Jan 6

Jan 6 Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: A Commentary on "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Martin Scorcese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” starring the ever-talented, Leonardo Dicaprio, is one hell of a movie. From its three hour run time, to the 506 F-bombs, the drinking and pill popping, lavish homes and luxury items, this film is a thing of excess in every way. Scorsese is not shy about drugs and sex and money, which is fitting, because neither is his protagonist. Jordan Belfort is the epitome of capitalism and displays all the selfish, greedy, money-grubbing behaviour one expects from a dirty white collar con artist. The film exposes (again, as it’s been done before) the wild and unsavoury underbelly of Wall Street, something many audience members may not have known was quite so ugly. So of course, you’d expect that some people wouldn’t like the film. In fact, I’m sure that some people hate it. More conservative audiences are bound to be offended by the strong language, frequent nudity and scenes of debauchery. The film is in some ways gaudy, and over-the-top, and really in-your-face, but to suggest that “The Wolf of Wall Street” it is glorifying the kind of greed and excess that the it portrays, and that it might encourage people to take similar actions, is absolutely ridiculous.

Dec 31

Dec 31 The Little Lady Unplugged: A Light in the Darkess

SweetTee

Life Notes

Last weekend, Mother Nature unleashed her fury on Toronto in the form of an ice storm. Everything in the city glittered under a thick layer of ice and the streets were as slick as skating rinks. We were reminded how nature’s force can be both strikingly beautiful and amazingly destructive. Trees, heavy with the weight of the ice on their boughs, simply snapped, falling onto homes, streets and, most frustratingly, power lines. Thousands of people were left without power as temperatures dipped below zero. I was one of those people. In fact, our power was off for eight days.

Of course, that came with its share of frustrations. For one, we learned the value of sharing body heat, as the temperature in our apartment plummeted. Pizza boxes piled up in our recycling bin as we had no means of cooking, even after we got a generator to power the heat. Navigating our home by candlelight and crossing our fingers for warm water from the shower head were both equally annoying. And of course, there was no wifi. We, like so many others, were unplugged.

Dec 13

Dec 13 My "Black Girl" is On and it's Turned Up Loud

SweetTee

Hashtag Black

[This is the first poem I've ever posted on this blog. I've always found that my opinions and views on black issues are well-expressed in the form of poetry, because defiance--and nearly all my thoughts in this department are defiant--is an art. For this blog, I've stuck to prose because it allows me to put more words on the page, but poetry is a fount of feelings, and my feelings here are strong.

I am tired of defending myself from the negative space that the combination of my race and gender subjects me to. I am tired of having to prove that I am a good "black girl", before others can slap me with the bad "black girl" label. I am tired of the "black girl" label being a bad thing at all. So here's my definition of black girl, whispered defiantly to those who disagree, spoken triumphantly to those who understand, and written straight from the heart.]