The Next Noir at the Bar Los Angeles

I missed the most recent Noir at the Bar event here in L.A. (featuring Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Denise Hamilton, Christa Faust and Jen Westeman, all writers I admire and have never met, although Hamilton and I  have tweeted about the whole NoHo Noir thing). But I will not be missing the next event, coming in October.
I will not be missing it because I HAVE BEEN INVITED TO PARTICIPATE.
I am so thrilled. I will be in stellar company--Eric Beetner, Johnny Shaw, Greg Bardsley, and Owen Laukkanen.  I cannot wait.
P.S. You can get a copy of that autographed poster from the August event--the link is on the FB page--and the proceeds go to a good cause.

This Kind of Behavior Will Not Be Tolerated...

You may have heard that yesterday there was an incident at the Republican National Convention in which two attendees threw peanuts at a CNN camera operator while whooping it up and yelling, "This is how we feed the animals."
The camera operator is a black woman.
And it's hard not to see that act as sort of symbolic of the party's disdain for African-Americans and Female-Americans, Mia Love's speech notwithstanding. A beautiful black Mormon Republican, daughter of Haitian immigrants, Love is being positioned as the "new face" of the Republican party, and good for her. She's already broken a number of barriers, including becoming the first black woman to be elected mayor of a Utah City. She's only 36; she'll go far. But how proud can she be of party representatives who are still openly racist and sexist?
The RNC responded swiftly to the incident with the CNN camera operator, calling the behavior of the attendees "deplorable." But with racism and sexism being subtexts in so much of the party platform, the protestations sound hollow.
You can read about the incident here on Deadline Hollywood.

Line of Duty, my new addiction

In general I don't watch a lot of television. And when I do, it tends to be in big, season-long chunks on dvd or streamed on Netflix when I'm recuperating from a hard day at the eye clinic and can't see well enough to read. It's not that I'm a culture snob--one of the shows I DO watch is Drop Dead Diva and another is Grimm--but I still haven't figured out how to balance out a freelance career, a pretty demanding writing-on-the-side career, a personal life and the odd night's sleep.  Something had to give and it was television. 
I did check out the BBC's Sherlock and liked it well enough, although honestly, I thought Sherlock's behavior in the second season ws a little ... smug.  I honestly didn't believe he'd go to Buckingham Palace wrapped in a sheet. But Freeman and Cumberbatch are lightning in a bottle together.
I'm still on the fence about Copper. I know a lot about the era. I once spent about six months researching a script called Dead Rabbit, which was basically Gangs of New York but with two brothers at the center. I thought the first episode was dark and dreary and predictable and on the nose. I liked the second episode better.
But then I stumbled across Line of Duty.It's currently streaming on Hulu (although I suspect it's eventually going to be part of their Hulu Plus package) and it's a slice of grit pie.  Martin Compston, playing the lead, a young detective sergeant who refused to take part in a cover-up after a raid leaves an innocent man dead, looks distractingly like a young Mark Dacascos in his Crying Freeman period,  but he's extremely good as the button-down cop. Lennie James, the other lead, is a black cop with a complicated love life and a taste for corruption. He's great too.
Sexism. Racism. Budget cuts. It's all there. Two episodes in, we really don't know that much about Kate Fleming, one of the detectives on James' squad, and I'm hoping that will change.
If you liked Dirty Pretty Things, I think you'll like Line of Duty.

A little knowledge can be a knee-jerk thing

there's a poster going around Facebook that celebrates American women in a way that's meant to contrast American attitudes toward women with Taliban attitudes toward the fairer sex.
It's pretty in your face, but doesn't it feel good to see those attractive American women in flight suits laughing it up on the flight line. (Never mind that they're all white and all but one of them is blonde, the picture looks like a screen shot of some new television series.)
And the message is--America, where women can be anything they want!
But not so fast... There's a really interesting website called Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership that has some sobering  statistics that suggest (and I know this will be a shock to you) that perhaps the United States is not quite as progressive as some people would like you to believe.
On NationMaster.com, there's a list of countries by percentage of women in government. Belgium is number one, with a whopping 55 percent. Care to guess where the US fits in?  We're at number 92 with a shameful 7.1 of women in government. (And remember, women outnumber men in the US by almost 5 million.)  The list only encompasses 112 countries (Good news, the US is ahead of Tajikistan, Benin, Syria, Chad, and Iceland (a surprise). But the countries with a better track record for women in government include Iran (27.1 percent), Saudi Arabia (33 percent), Libya (11.8 percent) nd Rwanda (10 percent).  Something to think about before dancing around singing "Neener, neener, neener."

He was the first, he won't be the last

Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon (the first man, we're still waiting for the first woman) has died. He was 82. R.I.P.

Shakespeare Trivia

I've just landed a job with a company that sells trivia games to the hospitality sector and one topic that we can't use for questions is Shakespeare because Shakespeare is everyone's go-to topic for trivia and has been overused. No kidding. If you Google "Shakespeare Trivia Game" you get more than 2.5 million responses in 0.29 seconds.
The first site listed on the first page of responses is Fun Trivia, which has a whole assortment of Shakespeare Quizzes and Trivia Games. Games are divided up into individual plays or lines and quotes. Other examples is a game called "Sad but true" (a phrase Shakespeare created) and one that asks you to identify the true source of a quote. The games are all silly, English geeky fun if you find yourself between seasons of Game of Thrones with nothing to do. (Seriously, Ned Stark could have been a Shakespearean character, not unlike Coriolanus in that he just couldn't learn to go along to get along.)

Feminist Fiction Friday--the Lists

I love lists. I could not function without my to-do lists (daily, monthly). But I also love lists that people post on websites, especially lists of recommended books. Sometimes the lists are disappointing--like lists of vampire books that begin with Twilight but don't include Barbara Hambly's Those That Hunt the Night. Sometimes they are great places to find a new book to read. On a whim, I Googled "Feminist Fiction" and the first thing that popped up was an amazing list--more than 600 books--on Goodreads. Crowd-sourced (anyone can add a book to it), you'll find the list here.
It's an eclectic list of books and includes the usual Kate Chopin, Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood titles you would expect. But it also had some books I wouldn't have thought of right off the top of my head. One of those books is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner, which was excellent, but A Thousand Splendid Suns is whatever comes after excellent. The friendship of two women is central to the story and there is a section in which a woman desperately tries to get medical aid in a country that forbids male doctors from touching female patients that will have you reaching for a checkbook to donate to Doctors Without Borders.
I wouldn't have chosen Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials for the list, even though there are so many female characters in it. But then I only read the first book in the series, which seemed to me all set up without real thought into the practicalities of having daemons with you everywhere.
But I digress.