The Night Is Younger Than the Girl Who's Got the Touch

I suppose I should start this post with last Saturday, when I attended a Zoom event for the International Wizard of Oz Club, based on the women of Oz. There was a lot of discussion of Ozma, and it came up how she was a trans icon. The thing is, how I mostly understand gender is that it's a case of how the individual identifies, regardless of what traits or sex organs they may have. Ozma is, quite literally, a girl trapped in a boy's body, but there's no indication in The Marvelous Land of Oz that Tip sees himself as anything but a boy. He tells Glinda he'd rather stay a boy, and Glinda tells him he has to go back to being a girl because it's what she was assigned at birth. I'm not saying Ozma can't be considered trans, just that there are some differences there. As someone mentioned, though, Tip largely wants to stay a boy because he thinks girls can't have adventures, even though he's familiar with Dorothy. Maybe Glinda wants a girl on the throne of Oz not just because she doesn't approve of transformation, but as part of a grander plan. As silly and stereotypically girly as Jinjur is, she's rebelling against a patriarchal society in the Emerald City. Glinda, on the other hand, is a woman who rules a country and keeps an all-female army who are implied to be the most powerful fighting force in the land. She's basically creating a matriarchy while also restoring the old royal line. Of course, all four major countries of Oz had female rulers until recently, although two of them were tyrants. L. Frank Baum definitely seems to have been receptive to the idea that gender is largely a social construct. Chick the Cherub was never assigned a gender as they weren't raised by parents, and is what we might now call non-binary. There was some mention of the two-spirit concept in Native American culture.

I probably wouldn't have watched the Oscars at all if Beth hadn't put them on, but I did end up seeing part of the ceremony. We all know what the main takeaway ended up being, but honestly I think it was only a big deal because the whole thing is usually just so rote and pompous, so the audience welcomes anything out of the ordinary. I'm not saying it's boring, just somewhat disturbingly indulgent. My friend Becca mentioned how Chris Rock directed Good Hair, about Black women's issues with hair, so he really should have known better than to make a joke about a Black woman's hair situation. Even if he didn't know she had alopecia, appearance-based jokes like that are generally punching down. I've also seen the argument that Jada Pinkett-Smith was perfectly able to defend herself, and Will Smith slapping Rock out of some sense of defending her honor is pretty misogynistic. I don't blame him for being pissed off, but I'm sure that's hardly the first occasion of an offensive joke made in a totally casual manner. In the long run, I think calling him out would have been much more effective than hitting him. But that wouldn't have immediately become a template for a whole bunch of memes.


On Tuesday, Beth and I went to see Sparks at the Town Hall. She's been obsessed with them recently, and this was actually her third show in four days, but I only went to the one. While she's the bigger fan, I do enjoy what I know of their music. It's often funny, absurd, and nerdy; and the music tends to be upbeat with a sense of urgency. They started with "So May We Start" from the movie Annette. The brothers are interesting to watch on stage. Russell, who's always the lead singer, dances around very energetically, and he's seventy-three now. He has an impressive singing range, too. Ron, who writes most of the songs, sits at his keyboard for most of the show, looking straight ahead and somewhat aloof.

He did do his signature arm-swinging dance during "The Number One Song in Heaven," and spoken-word bits in "Shopping Mall of Love" and "Suburban Homeboy."

Beth was talking about the latter song recently, and how it's interesting that it came out around the same time as Ben Folds's "Rockin' the Suburbs," and they're both about white suburbanites pretending to be gangsta. That said, they're different kinds of suburban white pretenders, young angry boys in Ben's song and upper-class WASP-y adults in Sparks'. One of the lyrics is "We've got that old-school mentality, Oxford and Cambridge mentality." Anyway, it was a very enjoyable show. Our next musical event is a performance by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, a very different sort of experience.