I Think I'm Over Britney Spears

Her new single, "3" ostensibly about threesomes, is incredibly boring.  Incredibly boring.  Lots of horns, lots of autotune, references to living in sin being cool, which might be interesting, but it's a case of "I don't think that means what you think it means."

Like a lot of women who had high school years where the charts were dominated by Britney and her ilk, I kind of root for Britney Spears.  I want her to be okay.  "Baby One More Time" is not a good song, per se, and "hit me baby, one more time" is a pretty disturbing lyric to put into a song about puppy love.  But in the video, she tilted her head, and looked up from under those big lashes, and she look like we've all felt at thirteen, or fourteen, or fifteen.  I felt awful for her during the period of her breakdown; I can't imagine what it must be like to look that dreadful and out-of-control, much less to do it in public, much less to do it when you have two children.  I really wanted her to come back, to be fabulous, to have fun, and to capture something about my twenties; I enjoyed her pop encapsulation of my teenaged heartache even if I didn't take it seriously, and I would have liked for her to do it again.

But I don't think it's ever going to happen.  The most interesting Britney's released in eight years is "Piece of Me," the product of a Swedish song-writing duo, and with the divinely ubiquitous Robyn on backing vocals, the incredibly nasty and autobiographical song about fame from her Blackout album, with the vicious chorus: "I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous / I'm Mrs. Oh My God, that Britney's shameless."  The song comes across as very, VERY self-aware, whether or not it actually is, and it's extremely effective.

I'm not sure that's ever going to happen.  When you've gone insane in public, threesomes aren't particularly scandalous.  And when you're very, very heavily handled to make sure you never break down again, it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever record something scary, and damaged, but good and honest again.  I wonder if it would be better for her if all of us just walked away, if she could take the kids and move back to Louisiana, or wherever, leaving Britney Spears a sweet, high school memory, and leaving her to have something approaching a life.

Regrets





I profoundly regret if, in yesterday's post on Riverworld, I gave the impression that I bear an irrational prejudice towards swords and sandals as a genre.  I don't, I promise!  My irritation came merely from what looked like a sloppy juxtaposition of a poignant concept with some cheesy-looking genre stuff, and from a strong desire to give Tamoh Penikett a severe talking-to, followed by hot chocolate with marshmallows in it, followed by a new agent.  I apologize if my vexation colored everything the entire post.

And I totally agree with commenter Alex R that setting and plot devices aren't necessarily determinative.  One thing I want to write about sometime soon is my interest in faerie, and in borders, something I think works to totally different, and beautiful effect in The Mists of Avalon, A.S. Byatt's Possession (about which more later this week) and Will Shetterly's Elsewhere and Nevernever, which are shattering and gorgeous, and influenced me hugely growing up.  That said, I like to see genre justified; by the end of a piece, or a movie, or a novel, I want to feel like I see exactly what the story gained by being set in a world with swords, or magic, or whatever else lit up the author's imagination.  That may be because I'm a writer, and I like to be able to understand my fellow authors' decisions.  But I think stories are better if their genres and their devices and their points fit together, like tumblers in a lock.

Baby-Making Music


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Lhoretsë.

You guys, there is a new Andre 3000 single out (which I guess has been circulating since July, but I just got it, so it's new to me, and DAMN), a verse and chorus of which you can listen to here, and it is AWESOME.  "Hey Ya!" is a great song, but it was always too bitter a song to actually be baby-making music, there's a cynicism and an honesty to "I don't want to meet your mama / I just want to make you come-ah" that's refreshing, but no matter how big a hit it became, it was never music to get utterly lost in.  "Look 4 Ya" is.  Oh, it is.  The verse is sexually adventurous without any attempt to subjugate one partner to another's fantasy: "Like we work at Ikea / Test every piece out of furniture to see if it's stable / If you want to take it out on me / Then do it on the table."  And the chorus is really sweet, the singer crooning "See if I can find you now / I've been looking for you."  It's totally tender, no disturbing sense of the chase on it.  That combination of winsomeness and desire is fantastic, and Andre's rhymes sound smooth and relaxed.  It's as if he's refined and improved on the ideas Cee-Lo Green was working on in "All Day Love Affair," and I'm crazy about it.

Smart Point on Polanski from scottstev

He wrotes, in response to my intense chagrin about the Polanski petition:
An important point is folks should strive to make the walkback from this position as painless as possible. Human nature, being what it is, often makes us fight harder when we make the most indefensible choices.
Totally true.  To start, I'll promise to buy at least two tickets to Fantastic Mr. Fox if Wes Anderson removes his name from the damnable thing.

Petitioners

Kate Harding had a characteristically fabulous and enraged post up on Jezebel yesterday about the sickening spectacle of 138 of artists signing a petition in support of Roman Polanski.  And while I'd hoped to stay as far away from this mess as humanely possible, the petition itself and the debate in Jezebel's comments raise artistic issues--and ethical ones--that are far too important to let go without comment.  So let's take the petition contention by contention, shall we (all statements in bold are from the text of the petition)?

Contention 1: His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

1978, I'll grant the petitioner.  But the use of the word "morals," implying a subjective judgement, is misleading.  What Polanski is wanted on is actually a "moral turpitude" case.  Moral turpitude is defined as "conduct that shocks the public conscience."  Rape is included on that list.  So is murder, voluntary manslaughter, fraud, and arson.

Contention 2: It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.  By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.  


It makes sense to me that international film festivals should be havens for free speech.  That in no way means they should be free crime zones.  And the idea that artistic events are cheerful zones of peace and prosperity everywhere is naive and silly.  Events organizers aren't stupid.  They don't hold major film festivals in Taliban-controlled regions where it's likely artists' safety couldn't be assured.  If they wanted to honor Roman Polanski, and have him come to accept that honor, perhaps the festival's organizers should have held the event in France.  The norm that artistic events are sacrosanct is not universal.  And while I think there's a case to be made that they should be, in the name of artistic expression, I would be curious to see someone make the argument that artists have the same right to be free from arrest and questioning on their way to and at artistic events in the same way members of Congress do.  The risk of artistic repression may be that severe in some places, but it is not the same in all places.  And artistic freedom should never become the refuge of a rapist.


Contention 3: The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one can know the effects.


This argument rests on the idea that Roman Polanski has an inherent right of freedom to movement and travel.  He does not.  He has not since he fled the country.  He is a wanted felon, not simply on the child rape charges to which he pled guilty, but on flight from justice charges.  Polanski is aware of this, and has structured his travel arrangements accordingly over the past three decades.  That he misjudged this time is due to idiocy on the part of him and his handlers, not on any rank violation of international law or free speech.  The idea that Polanski's arrest represents some sort of contradiction of the values of artistic events only holds if he had the right to move in the first place.  The idea that his arrest represents a slippery slope towards the repression of art is true only if he was arrested because of his artistic output.  This is not remotely the case.

Contention 4: This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

Why yes!  It will!

Contention 5: If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.

Speak for yourself, Woody Allen. And West Anderson.  And Sam Mendes (you're British, dude).  And Mike Nichols.  Normally I hate the elitist-Hollywood-types meme, but this grates.

So what are we to do with the artists who signed this petition?  A boycott is impractical for those of us who love popular culture, and virtually guaranteed to be ineffective if implemented on a mass scale.  A more targeted boycott of Polanski's work over the past three decades, when commercial failure might have made it more difficult for him to evade justice, might have been effective once, but that time is long past.  I don't know what recourse anyone really has to express dissent to these artists for their regrettable decision to sign this petition.  But journalists should ask a lot of questions (Wes Anderson's about to start promoting a childrens' movie, folks!).  The citizens of Los Angeles should be absolutely outraged about the idea that fellow residents of their city think rapists should get off if they're talented.  And the rest of us should think about the economy of celebrity wrongdoing.

Another Perspective on Art and SciFi

From commenter Bryan H (I'm pretty sure I know who you are, dude :) ):

Hi. My name is Bryan and I stopped following io9 months ago and I don't miss it.

Like you, I was originally drawn to the site because I enjoyed the female perspective, the diverse content, the science. But ultimately, it was the unceasing stream of 'spoiler' and mainstream super hero posts that drove me away.

My RSS reader became so overwhelmed by posts that featured 20 video embeds and discussions on the newest Batman incarnation that I felt that it was no longer worth the effort to seek out those great lists posts or anything that mentioned Samuel R. Delany.

The site just wasn't doing enough to uphold and draw public attention to the excitement and possibility that speculative-fiction is and should represent, and instead chose to pander to the corporate vision of sci-fi that features testosterone soaked action in tights with explosions in space.

Sometimes less is more, and when it comes to a site like io9 I'd like to see less of the expected and more of the unexpected.

As an alternative, one of my favorites is the BLDGBLOG. Run by architectual ponderer and one time Dwell editor Geoff Manaugh, the site explores the possibility inherent in design and buildings and environment... and well, everything.

If you're in doubt check out this interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
 Well, I have to admit I like some corporate sci-fi (she says, in a tiny voice), but this is exactly what I'm looking for.  Please keep sending stuff.

Mixed Feelings



I really like the idea of a movie about Purgatory.  The image in this trailer for Riverworld (which will air on Syfy in 2010) of a man recognizing one of his colleagues who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 as he emerges, dripping and disoriented, onto the banks of a river, apparently animate if not actually alive, is lovely, strange and sad, and most importantly, filled with possibility.  But does everything have to involve swords?  And does anything have to include someone doing Samuel Clemens drag?  I guess my bigger fear is that while he keeps accepting roles in this range, I'm not actually sure that Tamoh Penikett is actually good at angry and confused.  I'd like to see him do something else so I can decide if I think he can act or not.

Stuff That Works

I love pretty much everything about io9, Gawker Media's science fiction blog.  I love that it has a lot of women on the masthead, I love its mix of actual and speculative science.  But I think that most of all, I love and appreciate how much art they provide to their readers.  Ta-Nehisi's right, of course, that you can't reproduce everything online and capture what the artist put into the paint or the stone.  But some things, like photography, do reproduce well on-screen.  Take these pictures of Chernobyl: they're utterly stunning. The clouds in the second image, the rictus of the abandoned doll in the 8th, there aren't a lot of words.  Go look.  Or check out the gentle dragons and ancient cars in this gallery of Kiriko Moth's work.  io9 feels like a full museum to me, and I think that's what makes it so successful for me.  I can go there and watch video, I find art there, curated and commented on, that I might just read about somewhere else.  Their book recommendations are increasingly the stock on the shelves in my imaginary museum gift shop.  The bloggers are the docents.  The place just feels...whole.

All of which is a really roundabout way of saying that I wish more blogs presented more art instead of just representative samples.  I'm spoiled for choice here in DC, given the sheer number of museums, and particularly because most of them are free.  But while that's great for the big stuff, it isn't always conducive to discovering new artists, particularly those who are just starting out.  If you've got recommendations, please send them my way, and I'll post them.

On The Prowl


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Harlequeen.


Shaun Mullen, who blogs over at Kiko's House (which you guys should check out, if you like gorgeous photography, editorial cartoons, and Abraham Lincoln), had a big post up yesterday about the cougar phenomenon in popular culture, and emailed me to ask what I thought about it.  And I have to admit, the subject gave me pause.  I've always found the entire concept of cougars deeply boring and condescending.  Anyone who doesn't know that women like to have sex beyond their sixteenth birthdays, and throughout careers, college, motherhood, and beyond, is stupid or not paying attention.  So to have to invent a cutesy term to explain that extremely basic fact is overly simplistic and annoying.  And the depictions that have emerged to flesh out that term are even more condescending and strange.  Shaun writes that:
But the critic [of a review of Cougar Town that Shaun mentions] got it bass ackwards in asserting that older women today are more uncertain of themselves than ever, fearful of losing their sexuality and intimidated by all the young things around them whose social lives are one big orgasm. Puh-lease!  If that's the case, then I'm hanging out around the wrong shopping malls because the older unattached moms that I know seem quite certain of who they are, have fulfilling lives with challenging jobs (if not the best health insurance) and could care less about the Miley Cyrus lookalikes who will give a blowjob at the ring of an iPhone. 
I think both of those descriptions--single mothers are insecure drudges, single mothers are sexually and professionally confident--are overly simplistic.  Being a single mother isn't just a psychological condition.  It's an economic, physical and professional one as well.  You can be an older woman with children and be secure in your sexuality but insecure because you can't pay the rent because your ex-husband doesn't keep up with child support.  You can be an older woman and be professionally secure but not want to have a lot of sex because the person you loved is dead.  You can be sexually insecure because you were left, because you were abused, because you haven't had good sex before.  You can be sexually secure if you're pretty, if you're plain, if you've had good sex, if you haven't had sex at all.  You can want to have fun at absolutely any age.  And you can treat people badly at any age, too.  Picking out a guy who is younger than you, or older than you, doesn't actually indicate anything about who you are or where you're at in your life.



Cougarhood isn't a useful concept for understanding women's experiences, because there isn't actually a stable definition behind it beyond the "older woman who dates younger man" outline.  But unlike the "sexy librarian" trope, which doesn't pretend to be anything but a pop joke, the cougar trope is new enough to not be entirely cliche yet.  So while it's empty, and will be empty in twenty years when it's old, people think it has actual meaning now, and that's problematic.


(On the other hand, what do I know?  I watched Eastwick while preparing this post, and I have to admit--totally entertained, even though I know I shouldn't be.  Paul Gross has the charm of a knockoff Chris Noth, which is a good thing.  A reporter [and the show has a female reporter who wants to do investigative corruption stories!] utters these lines: "I don't deserve him anyway.  He is a volunteer fireman.  He has an environmental blog!"  And Rebecca Romijn...well, I'll love her forever.  I have needed magical trash since Charmed end, and I think this will fill the slot nicely.) 

The Randomness of the Universe

I have to say, it makes me very happy that Blythe Danner, rather than wasting her talents on the "Meet the Family" series, has moved on to making crazy nerd movies with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.  Well played, Ms. Danner.  Well played.

Roman Polanski

I've felt all day like I should have something to say about the director's arrest in Switzerland, although the apologia for his admitted rape of drugged 13-year-old have horrified me into a stupor.  Fortunately, my friend, co-worker, and occasional collaborator Gautham Nagesh has a post that mostly sums up what I feel.  Money paragraph:
That article perfectly captures the difference between the two countries. The French revere Polanski because of his talent, which is undeniable, and therefore are willing to treat him differently than they would a common criminal. Judging by the voices across the Internet today, most people in the U.S. consider him a rapist who belongs behind bars. God Bless America.
I'd amend this a bit, since I don't really believe the French basically believe that talent excuses people of heinous crimes, and I have been shocked by the American commentators who have argued that Polanski has somehow suffered enough.  But as a statement of the countries' respective legal stances, this is true, and damning.  Given that Polanski's art has provided a means of escape and safe harbor for him after he committed a heinous and inexcusable act, I can think of no more fitting punishment for him than that he be denied the ability to make art for a while.

The Deepness of Space.

Those of you have followed my obsession with what it'll take to get a permanent mission to Mars might enjoy this speech William Safire wrote for President Nixon to deliver in case the astronauts who made the moon landing weren't able to make it back.  It begins: "Fate has ordained that they men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."  Chilling, and poetic.

Loving Gabby Sidibe



Her work in Precious looks totally astonishing, of course (and there's more Paula Patton!).  This brief profile of her in New York makes her sound smart, both about her career and her life.  But most of all, I'm just happy that she's already got another leading role lined up.  I hoped the same thing for Nikki Blonsky after Hairspray, keeping in mind that weight is perhaps the most pernicious prejudice in Hollywood, and it doesn't look like starring roles have poured in for her, though she's getting some work (getting into highly-publicized physical alterations with former America's Top Model contestants over foolishness doesn't help your career either).  But Sidibe's already got another lead role lined up, one where she is profoundly not a victim.  She's not going to get pigeonholed by her breakout role, and I hope she doesn't get pigeonholed by her weight, either.

All Kinds of Shame


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Kevin Burkett.

I'm not sure Alessandra Stanley's Saturday piece in the New York Times on the rituals politicians and entertainers go through after their downfalls actually makes any sense.  She says, in the first and final lines of the piece:

One of the perversities of public life is that disgraced politicians seeking a comeback rely on clownish self-parody, while entertainers cloak themselves in moral — and immoral — seriousness....Wrong, vulgar and shaming. That’s the least of it, but these days, in Hollywood and Washington, it’s the price of re-entry.
It's an interesting attempt to look at the intersection point between celebrity and political culture as they've drawn culture to each other, I suppose.  But the problem is, they aren't actually parallels.  Tom DeLay isn't going to be able to get back into politics on the strength of his cha-cha (his comments about acting "prissy" are simultaneously totally unserious and an unnerving reminder of his attitudes towards gay people).  Rod Blagojevich isn't ever going to be elected to anything ever again: his scrabbling attempts to get onto reality television simply magnify his delusions, and magnify them to audiences who might have only thought of him before as a vaguely corrupt politician from somewhere in the Midwest.  What worked about Bob Dole's Viagra commercials is precisely that they were the act of a man who was done with his political career, and as a result could afford to demonstrate that he had a sense of humor (and provide fodder for Arlen Specter.  Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the Senator from Pennsylvania doing live standup, telling Bob Dole Viagra jokes, as well as the doorbell jest that features in this episode of Freaks and Geeks.  The man can wear a plaid sport coat and drink a martini.).  Stanley's column doesn't work because for the politicians she cites, there aren't any roads back, much less ones that involve sequined vests.

We let artists come back, and we love it when they end up revealing and working from something truly and deeply degrading because that's part of what we turn to art for.  We want artists to embody both our most embarrassing, personal, emotions and experiences and to demonstrate that it's possible to overcome them.  Whitney Houston may be a hot mess who can't take responsibility for her drug use, but her edited voice still has some dignity to it.  As long as some of us can relate to it, we can welcome artists back from it.  

It's not the same with politicians, at least not entirely.  Bill Clinton can come back from adultery because he was sufficiently apologetic without sacrificing his dignity himself, however humiliating and dorky the Star Report may have been.  David Vitter can survive a prostitution scandal because he never seemed that credible or serious in the first place, which lessens the fall a bit.  But both men proceeded with the business of their lives, without awkwardly shaking their hips while wearing old-man sweatpants on national television.  Despite their self-inflicted wounds, they refused to sacrifice their dignity. Both men are seriously flawed, but in their own ways, they managed to hang onto their political careers because they behaved as we expected politicians to behave: soberly and steadfastly.  Tom DeLay may have shimmied himself back into the spotlight, but it's not the same one he had on the past.  There may be currency to be had in being on the Z-List as well as on Congressional voting lists.  But no one should mistake star power for political power.

Soundtracks


Image used under a Creative Commons License courtesy of williamli1983.


References to the music that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan listen to as they head into combat have showed up everywhere from Doonesbury in the form of wounded veteran and Alex Doonesbury boyfriend Toggle to Iron Man.  And given that ubiquity, it's well worth reading Spencer Ackerman's excellent review of Jonathan Pieslak's Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War.  I won't try to recap the piece at any great length here, since you really should check it out in its entirety, but I think this point Spencer makes is very well-taken:
There’s no reason why it ought to be surprising that a group of mostly-white soldiers in their 20s should have a soft spot for classic rock. That’s what they grew up listening to on the radio in their parents’ cars, for one thing. But what do their musical tastes tell us about these men? The idea that such preferences are a revealing fact of identity is a painfully overdetermined subject of study: not all that much follows from the fact that someone likes a certain band or a particular song. Some people go for the familiar when placed in front of the karaoke microphone. Others do the same when they find themselves in a strange country, under fire, asked to confront an enemy that isn’t easily distinguished from the civilian population. Anyone who wants to understand a war is wasting time by looking at a soldier’s iPod. 
And the stuff he writes about the music soldiers are making, instead of what they're listening to, is fascinating. 

New (For Network TV) Faces


Image of Aishwarya Rai used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of regulus21.

I can't decide yet if The Good Wife is something that I want to keep watching.  But despite her (thus-far) thinly-written role, one thing I am profoundly thankful to the show for is the presence of Archie Panjabi (Who, sadly, I couldn't find a good Creative Commons image of.  Going to talk about Aishwarya Rai in just a second, I promise.)on American TV screens.  For those of you not familiar with her work, check her out in a minor role in The Constant Gardener, or as Parminder Nagra's older sister in Bend It Like Beckham.  It's in the latter role that I really fell for her: it's a much quieter role than the lead, but she did a nice job of communicating the difficulties of trying to live a modern life within the confines of tradition.  Panjabi is good at communicating heartbreak without histrionics.  I hope she gets to do more than unbutton her shirt to beguile a witless security guard and fool Julianna Margulies into taking tequila shots, but no matter what happens, I'm glad American audiences are getting to see her in a decent-sized role in a decently-advertised show.

And I wish Aishwarya Rai, and particularly Indira Varma would get the same opportunities.  Rai was a lot of fun in Bride & Prejudice (Which I will defend at great length.  Seriously, do you need any more proof than this?) but hasn't been in anything worth watching that's received a significant American release sense.  And if Rai was fun in that movie, Varma was fantastic, alternately snotty and wistful.  She packed the snottiness away, but kept the steel and the heart for a guest appearance on the two-hour premiere of Bones last season, and was wonderful, and gone too soon.  Diversity's a valuable thing on television, and explored and pursued far too rarely.  Having someone like Panjabi be an investigator at a Chicago law firm without comment on her ethnicity, or Patrick Gallagher playing an Asian football coach on Glee, is progress towards a time when television and movies will represent the full spectrum of Americans without having to be explicitly about the fact that the spectrum is wide.  And in Panjabi, Rai and Varma's cases, the added talent would be huge.

The Big Books

I didn't do Infinite Summer, mostly because Infinite Jest never sounded particularly interesting to me.  Yeah, I know, but in a world where I can read David Foster Wallace on porn stars and John McCain and lobsters, Infinite Jest felt unnecessary.  I like problem novels a lot: Underworld was definitely one of the more rewarding reading experiences I've had in the last couple of years.  Art, and nuns, and baseball are just more my alley than junior tennis and addiction is all.  But I've been following the exploits of the folks over at A Supposedly Fun Blog on and off, because hey, they're my friends.  And I want to take issue with Matt's roundup post on the experience, in which he argues that maybe we're just not suited for big novels anymore:

 That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina andMoby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things.  Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.
See, I think the thing about big novels is that they give you permission to mosey, to start, and to stop.  They're usually organized in reasonable chunks, whether they're serials or set-pieces like Underworld.  And I happen, as a busy person, to like literary mountains (I also acknowledge that I read extremely fast, and therefore approach this question with my perspective colored by that).  I'm old enough to know I'm not going to read everything, and that not everything I read is going to be virtuous.  But I like to mix it up.  There's no reason Charlaine Harris and A.S. Byatt and Joan Didion can't, or shouldn't coexist.  I get different kinds of pleasure from each of them, but I get definitive pleasure from both.  Which reminds me it's time to start rereading Posession again for this year's go-round.

I Love You, You Pay My Rent

Oh, how I hope Logo has enough sense of humor to license the Pet Shop Boys "Rent" as the soundtrack for this project.

Biggie, Mama, B-R-Double-O-klyn Drama

This video of Murs discussing the disappointing and disturbing lack of prominent female MCs on the hip-hop touring circuit, or in hip-hop in general





And the follow-up debate at Soulbounce are smart, and interesting, and I don't have a vast amount to add other than I agree that a) it's rational for some women not to feel entirely at home in hip-hop, b) the talent among women is undeniably there, but c) for some reason, the record sales and concert tours are not, and d) that's really too bad.  Avril Lavigne is incredibly annoying, but what Lil Mama does on this remix of "Girlfriend" is fantastic, and it should sell millions of tracks.  Huge ditto for "Truly In Love":





Murs suggests in the video that female rappers should do some limited city tours, even if they're in small venues and with small audiences, if only to build credentials for tours like Rock the Bells.  If any female MCs tour in DC, I'll commit in advance to buying tickets and bringing friends with me.  It's not a bad idea, it's just too bad it's come to this.

Welcome to the Dollhouse: My Interview with Joss Whedon




Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Himitsu.




Dollhouse is back tonight, and you can be sure that I'll be in front of my television, worrying about Echo, sort of rooting for Adelle and sort of being ashamed of it, and hoping the ratings get better because Fran Kranz really doesn't need something else he's part of to be cancelled or not make enough money and I'd sort of like for him to continue having a career. But 9pm is a long time from now, you guys. And so, to keep you busy until then, I have a special post. Last March, Joss Whedon was kind enough to take some time out of shooting The Cabin in the Woods to email me some very entertaining and thoughtful answers to questions I had about the show, for a piece I was working on for The Atlantic (keep in mind, only a few episodes had aired, and I was largely pursuing the human trafficking metaphor). I didn't get to use very much of his responses, but here they are, for your reading pleasure:


Alyssa: Human trafficking has become, for lack of a better word, a fairly popular subject for movies and documentaries in the past several years—and combating trafficking was a major priority of the Bush administration. How much did you consider you consider the politics surrounding trafficking when you designed Paul Ballard’s character?

Whedon: Trafficking is the lowest and most appalling crime perpetrated in any country not currently at war. So of course it makes popular fiction. Drugs are passé, murder is solved once a week on half the shows on TV… we always need to get more extreme. And here is a crime with classic foreign villains – with actual mustaches to twirl, desperate young female victims – the morality is genuinely simple and it’s a timeless American story: the captivity narrative. This is not to be callous, but the awful reality has a kind of fictional glamour to it. We can be outraged and moved but never feel it’s too close to home.

The people at Equality Now have been fighting human trafficking and sex tours for years without any real support. In fact, when I pitched Dollhouse to the staff there, one of them objected to the character of Ballard, saying a helpful FBI agent would be an unforgivable myth. For more stories to be told – for altruistic or sensationalist reasons – is to increase awareness and can only, I think, be helpful.

Alyssa: More broadly, can you talk about Dollhouse’s take on trafficking and prostitution? We know from the pilot that Caroline was in desperate when she signed up to become a Doll, but the episodes that have been aired so far show Echo enjoying her assignments. Is that ambiguity intentional, or will a clearer perspective emerge throughout the subsequent episodes?

Whedon: Now, having said the above, let me be clear that Dollhouse was never meant to be about trafficking. It was meant to be about power, desire, identity, and sexuality. I knew from the start that prostitution was part of the package, but that is something I was interested in exploring in a removed, fantastical setting. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with people paying for sex IN THEORY. And what I was interested in was the desires people would have if they could create a true sexual narrative for themselves, to give the act context. It wasn’t until later in the process that I woke up in the middle of the night and thought “this is trafficking”. My response to that was to try and show both sides – the reality of trafficking and the fantasy of the Dollhouse, to show their differences AND similarities. To come at it head on. The Dollhouse fantasy is a dark one, but the darkness is more about why people give up their lives and what people with control over them will do. It’s still a fantasy. To have Paul Ballard say “It’s the same as trafficking” and try to link it to actual criminals was deliberate – like so many others, I wanted to do some stories about actual trafficking. Partly as narrative inoculation: “We’re not them!” and partly for the same reasons as everyone else. We didn’t get as far into that as we’d hoped – there’s been a lot of adjusting.

Alyssa: Obviously, you’re skating around a raft of major political and moral issues in Dollhouse, but thus far, the show’s very much a piece of genre fiction. Do you contemplate doing episodes that have a greater sense of realism? Can you see doing an episode the examines the realities of prostitution, for example, more literally like you do with the social work system and low-wage service work in Season 6 of Buffy?

Whedon: Some. Not too much, because the moral gray areas in the show are already lacking in white, and the show would become depressing beyond repair if it was all about the seamy side of life. That’s what SVU is for. (I love SVU, by the way.)


Alyssa: One recurring theme I’ve noticed in some of your work is that women who resist coercion, whether it’s sexual or otherwise, have to be prepared to respond with violence. They’re usually competent at fighting back, but your female characters seem to be at risk a lot of the time. Is that just a function of the characters and the situations they’re in? Or is reflection of violence against women in society? Or an argument about how women should protect themselves?

Whedon: All of the above? I write primarily about women. I write primarily horror and adventure stories. At some point, the hero’s gotta be put down. But then there is an amazing amount of unbelievable shit happening to women all over the world every single day. A lot to cull from – and to fight against. I don’t write politically, but if any woman tells me she gained strength from or identified with a character of mine, I am going to be pretty screamingly chuffed.

Alyssa: One of the things I enjoyed most about Buffy was the fact that the show is deeply grounded in a community we get to know very well—at the end of the show, Sunnydale’s destruction feels like a major loss. Will we see an expansion of the world that Dollhouse is set in, beyond the house itself? I know you’ve been asked how viewers are supposed to get attached to Echo when she’s a different person every episode, but what role does setting play in grounding the show?

Whedon: The world will expand. Oh holy boy will the world expand. And then, unless our ratings tick up a bit, it will very suddenly contract.

Good Things






New York Times media critic David Carr tweeted yesterday morning "is it just me, or does tv season seem oddly full of interesting new shows? has 500 channel univ. finally started to infill with quality?"  And frequent commenter and total rockstar GayAsXmas (who y'all really should check out at Musings from the other end of the ballroomblogged about how he's backlogged on Glee along with a whole raft of other American TV shows.  I've been feeling similarly overwhelmed (I haven't even gotten to the House premiere yet, and given the news that Jennifer Morrison is leaving the show involuntarily, I'm consider sulking and not catching up as a form of protest.  That resolve will last until Sunday, tops.).  But after a totally exhausting week, I came home last night, sat down on the couch, and started catching up on things I've missed.


The verdicts?  Modern Family was decent enough for me to sit through a half-hour family comedy, something I have never done before in my entire live as a television viewer.  The combination of a gay couple, a heteronormative family with a father who wants desperately to be cool, and the father of one of the gay men and the wife in the other family, his Colombian bride, and her son, is reasonably appealing.  And like seemingly every other new comedy out there, the writing is surprisingly sharp.  I'm not going to lie: "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a picture of myself as an old-time sheriff" may actually beat out Say Anything's "I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen" as the best riff on that particular line.  The wannabe-cool dad's declaration that "You're surprisingly strong, homes," directed at his daughter's first boyfriend, who is carrying him to the couch after he's thrown out his back is pretty apt, too.


Community stayed strong in its second week, too, taking on campus protest, spearheaded by a housewife who wants a chance to get radical.  Danny Pudi's declaration that holding vigils "gets the ladies in the mood for social change, if you know what I mean" is sort of terrifyingly dead-on.  And I do wish the demonstrations I participated in once upon a time had involved more homemade brownies.  It's always nice to feel good after your former self gets recognizably tweaked.  Also, any television show that includes the subtitled Spanish translation of a hip-hop verse that turns out to be "the goat's mustache is Cameron Diaz" is definitely staying on my must-watch list.


And because I am just such a girl, last night's Glee made me cry.  Again.  I really appreciate the show seems to be resolving its predictable conflicts quickly and moving on to more interesting challenges.  Instead of teasing tension between Rachel and Finn all season, the show has wisely left it alone, leaving Rachel to figure out if she can be a decent person out of the spotlight, and giving Finn a pregnancy drama with a twist to deal with.  Kurt's coming-out drama turned out to be anything but.  Instead, the show's focusing on a host of more nuanced issues (not that it's unimportant that coming out be represented, but I do think it's useful to upset the notion that it's necessarily agony): the kids' desire to get out of their hometown for economic, social, and cultural reasons; Terri's obsession with her pregnancy; ambition and how it plays into our lives at every age.  (SPOILER ALERT) I also like that the teen pregnancy drama is playing out in a multidimensional way.  Finn's breakdown with Will, his terror and tenderness about potential parenthood, and his desire to do something more with his life so he can transcend his economic constraints, were beautifully done.  But what killed me was Puck's desire to become a father, to prove he can be responsible.  American popular culture generally seems highly uncomfortable with the fact that some teenagers want to become parents, no matter how ready they are to actually parent or provide for a child.  (SPOILER ALERT OVER).  When Glee debuted, there's zero way I would have expected that four episodes in, a mohawked Ohio football player with an outdoor pool-cleaning business and a cougar fixation would be the character I'd end up most invested in.  But being surprised is nice, a lot of the time.


As for Bones, I missed the middle of tonight's episode to take a call from a buddy in Shanghai.  But I think the show is definitively back.  I wonder--and I'll have more to write about this later--if the writers' strike didn't just throw people off, leaving a lot of shows to feel unbalanced last season.  But I'm profoundly glad the show's back.  I'm terrible at walking away from things, so I'm glad my Thursday evening TV rotation can stay enjoyable and intact.


Still to catch up with: Flash Forward, Eastwick (I love Rebecca Romijn), The Good Wife (I love Archie Panjabi), maybe The Vampire Diaries.  And for you Dollhouse (or Joss Whedon more broadly) fans, stay tuned for a VERY special treat later this morning.

True to Life


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Gene Hunt.


So, I was trying not to go there in my post about Valentines Day yesterday, but then scottstev brought the bitter for me (which I really appreciate, by the way!):


I really hate that somehow all these stunningly attractive people are pretending to have messed up and lonely romantic lives. I can see messy (and there are problems with ambundance, I'm sure) but I don't believe that Jessica Alba was ever at a loss for suitors and would get pity from a hotel clerk.
I think this is really true, and it's one of the biggest problems in American movies today.  People like Jessica Alba may have romantic problems, and I sure wouldn't take her shotgun wedding to Cash Warren any day, but they exist in a separate category from my romantic problems, or most other people's.  British movies and TV shows recognize this, and it is to their everlasting credit that John Simm is recognized over there as the sex symbol he undeniably is.  But while Simm takes my breath away (you have noticed the State of Play obsession, folks, right?) he's not someone that most American casting directors would even notice if Brad Pitt were anywhere within a fifty-mile radius.  And that's too bad.  Dramas are more compelling when the people acting them out can really inhabit the emotions behind them.  I'm sure Jessica Alba's love life is interesting, and I might even like to see a movie about it.  But her problems aren't mine, and it's weird for any movie to try to pretend that they are.

Cliches for Cliches

Of all the crazy franchises out there, the Bring It On juggernaut may be the one I object to least, on grounds that it's harmless, and the original totally deserves its cult status.  But does everything have to be a musical? And is Lin-Manuel Miranda, overly lauded for what I thought was the derivative and deeply annoying In the Heights (about which it should be said, the old lady's solo number is by FAR the best.) really the right person to bring high school girls' dialogue to the stage and translate it into music?  What do you bet he finds some actress he thinks can rhyme and has her rap?  Ugh.  Some days, I wish I could be a cheer-tator, and that Broadway didn't function on the principles of cheerpitalism.

Diablo Cody Re-Enrolls In High School


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Josh Jensen.

Commenter (and real-life friend) RachaelB messaged me this morning with the news that Diablo Cody's going to make a Sweet Valley High movie.  And I feel bad about this, but I'm just not sure I care.  Somehow, I managed to get through school without reading more than the back of a single Sweet Valley book (from that alone, it seems like things got scandalous when they got to college, but that's about what I remember).  If someone wants to push my nostalgia button, they'll make a good Babysitters Club movie, preferably based on one of the Super Specials, where everyone goes someplace crazy, and one of the girls smooches somebody's brother.

My real problem, though, is that Diablo Cody seems to have been assigned responsibility for redefining an entire generation's-worth of lady-genres: the pregnant teen movie, the horror movie, the pulpy high school movie.  I didn't like Juno very much, but I've come to appreciate Cody, mostly through her Entertainment Weekly column, which balances earnestness and thoughtfulness with the snark more than I thought her screenwriting debut did.  But I just don't see her as the reinterpretater of a generation.  Particularly not mine, which I feel a little defensive about, even if I can't claim all the source material as my own.

Secret Fears

Among mine: that I will be as dorky about pop culture as David Brooks when I grow up.  Really, the whole point of this blog is to provide a vehicle for me to learn about things I missed when I was young, an incentive for me to stay caught up with things, and to act as a fountain of youth for when I get ancient.  I'm going to be 25 the Monday after next, you guys.  The danger is real.

I Confess: I Am TOTALLY Going to See This Movie



I freely acknowledge that Did You Hear About the Morgans? looks slightly disastrous.  It is, among other things I violently dislike, a fish out of water comedy, and an opposites feud their way into romance comedy.  It relies on jokes about city people who don't like Sarah Palin.  But, in its defense, the movie doesn't seem to make country people look stupid.  Sgt. Ellis Carver appears to have gone on from the Baltimore Police Department to work in Witness Protection, so hey, good for him.  And though I didn't know it until now, I have been waiting all my life for Hugh Grant to say to a large bear: "My wife is a member of PETA.  I have been meaning to join."

But really, the reason I will see Did You Hear About the Morgans? is that I love Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker in a way that didn't seem remotely possible to me ten years ago.  They are actors who have gotten looser, and funnier, and a little sadder, too, as they've aged, and I think it's marvelous.  They've moved beyond the years when they looked the best to acting that is somehow truer than anything they did then.  Grant's self-deprecating performance in Music and Lyrics is a marvel of self-awareness wrapped up in a trifle, and Sex and the City may have become a horrifying machine of a franchise, but Parker isn't afraid to look bad in it any more, and that takes courage.  I'm sure It's Complicated will be the far better of these two grown-up romances, but I'd like to be able to have Parker and Grant's wryness about myself when I get older, and I'll enjoy watching them use it to tango with each other.

The Sound on the Page

Both this Slate piece on how difficult it was for Bruce Springsteen to write "Born to Run" and this Vulture interview with Mika are fascinating reads, if only for what they illustrate about how different songwriters' processes are.  Mika says:
Massively. Anything written down doesn't make any sense to me. I was always doing very badly at school until I came up with a technique of learning everything by tape. So I would record, I would get audiobooks with my textbooks, and I would record lessons and I would learn everything by hearing it. And I would never use any books. And that's when my grades suddenly shot up. Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.
And Louis Masur writes of Springsteen:
It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track. Van Zandt now laughs at the thought of it. "Anytime you spend six months on a song, there's something not exactly going right," he says. "A song should take about three hours." But Bruce was working with classic-rock motifs and images, searching for the right balance musically and lyrically. Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen's writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. "Spontaneity," he said, in 1981, "is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of 'Hound Dog,' and you put that thing on," and it just explodes.
 Both "Born to Run" and "Grace Kelly," for example, are intensely cinematic songs: they're visual and to a certain extent narrative.  And yet, the authors who created them arrived at similar effects by totally different routes.  I don't have a point to make exactly, except that as someone who has my own (strange, tortured) writing process, I'm always curious to visit other people's heads for a bit and see how they do it.

Target Demographics

I have to say, I find the fact that Couples Retreat is being advertised during NFL games entirely perplexing.  Can the equation really be as simple as Vince Vaughn=For Men?  To be fair, there's also some Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell and Kristin Davis, who, when + bikinis probably = For Men, as long as there are no cosmopolitans, or multiple bad bridesmaid dresses, or any one of a number of other chick-flick indicators present.  But even with the eye candy, a movie about a group of couples at a crazed Hawaiian marriage counseling resort doesn't exactly seem in the ballpark, or on the football field as it were, for dudes who get together to watch games on Sunday.  And at this level of quality, I can't really see what the movie has to offer to their wives, or girlfriends, or any lady of particularly discerning taste regardless of her relationship status.

Going Your Own Way

This amazing graphic about how to knock someone down while rollerskating seems execuse enought o talk a little bit about Whip It! and Coco Before Chanel.  Both feature spunky actresses (Ellen Page, Audrey Tautou), delicate precisely in proportion to their subject matter.  Traveling back chronologically (and therefore hitting more recent events first.  Yes, I am a nerd.), let's take Whip It!:



Roller derby is rough, for sure, and a lot of its charm comes from its participants reclaiming and remixing stereotypes of women.  But it's hard to imagine it as a genuinely revolutionary act, even in the fairly restrictive social circumstances that Drew Barrymore, directing for the first time, lays out.  If your'e an unwilling beauty queen, lacing up some skates is definite progress.  But in the broad scale of things, it's a step forward, not the seizing of the radio station.

In contrast, the clothing that Coco Chanel rebelled against was genuinely restrictive.  Wearing a corset has a long-term impact on your body, and on your options.  If you can't breathe, it's hard to do much else.  But if you can breathe, and run, and laugh, and dances, and eat, and sing, it's much easier to think, and to dream on a large scale:



I love working, and I have a hard time imagining a time when that would have been an unladylike emotion.  But I think for women to make progress, it's important not just that our condition shift, but that the framework by which we measure our life experience, and our options, shift as we move forward, too.

It Don't Come Easy


Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Evil Erin.


I haven't had a chance to watch Drop Dead Diva, a show about a supermodel reincarnated in a heavyset but smart lawyer's body, but this Times piece about the show's approach to makeovers and body image resonated with me.  As a long-term glasses-wearer and certified nerd, I used to enjoy makeover movies.  I recognized that it was cheesy to suggest that Rachel Leigh Cook was actually more attractive with her glasses off than on, or that Anne Hathaway would be a pretty girl if only she had a better hairdo, but I thought the metaphor for seeing someone with different eyes was reasonably apt.  But as I've gotten older, and started to believe that how people see each other is less malleable, I've found myself resenting the theoretical ease of transformation, whether it's in how a character looks, or how other characters look at her.


I like In Her Shoes, in part because Toni Collette is never going to be taller than Cameron Diaz, and she's never going to be blonder than her, and she's never going to have that big crazy smile.  The movie didn't try to pretend that Toni Collette was going to transform herself and then someone was going to fall in love with her--in fact, it presented her obsession with her sister as her main problem.  I think it's appropriate from a health standpoint, as well as from a psychological standpoint, to make the point that losing weight isn't easy.  And I think it's important for movies to recognize that our looks, and our self-esteem, are multi-dimensional.  Changing yourself comes at a cost.  Sometimes it's worth it.  But it's not a straightforward proposition.

Kicking Up a Fuss

Not going to lie, the Nigerian government's decision to try to shut down screenings of District 9 and to demand that sections of the movie that portray Nigerians be edited, seems like foolishness to me.  First off, remedial public relations: complaining about something draws attention to it.  So unless it's something that needs actual correction, either because people believe it, or because it's ubiquitous, leave it be.  And second, if you're a state, complaining about art makes you look like an amateur.  Have a sense of humor about it.  Offer the prawns refuge in Nigeria and claim the movie is just South African propaganda.  Whatever you do, don't act like problems with Nigeria's image are the fault of a South African filmmaker and a single movie.

Love Stories

Okay, I am DESPERATE to know which conceit connects all these characters.  Are there folks getting married, like in Love, Actually?  Do they live in the same charming Baltimore neighborhood from He's Just That Not Into You, which maybe, secretly, emits gamma rays that cause people to have terrible romantic lives?  Seriously, you guys, I need to know!  Because there cannot possibly be anything else remotely interesting about this:



I am, for reasons I will not disclose here, congenitally incapable of attending movies that include Ashton Kutcher, so I won't be able to find out by watching this movie.  Will someone tell me next February?  Please?

Staying Alive

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Pop Elegantiarum.

Really any television show that included this exchange, delivered by these people, would have made me happy:

Jason Schwartzman: "Why are you back on pot?"
Ted Danson: "Because I'm bored. God, I'm bored...Everyone has bad wine breath tonight. It's like Chernobyl."

But everything else about Bored to Death, for which I had extremely high hopes, and which had its premiere on Sunday, made me very happy too. The show is pleasantly low-key, for a project that's airing on HBO, and has a cast with resumes that range from snarky to twee. The show is funny, and is sarcastic. A montage in which Schwartzman sits in a cheap hotel lobby and watches various hookers and their clients check in and out, and another scene in which he's menaced by a thug in a leather jacket and tighty-whities brandishing a grill lighter have an air of Wes Anderson gone seedy. But even with those touches of affect, the show has an air of crazed plausibility about it. Advertising yourself as a private detective is the kind of thing that really bored, artistic people might dream up, and what makes it a television show is that the characters actually go through with it.

And if the concept's good, the casting is even better. Danson as a publishing executive wedging himself into a toilet stall so he can smoke, Olivia Thirlby actually getting to be a grown-up, Zach Galifianakis as a depressed webcartoonist, and that's just in the first episode? We get Oliver Platt, people! We get Patton Oswalt! None of the actors look like they're trying too hard, and it helps that they aren't given absolutely insane dialogue to wrap their mouths around. The pitch is good. And the first episode is available for free on iTunes. It's well worth checking out, especially as the fall television season gets into full swing, and the networks are trying like crazy to impress viewers. It's nice to watch something laid back and a little off kilter.

Take a Bow

In response to my post about the news that Glee's being renewed, Andrew wrote that if the show is canceled in season or two"that may not be a bad thing. I'm not sure if it's the kind of show whose premise can support more than a couple of seasons without getting stale. And of course there's only so much good music you can work into a show week after week."

I actually think this is wise counsel for a lot of television shows. It makes much more sense for artists to go into a show with a vision and a sense of how long it takes to tell the story they're working on, than to spin shows on without end simply because they're popular. Not everything has to last forever, and not everything should. If it takes a couple of seasons to tell Glee's story, and then that story is over, I'm absolutely fine with that. More rotation in the networks' slots, as with New York Times columnists and Senatorial seats would be a good thing.