST Magazine, August 10, 2017.

"On several levels, Bella’s characterization has all the makings of the dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype — she’s conventionally attractive, melancholy, sweetly helpless, quirky — which the out-of-place contextualization by Alfie does nothing to contradict. It is Alfie who presents Bella’s quasi-Dickensian past as an orphan as voiceover narration at the beginning of the film, which muddies the issue of whose point of view will be privileged right off the bat. Indeed, This Beautiful Fantastic could have just simply gone with Alfie as the main character — the vituperative, lonely old man who learns to be happy again by helping the fanciful girl next door. Yet Bella is the protagonist, whose desires and needs further the narrative of the film, not Alfie’s, which is a crucial deviation from the point of Manic Pixie Dream Girl (who exists merely as an object to the men around her). As a result, This Beautiful Fantastic does a messy dance with the specter of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, because Bella does seem to fulfill this role for Alfie, Vernon, and Billy in the diegetic sense, even as her subjectivity is placed at the forefront for the audience. It’s almost as if This Beautiful Fantastic wants to have it both ways: the odd-duck, pretty girl who changes the lives of the men around her for the better, but who is also the main character in her own story, and the effect is murky and downright unsettling."

• "'The Bold Type' Is Fun, But It Could Go Bolder."  PopMatters, August 15, 2017.

"The bigger question I have in mind as I continue to watch the show: is the vibe of sincerity the show throws off something that matters to The Bold Type at its core, or is it merely a veneer that the show applies like a coat of nail polish because suddenly “feminism” (or some version of it) is fashionable? In many ways, mainstream media does move more slowly than societal discourse, and it’s certainly refreshing to see characters with a variety of racial identities and sexual orientations proudly discuss that they’re feminists, and what being a feminist means to them, rather than presenting themselves as cool, reasonable girls in contrast to the hysterical and manipulative designated “feminist” characters (looking at you, Veronica Mars’ third season)."

• "'In A New Space,' Brenda Goodman Turns Towards the Light." Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, August 17, 2017.

"The visual language and vocabulary Goodman has used—and continues to use—to reflect her frame of mind is always evolving, forever guided by her “intuitive” approach. And often the meaning—that ineffable thing—is something that isn’t necessarily there from the start, but arises more organically as the painting is completed or even as viewers take it in for the first time. As she says, “sometimes meanings come to me during the process of painting[…] sometimes the painting just is what it is, and I learn something about its meaning from other people’s eyes and responses. But always my work comes from my heart, and viewers find the emotion it communicates for themselves.” When you consider Goodman’s paintings from In a New Space, then, the narrative of Goodman’s constantly shifting emotional states that has emerged over the decades via her work seems to have, at last, come upon a genuinely happy and satisfied chapter."