I'm saying The Lion King is racist.

And sexist and homophobic as well.

But those are some catchy songs!

Also, Patton needs some black friends, if only to make his daughter less racist.


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Celebrating books by certain successful people

I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. Hooray for books! I got to meet Lela Lee of Angry Little Girls fame, and I had her sign my copy of her new book. Hooray for me!

At the panels I went to, most of the audience was older and white. Unfortunately, most of the panelists were, too. Except for the Jada Pinkett Smith/Sistah Souljah stage, and the Writing between Races panel (which was the best! Click these words to learn about the five fabulous panelists), almost all of the people on the panels I attended were white. Most of them were male, more of them were affluent or comfortable, most of them were over 40. All of them were over 30. At least two of the panels had only white male speakers.

No, I did no select the panels I attended based on their abundance of old, rich white men. I chose topics that interested me, like authors who also write for TV, and novelists for young adults. Seeing the panelists magnified an pernicious problem of publishing: the vicious circle of who is allowed to speak in our society. To speak on a panel at the festival, you must have published a successful book. The people who have books published are usually white and mostly male, especially in nonfiction, even if the topics of their books are not other white people. Which leaves a bunch of people, like me, discouraged and dissatisfied, about the types of stories that being told, or more precisely, the types of stories that are not being told.

Outside of the panels, the crowd of thousands milling about the booths and stages was more diverse. Thought at the Patton Oswalt stage, the audience was more diverse in age and possibly in economic background than it was in color. Mostly different sizes and shades of white people. But I did stand next to one of the other two black ladies in the audience. Progress!

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When I have presentations to do,

I like to think of myself as a young comedian working on my stand-up act, like Patton Oswalt below, but without the expletives:

The A.V. Club: What if things don’t go well? Are you able to get perspective on that pretty easily, or is it bruising if something doesn’t really work?

Patton Oswalt: It’s not that it’s personally bruising. I’m in New York right now, and I had to run two sets for a TV show, so I went to two clubs. I went to Comix and I did my set and it went fine, and then I went to Gotham, and I ate it so fucking hard. [Laughs.] You get to a point when [the audience] knows who you are, so they’re happy to see you, but every now and then, you just get that, “This shit is not flying.” And then it’s even worse, because they’re like, “This asshole’s on TV, and he’s not fucking funny.” Like they almost expect you to know what the fuck you’re doing after you’ve been on TV for a while. So when you eat it like that… I actually ended up being pretty excited as I was re-writing it in the cab home [from Gotham], because I was like, “Oh, I have a lot more to work on.” I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.”

AVC: Is it better now than it was? At the beginning of your career, when you weren’t as known, it seems like it would have been an uphill battle every time, getting an audience on your side.

PO: Definitely. But you know what’s really weird? I’m grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over. Because I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn’t like that battle, or they just couldn’t do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience. And I think that’s really, really important. That’s why they’re okay stand-ups, but they’re never going to be great, because they don’t have that presence. They never built those muscles up.

I have a lot more to work on, too! And I would never have a home birth.

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