— छह हज़ार एक सौ आठ —

A lot happened over the weekend, enough that I could have posted separately about two different events—but, the weekend played out with a mixture of my never having the time for it and my not getting around to it. It could have been argued I had the time for it yesterday, but I opted instead for getting housework done while Shobhit was at other screenings with his Tasveer Film Festival pass: I vacuumed the condo for the first time in probably a month and a half; I washed the linens; I did my ironing. All that's not to mention having done the laundry on Saturday, which had built up so much that I had to add to the time on the dryer for the first load multiple times, and was unable to even take the second load out of the dryer until yesterday morning. So putting half of the laundry away was also among the housework I did yesterday.

Exciting stuff!

But there was exciting stuff I did do over the weekend, including seeing three movies: I took myself to see Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother on Friday, which I liked a lot despite some ambivalence about a turn of events in the story resulting in prayer; and on Saturday I finally got to see You Can See Everything, which absolutely lives up to the hype. It's incredible—the first solid-A I have given a film all year, making it instantly my #1 movie of the year so far. Amazingly, the movie I then saw yesterday may already have bumped it out of the #1 spot, but I'll get to that momentarily.

— छह हज़ार एक सौ आठ —

You Can See Everything clocks in at just short of three hours, and as I noted in my review, it amazingly justifies its own length—there's a lot of talk about how its highly unconventional structure and approach is likely to keep it from the strict Documentary branch of the Acedemy allowing it an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category, but it could very well become the first-ever documentary to earn a Best Picture nomimation, especially now that the category allows for up to ten nominees. All of this makes sense to me, and I fully support it getting a Best Picture nomination—and, I fully support its length. It is also why I went to a 10:30 a.m. showing, at which I was stunned to find the theater roughly half full. This was in one of the smaller theaters at the AMC Pacific Place, granted, but any other documentary might have had only two or three other people besides myself at that time.

I didn't even realize at the time I booked the ticket that this was also the day of the No Kings Mass Protest and Rally, which was scheduled to start from Westlake Park downtown at 2:00. This is only a couple of blocks from Pacific Place, and with a solid half an hour of trailers and commercials before the movie, it was shortly before 2:00 when my movie let out—perfect timing. Shobhit was already at Westlake Park when I got over there, sitting on a bench and reading the sixth book in the Game Changer (or more popularly Heated Rivalry) series. I'd like to read them myself one day, but I just have higher-priority books I want to read.

Anyway, the crowd was gathered on 5th Avenue and marching north to Seattle Center by about 2:05—so, within minutes of being quite on time. The crowd was big enough, I would say, to be impossible to ignore, but as usual I can find no official estimate—The Seattle Times just said "thousands."

I will say this: these marches are happening so often—"No Kings" specifically twice last year and twice this year—that I fear they are losing meaning. The crowds are certainly not as big as they once were. I have photo albums for all four of them (albeit mixed with fourteen anti-Trump protests—Women's Marches; Marches for Science; Black Lives Matter protests; No Kings Marches—since 2017), and my number of photos for each has progressively gone down. (Full disclosure: my merely-9-shot photo album for the one last March is because I had other plans and merely walked past it that day—it was more important to me to experience the Opening Day of the Light Rail Crosslake Connection with Laney as had been planned long before that No Kings protest was.) I got 81 shots at the first No Kings Protest in June 2025; 43 at the one in October 2025; and at this past weekend's—in which Shobhit and I actually marched—I got 36.

We did not stay that long at the rally at Seattle Center, I'll admit. We walked around the booths briefly and then headed home, but not before we went into the Armory building to use the bathroom on the basement level. That was right next to the Center Theater, in the lobby of which Shobhit saw a woman named Theresa. Also a wheelchair user, she apparently knows Karen, and lives "right around the corner from her" in Magnolia. Theresa told us she would be heading out to the rally soon, because "I am determined to be counted." I kept my mouth shut on this, but I did think: I'm not sure how effectively she would be "counted," at that point, when plenty of people would already have peeled off from the march and not gone to the rally.

And I have to say, after so many protests, there was an element I noticed this time that had never been quite so obvious to me before. A number of the signs seemed misguided at worst, and slightly off the mark at best; I even included a Bluesky post about this specifically, at the end of my thread of photos from the march and rally. "Atheists enable fascism"? What? To be fair, that was a sign attached to a Lime scooter at the rally and may have just been some weirdo on the sidelines trying to take advantage of the numbers in the crowd.

But still, some other examples: the balloons of Elon Musk and Chinese President Xi Jinping butt fucking Trump, complete with Musk's T-shirt reading SPA SEX, a play on SpaceX? The marchers holding these balloons definitely considered this a justifiably playful thing they knew those being depicted would hate—but, it just left a bad taste in my mouth. Everything about it uses some aspect of gayness as an act of humiliation, from anal sex to the existence of gay bathhouses, and it just feels grossly denigrating to the wrong people.

Then there was this woman with a sign hanging on her back, with an illustration of a polar bear on a floating piece of ice, and the caption THE ONLY ICE I WANT TO SEE. Uhhh. Huh? My first instinct was to criticize this because that sort of ice is clearly bad, but I decided to look it up first to make sure I wasn't being ignorant myself: it turns out that polar bears using floating ice for hunting activities is very normal and not inherently a representation of global warming. It's still a complex image, though, and one that does not really lend itself to this kind of metaphor. The fact remains that it's a bizarre idea to say that's the only ice you want to see; there are plenty of other, better examples of "ICE."

It did occur to me that maybe these kinds of things have long been present at these marches, and I just didn't notice them as readily—perhaps because I was also still on Facebook myself, where information that is misleading (and often outright false) runs rampant. I abandoned all Meta platforms, including Facebook, back in May; I only go back occasionally when I need to look something up, but I have posted nothing whatsoever on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads in five months now. Maybe this is what makes it easier for me to look around and observe even progressive-minded people who still come across as Facebook-pilled Karens.

It's kind of sad and depressing, to be honest. It makes me less hopeful that science and reason will ever truly win the day again, and our only hope is to become the more effective manipulators of the masses. Bleh.

— छह हज़ार एक सौ आठ —

— छह हज़ार एक सौ आठ —

My experience yesterday made me feel far better about humanity, so I'm glad my Saturday and Sunday experiences occurred in that order.

Yesterday was the Closing Night Movie and Awards Ceremony for the Tasveer Film Festival, and featured by far the best films I got to see as part of the festival—and both were trans stories. I didn't even realize the Closing Night film would include a short film first, but boy was I delighted to get to see it: it was called Aman, about an Indian trans man who gets pregnant, and it was one of the best short films I had ever seen. As you might imagine, it was not the most uplifting story in the world, but it was beautifully constructed and every person onscreen gave a wonderful performance. It also does end with the tiniest sliver of hope.

Three of the film's producers were in attendance, incluing one named Elle, a nonbinary person in a lovely white, flowing outfit who caught both Shobhit's and my eye on the red carpet outside the theater, they were such a beautiful specimen of a human being. (Elle is actually Spanish for they as a gender neutral pronoun, albeit in that case pronounced "ey-yay;" I actually heard the name pronounced "El-lay".) Shobhit chatted them up a bit, and introduced me, though in the end I kind of just stood around while they talked about stuff I could not really contribute to. Which was fine. Anyway, somewhat to my surprise, after Shobhit and I sat in the middle of a row maybe four rows from the front, Elle came and sat next to Shobhit, on the other side of him. They sat with us through the entirety of Aman, and then maybe halfway through the feature film, they got up and left. I spent too much time wondering where they went. Out of the building to use a bathroom, because there was a plumbling issue and unfortunately none of the bathrooms at the Tasveer Film Center were working? Some personal emergency? It just seemed odd to me to leave in the middle of a movie, especially as excellent as the feature also was.

I had taken Light Rail to meet Shobhit down there, as he had already attended other screenings with his festival pass; he texted me the bathrooms weren't working and so I took the cue to use the bathroom at the Columbia City PCC on the way from the station. When the feature film ended, I had to pee really badly again, so I did leave and go over to the PCC to use the bathroom again. And when I returned, there was a Q&A happening with the three producers in attendance—including Elle, who evidently had not left the area completely.

The awards ceremony was actually at ArtsLove Salon downtown, which we needed to take Light Rail back to. Elle had casually mentioned taking the train with us, and after the Q&A was done, Shobhit started recommending to them that they bring a jacket (the aforementioned outfit had no sleeves, and it was quite chilly outside). But Elle changed their mind and decided to call a car; right before Shobhit and I headed over to the Light Rail station, I did stop briefly to say to them, "I just want to say real quick, that was one of the best shorts I have ever seen. It was excellent." Elle gave me a very sincere thank-you with a light hand on my arm, and then we were on our way. We did see Elle at the post-screening dinner event (I was glad to get fed; at $50 a ticket it was the least they could do)—including accepting the Tasveer Choice Award for Best LGBTQIA+—but there was not much more interaction with them for the rest of the evening.

I have to back up a bit, though, and note the feature film itself, which I found so impressive that it may very well have pushed You Can See Everything out of the current-top position of best film I've seen this year so far: Elephants in the Fog, which was not only the second film this year I have given a solid A (in as many days), but the first film in which every single aspect I graded was a solid A. (Now, I did give the editing for You Can See Everything an A+, and there were no "plusses" for Elephants in the Fog, so they kind of come down to equivalent in the averages.) This is an "apples to oranges" scenario if ever there was one, comparing these to films, but they were both extraordinary—just in different ways. One breaks open the very form of documentary filmmaking; the other is a stunningly beautiful portrait of a very specific community that otherwise gets no global cinema representation.

In the case of Elephants in the Fog, it's about a group of what we in the U.S. would call trans women—but who refer to themselves as Kinnar, a legally-recognized "third" gender common in all of South Asia, but here specific to Nepal. In my view, the lead performance, by social activist (and, like all the trans characters, actual-trans woman) Pushpa Thing Lama, is straight-up Oscar-worthy, but won't get that level of recognition simply because the film won't get widely seen. That said, I was delighted to learn that this is indeed Nepal's official submission for consideration in the Best International Feature Oscar race, and I really, really hope it gets a nomination.

I was just deeply taken with this film—somewhat to my amazement, even more than I had been with Aman, which had already impressed me as much as any short film I had ever seen. What really set Aman apart was the lead character being transmasculine, which is underrepresented even among most stories about trans characters, who are already underrepresented—not to mention misunderstood—broadly, and globally. What set Elephants in the Fog apart was the story and the filmmaking itself, with excellent performances of a fantastically written story that was beautifully shot.

I almost felt bad not having as much to say about Elephants in the Fog in my review as I had for You Can See Everything. Most of my reviews average around 1,000 words these days; I wrote more than 1,600 about You Can See Everything, because there is just so much to say about it—too much; according to some: I already got a comment on that review saying, Dude. Please write "Spoiler Alert" above this excellent thought piece. It matters. "It matters," given the massive amount I actually did not spoil, is a stretch; I decided to ignore it and otherwise just accept the part that was a nice compliment. Anyway, my review of Elephants in the Fog came in at just under 800 words, but when I looked at what I had written, I felt like adding any more would have just been pointless filler. I can only hope people see this movie once it actually gets distribution.

Being another special event, this screening-plus-dinner-and-awards-ceremony started at 4:00 (thank god for that; the Opening Night screening on Thursday being at 6:00 made for a night far too late on a weeknight), and then Shobhit and I were at ArtLove Salon, after taking the train back downtown, at maybe 7:30.

We had a slight mishap with the buffet line. ArtsLove Salon has a kitchen island, and two lines were forming on either side—but, signs indicating the dishes were only on one side. Shobhit and I had dished ourselves naan with rice and what appeared to be Shahi Paneer, only to discover it was actually Chickan Tikki Masala. Shit! We had no choice but to throw our dishes away and then get back to the end of the line. We had been there earlier than most, but now were were behind most—and by the time we got to the front of the line again, they were out of the naan, which I was really looking forward to eating. Instead, we just had the one vegetarian dish, Methi Paneer, mixed with rice, and no bread. They did still have gulab jamun as a dessert and that is the one Indian dessert I do love; I took two of those syrup-soaked doughnut balls and ate them before I even dug into my rice.

The rest of the evening I kind of just wandered around, lookin at some of the art (ArtLove Salon has a great collection, actually), and not doing much in the way of mingling, though Shobhit did a fair amount of that. We watched the awards get handed out, and the event would have gone on plenty even longer, as apparently a drag show was soon to happen. I still needed to write my review, though, so we left shortly after 8:30. It was shortly after 10:00 by the time I was posting the link to my review, but I still went into the living room to watch this week's episode of Youth on HBO Max with Shobhit, since it's only half an hour long, and I was still pretty awake, after having made myself chai in the morning and then having another small cup of it from the Tasveer Film Center Blue Room, which I had taken into the movie with me (and which certainly contributed to how badly I needed to pee again by the time the movie ended, but I likely would have had to regardless).

I had thought tonight would be a brief break in my string of days in which I have gone to see a movie—I already went to movies on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—but, that has changed: we got invited to a "Friends and Family" screening of one of the Tasveer Festival award winners, another documentary feature, at a venue on the UW campus tonight at 6:30. So, now I'm going to that. I think I'll still stick with my plan to see Sense and Sensibility tomorrow after work, and let Wednesday be my break for the week. I will see a movie on Thursday, I'm just not certain which one yet as several movies open next weekend; then I drive down to Olympia Friday to see the Bee Gees tribute band concert with Dad and Sherri, after which I will stay the night down there.

— छह हज़ार एक सौ आठ —

[posted 12:34pm]