It Was a Very Good Year

No kidding.  Obviously, the Frank Sinatra version is best:



Happy New Year, guys.

Sweet Tooth

Man, when I talk about "mainstream American pop culture and hip-hop [circling] towards each other, until they're dancing to some of the same steps.  Both of their moves have something to do with racial attitudes, whether it's white Americans assimilating hip-hop style, slang, and norms, or hip-hop recognizing that rebranding and restyling could be a shrewd marketing move," Jay Sean's* video for "Do You Remember" is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about:





The visual signaling seems kind of obvious to me: the hanging out on the stoop, the tricked-out trikes, the muscle car, the aggressive sunglasses, the block party.  But it's much more gracefully and naturally done than, say, the video for Christina Aguilera's "Can't Hold Us Down," which I thought was a fairly clumsy attempt to recreate a street scene: kids jumping on mattresses and playing in hydrants!  Sassy and beleaguered women of color!  Men of color who are uniformly sexist and creepy!  Christina signaling her downness by wearing lots and lots of nameplate! (Although there's something poignant in Lil Kim's verse about men stealing her ideas.):





My go-too song and music video for this argument is usually Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down," though one thing I think is fascinating about that video is the way it sets Kanye up as a hipster artist, and Ne-Yo as a business-like rival for Keri's attentions.  The critical showdown takes place in an art gallery, for goodness sake!  If that's not hip-hop bourgieing itself up, I don't know what it is (even though I adore the song and video):





But visually "Do You Remember's" much more "urban" and it also has a dancehall verse by Sean Paul, and distracting (both sonically and visually) but probably marketable post-Usher-doing-"Yeah!" hypemanning by Lil Jon.  But the core of the song itself is pure candy: smooth sung vocals, super-sweet sentiments that seem almost at odds with how ripped Jay looks--lovermen tend to play the muscles down a bit.  Jay's been described as a one-man boyband, and I think that's essentially correct.  In other words, he combines a style I think a lot of us are embarrassed to have ever liked (though I'd never go back on the summer I spent teaching small children to sing and forcing them to dance every time "I Want It That Way" came on the radio.  Now that was the life.)  with elements we've come to think we've got to like, namely hip-hop and urban style.  It's irresistible.  Not good for that, maybe, but it's hard to focus on that in the moment.


*Can you tell I'm a little obsessed?  I'm shocked my neighbors haven't filed a noise complaint.  Either that, or they're dancing to the sound of these neat little pop ditties filtering through our shared walls.



Watching It All Happen

Among the entrants to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry is the music video for "Thriller," the first music video to make it into the collection.  This seems like a good thing to me.  Music videos are on a real creative upswing thanks to YouTube stepping into MTV and VH1's long-abandoned shoes.  And for most folks, I'd bet music videos are the most significant exposure they have to short film.  I'm a big fan of the genre myself (music videos are on my list of things to write much more about in the new year), and I'm glad to see them, slowly and belatedly, getting some of the recognition they deserve.  While music videos might seem disposable, or mere marketing vehicles, I think they're more important than that.  We live in a world, after all, where folks have pressed play on Susan Boyle's first appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" 83 million times: that's the crudest sort of music video, but music attached to visuals all the same, and available for free.

Joy to the World

I know that things I sometimes complain or express doubt about include people's willingness to make fools of themselves on camera, and overreliance on technology.  I want to carve out an exception on an issue where I suspend all doubt: flashmobs that involve dancing.  The specific flashmob that inspired that exception was this one, done to Glee covers, in Rome, forwarded to me by my sister (who also got me old-school Archie comics for Christmas.  My sister rules.):



Given the high-quality footage FOX put up of the event, and the relatively high quality of the dancing, I'm pretty sure it was a promotional stunt.  I'm not sure I care.  The folks who are watching look incredibly happy and surprised, a quality I think is both undervalued and underexperienced in popular culture today.

Metrosexuals, Maneaters, Menchildren

Over at The Sexist, blogfriend Amanda Hess is totally ripping it up with her long posts on masculinity and femininity in the aughts.  And damn is she bringing back the memories with her entries on everything from pop tarts to metrosexuality, along with the killer pop culture and gender analysis.  Remember this guy?




Carson Kressley by Save the Children.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Save The Children.


Probably the only triumphant fashion moment of my life is when Carson Kressley pronounced the outfit I'd put together of a rainbow bikini top, denim miniskirt, and bright red sneakers "absolutely fabulous" (his exact words, I swear).  Hey, it was 2003.  I had an excuse.


Or how about this particular piece of pop-cultural hilariousness?





Which raises all sorts of fascinating questions.  Such as, what happened to Mya anyway?  Why hasn't someone sat down with Lil Kim and helped her figure out how to harness her enormous talent better in the second half of of the decade?  And why doesn't Missy Elliot get more of the credit she deserves for generally ruling this decade ("Gossip Folks" for sure ranks high on my list of favorite songs of the decade, especially ones with lean production, and on my list of best Ludacris guest verses.  I would so go to a school where he was the principal.) musically?  One of the pieces I most want to write is a profile of Pink, the only one of the four blondes (her, Christina, Britney, and Jessica Simpson) to survive the decade with both her sanity and her artistic integrity intact without a single visible break.


But all of this is just random musing.  Some of Amanda's commenters (on the whole they're much less nice than y'all) have been complaining that she's using pop culture tropes rather than so-called "real" people.  I think that's sort of silly.  Pop culture is neither all-inclusive nor determinative of how we live our lives, of course.  But it's an astonishingly powerful mirror of our aspirations and our desires, however lowly or lofty.  And because we spend so much time and money on it, it's a strong indicator of what diverts us or encourages us.  Of course it makes sense to look to pop culture as part of our conversations about gender, as well as for our conversations about just about everything else.

A Better Way To Say It

Some of the commenters over on Bloggingheads are complaining that in the segment Matt and I did yesterday, when we discussed hip-hop's rise this decade, we don't adequately acknowledge that white people have been listening to hip-hop for a long time.  This is one of the things that I like about writing (even though doing BHTV is a lot of fun)--I don't have to hit publish until I'm dead-sure I've found the best way to express something (though on this blog or at my day job, you don't get video of me describing myself as a "ray of sunshine," so BHTV has some clear advantages).  I wanted to clarify a couple of the things that I said about hip-hop in the segment.

First, of course white people have been listening to hip-hop since the beginning.  I don't think anyone doubts that.  And of course the genre's popularity has been growing steadily.  But I really do think the aughts were the decade in which hip-hop became arguably the dominant genre in pop music.  It's amazing how many standard three-and-a-half-minute pop songs have rap verses, something that would have been incomprehensible a decade earlier.  Some folks might have done it, but it would have been an innovation, rather than a standard feature.  Latoya Petersen asked on Jezebel yesterday, "Since When Is Ke$ha's 'Tik Tok' Considered Rap?" and while I think it's a legitimate question, it also speaks to a larger shift in pop genres: do we consider a song with a pop verse and chorus, an R&B verse, and a rap segment a pop song?  A hip-hop song?  A R&B song?  That ambiguity is extremely creatively excitingly, and I do think it's a unique feature of this decade's music.

And it's not just that pop and hip-hop are interacting.  It's that "urban" has ceased to be a useful label to explain how hip-hop's audience is different from, say, rock's audience.  American culture has shifted such that popular culture and style are much closer to so-called "urban" tropes, and hip-hop has also shifted towards mainstream cultural norms, whether it's Kanye West and Andre 3000 getting in good with the high-fashion establishment; Ghostface showing up repeatedly on 30 Rock, which, by any measure is a fairly white and square show, Tracy Morgan notwithstanding; or Jay-Z declaring nonchalantly "I sold kilos of coke / I'm guessing I can sell CDs" or urging young men to "Throw on a suit, get it tapered up."  In other words, mainstream American pop culture and hip-hop have circled towards each other, until they're dancing to some of the same steps.  Both of their moves have something to do with racial attitudes, whether it's white Americans assimilating hip-hop style, slang, and norms, or hip-hop recognizing that rebranding and restyling could be a shrewd marketing move.  That trend may not have begun precisely on January 1, 2000, but I do think it's culmination--or at least a major step forward--happened in this decade.

And I'm not really swayed by the argument that hip-hop's sales are declining.  So are records in other genre, but sales aren't actually a perfect measure of cultural influence.  Illegal downloads, mixtapes, and YouTube views are key too.  If sales of every song with a hip-hop guest verse were included, I bet those figures would look different.  And record sales can't measure shifts in style, whether it's lyrical, production, clothes, or videos.  Timbaland's reach into pop alone is enormous, something that before 2002 (his work with Beck excluded) basically wasn't the case--he branched out tremendously in the aughts.

I'm not entirely sure yet what I think this all means.  I think pop, hip-hop, and rock will all survive as distinct genres.  But I think we're going to continue to see fascinating genre fusions, and that our music will be richer as a result.  I think this decade was big for hip-hop in a number of ways.  But I think bigger ones are on the way.

Just When You Thought I Couldn't Get Any Nerdier...

I've got to tell you, I'm pretty excited for Creation, the upcoming biopic of Charles Darwin, starring real-life marrieds Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as the naturalist and his wife.  I've always thought Bettany was a bit underrated, particularly given how wonderful he was in A Beautiful Mind.  That said, I think it's totally insane that the film's being sold with this trailer:




I mean, I love me a good theological dispute (absolutely no sarcasm intended).  But for serious, Darwin traveled around the world on a fairly astonishing exploratory voyage that radically changed his thinking.  So why is the second voyage of the HMS Beagle not even alluded to by name in the trailer, and shown only in momentary snippets?  Surely the market for Darwin nerds on its own must be fairly small.  The voyage of the Beagle seems like a much stronger selling point.

The Dominance of the USA Network

Vulture is surprised that the USA Network rolled over the basic cable competition this year with a bunch of quirky shows that aren't high-profile, aren't heavily reviewed, and aren't aggressively advertised on other networks.  The network's done something that I've rarely see another channel attempt, and never really thought was successful elsewhere: made watching its shows a matter not just of entertainment but of values.

Branding around "Character," the network's buzzword is brilliant, because it encapsulates both the network's character-driven approach to shows like Psych, about a two-man detective agency touting a fake psychic, White Collar, about a forger working for the FBI, Burn Notice, about a double-crossed spy and Royal Pains, about a doctor who becomes a private physician to the wealthy.  These shows all have plots, some of them even episode-long.  But the protagonists and supporting actors are the selling points for every single original show on the network.  The network also does high-minded programming, like Tom Brokaw's American Character Along Highway 50 documentary series.  And it sells very aggressively the idea that individual character, both in terms of values and personality, is both more important than race, age, religion, or any other attribute in defining a person, and that the network is a place that respects and embraces that.  (The network doesn't feature more noticeably diverse protagonists in its original programming than other channels do, though I'm fond of In Plain Sight, which stars a female U.S. Marshal dating a Latino minor league baseball player.)

The "Characters Welcome" slogan is great.  The whole campaign has managed to suggest that there's something nifty and individualist about slick and slickly advertised television programming.  It's bunk, of course.  But it's effective bunk.

Soundtrack of the Year

This DJ Earworm mix of the year's biggest songs is, typically, pretty great and catchy:



The fact that he's able to fit all this stuff together does make me wonder, though, if across pop genres, our music is starting to sound more alike?  Probably not, since it's so snippetty, but it does suggest that certain shimmery vocal and production styles are in vogue (I'd describe both Taylor Swift's and Lady Gaga's vocals as shimmery, so it may be a quality that makes sense only to me, though).  The mix also inspired me to actually listen to Jay Sean's "Down" in full for the first time, though, and I liked it quite a bit:



Actually reminds me of a No Mercy, though Jay's Desi and British.  Remember those guys?

More Bloggingheads!

Matt Yglesias and I went head-to-head on Bloggingheads again to discuss the decade in pop culture:



Of course, one challenge for me is that I was fifteen when 2000 began.  My taste has changed--and (I think and hope) improved--since then.  So I think it's no wonder I see the progression of our popular culture as positive.  My experience of it has certainly gotten better.

Is It Just Me?

Or has Leonardo DiCaprio grown into a singularly humorless actor?  Take the trailer for Inception, which looks gorgeous, and pretentious as hell:




He just looks dull.  I'm much more intrigued by Ellen Page's appearance in the movie, since she appears to have a sense of wonder and a smile left.  I feel like DiCaprio may have had that once upon a time, at least when it came to spotting Claire Danes at a Venice Beach party. But not any longer, and it seems like a real missing ingredient in his acting career.   Clooney, for one, knows you have to laugh or the hurt won't seem real when it comes.

When I Grow Up to Be A Man

I never got the appeal of Everybody Loves Raymond, and as a result, I harbored uncharitable feelings towards Ray Romano for years.  Having caught an episode of Men of a Certain Age last night, I feel a need to repent for that dislike.  Men has been on my list of things to check out for a while.  I like Andre Braugher.  And I thought the muted humor of the commercials tended to hit their mark effectively.

But I was surprised by how much I liked last night's episode.  In one pivotal sequence, Braugher's character discovers that Romano's character's ex-wife was cheating on him with the man she got together with once the marriage ended.  The conversation leading up to the reveal, at a somewhat awkward function, is almost precisely what you'd expect from adults who don't all know each other well, and aren't necessarily clicking on any particular level.  And when he convinces himself that the right thing to do is to tell Romano's character, the reactions he gets from another friend and his wife are also surprisingly--and I think compellingly--awkward.  His friend says the marriage must have been damaged for her to cheat.  And his wife is more concerned with the fact that his reaction embarrassed his friend's ex-wife (who is her friend) than in the fact that a manifest wrong's been done.  And I can understand why those reactions might be enormously disorienting: they suggest that the moral universe Braugher's operating in is mistaken, as is his estimation of his friendship and his obligations within it.

That's really the thing that the Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up to Be a Man," the theme song that plays over the opening credits, is about.  Digging the same things in a woman that you liked in a girl, or having your kids see you as cool, is really about whether not just your preferences, but your values, persevere.

Pencil and Paper



October 29, 1969: "You One Of Those Extremists Who Thinks It's Time For Desegregation?" by cliff1066™.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of cliff1066.


Growing up, my family was always a little weird about popular culture.  We didn't have a television for a long time.  I got to some Disney movies, but my folks don't go to mainstream releases a lot.  We did a fair bit of theater.  But one of the biggest cultural legacies I got from my family, particularly from my father's side of the family, was an obsessive love for the now-late Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block.  My grandfather had a collection of his books that I pulled off the shelves (along with World War II Sad Sack cartoons) and read.  I learned more about politics and American history from Herblock than I did from almost any other source, and wrote at least two college papers about Block's work (particularly on nuclear weapons).  He signed his autobiography for me when he received an honorary degree at Harvard.


So it was great to head over to the Library of Congress's Herblock exhibit today for a retrospective of the great cartoonist's work.  The show made the important point that Block didn't only absolutely nail generations of political figures, his work was a significant break with the round, doughy Midwestern School of editorial cartooning, and those spikier, more realistic figures were critical to the strength and distinction of his caricatures.  The decline of editorial cartooning has always made me sad, given that Block proved how good and strong the profession could be.  But the exhibit is a must, particularly since it shows how the cartoons were put together, blue sketching, black pencil and shading, and sometimes even parts of the cartoon cut and pasted in.  And I'm psyched to dive into the new collection of Block's work.  His old books had 200-450 cartoons max.  This one comes with 18,000 on disc.  God bless technology.  Especially when it keeps the work of cartoonists like Block accessible and looking great.

Brandishing Swords

Thegirlwhoateeverything and Emily Rutherford had really good points about the cult of Rent that I wanted to highlight here.  Thegirl wrote (in the midst of a longer, smart deconstruction of the show):
The film glorifies a starving artist lifestyle at the expense of any actual creations that these so-called artists make. Being broke doesn't give you extra credibility or talent, especially if it's not pushing you to develop your craft to a level where you could reach a wider audience and perhaps make some dirty, evil, filthy money. It's poverty porn for rich kids.
I agree the show would be substantially stronger if the case for any of the artists' talents were stronger.  And Emily makes a point that I think interfaces with Thegirl's argument.  She writes:

The show romanticizes a tragic epidemic that killed off tens of thousands of people in the face of uncaring, homophobic city, state, and federal governments--and that, even though our attitude to the virus has changed somewhat, continues to kill. I can't read Larry Kramer and Randy Shilts and Ed White and listen to my friends' and relatives' stories of the people they lost and really take Rent seriously anymore.
My friends thought I was pretty crazy when I was bitching about this: after all, the story's a total rip-off of La Bohème, and you don't see me bitching about how he ignored the realities of his Mimi's TB. I'm painfully aware of how few of the artsy teens singing "La Vie Boheme" know the meaning of the chant "ACT-UP! Fight AIDS!" that recurs in the background of the cast album, but maybe that's more my failure than the show's.

I think this is essentially right.  The show spends a lot of time romanticizing the bravery of the people who live with HIV, and very little dealing either with their emotional desperation or the societal conditions that caused it and abandoned many of them to their illness.  The reduction of Roger's girlfriend to this single line "whose girlfriend April left a note saying 'we've got AIDSbefore slitting her wrists in the bathroom" is really disgustingly callous.  The line's delivered with a sarcastic tilt--perhaps it's defensive, but given that it's Mark observing, it doesn't really read that way.  Roger's mourning over her is treated like moping, and his quick hookup with Mimi doesn't really dispel the suggestion that it is.  


The show also minimizes, in some really strange ways, the sacrifice Collins made in blowing up his job at MIT in the name of an alliance with ACT-UP.  Allying yourself with radical AIDS activists was a big deal--Collins didn't just lose his job, he probably lost himself a chance of ever working in academia at all.  But of course, Collins comes back to New York to chill with his bros, and the loss of his job becomes the equivalent of the loss of his coat when he meets Angel because TRU LOVE IS 4EVER and of course nothing else matters ever again.


This isn't to take anything away from people who faced HIV infection with enormous energy, courage, anger, and empathy.  I spent a bunch of time with Larry Kramer in college, enough to know that those positive attributes aren't the entire story.  For government agencies and leaders, and society at large, to face the shame they ought for their behavior in the early years of the epidemic, the whole story desperately needs to be told.  I recognize Rent isn't an act of retribution.  But it's not helping any either, if that's what a lot of folks know about the ways in which AIDS decimated entire communities--and entire arts scenes, which didn't have fabulous drag queens at the ends of long dark tunnels telling them to turn back.

Effects Matter

So, after setting up my new televsion last night (all thanks due to my parents!) and sitting down to blog, I found that the best option on my television at the moment was, sadly, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen back to back.  Fortunately, I only had to sit through about twenty minutes of the former travesty, but it was enough for me to notice that, stunningly, the special effects were actually worse than Jessica Alba's acting.  They were so bad it was distracting: it was as if they'd started doing the CGI on the Silver Surfer, wandered off mid-coffee break, had a surprise visit from Sarah Michelle Gellar wearing a cheerleader outfit and carrying a stake, and just never returned.  The movie is so dreadful it doesn't matter, really.  The effects are just another thing dramatically shortchanged in a crass, cheap adaptation of a venerated comic.

But in The League, the poverty of the special effects do make a difference in what could have been an entertaining B movie.  It's highly campy, of course.  Sean Connery, at 73, is wandering around punching people in the face.  Tom Sawyer's addition to the crew is diverting, but deeply underdeveloped.  The Invisible Man's nefariousness is signaled by the fact that he runs around naked and refuses to wear his trench coat and cold cream most of the time.  So, clearly, goofiness.  But the poor quality of the effects is again distracting, this time decisively so.  Mostly it's that Mr. Hyde just looks dreadful: the movie's effects folks mostly make him look misshapen and awkward and big, but it's not a convincing distortion, and they signal his transformations back into Dr. Jekyll mostly by waving the camera around and making things look blurry.  The animation on a guy who takes Jekyll's transformative potion to fight him are even worse.  Ditto for Mina Harker: they don't even bother to make her look vampiric, they just toss in some red in the whites of her eyes and have her nuzzle aggressively into someone's neck when she bites someone.  And it's particularly too bad, because they do a nice job on certain things, like the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's ship, which looks sleek and gorgeous and steam-punky.

Why they couldn't have done that across the board is beyond me.  Instead, the effects are a constant reminder of the slightly threadbare story they're hanging on, and the overstuffed cast holding it up.  If the effects were plausible, it might have been easy to ignore the movie's cheerful deficiencies and just gone along with it.  With nothing pretty or genuinely grotesque to look at, all its flaws stand in much sharper relief.

Trailers Roundup

While I was off being all Christmasy and stuff, a whole bunch of trailers for new movies dropped.  Just my luck, right?  Quick thoughts on a few of the most prominent:

Knight & Day



This looks pretty much unwatchable with one exception: it's one of the only movies I've seen hint of recently that, rather than pretending that Tom Cruise is a normal dude who isn't hypnotizing his child bride and raising the spawn of L. Ron Hubbard, utilizes his core creepiness.  He looks disturbing in his role as Cameron Diaz's semi-stalker-with-a-heart-of-something here, and that dementia looks about right.

Cop Out



I would very much like Tracy Morgan to have a functional career.  I would like Kevin Smith to start making good movies again.  Cop Out is not a start of a new trend for either one of them.  Let's be honest: Morgan works on 30 Rock precisely because he's playing himself.  He could do good work in other roles that give him similar opportunities.  But having him be the generic theoretically hilarious black cop is not that entertaining.  Neither is forcing Bruce Willis to be a straight man, when he can actually be pretty funny himself when he's loose. That said, the line "My partner.  He's smarter than Batman," is not bad.  On the other hand, dragging people behind cars as a method of torture hasn't been funny since James Byrd's murder, and considerably before that as well.

Sex and the City 2





So, I'm on the record as saying that SATC-bashing is illegit, and that dudes should basically treat the show as Star Wars for chicks (or in addition to Star Wars, for those of us chicks who love both).  But even I have absolutely no idea what this movie can possibly about now that Big and Carrie are married.  That doesn't mean I won't be at the movie the first full day it's in theaters, with the girlfriend I've watched the show and the first movie with.  I will add these caveats: if Big and Carrie break up AGAIN, I will fix Chris Noth with the fiercest glare I can find.  And if Miranda is treated as shabbily as she was in the last movie, Michael Patrick King will be getting an invitation he can't refuse to a fight club of smart women I'll form for the occasion.

Crowdsourcing

So, dear readers, there is now a new HDTV sitting in my living room, the better for me to watch things and criticize them for you.  My question is this: any advice from the Blu-Ray player owners among you?  I want one that can stream movies from Netflix, and obviously something that's as bug-free as possible.  Beyond that, I'm flexible.  Recommendations via comments or email will be much appreciated.

I Know I Said the Blog Was Going on Break...

But this New York Times audio slideshow of music by artists who died this year is a great way to spend some time.  The song choices--and the transitions--are a lot of fun.

All I Want for Christmas

Is you guys.  Seriously, readers, you are the single best gift I could have received this year.  I'll be off for the next two days cooking, opening presents, eating, and generally being familial.  But as a very small token of my regard, I leave you with an exceedingly cute depiction of Mariah Carey as Santa's curvy little helper:

Artistic Influences

Everybody working in culture's got 'em.  Artists love to talk about 'em.  AllMusic even includes a standard (if sometimes suspect) list of influences and influencees in artist pages.  And as a critic, I've got mine, too.  I love A.O. Scott's mordant tone (This line from his Star Trek review stands as one of my favorite all-time sentences in a critique: "Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair color from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don’t worry, he’s still a natural dickhead underneath.") if not always his conclusions and Manohla Dargis's crusading spirit.  But if I'm going to name someone who changed not just the way I write about movies but the way I watch them, credit has to go to a less famous source: Tony Palumbi.


Tony and I were buddies in high school.  We were fellow debate nerds, he was on a better swim team than I was.  For a long time, during the summer, he'd meet me after my job at the town swimming pool, we'd bike over to his house, and we'd watch a ton of action movies.  I don't know that I'd actually seen an action movie before Tony and I started hanging out.  I was pretty freaked out by violent action sequences due to a tendency towards bad nightmares.  He helped me get over that, and to appreciate the art of a good fight scene--and the unique sense of humor that often accompanies such fights.  The movies we watched ranged from ridiculous to awesome, but a lot of them stuck with me, among them Hackers*, Plunkett & Macleane (the combination of which gave me a Jonny Lee Miller fixation for a while...ahh, youth.), Blade, and Starship Troopers.  Maybe I would have gotten there on my own, but without Tony, I'm not sure I would be writing pieces like this one praising our transformation into a fanboy nation.


We sort of fell out of touch towards the end of college and after.  But thanks to the magic of the internet, Tony found me through Ta-Nehisi's post on my piece on Brittany Murphy.  Turns out, he has a blog that's a combination of pop culture and humor writing, and it's really good.  You should check it out.  I clearly get the most out of being back in touch with one of 


*Hackers may be dated as hell, but it is totally awesome, and informed a huge amount of my high school bravado.  If only real-life hacking was so hilarious, and involved so much cross-dressing.  And if only Jesse Bradford had gone on to have an actual career.

Kicking Ass

I realize that Kick-Ass is gratuitously violent and profane.  But when it comes to roles--and role models--for teenage girls, more of this please:

Getting Older


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy copelaes.

So, for some reason, I always find myself queuing up the Rent original cast recording around this time of year.  I think it's probably because more than half the show takes place between Christmas and New Year's, and I like the slightly fractured sound of Christmas carols that slither through the score.  But this year I really noticed a shift in how I feel about the show, something that's been coming on for a while, I think.  While in middle school and high school, I--and every other artsy girl in the country--definitely identified with the dramatic and freezing artists who make up the core of the show's cast, I've come to a place where I identify a lot more with the characters who are pursuing art and justice through the system, namely Benny and Joanne.

I feel deeply strange about this.  I was a bit of a college radical.  I got arrested in a protest!  I had to go to a disciplinary hearing!  I want to sympathize with the yippie protesters demanding that homeless people not be evicted from a vacant lot around Christmas!  But I kind of can't deny that I find the starving artists in Rent a little...obnoxious.  It's not actually romantic to freeze and live in a slum (or a hipster trailer)--romanticizing that experience is just a way to make it bearable.  And when Benny points out that "Maureen is protesting losing her performance space / Not my attitude," he's absolutely right.  Her protest has nothing to do with the lived experience of homeless people in New York.  It's all about a kind of bohemian posturing.  And as much as Benny's kind of an ass, sexually harassing Mimi, threatening to kick his old buddies out of their apartment, and declaring the death of Bohemia, he also ultimately gives them their housing back (not that they're remotely grateful or anything, which always rubbed me the wrong way), offers to get Mimi into rehab, and pays for Angel's funeral.  Like it or not, living does take money, and Benny's one of the only characters practical to recognize that.

But he's still basically an unpleasant person, and in truth, the person I like most in Rent now is Joanne.  When she sings "I look before I leap / I love margins and discipline / Baby, what's my sin? / Never quit, I follow through / I hate mess but I love you / What to do with my impromptu baby? / So be wise, 'cause this girl satisfies" in "Take Me Or Leave Me," that's basically my personality.  Joanne, tied with Benny, is probably the most effective character in the entire show.  She's working full-time as a lawyer along with producing Maureen's show; she's the only person with enough knowledge to figure out that Mark, Collins and Roger have squatter's rights; and she and Maureen find and save Mimi at the end of the show.  Joanne is engaged with the artistic efforts that absorb the rest of the show's characters, but she's also working for change in a larger world--she's not myopic, though it's clear from her calls with her parents that she's blazing her own path within the legal profession.  Joanne wants a world where wearing Doc Martens is no impediment to being a badass attorney, which is essentially what I'd like to see, too.

I even feel like Alexi Darling, Mark's producer at Buzzline, gets a bad rap.  The disdain with which she's treated, despite the fact that she gives Mark an income and the financial means to finish his movie is really kind of disgusting.  The news business may not be art, but at least Alexi wants to cover a protest in support of the homeless.  I don't really see a reason why Mark, et.al. are purer than her.

Now, let me be clear, I have a lot of respect for people who throw themselves into artistic work, despite the fact that it's rarely financially rewarding and exposes them to a deeply uncertain life.  I recognize there are major problems with gentrification, the treatment of the homeless in New York, etc.  I just respect people who work within the system to foster support for art, to combat sexism, to make the law fairer.  And ultimately, I grew up to be one of them.  My pre-teen and teenage ambitions to write fiction are basically shelved.  I work as a reporter, and write about popular culture in a mainstream publication that's been hesitant in the past to really dive into the subject.  And frankly, I'm okay with that.  I don't think it's a path that automatically deserves disdain.  I still like Rent.  But I see very differently than I did when my neighbor first taped the cast recording for me.

Moving Pictures

This conversation between Peter Jackson and James Cameron about the future of film-making is pretty great, and you should read the whole thing.  I hope Jackson's right about this, but I'm not entirely optimistic:
There are all great tools that people haven't quite gotten their heads around yet. But one of the things that has happened [is that] people focus on technology. Probably the film industry has been guilty; there's more attention spent on the technical aspects than the story. That's led to a self-fulfilling prophecy. People regard CGI as a gimmick, they almost blame CGI for a bad story or a bad script. They talk about CGI as if it's responsible for a drop in standards. We've gotten to a point now where there isn't nothing else we haven't seen. We've seen dinosaurs, we've seen aliens; with Avatarwe've seen realistic creatures. I think we're going to enter a phase where there's less interest in the CGI and there's a demand for story again. I think we've dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we've played with.
I think it may take longer than Jackson thinks for people to get sufficiently accustomed to spectacle that it's not enough to make a moviegoing experience satisfying for them.  But even if it takes a while, it's encouraging that two guys who are some of the most important technological innovators in film are also two of the guys most committed to story out there, and have the clout to make expensive, daring, story-driven movies.

Seriously?

"Drops of Jupiter" was one of the biggest radio airplay songs of the decade*?



Man, has a) pop culture generally and b) the role of radio changed a lot since 2001.

*I know the song was released in 1998.  Just going by the airplay stats in the linked article.

Women's Work


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of BitchBuzz.

I really dig this post by quadmoniker over at PostBourgie about the need for Hollywood to get more women directors in the mix.  She writes, of the stunning excellence that is The Hurt Locker (probably my vote for best movie I've seen this year):
 I’m not going to say that this was due to Bigelow’s special woman-sense or anything, because we don’t know why she was able to make it so good. That’s kind of the point....If we leave out half the population from movie-making, we’re leaving out half the perspectives that might be able to bring something new to the table. The major studios would be better off if they brought it, because I’d love to see more movies like The Hurt Locker.
The one thing I'd add is that we don't know that "half the perspectives" would necessarily be gendered.  It turns out that just as I didn't need a woman to make a movie about enduring female friendships in New York City, I didn't need someone with specific combat experience to make an astonishing movie about war: I needed Kathryn Bigelow.  The reason to finance movies by female directors is not because you've suddenly discovered that shucks, ladies go to the movies and they have all this money to spend on fancy shoes so why not on tickets, and broads will attract broads, right?  The reason to back movies by female directors is that they're just as well equipped as male directors to capture the entire spectrum of humanity.

Taking Issue

Now, my admiration for my Atlantic colleague James Parker's writing and vision of pop culture is a matter of public record.  But I've got some issues with his list of the top popular culture moments of the decade, which seems to me like a fairly good example of why lists like these are more a window into an individual critic's psyche than into any given set of experiences in any given period of time.

First, only one of his choices, the rise of Jersey Shore and The City, is about women artists, or performers, or whatever.  Leaving gender aside for a moment, it seems to me that if you want to single out reality television about the young and aimless, it makes more sense to pick Laguna Beach, which kicked all of this nonsense off. The show may be less aimless or offensive than either of Parker's choices, but it's an origin, a turning point, rather than a culmination.  But the gender stuff does matter.  Especially given that this has been a fascinating, problematic decade for women in popular culture.  What about Britney Spears' meltdown, the coverage of which was a popular culture phenomenon in and of itself, breaking new ground in invasive coverage of a clearly disturbed woman, and a major transition point away from late 90's-early aughts mass-produced pop?  What about Helen Mirren conquering the United States and rising as a viable alternative to Meryl Streep, herself in an astonishingly productive period of her career, both of them symbolizing a path to aging into grandness?  What about the absurd genius of Lady Gaga, who may be a late entrant into the aughts, but emerged as the first viable heir to Madonna in two decades?  The fact that black actors and musicians are left off this list bothers me too.  No Kanye West, no matter how ridiculous he may have become over the course of the decade?  The bridging of the gap between indie and hip-hop, and between black audiences and white audiences, seems to me to be a significant hallmark of this decade: thus, OutKast's B.O.B. topping indie record site  Pitchfork's songs of the aughts list.

Second, I have no idea how the rise of cable and premium television as not just a viable site but the critical incubator of astonishing entertainment is entirely left off this list.  Grizzly Man may be a good movie, but while James resonates to its pastoral awe, the depictions of urban centers and suburban tension in The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men say a great deal more about where our society is at today and how it got there than a fiercely individual movie about a suicidally individual man does.  I don't mind some of the smaller entrants on this list--the rise of things like tribute bands and fan culture more generally is certainly one of the important developments in popular culture of this decade.  But Grizzly Man just strikes me as too small.

But the thing is, who am I to say this list is entirely wrong?  Or any other critic?  We all see influences and progressions differently, and developments in different garden patches of popular culture register as more or less important on our respective radars.  I understand the urge to define canons: it gets pageviews and sells magazines.  But I actually think best-of lists are more useful as a way of individual critics explaining what they value and why as a service to the readers who rely on them year- and decade-round than of actually establishing definitive bests.

Literary Badvertising

So, during Law & Order marathons, James Patterson is running pretty strange advertisements for his latest novel, I, Alex Cross.  It's just him on screen, holding up the novel and telling viewers: "Buy this book.  Or I'll have to kill off Alex Cross...It's very good by the way."  I don't think of Patterson as an auteur with great artistic integrity, or anything, and I assume it's an echo of National Lampoon's "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, we'll Kill This Dog" cover, but it still seems unusually ineffective.  Patterson's not going to kill off a successful character, so the threat is hollow.  And the spot does zero to convince readers who aren't already familiar with Patterson's work that the novel is remotely worth reading.  Maybe they assume that anyone who is watching Law & Order marathons is naturally a Patterson-head.  But it's still a weak pitch.

Putting on the Mask


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of David Seto.

I basically agree with Ta-Nehisi on whether stereotypes in professional wrestling are harmful:
Truthfully, it doesn't bother me now and I see it as a kind of vaudeville. The key is that pro wrestling made gimmicks and employed stereotypes fairly equally. I'll leave to others to speak on how they felt. I think smacking Jimmy Snuka with a coconut was pretty ignorant, but the context of having, say, Roddy Piper as a hot-blooded Scottsman, Hillbilly Jim as an Appalachian hick, Nikita Koloff as "The Russian Nightmare," The Iron Sheik as the tool of Iranian tyrants, Hacksaw Jim Duggan as a redneck, and Brother Love as a Jimmy Swaggart made it hard to be angry. 
I think professional wrestling tends to walk a fine line between using typing to brand individual characters, and to convey messages and to rope in new audiences.  I don't think, for example, the branding of the wrestler Sheamus as "the Celtic Warrior" is an ethnically meaningful statement.  I don't know that there's strong enough ethnic identity in the United States that having a distinctively Irish wrestler would draw in new audiences, much less that such an ethnic enclave is significant enough to worth disapprobation to draw in with a type.  On the other hand, the increasing Central American immigrant population in the United States is big enough that it makes sense to coopt element of lucha libre, rebrand them within a larger context, and draw in an audience that misses a familiar form, but that's also interested in embracing American popular culture.

I'm not saying the WWE is exceptionally sensitive.  That fine line in ethnic branding doesn't exactly apply to WWE divas in the same way it does to the male wrestlers.  The plots are, um, broad.  But I think WWE has been smart, commercially.  They've used broad ethnic branding without getting in trouble for it.  And they've made a lot of money by doing so.

Choices, Choices

So, Ethan Hawke's new vampire-action movie, Daybreakers, looks a little mordant and silly, and I'm not sure it has any of the stylishness that made the Blade movies so much fun:



That said, I'm quite fond of movies, TV shows, etc., that grapple meaningfully with vampirism as a choice. Not all supernatural manifestations lend themselves particularly well to discussions of the nature of evil.  If you're a werewolf, in most narratives, you don't have a lot of choice about whether your brain shuts off and you get all hairy and bloodthirsty once a month.  If you're a zombie, you don't really have a brain at all to make choices with.  Vampirism used to be the same way: if you needed human blood to survive, you were going to kill people to get it.  But it's one of the few supernatural manifestations of evil that's changed with technological advancements.  The existence of blood donation technology means that needing human blood doesn't require murder--the killing part of vampire identity becomes a choice.  And synthetic blood can--as it does on True Blood--take humans out of the equation entirely.  It's true that medical advancement has more generally introduced the idea of cures to magical transformation stories.  But vampirism is the supernatural evil that's been most directly affected by medical developments, I think.

One of the reasons I found Twilight so vexing is that it entirely walks away from these kinds of opportunities.  Carlisle Cullen (the "father" of the Cullen clan of vampires, for those of you lucky enough never have to read the damn things) is a doctor for goodness sake--they're perfectly set up to include those medical developments in the novels, though except for a Breaking Dawn episode in which Bella drinks donated human blood, the books avoid both the medical developments that affect vampirism, and really the questions of evil and control and choice more generally.  Daybreakers may look kind of trashy and violent, and have some really doofy looking special effects.  But at least it has more moral questions going for it than Twilight does.

I'm Sorry...

But when, in the second Clash of the Titans trailer, Liam Neeson declares "Release the Kraken!" did everyone involved in the film's production somehow miss the Pirates of the Caribbean reference?  And if so, how?

Heavenly Creature

Renee Russo by Peter-Duke.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Peter-Duke.


I've loved Renee Russo since seeing her in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the movie that, when I snuck into it at 14 convinced me that sex looked like a lot of fun, that being an insurance investigator could be an incredibly alluring job, and gave me a permanent crush on Dennis Leary (probably I am the only person who took that particular lesson from that particular movie, but then, I've never claimed to be normal).  And of course, seeing her in Get Shorty helped quite a bit as well.  So I was somewhat delighted to learn that she's been cast as the titular god's stepmother in Kenneth Branagh's Thor adaptation.  I've always been mystified by how little Russo's worked; in the 21 years since she made her first movie, she's been in just 21 films, most of them clustered in the mid-90's.  But she's a siren, and I'm glad Branagh, who is wonderful at casting people, is giving her something to do.

So Long

I've got a longer remembrance of Brittany Murphy and the cultural impact of Clueless up at The Atlantic today.  It's hard to think of another movie that a) my father liked that also b) influenced a million middle-school girls' fashion choices.

Am I Blue?


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of k-ideas.

All questions of whether James Cameron's Avatar is a good movie aside (though I'll get to them in a moment), it's undeniably an incredibly important one.  It's simply the most technically impressive thing I've ever seen on a screen (and it's a must-see in 3-D).  The motion-capture works, something that other than Peter Jackson's Gollum, I don't think I've ever said about a single other movie, and it works here on a vaster scale than anything Jackson contemplated.  When the main characters are in their avatar bodies, they're both very much themselves and very much other.  The sight of Sigourney Weaver as an extremely tall, hippiesque, blue anthropologist made me very, very happy.  The biology of Pandora is a complete, convincing vision.  Cameron was smart enough to make a lot of the animals fairly ugly, which actually makes them seem more realistic.  When you think about a rhinoceros, it looks weird and a bit baggy--it makes sense that its biological counterpart would look kind of awkward, too.  If there's a flaw in the movie, it's that Cameron relies a bit too heavily on bioluminescence.  It's certainly pretty when trees and plants light up on contact, but those touches are really the only things that make the movie look less than fully realistic.  But it's a flaw in the directorial and production decision-making, rather than the technology itself.

I was too young to feel this way when Titantic came out (and too surrounded by weeping girlfriends to notice the three times I saw it in theaters--give me an advance break, I was 13), but walking out of Avatar, I was overwhelmed by the extent to which the movie is a beginning of a new era in filmmaking, not simply the end of an old one.  This hugely ambitious technology is just going to get better.  Directors are just going to keep finding better ways to use it.  As completely astonishing as Avatar looks, it's simply a first draft and a first attempt.

Which is probably a good thing, given how absurdly cheesy it is (and sometimes-commenter here and Lawyers, Guns & Money blogger SEK has thoughts on the movie's racial politics that are fascinating and trenchant, even if I'm not sure I entirely agree with them, here).  There was a lot I liked about the movie: watching Sigourney Weaver chew scenery is always delightful, especially when she's demonstrating that you don't have to be a military mercenary to cause someone a lot of trouble; I've loved Joel David Moore's turn as a dour forensic anthropologist on Bones, and so I enjoyed seeing him getting a strong supporting role; Michelle Rodriguez is adorable, competent, and tough--I'd really like to see her continue to come back from being a drunken mess in bad movies, and hope Avatar will help her to do that; and I love me some CCH Pounder. As for my concerns about the movie's take on disability (SPOILER ALERT), I think I'm ultimately okay with how Cameron addressed it: the movie's very upfront about the joys of mobility and sensation.  The most romantic scene in the entire film comes when Neytiri, the Na'Vi princess played by Zoe Saldana, finds the human--and crippled--body of the man she's come to love in his avatar form, saves his life, and calls him "mine" for the first time in the movie.  And when Jake permanently moves from his human body to his avatar one at the end of the film, the action comes as a form of radical cultural identification as much as an act of escape. (SPOILER ALERT OVER.)

But in the end, the analogies are kind of glaringly heavy-handed.  The hippie-chanting-in-the-forest-and-communing-with-nature stuff came across as a bit more embarrassing than profound.  Sam Worthington's kind of a blank slate, even if he's a blank slate with very nice eyes.  The dialogue frequently lands with the thud of rocks in a wet canvas bag.  But the power of the movie's visuals is such that it doesn't entirely matter.  For the long stretches of the film where you're just figuring out the world, Avatar is glorious.  And it's a herald of such good things to come.

We're the Kids In America

Brittany Murphy has reportedly passed away.  She was 32.  And while she'd seemed to have lost her way as an actress in recent years, her performance as Tai in Clueless is absolutely iconic.  I don't mean that in a big, Grace Kelly way, or anything like that.  But she was the epitome of cute awkwardness.  We may have all wanted to be Cher, but at heart, most of us were really Tai.  So sad.

Best Posse Ever

So, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was on FX last night, and I definitely didn't notice this when I saw it in 2005, but Angelina Jolie's team of spies in the movie is made up of some pretty amazing female actors.  Among them, Kerry Washington, former Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ADA Alex Cabot (aka Stephanie March), and House M.D. vet (and Kirk's mom!) Jennifer Morrison.  I've always had genial feelings for that particular piece of trash, and I feel even better about it noticing they gave some actresses a little work in roles that could have been filled by nobodies.

This Is Why I Love Pop Culture

Washington, D.C. is about to get deluged by what is apparently an actual phenomenon: extremely heavy snow and thunder, known as thundersnow.  And of course, someone's written a song about thundersnow.  Pop culture encompasses all things!

New Robyn!

Okay, there's a bit of false advertising in the title of this post.  Yes, there's new Robyn here, but she's just singing the chorus on a pretty sweet song by I Blame Coco, also known as Sting's daughter:



I'm kind of digging that "It's the Milgram device all over again" line.

But really, the song is making me wonder when we're going to get a new Robyn album.  She's had a great run of guest appearances, whether mixing it up with Snoop Dogg or absolutely killing the vocals on "The Girl and the Robot" (which has one of my favorite videos of the year).  But it's been 2005 since she released Robyn on her own label, Konichiwa Records.  That record is one of the defining CDs of my early twenties.  The bravado on "Curriculum Vitae" is a fairly precise match for my sense of humor, and for the kind of self-presentation I wanted to have when I was graduating from college.  "Bum Like You" and "Be Mine" were the opposite heads of a coin that encapsulated my feelings during a tough transition period.  And "Handle Me" is a great, slightly overaggressive anthem to independence of all kinds.  But we're coming up on five years now.  I want more from her--and I want it to be entirely her creative vision, not in collaboration with anyone else.  Robyn is too unique, and too fascinating, to deny us herself for this long.

The Angkor Temples and the Problems of Conservation



I loved visiting the Angkor temples around Siem Reap--the two days I spent hiking there were wonderful and revelatory.  But I'll admit that, as amazing as it is to climb all over and get up close with some astonishing works of art, the varying states of conservation at the temples left me fairly anxious.  First, for Angkor, tourism is clearly both a blessing and a significant challenge.  Admission to the temples is run by a hotel chain, and is magnitudes more expensive than any other entry fee I paid anywhere in Cambodia: $20 for a day, $40 for three days, etc.  Some of that funding goes to the hotel chain that runs the admissions process, but it's more money than the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap would be getting charging smaller piecemeal rates.  But tourism is also clearly overwhelming to the sites themselves.  When I climbed one temple to watch the sun set on my first day, the structure was literally packed.  That's not a problem in and of itself, but a thousand-plus people clambering up and around a stone structure every day of the year takes its toll.  And it's not merely getting there: my guide, and other guides I saw, actively encouraged visitors to touch certain reliefs, despite the fact that, like the monkey warrior in the slide show, they're becoming shiny from contact with human hands.  Oils and contact ultimately lead to deterioration.  It's an odd lapse in what otherwise seems like a reasonably rigorous guide training program.


And the reconstruction efforts themselves raised all kinds of questions for me.  For example, in Ta Prohm, the overgrown temple made famous by Tomb Raider, and Preah Khan, there are huge piles of stones that were part of the original structures simply heaped in courtyards.  They aren't being protected from deterioration by wind and rain, and the fact that they're piled up like rubble can't be great: that weight's got to produce a fair amount of friction.  At Banteay Srei, a beautifully preserved sandstone temple far from the core Angkor Wat complex, the stones are at least sorted and set out in order behind chain link, but they're still outside, on the grass and open to the sun and rain.  


I even wondered about the wisdom of letting trees grow up in the temples.  Obviously at this point, some trees are so intertwined with the temples that to remove them would threaten the structural integrity of the buildings (like the tree that's essentially holding together a small stone building in the picture of Preah Khan), something that's already a threat to the entire area because as new hotels break ground, the Siem Reap water table is dropping, and the ground under the temples is shifting.  But it doesn't seem like new trees should be allowed to grow just because Ta Prohm's gotten popular because it's gotten jungly.  


Among all these natural problems, there are severe human ones as well.  Because smuggling has become such a significant threat to Angkor artifacts, almost none of the statues that appeared in chambers in the temples are in their original locations.  Big bas-reliefs, balustrades and pediments are in place because they're exceedingly hard to move.  But statues are gone, to museums, academic institutions, or legitimate private collectors unless they're too damaged or disfigured (when the temples changed hands between Hindus and Buddhists in antiquity, adherents of the new faith often chiseled out representations of gods or Buddha--the Khmer Rouge left Angkor alone because it was a representation of what the Cambodian people could accomplish), or they're more contemporary representations that are part of ongoing worship.  I found myself inexplicably depressed by seeing a group of statues literally padlocked behind bars in one of the temples.  I suppose it's better to have some of the statues in place, but those are grim conditions in which to see them.


These are complicated decisions all, and they're being made by a complicated network of organizations--almost every temple restoration I saw seemed to be under the authority of a collaborating group of organizations, whether APSARA, UNESCO, or various international governments.  I don't know how those groups make decisions among themselves, or what body of conservation laws guides them.  They have different base material to work with at each site, so of course the results are different.  But if tourists are going to continue to flood Angkor, and if the temples are going to be around to awe them, it seems likely that all the teams in all their permutations will have to raise their conservation standards.

Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting



Quite literally, in fact!  Shaolin is set for a $137-million initial public offering that will enable the site--and the head monk there--to promote tourism in the region and to enhance Shaolin's cultural brand.  I recognize that this is a serious issue for Zen Buddhism, and indeed, having beauty contests at the temple seems pretty inappropriate.  But really, all I want to do is make Carl Douglas jokes.  I am a bad person.

Update: PostBourgie's Jamelle and coworker and buddy Gautham Nagesh have pointed out, via Twitter, that I really should be posting Wu-Tang videos on this post.  They're probably right, but I was a nerdy little suburban white girl when I acquired my goofy Carl Douglas references, and I stand by 'em.  But to appease them:

Soaring

Emily Nussbaum's New York piece about how television became art in this decade is, predictably wonderful.  But I wish she'd spent a little bit more time on the structural issues that allowed shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos to The Wire to Dexter to Mad Men to survive and thrive.  One point she makes that I think is critically important is that technology both allowed audiences to exist beyond the rigid time slot when shows originally aired and the time they were released on DVD, and provided supportive communities that deepened fans' analysis of and attachment to complex shows.  She writes:

In fact, a series like The Wire might not have found that audience were it not for galloping advances in technology: DVDs that allowed viewers to watch a whole season in a gulp and, later, DVRs that let viewers curate, pause, and reflect. By opening up TV to deeper analysis, these technologies emboldened a community of TV-philes, fans and academics who defended the medium as worthy of critical respect. Online, writers were forced to reckon with their most passionate viewers (and some loopy new critical forms: the recap, fan fiction, “filk”). A show like Lost, with its recursive symbol-games, couldn’t exist without the Internet’s mob-think. But this was true as well for The Sopranos and Mad Men, allusive dramas that rewarded rumination, causing nationwide waves of appreciation and backlash for months after each new episode.