King of Rock, King of Pop...

Two oddly similar "facts" that I stumbled upon in the last 6 hours from completely unrelated sources:

1. The Michael Jackson Fan Club reports that, as of today, 12 people have committed suicide in response to the death of The Gloved One.
2. As of 1991, about 100 times as many miraculous healings had been attributed to Elvis as had been attributed to the average Catholic saint.

Liars and monsters: part 2

While not nearly as bombastic as the Letterman-Palin mess, Canada had a far less banal crisis of misinterpretation involving politicians this past week. Aside from how the ideological positions are reversed in this example - rather than the liberal Letterman being taken to task for something he didn't say by the conservative Palin, it's a Conservative being burned at the stake by Liberals - there are eerie similarities.

The controversy surrounds newish MP Lisa Raitt, the Natural Resources minister, who is recorded - on a private tape that was left in a washroom - saying that she would love to have the Health minister's job. The problem, it seems, is that she's heard to say that the Health portfolio's issue-of-the-moment, a shortage of nuclear-istopes used in cancer treatments, is "sexy".

Like the Letterman joke, I'd like to believe that only someone who is incredibly dense would think that Raitt was literally calling cancer "sexy". And yet that's exactly how NGOs, cancer survivors, and Raitt's political opponents are choosing to interpret it. As someone who generally despises the Conservative government, I'd love to see Raitt resign and the party go down in shame. As someone who would like to pretend that representative democracies can work, I'd rather they admit that it's just not that big a deal.

The thing is, cancer is a sexy topic - in the same, desexualized way that terrorism is sexy - by virtue of its ubiquity and importance within Canadians' popular consciousness, and the same politicians castigating Raitt know this better than most. (I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't occur to many of them that a political gaffe of this sort presents a particularly sexy opening for some opportunistic attacks.) If Raitt made a mistake, it was not unlike Letterman's - her choice of words could be too easily misappropriated. (Which is not to say that the phantasmic meaning of sexy=sexual isn't implicit or subtextual, even when the word is being used in a particularly desexualized way as it is here. But, again, that's a different blog entry right there...)

Sarah Palin is either a liar or a monster (or both? why not?)

So David Letterman made a joke a few days ago about the Palin family attending a Yankees game and Alex Rodriguez impregnating one of Sarah's daughters. Sarah Palin immediately fired back, pointing out that the only daughter at the game was the 14-year old, Willow, and so Letterman was joking about "the statutory rape of my daughter".

And if he were joking about statutory rape, I'd actually share her indignance. But he wasn't - to all but the least discerning of people, it should be clear that he was making a joke about the older daughter, Bristol, who is already a teenager mother. (And given that Bristol's out-of-wedlock baby problematizes Sarah Palin's 'family values' schtick, also taking an indirect shot at Sarah.)

What amazes me about the entire exchange, though, are these three things:

1. The number of people (dozens, hundreds) who have the basic intelligence necessary to blog but are nonetheless convinced that a) Letterman actually knew which daughter(s) were present at the game, and b) that he would knowingly make a sex joke about a 14-year old. Sarah Palin herself called Matt Lauer "naive" for suggesting that Letterman was making a joke about Bristol (because Bristol has never been the butt of a joke, right?). When Lauer asked whether, in a press release, she was sincerely suggesting that Letterman couldn't be trusted around a teenaged girl (it's implied - and I'm willing to give Palin's people some credit and call it a joke, but a bad one - that he's a pedophile) she stumbled through her response and couldn't actually bring herself to tease out what was being implied. Because, at best, she's being completely disingenuous. At worst, she's being totally malicious.

2. Ironically, in refusing to admit the possibility that Letterman was making a joke at Bristol's expense, Palin actually endorses Dave's intended joke and its implied meaning - that, to put it plainly, Bristol is a slut. Palin has made it clear that she will rain down on Dave with hellfire for insulting her family and women in general, so one has to wonder why she uses no fraction of her outrage in support of Bristol. It's as if mom thinks that only one of her daughters is actually deserving of a defense - hence the title of this blog, because only a monster could behave that way.

3. No one seems to care that at least half of Letterman's joke was directed at A-Rod. In fact, if Palin is right, then the entire joke was at A-Rod's expense. That said, we should point out that the reason a joke about A-Rod impregnating anyone is at all funny is because he's infamous for being something of a (purported? confirmed? i don't follow him closely enough) serial adulterer. That level works if the joke is about Bristol but not if it's about Willow. If it's about Willow, then suddenly the joke is about A-Rod being a pedophile, an accusation that's never been raised against him. It seems to escape Palin entirely that her favored interpretation of the joke casts A-Rod as a pedophile, and that this is equally problematic. That she hasn't addressed this element of the joke whatsoever is probably worth thinking about - and I'd suggest that it's also an implicit endorsement of it. (One has to wonder whether A-Rod's ambivalent relationship to his American-ness and his race have some role to play in the ostensible obviousness of the joke's appropriateness, but that would be an entire post in and of itself.)

Batman and Robin #1

(Please forgive the awfulness of the image quality - my Photoshop has been glitchy, so I resorted to a hack job in *ugh* MSPaint. Forgive me, Burt Ward and Frank Quitely.)

I wasn't the only person who found Robin's pose on the cover of Batman and Robin #1 really familiar, right? I've been told that Morrison and Quitely are going for a 60s TV show feel, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with how they've managed to the incorporate elements from it without either a) importing the cheese-factor, or b) appearing to mock it.

I doubt I'm adding anything new, but I wanted to reiterate how awesome it is that Quitely pays homage to the visualized sound-effects of the show by actually working them into his drawings (what's the opposite of onomatopeoia, anyway?), how the text and images of the preview recall its cliffhangers, or how Pyg is a sort of grotesque twist on the sorts of lame, circus-like villains of the show. Pyg's henchmen, though, also manage to bridge a gap between the show and Morrison's own ouvre - not only are they a hideous take on the uniform henchman gangs on the TV series, but they also call to mind the Stepford Cuckoo's from Morrison's New X-Men. (Though exactly how far that link runs remains to be seen.)

Feminist fatherhood (and motherhood)

[I haven't written much on here about how I became a dad a little over four months ago. That's not to say that I haven't been writing - I've been keeping a diary for more than ten months, addressed to the baby herself - but that I haven't known how to write about it for more than an audience of two or three. But maybe I should try?]

Victoria, who's reviewing some books on motherhood, tells me that there's an assumption among those who write about (and attempt to enact) feminist motherhood that the mother should put herself first and not sacrifice everything for the baby. So I can only suppose that there's an assumption of a feminist partner (either another mother or a father) who is able to take on a co-primary caregiver role. (Though, as I understand it, the other partner's role often isn't emphasized at all.) The ironic thing is that many of the same people who write about feminist mothering admit that they don't know how to actually do that.

As for feminist fatherhood, it seems implicit that my goal should be the reverse – that dads need to learn how to put themselves second if not third, to the baby if not the mother. But I'm generalizing to a great degree when I say this - the practice of "feminist fathering" is far more amorphous and phantasmatic than feminist mothering. Amazon lists some 900+ books on the latter topic and about 125 on the former, but even this comparison is misleading - the "feminist fathering" search results includes many of the books that are more properly about feminist mothering, and the only result from among the first half dozen pages that is actually about feminist fathering addresses it in such a way that it calls the very existence of a practice into question: "Do Men Mother?" (What does it mean to "mother" anyway? And what sorts of limits does that place on fathering?)

But if I'm right to draw out this distinction, then it's also true that things rarely work out this way - and that, in fact, it's still often the opposite. Feminist moms can't fully extricate themselves from the mostly conservative models of motherhood they've inherited and the same seems true of feminist dads and fatherhood. (This might be why the book title above asks if dad can "mother", presuming that they need to cross-identify in order to find something worth imitating.) And while there are people in our lives that assert the need for Victoria to find me-time or for me to act more like a full-time dad, these are still largely exceptional moments. For the most part, our casual friends, colleagues, and co-workers will (uncritically and unconsciously, I'm sure) question Victoria whenever she goes anywhere without the baby and, conversely, assume that I should be free and flexible to drop things at a moment's notice. (Less often, there's an assumption that I can/should want to work more and make more money; Victoria is often challenged for not taking a leave from school and work.)

It’s hard enough to negotiate these ideals of feminist mothering and fathering when it seems as if no one knows how to negotiate them. But it's even harder when those people who should, you would think, be most supportive of these goals don’t realize that they’re constantly undermining them.

Airbrushing Uhura

Weeks after everyone else, I decided to get some Star Trek glasses from Burger King. And because I was weeks after everyone else, they only had Uhura and Nero left - so I got both.

Why this is worth mentioning, though, is because I barely recognized Zoe Saldana as Uhura. Bizarrely, she's been so excessively Photoshopped that her black hair looks golden-blonde. And her skin? Well, I'll put an image from the Star Trek site of Eric Bana's Nero glass beside the Uhura glass - can you tell that one actor is white and other's black? (And if you knew nothing more than this distinction, would you misapply those labels?)

edit: And there's probably a common sensical (and so incredibly problematic) reason that their skin colors seem to have been swapped - Nero is 'evil' (his glass is darker and the ship must absorb ambient light, it's such a deep green-black) and Uhura is 'good' (and much like her skin and hair, the ship and its background glow unnaturally). Because good is bright and evil is dark, of course.

The ongoing battle for Canadian identity: Ignatieff and the Tory commercials

With a federal election certain to be called in the next few months, the Conservatives have taken to launching pre-emptive attack ads at Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, a public intellectual probably best known in North America for his work in Security Studies - work that he did, the Tories point out, almost exclusively outside Canada, in the UK and USA.

The Liberals contend that attacks, based on a 34-year absence from the country, are simultaneously an attack on all expat Canadians (Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella lists Wayne Gretzky, Neil Young, and Celine Dion as figures who must then be equally problematic) and naturalized immigrants, who may have also spent the majority of their lives outside the country. Tory strategist Tim Powers counters that it's not that he left, or necessarily the length of time, but rather "it's what he said when he was outside the country" - referring to his explicitly identifying as an American and a Brit while residing in those countries.

Kinsella's analogies are hardly perfect; neither is Powers' response convincing. Kinsella's examples include people who represent Canada in an official capacity at international events (Gretzky) and keep a Canadian residence (Dion), and all three actively and repeatedly assert their Canadianness - none of which could be said of Ignatieff during those three and a half decades. As for Powers' argument, it doesn't escape the latter charge made by the Liberals, as a huge number of Canadian immigrants (and, as has been my experience, even many 2nd and 3rd generation Canadians) likewise don't identify themselves primarily "Canadian".

That Ignatieff (and Gretzky, Young, Dion, I'm sure, if they were challenged in a similar fashion) can convincingly, if not unproblematically, liken himself to both the celebrity expats and the marginalized (and presumably non-white) immigrant is no small feat and has everything to do with which of those two groups he more closely resembles. Those same immigrants couldn't look to Gretzky and Dion in order to legitimate their own tenuous hold on Canadian identity - they were, after all, born Canadian ("natural" Canadians vs. "naturalized" Canadians) and, tellingly, are all white. Ignatieff can invoke an analogy of oppression but the reverse, an analogy of privilege that should theoretically be open to non-white immigrants, seems somehow a harder sell.

Consider, too, that Ignatieff is able to reinforce his own claim to Canadianness (though not without a certain element of danger, as I'll explain) by way of an appeal to people who are considered provisionally Canadian without reciprocal increase in their Canadianness. But were a non-white Canadian lobby group to attempt to increase their access to Canadianness by way of appeal to white Canadian figures like Ignatieff, I suspect that a) the simile wouldn't be as convincing, b) they would do little to advance their own cause, and c) that they would actually damage Ignatieff's own status as Canadian. Rather than improve their own standing relative to hegemonic ideas of Canadian identity, they would problematize his.

There's an analogy to be made here to American racial politics - the "one drop" rule of racial blood - which Canada has regrettably absorbed: Ignatieff's whiteness can't whiten the immigrants' non-whiteness, but the reverse - the loss of Ignatieff's Canadianness (which is bound to his whiteness) - remains an ever-present risk. And it's precisely that danger that the Conservatives are invoking - and that Ignatieff, in drawing out what the Tories themselves could not say explicitly, is inadvertantly reinforcing.

Because there can't be a blockbuster newstory without an appropriately explosive ending...

In the latest iteration of the Missing White Girl media phenomenon*, Southern Ontario's media has been equal parts hysterical and manic for the past month and a half while reporting on the kidnapping of an 8 year old. So, of course, when two arrests were made just yesterday the TV personality who reported it on Canada AM made some appropriately asinine comments, noting that the arresting officers were comparing the case to that of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka - but that we "shouldn't make any assumptions."

Oh, right. That makes sense - because we don't know why she was kidnapped or what happened, even if we assume that these people kidnapped her. Because you know what will keep people from making crazy assumptions? Comparing the arrested to Canada's most infamous rapist/murderers. Certainly, I would never jump to any conclusions upon learning that the police are reminded of the serial killers that kidnapped and raped as many 30 teenage girls between the two of them.

That is some fine and responsible journalism, right there.

*Just to be clear: I don't use the expression or link to the Onion in order to disparage the victim; I do it only to mock the absurdity of the media's tunnel-vision and their obsession with wringing these stories for all the pathos they're worth.

The LOST season finale, and Season 5 in general...

Over on Geoff's blog, he writes that the show will pull through in Season 6 because it always puts the characters first and the mythology second. But I think that this season is among LOST's weakest precisely because that wasn't true.

The Jack-Kate relationship would serve as Exhibit A, I think. Jack became thoroughly unlikable and his skepticism transformed into a cynicism that bordered on nihilism; Kate was present but virtually inaccessible with respect to her feelings and motivation. The two interacted so little on the island that it wasn't until the finale that I realized they still had feelings for each other and we were supposed to be rooting for them.

Conversely, Sawyer and Juliet was pulled off in a surprisingly convincing manner. Still, given that their relationship arrived fully-formed, a flashback covering the previous three years on the island and giving us a reason to feel invested in them as a couple would've been nice. We're supposed to sympathize with Juliet, I think, when she's made to feel anxious by Kate's arrival, but instead I felt a sense of inevitability - that Juliet would be become jealous and do something dumb, that Sawyer would give her a reason, that the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle would reassert itself.

For all the character work that didn't happen, then, it's also surprising that so little of the mythology seems to have been developed or resolved. The trip into the past added surprisingly little to our understanding of the Island and its inhabitants, while the much more interesting stuff happening in the present was barely given any time to breathe. When you toss in the introduction of some timeless battle between Jacob and his adversary (now known to the internet as Esau) and a whole new group of survivors, it's enough to make one suspect that there will be little more effort put on the characters next year.

This is not to say that I think the show went all wrong. Some individual episodes around the middle of the season were fantastic - Locke's, in particular - and the season really picked up when it seemed they realized that it should have started with Jack waking up on the island and not spun its wheels for several episodes trying to explain how he would get there. And the inversion of Ben and Locke's roles - the evil schemer and naive follower - was damn clever and fiendishly executed. (These two are probably my favorite characters, and no less so now that Ben is emotionally crushed and Locke is no longer Locke.) And while Sawyer's turn as leader and thinker was far too short lived (again, this development would have benefited from a flashback), I liked what they did with him, even if they pissed it away with a predictable reversion in the last couple episodes.

Finally, I like that I have absolutely no idea where this next season will start. (I guessed that Season Four would start where, it turns out, Season Five began, and that Five would open with them back on the Island.) Having them landing in LA in 2004 would be a ballsy move, but I'm not sure where they would go from there; picking up in 2007 with the characters having landed in LA three years earlier would at least fit the timeline that the show has established, but would seem to make equally little sense. Really, though, nothing to this point suggests that Daniel was right in thinking that the past could be changed, and so I wouldn't be surprised to see the Losties from 1977 end up in 2007, as little sense as that might make. (The white flash did, after all, share a certain resemblance with the white flashes that sent them flying through time earlier in the season. In which case we have no reason to think that Juliet's necessarily dead.)

But that would just be a really cheap way to get them back, wouldn't it? And make it seem as if they were in the 70s for no good reason, except maybe to explain... no, they didn't even really explain or show us anything that we didn't already know or suspect we knew. (Radzinsky was more intriguing as a stain, and DHARMA more interesting when everything we knew about them was gleaned from old film and a pile of corpses in the jungle. And we discovered absolutely nothing new about The Others, except that Ellie and Charles have some sort of 'complicated' relationship, both romantically and with respect to the leadership of the group. Though we don't know what that complication is. Still.)

Problems in applying the Prime Directive

From an article on Star Trek's Prime Directive, from the Toronto Star:

[Queen's University's Kim Richard] Nossal warns, however, against adhering too closely to anything like the Prime Directive. Taken to its extreme, he says, it can be a justification for both isolationism and ignoring the needs of other countries under the guise of respecting their territorial integrity.

That kind of thinking, he says, is what allowed the genocide in Rwanda to go unheeded, an outcome now roundly seen as a failure by the international community to act when needed.

I'm sure that Nossal is a fine and rigorous academic, but it's this sort of sloppy work on pop culture that reflects poorly on all of the rest.

The first problem, and one that Nossal seems keenly aware of, is that the Prime Directive is an ideal that isn't at all applicable to any inter-cultural meetings or exchanges in the 21st century - colonialism and globalization have seen to it that there no society can exist without some awareness of and relationship with the West/Global North. (But maybe he was pressed to try anyway...)

The second, and more egregious problem, is that his example of Rwanda is a hideously inappropriate one. We could maybe cite examples retrospectively, and maybe even try applying the directive to contexts where the exposure to Euro-American influence has not already been disastrous. The problem with the Rwandan Genocide example, though, is that the situation was itself created by colonialism and overdetermined by it. The Tutsi and Hutu populations which constituted the opposing sides in the civil war, for example, were only 100 years ago class-distinctions that became hard-and-fast ethnic classifications when Germany and then Belgium took control. (The Belgians and Roman Catholic church went so far as to invent socio-scientific definitions and give out cards.) While the UN's non-interference in 1993/94 was a problem, it's useless, and dangerous, to discuss it - much less use it in a discussion of Star Trek's Prime Directive - without acknowledging that it couldn't have happened in the first place without European interference.

Really, though, I'm quite confident Nossal knows all of this. So what is it about pop culture applications of theory and politics that seems to cause writers to lose their critical edge?

8 quick thoughts on Scott Pilgrim

1. The latest volume, "...vs. The Universe", was an improvement over the previous one. (Which I kinda disliked.) Scott was less grating, perhaps because this issue was less emo in its pretentions and so I was less critical of the preposterousness of his relationship with Ramona. But also because...
2. This issue made it clear that, whether intentionally or because O'Malley - like me - is more interested in her, Ramona has become the central character in (what is ostensibly) Scott's story. At this point, there is little that is novel, provocative, or mysterious about Scott - and, luckily, Ramona supplies those things to an excess. Tellingly, she's also been featured on more covers than the title character himself. When she disappears, I want to know why and what will happen next. To her. Not to Scott, so much. Which is unfortunate, because the book closes in following the wrong character.
3. The film adaptation by Edgar Wright has been shooting here in Toronto for a short while, now, and Wright just posted a vlog of the first day of shooting. Some personal connections: One of the stand-ins visible in the first 15 seconds or so is a guy I took a grad class with a couple years ago. Which is not as weird as it seems, given that I know some of the real people that various characters in the series have been modeled on. (I also e-interviewed O'Malley, who once played in my friend's band, when the first book in the series came out. I don't typically advertise the results, though. It was a much... stranger exchange than I expected.)
4. Clever casting, one: The series' mastermind and villain, Gideon, was first seen in shadow, then given a fuzzy cameo in the penultimate issue, and won't actually be revealed in full until the last one. Appropriately, then, the identity of the actor playing Gideon is officially secret. (But unofficially, we know that it's Jason Schwartzman. Which is a pretty cool choice.)
5. Clever casting, two: Chris Evans and Brandon Routh are playing two of the evil exes that Scott must defeat. Given the series nominal status as a superhero series, of sorts, it's incredibly cool that they've cast guys who are most famous for playing superheroes. Only this time they're playing bad guys.
6. Clever casting, three: And Ramona's female ex? She's being played by Mae Whitman - Ann from Arrested Development. So Michael Cera, as Scott, will be fighting George Michael Bluth's ex-girlfriend.
7. Clever casting, four: I said it's 'nominally' a superhero series because it's actually something of a hybrid - it mixes and matches bits of superhero convention with copious video game references, teen drama more befitting an indy title (or hour-long TV serial), and a manga inspired visual style. It's bizarrely appropriate, then, that the very first evil ex is played by Satya Bhabha - son of Homi Bhabha, the post-colonial theorist who writes of, among other things, the political potential of hybridity.
8. Clever casting, five?: I can't actually find anything on the two remaining exes, the twins. But I hope that they don't disappoint, either.
   

QLC and the unending crisis of young adulthood(s)

I wrote a bunch of responses (not viewable outside Facebook, unfortunately) to Jen's blog about the Quarter-Life Crisis (QLC) phenomena and how acutely she feels it. Unfortunately, I think my tone sounded a lot more belittling than I intended. (Or, rather, it sounds belittling, and I didn't intend for it to sound belittling at all.) That said, I have, I think, some very legit problems with the logics of QLC, which are maybe easier to express if my text is detached from particular personal narratives of QLC.

The first problem is that the idea itself is hopelessly ambiguous, to the detriment of people who claim ownership of it. A pop article that Jen linked me to describes it as "[u]nrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction", which is so vague, varied, and multiple as to make confronting the problem, much less dealing with it, pretty much impossible. How can this possible be described as a phenomena - singular? It has all the specificity of your horoscope. And, it seems to me, provides an equally meaningful self-diagnosis.

The second is that it invokes a state of exception that is not actually exceptional. Young people in North America prior to World War II were similarly filled with anxiety and confusion and pined for a stable career and purpose; after World War II, the same demographic group - their kids - were dissaffected with lives that locked them into a singular purpose when adulthood commenced, an ironic effect of the stablity that their parents had wanted; the baby boomersacted on the dissatisfaction they inherited from their parents but struggled - and often failed - to break free of the roles they had learned from them; and their children have absorbed that anxiety and seem to be pining for that stable career and purpose. And following logically from that...

My third problem is that QLC is nostalgic for an era of securing and assuredness that doesn't deserve the affection. That security and purpose? That desire to, as the article put it, "know who [you] are"? That's exactly the limitation that your parents or grandparents either rejected or felt acutely on some level should be rejected. The complaint that you're indecisive because you can "be anyone [you] want"? That's exactly what they thought would solve their dilemma. So maybe they were wrong. But how does it follow that reinstating the conditions of their moment of crisis will solve this one?

And the last - and least obvious but most interesting, I think - is that it echoes other late-capitalist discourses of privileged self-victimization. Like the article says, these are typically "people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated" - people who have are more privileged than most and upset, in part, because they don't seem to go as far as they once did. And what's more, as Michael Kimmel - who is no stranger to discussions of the ways in which men situate themselves as victims - notes, this particular iteration of generational crisis is, in fact, an "anticipatory crisis". I'm inclined to agree - we're being prepped to be dissatisfied with being unsatisfied, trained to have a pathological need for some grand accomplishment. (And have it before 30!) We're victims of the fear that we'll become victims.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm somehow outside of this. I've felt alienated from my work at times; the first job I held after completing my MA was at a bookstore for minimum wage; my academic production has never been monetarily recognized or rewarded; I feel incredibly envious of the accomplishments that some of my friends can list off. Life is maddening. But this is not necessarily, and not always, a bad thing. And it's certainly not a new thing. It's simply a thing.

(I should also volunteer that I enjoy a certain extra privilege that complicates my relationship with QLC - I'm thrilled with my home-life, with my new baby, which makes things challenging on a daily-basis, makes them exhausting and anxiety-inducing but with the added benefit of being simultaneously comforting and secure. But it's not as if, by contrast, everyone who self-diagnoses themselves with QLC is without any interpersonal comforts, right?)

Two more readings of BSG's finale: a recuperation and a rebuttal

1. I complained in my original response to BSG's finale that it seemed horribly irresponsible to advocate forgetting as a means of healing - that joining together as one big community, following decades of animosity and multiple attempts to commit genocide, fails to adequately address (and even avoids or brushes aside) the themes that the show has been trying to tackle and the actual conflict that had underpinned it.

That isn't to say that it's an incoherent conclusion, though. To quote Agamben, one could argue that the finale "affirms the site of bare life as the route through which, and by which, redemption occurs. It is an affirmation of the redemptive value of extreme degradation." Bare life, in this case, is the decision to not only forget but to cast the ships into the sun and start over with nothing. And in the face of such an overdetermined history and a conflict which offers no clear or easy solution, perhaps this is the only viable means of attaining redemption.

2. Of course, it's worth asking whether attaining redemption is actually a worthwhile, or ethical, aim. Redemption is rarely an unproblematic process - especially racial or national projects of redemption, which is what the humans' effort to affirm their existence most resembles - and they're often motivated by guilt and selfishness. Too often, redemption manages to situate the vicitimizer as the victimized: the humans enslaved the Cylons and must conveniently forget (or diminish the importance of the fact) that they supplied the Cylons with the means and motive to destroy them. Redemption can also deflect or displace guilt on to a sort of sacrificial lamb, a figure deemed abnormal who is ejected from the whole (again, forgetting that he or she was produced by and within that whole in the first place) so that the whole can be recuperated: Baltar is the ideal figure, here, but Cavil also becomes a scapegoat for the Cylons.

Aimé Césaire's notion of "bourgeois shock" brings this critique of redemption into conversation with Agamben's bare life in a really nice way, offering the term as a way of characterizing the realization by Western Europeans that the methods of dehumanization and violence which commonly employed in their colonies could be turned against them and deployed within Europe itself. (Nazism is the prototypical example of such strategies turned inward, though 9/11 is also an excellent one - and both are often applied allegorically to BSG.) The redemptive reading of BSG through Agamben, then, is undone if we can read it as an expression of reactionary "bourgeois shock" - as a moment in which the self-important subject of history and bearer of civilization is shaken from its complacency and its assuredness that it could never be made the object of its own violence.

A quick thought on Lost

Just as there was back when we were trying to figure out what made certain survivors "special" in the minds of the Others, there's a lot of discussion now about why Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid were cast into 1977 while Sun, Frank, Ben, and Locke ended up in 2007. Surely, the discussion goes, there must be a good reason - having to do with the recreation of the original crash, with their personalities or actual physical bodies, or perhaps (and this one is my favorite, since it implies some new mysteries) because they're already present on the island in 1977.

What I suspect, though, is that the most obvious answer will be the right one - that it's simply that The Island wanted some of them in 1977 and others in 2007 in order to complete some sort of job. This is better than revealing that it's totally random, but only barely. I'm reminded, again, of the first season of Lost, when people were trying to figure out what the common bond among the characters was - that they were all in need of redemption, that they had all killed someone, that they had all cheated death, etc. - so as to explain why they ended up on that island. But as the show goes on, it seems increasingly likely that the only reason we'll ever get is 'because they were supposed to end up on the island', which is really just another way of saying 'because The Island wanted these specific people'. And that's just disappointing.

The BSG finale

This show left me feeling confused. And not a good-confused.

I felt happy, i suppose, for the characters, but my actual emotional response to characters usually diminishes within minutes of a stories end and the narrative and thematic elements are the ones that ultimately resonate. And that being the case, it felt like a waste.

I mean, I liked the build to the final battle, I liked Baltar's decision to stay, and I was even a bit struck by the cuteness of this Earth being the real Earth and the other Earth not really being Earth - BSG has been filled with revelations that contradict previously accepted truths, so it didn't seem so unbelievable. I found Adama and Roslin, and Baltar and Caprica's, endings sweet and appropriate, even if I didn't really understand why Adama, the character, would resign himself to years of solitary life, and I didn't really buy Baltar and Caprica's reunion. (The latter, at least, had a certain logic to it within the larger format of the show. Which, it turns out, makes it pretty exceptional. Except that they should have been raising Hera, too.)

I disliked Kara's sudden disappearance and the show's refusal to explain just how she came back from the dead and just what she came back as. I also found it ridiculous that they could have so easily infiltrated the massive Cylon base, found Hera, and had so few casualties. Suicidal Final Battles need to show that the good guys have paid a price. This one didn't.

And I hated a bunch of things.

• What about the Cylon 'plan'? We were told from episode one that 'They Have A Plan', and then one was never actually revealed? Was it simply that they were torturing the 'final five'? Because that's as near as I can get to a 'plan'. And that sucks.
  
• Religion had always been used as way of critiquing societies for justifying their banal existence by way of laying claim to an exceptionalism that we should rightly be wary of. And how we're told that there is a god and the whole series has evolved according to his plan. ...say what?
  
• We also have Lee deciding, unilaterally, to break up human and Cylon civilization and banish them to the various corners of the world. His rationale is that if they start over with a blank slate, they won't make the same mistakes. Except that this contradicts every bit of accepted wisdom on remembrance, redemption, and humanity's ability to learn from the past and imprve themselves - actively forgetting the sins and ignoring the oppressions of the past is the surest way to ensure that they would fall into those patterns again. I mean, for fuck's sake, wasn't that why the 'final five' travelled to the 12 colonies in the first place? To warn them because they had forgotten and would commit the same error? I wrote in a previous post that BSG has a troubling aversion to communalism and collectivism, and it seems that it pertains, too, to a collective memory. But collective memories are the best weapons against exactly the sorts of abuses and oppressions that this show ostensibly opposes. So this is a terrible lesson.
  
• And what about that fucking awful ending? Here's a show that has tried (with varying levels of success) to push the human-Cylon conflict as a metaphor for WWII, for the War on Terror, for Israel-Palestine. And at the end, we find out that it was actually a metaphor for... well, actually, it wasn't a metaphor at all. It's message was the most literaly one possible - it was a warning about treating our robots well, because, you know, they might decide to turn against us and kil us. Are you fucking kidding me? Not only is it ham-fisted and absurdly preachy in its delivery, but it's also insultingly stupid. It is possibly the worst closing scene to a series that I have ever watched. Ever.
  

Geoff asked over on his blog how other people would've ended the series. Given that one of the few consistent thematic threads on the show was the need to prove that humanity deserved to survive and continue, I suggested that the show should not have properly ended at all - that the quest to prove your own worth is an ongoing one that will never be resolved, and so to will the fleet never actually find a home. (At least, not in the finale.) Most of the major characters should have died in the battle to give it some actual resonance and to allow the characters least fit to usher in this new existence the opportunity to redeem it. Baltar, Caprica, and Hera, at least, could have survived to return to the fleet, thus allowing one storyline to run full-circle from start to finish and provide satisfaction and assurance that they knew what they were doing all along. Maybe Roslin could ironically out-live Adama, only to die as they resume their search for a new home - and so Roslin's death, in closing the prophecy, signals that it is space itself that is their new home. It wouldn't even necessarily be depressing - there are plenty of ways to put some sort of optimistic spin on it, to give some small hope, or at least to make it seem like this society is one worthy of survival, even if it never finds a permanent place to lay down roots. Something like that.

But my god - what we were left with? It boggles the mind.

BSG: On symbolism, politics, and the triumph of individualism

There's a quite thorough political analysis of the allegorical message of Battlestar Galactica at this blog, though I would stop short of recommending that anyone bother to read the whole text. (It's long and rambling. But I suppose that I'm about to post a long and rambling response to it. Still, I don't think this is hypocritical - I'm trying to save you from having to read two long, rambling blogs.)

But there's also some very good, and very apt, points in there that are worth repeating. For instance:

"it’s kinda dishonest when the great defining symbol of this culture-clash, the narrative linchpin of your ideological conflict, binds conceptually not to 9/11 but rather to the Holocaust."

"that very act of symbolic hyperbole articulates, I think, something about 9/11, about how Americans in particular, but by no means only Americans, responded to it emotionally, ascribing it a grossly-exaggerated import. That narrative misstep of a dubious analogy is revealing of the degree of faith, the depth of the fall, the jawdropping level of… well… self-importance necessary to place an albeit horrendous act on that level."

Whether or not the show's politics and message are reduced to incoherence, as Hal Duncan suggests, by this sloppy symbolism is almost beside the point. The show's juxtaposition of 9/11 and the Holocaust suggests that we're meant to understand the two as equivalent, and while this is hugely problematic, I think that what it says about American nationalism and identity is tremendously too interesting to dismiss because it makes for bad writing. We might even have to debate whether it necessarily leads to bad writing - while he and I might find the juxtaposition of these events distasteful and ludicrous, I think that the narrative manages to merge the two quite effectively for the purposes of storytelling. But regardles - even if it might be a narrative failure, that failure shouldn't preclude a discussion of it as a telling artifact of its time.

But in defense of the narrative - I do think that Duncan is pouring it on too hard. If the historical resonances are multiple and contradictory, then in fairness you have to point out that it's even more varied and confused than this. Duncan admits this when he notes that the humans' internment on New Caprica reads instead like it is actually occurring in the Middle East, but this time with the Israeli/American role being played by the Cylons and the Palestinian/Iraqi spot by the humans. But the Cylon-human conflict, with the Cylons determining to wipe out their creators and former masters, doesn't fit terribly well into either any of these metaphors, nor does Cylon society (despite the fact that it is radical and monotheistic, sure) fit the usual associations of racial and religious Others with barbarism and incivility as would befit a 9/11 metaphor. So this stuff doesn't fit the above real-world references without ignoring huge and important parts of the story and so reducing them to absurdity.

"even the inherent tension in the basic dichotomy of militaristic autocracy versus democratic bureaucracy is dissipated quickly as Adama and Roslyn prove to be pretty much of a mind."

"The result is a sort of thematic vagueness, where the show doesn’t really dramatise the ideological issues it’s pretending to deal with. It seems unwilling to really come down on one side or another and risk alienating viewers who might find such a stance challenging."

Along the lines of 'thematic vagueness' - it seems clear to me that BSG is trying to do and say something about militarism and nationalism more generally (or, rather, within a plurality of specific references that is so varied that any attempt to limit the field just doesn't work), that it's trying to work additional metaphorical angles that resist placement among those major touchstones because they're not trying to speak to any event in particular over the course of the entire series. Whether this is a good or effective strategey is, of course, totally up for debate. And so while I agree that the show has reached a point where its thematics have become nonsensical - and I've admitted as much in past blogs - I think this has less to do with the ridiculousness or wrongheadedness of a hybrid 9/11-Holocaust metaphor and more to do with the too many references to too many sources that have accrued over four seasons.

If I were to try and pin down an over-arching political message, I would probably push BSG's contradictory messages about autocratic militarism and democratic process aside and focus on its affection for heroic liberal individualism of a hegemonically masculine sort. If anything is consistently villified, it's the sense of collectivism premised on altruism that ostensibly underlies Cylon culture (and is eventually revealed to be rotten at the core and under the fascistic rule of Cavill/John), that is implied by the consensus-based approach of the Quorum of Twelve (who are shown to be spineless and completely ineffective), and which is attempted by various insurgencies (the union under Tyrell, but more aptly the mutiny as it is engineered by the hypberbolically crippled Gaeta and self-appointed man-of-the-people Tom Zarek) that find the autocratic rule of Adama and Roslin untenable.

If it's not already clear from my bracketed commentary, collectivism is always a sham or ploy in the BSG universe. What's curious, of course, is that while autocrats like the Adamas and Roslin are privileged, those sham collectives are usually being manipulated by their own - albeit evil-as-all-hell - autocrats. So maybe the difference is a qualitative one - the autocrat that rules transparently and unapologetically as opposed to the autocrat that rules by sleight of hand and claims, disingenuously of course, to not want to be the dictator that he is. Admiral Cain confuses this distinction because she clearly falls into the former category, and so would require us to make an additional and totally arbitrary distinction between good and bad Caesars, as it were. But her singularity makes it easier to consider her the exception that proves the rule, I think. Salvation is can only be achieved under the leadership of the right ruler. The problem is, aside from their transparency I'm not sure what makes the Adamas and Roslin so self-evidently 'right' in the minds of the show's producers.

Of course, with only a few episodes left, there's still time to up-end the apple cart.


P.S. I should probably also note that, yes, there is a racial subtext to an individualism/collectivism oppositionality. However, given the muddled political analogies that already confuse the ostensible real-world race correlates, I think that adding this additional layer would just make things messier and, so, doesn't contribute a whole lot to the discussion. Unless, of course, I want to argue that this is where the 'real' race politics of the show emerge...


Two final notes:

1) Ronald D. Moore - BSG's head-honcho and also one of the guiding voices on Deep Space Nine - seems to like muddying the politics of his lead characters to the point of unreadability as a rule. Look, for instance, at how Sisko changes on DS9. At some points, he's the fundamentalist protector of democratic process opposed to those who would violate the Federation's principles in order to preserve them - "Paradise Lost", 4.12 - and at others a Machiavellian schemer not unlike the characters he had previously opposed - "In the Pale Moonlight", 6.19. They're unreconcilable positions within the narrative logic of the show, which posits Sisko as civilization's saviour.

2) DS9 also showed a healthy mistrust for collectivism (the Founders) and shadowy autocrats (the admiral that Sisko takes down in "Paradise Lost"). And this might, in fact, go some way to helping us make sense of Sisko - he can get away with being an assassin and schemer because he doesn't desire to cheat his way into more power and influence. Likewise, he turns against that same admiral despite the fact that it costs him power and influence. There's something to be said in the DS9 and BSG universes for getting ahead the right way. Of course, what's right according to Ronald Moore and what's right to some of us in the audience isn't necessarily one and the same.

Facebook and the end of privacy

About a year ago, I blogged about Facebook and the impossibility of either not friending or de-friending someone on it, especially after you've succumbed to that initial urge to friend as many people as possible and learned that everyone you know knows at least two dozen other people that you know.

I use the word "impossibility" here not in the sense that it can't be done, but rather in the sense that you'll be viewed as a weirdo, jerk, or asshole if you do so. Because if everyone you know seems to know someone else that you know, then everyone you know will learn what you've done. And then everyone you know will be angry with you for one of two reasons: either they're angry because there's an unwritten understanding that you just don't do that, or they're angry because they wish they could de-friend people too (but don't feel that it can't be done).

And this means that, for all intents and purposes, it can't be done.

So you probably know where this is going. After a couple years where I accepted friend requests from pretty much everyone I'm related to, that I know, that I have known, only vaguely knew, met once, or never actually met, I realized that my friends list was full of people who aren't actually, well, my friends. Barely even acquaintances, really. And if Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is to be believed, this was intentional. He claims that "one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web - a truly global digital phone book."

But a listing in a the 'truly global digital phone book' is not what I signed up for. So I started defriending people: a few dozen of the people that I really never talk to, then a few more that I couldn't foresee having reason to contact over Facebook, and eventually I cleaved off about half of my list - about 150 people. And then I made myself invisible to everyone who wasn't still on my list. To say it was cathartic would be something of an understatement - only when I closed the door to the fridge and put a pad-lock on it did I realize that it felt as if people had been raiding it for years.

Zuckerberg's comment causes me to suspect that privacy and intimacy have not been valued by Facebook for some time, and it shows in the evolution of the space, its rules of ettiquette, and our friends lists. But, really, all I want is to be able to post a status update asking if anyone is free for coffee or wants to see a particular movie that Victoria would never see - and to not have to worry about who might respond.

Catching up with TV: BSG and Lost

[Warning: spoilers abound for those who aren't up to speed on the only two TV shows I'm currently watching]

I have but love to share for the pacing and content of Battlestar Galactica's final half-season. With only 10 episodes to go, an entire mythology to unpack, and a home to finally discover, Ronald Moore and crew saw fit to spend the first four on a mutiny plot that, apparently, had absolutely nothing to do with the show's most pressing issues. And as if to add insult to injury, they followed four episodes that offered no new revelations with a single episode that overflowed with them, many of which were the product of memories triggered completely by accident.

In fact, it seems as if all of Season 4.5 to this point has been poking fun at the show's mythology: the much anticipated reveal of the 5th member of the "final five" cylons was so compoundingly disappointing that I can only suspect that, having realized that outing Adama or Roslin or some other important character would seem a) predictable, and b) nonsensical, the show's creators decided to instead undercut every expectation we may have in increasingly hilarious fashion:

• our final cylon, Ellen, is already dead and has been for some time, and so the anxiety about her identity was a total non-issue
  
• she was an incredibly marginal character anyway, and it's hard to imagine a character that we would have suspected less or a reveal that would have made even less of an impact
  
• the "final" five is revealed to be something of a misnomer, since they're actually the first humanoid models
• they're also 2000 years old and completely disconnected from the cylons who rebelled against humanity, which muddies the underlying conflict
  
• Ellen's not even the last mystery-cylon, as we've now learned about Daniel's existence

All of which also appears to undermine what we were meant to understand as the thematic premise of the show: namely, that the hubris of the human race in thinking themselves gods has led to their own destruction. Rather, the eradication of the human race now appears to be part of a larger scheme orchestrated by one cylon to humiliate and break the final five, the parents who he has grown to resent and hate. Humanity's culpability in their own destruction is no longer even all that obvious.

I'm sure that all this has ruined the show for some people, but i like the move away from the mythology. Rather than acting out of, in varying proportions, a sense of guilt and/or destiny, the characters seem newly self-motivated to find a home and redefine themselves because they want to, not because they're supposed to. In the pilot, Adama asked whether humanity deserved to survive, a question that Athena shot back at him when she first landed on the ship. And if the mutiny hadn't have happened, if the fleet continued to press on only because they were supposed to, that question would still be hanging in the air.

(On a totally separate note - anyone have any good guesses as to who Daniel will turn out to be? The creator of the 12 Colonies' cylons, as revealed in the Caprica promo stuff, is named Daniel. And it's been pointed out that Starbuck's unnamed, unseen dad was an musician, which might be important given that Daniel is said to be artistic. I think it's important to point out, though, that the number of each Cylon model appears to indicate, roughly, their human age. Since Daniel is number 7 and is sandwiched between two women who appear to be in their late 20s or early 30s, wouldn't it make sense that he'd be the same age?)

* * *

On the flip-side, I think that Lost's fifth season is only now finding its feet. Among many others, I've complained that the structuring of the episodes has felt a bit off, that the absence of true flashbacks and flashforwards - which had always been tied to particular characters in each time-frame, if not particular themes as well - was making it difficult to enjoy the show. Not only were the events on and off the island totally separate and disconnected, (with certain, rare expections like Desmond and Daniel's meeting) but the fact that the groups had to share screentime meant that very little happened in each episode.

All of those problems seemed to be rectified in this latest episode, at least. It begins - and ends, though we don't know that initially - with the moment that Jack, Kate, and Hurley find themselves back on the island, implicitly promising us that while they begin the episode in LA with little hope of reconciliation or return, this is where they'll end up by the end of the hour. With the flashback/forward having been more or less abandoned this season, this was an unexpected surprise and it was nice to see it return - and for so much to happen in this one episode, too.

Which isn't to say that we're totally done with LA - given the mysterious and unexplained circumstances that led to Sayid, Kate, and Hurley ending up on the plane - and Ben's injury and visit to the marina, where we might guess Desmond and Penny are docked - we have plenty of interesting material for future flashbacks. But the creators have rightly guessed that we've seen enough of the real world for a while and that we'd much prefer to see everyone back on the island where they belong.

Added on Feb. 20: Come to think of it, this episode is how season 5 should have started - with Jack waking up, finding Kate and Hurley, then gradually finding everyone else and establishing the new status quo. How did they get there? Well, that's what the flashbacks would have shown us.

The X-Men and identity politics #2: Xavier's man Friday

[An exchange on Geoff's blog a couple weeks back with someone who didn't like my X-Men paper had me thinking that I need to start writing about mutants and race (and, obliquely, all aspects of identarian politics) again. For those few people familiar with the old paper, some of this will seem like a retread. But since that paper is long and, by virtue of being written with an academic audience in mind, not accessible enough. Which was one of the reasons I started this series in the first place.]

A paraphrased defense of the X-Men's politics: 'Focusing on fighting other mutants does not make the X-Men anti-mutant, assimilationist, or conservative. Those mutants are evil and would make relations with humans worse, and it's that working relationship which they're trying to build and preserve.'

My short response to this is an unequivocal 'sorry, but I don't buy it'.

The sort of assimilationist practices (and their rationalizations and justifications) that the X-Men engage in are at least as old as the novel format itself, so maybe it would help to historize them. Remember Friday, the slave-turned-servant to Crusoe in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe? Friday is the model non-white citizen of European colonialism - a savage who is so grateful that the white man has undertaken the burden of educating and saving him that he devotes his life to serving that same white man. Quite the opposite of encouraging us to embrace difference or form equitable relationships premised on mutual enrichment and growth, Defoe's story proposes an entirely unilateral transmission and unidirectional relationship. Friday is only worthy of notice because he recognizes his master's superiority and assumes an entirely deferential position relative to him. To do otherwise - to challenge Crusoe's authority or assert an equal standing - would be to threaten the natural order of the world and situate yourself as an enemy to it.

Appropriately, one of the tag-lines for the 2000 X-Men movie was "Trust a few. Fear the rest." And, sadly, the X-Men have participated in a similar politics for much of their publication. Like Defoe, the X-Men's publishers would have us believe that the only mutants who deserve to live in peace with normal humans are those mutants who would unquestioningly protect all of humanity. Yes, even those who would rather see all mutants jailed or dead are more deserving of the X-Men's protection than are the mutants who fight back because they don't want to be jailed or dead. These mutants who reject their oppression and the moral authority of those who oppress them are, at best, ignorant to the natural order and, at worst, evil. Like the hyperbolic island cannibals whose only function is to supply a contrast as the evil Other to Friday's good one, these evil mutants are often made to seem insane or power-hungry, and so undermine the standing of any mutant who objects to the X-Men's approach. Even when an 'evil' mutant, like Magneto, poses legitimate ethical and political concerns, those same concerns are undercut by unnecessary displays of violence and mutant supremacist language - as if these things are ultimately inseperable.

Bryan Singer, echoing the common refrain, suggested that Professor X is a Martin Luther King figure and Magneto was Malcom X. But if it weren't already clear, then I'll make it explicit: if the X-Men comics are meant to be read as any sort of metaphor on the politics of race, then we have to consider that Professor X is actually Crusoe's man Friday.

White male masochism and The Wrestler

Over on his blog, Geoff Klock is reading David Savran's Taking It Like a Man and pulled the following quote from the book: "[film] heroes remonstrate against a culture made uneasy by traditional machismo by proclaiming themselves victims, by turning violence upon themselves and so demonstrating their implacable toughness, their ability to savor their self inflicted wounds". Geoff illustrated Savran's point with reference to the Crank movies, which prompted Scott McDarmont to suggest that the same can be said of The Wrestler. Which got me thinking that The Wrestler is actually a much better example of the white male masochism that Savran describes.

Like Crank and Crank 2, The Wrestler celebrates a lead character whose defining trait is his ability to endure, and find pleasure in, absurd amounts of physical pain. But Savran isn't actually talking about literal physical pain - if he were, we would have to consider that these characters don't so much "proclaim themselves victims" since they actually are victims: their suffering is objectively marked by the savage beatings and physical trauma they endure, to say nothing of the always imminent threat of death as a direct result of these wounds. It's one thing to chastise someone for proclaiming himself the victim when it is otherwise unobvious, but something else entirely when he has one hour to live (as in the Crank films) or could have a fatal heart-attack at any moment (as in The Wrestler). They are, in a sense, beyond criticism - and employing that sympathy-generating strategy is itself deserving of critique.

Rather, Savran asks us to read these characters and their physical wounds and masochism allegorically. That's something of a stretch for the Crank movies, which are banal and superficial productions - the more interesting reading of these films would involve asking how and why this plays so well to the white male audience, who arguably find some catharsis in watching Jason Statham proposely get the shit kicked out of him and come out on top as a direct result.

But we don't even need to infer an allegorical level to the lead's physical pain in The Wrestler - Randy "The Ram" Robinson's entire life is a catalogue of emotional and existential pains. All three of the film's major plotlines lend themselves to Savran's critique.

1. The washed-up wrestler plot, which features his failure to recapture the fame, glory, and money he once enjoyed as a wrestler and the realization that he doesn't know how to do anything else
2. The absent father plot, where we learned that he abandoned his daughter as a child and that he continues to be unabile to put her first
3. The romantic plot, which shows us his difficulty in forming lasting relationships with women and his preference for the easy high (whether that be a one-night stand, drugs, or wrestling) instead of something harder and less certain

Conveniently, from the perspective of the masochistic white male victim, each of these can be figured as either/both the result of Randy's own failings or the fault of a society that doesn't understand him and has no place for him. He's too old to be a pro wrestler and unqualified for the world outside of it, a world that requires he talk to people; his daughter just doesn't understand how hard he's trying and is too much of a hard ass to give him a chance, a personality trait that is not-so-subtly reinforced by Randy's realization that she's a lesbian (and so, naturally, must be averse to masculine men); Randy's only on-screen sexual relationship is with a woman he picks up at a bar and smokes coke with, and he finds himself rejected by the woman he actually likes for no obvious reason - until the very end of the film, when it's too late.

Randy's moment of triumph, such as it is, comes at the end of the film, when he comes out of retirement in order to wrestle one last time - a match that he's been assured will probably mean his death. Not that we actually get to see that happen. Randy stumbles, gets light-headed, and climbs to the top of the ropes to perform his finishing move - against the advice of his opponent - as the crowd cheers him on. The film ends as he leaps into the air, poised to win the match on his own terms and according to the code of honor by which he's always performed. And that final image allows him to figuratively transcend his pain, to shout a silent 'fuck you' to everyone that wronged him, even as we realize that he would fall to the ground in a heap and die if the film were to continue. It's the sort of victory that's only possible in a film, and one which can only seem sincerely proud or empowering if we refuse to acknowledge its stupidity and our ostensible hero's culpability in his own death - a recognition that, while delayed by the sudden ending of the film, ultimately cannot be denied.

If the pleasure in white-male masochism exist where it allows us to "savor [our] self inflicted wounds", then I think it makes sense that the dead bodies need to be hidden from view. They're not exactly in a position to be savoring much of anything.

2008's Music retrospectacular

A brief look at the stuff from 2008 that surprised, disappointed, and impressed me. (See my 2007 list here.)

Two Surprises

2. Katy Perry - One of the Boys
This is surprisingly endearing and ironic album. After listening to "UR So Gay", one would guess that "I Kissed a Girl" is supposed to be comedic - that it doesn't sound like it's funny is probably the album's biggest failing.
1. Scarlett Johanssen - Anywhere I Lay My Head
The high-water mark for celebrity vanity-projects - because it doesn't sound like a vanity project.

Four Disappointments

4. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
I am a huge fan of Dan Bejar and loved the previous two Destroyer albums. But one or two songs aside, this one left me absolutely bored.
3. No Age - Nouns
For weeks, I was reading and hearing that this album was fantastic. After three listen-throughs, I found myself totally incapable of remembering even one melody from it.
2. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
I recall hearing that this album was conceived of as a series of one-minute long songs. And it shows - it's jarring, abrasive, and at times feels as if it were made intentionally unlistenable on a structural level.
1. Guns n Roses - Chinese Democracy
Axl sounds old and tired. And his self-importance was only interesting when it was paired with a musical exuberance that subtly undercut his earnestness. The music for this album just sounds bloated and pained.

Twelve Favorites

12. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
A dance-rock explosion.
11. Jason Collett - Here's to Being Here
In a year where nearly everything I liked was propelled by a beat that demanded you move to it, Jason Collett slips through the middle with an acoustic guitar and an affected country-twang.
10. Portishead - Third
A grower, for me. I expected another Dummy or Portishead. It took time for me to accept that they weren't going to go there again.
9. Deerhunter - Microcastle
I immediately want to compare this album to Yo La Tengo. Which is weird, because I've never really been a fan of Yo La Tengo, and I like this so much more than anything YLT recorded.
8. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
I've never found TV on the Radio affective or moving. But this album, at the very least, makes me want to move. And if you can do that well enough, well, that's enough.
7. Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
Goldfrapp moved away from glammed up electropop to this pastoral, electric folk just as the former was being taken up by people like Britney Spears. A canny move - and a great move for one of pop music's great voices.
6. Fleet Foxes - Ragged Wood/Sun Giant
So totally unlike everything else. It sounds like it's emerged from somewhere not just in the past, but somehow outside of time. I'm also a sucker for great harmonies.
5. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
Best disco album I've ever heard. And I'm not a fan of disco.
4. Black Kids - Partie Traumatique
If nothing else, these kids manage to write and record music that perfectly captures the immediacy and constantcy of absolutely having-to-hook-up-right-now-at-this-very-moment. Which is just a little bit precious and a little bit awesome.
3. Santogold - Santogold
I like Gwen Stefani, but she's a bit too poppy for my tastes. I like MIA, but sometimes find her music grating. But Santogold sounds more than a little like both, and seems to provide the perfect balance.
2. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
I will admit to being mostly ignorant of the afro-pop influences that these guys are cribbing. I just know they make for some fantastic music.
1. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
A shoe-gaze album by a 26 year-old fuelled by nostalgia for his teens and grounded in 80s synth-pop, it sounds as if the past is speaking through the music itself - present but forever at a remove. Young enough that he's still a romantic, but old enough that he's forgotten just how unromantic it is to be a teen.

The 'democratization' of news sites

I'm pretty sure that when media theorists praised the democratic potentials of the internet a decade or more ago, they didn't have the comment sections of major media news websites in mind. As my union's nearly three-month long strike lurches to an end - with a whimper, as the government is legislating us back to work - I'm continually depressed at the way in which comments threads are filled with old information, misinformation, or just plain old propaganda - ideas from which the newspaper can distance themselves insofar as they didn't write them, but all of which they nonetheless allow to be said, read, and repeated without any critical filter.

And as if this weren't enough of a problem, The Toronto Star takes the exercise to an additional level of absurdist faux democratic process by allowing people to click 'agree' and 'disagree'. (As you can see here, for instance.) By way of a click, a couple dozen readers of any online story can vote on what politicized interpretation of the news - which the newspaper could not explicitly endorse for reasons of politesse, factuality, or legality - most closely aligns with their own. It isn't an effort in the exchange of information, which is ideally what it should be, but rather a sort of mob forum. (Which, I suppose, simply reduces the standing of mainstream 'legitimate' media to the level of the rest of the internet.) And a quick look at the actual agree and disagree tallies are telling - readers will click to 'agree' with an insult or 'disagree' when a commenter lists information that corrects or casts doubt upon info offered by the paper or another commenter.

For instance: The Star was repeatedly a couple weeks behind in reporting our union's wage demands and were misleadingly suggesting in every update that the university was offering us 'increased benefits', when the 'increase' was only relative to their massively concessionary first offer. But when the 'increased benefits' were compared to the benefits available to each member when our previous contract was signed, it wasn't even close - hence, it was no increase in the sense that most of us would use the word. And every time that I posted corrections in the comments, more people 'disagreed' with me than 'agreed' - on a topic that, one would like to think, is beyond 'disagreeing'. I'm hoping that this will be revealed to have been part of a secret sociological experiment.

The curious case of the poet

Like pretty much everyone I've spoken too, I was bored stiff by the poem read by Elizabeth Alexander at Obama's inauguration. It was an awful poem - filled with clichés and trite or just plain boring imagery. It was also read in the most wooden manner. It wasn't good, but it was made several magnitudes worse by the poet's own recitation.

Which causes me to ask - why is it that we always expect poets to read their own writing? That expectation seems non-existent for most other varieties of professional writer: lyricists don't have to sing (and singers don't have to write their own lyrics); playwrights and screenwriters aren't expected to be actors; novelists or writers of non-fiction sometimes read selections, but it's hardly given the importance of a poet's reading - and the book-on-tape is rarely read by the author. So why the different standard?

Atheism, feminism, and Obama - briefly

Actual exchange, while Victoria and I were making lunch during Obama's inaugural address:

Obama: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."
Me: "So 'atheist' is a dirty word?"
Victoria: "It would be like saying 'feminist.'"

I get the sense, actually, that all the debate over Obama being a feminist has actually lent feminism a mainstream legitimacy that it hasn't enjoyed in decades - for better or worse. But atheism? Not so much.

It wasn't the internet that changed...

I'm still on strike, but some recent developments have it looking like the strike will soon be over. So I decided to see what the anti-strike contingent (which consists mostly of inactive undergraduate students and some very active anti-union grad students and faculty) was saying. This was a bad idea, as it seems that I somehow forgot how the internet worked - particularly that part of the internet where a) everyone thinks you're wrong, and b) they're mad as hell about it.

Things that I should have kept in mind when entering Hostile Internet Territory (the HIT):

1. "Logic", like moral authority, is based entirely in consensus. Whenever I'd try to explain a position point-by-point, it was declared illogical. Never was my ostensible mistake explained, though it was often illustrated by means of an analogy that made absolutely no sense. But it didn't matter because everyone else in the thread agreed that the analogy was perfectly apt.
2. Keep it short.The more I would write, the more often respondents would seize on the parts of my response that a) I felt were least important, ignoring the key bits, b) were the most poorly developed and ripe for attacking, and c) contained misspellings. Engaging an opponent in the HIT should be like running into the Romulans along the Neutral Zone - don't deviate from the course, don't make eye-contact, and say as little as necessary.
3. Keep it clear. This is not unlike the last point but deserves its own entry. I would use expressions like "I think it's fair to assume" or "my best guess", thinking that they expressed an appropriately casual and open-minded position. But I'm not one to write in a deferential or cautious manner, and so the specificity and strength of what followed those undercut my position. I should have remembered that people's memories in the HIT generally only extend back to the last thing that made them angry, and so the speculative element should have been reinforced.
4. Keep it serious. Never, never, never try to be sarcastic or ironic in a forum full of people who have previously told you that they hate you. (And who have written death-threats to your co-workers.) It might seem like quite the clever and good idea in the moment, but it never is.
   
5. Emasculate, emasculate, emasculate. Being called a "bitch", or some derivative thereof, is the ultimate put-down and sexism - even, as baffling as it seemed, when it's a woman challenging the masculinity of a man by way of comparing him to a woman - is par for the course. I was, at first, shocked to see this kind of thing being written by the people with whom I might some day find myself working or teaching. And then I remember that this is the HIT, where the enemy isn't really regarded as people and so things like sexism aren't really sexism.

(Note: I'm going to be trying to get back into the habit of blogging, though I can't really make any promises. But I'm also going to aim for shorter posts, more speculative and less concerned with carefully articulating and proving a point. Here's hoping.)

Search strings

I've been trying to get back into the swing of doing academic work - I'm still on strike, and have been for more than 6 weeks, now - but thought I'd try working myself back into the blogging habit by way of a frivolous posting: taking inspiration from Jen, here's a short collection of the funny and strange searches that bring people to my blog (which only brought people here once, unless otherwise noted):

• "hetero man crush" (3 unique visits!)
  
• "pictures taken of herself"
• asshole kevin dicus
• naked divas on play boy
• politicization of teenage pregnancy
• we are writing to register our displeasure and....
• x-men rape (2 visits)

On a less funny note, there are also something like 50 different searches that include the word 'masculinity', which is something of an accomplishment, I think.

The most clicked on page on my blog? You'd think that the index page would be the obvious answer, but it isn't - due to Google searches relating to The Dark Knight and Google image searches for Heath Ledger's Joker, it's actually my hysterical joker/hobo batman posting. (My very first post on the Joker promo pictures is #4.) The top-five is rounded out by a blog about Miley Cyrus and the ridiculous expectation that pop starlets should be entirely asexual, and my most recent blog about Canada's coalition crisis - it's been getting about two direct hits a day, which seems impressive for a discussion of constitutional politics. (Some credit goes to Facebook for that one - I posted a link there, which was then picked up by at least one other person and recirculated.)

Canadian constitutional politics - an FAQ

Canadian politics have been interesting this past week or two - the newly re-elected Conservative party returned with a slightly larger minority share of the seats, but in its first few days rushed to present a budget that 1) could very well bankrupt at least 3 of their 4 major competitors, and so 2) was something that the majority of Parliament would never accept. It also offered basically no movement on the economy. (The funding was the first item dropped when it became clear that the budget wouldn't pass, but the opposition still pressed to defeat the governing party. For the cynical, the economy issue provides a good cover to reject the more important threat to party funding; for the idealistic, the refusal to move on the economy is reason in and of itself to reject the budget.)

But to make a long story short for those who don't follow Canadian politics... our Conservative Prime Minister invoked a power usually reserved to enter into recess after a session of many months, and will hold on to power at the very least until late January, when Parliament will resume with a new speech and budget that may or may not see the minority Conservative government lose the confidence of the other parties (a euphemism meaning that the other parties would vote to remove them from power) and either force a new election or compel the Governor General to ask the remaining parties to form a coalition and replace them. (In fact, it was a coalition agreement between two parties, and the signed support of the other, that made it appear that the Conservatives would be out of power at this very moment had they not prorogued Parliament.) And yes, that's the short version.

Anyway... the ridiculous amount of disinformation that's been flying around his past week made me feel that it's necessary to write some sort of Canadian Parliamentary Boondoggle FAQ, with a focus on the most popular and fallacious statements that are being bandied about by Conservatives and their supporters. This is decidedly unlike most of the stuff I post here, but it needs to be posted somewhere.

The key myths

The coalition agreement between the Liberals and NDP (with the signed but unofficial support of the Bloc Quebecois) that would see the coalition replace the Conservatives as Canada's governing party is illegal

The governing party in Canada's Parliament governs only so long as they maintain the confidence of the House - that is, when a majority of Members of Parliament vote to pass major pieces of government legislation. When they lose that confidence - when the other parties reject a major piece of legislation - the Governor General either dissolves Parliament and calls an election or asks the remaining parties if they can form a governing party that can garner the House's confidence. The coalition agreement that was signed anticipated a budget vote that would have seen the Conservatives lose confidence and was meant to indicate to the Governor General that yes, another governing party would have the House's confidence. It's not just legal - it's part of the procedure.

The coalition agreement is undemocratic

Given the amount of negotiation and political reorganization described above, this charge is more understandable. Insofar as it may distort the will of the people that elected these folks in the first place, sure. But given that Canadians don't live in direct democracy where our political will is directly accessed, the same complaint can be made of our entire system: our vote only elects a representative who may or may not follow through on his or her promises. A representative who might even leave the party they were running for when you voted for them and join one that you despise. Or who may decide to remain a member of their party but work with the members of other parties. That's just how the system works - and if the coalition is undemocratic, then so is the entire system.

The coalition agreement is unprecedented

It's rare, but not unprecedented. PM Borden ran a coalition government for a number of years during WWI, and a coalition government ran the country in the years immediately preceding the formation of Canada.

The coalition taking power would effectively be a coup d'état

I'd like to think that this sort of hopelessly idiotic remark could only come from someone who doesn't actually know what a coup is or means. Was the constitution violated by the proposed change in leaders? Was Parliament taken by force? Was the government ejected by self-appointed military leaders? No? Then it wouldn't be a coup.

The 'Parliamentary system 101' stuff

A coalition that would install either the Liberal leader (previously Dion; potentially Ignatieff) or NDP leader as Prime Minister is illegitimate because they weren't elected Prime Minister in the last election - Stephen Harper was

Strictly speaking, nobody but the voters in Stephen Harper's own riding voted for him. Like I said above, we don't actually even vote for a particular party - we only vote for our local representative. In turn, he or she typically throws their support behind their own party leader, which is why the party with the largest plurality within a minority Parliament tends to govern. (Again, this isn't necessarily the case - though European Parliaments serve as a far better example.) That said, those same representatives are the only folks who actually choose the Prime Minister, and they're entirely within their rights to change their mind.

The coalition has no moral authority to govern because the Liberals and NDP were rejected by Canadians in the last election

Well, given that no one party received even 40% of the vote, we can fairly say that every party was rejected by most people in the country. That said, the coalition rightly points out that, combined, they received more votes than the Conservatives. And since no one is actually able to vote against a party or its leader, that's all we have to work from in determining who was 'rejected'.

The coalition itself is illegitimate because no one actually voted for it

No one actually voted for any specific party - you elected a representative, who in turn is a member of a party. But they could switch allegiances and keep the seat that you elected them to, which is the surest indication that you didn't actually select a party when you voted. Members of parliament do this infrequently, of course, but switching parties or becoming an independent operates according to the same principle - your elected official decides to alter their allegiance, which in this case would see the NDP and Bloc members decide to select the Liberal leader as their Prime Minister rather than implicitly selecting their own.

The coalition itself is illegitimate and lacks moral authority because it can only function with the support of the separatist Bloc Quebecois

This point usually has to do with the Bloc being a separatist party that wants Quebec to secede from Canada - it suggests that a nationalist governing party should have no part in seeking support from a separatist party. That said, the Conservatives discussed working with the Bloc in 2004 to remove and replace a minority Liberal government, and recently admitted that they that they would accept Bloc support to protect the Liberal-NDP coalition from toppling them. So this is apparently only an illegitimate move if it isn't executed by the Conservatives. Which reveals that it's just contradictory bullshit.

The more obscure stuff

The PM's request to prorogue was legitimate and the Governor General had to agree to it

It was legitimate, insofar as it's within the PM's power to request prorogation at pretty much anytime. Conventionally, though, these sorts of recesses are only called at the end of a session of Parliament (usually lasting many months) or before an election. Certainly, requesting a prorogue after only a throne speech and before any legislation is actually passed is unprecedented. It's also unclear whether the request had to be honored by the GG. While a Governor General of Canada has never denied this particular kind of request, previous GG's have denied other sorts of requests - most famously in 1926, when the Governor General refused the Liberal Prime Minister's request for an election and instead inquired as to whether the Conservative Official Opposition could replace them as the governing party. This said, an unelected official's refusal to grant the requested of an elected official probalby wouldn't look good on that whole issue of 'democracy'.

The cut to the public funding of Canadian political parties was a legitimate cost-cutting measure

The cut would've amounted to about $30 million, or about 0.01% of the total budget. Tiny, targetted cuts of this sort are almost always self-serving or purely a p.r. move. The cut itself might be a perfectly legal one, but the underlying motivations were hardly pure

The cut of public funding of Canadian political parties was legitimate because taxpayer money shouldn't be used to fund political parties

In fact, nearly every Westernized country subsidizes elections with public funding - John McCain, for instance, used more than $80 million of it in the American election. The idea, naturally, is to allow any party with popular appeal a fair chance at electing members, rather than limiting access to political power to only those parties that can afford to hire people to fundraise - and who can only afford to hire them because their previous fundraising efforts were so successful, and so the cycle goes. Simply, the system of public funding rewards parties for winning support for their policies by translating every vote into money, where a system devoid of public funding would reward parties for being able to wring the most money out of the most people. I may be an idealist, but it's not hard to see where one system can easily go most horribly wrong.

Pop music divas, gender play, and empowerment

1) Beyoncé's "If I Were A Boy" (embedding has been disabled by Youtube, so I only have a link)

The video for this song, off of Beyoncé's new album, features an incredibly serious and surprisingly subtle inversion of typically masculine and feminine stereotypes. It then surprisingly inverts them near the video's end in a way that could rightly be criticized as heavy-handed or obvious, though I would suspect that it's also a case of Beyoncé understanding that her intended audience might need more than a mere hint to get the point.

One of the reasons that this point - a statement on male privilege, where Beyoncé takes her boyfriend for granted, cheats on him, and laughs off his concerns - might need the explicit twist at the end is because the video's inversion doesn't totally work. Rather than becoming "a boy", her masculinized self has had masculinity grafted or added on to her femininity rather than replaced it. The inversion works for the most part during the exchanges with the boyfriend, but falls apart in public (her attractiveness is still coded in typically female ways - tight pants, hourglass figure) and in her interactions with other men, who stand above and behind her in conventionally familiar ways. One imagines that even the masculinized Beyoncé would not be immune to charges of being a whore, as little sense as that may make in the context of her song, because her "boy" character might be just as easily read as "ice queen" or simply "bitch".

All that said, this stuff probably constitutes the least important details of the video. Part of the lesson appears to be price of becoming like the boys - namely, the double-standard that exists when you fail to transition from the rules governing girls to a category of rules governing boys and are instead trapped inside both, subject to adhering to both at once. And the sudden transition to a stereotypical relationship between the two characters near the end also goes a ways to illustrating the tentativeness of women's masculine power, too - that is, even if you can hold a degree of masculine and feminine power at once, it's an anxious balance that's easily stripped away by those who wield more, and more secure, holds on that same privilege. And so the video fails because it's an exercise in realism.

2) Britney's "Womanizer" (again, embedding disabled)

But even if we found more to dislike than like in "If I Were A Boy"... well, thank god for Britney Spears, who lends some perspective by reminding us that while Beyoncé's video is flawed it could have been sooooo much worse.

Britney's various characters are also asserting some sort of power, a sort of campy masculine domination over an ostensible "womanizer" that's wronged them. But it's a wholly fantastical power, as the video's cheeky delivery undermines empowerment of these women in its joking presentation. This is the sort of thing that women might dream of doing, but it's not the sort of thing that any woman would actually do.

It's even sadder when we consider that the video's version of this woman's fantasy actually seems quite a bit more like a hegemonic man's fantasy. When the womanizer is being mobbed, we could be forgiven for wondering whether we should actually feel sorry for him - at times, it's not even entirely clear whether his punishment (?) is sex or... well, I'm not entirely sure what else it could be. Throw in the shots of a gratuitously nude Britney, with the womanizer seemingly showering in the background, and the audience can only be reasonably left with one conclusion: fantasy or not, being a womanizer is hot.

Things I Don't Get

• Pro-Lifers. I don't get why pro-lifers appear to value unborn human life more than, well, born human life. They seem to go to often ridiculous lengths to protect fetuses but, for the most part, are the same people who oppose a secure welfare net and reliable public health care system that would see those same babies safely into adulthood. Or maybe this is why they simply call themselves pro-life rather than pro-good life?
  
• Lynda Barry. I find Ernie Pook's Comeek neither funny nor insightful.
  
• Why no one does anything about price fixing. Everyone knows that the price of gas is fixed. Everyone knows that it's bullshit when they explain that it will take 90 days to refine, process, and ship the oil that is now selling for half what it was only a few months ago, and so we'll only see the price drop 3 months from now. But no one seems willing to point out the contradiction when, in advance of a storm that is merely expected to reduce production, the price of gas anticipates the next 3 months rather than waits for them to pass and jumps dramatically.
  
• How to take a compliment from the other team in sports. I always think they're mocking me, even when they compliment me after I've done something good. I was traumatized as an undersized child, evidently.
  
• Why the news - on TV, on the internet, in the paper - is incapable of staking out a critical position outside of the occasional editorial. A timely example: Now that Christmas is approaching, we're met with a barrage of tips about bargain-hunting and getting the best deal. Some even pretend to be exercising a pseudo-criticality by making token mentions of "the economy" and charity. But why is it that no one is will to critique the quest for "bargains" as an ultimately futile one, to note how short-sighted and self-defeating this strategy is when it encourages us to spend money on businesses that aren't locally (or even domestically) owned and whose profits leave the country, who don't buy or produce their products locally or invest locally (or, again, nationally), and who don't produce sustainable jobs at a living-wage and thus create the need to find "bargains" as a means of surviving on one's meager earnings?*
  

*This distress about news-discourse is also a more personal one that's connected to the media's inability to make sense of my union's positions throughout the strike - that, yes, continues. Once you start talking about 'restoring "real" wages to 2005 levels' and 'indexing increases to the benefit funds to membership growth', the media - and so the public at large - stop paying attention. In response, I've pushed the need to develop a strategy of 'sexy sound-bites'. I'm not entirely certain that it would work, but it seems that PR wars can't otherwise be waged through mass media.

Apologies...

I've been on strike since the middle of last week, and it's sapped a lot of my energy - both physically, with respect to waking up at 5:30 in the morning to picket, and mentally, in terms of worrying about when it's going to end and about stressing out over its reception by undergraduate students. I have plenty of things to write about, but I've been lacking the desire to write about them. I'll try to remedy that some time soon.

"Hetero man-crush"

One of my very favorite expressions to use is "hetero man-crush", in part because it always gets a laugh from people who've never heard it, and in part because it's almost always perfectly apt. I use it to describe non-sexual-but-more-than-platonic attraction to other guys, though it seems to be used by most other guys to exclusively describe an attraction to male celebrities or other guys that they don't actually know. (I suppose it's somehow safer or less anxious if it's confined only to people you'll never meet?)

I can't recall when I first started using it or who/where I got it from, though the very oldest reference to "hetero man crush" (as opposed to simply "man crush") that I could find on Google is in August of 2005, which uses it "to denote a man that [one] admires, to the point of wanting to get to know that person more, admiring that person to the point of thinking about them often and wanting to be like them." In fairness, though, that definition seems to fit "man crush" more accurately than "hetero man-crush", the latter being a bit more ironic and cute about the way that it self-reflexively asserts the heterosexuality of the speaker/writer. (And, in that assertion, also winks knowingly at the anxious and tenuous construction of that heterosexuality.) There has to be some admittance that you want to be too much like them, that your fandom (in the case of celebrities) approaches a discomforting level or your interactions with them (in the case of people you know) are already ambiguously gay. No definition of "hetero man-crush" works without the inclusion of those levels.

As for specific examples of my own? George Clooney as Danny Ocean is maybe at the top of the list, and I suspect it has something to do with both his overwhelming coolness and my love of Clooney's hair, given that I'm getting a number of grays and hope sincerely that my gray hair will somehow eventually be like his. It's incredibly unlikely, sure, but just maybe...

"Nick and Norah" and genre

I watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with some friends two weekends ago. 15 minutes in I knew that it was going to make for an interesting discussion - not because the movie was particularly good or bad, but because it I knew it was distinctly cruder than some of the people I saw it with were expecting.

Briefly, then: two of our group found the film discomforting, with their main complaints relating to the unrealistic handling of Norah's drunk friend and Nick's ex-girlfriend's interest in Nick. Why, they asked, was the film so casual - or, rather, irresponsible - in its failure to address the risk of sexual violence posed to the drunk girl, wandering the bars and streets of New York, and to the ex-girlfriend, who Nick abandoned while she was stripping in a parking lot? And why the hell would the ex-girlfriend have wanted a nerd like Nick in the first place, much less want him back?

Good questions, both. And also, I countered, somewhat unfair. What they should have been critiquing, rather than the film, I suggested, was its genre - because Nick and Norah is a genre film in the now-familiar (well, evidently not that familiar to my two friends) American Pie/Apatow model in which young people do ridiculous and self-destructive things, discover important stuff about themselves, and rarely pay any sort of consequences. And it makes as much sense to criticize these films for their failure to address sexual violence as it does to criticize, say, an action film for misrepresenting the accuracy of handguns and failing to address the real danger of getting shot and bleeding profusely. (A la the old 'it's just a flesh-wound' joke.) There's a sort of apoliticism at work in both forms that seem to ask that we don't take them all that seriously, that we recognize there's a sort of fantasy at work and that it's not really like real life.

That's not to say, of course, that the absence of sexual violence in the former genre and death of the hero at the hands of gun-fire in the second is not problematic. Quite the opposite, in fact - that genre fiction of any kind misrepresents real life for the sake of narrative ease and intelligibility (I mean, we couldn't laugh at the movie or want Nick and Norah to get together if Nick's abandoning his girlfriend led to her sexual assault) is totally something that we should acknowledge and discuss. And if we start to mistake their genre fantasies for real life, well, that's also hugely problematic - which is why I go to the trouble of asserting Nick and Norah's genre-pic status in the first place. But is it ultimately fair to ask for that kind of self-reflexivity of a genre pic, to expect it to address these issues and asks these questions of itself? No more fair, I think, than it is to ask Die Hard to explicitly disclaim its own ultra-violence as needlessly sensational. It's not individual action films or romantic-comedies that ruin people - it's their refusal to see these films as action films or romantic-comedies.

Uncanny X-Men 503 and THAT scene

I wanted to write something else - less contentious, more literary - about Matt Fraction on the X-Men, so it's a shame that this has to be the first thing. See, there's a scene in the middle of 503 where Cyclops and Emma Frost are investigating the Hellfire Cult's warehouse, during which Emma dresses up in some bondage gear and, presumably, things get a little unprofessional.

The thing is, as we learn at the end of the issue, it's not Emma in the bondage gear. Apparently, I was the only person (on a message board, at least) who was immediately skeptical - "this is kinky even for you", Cyclops' mentioning that she's unnecessarily in his head, and the uncharacteristically glowing red eyes were pretty much a dead giveaway. Or so I thought. But there are other, rather obvious clues: the story arc's mystery villain, the Red Queen, is shown telepathically extracting information about Emma Frost's personality earlier in the issue, and Emma admits to having no idea what Cyclops is talking about when he mentions the scene at the end of the issue - after which Cyclops immediately sees the Red Queen, who he identifies as his ex-wife, Madelyne Pryor. So it's implied and not totally clear until the end, but it happened nonetheless: Cyclops was telepathically raped. (If you're still not with me, see my brief discussion of the issue of consent in the very last paragraph of his blog post.)

When I asked why no one was talking about this on the message board, it was suggested that it's a sort of comeuppance for Cyclops. During Grant Morrison's run, Cyclops and Emma had a psychic affair that the former dismissed as not disloyal to his wife because it wasn't physical, and so Maddie is sort've toying with that logic - that is, it must not be sexual assault because it was only psychic. And, going back to Claremont's pre-Inferno days, the same person suggested that the story element of tricking him into doing something without his informed consent is not unlike the process by which Madelyne was herself transformed into a villain during what she thought was a dream. Notably, Cyclops didn't accept this as an explanation of her transformation, nor did he accept any blame for the mental distress that led her to that point, much of which was his fault.

So to the extent that it seems to be invoking these earlier moments of Cyclops' hypocrisy and using it against him, it works. But there's something so incredibly distasteful about the suggestion of rape, here, that I just can't get past. Maybe it's just that sexual assault is so often sensationalized, and that instances of gender-reversal of his sort are so often handled poorly, that I'm having a knee-jerk reaction that will turn out to be unfounded. And maybe it's also because I have some affection for Madelyne's original character and didn't like her transformation into a villain in the first place - and so I find it additionally detestable that she's been reduced again, this time into a rapist.

[I should also note that this scene caused me to reconsider an element in the last Casanova story arc where something surprisingly similar happens, though it escaped my notice in the moment. In that story, Casanova is undercover as his sister, Zephyr, and has a sexual relationship with a male terrorist named Kubark - who, predictably, feels deeply betrayed and disturbed when he learns that Zephyr was never Zephyr at all. This fits all the same criteria for any legal or moral definition of rape - you can't give informed consent when someone is withholding information that prevents a full awareness of the consequences of your actions, ie. when they're lying about who they are or intend to do you harm. And yet I totally missed it - probably because Casanova is deeply apologetic and Kubark is totally evil, responding with homophobia rather than admitting any emotional pain. It's probably to Fraction's credit that he can do this twice before I catch it, and that it can work so well in the context of the story. But I still find it a troubling sort of trope.]

God probably wanted me to write this

There were a couple articles in Time, recently, asking whether evangelicals telling folks that God wanted them to be rich or wanted them to get a house were to blame for the financial crisis. In short - if God wants you to get a mortgage that you shouldn't be able to afford, then he'll "make a way" and it's beyond you to question the logistics. It's easy to see that this road leads to disaster, in retrospect if not in the moment. Especially when you're encouraged to avoid looking down that road in the first place.

Of course, the market meltdown will hardly prompt a crisis in faith. I'm sure that people will find a way to rationalize God wanting them to suffer a crushing setback. (I'm also sure hubris will factor in, though not in the way that I would think to apply it.)

It all reminds me of one of my favorite religious paradoxes. Two sports teams meet in some sort of championship, and both extol their faith in God and assuredness that he'll help then win. And then one team invariably loses. They find ways to rationalize it, but it simply comes down to God not wanting them to win - which they deal with shockingly well, considering how sure they were that God wanted them to win beforehand. (Again, it was probably Satan-induced hubris, right? As opposed the Christ-induced confidence of the other team, I guess. Too bad we couldn't tell them apart beforehand and skip this whole thing.) But they never seem to make either of the leaps from there that, to me, seem entirely logical: 1) God just doesn't fucking care about whether you win a trophy when he has stuff like, say, natural disasters to concern him; and 2) maybe God just doesn't like you.

But, then, I don't really get any of this religious stuff.

It's the same everywhere, depressingly

With elections underway both here, in Canada, and the USA, I'm subjecting myself to twice the normal dose of bullshit politicking. There are all sorts of examples, but the ludicrous spin-doctoring that's happening on both sides of the border is perhaps the most aggravating. For example:

• An inquiry in Alaska found that Sarah Palin abused her power in attempting to have her brother-in-law fired from his job in law enforcement. The McCain/Palin team's response? It was "a partisan-led inquiry" whose findings can't be trusted. Which might hold water if it was a Democrat-led inquiry. Only it wasn't - the Republican members outnumbered the Democrats by more than two-to-one. So unless Palin's such a maverick that her own party would take a "partisan" position against her...
  
• An FBI expert confirmed that the relevant portion of a controversial audio tape, where the current Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, can be heard confirming to a biographer that he offered a dying independent Member of Parliament a bribe for helping to bring down the former Liberal government, had not been tampered with and represented an unbroken conversation. But the PM, who claimed that his response and/or the question had been doctored, has refused to address the tape, and his legal team is arguing that the findings somehow vindicated the PM. Because, y'see, at some point afterward the tape was stopped and rewound a bit, and used to record another piece of the same conversation. Clearly, they seem to be implying, the biographer erased the part where Harper said "Just kiddin'!" by recording over it - and in the PM's presence, no less.

I have nothing of much substance to add. I voted in an advance poll and I'm taking my usual efforts to subtly influence people. But it's no wonder that people are made too fall so easily for misdirection and outright lies - there's so much of it that deception becomes the normative state of mass politics.

Sleep and irretrievable ideas

I really need to start sleeping with a note pad or something beside my head. Often, I'll lie in bed for half an hour or longer, thinking or theorizing about something that I had been reading or working on and a really good idea will come to me. Unfortunately, unless I get out of bed to write it down, I usually can't remember it in the morning. (It's the same way with my dreams - about 10 seconds after I wake up, all I can remember is that I had a dream.)

Case in point: I distinctly remember thinking last night that I had an idea that I should blog about. But all I can remember now is that I had an idea. Of course, the caveat here is that if I can't remember the specific idea then I can't very well be sure that it was actually any good. Or that any of them are ever very good. (Almost-relevant Beatles anecdote: Paul McCartney often talks of a party where, in a drugged out haze, he told Neil Aspinall that he had discovered the meaning of life any Neil had to record it for him. When Paul woke in the morning he couldn't remember the meaning but recalled where he had put the paper. And written on the paper? "There are seven levels.")

Meet the new library, same as the old library

For the first time, I decided to check out a book in electronic format yesterday - through NetLibrary - since it would save me the trouble of having to travel to the actual library. Now, you would think that the advantage of reading an eBook through the school's library is not simply the convenience of reading from home, but also the fact that you don't have to worry about someone else having already borrowed the book and leaving you high and dry.

And if you thought that, you would be wrong, since it's not uncommon to get a message like this: "This book is already in use. Please try again later."

Inexplicably, every library only gets one "copy" (?) of each eBook, and if someone is reading that copy, well you're shit out of luck. But it's comforting to know that someone took the time to examine the library's weaknesses and, having identified them, subsequently duplicated those weaknesses in an entirely different medium.

I think I've seen this in a political cartoon-- Only this is real

So there's this unbelievably hilarious video, released by the opposition Liberals at an incredibly inopportune time for the ruling Conservative party, that shows then-leader of the opposition and now PM Stephen Harper giving a speech exhorting Canada to join the "Coalition of the Willing" for the war in Iraq. What makes it hilarious, though, is that he's shown alongside - at times, overlapping - then-Australian PM John Howard, (the Australians being a member of said coalition) who used the exact same words only 2 days earlier.

It's almost certain that Harper had no idea this happened and a speech writer just took a shortcut. And even if that isn't the case, it's plausible enough that I could at least buy that argument if it were offered. But it's really neither here nor there, in the end. Where it's damaging is with respect to Harper's most vulnerable point - his desire to 1) be more closely allied with pro-war interests in the USA and other Western nations, but 2) to do so while not seeming to follow them uncritically or appear to be their Canadian mouthpiece, one which simply parrots them. And with respect to the latter charge: well, that's exactly what he's doing in this video, isn't it?

Adventures in TAing, case 4 (in a ? case series)

This being my sixth contract as a University teaching assistant, and my ninth tutorial group overall, I've grown accustomed to what initially seemed an odd and even counter-intuitive trend among first-year undergrads. That is, whether you give them either 1) very narrowly defined parameters and few options for an assignment, or 2) a tremendous amount of freedom to chart their own course and sink or swim, they will invariably want the other option. That is, the students who are directed to choose one topic from a detailed, pre-defined list will complain about how oppressive the (lack of) options are, while the students who are invited to invent their own subject matter will typically demand as much guidance as I'm able/willing to offer. (Important caveat: While many in the former group who say nothing and just follow their instructions generally do turn in something competent - or at least readable - those in the latter group who remain silent and do whatever they please usually produce minor disasters.)

This leads me to only one logical solution, to be implemented on the day when (if) I get to design a course and syllabus of my own: if I want to be despotic and restrict their options to a set number of my own topics, I'll first give them total freedom and then simply wait to be asked to oppress them. (Of course, this blog would be pretty damning evidence in the event that I actually pull a stunt like this...)

Electioneering: what's in a name on a sign

So we've all seen hundreds of those lawn signs that politicians put up when they run for office, right? It's a branding exercise, so it's not surprising that there are certain rules to the practice of making and displaying these signs - colors and designs that signal your party or political affiliation, and typically the big, bold display of the candidate's last name with their first name in smaller type above it.

In Canadian party politics, at least, these things are a given. (And in most American signs, too. With regard to the display of names: of the 74 signs in the first 8 Google Image search results, 8 featured only the surname, 5 sized the first and last name equally, and only 2 used a larger font for the first name.) So imagine my bemused surprise when, for the first time ever, I saw a sign for a candidate from a mainstream political party - the ruling Conservative party, in fact - that reversed that sizing convention and displayed the candidate's first name in larger type.

Which sounds pretty innocuous, right? But I don't think so. The candidate's name is Kevin Nguyen, and given the Conservative party's xenophobia - a candidate, Lee Richardson, recently suggested that most crime is committed or inspired by immigrants, and received no punishment or rebuke from the PM or the party - I would not be at all surprised if the larger "Kevin" is supposed to emphasize his Canadianness (and, implicitly, his appropriated whiteness) and distract from his last name. Unsurprisingly, then, his bio on the Conservative party website calls attention to how he appreciates Canada and its "freedom" and "opportunities." It's the sort of maudlin nationalistic sentiment that's required of someone whose connection to the country is perhaps too anxious for comfort and needs to be explicitly reinforced - especially when, as an immigrant from Vietnam, he could very well be one of those suspect folks that Lee Richardson warned us about.

I'm sure that this is too subtle for any mainstream media to pick it up, but it's not nothing. It's the only campaign sign that draws attention to the candidate's first name - Kevin signs appear alongside signs that read Sgro, Manfrini, and Capra - in one of the most non-white and poorest ridings in the country, one which has nonetheless had a counter-intuitive history of electing white candidates from the centrist Liberal party rather than people of color and/or the leftist NDP. It isn't simply blind, unmotivated racism at work in the branding of candidate Kevin - it's strategic, and it's come from someone with a very canny understanding of the racism(s) already at work within the community.

And while I'm admittedly a bit of a pessimist and already expect the worst of political parties, this just strikes me as a hopelessly and depressingly cynical way to play politics.

Leo Quintum is Lex Luthor

There have been a lot of explanations offered as to why and how All-Star Superman's benevolent super-genius, Leo Quintum, could also be its evil super-genius, Lex Luthor. I thought I'd collect and categorize the best clues right here - and, in doing so, I think I've inadvertantly compiled a pretty good argument as to why this series is so incredibly awesome.

The Morrisonian: Grant Morrison absolutely loves two things: drug-induced epiphanies and time-travel. Luthor experiences the former when he ingests the vial that gives him Superman's powers, and it's no small stretch to imagine that he could have subsequently traveled to the past in order to do something about his new perspective, thus fulfilling the latter.

The Superficial: They wear very similar coats. They like to clasp their hands behind their back. Leo looks young, but uses a cane, which would seem to imply that he's possibly older than appearances suggest - or it functions to change his posture and disguise his body language. (The age issue is also tricky, of course, since Lex's reason for trying to kill Superman in issue 1 had a lot to do with Lex getting old. So maybe Leo looks younger because a redeemed Lex has actually reversed the aging process?) Quintum has hair and glasses, but this also makes sense as a disguise: hair and glasses are what differentiates Clark from Superman, after all.

The Merely Suggestive: In Quintum's very first appearance, he throws out a comment that is never revisited but seems mighty suspicious: "I'm trying to escape from a doomed world too, Superman... It's called the past." And when Superman gives Quintum his DNA later in the series so that he can build new Supermen when Clark dies, Quintum's reluctance is similarly provocative, as he tells Superman that "I could be the devil himself for all you know." Since Quintum doesn't eventually betray Superman, this exchange serves no purpose unless Quintum in fact is the nearest thing that the DC Universe has to the devil, albeit a reformed devil.

The Suggestive as Supplemented by the Pseudo-Scientific: Superman's response to Quintum's comment about being the devil is, just as interestingly, "Oh, I think I'm a better judge of character than that, Professor. This is how much I trust you, Leo." We could take Superman at his word, that he can separate the good apples from the bad, but recall that Superman had just used his x-ray vision to write out his own DNA sequence. The dude can read DNA strands. Again, if this exchange is simply an admission of trust in a character that we had never met before this series and have been given no reason to distrust, then it's not a particularly moving or necessary scene; but if Superman has read Leo's DNA and knows that he's Lex, it's a staggering and moving display of confidence in his former nemesis.

The Textual: Leo's line about maybe being the devil is additionally ironic because Lex, especially in this series, has often been compared to the Miltonic Satan. A self-deluded narcissist who squanders his considerable powers in petty efforts to prove himself superior to Superman, Lex - to quote Superman in A-SS #12 - "could have saved the world years ago if it really mattered to [him]". But like Milton's Satan, Lex is more interested in power and proving himself deserving of power than he is with saving the world - he'll even risk the world's safety by killing Superman in pursuit of his self-actualization. Additionally, Leo's last name has a more direct connection to Milton's Satan, as Macon Cheek has suggested that Milton actually produced a literary precursor to his Paradise Lost Satan in an earlier poem. And the poem was titled "In Quintum Novembris."

The Numbers: For those who look for clues in seemingly conspiratorial patterns of numbers, there's a lot here to play with. "Quintum", in addition to having a certain phonic relation to "quantum" - and quantum mechanics are related to time travel, to tie this back to an older point - quite obviously has the latin number five imbedded in it. But where else do we see that number? Well, Lex's focus issue is #5, his prison jumpsuit is 221 (2+2+1=5), and at his trial he's situated as the fifth truly evil personality in a line that includes Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.

The Thematic: Thoroughout the series, Superman is resolute in his belief that humanity is capable of doing everything that he has done, that they will be no worse off without him if only they believe in themselves. Though he tells Lois that he's the only person strong enough to lift the key that opens the door to the Fortress of Solitude, he also hopes that "One day some future man or woman will open that door, with that key." His fortress, he explains, isn't a "museum", but rather a "time capsule" - not a record of some past age of superheroes but an example for the one that is yet to come. And this lesson is all the more meaingful if Lex Luthor himself, as Leo, is seemingly on the verge of creating the new man or woman who will be capable of lifting that key. Further to that point, Cole Moore Odell suggests that when Superman admonishes Lex in the final issue for wasting his genius we should read it as a challenge rather than a rebuke - a request that Lex, having seen the error of his ways with Superman's super-senses, will refocus his efforts and actually save a world without Superman. And he'll even do it in the way that Superman suggested: "years ago." His reformation, then, is Superman's greatest triumph - a moral victory that manages to touch even the most cynical and skeptical of us. (Which is to say: it reforms the Lex Luthor in all of us.)

The Silly: So we've touched on nearly everything right? Except for why he named himself "Leo". It's similar to "Lex", sure, and it could simply be that Morrison wanted to drive home the fact that they're mirror-reflections by opposing Lex's "X" to Leo's "O". (Get it?) But there's somethign else - Leo Quintum isn't the only Leo in this series. In a blink-and-you-missed-it moment in issue 5, Lex briefly introduces his Superman-costumed primate to Clark Kent. Its name? Leopold. It's a connection that's at once hilarious and convincingly self-effacing: if Leo is Lex, then Lex has genuinely swallowed his pride in naming himself after a monkey. No wonder Superman felt he could trust him.

All-Star Superman #12

I was recently at the Toronto Public Library's Merril Collection of Science Fiction, researching 60s Superman comics for a lecture I'm going to be giving in January. It's hopelessly hokey stuff, but I can sorta see what Grant Morrison was drawing from when he imagined All-Star Superman - a naive and hopeless optimism that was much-deserving of the mockery it's received in the past couple decades, sure, but one that has a certain charm nonetheless. And if that naive optimism could be lent some depth and recuperated somehow...

It's tough to know where or how to start whenever I have to reflect on each issue of this series - and it only gets harder with this being the final issue of the best Superman story I've ever read. (And yes, I've read "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?") Linking it to kitschiest bits of Superman and claiming that Morrison and Quitely have not simply embraced The Big Blue Boyscout aspect of the character but made it enjoyable, well, that's one way to do it. Another would be to note how the characteristic meta-moment Morrison slips into every ultimate battle scene is particularly effective here: Luthor, realizing that he's squandered his genius, stares out of the panel at us and explains that "it's all just us, in here, together. And we're all we've got." Hilariously, and poignantly, Lex precedes that revelation with "this is how he sees all the time, every day". "He" is ostensibly Superman, but could also be Morrison and/or Quitely or us. (Assuming, of course, that the reader is male.) And so what Lex, the would-be world conqueror, realizes is that he's a character in a comic book. (And maybe he thinks that he's "just" a character in a comic book. It's implicit that Superman realizes his fictional status, too, but he also seems to understand that he's not "just" a fictional character - that there's power in his existence - and that its fictionality doesn't necessarily diminish the meaningfulness of their battle. If Lex is made to feel insignificant by the realization, it's because he's a pessimist, a skeptic, and a megalomaniac.)

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this final issue is how Morrison and Quitely manage to meld the ubermensch, the proletarian, and the Christ into one figure - only to discard it. They deliberately invoked Nietzsche in issue 10, they give us this wonderful shot of Superman in the heart of the sun that I know is paying homage to a Communist poster that exists but that I just can't find**, and they have Superman die and be returned to life by his father to finish his job before finally ascending into the sun. And for all of this deification of the character, they tell us in the end that the world doesn't actually need Superman - that good super-geniuses like Quintum* already exist to oppose the evil super-geniuses like Luthor, and that humanity can achieve something super all by themselves. Further to that point, it's telling, I think, that the iconic image of Superman I described above is not the final page of the comic, but that Quintum gets the last word and the door to his Superman 2 project is the final shot of the series.

The "world without Superman" cliché has always indicated darkness and disaster when DC attaches it to company-wide events. But not so here. At the close of All-Star Superman, it simply presents an opportunity for humanity to show that it was worthy of his protection in the first place.

* (Added 9/25: In the comments, james provides a link to an excellent discussion of Leo Quintum, which parses some obscure textual clues that would seem to indicate that he's Lex Luthor, having reformed and traveled back in time. And this revelation only makes an incredible story even better. I won't repeat everything the article says or add much else - it probably deserves its own post - except to say that I'm going to have to re-read the whole thing with that in mind.)

** (Added 9/26: A post at Comicboards' Superman MB suggested a similarity to Soviet artist Evgeniy Vuchetich's "Let us Beat Swords into Plowshares", which is displayed at the UN in New York. There's a certain similarity, though I'm not sure it's what I had in mind. The sentiment, though, totally works.)

Revisiting Dallaire's legacy

Back in May of this year, Canadian celebrity-general and current senator Romeo Dallaire publicly compared the actions of the USA and Canada in Iraq and Afghanistan - especially with regard to their prosecution of alleged terrorists and Omar Khadr in particular - to the actions of the people they were fighting. Just as terrorists "don't play by the rules", Dallaire argued to a governmental committee in Ottawa, the USA and Canada are "operating on a law of their own". Some of his comments, though, were not nearly so subtle: "The minute you start playing with human rights, with conventions, with civil liberties in order to say you are doing it to protect yourself […] you are no better than the guy who doesn't believe in them at all."

Needless to say, Dallaire would end up walking straight into a trap. When a Conservative MP asked him if he was equating the actions of Canada with those of al-Qaeda, Dallaire was all too willing to play that game and provide the "black and white" answer that would surely end his political influence: "You are either with the law or you are against the law [...] You're either guilty or you're not."

Dallaire is, of course, absolutely right to suggest the absurdity and hypocrisy in chastising the ostensible bad guys for resorting to unethical and illegal modes of warfare when the supposed good guys are only too willing to respond with criminal gestures of their own.* But it's also not surprising that his party quickly moved to distance themselves from such a politically poisonous remark - there is no room for ambiguity when it comes to issues of us and them, after all. No one would bat an eye when Dallaire's successor, Rick Hillier, would reduce the Taliban simply to “detestable murderers and scumbags.” If you're going to speak simply, the lesson seems to be, just make sure you don't muddy the established good-evil divide. (Interestingly, though, Liberal leader Stephane Dion implied that Dallaire would face a punishment or reprimand of some kind. To my knowledge, that never happened - publicly, at least.)

When this first happened, I delayed in commenting on it because I wanted to see what else would develop. The answer, it seems, is nothing - Dallaire still does humanitarian work and serves on the Senate, but my guess is that he won't see any more committee work. His professional political career was over the moment his lived actions compromised his symbolic power as a national hero. The government still needs that symbol, so the living man will just have to be muzzled.

Dallaire also provided the following quote, which is interesting for all sorts of reasons that are close to my research interests and work: "It [the aforementioned illegal war activities] makes us look like a damn bunch of hypocrites, nothing less. It emasculates all of us who are Canadian, who are trying to work in areas like eradicating child soldiers." I'm reminded of how Sherene Razack conceptualized the Canadian peacekeeper as "anti-conquest man", a figure who tried to walk the delicate line between war-maker and war-victim and was constantly at risk of becoming one or the other - depending, in part, on whether the anti-conquest man becomes the emasculated or the emasculator. Just another reminder that we can never underestimate the tremendous caché (legitimacy?) that ownership (and the ability to distribute, which is implicit in Dallaire's remark) of military masculinity carries.

* I realize that terms like 'unethical', 'illegal', and 'criminal' in this context are loaded and deserve to be better unpacked. I'm using them in the same sense that Dallaire and the UN would - with reference to UN conventions that govern the legal and ethical process of making war. Which is, I know, kind of fucked-up in and of itself - but I won't actually tackle that in this space. That's a discussion for another time.

Wikipedia's curious visualizations of fetish porn

So sexual fetish porn is incredibly racialized and gendered*. This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. But what might come as a shock is the usually very reliable and politically self-reflexive Wikipedia's participation in the production of these, uh... representations. (I'm trying to be subtle because it's all a bit discomforting. You'll see what I mean.)

Here's one, and another, and one more.

It's not that it's weird for Wikipedia to attach R- or X-rated images to its entries. It seems pretty sensible for an encyclopedia to do that when they're covering porn or sex and they do it in quite reasonable ways on other pages. What's weird is that in cataloging the porn fetishes, they manage to also perpetuate those most problematic aspects of them. And that's just not cool.

Now anyone want to tackle the implications of these images being cartoons? (And quite realistic, though still obviously fake, cartoons?)

*And they're racialized and gendered both simultaneously and connectedly, since those racialized roles of fetish-play are always assigned gendered (masculine, feminine) values. Or you could read it in the reverse - that the gender roles in hetero fetish-porn are implicitly raced. Anyway - the point being that they're inextricable and mutually implicated.

Chuck and me

When one of my students this past summer told me that the way I talked in tutorial reminded her of Chuck Klosterman, I wasn't sure whether I should be entirely flattered. Chuck Klosterman has a quite amusing and acerbic wit about him, but he's also a bit of an incorrigible and apolitical - or at least politically incoherent - asshole. (But the kind of asshole that you think secretly hates you but pretends to like you, rather than the kind that you're afraid will punch you in the face.)

But I've been reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs little by little over the past couple weeks, and I've come to realize that, whether I should feel flattered or not by the comparison, this student may have been on to a little something. For instance:

• Chuck and I find the kids in Trix commercials to be needlessly* cruel to the rabbit.
• Chuck wears black-rimmed, geek-chic glasses; I sometimes wish that I did.
  
• Chuck and I both sometimes suspect that we're the only people in the world who liked Vanilla Sky.
• Chuck and I both hate the emphasis that music critics put on the cleverness of lyrics. But for different reasons: he prefers lyrics that are immediate and relate-able, while I'm w(e)ary of cleverness-for-its-own sake because it's usually bereft of a meaningful or coherent politics
  
• Chuck and I are both one trick-ponies in our writing on pop culture. Despite the packaging, every essay Chuck writes about a pop cultural text can be reduced to a "this is actually a metaphor for real life"-style thesis; despite the packaging, everything I write about a pop cultural text can be reduced to 1) the ironic swerve, and 2) the politically oppressive message that it's secretly spreading. (But I'm probably giving myself too much credit and Chuck too little - for all its pomp, my two-part reduction is actually just a fancier, cynical version of "this is a actually a metaphor for real life".)
  

* Well, maybe not "needlessly". Chuck describes their interaction as a metaphor for how 'childhood cool' works. I just thought they were jerks.

Some comics...

I haven't done a lot of comic book blogging in the last few weeks (months?), in part because I've been buying trades and graphic novels almost exclusively, but also because a lot of the monthlies I've bought haven't done much to hold my interest.

Uncanny X-Men 502. I think that I might kinda like this story if it weren't for Greg Land's art. There's something very mid-80s Claremont about it, what with the composition of the team, a New Mutant, a Hellion, and the Hellfire Club all making appearances. I don't know what it's all supposed to add up to, though. 501 seemed to be playing with nostalgia - we get the Sentinels and Magneto in that first issue, but as a tasteless art installation and with imitation powers, respectively. This Hellfire Gang seems like an unimpressive twist on the Club, but maybe it needs time to go somewhere. As for Land, his visuals are stiff and flat, the transitions between panels are awkward or incoherent (I shouldn't have to look back and forth between them to figure out where someone came from or how they could have possibly moved like that), and his faces are just... freaky. What kind of expression is Pixie making on page 5 and why is she making it as she gets her head knocked in by a baseball bat? And why does Cyclops always have a completely ridiculous and entirely out-of-character shit-eating grin?

Astonishing X-Men 26. I read this maybe two weeks ago, but I seem to have retained virtually none of it. I remember the villain being slightly creepy and the plot trudging forward at a snail's pace. (Flips through it very quickly.) Ah, yes, and his head explodes or something at the end. And there's a really long discussion about whether the X-Men should kill which is, again, not terribly interesting because it's a discussion that they've had dozens of times and they should all be quite sure of where each other stand on the issue. They couldn't fit in a B-story or something? I'm starting to be of the mind that it's better to be explicitly bad than it is to be boring - and this is boring.

I also picked up the first issue of Omega The Unknown, because I had read a bit about its background and it sounded interesting. And that first issue, at least, wasn't disappointing. Maybe I just need a break from mainstream superhero stuff.

Adventures in TAing, case 3 (in a ? case series)

So i'm sitting in my office (and by "my office" I mean the office that I share with multiple people but which I occupy by my lonesome for one hour every week) at York University before teaching tutorial on Tuesday afternoon. It's the same office I had for the 07-08 school year, but better. Unlike most offices in its building, one wall has an embedded window to the hallway, which allows me access to the windows to the outdoors and real sunlight. The better part, though, is that I now have the computer to which I've always been contractually obliged but declined because I prefer the sunlight to four concrete block walls. Which is just fantastic.

I'm at this table with the computer, doing some blogging with the door open. And then The Weirdness happens.

This lanky dude wanders slowly past my door, stopping to read a post-it note affixed to the office window. (You're all assuming that he must be white because I didn't immediately racialize him and white guys tend not to notice the whiteness of other white guys. Ha! Actually, he was black.) It says "So-and-so's office hours: this time to this time on Friday". And it should take 5 seconds to read. But he stares at it intently for at least 20, which is why I notice him.

He's holding a magazine in one hand, and he taps on my door very lightly with it. I ask him if he needs help with something, and he just looks back at the note and gestures toward it with a shake of his head. I make a confused look and he gestures again and takes a couple steps into my office.

"Are you busy?" he says.

I ask him if he needs some help again. He walks toward me. (Don't worry - it was totally non-threatening.)

"Are you busy?" (2)

He didn't really answer my question, but I'm just going to assume that he needs help with something because these are the sort of brilliant deductions I'm capable of making on the spot. "Well, what do you need help WITH?"

"Are you busy?" (3)

I'm not freaked out (yet) but I'm wondering what his deal is. Because he can't possibly be solely interested in knowing whether I'm busy. Even I'm not interested in this question, and I have a vested interest in myself and what I'm doing. "Uhh... not really."

"Are you busy?" (4), this time a bit more emphatically.

Evidently, he didn't like my answer, which I thought was actually rather adequate. I notice that in his non-magazine holding hand he's holding a Political Science textbook and a syllabus that belongs to a course that is not the one I TA. So assuming that this guy's secret motive is very likely related to another class or the Poli Sci program or something else that I probably don't know anything about, I say "Do you have a question about Humanities 1970? [This being the course I TA, for which I have been given office space and time.] Because if you don't then I probably can't help you."

"Are you busy?" (5)

This time I don't even say anything. I just sorta arch my eyebrow and let my jaw go slack. I have no idea what's going on or how to respond anymore. It's like that two-second moment when you first realized that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze and you're so amused and surprised by the realization that you're momentarily stunned into paralysis. Only replace "amused" with "bewildered" or "mildly horrified". He sighs and rolls his eyes.

"Are you busy?" (6)

Now I'm getting a bit pissed off too. "I don't know what you need help with!" (I've thrown in an exclamation point for emphasis, not volume. I'm dropping my voice, rather than getting louder, so as to sound more authoritative and masculine. Because that's just how authority rolls. And because I'm wearing a gray and pink sweater vest that otherwise undercuts my masculine authority.)

"Are. You. Busy?" (7)

He clearly thinks I'm an idiot, but I don't know why. I silently wonder: am I being filmed? Am I going to be a reality TV star twice over? "How do you even know I can help you?"

"Are you busy?" (8) Yeah, he's very clearly using the 'I think I'm talking to a moron' tone. Which is appropriate, because, at this point, so am I.

But this is getting old. And it's getting unbearably annoying fast, so I start to get snarky. "You know, usually you start by introducing yourself or saying hello when you walk into someone's office. And then you ask your question."

He sighs audibly, throws his hands up into the air and stomps out of the room. And sensing that I have about one second to say something clever and biting before he walks out the door and I never see him again, I say, "Dude, you are weird." Seriously. I'm in my ninth year of higher education and that's the best I could come up with.

He turns the corner of the doorway and disappears just momentarily. Then he takes a step backward, leans his head back into the room and says - remarkably - "You too."

Note: It's very possible that there was another one or two "Are you busy"s in there. It was hard to keep track in the moment.

The curious coverage of election promises

We have elections in full-swing, now, both north and south of the 49th parallel, and I'm always struck by the ridiculous tax-cut-happy bias displayed in media coverage of campaign promises. A candidate or party can propose a tax cut with hardly anyone asking where the correlative spending cut will occur, but they can rarely propose new spending without explaining - immediately - how they'll raise the money to cover it. It makes sense that both should be subject to the same degree of scrutiny, right?

Naturally, this is a fundamentally Bad Thing for the parties whose promises are staked on new social or cultural initiatives, rather than on reducing the tax load. In the Canadian election, the two major parties find themselves hilariously separated both in terms of their ostensible spend/cut philosophies and their transparency: but while the Liberal party has been, to my mind, quite explicit in explaining how they'll balance the new taxes with the new spending, little attention has been given to what the Conservative party will have to cut in order to meet their tax cut promises.

Take, for instance, a proposed cut to the diesel fuel tax. It'll remove a not-insubstantial $600 million from the piggy bank, but the Conservatives didn't even bother to suggest where that $600 will be struck from their spending. And no one asked.

I'm also amused by the underlying assumption that more fiscally conservative governments will necessarily be more fiscally responsible. The largest budget deficit ever posted by a Canadian government was posted by the Conservatives in the early 90s. (Which is, in part, attributable to a larger recession, but has also been blamed on PM Brian Mulroney's disastrous "zero inflation" economic policy. The Liberal government that followed him turned it into a surplus in less than 5 years, though at high cost to government services.) Likewise, the Reagan and Bush #1 years saw a combined $3 trillion dollars worth of debt and Bush #2 posted a record deficit in 2004 of $415 million. (Clinton's last year, by comparison, saw a budget surplus of $236 billion.) So where does this myth of conservative budgetary savvy come from, anyway?

Paglia on Palin

Camille Paglia thinks that Sarah Palin is a feminist. Camille Paglia is wrong.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

Paglia's making the exact same mistakes that I listed in my earlier comments on this same topic of Palin's ostensible feminist credentials: she doesn't realize that it's problematic - and decidedly unfeminist - to suggest that a woman needs to become a masculine-feminine hybrid in order to succeed when a man need not be anything buy masculine, nor does she seem to realize that Palin's rise, while undoubtedly important for its symbolism, confirms her exceptionalism rather than her exemplariness.

For this reason, the Madonna comparison is an unexpectedly good one - Madonna is so singular and unique that she strikes us as very nearly unreal or artificial. She's a woman that has built a career out of projecting a future-woman or counter-cultural sexuality rather than reflecting the mainstream. If this is Palin's metaphorical match, then she hardly proves Paglia's point.

Madonna also offers the mainstream a sort of cultural catharsis - having allowed her threaten the center with her saucy lyrics and cone-shaped bras, conservative media bodies can point to their acceptance - even promotion - of Madonna as proof of their tolerance. And this is especially effective when we try to judge the sort of material effect that Madonna has produced: sincerely, now, what sort of socio-cultural change - beyond those to high-fashion or the producing and selling of pop music - has Madonna actually managed?*

And Paglia's implicit suggestion, that getting a woman to the president's office is somehow de facto feminist, is also totally wrong-headed. And not just because Palin is not a feminist. As an example: A woman, Kim Campbell, became Prime Minister of Canada for six months in 1993 and every Canadian got to pat themselves on the back for their increasing tolerance and sensitivity to gender inequality. And Canadians have been so impressed with themselves that in the 15 years since only one woman has even had the chance to lead one of our four major parties. (And she never had a realistic chance of winning control of Parliament.)

Some powerful symbolism offered by those six months in 1993: they allowed us to go back to excluding women from the boys' games without having to even admit that we were doing so.

*I fully expect that my casual dismissal of Madonna will get me in trouble with someone at some point in the future, and I'm probably be unfair in failing to consider all of the people that she's inspired. Granted. But I do think it's important that there hasn't been a Madonna-like figure since Madonna - that 25 years after Madonna's debut, no one has arrived to take the pop-feminism crown from her and run with it.

Thoughts on "Fringe"

J.J. Abrams newest show, Fringe, debuted tonite, an X-Files-meets-Lost kind of show that - rather than causing you to marvel at the cleverness of such a combination in a "why didn't anyone do this before?" kind of way - instead leads you to the realization that those shows were not quite dissimilar to begin with.*

I have to lead off immediately by drawing the Lost comparison because, as Victoria pointed out to me 5 minutes into the show, I fear that I might have enjoyed the pilot solely because it reminded me so much of Lost - my obsession for Lost being a matter of public record. For instance:

• The show begins on a plane that's suffering through a particularly rotten patch of turbulence, which seems like a deliberate allusion to Lost (which, though it doesn't begin with the crash, is overdetermined by that sort of TV-plane-disaster imagery)
• The guy that plays the authoritative, mysterious, and ambiguously bad guy Matthew Abaddon in Lost plays the authoritative, mysterious, and ambiguously good guy Phillip Broyles in Fringe
• The score is nearly identical. The same crescendo builds and suddenly stops before every tense reveal or commercial break.
• I swear, one of the photos that Broyles shows to Olivia when he tries to recruit her to join his team had a Dharma logo on it. Or some close approximation of it.
• The show uses a variation on an early swerve that was supposed to happen in the pilot of Lost. In that early draft, Jack (who, as the name implies, should be the everyman) would be set up as the main character only to die half-way through and cede the protagonist's role to Kate. In Fringe's pilot, Olivia and John (same rule applies) are set up as our co-leads, only for John to fall victim to an explosion 15 minutes in. In a bit of a new twist, John lives long enough for us to learn that he's actually a low-level villain - and Olivia is installed as the main character, just like Kate was supposed to be.

So yeah - maybe it's actually quite bad and I'm blinded by the associations with Lost. It features Joshua Jackson, and I'm not sure that I can ever see him as anyone other than Pacey Witter. And there are certainly some silly and seemingly unnecessary moments - Jackson's character is introduced brokering some deal for oil in Iraq for no obvious reason and Broyles seems too free with information about "the pattern" when he tries to recruit Olivia, (especially when we earlier learned that the mere existence of "the pattern" was a classified matter) as if the speech was more for our benefit than hers.

But no pilot is perfect, right? (Except for the Lost pilot, maybe...)

* This is not the sort of work that a good "Show-X-meets-Show-Y" cliché should accomplish, of course. The combination should be wacky or unexpected, and typically draws its material from different genres, if not different planets. For instance: my friend Claudio, in an interview to get into a University program many years ago, was asked a question to the effect of "sum up your dream film project". He responded with five words: "Citizen Kane meets American Pie". Which is perhaps a needlessly absurd example, but serves as a nice counter-point, anyway. (But I won't let you know whether the answer worked.)

Selling Sarah Palin: on post-feminism and the misuse of "feminist"

This isn't so much a complaint about Sarah Palin as it is about the media that is supposedly vilifying her and the fast-and-loose way that people now deploy the word "feminism". Namely, it's a complaint about the insistence with which some media types (and bloggers) sincerely push Palin as a feminist - often, as in these examples, her feminist credentials are posed as a question or debate, though the angle is always a sympathetic one - or at least present her political ambitions as an achievement made possible by feminism and representative of its success.

The first suggestion is, to anyone who knows anything about the broad philosophy of feminism, total bullshit. Feminism is not a politics that aims for the exceptional and symbolic advancement of a single woman, nor can it be reduced simply to the success of women - their ability to perform masculinity while preserving a recognizable femininity - in a man's world. Rather, a feminist and feminist politics are oriented toward gender equity and equality, and accomplishing that 1) by recognizing larger social structures and institutions that produce and reproduce this "man's world", and 2) doing something to change those same structures and institutions. Palin's politics are in no way feminist for the simple reason that she fails to recognize her exceptionalism as a woman who can play the boys' game, and so makes no effort to change that boys' game in order to make it inclusive. (Contrast this with Obama, who acknowledges historical and systemic race barriers - even if he can't explicitly call the USA "racist" - as well as his own good fortune to have been able to access systems of power that are only rarely available to other black men in the USA. Sarah Palin disingenuously describes herself as just a "hockey mom"; Obama would never reduce himself to just an "Afro-American dude".)*

The solution to the problem of the second argument is less obvious - which is merely to say that it's not completely fucking clueless - but equally misdirected. Marketing Palin as the end product of feminism or as a woman who will usher in a "new" feminism is actually a post-feminist position. Hillary Clinton got it right when she, like Obama, marketed herself as a pioneer - her run at the president's office was not indicative of feminism's success, but of its continuing gains and potential to succeed eventually. Conversely, Palin's nomination to the vice-president's office is seen by Republicans as just another reason to declare feminism dead and the feminist movement irrelevant - if a woman can be one step from the highest political office in the country, then surely gender discrimination is a non-issue. (And if you need me to tell you how and why this opinion is woefully misinformed, then you probably realized that I'm one of those self-hating feminist men and stopped reading this a long time ago.)

* In fact, the ways in which pundits describe Palin's feminist achievements actually serve to illustrate the persistence of gender inequality. Note how Palin is lauded for her ability to balance family and work - as if she could not be "feminist" if she focused on only one. Conversely, male politicians are rarely celebrated for their ability to be both good fathers and good leaders, nor are they decried for their perceived parenting failures. In fact, it's not really expected that they should have to parent- it's a mostly unspoken expectation that primary parental responsibilities will fall to their spouse, to whom most of the child-rearing questions are directed by the media anyway.

Film festivals and celebrity stalking...

irony: refers to incongruity between the intended meaning of an action and the actual or perceived meaning of an action

During the Toronto International Film Festival, crowds of people will gather outside theatres, on the sidewalk(s), to catch a glimpse of movie stars as they walk the red carpet. And this can sometimes be unintentionally hilarious. Case in point: a crowd of people stood along the sidewalk opposite the Elgin theatre on Yonge street and as we walked behind them on our way to dinner we passed two of the ostensible objects of their interest: Geoffrey Rush and Ben Kingsley (and his family). And because their backs were turned to watched the theatre entrance, the celebrity stalkers totally missed them.

Guilty displeasures, part 2

In a discussion about "guilty displeasure" with Omar Karindu below, he wrote that "the aesthetic involved in guilty displeasure is, I think, a way of mediating/deferring a larger ethical-aestehtic judgment -- one that would properly be rooted, as you say, in a more nuanced or complex analysis".

I wrote in response that "A blog is really the ideal venue for guilty displeasure, then, isn't it? I can defer (endlessly) a more complex ethical-aesthetic judgment and excuse my own lapses because this is only a blog." The guilt of guilty displeasure, I added, riffing off of Omar's earlier comments, seems to be in the purposeful refusal of the guiltily displeased blogger - who, for the most part, still considers him or herself a critical thinker - to engage in any extended or nuanced critique: the blog captures an immediacy that often precludes scholarly depth, and just as often those initial comments will never be revisited. And the blogger is typically okay with that - it is, as I noted above, "only" a blog.

And on that note, I'm renaming the blog "Guilty Displeasures". Not because I'm only going to register guilty displeasures, but because I'm too amused by the idea that blogging is itself unavoidably a guilty displeasure to not use it. (And besides, "Neil Shyminsky's Blog" was hardly an awesome title.)

Jumping into the Sarah Palin brouhaha...

It's rare that I agree with the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente on pretty much anything, but her critiques of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, seem dead-on. Palin stakes a lot of her reputation on her relation to Family Values and to invoke Family Values is, naturally, to expose yourself to loads of criticism when you start to look hypocritical. Wente notes, and I agree, that the hypocrisy isn't in the way that she's proposing to juggle five children, one a baby, and this job* or in Palin's failure to properly educate her pregnant teenage daughter**, but rather in the way that Palin "couldn't bear to say no to her country when it needs her - even if it meant sacrificing the privacy of her 17-year-old daughter to the global media machine." Her daughter, Bristol, at this point, is probably hoping that the Republicans lose - it's the only way she'll escape constant scrutiny and a marriage that we can't possibly be sure she wants***.

* Sincerely, if she can be governor of Alaska - whether that involves chops for foreign policy or not - then she can juggle both commitments.
** Snarkily, I should add that I think this is more of a failure to govern than to parent - Palin instituted "abstinence only" sex ed in Alaska, and her daughter is the beneficiary of that 'education'.
*** Neither Bristol nor the baby-daddy have been interviewed, so we'll have to take simply accept that Palin is being wholly truthful when she says they want to get married. Though it doesn't really matter whether they do or not - for her mom's sake, they have to get married. (Or at least say as much until she loses. Assuming she loses.) Nothing says Family Values like a Shotgun Wedding.

Setting the baseball blogosphere on fire

A friend of mine posted to my facebook that I had "set the [Toronto Blue] Jays blogosphere on fire" with a question I wrote to The Toronto Star's resident baseball expert, Richard Griffin. I thought he was just gently mocking me for having been a neurotic enough baseball fan that I wrote the letter in the first place, but it seems like people have actually latched on to my question and Griffin's response - most of the comments (which are at the bottom of that link to the blog) that readers have posted are in support of my position, the blog Drunk Blue Jays Fans wrote a satirical game report based on Griffin's reasoning, and the question and answer has been picked up on the sports journalism blog FIRE JOE MORGAN. (Catchphrase: "Where Bad Sports Journalism Comes to Die")

Now the response was a bad one, though not because he gave a poor answer to my question. Rather, it was that the answer he supplied was to a question I didn't ask - I was questioning the reasoning behind the expression "a career year" for a given player, (in this case A.J. Burnett) and Griffin's response didn't address how or why the term it used, instead pouncing on my use of fantasy baseball language and chiding me obsessing over statistics.

The irony, of course, was that Griffin attempted to undercut my argument that Burnett's "career year" has actually been his worst year by producing more (and, I should add, more problematic) statistics - he arbitrarily divided Burnett's season in 7 "bad" starts and 22 "good" starts, arguing that the 22 good starts make him worthy of "career year" status. And the numbers do look good - Burnett has an ERA over 10 in the bad starts, while it's just under 3 in the good ones.

But, unsurprisingly, jettisoning the poorest 1/4 of a pitcher's outings makes any and every pitcher look far better. I posted a few examples of how this logic can be used for every pitcher to Griffin's blog, ending with the most damning example: Barry Zito. Zito, for those who don't follow baseball particularly closely, is in the 2nd year of a 7 year contract in which he is being paid about $20 million per annum to produce statistics which rank him among the worst starting pitchers in professional baseball. And while he's improved since a horrific 0-8 start, it looks like he's improved dramatically when I apply Griffin's formula: he's 8-15 with a 5.31 ERA on the season, but 8-8 with a 3.49 ERA once we remove his worst 7 starts from throughout the season. Incidentally, he's 0-7, 12.56 in those games. (Now we could do something that's not arbitrary at all and remove those first 9 games in which he went 0-8 and suggest that he's made improvements since then. But that's not what Griffin did so I won't do it either.)

I probably enjoy baseball math too much. But it's like any other discourse - if you're going to jump in and play, you should at least know the language well enough to spot the bad rhetoric.

Dark and brooding redux

From the Wall Street Journal, on the proposed reboot of the Superman movie franchise:

Like the recent Batman sequel -- which has become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far -- Mr. Robinov [President of Warner Bros. Pictures] wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as "The Dark Knight." Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.' DC properties. "We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it," he says. That goes for the company's Superman franchise as well.

This is, of course, a stupid idea. And not just because we, as comic fans, know that a string of "dark" superhero movies with "brooding tone" will inevitably lose the plot and fail to realize that what works for Batman won't (and shouldn't) necessarily work for Superman - and so recreate, in movie form, the same mess of ultraviolence-for-its-own-sake crap that comicbook readers had to wade through in the early 90s. (And 'exploring evil sides'? Where, exactly, was that in Christian Bale's Batman? Now they're just making shit up.)

This, after all, is the essence of Superman:

At home on the farm, sending (and receiving) Christmas cards with his parents as snow falls gently outside the window. He's Superman, so he could write them all super-fast and fly them around, but he won't - they are, after all, just like normal folks who do things the normal way. And they share loving glances as Superman drinks something hot to keep warm - even though, of course, he doesn't need to. And while it could be coffee or tea, it's probably hot chocolate. And no Lois to complicate things with the threat of sex or competition for Superman's affection - just the immediate family, a purely nostalgic moment for a simpler time when Superman did things like write Christmas cards and drink hot chocolate to stay warm - even though, of course, he never had to.

We can deconstruct the ways in which this sort of image, and Superman himself, invoke a number of conservative ideologies about family, America and Americans, etc. The point is, though, how do you do a "dark" version of that featuring Superman's "evil side" without blowing the whole thing to hell? Not that it wouldn't be interesting to watch, I guess.

The absolute nuttiest Olympic sport: an introduction

(Note: This flurry of Olympics-related posting will, of course, subside as the event comes to a close, at which time I'll return to writing about more appropriately nerdy subjects.)

Quick - name an Olympic competition that you would dub indicative of "true Olympic sport" or that you might describe as the "sport that most accurately conveys the ideals of Olympism." One that the International Olympic Committee has described as having "a long and distinguished history" which is "steeped in culture and cultivated in the Olympic spirit".

Did you guess wrestling? Or something in track and field? A team sport, maybe? Because you sure as hell didn't guess modern pentathlon, right?

I refer to modern pentathlon as the "nuttiest" Olympic sport with good reason. It combines a long-distance cross-country race, a short swim - and now it gets a bit weird - pistol shotting, epee fencing, and show-jumping. (Yes, the kind that you do with horses. And, in this event, with randomly chosen horses that you've never met, much less ridden before.) The combination seems bizarre and pointless now, although it was meant to seem relevant when it was first created about a hundred years ago: Baron Pierre de Courertin designed it to "simulate the experience of a 19th century cavalry soldier behind enemy lines". So extra nuttiness points for the origin and the fact that this "modern" event is already two centuries outdated. Anachronisms of this sort are actually a bit endearing when only the hot-ticket event ever get broadcast on TV and every athlete with legitimate medal aspirations has at least three corporate sponsors.

Modern pentathlon is also actually far more dramatic than the other multi-talent events, like the triathlon, "traditional" pentathlon, decathlon, or gymnastics' all-around competition. Where those events rely entirely on counting points, the points for the first four events of the modern pentathlon are translated into seconds and applied to the 3km cross-country run, where the leader starts by him/herself and the others are staggered according to how far they trailed the leader. And with those adjustments made, it's simply a matter of the first person to cross the finish line winning. And it's all done in one day, too, which sounds more like an elementary school track-meet or carnival day - or an episode of American Gladiators - than an Olympic event.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons to knock the sport. If it sounds unreasonable to expect someone with little chance of sponsorship money to waste their time with modern pentathlon, then it should come as no surprise that the CBC describes it as "the domain of the idle rich", noting that "elitist overtones have prevented it from gaining widespread popularity", especially outside of Europe. And while the athletes must be competently skilled at a number of disparate disciplines, they rarely excel at any single one. As Frank Gosling, past president of Modern Pentathlon Canada, explains: "There are lots of people who aren't quite good enough to qualify for the Olympics in those events [swimming and running, from which modern pentathletes are often recruited], but if we can teach them to ride or fence or shoot, then they have a chance to go to the Olympics as a pentathlete." So it sounds like you need a bit of athleticism and a lot of free time. And lastly, it remains open to the charge that it's simply a stupid game and/or no longer relevant - even more so than events like equestrian or the discus, which at least have a long history on their side.

Interestingly, there's been some noise among athletes and organizers to remove that most elitist and least athletic element - the show-jumping - and replace it with mountain-biking. (Naturally, there's also a lot of resistance to any change at all.) But why stop there? Why not continue to honor the spirit in which it was created, and reimagine it as a showcase for the talents that a 21st century soldier caught behind enemy lines would have to employ? (If I made my own list, I'd have to fight the urge to veer into something hopelessly ironic and/or mocking, so I'll simply leave the question open.)

Beijing 2008's phantom protests

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, yesterday:

I believe these Games have opened up the country. [...] the Chinese definitely have experienced that they cannot live in splendid isolation.

Ariana Eunjung Cha in the Washington Post, today (emphasis mine):

In response to international pressure, China said it would allow protests in three parks during the Aug. 8-24 Olympic Games. Earlier this week, the official New China News Service reported police had received 77 applications but none had been approved.

So China continues to ignore ineffectual "demands" for some recognition of basic rights, and their contempt for both their own people and the international community is more or less condoned by a media that refuses to make this front page news, and so is complicit in allowing it to happen. I mean, I had heard about these official protest zones when the Olympics opened, but I hadn't heard that not one person had actually been cleared to use them.

That said, I've also stopped being surprised that no one seems to notice or care.

Custom board-gaming

So Monopoly is not the best board game ever. Granted. But there's a certain familiarity to it and a nostalgia that makes it a decently fun time. With that in mind, I recently made a custom Monopoly game for Victoria, which took an exhaustingly long time because I decided to embed pictures on to each property space on the board - exhausting because I'm not a fantastically skilled Photoshopper and my computer is old and slow. But it turned out well so I thought that I should plug the template and designer - Brad Frost - that made the process easier than it would have been and the end result far better than I would have imagined. (Just click his name to go directly to the template, which is on his blog.) And if you decide you want to give it a try, too, feel free to ask a relative novice like me for advice - or ask Brad himself, who was quite kind in helping me out.

(To maintain some shred of Marxian-hipster integrity, I decided to change the dollar amounts in the game from economic to cultural capital. Which actually works quite seamlessly with Monopoly money, since there are only numbers on the bills.)

Guilty displeasure

What's sure to be a new favorite term, from Carl Wilson's (of Zoilus) book about Céline Dion, A Journey to the End of Taste:

If guilty pleasures are out of date, perhaps the time has come to conceive of a guilty displeasure. This is not like the nagging regret I have about, say, never learning to like opera. My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they're pro-life or a Republican: intellectually I'm aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions more crudely tribal.

Wilson later links guilty displeasure to Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject - but Kristeva's writing is not really ideal for what's supposed to a semi-accessible blog, so I'll quote Barbara Creed instead: "The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self." It is, in short, something that is a part of you but which must also be denied, these denials being as important in your ability to fashion a coherent identity for yourself as are your affirmations.

Wilson's examples of guilty displeasures work for me, too, though I find myself struggling to find less obvious ones: the idea of patriotism, probably, since I'm sure that it's more nuanced than it seems in many cases but I'm nonetheless eager to dismiss its usefulness on the whole. Maybe I'll come back to this post and either add some items or add them in the comments as they come to me - more banal and poppy stuff. Though I'd love to here about what other people find a guilty displeasure, too.

Fabricating the "flawless": A lesson in irony from Beijing

The most recent, and most ridiculous, controversy at the Beijing Olympics deserves some kind of mention. In case you hadn't been paying attention, it turns out that the incredibly adorable 9 year old (left) who sang "Ode to the Motherland" at the opening ceremonies didn't actually sing it. Instead, it was a 7 year old (right) who wasn't given the honor or recognition because she was deemed too unattractive.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what Chen Qigang, the music designer for the opening ceremonies, told Radio Beijing: "The reason why little Yang [the girl on the right] was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation. The reason was for the national interest. The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feelings and expression."

This is, of course, unintentionally hilarious: while his job was, in part, to push this image of the exemplary Chinese child as a perfect one, he's subsequently been forced to admit that this ideal Chinese child that was paraded on stage is not simply exceptional, but that she in fact does not actually exist - that he had to fabricate her from the parts of real children, discarding what didn't fit. That the irony of this doesn't seem to occur to the people running the games is, I think, a little bit sad and a larger bit distressing.

"Lost" projects: Get Back's first mix

Over on Geoff Klock's blog, Scott wrote a post about 'lost' projects - be they books, films, or albums - that have accrued a magical aura due to some obstacle that prevented them from ever being realized, completed, or released. I responded with a couple of lost projects that interest me, though I want to write briefly about a project that was shelved but not technically "lost", since it would subsequently emerge in the form of bootlegs - the original cut of the Beatles' Get Back sessions. (Which would, of course, eventually become the sometimes-dreadful but generally more listenable Let It Be album.)


Get Back's first cut/mix (Glynn Johns - George Martin's assistant, who produced the session - made two "final" mixes before quitting. You can see the track listings here.) is no masterpiece. In fact, as uneven as Let It Be is, Get Back is worse. And how could it not be? The Beatles told Johns that they weren't going to overdub any of the songs, and so Get Back reveals that they had become sloppy and unfocused performers. To his credit, Johns rolls with it - if he couldn't cut the recordings into a tight "live" album like those the Beatles were able to produce early in their career, then he would make it sound like a 45 minute session, including the studio banter, missed notes, and false starts. This might be interesting - even entertaining, to a fan like me - but it doesn't make for good listening.

And if such an amateurish product weren't reason enough for the Beatles to want it shelved, the way in which it was revealing of their in-studio tensions probably was. The most notable of these reveals - Paul's version of the unbearably awful song "Teddy Boy" (which would end up on his solo album) - also showed up in a similar version on Anthology 3, as John shows his disgust for the song in both versions (or maybe it's the same moment, but cut to fit both performances?) by breaking into the song with a square dance lyric: "Take your partner, dosey doe..." and so on and so forth. It's a hilarious disruption of an awful song, but one can imagine that Paul was enraged and/or humiliated to hear it in the final mix.

That said, the album was worth seeking out - at least prior to McCartney's own revision of the Get Back sessions in Let It Be... Naked - solely because it was the only place where one could find the un-Spectorized versions of "The Long and Winding Road" and "Let It Be". But it also proves Spector right in some regards: his decision to speed up "Two of Us" was the right one, something had to be done about John's awful bass in "The Long and Winding Road", and these songs were not releasable without some serious overdubs. Though while Spector's ability to identify the problems is inarguable, his solutions - at least in the latter two cases - are far less agreeable to me. And so, perhaps strangely, my affinity for the incredibly flawed Get Back is actually somewhat greater than it is for the far more polished official release.