Just a Thought
Somehow, I totally missed the entirely lackluster (and weirdly basketball inflected--and yes I know it's for the LeBron movie, but it seems like a mismatch of subject and content.) video for the monster-Drake-Kanye-Wayne-Eminem single that Universal put out in October. I only mention it because it's yet another recent video that has a Beats By Dr. Dre laptop in it (Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" is the other, which makes since given that she designed the Heartbeats head phones for the line). And it really depresses me that Dre's technology is in more music videos than he is.
I Need Something More Than Real
Primary Colors, for many reasons, is one of my touchstone novels. But I've never been much for short stories, so it was with mixed feelings that I dived into the seven short stories about real political figures commissioned by New York this weekend. I shouldn't have hesitated. Some of them are very good. I particularly liked "The Astral Plane Nail and Waxing Salon," by Mary Gaitskill, in which Ashley Dupre finds herself giving Silda Spitzer a pedicure in a curiously ethereal nail salon. In particular, I liked the image of political wives and mistresses at peace with each other:
Adam Haslett's piece on Obama is beautifully written, but inevitably melodramatic, and it steals its ending from The American President's meditation on collateral damage from aerial strikes, which is too bad. I do like the man the President meets in the park, who strikes me as a plausible Washingtonian in his hobbies and occupation, if not in his end.
The truth is, no author is ever going to get true public figures entirely right (and with Palin, the results are pathetically condescending). You can't understand the whole mind of a character you don't create or control. But fiction can illuminate a bit of these very public figures, and more tellingly, our hopes and fears about them. When the prose is good, the result can be fun, too, as these stories are.
Monica finished with Hillary; they hung around at the door exchanging pleasantries. Hillary slipped Monica a tip, which Monica discreetly pocketed.I always felt a little bit bad for Monica Lewinsky, who appears to have built a reasonable life for herself. She was never particularly the enemy: Bill was, of course.
Adam Haslett's piece on Obama is beautifully written, but inevitably melodramatic, and it steals its ending from The American President's meditation on collateral damage from aerial strikes, which is too bad. I do like the man the President meets in the park, who strikes me as a plausible Washingtonian in his hobbies and occupation, if not in his end.
The truth is, no author is ever going to get true public figures entirely right (and with Palin, the results are pathetically condescending). You can't understand the whole mind of a character you don't create or control. But fiction can illuminate a bit of these very public figures, and more tellingly, our hopes and fears about them. When the prose is good, the result can be fun, too, as these stories are.
Helen Mirren Stands Alone
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Lessio.
Entertainment Weekly reports that NBC is planning a remake of Prime Suspect, though unsurprisingly (she's busy, people), Helen Mirren will not be reprising the title role. While I love Prime Suspect, and main character Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, I have essentially no idea how this translation will work for American audiences.
First, I have a difficult time understanding how they'll bring Tennison over to the United States. As I wrote in the post I linked to above,
Her alcoholism and her sex life are part of this tapestry, and the show deals with them that way: Jane Tennison is a talented and emotional detective who happens to drink too much, and who has an abortion at one point, not an exploration of abortion or alcoholism with police work as the Lifetime Movie Device of the Week. And that's the way life usually is: the hard stuff is part of life, not the sum total of it.Making Tennison the sum total of her damage would be a grievous error, and one I'm all too afraid the remake will fall into. I don't know that there are many American actresses who wear unpleasantness as easily, and as compellingly, as Mirren, and so I think it'll be difficult to find a strong actress to do the role however it's written. This isn't some story of a sweet little Georgia peach who turns out to have a soft candy center after she kicks ass. And unlike almost every other procedural, Prime Suspect, as a concept, rests on Tennison's shoulders. There are adversaries (notably DS Bill Otley within her own squadroom), there are members of her team, but there is never a partner, a coequal. And there wasn't much in the way of relationships, either. The actress will have to be phenomenal (Michael Ausiello has some ideas, though I'm afraid they may be tainted by his Connie Britton obsession), and so will the writing.
Second, the season arcs are going to be extremely difficult. Like The Wire, Prime Suspect focuses on a single major crime or criminal conspiracy each season (with one exception). But unlike The Wire, the investigation hews much closer to the original crime: there aren't major digressions into other crimes, just into the politics of the police station and into Tennison's personal life. In a way, Prime Suspect was the perfect fit for the BBC's system of limited-espisode series. It spins out a case that would be solved in an hour on Law & Order and digs into it, and the emotions surrounding it. And it works quite well. But that kind of extension isn't what mass American audiences are used to. Whether they'll have the patience for it, and whether the cases become a little less soapy seems entirely up in the air.
Finally, to expand those plot arcs, NBC will have to find some good subcultures for Tennison to have to learn to navigate. I'm not talking about the dips Bones takes into different worlds, but real, intractable social divides. My favorite Prime Suspect series is the second one, in which Tennison has to deal with the racial politics in an Afro-Caribbean immigrant neighborhood (while also failing at race relations in her personal life). Whether the show writers have the guts to have their new Tennison learn lessons like that is an open question. But I hope they do. It's one of the things that make the original show worth watching.
I realize I'm demanding something that sounds like a faithful recreation, and perhaps, unwisely, I am. But Prime Suspect is good for structural reasons, not simply because Helen Mirren was then, and always will be, astonishing. If NBC wants something genuinely fantastic, rather than just another procedural with a gal in the lead detective's slot, it'd be wise to understand what made the original work so well.
Update: In comments, GayAsXmas suggests Edie Falco. Brilliant.
I Think My Taste Is Broken
I was joking with PostBourgie's blackink about this the day before Thanksgiving, because while I was downloading the new Lupe Fiasco mixtape, I was compulsively listening to Adam Lambert's "For Your Entertainment." I don't watch American Idol. I thought that track he did for 2012 was ludicrously screechy when Vulture posted it. And the video is straight ridiculous:
I mean, come on. The guy is so babyfaced that it's impossible to believe him as dungeon master at some underground club (if you want to pinch someone's cheek while they declaim "Take the pain / Take the pleasure / I'm the master of both," they're doing something wrong) much less that he's two years older than I am.
But in a fairly catchy, manufactured way, Lambert is doing a serviceable version of something Lady Gaga's also done: asserting his inscrutability, and his performance as a paid service, extremely early in his career, indeed with his debut single. The song's got a lot of sexy, dominant imagery: "I'm gonna hurt you real good, baby," etc. But all of that bravado winds up in a declaration that "...I'm here for your entertainment." The whole song relies on a sense that the audience asked for something they're not particularly prepared for. I actually think it's much less likely that Lambert is going to substantially challenge audiences in the ways Lady Gaga does visually (if not musically), and she's got a lot more emotional inflection to her songs than he does, hollering entirely aside.
Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" may be the best being-devoured-by-audience-demands song of the last couple of years, but it came after her life and her career had become a genuine mess, and after she'd already let audiences fairly deep inside both. Gaga started, instead, with songs about her unreadability, and used the paparazzi as a metaphor for romance. Lambert's (not to be too crude about it) topping from the bottom to a certain extent, laying out an agenda for what he hopes to do now that folks are looking to him for music. I don't know if it's an intentionally protective shell, or if it'll work for Gaga or Lambert, but it's certainly intriguing. And that's always good marketing.
Looking Back Not In Anger But In Sadness
I don't listen to the radio very much on a day-to-day basis. We live in the era of the iPod so much that I never even bothered to find a station in the DC area, leaving me lost when I hop in a ZipCar. But when I go home to visit my parents, I vacillate between KISS 108 and 104.5. And the latter almost always leads me to that inevitable moment when you revisit something from your past that you remember fondly, only to discover that it was probably always terrible. This visit around, it was Meredith Brooks' "Bitch," a blast from the ancient past, by which I mean 1997.
I can't say why, exactly, I retain such good memories of the song. I was thirteen when it came out, and hearing a woman howl "I'm a bitch!" on the radio seemed...daring, I suppose, a year before "Baby One More Time" hit airwaves and a new generation of young female singers began redefining those standards. But the lyrics are really kind of dreadful, and the message is worse. "I'm your hell, I'm your dream / I'm nothing in between." Really? Maybe it's just that at 25 I feel a little weary of all this nonsense, but do we really want to celebrate that kind of female mercuriality? Is being nice to a dude part of the time supposed to make up for treating him terribly the rest of the time? Is it authenticity or just an excuse to act out? And that whole "I'm a goddess on my knees," thing? Well, there are some meaningful ways to talk about the power of submission, but the whole thing comes across as semi-crude and just another one in a list of opposites. And that's the most sophisticated the song gets.
I'm not devastated or anything. But I'll admit to having perked up a little when I heard those opening chords. They just won't be the same next time.
Romeo Save Me
I am humiliated by how much I want to see "Letters to Juliet":
The movie really should push none of my buttons. I actually don't like Romeo & Juliet very much, mostly because I actually prefer the proposal scene in Henry V. How can a girl possibly resist something like this:
And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy...What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king.
Love that he's not sure she'll take him for himself so he offers himself up in an escalating list of titles.
Let's see what else. The Golden Cynical Dude in the trailer seems exceedingly dull. I know how the whole movie is going to end now, thanks to poor trailer decision-making. Amanda Seyfried is so absurdly peaches-and-cream and adorable that I think she might be a rom-com robot. And her conflicts with her pasta-making fiancee seem exceedingly manufactured.
And yet, I will likely see this on opening weekend. I am an enormous sucker for movies involving the exchange of letters, Vanessa Redgrave, second chances, and Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting. "I was a scarlet letter" spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation. Also, "this love is difficult, but it's real" is one of the sager one-sentence assessments of a relationship in a song ever. And it has one of those changing choruses, much like The Cranberries, which, in its shift from "it's just my imagination" to "it's not my imagination," is uplifting if you notice it.
All of which is to say that I am as susceptible to marketing to anyone else. I'm just capable of working myself into a disgruntled, elliptical, tryptophan-induced huff about it.
The movie really should push none of my buttons. I actually don't like Romeo & Juliet very much, mostly because I actually prefer the proposal scene in Henry V. How can a girl possibly resist something like this:
And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy...What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king.
Love that he's not sure she'll take him for himself so he offers himself up in an escalating list of titles.
Let's see what else. The Golden Cynical Dude in the trailer seems exceedingly dull. I know how the whole movie is going to end now, thanks to poor trailer decision-making. Amanda Seyfried is so absurdly peaches-and-cream and adorable that I think she might be a rom-com robot. And her conflicts with her pasta-making fiancee seem exceedingly manufactured.
And yet, I will likely see this on opening weekend. I am an enormous sucker for movies involving the exchange of letters, Vanessa Redgrave, second chances, and Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting. "I was a scarlet letter" spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation. Also, "this love is difficult, but it's real" is one of the sager one-sentence assessments of a relationship in a song ever. And it has one of those changing choruses, much like The Cranberries, which, in its shift from "it's just my imagination" to "it's not my imagination," is uplifting if you notice it.
All of which is to say that I am as susceptible to marketing to anyone else. I'm just capable of working myself into a disgruntled, elliptical, tryptophan-induced huff about it.
Alright, I'm Off for the Holiday
I've got siblings to hang out with, a grandmother to watch make pies, a middle school science teacher to visit, and Thanksgiving fixins to prepare. See you guys on Friday, on a perhaps semi-limited schedule.
The Possibilities Are Endless
This history of sci-fi tie-in novels by Charlie Jane Anders at io9 is pretty awe-inspiring, especially if you're like me and never really got over the closing of the store where you furtively browsed through Tales from Jabba's Palace. With, of course, a typically thoughtful conclusion:
And that leads to the other big development of the past decade or so — bigger authors turning to tie-in novels to try and make some extra cash or win new fans, or just have fun with a beloved icon. Greg Bear surprised some fans by announcing he was working on a Halo novel, a sequel to Fall Of Reach. Tobias Buckell also wrote a Halo novel, 2008's The Cole Protocol. Jeff VanderMeer wrote a Predator novel, South China Sea, also published in 2008. And of course, Michael Moorcock surprised everybody by announcing he was doing a Doctor Who novel.I think doing something like this would be fun, and actually extremely challenging. In fandoms, we've all got our particular interpretations of our characters that it's very hard to shake. Working within existing constraints to both express and bound those interpretations would be a fun project to take on, especially if you're getting paid actual money to do it and not just typing it on your parents' computer, printing it out, and sending it in the mail to friends. I am less dorky than I was when I did things like that. But only marginally.
Some professional writers are alarmed at the growth of sharecropping novels, where authors dabble in characters they didn't create for media conglomerates that keep most of the profits. But they're a growing slice of the publishing world — and at this point, you can't claim it's impossible to create meaningful, groundbreaking work in the tie-in novel world. As a whole, tie-in books may look like a shower of drek — but they've helped expand our understanding of some of science fiction's most iconic characters, and — perhaps — helped those big media properties become more interesting and thoughtful along the way.
If You're Going to Glorify God, Might As Well Make It Good
By now, I'm sure many of you have seen this really kind of astonishing "Christian Side Hug" video. If not, avail yourself, and my apologies:
As an attempt to appropriate the tropes of hip-hop to make a Christian point, this seems pretty much fail in terms of quality. The delivery's choppy, and the rappers seem out of breath about half the time. There's basically nothing, much less anything interesting, going on in the music. And the lyrics are just incredibly awkward. The chorus lines "I'm a rough rider / Filled up with Christ's love" seem a pretty classic example of "I do not think it means what you think it means." And asserting you know how Jesus hugged people is just dopey. It's really too bad. Religiously-inflected and religiously-directed pop music doesn't have to be this terrible.
Exhibit A in that argument absolutely has to be Rich Mullins, the Christian pop singer who died in a Jeep accident in 1997. Mullins made music that was explicitly devotional, but that also sounded great and had tight lyrics. I'm not Christian, but "Hold Me Jesus" is a solid piece of pop songwriting no matter your religion:
It would be good for devout Christians to make better popular music. It's just bad to get yourself dismissed on sheer ridiculousness: people actually have to engage with you when you make good art.
As an attempt to appropriate the tropes of hip-hop to make a Christian point, this seems pretty much fail in terms of quality. The delivery's choppy, and the rappers seem out of breath about half the time. There's basically nothing, much less anything interesting, going on in the music. And the lyrics are just incredibly awkward. The chorus lines "I'm a rough rider / Filled up with Christ's love" seem a pretty classic example of "I do not think it means what you think it means." And asserting you know how Jesus hugged people is just dopey. It's really too bad. Religiously-inflected and religiously-directed pop music doesn't have to be this terrible.
Exhibit A in that argument absolutely has to be Rich Mullins, the Christian pop singer who died in a Jeep accident in 1997. Mullins made music that was explicitly devotional, but that also sounded great and had tight lyrics. I'm not Christian, but "Hold Me Jesus" is a solid piece of pop songwriting no matter your religion:
It would be good for devout Christians to make better popular music. It's just bad to get yourself dismissed on sheer ridiculousness: people actually have to engage with you when you make good art.
Is Zach Braff To Blame For The State of Popular Music Today?
Chris Milam's piece to that effect at PopMatters is well-written, and I do find the argument that certain genres of popular music have gotten a little self-absorbed fairly convincing, but man is it problematic on a number of levels. First, I refuse to acknowledge that Zach Braff has nearly enough influence on popular culture to set us all off track. Second, I think Milam may be overinterpreting the scene from Garden State in which "Natalie Portman popped headphones onto Zach Braff’s head and said flatly, 'This song will change your life.'" Portman's character in the movie may have picked the wrong song to have her life changed by. But I don't actually think there's anything wrong with having your life lit up by music. And I don't know that a desire for music to transform you actually leads to the predominance of bland music. If anything, it ought to set the bar for music much higher. It should take a lot to blow your head off.
But it was actually the last paragraph of the piece that bothered me the most. Milam writes:
While these questions and a million others go unanswered on the radio waves and split-screens and message boards and blogs and Top 40 countdowns of this Bored New World, I’m still in the back of a smokeless room, waiting for someone, anyone with a kick drum and an amp, a vein in their neck and a thorn in their side, hungry and desperate and raw, to step up and sing something with a heartbeat from the Other America, where there’s something to prove and nothing to lose.It's more than slightly weird to me that Milam seems to think that the quality of music a person makes is determined by the class that they're a part of. And while he doesn't say it, his argument seems to be entirely determined by his analysis of rock. It seems fairly abundantly obvious to me that growing up basically middle-class didn't stop Kanye West from pushing hip-hop forward, and it didn't deny Beyonce her voice. And there's something seriously problematic with declaring that the rock that comes out of poorer communities is somehow more authentic, inherently better, than rock that comes from anywhere else. Fetishizing other people's disadvantage in the name of your own enjoyment of art doesn't mean you're empowering them. You're putting them on a pedestal, and demanding that they not be allowed to get down.
Good LORD
It's like a Judd Apatow movie got stuck in a blender with a movie about a couple of Magical Africans:
Joshua Goldin, who directed, and whoever agents Michael K. Williams and Sanaa Lathan deserved to be collectively smacked in the face for putting these fantastic actors in the Magical Africans role. I am most seriously displeased.
Joshua Goldin, who directed, and whoever agents Michael K. Williams and Sanaa Lathan deserved to be collectively smacked in the face for putting these fantastic actors in the Magical Africans role. I am most seriously displeased.
The TwiHards Strike Back
You know what the great thing about the internet is? Ask for TwiHard reaction to a piece you write about sparkly vampires, and thou shalt receive. I just want to address a couple of points in Noah Berlatsky's (And, by the way, his Hooded Utilitarian blog has fascinating observations about comics, musics and various and sundry other things. Go check it out.) comments about my piece (and about me!). First, he writes:
Then, Noah writes:
And finally, he gets to me! (This is so much fun you guys!), and provides a good example of the first rule of argument, Thou Shalt Not Mug Thine Self, and its sub-tenet, Particularly Not By Making Baseless Assertions About Other People:
As for the assertion that "I'm kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family." First, it's a mistake again to conflate the abstract concepts of justice and equality as they exist in fairy tales with contemporary politics. And one of the things I find fascinating about contemporary fairy tales of all stripes is the ways they've managed to make the condition of societies and of individual marriages co-equal. In a lot of contemporary fairy tales, the main characters have to establish peace or societal equilibrium in order to craft a space where a marriage can thrive. In the Enchanted Forest novels, Cimorene and Mendanbar have to prevent war between wizards, dragons, and the Enchanted Forest. In doing that, they fall in love and set the stage for a productive marriage. And when Mendanbar is kidnapped, getting him back is both a matter of politics and family for Cimorene: the safety of the kingdom and the safety of her husband are one and the same. In Tamora Pierce's Lioness quartet, not one, not two, but four couples come together under conditions of war. Saving Tortall is the process through which all of them fall in love. When they've defeated Duke Roger, all four couples marry, and settle down to productive work in the kingdom together. In Wise Child, Juniper and Colman, the same sorcery that infects the kingdom is what tears apart Juniper and Finbar. And in The Mists of Avalon, the love that binds couples is integral to the strength of the kingdom. I actually think it exalts love to tie it to larger societal concerns, rather than to isolate it entirely from society, and it makes for wider-ranging and more interesting stories, too.
Second, I'm a non-partisan reporter. I don't have politics (she says sarcastically). Although, I am extremely excited that my very generous employer is going to give me at least 8 and as many as 10 weeks of paid parental leave when I do eventually have children (something I'm really looking forward to someday) so I can be both a good mother and a good employee! This whole "feminists hate the family" canard is tired, people. And it has zip to do with my textual analysis, either.
I'm a big fan of girls and women, being one and all. And while I believe we all get our choices, I think they have to be genuine choices. From the day Bella showed up in Forks and Edward got a whiff of her tasty blood, she's toast: she never seriously considers any other path, except for an instant when Jacob gives her a serious smooch. Bella, even though she's fictional, stands, like the rest of us, on the shoulders of giants, like Elizabeth Bennet, like Morgaine,whose fictional lives provided templates for rebellion in their own time. If what we choose to do with those fictional struggles is to ignore them, to fail to build on them, that strikes me as more than a little sad. We deserve the best stories we can possibly get.
She's constantly risking her life for her loved ones, either by attempting to sacrifice herself (as in the first book), or by racing off to Italy to save Edward from evil vampires (as in the second) or by using her magical powers to save her entire family in the last book. And, though you wouldn't know it from reading Rosenberg's summary, Bella actually has to practice intensely and at length to master those powers, so her final success is shown to be as much about determination and commitment as about innate skill.Actually, I've got a whole section in the piece about Bella's adventures and powers. I'm aware they're there, especially since Meyer spends so much time telling me how amazing Bella is after she gets vampired. And I think Noah's actually mistaken: when Bella finally uses her powers, she exerts them much farther than she's ever been able to in her practice sessions, which kind of defeats the point if you're trying to make an argument about "determination and commitment." (Also, to the point Noah makes in a paragraph I pull out below about Bella being more powerful than Edward, Meyer seems to establish pretty clearly that that's just because she's a new vampire, not that it'll be permanent.) The point, though, is that her quests are all internally-focused. There is no larger world beyond family and Forks in the Twilight books, and if I were immortal, I think I might get kind of bored with that after a while. But then, I was never the kind of girl who could stare at a guy's face for that long.
Then, Noah writes:
The real issue is, as Rosenberg says, that Bella's actions are all inspired by her love for family and friends, rather than by a desire to save entire kingdoms and uphold "justice and freedom." Of course, by this standard, Elizabeth Bennett isn't much of a role model either—why, she never saves anyone! And what about Jane Eyre, refusing to sacrifice herself by going off to do mission work among the poor and heathen and benighted. What kind of model for young girls is that?Not much of one! I think Noah forgets that I'm writting a critique of Twilight within the realm of fairy tale, and about why it's a step backwards within the innovations of that genre. But I absolutely agree that I would be completely and utterly freaked out if teenage girls wanted to emulate Jane Eyre. Less so if they wanted to be little Lizzy Bennets, since she's an intellectual and stands up to class prejudice (to the extent capable within her constraints of course). But I do think those books are regularly read with the acknowledgment that a) they're about an era when women's choices were substantially limited, b) frequently read in a context like a classroom where those roles can be discussed, and c) presented social criticisms in the times they were written. Twilight is neither set in another era (although it's curiously removed from the technology of today) nor is it mostly read in a critical context like a classroom. And while I recognize that many, many Twilight readers can distinguish fact from fiction, I do think that some of the book's themes demand a critical context, particularly the obsessiveness of the love affairs. Perhaps it's just me, but I think it's important, especially with young girls, to have a conversation about the fact that sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, if he leaves you, he is never coming back. I don't think this is a trifling point: Bella never experiences permanent romantic loss, something a lot of contemporary fairy tales have managed to incorporate into the genre, and that's a genuinely valuable lesson in a society where most people date before they marry.
And finally, he gets to me! (This is so much fun you guys!), and provides a good example of the first rule of argument, Thou Shalt Not Mug Thine Self, and its sub-tenet, Particularly Not By Making Baseless Assertions About Other People:
Rosenberg might as well just come out and say, "You know what? I don't really like romance—and, on top of that, I'm kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family." Rosenberg accuses Meyer of turning Bella into a "metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower." But she's not a princess in a tower; she's a wife in a family, and one who at the end is not only equal to her husband in strength and magical powers, but actually superior to him. That hardly seems rabidly anti-feminist to me-but I like Pride and Prejudice too, so what do I know.Actually, I love romance and romance novels. Particularly Julia Quinn's, where heroines regularly do things like write anonymous scandal sheets, go on ill-advised quests for diamonds, find alternate homes for abused daughters, help veterans overcome war trauma, and are mistaken for tempestuous Spanish spies in addition to falling insanely in love. I just don't see why those two things are incompatible. In fact, there are a huge number of romances where the protagonists fall in love by working together towards a common end, a process that tends to be a good proving-ground for common values and for proving trust and committment. And I love Pride and Prejudice just as I thank G-d every day that I live in a country and in a time where entails on property don't exist and I'm allowed to have a career.
As for the assertion that "I'm kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family." First, it's a mistake again to conflate the abstract concepts of justice and equality as they exist in fairy tales with contemporary politics. And one of the things I find fascinating about contemporary fairy tales of all stripes is the ways they've managed to make the condition of societies and of individual marriages co-equal. In a lot of contemporary fairy tales, the main characters have to establish peace or societal equilibrium in order to craft a space where a marriage can thrive. In the Enchanted Forest novels, Cimorene and Mendanbar have to prevent war between wizards, dragons, and the Enchanted Forest. In doing that, they fall in love and set the stage for a productive marriage. And when Mendanbar is kidnapped, getting him back is both a matter of politics and family for Cimorene: the safety of the kingdom and the safety of her husband are one and the same. In Tamora Pierce's Lioness quartet, not one, not two, but four couples come together under conditions of war. Saving Tortall is the process through which all of them fall in love. When they've defeated Duke Roger, all four couples marry, and settle down to productive work in the kingdom together. In Wise Child, Juniper and Colman, the same sorcery that infects the kingdom is what tears apart Juniper and Finbar. And in The Mists of Avalon, the love that binds couples is integral to the strength of the kingdom. I actually think it exalts love to tie it to larger societal concerns, rather than to isolate it entirely from society, and it makes for wider-ranging and more interesting stories, too.
Second, I'm a non-partisan reporter. I don't have politics (she says sarcastically). Although, I am extremely excited that my very generous employer is going to give me at least 8 and as many as 10 weeks of paid parental leave when I do eventually have children (something I'm really looking forward to someday) so I can be both a good mother and a good employee! This whole "feminists hate the family" canard is tired, people. And it has zip to do with my textual analysis, either.
I'm a big fan of girls and women, being one and all. And while I believe we all get our choices, I think they have to be genuine choices. From the day Bella showed up in Forks and Edward got a whiff of her tasty blood, she's toast: she never seriously considers any other path, except for an instant when Jacob gives her a serious smooch. Bella, even though she's fictional, stands, like the rest of us, on the shoulders of giants, like Elizabeth Bennet, like Morgaine,whose fictional lives provided templates for rebellion in their own time. If what we choose to do with those fictional struggles is to ignore them, to fail to build on them, that strikes me as more than a little sad. We deserve the best stories we can possibly get.
The Gift and the Curse, The Venom and the Serum*
I don't know what's in the water, but so many people are writing so much I like so much about the emotions behind hip-hop that it's making my head spin. Ta-Nehisi writes:
It's incredibly dorky, but I have OutKast's "The Whole World" as my ringtone. Every time that jangle songs that "The whole world loves it when you don't get down / And the whole world loves it when you make that sound" it's a reminder of how all-encompassing our obsession with our popular cultures are. I try to keep that before me in all this writing.
*Lyrics from Lupe Fiasco's "Conflict Diamonds," a remix of "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," so good it makes me weep:
In my memoir, I talk about a buddy who, whenever he was about to get jumped, use to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend. It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that whenever I hear society mocking the mask which young black boys don in urban America. We manufacture the conditions, and then rail at kids for creating a code of survival in response.And DJ Stylus expounds on his arguments about hip-hop culture in a long comment on my post about communality, humility, and hip-hop. I'm sorry if I'm belaboring this stuff, I am. It's just that it gets at so much of why I blog about culture, and not policy, or sports, or cooking, or any of the other things I care about quite a bit. To me, culture is where we figure out and express who we are. Whether it's in selfishness or in search of courage, in communing with the whole or in full expression of your very unique self, how we react to art says a huge amount about the sum of ourselves. Something like Twilight matters a lot not because it's some silly little trend, but because no matter how poorly written it may be, or no matter how unserious a lot of the conversation around it may be, anything that gets that many people to buy movie tickets in a single weekend is a serious business, that says serious things about our desires.
In my time, hip-hop was an art-form based on that code. If you were a kid living in a city, and thus acclimated to the rules of that city, if you spent time trying to understand which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends, in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in other words, you lived with the threat of random violence, then hip-hop was the language of your life.
It's incredibly dorky, but I have OutKast's "The Whole World" as my ringtone. Every time that jangle songs that "The whole world loves it when you don't get down / And the whole world loves it when you make that sound" it's a reminder of how all-encompassing our obsession with our popular cultures are. I try to keep that before me in all this writing.
*Lyrics from Lupe Fiasco's "Conflict Diamonds," a remix of "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," so good it makes me weep:
Pirates of the Caribbean: A Minor Retrospective
I am deeply susceptible to weekend movie marathons on cable channels. I can lose an entire day watching Frodo and Sam head to Mount Doom and Aragorn get around to being comfortable being King in between commercial breaks. As someone who reads quickly, and who frequently multi-tasks while watching television or movies, I'm often happy to dive into the same art multiple times, knowing that while I have a high comprehension rate, I'll probably find something new each time. And so, on a lazy weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find my Saturday night plans made for me, in the form of a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon.
I'd forgotten how much fun the movies are. They're wildly inconsistent in quality, especially as the double-crosses and the plot twists mount,. But Gore Verbinski and the writers do an impressive job of creating plot arcs, starting the series with Elizabeth Swann singing a "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" and ending it with her son singing the same thing, and having Jack Sparrow enter Port Royal on one boat not befitting his ambition, and giving him the means to leave on a similarly unworthy vessel. The sheer number of extremely good actors slumming it in what is basically broad entertainment is marvelous. One of the great tragedies of our moviegoing times, I think, is that we think big, enthusiastic, popular popcorn flicks are not the proper place for the serious actors of our era. (There are some exceptions, like Sigourney Weaver, for which thank goodness for James Cameron for seeing her action-heroine potential.) Folks like John Turturro or John Voight will turn up, winking and mugging, at the edges of the Transformers franchise, but the business is left to the likes of Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf, with predictable results. How much better is it to have a big, juicy, special-effects picture where Geoffrey Rush, Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp are all strutting their not-inconsiderable stuff, having fun, and giving us a gift while doing it?
And the movies deserve a lot of credit for establishing the enormous bankability of Johnny Depp's delightful brand of weirdness. If anything, I think the series' singular flaw is in backing off from the sexual menace Depp projects in the first movie, when he wants Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), and she's unable to admit that she wants anyone (including Orlando Bloom and Depp) for a great deal of the flick. By the third movie, the sexual chemistry between Depp and Knightley's been reduced to a joke, partially in the services of the plot (Jack Sparrow goes slightly mad, she winds up with the blacksmith's apprentice-turned-immortal-pirate captain), but not really excusably. If Elizabeth can go from proper colonial lady to pirate queen, why can't she take up with Jack Sparrow?
There's something nice about the fact that Depp and Rush's characters will be perpetually chasing after each other, grappling for possession of the Black Pearl. And it might actually work for subsequent movies, if Jack hadn't been reduced to something of a hallucinating cliche: at the end of the third movie, he's back on a dock with a dinghy instead of a true ship making allusions to penis size. It's meant to be a return to where he started, but somehow, Sparrow's arrival in Port Royal on the mast of a sinking boat had a hell of a lot more dignity and style. But by the end of the series, all the serious emotional energy has shifted to Knightley and Bloom, who can't exactly bear the freight of it. For movies that make the (factually dubious but in certain scenes emotionally compelling) case that piracy represented a kind of freedom, it's unfortunate to reduce the leading pirate so much at the end. If he decided not to come back for subsequent movies, I could hardly blame him.
Not To Belabor The Twilight Thing...
But I just had to share this fantastic picture Alexandra Gutierrez, blogfriend and American Prospect rockstar, made for me:
Now that's a sparkly vampire.
Also, I would LOVE seeing Blade face off against the Cullens.
Strange Days
After his shows this weekend, DJ Stylus posted what I think is an important and incisive blog post about the atmosphere in the different audiences, and what it means for how attitudes about--and ownership of--hip-hop are changing:
And ultimately, I think that's really what our reactions to music should be about. Does it make you want to dance in public, to overcome your fear of awkwardness and aloneness so you can move? Does it push you faster on the treadmill or the trail? Does it make you look up as you walk down an entirely familiar street and see things differently? I'm fine with letting musicians themselves be as esoteric and professional as they want. But I judge music largely by how it makes me feel. Which is part of the reason I'm not really a music critic. But I also just think music needs to be about joy, whether communal or personal, not about showing off--especially when you've got nothing to show.
I was reminded that when it comes to hip-hop these days, most people have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
Not exactly breaking news, I know.
When I was younger and wore hip-hop like a shield of identity, I’d be quick to check you on hip-hop dogma, then I’d strike a b-boy pose. Now that I’m getting older, I’ve started to feel like something was wrong with me. Like I’m the fuddy-duddy who refuses to change with the times. Talking to folks, reading these websites and being in the DJ booth trenches with my comrades are making me realize it’s not me....
You don’t have to have the same experience in order to love hip-hop. You don’t have to spend 20 years and tens of thousands of dollars collecting records. You don’t have make a pilgrimage to the Bronx or perfect a six-step. I understand being zealous about hip-hop. The difference between my experience and the what I’m seeing today is the lack of humility about what you DON’T know.
For instance. I love jazz. I started learning about it in high school. I’ve been to a lot of shows and collected a lot of music. I’ve even performed with jazz musicians. But I’d never critique an expert jazz musician without knowing what I was talking about backwards and forwards. So out of all the assholes that regularly give us grief in the DJ booth, why are the most rabid ones almost always on some hip-hop related bullshit?Now, I cop to having been in the audience that was "more diverse, significantly younger, and only really moved by the same hits that everyone knows," although I was making a fool of myself bopping around in the corner by the speakers, trying to avoid running into a crowd of Asian kids and getting in the way of the break dancers, no matter whether I recognized the song or not. Stylus's post, and my own reaction, reminded me of the great line in Bull Durham when Kevin Costner, as the experienced veteran, tells Tim Robbins, as the cocky rookie, "You gotta play this game with fear and arrogance." My approach to hip-hop has always been the reverse of that: I come to the genre out of great love and bearing the weight of great humility. I am willing to like almost anything. The only things I'd claim to truly know well are Cee-Lo and OutKast's ouvre's, and Eminem's. I have a LOT of lyrics memorized, but that's only because I have a head for words, no matter what form they come in. I'm not so great at recognizing samples. But I will dance to anything.
And ultimately, I think that's really what our reactions to music should be about. Does it make you want to dance in public, to overcome your fear of awkwardness and aloneness so you can move? Does it push you faster on the treadmill or the trail? Does it make you look up as you walk down an entirely familiar street and see things differently? I'm fine with letting musicians themselves be as esoteric and professional as they want. But I judge music largely by how it makes me feel. Which is part of the reason I'm not really a music critic. But I also just think music needs to be about joy, whether communal or personal, not about showing off--especially when you've got nothing to show.
This Is How to Spend Your Holiday
Watch The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and For A Few Dollars More streaming on YouTube. Of the three movies in the astonishing Sergio Leon-Clint Eastwood Man With No Name trilogy, only The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is streamable on Netflix. Putting them up on YouTube is a genius move for MGM. It's a way to make use of--and I'm sure make some substantial money off of, given the big flashy ads that are airing before the movie and studded around the screen--a part of their back catalogue that everyone ought to have seen, but that not everybody has, and that may not be generating a huge amount of revenue on DVD. It invites casual viewing: stuck in an airport with a laptop or a smart phone? Now you're all set. Seriously. Fantastic idea by MGM. I hope more studios follow suit. It would be great to see trilogies, or movies that fit together like this, put out there for a set period of time, and made into mini-events.
Personal History: High School Hip-Hop Edition
So, y'all know I like hip-hop a fair bit. But I don't know that I've ever explained to you guys why. So in honor of DJ Stylus's show tonight, I figured I'd make a full confession.
See, back in the day, I was a competetive high school policy debater. Policy debate, for those of you not familiar, involves talking incomprehensibly fast about various facets of a topic assigned to you at the end of the previous school year, usually with the end goal of demonstrating that either your policy proposal would prevent a lot of nuclear wars or that the other person's policy proposal would lead to a lot of nuclear wars. Either that or destroy the philosophical frameworks by which we know ourselves. Or whatever. This video is a pretty good summary. What you really need to know though was that when I was in high school I, and a bunch of guys in my graduating class, did an activity that involved talking extremely quickly and posturing aggressively. Is it any wonder we found our way to hip-hop? Of course, the stuff we found our way to was of sublimely mixed quality.
"Forgot About Dre" was on the high end of the scale:
Em could flow, not almost as fast as we could talk, but in the ballpark. And "Nowadays, everbody wanna talk like they got something to say / But nothing comes out when they move their lips / Just a bunch of gibberish" was the perfect insult for a bunch of hyperverbal teenagers to toss at each other. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but some hackers put together a fake CNN page purporting to report that Eminem had died in a car crash my junior year. I thought my debate partner at the time was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, Eminem survived, and my partner did too. Our obsession with that song though left me with a life-long weakness for guys who can rhyme really, really fast. I listen to far more Twista than anyone should, as a result.
Then, there was the psych-up stuff, most notably, Nelly's "Number One":
This song isn't really defensible, but I like it anyway. It's super-outdated, with the references to Sprint and Motorola's networks, "some internet chat line," etc. It's totally narratively and argumentatively incoherent. It's weirdly defensive for a song about how awesome Nelly theoretically is. The facial bandaid was the stupidest accessory ever. And yet the chorus "What does it take to be number one? / Two is not a winner / And three nobody remembers" is a bracing rebuke the the "we're all winners" educational psychology a lot of us got fed in school. In debate, when you lost, it was brutal. This was a way to remind yourself of that, and to prepare yourself for it.
And then, for some reason, some of our coaches hooked us up with The Gourds cover of "Gin & Juice," which really, I think you have to concede, is incredibly funny:
I don't know that this song had any major impact on my hip-hop habits, which is probably a good thing, since it's incredibly goofy. I don't really like party rap that much, just because I think it tends to be less lyrically creative and easily slides into misogyny. But this is classic.
Fortunately, I got exposed to better stuff. I remember hearing OutKast's "Ms. Jackson" on the radio for the first time as an almost spiritual experience, one that kicked off a life-long love of Dirty South rap.
And I will forever owe my drama teacher, who made us watch Slam, and introduced me to Saul Stacey Williams (and also stars Sonja Sohn). This blew my head off:
I mean literally. I cannot begin to explain what a huge impact "Amethyst Rock" had I mean. I knew a fair amount about the mechanics of politics, thanks to the debate team, but "the feds is also plotting me /
they're trying to imprison my astrology / put my stars behind bars, my stars and stripes / using blood-splattered banners as nationalist kites" was one of the most passionately political sentences I'd ever heard in my entire life. Ditto for Jessica Care Moore's "Black Statue of Liberty":
Somewhere along the way, I lost my copy of Listen Up!, this fantastic collection of slam poetry, but I still have Williams' She, which is one of the best documents about love and sex I know.
Such a mix of stuff, I know. But listening to and reading all this stuff again this week really swept me back into what it was like to be 15, 16, 17. I don't apologize for liking the worst of this stuff, but it's all tangled up with powerful memories for me now. For better or for worse, this was one of the places where I started, and a powerful force in the directions I began to grow.
See, back in the day, I was a competetive high school policy debater. Policy debate, for those of you not familiar, involves talking incomprehensibly fast about various facets of a topic assigned to you at the end of the previous school year, usually with the end goal of demonstrating that either your policy proposal would prevent a lot of nuclear wars or that the other person's policy proposal would lead to a lot of nuclear wars. Either that or destroy the philosophical frameworks by which we know ourselves. Or whatever. This video is a pretty good summary. What you really need to know though was that when I was in high school I, and a bunch of guys in my graduating class, did an activity that involved talking extremely quickly and posturing aggressively. Is it any wonder we found our way to hip-hop? Of course, the stuff we found our way to was of sublimely mixed quality.
"Forgot About Dre" was on the high end of the scale:
Em could flow, not almost as fast as we could talk, but in the ballpark. And "Nowadays, everbody wanna talk like they got something to say / But nothing comes out when they move their lips / Just a bunch of gibberish" was the perfect insult for a bunch of hyperverbal teenagers to toss at each other. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but some hackers put together a fake CNN page purporting to report that Eminem had died in a car crash my junior year. I thought my debate partner at the time was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, Eminem survived, and my partner did too. Our obsession with that song though left me with a life-long weakness for guys who can rhyme really, really fast. I listen to far more Twista than anyone should, as a result.
Then, there was the psych-up stuff, most notably, Nelly's "Number One":
This song isn't really defensible, but I like it anyway. It's super-outdated, with the references to Sprint and Motorola's networks, "some internet chat line," etc. It's totally narratively and argumentatively incoherent. It's weirdly defensive for a song about how awesome Nelly theoretically is. The facial bandaid was the stupidest accessory ever. And yet the chorus "What does it take to be number one? / Two is not a winner / And three nobody remembers" is a bracing rebuke the the "we're all winners" educational psychology a lot of us got fed in school. In debate, when you lost, it was brutal. This was a way to remind yourself of that, and to prepare yourself for it.
And then, for some reason, some of our coaches hooked us up with The Gourds cover of "Gin & Juice," which really, I think you have to concede, is incredibly funny:
I don't know that this song had any major impact on my hip-hop habits, which is probably a good thing, since it's incredibly goofy. I don't really like party rap that much, just because I think it tends to be less lyrically creative and easily slides into misogyny. But this is classic.
Fortunately, I got exposed to better stuff. I remember hearing OutKast's "Ms. Jackson" on the radio for the first time as an almost spiritual experience, one that kicked off a life-long love of Dirty South rap.
And I will forever owe my drama teacher, who made us watch Slam, and introduced me to Saul Stacey Williams (and also stars Sonja Sohn). This blew my head off:
I mean literally. I cannot begin to explain what a huge impact "Amethyst Rock" had I mean. I knew a fair amount about the mechanics of politics, thanks to the debate team, but "the feds is also plotting me /
they're trying to imprison my astrology / put my stars behind bars, my stars and stripes / using blood-splattered banners as nationalist kites" was one of the most passionately political sentences I'd ever heard in my entire life. Ditto for Jessica Care Moore's "Black Statue of Liberty":
Somewhere along the way, I lost my copy of Listen Up!, this fantastic collection of slam poetry, but I still have Williams' She, which is one of the best documents about love and sex I know.
Such a mix of stuff, I know. But listening to and reading all this stuff again this week really swept me back into what it was like to be 15, 16, 17. I don't apologize for liking the worst of this stuff, but it's all tangled up with powerful memories for me now. For better or for worse, this was one of the places where I started, and a powerful force in the directions I began to grow.
The Twilight Smackdown
Dear Bella Swann, This guy vampires better than you. Love, Alyssa
So, after burning my brain out on the Twilight books, writing you guys lots of cryptic posts about them, and convincing the good friend who lent me the novels that I am using her beloved Edward Cullen for eeeevil (sorry, Alison), the Atlantic piece I promised y'all about the oddly passive magic of Twilight (and and with lots of references to Cimorene, Wise Child, Juniper, and Morgaine thrown in for contrast) is here! I had an incredible amount of fun writing it (and re-reading all the books that I loved from my childhod and adolsecence that informed it), and I am not-so-secretly hoping this will provoke mountains of ire. After all, I need a better internet controversy out there than the suggestion I want to smut up the Harry Potter books. I have been practicing my Morpheus-style "bring it" gesture all week. So come on, Twi-Hards. Let's dance.
Where I'll Be On Friday
It's not often that I get to endorse awesome pop cultural things that my friends are doing, since, um, I work in Washington, DC, and most of my buddies are policy wonks. But on Friday, at 9pm or thereabouts, I'll be taking my skinny-jeans-and-vintage-bekicked self over to the Backstage at the Black Cat to see DJ Stylus spin old-school hip-hop with DJ Dredd. He's promised to play some OutKast to satisfy my sweet tooth, but the evening as a whole will be more throwbacky than that. Check out these mixes from their last set, if you're curious. Cover's $7. Dress is fly. Maybe I'll see you there.
In Memoriam
It was awful to hear the news this morning that Jeanne-Claude, Christo's wife and collaborator, has died. The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's exhibition of 7,500 saffron curtained gates in Central Park, ranks among the greatest artistic experiences of my life: I was in college in New Haven then, had very little money, and went to New York two days in a row to see them, because having seen them once, I couldn't not go back. Every bit of this marvelous New York profile of the couple is worth reading, but I particularly love this:
She will be missed.The Christos make no secret that their traveling show—from the political jockeying to the public debates to events like the signing of an original drawing, such as the one they’ve given to New York—is all part of what they consider their grand work of art. Whether this process is a critique of art and bureaucracy or simply great public theater, it’s an undeniably canny way to conduct business. “Keep in mind that the money we spend is our money,” says Jeanne-Claude. “If we made a choice of buying a big estate in Aspen, Colorado, or to cover myself in diamonds, we can also do it. Because it’s our money. But it would be very uncomfortable to be covered in diamonds.”
The Mordant Wisdom of Edward Gorey
Jezebel's review of the reissue of The Recently Deflowered Girl is hilarious, as is the guide to post-loss-of-virginity-etiquette,written by Edward Gorey under one of his pen names, itself. I know Gorey is a Goth icon, and his illustrations and visual style have become enormously popular. But I'll always think of him first and foremost as an incredibly sharp humorist. The man was an alchemist, especially when it came to sex, which is fascinating, considering he presented himself as essentially asexual (The Curious Sofa comes highly recommended). I mean, a story about a girl who ends up having sex with her mischievous pen pal sounds only mildly entertaining when I put it like that, right? But in Gorey's hands, it becomes this:
Deflowered By Proxy
You fall in love with pen pal, Walter, English turf accountant, whom you have never met. By correspondence, wedding date is set. Two days before marriage, he cables that he can't leave London due to pressing business deal. Instead, according to cable, he has made arrangements for proxy marriage and his friend, Howard, on 84th Street, will stand up for him. You invite Howard to your apartment following ceremony. After deflowerment, you say, "Incidentally, Howard..." He ways, "There is no Howard. I'm Walter, your pen pal."
You say: "Of course, silly. I recognized your handwriting on the marriage certificate."
When married to practical joker, it is always delightfully feminine to go along with the gag.The whole scenario is absurd, of course (as all the scenarios in The Recently Deflowered Girl are), but as with most great humor, the genius lies in the details. Walter is a "turf accountant"? And I would love to meet the girl who, after having sex for the first time, begins a sentence "Incidentally, Howard." The anachronistic touches actually make the story a lot funnier, too, since something like this could never happen in a time of social media, but that sort of feels like a loss. Gorey is wildly un-PC, too--something like "Deflowerment By Chinese Detective" would never pass muster today. But it's all an extremely effective part of Gorey's ghoulishness: he's a warped mirror, the silver cracking, on both the past, and our own strange brains.
Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves
After Spencer Ackerman publicly suggested that I need to start playing Hood Internet mixtapes at my entertainments, and the Twitterverse exploded about it, I downloaded the latest tape yesterday, and it really is that good. One track particularly stood out, one with a light female vocal snarling "I might like you better if we slept together." The gal involved is Philly rapper Amanda Blank. The video for "Might Like You Better" is pretty rad:
But I'm particularly digging "A Love Song" (the track has some blank space at the end):
Her flow reminds me a little bit of Estelle, whom I adore. She's got serious hip-hop cred (having worked with Spank Rock, Ghostface, etc.). And this is a really sweet ode to romance. We can always use more ladies in hip-hop. Check her out.
But I'm particularly digging "A Love Song" (the track has some blank space at the end):
Her flow reminds me a little bit of Estelle, whom I adore. She's got serious hip-hop cred (having worked with Spank Rock, Ghostface, etc.). And this is a really sweet ode to romance. We can always use more ladies in hip-hop. Check her out.
Oh, Joan Didion
V.L. Hartmann ran into Joan Didion on the street. I was in a class that got a rambling, multipage email from her that didn't remotely answer the question we'd asked her. But that's not the only reason I feel differently about Didion than Hartmann does, and lots of other young women do. I like Didion. I really do. The end of "Goodbye To All That"is an absolute masterpiece of description. Her political reporting is good, and unique: she's not necessarily amazing on policy, but she's wonderfully tart about the theater of it all. Despite all of this, I don't worship Didion, or even love her.
And I think this may be the reason why. I've always been uncomfortable with the "writers are always selling somebody out" line in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the credit Didion seems to get for saying it. An announcement like that isn't actually emotionally honest. It's a declaration of your own cleverness. Didion is telling you in advance that she will ruin you, and you will give in to her anyway. To be fair, I think Didion has somewhat more empathy than that: she's not predatory. Even if The Year of Magical Thinking is a somewhat idealized view of her marriage, she clearly loved her husband. She can be good at capturing boredom and venality and futility. But Didion is profoundly not a joyful writer, and I have a hard time with that. I think Anne Lamott is a much less strong prose stylist and reporter than Didion is. But her writing, about terror, and fear, and absolution, and grace is open in a way Didion's isn't. I read Didion to leanr. But I read Lamott to feel.
Carried Away
The Greatness of The Constant Gardner
Man, did this movie, about a British diplomat stationed in Africa and his younger, crusading wife, and what happens after her murder, rock me when I saw it in college. GayAsXmas drops knowledge on why it's so great:
Central to the success of these performances is the structure of the film, which moves in and out of different time lines, beautifully putting us in the headspace of Justin as he thinks back over moments he shared with Tess. This isn't simply a stylistic device to dress up a formulaic thriller, but a technical choice which raises the emotional pitch of the story. We discover Tess with Justin - our own prejudices about her choices are overturned as his own are. There wasn't a moment when I wasn't emotionally engaged. The tragedy of the film is not just the death of Tess and Justin, but that Justin only realises the true depth of his love for Tess at the moment of his own murder.I'd add that it's a stunningly gorgeous film, full of hot color and imagery that isn't afraid to be quite disturbing. The John le Carre book on which it's based is terrific, too, even if you prefer the Smiley stuff, which I do. In a weird way, it might be well-paired with the (exceedingly underrated) Lord of War, an acid comedy featuring Nic Cage in crazy mode as a Ukranian immigrant arms dealer, Jared Leto as his drug-addicted younger brother, and Ethan Hawke as a deludedly nobel federal agent. A scene in the movie where Cage's character, handcuffed in place, watches as a group of Africans strips the plane in which he's smuggling goods is one of the most gorgeous shots I've ever watched, and certainly the best use of speeding up time as an artistic technique.
Enduring Love
Notwithstanding the fact that Andrea Zimmerman picks Ned Nickerson (Nancy Drew's deeply boring boyfriend) as a literary character she'd sleep with, I find the whole project that led her to that conclusion kind of odd. Perhaps it's just me (in fact, it's certainly just me) but I have a hard time getting invested enough in literary characters to think about them making the leap into my life--or to wish I was leaping into theirs. There have been some exceptions--I badly wanted to be a Jedi Knight so I could wield awesome powers and flirt with Luke Skywalker for a humiliatingly long period of my preadolescence. But I have a hard time understanding, for example, the rabid pursuit of Robert Pattinson. What has the world come to when little girls are asking this actor, who stands in for a vampire as one of his jobs, to bite them becaue they want him to be Edward Cullen that badly? What has come to when folks want to devour artists like that at all?
GayAsXmas and I were talking about that weirdly possessive sense folks have about art yesterday afternoon, and he brought up the example of Buffy fans who savaged the show's writers when Tara died. Neither of us could understand it. "I think part of loving art is submitting to being wounded by it," I told him. I do believe that. There's art I've had to stop engaging with because it was too much for me, notably Battlestar Galactica, which I was unable finish (for reasons that have to do with more than the simple power of the show). But I don't know that I've ever been angry with an artist for hurting me, or wished things could turn out differently for reasons other than artistic ones. I may be a bit...control-oriented, let's say, about my work and my life. When I listen to music, or read a book, or go to a movie, or watch television, it a willing surrender of that hard-won control. I tend to think that mode of experience is more rewarding. And it's also a way to avoid being wounded and disappointed.
GayAsXmas and I were talking about that weirdly possessive sense folks have about art yesterday afternoon, and he brought up the example of Buffy fans who savaged the show's writers when Tara died. Neither of us could understand it. "I think part of loving art is submitting to being wounded by it," I told him. I do believe that. There's art I've had to stop engaging with because it was too much for me, notably Battlestar Galactica, which I was unable finish (for reasons that have to do with more than the simple power of the show). But I don't know that I've ever been angry with an artist for hurting me, or wished things could turn out differently for reasons other than artistic ones. I may be a bit...control-oriented, let's say, about my work and my life. When I listen to music, or read a book, or go to a movie, or watch television, it a willing surrender of that hard-won control. I tend to think that mode of experience is more rewarding. And it's also a way to avoid being wounded and disappointed.
Mending Bones (For emilisha and Leee)
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Incognita Nom de Plume.
At the beginning of this television season, while I was curious about what would happen with 30 Rock, and excited for Glee, I had one truly major concern: the fate of Bones. I wrote, in a paen to and critique of the show back in September:
On almost all of those counts, Bones' fifth season is succeeding utterly. Let's take the little stuff first. When The Wire's Wallace showed up as the slightly older boyfriend of Michelle, the teenage girl scientist boss-lady Cam adopted in the fourth season, my fangirling self lost it. But the plot thread, about whether Michelle is having sex with her boyfriend, and if she is, what Cam ought to say to her about it, was beautifully handled. The fight between mother and daughter, and the reconciliation that followed, felt genuine: teenagers fight with their parents as a way to reassure themselves about their own limits-testing, especially when they're feeling anxious about a potentially momentous decision. And it wasn't a one-character plotline. Booth stepping into the father role, and reading Wallace (I don't care what his character's actual name is) the riot act was a lovely bit of team-bonding. Booth may not be romantically involved with Cam any more, but when she needs a man in her life, he stepped effortlessly into that role, and she was able to accept it without trying to reassert any tie on him.And so Bones faces substantial challenges in plot and execution this season. There are two major potential romances that need to develop in a plausible, sincere way. One character needs to deal with her still-new role as a mother, while another needs to cope with her desire to have a child. Last season, the show relied on a rotation of guest actors to fill a vacant slot in the laboratory, but it's a gimmick with an expiration date. As a related issue, Zach's character, and the consequences of his downfall, were at best marginally addressed last season, and substantial questions about that downfall really need to be resolved. That's a lot of plot to deal with, and to fit in around the rotting bodies.But much more importantly, Bones needs to restore its credibility. The show pushes its fans, and that's a good thing. But it shows no respect for your fans to feed them something poorly written and to call it a gift to them, and it shows no respect for your characters to leave them with a lot of raveled threads, and to abruptly make them behave in ways that have little to do with the personas you've established for them. The show has had an unpleasant history of odd inconsistencies, whether making Booth and Bones smooch only to never mention it again; dropping a gripping story about a serial kidnapper for a season and a half only to pick it up again and subvert it to a dopey plot device; implying that a character convicted of a heinous crime is innocent and inexplicably failing to follow up on it. Doing this once or twice might be all right, but as a repeat problem, it feels like sloppiness. I'd hate to think the show is irretrievably broken.
The show's also done a nice job with the interns. Making Wendell's job a potential casualty of the recession was a nice touch (as was leaving it anonymous who saved his job), though I'm uncertain how I feel about his hookup with Angela--dude's probably going to get burned. I thought last season the lab's bigoted reaction to the Iranian intern was the show's ugliest, most uncharacteristic moment, so I'm glad they've rescued his character a bit, and done it in a funny way. And I never, never thought that the show could rescue Daisy, a hyperverbal and socially awkward intern (and it did burn me a bit that the one female intern was such a total pain), but they worked her into an episode about Egyptologist in a role that was hilarious and charming, and did a fair amount to advance Sweets' character.
Third, the show is back to doing the subculture exploration that's always made it strong. Cyndi Lauper's role as a psychic former cult member was a bit stunt-casty, but worked out anyway. The little-people wrestling ring was a good frame. Even the episode about the CIA analyst, which started out a bit cheesy, I thought, developed into a strong testament to personal character and organizational culture. And the episode about an Amish musical prodigy was beautiful: really, one of the best episodes of the series I think, and a lovely testament to the power of art.
Speaking of emotion-tugging, the show's done an absolutely terrific job moving Brennan and Booth's relationship forward, pacing it appropriately while still deepening the characterizations. Booth's aborted profession of love in the season premiere made the issue at hand explicit while preventing it from resolving too quickly. I'm thrilled that the show brought back Stephen Fry to work with John Francis Daly in last week's episode, both because I think the tension between them as colleagues is a dynamic that's developed really well, and because they were able to draw out a coherent explanation from Booth about why he hasn't pursued a relationship with Brennan. The upping-the-ante subplots, of Brennan going on a date with Booth's boss, and of Booth's son Parker demanding that he get a girlfriend, have been well-done, and I think it makes sense that as the characters are more powerfully drawn to each other, that incidents like these would acquire an added significance.
But most of all, David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel just have wonderful physical chemistry together, and they're finally getting a chance to express it through a straightened tie, a clasped hand, a lot of smoldering gazes. And they're balancing the initiation of physical interaction between Booth and Brennan, so it's clear they're being drawn closer together. It's been a bit obvious sometimes, but I think that kind of casual-but-not touch works. Someone as logical as Brennan would have to fully rationalize the situation for her to be comfortable discussing intiating a relationship with Booth. She doesn't have to rationalize touching him, because it doesn't actually change the formal relationship with him, so she gets part of what she wants without having to either construct a rationalization or acknowledge that what she wants is operating outside of logic.
I have caveats of course. The show hasn't done nearly as good a job with Angela and Hodgins, in part because I think Angela's character may be headed down an irredeemably vexing path. Her stupid fight with Brennan over the pig she was insisting everyone pony up to adopt (and how classless was it of her to hit up Wendell for money after he almost lost his job?) made her seem astonishingly flaky, sentimental, and self-centered. And her hookup with Wendell can only end in tears when she inevitably goes back to Hodgins. Which I don't want to happen anymore, actually. I was surprised and gratified when Hodgins said he wouldn't end Angela's celibacy. And I wish the show wold spend more time with him. I thought his arc last season when he was dealing with his breakup with Angela and Zach's incarceration was one of the few redeeming notes in that set of episodes. I'm a bit annoyed that they're slipping him back into conspiracy theory mode too.
That seems to me to be one of a few loose ends that hasn't been resolved, with the most significant one being Zach. I'm sure contractual and scheduling issues make the fate of the anthropologist-turned-serial-killer's-apprentice a complicated thing to fit in. But it simply must be dealt with. It shattered the team at the end of Season 3, and the revelation that Sweets knows Zach is innocent would shatter them again. It would be a brave plot decision. I hope Hart Hanson and Co. are bold enough to go there.
Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon, Kerri Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and Steve Earle Walk Into a Redneck Comedy
I am deeply perplexed by the trailer for Leaves of Grass, wherein Edward Norton plays both a nerdy professor and his redneck, drug-dealing twin brother whom he is forced to impersonate.
Leaves of Grass (Edward Norton) Exclusive New Official Trailer!
Edward Norton Official | MySpace Video
It's a really terrific-looking cast, and my adoration of Romance & Cigarettes means I try to keep my threshhold for the absurd reasonable, especially when Susan Sarandon is involved. And my love for Steve Earle is such that I'm willing to extend extra patience to this project. But I really hate the following things that appear in this trailer: deeply unfortunate attempts at accents, the consistent implication that rednecks are dumb, a seeming rip-off of Bull Durham's "a certain word that's a no-no with umpires" gag, and hot-for-teacher humor. I'm hoping there's something redemptive there that pulled all these people into this project. Because this trailure sure doesn't demonstrate what it is.
Leaves of Grass (Edward Norton) Exclusive New Official Trailer!
Edward Norton Official | MySpace Video
It's a really terrific-looking cast, and my adoration of Romance & Cigarettes means I try to keep my threshhold for the absurd reasonable, especially when Susan Sarandon is involved. And my love for Steve Earle is such that I'm willing to extend extra patience to this project. But I really hate the following things that appear in this trailer: deeply unfortunate attempts at accents, the consistent implication that rednecks are dumb, a seeming rip-off of Bull Durham's "a certain word that's a no-no with umpires" gag, and hot-for-teacher humor. I'm hoping there's something redemptive there that pulled all these people into this project. Because this trailure sure doesn't demonstrate what it is.
I Want to Be You Whenever I See You Smiling
I don't much like "best-of" lists, and while this one that Andrew Sullivan is pretty indie-tastic, it's actually not bad. I appreciate the nod for the Zach Galifianakis-Will Oldham "Can't Tell Me Nothing" video, which is pretty brilliant. But (though they get much-deserved credit for "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?") it's absolutely criminal that the genius video for Gnarls Barkley's "Smiley Faces" isn't on the list. It's a hilarious concept: two music historians fighting over the existence of a fictional musician named Gnarls Barkley, who is thought to have had a hand in all the major popular music movements of the last century. But it's also beautiful and audacious: the video sneaks Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse into footage or photo shoots from those great movements, and in doing so asserts Gnarls Barkley's place among them. I adore Cee-Lo, and I can acknowledge that it's a bit of an overreach, but the whole thing is so playful that it doesn't seem exhaustingly pretentious. With tongue-in-cheek bits like their appearance in a Yellow Submarine-like movie titled Baron Von Counterculture's Groovy Purple Dirigible, it's impossible to take any of the video's claim to greatness too seriously, and the framing device punctures the idea anyway. But it is a great video, by a pair of collaborators who have some wonderful work. I wish they'd get credit for that so Cee-Lo can go back to making solo albums.
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