Through awe, we once again regain spiritual humility. The current vampire pandemic serves to remind us that we have no true jurisdiction over our bodies, our climate or our very souls. Monsters will always provide the possibility of mystery in our mundane “reality show” lives, hinting at a larger spiritual world; for if there are demons in our midst, there surely must be angels lurking nearby as well. In the vampire we find Eros and Thanatos fused together in archetypal embrace, spiraling through the ages, undying. Forever.
Okay, the Vampires Can Stick Around
A Scolding
Howling at the Moon
Faaaantastic
The trailer for Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox looks bright and engaging, and the array of voice talent in it is pretty impressive. But it leaves me with one question: will the movie focus, as it should, on the food? I don't know if any of my foodie friends remember this, but The Fantastic Mr. Fox is an amazing book about the joy of eating. The three evil farmers in the book are characterized in part by what they live on: donuts stuffed with mashed goose-livers, extremely strong home-brewed apple cider, and three chickens a day--they're defined, in part, by their culinary limitations. The animals who live near the farmers are threatened by starvation when the farmers retaliate against Mr. Fox for stealing from them, and he forms an ingenious scheme to create a cross-species underground community that tunnels into the farmer's storehouses. The descriptions of the food are beautiful, and Roald Dahl really captures what it's like to be able to eat well when you haven't been able to for a while. I imagine it'll be somewhat hard to capture that sensation in the movie--visuals can do only so much, and food appreciation isn't as dramatic as evading maurading steam shovels, unless you're Brad Bird and you're amazing. But whether Wes Anderson intended it or not, I think it's highly appropriate that The Fantastic Mr. Fox should get its movie adaptation in the middle of a reinvigorated national conversation about what we eat, why we eat it, and what we get out of it.
Humor in Black and White
A lot of 30 Rock’s humor about race (Irish jokes excepted) seem to fall into that category. Edgy, but not really subversive. Based in stereotypes without really upending them. I agree with Alyssa that some of the jokes revolve around Tracy Morgan’s character (Tracy Jordan) trying to maintain a certain Black male image that’s not really him (pretending to be adulterous, or illiterate). But a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it.I think this is a really crabbed reading of Tracy's character, and a really limited reading of racial humor as a whole on 30 Rock. Tracy is black, sure, and the show is partially about that. But he's also a celebrity, and, as he explains in the pilot, and as demonstrated pretty consistently through the show, he's "straight-up mentally ill!" As a result, the show's racial humor tends to operate on a whole bunch of levels: it's a show about a racial minority in a majority-white workplace, it's a show about black celebrity and the media, it's a show about a guy who is crazy and unreliable but extremely talented, it's a show about white and black people's expectations of each other.
Let's take this contention: "a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it." First, Tracy isn't stupid, and I don't think the show portrays him that way. He believes a lot of crazy things, and his knowledge is certainly selective. But he's incredibly clever, whether he's commandeering a boat that isn't his to make it up to his coworkers after he joins the show against their will, designing a pornographic videogame that defeats the whole problem of the Uncanny Valley, or parsing the racial dynamics of the Little League team he's coaching. The scene where he delivers a monologue (around 1:05 in the video) after Liz, assuming he's illiterate, says he can skip work to take reading classes in "Jack-Tor," the fifth episode in the first season is a brilliant and self-aware mockery of Liz's assumptions: ""I can't read! I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader! NADER!" People who tend to assume that Tracy is stupid usually end up looking foolish.
Second, the show has gradually debunked the idea that Tracy gets away with more things than other people do. Whether it's in "Secrets and Lies," where Jenna acts out to get special treatment from Liz, only to find out that she's been getting it all along, or in "Believe In The Stars," where Tracy and Jenna switch racial roles, and require mediation from a teenager a drugged Liz mistakes for Oprah on a plane, they play exactly equal roles in making Liz's life hell. In "Flu Shot," Jenna and Tracy similarly create havoc when they team up to try to help out the ailing crew and end up being horribly condescending, and in "Cutbacks," they cause all sorts of trouble when they become convinced Kenneth is a serial killer. If anything, the show has moved towards treating Jenna and Tracy sort of like they're equally crazy sidekicks, and the third season had a whole bunch of episodes where Tracy is actually a helpful figure, particularly to Kenneth. To the extent that Tracy gets away with stuff like threatening to stab Conan O'Brien in the face, he gets away with it because he's famous, and the way the show satirizes corporate complicity in the absurd behavior of stars is pretty hilarious. I actually can't think of a single episode other than "The Natural Order" in the third season where Tracy inconveniencing someone else is the major subject of a show. In other words, I think Josh's description of the depiction of Tracy just isn't an accurate portrayal of the character's comedic arc, and I'm pretty hard-pressed to understand how someone could come to that reading. And I don't actually think that Tracy's character is the only path into racial humor in the show.
But before I get there, let's take Josh's other big contention, that the episode "The Natural Order" isn't funny. He writes:
What are they sending up in this episode? This is not a rhetorical question. Who or what is being satirized here? Is it satirizing people who believe that African-Americans are undisciplined? If so, why contrast that with the belief that hetero women object to being forced to strip clubs? Is it satirizing ostensible liberals who are willing to believe uncomplimentary things about Black people? Satirizing people who push for equal standards for everyone? People who push for special treatment for some people? Black people who “play the race card” to get out of showing up the work? Women who say they want to be treated equally but expect men to do the heavy lifting?Seriously, dude? There is a serious and substantial debate over business functions held at strip clubs (tax-deductable according to the IRS, at least as of 2006. Woo!), whether women should feel obligated to attend, whether it's sexual harrassment, and whether it's a sign of empowerment (or of a pragmatic sucking it up) to be able to go on a guy's-night-out events in order to ingratiate yourself in the workplace. I think mocking the self-deception of that latter motivation is pretty funny. There's a huge difference between equal standards for work performance and rigid equal treatment-and-experience feminism that refuses to acknowledge sexism and different styles, and it's pretty entertaining to watch that carried to slightly absurdist ends. But most importantly, the episode isn't really about race! It's about a famous person doing a non-famous person's work, about someone who's pretty quiet taking on the hard-partying identity that another person works to maintain. And ultimately, it's about the fact that everyone relies on certain kinds of privilege, no matter how vociferously we cast ourselves as disadvantaged.
"The Natural Order" isn't necessarily the best example of 30 Rock's consistent send-ups of the way we use our identities to get things out of other people. How about the utterly brilliant "Source Awards" episode, which features Wayne Brady as Tracy's business manager exploiting Liz's fear of being perceived as racist to keep him dating her, even though he's incredibly boring? Or "Generalissimo," where Jack tries to make his girlfriend's Puerto Rican grandmother like him by manipulating her favorite telenovela to fulfill her wildest dreams? Or "Cleveland," where Liz's then-boyfriend Floyd loses a promotion to an African-American guy in a wheelchair, which Jack later implies that he is only using to make himself unfireablely diverse?
The internal satires of African-American culture have always struck me as effective, too. The Black Crusaders arc, about a group of powerful black celebrities who enforce conformity among African-American media stars, gets at the self-consciousness both of somewhat sanctimonious stars like Bill Cosby, and ones like Tracy Morgan himself, who don't particularly want to live their lives as exemplars. The "Source Awards," with its send-up of the commercialization of hip-hop culture (Jack tries get an African-American entrepenuer, played by L.L. Cool J., to market a brand of poisonously disgusting champagne) and of beefs within the entertainment community, works well, too:
Then, there are the satires of how white people treat black people, and people of color period. Whether it's Liz turning her neighbor as a terrorist, mispronouncing an Indian-American intern's name, assuming that a black family to whom she gives toys at Christmas is scamming her, irrationally worshiping Oprah, assuming Tracy can't read, dating a guy she can't stand to avoid being thought of as racist, or insulting Tracy's wife's nails to provoke a fight, everything Liz does about race is wrong, no matter how sensitive she tries to seem. Ditto with Jack, who ends up fighting with Condi Rice during their relationship over her behavior at the movies, mismanaging a Little League team because he can't understand the racial and ethnic dynamics between the black and multi-facetedly-Latino players, and misguidedly trying to recruit Tracy as a Republican spokesman.
Not all humor is revolutionary. Not all jokes are going to change the world. But what I think 30 Rock does that is subversive and extremely effective is to puncture the idea that when it comes to race, good intentions will save us, that we can really understand what other people experience, and that race and sex can only be disadvantaging factors for people who are black or female. Is the show universally applicable? Of course not. This is a series about relatively wealthy, privileged people who work in an extraordinarily strange, distorting industry. But in 2009, are those truths that people have a hard time accepting? If the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, I think they've demonstrated that the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.
Interpreting England
And All the Pieces Matter
Consider the facts. Whelan made the call on behalf of an elderly neighbor. She did not mention race in the call. She was clear and explicit about what she observed, as well as the possible ambiguities in this situation. Not only did a huge number of commentators, many of them with very prominent platforms, not know any of these facts before they used those platforms to vilify Whelan a racist, but they did not know, and did not consider, the possibility that any of these facts existed.
It's easy to go with the convenient story, in literature and in life.
Hooked
A writer friend, whose brilliant first novel was rejected by 68 agents before she learned that sending a brilliant novel to American agents is not a good way to get published, told me she is certain that if Jean Genet or Julio Cortazar were debut authors in America today, they would never get published. Fine, I can understand how those of us who like edgy, explosive, poetic, radical, plotless work are in the minority of the market...Sometimes, I wish it was all predictable. I wish that I could reliably pick out books that would be impossible to put down, but that weren't as trashy and gross as nacho cheese-flavored Doritos. And I wish that I could also reliably pick out books that could be dipped into and dipped out of, like Drift, to carry me through summer days lying around on the High Line or sleeping in the grass along the Hudson. Then again, maybe wanting that predictability is exactly the problem. Maybe some horrible, Upper East Side dwelling literary agent who tries too hard to look like Joyce Carol Oates is not the reason that Victoria Patterson had to endure "endless rejections." Maybe I'm the reason!
Soundtracks to the Day
Cherish Is the Word
Emily Nussbaum's meditation on Madonna in New York is amazing. Especially the lists:
She seemed to shoot out new selves every six months—from Jellybean Benitez Madonna to Madonna of the Boy Toy Belt, Unshaved Leaked Photos Madonna, Madonna masturbating on a wedding cake, bouncing beside the waves in “Cherish,” dancing with the little boy in “Open Your Heart,” Who’s That Girl Eyebrows Madonna, Ideal Brunette Madonna (my favorite) saving Black Jesus in that incredible slip, Banned by the Pope! Madonna, “Vogue” Madonna, Fritz Lang Madonna, Wrapped-Plastic Sex-Book Madonna, Shame-Free BDSM Madonna, Sandra Bernhard–BFF Madonna, Bratty Letterman-Taunting Madonna, Self-Mocking Wayne’s World Madonna, the Madonna Who Ate Your Exotic Culture (“Vogue,” “Rain,” “La Isla Bonita”), Abused Sean Penn Madonna of the Helicopters, Contrarian I’m Gonna Keep My Baby Teen-Slut Madonna, Secretly Pregnant While Filming Evita Madonna, Underappreciated Dick Tracy/Sondheim Madonna, Water-Bottle-Fellating Truth or Dare Madonna (with Warren Beatty accessory), Bad Actress Madonna (Wax-Coated/Mamet), Momma Madonna, Kabbalah Esther, British Madge, and on and on. For years, Madonna felt like a slippery, elegant key to all feminine mythologies, a shape-shifter inspiring to any young girl (or anyone) who felt her shape shifting.Talk about empathy and art! Nussbaum thinks her discomfort with Madonna comes in part from the evolution of the artist's body, her seemingly iron will to hold back time no matter the physical cost. It doesn't matter if you look terrifying as long as you don't look old.
My disenchantment with Madonna springs from a similar well, but flows in a very different direction. I remember my senior year of college, I was driving up to Northern Connecticut to interview a famous gay rights activist who I was very intimidated by. I'd rented a car for the first time under slightly shady circumstances, and I was terrified that I was going to crash it. I was afraid I was going to get lost and be late. And because of all of these things, I left New Haven in a nervous sweat, sticking the Immaculate Collection in the CD player to keep me company. It took a long time, but by the time I reached the top of a very steep, very bare hill overlooking a very cold New England lake with "Cherish" turned up very loud, I felt like I was going to be okay. How can you not listen to a declaration like "Give me faith / Give me joy / My boy / I will always cherish you" and not end up happy?
I feel like that optimism, or not just optimism, blazing joy is missing from Madonna's later work. Maybe that's inevitable. I've been told we don't love the same way once we get older. It's hard to believe the world has vastly more to offer when you're on the cover of Vanity Fair holding the entire world. There's a huge difference between holding onto your spot on the pinnacle of the entertainment industry and struggling to make it up there. The former task is a grim one. The latter might be hard, and scary, and mean there are, you know, choices and privations and risks. But I imagine it's a lot more fun. And it's certainly more fun to listen to.
Staying Alive
Great Expectations
At Ease
Bunmi Oloruntoba is correct that io9's District 9 review has quieted the concerns I had for the movie, and made me even more excited to see it. Also, Bunmi's blog, A Bombastic Element, is great, touching on everything from teaching self-defense to elderly Kenyan women to photography in South Africa. Check it out.
Yes, Please
"I don't want to see a 'Sopranos' movie," he said. "If we're going to do a 'Rescue Me' movie, and I joked about this a couple of years ago when they brought it up … and I said, 'What if we do a "Rescue Me"movie, so it's the "Rescue Me" cast, but they're not firefighters and it's a zombie movie.' And they were like, 'What?' And I was like: 'How cool would that be? It's the 'Rescue Me' cast, but it's a zombie movie.' And they were like, 'No.' And I was like, 'Well, that's the only way I'm doing it.' Like 'Shaun of the Dead,' like a funny, real scary zombie movie. … They didn't go for it."
Bad Girls
Alyssa, since you're bringing up Jane Tennison, I was wondering if feel that "complex" characters, female and otherwise, are really kind of reductive vehicles that are driven by pop-psychology traumas, manifested in boozing and sleeping around, and if so, if there's a misogynistic element to such female characters? Or is this just a deficit in creative imagination?See my dilemma? I think there are a couple of categories of "complex" female characters who drink or have a lot of sex.
Reality-Based Apartment Community
Summerweight
Sadly, I can't embed it, but the Vistoso Bosses' "Delirious" is pretty, catchy summer pop, and the second song I've heard in recent months that caught my attention with a combination of featherweight sung vocals, a rap section, and a 1950's video aesthetic. For the Vistoso Bosses, it's school buses, full skirts, hair bows, saddle shoes and amusement parts. For Lil' Mama, it's a teen version of a club:
"Truly in Love" was released for Valentine's Day, but it's got the air of a summer jam all the way, something that, parenthetically, gives me further cause for concern about how her career is being handled. Girl is seriously talented. Don't believe me? Don't waste your time with the original, but watch her demolish the criminally untalented Avril Lavigne in this remix of "Girlfriend." The "Biggie / Mama / B-R-double-O-klyn drama" line at the end of her first verse is priceless. And yet her first album sank like a stone despite the undeniable likability of "Lip Gloss," maybe because it was poorly promoted, maybe because she ended up doing some more serious stuff about teen pregnancy or a weirdly aggressive collaboration with Chris Brown and T-Pain that doesn't really suit her exuberance. Anyway, I hope something works out for her. I'm really invested in the outcome of the in-song conversation between pop and hip-hop, and I think Lil' Mama could be a really fun part of that.
Thanks, Scott E!
Not only have I seen the Da Vinci's Inquest, but I voted for the mayor the show was based on!I'll be asking you guys a lot of questions along those lines. As I've said, I'm a late bloomer when it comes to pop culture, and while I've dived in deep and fast since the days when after-school television and Top 40 seemed like portals into a vast new universe, I'm the first to admit there's a lot I don't know. So I need you all, and people like the good folks at Post Bourgie to set me straight and help me along the way.
What should Americans know about the show? It took a while--too long--in the first season to find its footing and early on it's kind of bad. But then it gets pretty good. Nicholas Campbell is a pleasure to watch, and if you like shows that try to walk a line between crime procedurals and character-driven dramas, then you'd probably enjoy it.
The Ubiquitous Miffy
I really do love how exceedingly simple graphic design can get lodged somewhere in our brains, or perhaps more accurately, can hit at something that was already there. Hello Kitty may have a wider following, and Bruna himself believes that she's a ripoff of Miffy. But Miffy was there first. And because, while she's popular, Miffy doesn't have quite the obsessive brand power that Hello Kitty does, she's free to pop up everywhere, to represent cuteness and approachability in a huge array of circumstances--and to a large number of ends, commercial and otherwise.
The Art of Storytelling
Wish Fulfillment
Geek Heaven
(H/T: io9)
On Feeling Really Old
So this New York Times piece on the eerie surge of premature pop culture nostalgia by people my age succeeds not in kindling any particular warm fuzzies for me, but in making me feel, at 24, old AND out of it. That said, I'm willing to support anything that promotes Harry and the Potters:
What I Do Is Me
In my mind there is no gift--there is a considerable amount of labor, but I don't have much interest in talking about talent. There are a lot of talented niggers on the corner, in jail, under early tombstones. That's what my mother used to say.I agree there's no question that talent is no guarantor of success or even survival. But I think about writing, about how to teach it, about how to get better at it, and about the imperative to do it, I think you have a much more interesting conversation if you talk about the interaction between talent and labor. And I think that's true of art in general.
My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn't fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can't stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I've taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it's the way I'm best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.
Something in me means that I'm not capable of getting beyond luridly-shaded caricatures of St. Basil's cathedral, or women with leaves on their heads (not a lot of visual imagination, sadly) when I draw or paint, but I can write a killer kicker line on a piece about teenaged comic book characters. And I keep doing writing because there have been moments in my life--senior year of high school, most of 2005, and the last five months, when I've felt like I have suddenly understood certain things about writing with an intense sharpness. In between, there have been vast, frustrating plateaus, and there have certainly been times when I thought about quitting, or when I didn't know that what I was headed towards was a career in writing at all. Ray Bradbury describes the kind of moment I'm talking about (although his revelations, and his results happen on a level I can't even imagine inhabiting) in Zen in the Art of Writing:
All during my twentieth and twenty-first years, I circled around summer noons and October midnights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me. I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title "The Lake" on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up. Why the arousal of hair and the dripping nose? I realized I had at last written a really fine story. The first, in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new.Anne Lamott says in Bird By Bird that perfectionism "will keep you cramped and insane your whole life...I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die." She's absolutely right that the fear of not doing something exactly right can be crippling--I don't think Ta-Nehisi has to learn French before going to Paris. But I think that working really hard, that striving for the moment when you create something that satisfies you utterly is important, because in those instants when your hard work results in the highest expression of your talent, you find out who you are.
Bradbury is a huge fan of this poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as am I:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."
I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
I think that's about as good and concise a push to go big or go home on what you love, and what you get satisfaction from as you can find.
Something that's been amazing for me over the past seven or eight years is watching my friend Kat Harris become the musical theater artist she is today. We've lived in the same neighborhood since sixth grade, and we've been friends long enough that we knew each other when neither of us had an clue what we were good at, or what we wanted to do. She remembers me when I knew basically nothing about popular music, or movies, or how to find a seat in a middle-school cafeteria, and I remember her when she was seriously into Metallica, and was, like me, a debater. And somewhere in college, musical theater just clicked for Kat. I remember with startling clarity the way loving theater illuminated her, and how hard she worked to get into the Musical Theater Writing program at Tisch, and how hard she worked once she was in the program. But all that work wouldnt' have gotten her anywhere if she hadn't had an eye for subject matter and an ear for words. Her work is beginning to be performed, and singers are reaching out to her for pieces. I'm excited by the prospect of other people getting to experience her work, but I'm also excited by the constant sight of Kat become who she is through her art.