Wow, looks like I may end up dragging this thing out into October, which is a new record for personal futility. Oh well!

Roger had a bunch, as always, so his constitute the bulk of the outstanding answers. So let’s get going:

How do you feel about casting folks who aren’t the category they portray? I was thinking about Johnny Depp as Tonto, but there are tons of other examples. Should only a gay man play a gay man, e.g. Related question: how do you feel about casting a character that had been traditionally white differently? I’m thinking about making Kingpin, the white villain in the Daredevil comic books as a black man, or the black Asgardian in the Thor movie that made parts of fandom apoplectic.”

I think it can vary from character to character, in a lot of ways. Generally speaking, if a character has a specific ethnicity or ethnic makeup, then surely you can find someone of that ethnicity to do the part. This is why it rankled me a bit to have Benedict Cumberbatch, a white Brit, playing Khan Noonien Singh, an Asian villain, in Star Trek Into Darkness. (And yes, it does kind of bug me after-the-fact that they had a Latino actor, Ricardo Montalban, originate the role — but that was in 1967, when views on such things were depressingly different.) I could go on and on about that particular casting choice, because it felt like (a) the producers just had to have Khan in their movie, and (b) the producers also just had to have the Flavor of the Month actor in their movie, so there it is. No, I don’t think it worked. (And I’m not being dismissive of Cumberbatch’s talent in describing him as the Flavor of the Month; he’s been a hardworking actor for a while who is now EXPLODING in popularity. That’s all.)

Perhaps the worst example of this is, of course, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which he plays the Japanese Mr. Yunioshi in a racial-stereotype performance that has to be seen to be truly appreciated in all its awfulness. Another example that leaps to mind is Louis Jourdan, a French actor, playing “exiled Afghan prince” Kamal Khan in Octopussy. And if you really want to get right down to it, you could even make a case against Patrick Stewart, a Brit who played a Frenchman in Star Trek: The Next Generation, although with that one, the ethnic differences are lessened, and the showrunners oddly completely ignored Jean-Luc Picard’s French heritage most of the time after the first season.

On the flip side, I like it when ethnic actors show up in roles that make zero reference to ethnicity at all. I’m thinking of Native American actors Graham Greene and Wes Studi, in Die Hard With a Vengeance and Heat, respectively, for example. But making the Kingpin a black man in Daredevil? Well…I don’t know that that’s so much of a big deal. Changing the race of a fictional character for a movie doesn’t really bug me all that much. Denzel Washington cuts a nice figure in Much Ado About Nothing as Don Pedro, whom I’m sure Shakespeare didn’t envision as black. But then, in Shakespeare’s time, a man would have played Beatrice.

Where’s the line, then? Is it OK for a Japanese actor to play a Chinese character? I’m not sure. I can sure tell when the line is crossed, though.

I’m going to lump the next questions together, because they’re all shared topics:

Who will be the first woman President in the US, and when?

Spitzer and Weiner are running for office. Why shouldn’t they, with former SC gov Sanford now a member of Congress?

I wouldn’t want to even begin to try picking future Presidents. I know that Washington media loves to talk about who wants to be President and all, but ten years ago I had never even heard of Barack Obama, and ten years before that, the idea that we’d give the keys to another member of the Bush family would have struck me as deeply silly. And just five years before that, you had the Governor of Arkansas giving a disastrously bad speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which I would have thought would pretty much doom him from national politics forevermore.

Right now, I’d think that Hillary Clinton would be the most likely First Female President. I think we’ll have a Hispanic President within twenty years. The second black President? No idea whatsoever. Sorry, but these particular tea leaves are impossible for me to read!

As for Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, well…that shows how long it’s taken me to answer all these questions, because since Roger asked, both have been defeated! In terms of issues and views, I am actually pretty simpatico with both of those fellows, but their personal lives sure brought them down in a hurry. It does strike me as funny that marriage-based peccadilloes only seem to be politically fatal to Democrats. I do follow a couple of Republicans on Twitter who were endlessly crowing about how Democrats could POSSIBLY vote for anyone so VILE as these admitted adulterers — but when Mark Sanford got elected to Congress, one of them praised South Carolina voters for their “common sense”. So who knows.

(By the way, here’s my reminder to you all that the phrase “common sense” is one that you should never, ever use.)

Generally speaking, I try to never base voting decisions on candidates’ personal lives, unless they involve actual criminal activity. I didn’t marry these people, and I’ve read enough history to know the truth behind the great line of Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly: “Seems to me that every man who’s ever had a statue built of him was one kind of sumbitch or another.”

Relatedly, though, I am starting to believe in term limits. But that’s for another time!

A few more to come, I think!

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Good Lord, this really got away from me, didn’t it? What a strange month, September was. I figured to get ahead, but instead I fell behind! Oops. Anyway, we march on, with the remaining questions posed by a constant (and patient!) anonymous reader:

Do you have “comfort books”, that you read when life is tough?

I’ve actually had to think a bit about this, and it turns out…no, not really. There are quotes from books that I recall in times of stress, but even then, not too many. The words of Gandalf the Grey tend to be very meaningful to me, when he says, in reply to Frodo’s wish that the Ring had never come to him, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.”

I’ve known people who pick up the Bible or the Qu’ran or other such books when their lives are going through dark periods, but I’ve honestly never much been one to do that. I also don’t very often use my writing as a way of processing the demons, although I have done so in the past (here is an example). I’m not really sure if my reading really reflects the mood of my life’s “current events”, whatever those may be. Hmmmm…maybe it should.

How does the music you listen to vary with mood or stress?

Would you believe…kinda sorta the same way? Weird, huh?

Although, there are times when I do try to use music as a mood-enhancer, something to shake me out of my inner doldrums. Songs along this line include:

“Hello Goodbye”, “Octopus’s Garden” — The Beatles
“Dreams”, Van Halen
“Land of Make Believe”, Chuck Mangione (the 12-minute liver version, though)
“Human”, the Killers (no, the lyrics do not make any sense, but what an infectious song anyway)
“Dancin’ in the Street”, the cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger (Shut up, I like it.)

And so on.

When I listen to music while writing, I find that nearly anything works. I don’t try to match music to the mood of the work in progress, although sometimes I do that. I might listen to Star Wars or Star Trek music while writing one of the Princesses books, or perhaps some horror music while writing GhostCop, but not always. I like to use music as a way of shutting out the world a bit while I work, but I don’t always try to match the music’s mood to the writing’s mood.

Sometimes, if I’m writing a scary scene, the music’s mood can actually create a nifty feeling of incongruity. I like when this happens. It reminds me of Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are”, a song which forever creeps me out because of its brilliant use in the abduction-of-Barry scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

More answers to come, I promise!

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