I am trying and failing to complete some work for my university course. It's more accurate that I'm trying and failing to try to complete some work, as I'm really not doing anything. I'm in the pre-procrastination stage.

My problem is that it's too much like work, and I can convince myself it's pointless & stupid anyway.

Of the films on my watched/watching/want to watch list, I have watched Terror Nullius and started to watch BeDevil. I have found Born in Flames & A Prince.

I just typed the below review fairly off-hand, and I don't think it includes everything I want to say. I may update it later.

I decided to watch this film because I was watching old episodes of Bent TV, an Australian community broadcasting station for LGBT+ people. Back in the 90s they had a station in Adelaide, South Australia - the block of programming available on YouTube includes a report from the premier of Priscilla and an interview with Peter Postlethwaite (as well as not one but two lesbian dogs).

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a bit of an odd film. I'm mostly going to write about the different ways it represents identities, because I'm a boring loser who has no idea how to comprehensively review a film ("Introduction to Film Theory" went back to the library unread) but I have read more than a few articles about media representation online, back when you could get paid to do that kind of thing.

Based (very) loosely on a true story, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert follows three drag queens - two cis men and an elder trans woman, played by Postlethwaite - as they take a bus journey through the Australian desert to Alice Springs for a show. "Priscilla" is not a drag queen, as I have assumed for my entire life, but a silver-painted schoolbus. Mitzi, the queen who initiated the trip, quickly admits that the real reason they're heading up to the extreme rural north is because he has a wife and son up there - cue exaggerated shock from the other two. You'd think the concept of a married gay man would be fairly easy to grasp a mere 15 years after Stonewall, but hey.....

So off they go on a picaresque journey to the heart of Australia. Love and family are important in this film, but if this film has a theme it's the place of gay people in Australia. The three drag queens are asserting their right to a place in the "real" Australia, the outback, and by proxy they're asserting their place in Australia's national consciousness. It's a kind of liberal nationalist film (like Breakfast On Pluto). At least I think that's what's going on. It explains the scene in Priscilla that seems to confuse some reviewers, when an Aboriginal man (world-reknowned didgeridoo player Alan Dargin, credited solely as "Aboriginal Man") turns up at their broken-down bus and brings them down to the campfire to find someone to repair it. In 20th-century Australia, the enduring existence of Aboriginal people created a kind of crisis of Australian national identity, similar to the crisis that Black America caused for White America. Unlike the white Australian ruralites in this film, who (with the exception of Bill Hunter's character) are either latently or blatantly hostile towards the queens, Alan Dargin is welcoming and sympathetic, and while the anonymous figures gathered around the campfire are initially suspicious, they enjoy the show the drag queens put on. And is it a coincidence that the song the queens perform is "I Will Survive", when "Survival" is the rallying cry of indigenous people all over the world?

I've been meaning to write another blog post here for, well, a month. Originally I was going to review a film I'd watched, then I watched another film, and the problem of what to write about these films and how got too big, so I put the whole thing aside.

As replacement, I have a simple list of films I've watched in the last month, and a few that I want to watch. I shan't review them or we'd be here for ages.

Watched:

• Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• Cruising (rewatch, with director's DVD commentary)
• Fellow Travellers (miniseries)
• Misneach (miniseries) : Céist Bhróid, Athair Tony Flannery
• Pump Up The Volume
• Tomorrow Is Saturday (rewatch)
• White Riot
• Young Soul Rebels (rewatch)

I also watched some archive episodes from Bent TV, the Australian community radio station for LGBT people, including a charming tour of a lesbian street in 1990s Adelaide.

Films I want to watch:

• BeDevil
• The Birdcage
• Terror Nullius
• My Beautiful Laundrette
• Offside
• Small Axe (miniseries)
• Rude Boy
• The Redfern Story

Films I want to watch but can't find:

• An Dubh Ina Gheal | Assimilation
• Ningla A'na
• Born In Flames
• Rough Cut And Ready Dubbed
• A Prince

I also want to watch Dog Day Afternoon. In fact, I keep setting time aside to watch Dog Day Afternoon, and I have the DVD on loan from the library, but somehow I never quite make it. I think maybe this is because it feels like the wrong time of year to watch it, that it's a summer film not a September film (although September is scarily close to summertime now thanks to climate change).

Hopefully I'll watch 'em all one day soon.

CW: discussion of sexual abuse, rape patriarchy

I was on the radio tonight. This week's episode was themed around the Undertones (because they're playing a gig in Derry for the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign this Sunday) and Bikini Kill (because tomorrow, i.e Friday the 23rd of August, was just declared "Bikini Kill Day" in Olympia, Washington).

Managed to get the station just in time despite delays on the DART line (collision near Landsdowne Road station, I think).

During the programme I started crying a little bit because I read this "letter to my 16 year old self" by Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill (I'd been googling a quote from her about Problem Patterns during a song break).

When I was younger I always assumed that Kathleen Hanna grew up in a middle-class, feminist household (more or less like me), and that her anger about violence against women came from her experience volunteering in a domestic abuse shelter (back in the 10s her wikipedia page mentioned that her mom took her to a feminist rally, and that she'd been a volunteer counsellor in college). It wasn't until recent years that I learned that she came from a working/middle-class family with am abusive, tyrannical patriarch, or that she'd experienced the onslaught of so much personal violence, as she's discussed in some interviews.

The mythical middle-class Kathleen fit with the mainstream archetype of the riot grrrl movement - twee, middle-class girls (of whom there were certainly some, like Miranda July with her academic parents). But it also fit with my personal experiences as an upper-middle-class kid, and with my stereotype of what a feminist was and where they came from. I think I first saw the holes in the myth when I read the text of the "Evan Dando" zine, because of the unrestrained horror, bile and fury.

I also learned something nasty about my self in this. As I was crying, the thought went through my head that this meant Kathleen Hanna was very different from me, and that maybe I could never be a great musician/person like her. This suggests that something is very fucked about my attitude and relationships to other people.

I grew up in a private-everything environment where there was no bubbling threat of sexual violence (the kid who said "get out of the way of my locker or I'll rape you" to me got in big trouble after I told my mum). Instead you were taught that you were great, and you shouldn't care about people who were lesser than you. Ok, that seems to be what I picked up but I can't blame them for all of my personality defects.

My only exposure to patriarchy was seeing how women just coincidentally lost out on opportunities in the male world, but the supposed goal and ambition was always to integrate in and compete with the powerful - "lean in", even, it was around that era. So if I am not as revolutionary in my feminism as Kathleen Hanna it's because I've been programmed into believing oppression doesn't really exist, and I can do anything I want, and because I've protected by class/patriarchal power.

These long and unwise thoughts we're brought to you by reading about Kathleen Hanna over the last 10 years, and reading the Grimes ex-fan subreddit today.

The song of the day, today, is a song that is looping around my head. It's a song from Zero Patience, a film from the 90s, the first (and last) Aids musical.

Zero Patience is a fictionalization & reinvention of the death & afterlife of "Patient Zero", a real man who had the misfortune to a) be one of the earliest known Aids patients in the USA, b) feature at the centre of early Aids research, and c) have his life seized and cannibalized by a gay journalist who wanted to get Aids awareness into the mainstream and wasn't afraid to demonize "Patient Zero" to attract publicity.

The film challenges the dominant media narratives about HIV/Aids by a) humanizing "zero" (without using his real name), and b) presenting the perspective of radical Aids activists.

Also, Richard Burton (not that one, the Victorian author) is there, for some reason.

Anyway, the song that's looping around my head is a group number by a chapter of ACT UP, who confront Richard Burton with a song about their experience as sick people, fighting for their lives. The wild thing about this film is how it uses a very mainstream style to present minority viewpoints, and this number is no different - the different members of the "gang" introduce themselves, but the song is really led by "Typhoid Mary".

"My gang called me Typhoid Mary/Now I'm clean and in recovery/Kicked the habit, now I'll kick the system/control is what we want and need". That's the bit that's stuck in my head.

"Typhoid Mary" is a brash, almost abrasive activist who treats outsiders with contempt. She has red hair. I think she's a total babe (if that's acceptable terminology).

Anyway, that's the song. I'd like to link a clip of the song but there's none online. I can however link you to the entire film, which is available on Archive.org. Is aoibheann liom an Archive.

I'm sorry for using purple and orange on the same website.

I'm sorry for letting people down. Again.

I'm sorry for maintaining my sense of self-righteousness even though I'm doing nothing while a genocide is raging.

I'm sorry for being just like the rest of the smug bastards.

I'm sorry for holding principles that I refuse to act upon.

I'm sorry for being a fool. In the end it's myself I'm fooling...

Got sick of looking at my ugly orange theme. Remembered that I don't know how to code a nicer one. Decided to use a layout code generator to make a new theme (RIP sadgrl). Immediately remembered why I stopped using the sadgrl layout generator when I saw all the little fiddly variables for text colour, navigation colour, navigation link colour, etc.

Did it anyway. Spent like half an hour trying to work out why it was still orange then realized I hadn't deleted the original "style" header.

Almost gave up! But now my website looks a lot nicer. Maybe I'll even add some content one day....

Not sure why I'm using 90sified valley girlish dialect for web blog. Might be from spending all that time reading fanlore pages earlier tonight.....