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As I mentioned a while back, freeradical42 and I, with help from a few other friends, planned to run a science fiction and fantasy themed Tikkun Leil Shavuot at Balticon. The tradition is to stay up all night studying Torah on the first night of the holiday of Shavuot to commemorate the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

I prepared a variety of textual sources to work with, but had no idea how to gauge what kind of turnout to expect. I printed ten copies of my source sheets, thinking that if we got ten people it would be amazing.

We got 20 people!

Not all of them stayed all night, but they stayed later than I expected, and people kept getting up to go to bed and then delaying because they wanted to keep participating in the conversation. It was not perfect, and there are things I wish I had done differently to make the conversation work better, but I am so thrilled with how it turned out. It was such a cool experience to be a part of.

I promised vvalkyri that I would post my source sheets, so here they are. Bear in mind that these are not source sheets for a carefully structured shiur, just texts we used to start what ended up being a wide ranging six hour long pluralistic conversation about Judaism and its relationship to the past and future. With cheesecake!

Source Sheet 1- Sources on the kosher status of fantasy animals

Source sheet 2- Sources on the future of Shabbat observance

Right clink and save link as.

Cassavetes fanvid

I premiered a new vid at wiscon_vidparty this weekend. Meanwhile, I was at Balticon, and it was Shavuot, so I had no access to any information about how it was received, which was a weird combination of nervewracking and relaxing. Probably better than actually attending the con. brainwane says people seemed to like it! and I am choosing to trust her judgement.

It's an Iron Man vid to Le Tigre's "Cassavetes", which is a song about struggling to enjoy and have conversations about our enjoyment of problematic media. Tony Stark is a fascinating and frustrating man to be fannish about, because his personal struggles are so relevant, but he also lives such a charmed life that he literally gets away with murder.

I think my summary of the song is useful because those are two different things-enjoying problematic media and having conversations about that enjoyment- and I think having conversations is much harder, especially if I want to step outside of cliche. And the thing that is great about "Cassavetes" is that it doesn't step outside of the cliches, but tries to harness both positive and negative cliches as if stacking them on top of each other could reach toward some calculus of criticism. Punch in the magnitude of his genius, subtract his misogyny, factor in his alcoholism, and somehow you determine the value of Tony Stark, as if it weren't a fully emotional response to an artistic creation that was prompting this analysis to begin with.

I need to move away from value judgement to make sense of Tony Stark and the reasons I love and hate him. Okay, fine, he's an alcoholic, but what is it about his experience of addiction that speaks to me? Okay, fine, he's a misogynist, but what is it about the evolution of his relationship with Pepper that I find fascinating to explore? Okay, fine, he embodies the worst excesses of the American military industrial complex, but doesn't he also embody its noblest virtues?

But these are unanswerable questions, or at least, I don't have the vocabulary to really seriously have that conversation, so instead in this vid I just gesture toward the conversation I want to have by making fun of how ridiculous the conversation I am capable of having is.

Thank you to sanguinity and franzeska for betaing.

Title: Cassavetes
Vidder:seekingferret
Responsible for the lack of consistent title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Content Notes: Flashing colored lights, depiction of addiction
Length: 1:36
Song: "Cassavetes" by Le Tigre

"" (Watch on YouTube)

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